Killing Cousins

by Rett MacPherson

“I’m Torie O’Shea,” I said.

  “Wilma, unfortunately, doesn’t have a whole lot of time left,” he said.

  My heart sank. The news shocked me more than if somebody had told me that John Wayne had been a Communist. Why? Lord, the woman was in her nineties. How much time could she possibly have?

  A vision flashed in front of me of Sylvia all alone in that big house. Older people have a tendency to give up once they lose their closest relations. I had read that somewhere.

  “She is very weak and her heart is old and tired. I’m afraid that the heart is not getting a proper supply of blood to her brain.”

  “Has she had a stroke?” I asked.

  “No, no. She simply isn’t getting enough oxygen. She can’t remember things very well and she is a danger to herself. However, most often at times like these, the patients will start to experience ministrokes and heart attacks until they pass away.”

  Pass away. Wilma? No way. My eyes filled with tears, I looked away from him to Wilma, lying there oblivious to the fact that two people were discussing her death right in front of her. “But…”

  “She is very old, ma’am. She has lived a long and good life.”

  “Yes, but…” I couldn’t speak. What did I expect? Did I expect her to live to be a hundred? What then? A hundred and ten? A hundred and twenty? I looked back to the doctor and tried to smile. “Thank you, Doctor.”

  I walked swiftly by him out to the waiting room, where I gave a whistle and Rachel and Mary stood up to meet me. Rachel took one look at me and the color drained from her face. “Mom, are you okay?”

  “Why are you crying, Mommy?” Mary asked.

  “Wilma is very sick,” I said to them as I unlocked Matthew’s stroller.

  “Where are we going?” Rachel asked.

  “Home,” I said. “We need to go home and make some phone calls. I need to find a baby-sitter for you so that I can come back. I…I need to talk to Sylvia.”

  “Is Wilma gonna die?” Mary asked.

  “She’s very sick” was all I could say.

  Sixteen

  Traffic wound up River Point Road and was at a complete standstill. Traffic. In New Kassel. What the heck was going on? I thought about it a minute; it was just too hot to make my car wait very long with the air-conditioner grinding and God knows what in the middle of the road. So I turned around in Charity’s driveway and decided to go the back way. I’d go up Hermann Road and come down over the hill. It took me a few extra minutes, which in my current state probably took a week off my life. I wanted to get home and I wanted to get home quickly.

  As I came down over the hill, the river was on my left and the swell of houses on my right had all the trappings of suburbia. Roses, marigolds, manicured lawns and my next-door neighbor’s prized magnolia tree, which isn’t native to Missouri. I could also see past my house and my neighbors’ houses to where the Yates house stood. Or at least used to stand. The demolition crew was there, along with the emergency vehicles, the sheriff’s cars, the neighbors and the coroner.

  The coroner?

  “Mom, what’s going on?” Rachel asked.

  A heavy sigh escaped me and I gripped the steering wheel tighter. My hands were sweaty, the result of too much anxiety. “I don’t know,” I said and passed my house up.

  At the foot of the hill, where the river started to curve just slightly, I pulled in behind Deputy Duran’s squad car and got out. “You guys stay in the car,” I ordered. “And don’t touch anything.”

  The faces greeting me were long and grim. Especially the mayor’s. The building had indeed been torn down and some of the rubble had been stacked off in what was the Yates house backyard. Deputy Duran, having made eye contact with me from across the piles of garbage and the crowd of people, headed straight for me with his head hung low.

  “What? What is it, Edwin?” I asked.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” he said.

  “Another body?” I asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of? Is there or isn’t there?” I asked, searching his eyes for whatever it was that he wasn’t telling me.

  “When they started clearing away the rubble, one of the demolition crew found a skeleton.”

  “A skeleton.”

  “An infant skeleton,” he said. “In the wall.”

  “A wall baby,” I said, dumbfounded.

  “A what?” he asked.

  “It seems as though putting a baby in a wall was a good way to hide an unwanted child.”

  “Huh?”

  “I know, hard to believe, but it has happened. Young girls who could hide their pregnancies would dispose of their babies that way when they were born,” I said.

  “That’s awful,” he said. “I wonder if that’s what happened here.”

  “It’s either that or…”

  “Or what?”

  “Or somebody wanted to cover up the death of an infant.”

  No sooner had the words left my mouth than the world began to spin, and goose bumps danced down my arms and spine. Edwin seemed to be in a vacuum somewhere, because I could barely hear what he was saying. Something about how they almost missed it, but then a piece of drywall broke. And on and on he went.

  “Byron Lee Finch,” I said. My own voice sounded faint and far away from myself.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’ll lay you dollars to doughnuts that the body is Byron Lee Finch.”

  Edwin looked totally confused for a minute. Then the clouds cleared in his mind and some recognition flashed in his baby blues. “Wait a minute…isn’t that—?”

  “Catherine Finch’s baby that was kidnapped sixty-something years ago,” I said.

  “Well…you don’t know that for sure, Torie.”

  “Well, no, but jeez, Edwin. A baby is kidnapped less than two miles from here and a body never found—no ransom note, no nothing—and now there’s a baby skeleton in the wall! I’ll betcha it’s Byron Finch.” I shivered at my own hypothesis.

  “The files you wanted,” Edwin said. “That’s the case you wanted to read, isn’t it?”

  I nodded and looked past him to the mayor, who was wiping the sweat off his brow as he leaned against a wrecker. Poor Bill. This whole demolition thing was wearing him down. He just couldn’t get that house torn down smoothly for anything. Inwardly, I smiled.

  “And guess what?” I said.

  “What?” he asked. Bless his heart, he was beginning to sound just like the sheriff when he was exasperated.

  “Patrick Ward was Byron Finch’s cousin. How much of a coincidence is that? Patrick Ward ending up dead in the building where his cousin was put in a wall back in 1938?”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Torie, you don’t know that the baby in the wall is Byron Finch. This is just pure speculation,” he chastised me.

  “Yeah, but it feels right,” I said.

  “Well, you can’t go around paying attention to your feelings, for crying out loud. Who knows what kind of catastrophe will strike,” he said.

  “Torie! Torie!” I heard a voice from the crowd. I turned and found Eleanore standing there in an orange tank top and shorts and a bright green hat. She looked like a giant pumpkin. She waved me to her. I held up a finger.

  “God, I wish Sheriff Brooke was here,” Edwin said. “He’s gone three weeks and all bloody hell breaks loose.”

  Indeed, Edwin looked severely concerned about his new predicament, as he should be. The sweat trickled down between my shoulder blades as the silence fell between Edwin and me, as disconcerting as it was thick. “Can I see it?” I asked.

  “See what?”

  “The bod—skeleton.”

  Edwin looked at me long and hard. I knew what he was thinking. He was hearing the voice of my stepfather, his boss, telling him to say no to me no matter what I asked. But at the same time, Edwin needed some grounding, and I knew if there was anybody present who could make him feel better, it was I. It was just a matter of whether his insecurity would win ou
t over his boss’s orders.

  “All right,” he said.

  I would say that I was almost gleeful, but as soon as I got over the fact that I had won, it hit me that I was going to have to look at a baby skeleton. I told him just a minute and ran back to the car to make sure the kids were okay. The car was running and the air-conditioning blowing enough to make Rachel’s hair fly back from her face.

  “You guys all right?” I asked as I stuck my head in the door.

  “Yeah, we’re fine,” Rachel said. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Edwin wants me to look at something. Okay? Be good and don’t touch anything,” I said.

  “Can we turn on the radio?” Mary asked.

  “Sure, just don’t turn it up too loud,” I said. “Matthew is sleeping.”

  My gaze lingered on Matthew for a second. He was finally starting to fill out with baby fat beneath all of that loose-fitting skin that infants are born with. I took a deep breath and walked back to Duran with more determination than I really thought I had. Since I’d asked for this, I couldn’t act queasy now.

  He led me over to a pile in the middle of what was the Yates house. Lying there beside a piece of drywall was the skeleton of a baby about twenty-four inches long. I have no idea if this was the position it had been found in since the drywall had fallen all around it. But it was lying on its side, with one hand up by its head. The skull looked abnormally large compared to the rest of the body, as baby’s bodies are out of proportion.

  Something caught my eye. “What’s that? Next to the body?”

  Edwin knelt down and moved away debris. He took out a handkerchief and picked it up. “A diaper pin,” he said.

  My stomach lurched and I felt instantly dizzy. If it was at all possible, my face grew hotter than it already was. Somehow a diaper pin made it more personal. It wasn’t just a skeleton in a wall. It had once been a baby. A real-live baby, with fat feet and pink cheeks. Like the one in my car. And it had either been put in this wall dead or put in there alive and left to die. It was gruesome either way.

  “Oh my God, Edwin,” I said. “Let me see that.”

  He handed the handkerchief to me in the palm of my hand, with the diaper pin lying face-up. I didn’t want to smudge any of the dirt away, because it was evidence. But from what I could make out, it was either silver or silver-plated and had what looked like a fairy etched in it.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “Please, don’t get sick on me.”

  “No, no, I’m not going to get sick. It’s just that…How do you stay removed?” I asked.

  He looked up at me with moist eyes. “I don’t.”

  Seventeen

  Before I could make it to my car, Eleanore grabbed my arm. “Is it him?”

  “Is who what?” I asked.

  “The skeleton. The baby. Is it Byron Finch?”

  Seems I wasn’t the only one jumping to the logical conclusion. “How do you know there was a baby skeleton found?” I asked, looking around the crowd of gatherers.

  “One of the wrecking crew yelled out, ‘Hey, Sheriff, looks like a baby skeleton in here!’ We all sort of abducted that to mean that there was a baby skeleton found,” she said.

  “Deducted. Not abducted.”

  “So it’s true?”

  “Eleanore, don’t go around spreading gossip,” I said. What was I thinking? That was like asking a dog not to hike its leg. “We don’t know anything yet.”

  Just then I saw Rudy walking down the street. He, too, had gone in the back way and parked in our drive. I forgot Eleanore was there as I jogged up to him and threw my arms around his neck. “God, am I glad to see you.”

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “The sky is falling,” I said, still clinging to him. Oxytocin is powerful stuff. All I had to do was feel his arms around me and I started to calm down.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “When they went to tear down the Yates house, they found a skeleton in the wall.” I looked into his eyes for dramatic effect. “An infant.”

  “What?” he asked, confused.

  “I think it’s Catherine Finch’s baby,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I’m sure it is some other baby.”

  I wasn’t sure if Rudy was trying to convince me it was some other baby so that I would feel better because I was sort of involved with the Finch family, or if he was just hoping it wasn’t Byron so I wouldn’t be more involved. Really, it could go either way.

  I let it go for now. I had more disturbing news to tell him. “And Wilma is in the hospital. Her heart is failing.”

  Rudy didn’t look shocked when I told him. He looked unbelieving. As if what I had just said was so preposterous that he wasn’t even going to bother reacting to it. Finally he closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he believed me. “Oh, no.”

  “We have to make some calls,” I said. “My mom will want to know.”

  “No,” Rudy said. “Don’t interrupt her honeymoon.”

  “Rudy…if Wilma dies and my mother wasn’t told, she is going to be fuming. She’ll leave tire tracks on your backside.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the house.”

  I just stood my ground watching the coroner’s gurney being pulled out of the wagon. This was the first time a child of any age had ever been found dead in New Kassel. At least in the last fifty years. Before that I’m sure nineteenth-century disease took its toll on the children here as it did everywhere.

  “Torie. It could be another baby,” he said again.

  “How many babies disappear in New Kassel, Rudy?” I asked.

  “That baby could have been there for hundreds of years,” he said.

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because the Yates house hasn’t been there for hundreds of years.” Just then it dawned on me.

  “Torie?” Rudy said in his best parental voice.

  “I’ve got to go to the office. Drive the kids home for me, okay?”

  “Torie!”

  “I’ll be home in half an hour.”

  As if he believed that. I took off at a brisk pace toward the Gaheimer house. I cut through Charity’s backyard, careful not to step in any flowers or dog doo. Running wasn’t something that I indulged in when I was perfectly healthy, much less only eight weeks postpartum. One should only run when being chased. But I did cover the ground to the Gaheimer house at a pace a little quicker than a walk.

  When I made it to the Gaheimer house, it was locked. It stopped me for a minute, because it was never locked. Not until Sylvia went home for the evening. Then I remembered that Sylvia had probably left early and gone out to Wisteria General. Not a problem, I had a key.

  I had a key on my key ring in the ignition of my car.

  I hate it when I do stupid things. As I was about to go back to the house to get my key, I remembered that Sylvia kept a key in the back. I went around back and remembered that the thing I loved about summer was its long days. The sun was up when I awoke and nearly up when I went to bed. If it had been any other season, I’d be fumbling around in the dark back there. But it was about six in the evening and the sun was still cooking. I found the key on the inside of the wooden flower box, hanging in front of one of the back windows.

  I let myself in through the kitchen and went straight to the basement where we kept the files. Even if we put everything on computer, any self-respecting historian would still keep the original documents, so this basement would always be in use. Unless I could talk Sylvia into moving the files upstairs to the den or something.

  I pulled on the chain and the basement was awash in amber light. I went to the filing cabinets and found the one I needed. In the third drawer down was the housing developments file, and the history of buildings in New Kassel. I was thinking of compiling a “Then and Now” type of book on the town, but Sylvia was convinced it would be too expensive to make.

  And there it was. The ground was
broken for what we now call the Yates house in 1938, and the house was finished in late 1938, early 1939. It was built by Roy Thurman. The Thurmans lived in the house for a while and then, when the flood happened in the forties, they decided to move to higher ground. The house went through several owners in the forties and fifties, until finally Lyle Yates bought it in 1961. He and his family lived in it until they too got tired of fighting the floodwaters of the Mississippi and moved out in the nineties. I was there when he said he was too old to sandbag. FEMA was willing to pay him for his flood damages, so he took the money and moved out of Granite County to Festus.

  Bill had never been willing to pay the wreckers to tear down the house. Until now.

  I cannot tell you how disturbing it was to think that the Yates family had lived there for thirty years with a dead baby in their wall. I was convinced that the baby was Byron. I would have bet that whoever kidnapped him had dropped him in the unfinished wall of the Thurmans’ home. When the contractors came along, they did not know the baby was there, and they finished the house. It would work if there were open sections that hadn’t been dry-walled at the time.

  I shivered as I thought of something more sinister. What if one of the Thurmans had kidnapped Byron and then closed him up in their own wall? Why? Why kidnap a baby and then never ask for a ransom? Unless they were a childless couple and just wanted their own child. But then that wouldn’t work, because the townspeople would have noticed that overnight they had acquired a nine-month-old baby. A nine-month-old baby that remarkably resembled Byron Finch. His picture graced the cover of every newspaper for weeks. The Thurmans would have had to move. But they hadn’t.

  The only reason I could come up with at the time would have been that they kidnapped Byron and, for some unforeseen reason, he died. Then they were forced to dispose of the body.

  I suppose the question tickling at the back of my mind was whether or not the Thurmans knew the Finches.

  Of course, I suppose I should wait to see if it really was Byron they had taken out of that wall. And then, there was always the possibility that there would be no positive identification. With only a skeleton left, there wouldn’t be much to go on, except the things found in the wall.