Died in the Wool

by Rett MacPherson

  We talked a bit about when to get together and when to close and all that legal junk.

  Rudy walked by my office on his way to the bedroom, and I told him the good news. Then I made a mental note to call Geena Campbell and see if she would help me get this whole thing together. I’d pay her, of course, and I was seriously hoping that she’d agree to stay on one day a week after the initial opening. Oh, my God. My mind was racing with all of the things I would need to do to make this happen.

  I called Evan Merchant, and he answered on the third ring.

  “Hello, Evan, it’s Torie,” I said. “Congratulations, you’re going to get the money that you need.”

  “Not a moment too soon,” he said. “Congrats to you, too. You’re going to get your museum.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” I said.

  “I hope you can handle this house,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Hey, listen, I know it’s after eight, but do you think I could come over and look through the house again? The day I was there, I had Geena with me and we were just looking for quilts. Then Rudy went through the house with the real estate agent, so I haven’t really gotten to get a good look.”

  “Not a problem,” he said. “I’ll have the door unlocked for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’re not going to change your mind on me, are you?” Evan asked.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, and hung up the phone. “Rudy, I’m headed over to the Kendall house. I want to do a walk-through.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll hold down the fort.”

  * * *

  I was stepping into the foyer of the Kendall house within fifteen minutes. Rudy had said the plumbing and electrical systems had been done sometime in the seventies and might need to be replaced in a few years. I flipped the light switch on, and when I did, I swear it sounded like the house moaned. I walked through the big rooms in the front of the house back to the kitchen. There were no modern appliances. An old refrigerator that had the freezer on the bottom and the fridge part on the top was in one corner, and a gas-burning stove that must have been fifty years old sat next to it. The white sink had a dark brown rust or mineral stain in it but otherwise was in good shape. I checked in the cabinets to make sure there were no rodents of unusual size, nor cockroaches of either usual or unusual size. Pest control would have been my first call if there had been.

  Instead, my first call was to Sheriff Mort, but not until much later.

  After checking over everything on the bottom floor, and realizing that I would have to have the main bathroom completely gutted and rehabbed, just as Rudy had suggested, I made my way upstairs. I wondered about Glory’s last trip up these stairs. Was she obliviously heading up to her bedroom, to the poisoned pins and her death? All right, I didn’t know for sure that the pins were poisoned, but Maddie Fulton lying in the Wisteria General hospital bed went a long way to convince me. I was just waiting on the toxicology report to confirm my suspicions, not arouse new ones.

  I pushed open the door to Rupert’s room. The hinges creaked. I stood there in the dark for about twenty seconds, just listening to the house. Houses make noise. Houses breathe and settle and morph the exterior sounds into the interior ones. Hey, if Mort can have fish talk to him, I can have a house do the same. The feeling I got from this house was Tread lightly. Not Get out and don’t come back, like Amityville, and not Come in and stay forever, like the Walton home. No, it was just Tread lightly. I flipped on the light switch and was once again assaulted by Rupert’s mural. This time, I studied each wall carefully.

  The detail in the drawings was astounding. He captured fear and dread like Rockwell had captured wholesomeness and all-American. There was also whimsy here and there. Like, one part showed five men sitting around playing poker. One of the men had a bullet through his head and was obviously dead, but the funny part was that the player next to him had an ace up his sleeve. They all went on with their game as though the guy next to them hadn’t been killed while they played. It made me wonder if that had really happened to Rupert at some point in the trenches.

  Another comical scene showed a soldier asking for forgiveness from the priest, and he had his fingers crossed behind his back. All of these images, the horrible and the whimsical, ran together and spread along the walls of Rupert’s bedroom like some giant and ancient graphic novel.

  If you started as soon as you entered the room on the left and came all the way around, the bloodstains from Whalen’s suicide were all over the third wall or third panel in the mural. The bloodstains were about four and a half feet up the wall with heavy splatters on the bottom. Just to the right of his blood was a drawing of Glory Anne, sitting in a chair and quilting, a smile on her face and her hair falling loosely around her shoulders. Rupert’s ideal was to leave the trenches and come home. But hovering behind Glory Anne was a twisted and broken figure with his gnarly fingers about to snatch her up and do horrible things to her. The evil man was huge and hulking, but there was no way that I could identify the face, because Rupert had drawn it to look nonhuman. In fact, he looked a bit like Nosferatu, though I’m not sure that had been Rupert’s intent. I have no idea when that old silent movie even came out.

  I studied the bloodstains and understood why nobody had ever tried to cover them up. If they had, they would have covered up Rupert’s masterpiece. I think Evan would have probably painted over the whole room if given half a chance, but he hadn’t been able to stay in the house. The owner before him clearly had realized the historical and artistic value of this trench mural and had left it. I was going to call a history professor in St. Louis to come and study this and have it photographed professionally. I wanted to leave this room exactly as it was. I would give tours of it. I supposed I would have to put an age restriction on the tours, not just because of the bloodstains but also because of the subject matter and disturbing images. I decided right then and there that nobody under eighteen would see this, unless their parents saw it first and then allowed them to go in.

  Who was the monster that Rupert had drawn on the point of devouring his sister? Who did he represent? Anthony Tarullo? Whalen? Did he represent mankind in general? Or was it just an embodiment of a nightmare that Rupert had had to endure? I could never know for sure.

  I suddenly realized that it was exceptionally quiet outside. When I checked my cell phone, it said the time was half past ten. I’d been here almost two hours. It didn’t seem like it.

  I stood there another half hour examining the bloodstains. Had Whalen chosen this particular part of the wall to shoot himself on purpose? Was there a method to his madness? On the other side of the blood was an image of the sun setting on a soldier’s corpse. Something wasn’t right. Or maybe it wasn’t that there was something wrong, but there was something … something that I just wasn’t seeing.

  I walked the halls and found an empty bedroom. I guessed that this had been Whalen’s room and that the previous owner had cleared it out to sleep in. I peeked in Glory’s room, but quite frankly, I was a bit afraid to touch anything in there. I thought the poison had been confined to her pins, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I walked back down to what had been Sandy Kendall’s room. The bed was exceptionally big. I’ve seen a lot of antique furniture—you can’t live in a town like New Kassel and not have seen a ton and a half of antiques—but I’d never seen a bed this large. I didn’t remember any reports saying Sandy had been obese, but I did remember the article mentioning that he was taller than average height, and so was Glory. Based on that sculpture at her grave and things I had read, Glory was probably about five foot ten. That’s not unusual by today’s standards, but back then, she would have been very tall. My great-grandmother, my Grandma Gert’s mother, was six feet tall, and in every picture I have of her with other people, she is towering over them.

  That made me think.

  In what I assumed had been Sandy’s room, I began rifling through drawers and trunks until I found an old pho
to album in the chest. Next to his father’s Civil War uniforms and diaries, a worn and faded velvet-covered photo album lay waiting for someone to discover it. I opened it and began looking at the pictures. From the photo they’d printed of him in the paper when Whalen had killed himself, and a picture in the album that had his name penciled in on the back, I had no trouble recognizing Sandy. I finally found what I was looking for. A family photo.

  It wasn’t anything formal. It showed Sandy, his wife, Whalen, Rupert, and Glory. It had to have been taken right before Sandy’s wife died, because Glory looked as though she could have passed for sixteen or seventeen, and the boys were obviously grown. They were standing out in front of the house. Sandy towered over Whalen and Rupert, but Glory, even as a very young adult, was already nearly as tall as Whalen.

  I sifted through more pictures until I found a photograph of Sandy and his two sons, taken after Rupert had come back from the war. I could tell this by several clues. One was that Rupert looked as though he was wearing army boots and had the army haircut. Rupert also had that vacant shell-shocked look on his face, the look he only seemed to have after he went to France. That meant the photograph had been taken when Whalen and Rupert were grown men.

  Sandy still towered over them. Head and shoulders over them. Had he been so tall that his bed had been specially made? Why did his height matter?

  Well, it’s one of those things that happens with my brain. It grabs hold of some tiny thread without realizing that the thread is leading to a bigger string, which will lead to a massive rope. Sandy’s height mattered because it made me think of Whalen’s height, and Whalen’s height mattered because …

  The bloodstains. I walked back to Rupert’s room, realizing that unless Whalen was extremely short, the stains were in the wrong place. I sat down on the floor with my back to the wall and then turned my head over my shoulder and looked. I’m not tall by any means, but even if Whalen had been six to eight inches taller than I was, the stains would be too high. If I stood up, they were too low. If he kneeled? Maybe. But why would he kneel?

  I flipped open the cell phone and called Sheriff Mort. “I know this is going to sound strange,” I said, “but could you meet me at the Kendall house with a crime scene investigator?”

  “It’s eleven. Going on midnight,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “I suppose it could wait for tomorrow, but—”

  “It can wait until tomorrow,” he said.

  “You don’t even know what I want,” I said.

  “Whatever it is has gone this long without being investigated. It can wait until tomorrow.”

  “Okay, what time tomorrow?” I said.

  “I’ll be there at eight,” he said. “Bring doughnuts.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “What are we looking for?” he asked.

  “Bloodstains. Blood splatter.”

  “The stain on the wall I saw that one time I was there looking for squatters?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What’s the angle on this?”

  “That’s just it. I need to know the angle.”

  “All right,” he said. “Hey, how’d you like the game I left for you?”

  “It was … wonderful,” I said with no strain in my voice whatsoever.

  “Good. I got three deer this past year. I was afraid it was all going to get freezer burnt and go to waste. Glad you could help me out.”

  “I … You’re welcome. See you tomorrow.”

  I locked up the house and went home.

  Eighteen

  The really horrible thing about being me is that I’m so obsessive over things that I make myself miserable. All I’d have to do is say to myself, “Self, quit being so obsessive. Go to bed. You don’t need to know how tall Whalen Kendall was tonight. You can find that out tomorrow.” But Self won’t let me do that. Self says, “You have to know, you have to know, you have to know.” So then I tiptoe out of my bedroom at one in the morning and quietly enter my office and find the file I made on the Kendalls and look up how tall Whalen was based on his World War I draft papers. He was five foot eight.

  He was even shorter than Rupert, but still of average height for men a hundred years ago. I found it strange that Rupert and Whalen had not inherited their father’s extreme height. Based on photographs, Sandy must have been six foot six or more. I wondered if maybe Sandy had a disease or genetic disorder that made him exceptionally tall. Like, what was that thing that Abraham Lincoln had? He had a disease that made him extra tall and made his limbs grow long and lanky. Maybe it was something like that.

  At any rate, I now knew how tall Whalen was, which would help the CSI and the labs determine the trajectory of that bullet.

  I was wide-awake now, so I logged on to the Internet to do some surfing. I noticed that Mary’s little icon thingie was showing up on my buddy list. Mary was on the computer. Mary, who was grounded from the computer. Mary was on the computer, when she was grounded, at one in the morning. Granted, it wasn’t a school night, but last I saw her she was snoring her little head off.

  She was definitely pushing my buttons.

  I went to her room and could see the glow from the computer screen spilling out into the hallway. I stood at the door and watched her typing away and giggling over something that one of her buddies had just sent her. Her back was to me, and I wondered how close I could get to her and the computer without her knowing. I decided that I couldn’t get close enough, but I still wanted to know what she was saying. So I ran down to the kitchen and got the binoculars that I keep in the window. Out in the country I find that I need binoculars a lot. Way more than I ever thought I would.

  I ran back up the steps, repositioned myself at her bedroom door, and raised the binoculars. Now I could read what she was typing and what was being said back to her. Here’s the way her conversation went:

  Mary:

  He soooooo does like you.

  Megan:

  No way. He likes Lexy.

  Mary:

  She’s such a loser.

  Megan:

  At least she’s not as bad as Nikki Bittermeyer. I heard she stuck her tongue down some guy’s throat.

  Mary:

  No! Gross!

  Thank God, she still thought tongues in other people’s throats were gross.

  Megan:

  Can’t believe you got grounded.

  Mary:

  My mom is so uncool.

  Me? I am not uncool!

  Megan:

  No, your mom is cool. She’s just way overprotective.

  Mary:

  She’s a weirdo.

  I am not a weirdo. I couldn’t believe that Megan was sticking up for me and my own daughter was being such a little twit.

  Megan:

  I never said she wasn’t a weirdo. But at least she cares.

  Mary:

  Guess you’re right. But I hate her anyway.

  Megan:

  Why?

  Mary:

  Because I can! I’m an American! Besides, she’s always right. I hate that.

  Megan:

  You’re a brat. ☺

  Mary:

  Like you should talk.

  Megan:

  Well, I heard that Tony for sure does like you.

  Mary:

  I am not sticking my tongue down his throat.

  I really wanted to march right over there and jerk a knot in her tail, but then I’d just give fuel to her fire. The fire that had my name all over it. Yes, she was grounded, and she was technically in the wrong, but if I went over there now and yanked her off of the computer, somehow I’d be the bad guy. Instead I went back to my office and waited until she logged off and went to sleep. Then I sent her an e-mail. It said:

  Mary, when you’re ungrounded from the computer you’ll get to read this. I just wanted to let you know that I think you’re a really cool kid. And I love you very much. I hope when you become a mother you’ll understand how hard all of this is. I think we�
��ll go ahead and dye your hair black, since you really want to do that. I want you to be you. I just want you to be safe being you. That’s all.

  Love, Mom

  P.S. I’m changing the passwords on your computer tomorrow night, just in case you’re tempted to get online.

  With that, I logged off and went to bed and slept soundly until my alarm went off at six thirty.

  * * *

  I stopped by Pierre’s bakery in town and picked up some doughnuts, croissants, muffins, and Danishes. When I got to the Kendall house, Sheriff Mort was already there waiting for me. A storm had moved in overnight and left all the grass and leaves wet and the ground dark with moisture. The morning glory was blooming its head off, and Mort stood by it, apparently studying it. “This is a morning glory,” he said.

  “Yup.”

  “I saw this in bloom the other evening when I checked the house for you.”

  “Yup.”

  “That’s not possible,” he said.

  “Nope,” I said and held up the bag of goodies.

  “Oh, doughnuts,” he said. “I brought the java.”

  I don’t drink coffee, so I begged off and drank my bottled water with my cherry-cheese Danish. The CSI was not there yet, so Mort and I sat down on the front porch and prepared to wait.

  “Whalen Kendall was five foot eight,” I said. “For the record.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I want you to see if the trajectory lines up. I want you to check it as if he was sitting, kneeling, and standing when he shot himself.”

  “Well, obviously you’ve already got an idea that it’s not gonna match up or you wouldn’t have hauled me out here on a Sunday morning.”