Dead Past dffi-4

by Beverly Connor

  “How about our message?” said Diane.

  “OK, we’re hoping the keyword is palimpsest.” Frank took the first word in the doll code and tried it out with his square. KVQ = vvf. “Palimpsest isn’t the keyword,” he said.

  “Try papyri,” said Diane.

  “Won’t work,” said Frank. “Papyri and palimpsest start out with the same two letters. We’ll end up with vv again.”

  “So we’re nowhere,” said Neva.

  “Or an alternative method for decoding it,” said Jin.

  “Maybe the keyword is his name,” said Neva.

  “That would be too easy to decode,” said Jin. “If you are going to the trouble to have an elaborate code, you won’t have such an easy keyword.”

  The phone rang and Diane answered. She was expecting Garnett, but it was Beth, the museum’s librarian.

  “Beth,” said Diane. “You have something for me?”

  “Yes, I do. I can bring it to you. I thought you’d like to know that I did find some descendants of Leo Parrish that you might be able to contact. I don’t know where they are now, but I have info on the last-known locations of some of them.”

  “Great. Can you come to the crime lab?” Diane asked.

  “Yes. I’ll walk right over,” said Beth.

  Diane explained to the others that she’d enlisted the help of a genealogist to discover any relatives of Leo Parrish.

  “That was clever,” said Frank.

  “And fast,” said Diane. “Librarians are much speedier than private detectives.”

  It took only a couple of minutes for Beth to cross from the third-floor east wing to the west wing where the crime lab was. David was at the door to let her in. She entered, looking around at all the glass walls and high-tech equipment as though she’d just stepped onto another planet.

  “Well,” she said, “this is certainly different from the rest of the museum.” She was carrying a folder, which she held close to her. They all moved to the round table to learn about the family tree of Leo Parrish.

  “OK,” Beth said when they were all seated. “I’ll start with the Glendale-Marsh relatives. She pointed to each person on the chart as she named them, going from generation to generation. “Leo Parrish had an uncle, Luther Parrish, who lived in Glendale-Marsh in the thirties. He had two sons, Martin and Owen. Owen Parrish had a son. The son married and had a daughter-Oralia Lee Parrish. They all left Florida when Martin and Owen lost the family land. The daughter, Oralia Lee, married one Burke Rawson. They had no children that I can find a record of.”

  “We should be able to locate the Rawsons,” said David.

  “The last address I had for them was Ohio fifteen years ago,” said Beth. “Now, you mention that Leo Parrish wrote to someone when he was in the service. That was his sister, Leontine Parrish Richmond. She lived in Upstate New York.”

  “Were they twins?” asked Diane.

  Beth nodded. “Leontine had a daughter who was eleven years old in 1935.” She pointed to the chart with their names. “The daughter grew up, married, and had a son named Quinn Sebestyen,” said Beth. “He married a woman named Allie Shaw. And they had two children.”

  “Christian and Melissa,” said Jin.

  He was seated across the table from Beth and they all looked over at him, surprised.

  Jin looked as if he had seen a ghost.

  Chapter 49

  All of them stared at Jin who slid the family tree toward him and studied it. “This is amazing,” he said.

  “What?” said Neva. “You look like she just uncovered your relatives.”

  “Do you know these people?” asked David.

  Jin looked at Diane. “Do you remember when”-he snapped his fingers a couple of times-“when Dr. Webber asked me what I was interested in outside of work? It was in the morgue tent.”

  Diane thought back to the time in the morgue tent. It seemed so long ago now.

  “After Dr. Pilgrim took a break, after you found the fetal bones, and Dr. Rankin talked about how all we could do was pick up the pieces,” Jin said.

  Diane remembered. She wondered if that moment was the trigger for Archie Donahue, realizing as Rankin did that they could never make a dent in the drug trade because the money was too great. All they could do was pick up the broken bodies and mourn the broken lives. Was that the thing that pushed Archie to “try to make a difference,” as he had said-if he was indeed the murderer of Blake Stanton and Marcus McNair?

  “Yeah,” said Jin. “Remember, I was saying I was interested in strange disappearances. I was talking about that Court TV program about missing people-Judge Crater, Jimmy Hoffa, and some ordinary people who had disappeared mysteriously. Like that whole family that vanished. Their belongings were still in the house and even their car was still in the driveway.”

  “What are you saying?” asked Diane.

  “This was them-Quinn and Allie Sebestyen and their seven-year-old daughter, Melissa, and their ten-year-old son, Christian.”

  “Oh, my, this is getting strange,” said Beth. She looked uneasily around her as if that’s what happened here in the dark side-strange things.

  Diane needed a moment for the information to sink in.

  “When was this?” she asked.

  “About twenty years ago-1987, I think. Yeah, it was 1987,” said Jin. “Nothing was ever heard from them again.”

  They all fell silent.

  “Why don’t I leave this with you?” said Beth, rising from the table. “Shall I continue looking for information on these people?”

  “As long as it doesn’t keep you from your other work,” said Diane.

  “All of this was in records that I accessed via the Internet or by calling and asking some willing person to look up a marriage or death certificate,” she said.

  “This is excellent work, Beth. Thank you,” said Diane.

  David rose, escorted Beth out the door of the crime lab, and returned to the table.

  “Nineteen eighty-seven,” said Diane. “The year Juliet was kidnapped. And they had a seven-year-old daughter-the same age as Juliet. She and Juliet could have been playmates.”

  “I still feel like I’m missing something,” said David.

  “I thought it was just me,” said Neva. “I’ve had a hard time keeping up ever since I got here. First, the code, and now it feels as though I’m missing part of this story.”

  “I know,” said Diane. “I’ve been dribbling out information about Juliet-mainly because at first I didn’t know it was related to the Cipriano murder. It was just something I was doing to help one of my employees. Also, there’s some sensitive personal information on Juliet involved. But now it’s something we need to solve, because I think she is in danger.”

  Diane went over the whole story of Juliet with them. She told them about Juliet’s memories and how Diane thought the fear of new dolls sprang from another crime Juliet had witnessed, and that being a witness had led to her kidnapping.

  “Those are the crimes you had me look for in Arizona and Florida?” said David.

  “Yes,” said Diane.

  “You’ve been working on this mystery while you were working on the other crimes in Rosewood?” said Frank. “And running the museum?”

  “Yes, and I haven’t been doing a very good job of any of it, but that’s going to change. Jin, did the TV program give any personal information on the Sebestyens?”

  “Some. Not a lot. As I recall, Quinn Sebestyen was a math professor at a community college. His wife was a schoolteacher. The kids were good students. Everyone liked them. They were, by all accounts, an ordinary couple, an ordinary family. No marital problems that anyone was aware of, no great debt, no vices. The police couldn’t find any reason they would disappear on their own or why anyone would do them harm. The best they could come up with was that someone kidnapped them or murdered them for some unknown reason.”

  “Did they ever vacation in Glendale-Marsh?” asked Diane.

  “I don’t remember
that town being mentioned in the TV program,” said Jin.

  “Call the detective in charge of the case and ask him. See if he’ll send us more information,” said Diane.

  “You think the Sebestyens are the dead people Juliet saw?” said David.

  “Yes, I do,” said Diane. “How’s this for an hypothesis: Juliet was visiting her grandmother who lives at the beach in Glendale-Marsh, and she struck up a friendship with a little girl, one of the tourists. The little girl was Melissa Sebestyen. The genealogy chart Beth just provided to us shows that Melissa’s father, Quinn, was the grandnephew of Leo Parrish; Quinn’s grandmother was Leo’s twin sister. In the letters Leo sent home to his sister he probably sent the code and maybe even a book. It probably became a family heirloom. When Leo didn’t come home from the war, no one could crack his code. Quinn grew up with the story about Granduncle Leo and his hidden fortune in Florida. Quinn taught mathematics at a community college. Perhaps he inherited a family trait for being good with numbers and codes. He deciphered Uncle Leo’s code and went to Glendale-Marsh to find the treasure.”

  “Where does the doll come in?” asked Frank.

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps Quinn, being of a fanciful frame of mind, hid the code in his daughter’s doll for safekeeping, or perhaps the little girl hid it there.”

  “Why would a kid do a thing like that?” said Jin.

  Frank laughed.

  “I’m just hypothesizing,” said Diane. “Maybe she knew the code was important. Maybe the doll was a courier. Anyway, Melissa knew it was there because she told Juliet the doll had a secret. That’s something a kid tells another kid. None of the adults would have told Juliet that.”

  “I’m with you,” said Frank.

  “Someone besides Quinn knew about the hidden fortune-actually, a lot of people did-but this someone knew that Quinn had a line on where to find it,” said Diane.

  “Maybe Quinn told someone,” said David.

  “Not if Quinn’s the one hiding the code in the doll,” said Neva. “That sounds like secretive behavior to me.”

  “OK, maybe someone who was looking for the code tracked down Leo Parrish’s descendants-like Beth did,” said David.

  “That’s a good possibility,” said Diane.

  “Other relatives must have known about the treasure,” said Frank, “The ones who stayed in Glendale-Marsh. Even if they weren’t close to the sister, they knew Leo would confide in her-they were twins. And they could have passed down the story from one generation to the next just like Leo’s family did.”

  “Oh, I like that,” said David. “It’s very neat.”

  “Whoever it was,” continued Diane, “followed Quinn Sebestyen to Florida, tried to get the information from him, and ended up killing his entire family. Juliet came over to her new friend’s house and found them dead and wrapped up in plastic. She ran home to her grandmother, perhaps being chased by the killers.”

  “How did Juliet get the doll?” asked Jin.

  “Her grandmother thought she stole it. When she asked Juliet where she got it, Juliet said a friend gave it to her. Juliet doesn’t have much memory of that time,” said Diane. “We may never know. But the killers did not get Juliet or the doll in Glendale-Marsh, and she went home to Arizona. They followed her there to get the doll, not knowing that the grandmother back in Florida had kept it. They were probably afraid that Juliet recognized them. They kidnapped her and when they didn’t get the information they wanted from her, they left her for dead.”

  “Why did they suddenly resurface now?” asked Neva. “It’s been, what, twenty years?”

  Diane thought for a moment. She looked at Jin; then it dawned on her.

  “I think,” she said, “for the same reason that Juliet’s nightmares began again after all these years. The television program. I’m willing to bet that Juliet watched the program or at least caught some of the advertising for it and it triggered the nightmares.”

  “And you think the killer saw the same program and was afraid the cold case squad had a renewed interest in the disappearance of the Sebestyen family, and that Juliet might remember something?” said Neva.

  “Yes. And it also renewed the killers’ interest in getting the doll and the code they never found,” said Diane.

  “You keep saying they,” said Frank. “You think there was more than one?”

  “I think there were and are at least two,” said Diane. “A man and a woman. In the very moments before Juliet was discovered missing, a jogger was reported to have fallen in front of Juliet’s home. I think the woman was a decoy to attract the attention of the adults to the front of the house while the man kidnapped Juliet from her backyard. In the library when I heard the odd phrase about palimpsests, I believe it was a woman’s voice. It definitely wasn’t the voice of the man who took the doll from me.”

  “It’s a good story,” said David. “It might be true. I think the first thing we need to do is track down the other relatives of Leo Parrish. What were their names?”

  “Oralia Lee and Burke Rawson,” said Neva looking at the genealogy chart.

  “I’ll start with Juliet’s grandmother,” said Diane. “She may know them, or she may know someone I can call in Florida who knows them.”

  Just as Diane was about to get up to call Ruby Torkel, there was a knock at the door. They all looked over at it as if it might be the cardboard cutout of Darth Vader. No one ever knocked at that door.

  Chapter 50

  “Who could that be?” said Neva. She got up, walked over, and looked out the peephole.

  “Kendel,” she said and opened the door.

  Kendel, looking tall and sleek in her fur-trimmed chocolate brown cashmere sweater, matching wool slacks, and high-heeled brown leather boots, walked in carrying a package.

  “Hi. I wasn’t sure of the protocol for entering this place. I suppose people usually call first. I see Anna found a Darth Vader. She’s been looking for one for a month.”

  David brought a chair from one of the workstations and Kendel sat down at the table with them.

  “So, it’s Anna I need to thank for that,” said Diane.

  “The docents think it hilarious,” said Kendel. “They’re also hoping that the kids will pay more attention to Darth Vader than to the ordinary signs. From what I hear we need to put him in Security. How are you? How is your head?”

  “Sore scalp, but otherwise fine,” said Diane.

  Kendel winced when Diane touched the back of her head.

  “I found the book you were looking for,” said Kendel, smiling and opening the package.

  She pulled out a small, very old, blue clothbound volume no more than four by six inches in size. It was frayed around the edges, and the spine was so faded that Diane couldn’t read the lettering. Kendel opened it up.

  “It’s volume nine in a series,” she said. “Wonder Book of the World’s Progress, Art and Science.” She handed the slim volume to Diane. “Page fifteen. Second paragraph.”

  Diane’s face lit up as she turned to page fifteen. There it was. “The making of palimpsests was possible even with papyri.” Diane flipped through the pages, glancing at the black-and-white pictures of paintings. She looked at the copyright date in the front-1935.

  “How did you ever?” Diane asked.

  Kendel’s smile broadened into a grin. “I started with a linguist friend of mine. He parsed the sentence and analyzed the content. From him I found out it was probably in a book of the twenties, thirties, possibly forties, maybe earlier, but probably not later. He also suggested that it would be in a book that covered art, technology, and science because of the content and the syntax. From there I called on a few librarian friends. We found a list of authors who wrote in that domain in the right time frame and looked at some of their work. The style seemed most like the work of a man named Henry Smith Williams. We looked at a collection of his books. His main work was a history of science, but we didn’t find the sentence in those volumes. Then we found a series of W
onder Books. It was in the ninth volume, about art and science.”

  “I’m impressed,” said Neva. “You had to read all of those books?”

  “There were several of us and we are all fast readers-we mainly scanned the pages looking for the word palimpsests.”

  “The index didn’t help?” asked Jin.

  “Didn’t have one,” said Kendel.

  “Kendel, this is a great job,” said Diane. “I’m absolutely amazed. I thought it would be a long shot.”

  “I’m glad I can keep my reputation intact. Really, it was harder finding the crystal skull.”

  Kendel stood. “I just got back in, so I’m going home to rest on my laurels for a while before I come back to work. Oh, one of my librarian friends said that someone in the Bartram library was looking for books about palimpsests and became quite cross when the librarians couldn’t find the book she wanted. Interesting coincidence, I thought.”

  “It is, indeed,” said Diane. The voice she heard in the library, she thought.

  David escorted Kendel to the door.

  “I’m impressed with the people you have working for you,” said Frank.

  “So am I,” said Diane. “Kendel has headhunters after her all the time. One of these days they’re going to be able to lure her away. I hope that’s not for a long time.”

  David came back and sat down and sighed.

  “What?” asked Neva.

  “Nothing. I just wish I could get a woman like that to date me,” he said.

  “Have you asked her out?” said Neva.

  “No. I just told you, women like that don’t go out with guys like me,” he said.

  “I’m not even going to go there,” said Neva. “She puts her panty hose on just like the rest of us. Ask her out. You may be pleasantly surprised. If she says no, then you get to complain to us for the rest of the year-it’s a win-win situation for you.”

  “May I look at the book?” said Frank.

  Diane handed it over to him. She had been flipping through the pages, looking for inspiration. The key was in the phrase, she was sure, but how eluded her.