Breeding Ground (29 page)

“Why do you always say that! You've never given me a chance. You're too demanding. And you're harder on me than anyone else!”

“We don't demand more of you than we do Spence. But family has to work harder, and do a better job, Richard, than anybody else. We have to set the example. Being in charge isn't glamorous, you know. Not if you do it well. There's more stress. The worst decisions are yours. And you have to be a servant. A good leader really does have to serve. More than you can imagine. And I don't think recognizing that and being able to do it is something that can be taught.”

“That doesn't make sense.”

“No?” Alice rubbed the side of her right knee and then wrapped her hands together in her lap. “You want me to tell you what I really think? The way I would another employee?”

Richard looked unnerved for a second, taken aback and uneasy, as he stood up and walked toward the painting, then turned stiffly, and nodded.

“You're sure?”

“Yes.”

“You're not really interested in the business. You love ham radio and model trains. You can't get enough of talking to people all over the world on your radio, and most of those conversations are about trains of one sort or another. Modern trains, antique trains, model trains most often. You don't even travel anywhere that isn't connected to trains. Theoretically you care about the business, but you don't. Not really. Not like you do your trains.”

“That's not fair!”

“I think it was a mistake for you to not work other places before you came to work for us. If you had, you would've known more about what you want, and what your talents are, and what your limitations are too. And what it means to have to please a boss who isn't your father or mother. It was our fault as much as yours. We should have insisted.”

“What difference would that have made? I only—”

“And now I've come to the crux of the issue. You still want to hear what I think?” Alice was looking straight at him, quiet and self-contained, committed to doing what she thought she should've done years before this.

“I don't know. Do I?” Richard stared out the back for a minute, then turned and said, “I thought I heard someone in the kitchen.”

“Mary's brought the mail. She'll drop it off and go. So?”

“Go ahead. Finish what you were saying.”

Alice paused and drank some water, then looked Richard in the eye again. “I don't think you're suited to running the business. I think you'd be better off doing something you love, the way Booker loves this. You're not an engineer. You don't like horses, or understand what they need. Maybe you took the easy way out. Thinking that if you went to work for your dad you'd always have a job, and promotion would be easy.”

“Wait a minute—”

“There's more to life, Richard. Maybe you should think about working for some business that has to do with trains. A commercial train manufacturer, or a train museum maybe, or a model train maker. Something that really gets you excited. You know a tremendous amount about all those areas, and you could do a great job. Even something connected to ham radio, I don't know. I'm talking to you the way I would anybody else who wasn't happy in his job. I'm risking saying something that will hurt you because I love you very much, and I want you to be satisfied and feel good about what you're doing.”

Richard's face was white and waxy-looking. His hands had clenched against his sides. His mouth hung half-open, and his eyebrows had crushed against his eyes in what looked like horror and fury. “How can you say that to me?! After all the years I've worked for you! How can you throw away everything I've done as though it's utterly worthless!”

“It's not at all worthless. It's just not what you love. And it's not making you feel fulfilled.”

“Why do you say that! How do—”

“Because I love you, and I think it's true.”

His chin was trembling and his eyelids were edged with red when he picked up Alice's palette and slammed it onto the floor. “Lily's right! Neither of you appreciate me for what I do! All you can see is that Spencer is like you two!” He picked up a coffee can of soapy water and threw it against the far wall.

“Richard, stop!”

“Shut up! I wish you'd died from the blood clot!”

Alice was trying to get up out of her chair, pushing the ottoman off to the side, when Jack Freeman ran across the terrace and in through the French doors. “Are you alright, Mrs. Franklin?” He glanced once at Alice from between her and Richard, having braced himself to stop Richard, if he made a move.

“I'm fine, Jack. Thank you. But I do think it might be better if we talked about this later, Richard.”

“It's none of your business, Freeman. You're the hired help, remember? This is between my mother and me!”

“Your mother asked you to leave.” Jack spoke calmly, but he didn't blink or budge.

Richard glared at Alice for half a minute, then back again at Jack, before he walked across the gallery toward the front hall.

“I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, Richard. But real good can come out of this. We'll talk about it again, alright?”

“Oh, I'll be back! You can count on that! When we can talk alone!”

Two hours later, Mary Treeter came in the back door bringing Alice her groceries, and a Tupperware bowl of her special tuna salad, along with a loaf of homemade bread.

It was quiet this time. No raised voices and arguing. And she figured Alice had lain down again to put her legs up before dinner.

Peggy James got there at seven, expecting to walk in the front door, and found that it was locked. It wasn't that that didn't make sense. Alice could've changed her mind. It was nighttime, and she was alone. Why shouldn't she lock her doors?

Peggy used the key Alice had given her and laid Alice's office mail and typed correspondence on the desk in her study. She didn't hear Alice moving around, but she didn't expect to when Alice was painting. She just picked up the Dictaphone and went out the front door, locking it behind her.

Mary Treeter called Alice at eight, not wanting to wait till later in case Alice went to bed early, the way she surely should. She needed to ask Alice what time she wanted her there the next morning to clean the house and do the ironing.

There was no answer. And it troubled her. Alice could be in the shower. That might explain it. Anywhere else she'd be near enough to a phone that the fifteen rings would've given her time to get there and answer.

'Course she couldn't ignore Richard's voice that afternoon, when she'd taken Alice's mail in and heard them in the gallery. The way he'd talked to his own mother, that had been real upsetting. And she hoped Alice hadn't been hurt by it, or suffered a bad turn.

Mary told her husband, Carl, she was fixing to walk over to the Franklins' again to make sure Alice was alright.

She went in the back door, using her own key, and stood in the kitchen listening. She called Alice and got no reply. And walked on into the dining room, then turned left into the back hall (which was open on the left the whole length of the gallery), intending to check in the bedroom.

The basement door was standing open halfway across on the right, and that seemed real peculiar. The light was on in the basement too, falling out on the hall floor turning the flagstones yellow.

Mary stood on the dining room rug and stared straight ahead for a minute, with a thundering in her chest and a sick feeling in her stomach – even before she walked on across and looked into the basement.

Alice Franklin lay in a twisted tangle on cold concrete at the bottom of the wooden stairs, blood dried at the corner of her mouth, her eyes wide open.

Mary Treeter whimpered as she started down – not screaming, even at the bottom – but keening as she hurried on, certain in the marrow of her bones before she got to the foot of the stairs that Alice Franklin was dead.

Mary's husband, Carl, got there a minute after she phoned him, and Dr. Nesbitt ten minutes after that. He called Earl Peabody, the county sheriff, and Richard Franklin, who seemed stunned and thoroughly confused, before he said he'd call Booker and Spencer wherever they were in England.

Mary phoned Peggy James, knowing how much Alice meant to her, while they waited for Peabody – milling around, repeating themselves, wishing there was something they could do.

Peabody had his men photograph the scene, including the bottles of prescribed medication set out on a table on the gallery. There was a half-drunk cup of coffee, and a glass of water beside it, and bottles of Warfarin and codeine too, prescribed after her surgery.

“It don't make sense, Earl.” Mary was wiping her eyes with a rumpled handkerchief she'd found in the pocket of her housedress, as she pointed to the codeine tablets sitting by the glass on the table. “Alice didn't take pain pills once she got home from the hospital. Just that first afternoon. The day she got home. We talked about it more than once. Codeine made her queasy and all, and dizzy, and she wanted no part of it. Said they made her real depressed and weepy like too, and she hated that more than anything. Said she'd rather be feelin' a whole lotta pain, than want to burst into tears.”

Earl Peabody watched Mary for a minute – the short, plump, kindly-looking woman with the frizzy brown hair and pale hazel eyes and soft sincere looking mouth. “You're sure, Mary? You know for a fact she wasn't takin' 'em?” He was a tall man, heavy but strong looking, with thin brown hair, and thick black framed glasses, and a hand the size of a catcher's mitt pointing at the bottle.”

“You've known me since the second grade, Earl Peabody. Would I say it like I was sure if I wasn't?” Mary looked like a small ruffled hen by the time she finished.

Earl put a hand up as though he were appeasing his mother or stopping a nervous horse. “I know, and I trust you. I was just makin' sure. It's a real important point.”

“And why would she fall down the stairs? She wasn't s'pposed to be climbing stairs yet, and she'd have no reason to go in the basement. And even if she did, she'd know to hold on to the railing and take her time. She was moving around real careful all the time, 'cause she knew with all the blood thinners she was takin' she couldn't afford to risk a fall and start her brain or her insides bleedin'.”

“So you're sayin' you reckon she was pushed.”

“I am. It stands to reason.”

“You got anybody in mind?”

Mary stood there and looked at her husband, who rubbed her shoulder as though he were encouraging her to go ahead and get it said.

“Her son, Richard. He was here this afternoon. I brought her mail in a little before four and left it in the kitchen, and they were in the gallery here, and he was real upset. I couldn't hear what he was saying too clear, but he was mad, I know that, and talking to her in a mean voice, and it made me real disgusted.”

“But you don't know what he said?”

“That's what I just told you. The new yardman was here too. Jack. Freeman, I think it is. He might could tell you more. He was clipping shrubs by the terrace when I was walking home.”

Tuesday, May 22, 1962

Jack got a call from Peggy James before six, and called Jo at seven that morning to tell her about Alice, and what Richard said the afternoon before about wishing she'd died from the clot. Jack said he was on his way to talk to the police but thought she'd want to know.

Jo called Peggy James at her house at seven-thirty. Jo's mother had been a good friend of Peggy's, and Jo wanted to hear her version of what had happened. Peggy told her what she knew about the day before. And that she'd eventually figured out that the car that was parked across the street belonged to Michael Westlake, an employee Alice had fired for drinking on the job – a big man who'd acted violent when she let him go.

Peggy told Jo she was going to tell the Sheriff about Westlake being there, and about the phone call Alice had gotten the morning before too, though she didn't know who'd called.

The autopsy was done that morning in a hospital morgue in Frankfort, Kentucky, and the preliminary results were reported later in the day. More complicated tests would take longer, but they did find high levels of both codeine and Warfarin in her system. And she did die of bleeding in the brain. So the “death by unknown cause” investigation went forward as expected.

The fact that Midway and Versailles were very small towns made investigation easier in certain ways. Lexington itself was a small town too, in the sense that in all three communities' generations of people seemed to know each other, plus distant relations, and all personal business as well (hidden
or
exposed) with encyclopedic thoroughness and nearly total recall.

That didn't necessarily lead to accuracy and proper perspective, but in the case of Alice Franklin's death it brought people forward with a willingness to pass on information that sped up the process.

Peggy James went to see Earl Peabody at eight thirty Tuesday morning, when he was talking to Jack Freeman who'd presented himself at the station to tell him about Richard's confrontation with Alice, and that he'd said he wished she'd died from the blood clot.

Peggy told Earl about the phone call Alice got at nine the morning she died, and everything else that had passed between her and Alice, and her return at seven the night before when the front door was locked. She told him about seeing the car parked across the street, and that she'd finally remembered it belonged to Michael Westlake, who'd been fired by Alice, and been violent at the office, and might bear a grudge.

Michael Westlake came to the station at ten-thirty that morning to tell the chief that he'd gone to see Alice the morning before. He'd talked to her after Peggy left and thanked her for letting him go. He'd told her that that had been the shock he'd needed, and that being arrested in Lexington and spending more than three weeks in the hospital had dried him out and given him the opportunity to talk to someone who helped. He'd joined A.A. and had a mentor he respected, and he'd since set about making beneficial changes in his life. He'd asked Alice to consider taking him back, and she'd said she'd think about it and talk to Booker when he phoned from England. They'd parted on very friendly terms, just as Jack Freeman had come in the house to get her instructions for the day, so he'd be able to corroborate that.