Death & the Redheaded Woman

by Loretta Ross

  “You think it’s really possible? That there could be a secret passage?”

  Leona shrugged. “I’ve been around a long time, sweetheart. I’ve done a lot of auctions and I’ve seen a lot of houses. Wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’ve ever run across.” She thought carefully before she spoke again. Wren could almost see her mind turning. “You know, the Campbell house dates back to the 1830s. We refer to it as ‘Victorian’, but the High Victorian period didn’t even start until about 1867. More likely, it’s a Tudor floor plan with early Victorian architectural details tacked on. Now, the Tudor period was a time of deep social unrest, and heavy religious persecution. It wasn’t uncommon for Catholic families of that time to have secret chapels and priest holes built into their homes, so they could practice their faith without being found out and hide their clergymen from the priest hunters.”

  “But that doesn’t mean they’d include them in a house built in America several hundred years later, even if it was built to a similar floor plan.”

  “No, but large homes built in the American Northeast during the seventeenth and eighteenth century also often had secret exits and hidden rooms, to protect the inhabitants from Indian attacks and give them an escape route if they were under siege. Eighteen-thirty isn’t that far removed from those days, and this part of the country was the wild frontier back then. A wealthy family from back east could have very easily felt that they needed a bolt hole in case of attack by wild animals or savage Indians.”

  “You know, I never thought of that,” Wren conceded. “But if there’s a hidden exit or a secret hiding place, how do we find it?”

  “Next time you go over there, take our youngest grandkids with you and let them play hide-and-seek. If there’s a hiding place or a way out, they’ll find it.”

  Wren laughed. “Sounds like a plan. So, can we borrow them tomorrow?”

  “After school, sure.” Leona peered out the window, studying the crowd gathered in the side yard. “So where is your handsome-yet-still-regrettably-dressed young gentleman today, anyway?”

  “Up at Warrensburg. He said he had some business to take care of.”

  _____

  Maybeth Turner shivered and wrapped her arms around herself. The spring days had been warm, but the nights were still chilly. It was only early evening, and already the cold had begun to set in. She was not dressed for this. Her clothes were thin and revealing, tattered and, if she were honest with herself, none too clean.

  Tucking her hands into her armpits, she leaned against the light pole and did her thirteen-year-old best to look alluring.

  A gray Jeep Grand Cherokee pulled up next to her. The driver ducked his head to look at her through the side window and she felt her heart stutter and thud in her chest. The man was gorgeous—movie star handsome. No lonely college boy. Way beyond what she’d come to expect from this part of town.

  Maybe he’s Prince Charming, she thought. Maybe he’ll fall in love with me and want to get married and we’ll go to his castle and live happily ever after. Maybe he’ll let me stay all night. Maybe he’ll give me something to eat.

  Prince Charming powered down the passenger window.

  “Hey, sweetheart. You need a lift somewhere?”

  “Yes! Please!”

  She heard the lock snick and fumbled with the door. She couldn’t get in fast enough. The Jeep was warm and she sank into the seat and let it surround her. He manipulated the controls on his own door, rolling her window back up. She heard the lock snap closed again and refused to let it bother her.

  Prince Charming had beautiful green eyes. She thought they looked kind, though the older girls had warned her that a man’s eyes could be deceiving.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  She batted her eyelashes at him. “My friends call me Baby Cakes.”

  He raised one eyebrow. “Baby Cakes. Cute. So, Baby Cakes, you hungry?”

  “A little,” she admitted, trying to keep the eagerness from her voice.

  He went through the first drive-through they came to and got her a cheeseburger, fries and a chocolate shake. He didn’t order anything for himself and she took her food with shaking hands and dug right in, half afraid it was a cruel joke and he’d snatch it back away from her. He just drove along in silence while she ate. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a real meal and she refused to wonder what she was going to have to do to pay for this largesse.

  Her prince didn’t speak again until she was finished with the food and slurping the last of the milkshake from the cardboard cup.

  “So, Baby Cakes, where you staying?”

  She gave him a hopeful smile. “Anywhere you want me to.”

  “Oh. That’s nice. How about your home, though? You do have a home. Nice warm bedroom. Soft, safe bed. Clean clothes, a hot shower, a refrigerator full of food. A family waiting for you.”

  She swallowed the lump in her throat, fought back tears. “Family don’t mean anything,” she said. “Family ain’t nothing but a bunch of people you’re related to.”

  She glanced over at him and saw something in his eyes that was too old and too complex for her to identify.

  “Is that really what you think?” he asked.

  “It’s what I know.”

  “Mm hmm.” He sighed. “Sweetheart, pop open that glove box. There’s a picture in there I’d like you to see.”

  Setting her shake down in the cup holder, she opened the glove box and removed a four-by-six picture in a wooden frame. It was a studio portrait, a group of smiling, well-dressed people. An ancient, wizened old woman sat in the front with the others arrayed behind her in a fan shape. There were two couples, one not quite elderly and one in early middle age, and a pair of tall, handsome young men in elegant uniforms, standing together with their shoulders touching.

  She ran her fingers over the glass, quickly picking out Prince Charming in the fancier uniform, blue and white with shining buttons and stripes on his shoulder.

  “Is this your family? They look nice.”

  “Yeah.” His voice was tight and he swallowed hard before he went on. “This was taken not quite three years ago, in the summer. Just before my last deployment. Mom wanted a picture of her boys in their dress blues. I’d just gotten promoted to gunnery sergeant and it was my first chance to show off my new stripes.”

  He reached across and tapped the picture by the younger woman. “That’s my mom. Adele. She was an English literature professor. That’s how my brother and I got our names. I was named after a detective in an old mystery series. I always tell people it’s a family name, but really it’s not.” He grinned briefly and she grinned back. “My brother’s name was Baranduin, from Tolkien, but we called him Randy. He thought Brandy sounded like a girl’s name, so nobody called him that but me.

  “Dad was a retired cop. Thirty years on the force. Grandpa was a firefighter, which is why Randy became a firefighter too. Randy was also a paramedic. That’s what that snake symbol on his uniform means. It’s a caduceus. Grandma was a lawyer. She was a district attorney at a time when women DAs were rare, and believe me, you did not want to find yourself arguing against her.

  “The old lady in the front was my Nonna Rogers. She was my mother’s grandmother. Great lady. She’d just turned ninety-seven, and she knew more about what was going on in the world than anyone I’ve ever met. And gossip! That woman loved her gossip. She was stone deaf, but it didn’t faze her. She just learned to read lips.”

  “They sound nice,” Maybeth said again, not really knowing what else to say.

  “Yeah.” He took a deep breath and when he spoke again his voice was tight. “You can’t tell it from the picture, but my grandma Bogart was fighting breast cancer. She lost the fight a couple months later. After that, Grandpa pretty much gave up. He died within six weeks of her. The doctors said it was a stroke, but I always figured it was a broken heart. They’d been together since grade school and he’d never loved anyone else.”

  His eye
s were dry, though his voice was pained, but Maybeth was quietly crying.

  “Nonna died peacefully in her sleep just a little while after that. My parents were down because of all the deaths in the family, and lonely with me and Randy both out of the house, so they decided to get away for a bit. Go to the East Coast and watch the leaves change.”

  Maybeth looked over at him, fearful of what he was going to say next, and there were tears now rolling down his sculpted cheeks.

  “They were killed in an accident on the Storm King Highway.”

  “Oh, God! That’s so sad,” she said. “So there’s only you and your brother now?”

  “No. Nine months ago I was wounded in Afghanistan. I was missing and presumed dead for a while and when I got back to our own troops, I was out of it. When I finally woke up, there was a chaplain there to see me. He’d come to tell me my brother had died in a fire.” He pulled off to the side of the road, put the Jeep in park and turned to look at her.

  “That picture was taken less than three years ago, and of all those people I loved, I’m the only one who’s left. So don’t ever tell me that family doesn’t mean anything, Maybeth.”

  “I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know. I just—” She froze. “How did you know my name?”

  He pulled out his wallet and produced a laminated card.

  “My name is Death Bogart. I’m a private investigator. I know your name because your parents hired me to find you. They’re worried about you. They love you and they miss you and they want you to come home.”

  “They want me to?” she asked. “They really want me to?”

  “You didn’t think they’d want you to come home?” he asked, his voice rich with compassion and a touch of humor.

  “I figured they’d be glad I was gone.”

  He gave her a sad smile, traded his wallet for his phone and called a number on speed dial. “Mrs. Turner? This is Death Bogart. I have someone here who wants to talk to you.”

  She took the phone like it was going to bite her, looked at it for a long minute, then put it up to her ear. “Momma … ?”

  _____

  When Death pulled into Wren’s driveway, she was waiting for him at the door, her left hand cupped and tears in her eyes. He stopped a moment to speak with Tom Keystone, who’d been standing guard duty in front of the house, then came up the steps. He took one look at her and stopped.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She held up her hand, displaying the contents. “My thing died.”

  “Oh. I’m so sorry.” He looked down into her palm, bewildered. “Um, what was it?”

  “You know, I don’t know.” She looked down too. The little creature in her hand was about the size of a peanut, almost embryonic, pinkish-white, with tiny legs and translucent little ears. “I found it in the yard at the house where we had an auction today. It was alive then and I thought that maybe I could save it and it would make a really cool pet … whatever. And when it grew up, I’d know what it was.”

  “I see.”

  She glanced up at him. “You think I’m nuts.”

  “I think you have a kind heart. That’s never a bad thing. Listen, I need to ask you for a couple of favors.”

  “Of course. Anything.”

  He grinned briefly. “I’ve got a little girl, well, a young teenager, out in my Jeep. She’s a runaway I was hired to find. Her parents are flying in from Denver and I need to take her up to the airport to meet them, but she’s pretty raggedy and she doesn’t want them to see her like that. Can she clean up here? And I thought maybe, if you still have some of your yard sale clothes, you could find her something less … slutty?”

  “Yes, of course. That’s no trouble at all.”

  “And then, I was hoping you’d come up to the airport with us. I’d feel better driving around with a strange teenage girl if there was another woman along. And this is the first actual case I’ve ever had and I thought, after I hand her over to her parents, we could do something to celebrate.”

  “I’d love to.” She gave him a teary grin. “Did you have anything in particular in mind?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe one or two things.” He grinned back. “I’ll go get Maybeth and send her in. Why don’t you give me your, um, thing, and I’ll give it a nice burial.”

  She dropped the little body into his palm and kissed him on the cheek. He went back out to talk to the girl in the Jeep and in a moment Wren was welcoming her into her home.

  While they were sorting through bags of clothing, finding her something nicer to wear, Maybeth looked up shyly. “Mr. Bogart’s really nice. Is he your boyfriend?”

  “Um, well, sort of. I’m working on it.”

  The girl smiled, but then her smile faded and she sniffled. “Was all that true? What he told me about his family? It’s just so sad?”

  “Why is that, sweetheart? What did he tell you?”

  _____

  It only took Death a minute to dig a big enough hole to bury the dead whatsit. He shook his head, rueful, and tried to think if he’d ever known another girl who’d even pick up something like this, let alone cry when she was unable to save it.

  Well, his mom might have. She’d have named it Wooster, or maybe Gatsby, and his dad would have shook his head and comforted her and taken care of the body, just as he was doing.

  He’d been thinking about his family a lot today. He remembered now how much they had hated Madeline and wished, not for the first time, that he could introduce them to Wren.

  He patted Lucy, who’d crawled out from under the porch to limp along in his wake, returned the shovel to the ramshackle shed where he’d found it and went back in the house, only to find himself with an armload of tearful redhead.

  “Oh, Death! I’m so sorry! Oh, God, I’m so sorry!”

  “It’s okay,” he told her, bewildered. “It was only a little hole. It was no trouble.”

  “I mean about your family. Maybeth told me what you told her. In the last three years, you lost your whole family. And you got injured and your marriage broke up and everything! My God! How do you go on?”

  He tipped her head back and used his thumbs to dry her eyes. “I’m a Marine,” he said gently. “That’s what we do.”

  She buried her face in his shoulder again. “I just wish there was something I could say or do.”

  “Well,” he suggested lightly, “there’s always pity sex.”

  That made her pull back and peer up at him with a slight frown. “You can make jokes?”

  “You can’t cry forever, Wren. Sooner or later you have to find something to laugh about. Crying doesn’t do anything but make your nose run.” She held him close again and snuffled and he jogged her shoulder, teasing. “Are you getting snot on my shirt?”

  “No,” she said. “Maybe.” She leaned back and gave him a calculating look. “Maybe you should take it off,” she suggested, voice sultry.

  The sound of a shower, which had been running in the background, cut out. Turning together, they both glanced at the bathroom door

  “Or maybe not,” Wren conceded with a sigh at this reminder they were not alone.

  “That’s okay,” Death told her, brushing her hair away from her damp, flushed cheeks. “You can just undress me with your eyes until you get a chance to do it for real.”

  twelve

  They handed Maybeth over to her parents in a tearful scene at the airport. She and her mother were both crying and hugging everybody and her father couldn’t stop shaking Death’s hand.

  “I can’t believe you found her so fast,” he said. He turned to Wren. “You know, we only called him this morning? Every other P.I. we talked to said it was almost impossible, and that, since they worked by the hour, they’d have to charge us more than we could afford. But then one of them gave us Bogart’s name. He said he was just starting out and might be willing to work with us. And he was. He agreed to work for a flat rate, and not to charge us unless he found her, so of course, we gave him the
job. But I never dreamed when I hung up the phone this morning that I’d be bringing my baby home tonight!”

  He already had the check made out and as soon as Death wrote him out a receipt they took their leave.

  “It’s not going to be that simple, though, you know?” Wren said later, when they were sitting across from one another in a nice little Italian restaurant.

  “What’s that?” Death was concentrating on the breadsticks.

  “The Turners. There have to be reasons why she ran away in the first place. Unless they address those, they’re going to wind up right back where they started.”

  “Yeah, but now they know how serious she was about being unhappy and she knows how bad it sucks to be homeless, so maybe that’ll give them the kick they need to get help.” He took another breadstick from the basket, tore it in half and leaned across the table to feed it to her. “We can only do what we can do.”

  “You’re awfully wise all of a sudden,” she teased, when she could speak again. “Have you been reading more fortune cookies?”

  “Maybe I’m just clever.”

  “Well, now, I suppose that’s possible.” She grinned. “So how did you find that girl so fast?”

  He grinned and blushed. “Aw, it was nothing.”

  “No it wasn’t. And you’re dying to tell me.”

  “Well … yeah, actually, I am.” He jumped up and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Wait here a minute. I gotta get my laptop.”

  He was back in just a couple of minutes with the oldest and most battered laptop computer she’d ever seen. He sat next to her this time, crowding her into the booth and sliding her plate aside so he could set the laptop where they both could see it.

  She ran one finger across a gouge in the case “What happened to this thing?”

  “Bullet,” he said absently, opening it and flipping it on. He powered it up and called up a photograph. “Now, the Turners knew that Maybeth had been in the Kansas City area three weeks ago, because she posted to her Facebook page and the police were able to track the IP address of the computer she used to the Independence branch of the Kansas City Library. Police inquiries in Independence led nowhere and no one had any idea exactly where she was, until two days ago, when she texted a picture of herself to a friend, who posted it on her Facebook page. This is the picture.”