Thicker than Water

by Rett MacPherson

  “She can’t imagine why anybody would be happy in a small town like this—obviously she would hate it—and so therefore she assumes that I am not happy.”

  “Are you telling me that she just said all those things to me based on an assumption? You said nothing to encourage her? Because if that’s the case, she is Satan. That’s it, I’m calling in somebody for an exorcism.”

  Rudy said nothing. He just shuffled his feet.

  “Rudy?” A lump gathered in my throat. Was he unhappy in New Kassel? It had never occurred to me to ask him if he was happy or not. He’d always seemed happy. He’d never mentioned wanting to move out of the area. Funny how I was ready to kick him out the door a second ago, and now I was worried he would actually go.

  “All I said was that now that you had the money from Sylvia, maybe we could build a new house.”

  “Build a new house? Where?” I asked.

  “Outside of town,” he said. “But not away from New Kassel. I just meant down Highway P or something … or the Outer Road, where there was acreage. For your chickens. So the mayor wouldn’t complain anymore. I never said anything about leaving the area.”

  “Well, nice of you to discuss your plans with me,” I said. “Obviously you’ve discussed them with your mother.”

  “Torie, it was just said in passing. I was thinking out loud, really, not actually planning anything. It was a casual conversation we had on the way home from the airport.”

  “Well, if there is one thing I thought you had learned, Rudy, it is that you can’t have a casual conversation with your mother. Because she takes every morsel of information and stores it up to use later,” I said. “And I’m usually the target.”

  “I can have a conversation with my mother if I want to,” he said.

  “Yes, but then I have to deal with the onslaught.”

  He said nothing. He stewed for a minute, his gaze landing on everything from me to the kitchen floor to the clock. “You have to do something about your feelings toward my mother,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not healthy.”

  “Who are you, Deepak Chopra?”

  “Because she’s moving back to St. Louis.”

  “What?”

  “This autumn.”

  “Oh, great. God hates me,” I said. “No, no, better yet, in a former life I must have slaughtered a dozen innocent children or something, and now I’m being paid back.”

  “She is my mother. You have to deal with it.”

  I ignored his remark. “So are you unhappy here?” I said.

  “No,” he said. But his mother’s poison had worked. I had already begun to believe her. And that had been her goal, after all. Just then the front door opened. It was Mrs. O’Shea coming in with my three children.

  “Rudy,” Mrs. O’Shea said, “whoever was that man in town stumbling all over himself and smelling like urine?”

  “Bill McMullen,” he answered. “Town drunk.”

  “And the woman with the loud mouth who looked like the giant strawberry?”

  “Eleanore Murdoch,” Rudy said.

  “And that little skinny fella running around with pruning shears?”

  “Tobias Thorley,” Rudy said.

  Mrs. O’Shea shook her head. “Well, I told you not to go falling in love with the mountain folk.”

  With that she skipped off down the hallway with my three children. I crossed my arms and glared at Rudy. “Guess I best be gettin’ dat supper a-cookin,’ honey. No, better yet, I be goin’ out for fixin’s.”

  Nine

  I picked up Chinese food and took it back to the Gaheimer House. I booted up my computer and tried not to think of the plague that was Priscilla Louise Margaret O’Brien O’Shea. My mother-in-law liked to fancy herself full-blooded Irish, but her daughter-in-law is a genealogist, and I know better. Her grandmother’s name was Schwartz.

  I ate an egg roll while I checked my mail. I had an e-mail regarding the photograph of the little girl on Sylvia’s postcard. It read:

  I have studied old photographs of Dubuque for close to ten years now. I can, without a doubt, tell you that your photograph is taken at the old train station. If I can be of further assistance please let me know.

  Laura James

  The train station?

  I heard a knock on the back door, but before I could get up and get it, someone let himself in. “It’s Colin,” he called out.

  “I’m in my office.”

  “I smell Chinese food,” he said as he entered the office.

  Rummaging through my desk, I came up with an extra plastic fork. “Here,” I said. “I’ll never finish it.”

  “You look tired,” he said. He went back and got himself a soda, then settled his butt in the chair across from my desk and began eating my Chinese food. Was it me, or did he always eat everybody else’s food?

  “I am tired,” I said.

  “What’s up?”

  “What, you just come by to visit? You don’t visit me unless you have to,” I said. “I figured that week in Minnesota was enough bonding time for you and me.”

  “Rudy called, said you guys had a fight,” he said.

  “No, we didn’t have a fight. What we had was a complete refusal to see the other’s opinion.”

  “A fight,” he said.

  “So what did you think, I was going to go on a crime spree or something?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s just that since your mother is in a wheelchair and can’t exactly go and see if you’re all right, I sort of get delegated to do it,” he said and took a bite of rice. “So, I’m here to see if you’re all right, or my wife will not rest.”

  “Oh, you poor thing,” I said. “I’m fine. There, go report to her that I was stuffing my face and happily poring over records of dead people. She’ll think nothing has changed.”

  He didn’t believe that I was all right, obviously, by the expression on his face.

  “No, I’m not fine,” I said, “but you can’t do anything about it, and neither can my mother. However, you can do something about this.” I handed him the sheriff’s report from 1972. “What do you know about it?”

  He scanned it quickly and swallowed his food. “How should I know anything about it? I was a sophomore in high school when this happened.”

  “Well, what is it all about? Sylvia was attacked? Look, you’re her grand-stepnephew, don’t you know anything about her?”

  “I’m afraid that you knew her better than anybody,” he said.

  “My mom will remember this, I’m sure,” I said. “I’ll ask her. Might ask Elmer, too.”

  I thought to myself for a minute and chewed my food. “Can you find out if the guy was ever caught? If charges were ever filed?”

  “Torie…” he began with that tone of voice.

  “Look, I just want to know how the story ended,” I said. “I mean, her injuries were pretty serious. An attack like that in a small town, it must have caused quite an uproar.”

  “I would think.”

  “Did you know Sylvia hired a private investigator?” I asked.

  “After a scare like that,” he said, “I could understand it.”

  “Yeah, except she hired the private investigator this past year,” I said. “Not in 1972.”

  He stopped chewing for a moment. “Really?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Don’t you find that odd?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe.”

  I gave him that get-real look.

  “It depends on why she hired him,” he said. “If somebody skipped out on a business deal or something, I could see it.”

  “What if it wasn’t anything like that?” I said. “What if it was for something of a more personal nature?”

  “Then … what do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to comment on her odd behavior. The alarm system, the private investigator, the two calls she made the night before she died—it appears as though she was either worried about something or afraid
of something. And now I find out she was brutally attacked in 1972, right here in this house. She had a fractured skull, Colin. That’s pretty damn serious.”

  “Maybe she was suddenly worried about a repeat of that night,” Colin said.

  “Okay, I can go with that, but why? After thirty-some-odd years, why would she suddenly be worried about it?” Colin said nothing, but he was thinking what I was thinking. “Unless something happened to make her afraid,” I added.

  “It still doesn’t mean there was anything unusual about her death.”

  “I’m not saying there is. I’m saying that as her friend, employee, and heir to her estate, I missed an awful lot of what was going on right under my nose.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Don’t beat yourself up over it.”

  “If she was afraid and I did nothing to make her feel safe, then I am going to beat myself up over it,” I said.

  “You’re borrowing trouble.”

  “Well, trouble is my middle name,” I said.

  “I thought obnoxious was your middle name,” he said.

  A cold and fake smile played at the corner of my lips. “So,” I said, changing the subject from my obnoxiousness, “why do you suppose somebody would send Sylvia a postcard of a child standing at a train station?”

  “Maybe Sylvia was supposed to pick her up,” he said.

  I sat up straight. I think you have forgotten your promise. Was that it? Sylvia was supposed to have picked the child up at the train station and didn’t? But why the dramatics? This had happened in the thirties or late twenties. Why hadn’t the person just called her up and said, “Hey, where were you?”

  “Torie?” Colin said.

  “What?”

  “You’ve got that look.”

  “What look?”

  “You know what look,” he said. “And every time this happens I get a lecture from my wife on how I should have looked out for you better.”

  “I’m a big girl,” I said. “Tell my mother that. Say, ‘Jalena, she’s a big girl.’”

  “She’s your mother,” he said. “You’re always going to be a child to her. Don’t you know once babies are born, it’s your job to keep them safe? Forever. No matter how old they get.”

  “Bah,” I said.

  “I know, realistically, when they leave home you’re supposed to cut the umbilical cord, but honestly, a parent never stops being a parent,” he said.

  “How would you know?” I said. Colin was childless.

  “Because my mother told me so,” Colin said. “And so has yours. Besides, you don’t have to be a parent to understand that you just can’t turn some things off.”

  There were times I underestimated him. He would never know about those times, but they did happen all the same.

  Ten

  The next morning I went downstairs at five o’clock to repeat the process of the morning before—only when I descended the steps I entered the land of Oz. Mrs. O’Shea had just placed a huge stack of pancakes in front of Rudy and poured him a deep and wide cup of black coffee. My kitchen sparkled and smelled of lemons and ammonia. There was not a crumb on the floor, not a speck on the counter, and the food looked scrubbed, too.

  Even Fritz, my wiener dog, looked as though he’d been shampooed. Sitting under the table looking up at me with one of those purely canine expressions, he didn’t seem to be too happy about it.

  “Good morning, Torie,” she said. “Hope you don’t mind that I tidied up a bit, but I just couldn’t cook with the kitchen the way it was. I realize your housecleaning day wasn’t until tomorrow. Probably.”

  My housecleaning day was on whatever day I had the smallest amount of other things to do.

  “Would you like some pancakes? I know they’re Rudy’s favorite.”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  “Coffee?”

  “No, thanks again.” I would have day-old Krispy Kremes and warm Dr Pepper before I would eat those treacherous pancakes. She’d probably poisoned mine, anyway.

  “I told the sheriff not to bother coming over this morning to watch the kids. I’ve got it under control,” she said.

  The truth was, the kids would want to spend the time with her, and that was fine, but it irritated me just a bit that she’d taken it upon herself to make that decision. It was a minor thing and from anybody else wouldn’t have bothered me in the least. Take a deep breath, Torie. It’s fine. She’s done nothing wrong. I’m just overreacting because she’s ticked me off over everything else under the sun.

  I can’t express how proud I was that I’d just talked myself out of making a big deal out of nothing. If I could just do that for the next month—several times a day—I’d survive this, and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I’d be in line to be the next Powerpuff Girl. I would be able to tame lions. I … I … I could bring about world peace and stop worldwide starvation.

  “Oh, and really, Torie, that mayor of yours is just the most charming fella. He and I see eye to eye on a lot of issues. Especially over those chickens in your backyard. It’s just a breeding ground for disease. You know, that Hong Kong flu started with chickens,” she said. “The children could get the Hong Kong flu from just standing in your backyard.”

  The people in the world would keep on killing each other, and whoever didn’t die in war would starve, and the lions would eat me, because there was no way in hell I could talk myself down from this one. So instead of putting up an argument, I grabbed the keys for Rudy’s truck and headed out the door.

  “Torie!” I heard Rudy call after me. “Where are you going?”

  “To the freaking Strawberry Festival!” I screamed from the front porch. “Where the hell else would I be going?”

  With that, I slammed the truck door, put it in gear, and headed to Virgie Burgermeister’s house to gather the jams. There should be a law against demons being up and plaguing the world before dawn.

  This morning went much like the day before, only it was just me and Chuck loading the jars because Rudy was still at home stuffing his face with his mama’s pancakes. I said virtually nothing to anybody, and I now had a permanent crease between my eyebrows. I let the tourists in, gave them all a fake smile and fake wave, and then ran to the seclusion of the Gaheimer House, which I had decided I was never going to leave again.

  My sister handed me a Dr Pepper as I came in the front door. She said nothing for several moments and then, “Do you want to talk—”

  “No, I don’t want to talk about it,” I snapped. “Thanks for asking.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Well, I forgot to give you this message yesterday, but there’s a gentleman from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who wants to interview you about your job.”

  “Huh?”

  “He said that he’d heard wonderful things about New Kassel and all of the hard work that the historians have done to preserve the history and bring about tourism and such, and so he wants to interview you.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That would be great for the town.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Stephanie said. “So I told him I’d call him back with a time to do the interview.”

  “Tomorrow is good, whenever. All we’re doing here is just going through boxes and closets,” I said.

  “Great, I’ll call right now and leave him a message.”

  Two hours later I was wandering around the festival, making sure everything was going as it should without too many hitches. Rachel came running up to me with one of her school friends, all smiles and giggles.

  “Did you see the lead singer for that band this morning?” Rachel said. “Totally lame music, but man, was he cute!”

  “You having fun?” I said

  “Tons,” she said.

  “Where are Mary and Matthew?”

  “They’re with Grandma O. I think they were taking a ride on the tugboat.”

  “All right,” I said. “Sorry I’ve been so busy, but you know how it’s been lately.”

  “It’s all right, Mom.
Jeez, you’re always there any other time,” she said and shrugged. “We understand when something comes up.”

  I was always there, wasn’t I? I took a moment to pat myself on the back. I went to every concert, every PTA meeting, every game, parade, open house. As I looked at Rachel, I realized that it wouldn’t last forever. A few more years and she’d be looking at colleges and Matthew would be in grade school. Then it was just a few more years after that and he’d be looking at colleges and I’d be old and gray and be on my way to being Sylvia. I’m not sure how I went from patting myself on the back to depressing the hell out of myself, but I did. I think it said a lot about my state of mind at the moment.

  “Oh, the pie-eating contest is getting ready to start,” she said. “You gonna root for Dad?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Oh, come on, Mom. You’ve rooted for him every year. Why stop now?”

  We made our way through the crowd that had gathered around the table for the pie-eating contest. Rudy was wearing the same shirt he wore every year. That way, if it acquired any new stains, it wouldn’t really matter. His hands were tied behind his back, but he was ready for the job. In my opinion, he had stiff competition this year. Chuck Velasco was up and smiling, Colin cracked his knuckles and then his neck before they tied his hands behind his back, and this year even the mayor had decided to give it a go. At least a dozen tourists were taking the challenge as well. There were at least a hundred pies waiting to be devoured.

  In my opinion, this is a really disgusting tradition, but it was good for laughs and a great photo opportunity. “Rachel,” I said, “I’m going to go get my camera.”

  “All right,” she said.

  I ran back to the Gaheimer House and grabbed my camera from the top drawer of my desk. Then, as quickly as I could, I ran back to the contest tables. I snapped a few pictures, as did several tourists, along with Annie Boston, who often took pictures for the New Kassel Gazette. I moved around to get pictures from different angles, laughing all the while at the spectacle and somehow knowing that Rudy was not going to win the contest this year. Colin and Chuck actually looked hungry. Rudy was an amateur by comparison. I only hoped it wouldn’t wound his pride too terribly much.