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Bruce contemplated the water, standing with a mug of coffee as he took a break from his writing. His contact with Dorothy sometimes was the only human connection he had in a day. He didn’t count emails and phone calls, because most of those were business related. Dorothy was turning into a friend. He wondered if she suffered from incipient dementia because she repeated herself often. Although she was far sharper than the average old lady was reputed to be. Come to think of it, so was Aunt Nora. Maybe old ladies had been getting a bad rap all these years.
Aunt Nora could be stubbornly tunnel-visioned. That day he visited her, a couple of months after Uncle Joe’s death, had been strange.
They had both been missing Joe, of course. Both of them sitting in the den but conspicuously not sitting in Uncle Joe’s favorite easy chair. Then Aunt Nora said,
“I’m sorry you never had a father to take care of you.”
“Huh? Joe was my father.” Her words were distracting, but not enough to pull him out of his grief for the old man who had made him a full member of the family and been a father to him his whole life. The cancer had eaten at Joe until his death became a release.
His mother spoke again. “Joe was the best. Not like your real father. He was a…a prick.”
Bruce had been surprised, but amused, too. He’d never heard Aunt Nora use that word. She was always too ladylike to curse. He’d had to learn all his bad words from Uncle Joe and his adoptive brothers, Ned and Billy.
Aunt Nora was trying to tell him something. “Roger Dietrich, your real father, was a queer duck. He never seemed to have any friends of his own. He disliked all of Greta’s friends, and her relatives. He refused to attend family events, and he didn’t want my sister Greta to come to them, either. That was a problem, especially after you were born. Our parents wanted to know their grandchild. Greta was always making excuses for why she couldn’t visit or have any of us over. At first, we each thought we were being personally snubbed. Then, we compared notes and realized she told everyone the same thing. We understood. Her life with Roger was busy. She had a little baby and a new household to cope with. But it was more. One time I happened to be in the area and I dropped in on her.”
Bruce doubted it was accidental. His adoptive mother was nothing if not a manipulator.
“Roger behaved oddly. Greta acted nervous. She kept trying to get me to leave in a big hurry. I hardly had a chance to see you. Roger drank a beer and glowered at me. When Greta was going to show me something upstairs, he forbade her. He made her go get it. It was as if he didn’t want her to be alone with me.”
Bruce was suddenly more alert.
“Aunt Nora, you know what you’re describing don’t you?” he asked, trying to be gentle about it. She was already twisting her fingers together. She was obviously getting more and more upset.
She nodded. “I don’t like telling you this, Bruce. He was your father after all. We began to suspect Roger abused Greta.”
“Did you ever see him act violent toward her?”
“No, but it was obvious he had her under his control. She had always been such a lively, spirited girl. The difference in her behavior and attitude was very marked to anyone who had known her before Roger entered her life.”
“You always said it was an impulsive wartime marriage. Lots of people probably repented of those. War can change a man, make him more likely to act out violently.” He was thinking out loud, but it sounded as if he was condoning abuse, which wasn’t the case.
She made a dismissive gesture. “We knew. It wasn’t called Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, but after the Great War, World War I, many men had mental problems. It was ascribed to having been gassed, but the truth was they had seen horrors. There was a man who lived down the street from us when we were growing up who had it. Sometimes we’d hear him shouting in the middle of the night.”
“You think my father had it?”
“Possibly. None of us knew him before he returned from the war. Not even Greta. She met him at a USO dance and married him fast. We never met any of his people.”
He stirred restlessly in his chair. Everything was the same in this room as it had been his whole life. He could remember playing hide and seek behind the back of the couch. What was Nora driving at with this talk of the past?
“Why are you telling me this? What’s the point after all these years?”
“I would have told you a long time ago, but Joe forbade me. He didn’t want you to be burdened with our suspicions. Now that he has passed, I feel I simply must tell you.”
Still, she hesitated. She struggled to get up from her chair, and took a couple of shaky steps closer to him, assisted by her wooden cane. He took her other arm, to support her. She wasn’t strong anymore. He stood before his adoptive mother in a stance he’d taken as a boy when he wanted to face a punishment head on. Only now, his mother was much shorter than he was, and none too steady on her feet.
“Why did you stand up? Do you need something?” he asked.
Nora was as stubborn and determined as she’d always been. She continued into the kitchen, and pulled down the cookie jar. It was filled with cookies. She gave him a questioning look.
“I’ll have a few,” he said.
She put cookies on plates for both of them and then set water to boil. “French press?”
“Sure, Mom. What’s this all about?”
Nora’s earlier haste had been replaced with an obvious reluctance to go through with whatever she had planned to say to him. She was stalling.
They had French press coffee, a hangover from her family’s Norwegian heritage. They ate cookies. He had procured beautifully ironed napkins, too, from the breakfront.
“Oatmeal raisin. These are great.”
“Too bad your former wife wasn’t interested in the recipe. She might have done a better job of keeping you.”
Nora said it with a tart edge. She hadn’t been a fan of Carol’s, but oddly, usually blamed Bruce for the divorce. Even though it had been Carol’s idea.
“Past history,” he said.
“I’m in the past today, boy. Don’t get wise with me.”
“Come on, Mom, don’t keep me in suspense. What did you want to tell me about my parents? Although it’s a little too late to warn me my father was an abuser and I could become one, too. My kids are grown and gone without a mark between them.”
Bruce slouched in the wooden kitchen chair, wolfing down cookies as he’d done countless times in his youth. He still felt like a boy when he was around the woman who had been a second mother to him. He suspected she knew it.
“I don’t believe any of that inheritance nonsense, do you?” Aunt Nora asked.
“No, but I have inherited Dad’s tendency to get annoyed when you beat around the bush like this,” he said, smiling. Gently kidding Mom was a pleasure. He picked up their dishes and put them in the sink and turned on the water. Aunt Nora would insist on doing them by hand. He grabbed a sponge and got to work.
“I trained you well,” she remarked, pleased. He felt a smile creeping into his heart. She was so familiar, so openly loving. When Carol left, he’d missed the familiarity and implied love of being part of a family. He’d managed his newly single life okay, but it wasn’t the same. Maybe that was one reason she’d ended their marriage. With the kids grown, she’d wanted a deeper relationship, and she and he simply had worn theirs out. It had never been much more than a convenience, anyway. He had married too young, and had paid the price for his lack of discrimination. So had Carol. When she had finally called a halt to the empty show of a marriage that remained, he had been relieved.
Nora took the fragile coffee cup from his hand. “You’ve been rinsing for a whole minute. You’re wasting water, boy.” She gave him a sharp look.
He turned off the water and dried his hands. Nora had set the cup in the drainer and was slowly leading the way back to the den. She never used the front parlor, it was reserved for company. She always called it the parlor, stubb
ornly clinging to the terms and habits of her parents’ generation.
She dropped to her chair again. Bruce was too restless now to sit.
Nora seemed to gather her strength. Finally, she burst out with it. “We always believed Roger was the cause of Greta’s death.”
“What do you mean?” He hadn’t expected this. “I thought she had an accident. She fell down the stairs.”
At his mother’s silence, he made the obvious connection. “You think he pushed her?”
She nodded. “Joe disagreed with me. Since Roger was dead soon after, there was no way of proving anything. That’s why Joe made me promise not to tell you.”
“What made you believe it wasn’t an accident? Many people are injured or killed in simple home accidents.”
“Don’t show off with me, boy. Statistics mean nothing. Greta was like the rest of us Hagens. Big, thick bones. A mere trip down the stairs should not have killed her. As children, we learned how to fall. Go limp, our father always told us.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions.” He wasn’t sure he wanted to be led where she was taking him, but now she would not be diverted. Her aged face, lined and crepey, took on the semblance of a younger woman as the anger showed. Her deep grey eyes still had snap in them.
“You listen to me, young man. My sister was not killed by an accidental fall. Her husband either pushed her or threw her down those stairs. He probably hit her first.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Both her arms were bruised, she had broken ribs, and one leg was broken. What killed her was a broken neck.”
Aunt Nora had painted a horrifying picture. The thought that his blood father had murdered his birth mother was a jolt, but somehow not as unbelievable as it should have been. He didn’t know why.
“You saw her like that?”
She looked at him straightly. “Joe didn’t want me to, but I insisted on seeing her body before the embalmers could touch it. I talked to them and to the police. Her body had sustained tremendous damage.”
She struck the floor with her cane. “Back then, people took the attitude that what was done was done. I sensed that the police and the embalmers had their suspicions, but she was dead and it was too late. Roger acted broken up about it, and you were a little boy needing Roger’s care. The police decided there was no point in being involved further.”
“Didn’t anybody know about abuse in those days?”
“Of course. They called it wife beating. It was considered a private matter. Something low-class people did. The police didn’t order an autopsy on Greta’s body and Roger would not permit one. There was no opportunity to find evidence of previous injuries she hid from us. We could have raised a ruckus, sued to demand an autopsy, but Greta was dead. We had you to consider. We didn’t want you to grow up branded the son of a killer.”
“If he was one. What happened next?”
“We suffered through Greta’s funeral. Roger had to put a decent face on it and allow her family and friends to attend, not to draw suspicion on himself.”
“That was it?” he asked.
“No, boy. Of course not. I made a huge scene at the funeral, accusing him of killing Greta and warning him I would be watching his treatment of you carefully. I told him he’d better not try to deny me if I wanted to visit you.”
“Bet that went over like a lead balloon.”
She smiled a little, remembering. “My open accusation shook him. Then Dorothy spoke up.”
“Dorothy?”
“Greta’s best friend from when she had been working in the war effort. Dorothy disliked Roger intensely and she wasn’t afraid to say so. She told him she knew he had killed Greta and she was going to make sure he paid for it.”
“Whoa. You two didn’t pull any punches. I’ll bet Uncle Joe was trying to shut you up and drag you away.”
Nora smirked. “Of course. It made a dramatic picture. I was trying to claw Roger’s eyes out, and Joe was protecting the wretch. Pitiful.” Her wrinkled hands, soft from a lifetime of housework, smoothed the fabric of her dress. Nora always wore a dress and hose, even at home. She had never taken to what she excoriated as the ugly newfangled fashion of pants.
“Afterwards, Dorothy and I talked. We pooled everything we knew about Greta’s life with Roger. Dorothy told me not to worry. To get ready to take you in once you were orphaned.”
“You’re kidding.”
“That’s what she told me.” Nora smiled in satisfaction. “It wasn’t two weeks later that Roger died in a car crash, leaving you to us to raise.”
“Another accident that wasn’t one?” This was sounding melodramatic and unbelievable. Was Nora losing it? Nora was all alone in this big house now. She could be getting fanciful.
“You don’t believe me?” She sounded outraged.
“How can I? You tell me this crazy story, accuse my own father of murdering my mother. Then you claim a friend of yours killed my father out of revenge?”
“It’s all true.” She shook her head, sighing. She winced slightly at some random pain. “Now I understand why Joe didn’t want me to tell you.”
“Do you have any evidence? Any proof?” His voice sounded angry, and he softened it. He should not take out his frustration on his mother.
“Nothing. Perhaps Dorothy does.” Nora folded her hands in her lap. “I’ve agonized over this for years. I could have let it go, but it sticks in my craw. It always has. Roger got away with murder.”
The fire returned to her eyes. “You don’t know what Greta was like. She was beautiful, but more than that, she was always the life of the party, the funny girl who turned every chore into a game. Roger smashed it all to bits. She lost her smiles. Then she died. It wasn’t right. If Dorothy did something to make him pay, I am glad.”
Nora ended her tirade, and the life drained out of her. She looked old and tired.
He felt old himself. By now he was pacing the length of the room. It was hard to get his mind around all she had told him.
“My father murdered my mother and then some woman I have never heard of killed my father out of revenge? This is complete bull—”
“Don’t swear in my house,” came the stern warning.
“It’s okay if this woman murdered my father, but not if I say a bad word? Aunt Nora, you’re impossible.”
“I don’t believe in an eye for an eye, son. Don’t mistake me. You were our concern.”
“Why did you tell me this?” he asked, exasperated.
“Because I thought you had a right to know. Dorothy is still alive. You might be able to find out from her if she truly did cause Roger’s death. If he admitted anything about Greta before he died. I’ve never been brave enough to ask.”
“Why not? Why have I never heard of this Dorothy before today?”
“She’s older than me. She was Greta’s friend, not mine. She changed after Greta died. Got very fierce. Maybe we all did. I concentrated on the children, determined to raise you up right and help you have good lives. Dorothy took the other route. She started her causes. I’d hear about this protest or that protest she was leading. Or some petition drive she was spearheading. She went up against some powerful people in politics around here, and she was absolutely fearless. I always assumed that was connected somehow to Greta and Roger. I was afraid to look in Dorothy’s eyes and see the truth of what she might have done to Roger. Even though he deserved it. I know he deserved it.” One of her hands trembled visibly.
She was an old woman. Sometimes he forgot. He was not young anymore himself. He should have been paying more attention to this beloved woman who had raised him.
“Joe’s role in this?”
“He told me to let it alone.”
“Papa Joe was right, as usual.” He said it with a certain bitterness. Just when his life had gotten simple. When he was ready to goof off for a while. His dear adoptive mother was sending him on a quest. Oh, she hadn’t said it in so many words, but his duty was clear. He was to meet t
his Dorothy and find out the truth from her. Mom Nora probably had it all worked out and knew where Dorothy was living and how to contact her.
Which was why Bruce Wicklow, born Bruce Dietrich, was living next to Dorothy Duncan, born Dorothy Lane. To scrape up an acquaintance and learn whatever secrets she knew of his family’s tragedy. Talk about a messed-up reason to rent a house on an exclusive beach. This topped anything.
He’d made remarkable progress on his quest. He’d insinuated himself into Dorothy’s daily life by using Yappie, a dog he had searched for and adopted deliberately to soften Dorothy up because Yappie was the same breed as his childhood puppy. Supposedly, she had been the one who gave him his puppy when he was four. He thought he remembered a tall, dark-haired lady. Perhaps he didn’t. Aunt Nora had given him an old photo of Dorothy from that period, and she had not looked familiar. The photo had also included his mother, Greta. He hadn’t looked at her picture in a long while. She was a beautiful woman, as Nora had claimed. A beautiful woman who died long before her time.
Did Dorothy know if it had been an accident after all, or had she discovered it was murder? Had she possibly, somehow, taken revenge and caused his father’s death? His father had supposedly died in a one-vehicle car crash. He had been drinking. It was night, and a country road. He could have wrecked simply because he’d tried to avoid a deer. Although the police report said there had not been any skid marks indicating he’d braked suddenly. Yes, Bruce had checked the old records. Research was his longtime passion.
Time to go over and roust Dorothy for their daily beach stroll. He was convinced she was having trouble with her memory. Which wasn’t good for the success of his quest.
He should ask her before her memory got worse, but he was finding he didn’t want to barge in and rudely burst out with his questions. He needed some softer lead in. To get her to reveal the truth might be difficult. If she even remembered the truth by now. Although they said that memory of the newest parts of life left first. He’d been checking it out on the Internet. Memories of older events stayed the longest. He should be okay for a while at least.
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