SIREN'S TEARS (ALTON RHODE MYSTERIES Book 3)

by Lawrence de Maria

  The Bottomleys had two grown children, both boys, who rarely visited.

  “A son is a son until he takes a wife, a daughter is a daughter all of her life,” she said. “Doesn’t really bother me. Not much to do around here for my grandchildren.” She waved an arm at the photos above the fireplace. “And both my boys live where it’s warmer. One is in California and one in Georgia. Both married with kids and doing very well. I visit them each at least once a year. I’m one of those women who gets along with her daughters-in-law. And I take them all to Disney once a year. The one in Florida. Now why don’t you bring our wine to the table and I’ll get us dinner.”

  The roast turned out to be elk, which she served with a port wine reduction, potatoes and green beans. There was a basket of biscuits. The meat was rare and tasted like good venison. I said so.

  “We ran a food column featuring local recipes,” she said. “I became a good cook in spite of myself. Now what do you want to know?”

  “Anything you can tell me about Mary Naulls.”

  “My eldest, Tom, dated Mary. He liked her well enough, but I got the sense he thought there was something off about her. He wouldn’t say much, but I think she had a problem with sex. I don’t mean she was a lesbian or anything. That doesn’t bother anyone around here. It’s too damn cold to begrudge anyone keeping warm, with anyone. Mary liked men, but seemed afraid of them.”

  “Did that have something to do with her father?”

  Letty Bottomley looked at me.

  “What do you know?”

  “I flew in with Buzz and got an earful.”

  “Buzz is an old lady. He was our internet before there was an internet. I suppose he told you that Humphrey Naulls was a lecher.”

  “Not true?”

  “Hell, yes it was true. He even propositioned me. Unsuccessfully, mind you. A real Elmer Gantry. His poor wife was a laughingstock.”

  “There were no scandals? The man was a minister, for God’s sake.”

  “Humphrey did most of his catting around far from home. I was an exception to his proposition rule.” She smiled. “I may not look like much now, but in my day I could turn a few heads.”

  “I’m sure you could,” I said. “You are still a good-looking woman.”

  She nodded at the compliment.

  “And let’s just say I enjoyed the 60’s,” she added, with a glint in her eyes, “and leave it at that.”

  I didn’t mention that the boys at the town dock also had the same opinion of her younger version.

  “In any event,” Letty went on, “Humphrey really didn’t need to look locally. Fishing, trapping and logging are dangerous professions. There were plenty of lonely widows in the boondocks that he went out of his way to console and comfort. It’s not easy being a widow in these parts. I know. I’m one. But I was past the shenanigan stage when Ben died, and I’ve made my peace with it. It could be worse. The Kaulong tribe in New Britain, the island off Papua New Guinea, used to strangle widows after their husbands died. Personally, I’d rather be strangled than sleep with someone like Humphrey Naulls. Mary told me about the Kaulongs. She knew a lot about indigenous people, from her studies and travels. I always loved talking with her when she was in town. Not that she came back very often.”

  “Because of her father?”

  “Yes.”

  “You may have been an exception to his rule, Letty, but not the only one. Buzz hinted that Naulls did some of his lechery very close to home. Maybe in his home.”

  Letty Bottomley didn’t look shocked. Only sad. She passed me the second bottle of wine and motioned for me to open it. I did and filled our glasses.

  “Buzz isn’t a total idiot,” she said. “I suspected that as well. It’s not that incest is unknown in these parts. Winters are long and people get isolated. It’s rare, but usually of the brother-and-sister kind. Not my cup of tea, certainly, but not as monstrous as father and child. But no complaint was brought against Humphrey Naulls. The people in this town might have had their doubts about him, but he was a bit of a legend in B.C. The “Flying Pastor” bunk. He was always after Ben and me to do feature stories about him.”

  Letty looked at me shrewdly.

  “This is more than just Mary going missing, isn’t it, young man?”

  Letty must have been a heck of a newspaperwoman. While we finished eating, I told her why I was tracking Mary Naulls.

  ***

  “It’s hard to imagine that poor, sweet girl turning into a serial killer,” Letty said. “But you make a persuasive case.” Dinner over, we were back sitting by the fireplace, drinking coffee. “I’d say my son, Tom, dodged a bullet.”

  “I don’t think she would have harmed him. She seems to target married men in their 60’s, her father’s age. If I had to guess, I’d say they reminded her of dear old dad, right down to his philandering. That would suggest that she knows they were adulterers, probably from first-hand experience. And if her father did sexually abuse her, she could easily transfer her hate for him to any man she thought treated women dishonorably.”

  “Daughter of a hypocritical, perverted minister,” Letty mused aloud, “who sought solace in another religion, only to find out that there are hypocrites in every faith. My God, what a story! What are you going to do?”

  “I have to find her before she kills anyone else on Staten Island, or moves on. My problem is, I can’t even prove she is there. And even if I could, I don’t know her name, or what she looks like. I don’t suppose you ever took a photo of her for your newspaper.”

  Letty snapped her fingers.

  “You know, I seem to remember we did a story about her when she worked in South America. Local girl makes good kind of thing. I think she sent us some photos to use, and she was in some of them.”

  I felt a sudden thrill of anticipation.

  “Did you save the photos?”

  “I don’t know. If we did, they might be in the morgue at the paper.”

  “I thought you shut down the paper.”

  “I did. Sold the operation to a young couple. They turn out those all-advertising shoppers. I think you call them penny savers in the States. Not just for Ocean Falls, of course. Not big enough. They also print for Aristazbal Island, Bella Coola, Rivers Inlet and several other communities. Nice folks. I asked them to keep a couple of copies of all of our editions in the basement, for their historical worth. So, even if there are no photos, there should be a story with the photos in them.”

  I called Katie Paul at the tavern and she picked me up. I had a brandy with her at the bar, just to be sociable, and then went to my room. I was looking forward to possibly finding a photo of the elusive Mary Naulls. My elation at the prospect was quickly short-circuited by a cell call I got from Dr. Gallo at Richmond Memorial.

  “The toxicology report on Father Zapotoski came back negative, Mr. Rhode. The official cause of death is stroke. If anything precipitated that, it was no longer in his system. There are more sophisticated tests available, of course, perhaps at Government organizations, but I don’t have the standing to order them. I’m sorry.”

  I thanked Gallo for his efforts, feeling deflated. It looked as if I was going to wind up with a suspect and no proof. And that suspect was in the wind. Everything now depended on finding that photo.

  CHAPTER 29 – OBITUARY

  The next morning I met Letty Bottomley at her old newspaper office. She’d made a call and one of the new owners met us and let us in and then left. The “morgue” of the weekly Ocean Falls Gleaner consisted of several file cabinets of photos and research material, and boxes of old newspapers, all set against a back wall of the unheated and dank basement. A single ceiling light provided barely enough illumination. I was happy to see that the boxes were on palettes and looked dry.

  Letty started going through the boxes while I hit the file cabinets, whose rust-stained drawers were labeled alphabetically. In the “M-N-P” drawer I located a thick hanging file labeled “Naulls.” It was full of photos and stories
about the Rev. Humphrey Naulls, an obvious publicity hound. I was undoubtedly predisposed to regard him badly, but from looking at his hawk-face in the photos, I had no trouble imagining him as sexual predator. But there were no photos of his daughter. Since there was the possibility that a photo of her had been misfiled, or was in a file related to the topic of the story about her, I resigned myself to looking through every one of them if I had to. So I was relieved when Letty said, “Got it!”

  The paper was dated Monday, January 14, 2002. On Page 3 was a full page story about Dr. Mary Naulls and her scientific work in the rainforests of Colombia. The headline was: “COLUMBIAN GAL GOES NATIVE IN COLOMBIA.”

  “Catchy,” I said.

  “I guarantee I was away from the office that day,” Letty said with a laugh. “Ben thought he was a genius with headlines. He would never have tried that with me around.”

  There wasn’t much copy in the story. It was more like a photo spread.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” Letty said, “where there’s some damn light.”

  We found a table and lamp, and, blessedly, a magnifying glass for the faded, yellowish paper. There were a lot of photos of trees, frogs, huts and naked Indians sitting around a fire eating something with their fingers. There was only one photo of Mary Naulls, standing with a group of hunters carrying blowguns. It was a terrible shot, blurry and taken at too far a distance. My guess was she asked one of the villagers to try his or her luck with the camera. It was a miracle it came out as well as it did. But the only way you could be sure it was Mary Naulls was because everyone else was brown and only came up to her chest. She was wearing a floppy hat, the brim of which further obscured her features.

  “Let me have that magnifying glass.”

  Blown up, I could see that she was skinny and pretty, but that was all. The photo, at least 10 years old, was basically useless for identification purposes. Letty took the glass from me.

  “Doesn’t even look like the girl I remember,” she said. “She lost a lot of weight.”

  “I guess I’ll have to go through all the filing cabinets,” I said. “There may be photos misfiled, or labeled differently.”

  “That will take hours. We’d better start right away. I’ll see if I can round up some flashlights or a floor lamp.”

  “I appreciate the help, Letty, but I hate to take up so much of your time.”

  “Nonsense, it will be fun. I feel like a journalist again. I’ll call up the tavern and have Katie send over coffee.”

  I called Buzz the pilot, who said he was having a fine time and wasn’t in any hurry.

  ***

  “I don’t think I have ever seen so many moose, halibut and bear photos in my life,” I said three hours later. We were sitting at a small wooden table the shop owners had set up for us. “And not one damn photo of Mary Naulls.”

  “I guess my filing system left something to be desired,” Letty said, apologetically.

  “Hey, it was a long shot, anyway. If we found a picture, it wouldn’t have been much better than the one in the paper. Come on, let’s put this stuff away and I’ll buy you lunch at Captain Paul’s.”

  “It’s Sunday. Katie calls it brunch. Same menu, though.”

  While Katie Paul was broiling our salmon, Letty and I licked our wounds with the help of some Iceberg vodka.

  “It’s from Newfoundland,” Letty explained. “Supposed to be the purest. Made from water melted from icebergs.”

  “Well, we’ll have to drink some more, before global warming limits the supply.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Go home, I guess. I don’t plan on interviewing a bunch of headhunters in South America.”

  “You don’t seem to be the type to let things go. Sticks in your craw, I bet.”

  “You can’t imagine.”

  “I’m not too happy myself. No matter what Mary may have become, I liked her. I hope she’s caught, of course, but she needs help. I’m feeling a little guilty about the whole thing.”

  Our lunch arrived.

  “Doesn’t get any fresher than this,” Katie said as she put down the platters.

  I ordered two more drinks.

  “What do you feel guilty about, Letty?”

  “I was pretty close to Bella. I should have done something. Said something.”

  I felt like someone punched me in the solar plexus.

  “Bella?”

  “Yes. Isabella Naulls. Mary’s mother. She’s named after her. Mary Isabella Naulls. What’s the matter?”

  Katie came back to our table and put down our new drinks. I was already standing up.

  “Don’t you like the salmon, Mr. Rhode?”

  I ignored her.

  “Letty, did you run an obituary of the mother when she died?”

  “Of course. I wrote it myself.”

  “With a photo?”

  “Yes, we usually ran photos when we could.”

  “The salmon is getting cold,” Katie said, sounding annoyed.

  “I don’t remember a photo file for obits.”

  “The photos were usually supplied by the family and we typically returned them.”

  “But there would be a story in one of the boxes.”

  “Of course.”

  “Did Mary look like her mother?”

  “Damn! She did. Spitting image. They could have been sisters.”

  “Let’s go,” I said. “I have to see that obituary.”

  “What about the salmon,” Katie Paul said.

  “Keep it warm. And the vodka cold.”

  ***

  It didn’t take long for Letty to find the obituary of Isabella Naulls. She handed me the paper. I just stared at it. The resemblance was remarkable, which was not surprising. Isabella Naulls had died in 1989, when she was only 41, only four years younger than her daughter was now.

  “How could I be so goddamn stupid?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Rantox.”

  “What the hell is Rantox?”

  “The Fountain of Youth. And I took her at her word that she was born on Staten Island. I never even checked.”

  “Who?”

  “Isabella Donner.”

  CHAPTER 30 – UNWELCOME WAGON

  Buzz wasn’t happy when I called him and said I had to get back to New York. But he rallied and flew me to Vancouver in time for me to catch a plane east. That was the last break I got. My Air Canada flight was diverted to Saskatoon in Saskatchewan because of mechanical trouble and it was almost 4 AM on Monday when my cab dropped me off at home on Staten Island. I was dead tired. So was the cabbie, so I gave him a huge tip.

  When I put my key in the lock to open my front door, it turned too easily. The door was already unlocked. I was a bit groggy and was having trouble remembering if I had left by the front door or the back. I typically go out the back because that’s where I usually park, but I’d taken car service to the airport. Did I leave the door unlocked and the alarm off? Not likely, but possible. Since possible is no reason to get killed, I went to my car, which I had left in the driveway in the front to give the appearance that someone was home. I quietly opened up the trunk, where I keep a spare handgun in a gym bag.

  It’s a .25 caliber Beretta, commonly called a “ladies gun,” but it’s not pink, very light and certainly better than nothing. I take it jogging, despite the fact that in a recent case it proved less than adequate against a sniper using a high-powered rifle. But it made a lot of noise and attracted a lot of sirens, which allowed me to jog to safety. Well, maybe I ran.

  I pushed open my front door cautiously. That wasn’t hard, it barely budged. Something was blocking it. Accumulated mail? Away longer than anticipated, I had not stopped delivery. Same with the newspapers. When they pile up outside, the neighbors shove them through the mail slot so the house doesn’t look unoccupied. I have good neighbors. In any case, both scenarios argued against someone still being in the house wishing me harm.

  I put my shou
lder to the door and finally shoved it far enough open to squeeze in. It was pitch dark. I went to switch on a light and I tripped over something big and soft. Something that couldn’t have fit through the mail slot. I found the switch. I looked down.

  Judging by the gun in his hand, it was indeed someone who wished me harm.

  Past tense.

  Sprawled on his back with a surprised look on his face was a very dead man.

  ***

  “As alibis go, you have a pretty good one, Rhode.”

  I was sitting in the 120 in St. George talking to a couple of homicide detectives. Four hours had passed since I found the stiff in my vestibule.

  “You guys ever going to paint this place,” I said. “The wall flakes have flakes.”

  “The M.E. says the guy died when you were allegedly in,” one of the cops said, pausing to look at his notepad, “Saskatoon.”

  “No one is ever allegedly in Saskatoon.” I said.

  “Where the fuck is that, anyway,” the other detective said.

  Their names were Benedetto and Teichmann. I had their cards in my pocket. But I didn’t know who was who. They could have been Frick and Frack for all I cared, I was that tired.

  “It’s a city in Saskatchewan,” I said. “Canada.”

  “I know it’s in Canada. What were you doing there?”

  “I’m a big hockey fan.”

  “Do you know what time it is,” the first cop asked. “Stop fucking around.”

  “All I know is that I got home around 4 AM. You can check the airlines and the cab company if you don’t believe my receipts. The guy was just lying there. I don’t know who it is. I did notice he had a cannon clutched in his hand, so I’m lucky that he was dead. I’ve lived on the block a long time, so I’m pretty sure he wasn’t with the welcome wagon. You guys know who I am. I try not to murder people in my own house. I have that printed on my business card.”