Her Father's Secret

by Sara Blaedel

  “What’s this about?”

  She pointed at the envelopes. “Margaret Graham knew my father. I don’t know what was going on, or what this truth was that wasn’t supposed to come out. But it’s obvious she was blackmailing him.”

  For a second he looked confused again; then he asked her to follow him over to a desk against the wall in the large open work space. Officers in small cubicles were working, and the atmosphere was relaxed, even though they apparently took on new homicide cases every day.

  Doonan read the few lines of the newest letter.

  Ilka grabbed the burial testament out of his hand and showed him the signature. He glanced back and forth between the letter and testament before nodding.

  “Yeah, looks like we won’t need the handwriting experts on this one.” He sat down.

  Her phone began vibrating in her pocket as he read the earlier letters. She pulled it out and looked at the display. Her mother again. She ignored it and looked up.

  Stan Thomas, an older officer she’d also met, was walking toward them. Doonan filled him in on the new information Ilka had brought. He added that he was sure the letters were written by Margaret Graham.

  “Obviously your father didn’t shoot her,” Thomas said. “So what do the letters have to do with the break-in?”

  “It can’t be a coincidence she was killed,” Ilka said. “If she’d been covering something up, and then used it to squeeze money out of my father, maybe she was doing the same with other people. I don’t think it was a break-in. They would have taken everything valuable in the house after they killed her.”

  The two officers chewed on that for a few moments. They seemed to agree with her.

  “And if her husband hadn’t come to us to arrange the services, no one would have discovered the connection,” she added.

  Thomas studied her. “What else do you know about Margaret Graham?”

  “Nothing. I never met her, I didn’t know she existed. And I don’t know when the last letter was delivered either.” She looked back and forth between the two men. “But I regret not coming to you the second I found it. Maybe it could have saved her.”

  “Hold on now,” Thomas said. “Nobody knows that. If it was your father she was blackmailing, the letter must have been around quite a while. He’s been dead about two months now, right?”

  Ilka nodded.

  “Looks like we’d better take your fingerprints. And I’m going to have to ask you where you were on Monday between five and ten p.m. when Margaret Graham was killed.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Ilka that on top of everything else, she could be accused of killing a woman she didn’t even know. She stared straight ahead, trying to remember. It was the evening she’d been with Jeff. But she had no idea what time she got home. And she didn’t know Jeff’s last name, only that he worked for Fletcher. Anyway, she doubted that Jeff wanted to tell anyone about their rendezvous.

  “That afternoon I drove out to visit the Conaway family. They were close friends of my father. They live about an hour from town. Karen Conaway and her younger daughter can confirm I was there. You can also check my GPS, I used it on the way there and back too.”

  “Well, when did you get back?” Thomas said.

  She thought back to the bar. Twilight was falling when she and Jeff were walking to the marina. “Probably around seven.”

  “And you have an alibi for the rest of the evening?”

  Ilka hated to do it, but she nodded and told them about her meeting a guy at the bar beside the old jazz club. The girl working that evening could confirm it. “Then we walked down to his boat.”

  “So he can give you an alibi?”

  She nodded.

  “And does this man have a name, so we can confirm that?” Doonan asked. Something sleazy in the way he looked at her made her straighten up.

  “His name is Jeff. He works for Raymond Fletcher.”

  Thomas crossed his arms. “Looks to me like there’s spaces in those five hours you weren’t with somebody.”

  “Oh, come on! I didn’t kill anybody! Back then I didn’t even know who she was, and I don’t care what secret she was going to reveal. But you’re more than welcome to take my fingerprints, if that makes you happy.”

  Doonan ignored her outburst. “Are there other letters in the desk drawer?”

  “Not with that signature.”

  “No other letters hinting at what this is all about?” He pointed at the last letter about the blackmail money.

  She shook her head.

  “But if your father and Margaret Graham knew each other, she must’ve known he’s dead.” Thomas was sitting on the edge of the desk, his gut hanging over onto his lap. “The whole town knows, it’s been in the paper. What if this letter is new? Then it couldn’t be him it was meant for.”

  He scratched his head.

  “You mean, it could have been sent to me?” She shook her head. That was crazy; she hadn’t even been in town long enough to have something to hide.

  “That’s not what I’m saying. I’d just like to know the connection between your father and Margaret Graham.”

  Ilka was beginning to regret coming to the police station. It had never crossed her mind that the letter could have been meant for her. Or for Sister Eileen. Or Artie, for that matter. She thought about Sister Eileen, how strongly she reacted when Ilka said she was going to contact the police. On the other hand, the nun hadn’t tried to stop her; she’d just thought it wasn’t a good idea. Maybe she was right. And Artie had seemed genuinely surprised when she showed him the newest letter.

  She felt Thomas’s eyes on her. He turned to Doonan and told him to take a look at the woman’s bank account. “If we find anything that might be connected to criminal activity, we’ll show these letters to her husband. Maybe he can tell us something that’ll make sense of all this.”

  In her mind Ilka saw Maggie’s skinny husband in the short-sleeved blue shirt. She felt sorry for Michael Graham, who in the midst of his grief would probably be questioned. Luckily, she didn’t have to be there.

  “We’ll also need to talk to Mary Ann,” Doonan said.

  Ilka didn’t mention she’d been about to give the letters to the woman. And she saw no reason to bring up the shooting episode at the house. “Do you want this too?” She pointed at the burial testament and asked them to make a copy of everything, so she could take the originals home with her.

  The moment she stepped out onto the parking lot in front of the station, Ilka absentmindedly pulled her cigarettes out of her pocket and lit one. She leaned her head back and stared at the sky while blowing out a cloud of smoke, then she inhaled again and eyed the thin trail drifting away in the breeze. If only she could follow along! Away! Back to Argentina to herd cattle, as she’d done the year after beating her cancer. Her uterus had been removed at the age of twenty, but she’d recovered and long ago reconciled herself to being childless. Coincidences and events had affected her adult life far too much, and to put it bluntly she was sick and fucking tired of life not cutting her some slack. If only just once everything would go her way. Peace of mind, that’s what she needed. She’d had it once, when she married Flemming, but for a long time after he died she’d been angry, enraged at life and God and whatever the hell crossed her path.

  Ilka had never fallen in love after Flemming. She’d tried, but it never came. Instead she’d acquired a taste for men in small doses, with no strings attached. Right now, she wouldn’t mind a dose. The sense of being close to someone, their skin, a release that could dampen her nerves.

  She crushed the cigarette out on the sidewalk and walked to her father’s car. Suddenly she sensed she wasn’t alone, and when she whirled around, a dark-skinned man with a cap pulled down over his face emerged from a small clump of trees, like he’d been waiting for her. She couldn’t see his eyes, but he headed straight for her with his hands in his pockets.

  Quickly she got in the car, started it, and backed out while still struggling with he
r seat belt. She checked the rearview mirror; the man stood watching her. She couldn’t say why, but he frightened her so much that she floored it. Her back tire ran up a curb as she turned and drove off.

  She took a deep breath when he was out of sight. Her pulse was racing, and she kept breathing slowly to settle down. The man could have been anyone. It was impossible to say if he’d been keeping an eye on her. And the car that followed her home the other day from the Conaways’ could have been her imagination. Ilka shook her head to clear her thoughts; it irritated her that she’d let herself feel weak, fragile. But someone had for sure been on the boat; Jeff had heard the footsteps too. That much she hadn’t imagined.

  She needed so very, very much to go home. To settle in, be bored, know what was going to happen the next day, the next week. She missed her everyday routine, reading the paper in bed. Telling the kids to line up in a row and smile at the photographer. She missed hearing them laugh and tease and act like smart-asses to each other.

  Ilka drove down the main drag past the square, where she turned and headed toward West Racine. Maybe she should have let Artie know she was leaving to talk to the police, but surely Sister Eileen had told him.

  She turned onto the residential street and stopped to get a good look at Mary Ann’s house. The place looked deserted, so she drove on and parked in front. After staring at the porch a few moments, she walked up and rang the doorbell. No response. She waited, rang a few more times. Finally she worked up the courage to step over to peek in the window. Except for a plastic sack on the floor, the living room looked completely empty. At the next window she peered into a small room next to the living room, also empty. Feeling bold now, she circled the house and rested her forehead against the kitchen window in back. A teapot stood on the kitchen counter, along with some food. A ceiling lamp hung where the table once had been.

  Ilka had never been behind the house. The yard was enormous, like a park extending all the way down to a row of tall trees. The lawn was well tended, and large box trees had been trimmed neatly in rounded shapes, while flowers in late-summer colors sprang up from low, stone-lined beds. A bit too formal for Ilka’s taste, but the broad tiled walkways broke up some of the perfection. Obviously, they’d been designed to make the area accessible for Mary Ann’s wheelchair. Ilka walked over to a glass terrace door and peeked in. The room had a fireplace; otherwise it was also empty. The fireplace was plastered and ornate, but Ilka was only interested in the mantel, where Artie had told her the urn with her father’s ashes stood. The urn was gone.

  When Ilka pulled into the funeral home parking lot, she realized she’d already made up her mind. Maybe it was while she stared at the empty mantel, or it might have been in the car on the way back. No matter. She couldn’t take any more, it was way too much, too many unknown factors that made it impossible for her to navigate the life her father had led. She was in over her head.

  After she let herself in and shut off the alarm, she went straight to the front door and turned the sign.

  CLOSED.

  Sister Eileen and Artie were gone for the day, so to avoid any more misunderstandings she reached behind the desk and pulled out the telephone cord. It was time to get rid of the place.

  She’d come to Racine to find answers about her father, maybe to find out why he abandoned them. Or at least to understand why he’d ignored her efforts to keep at least some contact, however sporadic it might be.

  She tried to picture him in her mind. There would be no more answers, she realized now. It was time to accept that fact and get rid of him too. Mentally. Get him out of her head. Come to grips with the emptiness he’d left inside her. Live with it. She was old enough to understand you can’t always find explanations for what’s happened or for the life you’ve ended up with. That went double for other people’s lives. She wasn’t one bit wiser, and now she was involved in a homicide, which meant that for the first time in her life she’d had to come up with an alibi.

  She turned off all the lights downstairs before going to bed.

  At the pub the next day, sitting across from Gregg Turner, she said, “Margaret Graham is the Maggie I asked you about the other day.”

  She’d slept soundly and had been late getting up. And after one cup of coffee she’d still been determined to stop looking for reasons why her father had washed his hands of her. “Rest in peace,” she said out loud from behind his desk, while holding her cup. But damned if she’d let herself be suspected of killing Maggie just because she didn’t know what was going on. She could see how that could end. So she decided to uncover as much of the truth as she could. She’d checked the pub several times that morning to see if the ex-undertaker was at his favorite table in back, and finally he’d showed up.

  “My father tried to hide something.” Ilka leaned in closer to Turner. “And Margaret Graham knew it, and she was blackmailing him. And of course, my father couldn’t have killed her. If the killing has something to do with blackmail, there must be others involved.”

  Though her father’s old friend didn’t know what she was talking about, he didn’t stop her. The thought crossed her mind that he probably just missed having someone to talk to. But then he set his cup down, scratched his nose, and got straight to the point.

  “Paul made a few enemies, but mostly he got along fine with people. I never heard him mention this woman, and honestly, I have a hard time imagining anybody thinking it was worth blackmailing him. He never acted like a big spender. He wasn’t a man you’d think a blackmailer would set his sights on, if you know what I mean.”

  Ilka nodded. “The letter could have been meant for me, like the police said. If she was threatening to reveal something that could hurt me, it must be because my father was mixed up in something Maggie thought I knew about. But what?”

  The elderly man held up his palm. He was frowning deeply, but he didn’t answer her.

  “What’s it all about?” she said. “These ‘truths’ my father kept secret? How in the world am I supposed to know what he was doing?”

  The waitress came by and refilled Gregg’s cup. He took his time adding two spoonfuls of sugar, and they both stared at the cup as he stirred. Then he pushed his cup a few inches forward and folded his hands on the table. “You can’t know, of course not. Your father had a serious run-in with his father-in-law when Frank Conaway was sent to prison.”

  Ilka looked at him in surprise. She concentrated on blocking out the sportscasters’ voices from all the televisions in the restaurant.

  “I don’t know how much Frank’s wife told you about it,” he said. “A sad case.”

  “Nothing. I didn’t even know Frank Conaway was in prison.” She recalled the young daughter saying her father wouldn’t be home for a long time. And she had pressured Karen to set up a meeting with him, without having the slightest idea why he wasn’t there.

  The ex-undertaker sipped at his coffee. When he set the cup down, Ilka noticed his lips were pressed together. Clearly, he hated talking about this.

  “Raymond Fletcher made some serious accusations,” he continued, speaking slowly now. “None of us who know Frank Conaway believe he was involved in fraud. But it all happened right after the racetrack went bankrupt—there was a lot of confusion back then. The investors lost a lot of money, and accusations of fraud and insider knowledge were flying around against the men involved in the track. That was before the big loss was finally tallied up. But your father never doubted his friend.”

  “What did my father do? What happened?” Ilka had trouble picturing her mild-mannered father battling the rich old man, who looked very much like someone you didn’t want to mess with.

  “Paul didn’t believe Fletcher. He claimed Fletcher was the swindler and even hired a famous lawyer in Chicago to clear Frank’s name. Until he died, your father was paying the lawyer and fighting to get the charges dropped. Paul had his back to the wall, because Fletcher sent in the cavalry against Frank. More charges were made, but Paul kept accusing Fletcher of
using Frank as a scapegoat to hide his own crimes.”

  Ilka had no trouble figuring out where the money came from to pay the lawyer. “When was Frank Conaway arrested?”

  “A month or two after the track was closed. Around the first of the year.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “It all fits. The money came from the funeral home’s account; he took out every last dollar he could before he died, starting at the beginning of March.”

  Turner emptied his cup. She gazed at his furrowed brow as the pieces fell into place.

  “It doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “Close friends could always count on Paul. But why would helping a friend make him a target for blackmail?”

  Ilka shook her head. Maggie didn’t seem to fit into all this. “How was my father so sure Frank Conaway wasn’t guilty? And if he actually went around telling people that Fletcher was the real swindler, isn’t that possibly…”

  “Slander, yes. The case hasn’t come to trial yet, I don’t know the details. I don’t know why Paul was so sure. All he said was that Fletcher probably paid the police off. Which meant they were covering up for him.”

  Ilka couldn’t believe her ears. Raymond Fletcher was obviously a tough businessman, but he’d come to the funeral home and welcomed her into the family, had given her a large chunk of money to help cover her expenses. If her father really had been saying these things about Fletcher, why was he helping her, meeting her halfway? She wondered if Artie and Sister Eileen knew anything about this.

  A roar in the room startled her. She looked up; the TV on the wall showed someone scoring. She was surprised to see the bar half full now. Men mostly, standing around drinking beer, their faces raised to the game. Several women also sat on barstools and followed along. Apparently the game was almost over.

  Turner looked up at the TV and read the scores of other games. He slouched a bit. Once again Ilka felt an emptiness settling over her. As if she kept reaching for something beyond her grasp. And it was true: He was dead and couldn’t answer the questions he’d left her with.