by Lynn Bohart
“Funny,” he replied. “Anyway, I was wondering if you had any ideas. You know Kitty well enough. I always buy her jewelry, because, you know, that’s safe, and she likes it. But I wanted to do something more meaningful this year. What do you think would be something she could use, but would mean something long-term?”
I hesitated a moment and then replied, “How about a nice dictionary?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Blair and I decided to drive over to Queen Anne Hill the following afternoon. Charlotte Rowe was a tiny woman in her late sixties, with frizzy, thinning gray hair. She greeted us at the door of her small but elegant Craftsman-style home, dressed impeccably in crisp slacks, a print blouse and short jacket. She wore a string of pearls at her neckline. I guess once you’ve served as a prim and proper assistant to a man like Judge Foster, it’s a habit that’s hard to break.
“Please, come in,” she said, with a slight Southern accent. “It’s so very nice to have visitors.”
We stood in the broad entrance to her home, facing an oak staircase that led to the second floor. Oriental carpet runners covered hardwood floors, while framed floral prints graced the walls.
“I notice a slight accent,” I said. “Kentucky?”
“Yes,” she said. “You have a good ear.”
“I had a friend in college from Kentucky. It’s a very refined accent, I think.”
Her face beamed with pride. “My thoughts exaaaactly.”
She led us into an elegant living room, with a large picture window overlooking the wide porch.
“Your husband said you had some questions about Judge Foster.” She gestured to the antique sofa under the window. Blair and I sat down.
“Ex-husband,” I corrected her.
“Of course. You can imagine I was surprised to get a call from the governor,” she said with a chuckle.
“Yes, sorry about that,” I said, a little chagrined. “But he offered to be my front man.”
“Oh, no worries. I crossed paths with your…ex-husband many times over the years. He was always very polite to me.” She sat in a chair facing us and turned to Blair. “And Mrs. Wentworth, what does your husband do?”
I cringed slightly at the assumption that Blair did nothing. But then, of course, she didn’t. And she seemed unfazed by the question.
“My husband owns Wentworth Import Motors,” she said with a sweet smile.
“Oh, my,” Mrs. Rowe cooed. “My husband had a vintage Mustang that he just loved. Do you like fast cars, Mrs. Wentworth?”
Does the Pope like to pray?
Blair grinned. “I do. And men like their toys. Cars, electronics, barbecues,” she said, laughing.
Mrs. Rowe joined in with a chuckle. “Oh, yes. Rupert liked all of those things.”
“What did your husband do, Mrs. Rowe?” Blair asked.
“Oh, please, call me Charlotte. He owned a string of hardware stores throughout the area. He was a man’s man, if you know what I mean.”
“How did he feel about you working for Judge Foster?” I asked boldly.
You would have thought I’d asked if she liked eating flies. Her face froze, and she swallowed, as if the fly just wouldn’t go down.
“I’m sorry, I’ve been very rude. I’ve made some lemonade. Let me get us something to drink.”
She rose and disappeared down the hallway. I glanced at Blair.
“Well, that tanked the conversation,” she said.
“Yeah, I wonder if she was telegraphing what her husband thought about Foster, or what she thought.”
Blair’s eyes grew wide. “You don’t think she had an affair with him, do you? Didn’t Angela say there were rumors?”
“Shhh,” I warned her. “You don’t want her to hear us. But who knows. She worked for him for so long. I guess anything is possible.”
“But she’s probably not going to know too much about Mercer Island,” Blair whispered. “She’d have been too young to have worked for him when the Fosters lived there.”
“Yes, but over the course of thirty years, he might have said something. Plus, she may have met members of the family.”
“Here we go,” a chipper voice said. Charlotte returned, carrying a tray with three glasses of lemonade. She put the tray on a glass coffee table. “Please, help yourselves.”
She took a glass, while I handed one to Blair and took one for myself.
“Now, where were we?” she said. She seemed to have regained her composure. “You were asking about Judge Foster.” She took a sip and swallowed before continuing. “I want to be sure I don’t betray any confidences, you understand. But I’m sure you’ve heard that he was a difficult man. Cantankerous. Bull-headed. Bad-tempered. All the things his critics said about him were true. Lawyers hated to be in his court, but then so did the criminals,” she said with a brief smile. “And my husband, well, my husband hated him. But I must tell you that Judge Foster was brilliant. One of the finest minds I’ve ever known.” Her eyes glinted slightly as she walked us down memory lane.
“Do you know much about his family?” I asked. “We know he had a wife and at least three children.”
I had decided in advance how to suggest that there might be more than the three children. A cloud seemed to draw across her face.
“I don’t think he was much of a family man, if you know what I mean. I don’t remember him ever leaving early to go to a soccer game or award ceremony for his children. I think his wife did all of that. He was married to the job, like a lot of men. And he was very, very good at it.”
“But there was tragedy,” I prompted her.
“Oh, yes,” she said, taking a long drink. “Losing his daughter, Rose, was, I think, the most tragic event in his life. That was before I came to work for him, of course, but I caught him on more than one occasion just sitting in his office and staring at her picture. She was a lovely girl. Long blond hair and deep brown eyes. She had his coloring, you know. Holly had almost black hair and eyes like midnight. Emily and Mansfield took after her.” She paused a moment. “For as long as I knew him, he had only two pictures in his office. One of his wife and one of his daughter, Rose.”
Blair and I snatched curious glances at each other. “No pictures of Emily or Mansfield?” Blair asked.
“No. And he never talked about them. It was as if they didn’t exist,” she said quietly.
“Did you ever meet his wife?” I asked her.
She brightened up. “Oh yes, on several occasions. She was an elegant woman. Tall. Statuesque. And gracious almost to a fault.” She smiled to herself and released a small chuckle. “In fact, she was the exact opposite of the judge. I often wondered what attracted her to him. But opposites attract, or so they say.”
“Rose’s death must have been hard on her, too,” I said.
“Oh, yes. She was a beautiful woman, and yet you could see the pain in her face.”
“How did Rose die? We saw a newspaper article that mentioned she was found in the lake,” I said.
Charlotte took a deep breath and leaned forward conspiratorially, as if she didn’t want the neighbors to hear. “Well, I only know this because I sat with Mrs. Foster at a reception once, when she’d had a little too much to drink. Although Rose’s death was reported as an accident, Mrs. Foster implied that she suspected that poor Rose might have been murdered.”
I felt myself blanch. “Murdered? Why wasn’t that picked up by the press?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. She said that the judge would never allow anyone to talk about it. But Mrs. Foster said that it looked like something had been wrapped around Rose’s neck. But of course, she was found in the shallows of the lake.”
“But wouldn’t there have been an investigation?” I asked.
“I’m sure there was. But maybe that was the power the judge had over law enforcement and the media back then. He was an intensely private man. I doubt he would have allowed anyone to speculate, at least until something else was discovered, and I guess it never was
. No evidence was found that would point to murder. Twenty years later, though, and Mrs. Foster still hadn’t gotten over it.”
“I don’t know how you ever would get over that,” I lamented.
“I agree,” she said. “But, from what I’d heard, when Rose’s body was found, they actually thought she might have been a victim of the Green River Killer. That was all the talk then, you know.”
“Do you know why they suspected the Green River Killer?”
“No. Other than the timing. But her death was ruled an accident. I honestly don’t know if they ruled out murder, or if the judge’s influence just made them stop investigating. But since most of the media was focused on the Green River killings, the reason for Rose’s death was buried along with her. As I said, Judge Foster was a very private man.”
“I’m just surprised he wouldn’t want to do everything he could to find the killer, if in fact it was murder,” I said.
“His law partner told me that the judge did hire a private investigator, but after just a few weeks, the judge fired him. So, perhaps it really was an accident. I think Rose’s death crushed him, though. It crushed them all. Emily, the second daughter, was admitted to a mental institution not long after that. She’s schizophrenic, I think. And the son was sent off to boarding school.”
“What about their son, Mansfield?” Blair asked. “Isn’t he a judge himself now?”
“Yes,” she said with a nod. “He’s a district court judge down in Kent. Mansfield Foster. Now there’s a piece of work.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “Why do you say that?”
She swallowed a sip of her lemonade. “I shouldn’t gossip. But if Judge Foster was demanding, distant and controlling, Mansfield is known as a real bully. I’ve stayed in touch with a number of people in the court system since I retired, and he’s left a trail of secretaries, law clerks and legal assistants behind as he’s moved up the ranks. No one can stand to work for him.”
“Does his sister, Emily, still live in the area?” Blair asked.
“As far as I know she still takes care of her father on their estate on Camano Island.”
“Takes care of him?” I asked. “He’s still alive?”
She shrugged. “Yes, but he’s in his nineties now,” she responded. “When I was there several years ago, he was in a wheelchair, and Emily served as his primary caregiver. She functions pretty well on medication. And, as I recall, she works part-time as a librarian up there.”
“Do you keep in touch with the judge?” I asked.
She sighed. “No. We were never very close, even though I worked for him all those years. But I visited that once, just to say hello. Emily had turned the sun porch into a downstairs bedroom for her dad so that she could handle him more easily in the wheelchair, even though the house has a small elevator. He was very frail. He’d been a heavy smoker his entire life and had emphysema, oxygen tank and all. Frankly, I’m surprised he’s still alive. But I haven’t kept in touch since then, and I haven’t heard that he died. I think the paper would report that.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a phone number, would you?” I wondered.
“I can do better than that,” Charlotte said. “I’ll give Emily a call if you’d like.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I returned to the inn to find the entire Welch family in residence. The parents were enjoying bottled daiquiris on the deck, while the matriarch and patriarch were ensconced in the living room at the game table, playing Scrabble. It was another sunny afternoon, so the kids had taken over our small play area in the back, and were chasing each other around the swing set, laughing and screaming. As I passed the breakfast room, looking for April, Ahab called out, “Look what you’ve done. I’m melting…melting.”
“Not gonna work, Ahab,” I said to him. “You’re not the Wicked Witch of the West, and the kids aren’t leaving anytime soon.”
“She’s dead. You killed her. You killed her!”
I shook my head with a smile and went to find Crystal in my office. She was finishing up a reservation.
“Where’s April?” I asked.
“She’s upstairs in the attic,” she replied.
“Everything okay?”
She rolled her eyes. “I suppose. But Mrs. Welch, Sr. complained that we don’t have a backgammon game. Apparently, that’s her favorite. And she’s not fond of the little vignette you created by the front door.”
“Seriously? What’s wrong with birds?”
I used a little side area just inside the front door to create displays of some of the antiques we sold. Over time I’d created shipboard displays, early American displays, ghost displays, even a mafia display. Currently, I had a display of antique birdhouses, framed bird prints, two antique bird cages, a couple of bird feeders, and a small bubbling pond lined with a scattering of ceramic birds. To me it just screamed summer.
“She thinks it’s tacky for a bed and breakfast to push antiques for sale right at the front door.”
“Well, who made her Queen of the Ball?” I harped.
Crystal just gave me a shrug. “Maybe before she leaves you could fashion an entire display of old biddies out there,” she said with a smile.
I erupted in a laugh. “I have a bunch of etchings of the Salem witch trials. How ‘bout that?” We both laughed and then I caught myself, glancing over my shoulder. “Careful. We don’t want them to hear us. They’ll be gone by this weekend.”
“Longest week of my life,” Crystal lamented.
“Well, our job is to make their stay as memorable as possible.”
“Then where’s Elizabeth when you need her?” Crystal said with a wicked grin.
Ding!
We both jumped. Someone had slammed the bell at the front desk. It was the elder Mrs. Welch.
I stepped out to the desk. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Welch?”
Her pinched features were crowded down the center of her face, making me search for a place to focus my eyes.
“There’s a movie on On Demand tonight that the family wants to watch together. We’d like to move one of the TVs down to the living room.”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have cable connection down here,” I said.
I thought her beady little eyes would have impaled me with spears if they could have.
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
“Uh…no, I’m sorry. But we have a TV in each of the rooms.”
“But how can a large group watch something together?”
“Well, this is a bed and breakfast, not a movie theater. But you’re welcome to gather in the suite upstairs and watch it there.”
She threw her narrow shoulders back, turned on her heels and left. “They won’t let us do it,” she complained for all to hear as she returned to the living room.
I sighed loudly and turned back to Crystal. “I’ll be up in the attic. But if anyone asks, I melted down with the Wicked Witch of the West.”
“You mean the Wicked Welch of the West,” Crystal said, grinning again.
“Don’t you dare insult my favorite movie,” I warned her with a raised index finger.
I climbed the stairs to the second landing and traversed the hallway to the back stairs that led to the attic, where I found April sitting on the floor surrounded by boxes and loose papers.
“How are you doing?” I said.
“This is a job,” she said, looking up and wiping her brow.
I stepped over and glanced down to the mess around her. “Which box is this?”
“The one with stuff from the Crenshaws and Pattisons. I’m trying to organize it.” She looked around. “But I found more stuff in that little closet. A box of Halloween costumes that must have belonged to one of the families with kids, three boxes of Christmas decorations, a box of office supplies, some vintage dolls, a box of hair dye…”
“Hair dye?”
She chuckled. “Yeah. Who knows?”
“Anything that we can use for the book?”
“Y
es,” she said. She struggled to her feet and stepped over a pile of papers, heading for a battered old chest of drawers. “I found this stuck all the way in the back of the bottom drawer.” She lifted up an envelope from the top of the chest and handed it over to me. “It’s a letter to Lollie Gates - the prostitute you told me about.”
The small envelope was stained and wrinkled, and contained note-sized paper. I pulled it out and read.
Dear Lollie: We hired a private investigator, Mr. George Bourbonaise, to find you. We know that Mr. Miller had you abducted, so we instructed Mr. Bourbonaise to deliver this letter directly into your hands. Please don’t let anyone know you have it. We believe it could put you in danger, so Mr. Bourbonaise has been instructed not to interfere right now. He is just to deliver the letter and leave. We know where you are and are organizing a way to bring you home safely very soon. We are heart sick at losing you for so long. Don’t give up hope. We love you and can’t wait to have you home again. Mother
“They were going to rescue her,” I said with a defeated tone. “And look,” I said, reaching out to touch a spot where a drop of water had blurred the ink. “I bet this water smudge is a tear drop.” I shook my head sadly. “Oh, Lollie, what happened to you?”
A sudden breeze blew past us, making us both whirl around.
“She’s here,” April said, looking up. “The instant I found the note, I heard a voice say her name in my head.”
My back flinched as a shiver traversed my spine, and I looked around the small room, wondering if she might materialize. When she didn’t, I said, “So this chest of drawers must have come from the barn attic.”
April nodded. “And even though others have probably used it since then, no one ever found the letter. It was jammed into a crevice in the back of the drawer. Whether she did that, or it just happened over years of use, I don’t know.”
“How did you find it?”
She smiled knowingly. “With a little help. I was looking through this hutch next to it,” she said, gesturing to an early American kitchen hutch. “I heard something. When I turned around, that bottom drawer had slid all the way open.”