Died in the Wool

by Rett MacPherson

  “My point exactly,” she said. Then she threw her shoulders back and walked on down the road.

  Mort shook his head and smiled. “Who is she, anyway?”

  I laughed. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I mean, I know who she is because I had to arrest her, but who is she?”

  We walked into the Gaheimer House, and I offered him something to drink, which he declined. Waving to my sister, the sheriff and I ducked into my office quickly, so as not to disturb the tour. He took a moment to look around my office. Pictures of my kids line one end of my desk. Several ceramic items are arranged on the other end. They’re mostly things my kids made in art class, and they’re ugly as homemade sin, but they were made with heart, which is all that matters. He read some of the titles of books that I had sitting around, mostly histories of the area and compilations of records. Then he came to the antique Rose of Sharon quilt that had hung on my office wall for as long as I could remember. Sylvia had said to me when I first went to work for her, “You get the room with the Rose of Sharon for your office.” Funny, I’d never asked her who made it or where it came from. Suddenly, I wondered if she had made it in her youth.

  “Nice office,” he said.

  “Thanks. It’s small, but I have a great view of the main street in town right outside my window. It’s the office I’ve had for over ten years. I didn’t see any point in moving it once Sylvia died.”

  “You really care about this town, don’t you?”

  I smiled. “It’s my livelihood—but beyond that, yes, I really do. You know, towns have personalities just like people. I happen to be really compatible with this one.”

  “Why the move out of town, then?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “We were ready for a change of pace, and I think Rudy thought we’d get along better if I wasn’t quite in the thick of things so much.”

  “Has it worked?” he asked. It felt strange having somebody ten years my junior inquire about how my marriage was faring.

  “I’m still right in the middle of everything,” I said with a laugh. “I think Rudy really just wanted to move to the country and used my involvement with the town as an excuse. I’m not so sure I could have stayed in town, anyway. Not after that whole mess with Bill.” Bill, the ex-mayor, had hated me with a passion. He’s in jail now, thanks to the fact that I caught him at identity theft. At least he was ahead of the curve. He stole his identity long before it had become the “in” thing to do.

  “Well, I’m glad things are going well for you,” he said.

  “So, what have you got? Are you going to share? The suspense is killing me.”

  He smiled and his violet eyes shimmered. I’d only seen one other person in the whole world with violet eyes, a girl I’d gone to school with. You couldn’t help but be drawn to them. For some reason, they made me trust him a little more than I otherwise would have.

  “Well, Rupert’s suicide seems totally on the up and up. The investigators interviewed his sister about it. She said that Rupert had been despondent, and she said that when he first came home from the war, he was confused a lot. Half the time he still thought he was in the trenches. Back in France. On the occasions when he realized he was at home, he’d cry and tell Glory that she needed to hide and not let the big man find her. She also talks about him hiding under the bed and even sleeping on the roof. He seemed to be torn between wanting to be in wide-open spaces with lots of air and wanting to be huddled in dark, close quarters. It was as if he felt safe in the trenches but longed to be in the open.” Mort shook his head. “War really messes with men.”

  “I know,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “Glory also said that in his more lucid moments he understood he was at home and knew who everybody was, but he couldn’t get it through his head that the war was over. He thought it was still going on and that he’d have to go back at any moment. No matter how many times Glory would try to tell him that the war was over, he wouldn’t believe her.”

  “So you think he killed himself because he thought he was going to have to go back? He’d rather be dead?” I asked.

  Mort shook his head. “According to Glory’s testimony, one day Rupert woke up and was normal. Normal for the first time since he’d been back, and he told her that he understood that the war was over. Things were fine for about a week—Glory didn’t elaborate on what happened during that week—and then he killed himself. Glory was the one who found him.” Mort scratched his head, and I knew there was something he wasn’t telling me.

  “Does that bother you?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think Glory may have either assisted him or knew he was going to do it and turned a blind eye to it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because her brother—Whalen—said that he saw her come in from the back porch early in the morning and act as though nothing was wrong, but there was no way she could have been on the back porch and not seen her brother hanging from the tree.”

  “What could she possibly have done to assist him?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I’m really just thinking out loud.”

  “Well, Glory was the one who took care of him and really loved him. She was totally devoted to him. I wonder if she just sat with him while it happened. To comfort him.”

  “Comfort him?”

  “To let him know that she was there and she wouldn’t leave him,” I said.

  “Could be. Seems kinda sick.”

  “Well, clearly things weren’t quite right in that house,” I said. “What did Sandy and Whalen have to say?”

  “See, this is what makes me suspicious about the whole thing. I mean, I’m sure, based on the physical evidence, that Rupert killed himself. No question about it. But Sandy and Whalen Kendall both say that when Glory came to tell them that Rupert had killed himself, she was totally calm.”

  “Calm?”

  “Yeah, her father even states that he didn’t understand why Glory wasn’t hysterical. But she wasn’t. She calmly said, ‘Rupert’s gone and hung himself.’ Simple as that. So if she didn’t actually assist him or sit with him, I think she suspected he was about to do something like that, and I think she found him long before she told anybody. That would have given her time to get her hysterics over with.”

  “Yeah, and by the time she told her father and brother, the numbness had set in.”

  “Exactly.”

  “All right, so what about Glory?” I asked.

  “Her suicide is the strangest of all three, and I believe you may be correct, especially if the lab comes back with positive results for strychnine on her sewing things. A neighbor knocked on the Kendall door at about seven the night before her body was discovered. The neighbor thought Whalen seemed really upset, but Whalen claimed he was fine. The neighbor inquired about Glory, and Whalen said she was upstairs sleeping, that she’d taken laudanum to go to sleep.”

  “Why is that so strange?”

  “Because the other neighbor, who loaned them the laudanum, said she didn’t loan it to them until almost midnight,” Mort said.

  I sat down in my chair.

  “So … Neighbor A unexpectedly knocks on the door, and Whalen, who’s shook up because his sister is already dead, makes up an excuse about the laudanum,” I said. “Then later, when he and his father are trying to figure out how to cover this up, they realize they could use the laudanum excuse that Whalen has already laid the groundwork for. Except…”

  “They have no laudanum,” Mort said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “So they have to borrow some. Sandy goes to the one person he knows he can blackmail, Neighbor B, the next-door neighbor who is in debt up to her ears, a widow with half-grown children.”

  “Right. He wouldn’t go to the pharmacist, even if the shop was open at that hour, because the records would show what time the laudanum was purchased,” Mort said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “So which one killed her? The father or the brother?” />
  “I don’t know who killed her, but they both covered it up,” he said.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Why didn’t the investigators catch the time discrepancy? They talked to the neighbor who loaned the Kendalls the laudanum. Doris, that’s her name.”

  “Doris Jenkins, to be exact. The answer is, because when they went back to double-check that with her, she changed her story and said that she had been mistaken. She said Whalen had borrowed the laudanum at three in the afternoon the day before.”

  “The day before?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “So … Glory could have been dead almost two days before they reported it.”

  “Sandy and Whalen were shittin’ bricks,” Mort said. “Excuse the French.”

  “That’s okay. It’s appropriate,” I said. Then I rubbed my head. “Are you sure you don’t want something to drink? I need an infusion.”

  “If you insist,” Mort said.

  I grabbed two Dr Peppers and ran back to my office. I handed one to Mort and then sat back down in my chair, popped the can, and started drinking mine.

  “So you think one of them killed her?” Mort asked.

  “Who else would it have been?”

  “A jealous lover?”

  I thought of Anthony Tarullo. Could he have been so hurt over being jilted that he snuck into her house and poisoned her sewing pins? “It was personal,” I said. “Whoever it was. If my suspicions are correct, they poisoned her quilting pins, for God’s sake.”

  “So you think they were trying to make it look like a suicide?”

  “No, think about it. They could have discovered strychnine would not look like a suicide. At least not at first. Once the rigor had passed and without modern toxicology tests, well … then it could pass for a suicide, as it obviously did.”

  “So whoever it was, even if it was her father or brother, didn’t think about covering it up as a suicide until after the fact,” Mort said.

  “Yeah,” I answered, scratching my head, “but … okay, who would have the most to lose if Glory turned up murdered in the house?”

  “The father,” he said.

  “Exactly,” I said. “Which means he was the least likely one to do it. So I think it was Whalen.”

  “Or an outside source,” he said. “Because if you had poisoned your sister or daughter with a lethal amount of strychnine, wouldn’t you have cleaned up the mess so that nobody else would get poisoned? Or so that you wouldn’t accidentally poison yourself?”

  “Which brings you to an outside source. Like Anthony Tarullo,” I said.

  I swallowed the last of my Dr Pepper and explained to Mort who Anthony Tarullo was. “You have to promise me that if it turns out to be Anthony Tarullo we won’t say anything about it until his brother passes away. Marty Tarullo is ninety-something and worshipped his brother. It’s not like anything can be done about it now, anyway, and I don’t want to ruin that for Marty.”

  “I’m all right with that,” Mort said.

  “Okay, so what about Whalen’s suicide?”

  “He went in his brother’s room, locked the door, and blew his brains out all over his brother’s wall,” he said.

  “How do you know he locked the door?”

  “Because his father said that the door was locked when he heard the gun go off. He got the key and opened the door and there was Whalen.”

  “Did Sandy give any reason his son would shoot himself?”

  “He said that Whalen was completely distraught over both of his siblings dying and his wife and daughter leaving him. That he couldn’t go on. Sandy said he’d watched Whalen like a hawk right after Glory died, because he had been afraid that Whalen might do something like this, but he thought the danger had passed.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah, except that when the investigators asked why Whalen had gone into his brother’s room to do it, instead of his own room, or anywhere else, for that matter, Sandy said that he thought Whalen felt guilty that he had never seen combat and his brother had. Like somehow he’d let his little brother down. Sandy said that Whalen had said on more than one occasion that it wasn’t right that Rupert had seen blood spill and he hadn’t. That he was the one—as the older brother—who should have been in the trenches, not Rupert. I guess maybe, in his own twisted way, shooting himself in Rupert’s room was a way of paying homage to his brother? I honestly don’t know.”

  “So he’d seen the trenches after all,” I said. “Just the ones that Rupert had drawn, not the real ones.”

  “Apparently so,” he said.

  “Wow.”

  “Does that answer any of your questions?”

  “Sort of. Of course, it raises more questions.”

  “Most investigations do,” he said.

  “Well, thank you so much, Sheriff. I really appreciate it.”

  “No problem,” he said. “I’ll let you know as soon as the toxicology report comes back on those pins. Oh, by the way, there’s something in the kitchen that I brought for you. I had no idea you liked game, but Colin assured me that you did and that you’d really appreciate it. So enjoy, and I’ll talk to you later.”

  Game? What sort of game? I walked Mort to the door and then went back to the kitchen, where I found two big coolers sitting on the countertop. I’d completely passed right over them when I came in to get the two sodas a while ago. My mind had been totally gone. Totally in 1922 with the Kendall family.

  I lifted the lid on the first cooler. Inside was a bunch of frozen meat. Game? Oh, no. It was deer meat. Colin knows I don’t like deer meat. In fact, I can’t even stand to smell the stuff cooking. The second cooler had at least a dozen dead fish in it. I’m not sure it would have been worse if the heads had been cut off, but the little beady eyes stared at me from underneath the ice. I slammed the coolers shut and thought about killing my stepfather. It was bad enough that I had to deal with Rudy’s dead fish that he brought in the house, but Mort’s, too? A dozen dead fish and deer parts. Just lovely. What did I ever do to deserve such a malicious stepfather?

  Okay, don’t answer that.

  Seventeen

  There was a strange-looking bird sitting on my fence. It was late evening after the rose show, and Rudy and I were sitting out on the back patio, listening to the crickets and the katydids. He was wondering about … well, I’m not sure, since his mind is often vacant when he’s staring off into space. I was wondering what the heck kind of bird that was. “What sort of bird do you think that is?” I asked.

  “Some sort of thrush,” he said. “It has spots on its breast.”

  “How do you know what kind of bird that is?” I asked.

  “I had to identify, like, forty species of birds for some summer camp thing I did when I was a kid,” he said.

  “I did not know that,” I said, amazed that after eighteen years together, there were still things I didn’t know about him.

  “Why did you ask me what kind of bird it was if you didn’t think I’d know the answer?” he said.

  “I don’t know. Just making conversation.”

  “Women,” he said, and laughed. I laughed along with him.

  Just then the back door opened. Mary’s indignant voice said, “I’m home.” Colin had just dropped her off from working the sno-cone stand. She had to stay and clean up afterward. With her tone, she was letting Rudy and me know in no uncertain terms that she was insulted to have to spend the day doing manual labor. She was also making a production of letting us know she was home.

  “Great,” I said. “Did you have fun?”

  “Yeah, right,” she said, and shut the door.

  Rudy and I exchanged glances, and then he grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “We’ll survive her adolescence, don’t worry.”

  “I know,” I said. “What worries me is that it’s not as if she’s doing drugs or having sex. How do we cope if she moves beyond the hormonal, grouchy, smart-mouth, I’m-going-to-test-you-to-the-limit phase?”

&
nbsp; “We dig our heels in,” he said.

  We were quiet a moment. “You think Rachel and Riley are having sex yet?” I asked.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed. “Don’t even go there. Stop. Don’t ever say that again!”

  I laughed so hard my side hurt.

  “Good God, woman. Why would you say something like that?”

  “Well, it’s not as if she’s never gonna—”

  “Don’t!”

  “I hope she’s not having sex yet, but unless we buy her a chastity belt it’s going to happen someday. In fact, her future husband probably wouldn’t appreciate it if she had a chastity belt.”

  Rudy glared at me a moment. “You’re twisted, you know that?”

  As we fell into laughter once more, Mary came back to the door, opened it, and said in the most deadpan casual way possible, “Matthew put something down the toilet. Now it’s smoking.”

  All in all, a typical day in our household.

  Rudy went to see what was causing the toilet to smoke while I went upstairs to my office. I thought about how beautiful the day had been, how perfectly the rose show had unfolded. It would be a nice thing to add to the roster of events in New Kassel. Maybe next year we could have a rose festival. Devote a whole week to roses. We could have experts set up booths and teach people how to grow them, how to prune them, how to keep them from getting diseases, and so forth. It seemed like a brilliant thing to do. I was making a note of that when my phone rang. It was my real estate agent, Sherry Dowdy.

  “Hey, Torie, I just wanted to let you know that Mr. Merchant accepted your offer on the Kendall house,” she said.

  “Great,” I said, sitting down. As I often do, I had gone after something and wasn’t quite prepared for it when it actually happened. I was going to be the owner of the Kendall house. I would get my museum devoted to women’s textile arts. It was real. I was so happy I could have burst. It would be the first really big, important thing I would do in this town that Sylvia had not been involved with in some shape or form. This was all mine. Well, I’d have help, of course, but I’d achieved something outside the Realm of All Things Sylvia.