Her mama and brother Tyrone were so proud of her the day she graduated from college. And then—in an utterly surprise move—she announced that she would come back to Endurance and take the police exam. Everyone said it would never happen—not a woman, and especially not a woman who was biracial. But she made it happen when she scored the highest total in the history of anyone who’d applied for the depart-ment—ever. And, laughing, she said she planned to come home to keep an eye on her mama. It was only a matter of time before she became the first Endurance female detective. She worked hard at calling me “Grace,” she thought, and she fit into our group right away. She teased us about our concerns when it came to children and grandchildren, and we teased her about the men in her life.
Storing her thoughts away so she could concentrate on getting across the highway, Grace jogged across the asphalt, slowed to a leisurely walk, and vowed that she would do whatever she could to help TJ get through this tough time and solve this murder.
CHAPTER TEN
* * *
Grace leaned back in her chair at the Endurance Register and tapped a pencil over and over against her lower lip. She stared at her three children in the photo on her desk but didn’t see their faces. Her two-year-old granddaughter, Natalie, stared back from a second frame. But Grace’s mind was not on her family. Her thoughts were back at the Shady Meadows Cemetery, contemplating a story Brenda had researched. Pictures Grace had taken of three graves—one set a little off from the other two—were etched in her brain. And now, back at her office, she examined Brenda’s story about the graves as well as the town’s history leading to those three deaths. It was almost as if the story of the fire that had killed these three people was a story that had also consumed Brenda.
And if I remember correctly, Grace thought, she said she was working on an exposé, something that would blow the lid off this town. Could it have something to do with this story of a fire that happened out in the country back in the late 1960s?
Fingering the pages of Brenda’s first draft, which lay on her desk, Grace had found it unique and enthralling. As she read Brenda’s words, she could see her sharp mind, pulling out entertaining and little-known facts about the town’s history. In the margins where Brenda had written questions and notes to herself, each pencil stroke was perfectly connected and beautifully scripted, as if Brenda had taken her time. Every so often Grace felt as if she could read Brenda’s thoughts—her points of indecision and her points of certainty. This writing was nothing like her stories in the newspaper that had angered half the town. Brenda had pondered the details—way too many details. This would take considerable condensing. But Brenda hadn’t finished so Grace wasn’t sure what her huge surprise was.
The first part of the draft about the town’s history didn’t have an overabundance of margin notes. When Grace got to the three cold-case files that Brenda had selected, she saw very few notes about the first two cases. They had happened long ago. But when she read about the third cold case—the fire story—Grace observed a multitude of notes, questions, and thoughts Brenda had written in her clear, concise hand.
Her cell phone broke the silence—“I Wanna Dance with Somebody”—it was Deb. She hit the “ignore” button and figured she’d call her later.
Before quitting for the day, Grace decided to reexamine her last few hours of work concerning the town’s early days. The village of Endurance was originally a tract of land created by Congress after the War of 1812. The first settlers had arrived from Ohio and erected some simple cabins, a church, a military stockade—and later—a dry goods store. During those early years, families journeyed to the town, fording rivers and streams, and plodding down footpaths to reach a place where they could establish new lives. The soil was rich, black loam, perfect for growing wheat, and the plain was still a vast sea of open land with prairie grass that shimmered in the wind, unchecked to the horizon. As time passed, farms became visible on the landscape, followed by a post office. I’ll bet they delivered no junk mail, Grace mused. She skipped over information about surveying and the public auction of lots.
More charming were some of the early settlers’ adventures and the archaic laws the city council enacted. She read with alarm about one or two Indian scares and some horrific winters when the snow and ice made life lonely, impossible, and isolated since they had no modern machinery to remove it. They used oxen to break the snow drifts. Many settlers’ surnames were identical to some of the modern-day townspeople, but then some other names she’d never heard. She examined the rolls of early voters—all men, of course—and she saw Blair, Morgan, Atwell, Woolsey, and Hargraw. Once the town of Endurance incorporated, the town council passed laws regarding public intoxication, tavern licenses, gambling, and curfews. No citizen was allowed to let “horses gallop or cows wander down the public streets.” No stores or taverns could be open on the Lord’s Day.
The mid-1800s also brought the railroad dashing across the land. More settlers followed, and the expanding town of Endurance was granted a state charter and was named the county seat. The tiny village of huddled houses and diminutive stores, perched on the edge of the wilderness, gradually evolved into an industrial town sustained by the produce of the agriculture industry. Besides agriculture, these businesses and factories revealed the needs of various decades: candle and wax works, a telegraph office, hardware stores, shoe makers and shoe menders, tailors and haberdashers, and barber shops. As time passed and new inventions altered the landscape of prairie life, some stores disappeared and others took their places.
Endurance built a school to accommodate the influx of women and the growth of families. Its first teachers were “the godly Misses Emma and Elizabeth Farley, daughters of the local Presbyterian minister.”
Grace sighed. She had so much more to work on in her story about the history of the town. She glanced at the calendar. It was only the twenty-third of June and she still had plenty of time to finish the background piece. Putting her pencil down, she rubbed her eyes, stood up, and gently flexed her legs. Did she eat lunch? She couldn’t remember. She had been going at this since ten a.m. and it was now almost three.
Glancing through Brenda’s notes brought back a sharp reminder of how smart her friend had been. Brenda had condensed lesser facts and bundled periods of time that were sure to intrigue her readers. Grace would shape them a bit more.
After a break and a cup of yogurt, Grace considered the three sets of cold-case files that Brenda had chosen. Apparently she had planned a piece on each of them. These were the stories that had led Grace on a fact-finding, photograph-generating tour of the burial ground south of town yesterday.
Shady Meadows Cemetery yielded some clear images of graves that held the remains of several residents in the three cold cases. The first cold case concerned a man named Swensen. Grace located his grave and took a snapshot. He had died “a lawbreaker” in 1926. Gustav Swensen sat in on a card game at Samuel Davies’s home, and the players indulged in “overflowing beer mugs—manufactured at the illegal still of one Boone Whitemore.” It was Prohibition, with laws that would have been applauded by the stern Presbyterian founders of the town.
Leaving the house two hours after midnight, Swensen was “gunned down by a single shot, rudely administered,” and his stash of $1,500 poker winnings disappeared into the night. Neither the killer nor the loot was ever found. Grace looked long and hard to find Swensen’s grave in one of the older parts of the cemetery among other Swensens, Ahlstroms, Engbergs, and Olofssons. My, Grace had thought as she positioned her camera to take several photos of Gustav Swensen’s grave, I didn’t realize we had such a Scandinavian presence in the early town. I’m sure he must be an ancestor of Nub—his horse couldn’t have been much slower than Nub’s car. Despite his sins, Gustav was ultimately allowed burial near his upstanding neighbors. I’ll bet that ruffled a few feathers.
Brenda’s second story was a case of embezzlement at a shaky local bank. In the 1930s when financial institutions hung on by thei
r fingertips, one Dooley O’Hara, an accountant at the First Bank of Endurance, embezzled most of the bank’s reserves, pulling them right out of the vault, once again “in the dead of night.” Just goes to prove what my mother always told my rebellious teenage self—that nothing good happens after eleven at night. Dooley was caught, tried, and convicted in ten minutes by disgruntled bank clients and neighbors. He was sent to the penitentiary in Lexington and the stolen money was never recovered. A few months later the bank crumbled under the economic weight of the times and the town had even more reason to despise him. O’Hara died in the penitentiary the following year, a stabbing victim. According to the local historian, Alfred Peters, “Numerous of the prison’s inmates were blood relatives to recently-made-penurious people in the town of Endurance.” O’Hara was buried in a grave at the prison since the town wasn’t interested in having him back, dead or alive.
Brenda had spent most of her time on the third cold case, perhaps because she had been alive when it occurred. These were the three graves Grace had found and photographed—two together and one a few feet away. A fire killed a husband, wife, and a young teenager they had taken into their home. Prior to that fatal fire, the town experienced a number of damaging fires, too many, Grace surmised, to be accidental. During 1964–1968, several fires were attributed to arson. The fire chief’s theory was that a pyromaniac was loose in Endurance. They never caught him. A whole block of the town burned down in 1964, destroying a bank, a clothing store, a doctor’s office, a pharmacy, and a shoe store. In 1966, two more houses went up in flames and the cause appeared to be electrical. The year 1967 brought two barn fires in the country that were total losses in both property and livestock, but so far Grace read of no human fatalities. Each of the fires happened at night.
That all changed in January 1968, when William and Terry Kessler were killed in a farmhouse fire, along with Nick Lawler, a teenage friend of the family. The three bodies were severely burned and they did not find the body of Ted Kessler, the teenage son of the family. It was widely believed that he had set the fire.
The fire chief’s theory at the time was that Ted Kessler was also responsible for the earlier fires. Whether his family discovered his role or he argued with them concerning something else, no one knew. The Kesslers had taken the Lawler kid into their home because their son Ted had befriended him at school. Nick came from a transient family whose parents were habitual drug and alcohol abusers, and Nick spent most of his time at the Kesslers’. Witnesses claimed the Kesslers felt sorry for him because the family was dirt poor and he was allegedly the favorite target of his parents’ abuse. The graves Grace photographed at the cemetery belonged to the Kessler parents and Lawler. Grace read in Brenda’s notes that the high school football coach had collected money from townspeople to erect a small stone over Nick Lawler’s grave.
I bet there are still people around who’d remember that fire, Grace thought. Let me think. She glanced back at Brenda’s dates from the obituary. Brenda would have been fourteen or fifteen at the time. Maybe she knew some of the principal players. With all of these margin notes perhaps she had formed a theory about this fire. It was never really cleared up since the Kessler boy disappeared.
Suddenly, Grace’s shoulders hurt and her eyes burned. She yawned, stretched her arms, and moved her head in circles to loosen her neck. She’d been at this paper-sorting all day. She collected Brenda’s pages scattered here and there across the table and the floor of the office. She hadn’t managed to read everything, but she had made good progress. Her focus was drawn to a piece of paper near the bottom of the Kessler stack. She hadn’t reached that pile yet. Brenda had sketched a face in black ink and written “E. A. Poe” next to it. It was a good likeness, thought Grace. Next to the face were several numbers and a huge question mark. What could she have meant by that?
Grace surveyed the two cardboard cartons on the floor near the filing cabinet, cold-case files about the fire at the Kessler house. While Brenda’s account was based on the newspaper stories at the time, she had also studied the contents of these boxes. Grace would need to look through them also to add more details to the story. The date of the fire was listed on the outside. Do I have enough energy left to look through those boxes? she wondered. Well, maybe I’ll sneak a peek inside.
She tore open the packing tape that Brenda or the police had resealed. Before that the boxes had stayed pristine for forty-some years. Pulling back the flaps, she still caught the suggestion of mustiness from the police department’s basement.
Inside each box was a diverse collection of objects and papers, along with a list of contents. Piled in no certain order were papers pertaining to the fire at the Kessler house. Many were sheer onionskin paper and some were carbon copies hunt-and-pecked on police typewriters long ago. Grace thumbed through them quickly, reminding herself that the 1960s did things differently compared to 2011. She saw the medical examiner’s reports, lab reports, witness interviews, meetings of a task force, detective reports—Oh, Sean Helmsley was the lead detective and he’s been gone quite a while—newspaper articles, some handwritten notes, more interviews, and some black-and-white photographs. Some were long-ago Polaroids that were simply decomposed gray blurs. Evidently they had set up a task force with detectives, state police, and crime scene investigators, but eventually it was disbanded. Hmm. Where had she seen those photos of the house burning and the fire department valiantly trying to save it? She couldn’t remember. Maybe it would come to her later. The deputy fire chief was Richard White. I must remember to check if he’s still around or deceased like Helmsley.
She reached down to the bottom of one of the boxes and found a few scraps of dark material and several small objects. Other objects were still in paper evidence bags with writing on the outside. Maybe these had come from the house after they had put out the last of the sparks and smoldering boards. Grace put the papers and objects back in the boxes, figuring she would study them more tomorrow. She didn’t feel up to the medical examiner’s reports or the old photos of the bodies yet.
She folded the flaps back together and pushed the boxes in the corner, determined to do battle with them tomorrow. Standing up, she suddenly realized that she had gone through all this evidence and it was about a fire. And I’m fine, she thought. My heart is not beating rapidly, and sweat is not pouring off my face, and I’m feeling no anxiety.
Grace heard a noise behind her. She turned and saw TJ Sweeney standing in the doorway.
“ ’Bout ready to end your day, I hope,” TJ said. “Guess retirement is rougher than I thought.”
“Yes. I’m bone-tired. Ready for a drink and some quiet conversation, or perhaps no conversation but instead the office sofa at home for a nap.”
“I’m on my way back to the police department, but thought I’d stop by and treat you to a little surprise.”
“Surprise?” She raised one eyebrow. “Please don’t tell me you’ve brought photos from the morgue or something else macabre.”
“Nah. Couldn’t actually bring the surprise. Had to drop it off at the department with a witness and have it videotaped. You know, all the typical routine police stuff. I’ll have to describe it. Remember the black book you left for me that the Shiveley woman who works here was trying to find? Well, it had a number of interesting initials and even a few names in it, along with abundant dollar signs. I questioned one of the people named and it was enough to give me a search warrant for Brenda’s lockbox, which was sealed when she died. No one’s been in it. Her brother figured he’d have to come back and settle her estate after probate and once we’d finished the investigation. Among other objects, you will not believe what we found.” She unfolded a piece of paper and laid it down on Grace’s desk.
Grace walked closer to her desk next to TJ, and she stared at the paper.
“Oh, my God! You have to be kidding!”
“Nope.”
On the paper in large, black marker letters, TJ had written:
“Evidence seized
from Brenda Norris’s lockbox with a search warrant: $270,000 in hundred-dollar bundles.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN:
RONDA
* * *
Ronda Burke slouched over her kitchen table, as snores came from her nose and saliva dried in a pool below her mouth. The only sound that competed with her nasal symphony was the slurping and teeth-grinding of her twenty-six-pound Bordeaux bulldog as he devoured the remains of a three-day-old pizza spoiling in the delivery box on the kitchen floor. It was next to the overflowing wastebasket. Spilling onto the table near Ronda’s head was a limitless pile of cigarette butts, both in and near an ashtray. These accompanied the seven empty Keystone cans lying on their sides on the Formica surface, three of them with large dents.
Her back door, which opened onto a long flight of stairs, contained a mail slot. A pile of junk mail and envelopes covered the floor under the mail slot, a few white envelopes peeking from underneath catalogues, brochures, and credit card applications. Next to the mail pile was the edge of a kitchen counter whose top was filled with dirty dishes, half-eaten pieces of food that were quickly acquiring mold, and an occasional fly that feasted on the remains of several meals. This was not the home Grace would have pictured while thinking of the woman who had watched her children so long ago.
The metallic sound of the mail slot opening and closing caused a stir in Ronda and an alteration in her snores. Slowly she opened her eyes, moaned, and closed them. She licked her dry lips, tasting the remains of last night’s nicotine. A few seconds later she opened them again, groaned, sat up cautiously, placed one hand on her throbbing head, and attempted to read her kitchen clock on the wall across the room.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God, what a night,” she said to no one but the bulldog. “Why does something that tastes so smooth going down have to make me feel so rotten?” Briefly, she wondered what day it was. She pushed herself up carefully from the chair, put her hand on the place where her head hurt, and lurched over closer to the clock. “Four-thirty. Can’t be night ’cause the sun’s still out.” Then she picked up her cell phone, pushed the button at the bottom, and watched it light up. “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s Thursday and I’m due at work in twenty minutes. Can’t call in sick again. Tully’d kill me.”
Three May Keep a Secret (An Endurance Mystery) Page 9