“Oh.”
Ransford Dooley looked over at our table as if he knew that we were speaking about him. What a twist this was. Marie and this man sweet on each other. Suddenly I wanted to know more about Mr. Dooley.
“Thanks for the tea, Joe. I’ve got to go. If you think of anything specific about that week that Marie died, give me a call,” I said as I stood up.
“Sure will. Tell Rudy I’ll give him a call later this week.”
“Okay, and oh—have two loaves of that rye bread sliced and I’ll come by and get it in about an hour.”
“Certainly.”
As I stepped outside I noticed two people stood across the street having a very intense conversation. I recognized one of those people. It was Eleanore Murdoch. I also knew the back of the person she was speaking to but couldn’t place it. Then she turned her face slightly and looked over at me. It was Yvonne Mezalaine.
Oh, God. The last thing I or anybody in this town needed was for Eleanore to get involved with Yvonne Mezalaine. I didn’t trust Yvonne. I didn’t believe that she was Marie’s half sister. Somebody recording their family tree didn’t usually leave off siblings because of a family feud. You may not speak to a person ever again, but you still put their name on the records. It was interesting the way she slipped up at Wilbert’s office and said that Marie’s pedigree was impressive, when it would have been hers as well. Why hadn’t she said my family tree?
I crossed the street and decided to save them from one another. I wasn’t sure who could do more damage to whom.
“Eleanore,” I said, “how nice to see you.”
“Torie, hello,” she said. She looked me up and down and finally settled on my face. She had a habit of doing that. There wasn’t much to look at where I was concerned. The majority of my wardrobe consisted of jeans and shirts. I owned a few dresses and maybe two nice pants outfits and some shorts. But jeans usually cut it. Maybe that was her polite way of telling me that I dressed like a slob.
“Ms. Mezalaine,” I said in acknowledgment. “How are you ladies today?”
“Just fine,” Eleanore said.
“I was just leaving,” Yvonne said. “Good day, Mrs. Murdoch. Remember what I said earlier.” She turned to me then. “Mrs. O’Shea.” She then walked away, shoulders thrown back and looking like a million bucks.
I must have stared after her for a good solid minute. Was it something I said?
“Thanks a lot, Torie,” Eleanore said. Her earrings were big pieces of plastic fruit that clanged together. I don’t know how she could hear herself talk.
“What were you two talking about?” I asked.
“If you must know, I’m conducting my own investigation of the Marie Dijon murder.”
“What?!”
Eleanore physically leaped when I yelled. The reason that I didn’t ask her anything more intelligent than that was because I was too angry to formulate a coherent question.
“Yes. Did you know that Yvonne is Marie’s sister? And that Dooley, over at Pierre’s, was having an affair with her?”
“They were sweet on each other. Why does everything have to be so illicit with you?”
“I am not illiterate,” she announced.
“Ugh,” I moaned.
“Do you want to know what I think?” she asked.
“No. I don’t.”
“I think you are jealous. I think you are worried that I will solve the mystery before you,” she said.
“What … wait … this is…” I couldn’t talk.
“I have exterminated every piece of evidence thoroughly,” she said.
“Examined. You’ve examined the evidence.”
“Yes. I’m not being careless, you know. You just don’t like me horning in on your territory. Well, let me tell you, Victory O’Shea, what’s good for the chicken is better for the rooster.”
“Oh, Eleanore. If you’re going to be profound, at least try to be correct about it.” But I knew what she was getting at. If I could be nosy and conduct an investigation, so could she. And to say that she couldn’t would be rather conceited. And selfish.
“What’s more, I followed Mr. Wheaton and Mr. Lockheart into St. Louis the other day,” she went on as I began to get sick to my stomach.
“What … you what?”
“Yes. They went to Cervantes. The convention center.”
“They did?”
“Yes. And I’m not telling you anything more, or you’ll try and take credit for it.”
“Wait. I’ve been meaning to speak to you about what you printed about Sylvia,” I said, proud of myself for getting out a complete sentence.
“What about it? Great interrogative reporting, was it not?” she said. It was clear that she was pleased.
“You have set Sylvia off her course,” I said. “She’s very upset. I don’t know where you got your information, but you shouldn’t have printed something like that. You should never have speculated.”
“Yvonne is the one that told me about Sophie Gaheimer,” she said.
Yvonne? Hold everything. This was too weird. Eleanore had run that article just after Marie’s body was found. Nobody except me had speculated that Marie had been murdered. It was safe to say that Eleanore wouldn’t have been investigating Marie’s murder at that stage of the game. So what reason would she have to speak to Yvonne on the subject of Sophie Gaheimer? On any subject, for that matter. Did Yvonne come to her with the information? But why?
Maybe Eleanore was just yanking my chain and she really got the information somewhere else.
A few seconds later I looked up to ask Eleanore how she knew Yvonne, but she was gone. She was headed east in the direction of the river.
Seventeen
I was reading. Silently, by myself. A wonderful autumn breeze blew in my office window as evening approached. I had set aside my history books and started reading Hermann Gaheimer’s diary. My run-in with Eleanore and what she said about Sophie had made me very curious.
Hermann Gahiemer arrived in this country from Germany in the 1860s. He married Sophie in 1874. They had no children for nearly ten years. In March 1883 Hermann wrote this entry in his diary:
Sophie is pregnant and I know it is not mine for I cannot father children. She thinks I am ignorant of the truth. But it so happens that it is she who is ignorant. For I never told her that I could never have children of my own …
Hmm. Hermann made a vague reference to having had scarlet fever when he was younger. I assumed that was what had rendered him sterile. Some ten years later the journal speaks of Sophie’s lover being Gaston Levaldieu and that all three of their children are his. But all three have the name Gaheimer. He goes on to say in an even later entry that Sophie’s lover cannot be trusted, that he saw him speaking to a man of questionable character.
Intrigued, I continued reading. For the next thirty-five years Hermann only mentions his work, the town, and politics, and he does mention the children that he was raising as if they were his own. But around 1920 he begins to mention Sylvia. He speaks of her as being the most beautiful thing alive. When he first saw her he thought she was an angel and then he thought she was a devil because he did not think that God could create something as perfect and enchanting as she was.
It’s not long before his diary begins to tell of their shared love and I tried to skip through it as much as possible. Somehow I felt, once again, that I was a Peeping Tom, peeking across time. Then came this entry:
Sophie cares not that I love Sylvia. To divorce Sophie would be a scandal for Sylvia. I cannot do that to her. The children are grown and I’ve told them the truth, that I am not their father. I have left them each a small cash settlement in my will, with the provision that, if they contest it, I leave them nothing.
It was a reminder of the shrewd businessman that Hermann Gaheimer had been. Sylvia learned everything she knew from him. Finally, the last entry dealing with Sophie:
Truly a dark day. Sophie is dead. She was pushed to her death. I know, because I
saw it happen. I will let him get by with murder, because Sophie deserved it. For her betrayal and her horrible twists of truths, she deserves what she got. Lord have mercy on my demented soul.…
Wow. Hermann Gaheimer never ceased to amaze me. Sophie was pushed and Hermann never told a soul. The few people that were told the particulars of her death were told she had committed suicide. It must have been his final revenge on her—telling everybody she had taken her own life, even though the papers said it was an accident.
“Oh, my God!” I heard Rudy yell from the bedroom. “Quick, Torie. Hurry!”
I dropped the diary and ran into the bedroom and stopped at the doorway. Now, Rudy is a very brave man. He is strong in character and body. But he has one weakness, one very large phobia, and it just so happens to be mine as well.
Spiders.
Rudy had one foot on the edge of our bed and the other foot on the top of the dresser so that he was not touching the floor at all. In his hand was a baseball bat. Between his legs on the floor was a wolf spider the size of a large jawbreaker. His legs were the size of small branches. Okay, that might have been an exaggeration, but he was huge!
“Kill him,” he said in a flat voice.
“You kill him,” I said back to him.
“I’m not killing him.”
“Well, I’m not killing him either,” I argued. “As soon as I head toward him, he’ll run under the bed. I’d rather stand here and look at him all night than have to go to bed knowing he’s alive.”
“Well, do something,” he said.
“What do you suggest? Why don’t you just jump on him?”
“Because I’ll miss and he’ll run up my leg and you’ll be a widow.”
Rachel and Mary came scrambling up the steps and stopped dead in the doorway. “Wow,” Rachel said. “He’s huge.”
“Huge?” Rudy asked. “He’s big enough to give a name.”
“Okay,” I said. “How about some Raid. Do we have any Raid?”
“No,” he said. “You won’t allow any poisonous chemicals in the house because you don’t want us all to get cancer. Remember?”
“Well,” I said, “the next time we go to the store and I tell you that you can’t buy any bug spray, buy it anyway!”
In the meantime the spider remained calm and cool and never moved an inch. It was rather polite of him to allow us to have this argument.
“My teacher says to use hair spray,” Rachel said.
“Hair spray?” I asked.
“Yeah, she says it will stiffen them.”
“I want it dead, Rachel. Not tortured. Besides, I don’t think we have any hair spray either.”
“Why don’t you just step on him?” Rachel asked.
“Because,” I said, “it scrunches and it feels like I’m crushing bones or something. It gives me the heebie jeebies.”
The spider moved.
“George,” Rudy said to it. “You stay right there, George.”
Rachel and I shrieked. Mary, however, walked over very calmly and smashed George the Spider. Just like that. No squealing or cringing. No hesitation. Just splat and he was dead.
“Don’t you feel like an idiot?” Rudy said to me.
“No. You’re the one with the baseball bat.”
“Am I interrupting something?” Aunt Bethany said from behind.
“Oh, no,” I said. “We were just killing a spider.”
“It takes the whole family?” she asked.
“It takes this whole family,” I answered.
Rudy got down from his safety and came over and kissed Aunt Bethany on the cheek. “Hi, beautiful,” he said.
“Hello, ugly,” she said back to him.
“I’m going downstairs to get a snack,” Rudy said. “Torie, will you pick George up and give him a proper burial?”
“I’m not picking him up,” I said. “You pick him up. You were his intended victim.”
“No, you pick him up,” he said as he headed down the steps. Even dead, spiders were a menace.
“I’ve got some news for you,” Aunt Bethany said.
“Great.”
Rachel and Mary were hanging on Aunt Bethany’s legs. It was a good thing I didn’t have three children. There wouldn’t be any room for the third one to wallow.
“Girls, get off her,” I said.
Aunt Bethany squeezed them back. “I just love your girls,” she said to me. “My girls are going through that weird teenage stuff.”
Her oldest child, Adam, is twenty-two. The twins, Lara and Lynn, are now fifteen. Girls going through teenage metamorphosis are quite different from boys.
“I try to remember that all adults were teenagers once, and we survived,” she said.
I laughed at that one. “So, what kind of news did you say you had?”
“Sainte Marguerite,” she said. “It’s the island of Sainte Marguerite.”
“Yeah? What about it?” As soon as I asked, I knew what about it. “Oh, my God. The island of Sainte Marguerite.”
“What’s an island?” Mary asked.
“It’s a country with water around it,” Rachel answered her.
Aunt Bethany had never stopped staring at me. I stared back as the implications of this hit home.
“The man in the iron mask,” I whispered.
She nodded.
“Oh, my God,” I repeated as the gooseflesh rose on my arms. “Nah, no way. Oh, my God.” I wasn’t sure on the particulars but I knew that the man in the iron mask was an actual prisoner held in France, not just a work of fiction.
I shoved some books off my desk, rummaging around to find the letter to the countess. “Listen to this,” I said to my aunt. “‘The rumor of Louis XIV having a twin brother at birth, is but that … a rumor. In 1694 I was called to the island of Sainte Marguerite.’ Wow. See, her cousin had died and was replaced by his valet who died at the Bastille in 1703. Holy cow!”
“The man in the iron mask was imprisoned in 1664 and died in 1703.”
“Who was the man in the iron mask?” I asked.
“Nobody knows,” she said. “Alexander Dumas liked to think that it was a twin brother to Louis XIV.”
“What?” I asked the question but I don’t physically remember moving my mouth.
“Yes. See, the legend says that a seer told the king that his wife would give birth to twin boys and that they would tear apart the kingdom fighting over who should be king,” she explained. I looked perplexed I’m sure, so she went on. “Back then twins were a real dilemma. Their logic was that the first one born was the last one conceived, and that the last one born was the first one conceived. So who should rule? The actual firstborn, or the actual first one conceived?”
“I can see how that would be a problem.”
“So, according to the legend, the king and his wife, Anne of Austria, had the second-born child sent away to live with distant family or somebody, I’m not sure who it was. This child supposedly was never allowed to see a painting or coin with the prince’s face on it. According to the legend that Dumas weaves, the exiled prince finds out who he is and tries to overthrow the crown, and he is put in a mask and jailed so that nobody will know who he is.”
“Well, but this letter plainly states that particular version as being a rumor. So, let’s assume this letter is correct. It is saying that Henri de Lorraine, Duc du Guise, was the man in the mask. Why? Who was the prisoner really? What I mean is, do historians have a real theory on who he was?”
“All kinds,” Aunt Bethany said. “Everybody from the Duke of Buckingham in England to Vermandois the Grand Admiral of France. Even Molière was considered.”
“The guy who wrote Tartuffe? That Molière?”
“Yes, that Molière,” she said. “Oliver Cromwell, the Duc du Guise, and Nicholas Fouquet. Fouquet is the one I would have picked,” she said.
“Wow.”
“Yes, wow.”
“The documents have to be a hoax,” I said.
“Why?”
“It’s just not possible,” I explained. “Why would Marie be the only person in the world to be keeper of a secret like that?”
“Mom,” Rachel said. Her clear, young voice brought me out of my information-overload state of mind. “Can we have a drink?”
“Yes, sweetie. Go down and ask your grandma for one or ask Dad.”
Rachel and Mary disappeared down the steps to go get their drinks. I was silent for a while.
“It would explain why somebody would be willing to kill for these papers,” Aunt Bethany said.
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it. If you have undeniable proof as to who the man in the iron mask was, it would have to be worth lots of money. Plus a Pulitzer or something like it. It could make somebody’s career.”
“Lanny Lockheart,” I said. “There has to be more to it than that. Marie was related to this man, this Duc du Guise. Maybe she and Lanny had plans to do something with this information. Some sort of joint project.”
“But he killed her instead? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m just throwing out ideas. One thing’s for certain,” I said. “If Eleanore could follow Lockheart and Wheaton to the Cervantes Convention Center undetected, it would definitely be possible for Mr. Lockheart to have followed me to Camille’s.”
“And if you’re right, they have the papers.”
“Yeah. So why are they sticking around? Why haven’t they gotten out of Dodge? See? That’s what makes me think that there is more to it.”
Then I remembered the key that was in the envelope with the documents. I hadn’t taken it to Camille’s, and I had no idea what it was the key to. It was a skeleton key, so I knew that it would not fit a safety deposit box. Could this be what they were sticking around for?
“Do you think that Camille realized what you had?”
“I think she knew that this letter meant something. I think that, being French, she recognized the name Sainte Marguerite. But I don’t think she had any idea of the scope of this,” I said.
“So, what next?” Aunt Bethany asked.
A Veiled Antiquity (Torie O'Shea Mysteries) Page 11