Blood Relations

by Rett MacPherson

  “No.”

  “Professor Lahrs wouldn’t come down here to work on a project that could make or break his career and not bring one thing pertaining to it! Look, I know what I saw. I saw a letter written in 1921 by a man who claimed to have been the captain of The Phantom.”

  “Whose name was not Eli Thibeau.”

  “Right. The name on the letter was William Wade. The captain of The Phantom was Eli Thibeau.”

  “Maybe you misread it.”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t. The letter was written to his wife or his lover or something, and it was telling her that he had taken care of ‘it.’ Whatever ‘it’ was. And that they would never have to worry about their future. He mentioned very specifically getting a job for the time being as another riverboat captain. And since nobody would know he was the captain of a boat that sank, he shouldn’t have any trouble getting a new job. He signed it ‘William Wade.’”

  He shook his head.

  “What?”

  “It just sounds like a bad episode of The X-Files. If an asteroid hit the earth, you could find a conspiracy in it.”

  “That is not true,” I said. “And there are no bad episodes of The X-Files.”

  “Right, did you see the episode where the killer mushroom ate Mulder and Scully?”

  “I think those documents belonged to Jacob Lahrs and somehow Mr. Ketchum ended up with them.”

  “All right,” he said. “So what? They were associates.”

  I took a deep breath. “Do you mind if I do some searching on my own?”

  He opened his top drawer. “Where’s my Tylenol?” Not finding his bottle of Tylenol, he slammed the drawer and opened the other one. No Tylenol there, either. I opened my purse and tossed him a bottle of Advil, which he caught. He swallowed two of them without any water. How do people do that?

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll ask Jeremiah about the documents.”

  “Colin,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Do you care if I do some research?”

  “What kind?”

  “Nothing hands-on, for pete’s sake. I’m going to do some digging, look up Professor Lahrs’s family tree.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “Don’t look at me like that. I’m going to take Collette with me, and we’ll report back to you as soon as we find something.”

  “I wasn’t looking at you weirdly,” he said, reaching for his throat. “The pill is stuck.”

  Just then, I heard Collette’s voice out in the front office. “Oh, gotta go, Colin. Drink some water!”

  I was halfway to his door when I realized I’d forgotten to tell him about the speeding ticket. “Oh, and on the dashboard of Jeremiah Ketchum’s car was a speeding ticket dated the day Jacob Lahrs was killed.”

  Colin swallowed some water and gave me an exasperated look over the top of the cup. “How do you know that?”

  “I saw it on the dashboard yesterday.”

  “And you could tell what day it was issued?”

  “Well, yes. I looked very closely,” I said.

  “Maybe it was for jaywalking,” he said with a sneer.

  “It was issued in Jefferson County,” I said. “You might want to check on—”

  “Get out of my office!” he roared.

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and hobbled to the door.

  Collette and I drove up to the main library in St. Louis County on Lindbergh. We stopped for lunch in Kirkwood at Einstein’s Bagel, then headed on up to the library. We passed the Huntleigh estates, and that made me think of Jessica Huntleigh and why she had switched boats. Granted, there was no connection between the two Huntleigh families, but it niggled something in my brain. She’d gotten onto The Phantom for no apparent reason at all. And that just made no sense. Because the Louisiana Purchase was a luxury steamer. The Phantom was not.

  Once we got to the library and went up to the third floor—luckily, they have an elevator—I gave Collette a list of things to look up, then went about my business with my own list. I checked the 1920 census for William Wade and found him with his wife, Maria, and their infant daughter, Tamara. They lived on Russell in St. Louis. William had given his place and date of birth as Union County, Illinois, 1882, and Maria’s was listed as Syracuse, New York, 1889.

  “Psst, Collette,” I said. “Look for a marriage for Tamara Wade somewhere between 1938 and 1950. Check the city and the county.”

  “Why am I starting at 1938?” she asked.

  “As a general rule, you start looking for marriage records about eighteen years after the wife was born. Tamara was born about 1920, so start around 1938.”

  She nodded and went to get the proper microfilm roll.

  Over the next three hours, I checked out all the personal info on the Huntleigh heiress, as well as everything I could find on Eli Thibeau and William Wade. Collette and I met back at our table about 3:30 P.M. “What did you get?” I asked.

  “All right, in November 1941, Tamara Wade married a Robert Thatcher,” she said. My spirits sank. Not exactly what I was expecting. “But she got married again, this time to one Maxim Lahrs. Seems that Thatcher was a bomber pilot and died in 1943. So in 1944, she married Lahrs. Which is what we were expecting. Looks like Tamara and Maxim were the grandparents of our dead guy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They’d be too old to be his parents. What else?” “Well, once I found out when they got married, I checked the newspapers to see if there was an announcement for the wedding. Sure enough, seems Maxim Lahrs was a colonel and had been home on special assignment when he met Tamara and fell madly in love. So he was getting ready to head back to the war and decided to tie the knot first. Anyway, there was a big write-up about him and the wedding and who all attended. Tamara had one brother, Thomas, who, I figure, was only about two years younger than she was.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “Because William Wade died in 1922. I don’t think he was even around for the birth of his son,” she said.

  “How do you know he died in 1922?” I asked.

  “Because,” she said, and handed me a photocopy of the article. “It mentions that Tamara was the daughter of the late William Wade. I checked the obituaries in the paper and found his in 1922.”

  “You’re gonna put me out of business,” I said. “Excellent work.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Basically, I’ve been trying to make connections between Eli Thibeau and William Wade. I found the 1910 census and Eli gave his place and date of birth as Union County, Illinois, 1882. Same as William Wade.”

  “Yeah, but there must have been thousands of people born in Illinois in 1882,” Collette said.

  “True, but not in Union County. I’ll get back to that in a minute. I also checked on the Huntleigh heiress,” I said.

  “Why her?”

  “Something’s been bugging me about that whole thing. Sylvia told me that she had switched boats because the one she was on had broken down. But that’s not true. I checked. There was nothing wrong with the boat she was on originally. She just switched boats because she wanted to. Why would she do that?”

  “To travel with somebody?”

  “That’s what I was thinking. And Mr. Chapel asked me a really good question. I showed him a picture taken an hour after the boat sank. The pilothouse was still visible. He said if the pilothouse didn’t sink immediately, why didn’t the captain survive?”

  “You think he did survive and just slipped away?”

  I nodded my head. “Now, I’m not saying he deliberately caused the wreck. What I’m thinking is, once it happened, it was the perfect opportunity just to disappear.”

  “But why?”

  “Maybe because he was in love with Jessica Huntleigh, who was engaged to somebody else and was forbidden to marry him,” I said.

  “You’re reaching,” she said.

  “Am I? I checked on Jessica Huntleigh, and she was born in 1889 in Syracuse, New York. The very same inform
ation that Maria Wade supplied on the 1920 census. I think Jessica Huntleigh changed her name to Maria Wade.”

  “But why would she tell the truth for the census? I mean, she could just as easily have lied.”

  “True, but you know there is a seventy-two-year seal on census info. Nineteen thirty was just now made available to us. So maybe it never occurred to her to lie, because who was ever going to see it? I mean, who would ever look up Maria Wade anyway? And besides, she probably couldn’t imagine that the census would ever be available to the general public during her lifetime.”

  “I suppose,” Collette said.

  I scanned the article on the wedding of Tamara Wade and Maxim Lahrs. Then it hit me. “Photographs,” I said.

  “Photographs?”

  “There have to be photographs of Maria Wade. Jacob Lahrs’s family—somebody in his family has to have a photograph. I could compare one to a photograph of Jessica Huntleigh,” I said.

  “You really think it’s possible for a wealthy New York heiress just to disappear?”

  “In 1919, in the Midwest? Yes, I do. There were no Social Security numbers,” I said. “Back then, I don’t think you had to have a birth certificate for anything. Not like nowadays. Once the furor died down over the dead heiress, it would have been possible for her to change her hair and wear inexpensive clothes, and nobody would have been the wiser. Because nobody would have been looking for the Huntleigh heiress in the middle of St. Louis.”

  “The obituary for William Wade said that he was a riverboat captain—go figure—a businessman, a husband and father. The only child they listed was Tamara, which also makes me think that Thomas wasn’t born until after,” Collette said. She smiled suddenly from ear to ear. “This is fun.”

  “Addictive,” I said. “Guess what else I found? Or didn’t find, I should say.”

  “What?”

  “Prior to 1920, there was no William Wade listed from Union County, Illinois.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because the 1880, 1900, 1910, and 1920 census records are categorized by what they call a Soundex. A Soundex is a code given to the last name. Like Smith would be S, followed by three numbers. So no matter what county somebody was living in, you can find them by name. But if your checking censuses prior to that, you have to know an ancestor’s exact county of residence. That makes things difficult, because an ancestor could have moved in the ten years between each census. With the Soundex system, all you need is the state. I checked Illinois and Missouri all the way back to 1900, and there was no William Wade born in 1882 in Union County, Illinois. But in 1900, there was an eighteen-year-old Eli Thibeau living with his parents in Union County. And in 1910, he was living in St. Louis. By 1920, he was gone, and William Wade suddenly appears.”

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So what’s your theory?”

  “My theory is that Captain Eli Thibeau, alias William Wade, decided with his lover to disappear after the wreck. And I think that since he knew they would not have her money to live on, he had to come up with some way to give her the things she was accustomed to. The captain of a steamship wasn’t exactly a wealthy man. So when he realized the diamonds were on board, he saw what a great opportunity it was: They could disappear and be rich at the same time.”

  “So you think they were going to live off of the diamonds?”

  “I think that was the plan. In a letter that William Wade wrote, he talks about how they’ll never have to worry about their future. I think he’s talking about the diamonds.”

  “When was the letter written?”

  “1921,” I said.

  “The year before he died.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So did he ever get the diamonds?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We may need to talk to somebody in the family to get a better feel for whether or not they actually got the diamonds. Maybe that’s why Jacob didn’t seem concerned about the diamonds, because he already knew his great-grandfather had found them.”

  “One thing bothers me, though,” she said, scratching her head.

  “What’s that?”

  “If the Wades wanted to keep a low profile and not be discovered, then how did Jacob Lahrs know that his great-grandfather was really Eli Thibeau, the captain of the boat?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “That was pretty stupid of him, admitting that Eli Thibeau was his great-grandpa,” she said. “Because anybody could have come along and checked to see that Eli Thibeau never married and never had kids. William Wade did, but not Eli Thibeau.”

  “Yeah, but Jacob Lahrs probably wasn’t figuring anybody would ever check,” I said. “Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  I sat down in the chair at our table. “Mr. Ketchum said that Jacob Lahrs was making a documentary of his ‘discovery.’”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “Well, if Jacob was really hoping this documentary would be his ticket out of the junior college and to National Geographic, he had to know there’d be a certain number of background checks. Maybe the discovery wasn’t about the diamonds per se, or how the boat sank, but the whole thing. The whole cover-up. The fact that William and Maria Wade were really Eli Thibeau and Jessica Huntleigh. Finally, the disappearance of the Huntleigh heiress would be solved. And at the same time, he could blow the lid on where the diamonds have been all of these years.”

  Collette sat down in the chair next to me. “You’re brilliant,” she said.

  “No, just tenacious.”

  Twenty-one

  The next day, I felt just like a kid when it snowed. Suddenly, I wanted to walk everywhere instead of drive, take my own good time reaching my destination. But since I was wearing a house slipper on one foot, I thought it would be better if I drove. I was using the crutch less now, but I still had a bandage on my foot, so it wouldn’t fit in my boots.

  I was on my way to see Harlan Schwartz. I drove up New Bavaria Boulevard, which is in the more residential area of New Kassel. I heard a car behind me when I was almost to Harlan’s. I turned around to see who it was. Sheriff Brooke pulled up alongside me in his squad car. I rolled my window down and he followed suit.

  “Hey, Torie,” he said.

  “What’s up?”

  “Where you headed?”

  “I’m on my way to see Harlan Schwartz,” I said.

  He looked up the road and thought a moment. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Why? What’s up?” I asked again.

  “Had a talk with Jeremiah Ketchum,” he said.

  “And?”

  “He gave me everything he had. You were right. The documents belonged to Jacob Lahrs.”

  “And did he have a good excuse as to why he had Jacob’s documents?”

  He gestured to Harlan’s house. “Let me pull in the driveway,” he said. “Hold on.”

  The sheriff pulled his squad car into the driveway of a small ranch house, and I pulled in behind him. We both got out and stood in the drive, which had been recently shoveled and littered with salt. I hoped Harlan had paid some young kid to shovel it, because if he was out here shoveling at his age, I was going to be really upset.

  “Ketchum said that he and Jacob had been pouring over the documents at lunch on Sunday. When I had questioned him before, he’d said they’d had lunch and then Jacob walked down to the Corner Bar, while he and Danny went back to the Murdoch Inn,” the sheriff said.

  “What’s that mean? Jacob let Jeremiah take the documents back to his room and said he’d pick them up at a later date?” I asked.

  “Apparently so.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Although I think it could be just as possible that he killed Jacob Lahrs and then stole the documents. But what are the chances that he’d never seen the documents before? He’d probably seen them plenty of times. I don’t think stealing them would be motive enough to kill Professor Lahrs.”

 
“Why would Jeremiah kill him? I mean, if he did, what would he gain from it?”

  “Well, I thought about all of the info that you and Collette found out at the library. I’m wondering if Jeremiah had decided to take credit for the whole thing.”

  “Yeah, but what about Danny Jones? And everybody else who knew about what Jacob Lahrs was doing?”

  “Then maybe all Jeremiah wants is the diamonds.”

  “That would be more like it,” I said.

  I thought a moment.

  “What about alibis? Do they have airtight alibis?” I asked.

  “Well, Danny Jones and Jeremiah Ketchum backed each other up; they both said they’d had lunch together. Later, Jacob knocked on their doors to tell them he was headed to the copiers and that they’d have dinner when he got back. That was about six in the evening. Nobody saw them after that, but their cars were both at the Murdoch Inn. And then when I went to Eleanore and told her to roust everybody, they were both present and accounted for in their rooms. Now, Bradley Chapel and his cameraman, Kyle, were seen having dinner at the Old Mill Stream. They left between six and six-fifteen. Eleanore said she doesn’t remember seeing them come in, but she knew that Mr. Chapel had picked up his messages from Oscar at the front desk by six-thirty,” Colin said. “Then you found Professor Lahrs around sevenish.”

  “That’s everybody?”

  “Those are the main suspects. You know, there’s always the chance that somebody came to New Kassel just to kill Jacob Lahrs. It may not be anybody we’ve even met. He’s got an ex-wife who’s pretty angry with him,” he said. “I’m checking her out.”

  “How do you feel about Chapel? Does he seem all right to you?”

  “He’s all right,” Colin said. “A little overdressed for New Kassel. His cameraman is insane. He runs around in the snow in shorts, and I noticed he never wears socks. I confiscated the film they took of the crime scene, though.”

  “Really. I didn’t know they had taken any,” I said, and worked my lower lip between my fingers.

  “So,” Colin said, looking up at the front of Harlan Schwartz’s house. “You here to ask him about the wreck?”

  “He’s the only one in town who is old enough to remember it, other than Sylvia, and I already got her story,” I said.