Skeleton in a Dead Space (A Kelly O'Connell Mystery)

by Alter, Judy

  “I enjoyed it, too, Kelly. I hope we can do it again soon.”

  “Me, too,” I said and turned before he could try to kiss me. Was it my imagination or was he leaning in for a kiss? It wasn’t my imagination that I wasn’t ready for that, was almost scared in fact.

  I remembered another question. “Mike, wouldn’t a body that was in a house long enough to be a skeleton smell bad, at least at first? So bad the neighbors would notice?”

  He rolled his eyes and said, “’Night, Kelly.”

  But as he left I had a stab of conscience about the diary in my closet. No, I told myself, it wouldn’t help them. It was a personal thing.

  ****

  Two nights later, I was sound asleep when the noise started. Racing motors, up and down the street. Shaking my head to bring myself to consciousness, I sat up, listening. It was definitely cars racing up and down the street. I threw back the covers and padded barefoot to the window to peer out. At least three cars were racing down the street. They looked like low-riders, old cars fixed so that their back ends nearly dragged the pavement. As I watched, they raced past, then turned at the corner and whirled back. They’re going to defeat me by sleep deprivation.

  “Mom, I’m scared.” Maggie stood in the doorway.

  “Come get in my bed,” I said. “You’ll be safe. I won’t let anything happen to you.” Silently I cursed whoever would frighten my children.

  Em stumbled sleepily down the hall almost immediately. “I hear a lot of noise,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Cars,” I said. “Someone racing cars up and down the street. It has nothing to do with us.” Even as I said it, I knew that was a lie.

  Theresa. I told the girls to stay tucked in my bed and went to the guest room. Theresa stood staring out the window.

  “Theresa, please get away from the window.”

  “Why?” the girl asked. “They can’t see me. And they’re punks. They won’t really hurt anyone. They just want to frighten you.”

  “How do you know that?” Every fiber in me was on alert.

  The girl shrugged. “I just know,” she said. “I go to school with guys like them. They’re all show, but they’re really cowards.”

  “Theresa, come away from the window, please. They’ve shot up the front door once. I don’t want to take a chance. Come get in my bed with the girls.”

  Theresa shook her head. “I’m not afraid. I’ll sleep in my own bed.” She turned her back on me.

  I wondered from her words if Theresa knew more about this than she was letting on, but I didn’t know how to question her, how to find out without making her clam up permanently. Belatedly, I thought to call 911. But, instead, I checked on the girls and then ran downstairs to fish Mike’s card out of my purse and call his number. When I told him what was going on, the noise still roaring outside the house, he said, “We’ll be right there. Why didn’t you call 911?”

  I didn’t even answer.

  The police came, sirens roaring, and, of course, the cars left before they got there. So a chase wasn’t effective. The cars apparently separated and disappeared into the tiny back streets that lace Fairmount.

  Mike came to the door. When I opened it, he said, “Kelly, have you seen this?”

  I stepped outside. There was a large black bull’s eye on my new front door, apparently painted with a can of spray paint. Granted, it was the most irregular bull’s eye I’d ever seen since it had to straddle the many panes of glass and the wood between them. But there was no mistaking what it was.

  I looked at Mike. “What does it mean?”

  “It means what you already know. You’re a target.” He looked grim.

  I summoned up all my bravado. “After I gave up investigating?”

  “Did you tell them that?”

  “No chance. But if they’re watching me so closely, they should know.”

  “It’s not,” Mike said, “a chance I’m willing to take. Turn on your alarm, lock your doors, and call 911 before you call me if anything happens.”

  I looked long and hard at him. “Yes, sir, and…thanks, Mike. You make me feel safe.” I wished I could hug him or somehow get closer to him to say thank you, but I wasn’t comfortable with it. Maybe this was just the wrong time.

  Upstairs the girls were huddled in my bed, clutching each other, and Em was crying.

  “Hey,” I said. “Mike says it’s okay. We can go to sleep.” Well, he didn’t exactly say that, but I thought it was a good white lie.

  Within minutes, both girls were asleep. But once again, I lay awake, wide-eyed, reviewing all that was going on in my life.

  Next morning I was barely settled with coffee and the newspaper, the national news on TV, when the phone rang. I answered cautiously.

  “Just what was going on last night?” Florence Dodson demanded. “It kept me awake half the night. I’m sure it had something to do with that girl you’ve taken in to live with you.”

  “Mrs. Dodson, I have no idea what was going on or why. It bothered me as much as it did you. And I called the police.”

  “Well, I see there’s a bull’s eye on your front door. They must have done that. So you’re the reason the neighborhood is being disturbed.” Her tone was accusing.

  I was too exhausted to argue with her. “If I’m the reason, you don’t have to worry much longer. I’m moving in a month.” I hung up the phone before she could answer, but I knew a call from Mom would be next.

  Within ten minutes, the phone rang again, and it was my mother. “What kind of teenage hooligan have you taken into that house with my grandchildren?” she demanded.

  “Been talking to Florence, haven’t you?” I didn’t hang up on Mom, but I didn’t give her a lot of answers either.

  Chapter Eight

  I read the paper distractedly—really only leafed through it, sipping at coffee, and mostly staring out the kitchen window. With a start, I realized I needed to get the lawn guy to clean up the yard, rake leaves, and pull out dead plants left from summer. I’d completely ignored what had once been a garden so charming that I was probably too full of pride. Too busy, I told myself. Gardening would be good for me. I always enjoyed it. I’m trying to do too much. Vowing I would take better care of the Hunts’ garden, I went to wake the girls.

  They, too, were dragging. “Can’t we have a hooky day?”

  “I think I’m sick and can’t go to school.”

  I held firm. They just had a hooky day, and they were going to school. Theresa, on the other hand, was up, dressed, ready for the day, and text messaging on her phone.

  I went back downstairs, fixed breakfast, and the morning moved along as usual. Anthony was cheerful when he came to get Theresa, until he saw the front door. “What happened? Someone give the girls spray paint?”

  I shook my head and told him the whole story.

  He swore softly, so the girls wouldn’t hear him. “I have paint left. I fix today after I take Theresa to school. I’ll have to scrape the windows. Take a long time.”

  And it will take him away from the Fairmount house again.

  As if he read my thoughts, Anthony said, “Don’t you worry, Miss Kelly. I’ll finish that house.”

  “Thanks. I know you will. I just hope it’s not jinxed.”

  He crossed himself. “Don’t even say it.”

  The girls were still grumpy when I dropped them at their respective schools, and they pretty much ignored my pretend cheerfulness when I wished them a happy day.

  “Can you come get me early, Mom?” Em asked. “I think I’ll be tired.”

  I smiled to myself. “Miss Emily will see that you take a nap.”

  Em rolled her eyes and marched independently off to her classroom. But just before she went into the room, she turned and blew me a kiss. I returned the gesture.

  Then I went to my office.

  “Message for you,” Keisha said, handing me a pink slip. “Call Anthony.”

  Then why did you hand me the slip? I checked myself—I was
as grumpy as the girls. I dialed Anthony’s cell phone, and he answered promptly.

  “Miss Kelly, there’s one of those things—what you call them?”

  “What things, Anthony?”

  “Like was painted on your front door.”

  “Oh, a bull’s eye.”

  “Yeah, there’s one on the front door here, too.”

  I sighed. “Okay. Do the best with it you can.”

  “That was a newly refinished door,” he moaned. “Not as easy to fix as paint.”

  “Do what you can,” I repeated, feeling defeated. “I’ll come right over.”

  I went to the house, knowing there was nothing I could do. But I had a question for Anthony.

  After I saw the door, I said to him, “I simply can’t call the insurance company again. Do what you can. If we have to have a new door, so be it.”

  “I scrape and fix,’ he assured me.

  “Anthony, do you know someone named Joe, a young guy?” I repeated what the girls told me about the encounter at Ol’ South.

  “Yeah, I know him.” Anthony spat off the porch where we stood. “He’s no good. Doesn’t want honest work for a living. I warn Theresa away from him.”

  “She seems to have believed you, said he was no friend of hers.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s the truth or not. I think she likes him and just doesn’t want me to know. He work with me some summers ago, when Mr. Spencer was still around. Lazy, steals little thing—you name it, he does it. But he’s sweet on Theresa. I tell her no way. He’s older anyway, too old for her.”

  Sweet on Theresa. Maybe the whole thing has to do with Theresa being at my house and not with me or the skeleton at all. No, they mentioned the house and the skeleton. “Do you think he’s part of this bunch that’s trying to scare me?”

  Anthony nodded. “I think maybe but got no proof. Theresa says she didn’t recognize him last night.”

  So Theresa talked to her father about last night’s incident. I found that interesting because she hadn’t said a thing to me this morning. In fact, she was unusually quiet and not even interested in helping Em.

  Anthony went back about his work, and I stood on the porch, thinking how confusing everything was. Down the street an elderly woman, wearing an apron over a ratty sweater and wool skirt, swept her sidewalk. Impulsively I headed down the steps to speak to her. On my way I passed two nicely painted houses, one with a painted iron fence enclosing its front yard and the other with neat flowerbeds. Then a house badly in need of paint and shoring up, with an abandoned washing machine on the front porch and a yard almost bare of even crabgrass. The sidewalk in front of this house was cracked and dotted with holes, forcing me to watch where I stepped. I crossed the street and approached the woman.

  “Excuse me,” I began.

  “Oh, dear, I just never buy or give to people who come to the house,” the woman said, “even though you look a nice enough sort.”

  I hoped my amusement wasn’t obvious. “No, no, I’m not selling or soliciting. I own that house down the street.” I pointed. “I just wanted to ask you about one of the residents. How long have you lived here?”

  “Since 1949,” she said proudly, leaning a bit on her broom. “My husband, God rest his soul, bought this house when we married. Paid $4,000 for it, he did. I’ve lived here ever since.”

  “Do you remember Marie Winton who lived in the house from 1958 until 1967?”

  She sniffed a little. “Never did know her name. She wasn’t the neighborly sort, and back then, this was a real neighborhood. We all knew all about each other, walked in and out of almost any house almost without knocking. But I know who you mean. Pretty young thing. Dark hair.”

  “Yes, she wore it flipped up. Tell me about her—did she work, maybe teach school? Did she live there alone?”

  “Now, I don’t spread stories, but as far as I could tell she didn’t work. And she lived there alone but there was a man there a lot. Drove a big black Cadillac, he did, and always parked it in back, so one of the neighbors told me. I’m not the prying kind myself.”

  “And he visited her often?”

  “Most every day at noon. Stayed a couple of hours usually. Once in a while he came at night, but not very often. I don’t know what she did the rest of the day.”

  For a woman who’s not the prying type, you know a lot, and it’s all most interesting. Marie Winton was what Mom would call a kept woman.

  “Far as I could tell, she only lived there for two years. Then the house sat vacant for a lot of years.”

  The answer to the odor question. That whole time there was a corpse turning into a skeleton.

  “During the years the house was empty, did any of the neighbors ever comment on anything about it?” I hesitated. “Like a bad smell?”

  The other woman scoffed. “The only bad smell was from the rabbits the people next door raised. Must have been a thousand, before zoning laws made them move. Smelled worse than a barnyard. Nobody walked down that way if they could avoid it.”

  “You’ve been most helpful, Mrs.…oh, I’m sorry. I forgot my manners. I’m Kelly O’Connell.” I held out a hand.

  The woman took my hand in her left hand and said, “Pleased to know you. I’m Mrs. William Glenn. My husband, he was a teller at the old Fort Worth National Bank, all those years. Now it’s called heaven only knows what. Our children are grown and gone, but they’re good to me.”

  “Mrs. Glenn, here’s my card. I’m a realtor in the area. If you ever need anything, you just call me.”

  “Oh, dearie, I’m not gonna sell this house. They’ll have to carry me out and then the kids can sell it.”

  “Oh, no, that’s not what I mean. I mean if you yourself ever need any help, anyone to get groceries, or anything like that, I’d be pleased to help.”

  “Why, thank you, dearie. You’re a sweet girl.” A moment’s pause, and then, “You’ll let me know if that skeleton is Marie Winton, won’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I surely will.” I hadn’t mentioned the skeleton, and I saw no need to confirm that it was Marie Winton at this point. But clearly Mrs. Glenn knew about it. So did everyone else in Fort Worth.

  I nearly sang as I went back down the street. My cell phone rang, and I answered to hear Mike Shandy say, “They found Marie Winton’s family. They confirm that she went missing and was never heard from again.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “September 1959.”

  “Mike, have I got a story to tell you.”

  “Save it for the detectives, Kelly. They’re on your trail.”

  “I’ll be in my office the rest of the day,” I said stiffly. If Mike was going to follow procedure, so would I. But I really wanted to call Mrs. Hunt and walk through her house. I’d put it off till tomorrow.

  I called Keisha, who announced she wanted Chinese for lunch, so I stopped by Ho Ho next to the Grill—the name always turned me off the place but Christian insisted it was great for takeout. I got a beef and broccoli and sweet-and-sour pork, figuring we could share, which we did. Keisha claimed the office had been quiet except for some guy named Buck Conroy who called four times.

  I called Mrs. Hunt first, arranging to walk through the house the next morning. “Mrs. Hunt? It’s Kelly O’Connell. I wondered if we could set a time for me to walk through the house again and talk about what furniture you wanted to leave and so on. And also I didn’t look at the guest house. It seems I will have someone living in it—the young girl you met the other day. Maybe tomorrow morning, either 9:30 or 10:00?”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Hunt said, “Anytime. Just come after you get your girls to school. I’ll have the coffee pot on and a fresh coffeecake.”

  I could almost smell the coffeecake in my mind, and my mood brightened. “I’ll be there,” I said.

  ****

  Afterward, I wondered if I was expecting Mike Hammer or Sergeant Friday from Dragnet. Buck Conroy was an ordinary man, probably in his late forties, mostly lean bu
t a few more beers might push his belly over his belt. His hair was gray at the temples—distinguished, I thought—but his eyes were world-weary, as though it would take something big to surprise him. He flashed an ID at Keisha, who simply nodded in my direction.

  “Ms. O’Connell?” he said as I stood to meet him and hold out a hand. “Detective Buck Conroy.”

  “I’ve been expecting you,” I said, motioning for him to sit down, all the while wondering if I was about to get a lecture on meddling in police business.

  “Hear you found out some information from a neighbor,” he said. “Haven’t had time to get around to that. Who was it?”

  “Mrs. William Glenn, a sweet little old lady.”

  “I’m sure,” he said dryly. “Address?”

  I shrugged. “On the east side of the street, about halfway down the block. The house with the old-fashioned nandinas.”

  “Ms. O’Connell, if you’re going to do police work for us, you’ll have to be more precise with the details.” Now those world-weary eyes were laughing, and I laughed too.

  “Call me Kelly,” I said. “And I am not going to do police work. This was just a neighborly visit.” If Mike hadn’t told him about the threat to the girls, I wasn’t going to. “I hear you found the victim’s family.”

  “We think so, but let’s go back to Mrs. Glenn first.”

  So I repeated the encounter as I remembered it, which was almost verbatim. “She seemed to disapprove of Ms. Winton. I think my mother would call her a kept woman.”

  “Well, I know some that would like being kept, and some men that would like to have someone to keep—they just never seemed to mesh,” he said philosophically. “Now we got to find out who was driving that Cadillac. I suppose license plate’s too much to hope for.”

  “You won’t get it from Mrs. Glenn—she claims never to have seen the car. She’s not, after all, a gossip. Just heard about it from the neighbors.”

  “Any chance some of those neighbors are still around?”