By the time our coffee and dessert had been served— peanut butter mousse with a chocolate cookie crust and caramelized banana—we were both sated and somewhat drowsy. But while the Canlis dining experience had taken center stage, the conversation was equally satisfying, and provocative. Kathy had spun a tale of gold and madams in detail for me, and quite a tale it was.
Kathy and Wilimena Copeland’s mother was one of two sisters born to Kathy’s grandparents. Kathy described her mother as a God-fearing Bible Belt woman, a staunch opponent of all things she considered sinful, including dancing, whiskey, gambling, reading anything except the scriptures, radio, newspapers, swearing, young couples being alone without an adult chaperone, and dozens of other perceived evils inherent in human beings.
“Sounds like a formidable lady,” I said.
“I suppose you could say that, Jess. To be truthful— and I hate speaking ill of the dead—she was a very difficult woman.”
“What about your father?” I asked.
“Dad was a quiet, meek man who didn’t dare cross my mother, although he did leave us when we were young teenagers.”
“That took courage on his part.”
“I suppose he’d had enough and decided to be free of her iron hand.” She paused, as though to summonthe will to add to her story. “He ran off with a young woman who’d arrived in town with a traveling carnival.”
“Oh, my.”
“She was a contortionist,” Kathy said. “She could twist herself into a human pretzel. That’s how she was billed: Christiana, the Human Pretzel.”
I couldn’t keep from erupting into laughter. “I must say,” I said, “your father seems to have gone to extremes when choosing a female companion.”
“To say the least. Anyway, his departure left Willie and me to deal with Mom on our own. She was fond of playing us off against each other, good sister versus bad sister, who was most loyal to her and lived by her principles and who wasn’t. Guess which one I was.”
“Let me see,” I said. “You were the good sister, at least as far as your mother was concerned.”
“That’s right,” Kathy said. “Willie was—well, Willie became more rebellious with each passing year. She seemed to go out of her way to upset our mother, which I never agreed with. I’m afraid it set us at each other’s throats.”
“How unfortunate.”
“But inevitable. Anyway, when Mom died, Willie and I forged a truce that has lasted to this day. It’s not that we see things eye to eye. Far from it. But the love we have for each other and the common background we share have conquered whatever animosity we had earlier.”
“Sibling rivalry resolved in an adult, mature way,” I said.
“Yes, and I’m glad we were able to do it.”
“What about your father?”
“I lost touch with him until he became ill. He’d married the pretzel and taken a job with the carnival as its bookkeeper. He came down with cancer. I knew it only because Willie told me. She’d sort of kept in touch with him, just a postcard now and then, which was more than I did. Anyway, I went to Kansas when he was dying in a hospice there and spent a few hours at his bedside.”
“What about the—?” I couldn’t help laughing again. “What about ‘the pretzel’?”
“She’d left Dad a number of years before he became ill. I never did meet her, although Willie did once.” Kathy started to giggle. “Willie said she looked more like a dying, tangled vine than a pretzel.”
“A colorful description,” I said. “Now, what about gold and this infamous madam you mentioned, Dolly Arthur?”
“Do you know, Jessica, that you are the only person in Cabot Cove I’ve ever told this to?”
“I’m flattered. Is it that sordid?”
“No, but I’ve always been embarrassed about my family.”
“Well, you shouldn’t be. We’re not responsible for how our parents and other relatives behave, or how they choose to live their lives.”
“I know.” After a deep sigh, she said, “Dolly Arthur was my aunt.”
“Arthur was her married name?”
“Her stage name.”
“She was an actress before going into the brothel business?”
“I don’t know. Maybe ‘stage name’ refers to her particular stage, her house of ill repute. Anyway, Dolly’s real name was Thelma Copeland.”
“Aha. The family connection. Did you have much contact with your aunt Dolly as you were growing up?”
“None! Absolutely none! My mother and her only sibling, Thelma, were as opposite as you could get.”
“I’d call that an understatement, Kathy. What about the gold?”
“When Mom died in the early seventies, she didn’t leave a will, and Willie took charge of settling the estate and disposing of Mom’s personal possessions. I was happy she volunteered. I wasn’t comfortable doing it. Willie claims she ran across some papers in Mom’s house that indicated to her that Aunt Thelma, aka Dolly, might have become the owner of a sizable amount of gold panned during the Alaskan gold rush.”
“Might have?” I repeated.
Kathy nodded and finished her coffee. “I never saw the papers to which Willie was referring because she lost them. Typical Wilimena, always losing things.”
“Including husbands,” I added as an editorial comment.
“Yes, them, too,” she agreed ruefully.
“When did your aunt Dolly die?” I asked.
“Thelma died in 1975. She’s buried in a cemetery in Ketchikan.”
“Let’s stick with her stage name, Dolly. It’ll help me keep things straight in my mind.”
“Okay.”
“Willie was a young woman when she took on the task of settling your mother’s estate,” I said.
“Yes, she was.”
“And she never found those papers again?”
“Never.” She slowly shook her head and smiled. “In a sense, it didn’t make any difference whether she found the papers or not. It made a good story, and—”
“And what?”
“I think that’s how she’s managed to attract so many husbands, Jessica. Here she is, beautiful and vivacious, and with the lure of an inheritance of gold from an Alaskan madam, who also happened to be her aunt. Is it cruel for me to think that?”
“Not at all. You may be right, but it doesn’t matter. You think she might have taken her trip to Alaska to try and find the gold?”
“It’s possible. With Wilimena, anything is possible.”
“Had she made previous trips to Alaska in search of the gold?” I asked.
“Years ago. She told me she never had sufficient documentation to make any headway. But then she sent me this shortly before taking her most recent trip.”
She pulled a note handwritten on perfumed pink stationery from her purse and handed it to me.
Voilà! Kathy, I think we are both about to become rich! Love,Willie.
“Intriguing,” I said, motioning to the server for the check. “It sounds as though that absent documentation might have surfaced. Tell you what, Kathy. Let’s pick up tomorrow where we’ve left off. Right now, my circadian rhythms are about to crash.”
Wide awake in my bed at the hotel, I tried desperately not to think of a young woman, her body twisted into a pretzel, her face somewhere in the tangle. In some of my visions, she even had salt on her.
Thankfully, fatigue won out and sleep finally arrived.
Chapter Two
The fair weather of the previous day in Seattle was only a memory when I awoke in my suite. A misty gray cloud had descended over the city, and the TV weatherman forecast more of the same for the next three days.
No matter. I’ve never been a traveler who complains about the weather, one of those people who consider a trip ruined if the sun doesn’t shine every day. Weather changes, and so must we to accommodate it.
Kathy and I met for breakfast in the hotel’s dining room. She carried a manila envelope.
“Sleep well?�
�� I asked.
“I certainly did. I didn’t think I would because of everything we talked about last night, but I fell right off. The book I was reading was still on my stomach when I woke up.”
“I slept well, too,” I said with a chuckle, “except I had trouble getting the pretzel woman out of my mind.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Speaking of pretzels, let’s order.”
After a hearty breakfast, I said, “Those receipts that Wilimena left in her stateroom—are any of them from Seattle?”
“Oh, sure. I separated them according to location.” She opened the envelope she’d brought along. “Here,” she said, handing me a batch of receipts neatly secured with a large red paper clip and placing others on the table. Receipts and notes from different cities were fastened with clips of varying colors. I went through the Seattle ones. According to the dates, Wilimena Copeland had spent two days in the city before catching her ship to Alaska. The top slip of paper caught my eye. It was from a shop specializing in items for personal security. Wilimena had purchased a stun gun for $79.95 and a Mace pepper spray device for $16.95.
“Looks like your sister was expecting trouble on her cruise,” I said. “Had she been known to carry such things before?”
“Not to my knowledge,” said Kathy.
“Maybe we should swing by this store and see if she might have said something about her trip, and why she thought she needed them. On second thought,” I said, flipping through the remaining receipts, “maybe we should check out all of these.”
After determining that the security shop was within walking distance of the hotel, we set out, eventually finding our destination in an industrial section of the city. The store windows were filled with exotic, state-of-the-art electronic gadgetry. The owner, a handsome, slender young man wearing a blue T-shirt, jeans, and a tan photojournalist’s vest, had just opened the store and was busy turning on lights and removing dust-coversfrom display cases. “Good morning, ladies,” he called out. “Be with you in a second.”
His opening routine completed, he came to where we stood and offered an engaging smile. “Hi. My name’s Bill. May I show you something specific? We just got in some new bags with hidden pockets. Very popular with women when they travel.”
“Actually,” I said, “we’re not here to buy anything.”
He adopted an exaggerated expression of disappointment. “Let’s see,” he said, “you’re here to arrest me.”
Kathy laughed. “Oh, no,” she said. “You see—”
“Just kidding,” he said. “You don’t look like the police, anyway. So, I can’t sell you anything. What can I do for you?”
I handed him the receipt. He perused it, then looked up and said, “You want to return one of the items. There’s something wrong with it?”
“No,” I said. “You see, my friend’s sister bought these items on the date indicated. She’s—well, she’s disappeared and we’re trying to find her.”
“Disappeared? That sounds serious.”
“Precisely,” I said. “I just thought you might remember her and what she said about her plans when she was here in your store.”
He handed the receipt back to me and shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t have any way to remember her from this receipt.”
“Show him Willie’s photo,” I said to Kathy, who pulled it from her pocket.
“Her name is Wilimena,” Kathy said, “but everyone calls her Willie.”
“Oh,” he said, his face brightening. “Her!”
“You remember her,” Kathy said.
“I sure do. She’s hard to forget. You don’t meet many women named Willie. You say she’s your sister?”
“Yes.”
“And she disappeared in Alaska?”
“You knew about Alaska?” I said. “She told you she was going there?”
Bill laughed. “She told me lots of things. She’s quite a talker.”
It was Kathy’s turn to laugh. “Willie is never at a loss for words,” she said.
“Did she say why she felt a need to buy these self-protection devices?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, she did,” Bill replied. “She started kidding about how women can’t be too careful these days with men hitting on them. I didn’t argue with her. I mean, she was—is—a nice-looking woman who I imagine gets lots of male attention. Whether she needed a stun gun and Mace is another question. But if she felt more secure having those things with her, who was I to question it? She also said she was heading for Alaska to stake her claim in a gold mine.”
“Gold mine?” I said.
“I think that’s what she said. Maybe it wasn’t a mine, but it had to do with gold.”
I mentally dismissed Wilimena’s claim that she needed the devices to stave off unwanted male attention and asked Bill to expand on what she might have said about the gold.
“All I recall,” he said, “was that she claimed there was some distant relative in Alaska who came into a potful of gold and that she was on her way to claim it. Is it true?”
“I don’t know,” Kathy replied. “I’m hoping that we’ll find out.”
“Anything else you can remember, Bill, that might help us?” I asked.
He shook his head and smiled. “No offense,” he said to Kathy, “but your sister is quite a flirt.”
“I didn’t know,” Kathy said, not altogether successful in keeping amusement out of her voice.
“Yeah,” Bill said. “She started coming on to me, even asked me to join her for a drink after I finished work. Ah—well, no offense, but she was a little old for me.” He looked at us to judge how offended we were. “I mean,” he quickly added, “she’s a very attractive woman and all but—”
“No need to explain,” I said. “And thank you for being so forthright. It’s been a help.”
He walked us to the door. “I hope you find her,” he said. “If you do, swing back by here with her and I’ll buy you all a drink.”
“We may just do that,” I said, silently adding to myself, if we find her.
Kathy and I stood outside the store and pondered our next move. Kathy had further arranged the receipts and notes left by Wilimena in order of their occurrence, with the earliest ones on top. Next in line was a receipt from an electronics store for a digital recorder and assorted add-ons.
“It’s a shame we don’t have it,” I said. “When you picked up her things from the cruise line, no one mentioned a recorder?”
“No. Willie sometimes carried one with her to make notes about her various trips. I suppose she intended to do the same on the cruise.”
“And probably did,” I suggested. “Let’s see what impression she left behind with this store owner.”
The gentleman at the electronics store was in his late fifties or early sixties, dressed in a gray suit, white shirt, and red tie, markedly more formal than is the norm in Seattle, a pleasantly relaxed and informal city. He seemed sincerely upset when we told him that Wilimena had disappeared. “What dreadful news,” he said. “I’m so sorry to hear it.”
Murder, She Wrote: Panning For Murder: Panning For Murder (Murder She Wrote) Page 3