Rose Hill (26 page)

The complaints included things missing and assumed stolen, like
magazine subscriptions and mail-ordered items; mail that had obviously been opened and re-sealed; and in one complaint Margie was overhead sharing confidential information she couldn’t have known unless she’d read a certified letter before the intended party received it. In one kind of humorous incident, she had been accused of switching envelopes so a sexy lingerie catalog went to Father Stephen at his office address, and the person meant to receive the catalog got a religious magazine.

More serious, though, was the fact
that it was Margie who provided the evidence which sent Willy Neff to prison.

Scott went straight to the Rose and Thorn to confront Ian Fitzpatrick about what he’d found.
Ian was offended at being questioned, and told him it was all just “women’s gossip” and nothing more.

“Her father was a war hero, did you know that?” Ian said. “Eric Estep had a Purple Heart, shrapnel in his leg, and was fire chief of this town before you were a gleam in your mother’s eye!”

Scott was familiar with the stone wall which was formed out of Ian’s personal prejudices, especially where friends and family were concerned.

“We were in a war together,” Ian told Scott, as the younger man stood to leave. “I won’t have you dragging his good name through the mud.”

Ian and Scott had been the first police officers on the scene after Eric was found, in his office at the fire station, having blown most of his head off with a shotgun. It was Scott’s first year working in Rose Hill, and his first violent death as well, and he still had nightmares about it.

If Eric left a suicide note Scott wouldn’t know. He was out in the hallway puking his guts out while Ian, and Malcolm, Eric’s second in command, rearranged the scene to make it look like the accident it was later claimed to have been. Before his retreat to the hallway, Scott had seen what was left of Eric and the position of the gun, and knew better, but dutifully supported Ian’s official determination.

Scott fumed as he walked down to the post office to confront Margie. He knew he shouldn’t undertake any sort of questioning when he was this angry, but he wanted her to know he was onto her, to put her on notice that he would not tolerate this kind of thing just because she was the daughter of a local war hero and the former fire chief.

Margie saw Mrs. Crawford give Theo the card, and could easily have plucked the card and photo out of the trash. If a sentimental gesture from a kind woman could be made to look like a death threat, what other horrible things had Margie done no one knew about?

Did Willy really seek to procure the pictures that put him in prison, or had Margie just made it look as though he did? Mrs. Crawford told Scott Margie used to be sweet on Willy when they were younger. Had Margie’s accusation actually been revenge for his romantic rejection?

Scott was angry with Margie, and angry with Ian for protecting her. He had to admit the special treatment he resented Ian for giving out was really no different from what he was doing for the Fitzpatricks in Theo’s murder investigation. He was disgusted with himself and disappointed in how easily he had been corrupted. Scott felt dirty and felt like cleaning things up. He decided to start with Margie.

Margie wasn’t at work, so Scott went to her home, down near the river on Lotus Avenue. Margie’s mother, Enid, was alone at home, and it took her a long time to answer the door. Enid had crippling rheumatoid arthritis, and she could do very little for herself. Scott peeked in the window to show her who it was, and she made her painful way out of a recliner and across the room to the door.

On a small pension and social security payments, Enid was obviously dependent
upon her daughter to support and care for her. Scott was abruptly reminded of all this as the tiny, bent woman wrestled with the lock and the door handle. By the time she managed to open the door, Scott’s face was burning over having caused her so much pain and effort. He should have called first.

Enid smiled up at Scott and asked him in. The house was small and hot, and smelled like camphor and mentholated ointment mixed with talcum powder, but there was also an undercurrent of body odor. He tried breathing through his mouth and it helped a little.

Enid was dressed in several layers, including a housedress, tan-colored woolen tights, oversize boiled wool slippers, and a heavy wool cardigan topped off by a kind of apron vest like one Scott remembered his own grandmother wearing. Her white hair, what there was of it, was scraped back into a small bun, no bigger than a button mushroom, on the back of her head. She had droopy, red-rimmed, faded blue eyes, and the sagging skin of a woman who was once much fuller figured, but who had lost a great amount of weight. Her hands were knotted and curled inward, and Scott imagined her feet looked much the same.

“Is your daughter home?” he asked.

“Mary Margaret is at the grocery store,” she said.

It took Scott a moment to realize she wasn’t talking about Maggie; Margie was a “Mary Margaret” too. Enid offered to fix him a cup of tea or a snack and he refused politely, apologizing for making her come to the door.

“Well, when you see it’s the police you can’t ignore it,” she said. “I was afraid you’d come to tell me something had happened to my daughter.”

Scott cringed inwardly at having also caused this worry on top of the physical strain.

She shuffled her way back to her recliner and gingerly seated herself. She was watching a game show on a tiny black and white TV.

“What’d you want with Mary Margaret?” she asked him.

“I have a question about the mail,” he said.

“Well, she’s the expert on that, all right,” Enid laughed. “She’s been working there for over twenty years now.”

“How are you doing?”

“I’m fair to middling,” she said. “This gettin’ old is for the birds.”

“Happens to all of us,” Scott said, because he didn’t know what else to say.

“The home health girl brought a kitten to visit me a few weeks ago.”

She gestured to a calendar pinned to the dark wood paneling near her chair, where January featured a gray and white kitten, playing with a pink ribbon.

“It was a pretty little thing,
with yellow and white stripes. I wish I could keep a cat,” she told Scott. “I’m too old for it now. Eric never liked cats. He liked those big old red dogs like Fitz always had; what are they called?”

Fitz always had a big, shaggy, ginger colored dog, like Lazy Ass Laddie.

“Irish Setters?”

“Them’s the ones,” she said, clicking her false teeth as she talked. “He always had one of those awful dogs running ‘round here, digging up my flowers, and lifting a leg over everything. I wouldn’t let a dog in my house any further than the kitchen, so Eric would sit out there
with it of the evening and smoke his pipe.”

Scott nodded appreciatively.

“You wouldn’t have believed how that man cried after those animals when they passed. And each time he would swear he’d not get another, and it wouldn’t be any time at all before he’d bring home a pup, and we’d start all over again. What was I talking about?”

She looked puzzled and a little fearful.

“The kitten,” Scott said. “Home health brought a kitten to visit you.”

“Oh
, yes,” she said, beaming at the memory. “Ruthie brought it. Ruthie is June and Pete Wilkerson’s girl; you know them?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“She was a nurse in Pittsburgh for a while, but then came back here to look after her mother. June got the cancer, lost her breast, and had the chemo, but she’s okay now. Ruthie joined the home health, and she works at that old folk’s home in Pendleton, too. She comes over a couple times a week to give me a peanut oil massage. You ever had a peanut oil massage?”

“No ma’am,” Scott said.

“Well, they’re wonderful. If you ever have a chance you get one. Ruthie gives an excellent massage, and it helps my rheumatism greatly. I seize up so bad in this cold weather. She married Pudge Postlethwaite. Do you know Pudge?”

“Yes ma’am. We were at school together.”

“Did you go to Rose Hill School or that consolidated nonsense over in the county?”

“I went to Rose Hill.”

“That was a lovely school,” Enid said, leaning back in her chair. “Mary Margaret got a perfect attendance award at graduation.”

Scott nodded appreciatively and said, “Did she?” because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Mary Margaret is a good daughter,” Enid said, and Scott was seized with an irrational fear she had somehow gleaned his intentions for coming over. “I don’t know what I would do without her.”

She got emotional then and fumbled for a paper tissue pushed up in the sleeve of her cardigan. Scott mumbled something he hoped sounded comforting, and wondered if Margie was coming home soon. He was rapidly losing the steam that brought him to their house
, and now felt more like escaping than confronting her.

“Oh, I love this part,’ Enid said, and turned up the volume via a remote control the size of a deck of cards. Enid got caught up in her game show so Scott looked around the front room, as he couldn’t see the TV screen.

There was a pile of magazines and catalogs in a basket between his chair and the fireplace. He picked up a stack and looked through them, for something to do, and immediately noticed not one of them was addressed to Margie or Enid. Catalogs he could imagine Margie digging out of the trash as people flung them while sorting their mail, but subscription magazines seemed less likely to be discarded by the people who paid to receive them.

Scott, seeing Enid was focused solely on her television show, quickly went through most of the basket, until he finally came upon a Consumer Reports magazine with his own name and address on it. He also found one of Mamie’s
National Geographic
magazines.

Scott returned the stack of catalogs and magazines to the basket. How brazen she was! Anyone could see these–the women who came in and helped Enid or the home health nurses. Could she really feel so entitled to do as she pleased with the mail
that she didn’t care who saw what she took, or who knew? Scott was suddenly overcome with the desire to search the little house for more evidence, and wondered how hard it would be to get a search warrant.

“I knew that one,” Enid told Scott, referring to the question that won the game. She used the remote, which actually, physically turned the knob which changed the channels, to go to another show, and he realiz
ed they didn’t have cable, only the three basic stations, and a set of rabbit ears antennae with foil extensions on each end. Scott looked around. The little house was clean and neat as a pin, but everything was sagging, wearing thin, or obviously in need of repair.

He thought about how it must be for Enid, trapped in a body that held her prisoner through pain and limited movement, unable to tie her shoes or button her own cardigan, unable to bathe or dress herself; dependent on the kindness of others and the limited medical help she could afford. He thought of his own mother, with his father’s good pension, large life insurance check, and a retirement annuity to see her through old age comfortably.

He also thought about Margie, trapped in this house with her mother, night after night, relieved only during the daylight hours when volunteers and home health workers visited while she worked. She would have to be everything to the helpless old woman every evening and all night, every night, for many years to come. If Margie lost her job and was arrested it might kill Enid. Now that his anger had abated somewhat, Scott saw the ramifications of what he had been about to do.

“You tell Margie I’ll come see her tomorrow at work,” Scott said abruptly, and insisted Enid not get up to see him out.

He made sure the door locked properly behind him and gratefully breathed in deep lungs full of the frigid evening air as he walked away from the little house, crunching through the layer of snow that had frozen in large patches on the sidewalk.

He backtracked and grabbed the snow shovel off Enid’s porch, shoveled the path to the sidewalk, and a large swath near the curb. He sprinkled around a thick layer of rock salt, which they kept in a bucket on the porch, even though he thought it was probably too cold for it to work right now. While he did this, he thought about several things h
e wanted to do. He wanted to immediately go and buy Enid a new color TV, a gift subscription to cable, and a kitten. What he could do was go see his own mother, make sure she was all right, and hug her.

How, he wondered, could he punish Margie, protect the town from her, and yet not destroy Enid in the process?

Scott set off in the direction of his mother’s house. The vet’s cat Duke trotted out of the alley as Scott passed it, and the cat had a large dead rat in his mouth. Scott nodded to Duke and kept walking, and Duke ran alongside him until they got to Rose Hill Avenue. Scott watched Duke look both ways before he ran across the street.

“Smart boy,” Scott complimented him.

Hannah stopped by the station to let Scott know that when she arrived to feed Theo’s dogs and give them their morning exercise, she met a black SUV with government plates coming down the driveway. The windows were tinted so darkly she couldn’t see the driver or passengers. Hannah went ahead and fed the dogs, but felt spooked by the fact that the Feds had been there, and hurried her chores. As she left an hour later, she met a county sheriff’s car coming up the drive and thought it seemed odd. Shouldn’t they have been there first, before the Feds?