Kindred Crimes

by Janet Dawson

  “Do I get an answer?”

  He moved to a rack against the wall and pulled out lengths of molding, placing one and then another against the sketch. He selected one and laid it on the table to measure it. When he spoke again his voice had steadied.

  “I didn’t plan it. It just happened. It happened so fast I couldn’t stop it. I don’t talk about it. To anyone. I told you more last night and just now than I’ve ever told anyone.” His lips curved in a ghost of a smile. “But you’re a good detective, Jeri. You just sit there, push buttons, and ask questions until you get answers.”

  “What happened that night?” I asked, still pushing buttons, probing for answers. Mark’s face tightened and the shutters went down in his eyes. He slapped the tape measure against the table.

  “You talked to the cop, didn’t you? You read the newspaper articles. You know what happened.”

  “I know what the police found. And what the newspapers reported. I don’t know what happened after you left Leo Mercer’s house that Friday night, before the police arrived.”

  “There was an argument.” His hands gripped the frame molding like a vise, his knuckles white. “They ended up dead.”

  “There’s a large hole between that argument and murder,” I said, probing harder. “What started the fight? How did it move from words to a gun?”

  “Back off. Don’t push me.”

  His voice hissed with barely contained fury. A vein throbbed at his temple and the scar showed white on his face. I said his name and his hands moved, snapping the molding he held. The crack of breaking wood echoed in the room.

  His eyes had darkened with a kind of black undissipated anger, and his hands shook, each holding a jagged piece of wood. I saw that he was capable of murder. Most of us are, given the right — or wrong — set of circumstances.

  I walked around the table, warming myself at the space heater. The glowing electric coils did little to cut the chill in the room. Mark looked at the broken molding in his hands, then he dropped it into a waste bin.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his anger burning itself out, released in a sigh. The vein at his temple subsided.

  “How did you end up here?”

  “When I got out of prison, Vee said she’d set me up in business. All I had to was pick the place. I wanted to live in a small town, away from the city. A place where I could work with my hands and be accepted by my neighbors and not share my living space with another human being.”

  “Is that what you have?”

  “I get by. I don’t have a cellmate, but sometimes I get lonely. I frame pictures and work at odd jobs. It’s enough to pay the rent on my shop and my apartment. I’m happy, Jeri. Whatever that means. As happy as I’ll ever be in this life.”

  “Until I came along and disturbed your smooth little pond.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But it’s true. I’ve upset your routine. Dredged up the past.”

  “If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met you.”

  “That’s a mixed blessing,” I said. “But it’s beside the point. I came up here hoping to find your sister. I think I understand a little better why she disappeared. But I haven’t found her. I guess I was wrong.”

  “How can I get in touch with you?” Mark asked. “Just in case you’re not.”

  I took a card from my wallet and handed it to him. He read it before he slipped it into the breast pocket of his shirt.

  “Maybe I’ll call you anyway.”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Mark.”

  “Are you married? Involved with someone?” When I didn’t answer, his mouth quirked in the same cheeky grin he’d thrown at me yesterday. “You like to ask questions, but you don’t like to answer them.”

  “I’m divorced.”

  “So you have a few scars too.”

  “Yes,” I admitted.

  “Then I’ll call you.”

  I looked into his blue eyes and wasn’t sure how I felt. I liked him a lot more than I should. I was also wary of any involvement with him.

  “Goodbye, Mark.”

  He leaned over and kissed me very gently on the mouth. Then his arms encircled me and his lips moved on mine. I slipped away from his embrace. “Goodbye, Jeri.”

  Cibola’s streets were busier than they had been when Mark and I walked to the shop. I headed for the Murdock House. I should have been thinking about Elizabeth and the next step in my efforts to find her. Instead I was thinking about Mark Willis. I kept telling myself that this was a man who spent twelve years in prison for murder, but that didn’t stop what I felt when he kissed me. I was on dangerous ground, and I wasn’t sure of my footing.

  Fourteen

  I DROVE BACK TO OAKLAND BY WAY OF STOCKTON, located on the Delta, that vast water system where the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River join and mingle their waters before flowing into San Francisco Bay. Vee Burke had given me her parents’ address and directions to the house. The Madison house, in the northern part of the city, near the University of the Pacific, was a one-story structure with an attached garage, maybe thirty years old, built of dark red brick with white trim. The street was Sunday-afternoon quiet as I parked my car and went up the walk. The dried remains of a funeral wreath still hung on the front door, a reminder that Lester Madison, Elizabeth’s grandfather, had died last week.

  The woman who answered the door looked a bit like Vee Burke. She had the same nose and chin, but her face was thinner. Where Vee’s unruly hair flew out all over her head, this woman’s gray hair was short. She wore a navy blue skirt and a plain white blouse. It looked like a uniform. A pair of wire-rimmed glasses rode her nose, magnifying her blue eyes.

  “Alice Gray?”

  “Yes?” She looked at me as though she’d been expecting someone else.

  “I’m Jeri Howard, the private investigator working for your sister.”

  “Oh, yes. She called me. You want to talk about Beth. Please come in.” Her voice sounded like a rusty hinge, suffering from disuse, contrasting with her neat schoolmarm exterior.

  She stepped back from the door. The house was quiet, but it was an uneasy quiet, as though it were waiting for something to happen. Alice Gray glanced over her right shoulder, at the hallway that led to the bedrooms, and put a cautionary finger to her lips.

  “Mother’s taking a nap. I don’t want to wake her.”

  “I understand.”

  I looked around me. The living room had a musty scent, as though it had been shut up too long and needed fresh air and sunlight. It was crowded with heavy dark mahogany furniture. A high-backed sofa sat in front of the fireplace, bracketed by end tables and matching wing chairs. The sofa and chairs were upholstered in a rough-textured brownish red fabric that reminded me of dried blood. The furniture looked out of place in this room, as though it belonged in another house, in another time. Several flower arrangements wilted and drooped on the mantel, on the end tables, and in the center of the low coffee table in front of the sofa.

  “My father died,” Alice Gray said. Her hands touched a bowl of spiky yellow chrysanthemums on the coffee table. Several petals dropped onto the shiny dark wood. She swept them into her hand and tossed them onto the ashes in the fireplace.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “We were expecting it. He’d had several strokes.” She moved to the center of the room and turned to look at me. “Sit down, please. Would you like some coffee? I just made a fresh pot.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  She walked through a doorway leading back to the dining room and kitchen. In her absence I examined the room. I didn’t see any pictures, other than an amateurish oil landscape above the mantel and some floral watercolors scattered here and there in the living room and hall. Most people had family pictures, like those that crowded the mantel in the Franklins’ house in Alameda. But there was nothing here to show any evidence of the Madison family. I saw a thick black-covered Bible and several pamphlets on one of the end tables.
I picked one up and leafed through the pages. The fundamentalist text trumpeted doom and the impending end of the world.

  Alice Gray returned with a lacquered Japanese tray bearing two steaming cups, a sugar bowl, and a little pitcher of milk. I took a seat on the sofa. The coffee was strong and bitter. I lightened it with some milk. My hostess settled into one of the wing chairs.

  “Vee says Beth is missing,” she said, sipping her coffee.

  I nodded. “Elizabeth’s husband, Philip Foster, hired me to find her. Then he changed his mind.”

  “Because of this story that Beth hit the child,” Alice finished. “What nonsense. She wouldn’t do something like that.”

  “Did you know she was using the name Renee Mills?”

  Alice nodded. “Yes. As though a name mattered.”

  “Vee said she contacted Elizabeth about her grandfather’s illness, but Elizabeth said she couldn’t come to Stockton.”

  “Beth wouldn’t come back here.” She shook her head, a swift, economical movement. “Beth left Stockton at eighteen and never returned. She couldn’t wait to get out of this town. She doesn’t keep in touch with anyone except Vee, and maybe Karen.”

  “She lived with you for nearly two years in San Leandro, while she was going to Cal State. Why did she drop out of school?”

  “Beth never stayed with anything very long.” Alice’s voice colored with disapproval. She took another sip of coffee. “She was interested in college for a while. Then it lost its appeal and she wanted to do something else. So she quit. It’s happened before.”

  “How?”

  “She was constantly starting things and not finishing them. Piano lessons while she was in high school. Sewing projects left to gather dust in the closet. Summer jobs that lasted midway through July. She dropped out of college. I suppose she’s dropped out of her marriage now. I’m not surprised.”

  “Why?”

  “You know how my sister and her husband died,” Alice said grimly. “How do you suppose that would affect an impressionable fourteen-year-old girl? To have her parents shot down in cold blood while she was in the house.” She clasped her hands tightly on her lap and leaned forward in her chair.

  “It was horrible, appalling. I don’t think any of us ever got over it. My parents were devastated. Beth was a very sensitive girl. She didn’t rebound the way Karen did. Karen has always been very resilient. She was a very tough little girl.”

  She still is, I thought, recalling the very tough young woman I’d encountered Friday. Karen had presented me with a radically different view of her sister. Which eyewitness was closer to the truth?

  “Beth was just entering those difficult adolescent years,” Alice continued. “To have her parents taken from her so suddenly, so brutally... Vee and I tried to repair some of the damage by taking her to a psychologist. But after a while she wouldn’t see him anymore. Another project she wouldn’t finish.” She stopped, looking pained.

  “Did she like school?”

  “She liked learning. But school was difficult for her. She was such a sensitive child, easily hurt, moody at times. She felt separated from her classmates. They didn’t have her experiences to contend with, and they didn’t understand. Children can be very cruel.”

  “I’ve read the newspaper accounts of the murders,” I said. Alice flinched at the last word, as though the mention of murder still had the power to hurt after fifteen years. For a moment I felt as cruel as Elizabeth’s long-ago classmates. “The articles don’t give a complete picture of your sister’s family. Tell me about George and Frances. Sketch them for me in more detail.”

  “I’m the oldest. Vee’s in the middle. Frances was the youngest. We called her Franny. I’ve always thought she was Dad’s favorite. Mother — well, never mind Mother.”

  She stopped talking for a moment, sipping the coffee, her face softened by memory. Then she spoke again.

  “Franny was very pretty, always a little more independent than the rest of us. After high school Franny went to college at San Francisco State. That’s where she met George. As I recall, they met at a reception on campus.”

  My eyebrows went up slightly. Lenore Franklin had told me Franny met George in a bar in San Francisco. I wondered if Franny had sanitized the story of their meeting for family consumption.

  “He’d just gotten out of flight school in Florida,” Alice continued. “They had a short courtship and got married several months later. They eloped, actually. Dad was disappointed at first. Franny was so young, and Dad wanted her to finish school.”

  “George didn’t have any family?”

  “Just an uncle who was active in state politics. When George decided he wanted to go to the Naval Academy, this uncle helped him get an appointment. George’s mother died when he was quite young. His father was a farmer in the Florida panhandle. He died of cancer while George was in flight school.”

  “Were George and Frances happy?”

  “Every marriage has its ups and downs.” She shrugged, tilting her head to one side. “I suppose they had the same joys and problems as any other couple.”

  Was Alice an astute observer or one who looked through the haze of memory? “How often did you see them?” I asked.

  “Not as often as I would have liked. Navy families move around so much. They were in and out of San Diego, Pearl Harbor, Guam, even the Philippines. When they were transferred to Alameda we were delighted, with Vee in Piedmont, me in San Leandro, and Stockton an hour’s drive from the Bay Area. Still, we didn’t get together that often. I’m sorry now that we didn’t.”

  I heard a noise behind me. Alice Gray shifted rapidly from bittersweet memories to strained concern. I turned and saw a heavyset elderly woman. Her wrinkled black dress looked as though she had slept in it. Below her uncombed white hair she had a mulish jowly face that radiated anger and distrust at people in general. She gave me a long measuring look full of suspicion.

  “Mother.” Alice jumped to her feet. “I thought you were lying down.”

  “Heard talk.” The old woman came slowly into the room, her feet sliding in a pair of too-large bedroom slippers. “About the girls. Where’s the girls?”

  “They’re not here.”

  Alice seized the old woman’s arm, trying to coax her out of the room. Mrs. Madison wouldn’t be coaxed. She shook off Alice’s hand and walked around the end table to the wing chair, one hand gripping the chair back for support. She took the seat Alice had vacated, fixing me with her watery blue eyes.

  “You’re not one of the girls,” she challenged.

  “No, Mrs. Madison.” I wasn’t sure if she meant her daughters or her granddaughters. Alice and I had discussed both. “I’m Jeri.”

  Mrs. Madison harrumphed and gave me a thorough onceover. She focused on my head and glared at me.

  “Red hair,” she said, pronouncing judgment. “Sign of the devil.”

  “Mother!” Pained, resigned embarrassment crossed Alice’s face. She plucked her mother’s rumpled black sleeve. Mrs. Madison ignored her and leaned toward me, so close that I backed away in reflex.

  “Are you saved?” she demanded.

  “I’m not sure,” I said politely.

  “Get right with the Lord or He will smite you.” She shook her finger in my face.

  “Mother, please go back to your room,” Alice said. The phone jangled in the kitchen, adding to her exasperation. “Damn. I’ll be right back.”

  She hurried toward the ringing phone, leaving me alone with Mrs. Madison, who was concerned about the effect of my red hair on my soul. On first glance I decided the old woman wasn’t wrapped very tightly, but after the second, I thought I saw a shrewd glimmer in the blue eyes.

  “Have you seen Beth? Or Karen?” I asked, giving her stare for stare.

  “Yellow-haired witch,” Mrs. Madison said, as though we were chatting about the weather. A flinty smile creased her bulldog face. “Prying, pawing, sniffing around. She’s evil, and the Lord will strike her down. Just like Frann
y. Franny was evil and the Lord struck her down. We’ll all go to hell unless we come to Jesus.”

  “I expect you’re right.”

  She hadn’t answered my question. Or had she? Karen had yellow hair, I thought, recalling her platinum mane. But so did Elizabeth. The old woman had switched from singular to plural. I couldn’t tell if she was including both granddaughters, along with her daughter Franny, in her pronouncement of perdition. Certainly Karen’s job in the skin trade made her a candidate for her grandmother’s version of hell, if Grandma knew about it. But I wondered if Grandma’s opinion of poor sensitive Beth was more in line with Karen’s view than those of Beth’s aunts.

  I took Elizabeth’s picture from my handbag, the photograph of Philip Foster with his wife and child in front of the Christmas tree. I held it out so Mrs. Madison could see it.

  “Have you seen her?” I asked again. The old woman peered at the photograph and grinned at me.

  “Yellow-haired witches,” she said. “Both of them.”

  I tucked the photo back in my bag. This old woman with her talk of yellow-haired witches wasn’t exactly a credible witness. I didn’t think her memory was reliable back further than a few days, if it was reliable at all. But her words intrigued me. Had Karen or Elizabeth paid a call on Grandma Madison recently? Neither of them had actually attended their grandfather’s funeral. But had one of them come to Stockton, prying, pawing and sniffing around, unknown and unseen by anyone except her grandmother?

  “Mother,” Alice said, returning from the kitchen. “That was Mrs. Nevins. Remember Mrs. Nevins? She’s coming over to see you. She’ll be here in half an hour. Don’t you want to change your dress?”

  The old woman laughed, a delighted cackle. Alice succeeded in pulling Mrs. Madison to her feet and steering her toward the hallway. She was gone a few moments, evidently to help the old woman change.

  “I am sorry,” Alice said when she returned to the living room, her mouth a tight line. She slumped into the chair and put a hand to her face. “Mother’s gotten worse since Dad died. She’s eighty-five and sometimes she’s not quite lucid. She’s getting...” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word senile.