by K. K. Beck
“She died when I was a baby. Sixteen months. I’ve always been with my dad, and he doesn’t like to talk about her. Or her money.”
“Her money?” Jane heard herself say. It was disgusting. She was becoming obsessed with money. Or maybe she was finally waking up and smelling the coffee. Money was what made everything else fall into place.
“My mother was rich. For about a week. She came into a big inheritance on her twenty-first birthday. Just before she died.” Leonora looked up from her tea. “I need that money now. I need it to go to Juilliard. My teacher at school says I might be good enough. Maybe not Juilliard, but somewhere good. He can, like, arrange an audition. But I can’t do it without money.”
“What happened to it?” said Jane, wondering if Kenny had somehow frittered it away on sprout sandwiches and sandalwood incense.
“My mother gave it away. She had known it was coming ever since she was about fifteen. But by the time it arrived, she was mixed up with this cult, and gave it all to them. She and Dad were like hippies. Her parents disowned her, but she always knew she’d be getting this money from her grandmother.”
That knowledge, thought Jane, would have made it easier for Leonora’s mother to kick back and groove.
“Then, she got totally involved with the Fellowship.”
“The Fellowship?”
“Yeah.” Leonora laughed a little bitterly. “The Fellowship of the Flame. Sounds really dumb, huh?”
“Yeah,” Jane agreed with a sigh. She wondered what anyone could do after all these years. Presumably, the transaction was completely legal. “Did your dad try to get the money back?”
“No. He thought about it. A few years ago, he told Calvin Mason about it, but Cal said it would be too hard. For one thing, Mom and Dad weren’t really married. They went through some ceremony on a mountaintop somewhere. I’m the one who should have inherited.
“And, after all these years, we don’t even know if these people exist, or who they were. But Dad’s always said it was fraud. They got that money from her with a lot of lies. They made her kind of crazy.
“Mom’s parents, my grandparents, they tried to get it back. They couldn’t even find the Fellowship of the Flame. They were like a supersecret group. It was back a long time ago. Sixteen years.”
“How did she die?” said Jane, imagining a drug overdose.
“She drowned. They found her in Lake Union.”
Jane was silent for a moment. It sounded hopeless all right. And it sounded like a wrong that needed to be righted. The Fellowship of the Flame, whatever it was, sounded unworthy. The name alone—slightly reminiscent of some boys’ adventure book of an earlier era—was suspect. It also sounded harsher than other mushy cults.
“How much money did they get?” Jane asked.
“A quarter of a million dollars,” said Leonora.
“God. That was a lot of money back then. It still is.”
“I know. I could have enough to go to Juilliard and still not worry about Dad when I was gone.”
“How old is your father?” Jane asked sharply.
“Forty-one,” said Leonora.
“Well, he’s old enough to take care of himself,” she said. “You have to start thinking about your own life.”
Leonora sighed. “He can’t really take care of himself. He can’t handle anything. He’s just an old sixties person. If I went off and tried to put myself through school, who knows what would happen to him.”
“What about your grandparents? You said they tried to get your mother’s money. Don’t they have some money? Couldn’t they help you get to Juilliard?”
“They haven’t seen me since I was a baby. They’re kind of nuts, to tell you the truth. They hate Dad. They blame him for everything that happened to her. They act like he’s after their money, or something. Dad says we don’t need them. And Dad blames them for the way my mom turned out. She started going to shrinks when she was about thirteen. I guess she was just really screwed up.”
Leonora’s eyes, thought Jane, were too old for her face. They had a steely, resigned, wary glint to them, a knowing look too mature for a young girl.
“How old are you, Leonora?”
“Seventeen. I’m a senior at Roosevelt.”
“Really? That’s where I went to high school.” About the time this girl’s parents were running around in a psychedelic VW van somewhere, she thought. It occurred to Jane that they were a little out of it. The summer of love had already become history sixteen years ago.
“Listen,” said Leonora now, standing and thrusting her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “This is really dumb. There’s nothing you can do. I know that. It’s just that, after I heard what you said at Cal’s office, I thought maybe . . .”
Were there the seeds of a suitably hopeless case here? Would the board care about Leonora’s ambitions or about what her silly mother did sixteen years ago? All her life, Jane had made decisions based on two simple criteria. Was the situation interesting, and were the people involved likable? Lately, she’d been wondering if she wouldn’t have been better off if she’d made choices based on more cold-blooded logic. She was curious about Leonora’s mother and the Fellowship of the Flame, and she liked Leonora. She felt attracted to the situation, but she promised herself to get out fast if the case didn’t shape up as suitably hopeless. After all, this was business, and Jane had decided that now, more than ever, was a time to be businesslike.
“Let me see what I can do,” said Jane, after a pause. “I suppose the way to start is to get as much background as possible. I’d better talk to people who knew your mother, like your father and your grandparents. Maybe we can find out where your money went. It might be all gone and irretrievable.”
She reached over and patted the girl’s hand. “If it is, we have to think of another way to finance your musical education.” Why had she said that? She reminded herself that her job was to find a hopeless case, not get bogged down in other people’s problems.
“I don’t think my mom was a bad person,” said Leonora, a little defensively. “Just confused.”
• • •
Two days later, Jane sat on the sofa at Kenny and Leonora’s house, looking at a photograph of Leonora’s mother. She didn’t look confused, thought Jane, so much as she looked too open. A wide, broad-planed, slightly foolish face, with Leonora’s eyes. The expression in them, though, was entirely different. There was no wariness there. They were big pale eyes with a fanatic’s glaze to them. Her hair, dark like Leonora’s, was parted in the middle and hung straight down to her shoulders. It was a studio portrait, with shadowy lighting. Leonora’s mother wore a black sweater and pearls. It looked like a yearbook picture.
“That’s what Linda looked like in high school,” said Kenny uncomfortably. “That’s what she looked like when I met her.” He glanced quickly over at his daughter, as if to gauge her pain. Leonora was examining the picture coolly, dark brows knit together in concentration.
Leonora had called earlier that morning and asked Jane to come and talk to her and to her father. “I made him see,” she had said, “that it’s time to deal with this.”
• • •
A small lake a little north of downtown Seattle, Lake Union was fringed by festive houseboats, sailboat moorages, maritime businesses, boatyards, wharves, and restaurants with views of the water and seafood on the menu. It was also, thought Jane with a shiver, where Leonora’s mother had been drowned.
Kenny and Leonora lived on the east side of the lake, up a few blocks from the water’s edge, in a little house on a dead-end street; the house looked like a neglected turn-of-the-century beach cottage.
The stand of bamboo separating it from the street gave it a bohemian look, and inside it was full of rough-hewn furniture and clutter.
Even though it was summer, and there was no fire in the cast-iron stove, there was a smoky tang to the air, and a dark, closed feeling from the weathered, silvery wood that lined the interior.
Kenny had produced a box, and from it, he was handing her, one by one, pictures and documents.
“I was going to save this stuff until Leonora was grown up,” he said. “But I guess she is grown up. Pretty much, anyway.”
There were more pictures. Leonora’s mother and Kenny on their wedding day, he in a pirate’s blouse and flared velvet trousers, she in a dress put together with yards of sheer muslin and elastic at arms and wrists. There were rhododendron blossoms in her hair.
“But it wasn’t a legal marriage?” said Jane, thinking of her own wedding a few years later in Paris. She had worn a beige silk dress and a straw hat, and they had had lunch afterward at the Ritz with about ten friends, before leaving for Rio where she met the numerous da Silva’s and learned the samba. She smiled nostalgically.
“Well sort of,” said Kenny. “Linda and I had this friend do it. He was a Universal Life minister, I mean he sent away for the license to perform marriages and all that. But he never signed a certificate or anything, and he kind of disappeared. In fact, we never saw him after the ceremony. His name was Carrot. I don’t know why.”
Leonora rolled her eyes. As well she might, thought Jane. She was willing to bet money that the ceremony had included quotations from Kahlil Gibran, vows including bail-out clauses and woozy pledges of devotion long on metaphor and short on taste.
There were a few more pictures, Linda in jeans and a peasant blouse curled up on a sofa with a cat, staring into the camera. Linda from the waist up, her arms around a group of friends, tilting her head back laughing, in a sylvan setting. Everybody was nude. Much easier to spontaneously shed your clothes out in the woods when you were in your twenties, thought Jane. Linda had pretty breasts and smooth skin, with the long dark hair running over her shoulders like veiling.
“There were these things, too,” said Kenny. “Her notebooks.” Jane accepted the spiral notebooks in bright colors, and opened one of them. I feel so close to the heart of the universe, she read.
When I walk in bare feet across the grass, it’s as if the grass itself were growing up into the soles of my feet. All living things are connected, and I know it with my whole self, not just with my linear little brain—the weakest part of us.
Jane’s own youthful journal had been much different. I’ve got to get out of Seattle, she had written, with a row of exclamation points. And meet some really exciting people.
“May I borrow these?” Jane asked. “They might help.”
“Just what is it you’re doing, anyway?” Kenny said gently. “Leonora says you want to help her get her money back. I don’t see how you can do that.”
“I don't know either,” said Jane. “But I want to look into it for you.”
“Why?” said Kenny.
“It’s my job,” said Jane, managing to put conviction into her voice.
Anybody else but Kenny might have said, “Get a real job,” at this point, but he just nodded and said, “I have to tell you, those Fellowship guys were pretty scary. Evil. They were actually evil. They’d plugged right into the dark side, you know?”
“I know,” said Jane. “I believe in evil.” She savored the snobbish thought that her own belief was founded on more sophisticated theological principles than Kenny’s, who apparently had developed a cosmic view based on the outer space movies of George Lucas. A lot of the evil Jane believed in sprung from passivity and foolishness and sloppy thinking, but it had blossomed into full-blown evil and taken on a life of its own nevertheless. “Tell me what you know about them.”
“They were everything Linda was looking for. That was the horrible part.” He sighed. “And then, they killed her.”
“Drove her to suicide?” said Jane, darting a look at Leonora.
“No,” said Kenny, shifting uncomfortably. “I think they killed the person she was. After the Fellowship, Linda became a stranger to me.”
Jane didn’t believe him. Or rather, she did believe his first, spontaneous statement before he’d backtracked. Kenny, she felt, really did think his wife had been killed.
Chapter 7
What exactly did happen to Linda?” Jane asked.
“I don’t know. She drowned. They found her body. Floating.” He glanced over at Leonora. “I had to identify the body.”
They were all silent for a moment.
“I tried to stop her,” he said. There was a defensive edge to his voice. “I tried to get her away from those people but I couldn’t reason with her. You see, at first, they seemed okay. She hadn’t been happy. She had never been happy, and they seemed to be helping her get centered.
“But then she got weirder and weirder. She kept secrets from me. She told me I wasn’t spiritual enough to be told the secrets of the universe.”
“I don’t understand,” said Jane. “You think if you’d been able to get her away from the cult she wouldn’t have died?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Do you think she killed herself?”
“No. She was happier right before she drowned than she’d ever been. She acted like she had all the answers. She was smug, I guess you’d say.”
“So you think her death was an accident?”
“It must have been. But it’s hard to believe. You see, Linda hated the water. Why was she even there? She couldn’t swim.”
“I never knew that,” said Leonora.
“If you don’t believe it was suicide or an accident, then you must think it was murder,” said Jane.
“There weren’t any marks on her,” said Kenny. “The death certificate said accidental drowning.”
“Did you ever wonder if it was murder?” said Jane.
“Of course I did,” said Kenny angrily. “But what could I prove? I talked to the police about it at the time. They told me I wasn’t her next of kin, because we weren’t really married.”
“I don’t see what that would have to do with it,” said Jane.
“You didn’t find out?” said Leonora. “She was my mother, and you didn’t find out?”
“Hey, I did what I could, okay? The police weren’t interested.” Jane thought he sounded ashamed.
“She was my mother,” Leonora repeated. The girl had more control than most adults. She barely raised her voice. Jane waited for an adolescent outburst but it never came. Leonora just stared at him with what seemed like resignation.
Jane wanted to know more. She decided to press on, hoping that using a matter-of-fact, uncritical tone would keep Kenny’s defenses at bay. “What made you think she was murdered?” And why hadn’t he pursued it? Jane tried to imagine him talking to the police. Back then, the cops had crewcuts, and the young people had long hair and mustaches. Now it was the other way around. There was a lot of animosity back then, too, between cops and hippies. And she doubted Kenny would have made a good impression. It occurred to Jane that the police, if they suspected murder, might even have considered him a suspect. Weren’t spouses, legal or otherwise, the usual suspects?
“Nothing specific made me think it was murder,” Kenny said. “That’s it, don’t you see? I didn’t have anything to go on, really.” The edge of shame still clung to his voice, and he glanced over at his daughter. She had turned away from him, and Jane saw her in profile, her jaw clenched tight, her pale face like a mask.
“There must have been something,” said Jane. “Something that made you think she was killed.”
“No one ever knew what happened during the last hours of her life. I never found out and I don’t think I ever will. There’s no point going into it now.”
He leaned back and pushed his hair off his forehead. He had reddish, freckled skin and springy gingery hair with gray running through it.
Leonora turned back to look at her father. “I didn’t know she didn’t like the water,” she said, slightly accusing. “There’s a lot I don’t know about her.”
“I don’t think I knew much about her myself,” he said. The edge had gone from his voice. Now he just sounded tired. “We were in love. We hat
ed our parents. We wanted to be free.” He closed his eyes and tipped his head back, resting it against the top of the sofa. “If you want to know the truth, she could have been anybody.”
Except, you fool, she was the mother of your daughter, Jane thought. There was entirely too much unfinished business here. “I’d like to start with the family,” she said decisively, plunging on ahead, even though she wondered how wise it was to commit herself to a full-fledged investigation. “Her parents. Any siblings. Can you give me their names?”
• • •
It was too easy to say no on the phone, so Jane drove over to Bellevue. Once a small town with strawberry fields across the lake from Seattle, it was now a sprawling suburb with its own high-rises and four lanes of traffic snarled between downtown malls.
The house was easy enough to find. Jane pulled up next to the driveway. The mailbox sat on a rigid length of chain, the links welded together so they curved up like a snake charmer’s cobra, a rather heavy-handed sight gag. The name was stenciled neatly on the box: DONNELLY.
The house was of postwar vintage, a low roman brick rambler, partially concealed by thirty years’ worth of landscaping: prickly pyracanthus along the fence, lots of rhododendrons and camellias, a clump of birches. Everything was overpruned—the hedges too square, the tree limbs too short for the thickness of their trunks.
She walked up the drive. It seemed less intrusive than parking right in front of the door. She’d worn her Chanel suit and low-heeled shoes, so she’d look like a respectable young Bellevue matron.
Mrs. Donnelly answered the door.
Jane gave her a friendly smile. “Mrs. Donnelly?”
“Yes?” said the woman a little nervously. Mrs. Donnelly looked like someone who’d just had a magazine makeover. She was wearing an expensive, gaudy sweater, hand-knit and encrusted with orange butterflies embroidered in angora and outlined with black sequins. Her black trousers were probably wool gabardine but managed somehow to look like polyester. Her frosted blond hair was tightly permed. Her fingernails (probably acrylic) and mouth were exactly the same shade of orange as the sweater. But beneath the gloss, Mrs. Donnelly had a tired, worn little face out of a Depression-era photograph. It was the face of someone in a limp housedress and dirty scuff slippers.