Murder Old and New

by Chet Williamson

  I thought about asking Uncle Ralph if he still carried a metal detector in his trunk, but then realized it wouldn’t be much use. Seventy years buried things deep, and what would there be to find? Maybe a coin that had slipped out of somebody’s pocket during the hubbub, and what would that prove? If Elmer had left an overlooked suicide note, it would have to have been engraved on brass to survive all that time outside.

  Still, I took a few photographs of the tree with my digital camera, and asked Uncle Ralph to stand beside it so that I had something to compare size-wise. He was a little uncomfortable about it. “Livy, this is just creepy,” he said, frowning up at the limb. “What’s the point?”

  “I’m not sure myself,” I told him. “What I don’t get is why his neck was broken. And until there’s an explanation for that, this just might not be a real suicide.”

  “Girl, I always said you had too much imagination, and this just proves it.”

  I pushed the button to turn off the camera and started walking with my uncle back toward the road. “Is there anybody still in Roseland,” I asked as we slogged through the mud, “who would have known Elmer Bingley? Who might remember something that…”

  “That I don’t,” he finished for me. “Boy, not many. That was a long, long time ago, Livy.” He was silent for a moment. “But Ruth Lehman is still around. She lives with her son Bud and his wife. Gotta be near a hundred, maybe more, but I saw her at the last carnival. Bud and Rita brought her down in a wheelchair. She seemed sharp, at least she knew who I was, and she asked about Brad—she didn’t know he died.”

  “She lived here back then?”

  “All her life. Same house too, down on Water Street. Bud and Rita moved in with her when old Frank died a few years ago—that was her husband.”

  “Think she might know anything?”

  “Won’t know till you ask, but she’s always been a sort of living history book. We could try her.”

  By the time we got back to the road, our boots were coated ankle-high with mud, hardly the fashion for visiting, even in Roseland. I had a pair of shoes in the car, and Uncle Ralph had brought some along too, so we changed footwear and walked to the Lehman house, an old frame two-story right on the main drag through the village. You could tell it was old because its front door was only ten feet from the edge of the road.

  We went around the back, however, to the kitchen door, and Uncle Ralph knocked loudly. For decades the kitchen was where most people socialized, and lots of these old houses had mud rooms right inside the door.

  We waited there for almost a minute until we heard a clump…clump…clump, and finally the curtain was pulled back by a white, spidery hand so thin the blue veins seemed drawn on the bones beneath. An old woman’s face looked out that made the gal at the end of Lost Horizon look absolutely chipper, but I wasn’t so much shocked as embarrassed at making such an old fossil come to the door, and a low moan from Uncle Ralph told me he felt the same way. The clumping, I was sure, had been the old woman’s walker, and it clumped again as she pulled it back from the door she had opened so we could come in.

  “Mrs. Lehman,” Ralph said, “I’m so sorry we ran you to the door.”

  “Had to anyway,” she said. “Somebody was knocking.” I wondered if it was something in the water that made Roseland natives, even centenarians, spew out one-liners. Uncle Ralph laughed, and the old woman smiled. It lit up her face, and for a moment the tapestry of wrinkles seemed to vanish, and she was suddenly pretty. At least her dentures, if nothing else, were new. “We gonna stand here, or you want to set a spell?”

  “We’d like to talk a little,” Ralph said. “This is—“

  “Let’s do our introducing in the parlor. I’m not a good stander.” She turned and clumped toward an open door that led to the front room. “Come on in…are your shoes clean? Ain’t me, but Rita gets all upset anybody gets dirt on the rugs.” The kitchen was old fashioned, with tall white wooden cabinets with green trim, a white ceramic double sink, and an old Kelvinator fridge with rounded corners. The floor was genuine linoleum, and I was sure that none of the pictures and knickknacks on the wall was younger than fifty years.

  We passed through a dining room shrouded in darkness except for ribbons of light coming in around the edge of the heavy velvet curtains, and came out into the relatively well-lit parlor. Mrs. Lehman maneuvered herself toward a lightly padded upright chair with wooden arms, and gestured to us to sit in the other overstuffed chairs, from none of which, I guessed, she could have extricated herself. As it was, she fell back into her chair with a soft, “Woof…”

  Her hair was pure white and so thin that much of her scalp peeked through. There seemed to be no effort on her part to disguise it. She had reached that age where comfort or just the continuance of living trumped vanity. Her faded flower print dress was shapeless on her thin body. She seemed like so many sticks in a cloth bag.

  “Now, Ralph,” she said, “who’s this pretty girl here?”

  “This is Olivia, Brad’s daughter.”

  I smiled and nodded. “Livy for short.”

  “I liked your father a lot,” Mrs. Lehman said, and I just kept smiling. Her voice wasn’t nearly as harsh and aged as her looks, and the scuffed upright piano against one wall made me think that she might have sung quite beautifully in her time. “He was a lot better behaved than this one,” she said, jutting her icepick chin toward Uncle Ralph. “So what’s this visit for?”

  I admired her getting to the point. Many old people think that visits, even from doctors and ministers, are random occurrences, that living people drift in and out of existence like memories. But Mrs. Lehman recognized that an acquaintance and a stranger didn’t just come into her house like a breeze. “Uncle Ralph told me that you know a lot about Roseland—the people who lived here. That you’ve been around for quite a while.”

  “Ninety-nine years, if that’s quite a while,” she said.

  “Did you write to the Today Show yet?” Ralph asked.

  She shook her head and made a sour face. “Don’t make me old before my time.” Then she brightened and looked back at me.

  “What do you want to know, Livy, is it?”

  “Yes. I wanted to know about Elmer Bingley.”

  Her face changed, very slowly. Her eyes lost their sparkle, her features the sense of importance at having been consulted, and the lines and wrinkles took over her face so that it clung to the skull like a lined mask. Finally, she spoke. “That was bad.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Uncle Ralph told me some, about his wife dying, and his daughter running away. Did you know them?”

  For a moment she pressed her lips together hard, and I thought she wasn’t going to say any more, that Ralph and I would have to stand up, excuse ourselves, and leave, but she nodded. “As well as anybody could, I guess. They didn’t let other people in much, didn’t come to church. I seen them at the store sometimes, mostly him, she stayed in the house, and the daughter—Ruby, her name was—she’d be with friends sometimes her own age. The mother, hardly ever, I don’t even recall her name, might’ve been Ada, Eva, something like that. Mrs. Bingley, that was what we called her. She stayed at home.”

  “She died before Mr. Bingley hanged himself?”

  “Yes, she did. She drowned.”

  “Did she?” Uncle Ralph said. “I forgot that.”

  “We used to pick black walnuts at some trees around the pond a mile or so west of here—it’s filled up now. Looked like she was picking walnuts and fell in. Elmer Bingley said she couldn’t swim.”

  “And then his daughter ran away?” I asked.

  “She disappeared,” said Mrs. Lehman. “Some of her things were gone, so folks thought she ran away.”

  “And how long after that did he hang himself?”

  She looked at me evenly. “Seems like maybe a week or so, best I can remember.”

  “Uncle Ralph said there was a rumor about the girl—Ruby. That maybe she was going to have a baby. Did you ever hear anything
like that?”

  Mrs. Lehman leaned forward and winced as though the motion pained her. “Why do you want to know all this?” she asked me.

  I opened my mouth, but suddenly realized I couldn’t come up with a reason that would make sense to Mrs. Lehman. Uncle Ralph stepped into the breach, a bit too flat-footedly for my tastes. “Livy thinks that maybe Elmer Bingley didn’t kill himself. There were some photos that Brad took, and—“

  He broke off, and when I looked back at Mrs. Lehman I knew why. Her face was stern and she was shaking her head back and forth, back and forth with a certainty that would admit no doubt. “Elmer Bingley had plenty of reason to kill himself,” she said. “He had more reason than any person I ever knew.”

  “What” I said. “You mean his wife’s death, his daughter running away?”

  “More than that.”

  “The baby?” I asked.

  Mrs. Lehman looked at Uncle Ralph. “Ralph, you get out now. Go wait on the back porch, you let me talk to this girl.”

  “What, girl talk?” Ralph said.

  “Yes, girl talk, go on now…”

  Ralph gave an exasperated sigh, but stood up and walked through the house. Mrs. Lehman followed him with her eyes and ears until we heard the back door close. Then she sat back and looked at me. “This is ugly talk,” she said. “Rumors. But…” She paused.

  “Where there’s smoke there’s fire?” I said. “Sometimes?”

  “Sometimes,” Mrs. Lehman agreed. She put her hands on her lap primly, as though indicating that she was still a lady despite whatever sordid tale she might tell. “Some of Ruby’s friends,” she said carefully, as if parsing each word, “and she didn’t have many, told their parents certain stories. About Ruby and her father. That they had seen him talk to her and act towards her in ways that, well, that weren’t fatherly. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I said.

  “Well, back in those days, even if you knew something like that was going on, there wasn’t much you could do about it. Elmer Bingley didn’t go to church, so there was no pressuring him that way, and he worked over in Lebanon. Besides, nobody knew for sure.

  “Then Mrs. Bingley drowned. Elmer was at work when it happened. And a couple weeks later the rumors started about Ruby, that she was expecting. She had a boyfriend, but nobody knew if they were…doing anything or not. But I heard that her father was the one who did it. Ruby disappeared then. Nobody ever heard from her since. Whether she ran away and had her baby—or did something else about it…” A shadow passed over Mrs. Lehman’s face, and I reminded myself never to invite her to a pro-choice rally. “Nobody knows. Some thought she might have done what her mother did—if she did it and it wasn’t an accident. But nobody ever found Ruby dead or alive. Her boyfriend was pretty broke up about it.

  “Some of us started putting things together about then. If Elmer had been the father, that’d sure enough be a reason for Mrs. Bingley to drown herself—if she did. And if Ruby was pregnant by her own father, that’d be reason enough for her to run away.

  “So we weren’t all that surprised when Elmer hung himself. Maybe everything he’d done came on him all of a sudden, and that was the only thing he knew to do.” Mrs. Lehman tried to make a tsk tsk with her tongue, but it sounded as though she was smacking her lips instead. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit, I thought, but didn’t say it.

  One thing did bother me, though. “You say that Ruby had a boyfriend?”

  She nodded. “Lyle Flory. Kinda quiet and shy boy. Came out of it later, though, and became a salesman. Did pretty well for himself until he died. Died young, cancer.”

  “Did you know him after he grew up? Was he living here?”

  She shook her head. “No, he moved to Harrisburg.”

  “Does he have any surviving relatives you know of?”

  “He had a younger brother, Ben. He might still be alive. He moved to Harrisburg, too, I think. No more Florys in Roseland now.” She resituated herself in her chair and fixed me with an even look. “But why do you want to know anything about Lyle Flory? Or Elmer Bingley, for that matter?”

  I told her about finding the pictures and about my conversation with Doc Mead, and his opinion that Elmer’s death might not have been a suicide. I didn’t mention the Hangman Murders, though.

  Mrs. Lehman listened, nodding from time to time, and when I finished, she leaned toward me. “Let me tell you something, honey. If the things I heard were true, and I think they were, then Elmer Bingley wasn’t a good man. He did some real bad things that caused the death of his wife and maybe his daughter. I don’t think he wanted to keep on living, and he sure didn’t deserve to after what he did. Whether he hung himself or somebody else did it for him, I think justice was done. I wouldn’t go bothering Lyle Flory’s brother about it. If Lyle had anything to do with it, he paid his debt to God fifty years ago when he died.”

  And if Lyle had anything to do with it, maybe he had something to do with some other murders too.

  That’s what I thought about as I thanked Mrs. Lehman and said goodbye, and followed Uncle Ralph to the Stonebrook Tavern where I had promised him dinner. It was an early dinner, but that fact did nothing to daunt his appetite. He ordered the crab imperial all right, as well as a clams casino appetizer. I had a salad.

  After we’d been served, I filled in Uncle Ralph on what Mrs. Lehman had told me. He’d never heard the rumors of incest. “Well, that pretty well ties it up, don’t you think?” he asked. “After what he did, he couldn’t live with it—seems pretty simple.”

  I shook my head. “Not necessarily. I’ve read about this kind of thing. For the most part, fathers who molest their daughters never feel they’re in the wrong. If they felt any guilt, they wouldn’t have done it in the first place. From their point of view, they feel it’s their right, so they home grow their own victims.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Uncle Ralph said, though not disgusting enough to keep him from eating.

  “That’s the twisted way they think,” I went on. “If Elmer Bingley’s wife killed herself and his daughter ran away because of what he did, he’d feel anger, but probably not remorse. He might think about suicide, but he probably wouldn’t do it.”

  I speared a lettuce leaf and a piece of tomato and dipped them into the little plastic tub of blue-cheese-on-the-side. After I chewed and swallowed, I asked, “Did you know Lyle Flory?”

  “Just to say hi to. He was older than me.”

  “How about Brother Ben?”

  “Again, just to…wait a minute. You’re still not done, are you?”

  I smiled and fluttered my eyelids. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  When I got home, I found one Benjamin J. Flory in the Harrisburg phone directory. It was only a bit before seven, so I dialed.

  It rang five times before it picked up. The voice of the man on the other end was high and tattered, like his vocal cords were made of cheesecloth. “Hello?”

  “Hello, is this Benjamin Flory?”

  “Yes?” The word rose at least an octave from beginning to end.

  “Or maybe I should say Cousin Benjamin. This is Irma Flory—of the New Mexico Florys?”

  “New Mexico?” There was a hint of doubt.

  “Oh yes, there are Florys all over the U.S.—and Canada. Now we’ve never met—our families might not have either, but I’ve been working several years now on a Flory genealogy, and I’ve still got a few blanks on the Lebanon County Florys, and I was wondering if you could maybe answer a few questions for me.”

  “Well…I guess…”

  “Wonderful. First of all, the year of your birth?”

  “1925.”

  “Ah! I had 1924, I don’t know where I got that…now you have a brother named Lyle?”

  There was a pause. “Had. He died in 1958.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. And what year was he born?”

  “1917.”

  “And he was never married, is that correct?”

  “No,
he never was.”

  “And what was his profession? I’m trying to get professions.”

  “He was a salesman.”

  “Oh, I see. What did he sell? I’m just curious—my father was a salesman.”

  “Well, he sold encyclopedias mostly.”

  The book junkie in me took over. “Really? What kind?”

  “Home Popular Encyclopedia, it was called.”

  “Oh, I see.” I stifled my gag reflex. Home Popular Encyclopedia was a worthless, cheaply bound ten-volume set that sold from the 20s through the 60s to families who couldn’t afford a real Encyclopedia. “Was he a traveling salesman then?”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “Oh, so was my father. He went all over the east coast—was gone for months at a time. And where did your brother sell?”

  “Oh, states around Pennsylvania, I think—out to Indiana and then up into New York and over into New Jersey.”

  “Oh. Oh. Isn’t that interesting.” Darn right it is. Oh yeah, baby… “Well, Mr. Flory, thank you for your time. This’ll be a big help. I’ll be sure to send you a copy when it’s finished.”

  “What was your name again?”

  “Irma. Flory, of course.”

  “And you’re from New Mexico? Whereabouts?”

  “Uh, Taos…” It was the first New Mexico town that popped into my head.

  “What’s your address?”

  “My address?” Oh crap. “Why it’s 245 West…” I started blowing into the mouthpiece of my cell phone and mumbling between breaths, “Oh no, my battery…it’s going…” and then punched the End button, a technique, I’m ashamed to say, I’d used before when I wanted to end a call. Odds were that Benjamin Flory wasn’t going to star-69 me.

  Now that, I thought, setting down the phone, was too darn easy. I nailed the Hangman Murderer and had barely broken a sweat. Of course, my boots were muddy, but they’d wash off.

  Chapter 6