A Comedy of Heirs
Page 18
She. It was a she. Sarah Clayton McCarthy?
“That’s all I know,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Account for all the women that were there.”
“I was in the house, Mom was in the kitchen with Grandma, Sissy was upstairs…”
“Aunt Charlotte?” I asked.
“Downstairs in the cellar.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“Is there a way out of the cellar other than coming in through the house? Is there an exterior exit?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “But it was padlocked. She would have had to have the key in the basement with her to get out…”
“And … your cousin,” I said, snapping my fingers. “Dolly, that’s it. She was in the chicken coop? Did anybody see her come out of the chicken coop?”
“Dolly couldn’t have done it,” Aunt Ruth said.
“Why not?”
“She was about sixteen years old. A frail and puny thing. A shotgun would have left a bruise on her, if it didn’t knock her a hundred feet.”
“Not if you shoot it from the hip. It wouldn’t bruise then,” I challenged. “Besides, I shot my first twelve gauge at fourteen.”
“You don’t understand. Jed found her shivering in the chicken coop, back underneath some of the nests. Shaking and everything. It wasn’t her. She weighed about ninety pounds. You would have to know her to understand,” Aunt Ruth said.
“Okay … What about Uncle Jed’s wife? Aunt Dana. She dropped him off, what if she came back?” I asked.
“Why?” Aunt Ruth said. “There is positively no reason for Dana to have killed her husband’s grandfather. She can’t defend herself since she’s dead, by the way.”
Regardless of what Aunt Ruth said, Dolly could have done it. Aunt Charlotte could have somehow got out of the cellar and done it. Aunt Dana could have come back, even though I don’t know of a reason. Or it could have been Sarah Clayton McCarthy.
Or it could have been Della Ruth’s sister who lived three miles down the road or one of the women that Nathaniel Keith had gotten pregnant. It didn’t have to be somebody who was on the property. I don’t think this helped at all. It seemed like it made it worse. I was unaware of all the people that it could have been until Aunt Ruth said it was a woman. It narrowed it down but it also opened it up.
“So now you know,” Aunt Ruth said. “Are you satisfied?”
“Well, it certainly makes a difference,” I said. “I appreciate you sharing this information with me.”
The waitress came and gave us our food and then set the check down on the end of the table. Aunt Ruth looked at it and then gave me a sharp glance. That meant I was picking up the tab. Which was fine, I had intended to all along. She just didn’t have to be so blasted annoying about it.
“Do you think you can drop the subject now?” she asked. “I don’t want to hear a word of this mentioned at Jed’s wake later today. Not one word.”
Oh yes, ma’am! I couldn’t very well say anything. She’d told me what I wanted to know. I would owe her for the rest of my blooming life! I bit into my turkey on sourdough and watched her eat her quiche across from me.
“Just one more thing,” I said.
Aunt Ruth rolled her eyes heavenward and clenched her jaw. “What?”
“Why did Della Ruth sit at the door with a shotgun and threaten everybody if they opened the door or went outside? What was that all about?”
“Who told you that?” she asked with narrowed eyes.
“Did it happen?”
“Yes,” she said. “Grandma was trying to protect us.”
“Protect,” I repeated.
“Yes. That’s all she needed was for us to go outside and get shot, too. Who’s to say if the killer was still there or not?” Aunt Ruth countered.
“So, you think she was keeping you all inside so that none of you would get shot?” I asked. “Then why did she make you wait until Nate Keith was dead? Why not an hour before or an hour after? How come it was just until he was dead?”
Aunt Ruth shrugged. “Guess she was just being safe,” she said. “Now, can we drop this? For good?”
“I will never speak of it to you again,” I said. I now knew that it was definitely a woman. “Oh, except one thing. Did you tell Mr. McCarthy that it was a woman?”
She thought on that for a moment with a mouth full of quiche and then nodded her head. “Yes, I did.”
I would be seeing, or talking, to Hubert McCarthy tomorrow.
Thirty-two
I hate that dead body–formaldehyde smell. I hate funeral homes. I stood in the foyer of the Progress funeral home with its fancy chandeliers and real wood moldings and doors. And that smell. It was the same funeral home that both of my grandparents were laid out at the day before their funeral at the Pine Branch Methodist Church. I waved to my cousins as I made my way through the winding hallways and passed several other rooms with “occupants.” Rachel was on one hand, Mary on the other and Rudy bringing up the rear.
Finally, I made it to Uncle Jed’s room. My father was standing next to the casket with his hands clasped behind his back. He didn’t own a suit, so he was dressed in his best black shirt and jeans with his dress shoes, and I’d bet you ten to one, white socks. I waved to Aunt Sissy who stood next to her very pregnant daughter.
“Girls, get your coats off,” I said. “Set them on the end of the pew.”
“Is this a church?” Rachel asked.
“No,” I answered.
“Then why is it called a pew?”
“I don’t have any idea,” I said. “I guess they try to make it look like a church.”
“Why?”
“Because they used to have funerals and stuff at churches.”
“Why don’t they now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Which I truly didn’t. “Sometimes they do.”
“Mom,” Mary said. “What is that?” She pointed to the casket at the end of the carpet runner.
“That’s Uncle Jed,” I said. “I told you he died.”
A horrible mixture of fear and disgust played across her face. Then a tad of curiosity and a long silence as she weighed what I said against what she was seeing at the end of the room. “Do they just let dead people lay around here?”
“Yes,” I said. “They lie here until the family has had enough of a chance to say goodbye and then the family takes the body and the casket to the cemetery and they bury it.”
“Why?”
“Can I tell you later?” I asked. I really didn’t want to go into the fact that the body would start to smell and turn colors and all that gross stuff, when Uncle Jed’s children and grandchildren were within earshot.
“No, tell me now,” she demanded
“I’ll tell you later,” I said.
“Mom,” Rachel said. “Do we have to go up there?”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“Good,” she said with relief.
“Does he smell?” Mary asked.
“Rudy, why don’t you take the girls down the hall and get a soda,” I suggested. Rudy, who had been studying the lint on the carpet looked up with a knowing smile. It was as if he was saying, Glad you got those questions and not me. He nodded and took the girls’ hands and they disappeared.
I took a deep breath and walked down the carpet runner to the casket. Gladioluses sprayed forth from nearly every bouquet of flowers that surrounded the casket. My mother-in-law always said that she would never plant gladiolus in her flower garden because they were the funeral flower. She won’t go to a cemetery after the person is buried, either. I laced my arm in my father’s arm, and he gave me a nervous smile.
“You okay?” I asked.
“No. Dumb question,” he said. “Why does everybody ask that question?”
“Because they don’t know what else to say.” I laid my head on his shoulder for a second and then took another deep breath and walked over to say my goo
dbyes. God, I hated this kind of stuff.
The person lying in the casket was not the person I’d known three or four days ago. It was just a shell. He didn’t look like himself. Dead bodies hardly ever do. For some unknown reason the undertakers apply tons of makeup and fix their hair and make them look, well, like mannequins. Real people don’t look like that. I remember the one thing I noticed about my grandfather when he was laid out, was that they’d covered the tobacco stains on his chin with makeup. For months, I was convinced that he had been replaced with a body from the FBI bank of unknown cadavers.
Jedidiah Keith was also in a suit. Uncle Jed had never been in a suit in his life. Why should he start in death? He should have been laid out in his flannel shirt. Why do we do this? Where did all this ritual begin? Just who was the brilliant person who said we had to drain all the bodies of fluids, sew their mouths shut, pop their eyeballs out, pump them full of a toxic substance, put this shell of a human being on display for everybody to see, and then stick them six feet under the ground? Am I the only one who thinks that this is morbid?
“Well, Uncle Jed. I know you’re not in there anymore, but I’m going to say this anyway,” I said softly. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, wherever you are, or if you can hear me. I really hope that you were just drunk and fell into the river on your own accord. I need for that to be true. I apologize from the bottom of my heart if you are dead because of me or because of anything I might have said or done.”
That really sounded horrible.
He, of course, said nothing back to me. No thunder or lightning or skies parting. No apparitions, not even so much as a cockroach went across the floor to give me some sort of sign that he heard, understood or forgave me. I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a pint of whiskey.
“This is for you,” I said. I laid it in the casket next to him. “It’s even the good stuff. Crown Royal. The quickshop was out of Jack Daniel’s.”
I fought back tears as I said, “Goodbye.”
My father came over and took my hand and sat me down in the front pew. He crossed his leg and, sure enough, white socks. Why do men do that? “Whiskey?” he asked me with a smile.
“I know it’s not him. All that was him is long gone. It left the moment he died,” I said. I swiped furiously at the tears on my cheeks. “I just … I don’t know. Call it a peace offering. In case he could see me.”
My father looked at me strangely. Which he does a lot, but this time he had a specific meaning behind it. He didn’t understand, exactly.
“To me, that is just a hunk of flesh. But in case he can see me somewhere, I wanted to give him the whiskey,” I explained.
“I see,” he said. “You know, he could never afford the good stuff.”
“I know,” I said. We sat there a moment in silence. Father and daughter. More alike than I ever wanted to admit. I was amazed my mother hadn’t gone crazy from having such a close copy of her ex-husband as her daughter. It was weird. The things I liked about my father, I prided myself on, too. The things I didn’t like about my father, I tried to pretend didn’t exist in me. We were both stubborn and predictable in an unpredictable sort of way. All of my obsessive traits … from my father. My mother has never been obsessive over anything a day in her life. My father? He gets on something and he doesn’t stop until he’s mastered it.
If only I could figure out what side of the family the nosiness comes from.
“I should go rescue, Rudy,” I said.
“How did your lunch go with Ruth?” he asked as I was about to get up.
“Good. If she wasn’t lying, she told me quite a bit of useful information.”
“I’m glad.”
“Of course, I had to write it in blood that I would never bring the subject up to her again,” I said.
He smiled. “I thought as much.”
“Hey, have you ever heard of a woman named Naomi Cordieu?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Though there are some Cordieus from around here.”
“She seemed to be under the impression—you absolutely cannot breathe a word of this—that your father might not have been the son of Nate Keith.”
“What?” he asked.
“Was that ever the subject of an argument at your grandparents’ house?” I asked. “That you can remember.”
He gave me the raised eyebrow.
“Naomi has a box of pictures of your father … said that they were given to her late husband from Della Ruth.”
The other eyebrow went up. After all, how could you explain that unless Della Ruth was a close personal friend of either Naomi or Bradley Ferguson? Even then, why only pictures of John Robert? Why not all the other kids?
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “She gave them to me. I have them at home.”
“I can’t answer that,” Dad said. “I really don’t know.”
“Okay,” I said. “Just curious.”
We sat there a few more minutes and finally I stood up. I looked at Uncle Jed’s body lying on the white satin lining of the casket from the pew.
“I truly believe he was drunk and slipped on the ice,” Dad said.
“Really? You’re not just saying that?” I asked, desperately wanting to believe him.
“Yes,” he said. “I really believe that.”
Thirty-three
Hubert McCarthy sat in his wheelchair looking pitifully pale, darn it. I couldn’t be ruthless if he was looking all pitiful and puny. His son was at the grocery store and Hubert had yelled at me to come on in.
He also had a look of expectation. Either he expected me or he couldn’t wait to find out what it was that I had to say. “Please, sit,” he said.
“No, thank you,” I said. I didn’t want to sit. I didn’t want to let my guard down for a second. I wanted to remain in charge of the situation.
He pointed to the magazine rack by his television. “There’s a present in there,” he said. “For you.” Since his Christmas tree was tiny and on top of his television, the magazine rack doubled as a present holder.
Great. Just what I needed. A present. Maybe he did this on purpose, to throw me off. So that I wouldn’t say what it was I came here to say. Actually, I wasn’t exactly sure what it was I was going to say. I’d rehearsed it a thousand times on the drive up here to south St. Louis. Nothing sounded right. It always sounded like I was accusing his dead wife of murder. Okay, so in a roundabout way I was accusing his dead wife of murder. But all he had to do was convince me of it otherwise, and I’d drop it.
“Mr. McCarthy, I’m sure you’re aware that your wife was the daughter of Harlan Clayton,” I said.
“I’m aware of that.”
“Harlan Clayton hung himself.”
“Yes.”
“Because of Nate Keith.”
“As I live and breathe,” he said. I wasn’t too convinced that he was doing too good a job at breathing, myself.
“Were you aware, I don’t know how you couldn’t be, that Nate Keith was murdered on the anniversary of Harlan Clayton’s suicide?” I asked.
He narrowed his filmy eyes at me and then he smiled. Crooked yellow teeth peeked out behind thin gray lips. “You’re good,” he said. “You think you got it figured out?”
“No, not exactly. I wouldn’t be here asking questions if I did. I know that the murderer was a woman,” I said.
“Really?” he asked. “I see you got somebody to break the silence.”
“Mr. McCarthy, the individual that gave me that piece of information also said that they told you that same thing,” I said. He said nothing. He just went about his business of trying to breathe. “Which means either they didn’t tell you and lied to me about it, or they did and you kept it out of your report for fear that your wife or one of her sisters would be suspect number one. Considering the August fourth date and all.”
“What do you want me to say?” he asked.
“Did you know? Did you keep it out of your repor
t?” I asked.
“My wife did not kill Nathaniel Keith,” he said.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Because she was my wife. I know.”
“Everybody thinks that their loved one—father, best friend, wife—couldn’t have done something horrible based on the simple fact that they are their father, best friend or wife. Somewhere along the line, somebody gets disappointed,” I said.
“My wife did not do it!” he said. It took every ounce of energy he had to raise his voice to a convincing yell. His chest rose and fell heavily, trying to make up for the exertion he just exhibited. “Nathaniel Keith caused her and her family enough pain, without his death dragging their reputations through the mud, too.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” I said. “But, if one of them did do it…”
“My wife did not kill Nathaniel Keith.”
“Did you know the killer was a woman?”
He just looked at me. If he said yes, he was admitting to leaving information out of his report of the investigation.
“Did you know?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Yes, Ruth did tell me that she saw somebody in a dress. That doesn’t mean a woman pulled the trigger. It doesn’t mean that she was alone. It doesn’t mean that a woman did it. Ruth could have seen her cousin, Dolly, walking around in the yard. So, yes, I knew that Ruth said it was a woman. No, I didn’t know that it was a woman. Can you say without a doubt that it was a woman?”
Well, gee. When he put it that way, I guess not. I lowered my eyes and looked away. I sat down on the edge of his couch and rested my head in my hands. “My head hurts,” I said. “I’m almost to the point of not caring. I’ve never been to the point of not caring.”
“I’m impressed that you persuaded the family to open up. Especially Ruth,” he said. “You’ve done good.”
“Oh, who cares,” I said and slouched back on his couch. I couldn’t believe I was actually sulking in this man’s house. I couldn’t help myself, though.
“You’ve got them to admit and acknowledge that this did happen,” he said. “After I closed my case, they never spoke of it again. You did good.”