Killing Cousins

by Rett MacPherson

  She laid an aged and gnarled hand on mine. It was the simplest of gestures, but from Sylvia it meant the world. It was all I could do not to break down again.

  “I think she forgot that all this time had passed. Patrick came here to tell us that he was tired of living with the secret. That his conscience had bothered him too long. He wanted people to know the truth,” she said.

  “So he didn’t come here to remove the body so that when the building came down it wouldn’t be found?” I asked. “Governor Danvers—”

  “On the contrary. He didn’t know the building had been slated for destruction. He said that if Hope Danvers wanted to go all the way with her career that there were things she needed to answer for. The people needed to know the truth about everything in her life.”

  “He was going to expose her?”

  “He was going to expose all of them, and make them all answer for what they did,” she said. “Wilma didn’t realize that he was an old man now, too. She kept saying that the children needed to be protected. We had to protect the children. In some ways, I think Wilma was as traumatized by what happened to Byron as the children were.”

  Wilma had thought the children were in danger. In her delusional state, she had thought she was still protecting the children. Only, the children were adults now, with grandchildren of their own.

  “Why didn’t you tell Patrick that the building was slated for destruction?” I asked.

  “You know Bill, he talks and talks,” she said. Her voice trailed off and she looked to the window. “I really didn’t think he’d ever get it done. I, too, was ready for the truth to be out.”

  I waited for her to say something else. Eventually she swallowed hard and finished what she was telling me. “It never occurred to me that Wilma would do something…dangerous.”

  “What happened?” I asked. “Tell me what happened after he told you both what he was going to do.”

  “Wilma asked him to stay for dinner and I went upstairs to watch television. The Thin Man was on one of the cable stations. I wanted to watch it. I’d already eaten a sandwich, so I wasn’t that hungry. When I came down to eat, Wilma had washed up the dishes. There were no leftovers,” she said. “I thought nothing of it—until Patrick was found dead.”

  “So you don’t really know if she poisoned him or not,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t know for sure. But I—”

  “But nothing,” I said. “You don’t know for sure and there’s no way to prove it, now. We can never know.”

  “But I know.”

  I was willing to say that it was a question that there could never be an answer to. At least in my mind. Even if Wilma had poisoned him, she didn’t know what she was doing. And she thought she was protecting the children. It seemed to be the thing she lived for.

  “How did you know?” Sylvia asked.

  “I found the blanket,” I said. I was pretty sure that Sylvia had read that in the paper. But there was no way for her to have known that, for me, that fingered either her or Wilma.

  Sylvia gave a crooked smile.

  I went on. “I knew none of the six cousins had hidden it. I knew Walter wouldn’t have hidden it. He would have said something. The two servants would have had ample time to throw it away, and nothing they did would have been questioned. I knew Catherine hadn’t hidden it, because she genuinely thought Hector Castanza was Byron. How could she have thought that if she’d had proof that Byron fell victim to a horrible disaster that night? That only left you, that I knew of. But then Elmer said ‘the Pershings’ when he was talking to me about his father and the case. Lanna had said that the only people Patrick was still in contact with were his family, Elmer Kolbe and ‘the Pershings.’ Then Colin showed me a list of people who were present and accounted for the morning after Byron’s disappearance, and Wilma was on the list,” I said. “I knew what children meant to Wilma…I sort of figured she was the one who hid the blanket.”

  “What are you going to do?” Sylvia asked after a long pause.

  I found that after several moments of contemplating that question, I could not answer it.

  The New Kassel Gazette

  The News You Might Miss

  by

  Eleanore Murdoch

  Thank you, everybody, for making this year’s Pickin’ and Grinnin’ Festival the most successful in the history of New Kassel! We sold all of our leftover berry products, Helen ran out of chocolate, Tobias actually got a blister from making that kettle corn, and the rectory yard received very little damage. We are in the black, fellow citizens!

  On a sad note, I’m sure you’ve all heard the “official” news by now. The skeletal remains found in the old Yates house have been positively identified as those of Byron Lee Finch, infant son of the late Catherine Finch, world-renowned singer. Autopsy results state that he was most likely hit by lightning in a middle-of-the-night rendezvous with his cousins. I don’t know about you folks, but the fact that I passed by him every day while he lay in the wall of that house sort of gives me the heebie-jeebies. Not to mention it makes me wonder what all the rest of you may have hidden in your walls! At least we can take some solace in knowing that his remains are finally to be interred in the Santa Lucia Cemetery, next to his mother and father.

  And as far as Proposition 7 is concerned, I want to thank everybody who helped Helen Wickland, Torie O’Shea, Charity Burgermeister and myself in our VOTE NO campaign. You’ll have to wait until the next issue to find out if all our hard work paid off and we have succeeded in keeping our well-meaning, but-misguided, mayor at bay.

  Until next time…

  Eleanore

  Thirty-Eight

  It rained a steady downpour of big warm drops. If I could have analyzed the raindrops, I would have sworn that they were gray. The sky was gray, my mood was gray, the world was gray. Only the gentle rustle of the trees reminded me that maybe not everything was gray in this bleak void.

  I stood at the freshly dug grave of Byron Lee Finch with a single white rose in my hand. The rain pelted off the many umbrellas around me. Rudy held ours above us. Rachel held her smiley-face umbrella over herself and Mary. Aurora and Cecily were both in attendance, as were Hugh Danvers and Lanna Petrovic. The governor had managed to plead previous engagements as her reason for not showing.

  The sheriff and my mother were in attendance, located right next to Rachel and Mary. Sylvia was there too, on my left, stoic as concrete. Father Bingham said his “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” thing and then “Amen.”

  One by one, my family and the townspeople left. One by one, the reporters all left.

  I remained. And I wept.

  I’m not sure why I cried. I guess I cried for poor little Byron. He hadn’t meant for all of this to happen. He was just an innocent baby sound asleep in his bed, and then carried through the woods, and then he was dead. I cried for his sisters, who had never wanted anything to happen to him. They just wanted to see the miraculous appearance of a fairy. They wanted to see the thing they’d read about and been told about by their mother. In a sense, it was for her approval that they had begun the adventure in the first place.

  I cried for the other four children who had lost their innocence that night. With a flash of lightning, a life without nightmares was gone. They would never sleep soundly, they would never feel guiltless again.

  I cried for Catherine, who had lost a child, the thing that had spurred me to solve this mystery in the first place. And I cried for Sylvia and Wilma, who had kept a secret all those years. I wasn’t sure if what they’d done was good or bad. Mostly, I wept for Aurora and Cecily, though. In a sense, they had lost their brother and their mother on that night. But I think the real reason I cried for them was because they had never really had their mother in the first place. I could not imagine having a favorite to that degree. Oh, sure, I may like the way Rachel handles a situation better than Mary, but Mary always rebounds and makes me laugh at something so goofy that Rachel could never manage.
I couldn’t imagine giving birth to three children and only living for one.

  Catherine Finch had been so cruel in that sense that I’m not sure she ever really knew what she had lost. That was the saddest thing of all.

  “Torie?” a voice said.

  I turned to find my husband Rudy standing in the rain. He’d left me the umbrella, and so he was nearly soaked. “Are you going to stand here all day?”

  “I think I might,” I said.

  He walked over to me and gave me a big hug, getting me wet in the process. “Okay, what is it? There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “I don’t mean for there to be something.”

  “Come on, tell me. What are husbands for?” he said. I looked up into his chocolate-brown eyes and smiled.

  “If I tell you, then there’s two of us who know,” I said.

  “Who know what?”

  “Are you sure you can handle it?”

  “Bullets bounce off my chest,” he said, sticking his chest way out.

  I explained to him, as best as I could, about Wilma, and how Sylvia and I suspected that Wilma had been the one to poison Patrick. He listened intently until I was finished. “I don’t know what to say,” he declared. “Wilma can hardly be held accountable. We all know she wasn’t in her right mind.”

  “Sylvia said that for days after Patrick visited, she’d find Wilma saying things like ‘We must protect the children. Nobody can know.’ It’s pretty obvious that she didn’t understand that they weren’t children any longer. She’d lived with that secret for so long…”

  “Remember that,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you have any secrets, when you’re old and senile you may start confessing to things you don’t want me to know about,” he said with a smile.

  “Yeah, but by then you’ll be so old and senile, you’ll forget whatever it was I confessed to you five seconds after I confessed to it,” I said. We laughed together, and I felt a little better. Which was what Rudy did best. He always made me feel better. Well, there were times when I could just strangle him, but then again I wasn’t always an angel, either, so I should just forget about those times.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked finally.

  “About Wilma?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Are you going to tell anybody? I mean, technically, Sylvia knew. She was an accomplice.”

  “That’s the strange thing, Rudy. I finally know what it’s like to be the one with information that others want. And I love the person too much to tell the truth. Is that bad?” I asked.

  “Wilma’s gone. No justice can be done now. So let it go,” he said. “And so far as Sylvia knowing about Byron, there really was no crime committed. It’s not like she was harboring a murderer all these years. Besides, what could they do to her, besides ruin her name?”

  I looked down at the little pile of dirt.

  “I should still tell the sheriff,” I said. “It’s really up to him to decide if anything should be done. Not me.”

  “What?” He felt my forehead. “Torie, are you feeling all right?”

  “I just feel funny keeping it from him,” I said.

  “Because he’s your stepfather now?”

  “No,” I said. “Because he’s my sheriff.”

  Thirty-Nine

  “Where are we going?” Sheriff Brooke asked from the passenger side of my van.

  “We’re going to Aurora’s house,” I said. “To give her those boxes.” I pointed to the boxes that I had stacked in the very backseat of the van.

  It was a week after the funeral of Byron Finch. The sun was shining but it was starting to get cool. Autumn would set in in full force in about three weeks. My favorite time of year.

  “So, what am I giving her?” he asked.

  “All the photographs I could find. You know, her and Cecily’s baby pictures were still in the albums. I thought they’d appreciate them.”

  “All of those boxes have photographs?”

  “No, there’s a set of china, a tea set, some jewelry—oh, darn it,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I keep forgetting to call that guy about the necklace. I’ve never found anything resembling the necklace that he asked about,” I said. “Probably just a rumor.”

  “I wish it had been true. I might have been able to retire,” he said.

  “Or at least make another trip to Alaska,” I said.

  “Oh, no. I promised your mother that our next trip would be back to West Virginia. She wants to see her homeland,” he said.

  “That’s sweet,” I said.

  “I thought so,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes and wondered if there would ever be a point in time when he wouldn’t irritate me, even just a little. “I thought maybe you could give them the two big oil paintings in the house, too. And if they make a special request, you might consider giving—”

  “You’re going to bankrupt me,” he said.

  “It’s the right thing to do.”

  He nodded.

  “Speaking of the right thing to do,” I said.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Shut up,” I said. “Just shut up, okay? I’m trying to do something here and it’s hard.”

  “If it helps you any, I’ll meet you halfway,” he said. He placed his hands on his chest and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about…well, you know. Throwing you in Bertha. You’re an okay kid, but, well, you just irritate the hell out of me most of the time. That’s all. I know you mean well.”

  “My mother put you up to that, didn’t she?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “Oh, yes, she did,” I said, smiling and pointing at him.

  “No, she didn’t. Now what was it you were going to tell me?”

  “Sylvia and Wilma knew where Byron Finch was the whole time. The kids confessed to Wilma, because they knew she’d help them. She was the only grown-up they could trust. Wilma told Sylvia, and neither one of them ever did anything about it.”

  I looked over at him, and his mouth was open. “You’re kidding,” he said.

  “No, I’m not. And there’s more.”

  “There’s more?”

  “Sylvia said that she agreed with Wilma. That if Catherine had known that the children had been involved, it would have been far worse. Byron, evidently, was Catherine’s favorite and everybody knew it. I mean, he was the favorite to the point of the other children barely existing in her eyes,” I said.

  “Oh, jeez.”

  “I’m going to tell you the next part only because I think it’s the right thing to do. It seems Wilma and Sylvia were the last people to see Patrick Ward alive,” I said.

  “Oh, jeez!”

  “Hope lied to you. Patrick was going out to the Yates house to finally remove Byron from his prison and expose them all. He was tired of the lies, and wanted the truth out. Especially when he realized that Hope was going to try and climb all the way to the top of the political ladder. In a way, he would be doing her a favor. Imagine if she became President and then the truth came out,” I said. “But I think he was doing it more for himself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was coming to the end of his life, too. He was in his late sixties and he knew his time on this planet was getting short. I think maybe he thought if he was the one to break the silence and make things right, that maybe Saint Peter might think so, too. If you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, yeah…I do.”

  I turned onto Aurora’s street and parked in front of her house. I turned the engine off and stared at the sheriff. “Sylvia said that Wilma acted very funny for days after Patrick was there. That she kept talking about having to protect the children. I just wanted you to know, because I think it’s up to you to decide what to do about it.”

  “What?” he asked and grabbed his heart. “You mean, you don’t think it’s your business to decide the fate of our law-breaking citizens? When did this revelation occur?” />
  “Don’t be an ass, Colin. I loved Wilma, almost as much as I do my own grandmother,” I said. “That’s the great thing about a small town. It’s as if everybody is related to one another. I’m lucky to have such a large extended family.”

  He said nothing. We both looked up at the house of Aurora Guelders.

  “You’re no fun when you’re all serious,” he said.

  “Well, you’re never any fun.”

  “So what do you think I should do about this?”

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “I value your opinion.”

  Since when? “I would do nothing. But then I’m very close to the subject. I think that keeping the secret all those years was wrong on one hand, but on the other…I don’t know. And if Wilma did do something to Patrick—”

  “Do something? You mean kill him, don’t you?”

  “If she did kill him, you can never prove it. And I don’t think she was fully in her right mind, anyway. She was a sweet, sweet woman,” I said. “In her right mind, she would never have committed murder. I believe that.”

  “Well,” he said after a long pause. “We’ll never know, will we? Wilma’s gone. And with her went the truth.”

  “What if she didn’t do it? Then Patrick Ward’s killer is still out there,” I said.

  “That’s the problem with you, Torie. You’re too critical. Sometimes you don’t win them all. Sometimes, cases go unsolved. And sometimes, believe it or not, some cases are better not solved,” he said.

  I appreciated his words, more than he would ever know. Basically, because I would never tell him. “Let’s get this stuff unloaded,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “By the way,” I said. “Rudy told me that you found out who had been trying to scare me that night in Catherine’s house. Who was it?”

  “No surprise, really. It was Hugh Danvers. Some of the cousins were worried about what you were going to find in the house. Hugh thought if he could scare you, maybe you wouldn’t go back. The silly thing is, eventually I would have gone through all of Catherine’s things, and what if I had found the blanket?” he asked. “I’m convinced that if people really thought their actions through, they’d never do most of them. But people don’t think. They think they’re thinking, but they’re not. They’re thinking from a biased position. What’s best for them.”