Murder Old and New

by Chet Williamson

  The only thing that creeped me out a little was that Tom Drummond had been recently buried there. When I caught up on all the stories about the Gates Home debacle in the newspapers, I’d been surprised to read in Drummond’s obituary that interment would be at the Stonebrook Cemetery. Still, everybody has to be buried somewhere, and since he’d been living locally all his life, and I assume his family had been from Roseland, it wasn’t that big a coincidence.

  Right after lunch, I drove out to the cemetery with a bouquet I’d gotten the day before, and parked along the side of the road. I decided to exorcise my demons by finding Tom Drummond’s grave first, and it wasn’t hard. It was the only bare plot in the place.

  There was one of those small twofer headstones on which both husband’s and wife’s names are engraved. The stone read “Ella Raines Drummond 1923-1996” and, on the side with the bare patch, “Lester Thomas Drummond 1917-” The death year hadn’t yet been engraved. I figured they’d wait till spring for that.

  As I stood by his grave, looking down at the newly turned soil and smelling the dampness of the wet earth, I thought that despite Tom Drummond’s being a monster, he had at least done something to partly redeem himself at the end. He’d sacrificed himself for Mary Hamilton just as surely as Genevieve had for my mother, so he deserved a few kind thoughts.

  Once the full story had come out, Tom Drummond had been cleared of the murders in the Gates Home, but the revelation in his own words that he had been the Hangman Killer would assure that his name lived on only in infamy. He had no children or grandchildren, no one to remember him during the fifty years he had lived without killing.

  I turned away from his grave and took the flowers over to my father’s. First, I filled the small metal vase that was attached to the granite marker from the pint bottle of water I’d brought, then put in the flowers. I stood there in the warm sun for a long time, thinking about my father, about all the things we’d done together, the fun times we’d had, and about how there was no hug like his in the whole world that had made me feel as safe and as loved. Maybe someday I’d find a hug like that again.

  I sighed and turned to leave, but stayed where I was when I saw a shiny Toyota Prius pull up and park along the road just behind my car. A young man got out of the driver’s side, walked around the car, opened the passenger door, and helped a much older woman climb out. They talked for a moment and she shook her head. Then the young man opened the metal gate of the cemetery, and she walked through with the help of her cane while he got back in the car.

  The old woman was wearing a long, tailored navy wool coat and a dark wool hat. Chin-length white hair, stylishly cut, framed her thin face like parentheses. I held back from walking to my own car, deciding to continue enjoying the weather and give the woman a chance to reach her destination without me disturbing her.

  She walked away from me then, toward the part of the cemetery I had visited earlier. As she drew nearer to Tom Drummond’s fresh grave, I held my breath, thinking that surely there was some older grave nearby she was visiting. But she stopped right in front of the bare earth and Tom Drummond’s stone.

  For several minutes she stood there, just looking down and leaning on her cane. Then she straightened up and started walking back the way she had come.

  I started walking, too.

  She moved slowly, so I caught up with her twenty yards or so from the cemetery gate. Since I didn’t want to startle her, I said hello very gently when I was still behind her, in case she hadn’t heard my footsteps.

  As it turned out, she had, and turned as soon as I spoke. “Hello,” she said in a voice that sounded surprisingly young in such an old face. Then she smiled and I saw her teeth, still her own without a doubt, and still with the gap between the front two that had made her appear so sweetly vulnerable in her yearbook photo.

  I could barely speak, but managed to get out, “Beautiful day.”

  “It is indeed,” she said.

  I didn’t know how much longer I could hold back, so I cut to the chase. “I was visiting my father today. First good day for it in a long time.” I nodded back toward Tom Drummond’s grave. “A relative?”

  “No,” she said. “Someone I went to high school with. Oh, a long time ago. I hadn’t seen him since then. I read about it in the paper, and just thought I’d…well…”

  “Ah.”

  “It turns out he wasn’t…the best person in the world. But I thought I’d come out here just to see…and to reminisce a little.”

  “He must have meant something to you then?” I hazarded.

  “Well, just between you and me,” she said, leaning toward me conspiratorially and lowering her voice, “he had a little crush on me.”

  “I can see how he might have…Ruby.”

  Her green eyes widened and her smile disappeared. “How…” she said, then paused. “Who are you?”

  “I knew Tom Drummond,” I said. “When he was in a home. At the end.”

  “But…you called me Ruby. Nobody…” She trailed off, then said, “My name is Evelyn. Evelyn King. Evelyn Martin King.”

  I spoke quietly, gently, as I might to an animal I didn’t want to spook. “Is that the name you took? Evelyn Martin? When you ran away? Ran away to have your baby?”

  For a long time she looked at me in astonishment, then asked again, “Who are you?”

  “My name is Olivia Crowe, and I think I know what happened, what you did and why you did it. You ran away because you were pregnant, and to get away from your father, so he wouldn’t…hurt you anymore.”

  She seemed to get dizzy then, and started to sway. I took her arm, and the young man got out of the car and started coming toward us. “Gram?” he said, “are you okay?”

  “Just take me to the car,” she said after a moment. “This young lady and I need to talk a little.”

  We got her into the passenger seat, and she told her grandson to take a short walk in the cemetery while she and I talked. I sat on the driver’s side and looked carefully at the woman who had become Evelyn Martin King.

  She seemed well-preserved and well-off. Diamond studs sparkled in her ears, and when she took off her gloves the gems in her rings looked real. If her early life had been rough, it appeared to have been made up for, at least financially.

  “Now,” she said, leaning toward me, and there was nothing of the meek little old lady in the sharp bite of her words. “How do you know who I am? And just how much do you know?”

  I told her what I had learned and how. It took a while, and when I finished she sat there looking at me for such a long time and with such intensity that I felt even more uncomfortable than the situation warranted. Then she leaned back and rested her head against the seat, closing her eyes for a moment before she spoke.

  “When I got pregnant,” she said, “I decided to leave Roseland. My mother had died and I felt that…no one would understand once my condition became obvious. So, I packed a few things and I took a train to Philadelphia. There I took the name of Evelyn Martin and I had my baby at a clinic where I told them my husband had died.

  “I tried to forget everything about Roseland. I didn’t learn what had happened to my father until years later. By that time, I had married a man named John King who thought I was a widow. He adopted my son. He was a businessman and did very well. We had two more children and he moved his company to Harrisburg in the 1960s, and we lived there ever since. All my three children are married and successful, and I have four grandchildren. My husband died fifteen years ago, but I have lived a long and happy life.”

  She seemed as though she wanted to say something else but wasn’t quite sure how. So I asked, “Why did you come out here today?”

  She opened her eyes and turned slowly to look at me. “For him, I think. I said he had a crush on me? No. He loved me. He loved me like a dog loves its master when he beats it and it just licks his hand. I treated him like dirt and it didn’t matter. My husband loved me, but never the way that Tom Drummond did. I guess I
just came here to try and…remember what that felt like.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said to fill the silence.

  “Sorry for what?” she asked coldly.

  “Sorry for what happened to you, I guess. When you were young. Having something like that happen…”

  “I was unlucky, but it worked out. Girls got pregnant all the time. They still do.”

  “But not…like that.”

  She cocked her head, and her eyes got hard again. “Like what?”

  “The…abuse. Your father.”

  Evelyn looked at me for a long time, as though she were memorizing my every feature so that she could track me down if she needed to. And I was afraid of her, afraid of this woman in her nineties. “My father?” she finally said. “Listen to me. My father never touched me. Lyle Flory got me pregnant, made me do what I didn’t want to do, but I did it anyway. I didn’t want to marry him. I didn’t want to go through having a bastard in a little town like Roseland. So I left. I left Ruby Bingley behind. And it all worked just fine. And I don’t give a good goddamn what people said about Ruby Bingley and her father. That’s just talk. Rumors. Lies. You understand?”

  I swallowed hard and nodded.

  “Forget you ever met me,” she said. “Ruby Bingley’s been dead for a long, long time. Nobody in my family knows her name, and it’s going to stay that way.”

  Her eyes made it a question, and I nodded again. “Yes. It is.”

  She inhaled deeply, as though finished with an unpleasant task. “It was very nice to meet you, Olivia Crowe. I hope we won’t meet again.”

  I got out of the car and walked back to my own, while Evelyn King’s grandson got into his Prius and drove his grandmother away.

  I stood there until their car had disappeared over a slight rise, and stood even longer, wondering what were lies and what was the truth, and deciding that it really didn’t matter. Elmer Bingley was dead. Tom Drummond and Harold Newbury were as dead as their victims. And Ruby Bingley had died a long time ago.

  The sun was bright and warm, and a new season would be coming soon. The snow was gone. The storm was nothing but a memory.