Her Father's Secret

by Sara Blaedel

  “I’d like to talk to you,” she said. “Not about the funeral though. It’s something private. Is this a bad time for you?”

  But Graham had already stepped aside for Ilka to come in. He didn’t seem all that surprised to see her either.

  “Are you here to talk about my affair with your father’s wife?” He added that he could understand if the gossip had flared up again, seeing what had happened. “It ended a long time ago, and I haven’t spoken to Mary Ann for years.”

  He showed her into the living room. She noticed the rugs, in contrast with the hallway’s bare wood floor. Ilka stood for a moment and imagined Graham coming home from bowling to find his wife just inside the door.

  After she sat down on the plush leather sofa, he took a seat in a chair across from her. “I hope the rumors aren’t about me shooting my wife, so I could run off with my ex-mistress.”

  He smiled sadly. His attempt at lightening things up made her realize the police hadn’t talked to him yet about the letters.

  “I haven’t heard of anyone accusing you of that.”

  His expression changed; he was probably wondering now why she’d stopped by.

  “Your wife signed my father’s death certificate.” She handed him a copy.

  He thumbed through to the last page, then he handed it back. He looked relieved. “There’s nothing strange about that. She worked for Dr. Vincent after quitting the hospital, he was Paul and Mary Ann’s doctor, so he must have been called in when they found your father. She told me once it’s normal here for doctors to sign the death certificate of their patients, long as there’s a witness. Coroners only must sign when a sudden death looks suspicious, but usually that happens at the hospital or the morgue. My wife worked in the reception. She made sure all the papers got sent out, and she signed as a witness too.”

  Ilka stared at the stamp mark proving the death certificate had been certified by the Racine Health Care Clinic. It was signed by Dr. Vincent and witnessed by Margaret Graham. His signature was simply a few tall strokes, while hers was legible.

  No matter what, Maggie had definitely known that Paul was dead. Now the letter made even less sense to Ilka.

  The living room window was open a crack, and cool air seeped into the room. Graham watched a scooter zip by outside, then he turned to her. “I was so much in love with your dad’s wife. I never meant to cheat, it never crossed my mind, not really. Back then, I thought of myself as a faithful husband with a solid marriage; definitely not a bad one. Not fantastic, but okay. I’ve thought about what happened a million times. It doesn’t make sense, it just happened, I fell head over heels in love. Couldn’t stop myself. Couldn’t walk away.”

  He threw up his hands, as if gesturing helped. “I tried telling myself it was an obsession, like that made it okay, but no. I wasn’t crazy or anything. It wasn’t like some virus and I could be cured. I was one hundred percent in love with another man’s wife, and I wasn’t strong enough to walk away. She fell in love with me too. The same way. We had an affair, but Maggie found out and told your dad. I figured that’s why you showed up here today, to get some answers, an explanation. I can tell you this, I was going to leave my wife to live with Mary Ann. She would have left your dad too, even though we’d have had to move out of town while the kids were still in school.”

  He sat straight in his chair and looked her right in the eye as he spoke. A sad man, yet composed. He paused for a moment, seemingly to give her an opportunity to ask questions, or even to come down on him hard, but she said nothing.

  “We met at a wedding reception. Both of us were friends of the couple. Mary Ann came by herself, but Maggie was there too. Funny, she’s the one who introduced me to Mary Ann. Which she also blamed herself for, plenty of times over the years.”

  Graham fiddled with his shirtsleeve and smiled wistfully as he shook his head. To show that he’d put it all behind him, Ilka thought. But something in his eyes told her that though it happened long ago, and Mary Ann was just a part of his past now, she wasn’t the least bit forgotten. Bringing back all these memories livened up his face.

  “There was something magical and light about Mary Ann back then. It hit me like a ton of bricks. She claimed we drank the wedding couple’s love wine by mistake, out there on the lawn, looking out over the lake. She gave me her phone number, and right then and there I should’ve thrown it away, but I called her that night. And the next day we got together. She’d made a picnic basket, and we sat down there by the lake. She knew so much about things, she was so sunny, happy. And she had a great voice.”

  Ilka could hardly believe her ears. Mary Ann, magical and sunny? And she couldn’t at all picture her father’s wife singing. On the other hand, she’d never have imagined her shooting at people either.

  “I loved my wife, but I was ready to give everything up for Mary Ann. Then they had the accident. All those years ago, in May, a horrible day. And I haven’t seen her since. She wouldn’t see me, she returned all my letters. I did all I could to get to her, but she made it real clear. It was over between us.”

  He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs, folded his hands over his knees. He spoke with compassion, as if Mary Ann could hear him. “Life hasn’t been easy for her. It wasn’t easy being married to your dad. He was very busy, and she felt all alone with their first daughter. I think she was lonely. Then they had Amber, and they fell into a routine.”

  “Did my father never do things with his family?” Ilka said. She was alert now to something opening inside her, something she recognized.

  “Of course he did, sure, it wasn’t like that,” he said. “He took care of them, provided for them. Mary Ann’s dad gave the house to them for a wedding present, but it looked to me like Paul took care of the rest. It was more that he didn’t pay her all that much attention. That’s what she was missing.”

  He shrugged and raised his eyebrows, as if he was a bit embarrassed at being the one who gave her father’s wife what she’d needed.

  “I could be wrong about that last part, though. I tried to fool myself into thinking I wasn’t taking anything away from him.” He smiled shyly. “Don’t misunderstand me. Mary Ann cared about your dad, and she loved her two daughters, but when you fall in love it’s hard not to be blind. And that’s what we were. Blinded by each other.”

  He looked down at the floor. Ilka nodded, even though that had never happened to her. Flemming was the only man she’d really fallen in love with, but it hadn’t happened as it did with Maggie’s husband and Mary Ann. It was a love that slowly grew and gave her a sense of security without blinding her. She’d just known they were going to stay together.

  “So anyway, the day Maggie came home and caught us, there was no turning back. Mary Ann and I agreed the time had come, even though we hadn’t chosen it. And we hated all the secrecy, we wanted to get it out in the open. We just hadn’t done it yet. I asked Maggie not to tell Paul, but she was crazy mad and hurt, she said she already knew what was going on, and she’d told him. But your dad hadn’t said anything about it to Mary Ann.”

  He glanced at the open window again. It was quiet outside, no traffic, not even a bird singing. “Before we got caught, Mary Ann talked to a lawyer about what would happen with the house in case of a divorce. But then they had the accident. And like I said, I never saw her again.”

  He spoke in earnest when he turned to her. “Mary Ann was the love of my life. But I’ve never felt so empty before, now that Maggie’s gone. We’ve been together two-thirds of my life. She was my wife, seems like forever. Maybe I never really knew how much she meant to me. I can’t tell you how many times I regretted not running away with Mary Ann, back when we had the chance, but now I regret even more not seeing how much I loved my wife. Maggie forgave me, and we had a lot of good years together, even though we almost broke up a few times. I sort of bottled myself up right after what happened with Mary Ann, couldn’t let go of it.”

  Ilka felt she should stand up and leave.
Thank him for talking to her, for telling her this love story her father was indirectly involved in. Tell him he was welcome to call if he had questions about the funeral. Yes, she should get out of there, right now. But she couldn’t.

  Graham was leaning over with his head in his hands, though he wasn’t crying. It seemed that he too was trying to absorb everything he’d said. As if it had been buried inside him all these years, and now it had clawed its way out. He looked exhausted. It moved Ilka to see how burdened with grief he was at discovering how much he’d loved Maggie. And yet she leaned forward and said what she should have waited to say until after the funeral.

  “Did you know that since the summer of 1998, my father deposited fifteen hundred dollars in your wife’s account, every three months? Over one hundred thousand dollars in all. And it looks to me like she was blackmailing him. But maybe you have an explanation.”

  She didn’t mean to sound belligerent; she tried to smooth it over by telling him that because of a few letters, the police had gone through his wife’s bank account and had discovered the transfers from the funeral home account.

  He sat with his mouth open, but he waited until she had finished to speak. “I don’t…I don’t know anything about that, it’s…But that can’t be right. That much money, I would’ve known about it.”

  True, she thought. It was a lot of money, something that would have affected their financial situation.

  He walked over to a low bureau behind the dining room table and brought back a dark-green ring binder. His finger trailed down the latest entries in their bank account, occasionally stopping, then he turned the page and kept checking. Page after page. Finally, he straightened up and nodded, though now he was pale and shaking. He closed the ring binder.

  “I don’t understand. If it started eighteen years ago, that was about when Maggie found out about Mary Ann and me, but if she was blackmailing someone, wouldn’t it be…one of the guilty parties?”

  He sank back in his chair, completely lost. As if he were trying to grab on to something that wasn’t there. “She never said a word about this. Why would she ask him for money? What was in those letters that made the police look into this?”

  Ilka hesitated a moment before picking up her bag and finding Maggie’s letters. She handed them to him.

  As he slowly read the letters, he looked at least as shocked as just before, when he’d learned about the blackmail. “What did she mean, finally? She makes it sound like your dad deserved the credit for Mary Ann and me breaking it off.”

  He shook his head. “The accident did it. Two people were killed, that was tragic, and she was paralyzed. They all could’ve died. I don’t understand how my wife could be so heartless, to see the accident as a good thing for her because it saved our marriage.”

  He stared at the letters lying on the table between them.

  Ilka had thought the same thing. Artie had told her how much the accident had affected her father. She couldn’t imagine his reaction when Maggie’s letters came, making it sound as if he’d done her a favor.

  Graham sat up and made a great effort to pull himself together. “I have no idea why she would blackmail Paul. We didn’t lack for anything, she didn’t need the extra money.” He seemed to feel he owed Ilka an explanation on behalf of his dead wife.

  “Maybe we’ll never find out.” Ilka saw no reason to mention how much his wife must have felt betrayed and rejected by his affair. “But the police will probably want to talk to you about this. They might ask if she was blackmailing someone else, who’d then have a motive to kill her.”

  “I always felt my wife was well liked and respected,” Graham mumbled. “She got along with people. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill her.”

  She let him think about it.

  “Are you saying it was a…a hit? You think she did something so bad that they came here to kill her?”

  Ilka had no answer for that. She asked him if he could think of anything that connected Maggie with her father. “Did they stay in touch after you and Mary Ann broke it off?”

  “Not that I know of, but if he’s the one who gave her this money, then they must have.”

  “Forget about the letters for a moment. Could your wife have been doing some sort of work for my father, that he paid her for? Decorations for the funeral home?”

  “Decorations!” He looked confused for a moment, then gestured for her to look around. “Does it look like we have a lot of decorations here? Maggie didn’t like knickknacks, why in the world would she make decorations for the funeral home?”

  “I’m just trying to find a logical explanation for why my father gave her so much money. And one reason could be that she did something for him.”

  “I didn’t hear her mention Paul Jensen one single time after what happened. I didn’t even know they knew each other. Just what are you thinking about?”

  “I’m not thinking of anything, really. Maybe your wife knew something about my father that made him willing to pay her off, even though he didn’t have much money. Did he do something wrong? What did she have on him?”

  “Well, the money was put in her account, that’s for sure,” he said, as if stating the obvious somehow helped make sense of it. “We had a joint account, but we kept separate accounts too. I kept my nose out of my wife’s money. I did get a letter from the bank two days after she died, and it surprised me how much money she had, I can tell you that. But she didn’t spend a lot, and we paid our regular expenses through the joint account. Besides, she earned a decent wage working for Dr. Vincent, so I didn’t think a thing about it. I guess I’d better give all these papers of hers to the police.”

  Graham ran his hand down his face and took a deep breath. “It’s just so strange. It’s a side of her I never saw. I can’t imagine what she knew about your dad, but the way it goes back to when everything happened with Mary Ann and me, now that makes me wonder. And the letters, it’s nothing she ever talked about. It’s just really confusing. She couldn’t talk about her work at the clinic, but as far as her private life goes, I can’t think of anything involving your dad.”

  His shoulders slumped, and Ilka waited until he looked over at her again. “Maybe I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did,” he said, his voice small now. “I wish I had some answers for you. I don’t know what to say.”

  “I understand, it’s okay. My problem is, I can’t stop thinking he might have been killed too.” She thought about her father’s urn and the bare mantel at Mary Ann’s house. She needed to find out where it was.

  “Could it really be true somebody came here to kill my wife?” Graham asked again, as if the idea was just now beginning to soak in. “They must have been keeping an eye on her. So they’d know she was alone when I went bowling. I need to talk to the police again. This changes everything.”

  Ilka stood up, and she wanted to grab hold of him, now that his world had been shaken for the second time in a very few days, but before she could make a move he held his hand out.

  “Thank you. I don’t know what my wife was involved in, but thanks for coming here and being honest with me. I can’t excuse anything she’s done, but I’m sorry if it caused problems for you and your dad.”

  On the way to the car, his last words hung in Ilka’s mind. Problems! Everything that happened seemed to cause problems that blasted her from every direction. But right now, one overshadowed all the others: her father’s ashes. Where were they?

  Ilka had just started the car when her phone rang.

  “Now don’t hang up!” her mother yelled. “We need to talk. You’re avoiding me, and I can understand if you feel ashamed. You can’t call Jette and ask for money and expect her not to tell me you called. What were you thinking? She’s not like your father, always going behind my back.”

  “Don’t start in on that again,” Ilka said. She’d had enough of everything being about her father’s mistakes. Michael Graham had said it very well, she thought. He’d let himself and his emotions get st
uck in the past, and he ended up overlooking what he’d had.

  “But I mean what I say.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry, it was a stupid thing to do. Of course she had to tell you. I was under a lot of pressure—I am under a lot of pressure. I’m in debt, and I don’t know how I’m going to get out of it. And unfortunately, you were right, I got pulled into this and I lost my head.”

  Immediately Ilka regretted what she’d said.

  “Oh no, honey!”

  Would a person really still call their forty-year-old daughter honey? Ilka thought.

  “Do you have enough money for the ticket home? I’ll buy it for you.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Ilka said. “I can’t just come home. I think Dad was murdered.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “I’m not convinced he died in his sleep. And in fact, I think he was doing what he could to be a decent human being.” She explained how the funeral home’s debt came from him helping a friend. “He didn’t gamble it all away.”

  She sensed her mother holding herself back.

  “It’s like these skeletons keep falling out of the closet. He was involved in a traffic accident many years ago; two people were killed, and his wife became an invalid. So the situation isn’t that simple. His life wasn’t exactly a bed of roses. And his wife had an affair once.”

  Ilka stopped; it was getting too complicated.

  “We’ll fly over to you. I’ll find out how soon we can leave.”

  “No! Don’t. I’m coming home. It’s all going to be okay, it’s just that it’s taking longer than I’d thought.”

  She couldn’t even begin to explain that she was going out to look for her father’s ashes.

  “But I’m worried about you being over there alone. Honestly, it sounds to me like your imagination is running away with you.”

  “Mom, I have to go.”

  “If Paul got himself mixed up in something, the police will have to take care of it. It’s not your problem.”