Blood Relations

by Rett MacPherson

  “What types of things did the CSU find?” I asked.

  “Well, one of the things was a guitar pick.”

  “A guitar pick?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “It was red and had an alien’s face on it.”

  “You do know that Danny Jones is a musician,” I said. “I saw guitar picks all over his car.”

  “When were you in his car?” my mother asked.

  “I wasn’t in his car,” I said. “I was outside looking in.”

  “I’ll make a note to ask forensics to bump that one up. If there’s a print on it, and it had the right placement in the snow, we could have our killer.”

  “Well,” I said, stretching. “I’m going to go visit Jacob Lahrs’s grandmother.”

  “Why?” Colin asked.

  “Torie,” Rudy warned.

  “I’m going with Collette. If she’s going to do this story right, then she’s going to need an interview with the family. Think about it. Jacob’s grandmother is the only one who can really tell us about her mother, Jessica Huntleigh,” I said. “I can’t help but wonder if anybody else in the family knows what Jacob knew.”

  “Be careful,” Mom said. “She may not know who her mother was, and you could greatly upset her.”

  “I know,” I said. My mother always worries about me upsetting somebody. “But Collette’s going with or without me, so I figure I should go along and judge the reactions.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Colin said. “And manipulate the conversation, and snoop around, and—”

  “Yeah? So?” I asked, my face flushing.

  “At least she has the decency to blush,” my mother said.

  “Just be careful and call me the minute you get back. I want to know what you find out,” Colin said.

  “Okay,” I agreed. Colin has learned that people often give different answers to certain questions, depending on whether or not you wear a badge. Sometimes he lets me question somebody in a casual sort of way, and then he’ll go and interview them on his own. Then we compare notes. Quite often, the answers are different, or even just our impressions.

  I’d venture to say that if pressed, and he had to answer honestly, he’d admit that I’m not such a bad stepdaughter after all.

  Twenty-eight

  Collette drove a little too fast for my taste. But she does a lot of things too fast for my taste. I guess if one is going to own a little maroon sports car, one should drive it like a sports car and not like a station wagon.

  The town of Pevely sits between Highway 61-67 and I-55. I remember when I-55 was built, back in the early seventies. I was a kid at the time and was quite impressed with its two lanes heading south and two lanes heading north, separated by a large grassy median. Once you get up to Arnold, it becomes eight lanes, four on each side. Then later, as a teenager, I realized that if I wanted to, I could take it all the way to Memphis. That made it the coolest of all highways to me.

  Highway 61-67 has a different history altogether. It starts as Lemay Ferry Road up in St. Louis—four lanes, separated only by a yellow line. Then it becomes Jeffco Boulevard in Arnold, and in Festus, it is called Truman Boulevard. It takes a wide detour around Wisteria and continues on south as just Highway 61, and southwest as 67. It had originally been called “Cow Dung Alley,” the path the farmers used to take to get their cattle and crops up to St. Louis. I’m not sure when, but at some point in time, somebody got the brilliant idea to pave it and give it a more appealing name. It had been the only way north and south along the Mississippi, until I-55 was built in the seventies.

  Pevely, where Jacob Lahrs’s grandmother lives, manages to snuggle in between the two highways just perfectly. Although to get to her house, we had to go to the western outskirts of town—under the Highway 55 overpass and down Highway Z, which is no more than a two-lane country road.

  “I’ve never understood why they call these kinds of roads highways,” I said, gripping the armrest. Collette didn’t slow down to any noticeable degree on this road, and it made me a wee bit nervous. There was no shoulder, no sidewalk, just two lanes of blacktop winding around sharp curves and up and over hills.

  “I know,” she said. “Whoever named them highways needs to be dropped into Los Angeles or Atlanta on a Monday, say around five or six in the evening. Then they’d know what a highway is.”

  I shivered at the thought of all of those cars in Los Angeles. And all of those people. None of whom would be more than a passing face to another driver. A nameless individual, whom you’d never see again, unless you happened to find yourselves in the same traffic jam. To have to live like that would be the equivalent of a prison sentence for me. Collette can say all she wants about my not getting out enough. She can say that I just want to stay in my “safe” walls of New Kassel until the sun comes up. It seems pretty clear to me that she’s the one who’s hiding. She is hiding in the crowds of people, where she can be the person she imagines she is, rather than the person she actually is.

  “So, do you want to hear about the guy I met last week?” Collette said. She had the look of a satisfied cat.

  “Does the guy have a name?” I asked.

  “Steve,” she said.

  Steve. The last Steve she had gone out with was a professional hockey player. When she found out that his two front teeth were fake, she ran into the arms of … Clarence, the real estate broker. No missing teeth there.

  “Okay … what about him?”

  “Oh my God. We’re talking arms of steel. Rippled abs, fast hands, beautiful eyes…”

  “Sounds like Superman,” I said.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” she replied. “But the analogy could work.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “He’s a drummer.”

  “A drummer,” I said, letting the word hang in the air as if it were a disease. I have nothing against drummers. I dated a drummer once. “What band?”

  “The Bloody Virgins.”

  “Jesus, Collette,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The Bloody Virgins? What kind of band is that?”

  “Mmm, death metal, I think.”

  “You don’t even like death metal.”

  “I didn’t say I liked his music. I said I liked his arms and hands, and abs and eyes. And oh, a few other things, too!”

  “How did you meet him?” I asked, afraid of what the answer would be.

  “A bunch of us girls went out after work.”

  “And a death-metal band happened to be playing a happy-hour set?”

  She laughed. “No, silly, our happy hour sort of went on until one in the morning. And we switched bars several times, too, and at the last one, there was Steve.”

  She spoke his name as if it were liquid butter. “Okay, wait,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You can’t go into your latest … endeavors right now. Although I’m sure they are worthy of a chapter in the Kama Sutra. Jacob Lahrs’s grandmother lives on this next road up here,” I said.

  “Where?” she asked. “This one?”

  “No, the one on the right.”

  She turned down the gravel road and looked at me as if I’d committed a cardinal sin. “You never said anything about a gravel road.”

  “So you’ll have to wash your car,” I said. “A small price to pay for a great story.”

  “Oh, I totally agree,” she said. “I just … I dunno.”

  “Did you forget that there are gravel roads still in existence?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Right here,” I said, pointing to the house on the left. Well, it was the only house that was visible, except for one way down on the right. The house was a large two-story affair with a wide front porch. Empty flower buckets hung from the porch at three-or four-foot intervals, waiting for spring, when Tamara Wade Lahrs might plant petunias or pansies in them. A bird house and bird feeder were off to the right, situated close to a large cedar tree. Across the gravel road were several cows,
contained by a barbed-wire fence.

  I braced myself as we got out of the car, because I knew what was coming. Collette took her sunglasses off and looked across the road. “Cows?” she said. “Cows!”

  “Yes,” I said. “Otherwise known as cattle. You know, where milk comes from. Or did you think it came from the store?”

  She shot me a look that said I’d better shut up or I’d be dead.

  “The world is not covered in concrete, Collette.”

  “Yeah, well, it should be,” she said.

  I couldn’t help but laugh at her. We walked up to the front porch and looked around for a doorbell. I found none, so I opened the storm door and knocked. An eighty-year-old woman answered the door. I knew her age because of the census records we’d found at the library. She wore her gray hair cut short. Her snappy hairdo gave her the appearance of a woman much younger.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “Hello, Mrs. Lahrs. My name is Torie, and this is Collette. We’d like to talk to you about your grandson, Jacob.”

  The expression on her face went from politeness to sorrow at the mere mention of his name. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

  “Mrs. Lahrs, I live in New Kassel. I spoke with your grandson just the day before he was killed,” I said. “We want to know who killed him as much as you.”

  “Are you the police?” she asked.

  “My stepfather is the sheriff,” I said. “I work for the Historical Society, and sometimes I assist him on cases that involve a historical aspect.”

  Her gaze darted from my face to Collette’s, then back to mine. Clearly, she was unsure what to do. “I don’t think I can help you.”

  “Mrs. Lahrs,” I said. “I know what your grandson was working on.”

  “What he was really working on,” Collette added.

  Mrs. Lahrs’s gray eyes narrowed a bit.

  “May we come in?” I asked.

  “For a few minutes, I suppose,” she said, and moved to let us pass.

  The living room was spacious. An old Kimball upright piano stood in the corner, almost like the one I owned. The furniture was probably twenty years old, but it showed no obvious wear. Brown-and-blue plaid upholstery added a warm color to a room otherwise devoid of it. Cream-colored carpet, white walls, and white lace curtains surrounded us. I took a seat next to Collette on the couch and Mrs. Lahrs sat in a neighboring chair.

  “I don’t know what you think I can tell you,” she said. “Jacob was a spirited child. Very special.”

  “How many grandchildren do you have?” I asked.

  “Thirteen,” she said, smiling. It had been her most unguarded moment so far.

  “Mrs. Lahrs,” Collette began. “What did Jacob tell you about his work?”

  “He was a teacher at the college,” she answered.

  “No, I mean, his extracurricular work. The project he was working on in New Kassel,” said Collette, clarifying her question.

  “It had something to do with … the wreck of that steamer,” she answered.

  “Your grandson’s associate told me that the captain of the steamer was Jacob’s great-grandfather,” I said. A dark expression played across Tamara Lahrs’s face. “And Jacob didn’t seem upset that I knew. I suppose Eli Thibeau could have had children before he died, and therefore Jacob could have been descended from one of them. But Eli Thibeau did not have any children before he died. He did what most men can’t do: He had them after he died. In other words, he had them once he became William Wade. Now, Jacob knew that this information was a matter of public record. He knew all I had to do was go and look at the census records and I could find out the truth.”

  I remembered Danny Jones’s words: Jacob said more than once that if you weren’t so anal, he’d bring you aboard.

  Collette and Mrs. Lahrs looked at me, waiting for my next words.

  “I think he wanted me to know. I think a part of him wanted me on board his project. And if he had lived long enough, he might have actually asked for my assistance.”

  She was quiet a moment. I had no idea if any of what I’d just said was true. There was no way I would ever know if Jacob had given me that piece of information for a reason. It was pure speculation. But I’d felt on more than one occasion that it seemed odd for him to have told me that Eli Thibeau was his great-grandfather, knowing I could find out the truth. If it helped Tamara Lahrs open up to us, it was worth the slight deception.

  Tamara stood and went to the bookcase behind her. She pulled out a photo album and opened it. “This was my mother. You can tell by the photograph that she was Jessica Huntleigh,” she said.

  Collette nearly jumped into my lap to get a better look. Tamara handed me the album, pointing to a good-quality studio portrait, probably taken in the late twenties. It was Jessica Huntleigh all right. “Oh my Lord,” I said.

  There were other pictures of Jessica through the years, with her two children and without them. Some of them were taken from a distance or with poor lighting, so it was difficult to see the resemblance. But there was no denying the studio picture. I wondered if she’d had the picture taken as some sort of private declaration.

  “She is buried at Shepherd of the Hills, off of old Highway M, under the name Maria Wade,” she said.

  “It’s all true,” Collette said to me. “Everything we suspected.”

  Tamara Lahrs looked at me questioningly. “We did quite a bit of research before coming here. We had our suspicions about Jessica Huntleigh,” I said. “Did your mother ever try to contact her family once Eli died?”

  Tamara nodded her head. “During the Depression. When things got so bad, she felt she had no choice but to try to contact them. She did it for me and my brother. She thought … they could help out—financially.”

  “And what happened?” I asked.

  “At first, they didn’t believe it was really her. After ten years, it was too much, even for her mother to believe. But she sent them photographs and told them things in letters that only she could have known. Her mother believed her, eventually. But there was no happy reunion.” There was a sadness in Mrs. Lahrs’s voice. “Her mother told her that if she could help us, she would. Simply because Jessica was her daughter. But she told my mother that if the reasons were true about why she had faked her death, the family could never fully welcome her back. She would disgrace them all. Not that it mattered.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Evidently, by that point, her father had lost most everything in the stock market crash of 1929. He still had his land, but nobody was buying. Her family could not help her,” she said.

  “But … aren’t the Huntleighs a wealthy family now?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The family moved to Europe, where they had a château and land and a house full of antiques and gold. My grandfather was a shrewd man. He found a way to rebuild his empire. And then they came back to the States.”

  “That must have been so devastating to your mother,” I said.

  “She killed herself,” Tamara said, as calmly as if she were noting the weather outside.

  “She what?” I asked.

  “After my brother and I were safely married, she locked herself in her room and just stopped living. She willed herself to die.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Lahrs,” I said. “She was probably ill and just never told you.”

  “No,” Tamara said. “She went to bed and only got up to go to the bathroom and answer the door. She stopped eating. It took her two months to die.”

  My mother’s words came back to haunt me: and you could greatly upset her. I firmly believe we never give our mothers enough credit. How often do we just dismiss what they say, only to find out that they know what they’re talking about? I wondered then if my children would ever discover how brilliant I am.

  “Mrs. Lahrs, I am so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “My mother led a life more tragic than a Shakespearean character,” she said.

  Wealthy girl gives up
everything to be with the man she loves, penniless steamboat captain, who dies, leaving her destitute. Then her family refuses to help her, and she wills herself to die. Yup, tragedy on the grandest scale.

  “When did you discover the truth?” Collette asked.

  “During the Depression, Mother told me that her family had lots of money. I had asked my mother on several occasions how come we didn’t have any grandparents. She told me that my father’s parents were dead, and that hers lived far away and didn’t speak to her anymore. But she never once hinted that her parents were the Huntleighs,” she said. “I didn’t find out they were the Huntleighs until after she was dead.”

  “How did you find out?” I asked.

  “The same way you did,” she replied, leaning back in her chair. “After she was dead, I suddenly wanted to know everything about her. Funny how I didn’t think to ask what school she’d attended. What her mother’s maiden name was. Just didn’t seem important until I couldn’t ask it.”

  “I’ve heard that more than once from my clients,” I said.

  “I started going through Mom’s papers and such. She had no birth certificate. No diploma. Nothing prior to her marriage to my father. Then I noticed the same thing about my father. There was nothing. No photographs of either of them before 1919, no papers, nothing. Of course, the 1910 census wasn’t available to see back then, so I couldn’t check their whereabouts. I’m not even sure it would have occurred to me then anyway.”

  “How did you find out, then?” I asked.

  “Well, what my mother did have were newspaper cuttings about this family in New York, the Huntleighs. Tamara and Chester Huntleigh. She must have had four dozen clippings, with pictures. I immediately thought that these must be the ‘wealthy’ parents she had spoken of. And the resemblance between my mother and my grandmother was profound. And of course the name—Tamara,” she added.