by A W Hartoin
“Anybody older you can ask?”
“Let me think about it.”
Lefty topped off my wine and said, “What bothers me is that guy is living at Shady Glen.”
“Tank said he’s in a wheelchair,” I said.
“I know, but still.”
Clarence passed me the potatoes. They were so good I was going to split a seam. “What is Shady Glen?”
“A retirement village and it doesn’t come cheap,” said Lefty. “How does a jail bird afford that?”
“That,” I said, “is an excellent question.”
“Is it supplemented by the church?” Clarence asked. “I believe the diocese is very active.”
“Not Shady Glen. Private all the way. Tom Altemueller had his mother in there. He said it was almost six thousand a month.”
Irene whistled. “Stott must have family money.”
We’re always ending up at money.
“Mercy?” Clarence asked. “Did you think of something? Sister Miriam says you’re always thinking. She acts like it’s a bad thing, but it can’t be, can it?”
I patted her hand. “My thinking has a history of causing her a problem, but you’re right. I was thinking that money keeps coming up everywhere I turn.”
“How do you mean?” Lefty asked.
I told him about the pedophile angle with the church that we’d all but ruled out and that left money. Murder almost always came down to love or money. Serial killers were the rare exception. They killed for the pleasure of it.
“That’s it?” Clarence asked. “Just the church’s money?”
“It’s not…I don’t know. I just keep hearing it. Maggie was supposed to be meeting with my godmother to talk about donations and fundraising for St. Vincent’s, for starters.”
“Was that place in trouble financially?” asked Lefty.
“State budget cuts hurt them. There was never enough money,” I said.
“Anything else?” Irene asked.
“The first thing I heard about the land that Maggie was found on was that the family was wealthy. Tank talked about how much money he lost on the fires.”
“A bundle for certain.” Irene offered me more pie, but I couldn’t fit it in, no matter how much I wanted to.
“Thank you,” I said. “Also, the newspaper articles on the high school quoted how much money the project lost. I keep hearing about money. It’s probably not related, but I can’t help but notice.”
“The high school is a disaster,” said Irene. “Tank brought that up?”
“He did. You weren’t happy about the land being sold either?” I asked.
“We were not. Those Sniders. Always out for a buck.”
“Now Irene. That was the old generation. Robert Junior’s a good man and he’s making us proud.”
“He sold that land and he knew what it meant to the community,” said Irene.
“He probably needed money for his campaign.”
Our hostess got up and started cleaning. I recognized that reaction. Angry cleaning was something my mother specialized in. “That is ridiculous and you know it. We all saw Angela’s new BMW.”
“The woman can get a new car. It’s their money,” said Lefty.
“Their money? Vultures, the whole lot of them.”
Lefty drained his wine glass and explained that his feisty wife was not a fan of the Snider clan and for good reason, in my opinion. Having dealt with The Klinefeld Group, I knew that some things did not fade with time and, according to Lefty, St. Seb had a long memory.
Back during the Great Depression a lot of farmers struggled and went under when the banks called in their loans. The Snider family went in and offered just over what the farmers owed to sell their land to them instead of going into foreclosure. It was a terrible deal, but Irene’s grandparents took it because a little money was better than no money. The Sniders held that property and sold it later at a huge profit. The Sniders were a wealthy family to begin with and feeding on the farmers was seen as the worst kind of opportunism. They, also, went after friends and neighbors, repeating the pattern with store owners and even some houses in town were bought that way. Irene estimated that by the time the depression had ended during the war, the Sniders owned around forty percent of the property in and around St. Seb. They gave no money to charity or any church and were regularly seen wearing fur coats and driving brand new cars when everyone else was struggling to put food on the table and sending their sons off to work for the PWA after Roosevelt was elected.
“That wasn’t Robert Junior,” said Lefty. “It wasn’t even his father.”
Irene snapped her dish towel. “You think they’re different now?”
“I think he’s different.”
“How is he different?” Clarence sipped her wine. It would take two hours to drain that shot glass.
“Robert Junior is going to be president someday,” said Lefty. “He’s the change we need.”
Irene threw up her hands. “You drank the Kool-Aid. Robert Junior is no different.”
“He works for charity. He’s putting in his time in the State House.”
“A politician?” I asked.
“Yes, and a good one, too.” Lefty explained that Robert Junior was a lawyer that had been elected as a state representative and was now looking to move up to better things as the state attorney general. He was well-liked and had a good approval rating. But whatever Lefty said, Irene countered. She was biased, but her words had a ring of truth. Robert Snider Junior sounded like a guy who figured out how to be popular after losing his first election when he tried for alderman. Lefty admitted he changed his tune on some key things and managed to get into the House. It sounded to me like the property sale for the high school was a misfire, but Robert Junior was now popular enough that he didn’t care. From what both Irene and Lefty said, he wasn’t terribly bothered about the disapproval.
“So where’d the money come from originally?” I asked.
“Slaves,” said Irene.
Lefty slapped the table. “You don’t know that.”
She scowled at him. “They came from the South after the Civil War and were loaded. Where do you think it came from?”
“I don’t know.”
“It can’t be worse than slaves,” said Clarence, looking rather shaken by the conversation. I bet her homeschooling mom never talked about people using their neighbors to line their own pockets or politicians lying. Clarence was too sweet to have been exposed to more than the common cold.
“Well,” said Irene, “I guess bank robbery is better.”
“That was just a rumor,” said Lefty.
“Yes. I’m sure a mysterious aunt died and left them a fortune out of the blue.”
I took a drink and chuckled. “That’s straight out of a romance novel.”
“That’s what my great grandmother said they said. When the money got low, back in the day, old Daniel Snider went to visit this dying aunt in Decatur and came back with a suitcase full of cash.”
Clarence surprised me by drinking the rest of her shot glass and asking for more before saying, “Strange things do happen. Mercy was born in the Bled Mansion and nobody knows why.”
Lefty and Irene turned to me.
“Really?” Irene asked.
I shrugged. “It’s true. How did you know that, Clarence?”
The little nun blushed. “Sister Miriam told me.”
“She thinks it’s odd?”
“Oh, yes. She certainly does.”
Aunt Miriam had never mentioned that to me and she was a big mentioner. I’d never known her to hold back and she had a cordial, if somewhat restrained, relationship with The Girls. They were never tight like Myrtle and Millicent were with Grandad and my parents.
“I might have to ask her about that,” I said.
“Please don’t.”
“It’s not a secret.” Not that anyway.
Clarence clutched her shot glass. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t want to ca
use trouble for your family.”
“I can’t imagine you causing trouble,” said Irene. “And that Snider money isn’t just odd. It’s downright suspicious.”
“Why?” Clarence asked, glad for the change in subject.
“Because the weekend Daniel Snider was in Decatur just so happened to be the one and only bank robbery in the town’s history. Beat that, Lefty.”
“It’s coincidence. That’s all.”
“Oh, you think so?”
“I do.”
“Care to bet?” Irene asked.
Lefty rolled his eyes. “There’s no way of settling it. That happened over a hundred years ago.”
Irene pointed at me. “We have Mercy Watts at our table. I googled her. She’s not just some pretty face.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome. She’s a real detective. Her father is Tommy Watts. He worked for the FBI.”
“So the hell what?” Lefty asked. “She’s here about the nun. Why would she spend her time answering a question that has nothing to do with anything.”
They were about to really go at each other when I said, “Because I’m curious and this is the kind of thing my dad loves.”
“Really?” Lefty was aghast and more than a little bit worried. Losing a bet to Irene probably wasn’t something to be taken lightly.
Irene put her hands on her hips. “What can you do, Mercy?”
“I’ll make a call and see what my guy says about the Snider finances,” I said.
“That sounds like an invasion of privacy,” said Lefty.
“A little bit, but if you want to know, that’s how it goes.”
“I’m in,” said Irene.
“You would be,” he said. “You just hate the Sniders.”
“I don’t trust the Sniders. You didn’t grow up here. You don’t understand. There’s something off about them.”
“They’ve had their troubles like anyone else.”
Clarence leaned forward. “What troubles? Are they in need of counsel?”
“It was a long time ago now,” said Irene.
“Still bad,” said Lefty.
“Not for the reason you think.”
Fats walked in, dressed in fresh spandex, and looking like she might just have done five hundred sit-ups. “I have to hear this.”
Lefty and Irene told two versions of the same story. I suspected that was a reoccurring theme in their marriage.
The facts were simple. The interpretations were not.
In 1999, Robert Junior’s father was killed in a hunting accident. The Snider family went out turkey hunting as people did and Robert Snider, who wasn’t wearing safety orange, accidentally got shot and died just after the paramedics showed up on the scene.
That was Lefty’s version. A simple accident. Family tragedy. Nothing more.
Irene wasn’t so convinced. Robert Snider, according to her, was the family black sheep. He had a business degree, but couldn’t hold a job. He drank and had multiple accidents that the family paid to have swept under the rug. His wife was seen with bruises and the occasional black eye. She moved out a few times but was convinced to come back with what Irene described as bags of cash. The family bought Robert a car dealership that he ran into the ground and in the months before he died he was admitted to the hospital for what the family called exhaustion.
“He had a breakdown,” said Irene. “And it was a humdinger.”
“Dr. Johnson told me it was exhaustion,” said Lefty.
“He’s on the payroll. What do you expect? Mercy, do people get exhaustion or is that code for freaking crazy?”
“Irene!”
“He was in Walmart yelling that someone should just kill him because they were out of his favorite yogurt and started peeing in the front yard. Daily.”
Fats forked a piece of steamed broccoli and said, “I’m going with freaking crazy.”
“People have been known to work themselves into the ground,” I said. “It can have dire consequences.”
“There,” said Lefty triumphantly.
“Exhausted himself doing what?” Irene asked. “He didn’t work. His brother, James, had taken over the dealership. How hard is it to lift a bottle?”
They went around and around about the merits of crazy versus alcoholic or lazy or entitled. Robert was seen as guilty of pretty much every vice there was. I had a feeling Irene was right. Maybe the Snider family had a problem and they decided to solve it. It was coldblooded, but they sounded special to begin with.
My phone buzzed and I excused myself to answer it.
“I made it,” said Chuck.
“To the hospital?” I asked. “Just now?”
“Fifteen minutes ago. It was a nightmare. I’ve never seen roads that bad. I took a cruiser and slid off the road. I had to hitch rides with snowplows.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’ve had better days, but I’m fine.”
“Have you seen Uncle Morty?”
He paused. I don’t know if it was for effect, but he had me worried.
“Chuck?” I asked.
“He’s okay.”
“What did he do?”
What didn’t he do would’ve been the better question. So far, he’d tried to escape the ICU, pulled out his IV, yelled at everyone, and stolen three phones in ill-advised attempts to call Nikki in Greece. He didn’t know the number and kept calling 911.
“It gets worse,” said Chuck.
“Worse? He didn’t…hurt someone, did he?”
“He…cried when I walked in.”
I waited for the rest, but it wasn’t forthcoming. “And?”
“He cried, Mercy. Morty Van der Hoof cried. On me.”
“Well, he did have a heart attack and they’re talking about a procedure tomorrow. He’s probably terrified. I would be. Can I talk to him?”
“No. They shot him up with something. Thank God.”
“Okay. So it’s fine,” I said.
“It’s not fine. I can’t unsee that. I’m going to have to burn this shirt. It’s covered with snot and old man tears.”
“He’s not that old.”
“Missing the point, Mercy,” said Chuck.
“What is the point? You didn’t think it was so bad that my dad cried about my mother’s stroke.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“I didn’t see it.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’ll probably survive. I did.”
“Real sympathetic,” he said, sounding like a petulant little boy.
“I know. I really appreciate you going in this terrible storm, but some family had to be there.”
“It’s a good thing I love you like I do.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“I just realized that Morty is going to be my family forever,” he said.
“He has been since my uncle adopted you.”
Irene came over and gave me my newly filled wine glass and gave me a motherly look that I really needed.
“It’s different now,” said Chuck. “The family’s going to call me. Nobody calls me.”
“I call you,” I said.
“That makes it all worth it.”
“That’s a good man you’ve got there,” said Irene after I’d hung up.
“I think so,” I said.
“A girl like you needs a good man.”
“A girl like me?”
“You’re in the spotlight. All that press and it gets pretty nasty. Your father’s famous and you’ve got that face. You need a man that will have your back, not try to get in front.”
My eyes welled up. “He’s working on it.”
“Not easy?”
“He’s a police detective.”
Irene hugged. “Know where you are and it will be fine.”
“We’re figuring it out.”
“It takes work, even if you’re a bed and breakfast owner with a ghost that prefers your husband nine days a week.”
I wiped my eyes. “Elizabeth likes Lefty better?”
“Absolutely. Come in and have some dump cake. It cures the blues.”
“You just want me to call my guy and find out if Daniel Snider robbed that bank.”
“I wouldn’t say no.”
We laughed our way back into the kitchen to eat dump cake and watch Fats weigh her second course of steamed cabbage. It was the calm in the middle of the storm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THERE ARE BAD nights and then there are bad nights. That was a bad, bad night. It started off well-enough though. We did the dishes and curled up in front of the wood stove with more wine and chocolates. I say “we”, but it was everyone except Fats who decided that was the time to do her kickboxing routine. Clarence was fascinated by my bodyguard for two reasons. Firstly, because Fats could do the splits while standing on one foot. And second, that she thought it looked like a good activity for what she called her “Troublesome Trucks.” Little kids were a handful at the best of times and even the calmest ones needed to get out their endless energy. By the time we went to bed, Fats had devised a training regime that wasn’t totally insane and parents might like. It included a fifteen-minute stretch and warmup that should be able to drain the spazz out of the most active kid.
While Clarence and Fats talked kids, I messaged Spidermonkey about the Snider family and its dubious history. He questioned the wisdom of getting off on what he called a tangent, but I insisted. It wouldn’t take long and I was curious about the bank robbing theory. There was something appealing about getting dirt on a family that had been rubbing people’s noses in it for a hundred years.
I admit I probably wasn’t thinking straight. The wine and excellent food had dulled my senses. I actually called my dad for backup. Only a copious amount of wine could’ve gotten me to do that and it totally worked out. Dad was on the Sniders so hard. He started calling his old contacts at the FBI and we were off to the races. Literally. Dad against Spidermonkey. Both wanted to beat the other to the answer. I had to mute my phone to avoid the one-upmanship.
Dad did ask one question that rolled around in my mind long after I muted him. “How old was Robert when he died?”
I asked Irene and the answer was fifty-one and she said it with a good deal of scorn. Fifty-one was long past time to get your crap together and, for once, Lefty agreed. We left it at that and I had more wine. Through the talk of St. Seb’s many spectral occurrences and family stories that we shared, numbers, names, and dates kept coming back at me. Fifty-one. Twenty-three. 1999. 1965. Thirty-two. December third. December seventh. And the money. Always the money. Maggie. Stott. Dominic. Myrtle and Millicent. Robert Snider. Dr. Desarno. Kathleen Coulter. The bishop. Aunt Miriam. Chief Lucas. Barney Scheer. Janet Lee Fine. Tennessee. Kentucky and, of course, Kansas. It was a spiderweb with threads going every which way, but I couldn’t bring them together. I couldn’t see it.