by CeeCee James
“It was a jewelry store burglary that went wrong.”
“I see. What brought questions about this case about?”
“So, I don’t know if you heard, but I’m the realtor, or at least the assistant, to a house for sale up in old town. The Valentine Manor?”
He folded his hands and rested them on his desk. He didn’t say anything but I could tell by the way he was studying me that he was interested.
My throat suddenly felt dry. I cleared it, and then coughed.
“Would you like some water?” he asked.
I nodded and he got up heavily. He lumbered over to a water fountain and filled a plastic cup. This he brought back and set in front of me.
I sipped it gratefully. “Thank you,” I said.
“You were saying?”
“I was doing some research and came across that crime. Did that person ever get caught? The one that got away?”
“Get caught?” He smirked at me. I wasn’t sure why, so I tried to clarify.
“Yeah, get caught. Like did he rob another jewelry store? Or did you find out who he was through video footage?”
“Camera footage wasn’t nearly as widely used as it is now, despite all those cop shows you might have seen on TV. We didn’t have dash cameras and body cams. Especially out here in these parts.” He rubbed the side of his nose. “We did however, lift a picture from the jewelry store surveillance.” He turned to his computer and started typing. After a minute, he spun the screen around to me.
A grainy, black-and-white photo of a man stared directly at the camera. He wasn’t young, like I expected. More like a man in his late forties. I was surprised at his age. I stared harder. He seemed vaguely familiar, in a weird way.
I looked back at Officer Benson. “Did you see him, personally? I mean, I know he shot at you guys.”
Suddenly, I blushed, realizing how stupid and insensitive I sounded. “Are you okay? Did it heal up?”
“Yeah, I healed up pretty well. You were asking if I caught him. Well, we did something that we thought would catch him, but it never panned out.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“We never released this information, but we were scouting the hospitals afterward. You see, Miss O’Neil. He didn’t just shoot us. I got him too.”
“You shot him?” I asked.
“Yeah. I did. He was running away, but it hit him in the leg.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“He should have showed up at a hospital. We searched everywhere in all the state’s counties but no one showed up.”
“What about like vet clinics?”
He snorted again. “You do watch a lot of movies, don’t you?”
“Well, I don’t know?” I answered, lamely.
“Vets don’t generally work on people without alerting us.”
“Maybe he took care of it himself.”
“Like with Grandma’s sewing kit?”
I was digging myself in deeper. The one thing I hated was to appear foolish, and I was edging dangerously close to that territory.
“Not a sewing kit, exactly,” I said. “But you know…”
“Poke the bullet out with a knife, douse it with alcohol and sew it up. Or maybe super glue it? That’s the newest rage, right?”
I kept quiet. Was I being ridiculous or was he being smug? I couldn’t tell.
He must have realized how he was coming across because his smile softened. “Aw, I’m sorry. I’m yanking your chain. You don’t deserve it. Seriously, I hit him with a nine mm and there ain’t no way he was going to be able to dig that one out at home.”
“So, what do you think happened to him?”
“I think he either has connections we don’t know about, or he ended up holed somewhere for a few days.”
“What if I have an idea where he holed up?”
“You think you can solve that cold case?”
I shrugged. “What about the skeleton discovered at the Valentine’s?”
“Listen, you want me to dig into that, you need to show me a connection between the robber and the Valentines. Right now I don’t have the time to track down every unidentified body that’s found to see if it’s from a burglary twelve years ago. But I’ll look into this, if you promise to see what you can learn on your end.”
My confusion still ensued. He rolled his eyes, obviously done with me. “Just tell me what the Valentine’s are saying about the skeleton. Keep me in the loop.” With that, he heaved his considerable bulk from the chair. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have an interrogation in room two.”
“Of course,” I said, standing as well. I followed him out to the hall, where he went to the left and I went to the right. I waved goodbye to the receptionist, who barely glanced up as I left.
Chapter 20
How in the world was I going to find a connection between the burglar and the Valentines?
I sat in my car, my head against the backrest. Two steps forward, one step back, I swear.
All right. I’ve got to move forward. What can I do from here?
I needed to find some more information about the Valentines. Surely they weren’t as mysterious as they seemed. Everyone has a past, after all. The microfilm at the library came to mind, and I decided it deserved a revisit.
Parking at the library this time wasn’t nearly so dramatic. It’s true, the bronze statue gave my heart another squeeze, but it didn’t evoke the tears of last time. I hurried in and found my way back to the same cabinets as yesterday.
All right, little Brookfield Gazette. Give me all you’ve got. I yanked open the cabinet and pushed through the film to the way back. I figured I needed to start around the 1930’s if I wanted to find birth announcements for their family.
The clock ticked in the background as I studied the microfilm. I started out enchanted at the old time news and ads. Look at the quaint medicines! But, as more and more time passed, I ignored everything except the word Valentine.
After a few more minutes—and a tiny giggle of triumph—I found the birth announcement for Gladys. She was a baby like the rest of us, diapers and all! I smiled bigger, thinking how she’d hate to be thought of that way.
The announcement was formal and flowery, with all the basic information you’d expect. I read it feeling like I won the lottery. In fact, my cheeks hurt from grinning.
After a bit more time, I also tracked down the announcements for both Charity, and Richard.
Everything was to be as expected. Except for one thing.
I couldn’t find anything for the baby.
That was beyond bizarre. I knew there’d been an infant. I’d seen the picture. Frustrated, I continued my search, paragraphs and frames of the film flashing on the screen. There was a birth announcement for Marla Springfield, from the Springfield restaurant which caught my attention, but nothing for the last Valentine baby.
I rubbed my forehead, where pressure building warned of a coming stress headache. I couldn’t believe it. I flipped forward a year , still nothing. Flipped to the next year. Nothing.
A tingling sensation twirled in my stomach. Something was up. To be thorough, I checked clear through the next twenty years. There were no more Valentine birth announcements.
I was about to give up when I found something else quite intriguing. Gladys’s formal ball. The announcement declared it was held at their house, and in the snobbish tone, it pontificated that all of Brookfield’s elite attended.
Well, la-di-da. I zoomed in on the picture. Framed in a dark background was a beautifully dressed Ms. Valentine with a quiet Mona Lisa’s smile so similar to her mom’s. Surrounding her were several young men dressed to the hilt. The photo had these words under it.
Brookfield’s most eligible bachelors take turns swinging a blushing Miss Valentine out on the dance floor.
I sat back in the library chair and blinked. With all of those eligible men, why hadn’t Gladys Valentine ever married? It seemed to me that back then there was a rush to get married
, with the title “old maid” applied to single woman who—by today’s standards—were still quite young.
It was hard for me to coincide the grumpy woman I knew now to the fresh-faced woman in the photo. She’d been so pretty. Her family quite rich. That sounded to me like all the right ingredients for men from miles around to come wooing. What on earth happened?
Come to think of it, Charity hadn’t married, either. My eyebrows flew up in shock. Nor Richard! How weird that all three—maybe four since I still hadn’t found any information on the baby—of the children had remained single.
Something had to have happened. I rubbed my temple again. It seemed the rabbit hole of the Valentine family was deeper than I realized.
Leaning forward, I scrolled through the end of the year. There was a wedding announcement for Marla Springfield and Kyle Murphy. My jaw dropped. Was that the Valentine’s Kyle? It had to be. The infamous Kyle…wow. Why hadn’t Marla mentioned the name of her husband when we talked at the restaurant?
The article listed the rest of the wedding party. I paused when I came to the maid of honor’s name; Gladys Valentine.
Well now. What have we here? Marla had said she’d had a falling out with Gladys. In fact, she said all of the Valentines had quit talking to her.
I kept scrolling. Later that month was an announcement congratulating the heroes who were leaving for Korea. Among those on the list were Richard Valentine and Kyle Murphy.
I was right. Marla had been married to that Kyle.
I remembered she said she filed for divorce while her husband was in Korea.
Last among the announcements was a notice of death for Elisabeth Valentine. I assumed that must have been Mrs. Valentine when I saw that she was survived by her children, Gladys, Charity and Richard, along with her husband.
Weird and weirder. There was no mention of a fourth child.
Who was that baby? There was no birth announcement and no death announcement for anyone else in the Valentine family.
I grabbed a pen and started doodling a list. Okay, what did I know about Kyle?
He was taken in by the Valentine’s because their father felt pity for him when his family died, but he turned out to be quite the mess.
He married Marla later and then she divorced him.
She called him a cheater.
Mrs. Crawford was still in touch with him.
I stared at the list as more pieces started tumbling around. Most notably, the fact that Marla and Gladys had a falling out in their friendship. I knew they had once been close, as evidenced by Gladys being in Marla’s wedding.
I gasped. I knew what had happened, and I knew who the baby was. Of course! Gladys must have had an affair with Kyle.
Which meant the baby was the son of Gladys Valentine and Kyle Murphy.
Back in the 50’s, having a child out of wedlock was a huge taboo. Families even sent their daughters away so that no one would know. As an elite family in the town, it would have been a secret the Valentines never would have wanted out. Especially since the baby had come from an affair. They would have been black listed from everything. They would have been ruined.
I remembered the scripture that had been highlighted with the picture of the baby. It had mentioned, “In sin did my mother conceive me.”
I guess that the original Mrs. Valentine must have tried to pass the baby off as hers. But when she died, the baby disappeared as well. Where did he go?
So far, I’ve found skeletons left and right in the Valentine family line, like people had warned me. But they weren’t helping me on identifying the real skeleton that I’d found in the bedroom.
I figured I’d email Officer Benson with what I learned, although at this point it felt more like gossip you’d hear at the local beauty parlor. Which made me think of Jan from the Post Office. Maybe I should visit her one more time. After all, I remembered how she liked to talk. Maybe if I came with some direct questions, she’d have something more to say.
I glanced at the clock and saw it was about fifteen minutes before five. Without another thought, I grabbed my purse and headed out of the library.
My brain spun my newly-learned facts around as I drove, like all those details were socks in the washing machine. I hoped Jan was working. It was nearly five when I found a parking spot right in front of the post office and squeezed my car in, then jumped out. I ran for the door just as Jan was coming with the keys.
“Hi!” I said breathlessly. “Is there any way I can get a book of stamps before you close?” Wow, I was becoming an expert at popping off these excuses.
She glanced at her watch, her dutch-boy haircut falling forward. “Sure, we have about five minutes. It’s been a slow as molasses kind of day so I was just going to flip the sign. But we still have time.”
Jan led me to the back. Her sensible shoes scraped against the linoleum. Squeak. Squeak. Squeak. I didn’t know how she could stand that noise all day. She went to her drawer and pulled out several books from a drawer and set them on the counter. “How many you need?” Her eyebrows raised with a look that said she’d seen people buy a plethora of stamps and nothing could surprise her.
“Oh,” I scrambled in my purse for my wallet. “One is fine.”
She sighed as she slid the unwanted books away. “So, how’s it going up at the Valentine Manor?” Her tone was casual and she looked through a pile of junk mail as if to highlight how uninterested she was.
I bit back a smile. So she wanted to do a little fishing for info, as well. That was good for me.
“It’s been okay.” I hesitated a second, before blurting, “I saw a couple pictures. One of Kyle and Richard in their uniforms."
“Mm.” She nodded. “Those two were trouble personified.”
“Really?” I asked, grabbing my stamps as an excuse to lean closer.
“Oh, you betcha. They were what we called Greasers back in the day. You have any idea what they were? Troublemakers for sure. Quite the little thieves.”
“Thieves, huh? Did they ever get caught?”
“Why do you think Mr. Valentine was in such a rush to get them into the military?”
“Sounds like they really did everything together. I bet you’re surprised Kyle never came back to see Richard. Has he ever been back?”
“They had a falling out,” Jan said. “Honestly, it’s no surprise. Kyle Murphy wasn’t ever close to anyone. Not even with his parents before they died. And then, when Marla divorced him, I suppose he didn’t have a reason to return.”
“Speaking of the family, I saw a picture of all of the Valentines together.” I hesitated, not sure how I was going to explain what I saw in the picture. “Interestingly, besides the three kids there was a baby as well.”
Her expression of interest dropped like a curtain. Suddenly, she seemed done with this conversation. “You be careful what that tells you right there.”
“Tell me what?” I asked. This was what I was waiting for.
She pushed back my debit card. “Anything else?”
“No, no that’s all.” I tried again with new bait. “Did you ever think it was weird that none of them have kids?”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, I mean…” I shrugged. Wasn’t it obvious? “None of the Valentine’s are married.”
“Honey, you don’t have to be married to have a baby.”
Oh, she was hovering over the hook! “But they seem so proper,” I teased out.
She shrugged. “There are rumors. Lots of rumors. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of them yet.”
This is what I was waiting for. I leaned in closer and tried to keep the look of eagerness from my face like I was a cat about to pounce on the canary. “What kinds of rumors?”
“Juicy ones. Ones you should know if you’re selling that house.”
“Juicy, like how?”
Jan shrugged. “Let’s just say, if there was a baby, maybe the baby disappeared right around the time Kyle did.”
“Was Gladys
the mom?” I whispered.
The bell above the door rang.
She glanced behind me and straightened. “Will there be anything else?”
I glanced behind me and saw a woman at the counter filling out a form. It looked like it would take her a minute. Surely Jan had time to answer my question? I looked back to see a stiff smile on Jan’s face. I was dismissed, no doubt about it.
What was it about this town keeping the Valentine’s secrets?
Chapter 21
“I have great news!” Kari squealed through the phone. “We have a buyer for the Valentine mansion!”
“That is great!” Was she serious! This house really was about to be in my rearview mirror after all!
“Well, the only problem is that I am completely booked for today. Do you feel comfortable enough to swing by the place and get the family to sign it? It’s completely cut and dried. The buyers didn’t ask for anything out of the contract. And when the Valentines have finished, put up the sale pending sign?”
I’d covered that aspect in my online realty class, and was beginning to get the feeling that Kari liked having an assistant. “Absolutely, I can do it. I guess you can just text me the details and...”
“Awesome, thanks! Everything you need will be on my desk.” And then there was a dial tone.
Okay, then.
Of course, it would happen right now. The movers had called and were finally showing up with my things this afternoon.
I was looking forward to my full wardrobe. I pulled the second outfit out of the bag that I’d bought the other day and got ready to go.
Tan slacks, a pastel pink camisole, and a cup of coffee in my hand later, I was out the door. I drove straight to the Flamingo Realty. No one was there, but Uncle Chris had given me the key. I walked inside and over to Kari’s desk where I found everything as expected. I glanced over the forms and saw that the buyer was a company called Diamond Enterprises. I typed the name into my browser on my phone, which came up with a site that said they provided “luxury condominiums and vacation rentals.”
I raised my eyebrows. It seemed like the small town’s fears of getting more traffic in the future were true.