by Edie Claire
A mother of two, Leigh thought to herself, at least. Did she know about Dean? Did she know who he was, where he was?
She straightened as a grim thought struck her. If Peggy Linney was killed because of what she knew—could her granddaughter be in danger also?
By the end of the service the Dixie cup in her hand had been kneaded into a gritty lump of mush. Becky and the children rose, and Leigh didn’t hesitate in standing up to follow them. The woman might end up thinking Leigh was completely crazy, but she could deal with that. What she couldn’t deal with was another member of the Linney household dropping dead while she stood idly by.
"Feeling better?"
Vestal had reappeared at her side—inconveniently blocking her path. "You look like a young woman who shouldn’t have skipped lunch," he said cheerfully, extending a packet of cheese crackers.
Leigh looked helplessly over his shoulder as Becky and her children pushed their way hurriedly out of the chapel. "Thanks so much," she responded with a smile, tucking the crackers into a dress pocket. "I guess my blood sugar is running a little low today."
Vestal’s eyes practically brimmed over with glee. "How long have you been married?"
Oh, great. "I didn’t mean—" she broke off the non-explanation. She was not discussing anything personal with the loose-lipped funeral director, no matter how helpful he might have been. "I’m sorry," she continued, pushing past him as politely as possible. "But I really need to talk to Peggy’s granddaughter. It’s important." Thanking him again for the crackers, she exited the chapel as rapidly as was seemly and rushed out into the lobby.
Gone. She skirted the rest of Peggy’s family and headed out onto the front walk, where she could see the woman in question and her children heading for a rusted, peanut-butter colored hatchback parked crooked on the street. "Becky!" she called out. "Wait!"
The woman turned and looked at her pursuer blandly, as though being chased on the street by a stranger was not a particularly unusual event. Leigh sprinted to her side and stopped abruptly, almost too breathless to speak. She simply had to get a treadmill.
"I’m sorry to be yelling at you," she apologized, "but I needed to talk to you and I was afraid you were leaving." She extended a hand. "I’m Leigh Koslow. I knew your grandmother."
The kids, who had halted only to watch the strange woman running, now proceeded to get in the car. Becky didn’t move, but her hands-on-hips posture made her lack of interest clear. "Oh?"
"Do you think," Leigh began, planning her next moves quickly, "that we could talk privately somewhere? It won’t take long, but it’s very important, I promise you. It’s about…an adoption."
Becky’s sparkling purple eyelids flickered. She said nothing for a moment, then tossed her car keys through the car window to the teenaged girl in the passenger seat. "Millie, take your brother and go to Wendys. Pick me up here in ten minutes. And I mean ten minutes, not fifteen!"
The girl scooted anxiously to the driver side and revved up the engine with a roar. Her brother was vaulting into the front seat as she pulled away from the curb; the car sped off down the street with his legs still flailing in the air.
Becky seemed unconcerned. "Now who are you again?" she asked irritably.
"Leigh Koslow," she repeated, realizing the name was meaningless. She gestured to a set of concrete steps in front of the house they were passing, and the woman reluctantly sat down next to her. "I’ll be honest with you," she continued. "I didn’t know your grandmother very well; I only met her a few days ago. But I do know that she once helped you out with a problem. And I could be totally wrong, but I’m afraid that that favor might have gotten her into trouble. And you need to know—because for all anyone knows right now, it could get you into trouble too."
Becky bit a purple and orange striped fingernail. "How do you know all this?"
Lucky guess? The honesty, such as it was, had to stop here. There was a chance that this woman didn’t even know what had happened to her baby. And while Leigh didn’t want Becky or anyone else in Peggy’s family to come to any unwitting harm, she also didn’t want to be single-handedly responsible for shaking up the family tree—particularly if fruits like Dean were going to fall off of it.
"Peggy told me some things," she hedged. "But not much. Just enough for me to worry that something she knew was scaring somebody. I’m looking into it because someone has been threatening my father, and I think it may have something to do with Peggy and the baby. Can you tell me more? Please?"
She held her breath. Her story was lame and full of holes, but she didn’t want to tell Becky much more until she knew more herself. With any luck, Becky would be the talkative type.
As it turned out, she was. "I’m surprised Grandma talked about it," the woman began with a mumble, still biting the nail. "She told me never to tell anyone. Not even my mum knew what happened to the baby."
"What did happen to your baby?" Leigh asked, her breath held.
Becky shrugged. "Don’t know. Never did. Grandma took it and said she had found a wonderful home for it with some family in West Virginia. All I knew was that Grandma gave me a place to live after my mum threw me out of our place in Brentwood. And after the baby came, she smoothed things over so I could go back home. Course I didn’t stay long. Once I hit seventeen I was out of there; Grandma was always good about giving me money and stuff."
She paused long enough to give Leigh a searching look. "What’s all that got to do with your dad? I don’t get it. Nobody’s talked about that baby in years. Hell, I got four more where he came from, so what does it matter now? I was just a kid."
Leigh felt like biting her own nails, but refrained. "It probably doesn’t matter. It was just a long shot." She jumped up off the wall. "So, are you headed back to Cleveland?"
"Yeah," the woman answered suspiciously. "Look, should I be worried or what? I mean, are these people who adopted the baby going to sue me or something? It’s not like I’ve got any money."
"No," Leigh assured, "It’s nothing like that." Her conscience was feeling better now. Becky clearly knew nothing in particular, and in any event would soon be back out of state. She wouldn’t be in any danger; and neither, it sounded, would her mother. Peggy and Lilah had had the good sense to keep them out of it. Unfortunately, Leigh had now opened a rather large can of worms.
She thought fast. "You see, there was an illegal baby-selling ring going on around the same time your baby was adopted, and my father—" This whopper of a lie would take some serious penance, she thought miserably. "My father is a journalist and he was writing this story about private adoption in the seventies, and one of the people who had been involved in the ring way back started threatening him if he brought up anything that would get them into trouble. Peggy wasn’t mixed up in anything illegal herself, of course, but when she died so suddenly after he interviewed her…it just looked a little suspicious, that’s all. But I’m sure now it was all really nothing."
She did some quick fact-checking in her head. Did that make sense? Barely. She hadn’t explained how her father would know to interview Peggy in the first place, and there was probably a statute of limitations snag, but she was counting on Becky to overlook all that.
She did. "I don’t think Grandma would have done anything illegal," Becky said thoughtfully. "It’s not like she stole the baby, because I was going to give it up for adoption anyway." She paused, her purple eyelids flickering again. "But she may have gotten paid for it."
Leigh sat back down with a thump. "I thought the baby went to a couple in West Virginia," she whispered.
"Yeah," Becky began slowly, "That’s what Grandma said. But I don’t think that’s what she did."
Leigh waited. Becky said nothing. Leigh waited some more.
"See, Grandma set me up in a boarding house a couple months before the baby came," Becky explained. "But she didn’t talk about any couple in West Virginia then. She said that maybe she could help me raise the baby. But I was too scared—and I was just a k
id, you know. I had stuff I still wanted to do. We used to argue about it. But then just a week before I had it, she suddenly started talking about how maybe giving it up would be the best thing. And then she told me she knew the perfect family, and that they would raise him as their own. When I went into labor we didn’t go to the hospital—she had this doctor come over, and they delivered him right there and took him off. I didn’t think about it then, but you know, now it seems kind of funny."
Leigh cursed her overactive imagination. This was a new low, even for her. Never before had she accosted a perfect stranger at a funeral and unwittingly convinced her that her dear departed granny was a black-market kingpin.
"And there was something else, too," Becky continued. "I overheard her talking on the phone one night after she thought I was asleep. I wouldn’t have paid attention except it was so strange. She was saying something like 'Everybody feels like that after they’ve had a baby. It’s just your hormones.' And I wondered who she knew that had just had a baby. Then she said 'Once you get this little one in your arms, everything will be fine.'
"I could tell she was talking about my baby, so I asked her about it the next day. Then she got really nervous. She told me that the woman she was giving the baby to had just had a stillborn. I thought that was pretty neat—I mean, that my baby would make this other woman happy again. But I couldn’t figure out why Grandma was so jumpy about my knowing that. But now—well, I don’t know what to think."
Leigh sat on the hard wall with her tongue stuck in her throat. She didn’t know what to think either.
***
Leigh walked in the back door of the Koslow Animal Clinic in a daze. Perhaps it was just the low blood sugar talking, but her conversation with Becky seemed to have brought up more questions about Dean’s birth than answers. She shuffled down the basement stairs and opened the freezer outside her father’s office. Deftly avoiding the pathology specimens, she selected one of the single-serving casseroles her mother kept stocked there and popped it into the microwave around the corner. She did not feel well.
"You don’t look like you feel well," Nancy observed from her business manager’s desk, the one tidy spot in the veritable sea of dog food, extra gas canisters, and stacked veterinary journals that passed for Randall’s office. "Are you all right?"
Leigh sank down on a pile of food bags and waited for the ding. "I’ll be fine once I get some food in me."
Nancy watched her with concern. "Did something happen? Do you want me to get your dad?"
Leigh shook her head. "I’ll talk to him after I eat. I just skipped lunch, that’s all. It couldn’t be helped." The memory of Dean Murchison’s roving toes reared its ugly head again, and she shivered involuntarily.
Nancy noticed. "Really, Leigh. You look awful. Where have you been?"
"At Peggy Linney’s funeral," she answered matter of factly. Much to her surprise, Nancy visibly recoiled at the name. Leigh stared at her. "You know Peggy Linney?"
Nancy didn’t answer for a moment. The microwave dinged, but Leigh ignored it.
"My mother worked with her a long time ago," Nancy answered quietly. "Let’s just say Peggy wasn’t very nice to her."
Not speaking ill of the dead was all well and good, but it hardly served Leigh’s purposes at the moment. Leaving Nancy to ruminate further, she retrieved her lukewarm casserole and began to attack it with a plastic fork. "What type of work did your mother do?" she probed after a few mouthfuls.
Nancy ceased looking uncomfortable and smiled a little. "My mother was a housekeeper—the best in the business. She simply loved cleaning things. She said it purified the soul." She paused a moment, looking wistful. "Momma should have had her own business; she would have been wonderfully successful. She always said she couldn’t handle the business side of things, though—that she just wanted to clean. She told me I should work hard at school so I could handle the money when I grew up." She extended the pile of checks in her hand with a sad smile. "And voila," she said softly.
The implication hit Leigh like a ton of bricks, and she cursed herself for not getting around to questioning the staff sooner. "Your mother worked for Lilah Murchison, didn’t she?"
The wistful look left Nancy’s face, and she exhaled loudly. "Yes, she worked with Peggy Linney at the Murchison house for years. She enjoyed the work, but Peggy was—" she seemed to be debating whether or not to be rude, and Leigh rooted heavily for her catty side. "I shouldn’t say it now, but Peggy was a bitter, narrow-minded racist, and she made my mother’s life miserable."
"I’m sorry," Leigh said sincerely, feeling ever-so-slightly less of the irrational guilt she had been shouldering. "How long did your mother work at the mansion?"
"A long time," Nancy answered sadly. "Too long. She worked there right up until I went to college, and then she got too sick to work. She died of breast cancer."
As Leigh offered her sympathy yet again, Jared bustled into the office with a whisk broom. "Is it okay if I sweep now, Nancy Johnson?" he asked loudly. "Doctor Koslow says not to sweep if it bothers you, Nancy Johnson."
Nancy offered a broad smile. "That’s fine Jared. Go ahead. You won’t bother me at all."
"Thank you, Nancy Johnson."
Leigh watched the young man’s powerful arms move the broom in great arcs across the floor. "Speaking of being a wonderful cleaner," she quipped, shoveling the last bites of casserole eagerly into her mouth. "Jared’s a natural. I need him at my house."
"I work for Doctor Koslow and Lilah Murchison, Leigh Koslow," Jared answered immediately. "They say I do a good job, Leigh Koslow."
She couldn’t help but grin. "You do a fabulous job. A heck of a lot better than I would do, I promise you that." She shifted on the dog food bags and realized that the package of cheese crackers Vestal had given her was still in her dress pocket. She ripped it open hungrily.
"Mrs. Murchison says she wants me to work for her forever and ever, as long as I want, Leigh Koslow," Jared continued, his broom in constant motion. She had no doubt that what he said was true; it couldn’t be easy to find an honest, dependable person willing to work after hours cleaning out the litter pans of twenty-three cats—garage apartment or no.
"I’m glad Mrs. Murchison isn’t dead, Leigh Koslow."
Chapter 12
Leigh stopped in mid chew. She glanced quickly at Nancy, wondering if there was a news flash she had missed. Surely not—no one survives four days of floating around Lake Michigan in April, do they? Nancy’s equally puzzled expression seemed to concur.
"What do you mean by that, Jared?" Nancy asked. "You know that your sister told you Mrs. Murchison was dead."
Jared continued sweeping, and did not look up. "Mrs. Murchison isn’t dead, Nancy Johnson."
Leigh and the business manager exchanged confused glances. Perhaps Jared was in denial, but if so, the reaction was delayed. Nancy scribbled quickly on a piece of paper, then showed it to Leigh with a shrug. Memory problem? Nikki said he wasn’t that upset—he hardly ever saw L.M.
"Jared," Leigh asked slowly, "Nikki thinks Mrs. Murchison is dead. Why don’t you think she’s dead?"
Jared didn’t answer for so long that Leigh was almost ready to repeat herself, thinking he hadn’t heard her. But finally he turned and started sweeping the same section of floor for a second time. "Nikki said Mrs. Wiggs was dead, Leigh Koslow," he answered evenly. "Mrs. Wiggs came home. Mrs. Murchison must have came home, too. Mrs. Murchison never goes anywhere without Mrs. Wiggs. That’s what Nikki says, Leigh Koslow."
Both women sat stupidly for a moment, watching Jared sweep as if hypnotized. "That’s the oldest cat," Nancy said quietly to Leigh. "She was traveling with Mrs. Murchison when the plane crashed."
Leigh finished off the last bite of cheese cracker. This business of being constantly blindsided by new information was taxing, and if her mental faculties were going to be put through any more paces, she had to have some carbs. So, she tried to think logically. Jared thought he had seen a particular
cat, and that’s why he thought Mrs. Murchison was alive. No problem. Either that cat never went on the trip, or Jared had seen the wrong one.
"Jared," she began conversationally, "When did you see Mrs. Wiggs?"
His answer was downright chipper. "Last night, Leigh Koslow. Third floor litter pans, Leigh Koslow. Mrs. Wiggs sleeps on the windowsill, Leigh Koslow."
Leigh swallowed. It would be perfectly logical to assume that Jared had mistaken one cat for another. It would also be extremely unlikely. Because although there were whole categories of information that totally bypassed the young man’s comprehension, what he knew, he clung to. He fed off it. It was his whole world. If her father’s claims of Jared’s ability to remember client pets were even half true, Leigh had no doubt that he could recognize any of the twenty-three Murchison Siamese—probably with a blindfold on.
"Did Nikki see her, too?" she asked softly.
He shook his head. "Nikki goes out skating on Monday nights, Leigh Koslow. Every Monday night Nikki goes out skating."
Skating? No time to ponder that. "Did you tell her this morning, then?"
"Tell her what, Leigh Koslow?"
"Did you tell Nikki that you saw Mrs. Wiggs?"
"Nikki isn’t here, Leigh Koslow."
She took a deep breath. Nancy caught her eye with a concerned look.
Leigh decided to try one more angle. She refused, in the absence of hard evidence, to let herself believe that Lilah Murchison had somehow cheated the grim reaper. With no death there would be no will to probate, no millions waiting to be fought over, and—ostensibly—no more threats to the clinic. It would be entirely too fortuitous.
She rose and followed Jared into the back storeroom. His head was still down as he conscientiously swept up piles of hair and scattered pieces of stale kibble. "Jared," she began anxiously, trying to keep her voice light, "Has Mrs. Wiggs been home all week?"