Private Investigations

by Victoria Zackheim

  Why? Remember that the guards in the woods after the execution didn’t bury all the bodies together. Two were found separately. That’s suspicious, isn’t it? Especially when those two bodies weren’t interred with the rest in the cathedral. Why is that? Is it because someone affiliated with the church knows that those remains aren’t, in fact, those of Alexei and Maria? And do we now need to go back and rethink everything? Maybe Anna Anderson wasn’t Anastasia, but what really happened to Maria? I mean, if you’d gone through the hell she had, would you come forward and claim your birthright? Or would you quietly recede, careful to make sure no one knew who you really were, not wanting to draw the attention of those who had butchered your family? Might you even go so far as to convince a mentally ill woman that she was your dead sister so that everyone was thinking about Anastasia, not you?

  A little confusion, a few well-chosen facts, and a ready imagination are all it takes to develop a mystery that could well intrigue people for centuries. We might want answers—and sometimes we even accept them—but the quest is often far more gratifying than the conclusion. Mystery excites us, engages us, and irresistibly pulls us into its twists and turns, providing endless opportunities to find a more satisfactory ending to a story. It lets us cling to hope far longer than we might otherwise be able to, satisfies the primal part of our brains that trusts instinct, and, on occasion, guides us to truths that, unexplored, would remain hidden. But most of all, mystery is good fun. Who would want to live in a world without it?

  GODFATHERS, NANCY DREW, AND CATS

  – Carole Nelson Douglas –

  BY THE TIME I WAS FIVE, I’D FACED CERTAIN DEATH AT THE hands of others. When I was nine, I testified as a witness to a physical assault. During middle school, I was a conscientious pupil yet ran an undetected smuggling operation out of the stately redbrick school building. At twelve, I was suspected of a serious jewelry theft. All of this was kid’s stuff compared to the people I have strangled, poisoned, and pushed to their deaths through most of my adult life. Not bloody, anonymous, “mean streets” stuff, merely everyday murderous domestic malice among friends and family and associates. No, I am not a “gone girl.” Just a veteran fiction writer who has wondered from childhood how ordinary people let their lives spiral into unhappiness, even violence and disaster. So I explore my past as prologue.

  MYSTERY MAN

  Age: Toddler

  Location: House near Seattle in Sunnyside, semirural Washington state

  Me, tiny feet sinking into a sofa cushion, leaning over the 1940s gray, chartreuse, and maroon floral sofa-cover fabric (destined to soon become drapes in St. Paul, Minnesota). I gaze out the window to the driveway, saying over and over, “Why doesn’t he come?”

  My father, a Norwegian immigrant salmon fisherman, was often away, but I don’t recall ever getting the answer to my plaintive litany. My only mental memory of my father is a shadowy silhouette of a man wearing a fedora and standing near a big black car, the iconic image of a vintage private eye. No wonder old 1940s Boston Blackie and PI movie reruns of 1950s TV will entrance me later. By then, the only lasting reminder of my father, besides meager snapshots, will be the exotic new word I had to learn to spell and print on grade school class forms: Father: deceased. (Years later, my mother asked for the Christmas gift of a notebook “so I can record everything about our family and your father,” as I’d been encouraging her to do. She died of a brain tumor within three months. Her few notebook scribbles concentrated on how he had died on that fishing trawler during a run of salmon. It portrayed a man of duty, Arnold, who became the Nelson in my writing byline for decades. Like his salmon prey, he never flagged in leaping up against the water, the sea. Twice he lay down with chest pains and arose. The third time he didn’t, making my mother a forty-three-year-old grade school teacher, a widow with a small child, a farm-reared woman who didn’t know how to drive a car in post–World War II America.) My origins on the Norwegian side remained a mystery, making me curious about other children and families and fathers.

  Did I search out father figures? No, but I can now discern key events in my evolving life as a writer/mystery writer when a man of celebrity or authority acted on my behalf, an unofficial godfather creating turning points in my life. Facing the mystery of my father’s sudden and forever absence so young, and being an only child left to find answers for herself, gave me a lifelong need to solve life’s mysteries small and large. I wanted to see and understand the people and situations behind doors other than my own. I became a neighborhood kid detective, reporter and newsletter publisher, amateur psychoanalyst, snoop, actress, and playwright. My later adult occupations legitimized that need to know. I never again wanted to find myself in the dark, like that bewildered, forlorn child.

  LOST FLOCK

  Age: Two and a half

  Location: Washington state

  Wearing rubber boots in the damp, long grass, I watch my beloved bantam chickens pecking the ground. My mother and I are leaving Washington, and she has told me that the boy who lives next door, the son of a family friend, would care for them. This moment will come back to haunt me ten years later.

  We retreated to St. Paul, Minnesota, to join her two sisters, so I grew up in the majestic shade of Nativity of Our Lord Catholic Church, looming like a Gothic ship’s prow through the leafless winter elm trees. I was the youngest, smallest, and the only only child amid blocks of large, often disorganized Catholic families. Also, I was so myopic that it was a miracle I didn’t get killed crossing the street before I got glasses at seven. No wonder my nose was always in a book.

  Still, even in that cloistered neighborhood, I had childhood brushes with petty crime and punishment.

  THE GREAT ESCAPE

  Age: Five

  Location: St. Paul, Minnesota

  I’m in the backyard of a family with five older girls who have become my March sisters from Little Women. Older bully boys accuse me of blabbing about I-don’t-remember-what and force me to climb wooden slats nailed into the trunk of a backyard elm tree towering far above the garage roof lines. “Your punishment,” one says. “You have to jump down.” Penned in, looking down, down, even half blind, I know that would kill me.

  On that languid Minnesota summer evening, mothers were calling their kids home to dinner, including mine: Car-ole. Car-ole! The power of the parents prevailed; the boys let me climb down. Now I wonder if it’s just coincidence that many murders in my mystery series set in Las Vegas are by falling rather than knife or gun. And that one protagonist is a bungee-jumping magician? Vegas teems with aerial shows, and deaths aren’t bloody in traditional mysteries. But, subconsciously, am I revisiting that elm-tree ordeal?

  THE BOOK SPY

  Age: Six

  Location: 1920s-vintage two-story family home

  It’s evening, and I’m supposed to be in bed. Instead, I’m peering down through the staircase overlooking the warm lights and sparkling stainless silver coffee urn at my mother’s book-club meeting in the living room below. The women have left, but the books remain. (Years later, by daylight, I read and reread Kipling, George Eliot, James Fenimore Cooper, the Brontë sisters, Oscar Wilde, and my favorite, the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, font of dark mystery.)

  My mother’s dark oak bookcase would soon house my own shelf of Sherlock Holmes stories and the ninety-nine-cent Nancy Drew hardcover mysteries begged from my mother every time she took me downtown to buy school supplies. “Please, Mother, please!” (Hearing children plead that at my later book signings is my greatest pleasure in authorhood.) Still, even in that cloistered, benign neighborhood, I glimpsed instances of violent death. One was the fatal fall of a girlfriend’s mother down the basement steps—because of encephalitis, they said. The widower immediately married his much younger secretary, leaving his four children’s lives in disarray and separation. I always wondered.… And then there was the wife and mother who showed up on her neighbor’s doorstep so covered in blood that she was unrecognizable, asking for help. It
was St. Paul’s most savage murder. She was the victim of a brutally executed murder-for-hire ordered by her womanizing but mild-looking and bespectacled attorney husband, T. Eugene Thompson. It shocked me, as if actor Wally Cox, in his 1950s TV role of the terminally timid Mister Peepers, had gone rogue. Could anyone like that live next door to me? I watched to make sure. I was a painfully shy child, but I had a secret bold streak.

  NANCY DREW JR. (HORSE-CRAZY CUB REPORTER–SNOOP–ADVENTURER)

  Age: Seven to thirteen

  Location: Cruising quiet neighborhoods as far as my clunky Schwinn bike could take me

  I’ve spotted a horse left alone while the owners work and feed Sidewinder (for the crooked white face blaze) carrot treats from a lunch bag. To reach him, I have to pedal across the mile-long tractor-semitrailer-truck-crowded Mendota Bridge over the Mississippi River flats far below.

  It was unnerving. But that ride, plus climbing steep Mississippi river cliffs with a tomboy friend of Indian heritage and clambering behind the deserted, frozen Minnehaha Falls in winter would give me scenes of derring-do in future novels. I was primed. I held on for my life by fistfuls of whip-thin bush stalks and skidded over black ice, firing my cub-reporter interests. I lived in a boring grid of low bungalows and square two-stories, so I was fascinated by other people’s houses. I discovered one with a castle-like turret and another on a bush-strangled double lot that had a curved driveway with matching lion statues. I often snooped those lion-house grounds like Nancy Drew and even produced a mimeographed Neighborhood Newsletter to flourish when I knocked on the door and asked the lady if I could see inside her house for a story. Uh, no. I’d heard the family name was Nightwine. Is it any mystery why a sinister character named Nightwine inhabits my mystery novels? In any case, I had developed a fierce code of justice from my Catholic education. If it was a school-based injustice, I believed that Sister could fix it. If not, Father from the rectory would. And if not he, then God surely would restore right and just order.

  WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION

  Age: Nine

  Location: Fourth grade classroom at Nativity School

  I am an incensed witness when the new kid, Arthur, beats up my friend Patty on the way to school. Called to testify, I fearlessly, passionately “finger” the new bully boy to his face. (Shades of “You dirty rat” from James Cagney gangster films on TV.) Patty sobs.

  SOCIAL WORKER

  Age: Eleven

  Location: Large front bedroom of Patty’s house

  Patty sits amid a watching circle of older sisters, about to razor-etch a boy’s initials onto her knee. I tell her I will never be her friend again if she does this. She does. I leave.

  We never spoke again until a school reunion decades later. She and all her sisters had married controlling alcoholics, but she had been the only one to divorce hers. I told Patty she’d been the “Cool Hand Luke” figure on our block, like the jailed Paul Newman in the film, who was egged on to defy authority and pay the price, a scapegoat victim-hero for others. She called her four older sisters that evening: “Remember all those times Carole was over at our house? She wasn’t just there. She was observing.” It was true. I had been a victim, a witness, a prosecutor, and a “house” detective, and now I was a social worker, building characters, writing sketches of the girls around me, recording what we would later call dysfunctional ways. Patty didn’t have a scar, but classmates later reported domestic verbal and physical abuse. Maybe I was better off with only shadowy memories of a father. And who knew all of this would find its way into my novels?

  PROFESSIONAL CAT SMUGGLER

  Age: Five to twelve

  Location: Nativity Church’s stately redbrick school

  The school entrance is a set of huge, heavy, noisy double doors that buffer the severe winter climate. My father loved cats, as I do, but my mother won’t have one in the house. (She allowed a parakeet, even finally a small dog.) I work a deal to bring a stray cat home for two meals and a night in the warm basement before I send it on its way. Strays abound near playgrounds, so I smuggle one into our ranked lines of students going in, I the last in line—like The Wizard of Oz’s Cowardly Lion marching into the witch’s castle—and leave the cat in the between-door zone. Sometimes it is found and released. If not, I pick it up to take home, and my night shelter is in business.

  Cat rescue would become a key element in my future writing career, but as a kid it taught me how to avoid suspicion, sneak around rules, and have a ready “story”—all those antisocial ploys of criminals that my mother wouldn’t have encouraged. Our continual duel over cats gave me the relentless drive that it would later take to pursue work in rejection-based fields such as acting and writing. Some attempted rescues had heartbreaking, haunting outcomes. I learned that empathy is never enough in an often cruelly evil world.

  DIAMOND THIEF

  Age: Twelve

  Location: Split-level home on Puget Sound

  When I am twelve, my mother brings me by train to visit people from our brief life with Father in the Pacific Northwest. One couple, living on pricey Puget Sound, are our former modest rural neighbors. The son inherited my fluffy little chickens nine years before. Alone in the lower garage level, he torments his sister and me by tearing the wings and legs off bugs.

  I realized that house was “split-level” in more ways than one, and the word psychopath was learned. (I still cringe wondering what that kid did to my flock.) But there was another revolting situation. I was accused of stealing the mother’s diamond ring. Did I take it? No. “No” was not convincing enough, I saw as my heart sank. After we had returned home, a letter came. The ring had been found in the garbage disposal. Later, I would create and follow a doozy of a psychopath in more than two dozen books. I called her Kitty the Cutter, the graduate of a brutal Irish Magdalene Home for unwed mothers.

  THREE LITERARY GODFATHERS ARE WE

  Age: Eighteen to twenty-one

  Location: University of St. Catherine, St. Paul

  Writing is not my first love; acting is, and I thirst to find local role models who had made good in both “impractical” majors.

  The sponsor of a Minneapolis-born actor’s St. Paul Winter Carnival appearance wouldn’t let me, a local college-paper reporter, interview him, so I went full Nancy Drew to finagle a meeting with my target, the late actor Robert Vaughn, a very intellectual and nice fellow Minnesotan and then-star of TV’s hot The Man from U.N.C.L.E. series. I wouldn’t hear about “fanfic” until long after, but I was writing and broadcasting a satirical Eve Cain, The Girl from B.U.N.N.I.E. serial on the campus radio station. “No” wouldn’t have stopped Nancy Drew. And they didn’t call it stalking then. I donned high heels and a smartly silly hat to look like a women’s-club event coordinator and left a manila envelope addressed to the actor at the St. Paul Hotel front desk. When the bellman retrieved the envelope, I tailed him into the elevator and lurked in espionage mode to see the room number so I could call Mr. Vaughn personally, then cleverly (I thought) walked down four floors and summoned the elevator. The doors opened on Robert Vaughn standing alone in a velvet-collared Chesterfield coat, eating an orange. Speechless, and caught in the ridiculous outfit I’d planned to dump in the cloakroom later, I got on the elevator and faced forward, then blurted that I’d sent the message: “Say U.N.C.L.E. and give a college reporter a break and an interview.”

  He not only escorted me to his welcome party but arranged to host a long interview lunch at his Minneapolis hotel when his gig was over. Why? Did he like my oddball combination of chutzpah and sincerity? A mystery… finally solved in his 2008 autobiography, A Fortunate Life. At twelve, he’d donned porkpie hat and sunglasses to get into a famous adults-only film, Ecstasy, featuring Hedy Lamarr. What was certain to me then: my writing the spy-caper radio series and a cheeky interview pitch had won over handsome Godfather I. My confidence tripled. It quadrupled when a later The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. spin-off featured Stefanie Powers as April Dancer (sounded like a racehorse name, I
sniffed on behalf of Eve Cain, but I’d correctly anticipated a female spin-off). My writing and grasp of pop culture might actually sell. When I created my Las Vegas–set murder mystery series twenty-seven years later, my radio series inspired me to add an international IRA thriller subplot for added dimension, substance, and longevity. I call the result of my particular mix cozy-noir. A mystery…

  IN VOGUE

  Age: Twenty-one

  Location: High-rise Manhattan penthouse of publishing giant S. I. Newhouse

  White-coated black waitstaff are swooping canapé trays past guests, raising my eyebrows. By now not so ridiculously dressed (hopefully), I am rubbing Midwestern shoulders in my sample-shop wardrobe with East Coast trust-fund babies wearing cashmere twinsets and real pearls.

  I was one of twelve national finalists in the Vogue magazine annual Prix de Paris writing contest for women college seniors, won previously by Joan Didion and Jacqueline Bouvier (Kennedy Onassis). Thanks to Robert Vaughn, I had a hip, timely subject for the celebrity profile entry, one of nine assignments. (Not the one I dictated to a friend with a manual typewriter on her lap while driving to make the midnight posting date at the St. Paul Post Office. We were both wearing mittens.) I didn’t win the year’s job at Vogue but could have been an editorial assistant if I had learned shorthand and could have survived in Manhattan on a meager salary without parental underwriting. Unlike the rich girls, I was not going to live off my mother’s modest teacher’s income one minute after graduation.

  OVERQUALIFIED

  Age: Twenty-one

  Location: Employment-agency office

  They find my liberal arts ways fit only for teaching for the Famous Writers School. (Sheer fraud! I think, but maybe, in hindsight, it is an omen: author Jessica Mitford will “out” the school four years later.) In the St. Paul Pioneer Press classified ads, I find an interesting flunky job with little pay in the advertising department. But… Godfathers II and III are awaiting me. GII, the advertising manager, chooses “overqualified” me over eighteen others. An older woman coworker (Godmother I) urges me to take a theater review I’ve written for fun to editorial on the sacred fourth floor. GIII, the managing editor, is a hulking man who camps out on the paper’s roof for charity every winter. Intimidated, I watch him skim my review and bark, “Five dollars.” I’m hooked.