Private Investigations

by Victoria Zackheim

  My house was my own. My nieces went back to their mom and started a new school year, both of them happy and safe. And I had a new life. I was in horrible debt, but I was in charge of my own decisions for the first time since Adam had moved into my life.

  The week before the New Year, I got a call from the girlfriend. She told me in shaky breaths that the police had come and arrested Adam under another name. Patrick hadn’t been his first name but his legal last name. The name he’d grown up with. He’d called his mother over Christmas, thinking that he’d mend fences with the offer of a grandchild. She’d turned him in. He’d broken parole, and since she had put up the bail money, she was in danger of losing her house.

  I went to the county courthouse and watched his arraignment. Gone was the swagger. He answered to a name I’d never heard. The man I’d lived with, had shared my life with, was gone. He’d never really existed.

  When they asked if anyone was available to pay his bail, he looked around the courthouse. I stood. His eyes lit, and for a minute, he looked like Adam again. My voice was strong as I responded, “Cold day in hell.”

  Then I walked out of the courtroom and down the marble steps into the frigid winter afternoon. I called my boyfriend and told him I’d gone to the courthouse. As I told him what had happened, what the charges were, and how I’d left the room, a calm came over me. It was over. For the first time in a year, I could breathe. Now I just needed to clean up the damage.

  Two years later, I got a summons. Adam/Patrick was trying to get custody of the child he’d fathered. I was being called as a character witness against him by the girlfriend. We’d never gotten along, and she’d pulled some pretty nasty crap on me, even after Adam was out of the picture, but the baby didn’t deserve to have a liar for a father. I agreed to testify on her side.

  I felt like an idiot sitting there, telling the courtroom how I’d been duped. How he’d spent my money, lied to me, lived in my home, all the while dating and sleeping with other women. After I’d told the story of that year, Adam/Patrick stood to cross-examine me. He was serving as his own attorney. He walked over to me, staring into my eyes. His new girlfriend looked at me as if I’d lied under oath to get back at him for leaving me. For not loving me like he loved her.

  He said that the girlfriend/baby mama had said he was abusive to her. That he’d hit her. He leaned against the banister separating us, and I scooted back in my chair. Then he asked the question: “In all the time we were together, did you ever see me hurt her?”

  I took a deep breath and answered honestly, “I’ve never seen you hit her, but I heard it through the wall. And I believe her.”

  “Why would you do that?” he challenged, his blue eyes narrowing.

  “Because you came into my bedroom and tried to choke me. You hurt me.”

  The courtroom got quiet as he stared at me. I had finally spoken up. I’d finally revealed what he’d done. He shook his head as if he was disappointed in me. “No further questions.”

  The judge excused me. As I passed by the baby mama’s lawyer, he held out his hand. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you for being brave.”

  I ran from the courthouse, wanting to be out of that city. Away from Adam (or whatever he wanted to call himself) and back home, where I could feel safe. I didn’t feel brave right then. I felt scared.

  As a mystery author, I enjoy writing the final scene. Where everything is back to right. Where the bad guy is in jail and justice has been served. In real life, this lovely sense of closure doesn’t always happen. We don’t always get to say the snappy comeback to the idiot who degrades us. Or put the bow on the ribbon shutting the box that we can now put away, knowing the pain is over. Many times, real people carry around the open box with their pain leaking into their lives. But in books? The good guy wins.

  I have been in a relationship where I’ve given up my power. The mystery of relationships teaches us that each couple’s truth is their own. But looking from the outside in, I’d never thought I’d be the one duped so completely.

  Adam had developed a completely different personality when he arrived in Idaho. His mystery was based on the good guy he thought he was, or wanted to be. At least, that was what I assumed was under all of the lies and deceit. But the more he fell into his new good-guy personality, the more lies he had to tell and the more he went back to his real personality. The one that didn’t care who he hurt. This was the mystery that came back to bite him when he let his guard down.

  Living with someone who believed that deception was a normal part of life made me trust less. The mystery of deception kept me from seeing the warning signs. I’d always wondered how women in bad relationships didn’t see the monster they were living with. Now, I know.

  What did I learn from this situation? That even when all is dark, there will be light. And that strong heroines learn to save themselves.

  THE LONG SHADOW OF WAR

  – Rhys Bowen –

  I THINK I WAS DESTINED TO WRITE ABOUT WORLD WAR II. It has haunted my subconscious for my entire life. After all, I was born into the middle of it, and I survived a near miss during a bombing raid in Essex, just outside London. While I was too young to remember details, my heart rate still quickens if I hear a siren wailing or see a searchlight strafing the sky. I do remember the matter-of-fact way everyone got on with it, did their duty, and didn’t panic.

  My father and my uncles all joined up, because it was their duty to do so, and were sent overseas. At home, we saved every scrap of paper, vegetable peelings for pig swill, and items of metal that could be used to build planes. We lived on a quarter pound of meat per person per week. And after the war ended, conditions were almost as grim for a long time. New clothes on ration, new furniture on ration, cars almost nonexistent. But people were cheerful. They didn’t have nervous breakdowns or rush to their shrinks. It was this “England expects” attitude that I wanted to recapture in any story I wrote. Of course, there were always a few people who didn’t feel this patriotic swelling of the heart and used the war to profit on the black market. They, too, were remembered when I wrote about those years.

  My father was away fighting in Egypt and later in Palestine. He did not see me until I was three. My uncles were in the navy and air force, and fortunately they all came home safely. So I was born into a world without men. What a shock when they reappeared!

  Long after the war, we were still feeling the effects in my home and throughout Britain. Food rationing continued until the 1950s. I remember tasting my first banana. What a disappointment! And I was old enough to remember when sweets came off ration. There was a run on the sweet shops, and they sold out in minutes. The hardships faced by a child!

  Every town had its bomb sites. You could not walk far without coming across the remains of a bombed building, the blackened shell of a burned-out church. And war memorials. Every village had its central memorial, often an obelisk etched with the names of the locals, boys and men, who hadn’t returned. I grew up conscious that a great war had been fought and that we had been victorious. We were the good guys!

  I’ve written about so much of this. But this isn’t about my novels; it’s about the mysteries of war—how I survived and moved forward with my life and how it still continues to impact me so many years later. I rather suspect that my biographers will say I had the perfect childhood for a writer. Being born in the middle of a war, I had all those memories, all those experiences. What they don’t know is that I was overprotected. Imagine being a child who never played with another child until you were three. My mother was a teacher and not allowed to quit her job, as there were not enough teachers. I was raised in isolation by my grandmother and my blind great-aunt, who was called Min by the family. (Yes, the Brits give family members silly nicknames. Her real name was Sarah Ann.) Min was a great storyteller and also a willing participant in my games of pretend. She was always the old witch/bad fairy/evil queen, and I was always the princess/good fairy. Can you imagine how magical it is to escape in
to the mystery world of fantasy when your country is being bombarded?

  When I wasn’t playing with Min, I amused myself. I longed for more human contact, a real playmate, as was evident in my need to invent an imaginary family. They were called the Gott family. Four sisters: Gorna Gott, Leur Gott, Goo Goo Gott, and Perambulator Gott. (You can see that I didn’t know what real children were called!) They had to do everything with me, from having their own places set at the dinner table to going on our shopping expeditions.

  And when I wasn’t playing with the Gott family, it was my grandmother’s button box that occupied me. Those buttons became families who rode around in matchbox cars, lay in matchbox beds in hospitals, or sat in rows in a matchbox school.

  My world was filled with wonder but also with change and uncertainty.

  After the war, we moved to a big, drafty house in the country. (To this day, my much younger brother and I both swear it was haunted.) Again, I was isolated from other children, and I continued my games of pretend adventures: circus star on my own trapeze and girl sleuth chasing down criminals as characters did in the books I was reading. An isolated child does a lot of reading to fend off the loneliness.

  I started off being attracted to reading mysteries because of their puzzles, their settings, adventures, the chase, and then the satisfaction of justice served at the end. As a young girl, I discovered the Famous Five: four children and a dog who went camping alone, discovered secrets in a smuggler’s cave, and apprehended criminals. Oh, how I longed to do that! Now I see how unrealistic they were. The burglars, or smugglers, or whoever they caught always came along quietly. In today’s world, children know that the bad guys would probably pull out a gun and shoot them all. So sad!

  As soon as I was allowed in the adult section of the library, my world changed, and so many mysteries… about mysteries!… were solved. That was where I met Agatha Christie, whose puzzles and settings attracted me to her books, pulled me into her world. Big country houses with a body or two. Sweet English villages with poison-pen writers. And such clever murders. How I could identify with them in my own drafty house and small village setting. They were my friends when we were healing from the war. They were also my gold standard for many years. Still are, actually.

  I grew up, went to college, and then went to work for the BBC in London as a studio manager in the drama department. I started writing my own radio and TV plays, some of which were actually produced by the BBC. I was lured down to Australia to work for ABC. I met my husband, married him, and came to California. That was when my thoughts turned to writing fiction. I established a successful career as a writer for children and young adults. Then one day it dawned on me: Why was I not writing what I liked to read? All this time I had read and devoured every mystery novel I could get my hands on. Why not try to write one?

  When I decided that I wanted to write mysteries, I created my own version of Agatha Christie. My sleuth was a Welsh police constable in the mountains of Snowdonia, where I had spent many happy hours as a child. I even called my village Llanfair, which means St. Mary’s, in homage to St. Mary Mead. Like Agatha, I had a cast of quirky villagers.

  By then I had paid my dues as a writer and found a publisher without much trouble, creating a series of cozy mysteries. But then, as the series progressed and I got to know my characters better, a darker element crept in. Real life, real problems began to be part of my stories. In one book, a Pakistani family takes over the local grocery store. The daughter becomes friendly with Evan and his wife, Bronwen, then comes to confide in them that she has overheard her parents discussing taking her back to Pakistan to marry her off to an older man. My editor was horrified when I turned in this manuscript. “You can’t say that,” she said. “It’s too inflammatory.”

  I told her it was happening all the time in Britain. Strict Muslim parents clash with their children, who have been raised as normal British teenagers. The girls are often tricked into going back to Pakistan—to a big family celebration—that turns out to be their wedding. Then they are stuck with no passport and no means of escape. I had to write about this. It was real, and the world needed to know. I assembled a whole stack of newspaper cuttings and presented them to my editor. “See,” I said. “This is happening all the time.” She allowed me to keep the plot thread and the parallel story of the girl’s brother being radicalized.

  It’s interesting to me how my work has evolved from storytelling for pure entertainment to a vehicle for social justice. I don’t mean that I’ve started to preach in my books. I still want to be first and foremost a storyteller. But as I become more familiar with the characters in my series, I start to see the bigger picture, the problems in their world, the injustices they may encounter. And I see the relevance to our modern world and the prejudices we still encounter. I want to make my readers see parallels to our current environment and maybe want to do something about our modern injustices.

  My theory is this: if I have created real characters, true to their time and place, then they have to be aware of the world around them. True events were happening at that moment and in that place. In the Molly Murphy books, set in New York City in the early 1900s, maybe there was an election, a snowstorm, a train crash. Events became part of the stories. Very early in the series, I realized that Molly couldn’t vote! Her best friends are passionate suffragists. Molly joins in a march and plans meetings, much to the disgust of her husband. Yes, this was fiction, but I had a responsibility to share with readers the unfair disadvantages to women. They needed to know that in New York state a woman had virtually no rights. She could not vote. She could own no property. She was the property of her husband, who could legally beat her as long as the stick was no thicker than his thumb. He could have her committed to an insane asylum with just his signature and that of one doctor. Think of how many annoying wives were disposed of in this way. Did you know that one of the signs of insanity was the reading of novels?

  And so my Molly Murphy became a champion of women’s rights. I hadn’t intended her to. It just happened. Another mystery: why so many of these terrible situations were kept secret. As a writer, I could help to change that.

  When I moved on to my Royal Spyness series, I looked forward to writing books that were pure fun. Light social commentary and jabs at the class system in Britain. A penniless minor royal in 1930s London trying to make her own way in a difficult world while being given annoying little tasks by the queen. However, as I wrote the books, I became more and more aware of the background conditions. The Great Depression meant many people were out of work, some still with injuries from the Great War. Soup kitchens were a common sight at major railway stations. Beggars on street corners. And of course, this contrasts sharply with the aristocrats whom Georgie meets: the Bertie Woosters of the world, drinking champagne out of slippers, spending winters in their yachts on the Med. Fictional characters, true, but they reflected a part of our world that few would ever know. A population essentially untouched by the horrors of war.

  And what about the struggle in Europe between communism and fascism? Europe was poised on a knife’s edge until fascism, in the persons of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, took control. But I could have no foreshadowing. My characters saw Hitler as a comical character, that funny little man with his mustache. After twelve books, we had not yet reached a time when we know that Germany is rearming. The second World War was coming inevitably closer, yet we lived as if everything were returning to normal.

  I was faced with a writer’s dilemma. As war came closer, I realized that there were many aspects of that history that could not be touched in what are considered comic novels. Could I send Georgie to Germany to rescue Jewish children? I couldn’t see how I could find any fun in that kind of situation, and thus my readers would be shocked to find a dark book had come into my series. But I was still dying to write about World War II, and the time had come to finally do what I had thought about for years.

  I believe that one of the reasons so many people seem to be
attracted to reading about that war is that it was the last time we had a clear sense of good versus evil. Every war, every confrontation we’ve had since then has been colored in shades of gray: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. During each conflict we have questioned whether we were doing the right thing by getting involved and sending young people into battle. Battles that were once between armies have turned into ugly skirmishes, rooftop snipers, civilian casualties. With World War II, everybody knew we must stop evil before it swallowed the world. Everybody was prepared to do his or her part, however small it was, and everybody had that great sense of purpose and togetherness. And of course, that period is full of so many good stories because it was a time of heightened emotions, of heart-wrenching good-byes, of ever-present danger. No corner of Europe was quite safe.

  In times like ours, when there is division, uncertainty, and terrorism, it is comforting to read about a period when we fought and the right side won. After 9/11, everything changed. We were no longer safe even at home. These new conflicts that we call war are so different. Perhaps that’s why we turn to books. When war comes to small English villages, disrupting peaceful lifestyles, and even quiet and simple people do great and noble deeds, take great risks, make great sacrifices, we can relate. We like to be reassured that in the end, good will triumph again.

  I always felt that I would write about the war but wasn’t sure what I could say that had not already been said a million times. Then, a few years ago, I got my first inspiration. I read that there had been British who had aided the Germans. Even more, a circle of British aristocrats who were pro-German and felt that we had a lot in common with the Germans. They were actually working behind the scenes to assist with the invasion. I was horrified. And embarrassed. I tried to understand their motivation and discovered that it was misguided but altruistic. Their feelings were that Britain could never win, and the longer we held out, the more of our historic buildings, even entire cities, would be destroyed. They felt that the Germans were so similar to us that we would have been treated fairly, especially because Hitler admired us. Utter rubbish! Were we not able to see the way that other occupied countries were treated?