Authors: Mary Daheim
I
T DID MAKE
me think, of course. The terse note also made my jaw drop. Afterward, I questioned my sudden urge to find out more about Olive Rowley. I suppose it occurred to me that I couldn’t understand her children unless I knew more about their mother. She had always been there in the background, but if I’d seen her as the downtrodden wife of a successful man, I’d also unconsciously assigned her the role of the hand that rocks the cradle. It was Olive, not Cornelius, who had formed Eddie and Carrie. Oh, he’d definitely had his influence, but a man who would leave his family for months, even years, at a time to go off as a timber cruiser and make a fortune wasn’t the one who guided his offspring through their youth.
Maybe Tessie and I were judging Olive too hastily. Mrs. Rowley might have contracted the disease from her husband. How had he amused himself during those long separations? I posed the question to Tessie.
But she gave a shake of her head. “Whoever wrote in the margins knew some of the early residents’ intimate secrets. I’ve come across this same handwriting on other obituaries from the 1890s to the post–World War I era. ‘Drank himself to death.’ ‘Opium user.’ ‘Died in a Seattle brothel.’ There’s no such annotation on Mr. Rowley’s funeral notice.”
Tessie was probably right. Cornelius had lived for another
eleven years after Olive’s demise. Maybe his wife’s disease had been one of the reasons he’d left home in the first place.
“The navy?” I remarked, rubbing at my chin. I was still a bit shocked, trying to picture Olive Ross Rowley kicking up her heels with a bunch of randy sailors.
“Oh, yes,” Tessie replied, her chortle gone and a sad expression now hovering on her piquant face. “They held training exercises up here in those days, out on the strait. That’s how the local Elks Club was formed—to provide a lodge for the young men while they were in town. Half of the original Elks were from the navy. It was first called the Naval Lodge, in fact, number 353. I’m sure that part was quite above board.”
I nodded. “Meanwhile, Olive was providing her own sort of entertainment. My, my.”
“People are very peculiar,” Tessie mused. “Isn’t it odd how we tend to pigeonhole them?” She gave me a rueful smile.
I leaned back in the chair. “Oh, yes. I’ve seen everybody in a different light. Cornelius, the swaggering empire builder but cuckolded by his second wife. Now by his first wife as well. Simone, an adventuress yet a misfit, fighting for the man she really loved. Carrie, supposedly driven by the fear of becoming an old maid or obsessed with a virile Irish logger, take your pick. Sedate Sanford, marrying a sweet local maiden but turning morose because he loved Minnie Burke. Eddie and Lena …” I shook my head. “It never pays to jump to conclusions. I know that.”
Tessie nodded vigorously. “We all do. But it’s so easy. Especially when you’re dealing with old photographs and dry facts.” Carefully, she replaced Olive Rowley’s obituary in the file folder. “But what difference does this make about the first Mrs. Rowley? In terms of the dead person, that is.”
I thought before I answered. “I don’t know.” I recalled the later photographs of Olive Rowley, hanging back behind Cornelius, wearing her hat over her face. The poor woman had probably been concealing chancres. How had her husband and children borne the shame? Her death had sent her widower off to seek solace in the arms of a beautiful young Frenchwoman who loved another. Her son had taken to wife an older woman whose virtue was unassailable but whose ambition left him in the dust. And her daughter had married beneath her, apparently swept up by love for an unsuitable Irish opportunist.
They had all made a wreck of love. But who didn’t? I had. I had fallen for a married man and borne him a child. For twenty years I had clung to that love while trying to pretend that the object of it didn’t exist. Foolish and perverse, I’d cut Tom Cavanaugh off from our son. Adam had been old enough to be a father when he had finally met his own. My obstinate refusal to let Tom shoulder some of the responsibility had been unfair to all of us. Now I had to figure out if Tom was to remain my sometime lover or only my part-time co-parent. If I wanted a future, I had to let go. But for more than twenty years the hold was as firm as it was familiar. I nurtured my ill-starred love like a treasured keepsake. Every so often I could take it from its little box and thrill anew. It was, as Vida so pointedly told me, a safeguard against trotting my heart out into the world and risking the unknown. Or another hurt.
“Damn,” I said, apropos of many things.
Tessie, however, discerned only one. “You’ve got Olive taken care of, eh? I trust it helps. Poor woman, she must have been a social anomaly around here.”
“I hope so,” I responded dryly, getting up from the chair. I put out my hand. “Tessie, you’ve been wonderful. I’m heading home in the next couple of hours, but
either Jackie or I will keep you informed. If we learn the truth.”
Tessie’s grip was firm.
“You
call—or write,” she insisted. “The least we can do after all this is exchange Christmas cards, eh?”
It was. The very least. Reluctantly, I let go of Tessie’s hand.
Despite having been gone longer than I’d planned, Jackie was nowhere to be seen outside of Gordy’s. I circled the block, then pulled into a loading zone. A moment later Jackie popped out onto the sidewalk. She carried a white paper bag and fairly bounced up to the car.
“The pizza oven wasn’t fired up this early, so I got doughnuts. Want one?” She waved the bag at me.
I can’t resist doughnuts. At the arterial I grabbed a cinnamon-and-sugar offering. The first bite told me it was delicious. “I thought you were in there gobbling pizza by the pound,” I remarked, heading along Eighth Street to the Melcher house.
“Oh, no,” Jackie replied. “I was sleuthing. Did you see that little museum when you were at Gordy’s? I went in and looked around. You’ll never guess what I found!”
I wouldn’t, of course. Jackie was still bouncing. “What was it?”
“A pair of women’s satin opera slippers with rhinestone buckles. Size seven. They belonged to Simone Rowley!”
I forced myself to concentrate on my driving as we crossed the bridge over the Valley Street gully. “Are you sure? That they belonged to Simone, that is.”
“Oh, yes.” Jackie was very definite. “I spoke to a man who knows all about the stuff they’ve collected. There’s a hat that belonged to her there, too.”
I remembered the hat with its jaunty green feather. “So it’s not Simone in the basement after all,” I said in a thoughtful voice. “Mike Randall guessed the skeleton wore a smaller shoe.”
“I told you Simone was taller.” Jackie’s exuberance was still in high gear. “So if not Simone, we’re back to Carrie. I was having some doubts about Simone. You know, it’s possible that if she was pregnant, the baby could have belonged to Cornelius. Maybe she didn’t want to leave the house the night of the fire because she was having morning sickness in the evening.”
Jackie’s reasoning confounded me. We were crossing a second bridge, above the truck route. I finished my doughnut, signaled for a right tum, and sifted through Jackie’s logic all at the same time. I managed the first two tasks just fine but gave up on the third.
“If it’s not Simone in the basement, then those aren’t the bones of the baby she was carrying,” I pointed out. “Simone left town. Lena gave her things away except for some of the jewelry, which Rose may have gotten. That means Simone had the baby somewhere else. Hmmmm.”
We pulled into the Melcher driveway. Getting out of the car, I glanced up at the ramshackle livery stable on the bluff. The bright sunlight caused me to squint.
“I think we should deep-six the idea about Simone being pregnant,” I said as we started to unload the trunk. “Madly in love or not, we have no evidence that she was going to have a baby. If she were, I doubt she would have undertaken a horseback journey from Port Angeles to Seattle. You’re right, we seem to be stuck with Carrie. So to speak.”
It required three trips to bring the groceries into the house. We were putting them away when Jackie finally responded to my latest remarks.
“It’s terrible.” she declared, unceremoniously dumping
vegetables every which way into the refrigerator. “If Jimmy Malone murdered his first wife, he also murdered his unborn child. What a brute he must have been!” She shuddered as I reopened the fridge and pulled out the crisper drawer.
“Vegetables in here, Jackie,” I said firmly. “Any meat you’re not going to freeze goes in the other drawer, underneath. Yes, it makes a difference.”
“It sure does,” Jackie agreed with fervor. “It’s one thing to kill your wife, it’s something else to kill a helpless baby.”
“No, I meant the drawers in the—”
“How did Claudia Cameron talk about her father? Did she mention abuse? I’ll bet he beat them. Minnie, too.”
Jackie’s haphazard approach to food storage had momentarily distracted me. Carefully placing com, onions, and carrots in the crisper, I tried to address her assessment of Jimmy Malone. But it wasn’t Jackie’s heated statement that had tugged at some vague thread in my brain. It was someone else, speaking of the past …
I shook myself. “Damn, I just caught a snatch of an odd remark, but I don’t remember who said it. Or what it was.”
Jackie was on her hands and knees, putting canned goods in a cupboard. “About Jimmy the Jerk?” Her voice was a trifle muffled.
“Yes. Well, maybe.” I placed a loaf of whole wheat in the wooden breadbox. “As I said, I don’t remember. But Claudia didn’t mention that her father was violent. He drank, though.”
Jackie stood up. “You see? That’s the usual scenario. The husband drinks, then beats up his wife. The kids, too. But in those days nobody talked about it. Claudia Cameron is an old lady, she wouldn’t dream of bringing her abused childhood out into the open.”
Jackie had a valid point. “You might be right,” I allowed, dividing a five-pound hamburger chub into portions for two. “Yet Claudia spoke of her father only with fondness. On the other hand, there were serious problems with Walter. He grew up to become the Root Cellar Rapist.” The allusion to sex—if one could term it so, as opposed to violence—made me think of Olive Rowley. I recounted my discovery with Tessie Roo. Jackie burst out laughing.
“Olive was a slut! Wow! Wait until Paul hears this one!”
“It’s pretty tragic,” I said mildly, wrapping hunks of hamburger in plastic. “It killed her. You know,” I continued, putting the parcels into the freezer section of the refrigerator, “Olive must have had a history of promiscuity. She wasn’t in Port Angeles long enough to have contracted syphilis and die of it. I’d guess that she was misbehaving back in Michigan, probably while Cornelius was out here establishing his claim to fame.”
Jackie was still laughing. “Olive had one of her own, if you ask me. Oh, my!” Jackie wiped at her eyes.
My sense of humor is usually fairly acute. Yet I was having a problem matching my reaction to Jackie’s. Nymphomania knows no time or place. How wretched it must have been for a nineteenth-century Victorian married woman to find herself deprived of her husband and yet trapped by her own rampant sexual desires. Clinically, I knew next to nothing about the social problem. I considered my own desires relatively normal, though I had lived a celibate life for stretches as long as five years at a time. My brother, Ben, claimed that celibacy was never as difficult a problem for him as obedience. As a priest he found it far easier to resist the temptations of seductive female parishioners than to knuckle under to a lamebrained superior. “Asshole priests,” Ben had once told me, “are a hell of a lot
harder to cope with than unhappily married women who want to be counseled by going to bed.” Thus, I found myself inadequate when it came to judging Olive Rowley.
At last Jackie had her mirth under control. “I don’t see where Olive’s case of the clap helps us solve the mystery, though. I’m still voting for Jimmy killing Carrie, baby and all.”
My nod was unenthusiastic. “You’re probably right. It’s all there: motive, opportunity, the whole bit. The reason I was curious about Olive was because I thought her character might provide a clue to her children’s personalities. Now we discover that Olive suffered from some sort of aberration. I don’t know how, but maybe it explains her grandson, Walter.” I heard the doubtful note in my voice.
As ever, Jackie’s mood swing was swift. She dashed across the kitchen and embraced me. “Oh, Emma, I hate to see you leave! This has been such fun! I can’t wait to tell Mom about it!”
I hugged Jackie in return. “I’ll write her a long letter as soon as I get home.” Or, I thought to myself, as soon as I get my personal and professional lives straightened out.
Jackie squeezed me tight, then jumped back. “A souvenir! You’ve got to have something to remind you of your stay here!” She raced out of the kitchen and headed for the stairs.
I glanced at my watch; it was almost eleven. Dutifully, I followed her to the second floor. But she didn’t stop there. She was headed for the finished attic.
I was huffing a bit when we reached the storage area. By now I knew it well. Jackie delved into the big trunk where we’d already found some of our treasures. She brought out a small velvet-covered jewel case I hadn’t seen before.
“This was Lena’s, I think,” she said, prying the case open. “No flashy stuff, though I found a nice little gold circle pin I wear sometimes. Paul said it was made out of nuggets somebody brought back from the Yukon.”
Jackie sorted through some modest brooches, a few gold and silver chains, and several pairs of men’s cuff links. “Drat!” she exclaimed, wrinkling her nose. “There isn’t much here that you’d really like. I guess the pin was it. You don’t have pierced ears, do you?”
“No, I don’t. I never saw the need to put any extra holes in my head.”
Jackie held up a pair of small pearl earrings with gold posts. “You could convert them, I suppose,” she said dubiously.
I pointed to what looked like a silver watch on a slim chain. “That’s kind of nice even if it probably doesn’t work.”
Jackie picked up the round silver object and clicked it open. It wasn’t a watch; it was a locket. The black hair lay soft and limp inside. We both stared.