by Edie Claire
"Yes?"
Well, perhaps it could have been Maura after all. But why?
Leigh's thoughts were cut short by a sly smile from the policewoman. "That's okay, Koslow, don't torture yourself. It wasn't me. But you've just proven that it could have been a woman."
Leigh's face reddened.
"You also said he or she was a moron," Maura continued, "what makes you think that?"
Leigh sniffed. "What intelligent person that you know writes messages on dead fish and dresses corpses up in stupid-looking hats?"
"A criminally insane one," Maura said heavily, "and there may be a method to his madness. Using the fish, for instance."
Leigh looked at her blankly.
"Fish? Paul Fischer?" Maura said slowly. "Get it?"
Leigh hadn't. "Well, sure," she said quickly. "That much is obvious. But it doesn't prove this guy is really dangerous."
"Of course not," Maura said. "It doesn't prove anything. That's my point. We don't know what this person is capable of."
Leigh exhaled in defeat. "I understand what you're saying. But I'm telling you, Cara won't leave. And with the security system on and the police driving by now and then, I'm sure we'll be fine." She got up to leave. "But we have some detective work to do—"
The glare aimed at Leigh could kindle a fire.
"I mean," she backtracked, "we have some genealogical research to do. If Cara and I make a mission of finding out all about Paul Fischer's life and the history of the house, we're bound to stumble across something suspicious."
Maura's eyes appraised Leigh carefully. "All right, Koslow. But let me tell you this. My official advice is for you both to get the hell out of that house. Sadly, I have no legal right to make you. That said, as far as doing library-type research on Paul Fischer and the house, that's fine. You and Cara working together can make faster progress than the overworked Avalon PD. But if you find anything"she pointed a finger"And I mean anything, you tell me about it right away. Understand?"
Leigh raised her hand in a salute. "Capiche!" she said with a smile, then rose to leave. Her eyes rested momentarily on Maura's gun holster. "Hey, Maura, do you think—"
"Go, Koslow!"
Leigh decided to comply. Fun was fun, but she had work to do.
Chapter 9
Leigh offered Cara her arm for balance as the two walked up the crumbling concrete steps of the Rhodis home. There were only six, but when Cara reached the top she stopped to massage her bulging abdomen.
"What's wrong?"
"Oh, nothing," Cara replied unconvincingly. "It's just another Braxton Hicks."
Leigh felt a flicker of panic. She was supposed to be a companion, not a midwife. And where the hell was Gil when you needed him, anyway?
Cara looked at Leigh's expression and laughed. "Oh, knock it off! I'm fine. You're getting as bad as your mother!"
Leigh scowled. That was hitting below the belt.
Cara laughed again and put her hand on Leigh's arm, a form of apology. "Really. It's no big deal. As long as I don't have more than four an hour, there's nothing to worry about. I'm just supposed to be taking it easy, which I am. I'm the quintessential lady of leisure, in case you hadn't noticed."
Leigh was only partially reassured. "Are you sure you're up to this?" she persisted. "You could just tell me all this stuff yourself, like I asked."
Cara shook her head. "I think you should hear this firsthand. Besides, what's so stressful about having a chat with my next-door neighbor in the middle of a Friday morning?"
Giving up, Leigh rang the yellowed plastic doorbell. Adith Rhodis appeared in a matter of seconds. She opened the flimsy screen that separated them and flashed a wide smile. "Well, hello, Cara dear! Come in, come in! And you must be her cousin Leigh. So nice to see you again!" The older woman grasped Leigh's hand and held it tightly. "I can't believe how you've grown up into such a lovely young woman. Last time I saw you you were just a little thing holding cotton balls for your Daddy!"
Leigh smiled painfully. That was at least one poodle ago. "It has been a long time, hasn't it?"
Mrs. Rhodis turned back to Cara. "So, how are you, dear? I can't believe you walked up those rickety old stairs to get here. It's a wonder you didn't fall to your death. I've been on Bud for years to get them steps fixed and he always says the same darn thing: 'I'll do it in the spring, Adie!'" She leaned towards Leigh conspiratorially. "Old buzzard ain't got much spring left in him!"
Leigh grinned back at the older woman. Adith Rhodis appeared to be somewhere in her seventies. She had wavy, white-gray hair that stood up in all directions, an image fitting well with her flowered polyester house dress and knee-high stockings. Her eyes, on the other hand, were those of a disobedient thirteen-year-old with a wild imagination.
An ear-piercing yapping suddenly erupted from within the house. "Oh, that Pansy!" Mrs. Rhodis continued with a smile. "She can't hear the doorbell anymore, but somehow she knows!" She tapped her forehead with a finger. "Some animals know a whole lot more than we do, you know."
Cara nodded pleasantly, and Leigh, who had heard it all before, tried to. Mrs. Rhodis led them through a dark, slightly musty smelling but well-furnished living room into the back kitchen. They could see Mr. Rhodis sitting peacefully in a lawn chair on the attached screened porch, while a frantic poodle clawed wildly at the screen door that led inside.
When Mrs. Rhodis opened the door the obese little dog scampered in and sniffed the visitor's feet. Pansy was what the staff at the Koslow Animal Clinic affectionately referred to as a "coffee table dog." Her chunky, rectangular body was smoothed with ample pads of fat, each corner precariously suspended by a spindly limb. "Easy Pansy, don't scare them to death!" Mrs. Rhodis laughed. She turned to Leigh. "She's a bit overweight, you know. Your Daddy's always on me about that. But I only give her this much food a day!" she said defensively, holding her fingers to outline a volume of food that wouldn't keep a cat alive. "You know what it is," she said, leaning close to Leigh's ear and pointing a thumb towards the porch. "It's Bud. He's always giving her them Pupperonies."
Cara's face was beginning to break out in a sweat at the stagnant heat of the kitchen. Mrs. Rhodis noticed and quickly clamped her hand to her mouth. "Where are my manners! You poor thing. Let's go outside on the porch and sit. It's nice out there. I'll bring you girls some lemonade."
She opened the screen door again and pushed Cara gently towards it. "Go on, go on," she insisted, "have a seat on the rocker. I'll be right back. Why, I remember when I was pregnant with Jimmy...." Mrs. Rhodis' voice trailed off as she wandered back into the kitchen.
Leigh and Cara settled themselves on a suspended loveseat and started up a gentle rock. It was pleasant on the breezy porch. They could see snatches of the Ohio through the trees, but a tall hedge leant privacy to Cara's small back yard. Mr. Rhodis sat quietly smoking a wooden pipe, whose bowl was carved into a bust of Sir Walter Raleigh. Mr. Rhodis was long and lanky, with weathered skin and a thick crop of snow-white hair. He nodded at them pleasantly, but didn't say a word. Cara leaned down to scratch Pansy's broad back, and the little dog panted and squirmed in contentment.
In a few moments Mrs. Rhodis returned with three tall tumblers of lemonade. Cara and Leigh took them thankfully. "Please sit down, Mrs. Rhodis," Cara insisted. "We didn't mean to make more work for you. It's just that, with what's been happening lately, Leigh and I are trying to find out everything we can about Paul Fischer and my house, and I knew you could help."
"Well, you've come to the right place!" Mrs. Rhodis began merrily, but then her face turned grave. "I can't believe what you said about his body. That's the most scandalous thing... I don't believe it really was his body. How could anyone know for sure, anyway? When it's that old—" she broke off in a grimace of disgust that was purely theatrical. Then she leaned toward Leigh, eyes sparkling. "What exactly did it look like, anyway?"
Cara grinned expectantly. Leigh searched her mind for a way to avoid the question, then turned from
Mrs. Rhodis and swallowed hard. "If you don't mind, Mrs. Rhodis," she said softly, looking down into her lap, "I really don't think I can talk about it."
Cara rolled her eyes. Mrs. Rhodis, however, was suitably taken aback. "Oh, my! I'm sorry, my dear. Me and my big mouth! I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable." She leaned forward to pat Leigh's knee. "We won't talk about it anymore." She sat back in her chair and adjusted her polyester skirt, clearly disappointed.
Leigh felt ever so slightly guilty. "That's all right, Mrs. Rhodis. We did come here to talk, after all. But what Cara and I wanted to know more about was Paul Fischer's life. You know, what he was like, what kinds of things he kept in his house. We're trying to figure out who might want something that he left behind."
Mrs. Rhodis' eyes gleamed. Mr. Rhodis continued to puff on his pipe. Thankfully, the breeze carried the smoke well away from the loveseat. "I can tell you anything you want to know," Mrs. Rhodis said proudly, taking a swig of her own glass of lemonade and settling back in her chair. "As they say on TV, shoot."
Leigh and Cara looked at each other. Cara gave Leigh a nod. "Well, for starters," Leigh asked, "how long have you lived next door to him?"
"How long? Oh, let's see..." Several minutes elapsed while Mrs. Rhodis proceeded to describe in excruciating detail the various residences of her childhood. Leigh politely bit her lip while waiting anxiously for information from the relevant decade. Eventually, it came. "Bud and I moved in here in 1940, right after we got married. His parents lived here too for a while. Anita was still married to Harlan back then, and she had little Robbie."
Leigh restrained herself from asking who the hell Anita, Harlan, and Robbie were. "How long did you say Paul Fischer had lived next door?" she interrupted.
Cara flashed her a look of annoyance, but Mrs. Rhodis didn't seem to mind the redirection. "Oh, Paul moved in along with his father after Norman—that's his father—married Anita. Paul was already a grown man, but he wasn't very mature for his age. I always thought it was a little odd that a man should expect his new wife to house his grown son, but Anita, she put up with a lot. Why, I remember one time when that knife salesman's car broke down out on the boulevard..."
Leigh buried her face in her lemonade cup to suppress a scream.
"Excuse me, Mrs. Rhodis," Cara said politely. "Let me backtrack a moment for Leigh's sake." She gave her cousin a sly glance. "This house was built by the Stewart family, of which Anita was the last remaining member by the 1930s. She lived here first with her husband Harlan and her son Robbie. In the forties, after her husband died, she married Norman Fischer. Paul was Norman's son by a previous marriage."
Leigh nodded appreciatively and turned to Mrs. Rhodis. "So if you and Paul Fischer were neighbors that long, you must have known him pretty well."
Mr. Rhodis scoffed. Leigh and Cara quickly turned to look at him, but he sat impassive as ever, puffing away.
Mrs. Rhodis ignored the interruption. "I suppose I knew him as well as anyone, but that wasn't very well. He spent all his time at work or inside; I only talked to him when he was hanging out laundry or making repairs on the house. He never seemed to have much to say. I always figured he was kind of simple, until he showed me how he could write."
Leigh sat up expectantly. "Paul Fischer was a writer?"
Mrs. Rhodis smiled. "I guess you could say that. I had cause to... well... look in his windows a time or two, and the house looked clean as you please, but there were papers and books stacked everywhere. Nobody can be too simple if they spend their whole life reading and writing, that's what I say." She turned up her nose with authority.
"Did you ever read anything he wrote?" Leigh asked.
Mrs. Rhodis cracked a wide grin and glanced at her husband. "Just once, a few years before he died. He showed me a poem he wrote about Bud. 'Man on the porch, smoke's a blowing...'" She cackled. "You remember that, don't you Bud?"
Mr. Rhodis rolled his eyes.
"Bud wasn't too impressed," she continued. "But I thought it was good. Paul said he wrote other things, but I don't know what." Mrs. Rhodis suddenly turned to Leigh, a distinct gleam in her eye. "Well, I do know one other thing he wrote. He wrote a will."
Leigh leaned forward. "But no will was found, right?"
Mrs. Rhodis looked smug. "Just because nobody ever found it doesn't mean he never wrote it."
Leigh's heartbeat quickened. "What makes you think he wrote a will?"
"He told me so!" Mrs. Rhodis answered proudly. "About a year or so before he died, he said he'd made up a will, but he hadn't paid any lawyers or anything. He just wanted me to sign it and maybe keep a copy of it at my house."
"You didn't think that was strange?" Leigh asked.
Mrs. Rhodis scoffed slightly. "Honey, everything about Paul Fischer was strange. But no, I wasn't surprised about him not spending an arm and a leg on lawyers just to write a will. He was only around sixty, anyway. Bud and I are half dead already and we still haven't gotten around to making one up!"
"So what happened to Paul Fischer's will?" Leigh asked hopefully.
Mrs. Rhodis sighed. "I haven't a clue. He never brought it up again."
Leigh's hopes faded. "You mean he asked you about signing it and keeping a copy but never went through with it?" she asked.
"That's about the size of it," Mrs. Rhodis answered. "That sort of thing wasn't unusual, either. He also promised to build flower boxes for the bedroom windows."
Mr. Rhodis coughed. Mrs. Rhodis shot him a look, but didn't say anything.
"What did bother me," she continued, "was not finding his writings later. After he died, I offered to help out—you know, box his things up for the next of kin. But there was nothing there. Not a scribble. I couldn't even find the poetry notebook he'd showed me before."
Cara jumped in with sudden energy. "What I was trying to tell you the other day, Leigh, is that Paul Fischer may have hidden some of his writings in the house. He told Mrs. Rhodis that he wanted her to keep a copy of the will because it contained important information that people needed to know after he died."
Cara's eyes shown with the same fiendish excitement they had when, at the age of ten, she had discovered a six-pack of beer hidden in a storm drain at the elementary school.
"Important information?" Leigh repeated warily. "And do you have any idea what that might be, Mrs. Rhodis?"
The older woman smiled as if she had been waiting for years to answer that question. She took a long swig of lemonade for dramatic effect, then spoke. "I always thought that boy knew a whole lot more than he was saying about the night Anita and Norman died. In all those years, I suspected. But when he told me about the will, I thought he was speaking especially to me, you know, like in code. 'I'm going to let you know what really happened, but not till I'm dead and buried.' That's what he was really saying. I knew it. Pansy was with me then, and she knew it too. I could tell."
As Mrs. Rhodis's speech took a sharp turn into the paranormal, Leigh's interest turned to skepticism.
Cara was not so affected. "You had Pansy then? But that must have been eleven years ago!" she said enthusiastically, leaning over to pat the furry off-white lump.
Mrs. Rhodis beamed. "Yes! She was just a pup. But she had the gift even then. Why, I remember one time—"
"Please, Mrs. Rhodis," Leigh broke in as politely as possible, "What did you—" she cleared her throat, "and Pansy—think Paul Fischer wanted everyone to know?"
Mrs. Rhodis paused. "Why, what really happened in 1949, of course!" she answered in surprise. She looked from Cara to Leigh and leaned forward. "Cara did tell you about the murders, didn't she?"
Chapter 10
Leigh turned a hard look on her cousin. "Murders?"
Cara smiled pleasantly. "Now, Mrs. Rhodis," she said conversationally. "You know that the deaths weren't officially ruled as murders. The police determined that Anita's death was an accident, and there wasn't any clear evidence that Norman hadn't committed suicide. Right?"
Mrs. Rhodis p
ursed her lips and sat back. "There's what the police say—and then there's what I know."
For no apparent reason, Pansy let out a sharp, annoying bark. Mrs. Rhodis' face lit up. "Yes, sweetie pie. You know it too, don't you?"
"Would anyone care to fill me in on exactly who died when and how and whether it happened in the bedroom I'm sleeping in?" Leigh asked with poorly concealed annoyance.
"Oh dear," Mrs. Rhodis said, clamping her hand over her mouth again. "Cara didn't tell me you were superstitious. Perhaps we shouldn't discuss this." The older woman was trying to hard to look contrite, but Leigh caught the mischievous gleam in her eyes.
"I'm sure Leigh isn't worried about any ghosts coming back to haunt her," Cara said without conviction. "But not everyone has the stomach for crime that you and I have, Mrs. Rhodis."
Their hostess glowed at the compliment.
Leigh tried to relax. "Please, Mrs. Rhodis," she asked politely. Tell us what happened. I'm sure no one can recall the details as well as you can."
The flattery worked.
"It happened the night of August 12, 1949," Mrs. Rhodis said precisely, adjusting her ample bottom in the vinyl-seated chair. "Bud and I had just got Jimmy to bed when the ruckus started. Yelling and fussing and doors slamming, then the ambulance and the police. I got up and went over, of course. I knew it had to be something with Anita."
Leigh wondered if the older woman had been tipped off by the poodle of the decade, but she kept her mouth shut.
"Well," Mrs. Rhodis continued, "Turns out Anita had taken a bad fall down the front staircase. Anyone can fall down stairs, of course, but Anita never was the lucky type. Only had the one boy with the good husband, then latched on to that thug Norman without a thought. I told her a hundred times, I said: 'Anita, you don't need another man around just yet. Take some time!' But she never did listen to me. And I was one of her best friends. Why I remember the one time when she bought that bad hunk of liver—"