Died in the Wool (25 page)

“Missus O'Shea,” he said, and grabbed my hand. His hand was soft and cool. His voice came out almost a whisper. “I wanted to ask a favor of you.”

I glanced around the room, uncertain what he was about to ask. “If I can do it, I will.”

“Would you…” He took a deep breath. “Would you continue putting flowers on Glory Anne's grave for me? Once I'm gone, everyone will forget.”

A sniffle came from somewhere in the room, and I have to admit, a lump bulged in the back of my throat. I barely knew the man, but his devotion was utterly heartbreaking. Even on his deathbed, he could not forget the woman who was Glory Anne Kendall. Really, he couldn't forget his brother, either, because this tradition of putting flowers on Glory's grave was for his brother.

“Of course,” I said.

“Every June,” he instructed.

“Every June,” I repeated.

His grip loosened and his hand fell limply to his chest. Instinctively I checked to see if he was still breathing, and he was. No monitors went off, and his chest rose every few seconds. The brief exchange with me had worn him out. I looked to his daughter, who was dabbing her eyes. “I don't understand,” I said. “He could have just asked any one of you to ask me for this favor. Why did he want me here?”

“Because he wanted to see your face when you answered. He wanted to know whether or not you were sincere,” she said. “He hated telephones for that reason. He said you couldn't really tell what people were thinking unless they were right in front of you.”

It made sense to me, and I was deeply honored that he chose me to carry on this tradition. “What are the doctors saying?” I asked.

“His heart is giving out,” she said. “He'll go into a coma before long, and he'll just slip away.”

I said my apologies to her and decided that I'd intruded enough. I backed out of the door silently and headed for Fraulein Krista's for a hot fudge sundae.

Okay, so I eat when I'm sad. So what? I've been doing it for almost forty years and it's never failed to make me feel … less hungry. At the end of the sundae, I was still sad, but the sundae had been good, and that was something. Right?

Sitting there at the table in my favorite restaurant in town, steeped in Bavarian polka music and the smells of sauerkraut and bratwurst, I came to a startling conclusion. I hate loose ends. I hate ambiguity. I hate random acts. I hate misrepresentation. I hate it when people such as the Kendalls had shown themselves one way to the public, when they were something else entirely in private. I mean, I know all families have their “public faces” and their “private faces,” but the Kendalls lived double lives. When does that start to become a problem? When does that double life start to eat away at a person and cause him or her to start breaking down?

I have a cousin who has a lot of the same childhood memories that I have because we spent a ton of time together. When you hear her recall these memories, and then you hear me tell the same stories, they are very different. I remember my grandparents' farm as a lot of fun, but not all fun. Every magical stroll through the berry patch that I took, I got chased by bumblebees half the time. Although the baby chickens were cute, I sat in chicken poop more often than not. Yes, Grandma taught me about making strawberry jam, and Grandpa would sit on the porch and play the violin, but a great deal of the time I sat around wishing to God they got more than three black-and-white channels on their TV. But to hear my cousin talk, well, the place was akin to Shangri-la, a mystical place that couldn't exist. There were never any bad moments, like having five ticks at one time on your back sucking the life out of you, or ripping your pants out in a mudslide and having to have six stitches in a very delicate place. No, none of those things ever happened.

When could a person's memory really be trusted? Was Marty Tarullo remembering a love between Anthony and Glory that wasn't real? That had been made romantic by time? Was Judy Pipkin's mother's memory correct? Or was she maybe a little jealous of the attention that Glory got? Had her memory of what happened become tainted with green? Or was her memory really the memories of her mother that she'd adopted as her own? I just couldn't be sure.

The most disturbing part of this whole existential epiphany that I was having in the most unlikely of places was that Colin was right. I couldn't go public with “theories” because then the public would start to come up with their own incorrect “memories” of what happened. I had to go public with facts or nothing. Right now all I had to give the public was the very things I hated. Random acts, misrepresentation, loose ends, and ambiguity.

Can I just say that I'm so happy that Colin wasn't anywhere around at this moment of weakness or I might have actually told him these things.

Then I got the phone call I'd been waiting for. It was Professor Whitaker. “Torie, you need to come up to my office. Emilia did this thing on her computer. She took pictures first with some digital whatchamacallit … Hell, I dunno, but anyway, she's been able to erase certain lines of the drawing, and I think she's got the face beneath the monster.”

“I'll be right there.”

*   *   *

I called Rudy to let him know that I might be late. The college is almost two hours from New Kassel, and I didn't know how long I'd be there, so I wasn't sure when I would get home.

At one time southeast Missouri, like St. Louis, had been almost all French. You can still find a lot of French influence there, if nothing else in the last names in the white pages and the number of Catholic churches. In St. Louis, the French dominance is all but gone save for a few place names like Chouteau Avenue and a few sculptures like the one of Saint Louis at the art museum. The Irish, the Germans, and eventually the Italians came in and all but squashed the French.

West of St. Louis, along the Missouri River valley, was where the Germans mostly settled, followed by a good contingent of Irish, and it has remained remarkably German. The area I am in has been called the Little Rhineland, and with all the excellent wineries that have popped up to dot the Missouri River almost all the way to Jefferson City, the title isn't far from correct.

Nestled in this amazing green, rolling countryside, Oldham College sat stoically on a hillside, facing south. In front of the building that houses the history department was a man-made pond filled with Canada geese and mallard ducks, all swimming, oblivious to my presence. Professor Whitaker was with a class when I arrived, and I had to wait fifteen minutes until he was finished. Then he led me down a hall, up a flight of stairs, and around a corner to Emilia's office. I could barely contain my excitement. Anticipation flowered in my chest as we entered the room where her computer sat with the monster face pulled up on the screen.

“Hi, Torie,” she said. “I have to tell you, I've had a lot of fun doing this. I wasn't sure I'd find an image quite so clear, but here you go.”

She pushed some buttons and explained what she'd done to obtain this image. Computer jargon. Me not understand computer speak. I just push buttons on a computer and things happen. When they don't, I call Rudy. When Rudy can't fix it, I call Rachel. If Rachel can't fix it, then we need serious help.

None of that mattered. Because when the computer was finished doing whatever it was it was doing … there was a face. Not a monster face, but a human face.

“Torie, are you all right?” Professor Whitaker asked.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you just turned white,” Emilia said.

“You're positive this is right?” I asked, feeling light-headed.

“Pretty dang close,” Emilia said.

“Why, who is it?” Professor Whitaker asked.

“It's Sandy Kendall. Her father.”

“Is that bad or good?” Emilia asked.

“It's not good.”

Twenty-one

I'd asked Emilia to find the human face under the monster face, but I thought she'd just uncovered the real monster. She printed a copy of the image for me. I thanked them both and left for home. I was in such a hurry to tell somebody what I had discovered that I just began making phone calls on my cell phone to whoever would listen. The first person I got was my sister, then Rudy. Then I called Colin and Mort, and neither of them answered any of their phones.

I arrived back in New Kassel around three in the afternoon and went to my office. Stephanie had left about a half hour before. I booted up my computer and then went to the kitchen for a Dr Pepper. The first drink was heaven. All that carbonation bubbling down my throat made me as happy as I could be, even if it was short-lived. The second drink was never as good as the first.

I went back to my office and pulled up what my old boss, Sylvia, had accumulated on the Kendall family. Many years ago Sylvia and her sister, Wilma, had decided to gather five-generation charts and family group charts on the people of New Kassel. They deposited them in the historical society so that people who wanted to trace their ancestry to this tiny town could find the information. I had spent many hours entering the handwritten documents into the computer, but I hadn't been alone. Helen had done some of it, Elmer had helped out, and on occasion even Sylvia had pitched in. Sylvia may have been a cold and cantankerous old bat, but she was light-years ahead of most of her generation, and she hadn't been afraid of change.

On more than one occasion these family group sheets and generation charts have helped me. On hundreds of occasions they have helped others connect the dots. At times, Sylvia had supplemented things she knew to be true with assumptions and her own memories. Those were the things I had to be careful of, because sometimes she could be a bit prejudiced. So I tried to keep this in mind when I looked up the charts on the Kendall family. I couldn't imagine that there wouldn't be information on them.

Sandy Kendall's five-generation chart indeed showed his ancestors back five generations, except on two branches for which Sylvia only had three generations documented. It was a pretty typical family tree of the “second boat” type. He most likely had no ancestors from the
Mayflower,
the first boat, but some lines of his family had been in the country since the 1630s or 1640s; thus they were part of the immigration wave known as the second boat. Mostly his family was from Virginia and Pennsylvania, with one line from Connecticut. Then I checked the family group sheets, which are a record of each person's family: who the individual married, children, and vital information, like occupation, place of burial, and birth and death dates.

Under Sandy Kendall's group sheet, Sylvia had written an addendum. Another page of nothing but notes. As I suspected, it was all about the suicides. As I had also suspected, Sylvia had known the family personally. She mentioned newspaper after newspaper coming to town to interview witnesses. Then in late 1993 she made just this one note:

Although these cases have long ago been laid to rest as suicides, I cannot help but think that in at least one instance, this is dreadfully wrong. I do not doubt that Rupert hanged himself from the tree in the backyard, as he was terribly deranged and ill from the trench warfare that he had endured. What that boy saw, nobody should ever see. How some men return from war intact and others don't is a mystery to me, but I think it has something to do with the state they're in when they go. Rupert had always been a gentle, almost timid soul. To think of him having to actually kill another human being … I'm honestly astounded that he made it home at all.… And, for the record, I am not at all shocked that Glory Anne would have taken too much laudanum, although I've never known her to use it. She was a friend of mine, although we weren't especially close. Glory Anne was not close to many people. But Rupert nearly tore open her heart. To see Rupert in that state was more than she could bear on most days. Then for Sandy to deny her the one true love she had—I think she'd hit bottom, as they say. She never spoke to me about planning to take her own life. She always smiled and acted as if everything was fine. I never expected she would do this, but when I heard the news, neither did it surprise me. Whalen is the one that I cannot fathom. Once Glory was gone, Whalen was free to find Hazel. I suspect that is what he was about to do, but a bullet stopped him. Of course, I can never prove any of this, and I suppose it is unfair of me to write about their choices with none of them here to speak for themselves.

That was it. A few cryptic lines sprinkled throughout the paragraph that would drive me insane. I would think about them for months. Possibly even years, unless I learned the truth.
Once Glory was gone, Whalen was free to find Hazel.
What did that mean?

“What does that mean?” Colin asked from the doorway.

I jumped at his voice. “Oh, jeez. You scared me,” I said.

“What does it mean?” he asked. He came in and sat in the chair across from me. He glanced at the Rose of Sharon quilt hanging on my wall.

“I'm not sure, other than I think I've been barking up the wrong tree this whole time.”

“Explain,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Mort as he came in. “Explain for me, too.”

“Oh, hi. I tried to call both of you and there was no answer.”

“Looks like we both got the message at the same time,” Mort said, smiling at Colin. “And here we are.”

“Well, all this time I've been thinking that it was Whalen who killed Glory, although I could never come up with a really plausible reason why he would. Judy Pipkin's mother said that the brothers were crazy about their sister, and she implied that there was more to it than your usual sibling affection. So for a second I thought that maybe Whalen killed Glory because he didn't want anybody else to have her. That motive has never made sense to me, but the courthouses are full of cases where men have killed women just to keep anybody else from having them.”