Nabbed in the Nasturtiums

by Dale Mayer

  She pulled the box closer to her. “That’s okay,” she said. “I can help you out with that.”

  He laughed and laughed. She just grinned. “Have you heard from my brother?”

  “No. Am I supposed to?” she asked, looking down at the pizza and realizing her stomach was suddenly souring at the thought of more.

  “Nope, not necessarily,” he said. “I’m just making sure everything is on the up-and-up.”

  “Me too,” she said. “The good news is that, even though I haven’t heard from him, I also haven’t heard from Mathew.”

  “You’re right. That is the good news. On the other hand,” he said, “you definitely have paperwork that needs to be settled.”

  “What about Robin? Is that all locked up?”

  “They’re investigating the ex-husband, James, right now,” he said, “but that’ll be Vancouver’s issue, not ours.”

  “Right, except that he killed her here.”

  “Yep, but now they are dealing with the older crimes down there. His parents and all.”

  “He should be made to pay, no matter what.”

  “He will,” he said, “but he doesn’t need to be held here, if they have other issues that they need him to deal with down there first. And this case will just add to the pile.”

  “I guess it doesn’t really matter, does it? As long as he goes to trial.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. Mack stood, grabbed a napkin, and wiped his hands and face. “I really would like to stay and have coffee, but—” And his phone buzzed again.

  “You’re really busy, huh?”

  “Always,” he said, “since you hit town anyway.” Then he laughed and added, “But I’m glad you came.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “Seriously?”

  She shrugged. “Most of the time you’re yelling at me.”

  “But I don’t always mean it,” he said in a worried tone, and she flashed him a grin.

  “I know,” she said. “I was just bugging you.”

  He rolled his eyes, then leaned over, kissed her on the temple, and said, “Now stay safe.” And, with that, he was gone.

  She reached a hand up to her temple and thought about his words and where they were heading and grinned. If he were still around, she’d have said something to him, but the witty repartee was out of her hands now. At the moment she didn’t have a clue what she would have said, and she was still stunned that he’d kissed her. Not that it was a real kiss or anything, but it was hardly something to ignore either. It said a lot about the progression of their relationship.

  She sighed and cleaned up the table, surprisingly full after two large pieces of pizza. With enthusiasm and a fully empty table, she got out her laptop and her notes and started in on Hinja’s notebook about her niece, Annalise. Even as Doreen read the first page of the notebook, her gaze kept going to the letters. Finally she sighed and said, “Fine, letters first.”

  She opened the first one, realizing none had envelopes, and read it. It was a sloppy mess about how Hinja had finally found the true love of her life. It was both tender and endearing. The second was similar; the third one was similar, yet the tone changed over time. In each of the subsequent letters, Hinja worried that her lover wasn’t faithful. Complaining about long absences and slow responses on letters. All the letters were address to a Bob—or just to B at times. Underlying Doreen’s suspicion that Bob Small was Hinja’s lover.

  But then again, this was snail mail versus email, and Doreen didn’t think anything happened very fast in the mail back then. By the time she got toward the end of this stack, the letters were very different. Hinja was hurling accusations at Bob and asking if he’d done something to hurt her by hurting her niece. Of course Doreen found no written replies.

  That was the odd thing about these letters. There were no replies from Bob; they were all one-sided. And, as Doreen looked at this collection of letters, she realized that somehow Hinja still had these letters. Doreen found no letters written to Hinja from her beloved. So how had Hinja gotten these letters that she’d sent to Bob Small back again? Was there a response anywhere? And if not, why not?

  Bob could have marked the envelopes Return to Sender. Is that why Doreen found no envelopes? Why would Hinja have just her letters that she’d sent him? It made no sense and just deepened the mystery. Although Doreen wondered if the poor woman wrote them but never sent them. Like some kind of release, getting closure, without confronting Bob. Even so, after all these years, why would she keep these letters that, if she read and reread them, would just fester all those negative emotions and feelings?

  Why?

  Chapter 10

  The questions were piling up, but the answers were not. Frustrated, Doreen set the letters down for the umpteenth time, then looked at her notes and shrugged. “All I have written down,” she said aloud to the animals apparently, “is that she had a growing suspicion that her lovely boyfriend, who she thought was the best, may have had something to do with her niece’s disappearance. But she offers no proof, and she saved no letters from him, no responses at all to confirm or to deny her suspicions. So, of course, none of this is very helpful and doubly frustrating because so little was here.”

  Putting the letters back into a bundle, Doreen returned them to the box and went back to the notebooks again, that had served as Hinja’s journals. Doreen went through every page of the first one, going quickly, but, at the same time, trying to be thorough. But again, it was just about Hinja’s personal life way back when. Dropping the first journal back in the box, Doreen went through the second and then the third.

  By the time she got to the fourth, which was the one that she knew had the good stuff in it, she had a rhythm to the woman’s mind-set. How Hinja thought and how she wrote. Just a simple case of jotting down something before it disappeared from her brain. It would be interesting to ask Nan just what it was that Hinja had died from. It might explain some of her disjointed thoughts. Then again, if somebody were to analyze Doreen’s own notes at some point in time, they might look the same. Everybody had a different system that worked for them.

  Doreen worked her way through the last journal again and saw that the relationship with Bob had been a huge high for Hinja. She’d fallen in love with this trucker, who traveled all the time. As long as he kept stopping in to see her, when he was back in town, that was enough for her. Apparently they did everything together, when he was here. He stayed with her; they went out for dinners and breakfasts, and, other than that, spent a lot of time in her bedroom.

  Doreen thought that was interesting because it was like he came for a roadside stop—like a sailor home on leave—and then left again on a job. Or maybe he didn’t? For all Doreen—and obviously Hinja—knew, he had a dozen women like this at various stops across the country. Sometimes he was out trucking for weeks on end.

  According to the journal, they kept in touch all the time, or at least as much as they could. He used to phone once a week and more often, if possible. Of course Doreen didn’t have copies of their phone bills to see if that could be confirmed. She had no concrete reason to doubt it, and, being so long ago, she had absolutely no way to find that information which would make much difference at this point. Either he had called Hinja or he hadn’t. Without his phone records Doreen had no way to check if he’d called anybody else or not.

  As Doreen reached the end of the journal, she read about how Hinja found out that sometimes Bob was in town longer than the time he spent with her, and she became suspicious about what he was doing. There was talk about another woman disappearing in a neighboring town a few weeks earlier, and he’d said something odd. Something about her being a pretty little thing. At that, Doreen put down the journal and scrambled for the newspaper clippings in her basket. She pulled out an article, setting it on the table beside her.

  Shortly prior to Hinja’s niece’s disappearance, there had been
another young woman, eighteen years old, who had disappeared in a similar manner and in the nearby area. This brunette had curls, the kind that languished all around her shoulders, framing her face and giving her quite an angelic appearance. Again Doreen had absolutely zero information about this particular woman’s disappearance, other than what this one article said, and her body had never been found.

  “Gone from Abbotsford” was the title of the article, and the journal continued with Hinja’s related notes.

  I didn’t want to think about such a thing, but his tone of voice made me wonder. There was just such an admiration, almost a faint lost-love look about his eyes. I asked if he had ever met her, and he shook his head and quickly covered up, saying that he had seen her photo on TV. And, of course, that was quite possible because that’s where I had seen it myself. I didn’t say anything to him, as I didn’t know what to say. I mean, what could I say?

  It was just such a strange thing, the way he seemed so raptly intent on her features. He even mentioned the curls on her shoulders. I did mention at the same time that my niece had a similar hairstyle. He looked quite interested and said that he hadn’t realized so many women had curly hair. I told him that a curling iron made even the straightest of hair look like ringlets. He didn’t seem to understand what that was, so I showed him mine.

  He was quite fascinated at the idea. When I realized that my curling iron had disappeared at the same time as when he headed out on his next trip, I thought something strange was going on. For the longest time I thought maybe I’d just misplaced it, but, after I turned the house upside down, I found absolutely nothing except the irrefutable conclusion that, if my curling iron were nowhere else, it was in his possession. But why the devil would he want a curling iron?

  Doreen sat back and wondered the same thing herself. Was it a fetish? Now that he knew he could make curls like that, would he start using the curling iron? But on what? Dolls, dogs, horses, women? She found no mention of Bob requesting that Hinja curl her hair into ringlets like that, but apparently that’s where his fascination was.

  On that note, Doreen got up and shuffled through the photographs in her basket. Sure enough, almost every woman pictured had curls. Whether they were natural or contrived, all the photos that Doreen had were of women with curls, except for one. She pulled that one up and took a look at it. Just because they had curls at one moment doesn’t mean they had curls all the time, especially by the time a photo was taken for the police.

  In the write-up on this woman, it said that she had blond curly hair, but, in the picture, she sported a ponytail. Putting the photo down again, Doreen made mention in her own notes.

  Serial killer after curly hair. Fascinated with curling iron, not understanding that curls could be created if not naturally inherited.

  She kept reading to see that Hinja’s suspicions had continued for a few more weeks. She did see Bob one more time, but his phone calls were less frequent. She got a little worried about it and asked him if he was tired of her. The only response she got was, “No, not at all.”

  “But I’m not seeing you very much,” she replied.

  “I just have other things happening right now,” he said.

  Nothing confirmed that a problem existed, but, for Hinja, nothing else was happening between them, and that was an issue in itself. She didn’t know what to say or how to get him back, and then, as time went on, she wondered why she even wanted to. He wasn’t even basically attractive. He was huge; he was gaunt and, in many ways, rough around the edges.

  Yet she was still attracted to him, and it bothered her a lot because he didn’t want her now. So it was much harder for her to separate from him. All in all, the whole thing was very distressing to Hinja. The journal went on and on and on, with more and more of her complaining about him and about what she was seeing and not seeing.

  What was interesting to Doreen was that it had gone from true love to this nasty spiral, where Hinja wrote things like: What did I ever see in him? Why would I ever want to go out with him? He obviously doesn’t care; he obviously doesn’t like me. Then it spiraled into more negative self-loathing for having gone out with him in the first place.

  Doreen found that both sad and depressing because Hinja had no reason to have such self-hate over something like that, but that’s what Hinja had gone to. But then she mentioned him stopping by again, and she had been so excited to see him, only to find out he was collecting some belongings he had left behind.

  Doreen read out loud.

  I let him inside to get a few things from the bathroom that he had kept there. It was very depressing to see that this relationship, which I’d held such high hopes for, resulted in the end of it, something so quickly over. When he grabbed his bathroom stuff and a small envelope, I asked him what was in it.

  He just looked at it, shrugged, and said, “It’s mine.”

  “Yours?” I asked.

  “Yep, mine,” he said briskly, as he turned to walk away.

  I reached out and snagged the envelope from his hand, and the response was instantaneous. He turned around in a fury and belted me across the face.

  Doreen gasped when she read that. She put down the journal and stared out the window. For somebody to turn around with that kind of brutality meant that it was always there, and he’d just kept it hidden.

  Reading on, Doreen continued in the journal.

  I burst into tears and didn’t know what to say. I was so stunned. The envelope had dropped to the ground, and I saw some photos sticking out. Girls, girls with curls. I didn’t know who they were or what they meant to Bob, but he quickly snatched them up, glared at me, and said, “Damn good thing that didn’t open.” Then he turned and walked out.

  This time he walked out of my life. But he didn’t walk out of my mind. All I could think about was that envelope, wondering if that’s why I didn’t appeal to him anymore. Because I didn’t have curls. I would have gone to the curling iron on a daily basis if I’d realized that’s all it took. But it did disturb me because I thought I recognized one of them. I thought that maybe it was the girl from Abbotsford, who had disappeared those few weeks ago.

  But how could he have gotten her photo? Except that the newspapers were full of them, only this didn’t look like newsprint. I hesitated for a long time, wondering what I was supposed to do with this information, if anything. Then I realized that him hitting me had been more than effective. The bottom line was that I was now terrified to face him or to do anything that could bring that wrath on me again.

  I know that it was cowardly and foolish and that I should have gone to the police, but I didn’t have anything solid. I didn’t have any proof. I didn’t have anything.

  Doreen read, her voice dropping to a painful whisper. “Oh my,” she said to Thaddeus. “It is haunting to even read this. To think that Bob’s photos were all just sitting with this poor woman’s things.”

  She sent Nan a quick text, asking if her friend had ever married again. Nan came back with a response quickly.

  No, never. She hated men. I always wondered if she was afraid of them. I don’t know really. She wouldn’t even go out partying with me. It was very strange.

  After reading that, Doreen looked at the journal and said, “No, not really. It’s very understandable. That poor woman.”

  As Doreen read on, she found only a few more pages left, and the next section was about the disappearance of her niece, and the pain and torment she was going through, trying to help her sister find her daughter. Doreen found more and more emotional writing and short phrases.

  How could anyone do anything to that beautiful girl? She is so special. Why would anybody want to hurt her?

  When Doreen got to the very last page, Hinja finally spoke her mind.

  This is the only time I’ll put it down, and it’s something I’ll have to live with. But what if … What if it was Bob? What if he and his collection of curly-haired girls and my mention of my niece are connected? What if … What if … Oh, my G
od, this thought is absolutely so horrible. What if he took her?

  The writing in the journal ended. Blank pages followed after that, but Hinja never wrote any more in it. Did she ever tell the cops? That was the question. Doreen went to the case file, but very little else was there. The authorities interviewed everybody they knew to interview, but Doreen found nothing saying that the aunt had stepped forward with this information. “I wonder if she felt that Bob would come back on her, which he might have, because those photographs and the mention of her niece would have given the police something to go on. That would have given them a suspect. Or did Hinja go to the cops later, as in much later, and many more girls were gone?” Just then her phone rang.

  “So, what are you doing that you’re asking these questions?” Nan asked, without any hello.

  “I was going through Hinja’s journal and her collection of the articles,” she said. “The letters just show a woman in love in the beginning, then on through to the breakdown of the relationship,” she said. “The journal is a whole lot more interesting, and she did end up suspecting Bob, the man she had a relationship with, of choosing her niece because of her curly hair. Hinja saw an envelope with a series of other photos, but not clearly enough to identify anything but the fact that the women in the photos that she saw had curly hair. Apparently, at some point, Bob also took a curling iron from her place.”

  After silence on the other end, then Nan whispered, “So that’s what bothered her.”

  “Bothered her how?”

  “She was haunted, haunted by it, haunted by him. She wouldn’t go out with any other men. She didn’t trust any men. The loss of her niece tore her up terribly.”

  “When you consider it,” Doreen said, “I find absolutely no sign that she went to the cops about it.”

  “I think she did. Much later. Too late though,” she said. “That’s something that she needed to have done right away.”