The Big Book of Female Detectives

by The Big Book of Female Detectives (retail) (epub)

  “Beneath the Lilacs” was originally published in Women on the Case, edited by Sara Paretsky (New York, Delacorte, 1996).

  Beneath the Lilacs

  NEVADA BARR

  LILAC TREES, two in white, two in plum, and two in the palest lavender, had grown up as Gwen had grown. Now she was in her forties and the lilacs were higher than the eaves of the house. One of the plum-colored trees had died. Slash, piled shoulder-high, lay on the concrete between the garden and the alley. It had taken Gwen all morning to cut it down and haul the withered limbs out to where the garbage men might deign to take them.

  Digging out the last of the grasping roots, Gwen uncovered the bone. A museum curator, she knew a finger bone when she saw one. Letting her rump fall back on the freshly dug earth, she contemplated her find.

  The day was still and warm, a hint of the hard winter past making the fragile spring almost unbearably precious. Growing up in Minnesota, there’d been many days like this one. Payoff days, her mother called them. Days when you were paid in full for chilblains, dead batteries, frozen nose hairs.

  Here in the arbor behind her mother’s house in Minneapolis, two blocks from Lake Nokomis, Gwen had spent those days curled down in the fertile earth arranging tiny plastic soldiers on the rooted mounds beneath the lilacs and fighting glorious bloodless battles till the last Horatio fell heroically defending the last bridge.

  When had a real corpse come to join those of her phantom armies?

  An Indian, perhaps, buried before whites settled the area. A homesteader, laid to rest in a family plot long since forgotten, sold and resold till at length a city had crept over sod and sodbuster alike.

  Gwen looked up from the earth between her feet. Beyond the shade-dappling the sun shone with an unwavering intensity that by July would seem harsh. So close in winter’s shadow it was a promise of renewal and, so, eternal life. Every leaf, each blade of grass, was wreathed in light. Spring’s coronation.

  The glare was not so kind to man-made structures. Mullions in the many-paned bay window were peeling, white paint curling off in strips like sunburned flesh; a crack ran up the foundation where the water faucet poked through the cement; the little statue of the Virgin Mary listed drunkenly, attesting to a neglect Gwen’s mother would once have been incapable of.

  At some point during the twenty-six years Gwen had been gone, Madolyn Clear had gotten old. A pang of guilt and one sharper for opportunities lost cut through Gwen’s chest. She pulled up her knees and hugged them close.

  She had always thought of her mother as a rock, remaining unchanged as the oceans of life broke against her. For a little girl that brought with it a strong sense of security and not a little loneliness.

  A memory from childhood, a snapshot without cause or effect, rose in Gwen’s mind. She was very young, not more than two or three. It must have been around the time her father died, though there were no cerebral Polaroids of that. She was dressed in a T-shirt and underpants, her short hair molded into sleepy spikes. Mud mottled the carpet under her bare feet. One plump hand, fingers spread like a starfish, was pressed against her mother’s bedroom door at the top of the stairs. Inside she knew her mother was crying.

  Idly, Gwen wondered if she’d pushed open that door or stayed lonely and lost in the hallway. Probably the latter. There were no memories of seeing her mother cry. Not ever. Everybody cried. Madolyn must have felt safe only in private.

  Privacy, her mother’s one indulgence, was all but lost to her now. Since the stroke the sitting room had become her bedroom. The stairs effectively banning her from the rest of her house, she spent her days in the bay window, propped up in the hideous comfort of a hospital bed looking out on her garden.

  Light glittered off the windowpanes. Gwen couldn’t see inside, but she waved anyway.

  Her mother was no longer a poor woman. Money could buy cooks and nurses and therapists. Gwen had been asked to tend the garden. So much needed to be done with love and not just with a spade. Turned firmly out-of-doors, she nurtured the flowers with the tenderness she was forbidden to lavish on her mother.

  And a skeleton lay beneath the lilacs.

  Gwen wondered if she should tell her. “No shocks,” Dr. Korver had warned, but Gwen doubted a corpse would distress Madolyn. Pragmatism had soaked so deep into her mother’s bones it was sometimes hard to reconcile the woman as she was with the photos of her as a young bride, dripping with white after the wedding mass, decked in the ruffles and lace of her going-away suit.

  And, too, there was nothing awful about a skeleton so long and so quietly dead. Her mother might even be intrigued, delighted. Who wouldn’t be delighted to find a skeleton in the arbor? A story to dine out on for years to come. Still Gwen felt an odd reluctance to tell her. Perhaps it was simply a reluctance to move. The heady scent of the lilacs wrapped around her in a gauzy cloak. Like Dorothy in her poppy field, Gwen was paralyzed with the perfume.

  Wriggling her feet deeper in the warm soil, she watched the dirt cascade over the rolled cuffs of her trousers. The house had its ghosts, its lonely hallways, as all houses did, but not the arbor. Bootsies and Tippies and Pinky-Winkies lay interred in various corners and there were remembrances of skinned knees and broken arms and once she’d dislocated Ricky Harper’s little finger, but none of that marred the garden’s perfect peace. Despite Minnesota’s snows Gwen remembered it always sunny, always in bloom. As one remembers childhood.

  A second snapshot materialized. This one was captioned, a single line of dialogue in a familiar yet unnameable voice. Gwen was at the piano pretending to play. Her feet didn’t reach the floor; a dress in rustling pink frothed around her little bottom. On the high back of the old upright sat a yellow cat. His tail, fat as a striped sausage, switched down near the pages of music. The window to the garden was open and there was a faint pleasant sound of distant laughter.

  The voice wasn’t her mother’s—a neighbor lady probably. “At least now you can keep the house full of flowers,” she’d said. “Small blessings.”

  Gwen’s house in Pasadena, California, was always filled with flowers. Her first husband had been allergic to them and to her cats. After the divorce her mother said it wasn’t wise to completely trust a man who was allergic to cats. It meant they were part rat.

  “…now you can keep the house full of flowers. Small blessings.” Who had been allergic? Not Gwen, not her mother. Not you, Gwen thought, looking at the spectral finger beckoning amid the roots. At least not for a long time.

  Gwen seldom thought of the past. She and her mother didn’t discuss it by mutual if unspoken agreement. Yet here under the lilacs the past seemed to rise up from the earth as insistent and cloying as the scent of the blooms overhead.

  Coming home, Gwen thought, and her mother’s stroke proving a mortality neither wished to admit. Gwen’s age. She’d found herself getting in touch with old college friends, thinking fondly of reunions. The mad scrabble to grow up, to do and be and speak, was over and there was a desire to recapture the things undervalued in the rush to adulthood.

  Surely it had been more than a decade since she’d thought of Ricky Harper, though they’d dated in high school and he’d gotten even with her for dislocating his little finger by breaking her heart. Disasters of about equal magnitude.

  “Lit out,” Ricky had said. Gwen remembered the words clearly. He’d said it of her father, hence the damaged pinky.

  She turned her thoughts back to the bony pinky protruding from the rich black dirt.

  The strange and dreaming lethargy lifted and she rubbed her face like a woman coming out of a long sleep. A curator’s instincts reasserted themselves and she pulled off her mother’s gardening gloves—heavy white cotton decorated with apple-green sprigs. The kind old ladies wear. The hands that were exposed were starting to wrinkle, age spots beginning to form from so many years working out-of-doors, and Gwen smiled at her snobbery.
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br />   Kneeling over the bone, she carefully swept away the earth. Without access to a lab, she couldn’t tell how old the find was, but the knuckle was still intact. Bit by bit she removed the soil until wrist, thumb, and index finger were exposed. Probably it was nothing, still she felt excitement building. Anthropologists, even those who’ve long since left fieldwork, dream of finding a Lucy the way gamblers dream of the big jackpot.

  Several more minutes work raised Gwen’s hopes even further. On the third finger of the right hand—for it was a right hand—something glowed dull and coppery. Gwen allowed herself a snort of derision as images of Aztec gold and Ojibwa copper danced incongruously through her head.

  With great care, not as if the finger could still feel, but as if prying eyes might see and suddenly cry “Thief!” Gwen worked the ring free and polished the face of it clean with the tail of her shirt.

  1946. University of Minnesota.

  Modern dead; not history but murder.

  Panic clouded Gwen’s mind. Nausea threatened to rob her of her senses, and though she was sitting, she felt as if she would fall and clung to the sturdy trunk of a lilac.

  Numbers, clear and neat as arithmetic problems, clicked through her thoughts. In 1945 her parents were married and bought the house. One year later her father graduated from the University of Minnesota and went to work for the city.

  Without looking at it again, Gwen slipped the ring in her pocket and gently pushed dirt back over the bones.

  Cancer, her mother had said.

  “Lit out.”

  Never once had Gwen visited her father’s grave. Buried in Sioux Falls, her mother told her, in his hometown. Gwen had never been there. Madolyn was estranged from her husband’s family. Religious differences was how she explained it and, assuming they were Protestant, Gwen hadn’t asked again.

  Cards addressed to Gwen came at Christmas and on birthdays till she was out of school. Grandparents she’d never seen and did not mourn died while she worked on her doctorate at Stanford.

  Gwen eased up from the ground and started to brush the dirt from her trousers, but the effort proved too great. The forty feet to the back door stretched an impossible distance and she found herself shuffling along the walk, the noise of her dragging steps clogging her ears.

  As she passed through the front hall her mother called to her, but she pretended not to hear. Mud from the newly opened grave tracked the sage-green carpet of the upstairs hall and the snapshot came again: the little bare feet, the starfish hand, the mud, the weeping behind the closed door. Someone had tracked freshly dug earth upstairs that day as well.

  Gwen’s head swam and she stumbled the last few steps to collapse on Madolyn’s bed; hers now.

  She closed her eyes and would have closed her mind had she been able. Images chased each other around inside her skull like maddened ferrets. She imagined she could feel the weight of the ring in her pocket pressing on her thigh. Soon she would take it out, examine it again, but there was no hurry. An old photograph of her father had served as the springboard for the ten thousand daydreams of a lonely child. The ring was his. She’d memorized it along with the grain, the light, and the shadows of the photo.

  Anger plucked her from the bed like a giant hand, and in anger, she snatched up the phone. There was no statute of limitations on murder.

  Before the second ring she laid the receiver back in its cradle and sat down on the edge of the bed. Her knees were shaking too badly to support her.

  Lots of men must have graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1946. They would all wear the same ring. The corpse could have been a classmate of her father’s, a family friend.

  Buried in the backyard.

  A lover then; her mother took a lover, her father killed him then “lit out.” Or died of cancer as her mother said, taking his secret with him. Madolyn may not even have known of the murder. It could have taken place when she was out of town for some reason.

  Gwen felt herself calming down, her breathing leaving off the ragged pattern of tears. Hysteria was being replaced by a lifetime’s habit of rational thought. Explanations could be found. Truth was seldom more awful than one’s febrile imaginings. She smiled, if weakly, at the lurid picture she’d conjured of her mother wild-eyed and blood-spattered wielding Norman Bates’s knife.

  For several minutes Gwen sat, her feet flat on the floor, her back bowed, staring at the carpet and thinking nothing at all. Too many electrical impulses at once had short-circuited her brain. From below the sweet strains of Doris Day’s “Sentimental Journey” filtered up through the heater vents.

  Of course Gwen would have to pursue it. Letting sleeping skeletons lie was out of the question. Her mother was too fragile to confront, the police too abrasive. Not that the Minneapolis police weren’t as polite as midwestern myth would paint them, but there would be digging literally and figuratively. Strangers couldn’t be expected to take the time and energy that delicacy required.

  Again she picked up the phone. Grandmother and Granddad were dead, but Gwen assumed Sioux Falls still existed. Seven phone calls to the seven cemeteries and mausoleums didn’t turn up any Gerald Clear interred in 1950.

  Nausea returned. Gwen put her head between her knees. Her hands fell to the carpet like leaves and she found herself staring at the dirt-encrusted nails with morbid fascination as if they were the hands that buried the corpse, not the ones to unearth it after so many years.

  Pushing herself to her feet, she made her way toward the bathroom to wash. On the wall above the light switch was a small wooden cross adorned with a long-suffering silver Jesus. Clawing it down, she hurled it against the far wall. From downstairs her mother called: “Honey, are you okay?”

  “I’m okay, Ma,” Gwen shouted.

  “Come downstairs when you’re done.”

  Gwen turned on both taps to drown out her mother’s voice and watched the dirt from her hands sully the white porcelain of the old-fashioned sink.

  There was an uncle in Des Moines, she remembered. Once or twice as a child she’d seen him, but relations between him and her mother were strained. Gwen didn’t even know if he was still living. If so, he would be close to eighty.

  Her old bedroom had been converted to a study some years after she left home. Oblivious to the mess she made, or on some level relishing the release of destruction, Gwen turned it upside down searching for his address. She was almost disappointed when she found it fairly quickly under C in her mother’s well-ordered Rolodex.

  Lest thought rob her of courage, Gwen punched in his number not knowing what she would say if he should answer. When an old voice creaked “Hello,” she was momentarily stunned. At the third repetition, she found her tongue. “Uncle Daniel?”

  “This is Daniel Clear,” the man said with unconcealed annoyance.

  Gwen introduced herself in greater detail and the annoyance evaporated. She told him her mother had had a stroke. Daniel took that as the reason for the call and Gwen didn’t disabuse him of the notion. Had it not been for the skeleton, she wondered if she would have thought to inform him. Probably not.

  “Tell me about Dad,” she said when the preliminaries were behind them.

  Uncle Daniel didn’t find it an odd question and Gwen realized she’d been wanting to ask it for a long time. The romantic fog of perfect love her mother had generated around her father’s memory had ceased to be enough after Gwen’s own marriage failed in mutual acrimony.

  The picture Daniel painted of his little brother had grit, sand, and spice, and Gwen knew when this was over she would seek the old man out.

  Daniel remembered an altar boy, quick with his fists, hot-tempered, a favorite with the girls and the apple of his mother’s eye.

  His memories dwindled and he began wandering to second cousins and others Gwen neither knew nor cared about. She asked him why he—all of her father’s family—had bec
ome estranged from her mother.

  “It may seem like a little thing to a modern young lady like yourself,” he said. “But to us it wasn’t. It nearly killed your grandma. Your mother just went and buried him up in the cities. Never invited any of us to the funeral. Didn’t even tell us till it was all over.”

  Gwen sat in the wreck of the study and grasped at straws of justification. Hot-tempered, quick with his fists, a favorite with the girls. People didn’t kill without reason. Had her father cheated, been killed in a moment of passion? Had he beaten her mother? Was he killed to protect Gwen? Gwen had no memories of abuse, but people sometimes didn’t.

  The thought physically sickened her. A glimpse of herself, face half in shadow, hankie clutched to her eyes, on Oprah, leavened the horror with absurdity. Vaguely she remembered repressed memories, like chicken pox, were more or less age-specific. Mid-thirties rang a bell. She comforted herself with that.

  And the lies of True Love and her sainted father? Fairy tales to delight a little girl? Or to rewrite history for a shattered and disappointed woman? The crosses, the statues, mass and communion and confession: the ultimate hypocrisy or lifelong penance?

  The phone was still cradled on Gwen’s knees. With one hand she flipped through the Rolodex, then punched in the number for Dr. Korver’s office. In his seventies, he still ran a practice. Gwen pleaded emergency and because Annie, the receptionist, had known her since she was three years old, she was given an appointment.

  Compelled by some outdated formality that overtook her when she returned to childhood haunts, Gwen divested herself of jeans and slipped on a fitted rayon dress and flats. The short, graying hair got a few licks with a brush but, as always, it did what it did. Without saying good-bye to her mother, she lifted the car keys from the hook under the kitchen cupboard and slunk out the back door.

  Dr. Korver looked much as he had as long as Gwen could remember: bow tie, suspenders, a clean-shaven and age-defying baby face. His hair was white but was still so thick and lush, one could almost believe he had it bleached to reassure his older patients.