by Jan Burke
Travis took the photo from her, studied it and said, “Do you have a magnifying glass?”
“Yes, in the desk in your room.”
“My room?” he laughed.
I went into the guest room, which doubles as a study, and got the magnifying glass out of the desk. I brought it to him. After a brief look at the photograph, he said, “It’s a hobo sign.”
“Hobo sign?” I asked.
“You know, one of the signs hoboes leave for one another. Some people call them Gypsy signs, some people say they go back to old medieval ritual signs. Wherever they came from, drifters depended on them. They could tell a man where to catch a train or find a camp or a handout. If he knew where to look for them, the signs could tell him a lot about a house—to beware of a vicious dog, or that the owners will care for a man who’s sick, or that a man with a gun lives there. A drawing of a cat, for example, means ‘A kind woman lives here.” If there are three triangles by the cat, it means ’Tell her a sob story.“”
“What does this one mean?”
He looked up at me. “It means ‘Run like hell.”“
25
He handed the photo and the magnifier back to me. I could now see that the mark was drawn in pencil, and looked like an “h” that slanted to the right; it wasn’t hard to imagine a stylized runner.
“There’s another way to draw that one,” he said, as I handed the photo and glass to Rachel.
He borrowed Rachel’s pencil and awkwardly used his bandaged hand to draw a circle on one of the manila envelopes. Then, across the circle, he drew two parallel arrows. The arrows pointed right.
“If you saw that, you knew you should hit the road, and quick!” he said.
“How do you know about these signs?” Rachel asked.
“My dad could understand symbols and pictures, even numbers—he just had trouble with letters and words. His family taught him hobo signs from when he was very young; he taught them to me. If you weren’t on the road, of course, they were only good for so many situations. My dad and his brother had other little signs they used if they had to leave notes for one another. My mother and I used them with him, too. That was a big thrill, of course, when I was younger. We pretended to be spies, or to have our own secret language. Took me awhile to realize it wasn’t a game.”
“Wait!” Rachel said suddenly, and searched through her papers. She handed a photo over to Travis. “I took that at the back of your mother’s apartment. Someone tried to break into a window. This was drawn on the window frame, between the bars.”
His expression was grim as he said, “It means ‘This is the place.”“
Rachel went back to the murder file photos, looking through other shots, sorting out photos of the exterior of the house. “There aren’t any others,” she said.
“There probably are others,” Travis said, “but you have to know where to look for them. Maybe I should say, there probably were others—the whole area where the farm was is now an industrial park. My father had the place torn down years ago.”
“Getting rid of memories?” I asked.
“I guess,” he said, but I’m not sure he really heard the question. He had taken the stack of glossies from Rachel and was studying them intently, through the glass. He held one out to her, a photo of the front door. “There’s another hobo sign in this shot,” he said. “Look here—at the little pencil marks on the facing of the front door.”
“I still don’t see it. What are you looking at?” she said.
“Here,” he said, moving to look over her shoulder. “These three slanting lines. They mean ‘This is not a safe place.”“
Rachel handed it over to me, and Travis had to point out the lines to me as well. “What do you make of it?” Rachel asked.
“Assuming they were left on the night of the murder, and left by the murderer, then the killer was warning someone else,” I said. “Those two assumptions are big assumptions. But if the killer left them, then the question is, who was he warning?”
“The DeMonts may have known these symbols?” she asked.
“Yes,” Travis said. “If my uncle didn’t lie about Horace living on the road, then Horace would have certainly known them. And Robert. I don’t know if he taught them to his other kids or not. I don’t know if the others traveled with him.”
Rachel had another set of pictures. “These were taken of your dad’s apartment,” she said. “Do you know about these?”
He nodded, looking through the pictures. “My dad rented this apartment when he separated from my mom. He was going to buy another house, but he said he wanted a place where I could visit him in the meantime. At first, I had thought he would just go back to Gwendolyn, but he didn’t. I think he also wanted a place that was just his, a place to sort things out.
“When Richmond found out about the apartment, he got a search warrant. One for our house, too. He never found anything.”
I was looking over his shoulder at a shot of Arthur’s bedroom. Everything was neat and tidy—the bed made, the closet orderly. “Look,” I said. “Your mom had a night-light just like that one.”
“The Virgin Mary night-light?” he smiled. “No, it’s the same one. He gave her that one. She said he told her it might make her feel protected. My mother used to laugh and say she thought it was his way of saying he wanted her to be as pure as the Virgin Mary—that he didn’t want her to have any other men in her life.”
“Was she afraid of him?”
“No,” he said. “Not at all.”
“But she didn’t let him back into her life—I mean, not until recently.”
“No, like I said, she felt tremendous guilt over everything that had happened before the murder. She didn’t want to profit from Gwendolyn’s death. Once the crisis was over and she felt sure my father wouldn’t be charged with Gwendolyn’s murder, she felt guilty about lying on his behalf. She decided that no matter how much she loved him, he wasn’t good for her or for me. She couldn’t trust him again.”
“And he went along with this?”
“Think of the threat she could hold over him,” he said. “I’m not saying she ever did threaten him, but we both knew that my dad was dependent upon our silence.”
So my aunt had exercised her own form of blackmail over those years. Stay away from me and your son, or I’ll blow your alibi.
“Once she got an idea in her head,” Travis was saying, “it was harder than hell to get her to let go of it. A couple of years ago, she read a passage in one of her Georgette Heyer novels to me, about a shy woman. Heyer had made the observation that shy women often have strong prejudices. She asked me if I thought that was true.”
“What did you say?”
“I said the fact that she hadn’t spoken to my father in a decade ought to prove that Ms. Heyer severely understated the case.”
“This was near the time you had the fight with her over your dad?”
“Yes. I had reached a point in my life when I needed to get to know him. If he was a liar, a cheat, a killer—whatever—I needed to get to know him. The pity was, I had lost ten years during which he was perfectly healthy.”
The phone rang.
“Reed tells me I’m not supposed to yell at you,” the voice said. “Can I just say I’m worried?”
“Frank! Please don’t worry. I’m home, I’m safe, just a little bruised.”
“We’re leaving Boise tomorrow morning—”
“You’re coming home!”
“No,” he laughed, “but I’m glad you sound so excited about the idea. We think our guy is in Montana now. We have some pretty solid leads.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry. I’m anxious to get back, too. Twice as anxious now.”
“So where will you be?” I asked.
“I’ll call you when I know for sure. We’re still working on finding a place to stay.”
“Frank, you know how you’ve been telling me about the people you’ve met there, with the Boise PD?”
�
��Yes,” he said warily.
“Is there anyone there who might be willing to look something up for you?
He groaned. “For me, huh?”
“Okay, for me. It’s important.”
“What is it?”
“I need to know if there’s an arrest record for a Robert or Bobby De-Mont in the summer of 1940.”
“Did you just say ‘1940’?”
“Yes.”
“Irene—”
“Come to think of it,” I said, remembering that Gerald mentioned that school had just let out for the summer, “it was probably June of 1940.”
There was a pause. “Want to tell me why I should put any new acquaintance of mine to that kind of trouble?”
I told him about the conversation with Gerald Spanning.
“Hmm. Any idea at all what the charges might have been?”
“No, but to send a lawyer all the way to Boise—”
“A lawyer and a bunch of money,” he said.
“If it was a violent crime against a woman, it would be worth it to De-Mont to have it hushed up, don’t you think?”
“I’ll see if I can get anyone interested in it. Spell the name for me again.”
I did. “Thanks, Frank.”
“Irene?”
“Yes?”
“Be careful, okay?”
“You, too.”
“Think about staying somewhere else, okay?”
“I have been, much more seriously,” I said. “I’ll give you Travis’s cell phone number in case you can’t reach me here.”
He told me that Pete wanted to talk to Rachel, and I put her on.
“Travis,” I said, “Frank doesn’t think it’s a good idea for us to stay here, at least for a while. Do you mind if we stay somewhere else tonight?”
He looked relieved. “I didn’t want you to feel insulted. Let me pay for a couple of hotel rooms somewhere, or we could stay in the van. Either way, I’d feel safer.”
“I think I know someone who’d probably love to have us stay over at her place. The rooms are small, but the food is great. And wait until you see the gardens.”
26
Jack was willing to take care of the pets, so Travis and I arrived on Mary’s doorstep about an hour later. Rachel had been invited to join us for dinner but wasn’t going to stay overnight.
“Travis!” Mary cried, as he entered the house. Within moments she had instructed him to call her Aunt Mary if he wanted to, because even Frank and Rachel called her that. “So there’s no need to stand on genealogical ceremony,” she said. “Irene, he must be half-starved, waiting so late for his dinner. Travis, I hope you like beef stew, because I’ve got a big pot of it simmering on the stove.”
I never really think of her as motherly, or even grandmotherly, but as I watched her fuss over him in an agreeable way, I began to realize there were sides of Mary Kelly I didn’t always get to see. She might spoil Frank or goad me, but her treatment of Travis was more tender, and solicitous without being oppressively so.
“What happened to your hand?” she asked. His answer earned me a look of reproof from her. “Sweet heavens, Irene! I expected you to take better care of him!”
“Yes, I managed to injure him within twenty-four hours of meeting him,” I said.
“That’s not true!” he protested. “Irene has been nothing but good to me. And I think she was hurt worse today. I told you what happened, Aunt Mary—my injury was my own fault, not Irene’s.”
“Well, I’m just thankful you weren’t hurt any more seriously than that,” she said, turning back to the stove. Travis couldn’t see her face from where he sat, so he didn’t see her smile. I decided she must have been pleased that he had started calling her Aunt Mary. Maybe that was it.
She then began regaling him (and Rachel) with stories of some of the more ridiculous moments of my childhood. The story of Barbara locking me in my grandmother’s outhouse had already been met with hilarity.
It was with some relief, then, that I heard Rachel’s cell phone ring in the middle of the story about the time my father took off work to come to my school for a conference with one of the nuns, only to discover that the good sister had been barricaded in the library. Aunt Mary hadn’t reached the part about the fire when the phone rang.
It was McCain, trying to reach me through her. I told her I’d talk to him and she handed the phone to me. I glanced over at Travis, who was listening to Mary tell another story. I walked out of the kitchen. Rachel watched me, but didn’t say anything.
“I understand you’ve had a rotten day,” McCain said.
“I understand you have, too.”
He laughed. “Well, nobody’s giving me half a million to cheer me up.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your inheritance, Ms. Kelly. Arthur Spanning remarried your aunt.”
“I know,” I said. “I just talked to their priest today. He can tell you that neither Travis nor I knew that, by the way.”
“He can tell me that you acted like you didn’t know.”
“Ask Rachel to give you Harold Richmond’s number—he can tell you what happens to people who don’t let go of one idea. Maybe you’ve only ever had one in your lifetime, and this is it. But trust me, it’s a bad one.”
“Why should I doubt that the sole beneficiary of Briana Maguire’s estate should be interested in five hundred thousand dollars?”
“She didn’t have five hundred thousand. I doubt she had five hundred.”
“You should talk to your buddy Reed Collins about the papers that were found in Mr. Ulkins’s office.”
I sighed. “That can only mean something came to her through Arthur. Travis should have it. Travis already has most of Arthur’s money, and Arthur wouldn’t have wanted me to take anything from his estate. I’ll talk to his lawyer, if it will make you lay off.”
“Where is that lawyer, by the way? No one seems to be able to locate him. And you’re keeping your cousin damned close to you, aren’t you?”
“Look,” I said, “I was going to offer to help you out here, but maybe I’ll just have you talk to my own lawyer.”
“We’ll talk again, Ms. Kelly. By then, you’ll need that lawyer.”
I walked back toward the kitchen just in time to hear Travis say, “These stories are funny, but they must be embarrassing to Irene. Don’t you have any positive stories to tell about her?”
As I stepped into the room, I said, “She’s too old to change her habits, Travis.”
“I’ve got all kinds of stories about her,” Mary said. “But I don’t want her head to swell. She knows I’m proud of her.”
“Do you?” Travis asked me.
It was the look of worried uncertainty on Mary’s face that made me say, “Of course I do. And the reverse is true as well. She knows I’m proud of her.”
“This stew is about to burn,” Mary said, suddenly turning away to stir the pot.
I was assigned to the smaller of the two small guest rooms, to sleep on a bed that I had slept in before, and had always found to be comfortable. But on those previous occasions, I hadn’t been thrown against a wall a few hours before bedtime.
At about three in the morning, I decided to break down and take half of one of the pain pills I had brought with me, prescribed for an older injury. I rarely took them, but I needed sleep. I got back into bed and was trying to find a tolerable position, trying not to think of Ulkins, when there was a slight tapping at the door.
27
“Come in,” I called.
It was Mary, and by the hall light I could see she had a rather festively colored, comfy-looking robe on. She sat next to the bed, and took my hand. “You poor thing,” she said. “Anything I can get you?”
“I’ll be all right,” I said.
She sat next me, reminiscing for a little while about the numerous childhood injuries I had sustained, recalling some scrapes and bumps and a rather spectacular fall from a tree. All the while she softly stroked my hai
r the way my father used to do when I was little, whenever I had had a particularly bad day, and I wondered drowsily if she had comforted him in this same way when he was a boy. I don’t remember falling asleep or hearing her leave the room.
She didn’t wake me the next morning to go to Mass, but she took Travis to St. Matthew’s with her while I slept in. Later they dropped me off at my house, where I got into the Karmann Ghia, put the top down and headed for Huntington Beach. They were going shopping—in the Mustang—while I went to talk to the DeMonts.