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

by Rett MacPherson

  “So get a surfboard. Look, I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, but I would say that Sheriff Brooke must be getting close to something or you wouldn’t have gone to all of this trouble just to tell me to lay off. What are you hiding?”

  “Let us just say that if too much of an investigation was made on my family, we could be severely hurt. And we have a lot to lose.”

  I watched him closely as he swirled the wine in his glass as if it were Kool-Aid, and he had to mix the sugar up.

  “Who killed her?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then what could be so bad that Sheriff Brooke’s investigation could uncover?”

  “You’re the instigator here. Sheriff Brooke was taken care of until you came along and made him think differently.” He laid his fork and knife across the ends of his plate, and then crossed his hands together. “Several years before our divorce, our family sought counseling.”

  Could I really be this lucky?

  “I warn you, if any of this leaks out, I will know where it came from,” he said. “I will ruin you,” he said. He smiled at me, cold and calculating. “There were several reasons for the counseling. The main one was the children. Norah was having great difficulty with them in their early teenage years. Rita was jealous of everybody and everything, and Jeff was as obsessive as Rita was jealous.”

  Hold everything.

  He couldn’t possibly be talking about the same Rita and Jeff. They barely acted like they had personalities, much less enough of one to be neurotic. Maybe Zumwalt was trying to throw the suspicion off of himself.

  Rain began to splatter against the window and he got up to look out. He spoke to the window, not me. “I also had a problem, one that I still indulge in. I like women, Mrs. O’Shea.…”

  “That’s great. Most men do.” I was worried. I wasn’t prepared to hear his confession. Besides, the bad guy usually confesses to all sorts of dastardly things, right before he kills or attempts to kill whomever it is he’s confessing to.

  “Yes. I agree,” he said. “But I like mine in unusual ways. Let’s say some people wouldn’t understand my preferences.”

  “Are you a pervert?” I asked. “Is that what you’re trying to say to me? What? You like to hurt women, is that it?” I was on my feet now, purse in hand and ready to run.

  “You’re afraid,” I said. “You’re afraid that if somebody finds out that you like to hurt women, they’ll think that you killed Norah. Right? By giving her the ultimate pain. Am I right? They’d hang you up. No amount of evidence or lack of it could save you. The press would have a field day.”

  He swung around, eyes full of poison. “You don’t know what that kind of information could do to me.”

  “I understand perfectly well what that kind of information could do to you. I can hear the gas pellets dropping now,” I said. “Or maybe the sizzle of the electric chair.”

  “It could destroy my reputation,” he sputtered. “I’d never work again!”

  “Good! Good, I’m glad. How come perverts and psychopaths want to inflict pain and suffering, but never think they should have to pay the price? When the tables are turned, it’s not very funny, is it?”

  I was yelling now, and I could just imagine all the servants piled up on the other side of the door, peeping through the keyhole, trying to hear or see what was going on.

  “I’m warning you,” he said.

  “Fine, warn me. I don’t do very well with overbearing, perverted male authority figures. You know, kind of makes my skin crawl.” I moved to the door. “So this is what money buys. The ability to be a pervert and get by with it. Well, you can keep your demented world, Mr. Zumwalt.”

  I was headed for the entryway when he called after me, “You are investigating the wrong family member. Tell Sheriff Brooke to halt or you will both be very sorry.”

  All the way out to my car, my only concern was that he had poisoned me. The next thing I knew, I was on Clayton Road headed for Interstate 270, glad to be back in the real world. It was as if I’d been trapped in the Twilight Zone.

  Why? Why the confession? Maybe it was to let me know what and who I was dealing with. He had no reason to kill Norah, unless it was the result of an argument that got out of hand. But I found it hard to believe that an argument gone awry would end in several stab wounds. Usually, the victims just get hit over the head, pushed down the steps, or strangled. Believe me, I’ve been angry enough to want to strangle somebody before. But after stabbing somebody a few times, don’t you think you’d stop yourself and go, “Is she dead yet?” Why go any higher?

  He had risked a lot by confiding his secret to me. There was the chance that I would run and tell everything that I knew, and he took that chance to clear himself of the murder, no matter how much it implicated him in other things.

  I am not a detective, I reminded myself. I wasn’t trained to look for lies in every sentence. Could Zumwalt be using my naïveté to throw the suspicion elsewhere? Sheriff Brooke would not take this the same way that I had.

  NEW KASSEL GAZETTE

  THE NEWS YOU MIGHT MISS

  by Eleanore Murdoch

  What’s this? It is a sad, sad day for me when I have to report the kind of information that our native Colette Bourneville is reporting up in crime-infested St. Louis.

  Torie and Rudy O’Shea had a break-in! Here. In New Kassel! First a murder in Wisteria, which is only ten miles away, and now a break-in! Sad, sad, sad. Torie’s mother, Jalena Keith, said that the only thing they had been robbed of was their peace of mind.

  Speaking of Jalena Keith, her blackberry cobbler won first place at the Bake-Off last Saturday at Pierre’s. Are we surprised? I’m not.

  Well, since school is out, I just want to tell everybody to be especially careful with their children until the floodwater goes down. If it ever goes down.

  And Father Bingham was happy to report that people are sinning as much as ever. He had twenty-four people in his confessional last week, and a nearly full congregation for both masses on Sunday morning.

  The Lord delivers, Father Bingham.

  Until next time.

  Eleanore

  Sixteen

  Sheriff Brooke sat crammed in a desk chair that looked as if it came from the local grade school. We sat in front of the microfilm reader in the New Kassel library. I had asked Aunt Bethany to keep the film indefinitely, thinking I might have to use it again.

  “Here it is,” I said. I found the article on the murdered woman. “Read it.”

  He acted stupid for a minute, as if he didn’t know how to read, and then reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his reading glasses. He looked embarrassed and then cleared his throat and began to read.

  “A neighborhood is in shock. The body of twenty-year-old Gwen Geise was found in a neighbor’s barn Tuesday morning. The barn was on the property of Simon Jaffe. Miss Geise’s throat had been cut from ear to ear. Sergeant William Heinze of the Partut County Police Department says there are no suspects as of yet. No motive has been revealed either.”

  Sheriff Brooke sat back and said nothing.

  “Okay, in 1942, Eugene Counts lived in St. Mary’s and Michael Ortlander lived in Pine Branch. I’m assuming they knew each other from church, because Eugene’s father preached at the Pine Branch Church,” I said.

  “Where is Ortlander’s mother?” he asked.

  “In Progress, which is in Partut County.”

  “Vitzland is in Ste. Genevieve County?”

  “Yes. I know what you’re thinking. If you had switched identities with somebody, why would you come back to the same area?” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said as he took off his glasses. “It makes no sense. When did he come back to the States?”

  “I don’t know. Howie might be able to help on that one.”

  “Who is Howie?” he asked.

  “Howard Braukman. He works for the National Personnel Records. He was how I found out that Ortlander was alive i
n the first place, even though I thought he was Eugene Counts at the time. But I think Ortlander would have come back in the last twenty years. Sometime in the 1970s.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe he thought that he had aged enough that nobody would recognize him as Michael Ortlander,” I said.

  “Yup. And he figured that everybody that knew Eugene Counts would either be dead or wouldn’t care anymore.”

  I forwarded the microfilm machine to the same year but three days later. Sure enough, there was a notice of her burial.

  Friends and family buried Gwen Geise today. The twenty-year-old schoolteacher from Partut County was found dead in Maple Grove, in the west part of Partut County, on Tuesday. Investigators say they have a few leads and maybe even a suspect, although they won’t elaborate. Internment was at the Yount Cemetery.

  Sheriff Brooke sighed heavily. “I think I’ll call the Partut County sheriff and see if I can have a look at the record for her murder. Who knows? Maybe Sergeant Heinze is still alive and I could talk to him.”

  “You think Ortlander killed Norah?”

  “I think it’s a pretty good possibility. I mean, we know that Norah put the ad in the paper. I think she suspected that her father was alive even before she contacted you. Once you told me about the ad in the paper, that summed it up for me. Somehow, she suspected,” he said. “He’s the only one with any real motive to kill Norah. I have to admit,” he said, rubbing his eyes and yawning, “I’m not so sure I would dismiss John Murphy as easily as you did.”

  “He just doesn’t seem to have a big enough motive.”

  He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “People have been killed for milk money,” he said. “There is always the possibility that it was random. We can’t forget that. There may not be a logical explanation for her murder. It’s something you have to live with.”

  “No. I refuse to think that way. If it was random, I wouldn’t have had that message left on my computer.”

  “Did you ever think that maybe it was Harold Zumwalt or Jeff—oh hell, Rita for that matter? Maybe they don’t want you uncovering family skeletons. They don’t care if you find her murderer, one way or the other. They just want you to stop snooping! Your break-in could have had nothing to do with Norah’s actual murder!”

  He raised his voice a little on that one. Aunt Bethany glanced over, and I waved to her.

  “Let’s get copies of these and I’ll see what I can do about getting ahold of that police record,” he said.

  I was satisfied with that. It seemed for the first time since all of this began that we had a solid suspect. I hadn’t told Sheriff Brooke about having lunch with Zumwalt, but what did it matter?

  “One more thing,” I said. “Did you investigate Cora Landing?”

  He had a peculiar look on his face. I sensed that he really didn’t want to answer me. “It was a dead end.”

  “Bull spit.” Aunt Bethany frowned at me on that one. I hadn’t actually said the word, but I suppose it sounded enough like it to get me into trouble.

  Sheriff Brooke smiled nervously at her.

  “There is no point in getting us thrown out of the library, for Christ’s sake,” he said.

  “She’s my aunt. She won’t throw me out. She’ll just tell my mother,” I answered him. “There is more to Cora Landing than you’re telling me.”

  “She’s a beautician,” he said.

  “Do you expect me to believe that Norah had an appointment to get her hair done? If it was that easy, you would have just said that outright. Now, who is she?”

  “She’s John Murphy’s lover.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, but she wasn’t with him on that night.”

  “Then what? John Murphy was cheating on his mistress? Having an affair with an affair? He said he was with a woman that night.”

  “That’s what he told you. Until he’s named her to us, he has no alibi.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “It’s possible he has no other alibi, and he just told you that to get you to shut up and leave his office.”

  “Then why was Norah meeting her?”

  “I’m assuming that Norah confronted Cora over the affair.”

  “What about Cora? She could be a suspect.”

  He glanced around the library nervously. “I’ve considered it, but it’s not the usual female method of killing somebody. Besides, she was in a diner with her entire bridge club the morning that Norah was killed.”

  I hate it when people burst my bubble.

  * * *

  I thought about Cora Landing the entire time I got groceries. I also thought about her the whole way home. I had this feeling that I’d end up speaking to Cora Landing before this was all over. Just to satisfy my own curiosity.

  I turned left onto River Point Road and pulled into my drive. For a second I wondered why there were no lights on in the house. I reminded myself not to panic. After all, we had had the alarm installed a few days earlier. I remembered that my mother had gone into St. Louis County to visit a friend of hers, and Rudy, who’d come home from his business trip two days before, had taken the girls to his brother’s house. I felt funny about this though, because it was around six-thirty in the evening and neither Rudy nor my mother had mentioned anything about staying for dinner.

  I carried in the groceries, leaving out the chicken. When everybody came home, we could eat. To give Rudy more time, I took a shower.

  It was after seven, and still nobody was home. I was getting angrier by the minute. I ended up eating a cupcake and drinking a flat Dr Pepper for dinner. Not that I would normally eat that sort of thing for dinner. I was feeling dejected and forgotten, so I had to eat something dreadful so that I could use it against them when they finally did come home. “Look, I had to eat a cupcake for dinner.” Poor pitiful me. Rachel and Mary would probably congratulate me.

  Okay, anger and self-pity soon gave way to genuine worry. I called Rick’s house, and Rudy had left over three hours earlier. Rick lives in Meyersville, about twenty minutes away. Where was Rudy? Here is where I became a paranoid psycho of some sort.

  In the span of ten minutes I envisioned him dead, and my children kidnapped. Or he could have had an accident and they were all dead. From there I went to imagining how I would tell his mother that her son had died, and to whom I would give his godforsaken ties. Then came the funeral. And there I was crying over three caskets that, of course, were a figment of my extraordinarily delusional mind!

  Okay, I was calm. What if … what if he was with another woman? I had been acting weird lately. I hadn’t been giving him or the girls the proper amount of attention. What if he was really at a lover’s house, leaving my children in the car while they consummated their meeting? Or worse yet … he took my children inside.…

  How do I do this to myself?

  There was probably a perfectly logical explanation for why nobody had seen him or my two children in three hours. At the moment, though, the only explanations that I could come up with were hysterical ones.

  Then I stopped. I had been so preoccupied with carrying out Rudy’s castration sentence in my mind that I hadn’t noticed how excruciatingly quiet it was. I stood in the middle of the kitchen with the hair raised on my arms. It was too quiet. Something wasn’t right.

  I walked out onto the back porch and breathed deeply, the fragrance of my roses soothing me. The sun was setting directly over my cherry tree, just beyond the chicken coop.

  Now I noticed it.

  Where were the chickens? They weren’t out in the courtyard, clucking or pecking at the ground.

  That was the whole point. I couldn’t see or hear anything, except the crickets, and their song had become so loud in my ears that I thought I’d gladly go deaf.

  “Here chickie chickies.” I was calling for chickens. I was convinced that I had lost my blooming mind for sure. My voice cut through the silence in the backyard with a resounding echo.

  Slowly, I walked down th
e sidewalk to the chicken coop. I lifted the latch on the courtyard door. I thought I heard a muffled cluck or two. I walked over to the building where their nests were, my heart thudding.

  The door was shut and I had to yank, with my foot on the side of the building, to get it to open. Every chicken I owned came flying at me, squawking and pecking. I screamed from the sheer fright of having two dozen chickens fly in my face.

  I jumped back and the gate to the courtyard rammed me in the back, and I screamed all over again because of that. The chickens were spastic, running around the courtyard. How long had they been locked up? It couldn’t have been an accident. What were the chances of every single chicken being inside when the door shut?

  Shut so hard that it was stuck, I reminded myself.

  I overreact to everything, right?

  My steps back to the house were quick but cautious. How long had I been in the house by myself? An hour? Two? Nothing had happened to me while I was in there. My God, I had even taken a shower.

  I was just paranoid. Still, when I reached the steps that lead to the porch, I was trembling. The house no longer seemed to be mine. It no longer seemed to be the one that I had lived in since I was a child. It took on the eeriness of a dark abandoned piece of property. A stranger.

  I slithered in the back door and stood in the kitchen, looking at everything. Was anything out of place? Was that coffee cup on the counter before? Of course it was. The area rug in the living room was turned up on one end. Did I do that? Was it like that when I got home?

  My hand was on the banister, ready to head upstairs. The faces from the family portraits and baby pictures all looked down at me from the wall. This was my home. Those were my photographs. I felt brave for a second and ascended the steps without stopping. If I had stopped, I would not have gone all the way up.

  Maybe my paranoia was a built-in defense mechanism, to warn me of the dangers. Now that was a paranoid statement if I ever heard one.

  I looked at my desktop. The box from Rita was on the floor now, instead of being on the desk. Did I move that? Damn, damn, damn. Why couldn’t I remember?