Family Skeletons: A Spunky Missouri Genealogist Traces A Family's Roots...And Digs Up A Deadly Secret

by Rett MacPherson

“Well I thought so. He’s been our sheriff for a while, but you never speak to him when you see him. I assumed you didn’t know who he was.”

  I would probably pay dearly for that little dig.

  “Oh, yes,” Sheriff Brooke said. “We know each other quite well. This is my aunt, sort of.”

  I’m glad there were no flies in the office because I would have assuredly caught one in my open mouth. I felt myself sit down, not paying the least bit of attention to whether the chair was behind me or not.

  “Explain,” I said.

  “Well, my grandmother’s first husband was Sylvia’s brother. My father being born to my grandmother’s second husband. So, I’m not sure what that makes us,” he said.

  “It makes us nothing!” she said. “My brother got what he deserved for lusting.”

  “It makes Sylvia your great step-aunt, if there is such a thing,” I said.

  “Torie, I will not allow this sort of behavior from one of my staff. I want upstanding role models of the community. I shall have to replace you with Mary Emma Wiggs if you keep consorting with … him.”

  “Mary Emma Wiggs is a good woman. If you feel the need to replace me, then by all means, do.”

  We had a staring contest, Sylvia and I. And for the first time in history, I actually won. She stormed out of the office with all the regality of a queen, not so much as glancing in Sheriff Brooke’s direction.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the sheriff after she had left.

  “Don’t worry about it. I thought you handled her pretty well.”

  “If I could only figure out what makes her like that, I could probably handle her even better.”

  “Good luck. So, are you ready?”

  “For what?”

  “I thought you might like to pay Mr. Eugene Counts a visit.”

  I wasn’t sure why he asked me to go, unless it was because I knew a great deal about Eugene Counts and his family. Maybe he just wanted to get my opinion of Eugene Counts. I started to say yes, and then remembered the museum and a very upset Sylvia Pershing. But when would I ever get a chance like this again?

  In the car, I learned a lot. Sheriff Brooke was much more talkative today than in the past. Maybe it was because I was more receptive. I have a way of finding out things about people, when I’m in the right kind of mood. People just open up and talk to me.

  I found out that he was forty-two in March. Divorced twice, with three children. He had been valedictorian of Wisteria High School in 1971. Culinary school followed before he decided on a career in law enforcement.

  Not at all what I had expected. I had figured that Sheriff Brooke was the type to eat cold pizza and beer for breakfast and would have to smell his socks to see if they were the clean ones.

  I filled him in on a more detailed account of the conversation that I had had with Mrs. Ortlander. I had called both Rita and Jeff earlier to see if they knew of a Cora Landing. I wasn’t even sure if it was a who or a what. The sheriff had no idea who she was, but he would check it out.

  “Did you check out the calls on Norah’s long-distance bill?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What about the call to Vitzland?” I asked.

  I could see the lightbulb go on over his head. “Newsome said that everything checked out. There were two calls that were under a minute. They were wrong numbers.”

  “It’s Eugene Counts. I called it from the office this afternoon and a woman answered and said ‘Counts residence.’ Not that I really thought it was anybody else. I knew it had to be him.”

  He shook his head. “We didn’t know who Eugene Counts was at the time.”

  “Of course, it makes perfect sense that he would have thought it was a wrong number,” I said.

  Vitzland was a town without a McDonald’s or any other fast-food joint. It was a small town with two gas stations, a Big J grocery store, and a school. One could get to Vitzland by taking River Point Road or Hermann Avenue out of New Kassel and heading south about ten or fifteen miles. It sat right across the border of Granite County; therefore, all calls were long distance.

  Sheriff Brooke pulled into a gas station and asked for directions, which I found to be a very uncommon characteristic for a man. Most men will drive around in circles with the sun setting several times on them before asking for directions. I suppose somewhere in their code of honor it is written: “Thou shalt not ask for directions, lest you be thought of as incompetent.”

  Within two minutes we were sitting in front of Eugene Counts’s home, and I was petrified. What if he was the person that broke into my home? A lot of seventy-year-old people are in good enough condition to climb a ladder and jump a fence. He could be a Jane Fonda workout freak. But he had no reason to know who I was, I reminded myself.

  Sheriff Brooke sensed my nervousness. “You’re fine,” he said.

  All I could think of was Eugene’s innocent face, his dark eyes and features perfectly poised under his army hat. If he had murdered the girl in the newspaper article and his friend Michael Ortlander, then the killings were done before his internment at the POW camp. Which meant the camp hadn’t changed him. He was what he was, and he had everybody fooled.

  “I just got a bad feeling, you know?” I asked.

  “I know all about those,” he said.

  Eugene Counts owned a large farmhouse on a street with several other large homes that resembled the farmhouse style. It had a huge porch with a glider sitting on it. I tried to imagine him sitting there on his glider, looking out at the neighborhood. Was he at peace when he did that? Or was he thinking back to the murders, savoring every detail like the sick puppy I thought him to be?

  Did his neighbors suspect? Were they oblivious? Could these deviants of society really exist right alongside everybody else? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answers to the questions that plagued me in those last few seconds before Sheriff Brooke rang the doorbell.

  I was glad we were on the porch because it was raining again. Some levees had already burst. So far, the New Kassel one was holding its own. We waited for what seemed like an eternity before anybody answered the door, and I felt my stomach drop to my toes. There was no turning back now. I was here.

  A woman answered. It was obvious that she was the cleaning lady or some other sort of domestic employee. She was in jeans and a shirt, but the white nurse’s shoes and apron gave it away.

  The voice was quiet as she managed a “Hello.”

  “Yes, is Mr. Counts in today?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Sheriff Colin Brooke, Granite County,” he said, badge flashing.

  She didn’t seem shocked or worried. She just excused herself and closed the door, leaving us to stand on the porch. Sheriff Brooke looked around the neighborhood, seeing things through a policeman’s eyes. There was no way I could see the same things.

  The door opened, and she ushered us in and left. The pit of my stomach turned with every grueling second that she was gone. This was Norah’s father. In March, if somebody would have told me that I would be standing in the living room of the father of Norah Zumwalt, I would’ve laughed.

  “What are you going to say?” I asked Brooke. “Hello, why did you kill the daughter you never knew existed?”

  “Shh,” he said.

  A tall and stately man appeared. I knew he was supposed to be seventy years old, but he came across a decade younger.

  “Yeah?” he asked.

  If the woman who answered the door had told him that we were the police or with the sheriff, he gave no hint of it. He treated us with the calm but slightly irritated tolerance that one would give a shoe salesman.

  “Mr. Counts, I’m Sheriff Colin Brooke, with the Wisteria Police Department.” Brooke was so professional when he flashed his badge.

  Eugene Counts never said a word. He was dressed in a pink golf shirt and wild printed pants. He was dressed for the golf course, but the rain would not likely let up.

  “Your telephone number showed up on the r
ecords of a woman who was murdered a couple of months ago,” he said, watching for any sort of reaction. “It could have been a wrong number, but we thought if you were acquainted with her, you might give us some clue as to why she was murdered.”

  “What was the name?” he asked, not moving a single muscle except to speak. His reserve was remarkable, and he still had not stepped completely into the living room.

  I glanced around, hoping to see some clue to his past life, his former self. I found no such thing. His living room was cozy, but impersonal. No photographs or plaques graced the walls or the tables. There was absolutely nothing to give a hint as to who its owner was. Not even a clue that the man was a veteran. I had an eerie feeling that the entire house would be like that.

  “The woman’s name was Norah Zumwalt,” the sheriff said.

  Again, to my great disappointment, the name of his daughter brought no reaction from him. He only thought a moment and said, “I suppose it was a wrong number. I don’t know anybody by that name.”

  “You’re sure?” Sheriff Brooke asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  There was something about him suddenly that didn’t sit right. Hands in his pockets, he waited for more. The woman came back into the living room, whether by accident or curiosity, I couldn’t be certain. Eugene gave her one glance, and she went as fast as she could back in the other direction. He never said a word, just glanced. That glance had been powerful enough to send the woman scurrying like some sort of street rat.

  I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to know—no, I wanted to demand why he had abandoned his mother? Why had he abandoned the woman, Viola, to whom he had expressed his undying love? Was it all a game? Was none of it real to him? It was certainly real to Edith Counts. To Viola Pritcher.

  “Well, I’m sorry to have bothered you. If it would come up, can you vouch for your whereabouts on May second of this year?” the sheriff asked him.

  “If it should come up,” he answered, “you can ask my lawyer.”

  He was smooth. I was irate with Sheriff Brooke. I could barely believe my ears. Why had we driven down here to ask him one question? We could have done that on the phone! I was furious, and believe me, Sheriff Brooke was going to hear about it.

  “Gene,” a male voice from down the hall said.

  “Be right there,” he answered.

  “Like I said,” Sheriff Brooke began. “Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, and swallowed. I was scared to death, but if I didn’t ask him this question, I would never forgive myself. “I’d like to ask you a question. I’d like to ask you about the death of Michael Ortlander.”

  A pale gray ring formed around his mouth as the color drained from his face. It was much like watching a cartoon. I had no idea that a simple question like that would have received such a reaction. Of course, Sheriff Brooke had the same pale look to him, too, but I knew it wasn’t for the same reason.

  “Get out,” Counts said in a steely, cold voice.

  “He was your friend, wasn’t he? His mother is very interested in the circumstances concerning his death.”

  I had him going now. He probably couldn’t figure for the life of him how we went from a wrong number to knowing about Michael Ortlander! And I reveled in my superior intelligence, for the moment.

  Sheriff Brooke, on the other hand, had a look about him which suggested that, for the first time in his life, he was contemplating murder. Either that or he had just seen his career and his pension fly right out the window.

  Eugene moved toward us very quickly, shaking from fear or anger. I hoped it wasn’t anger because I suspected what he did to his so-called friends. I could just imagine what he did to his enemies. He opened the door to let us out. I turned a foot away from him on the porch, facing him and all of his deceit.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to appease him. “I thought he was your friend. I spoke with his mother—”

  I did not finish my sentence.

  I could not physically finish my sentence. At that moment, something clicked, and I was stunned into silence. That was probably the first time that phenomenon had ever happened to me.

  Eugene stared at me with one brown eye and one blue eye. This man was not Eugene Counts. Eugene had the dark brown eyes and unsettling good looks of a French rogue. The man who stared at me with hatred was Michael V. Ortlander!

  “Don’t ever come back here,” he said, and shut the door.

  * * *

  Sheriff Brooke dragged me from the porch. My discovery of Counts’s real identity had astonished me so much that I couldn’t find the muscles to make my legs work. Unusual things were happening to my reflexes these days, and I didn’t like it. It was as if I were a puppet, and somebody else was controlling what I did. The ordinary reactions that once upon a time I could have counted on were failing.

  Once we were in the car and on the two-lane blacktop road, Sheriff Brooke let me have it.

  “What the hell was that all about?” His nostrils flared, and I could sense that he was trying very hard to control himself.

  “Florence Ortlander wasn’t crazy,” I managed.

  “You had no business—”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “—asking him a question like that.”

  “It was there the whole time.”

  “What are you? Nuts?”

  “I just couldn’t see it. If I had looked from the right point of view, maybe.”

  “That’s it, you’re nuts.”

  “Mom probably saw it. She sees everything.”

  “You’re nuts, and I’m dead,” he said.

  It was quiet a few minutes. Each one of us tried to take in the situation at hand and sighed with relief that we had just survived the previous situation unscathed.

  “What did you say?” Brooke asked.

  “Florence Ortlander, she wasn’t crazy. She said that she saw her son alive after the war. I didn’t tell you that part of the conversation because I just thought it was the ramblings of a senile old woman. I thought she was crazy. But she probably did see him.”

  Sheriff Brooke beat the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. Then he breathed deeply. “Do you know why I asked you to come along today?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you see things totally different than I do. Maybe it’s because you’re not a cop. Maybe it’s because I need a vacation. Whatever the reason, the only leads that I have in this case are because of you.”

  That took a lot for him to say, I grant you. I watched him mutely as the road led us into a valley of grazing horses.

  “But,” he said, “you can’t just pull that kind of … stuff.”

  “Florence was convinced that her son had somehow survived the war,” I began. “She claimed that she saw him one day, long after the war had ended. Evidently, he didn’t see her, or he pretended not to see her,” I said. “All of this time, she was right, and nobody believed her, I bet.”

  “Come again?” he said.

  “That wasn’t Eugene Counts back there. That was Michael Ortlander.”

  “What? But how…?”

  “That man had one blue eye and one brown eye. Eugene had deep dark brown eyes. Once I made the connection, it was easy to see that he was the same man that Florence showed me as being her son. Just older,” I said. My heart pumped, and my blood pressure was about to come out the top of my head. “I’d say he killed Eugene Counts and swapped dog tags with him. He went to a POW camp as the sole survivor of his platoon, so nobody would ever be the wiser. Except Eugene’s girlfriend and family couldn’t figure out why he never contacted them. He also hadn’t banked on Eugene, the real Eugene, having fathered a child.”

  “But why would Ortlander kill Eugene Counts?” Sheriff Brooke asked.

  “I think he killed that girl back in the forties,” I said. The sheriff looked lost. “Did I tell you about her? Well, anyway, the wound was identical to Eugene’s. So if the police ever got too close to cat
ching her killer, Ortlander didn’t have to worry, because he was no longer Ortlander! He was a new person. He was now Eugene Counts,” I said with a sweeping motion of my hands.

  I noticed Sheriff Brooke had pulled off of the two-lane road and turned into a gas station. Low and behold, an attendant, yes, a real breathing human being, asked Sheriff Brooke how much gas he needed, just as the sheriff was taking off his seat belt to get out. Sheriff Brooke looked as shocked as I felt at the attendant’s arrival.

  “Ten dollars, regular. Is there anyplace to get some food around here?” he asked.

  Red hair and freckles were all I could see for all the grease on the attendant. “Big J grocery.”

  “No, I mean, like a restaurant?”

  “Nope. You headed north?” Sheriff Brooke nodded in agreement. “Closest place is about ten or fifteen miles up the road at New Kassel,” he answered.

  “Guess we’ll just wait until we get home,” the sheriff said. He never looked at me as he asked the inevitable. “You think Ortlander killed Norah because she found out he wasn’t Eugene Counts?”

  However relieved I was that Eugene Counts was not a mass murderer, it was still difficult for me to switch the identities. I had come to think of Eugene Counts as alive and breathing in Vitzland, Missouri. Now I had to think of him as having died in Europe during the war.

  “I think it’s a real good possibility,” I said. “But Norah Zumwalt never let on that she knew he was alive.”

  It was hard to say what Sheriff Brooke was thinking. Hell, I’d just handed him a fifty-year-old murder to solve, as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t enlist my help anymore. After all, I seemed to create work for him.

  “What about the neighbors? You get all their statements?” I asked.

  “Yup. Nobody saw or heard nothing. How can a woman be stabbed repeatedly and not be heard?”

  I just shook my head. How come nobody knew about John Murphy? How come there was no murder weapon? No motive? No motive, until now.

  “The only thing we have even close to a clue from the neighbors is a car that was parked in front of her house on Thursday night. It wasn’t Rita’s or Jeff’s.”

  “That could have been the person that came to her door when I called her.”