Family Skeletons: A Spunky Missouri Genealogist Traces A Family's Roots...And Digs Up A Deadly Secret

by Rett MacPherson

  “I think so. He’s been pretty sweet about things that I think most men would have lost it over.”

  “Like what?”

  “Just me being an all-around bitch about things. So how’s your sex life?”

  Asking Colette about her sex life was like asking for a four-thousand-page dissertation that read like the Kama Sutra.

  She smiled. “Have I got a story for you.” She settled back into her chair and prepared to tell me her story as only she could tell it.

  * * *

  After we finished our fajitas we headed for the late show. I didn’t enjoy it very much because my conscience kept reminding me that I had actually eaten two dinners tonight. But about halfway through the movie I finally stopped beating myself up over it.

  I arrived home at about two in the morning, wired. Movies do that to me. When I went to see The Silence of the Lambs with Colette, I was so wired that I talked the entire way home. She never got to say one word.

  On top of it, I was broken out in hives for hours. I hate having a body that lets the entire world know when I’m upset. When I got married I had to wear a wedding dress that came up to my neck so that the hives wouldn’t show.

  I grabbed a Dr Pepper and headed upstairs. I sat at my desk, drinking my soda from the can. I usually get a glass, but I didn’t want to make all of the noise with ice cubes and a glass.

  I snooped through the box from Rita. I hadn’t really looked at anything except the letters from Eugene Counts. Now it seemed I had some unspoken approval to poke through it. There were receipts, check stubs, coupons. Rita must have picked up everything on her mother’s kitchen counter and thrown it in the box, too.

  The quiet of the house made me settle down, and I decided I’d check through the box more thoroughly in the morning. I made my way to bed, snuggled up against Rudy, and surprisingly, was asleep in minutes.

  It is not unusual for me to wake up several times in the night, even if it is just to roll over. But when I awoke at 3:46 A.M., I had a gut feeling that something was wrong.

  Momentarily, I felt panicked. My eyes wouldn’t focus, due to lack of sleep and the tequila. I was afraid to move. Afraid that if the boogeyman stood at the foot of my bed, he would know I was awake. Finally, I was awake enough to realize I was being ridiculous, and I sat up in bed.

  It was the last calm moment of the night.

  A greenish glow came from my office. Amazingly, I found the guts to get up and go see what it was. The ominous glow came from straight ahead. I knew what it was before I had a coherent thought.

  I stood in the doorway shaking, unable to move. My computer was on!

  I hadn’t had it on all day, so I know I didn’t leave it on. Mom can’t get up the steps, and my girls don’t know how to turn it on. Rudy never touches the computer. Besides, he was asleep. Anyway, I don’t think he would have left the foreboding message that was on the screen:

  “This is a warning, Victory O’Shea. Next time will not be.”

  Thirteen

  The chickens squawked like mad, and that scared me even more. How close had I come to catching whoever this was in the act? All I could think of was ending up like Norah.

  “Rudy,” I said. I ran into the bedroom and tripped over my shoes at the foot of the bed. “For God’s sake, dial nine-one-one.”

  “I don’t know where your car keys are,” he mumbled.

  “Rudy, wake up,” I said from the floor.

  “Check in the sock drawer,” he said.

  I got up, rubbing my shin that I had hit on the bedpost on the way down. I threw open the bedroom window in time to get a glance of a dark figure jumping onto our wheelbarrow and then over the fence and into the woods. “Don’t bother calling nine-one-one,” I said as I looked down at him. He hadn’t budged. I could be dead for all he cared. “Rudy, wake up!” I yelled. I gave the foot of the bed a good swift kick.

  “What the hell?” he asked. He came to, throwing the covers off. The more he tried to get the covers off, the more tangled he became.

  “Call Sheriff Brooke,” I said.

  I took the steps two at a time. The first floor met my feet with a thud in nothing flat. I gripped the banister as I turned down the hall.

  “Mom? Everybody okay down here?”

  “I think so,” she said. It was not surprising that she didn’t seem as though she’d been asleep.

  “Be right back,” I said to her. I went to the bedroom opposite hers and was very relieved to see that Mary and Rachel had not awoken. Rachel scratched her belly, mumbled something, and rolled over. Mary never moved. She just lay, spread-eagled on her back, with her mouth open and snoring.

  I went back to Mom’s room. “Somebody was in my office.”

  “I know,” she said. “You know how light I sleep. I heard whoever it was come in the window, but I couldn’t do anything. There was no way to warn you without letting whoever it was know that I was awake.”

  “Well, we’ll fix that. You’re getting your own private phone line installed this week.”

  “Torie?” Rudy called from upstairs.

  “I’ll be back, Mom.”

  I didn’t want this making the local news, I thought as I headed back up the steps. I thought it would be best if I didn’t panic and run like a fraidycat. Isn’t that exactly what the person wanted? He wanted to scare me. If he had wanted to kill me, he would have. Or he would wait until he got me alone; he wouldn’t warn me first.

  Within fifteen minutes Sheriff Brooke arrived, disheveled and concerned. He was also slightly irritated. There must have been something in my face that told him the seriousness of the matter, because as soon as he came in the house and got a good look at me, the irritation disappeared.

  Briefly I told him what had happened, and of course he wanted to see the computer. We went upstairs, both windows open now, letting in a nice June breeze.

  “Did you touch it?” he asked.

  “No. Not since yesterday anyway.”

  “Let me get somebody in here to get some prints,” he said, reaching for the phone.

  “I don’t really think the guy would leave his prints all over the keyboard,” I said.

  Sheriff Brooke shoved his hands on his hips and glared at me. “Let me do my job.”

  “I just don’t want this person to know how much he scared me.”

  “So you want to be dead instead?” he asked me. “What did you do today that might have caused this?” he asked.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing,” I said, angry at his accusation, however warranted. My hair resembled a short version of the Bride of Frankenstein’s, and I wore an oversize T-shirt with stains of every color and size on it, big fuzzy house slippers, and a scowl. I was in no mood to be jerked around.

  “Torie, let the sheriff do his job,” Rudy said. He was trying to be in control of the situation. It was difficult for him to do when he was standing in his Santa underwear. They weren’t just any Santa underwear. Santa was in his swimming trunks sitting under a palm tree. My mother bought those for him for Christmas one year.

  He must have read my mind because he glanced down at the front of himself. He grabbed his robe from the floor and said, “I’ll be in the john.”

  “I confronted Zumwalt with my theory,” Sheriff Brooke said to me. Then he said into the phone, “This is Brooke. I’m at forty-one twenty-six River Point Road in New Kassel. Send over a unit. There’s been a break-in.” He hung up the phone.

  “What theory?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  “That he killed his ex-wife for the insurance money,” he said. A smile lingered on his face. The confrontation must have been a sight to behold. I wish I could have been there.

  “Really? You said that?” I asked, impressed as hell.

  Somehow I got the impression that Sheriff Brooke didn’t have any real suspects. I think he was just trying to stir up all of the hornets’ nests, hoping the right hornet would fly out at him.

  “Not in those exact words,” he said. “But
he got the picture. He started to twitch and sweat, and now … you have a break-in,” he said as he crossed his arms and leaned up against my bookshelves. Which, by the way, cover two walls of my office.

  “Did you mention my name?” I asked.

  “No, but Jeff and Rita probably have.” He was silent, waiting for my confession.

  “All I did was go and visit Michael Ortlander’s mother. You know, the friend of Eugene’s.”

  “What?!” he yelled, nearly knocking my precious leather copy of The Bostonians off of the shelf. “Damn it!” he yelled at nobody in particular. He paced back and forth and ran his fingers through his hair.

  “I thought—,” he began loudly, then stopped himself and counted to ten. He showed considerable restraint when riled, I noticed admiringly. “I thought we were going to go together,” he said.

  “If we went to see Eugene Counts,” I said defiantly. “I didn’t go to see Eugene Counts.”

  He burned slowly for a few seconds. “I’m going to throw your butt in jail,” he said, pointing his finger at me.

  So much for restraint.

  “Did you forget already what Norah looked like? Did you forget the blood?” he asked. “I cannot believe you would be so stupid.”

  “Nothing happened. The little old lady told me how her son died and Counts was the only survivor of the whole platoon. He went to a POW camp.”

  “So?”

  “So unless Florence Ortlander has a set of bionic legs, or Doris the bedpan-wielding nurse from hell jumped out my window, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” I said. I was getting louder by the minute. “Nobody else knew I was there,” I added as my closing argument.

  He waited silently, as if he knew there was more to the story. And waited. And I began to feel really guilty, so I just said it.

  “Of course, I did go to see John Murphy last night, too.”

  Sheriff Brooke sat down on that one, putting his head in his hands. He looked as if he were going to explode or cry, I wasn’t sure which, and figured this was no time to point out the fact that he was sitting on my stack of Books in Print. Aunt Bethany always makes sure that I get the old set when the new ones come in at the library.

  “You didn’t say anything about staying away from John Murphy.”

  “And what did you learn?”

  “I don’t think he did it.”

  “Why not?” he asked snottily. “Please, pray tell.”

  “Because he cried.”

  “He cried.”

  “It was the way he cried. I guess you just had to be there,” I said.

  “Which I wasn’t,” he reminded me.

  “Don’t look at me like that. He’s got an alibi. He was with another woman,” I said.

  “And until he names her, and she’s questioned, he remains without an alibi,” he informed me. I love learning all of this police stuff.

  “The insurance policies were legitimate,” I said.

  “How did you know about the insurance…? Forget it. What makes you so sure about the insurance policies?” he asked.

  “Rita didn’t want to discuss why they hadn’t told John about Norah’s death. That leads me to believe that John’s story is correct.”

  “I bet if you talk to Jeff or Rita, you’ll hear just the opposite,” he said.

  “Possibly.”

  “I’m going to tell Newsome to be more careful about where he’s at when he’s discussing investigations.”

  It won’t do any good, I thought. I’m nosy by nature.

  Fourteen

  I truly believe that Sheriff Colin Brooke was beginning to wish he had never met me. I didn’t care.

  There was no way that I was going to leave this alone, and Brooke knew it. The break-in and the message that was left on my computer had answered one vital question.

  There was no way that Norah Zumwalt’s murder could have been a random act of violence. It was somebody who knew her.

  It was almost noon, just about nine hours after the invasion of my home. Rudy had been much more affected by this than I had first thought. He called three different security-system companies by nine o’clock. Our security system would be installed within the week.

  I began looking through the contents of Norah Zumwalt’s box with much deliberation. Every piece of paper I examined closely.

  Rudy came upstairs, never looked at me, and went straight to the bedroom. I noticed, but said nothing. I flipped off the radio that had been playing a piano sonata. I had recognized the piece but not well enough to name it.

  Telephone bills, electric bills, and a parking ticket were among the items in the box that Rita gave me. Two things in particular struck me. There was a call on her phone bill to a number in Vitzland, Missouri. What a coincidence—the same town that Eugene Counts lived in. But the call was made days before she came to my office at the historical society. Could she have just called all the E. Countses in various directories, trying to find him? The call was under a minute, as if she hung up as soon as she heard his voice.

  The second thing that bothered me … Just then Rudy threw his suitcase on the bed.

  “Honey, do you have a business trip this week?” I asked.

  Silence. The second thing that bothered me was the paperwork from the veterinarian. According to the papers in my hand, Norah’s dog was scheduled to be in the vet’s office at eleven o’clock the morning she died. Rita had said that Jeff took the dog in to get its shots. So how did the paperwork end up at the house if Jeff saw her last on Thursday? Maybe he brought it to Rita later and she just threw it in the box with her mother’s other things.

  Would you mess with a receipt from a veterinarian if your mother had been murdered? I wouldn’t. This didn’t sit well with me.

  Rudy threw his pants at the suitcase, missing it by a mile. I could see the bed from my office but nothing else. I stepped to the doorway, reading another piece of paper. All it said was: “Cora Landing. 5:30 Thursday.”

  “Rudy, is something wrong?”

  Silence.

  “Look, if you don’t tell me what’s wrong, how can I argue with you?”

  “I don’t want to argue with you,” he said without looking at me. “I want you to use your head.”

  “What?”

  “You’re one of the most intelligent human beings I’ve ever met, Torie. Use that brain of yours. You’ve got to stop. Norah has become an obsession. This is our home, Torie. Our children live here. Your mother lives here. I don’t like what’s happening.”

  “Do you think I invited somebody to break into our home?” I asked.

  “No, but you’re ticking somebody off. You’re not a cop, you’re not a PI, so why don’t you act like the good little tour guide that you are and leave this to the sheriff?”

  I could get really ticked off here, I thought. But I breathed deeply and pretended to be happy. “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Chicago,” he said. “Be back in two days. Do you see what I mean? This trip has been on the calendar for a month, and you’re so far out in the ozone that you completely forgot about it. I’m afraid to leave you alone.”

  “Are you suggesting that you are my baby-sitter?”

  “You need one,” he said angrily.

  Okay, I was ticked now.

  “I don’t understand, Rudy. What’s the problem here? Is it the break-in, or are you just jealous because I’ve had some excitement in my life the last few months? I wish I had never found Norah’s body, but I did. I wish I could have just stayed ignorant of everything and played with the old ladies at the historical society all summer. But I did find her. And now I have a chance to do something about it. I didn’t think I could at first, but now I think I can really help Sheriff Brooke.”

  “Finding her murderer is not more important than your family’s safety,” he said.

  “I realize that,” I said. “But we’re getting an alarm, and I don’t think that this person will hurt us. It would be stupid.”

  “Killing Norah was st
upid.”

  He chewed on the inside of his lip, and his brown eyes turned soft. “I can’t be here all the time,” he said. “I don’t want to come home from a business trip and have Sheriff Brooke meet me at the door telling me you’re dead.”

  I reached up and brushed my fingers across his eyebrow. He was genuinely concerned for me. Rudy usually treats me as though I can take care of myself most of the time. He was showing macho pigheaded concern. And I actually sort of liked it. He pulled me to him and kissed me. I kissed him back with passion. He knocked the suitcase on the floor and we landed on the bed.

  “I’ll be careful. Besides, Sheriff Brooke doesn’t think he’ll attempt this again. He’s made his point,” I said as he kissed me on the neck.

  “And if the sheriff is wrong?” he asked me. His breath was warm on my ear.

  “Shush,” I said, and kissed him.

  * * *

  Two hours later I stood in my office at the Gaheimer House freaking out over the fact that the New Kassel Museum would open in three days.

  “Are all of the donations taken care of?” Sylvia asked.

  “Everything except the Prussian vase that Tobias Thorley is donating. He said that his grandfather brought it with him when he came over.”

  We had been taking donations for the museum, in the form of money or items. Sylvia had even forked over a few of the items from the Gaheimer House. Elaine Dinwiddie, Staci and Elmer Kolbe, and myself had worked long and hard on displays. I got to write the blurbs for all of the items, checked over by Sylvia Pershing, of course.

  But we were down to the wire and I didn’t have any food or music lined up for the weekend’s festivities, and Sylvia wanted much more than Tobias’s accordion wonders.

  There was a knock on the door. I looked up and there was Sheriff Brooke.

  “Hiya, Torie.”

  “Hello, Sheriff. Please come in.”

  Sylvia made no attempt to leave; instead, she nearly growled at him as he nodded acknowledgment to her.

  “Sylvia,” I said. “This is Sheriff Brooke.”

  “I’m well aware of who he is,” she said.