The curtain moved as they parked in front of number 15, a medium-sized, puke-colored trailer as rundown and sad as the others, except for the painting that covered about a third of the side. An artist with a good eye had depicted a crystal-blue lake surrounded by lush green grass and trees, towering mountains and a cloudless deep-blue summer sky. Two sagging lawn chairs faced the painting, as if one could escape from the drabness of the Hope Falls Trailer Park by staring at the picture.
A short, pear-shaped woman with too much makeup and bleached-blond hair teased into an old-fashioned beehive appeared at the screen door. She reminded Corelli of a colorful Humpty-Dumpty, dressed in a huge bright blue, red, and yellow T-shirt that drew one’s gaze to her rotund upper body and bright blue leggings that emphasized the thinness of her legs.
“Hi there,” she said, reaching up to tuck some loose hair into the mound. “I’m Theresa. Y’all must be those New York detectives.” She tittered. “We weren’t expecting girls, but y’all come in anyway.”
A man popped up off the sofa as they moved past her into the room. The resemblance to Connie Winter was striking. He had the same pasty coloring, red-brown hair, jowls, and small brown eyes.
“Hon, these ladies are Detectives, um, Corell and Parks. Did I get that right, girls? This here is John.”
Corelli and Parker handed each of them a card. “Actually, I’m Detective Corelli and this is Detective Parker.”
John mumbled a greeting and shoved the cards into his shirt pocket.
“Sit,” said Theresa as she poured four glasses of lemonade and placed each glass on a napkin on the coffee table. She sat next to John on the threadbare brown and orange striped sofa, leaving Corelli and Parker the worn orange easy chairs. Neither the light through the two narrow windows nor the glow of the lamps on either side of the sofa did much to brighten the room, but one of the lamps illuminated the pictures in the three jewel-studded frames. In one, slimmer and much younger versions of John and Theresa wearing leather posed next to a motorcycle. Another held several small snapshots of a girl, presumably the daughter, and traced the progression from happy little girl to emaciated drug addict. Cleaned up, the girl would probably look like her cousin Aphrodite. The third frame contained snapshots of a sullen boy who grew into a sullen teenager. On the far table was a studio portrait of the grown up sullen teenager with a woman and two children, presumably his family. Newspapers, including the New York Post, the New York News, and the New York World were on the chipped Formica coffee table that separated the sofa from the two facing chairs. To the right, images flickered on a nineteen-inch television on a rickety metal stand, but the sound was muted. Worn brown carpeting with a legion of old stains stretched wall-to-wall. The smell of a floral air freshener hung heavily in the room, but it didn’t quite mask the odor of cat urine. A small table fan pushed the air around but didn’t cool.
When Parker pulled out her notebook and pen, John began to tug a lock of his hair. Theresa pulled the hand away and began to rub it, as if trying to soothe him. Just then the outer door squeaked and a taller version of John limped into the room.
“This here’s Peter, John’s brother,” Theresa said. “Sit there Pete, next to John.”
He shook their hands. “Detective Brown asked me to come by to save you time.”
“Thank you. We appreciate you all making the time to see us. We’re sorry for your loss.”
The three of them exchanged a glance, clearly not expecting thanks or condolences. Stephanie Brown must have really terrorized them.
“I’m Detective Corelli, and this is Detective Parker.” They handed Peter their cards. “We’re interested in whatever you can tell us about your sister.”
They looked at each other. “You talk Pete. You’re the oldest,” Theresa said.
Peter shrugged and cleared his throat. “I’m one year older than Johnny and three years older than Con. Our momma was warned not to have any more kids after Johnny, but she was religious and wouldn’t use birth control. When she got pregnant again, Daddy wanted her to have an abortion. She wouldn’t listen and died birthin’ Con. Daddy always blamed Con.”
Their West Virginia accents were thick. Corelli had to listen carefully to understand. A glance at Parker confirmed she too was having difficulty.
“Do you think Connie knew he blamed her?”
“Yes, ma’am. As far back as I remember, every time he got drunk, which was most days, he would beat her and say, ‘you worthless piece of shit. Your ma shoulda got an abortion.’”
“I understand your father was a miner. Did he work?”
“Yeah, every day. Old gal down the road kept us til we were old enough for school. She was a drinker too, so most days she passed out and didn’t get around to feeding us. I was only three so I don’t remember how she treated Con but I do remember Con crying all the time. We mostly watched ourselves.”
“And your father didn’t do anything about it?”
Peter shrugged. “He usually gave us somethin’ to eat before he started drinking at night, although sometimes he passed out first and we ate what we could find. If Con cried, I gave her milk when we had it. When we got older, he wanted Con to take care of feeding us all. I remember one night, I was maybe eleven, he beat Con because she didn’t know how to cook. Me and John hid so he wouldn’t get us, but he kept hitting her and cursing her, saying that she was good for nothing, and girls were supposed to know how to cook. None of us had anything to eat that night.”
He ran a handkerchief over his face. “God, I haven’t thought about this in years. How could he do that to a little girl? And we joined right in with him, repeating his words, tormenting her, sometimes beating her. No wonder she left.” He put his head in his hands, elbows on his knees, seeing the past with adult eyes.
“Well, she didn’t help,” John said. “She used to stutter and stammer and talk so low he would get really pissed. And she always burned the food.”
“How old was she?” Corelli asked.
“Eight? Ten?” Peter said. “I don’t know, but he started early and he never stopped until she left. And don’t make no excuses, John. We did it too.”
“But when she got bigger, she didn’t cry when I hit her,” John said. “She laughed and told me, ‘someday you’ll be sorry because I’m gonna be rich and you’ll still be scratching dirt.’ I guess she did show us. She made all that money and didn’t give us none.” John’s voice was full of hurt and self-pity.
Peter shook his head, seeming disgusted by his brother.
For the first time, Corelli felt a twinge of sympathy for Winter. “Was there some incident that pushed her to leave?”
“Nothin’ special that I knew,” Peter said. “She was sixteen, so she musta felt she could get by on her own. She stole the week’s food money and hopped a bus out of here. Her note said if he came after her, she’d tell the police about him beating her. We never heard from her again.”
John piped up. “Not til about eighteen years later when she came back in a stretch limo with a show-fer and gave Mrs. Lipkin a shitload of money to fix up the library. She made them call it the Connie Broslawski Library. We didn’t see her until the big bash when the new library was ready. We got special invites for us and the kids. She wouldn’t give Freddie, my son, the time of day, but she became thick as thieves with Stacy and started coming around to take her to Disney World and other places.”
“And you had no problem with this?”
Theresa spoke for the first time. “At first we felt lucky because she was doin’ so much for Stacy, buying her expensive clothes and toys, givin’ her money, driving her around in her limo, and taking her traveling. But then it seemed like Stacy didn’t like us no more, like we wasn’t good enough for her. Con put big ideas in her head and turned her against us. She told her bad things about us, and we had a hard time controlling her. It was always, ‘I’ll go live with Aunt Con if you don’t do what I want,’ or ‘Aunt Con will get it for me.’ And Frederick was mad at us all the
time ’cause she didn’t give him nothin’.” Theresa started crying. “It was like we lost our little girl. Then when Stacy was about fifteen, Connie was supposed to take her to New York for the weekend, but she didn’t come. We tried to get in touch, but we couldn’t find any Connie Broslawski in New York. We never heard from her again.”
Theresa reached for her glass of lemonade and sipped. “About broke Stacy’s heart. She kept making excuses for Con, but when she realized Con wasn’t coming back, she went nuts and started running with a wild crowd and using drugs.”
So much for sympathizing with Winter. How low, getting vengeance by destroying his daughter. “What made you interested in finding Connie after all these years?”
John cleared his throat. “Stacy tried to kill herself about three weeks ago and she needs a rehab program, but we already mortgaged the trailer to the limit trying to help her. When we saw Connie on TV getting that big award, we knew she would help. She had a different name, but I recognized her right away, especially when I heard her talk. I got the New York papers the next day to read about her.”
“Were you able to get in touch with her?”
“I kept calling, but the lady who answered the telephone said Con didn’t have no family, so I figured she wasn’t giving her my messages. We decided I should go to New York to talk to her. I knew when she heard about Stacy, she’d give us the money. She had so much.”
“And did you see her?”
“No. Thursday night I got the bus to New York, Port something—”
“Port Authority Bus terminal,” Corelli filled in.
“Yeah, that’s it. Bus got in about six in the morning. I got some breakfast at one of those delis they have there, then I walked around Times Square. Boy, that is somethin’ else. When it got a little later, I got directions to Wall Street and I went to her office. The guard called upstairs but I think that same lady answered, because they wouldn’t let me in.”
“I understand you had to be escorted out of the building.”
He clasped his hands in front of him and seemed to find them fascinating. “I was really mad ’cause nobody would listen. Stacy really needs help, and those stupid people wouldn’t let me see Con.”
“What did you do when they threw you out?”
He glanced at Theresa. She offered an encouraging smile. “I waited outside all day. Then about five thirty a limo with Winter on the license pulled up, so I figured it was hers. But a man and a fat lady got in and it drove away. I wanted to ask if she was still at the office, but they left before I could catch them.”
“What then?”
“I couldn’t find out where she lived, so I figured I’d hang around New York and go back early Monday and catch her when she came back to work. I left there about six o’clock and walked around the city seeing the sights until late. I did the same Saturday and Sunday. I even rode one of those double-decker buses you see in them English movies.”
“Did you get a hotel room?”
His eyes boomeranged around the room looking everywhere but at Corelli. “Nah, I slept in that Port place.”
“When did you find out she was dead?”
“Monday morning. I went down to her office again. The police were there and somebody said Connie Winter was murdered, so I came home.”
“Why did you lie to the police?”
“I was afraid they would think I killed her for her money.”
Peter seemed cut off, distant. Corelli wondered if he was thinking about the possibility that his brother was a murderer or feeling guilty about the past.
“Did you?”
Theresa choked on her lemonade. Peter stared at John, who jerked to his feet. “No way. They wouldn’t let me in. I never even saw her.” His breathing was rapid.
“John wouldn’t hurt nobody,” Theresa said. “He just wanted her to help Stacy.”
“Does Stacy know you located her aunt?”
John and Theresa exchanged a glance before he said, “I told her Wednesday. I was tryin’ to make her feel better.”
“Where is she now?”
“We don’t know,” Theresa said, dabbing at her tears. “She walked out of the hospital Thursday morning, and nobody’s seen her since.”
John put his arm around Theresa.
Corelli watched Parker make a note. If this were a Greek tragedy Stacy would have murdered her aunt to get vengeance. “Do you have a recent picture of Stacy that we could borrow?”
“She wouldn’t hurt–”
“It’s routine. Since she’s missing.”
Theresa leaned over and removed a picture from the frame on the table next to her. Parker slid the picture into her notebook and handed Theresa a receipt.
Corelli waited until she had their attention. “Is there anything you would like to tell me? Or ask?”
Peter cleared his throat. “Does she have a family?”
“Yes, a husband and fourteen-year-old twins, a boy and a girl.”
Peter nodded. “How are they taking it?”
“As well as could be expected.”
John leaned forward. “Do you know if she left us something in her will?”
“Oh, John,” Theresa said, as if she was embarrassed that he asked, but her eyes glittered and her mouth hung open. Peter’s mouth turned down and he shook his head.
Corelli kept the sneer off her face but not out of her voice. “I have no idea whether she remembered you.”
Chapter Thirty-One
The next morning at nine a.m. sharp, they parked in front of the Connie Broslawski Library, a three-story ultra-modern glass and brick building that stood out in the dusty, depressed town like a shark in a fish tank.
Parker gazed at the showy sign. “Why Broslawski? Why not Winter?”
“Knowing Winter, there was a reason. Maybe Clara Lipkin can enlighten us.”
The lobby was dominated by a huge bronze plaque with a raised likeness of Winter and a message: “Thanks in part to the kindness and generosity of librarian Clara Lipkin to a poor little girl, I have become successful beyond my wildest imagination. I hope my gift will enable other girls to achieve their dreams.” It was signed, “Connie Broslawski.” The walls nearby were covered with photographs of Connie with various women, individually and in small groups. Some of the women looked like they were sucking lemons, others looked shy, as if they were in the presence of a movie star. There was a picture of Winter with her niece Stacy, but none with either of her brothers.
They walked to the desk and asked to see Mrs. Lipkin. The twenty-something librarian said Mrs. Lipkin had retired a few years ago, but when she saw their shields, she offered to call to see if Lipkin was home from her latest trip. After a whispered conversation, she put the phone down and directed them to Lipkin’s house a few blocks away.
The lanky, white-haired woman with warm blue eyes who opened the door appeared to be in her early seventies and carried herself like a runway model, elegant and graceful. She invited them to join her for coffee.
Corelli peered into Lipkin’s living room as she led them through the house. Her furnishings were simple, comfortable and tasteful. Everything seemed lived-in but nothing was threadbare or worn. Books were stacked on the floor and on a table near a large easy chair placed in front of the stone fireplace that covered most of one wall. Even the hallway was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, shelves overflowing with books.
The kitchen smelled of cinnamon and freshly brewed coffee. It was the kitchen of a cook, with modern appliances, gleaming white wooden cabinets, granite countertops, and cream-colored ceramic tiles on the walls near the stove and the sink. A rectangular oak table, topped by a bouquet of fresh flowers and set for three, occupied the place of honor in front of floor-to-ceiling windows that faced a yard shaped and shadowed with trees and shrubs and sprinkled with beds of red, yellow, and purple flowers. This room, too, had a well-used stone fireplace. The contrast between Lipkin’s house and the Broslawski’s trailer couldn’t have been more stark.
Lipkin poured coffee and offered a plate of donuts and muffins, before helping herself to a donut. She sipped her coffee. “How can I help you?”
Corelli stirred her coffee. “Do you know why we’re here?”
“No idea whatsoever. I returned from a month in France last night.”
“A woman was murdered in New York. You knew her as Connie Broslawski, but her legal name was Connie Winter.”
Lipkin’s hand flew to her throat. “How horrible. When? What happened?”
“Over the weekend. We were told you could fill us in on her background.”
Lipkin reached for a tissue from the box on the nearby counter. “Poor thing. She had such a sad childhood.” She dabbed her eyes and blew her nose.
“Connie’s mother, Sonia Wintczak, was a regular at the library when she was in high school. She was bright and dreamed of being a teacher.” Her gaze drifted to the birds chattering and diving for seed in the feeders hanging on the tree just outside the window and then flicked back to Corelli. “But like many of the local girls she married right after high school and her dreams fizzled. By all accounts her husband Bartek adored Sonia and was devastated when she died giving birth to their third child, Constance. He started to drink heavily after her death.
“I met Connie when she started elementary school. It was next to the library and her class came in several times a week for story hour. She was a pathetic little thing, always hunched up like she was trying to hide. Bartek dressed her in castoffs he found at the church. No one ever taught her personal hygiene, so she was dirty, her hair a tangled mess, and she smelled. Her speech didn’t help. She hesitated between words and filled in with ‘uhs’ and ‘ums.’ Then she made it worse by speaking so low that it was difficult to understand her. Of course, she was tormented by her classmates, the neighborhood kids and her brothers. She was always alone.”
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