by Mary Daheim
Jackie knew she couldn’t avoid the grocery store forever. She also knew she had to stock her cupboards with more than the basic items I’d picked up Wednesday afternoon at Safeway. I volunteered to accompany her on a shopping expedition.
“I’ll run interference to keep you away from veteran mothers,” I promised. “I will spare you gruesome stories concerning veil of pregnancy, toxemia, and conniption fits.”
Jackie took me up on my offer. At precisely nine o’clock we headed for the supermarket. I was browsing in produce while Jackie studied meat and fish. It seemed to me that she knew nothing about vegetables except for celery and green beans. I decided to introduce her to eggplant and broccoli and cauliflower. Com was in season, of course, so I chose a half-dozen ears, some white, some yellow. Pleased with myself, I was contemplating brussels sprouts when I heard a familiar voice at my elbow.
“Hey, don’t tell me you can cook, too! Why don’t we say to hell with it and run off and get married?”
With a grimace I turned to face Leo Walsh. “Gee, Leo,” I said with more sarcasm than I intended, “how come your body isn’t being washed ashore off Agate Beach? I thought you would have jumped by now. Instead you’re scouting wholesome vegetables.”
Leo’s expression was mocking as he fingered a turnip. “I’m getting tomatoes to make Bloody Marys from scratch. What’s your excuse? I thought you didn’t live here.”
I uttered an impatient sigh. “I don’t. I’m shopping with a friend. Why don’t you grab a lime for your vodka martinis?”
Leo picked up a long, large turnip. “I kind of like this. What do you think?” He leered at me.
“Leo,” I said coldly, “you’re a mess.”
He flicked at the end of the turnip. “I’ll bet you’re wondering how I always seem to … turn up?”
I whirled away. “Hit the road, Leo.” I didn’t want him to see my smile. I’m a sucker for bad puns.
“Lettuce,” he was murmuring. “Let us … what?”
Over my shoulder I managed a faintly appalled look. “Stop it. I’m leaving town in less than three hours. Good luck, Leo. Goodbye.”
“I’m taking the Greyhound at two,” Leo replied, mercifully replacing the turnip. “Where are you headed?”
“Mars.” I had turned back to the brussels sprouts. I had a feeling Jackie wouldn’t go for them. I reached for some peas instead.
“You got your car back?” Leo’s voice held a note of envy.
“Almost.” I was forced to look at him again. I couldn’t stay in produce forever. On this Friday in late July Leo Fulton Walsh wore a faded plaid summer-weight shirt, gray Dockers, and the same loafers he’d had on in the library. The hollows under his eyes were dark, and his gaze seemed haunted rather than bloodshot.
Haunted. I recalled what Paul’s aunt Sara had said about Sanford Melcher. His eyes had seemed haunted as he wandered through the Rowley house, composing his poems and playing the piano. Sanford had ended up in an institution, apparently the result of losing a son in World War II. Or maybe it had been more than that; maybe he’d always been on the verge of madness; maybe he’d cried for help, but no one had heard him.
“I’m going home,” I said finally in a quiet voice. “I live in Alpine, up on Stevens Pass.” Noting that my words didn’t seem to mean anything to Leo, I amplified: “It’s in the mountains outside of Everett.”
Leo’s face fell. “You’re not headed for Seattle then?”
I shook my head. “No. Is that where you’re going?”
“I was.” Leo’s gaze went beyond me, somewhere in the vicinity of the chives.
The Kingston ferry plied the waters of Puget Sound between the Kitsap Peninsula and Edmonds, a suburb north of Seattle. I planned to hit the 1-5 freeway out of Edmonds, hook on to the 405 link that went east, get off by Monroe, and head up Highway 2, also known as Stevens Pass. But it was possible to drive to Winslow on Bainbridge Island and catch the ferry that went right into downtown Seattle. I could reach 1-5 from there, take 520 across the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, and get on 405 in the maze of eastside suburbs. It would take a little longer, but not much.
“I’ll pick you up shortly after noon,” I said. “Where’s your motel?”
Leo showed no sign of amazement at my generous offer. He was staying out on Highway 101, just inside the city limits. “I don’t have much luggage,” he added. “I’ll be waiting in front of the motel office.”
Briefly, we strolled the aisle side by side. Leo bagged a couple of Rome Beauty apples; I sniffed a cantaloupe to test its ripeness. A sense of panic overcame me. Was I crazy to offer a ride to a virtual stranger? Leo Walsh could be wanted in eleven western states for all I knew. He might be a serial killer. He could be the Root Cellar Rapist reincarnated. Distractedly, I dumped the cantaloupe into my grocery cart.
But we’d be traveling in broad daylight on a busy highway. The ferry would be jammed with summer traffic. Before Leo got in the car, I could always pat him down for weapons. The idea made me smile. He noted my droll expression and jiggled my cart.
“What’s up, Emma Lord? Are you thinking about pulling off the road and trying to ravish me?” Before I could answer, he gave a sad shake of his head. “Don’t bother. You’d be beating a dead horse.”
“Leo …” I was exasperated. “Has it ever occurred to you—or any other man I know—that sometimes women aren’t thinking about sex? Once in a while we look at a man and consider him as just another human being. I realize that’s a pretty tough concept for men, but for women it actually works that way. Honest.”
On the other side of potatoes, onions, and summer squash two older women were standing in front of the frozen-food case, staring. It seemed that Leo and I were making a habit of drawing an audience. At the far end of the aisle I spotted Jackie, pushing her cart past dairy and wearing a dazed expression. I didn’t want her to see me with Leo; I certainly didn’t want her to find out that I planned to give him a ride.
Leo had started his comeback, but I waved him into silence. “I’ve got to run. I’m meeting a friend.” Seeing the disbelieving look in Leo’s eyes, I jerked my head in Jackie’s direction. “There. I’m meeting her in cheese.”
Jackie had fewer than a dozen items in her cart. “It’s all so confusing,” she complained as I briskly led her to the fresh pasta section. “I never really shopped for groceries until I got married. My roommates always did it.”
Her lack of experience showed, but it wasn’t up to me to teach Jackie the rudiments of food buying. For the next twenty minutes we scooted up and down the aisles. When I figured she had enough supplies for balanced meals to last a week, we checked out. The total was a hundred and seventeen dollars and fifty-three cents. Jackie was dismayed.
“I never spent that much on groceries in my life,” she moaned as we loaded the Honda’s trunk.
“That’s because you’ve been eating junk, which costs more in the long run,” I said sternly. “Shop once a week unless you’re having company. Pay attention to the specials. Use coupons. Buy things like hamburger and rice in bulk. Didn’t your mother teach you anything?” I couldn’t believe that the practical Mavis had sent her daughter out in the world so ill-equipped to run a household.
Once more Jackie appeared tearful. “Cans. We should have bought lots of canned food for the poor. I keep forgetting. The only things I’ve given them were some marinated artichoke hearts and chocolate-covered ants we got at one of the wedding showers. Was that so wrong?”
It didn’t sound exactly right to me. But I couldn’t handle Jackie’s peculiar attitude toward charity and nutrition at the same time. I sighed and closed the trunk. “Jackie, excuse me. I feel like an aunt. I’ve never raised a girl. I should keep my …” I stopped, my eyes widening. “Olive,” I whispered. “We never checked on Olive!”
Jackie’s sorrowful gaze followed mine over to Lincoln Street. I was looking in the direction of the museum. Jackie wasn’t. “Olive,” she repeated after me, her voice dull. “O
lives and double cheese and Canadian bacon and green pepper. Emma, I can’t stand it. Please.” Her knees buckled; her fingers were entwined in a pleading gesture.
There wasn’t time to argue with Jackie. The courthouse clock was going on ten. I took the wheel, driving us over to Lincoln Street.
“Who’s Olive?” she finally asked as I braked in front of Gordy’s.
“Olive Rowley, the forgotten woman. Cornelius’s first wife, the mother of his children.” We were again blocking traffic. “Go. I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.”
I found a parking place in the block below the museum. To my relief, Tessie Roo was on duty. Her smile was wide when she saw me. While she hunted for the appropriate file folder, I told her what we had learned or surmised since the previous night.
Tessie was impressed. “I’m going to write down as much of all this as I can without jeopardizing my genealogical integrity. Much of it can be verified. The part about Walter Malone is shocking.”
“If we figure this whole thing out, there may be more shocks,” I said wryly. “We might hang a killer on the Rowley-Melcher family tree. That won’t do them any favors.”
Tessie didn’t agree. “There’s never any harm in the truth. It’s the deep dark secrets that cause problems. Part of growing up is facing the fact that nobody is perfect, including your ancestors. Ah, here’s Olive Rowley.”
The first Mrs. Rowley was there, all right, but only in an obituary. Born Olive Ross in 1847, in Bridgeport, Michigan, she had married Cornelius in 1866. She had joined her husband in Port Angeles in 1895 after he had jumped his first land claim.
Mrs. Rowley was active in creating a wholesome social environment for the naval men stationed in Port Angeles. Her untimely death at the age of forty-nine is mourned by all, including her husband, Cornelius, her children, Edmund and Caroline, and numerous relations in Michigan.
A handwritten note was scrawled in the margin of the newspaper clipping. I couldn’t decipher it. I asked Tessie if she could read the uneven script.
“I should think so,” she replied, squinting at the page. “This was done by some busybody before me who knew all the local scandal. I’m rather used to it by now.” A sharp chortle erupted from Tessie’s throat. “Well! That’s to the point! It says ‘Died of syphilis’! That makes you think, eh?”
Chapter Fifteen
IT DID MAKE me think, of course. The terse note also made my jaw drop. Afterward, I questioned my sudden urge to find out more about Olive Rowley. I suppose it occurred to me that I couldn’t understand her children unless I knew more about their mother. She had always been there in the background, but if I’d seen her as the downtrodden wife of a successful man, I’d also unconsciously assigned her the role of the hand that rocks the cradle. It was Olive, not Cornelius, who had formed Eddie and Carrie. Oh, he’d definitely had his influence, but a man who would leave his family for months, even years, at a time to go off as a timber cruiser and make a fortune wasn’t the one who guided his offspring through their youth.
Maybe Tessie and I were judging Olive too hastily. Mrs. Rowley might have contracted the disease from her husband. How had he amused himself during those long separations? I posed the question to Tessie.
But she gave a shake of her head. “Whoever wrote in the margins knew some of the early residents’ intimate secrets. I’ve come across this same handwriting on other obituaries from the 1890s to the post–World War I era. ‘Drank himself to death.’ ‘Opium user.’ ‘Died in a Seattle brothel.’ There’s no such annotation on Mr. Rowley’s funeral notice.”
Tessie was probably right. Cornelius had lived for another eleven years after Olive’s demise. Maybe his wife’s disease had been one of the reasons he’d left home in the first place.
“The navy?” I remarked, rubbing at my chin. I was still a bit shocked, trying to picture Olive Ross Rowley kicking up her heels with a bunch of randy sailors.
“Oh, yes,” Tessie replied, her chortle gone and a sad expression now hovering on her piquant face. “They held training exercises up here in those days, out on the strait. That’s how the local Elks Club was formed—to provide a lodge for the young men while they were in town. Half of the original Elks were from the navy. It was first called the Naval Lodge, in fact, number 353. I’m sure that part was quite above board.”
I nodded. “Meanwhile, Olive was providing her own sort of entertainment. My, my.”
“People are very peculiar,” Tessie mused. “Isn’t it odd how we tend to pigeonhole them?” She gave me a rueful smile.
I leaned back in the chair. “Oh, yes. I’ve seen everybody in a different light. Cornelius, the swaggering empire builder but cuckolded by his second wife. Now by his first wife as well. Simone, an adventuress yet a misfit, fighting for the man she really loved. Carrie, supposedly driven by the fear of becoming an old maid or obsessed with a virile Irish logger, take your pick. Sedate Sanford, marrying a sweet local maiden but turning morose because he loved Minnie Burke. Eddie and Lena …” I shook my head. “It never pays to jump to conclusions. I know that.”
Tessie nodded vigorously. “We all do. But it’s so easy. Especially when you’re dealing with old photographs and dry facts.” Carefully, she replaced Olive Rowley’s obituary in the file folder. “But what difference does this make about the first Mrs. Rowley? In terms of the dead person, that is.”
I thought before I answered. “I don’t know.” I recalled the later photographs of Olive Rowley, hanging back behind Cornelius, wearing her hat over her face. The poor woman had probably been concealing chancres. How had her husband and children borne the shame? Her death had sent her widower off to seek solace in the arms of a beautiful young Frenchwoman who loved another. Her son had taken to wife an older woman whose virtue was unassailable but whose ambition left him in the dust. And her daughter had married beneath her, apparently swept up by love for an unsuitable Irish opportunist.
They had all made a wreck of love. But who didn’t? I had. I had fallen for a married man and borne him a child. For twenty years I had clung to that love while trying to pretend that the object of it didn’t exist. Foolish and perverse, I’d cut Tom Cavanaugh off from our son. Adam had been old enough to be a father when he had finally met his own. My obstinate refusal to let Tom shoulder some of the responsibility had been unfair to all of us. Now I had to figure out if Tom was to remain my sometime lover or only my part-time co-parent. If I wanted a future, I had to let go. But for more than twenty years the hold was as firm as it was familiar. I nurtured my ill-starred love like a treasured keepsake. Every so often I could take it from its little box and thrill anew. It was, as Vida so pointedly told me, a safeguard against trotting my heart out into the world and risking the unknown. Or another hurt.
“Damn,” I said, apropos of many things.
Tessie, however, discerned only one. “You’ve got Olive taken care of, eh? I trust it helps. Poor woman, she must have been a social anomaly around here.”
“I hope so,” I responded dryly, getting up from the chair. I put out my hand. “Tessie, you’ve been wonderful. I’m heading home in the next couple of hours, but either Jackie or I will keep you informed. If we learn the truth.”
Tessie’s grip was firm. “You call—or write,” she insisted. “The least we can do after all this is exchange Christmas cards, eh?”
It was. The very least. Reluctantly, I let go of Tessie’s hand.
Despite having been gone longer than I’d planned, Jackie was nowhere to be seen outside of Gordy’s. I circled the block, then pulled into a loading zone. A moment later Jackie popped out onto the sidewalk. She carried a white paper bag and fairly bounced up to the car.
“The pizza oven wasn’t fired up this early, so I got doughnuts. Want one?” She waved the bag at me.
I can’t resist doughnuts. At the arterial I grabbed a cinnamon-and-sugar offering. The first bite told me it was delicious. “I thought you were in there gobbling pizza by the pound,” I remarked, heading along Eighth St
reet to the Melcher house.
“Oh, no,” Jackie replied. “I was sleuthing. Did you see that little museum when you were at Gordy’s? I went in and looked around. You’ll never guess what I found!”
I wouldn’t, of course. Jackie was still bouncing. “What was it?”
“A pair of women’s satin opera slippers with rhinestone buckles. Size seven. They belonged to Simone Rowley!”
I forced myself to concentrate on my driving as we crossed the bridge over the Valley Street gully. “Are you sure? That they belonged to Simone, that is.”
“Oh, yes.” Jackie was very definite. “I spoke to a man who knows all about the stuff they’ve collected. There’s a hat that belonged to her there, too.”
I remembered the hat with its jaunty green feather. “So it’s not Simone in the basement after all,” I said in a thoughtful voice. “Mike Randall guessed the skeleton wore a smaller shoe.”
“I told you Simone was taller.” Jackie’s exuberance was still in high gear. “So if not Simone, we’re back to Carrie. I was having some doubts about Simone. You know, it’s possible that if she was pregnant, the baby could have belonged to Cornelius. Maybe she didn’t want to leave the house the night of the fire because she was having morning sickness in the evening.”
Jackie’s reasoning confounded me. We were crossing a second bridge, above the truck route. I finished my doughnut, signaled for a right tum, and sifted through Jackie’s logic all at the same time. I managed the first two tasks just fine but gave up on the third.
“If it’s not Simone in the basement, then those aren’t the bones of the baby she was carrying,” I pointed out. “Simone left town. Lena gave her things away except for some of the jewelry, which Rose may have gotten. That means Simone had the baby somewhere else. Hmmmm.”
We pulled into the Melcher driveway. Getting out of the car, I glanced up at the ramshackle livery stable on the bluff. The bright sunlight caused me to squint.
“I think we should deep-six the idea about Simone being pregnant,” I said as we started to unload the trunk. “Madly in love or not, we have no evidence that she was going to have a baby. If she were, I doubt she would have undertaken a horseback journey from Port Angeles to Seattle. You’re right, we seem to be stuck with Carrie. So to speak.”