An Old Faithful Murder

by Valerie Wolzien

  “Father could be a difficult man. I’ll be the first to admit it. He tended to be overly involved in the lives of his children. I think we would all agree to that. But it was his concern for the family that caused problems, and we all knew that and understood it. and even …” She paused and ended more stridently, “and yes, we even loved him for it.”

  Well, it was good to know that Jane was a rotten liar. That would make Susan’s work easier. A little easier. Now all she had to do was find out the truth and why Jane was so diligently lying to hide it. Just because Susan didn’t see Jane as the killer didn’t mean that she wasn’t just that. Anyone could have hit George with that shovel and killed him; no special strength was needed.

  “It was the most difficult for Darcy, of course,” Jane was continuing. “He’s the youngest, and in some ways, the most special.…”

  “Why?”

  Jane seemed surprised by the question. “Well, because he’s the youngest …”

  “You said that.” Susan was beginning to grow impatient.

  “So he was always the baby of the family,” Jane continued, glaring at her. “And, of course, now he’s the last to be a grownup. Our parents have moved out of the lives of the rest of us—more or less.” She ended less confidently than she had begun.

  “And the rest of you aren’t gay,” Susan reminded her, having no idea whether or not it was the truth.

  “My parents are, like most of their generation, a little conservative about that type of thing. I do think that my father would have come to accept Darcy as he is in time. I was talking to my mother about it yesterday, and she agreed.…”

  “Darcy is obviously your mother’s favorite,” Susan said, and then reminded herself that interrupting was not the way to get information.

  “Well, maybe.”

  Who wants to hear that one’s sibling is more loved than oneself? Susan wondered if now Jane would have to end this speech and say something significant.

  “What you have to understand is that we are a very close family. We had our problems, like all families. Right now, Darcy’s choice of life-style is putting a lot of stress on us, but we would have solved that just like we’ve solved problems in the past. No one would have killed anyone over … over anything.”

  “But someone did.…”

  “How do you know Father wasn’t killed by some freak who hated men who wore red suspenders? There are a lot of psychopaths in the world, and they certainly could be in Yellowstone National Park.” Jane was getting angry … and anxious?

  “And Randy?” Susan pushed.

  “A rejected lover,” Jane flashed back.

  “It’s a lot of coincidence.” Susan kept her voice quiet.

  “But it is possible!” Jane insisted. “Now, listen, Mother asked you to help us, not hurt us. You don’t know all the pain this family has suffered over the years. And if you did, you’d try to spare us any more.” She glared at Susan.

  “Maybe it would be easier for me to find out what I need to know if I asked the questions and you just answered,” Susan suggested, wrongly assuming Jane would never agree to that. “And why don’t you start by telling me about the problems the family has had in the past. It usually helps if I have as much background as possible about everyone involved.”

  Jane didn’t say anything, staring through wide, crystal blue eyes.

  “For instance, Joyce tells me that Carlton is an alcoholic,” Susan said, priming the pump.

  Jane played with the delicate gold chains around her left wrist, taking her time before saying more. “As I said, we are a large family. I don’t think the fact that one of us abuses alcohol is in any way a reflection on the rest of us.…” And then she lost control. “You really are a ghoul, you know. Do you like collecting information on people’s weaknesses? So what if one of my brothers is gay and the other is an alcoholic? What business is all this of yours?”

  “Your mother asked me to investigate these murders,” Susan reminded her. “And no, I don’t collect information about people because I take some sort of perverse enjoyment in discovering their weaknesses. I do it to help people. It always helps people to know the truth.”

  “You’re going to have to grow a mustache if you’re going to insist on these Hercule Poirot imitations,” Jane said, almost smiling. “But I understand what you’re saying, of course. In fact, I don’t see how we can survive as a family unless we know who killed Father. Which one of us killed him,” she amended sadly. “So what do you want to know?”

  “How important is your family to you?” Susan asked the first question that came to mind.

  “A lot. I don’t think most of my friends are as tied to their families as I am to mine. Though large families may tend to be more connected than families with fewer members.” She stopped playing with her jewelry and looked up at Susan. “I’ve given this a lot of thought from time to time. Ours is a family of alliances. Some of the alliances changed over the years, and some remained static. For instance, Charlotte and I are only one year apart in age. In some ways we might have been twins. We look similar, we like the same things, and so we formed our own unit inside the family. And even now, when we live on opposite sides of the country, we stay in close touch. We vacation together about once a year. Once we even discovered that we had dated the same man—an airline pilot who flew the red-eye—although not at the same time,” she explained.

  “And did the rest of the family work like this? Are there other groups within the main group?” Susan asked, thinking vaguely of a social psychology course she had taken her sophomore year of college, and that she now, when it might come in useful, had completely forgotten.

  “Not exactly. Carlton and Jon have similar talents—they were always interested in science, for instance. But their ages were too far apart for them to be close when they were children. So Jon inherited Carlton’s rock and bug collections, and his chemistry set, I think. But there’s a fifteen-year difference in their ages, so …”

  “That’s really unusual, to have such spaces between children. How old are you all?”

  “Let me think. Carlton must be forty. I’m thirty-one, Charlotte is thirty. Jon is twenty-five (we celebrated his birthday over Christmas), and Darcy is just twenty-one.”

  “Your parents did some interesting spacing of children,” Susan commented.

  “My mother had at least two miscarriages between Carlton and myself—maybe more. We never talked about it. And I knew she had a baby that died within the year after Charlotte was born. I don’t remember it, but I can vaguely remember going to visit its grave when I was a child. I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl; all that was carved into the granite was Baby Ericksen—it might have been any of us. Anyway, she also had a miscarriage between Jon and Darcy. I was six or seven at the time, and I can still remember how upset she was. Probably that’s the reason she and Darcy are so close.

  “They’re the other group within the family, I guess. She has always adored him, and he has always adored her. Even during Darcy’s adolescence, he rebelled against my father, not against Mother.”

  Susan was a bit overwhelmed, trying to imagine the cumulative pain of a woman who had suffered so much loss over the years. And who once again was grieving. She was sure it didn’t get any easier.

  “I’ve always admired my mother; she’s been through so much. And now …”

  “And now?” Susan prodded.

  “I have a horrible feeling that she thinks Darcy killed my father.”

  “Why?” Susan asked.

  “She’s not really grieving for Father. Her first reaction, almost her only reaction so far, has been to hold Darcy closer than ever. He’s moved in with her. And she refuses to leave the room unless she’s with him. And the times that he has left without her, she’s been frantic. Charlotte was with her this morning after Darcy stormed out, and she says that she thought Mother was going to go mad, she was so worried about him.”

  “I suppose it’s my turn to talk, isn’t it?�
�� a voice interrupted.

  Charlotte had joined them.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Charlotte sat down on the heavy trunk that served for a coffee table. She was wearing black wool slacks, a shell pink silk shirt, and a black vest displaying elaborate vines embroidered in gold thread. Where, Susan asked herself parenthetically, did these sisters get their clothes? And if this was their idea of casual, what did they wear when they got dressed up?

  “Mother is still busy nursing Darcy, so I took this chance to get away,” Charlotte explained to her sister. “How does this work? Do we tell her what we think she should know, or does she ask the questions and we answer?”

  “Whichever you prefer,” Susan explained, before Jane could answer. “Although usually I ask the questions.” And she preferred to ask them when she was alone with the other person, although she didn’t say so.

  “I had just finished explaining about the age differences in our family and how many children Mother lost,” Jane added.

  “She’s lived with a lot of loss, but I don’t know how she’s going to survive this,” Charlotte said. “No matter what has happened in her life, no matter what terrible tragedies she has lived through, Mother has always had Father right by her side. We’ll all do what we can, of course, but for Mother there’s only Darcy—and he’s pretty fragile himself. There’s no way she can depend upon him now, no matter how much she tries.”

  “Maybe …” Susan hesitated, knowing that neither woman would want to hear what she was going to say. “Maybe she isn’t depending on him. Maybe she’s trying to protect him.”

  “I think that’s true. She’s trying to make sure he doesn’t kill himself,” Charlotte said, nodding to her sister. “That’s why she was so worried when he skied off this morning.” She turned to Susan. “My youngest brother is very high-strung. I think the murder of his lover and the murder of his father have been too much for him.”

  Susan, who had been thinking of Darcy in the roll of murderer, not mourner, didn’t know what to say next. Of course, Darcy could be both murderer and mourner. “Is Darcy usually … umm, more stable than this? I mean, Charlotte said he’s ‘high-strung,’ and being gay is difficult in this society, and …” She decided to stop before they could construe her questions as insulting.

  The sisters exchanged a look that Susan wished she could interpret. Charlotte spoke first.

  “What I meant when I said high-strung is … I think we should tell her, Jane,” she insisted, interrupting herself and reaching out to her sister.

  Jane nodded. “Yes. I think we should.”

  Susan sat quietly, waiting for Jane to begin.

  “Except that it’s not all that easy to explain.”

  “Maybe the beginning,” Susan suggested gently, falling back on a cliché.

  “Where’s that?” Jane asked, apparently honestly.

  “I know where it begins for me,” Charlotte surprised them by saying. “Back with the ink.” She gave her sister a look best called significant.

  “Go ahead and tell her. Maybe it’s time someone knew the truth about us.” Jane turned just enough to look out the window. Susan hoped she wasn’t going to get to watch each Ericksen dissolve into tears, one after the other.

  “It’s a silly story in some ways. It wouldn’t be worth telling—or would have been forgotten by now—if it hadn’t started a whole string of events.… But I’m getting beyond the beginning right away. Anyway, the story starts about fifteen years ago when Darcy was just a little more than five years old. My parents had an argument. Not a knock-down, drag-out argument, just a run-of-the-mill screaming contest like most married couples have occasionally. It would have been over with and forgotten if Darcy hadn’t been awake later than usual for some reason and overheard the whole thing. He … he got mad at Father, presumably for upsetting Mother, and he went to Father’s desk, found some permanent ink that Father used to identify specimens, climbed to the top of Father’s dresser, and poured the entire bottle of ink into a pile of a dozen white linen shirts that Father always had made in London. It ruined the shirts, of course. And some of Father’s work was on the desk, and that was destroyed, too. I don’t remember the reaction, but the family story goes that Father was furious.”

  “But knowing Father, I’ve always wondered if he was a little proud of Darcy. It was the type of act that showed what Father might have called spunk,” Jane added.

  “True. But remember, we were barely in our teens. We’re working entirely on memory.”

  And family myth, Susan added to herself. “I gather this was only the first time something like that happened” was what she said aloud.

  “Just the first of many,” Jane agreed. “You see, even as a small child, Darcy was terribly attached to Mother. If he saw her unhappy, he did something about it. Actually, there were some very funny things … like when my mother complained that one of the women she did some sort of volunteer job with was working her too hard, and the next time that woman came over to the house, Darcy threw a ball at her, screaming that she was a slave driver. He was very young then, of course.”

  “But as he got older … ?” Susan asked.

  “As he got older, he got more and more sophisticated.” Jane sighed. “It really was remarkable. I understand the lengths some children will go to, to get and keep their parents’ attention, but for Darcy it was easy: he charmed my mother.”

  “And your father?” Susan was hesitant, but she had to ask.

  “He wasn’t so successful with Father,” Jane admitted. “Certainly, though, it was partially Father’s fault.”

  “Definitely,” Charlotte agreed. They exchanged looks again.

  “You see, Father is somewhat sexist. Up until Darcy’s birth, he had two sons, both of whom were interested in science, as he was, and two daughters, who are more interested in the arts. Darcy is an artist. He was from the first time he put a crayon on a piece of paper.”

  “Your mother said he is very talented.”

  “Oh, he is,” Charlotte agreed. “He goes to art school, and he’s certainly one of their best students.”

  “But it’s more than that,” Jane added. “Darcy looks at the world through the eyes of an artist. He sees little relevance in Father’s facts, and classifications, and natural laws. To Darcy, reality is only the beginning. Everything is processed through his imagination and becomes something special. It’s not just his art, he lives life like that. You know, my mother’s the same way.”

  “And your father didn’t object to it in a woman?”

  “Well—” Jane paused, apparently trying to find the right words “—my mother was always able to find an outlet for her creativity in domestic things. She’s a fabulous gardener, not because her plants grow well but because she invents gardens that are rare and special. In Wisconsin one summer, she spent weeks creating a garden within a garden. She literally worked from dawn until dark until she had a tiny plot, complete with a miniature waterfall that was a minuscule reflection of the larger garden around it. And our homes were always decorated with great imagination and flair.”

  “And her cooking is extraordinary,” Charlotte said. “Not just good, but presented wonderfully. I remember one of my birthday parties when everything was shaped like a star—from cakes and cookies, to the tablecloth, and all the decorations. She even made each guest a crown of stars to wear. My friends were overwhelmed.”

  “And Darcy takes after your mother?”

  “Yes, but the problem was that Darcy always wanted to help Mother with all her projects. And Father thought it was effeminate.”

  “And … ?”

  “And was always insulting about it,” Charlotte said. Susan thought she was getting mad. “Father has been making cracks about toughening up Darcy as long as I remember. And, of course, it never worked. For instance, Darcy was wonderful at sports: soccer, baseball, all the games kids play. And Father would have been so happy to go and cheer him on.…”

  “But it didn’t work out?”
Susan asked.

  “The first soccer game of the season in third or fourth grade, Darcy made the game winning goal. My mother had insisted that the whole family be there to watch, and we all dashed onto the field after the game to congratulate Darcy. He looked so sweet in his striped shirt with white shorts and knee socks.… Anyway, Father walked slowly across the field and came up to Darcy with a big smile on his face. He said something like ‘It’s about time you made me proud of you.’ Darcy never played soccer again,” Charlotte added. “If it was for Father, he just wouldn’t do it.”

  “Unless Mother insisted. He would do anything for Mother,” Jane added.

  “It’s true,” Charlotte agreed. “Mother has been keeping the peace between them for years.”

  “Have there been any other conflicts like this in the family?” Susan asked, thinking that one sounded like more than enough.

  “Not really,” Jane answered quickly. Maybe too quickly.

  “I suppose we all rebelled in adolescence. But nothing unusual. As long as we were getting good grades in school and not doing anything to publicly disgrace the family, the rest of us were allowed a fair amount of freedom and we went our own way,” Charlotte said.

  Susan stood up, sensing that no one was going to say anything more right now. Neither woman had mentioned that their older brother had changed his whole life, going so far as to change continents to avoid his family. She wondered what else they weren’t mentioning.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It was Beth who made Susan realize how little the Ericksens were affected by Randy’s death.

  “I keep thinking about Randy” was the way she put it. “It must be terrible to die among strangers.”

  Susan wondered if Beth was thinking that she was also among strangers. Beth’s next comment, that “Randy and Darcy hadn’t been together long,” gave Susan an opening.

  “Had you met him before this trip?”

  “Once. In New York City. Jon and I were there after Christmas. He was visiting me. I grew up in New Jersey, and my family still lives there,” she explained. “Jon has been living in the city since last fall. He was on some sort of work-study semester. I don’t think he knew Randy before then. Randy just graduated from NYU last year, and he’s been working for an ad agency since then. By Christmas they were sharing an apartment.”