by Una Tiers
“Hello.” I said by way of introduction. Could these be long lost relatives?
“I’m Dorothy Daisy. You just buried Jeanine. Not Dorothy, Jeanine.” Her temper was escalating.
Everyone stood as still as the monuments around us and it started to rain.
The younger woman took the older one by the arm. “We should go.” She urged.
The younger woman was sixty or seventy years old. She introduced herself. “I’m Sema, Seumas Daisy was my father.”
As it rained harder, we sprinted to the cars for shelter and emotional distance. Emma graciously hollered an invitation out loud to no one in particular to join us for lunch.
The younger woman led “Dorothy” to the car, half pulling her.
The older woman continued to howl. “Did you hear me? I’m Dorothy Daisy.”
David looked to me for an invitation and I waved for him to join us.
Seating was a little awkward at the restaurant across the street from the cemetery, but I managed to sit next to David and across from the new Dorothy. We seemed to cluster into two groups, the old Dorothy and the new Dorothy group.
When they set a bottle of vodka and orange soda on the table with a dish of ice, we all had a drink. Maybe I was wrong, but I don’t think this was the first drink of the day for Dorothy, new Dorothy.
There was a long wait for the food so the liquor had a chance to loosen our reserve.
I buttered a roll for myself and one for David out of habit. He gave me a half smile and a nod.
“She told you Seumas ran away and got married, didn’t she?” New Dorothy was whispering and beginning to slur her words. Her laugh was clearly familiar to me.
“Yes,” Emma answered.
“Well he didn’t.”
“What happened?” Emma encouraged her.
“Jeanine told us he tripped over a game board on the stairs and hit his head on concrete step at the bottom.” Her words were about as painful to hear as they were for her to say.
We stared at her.
“He died at the house?”
“Yes.”
“When?” I asked.
“It was a week before we, he was going to leave to get married. We’d all been arguing, Seumas wanted us to buy his share of the house. It was ugly, he and Ross almost got into a fist fight one night. I was scared and I called the police. Another time one of the neighbors called the police.”
Our soup was served. No one touched it. I buttered more bread.
“Was he cremated?” I asked as a follow up to the headstones being so close to one another.
“No, Seumas never made it out of the yard. Jeanine and Ross buried him in the garden like a cat.”
“You mean under the daisies?”
“Yes. Didn’t she tell you the daisies were a family secret?”
I nodded.
“I came home from work and I couldn’t believe what they had done. They buried him in the yard. In the yard.” She shook her head and the tears splashed from side to side.
We were very quiet. Sema, looked anxiously around the table. “Mom you don’t have to go through this.”
Did I hear her say Mom? A few glances from Emma and raised eyebrows from Martha assured me they heard it too.
Dorothy made herself another drink, looking with disgust at the orange soda.
“You folks look at me like I’m nuts. You don’t know what it was like in that house. You don’t know what our family was like. We were twenty, then thirty, then forty, then fifty and sixty year old children. Until he died, my father deposited our paychecks into his bank account and we got an allowance.
Our father decided we would attend college, so we did. He picked out the college and the classes we would take.
Our mindset was no different than a child. Seumas was dead and we didn’t want to be blamed, so we covered it up, literally. It was the same when Ross died.”
“What do you mean about Ross?”
“Ross wasn’t the same after Seumas died. He was moody, hardly ate and took long walks, sometimes in the middle of the night. He hardly talked to any of us. But, he spent a lot of time in the garden.
One morning Ross didn’t bring the newspaper in, that was always his job as far back as when we were kids. It was my job to bring the milk in a very long time ago.
We found him dead up in the attic. It was winter and Jeanine said we could wrap him in blankets and bury him in the spring. The three of us, Jeanine, Nancy and I weren’t able to do the right thing because we thought if we did, they would find Seumas. We wanted to get out of that house, but it held us. The secrets held us.”
“Didn’t things change after your father died?” Emma asked.
“No, Seumas took his place as far as being the family banker. He sat at the head of the dinner table. We went along with it like sheep.”
”I’m sorry,” someone offered.
“After Ross died, we had another awful family meeting and Nancy said she would make a death certificate, like she made for Seumas.
This was the first I heard about it. So whenever the two of them, Nancy and Jeanine were out of the house, I searched through their bedrooms for paperwork. There was a folder under Nancy’s mattress with birth and death certificates and when I compared documents, I saw something was wrong with his birth certificate.”
“Whose birth certificate?” David asked.
“Seumas. It’s been so long, I don’t know exactly what it was. I went to the church where we were all baptized. The record they had for his baptism listed his birth a year earlier than the birth certificate at home. The parent’s names were different. His paperwork at the house must have been doctored.”
“What does that mean?” I asked trying to keep track of everything she said and trying to compare it against what Dorothy, the other Dorothy said to me.
“At first I thought it meant he was born before my parents were married. Having a child out of wedlock was so very unacceptable and my parents thrived on how things looked.
Later, Nancy told me he, Seumas was adopted but they didn’t tell him. She said she found papers partially burned in the fireplace the night my mother died.”
She laughed; he built a fire after she died. He was probably burning other papers. He was probably hiding other secrets.”
“Do you know what it meant?” Her voice dropped to almost a whisper. “It meant we weren’t blood relatives. Seumas was not my biological brother.” The tears rolled freely down her face.
“Why does that matter?” Emma asked.
“It would have made a world of difference if we knew. I could have had a normal life if I knew he wasn’t my brother. Did I mention that our family was always isolated? Well I wasn’t kidding when I said that.
My parents discouraged dating the way they preferred we not invite classmates to the house. So we became good friends with one another. There were no other options.
Seumas and I had a special way together. He taught me how to roller skate. He made me laugh, he brought out the best in me. We finished one another’s sentences.” Her smile told us she was in the past and content as could be.
“We went too far. I was with child and my parents sent me away. I carried the shame and heartbreak all those years. The family was told I had tuberculosis.”
The waitress removed the soup and looked at us without asking questions. I imagine we were a grim looking group.
“When he said he was retiring, and getting married, I almost died.
Our relationship had settled into literally best friends. He never said a word about meeting anyone. Two weeks before he was going to leave, he gave me a passbook. He told me he had saved money for us to start over again. I didn’t need to be asked.”
Minutes passed and we all focused on the bread again. The waitress brought a dish of mashed potatoes and another one of green beans that looked canned and then overcooked.
I passed the bread basket and the butter around the table.
“For the first few days, I
couldn’t believe we would actually leave that house. Then I transferred my retirement benefits to a new bank account, the first one I ever had and gave notice on my job. I didn’t tell my sisters. I sewed the bank book into my coat so I could have it with me all the time.” She sobbed. “I never told him about our daughter.”
She pulled out and lit a cigarette faster than anyone could raise an objection. The restaurant manager was on us before she closed her lighter.
“This is a non-smoking restaurant madam.”
Bleary eyed, Dorothy took one look at him and put her cigarette out in the mashed potatoes.
We all buttered more bread.
“Is Ross still upstairs?”
“I don’t know. Jeanine said we could move his body in the spring. She put dehumidifiers in the attic and a jar of moth balls on each step on the stairway going to the attic. It made me sick.”
“And Nancy?”
“She was at the house when I left.”
“When was that?” David asked.
“After Ross died, maybe a year. I’m not sure.
“You just walked out?” Emma asked.
“Yes, I was nervous all the time and started to carry papers with me all the time. I was afraid my sisters would snoop the way I did. I had already quit my job and had to pretend to go to work each day. I went to the library, praying I wouldn’t see anyone I knew.
One day I just had enough. I made lunch and had my papers with me. Instead of the library, I went to the bus station and headed for Colorado. That’s where I gave our baby up for adoption. I never came back to Chicago until a few months ago.”
David collected identification and the house keys.
We left the restaurant exhausted, more emotionally than anything. I was also embarrassed to say I was getting hungry. Not for mashed potatoes though.
Chapter Twenty
I checked in with Emma after the early news. She reported the number of police cars, the dogs and, the news trucks. They set up lights like they were filming a movie. Declining her invitation to stop over for coffee, I didn’t want to think too hard about some of the things that happened.
For some reason, I pictured Emma sitting in the dark, near a window with a pair of binoculars.
“Fiona, Dorothy was here. She saw the news and wanted to see the house but they won’t let her go inside.” She added.
“Was her daughter with her?” I asked.
“No, but she let me call her for a ride. Dorothy had too much to drink and I didn’t want to put her in a cab. Anyway the street is blocked off to traffic.”
“Did she tell you anything new?”
“She told me the reason she never told Seumas about the baby.”
“And?” I rolled my eyes.
“She said she wanted to protect him from the pain she carried around all those years.”
Thinking it over, Seumas went to his grave not knowing who his parents were or that he had a daughter. He didn’t know his sister, well, wasn’t really his sister.
“Oh, Fiona one other thing happened. My cousin called and said everyone told her she smelled like cigarettes.” Emma added.
“Your cousin the nun?”
“Yes. She didn’t wear her habit when she was here but I wonder if Martha did something because she was with Dorothy a few times when I had to go out to the store.”
My guess was it was Martha who helped Dorothy leave the nursing home. She smoked several cigarettes while we were waiting for the hearse at the cemetery. And Dorothy, did say Martha took her out of the nursing home. Then I thought about the mashed potatoes at the funeral luncheon.
The ten PM news reported a recently deceased woman living in a house where a body was found, mummified in the attic. The police declined to make a comment on a pending investigation.
Two weeks later, I looked up from my desk when someone coughed. David asked if I wanted to go for dinner.
“It will be on the late news, so I thought I would stop by,” he explained.
His county car was parked illegally and he opened the door although I tried to get to it first. I wanted him to know we were friends now. Boyfriends opened car doors, friends, not too much.
“Natural causes,” he started.
“For both of them?” I asked.
“Yes. And…”
“And?”
“The DNA from the body in the garden did not match Dorothy, the live Dorothy.”
“Was it Seumas?”
“We’re not sure yet, the tests take weeks to come back.”
“And Nancy?”
“Only two bodies were found. They brought cadaver dogs in and there was some digging. Do you want to hear about it?”
“No graphics please.” I answered with a shudder.
“Nancy didn’t leave much of a trail. Her social security check was diverted from the family account more than fifteen years ago but the account was closed a year later. We are trying to determine if she is still alive.”
He waited and then continued. “Sema was looking for her parents most of her life. She wrote to her mother, Dorothy, about the time the dead Dorothy went into the hospital.”
“Dorothy didn’t mention anything about it.” My face almost caught fire. I removed a few pieces of mail from the mailbox and where did I put them? They must be in the car stuffed between the seats.
“But they found each other, right?” I asked.
“Yes. Dorothy went to look for her daughter and volunteered at the agency where the old records were stored. It took her two years to find the information and the adoption file gave an address for the daughter in Chicago. The address was out of date. She, the real Dorothy came to Chicago and canvassed the neighborhood where her daughter last lived and learned her daughter was in a retirement home.”
“Do you think you’ll find Nancy?”
“No, her body isn’t at the house, we’ll close that part of the file. But Dorothy might have trouble selling the house until she can prove Nancy isn’t alive.”
“I think there is a way, but I’m not certain how you have a person declared dead for court purposes.”
“Want me to suggest she call you Fiona?”
“Nooooooooo thanks.”
“Hey by the way, did you find the clue I left in your office?”
“What clue David?”
“I left a business card of an attorney friend who does mental health work at your office. I talked to her informally of course about how Dorothy could have been picked up off the street. She didn’t want to get involved but she said she would talk to you. She said she also ran into you at a bar. Kimberly Face?”
Why did my stomach drop. He had a thing for women lawyers.
“Mental health?” Another area of law I didn’t know anything about.
“Kim, I mean Kimberly mentioned that with a mental health case they can pick someone up but usually the police do that type of thing. I talked to her and she said she would talk to you as a favor to me. I just didn’t think I could spell it out since that guy Paul from your office walks past the door whenever I’m there.”
“How do you know Kimberley?” I asked but already jumped to a conclusion.
“I met her on a case, just like you.”
My luck with men simply has not improved.
About the Author
Una Tiers (nom de plume) is an avid reader and attorney in the Chicago, Illinois area. Her early reading enthusiasm exhausted her school library and she was introduced to the magnificence of the downtown Chicago Public Library. Years later, she had the honor to take writing classes with Harry Mark Petrakis, downing a bowl of cheddar chowder after classes.
Over the years, creative writing took a backseat to drafting legal documents. After one particularly brutal day in court, Una wrote a story murdering the problem judge (on paper). Feeling better, she returned to work. Adding additional victims proved to be a stress reliever making Una smile. The story grew into Judge vs Nuts, published in 2012.
Judge vs Nuts is availab
le at Amazon and other fine E-stores. http://amzn.to/LVVhfl
Fiona Gavelle is living a dismal existence. She works in a dusty law office where she does more secretarial than lawyer work and her husband thinks she should work and keep house simultaneously.
One snowy night, Fiona learns she has been unceremoniously booted from her crummy job, has the final argument with her spouse, leaving her no choice but to move in with her favorite aunt. With little else to do, she drives a friend to the funeral of a stranger.
In 2013, Una released her short story, Not Safe for the Bank(er) as an Amazon eBook. It is also a Fiona Gavelle Mystery.
Here is chapter one:
Chapter One
The police car parked on the sidewalk didn’t suggest anything out of order, but the crowd inside the bank did. As the door hit me in the ass, I stopped like a cartoon character.
Feigning confidence to cover my indecision, I scanned the room. Ten or twelve police and an equal number of humorless guys in suits were watching me with at least scorn. Mr. Fives, the bank manager was sitting in the lounge area squeezing his face in his hands, then running them up through his hair making it stand up in goofy clumps.
His eyes widened, "Ms. Gavelle you need to help me." He stood up part way and sank down in resignation.
Relieved to see a friendly face, and inappropriately curious, I started over to him.
"Are you okay Mr. Fives?"
Before he answered, a large man stepped between us fuming with exasperation.
“You can't talk to him."
"He's asked to speak to his lawyer." I searched for a poker face to apply. Oh how I love when my mind works at lawyer speed.
After some mumbling and discussion among the suits and uniforms, the large man stepped aside and Mr. Fives and I went into his office. The floor to ceiling glass walls would drive me crazy but in a bank I guess they were necessary. Mr. Fives looked considerably less handsome with a splotchy face than when sitting at his desk printing out extra copies of my monthly statements or hawking a new credit card feature.
