The Homicide Report: A Nell Matthews Mystery (InterMix)

by JoAnna Carl

  Why? Why would he do such a thing? Why would he do it without telling me?

  Why would he do it without asking my permission?

  A flash of anger hit. Mike was manipulating me again, doing things behind my back.

  Oh, he’d say he was keeping his eye on the goal, accomplishing what needed to be accomplished by the simplest route, worrying about what needed to be done, not the method he used to do it.

  But how could he come by my office to say good-bye and tell me nothing about where he was going? How could he take away my access to his house? How could he leave me emotionally stranded?

  And how the hell had he known where to go?

  All I’d ever told Mike about my mother’s death was that she had been killed in a car wreck. Even when I’d gone into more details, two days earlier, I was sure I’d never mentioned the town or county where the wreck occurred. I had no relatives in Michigan. We’d only lived there for six months. There was no way Mike could even have known where my mother died.

  Unless he’d been poking into my background without my knowledge.

  That thought made me really angry.

  “Nell.” Ruth Borah’s voice brought me back to the Gazette newsroom. I jumped all over.

  “Sorry, Ruth. I was a million miles away.”

  She asked some routine question, and I forced my mind back to the copy for Sunday’s paper. It was a half hour before I caught up again. Then I looked at the notepad on my desk and discovered a name and phone number written on it. It was scrawled in my handwriting, using my ballpoint pen. The area code was the one I’d just punched to reach Jessamine, Michigan.

  I had no recollection of doing it, but I had apparently written down the name and number of the former sheriff when the Jessamine dispatcher had said it. Thank God for habit. I might have had to call her back. If I wanted to talk to the guy.

  I decided I did want to talk to him. But I couldn’t do it then. The phone was ringing with the usual assortment of odd calls from the public, the two reporters on duty began to turn stories in, Ruth’s husband came by and took her out to dinner, and I didn’t have time to do anything but work for forty-five minutes. Then things calmed down a little, Ruth came back to her spot on the desk, and the time for my dinner break arrived.

  I decided to call the Michigan sheriff from the library phone. It would be more private than the city desk. I headed back there, taking the note along.

  “Ronald Vanderkolk,” the note said.

  A Dutch name. That jogged my memory. That whole area of Michigan had a lot of people of Dutch descent. I remembered my mother talking to my dad about it. “They don’t like me,” she’d said. “And I have the feeling it’s because I have dark hair, and I don’t have a ‘van’ to my name. You and Nell are blond enough to get along—if you’d just spell Matthews with a double I in it someplace.”

  I stared at the former sheriff’s name, remembering my mother. She’d been dark and lively, and my father had been much taller than she was. For a moment I could picture her clearly. I could remember my father laughing when she complained about feeling cold-shouldered by the small Michigan town.

  “You have to live here ten years before they’ll ignore you,” she’d said.

  I could remember my mother’s dark eyes snapping, remember her lips pouting, then smiling. But I couldn’t picture my father’s face at all.

  I stared at the name I’d written on the slip of paper. Ronald Vanderkolk. A good Dutch name in a good Dutch community. I was willing to bet Ronald Vanderkolk had had enough cousins to keep him in office until he had hit retirement age.

  I jotted down a few questions for him, then picked up the phone and dialed 9 for an outside line, then 0 for a credit-card call. The phone rang four times before a woman’s voice answered.

  “May I speak to Sheriff Vanderkolk?”

  I heard a sigh. “May I tell him who it is?”

  Oh, God! Who was I? I hadn’t stopped to figure that out. Was I a reporter for the Grantham Gazette? Or was I the daughter of a murdered woman?

  I adopted my mother’s maiden name on the spot. “This is Nell Lathen,” I said. “I’m a reporter for the Grantham Gazette.”

  That brought a sniff. “Just a minute. He’s packing.”

  Packing? Was he going out of town?

  “This is Ronald Vanderkolk.” The voice sounded vigorous.

  “Sheriff, I’m sorry to bother you. I know you’re busy.”

  “Just getting ready for one of my trips.”

  “Trips?”

  “Transporting prisoners. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m with the Grantham Gazette newspaper. Twenty years ago a young woman from our area was killed in your county—”

  “Is this another call about Sally Matthews?”

  Obviously Mike had found him. “Yes,” I said. “A local situation has arisen—”

  “Yes, and I’d like to know what it is.”

  His reaction threw me. I had called to get information from him. I wasn’t set for him to demand it from me.

  “Uh,” I said, choking back a stammer.

  “Just what’s going on down there?” he said gruffly.

  “I’m not quite sure,” I said. “A relative of Sally Matthews is trying to find out just what happened to her.”

  “How did the Grantham police get involved?”

  “I wasn’t aware that they were,” I said.

  “Then who is this Mike Svenson who showed up here, wanted information?”

  “Officer Svenson is chief hostage negotiator for the Grantham Police Department,” I said. Vanderkolk could find that out by calling the Grantham P.D., so I wasn’t letting any particular cat out of any particular bag. “He’s a well-respected officer.”

  “Big, redheaded guy?”

  “With a crooked nose,” I answered. And after I got hold of him, his nose might get crookeder.

  “Then he’s a real Grantham officer?”

  “Oh, yes. What did he want to know?”

  That brought a long pause in the conversation. Vanderkolk obviously didn’t want to tell me, but in a few moments he spoke. “He just wanted to know about this Matthews case. Now, young woman, what is it you want to know?”

  “Probably the same things he did,” I said. “Was Sally Matthews’ death considered a homicide?”

  “Murder. Maybe manslaughter if the guy got a good lawyer.”

  “Did you ever charge anyone?”

  “No. We were close to charging the husband.” My heart sank. Aunt Billie had been right.

  It was an effort to keep my voice steady. “Was he arrested?”

  “No. Still at large. And, yes, we’d still like to get him, if you know where he is.”

  “I assure you that I don’t. Can you give me a brief outline of the case?”

  Vanderkolk paused again, but he finally went on. “Sally Matthews was a twenty-six-year-old woman, married, with one child. Her husband was the new editor for the Jessamine Journal. They were strangers to the area—only been here a few months. She was found dead on a county road north of Jessamine. She’d been hit by a car. Died instantly.”

  “An accident?” I tried to keep from sounding hopeful.

  “We thought it might be at first. Hit-and-run. But we couldn’t figure out how she got out there. It was just a farm road. Pretty secluded. Then we found out that her own car had hit her.”

  “Her own car!”

  “Yeah. Car she and her husband owned. They just had the one. Radiator grille was all dented, and we found hair—her hair—on it. Plus some fibers from her coat.

  “Then when we found out she and the husband had split up—”

  I gulped. It was hard to keep my voice steady. “That left him as suspect in chief?”

  “Right. And when we found out the motive, that clinched it.”

  “Motive? He had a motive in addition to the fact that they had separated?”

  “Oh, yes. It was pretty well established that she’d had a boyfriend. Ma
ybe boyfriends. She was a cute little brunette. Husband worked nights, worked long hours. Guess she got lonesome.”

  I discovered that tears were running down my cheeks. I tried to say something, but my voice wouldn’t work. I grunted some noise out, and that was enough encouragement for Ronald Vanderkolk.

  “The husband—I told you he was with the newspaper. He knew several of the Jessamine officers and a couple of my deputies. He had a reporter over at my office all the time. Somehow he got wind that we were about to apply for a warrant. He took off.

  “Like I say. He had motive, had access to the car—he’d had enough of the wife’s running around, decided to get rid of her. Or maybe they went off to have a talk and the situation got violent. It was a pretty clear case. But we never found him.

  “That’s the whole story, anyway. Just a domestic disturbance—slutty wife, angry husband.”

  I don’t think I even said good-bye. I just hung up.

  My nose was running. I stole a Kleenex from a box on the head librarian’s desk. Then I stole another. I stood there and cried through four tissues, angry and grieving.

  What a nasty old man, I told myself. He hadn’t known my mother. She wasn’t a slut. She was a nice person. She read to me. She liked to sew—I remembered the blue and white gingham curtains she’d made for my bedroom in Michigan. She made cookies, for God’s sake! And she let me decorate them.

  Oh, she was hot-tempered. She and my dad could give each other what-for. But maybe I remembered the bad times because they’d been unusual. There were lots of good times in our lives, too. I remembered wading in Lake Michigan and roasting hot dogs on the beach.

  The sheriff was right about my dad working nights. My mom would fix dinner and have it ready to go on the table as soon as he walked in the door. We’d eat together, and he’d have to rush back to the office.

  Then I’d help with the dishes, and my mother and I would watch television. She’d liked situation comedies. I remembered lying on the couch, with my head in her lap, watching M*A*S*H. She would stroke my hair and rub my back. I got to stay up late as long as I was quiet. Until the ten o’clock news came on.

  Wait a minute, I thought. That wouldn’t work. The time difference. In Michigan they didn’t have ten o’clock news, as we did in the Central time zone. Michigan was in the Eastern zone. Our prime time for television is seven to ten. Theirs is eight to eleven. My mother had let me stay up until the eleven o’clock news. And my daddy had come home from work around midnight.

  So when had my mother been seeing other men?

  The sheriff was wrong, I realized. My mother hadn’t been out running around while my dad worked nights. And no one had come to the house. In a strange town, with no friends, my mother had spent night after lonely night watching sit-coms with an eight-year-old.

  I went through two more Kleenex. Then I heard my name.

  “Nell Matthews!” it boomed.

  I jumped all over. It was the building’s intercom. The switchboard operator was paging me. “Nell Matthews! Call the switchboard!”

  I called. “Grantham Gazette,” Kimmie answered.

  “This is Nell. Did you page?”

  “Oh, yes. You have a caller.”

  “A caller?” I heard a squeaky voice in the background, and I remembered. Martina’s boyfriend had been planning to bring something to me, something she’d given him. “Oh, I guess it’s Dan Smith. Tell him to wait for me a few minutes.”

  I was going to need a few minutes to get myself together. I had to look like a wreck. Thank God I dye my eyelashes. If I’d been using mascara, I would have had it all over my face. As it was, I was puffy-eyed and runny-nosed. I headed for the ladies’ room via a back hallway.

  Five minutes later, as I walked toward Dan Smith, I saw that he was holding a cardboard box—a stout corrugated box about the size of a department store shirt box. It had a computer company logo on the side, and I immediately was sure it had come from the Gazette computer department. Computers, annoying as they can be, do deserve credit for one thing—their makers ship equipment and parts in solid, well-constructed boxes. I always beg a few discarded boxes from the computer guys for any Christmas mailing I do, and I was willing to bet that Martina had gone to the same source for a container to store whatever she had given Dan Smith.

  He leaned across the little railing that defined the reception area and pushed the box toward me almost secretively.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  Dan looked shocked. “Oh, I haven’t looked in it! Martina just asked me to keep it for her. She said it was something from the Gazette library that she wanted out of circulation for a few days.”

  I took the box, and I almost dropped it on my toe. “It’s heavy,” I said. “Or heavier than I expected.”

  Dan nodded. “Yes, but she said it wasn’t breakable. If you’ll just see that it gets back to the right place . . .”

  I renewed my promise to let him know about funeral services for Martina and carried the box back to the library. With so few staffers on duty, I wasn’t likely to be interrupted if I opened the box there. But what could be in it? I undid the box’s tricky cardboard latches warily and folded the top back, almost ready for something to jump out.

  But nothing jumped. Inside I saw white fake leather with embossed red letters. TALON, it read, in letters several inches high. Smaller letters said, EASTWICK METHODIST COLLEGE.

  “Hell’s bells,” I said. “It’s a yearbook. No wonder the box was so heavy.”

  The box held a thirty-year-old copy of the Eastwick College yearbook, The Talon. Heavy, slick paper and a classy binding make a yearbook heavy for its size.

  Looking across the library, I immediately saw where the book had come from. Thirty years ago the wife of the Gazette’s publisher was an active Methodist laywoman. I’d helped with her obituary the first month I worked at the Gazette, and I knew she’d served as a regent for Eastwick Methodist College. She must have felt obligated to buy a yearbook every year—or maybe they gave her one—because we had fifteen years’ worth of them in our library.

  Why had Martina hidden this book?

  “Weird,” I said. I opened the red and white cover and riffled through a few of the yearbook’s pages. There were no handy place marks forcing the book to fall open at key pages. It would take an hour to go through the book, and I still might not know why Martina had thought it should be “out of circulation.” I glanced at my watch. My dinner break was almost over. If I hurried, I could run down to the break room and get some crackers out of a machine before I went back.

  I stuffed the empty computer packing box into the biggest trash can in the library, then carried the yearbook to the empty spot on the shelf where it belonged. It had been there for thirty years, along with the other Eastwick yearbooks. Occasionally they were handy for finding out background on some person who was an Eastwick alum.

  Was that what Martina had used this yearbook for? Had someone’s name come up in a story?

  By the time I was halfway down the stairs to the break room I’d rejected that theory. No, she wouldn’t have been wanting to keep the book “out of circulation for a few days” if the information was to be printed in the newspaper. Few people outside the staff used the Gazette library. It was much more likely that she’d wanted to keep some staff member from seeing the book.

  Who? What could be in it? Was some staff member in it?

  I plugged money into the junk-food dispenser and pocketed a pack of cheese crackers and a candy bar. Glancing around the break room, I saw a white jacket, topped by fluffy blond hair.

  It was Martina! I jumped all over, and I must have gasped, because the person turned around, and I saw a young man who works in circulation. His white shirt and curly blond hair had only a superficial resemblance to Martina’s jacket and bleach job.

  “Now I’m seeing things,” I muttered. “And I’m talking to myself.”

  Martina was still driving me crazy. I angrily tore my crackers open. The wom
an was as big a pain dead as she had been alive. How had she become a newspaperwoman, anyway?

  I stopped and thought about it. Most of us went into newspapers after journalism school. Had Martina done that? Had she gone to Eastwick Methodist and majored in journalism?

  I ate my crackers on the way back up the stairs, and I rushed back to the library and snatched the Talon yearbook off the shelf. Flopping it open on a table, I went for the index.

  There was no Martina Gilroy listed.

  But—had Martina’s name been Gilroy when she was in college? I was pretty sure she’d been a divorcee. She might have had a different name in those days. I turned back to the table of contents and found Eagle Press listed. Maybe that was the Eastwick newspaper.

  I flipped to the Eagle Press staff pages and scanned the pictures. There were small groups of editors, and two larger pictures of reporters, photographers, and other staffers. There were no blondes with fluffy hair, of course. The students from this era had long hair—both men and women.

  I looked at the women’s faces. Nah. Not one of them could be Martina. In fact—logic set in, and I rechecked the date of the yearbook. Thirty years ago. And Martina had been sixty when she died. If she had gone to EMU—and I didn’t know that she had—she would probably have been there ten years earlier than this book.

  “Dumb,” I said aloud. “Wrong era for Martina.”

  Then a name caught my eye. “Arnie Ashe.”

  It was under one of the small pictures, a snapshot showing four people around a typewriter. A typewriter, for God’s sake! They’d written on typewriters in those days.

  I looked at the collegiate Arnie. A short, squat guy with long dark hair.

  It wasn’t the Arnie I knew.

  I kept staring at the photo, mentally removing the hair to match Arnie’s present bald state.

  But the picture labeled Arnie Ashe simply was not a picture of the Arnie Ashe who had recently joined the staff of the Grantham Gazette. The one in the photo had dark hair—Arnie shaved his head, of course—but the young man in the photo also had dark eyelashes. Our Arnie’s lashes were light. The man in the photo had a round face. Arnie had a long head. The man in the photo was the shortest one in his group. Arnie wasn’t a giant, but he was taller than the Arnie in the picture.