Knot My Sister's Keeper

by Mary Marks

  Wow! Eliza Shiffer was pissed off for two reasons: money and jealousy. Both strong motives for murder. Had I just stumbled across our prime suspect?

  The doorbell disturbed my train of thought. I opened up to see Lucy wearing the sky blue cotton blouse she favored because it made her orange hair look more “authentic.” I stepped aside to let her in.

  I led her to the dining room, showed her the note on gray stationery I’d just taped together. “Giselle and I believe Eliza Shiffer was the mother of Quinn Junior, Wolf Shiffer. We’re just waiting for the DNA results to prove he’s our half brother. What I can’t figure out is why Eliza made Quinn give her cash when she could’ve just disguised the payments as extra commission.”

  “How often did your father sell a painting?”

  I went to the murder board in my sewing room and returned with the document Wolf had printed out. I ran my finger down the column labeled Date of Sale. “It looks like he averaged two to three sales a year.”

  “There’s your answer,” said Lucy. “If this Shiffer woman relied on child support from your father’s commissions, then she’d only get paid two to three times a year. Maybe that wasn’t enough.”

  “But those sales were in the six figures. Her thirty percent commission would’ve amounted to well over one hundred thousand. In 1980, that was a huge income for anyone, let alone a single mother.”

  “You can’t always tell from the gross income how well a business is actually doing,” said Lucy. “I helped Ray grow from his one-mechanic garage to the string of full-service auto shops we own today. And I can tell you there were months we ate hot dogs and beans when our expenses exceeded our income. But we always met payroll and never got behind on the rent because we lived on a budget and saved.”

  “You’re right. Eliza may have owned her own gallery, but who knows how successful she was? She certainly looked successful and very high maintenance. She was plastered with diamonds in the photo of her I saw.”

  “So, you think money is the reason she could’ve killed your father?” she asked.

  “That and the fact he wouldn’t leave his wife, Louise.” I spread out the cream-colored hexes. “Are you ready to tackle this pile?”

  A few minutes later, we had another note written by a different hand.

  4/23/65

  Quinn dearest,

  Here is the picture you asked for. She’s in the fifth grade. I can’t accept any money from you without my family finding out. Go ahead and open the account in her name. But she can’t know where the money came from. She thinks you’re dead, and we agreed to leave it that way until she turns 25.

  Yours forever,

  Shirley

  I clutched the edge of the table to steady myself. My breathing sped up with each increasing heartbeat.

  Lucy’s voice pierced the fog that covered my brain and I felt her arm around my shoulder. “Are you okay, hon?”

  “No! I’m not okay.” Tears stung my eyes. “My mother wrote this. The note is about me!”

  “Yeah. I gathered. Sounds like he was more interested in you than you thought. He asked for your photo and set up an account for you.”

  “Well, if he did deposit any money in my name, I never saw any of it.”

  Lucy paused in thought, drumming her fingertips on the table. “Get your laptop, girlfriend. We’re going to find that money.”

  Her fingers sped across the keyboard. She typed unclaimed property California into Google’s search engine and got nearly a half-million hits. She clicked on the URL for the state controller’s office home page then tapped the button for unclaimed property. “Go ahead, make your day.” She slid the laptop in front of me.

  I typed in Rose, Martha Rivka. Finding a bank account wouldn’t merely be about coming into some money. Finding a bank account would prove that my father had cared about me, after all. Was I prepared to have the world as I knew it turned upside down yet again?

  I knew Bubbie and Uncle Isaac loved me. They were the ones who actually raised me. My mother, on the other hand, had been distant. Disconnected. But this note suggested she didn’t always live in her fantasy world. She’d made some very self-serving but practical decisions about my welfare. If an account did exist, it would challenge all my assumptions about my father; it would prove Jacob Quinn Maguire had taken responsibility for me, after all.

  I held my breath and hit search. Five results popped up for Martha Rose, but none of them were me. I flopped against the back of my chair and blew out a puff of air. It seemed like I didn’t have to worry about my world being toppled after all. “This was stupid.”

  Lucy grasped my shoulder. “I’ll tell you what’s stupid, Martha. You typed in the wrong name. Quinn set up that account when you were in the fifth grade. What was your name then?”

  “You’re right. What was I thinking?” I went back to the screen and typed in Harris, Martha Rivka. I took another deep breath and clicked the search button. This time, one result popped up. A savings account at Bank of America on Pico Boulevard in my old neighborhood had been escheated back to the State of California in 1983, three years after Quinn’s disappearance. I followed the link to the next screen giving the details.

  “Ha!” Lucy whooped and threw her hands in the air. “You just won the lottery!”

  I had to blink several times to make sure I saw what the screen revealed. One-point-eight million dollars waited for me in Sacramento. I did the math. If Quinn opened the account when I was ten years old in 1965, he had fifteen years to make deposits before he disappeared in 1980. The account would’ve accumulated interest from B of A all those years until it was handed over to the state as required by law—three years after they lost contact with Quinn. The interest payments would’ve stopped once the funds left the bank, but the principal remained intact.

  So, it was true. Quinn did think about me. He asked for my picture and tried to provide for me. I really did have to reevaluate everything I’d believed about my parents. As if on cue, the muscles in my back tightened with stress and squeezed my neck and shoulders, creating the seeds of a headache.

  “You know what this also means, Lucy?” I rubbed the side of my neck. “It means that, besides Quinn, at least one other person in Giselle’s family knew about me. Her grandmother Edith Eagan.”

  “I wonder . . .” Lucy picked up another shoe box and began riffling the contents.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Yesterday, when we were sorting the hexagons, I came across a piece of a black-and-white photograph and tossed it in here with the newspaper clippings. Now I’m wondering if anyone else turned up more pieces and what the photo might show.”

  I made room on the table, and hexes drifted out of the upended container like black-and-white snowflakes. Sections of the picture were easy to detect because the photo paper was thicker than newsprint.

  We found twelve hexes and taped them together. A partially assembled head shot stared back at us from the table. The pieces had been cut out of the middle portion of an eight-by-ten-inch photo of an infant—my daughter, Quincy, born in January of 1980.

  So Quinn knew about his granddaughter! Was he pleased? Did he want to know us? He disappeared in May 1980. My twenty-fifth birthday was the following month, in June. If he had lived, would he have contacted me on the day I turned twenty-five?

  My heart felt like a rock in my chest. “I feel cheated, Lucy.”

  “I’m sorry, hon. This has been a real shock. You look like heck, girlfriend. What can I do?”

  I reached inside the pink box from Bea’s and grabbed an apricot Danish. Maybe I could make the headache go away with some sugar. “Could you please research how I go about getting that money back from the state?”

  “Sure. But I’m going to do that at home. You look like you need to rest right now.”

  “You’re the best, Lucy. I think I’ll take a walk. Try to process everything.”

  After she left, I grabbed my keys, locked my front door, and headed toward the p
ark down the street from our housing tract. The homes were built in the 1950s on land that used to belong to the old RKO movie studios. Fifty-five-year-old liquid amber trees lined the parking strip. Their mature roots had pushed up portions of the sidewalk until it resembled a fallen deck of cards. I carefully navigated the rough parts until I reached the rolling green of the parkland at the end of the street.

  A cement path wound around silent soccer fields that would vibrate later in the afternoon with the sound of children playing. Resting on a wooden bench under a tall eucalyptus tree, I tried to corral the thoughts swirling in my head.

  Something bothered me about the $60,000 from the Shiffer Gallery Quinn was supposedly taking to Atlantic City. Was he really going to wager all of it? Or was some of that cash given back to Eliza Shiffer and some of it deposited for me? Did Quinn keep a record of the money he paid out? What did he do with the B of A statements for my account? Did the answers lie buried inside that mountain of hexagons cut from ledger sheets and bank statements?

  I thought about Giselle’s repressed grandmother, who cut up evidence of Quinn’s secret life and sewed it into the back of a quilt. Who did that? Did she tell anyone else in the family about my daughter and me? About my bank account? Would the knowledge that Quinn made payments for his illegitimate children make someone angry enough to kill him? Like the creepy old grandmother, or Giselle’s angry mother?

  Maybe Figgy had the answer. I’d ask her the hard questions and pray she’d feel freer to answer without my sister present.

  I closed my eyes against the swirling in my head and pretended to sit on the banks of a river. Breathing slowly, I imagined that the swoosh of traffic on the nearby 101 Freeway was the sound of clear water rushing downstream from melting snow in the mountains. A cool breeze pushed the curls off my forehead and calmed the ache in my skull.

  I inhaled deeply, opened my eyes, and headed back to my house. Time to contact Giselle.

  CHAPTER 24

  “I just saw your text, Sissy. I meant to call you earlier, but my meetings are taking longer than anticipated. As a matter of fact, Harold and I are about to take the Saudis to lunch, so I only have a minute to call Figgy. When do you want to talk to her?”

  “This afternoon, if possible.”

  “Fine. I’ll set it up and text you. Anything else?”

  “Plenty! Call me later when you have time, G. Lucy and I discovered something really big this morning.”

  I wound my way over Coldwater Canyon from the Valley to Beverly Hills at two in the afternoon. Figgy must’ve heard me drive up to the big house because she opened the door as soon as I mounted the stone steps.

  “Would you like some tea, Mrs. Rose?” She wiped her hands on a white apron.

  “Yes, I’d love some tea, but only if you’ll join me. And please, call me Martha.” I wandered into the living room and sat on one of the six lavender velvet sofas.

  The old woman returned from the kitchen in five minutes, holding a tray. Her blue and silver Nike trainers squeaked on the hardwood floor. “I brought a plate of those croissants Miss Giselle loves.” She set the tray on the marble-topped coffee table in front of me.

  I didn’t hesitate to help myself to tea with milk and one of the flaky curved pastries topped with slivered almonds and filled with ground almond paste. I considered the sugar to be necessary medicine today for fighting my dull headache. “Should I call you Anna?”

  “Everyone calls me Figgy.” The housekeeper regarded me cautiously and perched on the edge of a straight-back chair. She poured herself a cup of tea. “Miss Giselle said you have some questions?”

  “Yes.” I gave her a reassuring smile. “You know we’re trying to find out what happened to our father, right?”

  She wobbled her head. “Not a good idea. The past is gone.”

  “Figgy, I think you know secrets about the family that could help us solve Quinn’s murder. I also believe you didn’t say anything in front of Giselle because you wanted to protect her from being hurt. And maybe you thought you’d get in trouble. Am I right?”

  She lowered her eyes but said nothing.

  “I know this can’t be easy, and I appreciate your cooperation. You told us the last time I came that you once listened in on a phone call from the mother of Quinn’s son to Giselle’s mother, Louise. Was that the only time?”

  “No.” She pressed her lips together.

  “Did you ever eavesdrop on anyone else? You won’t get in trouble for telling the truth.”

  She squared her shoulders and jutted out her chin. “Yes. All of them.”

  Bingo! Just as I suspected.

  “Thanks for your honesty. Did you ever hear Quinn talking to any of his lovers?”

  “That horrible woman who tormented poor Mrs. Louise about Mr. Quinn’s son.” The skin tightened around her eyes as she spoke. “She used to call him at night. At first, she just begged him to come to her place. After a while, she got nasty. Said she’d make him pay if he didn’t leave his wife. That woman was the devil!”

  “Okay, this is very important.” I sat forward. “Did you ever hear her name? Does the name Eliza ring a bell?”

  “No. He called all of them macushla, or something like that.” Macushla was an Irish term of endearment.

  “You said all of them? More than one woman called him at home?”

  “Yes. Whenever Mr. Quinn went into his office and closed the door, I knew he was up to something sneaky. That’s when I’d pick up the extension if I could. A couple of months before he disappeared, he spoke to a woman with a sweet voice. She told him he was a grandfather to a redheaded baby girl named after him.” She looked at me over the rim of her teacup. “Was she talking about you?”

  “My daughter, Quincy. Please go on . . .”

  “They laughed together and he asked for a picture. Said he couldn’t wait until June when he could finally meet his girls.”

  I blinked back tears of anger. Just two weeks! I missed Quinn by two weeks. Now, more than ever, I was determined to find the person who deprived me of ever knowing my father.

  “Did you ever hear him talk about gambling debts or money?”

  “Once, when Miss Giselle was three, Mr. Jerome stormed over here and shouted at Mr. Quinn for losing so much money. Mr. Jerome was angry because it wasn’t the first time. He told Mr. Quinn to take better care of his family if he knew what was good for him.”

  “That sounds like a pretty serious threat. What did Quinn do?”

  “He just said, ‘I know what my responsibilities are.’”

  Did Quinn lie to his father-in-law about the extent of his gambling losses in order to hide where his money was really going—to Eliza Shiffer and to my secret account?

  “How much did Giselle’s mother, Louise, know about the gambling and the other women?”

  “Enough to break her heart. Your father caused this family a lot of pain.”

  “I know. It seems he caused everyone pain. I’ve asked this once already, Figgy, but I need to ask you again. Do you think Giselle’s grandfather could’ve been angry enough with Quinn to kill him?”

  The housekeeper clasped her hands until her knuckles turned white. “Like I told you a week ago, anything’s possible. But even if he did, what good would it do to drag that up now? The only thing Miss Giselle has left of her family is memories. Don’t ruin that.”

  “Okay. Let’s set that aside for now. Tell me about Edith Eagan, Giselle’s grandmother.”

  Figgy frowned. “I didn’t work in the big house back then. My job was to take care of Mrs. Louise and her family in the small house.” Small was a matter of interpretation. I estimated that the house Jerome Eagan built for his daughter next door was a five-thousand-square-foot replica of the twenty-thousand-square-foot main house where we now sat.

  “Sometimes, when Mr. Quinn and Mrs. Louise were gone, Mrs. Edith would sneak over and shut herself in Mr. Quinn’s office. I’d bring her tea—even when she didn’t ask for it—just to see what she was up t
o. I saw her go through his filing cabinet and the papers on his desk. Once, I opened the door a crack and peeked in. She rattled a drawer in the antique rolltop desk and cursed because it was locked. Later on, though, I’m sure she opened it.”

  “How?”

  “When the police found Mr. Quinn’s Cadillac abandoned at the airport, his key ring was still in the ignition. The man detective . . . what was his name?”

  “Rohrbacher?” I poured myself another cup of tea with milk.

  “That’s right. One day, Detective Rohrbacher showed up to see Mrs. Louise, but she wasn’t here. Mrs. Edith must’ve seen him park in front of the little house because she hurried right over. He held up the key ring and asked, ‘Can you identify any of these?’

  “Mrs. Edith said, ‘Of course. I recognize all of them. We don’t want these floating around. I’m sure our friend Chief Nelson would want you to return them.’ Then she held out her hand, cool as a cucumber.”

  “Did Rohrbacher hand them over?”

  “Right away. I was standing close enough to see an old-fashioned key with a long, round stem. I’m pretty sure it was for that desk drawer because, right after the detective left, Mrs. Edith ran to Mr. Quinn’s office and shut the door.”

  And I knew what had been locked inside that drawer. All those papers that ended up as hexagons. I explained to Figgy how Edith Eagan had cut up Quinn’s private papers and sewed them into the back of the Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt. “Do you have any idea why she went to all that trouble to hide the contents of that drawer instead of just destroying them?”

  Figgy shrugged. “Mrs. Edith wasn’t a bad person. She must’ve had her reasons.”

  Indeed. I could just picture the furtive little woman, sitting like Madame Defarge, stitching secrets with busy fingers. The question was, what drove Giselle’s grandmother to such sneaky and bizarre behavior?

  I thanked the housekeeper and drove back to the Valley on Coldwater Canyon then west to Encino on the 101. Bumper greeted me with a yowl just inside the front door. With his tail swishing sharply through the air, he marched into the kitchen, sat next to his empty water bowl, and complained again.