Sisters On the Case

by Sara Paretsky

  Father Conway always prayed as though he had a train to catch. Ed McNair, the sheriff, was there, and several deputies. Her father wasn’t wearing his deputy sheriff badge. Donel Rossa was there.

  When the gravediggers loosened the straps to lower the coffin, what flashed through her mind was the story her mother once had told her of the man who brought his wife, coffin and all, home to Ireland and buried her on land he claimed was stolen from him. She’d never found out if it was a true story or one of many her mother made up. In time she had asked her Aunt Mary if it was true, for the sisters had come from the same village as her mother on the coast of the Irish Sea.

  ‘‘She could as well as not have made it up,’’ an answer the very ambiguity of which she had somehow found satisfying. She had discovered you could tell the truth with a lie. That may have been the moment when she first knew she was going to be a writer.

  The sisters could barely have been more different from one another. Norah, the older, was thirty-four, tending to fatten as she grew older. She smiled a lot, but it never seemed to mean much, on and off. Mary said if she ever laughed it was under her breath. Mary, having met with a lifetime’s share of troubles, tended at thirty-two to make fun of both her sister’s and her own foibles. Rheumatism was already hacking away at her joints; she was more bone than flesh anyway, and her very blue eyes were sometimes shot red with pain. The devil trying to work his way in, as she put it. Norah was convinced he had already made it.

  It was late on a morning of early August heat when Mary saw him come out from the shade of the last elms that arched Main Street. He stopped at the mailbox by Norah’s walk and seemed to study the names. Norah’s was first, Mary’s scratched beneath it as though it was an afterthought, which, in a way, it was. After deciding, perhaps, which of the women it was he saw in the field between house and barn, he came directly to her. He stepped with care to avoid the potatoes she had forked from the ground. He was unshaven, and younger than she had thought at a distance, and for an instant she felt she had seen him before. He was young-old or, better, old-young. His clothes weren’t shabby, but they’d not been in a wash-tub for a while. Nor had he. But his kind was not uncommon on the road, men without work, some wanting it, some not. The grain harvest, then silo-filling, were soon ahead.

  ‘‘You’re Mary O’Hearn, are you, ma’am?’’

  She looked hard at him—something familiar again—and he moistened his lips before saying more.

  ‘‘You’re welcome to a cup of water there at the pump,’’ Mary said.

  The pump with the well beneath it stood a few feet from the faded red building she had converted from barn to the house she lived in. Beyond the pump, and shrouded in rosebushes, was the outhouse she still used. Norah had indoor plumbing.

  His eyes shifted from the pump to the outhouse, then back to her. ‘‘Would it trouble you if I asked to use the wee house?’’

  It would, but she nodded, and dug the fork into the ground to lean on while she waited for him to go and come back. Cows’ eyes, she thought, dark and murky. If he was Irish, and she felt he was, a Spaniard had got in there somewhere. Black Irish, they called them with his looks at home.

  When he came back he asked, ‘‘Don’t you remember the skinny runt of a kid that sang at your wedding? That’s what they used to call me, Skinny-runt.’’

  Mary grunted, remembering not the child, but the man beside her with tears in his eyes when she suddenly looked up at him. She could still hear the high, sweet trill of song, but what she had always seen, remembering, was the tears. ‘‘What was it you sang?’’

  ‘‘The ‘Ave Maria.’ That’s what I always sang, the ‘Ave Maria.’ ’’

  ‘‘And your name?’’

  ‘‘Denny. Dennis O’Hearn, the same as yours. It was my father’s brother Michael you were married to, may he rest in peace.’’

  There was almost mockery in the sound from her throat. Neither peace nor prayer came easy to her. ‘‘Your voice has dropped a notch or two since then.’’

  ‘‘I was afraid it wouldn’t ever,’’ he said.

  She gave a snort of amusement.

  She brought him a cup of tea with bread and jam where he sat on the bench by the door. By then, she was sure, Norah would have a crick in her neck, trying to see what was going on.

  ‘‘Bring your cup.’’ She led the way into the house through the kitchen and into the room she called her parlor. The house was cool and dark, more walls than windows. She lit the one electric lamp and moved it to where it cast light on the portrait above the couch.

  ‘‘That’s him,’’ Denny said, looking up at the tinted photograph, life-size, head and breast of a young policeman in his high-buttoned uniform. His mustaches bristled and his eyes had spark. ‘‘I wouldn’t think I’d remember him so well, but I do.’’

  Mary turned off the light and they went outdoors again without speaking. He knew when to keep his mouth shut, Mary thought. Within months of her marriage to Michael O’Hearn, he was killed in the line of duty. She squinted in the sudden sun to have a longer look at Dennis. ‘‘I don’t see any resemblance at all.’’

  ‘‘My mother’s name was Castillo.’’

  So she’d been right about the Spanish strain.

  By midafternoon he had picked all the potatoes she’d harvested in two days’ digging. It was easier for her to dig them up than to pick them and she’d have paid a boy from the town a nickel a bushel. She put off deciding whether to offer him the sixty-five cents. She watched him wash his hands and face at the pump and shake himself dry. She thought of the dog she no longer had. He wiped the dust from his shoes, one leg against the other. City shoes, she decided, even though they were high-laced, broken in a hundred miles south on the streets of Chicago.

  ‘‘Have you no baggage?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘I left a carryall with the stationmaster. I’ve to pick it up before dark.’’

  ‘‘The mean bastard,’’ she said. ‘‘It would kill him to turn on a light if there wasn’t a train coming in.’’

  He went back into the town before suppertime. And about time, Norah thought. She had watched, off and on, the whole afternoon and almost ruined a pattern trying to watch and use the scissors at the same time. As soon as he passed her house—a queer-looking dark fellow, half Indian, she thought, with the reservation a few miles north—she went across to where Mary was washing the smallest potatoes.

  ‘‘Have you lost your senses, taking a stray like that into the house? And letting him use your convenience.’’

  ‘‘Convenience!’’ Mary mocked.

  ‘‘You could catch something from the likes of him.’’

  ‘‘I could, and wouldn’t that surprise you?’’ Mary gave her a bark of a laugh.

  ‘‘Not in the least,’’ Norah said, fairly sure she was being made fun of.

  ‘‘I’m thinking I’ll fix a cot for him in the back kitchen.’’

  ‘‘So he’s coming back, is he? And why not? The hospitality of the house. And never a word to me, Mary.’’

  ‘‘Amn’t I telling you now?’’

  ‘‘When you’ve already made up your mind. There was a piece in the paper last week if you ever read it, a man’s watch stolen right from the table where he was asleep in his bed.’’

  ‘‘My old clock wouldn’t bring much,’’ Mary said. Then she told her sister, ‘‘You can’t call him a stray, Norah. He’s Michael’s nephew, his own brother’s son.’’

  Norah sucked in her breath, needing all of it. Michael, more than ten years dead, ought to have been out of their lives, but he never would be—a man she had never met, never wanted to meet, married to a sister she was sure she had saved from the streets after he died. Many times since she wished she hadn’t and near as many times said so to Mary when goaded by her. Out of this roiling memory, she cried, ‘‘Did you invite him to come? Did you know he was coming?’’

  ‘‘What a crooked mind you have,’’ Mary said. ‘‘I didn’t know wh
o he was till he told me. He sang at my wedding. A wisp of a boy then, he sang like an angel. Even Michael cried. His name is Dennis— Dennis O’Hearn.’’ Mary lifted her chin saying it.

  As though he was a child of her own, Norah thought with another surge of anger. She was as barren herself as Mary. More so, an old maid.

  The two Lavery sisters had been brought over from Ireland, one after the other before either was twenty, by the childless couple from whom Norah inherited the farm, lock, stock, and barrel. It was not written into the bequest, but confided to the priest as well as to Norah, that it was hoped she would take care of her sister if ever she returned in need. Mary had run away within a year of her arrival. She was not greatly missed. Except by the farmer who had grown too fond of her.

  Norah could see the change come over Mary. It was always like that with her after she had been mean. Mary touched her toe to the mound of potatoes the size of marbles. ‘‘Will you take a handful of these for your supper?’’

  ‘‘I will. They’re sweeter by far than the big ones.’’

  ‘‘Aye. Why shouldn’t they be, coming to you for nothing?’’ She knocked the soap from the dish by the pump and filled it. ‘‘Bring the dish back the next time you come.’’ When Norah was halfway along the path, Mary called, ‘‘Listen for the telephone in case I ring you later.’’

  Mary was never without a drop of whiskey in the house. She kept a small flask of it under her pillow to ease the pain at night. Everyone knew but nobody told in the town where she got it. It would be a sad day for her when Prohibition ended, and the end was in sight. They’d be shipping the real thing in from Canada, and it wouldn’t be half as good as what she got from Donel Rossa.

  Rossa belonged to the first generation American Irish who farmed the rich soil of southern Wisconsin. His principal crop was corn, which he sold to a variety of consumers, some, no doubt, to members of his family said to have connections with the Chicago underworld.

  Something Mary kept hidden in her heart was that soon after Michael was killed she began to receive, like clockwork and wherever she was, a pint every month marked ‘‘holy water.’’ Since her coming back from Chicago, it was delivered by Donel himself, and if ever she mentioned paying him for it, he’d say, ‘‘Ah, Mary, Michael O’Hearn was a fine man. It comes to you with his pension.’’ God and Mary knew the pension could take a supplement, but whenever question of where it was coming from bothered her, a tweak of pain put her conscience if not her bones at ease.

  Donel was older than the sisters, closer in years to the old couple who had brought them over. Mary hadn’t become close friends with him until she moved out of Norah’s house, saying she’d rather live in the barn. The barn was an empty shell by then. Norah had auctioned off livestock, equipment, everything but the barn doors. And since Donel had had a hand, along with Father Conway, in bringing Mary back to where she wasn’t wanted, he’d undertaken to help make the barn livable.

  He was the first one Mary phoned to come round that night after supper. ‘‘I’ve someone here I want you to meet. Come and bring the missus.’’

  ‘‘And I’ll bring a smile,’’ he promised.

  A smile: his word for a bottle. As though she hadn’t expected it.

  Norah, as usual, put off going over for as long as she could stand not to go. She wanted them to wonder what was keeping her and at the same time suspected they wouldn’t miss her if she didn’t show up at all. They never tired of singing the old songs over and over, and she could hear the thump of Mary’s stick on the floor as she beat time. When there was a quiet minute she imagined them passing the bottle to all there except Margaret and Tom’s lump of a girl pretending to be asleep on the couch. Norah got her shawl from the hall stand, went out the front door and locked it behind her. You never could tell at night.

  She moved with caution along the path, guided only by her memory of it in daylight. Rossa’s voice was the loudest. It always was. She didn’t like him. He treated Mary better than he did his wife, for one thing, but closer to the truth of it, Norah was sure he did not like her. She could never forget the look he had given her when she clapped her hands at news of Mary’s marriage. The smile on his face had seemed to say, So now it’s all yours, all yours. He’d been right, of course. And he was the one who came to tell her Mary’s husband was dead, so soon. She would swear it was his cold eye that kept pity from coming over her. Now as she neared the barn, she tried to listen for a new voice among the familiar. The Angel Gabriel couldn’t be heard over Rossa and the thump of Mary’s stick.

  Dennis O’Hearn wasn’t bad-looking when you saw him up close, she decided, but she would never have taken him for an Irishman. There was a hangdog look to him, big sad eyes that reminded her of the dog Mary wanted to bring into the house when they lived together. Now he picked up on a tune Margaret hummed for him and put the words to it. Norah had not heard it before, a nursery song, nor had she heard a voice like his, deep and dark and soft as velvet. Her love for music was the truest thing in Norah’s life. It drew her to High Mass on Sundays, and prompted her to buy a piano as soon as she had money. It stood mute in her living room save for the few chords she had taught herself to play so that she might know there was music in it.

  It was strange the way Dennis O’Hearn’s and her gaze met and locked as though their eyes had got accidentally tangled. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand to hide a smile, she felt. And she sensed her color rising to the roots of her hair. She caught at the foot of the girl stretched on the couch. She’d had to push it aside to make room for herself. The young one pulled her foot away so fast Norah almost lost her balance. She flashed her a smile when she’d rather have pinched her. The upstart mimicked her smile back at her.

  The room was stuffy and smelled of the men, sweat and tobacco smoke and the cow barn, and a whiff of Mary’s liniment. Mary called this one big room her parlor. Norah always thought it resembled a gypsy’s nest. To be sure, she’d never seen one. But, for example, instead of a door to the kitchen, the frame was hung with a curtain of beads Mary had bought off a peddler’s wagon. The beads rattled if a wind came up or when someone passed from room to room. Mary’s nook of a bedroom was to one side, chopped out of the kitchen. If Dennis O’Hearn roamed through the house at night, it occurred to Norah, Mary would hear him part the curtain. Would she call him in to the side of her bed and ask him to rub liniment into her knees? Surely not. But Mary was that way. She was as easy with men as she was with women.

  The songs they sang came, most of them, out of The Golden Book of Songs. Norah had a pristine copy of it on her piano at home. Mary’s copy looked like an old prayer book that had lost its covers. She tried to picture how this lot would fit in her parlor, where the piano took so much of the room. Mary, when first she’d seen it, let out a whoop. ‘‘Holy Mother of God! It looks just like Reverend Mother!’’ They wouldn’t fit at all, Norah decided. They just didn’t belong there.

  ‘‘Can you sing ‘Mother Machree,’ Dennis?’’ Rossa asked. ‘‘I don’t think it’s in the book. ‘There’s a place in my heart which no colleen can own,’ ’’ he started, not waiting for Dennis to answer. Suppose Dennis could play the piano, she thought. There were people who played by ear and he might. He picked up on ‘‘Mother Machree’’ and he knew the words by heart. Before he could finish, Rossa demanded ‘‘That Old Irish Mother of Mine.’’

  ‘‘Give me a minute,’’ Dennis said.

  ‘‘Let the man wet his whistle,’’ Mary said. ‘‘Isn’t there a drop left in the bottle?’’

  Rossa sent his wife out to the car for the spare he kept hidden there.

  ‘‘Norah.’’ The girl’s mother leaned toward her. She’d seen what happened between her and the upstart, but that wasn’t on her mind at all. ‘‘Do you remember the queer woman at home who’d come out on the castle grounds just before dark? She’d sing ‘The Last Rose of Summer.’ Don’t you remember? A veil round her head so you couldn’t see her face. But every night she�
�d be there . . .’’

  ‘‘You know better than ask Norah about something back home,’’ Mary said. ‘‘She’d turn to salt if she said the word ‘Ireland.’ ’’

  That was Mary.

  ‘‘I remember—I remember the roses on the castle grounds,’’ Norah said. ‘‘And the wreath they sent of them for our mother’s funeral.’’

  ‘‘Oh, for the love of God!’’ Mary said, out of patience.

  Dennis sang ‘‘The Last Rose of Summer.’’

  There was no beat Mary could thump to liven ‘‘The Last Rose of Summer’’ and she felt the party turning into slop. She pulled herself up from her chair and announced she was going to fire up the kitchen stove and make tea. She swiped at the curtain with her stick and set it jingling.

  ‘‘I think I’ll go home now,’’ Norah said. ‘‘It’s been such a grand evening.’’

  Dennis was on his feet before she was. ‘‘I’ll walk you home, Miss Lavery,’’ he said.

  ‘‘Then you don’t need to come back,’’ Mary snapped, quick as a dart.

  You could hear the chirp of the crickets.

  ‘‘Oh dear, dear me,’’ Rossa said then.

  Tom Dixon added treacle. ‘‘Stay a while longer, Norah, and we’ll all go out together.’’

  Mary would have as soon seen them all go out then. A man as fond of the military as Tom was known to be, you wouldn’t have thought such an appeaser.

  But it was Dennis O’Hearn who set things right again. ‘‘Please come back and sit down, Aunt Mary. I know how to fire up the stove, and I’ll put on the kettle for you.’’

  ‘‘Denny, will you put the kettle on?’’ took on a familiar ring in the next few days, and finding that it pleased her, he brought her a cup of tea every morning as soon as he heard the creak of her bedstead. It was what he had done for his own mother till the day she died.