Skeleton in a Dead Space (A Kelly O'Connell Mystery) (9 page)

When Tim was gone, Mike said, “I didn’t mean to make trouble.”

“It’s trouble that’s there anyway.”

“Are you really afraid he’d kidnap the girls, Kelly?”

“I’m terrified,” I replied.

“Let’s have dinner in. I’ll bring something, maybe from Nonna Tata, and you provide the wine. That way, that jerk will know I’m on the premises and waiting for him to bring those girls home.”

“Thanks, Mike. That would be great. I’ll have a pinot ready.”

He left, and I turned to see both girls peering out the kitchen door and Theresa standing behind them, the look on her face dark.

As I bent to hug the girls, Theresa said, “He’s evil, Miss Kelly. I know the kind. He’s evil.”

I tried to cover the girls’ ears. I knew Theresa meant Tim, not Mike, but I didn’t want them to hear that.

The girls were upset after Tim and Mike left. Maggie balked at doing homework, and Em wouldn’t leave my side. Theresa, upset in a different way, retreated to her room and refused to come out for dinner. I gave the girls waffles and bacon, sent them to early baths, and tried to tuck them in early. Both wanted to sleep in my bed, and I thought that was okay. They needed security after seeing their father behave so badly. I read to them until Em was asleep and Maggie seemed comforted.

As I got up to leave, Maggie whispered, “He’ll be sorry, Mom. He’s not like that. It’s just …well, he told me he wants us to grow up in this house.”

Curious, I sat back down by Maggie. “What else did he say to you, Mag? Did he say again that he wants you to go back to California with him?”

“Oh, yeah, but I told him no way. I live with you.” She yawned widely.

I leaned down to kiss her nose. “You ready to go to sleep?”

“Yeah,” Maggie said. “I don’t think I’ll have bad dreams.”

Theresa was sitting at the small table in the guest room, busy with pencil and paper.

“Homework?” I asked.

The girl quickly put her hand over what she’d been working on. “No,” she said hesitantly, “I…I’m keeping a journal.” Then, defiantly, “You can’t see it. Neither can my dad.”

Mildly, I said, “I’m sure neither of us would think of asking to see your journal.” Then I felt guilty, because I knew I was about to look at Marie Winton’s journal. But to Theresa, I said, “I don’t know why you say Tim is evil, and I don’t think I want to know—I have my own opinions on the subject. But I do want you to make sure he doesn’t take the girls off to California some night when I just think he’s taken them to dinner.”

“I understand that, Miss Kelly, and I can do it.”

“He’ll pick the three of you up at five tomorrow night. I told him the girls have to be home at eight because it’s a school night.”

“Okay,” Theresa said impassively. “I’ll go and eat his food. I hope he takes us some place really special this time.”

I smiled. “Maybe I should suggest Bistro Louise?” It was one of the more expensive restaurants on the southwest side of Fort Worth.

“I’ve never even heard of that,” Theresa said dreamily. “Is it good?”

I nodded. “It is. But I doubt you’ll go there.”

She shrugged, and I leaned down and hugged her. Somewhere inside this girl was a really sweet child trying to come out of a protective shell.

I looked in at the girls, but they were sound asleep. I was free to put on my robe and read Marie Winton’s diary, even though it made me feel like a voyeur or worse. Some pages did make me feel worse, for Miss Winton had been a young girl carried away by passion, and she wasn’t hesitant about committing that passion to words, words she never thought anyone else would see. She was in love with a man named Marty, but there was little description of him, except that he was married. As I read on, I became increasingly frustrated. Although Marty was mentioned a thousand times—and by then I could have identified him from some pretty personal physical details—there was no indication of his full identity. There was mention of a wife and daughter, but only in passing.

Marie had not begun the diary when she first moved into the house. Indeed she only began to keep it in early 1959, and it stopped abruptly on September 12 of that year. But the last entries were fascinating. Marie confirmed in June what she suspected. She was pregnant. She reported that Marty was overjoyed and promised her they would marry before the baby came. She asked about his wife, and he told her not to worry. He would take care of everything. What happened between 1959 and 1967 when the house was sold? Obviously, the skeleton was the pregnant Marie Winton. By then Marie had replaced Miranda in my mind. Indeed, I began to feel like she was an old friend, a girlfriend that I wanted to lecture as I had Joanie, for she was as foolish as Joanie.

Marie filled her days decorating the second bedroom as a nursery, buying baby clothes, thinking up children’s names—she favored Rebecca for a girl and William for a boy, because she thought it sounded strong. Apparently Marty was generous and allowed her to spend lavishly on the nursery. I also noted wryly that, like me, she didn’t appear much interested in making baby clothes or knitting for the infant.

But in late August, the tone of the entries changed. Marie reported that she saw a strange car outside the house several times, always the same car—a black Cadillac—and when she went onto the porch, it drove away. She told Marty about it, but he told her not to worry. Then one day, he brought a suitcase to her house and announced he left his wife and was moving in. Marie wrote of it with great joy, but she said some nagging fear wouldn’t leave her alone. She didn’t know what it was, but something was wrong.

And then, September 12 was the last entry, a brief happy note anticipating the baby and the family she would soon have. “I wonder when we will be married,” she wrote. “I guess Marty will surprise me.”

I closed the diary and found that great big tears were streaming down my cheeks. I cried for a young woman who had so many dreams and never lived to see them come true. What would I do with the diary? For the moment I tucked the small volume up high on my closet shelf. I wasn’t ready to turn it over to anyone—it was too personal.

I was sound asleep, a child pressed into either side of me, when the phone rang at three o’clock. I should have learned by now not to answer, but, sleepily, I muttered, “Hello?”

The same young voice as before said, “You haven’t stopped investigating that skeleton. We know you’ve been checking tax records and ownership stuff. If you don’t give it up, you could be putting your daughters in danger.” The line clicked, and, now wide awake, I stared at the phone. Putting my daughters in danger! I looked at them sleeping so peacefully, and my heart twisted. I would quit searching for answers, I vowed. The police would have to handle it. I would stick to renovation and selling real estate. But the same old question niggled in my mind: how could anyone so young care that much about something that happened forty-plus years ago? And particularly someone who I suspected was a gang member with no connection to that forty-year-old skeleton?

I lay wide awake, clutching the sleeping girls to me, rethinking everything I knew about the Marie Winton. Tomorrow, I vowed, I’ll tell everything to Mike Shandy and give him the notes I’d made. If I thought that resolution would bring sleep, I was sadly mistaken.

****

The next morning at breakfast I told the girls that their father was coming to take them to dinner. Maggie took the news with equanimity but Em wailed, “I don’t want to go. I don’t like him.”

Theresa was up like a shot, her arms around the child, saying soothingly, “I’m going too, Em. It will be all right. Maybe he’ll take us for pigs in a blanket.”

“At Ol’ South?” Em asked.

Theresa nodded, and Em said solemnly, “Okay, if I can hold your hand, Theresa.”

“You can, Em.”

I marveled, less at Em than at Theresa. The girl could go from light and sunshine to dark and back again without any warning. I sighed. If that was a symptom of all teenage girls, I had some rough years ahead of me.

I was dispirited as I dropped the girls off and went to the office. I had, I knew, lost the sale of my house—and it was all Tim’s fault. Well, maybe a little Mike’s. What a time to arrive talking about the skeleton. I was sure he spoke before he thought.

At the office, I had barely dug out all my notes on the skeleton when Anthony called. “Mother of God!”

I wished he’d stop saying that. Among other things, it scared me.

“The house,” he yelled, as if I was hard of hearing. “They trashed it. Graffiti on the brick walls, paint everywhere on the inside…Miss Kelly, I don’t know how many times I can keep fixing this house. I don’t ever get to remodeling, because I’m always fixing damage.”

“I’ll be right there, Anthony, and I’ll call the police.” I dialed the non-emergency police number and reported the damage and then headed to the house. What greeted me was appalling. Bright yellow paint splashed all over the red brick walls, not in the front of the house, but on the sides and the back.

“They didn’t anyone to see them in front,” Anthony said. “Punks.” He spat in contempt.

“What’s inside?”

“Come. I show you.”

It looked like someone had a paintball fight in the house—bright colors were smeared all over the walls and floors. I reached out to hold on to Anthony and keep myself from falling in shock.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Anthony said. “We hadn’t painted the walls yet, and we can cover that, use Kilz if we need to. And we haven’t refinished the floors. But it’s the idea that someone did this. Why did those punks do it?”

“How do you know it’s punks?” I asked.

“Didn’t you say before that you had phone calls from someone who sounded young?”

I hung my head. “Yeah, and I had another phone call last night. The caller warned me to leave the mystery of the skeleton alone. But why do young punks—your word, not mine—care about whether or not we solve the mystery of a skeleton forty years old?”

“Because somebody is paying them,” Anthony said sagely,

I told myself if I stopped investigating, the vandalism would stop and the girls would be safe. Simple solution.

The police were perfunctory. “Hard to catch people like this. Best you can do is secure the house.”

I thought we had.
But after the police filled out their report and left, Anthony and I huddled. I called the electrician we used and arranged for motion sensitive floods all around the house. Anthony described the doors that should go on the house and went off to Old Home Supply to buy them and then to Home Depot to buy deadlocks. And he bought enough plywood to cover the windows—from the inside, where it couldn’t be pried off.

“We finish,” he said, “this place be like a fortress.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling exhausted. I wondered if anyone would miss me if I snuck home and took a nap at noon. I got in my car to drive, reluctantly, back to the office.

“Phone message,” Keisha said, handing me a pink slip.

It was Claire Guthrie. With trembling hands, I dialed the number. Of course, they didn’t want the house—with a belligerent ex-husband and a policeman who arrived talking about skeletons.

“I want your house,” Claire said, “but Mr. Guthrie is uncertain after everything that went on last night. Can we meet for lunch, and you can explain it to me? I think I can persuade him.”

I grasped the phone. Haltingly, I managed to say, “Lunch would be great. What’s a good day for you?”

“Have you had lunch yet today?”

“No.”

“Let’s meet at Bistro Louise in half an hour. Will that work for you?”

I tried to be nonchalant, though my heart was racing. “Sure. I can do that.”

“Okay. See you there.”

Bistro Louise, owned by a chef, was a high-toned restaurant that specialized in French haute cuisine. I ate there once years before, when Tim was spending money. I remember being appalled that I ordered Dover sole and later found it cost $45.

Claire and I met as though casual friends over lunch, and I managed to hide my agitation. I ordered the Salad Niçoise, and Claire ordered the sautéed flounder. I admired her panache. After five minutes, it wasn’t hard to forget my agitation. I liked her.

“Okay,” she said bluntly, “tell me what all that was about the skeleton.”

I did my best to tell the story, leaving out the vandalism at my house and making it sound as though everything revolved around the house being remodeled. As for Tim, I shrugged, said I was getting a restraining order, and he’d probably eventually go back to California. “He wants the girls,” I said, “but he’s not getting them. He doesn’t really care about that house.”

“My goodness,” Claire said, “you do lead an exciting life. But I have to tell you I’ve been through it too. I know all about it. Not the skeleton, of course, but the ex-husband. I have one who’s nasty, nasty.” And she was off telling tales that honestly did include a kidnapping attempt. “He went to jail,” she said complacently. “Now, let’s talk about happier things. How did you get into your business, and where are you moving?”

So I told her about my love of old houses, and I dwelt on the Craftsman house I was buying until I was afraid she’d want it for herself. But she didn’t. Instead she switched the talk to old houses in general and then antiques and we chattered away all through lunch, our talk punctuated by frequent laughs.
I could be friends with this woman.

Finally, she said, “About your house,” the words I was afraid to hear, but her eyes twinkled with amusement. “I know I can persuade my husband. Can you write a contract I can give him tonight?”

“What do you want written into the contract?” I asked, trying to keep hesitation out of my voice.

“We want all light fixtures to remain,” Claire said, “and we want some minor repairs done—the light switch in the master bath moved away from the shower, the furnace vents cleaned and inspected. Of course I guess the regular inspection would catch things like that.”

“Yes, it would,” I said with a sigh of relief. “Do you have a realtor?”

“No. I just consulted you. How soon can you close?”