Died in the Wool (21 page)

“Yeah, and by the time she told her father and brother, the numbness had set in.”

“Exactly.”

“All right, so what about Glory?” I asked.

“Her suicide is the strangest of all three, and I believe you may be correct, especially if the lab comes back with positive results for strychnine on her sewing things. A neighbor knocked on the Kendall door at about seven the night before her body was discovered. The neighbor thought Whalen seemed really upset, but Whalen claimed he was fine. The neighbor inquired about Glory, and Whalen said she was upstairs sleeping, that she'd taken laudanum to go to sleep.”

“Why is that so strange?”

“Because the other neighbor, who loaned them the laudanum, said she didn't loan it to them until almost midnight,” Mort said.

I sat down in my chair.

“So … Neighbor A unexpectedly knocks on the door, and Whalen, who's shook up because his sister is already dead, makes up an excuse about the laudanum,” I said. “Then later, when he and his father are trying to figure out how to cover this up, they realize they could use the laudanum excuse that Whalen has already laid the groundwork for. Except…”

“They have no laudanum,” Mort said.

“Exactly,” I said. “So they have to borrow some. Sandy goes to the one person he knows he can blackmail, Neighbor B, the next-door neighbor who is in debt up to her ears, a widow with half-grown children.”

“Right. He wouldn't go to the pharmacist, even if the shop was open at that hour, because the records would show what time the laudanum was purchased,” Mort said.

“Exactly,” I said. “So which one killed her? The father or the brother?”

“I don't know who killed her, but they both covered it up,” he said.

“I don't understand,” I said. “Why didn't the investigators catch the time discrepancy? They talked to the neighbor who loaned the Kendalls the laudanum. Doris, that's her name.”

“Doris Jenkins, to be exact. The answer is, because when they went back to double-check that with her, she changed her story and said that she had been mistaken. She said Whalen had borrowed the laudanum at three in the afternoon the day before.”

“The day before?”

“Yes,” he said.

“So … Glory could have been dead almost two days before they reported it.”

“Sandy and Whalen were shittin' bricks,” Mort said. “Excuse the French.”

“That's okay. It's appropriate,” I said. Then I rubbed my head. “Are you sure you don't want something to drink? I need an infusion.”

“If you insist,” Mort said.

I grabbed two Dr Peppers and ran back to my office. I handed one to Mort and then sat back down in my chair, popped the can, and started drinking mine.

“So you think one of them killed her?” Mort asked.

“Who else would it have been?”

“A jealous lover?”

I thought of Anthony Tarullo. Could he have been so hurt over being jilted that he snuck into her house and poisoned her sewing pins? “It was personal,” I said. “Whoever it was. If my suspicions are correct, they poisoned her quilting pins, for God's sake.”

“So you think they were trying to make it look like a suicide?”

“No, think about it. They could have discovered strychnine would not look like a suicide. At least not at first. Once the rigor had passed and without modern toxicology tests, well … then it could pass for a suicide, as it obviously did.”

“So whoever it was, even if it was her father or brother, didn't think about covering it up as a suicide until after the fact,” Mort said.

“Yeah,” I answered, scratching my head, “but … okay, who would have the most to lose if Glory turned up murdered in the house?”

“The father,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “Which means he was the least likely one to do it. So I think it was Whalen.”

“Or an outside source,” he said. “Because if you had poisoned your sister or daughter with a lethal amount of strychnine, wouldn't you have cleaned up the mess so that nobody else would get poisoned? Or so that you wouldn't accidentally poison yourself?”

“Which brings you to an outside source. Like Anthony Tarullo,” I said.

I swallowed the last of my Dr Pepper and explained to Mort who Anthony Tarullo was. “You have to promise me that if it turns out to be Anthony Tarullo we won't say anything about it until his brother passes away. Marty Tarullo is ninety-something and worshipped his brother. It's not like anything can be done about it now, anyway, and I don't want to ruin that for Marty.”

“I'm all right with that,” Mort said.

“Okay, so what about Whalen's suicide?”

“He went in his brother's room, locked the door, and blew his brains out all over his brother's wall,” he said.

“How do you know he locked the door?”

“Because his father said that the door was locked when he heard the gun go off. He got the key and opened the door and there was Whalen.”

“Did Sandy give any reason his son would shoot himself?”

“He said that Whalen was completely distraught over both of his siblings dying and his wife and daughter leaving him. That he couldn't go on. Sandy said he'd watched Whalen like a hawk right after Glory died, because he had been afraid that Whalen might do something like this, but he thought the danger had passed.”

“That's it?”

“Yeah, except that when the investigators asked why Whalen had gone into his brother's room to do it, instead of his own room, or anywhere else, for that matter, Sandy said that he thought Whalen felt guilty that he had never seen combat and his brother had. Like somehow he'd let his little brother down. Sandy said that Whalen had said on more than one occasion that it wasn't right that Rupert had seen blood spill and he hadn't. That he was the one—as the older brother—who should have been in the trenches, not Rupert. I guess maybe, in his own twisted way, shooting himself in Rupert's room was a way of paying homage to his brother? I honestly don't know.”

“So he'd seen the trenches after all,” I said. “Just the ones that Rupert had drawn, not the real ones.”

“Apparently so,” he said.

“Wow.”

“Does that answer any of your questions?”

“Sort of. Of course, it raises more questions.”

“Most investigations do,” he said.

“Well, thank you so much, Sheriff. I really appreciate it.”

“No problem,” he said. “I'll let you know as soon as the toxicology report comes back on those pins. Oh, by the way, there's something in the kitchen that I brought for you. I had no idea you liked game, but Colin assured me that you did and that you'd really appreciate it. So enjoy, and I'll talk to you later.”

Game? What sort of game? I walked Mort to the door and then went back to the kitchen, where I found two big coolers sitting on the countertop. I'd completely passed right over them when I came in to get the two sodas a while ago. My mind had been totally gone. Totally in 1922 with the Kendall family.

I lifted the lid on the first cooler. Inside was a bunch of frozen meat. Game? Oh, no. It was deer meat. Colin knows I don't like deer meat. In fact, I can't even stand to smell the stuff cooking. The second cooler had at least a dozen dead fish in it. I'm not sure it would have been worse if the heads had been cut off, but the little beady eyes stared at me from underneath the ice. I slammed the coolers shut and thought about killing my stepfather. It was bad enough that I had to deal with Rudy's dead fish that he brought in the house, but Mort's, too? A dozen dead fish and deer parts. Just lovely. What did I ever do to deserve such a malicious stepfather?

Okay, don't answer that.

Seventeen

There was a strange-looking bird sitting on my fence. It was late evening after the rose show, and Rudy and I were sitting out on the back patio, listening to the crickets and the katydids. He was wondering about … well, I'm not sure, since his mind is often vacant when he's staring off into space. I was wondering what the heck kind of bird that was. “What sort of bird do you think that is?” I asked.

“Some sort of thrush,” he said. “It has spots on its breast.”

“How do you know what kind of bird that is?” I asked.

“I had to identify, like, forty species of birds for some summer camp thing I did when I was a kid,” he said.

“I did not know that,” I said, amazed that after eighteen years together, there were still things I didn't know about him.

“Why did you ask me what kind of bird it was if you didn't think I'd know the answer?” he said.

“I don't know. Just making conversation.”

“Women,” he said, and laughed. I laughed along with him.

Just then the back door opened. Mary's indignant voice said, “I'm home.” Colin had just dropped her off from working the sno-cone stand. She had to stay and clean up afterward. With her tone, she was letting Rudy and me know in no uncertain terms that she was insulted to have to spend the day doing manual labor. She was also making a production of letting us know she was home.

“Great,” I said. “Did you have fun?”

“Yeah, right,” she said, and shut the door.

Rudy and I exchanged glances, and then he grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “We'll survive her adolescence, don't worry.”

“I know,” I said. “What worries me is that it's not as if she's doing drugs or having sex. How do we cope if she moves beyond the hormonal, grouchy, smart-mouth, I'm-going-to-test-you-to-the-limit phase?”

“We dig our heels in,” he said.

We were quiet a moment. “You think Rachel and Riley are having sex yet?” I asked.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed. “Don't even go there. Stop. Don't ever say that again!”

I laughed so hard my side hurt.

“Good God, woman. Why would you say something like that?”

“Well, it's not as if she's never gonna—”

“
Don't
!”

“I
hope
she's not having sex yet, but unless we buy her a chastity belt it's going to happen someday. In fact, her future husband probably wouldn't appreciate it if she had a chastity belt.”

Rudy glared at me a moment. “You're twisted, you know that?”

As we fell into laughter once more, Mary came back to the door, opened it, and said in the most deadpan casual way possible, “Matthew put something down the toilet. Now it's smoking.”

All in all, a typical day in our household.

Rudy went to see what was causing the toilet to smoke while I went upstairs to my office. I thought about how beautiful the day had been, how perfectly the rose show had unfolded. It would be a nice thing to add to the roster of events in New Kassel. Maybe next year we could have a rose
festival.
Devote a whole week to roses. We could have experts set up booths and teach people how to grow them, how to prune them, how to keep them from getting diseases, and so forth. It seemed like a brilliant thing to do. I was making a note of that when my phone rang. It was my real estate agent, Sherry Dowdy.

“Hey, Torie, I just wanted to let you know that Mr. Merchant accepted your offer on the Kendall house,” she said.

“Great,” I said, sitting down. As I often do, I had gone after something and wasn't quite prepared for it when it actually happened. I was going to be the owner of the Kendall house. I would get my museum devoted to women's textile arts. It was real. I was so happy I could have burst. It would be the first really big, important thing I would do in this town that Sylvia had not been involved with in some shape or form. This was all mine. Well, I'd have help, of course, but I'd achieved something outside the Realm of All Things Sylvia.

We talked a bit about when to get together and when to close and all that legal junk.

Rudy walked by my office on his way to the bedroom, and I told him the good news. Then I made a mental note to call Geena Campbell and see if she would help me get this whole thing together. I'd pay her, of course, and I was seriously hoping that she'd agree to stay on one day a week after the initial opening. Oh, my God. My mind was racing with all of the things I would need to do to make this happen.

I called Evan Merchant, and he answered on the third ring.

“Hello, Evan, it's Torie,” I said. “Congratulations, you're going to get the money that you need.”

“Not a moment too soon,” he said. “Congrats to you, too. You're going to get your museum.”

“Thanks a bunch,” I said.

“I hope you can handle this house,” he said.

“Don't worry about me,” I said. “Hey, listen, I know it's after eight, but do you think I could come over and look through the house again? The day I was there, I had Geena with me and we were just looking for quilts. Then Rudy went through the house with the real estate agent, so I haven't really gotten to get a good look.”

“Not a problem,” he said. “I'll have the door unlocked for you.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You're not going to change your mind on me, are you?” Evan asked.

“Don't be silly,” I said, and hung up the phone. “Rudy, I'm headed over to the Kendall house. I want to do a walk-through.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'll hold down the fort.”

*   *   *

I was stepping into the foyer of the Kendall house within fifteen minutes. Rudy had said the plumbing and electrical systems had been done sometime in the seventies and might need to be replaced in a few years. I flipped the light switch on, and when I did, I swear it sounded like the house moaned. I walked through the big rooms in the front of the house back to the kitchen. There were no modern appliances. An old refrigerator that had the freezer on the bottom and the fridge part on the top was in one corner, and a gas-burning stove that must have been fifty years old sat next to it. The white sink had a dark brown rust or mineral stain in it but otherwise was in good shape. I checked in the cabinets to make sure there were no rodents of unusual size, nor cockroaches of either usual or unusual size. Pest control would have been my first call if there had been.