The Mother's Day Murder (17 page)

“Yes, it was. She came home with only her brown habits and she needed some secular clothes to wear at her job. She didn’t want anything fancy so I stitched up some skirts in a couple of different colors and she got blouses to go with them.” She said it as though it were the easiest thing in the world.

“You must be very talented,” I said.

“Some people can put cookies together. I put skirts and dresses together. It’s just something I’m able to do.”

I looked down at my notebook. “Have you had any dealings with God’s Love Adoptions in Cincinnati?” I watched her face carefully as I asked the question.

“I’ve heard of them, but I don’t recall ever talking to anyone there.” Her face had not changed. If the name had come as a shock, she didn’t show it.

“A Mrs. DelBello?”

“I don’t think I know anyone by that name.”

“Did you visit Good Samaritan Hospital during the year that Katherine was home?”

“I’m sure I did. I visited B.G.”

“Did you go with Katherine?”

“Maybe once or twice, but I preferred not to.”

“Really? Why?”

“I think Katherine liked it better if she went alone.”

That was interesting. “I understand his son, Little B., came to live with your family.”

“He did. There was that awful business with B.G.’s wife leaving and someone had to take care of him. It fell on my mother. Everything seems to have fallen on my mother,” she said lightly. “Mom was a magician. She could handle anything, which was good because she had to handle everything. She was really something else.”

“I gather you were living at home the year that Katherine was there.”

“Yes, except for a couple of months when a friend of mine from school needed a roommate for her apartment in Cincinnati. I begged my parents to let me stay with her just till her lease ran out. I never thought they’d give permission, but they did. It made it easier for them once they had Little B. with them. It was a big house but it wasn’t that big!”

“Do you remember what months you lived in the apartment?”

“Spring, I think. Maybe into the summer.”

May is a spring month. May was when Randy Collins was born. “Does that friend of yours still live around here?”

“Yes. She’s married and they have a house. Why?”

“Would you mind if I talked to her?”

Her face clouded over. “Could you tell me what this is about?”

“I can’t, Hope. It’s about Katherine and I can’t talk about it till we find out exactly what happened.”

“But if it’s about Katherine, how can my friend have anything to do with it?”

“I can’t explain. But I think Katherine would want you to give me her name and address.”

She shook her head. “This is about me, not Katherine. What do you think I did, living in that apartment? And what difference does it make?”

“I don’t know what you did. I just know it’s important that I speak to your friend.”

She wavered, sitting on the sofa with both hands palms down on the cushions, as though ready to move, but not quite decided whether she should or not. “I’ll give it to you,” she said, “but only because Katherine called and said I should try to help.” She got up and left the room, returning a minute later with a square of paper on which was written a name, address, and phone number. “Her name is Mary Short now. You can probably get her at home around dinnertime. Is there anything else?”

“I’m sorry to have upset you. There is one other thing. I’d like to talk to Little B.”

“No one calls him that anymore except family. He’s Bart now. He’s married. I can give you that number, too. Is that all?”

I got up and followed her to the atrium and waited there while she went to a room beyond the dining room. She came back with another square of paper. I thanked her and apologized again for upsetting her, but she didn’t smile. She was clearly distressed and I thought
she might call Joseph tonight and ask what all this was about. Joseph would probably guess what I was after. If she chose to tell her sister, that was her business. I was glad to have gotten the information I now had in my notebook and on the two squares of paper. There was more work to do.

18

I drove to the hotel, checked in, then called Jack and brought him up to date. Then I called Mary Short who invited me to come over this evening. Before I went downstairs to have dinner, I called Bart Bailey and talked to his wife. Bart hadn’t come home from work yet but he would be there around six or so and then they would have dinner. I told her I wanted to talk to him and she said they weren’t going anywhere tonight, so it was still possible I could see him after I spoke to Mary Short.

As I ate dinner in the hotel restaurant, I thought about Hope McHugh as the possible mother of Randy Collins. Suppose Hope had cut her hair short. In fact, I had no idea whether she wore it short or long twenty years ago. I had seen no old pictures in her house. Suppose she didn’t wear makeup. Suppose she wore the kinds of skirts and blouses she had run up for Joseph to wear to work. And why not? If she could make them for her sister, she could make them for herself. She could have easily installed a phone in the apartment she shared with Mary Short in the name of Katherine Bailey. No one asked for identification when you got a telephone. You put down a deposit and paid your bills. When I
moved into Aunt Meg’s house, I had the name changed on the bill with no trouble at all. In fact, I noticed that the bills that came to the house were addressed to Uncle Will, who had died many years before. As long as the bills were paid, nobody cared.

The more I thought about it, the more plausible it became. Hope had lived in the same house with Joseph for much of the year that Joseph was here. She could easily have looked in Joseph’s bag, found her Social Security number, if she needed it for the adoption agency, and any other documents she might have required. I wished I could have seen the hospital file but I knew I couldn’t get access to that without a court order—or the way Randy Collins had, by getting a job at the hospital and looking at it herself.

When I finished my dinner, I went upstairs, grabbed my coat since it was a chilly evening, checked at the desk on how to get to the Shorts’, and took off.

“I’ve known Hope forever,” Mary said as we sat in her living room. In a nearby room, where her husband was sitting by himself, a television set was making a constant noise.

Mary Short was tall, something of a contradiction, and wore jeans and a cotton sweater adorned with a beautiful silver pendant on a black cord.

“Hope told me you shared an apartment for a few months about twenty years ago.”

“That’s right. It was a lot of fun, the only time I ever lived in my own place. I had a job in Cincinnati and I roomed with someone else for a while and then my roommate announced she was getting married and she
moved out a couple of weeks later, leaving me with a rent bill I couldn’t manage.”

“And a lease you couldn’t get out of,” I volunteered.

“That, too. So I called Hope and she asked her parents and they said since it was me, she could do it. She was old enough to do what she wanted, but she was a good daughter.”

“She’s a lovely person,” I said. “Do you remember if she had her own phone when she shared that apartment with you?”

Mary pressed three fingers against her lips, thinking. “I think she had one put in after the first month. I had a boyfriend—it was my future husband—and we talked incessantly. Hope couldn’t even call home without asking me to get off.” Mary rolled her eyes and laughed. “Now I scream at my daughter for doing the same thing.”

“How was her health during the time you lived together?”

“Hope had problems. It was very sad. She was in pain, she missed work sometimes, she saw doctors. I can’t say she was in good health, but she never lost her spirit.”

“How did she wear her hair?” I asked.

“We all had it long for a while. It was the style. Then we both went out and cut it short. We looked much better and the sink stayed a lot cleaner.” She laughed again.

“Was it short while she lived with you?”

“We cut it while we lived together. I remember that.”

“Did she leave the apartment for any period of time?”

“She went back to her parents’ sometimes on the weekend.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all I remember.”

“Mary, I’m going to ask you something that may shock you but I’d appreciate an honest answer. Did Hope ever give birth to a baby?”

“No. Hope? No. No. Why would you ask such a thing?”

“It’s important. Did she ever look pregnant?”

“Never. No.”

“What happened when the lease expired?”

“I got married.”

“And moved out?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to Hope?”

She looked very serious now, the sparkle in her eyes gone. “I think she moved out, too. I’m not sure. Why are you asking these questions? What would ever make you think that Hope—she can’t even have children. They gave her a hysterectomy. It was the end for her. She’s never really gotten over it.”

“Did you ever see her phone bills?” I asked. “Did you ever see the envelopes they came in?”

She shook her head, clearly bewildered. “I don’t know. Maybe. She usually came home first, I think. I don’t know.” She looked confused, as though wondering where these strange questions were leading.

“I just wondered if the phone bill was in her name.”

“Who else’s name could it have been in? Her parents didn’t pay for it.”

“Did Hope have a boyfriend while you lived together?”

“Hope always had boyfriends,” she said without stopping to think. “She may have met her husband during that time. The truth is, I was in love and I was self-centered enough to think about very little except myself. If I’d
been a better roommate, I wouldn’t’ve hogged the phone the way I did.”

“What’s her husband like?”

“He’s wonderful. Kind, devoted, rich, although that came a little later. He adores her. I couldn’t imagine her marrying anyone better. And he knew when he married her that there would be no children.”

“I’m a little surprised that they didn’t adopt a child.”

“That was their decision. They didn’t want to.”

“I don’t have anything else to ask you,” I said. “I appreciate your candor.”

“I wish I understood what you were after.”

“It’s complicated and I’m not at liberty to say any more than I have.”

She showed me to the phone and I called Barton Bailey’s number. Bart was home and would be happy to see me.

The Baileys were a nice young couple, both of them younger than I. They lived in a small house with a one-car garage and one car outside in the driveway. The three of us sat in the living room, Wendy slightly apart from us in a comfortable chair.

“My cousin Katherine called and said I might hear from you,” he said, looking at me warmly. He was much too tall to be called Little anything but I noticed his wife called him B. I stuck to Bart.

“She’s been busy calling,” I said. “I’m trying to get some facts together and I can’t tell you much about why. I just hope you’ll be forthright.”

“It’s my middle name,” he said with a grin, and I noticed Wendy smiled, too.

“Do you remember the year your father died?”

“Oh, yeah. I still think of it as the worst year of my life.”

“Katherine came home that year. I’m told she came because your dad was sick.”

“At the time, I had no idea why she was back. But at some point I think I realized that’s why she came. That was a long time after. Everybody loved my father. I couldn’t exaggerate that. His death left such a big hole in the family, they still haven’t recovered.”

“That’s the way your cousins talk about him,” I said.

“And he and Katherine were special friends.”

The phone rang and Wendy got up and went to the kitchen. When she answered, she pushed the door shut.

“She said as much to me,” I said.

“I brought down some albums when I heard you were coming. You interested in family pictures?”

“I’d love to see them.”

He sat next to me on the sofa and opened one large, fat album that started with black-and-white pictures. “That’s Dad when he was three,” he said. He pointed out his grandparents, his father as he grew older, the cousins Katherine, Hope, Betty, and Tim where they appeared. There were a lot of pictures of B.G. and Katherine together, one with his arm around her as they sat on the ground with a picnic basket nearby.

Color pictures started to appear. B.G. was there with a number of girls. “That’s my mom,” Bart said pointing to one. “That’s around the time they met.”

“She was a good-looking girl,” I said. The girl in question had a great smile, a lot of hair, a very thin figure. “But you look like your dad.”

“I know. I don’t know what happened between them. She up and moved out one day. Dad always said, ‘People
change.’ I kept wondering why, but I never got an answer. She just didn’t want to live here anymore, didn’t want to be his wife, didn’t want to be my mother.”

“It must have been very hard for you.”

“It still is,” he said, his voice wavering.

We went back to the pictures. He turned a page and I saw Joseph wearing the habit of a novice. “Oh!” I said with pleasure and surprise.

“Yeah, there she is when she decided to become a nun.”

“Was that after your dad married?” I asked.

“It must have been. There are some pictures somewhere of her graduating from college. That’s when she decided to become a nun. If you figure out the years, Dad was married by then.” He pulled over a smaller album and began to leaf through it. “See? Here’s Katherine graduating. And there she is in the habit.”

The pictures were carefully dated and he was right; she had graduated first and become a novice afterward. The album was on my lap. I turned a page, then another. It wasn’t a very large book but I saw that it contained only pictures of Katherine and B.G. I didn’t say anything, just kept turning the pages. There were several blank ones at the end. B.G. had died before filling them. The last pictures were from the year Katherine had come home. She was wearing secular clothes, something I had never seen, but her face looked very much as it had the first time I had met her, when I was thirteen or fourteen and visited the convent. These had not been taken very long before my first visit.