Authors: Mary Daheim
The problem didn’t faze Jackie. “Stashed in Seattle. It was only five years. If Jimmy was counting on a fortune, that’s not long to wait.”
Again I had to contradict. “It might be to Minnie. It sounds like the old story: ‘Stick with me, honey, I’m getting a divorce. But these things take time.…’ ” I choked on my own flippancy. Fortunately, nobody noticed. But suddenly my own dilemma was forced upon me. Not that Tom Cavanaugh had ever promised to divorce his wife, Sandra. Far from it. Her mental instability seemed to bind him even closer. Tom was too honorable to abandon a woman who needed him. Except I wasn’t sure she did—Sandra needed a keeper, not a husband. But of course that was the role Tom had assumed. “On the other hand,” I added in an acid tone,
“some women are notoriously patient.” I hoped no one would realize that I meant myself.
No one did. “So far,” said Mike, “Jimmy has the best motive. If he was a bigamist.”
“Sanford,” Jackie put in. “Maybe he was gloomy because he’d killed somebody. Hey, let’s get wild with this one. Sanford was gay, and why not? People didn’t talk about that stuff in those days, right? He was crazy about Jimmy, a big, rough, tough, macho guy. Sanford killed Carrie in a fit of jealous rage.” Jackie crossed her arms over her abdomen and sat back on the sofa, looking well pleased with herself.
“That’s plausible,” Mike said, offering Jackie a smile of approval. “I understand that loggers often used to exhibit homosexual tendencies, if only because they lived in isolated camps where there weren’t any women. You may be on to something, Jackie.”
Her husband seemed dubious. “I know we can’t rule out any possibilities, but if this one is right, murdering Carrie didn’t bring Sanford and Jimmy Malone together. Jimmy went off to Seattle and Sanford settled down with Grandma Rose.”
Jackie was undaunted. “Jimmy rebuffed Sanford’s advances. Being in the olden days Sanford couldn’t admit he was gay. He had to live a lie, so he married Rose. That’s why he was glum and she was unhappy.”
As theories went, it wasn’t bad. A major sticking point for me was the five children that Sanford and Rose had produced over a period of fifteen years. I had a variation to offer. “What if the Widow Simone was in love with Jimmy Malone?”
Jackie was aghast. “Not her type. Even if she got a pile of money from Cornelius, I can’t imagine her running off with an Irish logger.”
I didn’t entirely agree with Jackie. When it comes to love, men and women are unpredictable. The heart follows
its own highway, and didn’t I know it. But Jackie had opened up some new avenues of thought for me.
“Let’s go back to what we know—or think we know,” I said. “Jimmy Malone went to Seattle. From what we’ve heard, he took Carrie and the kids along. If that’s really true, then we may not have found Carrie after all.” Jackie and Paul both tried to interrupt, but I waved them into silence. “My point is, a woman went with Jimmy to Seattle. How do we know for certain that it was Carrie? It could have been Simone. Or Minnie.”
“Oh, poopy!” In frustration, Jackie twisted her wedding ring on her finger. “We don’t know. We
can’t
know. But I see what you mean, Emma—if Carrie had been killed, another woman might have taken her place. With those big hats, the same clothes, and long capes, how could anybody who didn’t see them up close tell the difference? How would they have traveled? By train?”
“No,” said Mike. “The railroad didn’t come through here until much later. World War I, I think. They would have had all their belongings with them, so I’d guess they went by boat.”
Jackie gave the rest of us a knowing look. “You see? They leave the house in a carriage or a wagon, go down to the dock, and sail away. Nobody sees them off because Simone has already left, or if she’s still in town, she wouldn’t give a hoot. Lena probably doesn’t, either. Good riddance is how she figures it. And her husband, Eddie, is too henpecked to make a fuss over his sister’s departure. Sanford doesn’t care because he’s not actually related to Carrie.” Jackie paused, then gave her ring another frantic twist. “Oh, blast! This isn’t getting us anywhere! Now we’re back to the uncertainty of whether or not we’ve got Carrie in the basement!”
I stared at Jackie’s hands. “Your ring … Where’s Carrie’s? We found the earrings, the silver bracelet, the
cross, and the gold locket. But no ring. Carrie must have had a wedding set, maybe an expensive diamond.”
Paul’s expression was sheepish. “The rings may still be there. As we said, it’d take a long time to dig through that whole section of dirt.”
Mike had an idea of his own. “Maybe the killer took the rings. If the set really was expensive, he or she might have wanted to keep them to sell or pawn.”
“Who needed money?” asked Jackie.
“Grandpa Sanford?” Paul suggested. “If Lena ran the household, I have a feeling she kept her son on a short leash.”
“We need that will,” Jackie said, pouting a bit. “Why couldn’t Meriwether and Bell have been in the office this afternoon?”
“We need marriage licenses,” I put in. “We have to find out when Jimmy Malone married Minnie.” I thought of Vida and how she would relish our task. We knew about Carrie and Jimmy’s wedding, but the only way to verify a ceremony between him and Minnie Burke was through the county offices, either in Port Angeles or Seattle. Vida would expedite matters by revealing that one of her numerous nephews, nieces, cousins, or godchildren worked for the county clerk. I had no such ties, either in Clallam or King Counties.
“We might coerce somebody in Seattle to check the marriage licenses for 1908 or 1909,” I said, finishing my third Pepsi of the day. “It would take time, though, even if we found a willing accomplice.” Due in part to the Alaska Gold Rush, Seattle had been a rapidly growing city in the early part of the century. Off the top of my head, I estimated its population at between a hundred and two hundred thousand. Going through a full year of marriage licenses would be a big job. Jackie volunteered to make the call in the morning.
“You’ll be off to Victoria at eight-thirty,” she said to me. “I’ll handle telephone research. Maybe when I call King County I’ll pretend I’m a private detective.”
Mike decided to call it a night. He had an early class on Thursday and also needed to finish grading some papers. I considered phoning Vida to see if there were any more crises in Alpine. Then I remembered that this Wednesday was her Cat Club meeting. She and several of her contemporaries got together once a month to eat gooey desserts and rake the rest of Alpine over the coals. The following day was always marked by their vows to go on a diet—and to rake over each other, usually by phone.
It was half-past nine when Mike left with his jar of bones. Since Paul also had to get up early for work, he, too, said good night. Jackie lingered with me in the den. She was studying the gold locket and looking poignant.
“Dark hair, black, really. Whose?” she inquired in a wistful voice.
I turned back to the photo albums. “It’s hard to tell what shade of hair the people have in these pictures, since they’re not in color. We can rule out Carrie and Rose because they were both fair. Jimmy, too, because he seems to be redheaded. That may be a cliché, given that he’s Irish, but his hair certainly doesn’t look very dark. Lena’s hair may have been brown, but she appears to be going gray in the photos from this period.”
Jackie leaned closer to me on the sofa, frowning at the album pages. “I feel I know these people now. Carrie may have been murdered, but it’s Rose I feel sorry for. Maybe that’s because she’s Paul’s grandmother.”
“Probably,” I agreed. “He knew her. That brings Grandma Rose into better focus.” I turned more pages. “Eddie and Sanford were both dark. So was Simone. But
the hair might be from someone further back. Cornelius or his first wife. Lena’s first husband.”
Jackie sniffed. “Lena with a locket? She wasn’t the sentimental type.”
I allowed that Jackie was right, though something she had said pricked at my mind. For the moment it proved elusive. “The problem is, if we assume the locket belonged to Carrie, wouldn’t she have her husband’s hair in it? Then it would be red or light brown, not black.”
Jackie waved her hand, then gave the album a slap. “There’s no locket in any of these photos. The women are all wearing pearl chokers or those high collars with tons of lace.”
Again some small fragment of an idea passed through my brain, then danced away. But Jackie was on target about the locket. I hadn’t been able to spot it, either. Maybe it came from a later period than the skeleton. Or maybe it was never meant to be seen.
“A lover,” I said, startled to discover that I’d spoken out loud.
“A lover?” Jackie perked up. “Who? Carrie? Simone? Not Lena!”
“Probably not Lena.” But, as Vida would say,
you never know
. Nothing could be ruled out with people. “But if it was Carrie or Simone, they wouldn’t flaunt the locket.”
“Simone might,” Jackie said. “She strikes me as … What do you call it? Brazen?”
“No,” I disagreed. “Simone knew what she was doing when she married Cornelius Rowley. She wouldn’t do anything to throw a spanner in the works. If she had a lover, he was a well-kept secret.”
Jackie had settled back onto the sofa. She was smiling slyly. “A lover. I like it. Simone would have done something like that. She was French, after all. Don’t Frenchwomen always have a husband and a lover? Sort
of like owning a washer and a dryer. They’re practically a domestic necessity in France.”
I didn’t try to dispel Jackie’s illusion. She was the French major, after all. “We’re going in circles,” I noted, then suddenly captured the elusive idea that had been needling me. “The cross—Lena wore a cross in that first picture. Let’s compare it to the one we found in the basement.”
One simple gold cross looks very like another. But at least the cross from the basement and the one that adorned Lena’s pristine shirtwaist appeared similar.
“She was a religious woman, according to Aunt Sara. Her statue in the park doesn’t show her wearing a cross. I wonder …” My weary brain tried to deal with the matter and failed.
“It’s sure not Lena down there. She lived forever,” Jackie pointed out. “Maybe she lost the cross. It might have fallen off the chain.”
That was certainly a possibility. But there was another, uglier scenario. “Fallen off in a struggle?” I stared meaningfully at Jackie. “I can’t figure a motive for Lena killing her sister-in-law, though. All this speculation is fine, but we need more facts. Maybe we’ll get them tomorrow.”
“We need more pictures.” Jackie had gotten off the sofa and was going through a bandbox filled with loose photos. We had glanced at them earlier, but they seemed to be from a later era. Women in felt cloches, men in belted polo coats, children in pinafores and overalls recalled the period between the two world wars. But near the bottom of the bandbox were some earlier pictures. One was a duplicate of the Rowley-Melcher house photograph we’d seen on exhibit at the museum.
Jackie waved the eight-by-ten at me. “This is much clearer, even if it is smaller. I’m going to get that magnifying glass.” She rummaged in the drawer under the
glass-fronted bookcase. “Here, let’s see if we can make out who the fifth person is, the one partly behind the front-porch arch.”
But enlarging the photo under the magnifying glass had virtually the same effect as the blow-up in the museum. The figure became fuzzier, though we were able to discern that it was a woman. “If we could get someone to digitalize this, we could see it much better,” I said. “Does anybody do that kind of work in Port Angeles?”
Jackie had no idea. Indeed, she didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about. I explained that, basically, digitalizing was a process wherein an image was made sharper.
“It’s costly, and probably not worth it,” I added. “For all we know, whoever this is might be a neighbor.”
“A neighbor!” Jackie’s hand flew to her face. “The Bullards! They live next door. They always have. He was a banker. He’s retired now, but his father is still alive. He must be about a hundred. I think he’s in a home.”
“Check him out,” I said, half staggering to my feet. I was tired, though I hadn’t worked half as hard as I did every day on
The Advocate
. Researching the past was tougher than I thought.
Jackie promised to speak to Mr. and Mrs. Bullard in the morning. She still seemed to be in high gear. As I headed up to bed, I envied her youthful energy. I was sure I’d fall asleep as soon as my head touched the pillow.
And I did, though I dreamed of straw-hatted men and tiny-waisted women, riding on bicycles built for two. They went round and round, never reaching their destination. We were doing the same thing in trying to piece together an eighty-year-old mystery. When I woke up shortly after seven, I felt a sense of futility. It was a wild-goose chase, and even if we somehow figured out
a solution, there was no point to it. In fact, we could easily bring shame to the Melcher family.
On the other hand, it was better than thinking about my love life. Or was it the lack thereof that really bothered me?
I went into the bathroom and took a hot shower. I didn’t need a cold one. That bothered me, too.
T
HE CAPACITY OF
The Victoria Express
was one hundred and fifty passengers. On this cloudy morning in July I doubted that the ship held more than half that number. Of course, there would be several additional crossings during the day. Meanwhile,
The Coho
, which carried a thousand people and also took on cars, would make at least two trips across the strait.
I had waited for breakfast until after I boarded. The menu wasn’t elaborate, so I fueled myself on powderedsugar doughnuts and coffee. My desire for a second cup led me to an encounter with an obstinate vending machine, which supposedly accepted both American and Canadian coins. It didn’t seem to want to take either one, and I ended up giving the thing a swift kick. I didn’t get my coffee, but I did acquire a sore toe and eighty-five cents in mixed change.
Midway, we encountered some heavy seas, and I was glad I hadn’t eaten much. I’d forgotten that the open waters of the strait can cause seasickness. Jackie had been wise to stay home; she would probably have spent most of her time leaning over the rail.