by JoAnna Carl
“Gran told me she was killed in a car wreck,” I said. “I can’t believe she lied to me.”
“She didn’t lie. She just didn’t tell the whole story. And it wasn’t a wreck, exactly. Sally was hit by a car.”
“Hit by a car?”
“Yes.” Aunt Billie gulped. “It was awful! Nobody wanted to tell a little child all the details. I can’t talk about it yet.”
“Was it a hit-and-run?”
“Only in the sense that whoever hit her didn’t stop. It wasn’t a hit-and-run accident.” She emphasized the word “accident.” Then she leaned across the table toward me and made her chin firm. “Whoever did it had chased her down the road, Nell. They followed her into the bushes to hit her. It was definitely done on purpose. It was murder.”
The room stood still again. Murder. My mother had been murdered. It didn’t seem possible.
“Alan—your father—” Aunt Billie stopped again.
I grabbed at the variation in topic. “Yes, what happened to my father? Why did he go away?”
“He didn’t have a lot of choice, I guess.”
“Why not?”
“Well, Mother always said . . .” She had to stop and blow her nose. “Mother always said he did it mostly for you, Nell.”
“For me? How could deserting me help?”
“Oh, he knew you’d be taken care of! Probably better than he could do it himself.” She made a pleading gesture. “Your parents were so young, Nell! They would have grown up—eventually—I guess. But we all worried about them. They didn’t seem responsible enough to take care of a baby, of a little girl.”
“But he could have come to see me occasionally, Aunt Billie. He didn’t have to abandon me completely.”
“Oh, I guess he thought it would be worse . . .” Her eyes were swimming again, and her face was screwed up with pain. She stopped talking again.
“Look, Aunt Billie, I’m sorry if I’ve brought up a subject that’s obviously painful for you, but you can see why I need to know. I’m grown up now. I can see that my father might have felt that Gran and Grandpa would be able to take care of me better than he could. But I don’t see why he couldn’t send a birthday card now and then—why he dropped all contact.”
“He didn’t want to! I’ll give him that much credit. He loved you terribly, Nell. He didn’t want to go away. He did it to protect you!”
“To protect me? How could abandoning me—emotionally, even if I was taken care of physically—protect me?”
“Nell, darling—” Aunt Billie gulped twice. Then she spat out words like machine-gun bullets:
“Nell, he was about to be arrested for your mother’s murder!”
Then the room did get still. I don’t think I even breathed for a long time. Maybe I would have been paralyzed forever if the mundane world hadn’t intruded in the form of a middle-aged waitress.
Her voice came from beyond the roses. “More iced tea?”
The question started time moving again. I looked at the plump, gray-haired waitress in her gingham uniform, peeking into the fake rose bower, and I thought, “The world has not ended.”
My grandmother had known that her child had been murdered, and she had lived with that knowledge. She had lived a full and happy life. And she had taken me in and loved me and had given me a full and happy life. I knew she had grieved—my mother’s picture stood on her dresser always—but she hadn’t let grief win. She hadn’t let it destroy her. She hadn’t let it destroy me.
I’m tough, I thought. I’m her granddaughter. I can do as well as Gran did. I’m strong. It’s in my genes.
The waitress was still standing there with her pitcher at the ready. “More tea?” she repeated.
I said, “No, thank you,” and I was surprised at how calm my voice sounded. I waited until the waitress had left, then spoke to Aunt Billie.
“Did he do it? Did my father kill my mother?”
“Yes! I mean, no!” She mopped her eyes again.
I let her get control of herself. I even ate a bite of my hamburger. It tasted like the sawdust special, but putting food in my mouth was another way of reminding myself that life was going to go on.
In a minute Aunt Billie gave a rueful smile. “You can see why none of us ever wanted to talk about all this, Nell. It was the worst thing that ever happened to the family.”
“I’m sorry. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have brought it up in a public place.”
“It seems that’s the only place we ever see each other anymore.”
Her comment stabbed my conscience. She was right. I didn’t have anything in common with her, and I never tried to deal with her on more than a superficial level. Yet she was the closest relative I had. And we saw each other only if she came to Grantham shopping. I’d never invited her to my house because I didn’t want to explain Rocky to her. So we only met in restaurants and malls.
“Aunt Billie . . .” I reached across the table, but she waved my gesture aside.
“It’s all right, Nell. You’ve developed other interests. That’s natural. But back to your question. Did Alan kill your mother? I always thought so.”
“Did he admit it? Confess?”
“No. And Mother always stood up for him. She said she didn’t think he had it in him to kill someone.”
“But he was going to be arrested?”
“Yes. We were all there, you know. It was four days after Sally’s body had been found.”
“I remember that part. I remember you and Gran and Grandad coming. I stayed at my friend’s house until you came.”
“Yes, we drove all night to get there. Straight through. Marshall stayed home with Carrie. She was nine.”
“I remember the house on Elm Street. It had a glassed-in front porch.”
“Yes, it’s the Michigan winters. They use those sun porches to keep the cold out, I guess. I think they’re ugly.”
“But I don’t remember Daddy coming to the house after you all were there.”
“No, he was busy, keeping up with the investigation. Since he was managing editor—”
“He was managing editor? I thought he was a reporter.”
“He had been city editor in Amity. It was a big promotion, this new job. A real opportunity. That’s why they moved so far away. And I think he was doing well. But Sally—she hated it up North.”
“I remember that. She wanted to go back to Amity. They were going to make her take a lot of classes to get a Michigan teaching certificate. I remember she was mad about that. She said everybody was unfriendly. And ignorant. They didn’t know anything about our part of the country and wouldn’t believe we were part of the United States. She had a lot of trouble making friends.”
“Yes, she’d call Mother and cry. I never knew how she met—”
Aunt Billie’s sentence ended abruptly. She coughed and took a drink of her tea, while I waited for her to go on.
“Sorry,” she said. “Anyway, I learned a lesson from Sally’s death. I’d always been jealous of her, you know.”
“Why?”
“Oh, she was the pretty one. The witty one. The cute one. The one everybody noticed. I was four years older, but she got all the attention.”
“Gran always called you ‘my good daughter,’” I said. “She never said my mother was the bad one, but—well, I know my parents had to get married, for example. I think Mother embarrassed Gran and Granddad a lot.”
Aunt Billie sighed deeply. “Well. Anyway, Nell, I admit I resented Sally. She was always causing a stir in the family, always getting attention. You say your parents ‘had to’ get married. I always thought Sally had you because she didn’t want me getting all the attention by having Carrie six months earlier.”
I must have frowned, because she went on. “The jealousy between us was just silly. But we never made it up, never got over being—well, rival siblings. And then she was dead, and it was too late to ever make it up.”
She looked at me earnestly. “Don’t do that in life, Nell. Se
ttle things. Don’t let them fester. And don’t learn that lesson the hard way, the way I did.”
That pretty well ended our lunch. I drove Aunt Billie to the mall where she was to meet her friend, and I drove myself home, full of crazy emotions.
One moment I was near despair. My mother had been murdered, and my father had been accused of the crime.
The next I was exultant. My father hadn’t abandoned me because he didn’t want to be bothered with me or even because he didn’t think he could manage to raise a little girl by himself. No, it had taken the threat of a prison term to get him to go.
He had loved me. Even Aunt Billie, who thought he was a killer, said so.
My mood bounced back and forth between despair and exultation twenty times between the shopping mall and my house. I went in the back door, and I heard a movie on in the living room TV set. Brenda is devoted to these stupid problem-of-the-week movies. She even tapes them to rerun on her free days.
As I stopped in the hall to check the mail, she saw me. “Hi, Nell. Come sit down. You’ll love this. It’s about men whose wives are in prison. I don’t know how television would survive without dysfunctional families.”
Television, huh! I could tell her about dysfunctional families.
But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to talk to Brenda about what I’d learned from Aunt Billie. I wanted to talk to Mike about it.
Wherever he was.
I went upstairs, lay down, and stared at the ceiling of my bedroom. I wanted Mike there with me. I wanted him so bad I could hardly bear it. And I didn’t even know where he was. He’d left town, left me, hadn’t told me where he was going. I didn’t know if he’d driven, flown, or hitchhiked.
And he’d taken my garage door opener and my key. I couldn’t even go to his house, sniff his clothes, look at his belongings. And our six months wasn’t even up.
Maybe I should have married Mike when I had the chance.
The first two weeks Mike and I were lovers were tumultuous. We’d known each other for more than a year, but at that time I was covering the violence beat, and I’d made a rule of not dating cops. Mike claims he’d wanted to ask me out all along, but he knew—or feared—that I’d say no, so he wouldn’t.
Then—through factors that included the risk of death, family skeletons, greed, jealousy, and even a lovable orphan—Mike and I were thrown together in both physical danger and emotional crisis. By the time we’d settled the bad guys’ hash, found the orphan a home, and come down from our adrenaline high, we were heavily involved, both emotionally and physically. In fact, I’d spent ten nights out of twelve in Mike’s king-size bed.
At breakfast on the thirteenth day I’d mentioned that I needed to gather up my clothes and figure out where all my dirty laundry was.
At that time we’d never discussed the future—there’d been too much present going on—so I was somewhat surprised by Mike’s reply.
“It might be simpler if you moved in over here,” he said, “but there’s one catch.”
“What’s that?”
“You have to marry me.”
Mike’s reference to moving in had already made my heart bounce halfway up my esophagus, and the word marry sent it right to my tonsils. I couldn’t say a word because of the fist-sized lump back there.
Mike sipped coffee and looked at me. The silence grew. Finally he spoke.
“Is that a no?”
I choked the lump of heart tissue back into my chest. “Why is marriage a required part of the deal? Lots of people just live together these days. I never have, but—”
“I have.” Mike’s voice was real firm. “It doesn’t work for me.”
He drank coffee again. This entire conversation had lots of long pauses in it.
“Annie and I were together for two years,” he said. “We even bought a town house together. And just when I decided it was time to get married, she decided she didn’t want to live with a guy who has nightmares and gets up in the middle of the night to sit around watching old movies and shake. So she hired a U-Haul and moved to Dallas. I had no warning, no say in the matter.” He looked at me directly. “I had no legal rights.”
I still didn’t know what to say.
“Now—two years later—I think her decision was best for both of us,” Mike said. “The nightmares were just the tip of the iceberg for her. She hated my being a cop, and that’s all I want to be. So we weren’t going to make it in the long run. It was better to make a clean break. But I hated seeing an important part of my life simply drive off in a U-Haul, with no legal complications, no ceremony. Dammit, we didn’t even have a big fight! Those two years of my life were important. They shouldn’t have ended so . . . casually.”
He was glaring at me.
“Mike! I promise. When we break up, I’ll holler and scream and throw four hissy fits. I’ll get a lawyer and sue you. At least for palimony.”
His glare changed to a grin. “I hope you’re not planning on a big settlement. That town house in Chicago is still eating me up financially.”
“You still own it?”
“We had an offer, but Annie said no. It’s rented—most of the time. I can’t sell on my own. Which is another problem with having entanglements that aren’t settled by simply hiring a U-Haul. Anyway, I found out that living together doesn’t work for me. It’s marriage or nothing, Nell.”
I’d already known about Annie, of course. And I’d known that she’d hurt Mike when they split up. Maybe I hadn’t known just how deeply she had hurt him. Maybe I was worried about her—even a couple of hundred miles away, she was my rival, the only other woman who was important in Mike’s life.
But right at that moment Mike looked so forlorn that I didn’t care how he felt about her. I got up, went around the kitchen table, and sat in his lap.
“I care about you a lot, Mike,” I said. “But I think we ought to let our passions come off the white-hot level before we make any permanent decisions.”
“I want you with me, Nell, but I’m not sure I can handle our living together. Unless we get married.”
“And I want to be with you, Mike, but I don’t think I can handle getting married.”
We put our arms around each other. He nuzzled my neck, and I licked his ear.
“Maybe we can compromise on great sex,” I whispered.
Mike tweaked the belt of the robe I was wearing.
Later that morning we agreed on the six-month plan. I maintained my own address but visited frequently. There was to be no discussion of the future for six months.
And now, after five and a half months, Mike had asked for his garage door opener back.
I could hear the commercial break downstairs, ending Brenda’s movie. I got up and slowly combed my hair. Time to go to work.
The thought wasn’t enticing. Checking facts, checking grammar, asking reporters why they hadn’t included this or that information. Taking out information they shouldn’t have included. Tightening the writing. None of it would be as interesting as my personal life.
What had happened to my mother? Had she been killed in the way Aunt Billie said, run down deliberately? Had my father really fled to avoid arrest?
Was he still on the run?
Could I call Michigan law enforcement officials and find out?
I was still looking in the mirror and holding my comb in my hand when that thought finally struck me.
I’m a reporter, I thought. I can call people and find out things. I can get reporters in Michigan to help me. I don’t have to stand here, paralyzed, and feel that this is something that happened to me and that I can’t do anything about it.
I can do something about this. I may not be able to change any of it. But by golly, I can check it out.
I ran down the stairs and out to the car. I wouldn’t be able to do it right away, of course. I’d have to do my regular work. And it was Saturday. Law enforcement officials wouldn’t be likely to be in their offices today. I might have to wait until Monday to talk to
some of them.
I skidded into a slot in the Gazette parking garage, used my electronic card to get in the back door, and ran up the two flights to the newsroom. To my delight, the dayside general reporters hadn’t turned in much that morning, and I had read nearly all the Sunday copy on Friday afternoon. The proof file was quickly emptied.
It was less than an hour later when I went to the Gazette library and dug out a road atlas to locate Jessamine, Michigan, the town where we’d been living when my mother died.
Jessamine was a city of twelve thousand in western Michigan, I learned. I wrote down the name of the county, went back to my desk, and pulled out my long-distance credit card. I was borrowing the Gazette’s credibility, but I’d pay for the call myself. A quick call to information got me the numbers for the Jessamine Police Department and for the county sheriff’s office. If they referred me to the state police, I’d get the number from the Jessamine P.D.
When I called the police department’s number, I had a piece of luck. “City-county dispatcher,” a voice said. Good, I could contact both city and county at once.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m a reporter with the Grantham Gazette.” I added the name of the state, since Americans are notoriously bad at geography.
The dispatcher’s voice was cautious. “Yes?”
“I’m looking into a homicide which supposedly occurred in your county twenty years ago,” I said. “Who would have any information about that?”
“What’s the case?”
“The victim’s name was Sally Matthews,” I said. “I believe she was struck by a car.”
The dispatcher gave a disgusted snort. “Humph! What’s the deal here?”
“What do you mean?”
“That case has been in the dead file for nearly twenty years, and now we have two inquiries about it in one day.”
“Someone else called about it?”
“He didn’t call. He came by the station. I referred him to the former sheriff.”
“Who was it?”
“I’d have to look his name up. It was some big redheaded guy.”
Chapter 12
Mike. It had to be Mike.
Mike had left Grantham the night before, flown to Michigan, and gone to the town where my mother was killed.
