Deadly Descent (9 page)

Chapter Eighteen

Judy was waiting outside the door the next morning.

“Aren’t you the early bird?”

“I do have a few virtues.”

“More than a few,” I said, slipping the key into the padlock. “I’m going to read microfilm all day and turn nearly everything else over to you.”

She grinned.

I hung up my jacket and started reading where I had left off the day before.

Finally I came across something new. The Champlins had lost an infant son when he was three months old. There were just two sisters. No male heir to the land.

After a period of years, the
Gateway City Gazette
started mentioning Rebecca and Emily and Herman as individuals:

Five years indicated excellent health and parents who cared about his moral development. The Presbyterian Church was mainstream. Herman wouldn’t have been burdened with defending its doctrine.

Normal, happy, included children. There was a handkerchief shower for Rebecca on her twelfth birthday. I made a note to look up their school records and grade cards later.

I found all their names on grade school commencement lists. Then Herman began to emerge as a splendid athlete. There were pictures of him on the football team in high school. He cut a dashing figure. The girls’ regularly won prizes at the county fair. Both were expert needlewomen. One year, Rebecca would have an exhibit labeled best of show, and the next year Emily would take the grand prize. They were clearly neck and neck in a number of categories.

Then I spotted a surprising item. Miss Rebecca Champlin and Mr. Herman Swenson were dinner guests at the Laurence Adams residence one summer evening.

Rebecca and Herman.

Not Emily and Herman.

No parents were mentioned at the dinner, so it would have been a date. I found one more reference to Herman and Rebecca as a couple, stopped scanning, and began to read very carefully.

Miss Emily Champlin proceeded to Normal School where she would acquire a teaching certificate. Thinking I had missed something, I searched for information about Rebecca’s plans, but I couldn’t find anything. I zeroed in on the list of fair prizes again and was glad I had gone back. Instead of the girls sharing all the prizes, I found only Emily’s name listed as winning award after award.

What had happened to Rebecca? Why was she not entering her needlework? Had she finished high school? I made a note to check the high school attendance records.

Something was missing. Josie and I used to play
I Spy
. “If it was a snake it would bite you,” we’d call gleefully when the seeker came close to the hidden object.
Doubly true now,
I thought.
Some connection as plain as the nose on my face, but I just can’t see it.

The phone rang. Judy answered and shook her head when I mouthed, “for me?” Then I was jarred from microfilm to real time at her words.

“The answer is an unequivocal no.” Judy said. “Tell her if she sets foot on the place I’ll sic the dogs on her.” Her face tightened, and her lips quivered, belying the braveness of her words. “Tell her that.” She hung up.

“Trouble, Judy?”

She sat down, fished for a Kleenex and blew her nose. “Fiona had the nerve to call Dad and tell him she was going to go through Mom’s things. Stuff in our attic.
Told
Daddy. Didn’t ask.
Told
him.”

“You’re kidding, Judy. Of all the nerve.”

“That’s my aunt.”

“Sounds like you took care of it.”

“Maybe. Dad can’t cope with her.”

“Who can? I’m young and healthy and have all my faculties, and Fiona Hadley is the most difficult person I’ve ever dealt with.”

Knowing this was not the right time to mention Brian’s fears about Alzheimer’s, I turned back to my microfilm.

“May I go home, Lottie? I need to be there just in case she tries it.”

“Sure. I’ll be here the rest of the day.”

***

I looked at the death certificates again, then at Herman’s and Emily’s marriage license. Emily’s parents had died two months after she and Herman were married.

I forwarded to the column reporting on the wedding and searched through the guest list. Both sets of parents were in attendance, but not Rebecca. It clearly had been a prime social occasion, and the list of gifts was long and elaborate. The writer said the gift from Herman’s parents was a lovely house on Maple Street and that the industrious and talented groom would join the staff in his father’s bank.

So Herman had started as a banker, not a farmer.

Then two months later there was the account of a tragic farm accident. One of the Champlins’ cows had gotten out and wandered onto thin ice at the edge of a small pond close to the house. The ice didn’t hold. Mr. Champlin tried to save it. Mrs. Champlin heard his cries and went after him. They both drowned. Miss Rebecca, who had been recovering from a lengthy illness, saw the whole thing from the parlor window and called the sheriff, but he was too late. The sheriff said they froze up right away.

Rebecca had been sick for a long time! That explained the lack of needlework in the fair, and perhaps even Herman’s dropping her for Emily. Back then, no one could afford to take on the burden of a sick wife. Strong backs in women were prized. It took a lot of physical strength to run a household.

The two sisters were now orphans. Who provided for Miss Rebecca? I rose and poured a cup of coffee, returned and located a photo of the old Champlin homestead. It was a two-story white frame farmhouse, the same house featured in Rebecca’s sale bill after the murder. So she had kept on living on the home place, even after her parents’ deaths.

Then I saw an announcement that the entire Champlin estate was up for sale. Land and all. What had Miss Rebecca planned to do? What was her illness? That was the key to a number of things. Had she wanted to live with Herman and Emily? It couldn’t be too comfortable a situation to be living with your sister and ex-boyfriend. Was she bitter? On the other hand, perhaps I was jumping to conclusions. Perhaps she was the one who had broken everything off with Herman.

I read on through the stock market crash and its accompanying impact on the county. The Swenson bank appeared to weather the collapse, but went under right before the United States entered the war. A run on the bank changed everything for Herman and Emily in a heartbeat. A scant month after this, the senior Swensons left town for their new home in California.

The sale of the Champlin land and homestead was canceled. Herman’s and Emily’s house in town was for sale, and the social items reported that Herman would be taking over the Champlin land and trying his hand at farming.

There were accounts of his buying lumber to build a house on the acreage. Remembering the sale bill, I knew this was a very modest house indeed, but would have been easy to expand. The house of a young couple who had high expectations.

I stopped to stretch my aching back.
Why did they do that?
It would have made more sense for them to have taken over the big house and build a smaller one for Rebecca.

Then Rebecca Champlin popped up all over. She began raising hogs. Buying and selling them, too. A businesswoman. She couldn’t have been very sick. I needed to check with Minerva, but I suspected Rebecca had fought for the house and farmstead and a very small portion of the land, possibly no more than forty acres. Herman and Emily had settled for the land itself. Normally this would have been a good decision. But I knew what had happened directly afterward. The dust storms.

Herman and Emily had gone into farming at the worst possible time, and he wouldn’t have known a thing. This was a common mistake on the Great Plains. People came here thinking just anyone could farm. It would be a snap. Just throw a few seeds at the ground.

No one would have helped Herman. I was sure of that. He was the banker’s son.
Son of the serpent
. No one would have encouraged him or coached him. He had lost everything the Champlins had spent one hundred years building.

From the two sale bills, it was easy to see Rebecca had been a shrewd buyer and seller. A fine steward. And Herman? Either through bumbling or bad luck, he had ended up with even his wife’s pots and pans and tea towels mortgaged.

“Would you like me to get the mail?”

“Sure, thanks, Margaret,” I jumped, sending a half cup of coffee to the floor, and with an embarrassed smile, ran for paper towels.

“I hear you have a new assistant.”

I stiffened at the disapproval in her voice. “Yes, I do.”

She nodded at the “wanna make somethin’ of it” tone in my voice and left. She returned in fifteen minutes with a stack of mail, dumped it onto my desk.

“Call me if you need anything.”

“Okay. Thanks, Margaret.”

She sighed, left. I regretted the awkwardness developing between us, but not enough to fire a perfectly competent person just because of her blotted past.

I opened a letter from Illinois.

The letter would have fit perfectly with yesterday’s column and I could have dealt with both questions at once. The book was not about achievement or prestige. It was about reality. Life.

I date-stamped the page, reached for the daily correspondence folder, then stopped and stared at the letter. Although it had come from Illinois and yesterday’s letter had come from Iowa, the two letters were virtually identical in all other respects. I was sure they had been sent by the same person. They were both on plain white paper with no return address, no date, no closing, sent in a dime store business envelope and no doubt printed with a laser printer. Again, I thought wistfully of the column that had already gone to the printers. Then I put the letter back in the envelope and filed it.

I was uneasy that this person would take the trouble to use two separate towns. It was a rather sophisticated thing to do and involved addressing a letter to the postmaster in each town, enclosing a stamped, pre-addressed inner envelope and a note asking the postmaster to forward it.

I decided to address the questions, head on, in next week’s column. It would take just a simple paragraph at the end to put this person at ease.

Chapter Nineteen

I found Sam Abbott wrestling with a report, which he willingly set aside the moment I walked through the door.

“Made any progress with the Swenson murder, Lottie?” There was a twinkle in his eyes. He had clearly expected me to bomb out.

“As a matter of fact, I have.” He reached for his pipe. I watched serenely as he went through his little ritual and waited, knowing he would be the first to break.

“Well, are you going to tell me about it?”

“So glad you asked,” I grinned. “I found out all kinds of things that aren’t in that report of yours.”

“Not mine,” he protested. “The sheriff’s report at the time. I just inherited all this stuff. I didn’t create it, but I have studied it. Over and over again.”

“Well, I learned Herman and Emily came from well-to-do families and Herman was an only child who should have inherited a fine bank. He would have, too, if it hadn’t been for the number of loan defaults after farmers volunteered for service. A number of our men eligible for exemption declined. When Emily’s parents were killed, Herman took over the farm. He shouldn’t have. Everything he touched died. There is some mystery about Rebecca, and the two sisters hated each other’s guts. All the other farmers in the county were out to get Herman because he was old man Swenson’s son, and everything blew up over passing down the farm.

Startled, Old Stone Face inhaled sharply, then coughed. “Well, well, well. A real Nancy Drew. What makes you so sure the sisters were at odds?”

“The social columns told me Rebecca had dated Herman, and she didn’t go to their wedding. The sequence of legal notices after the death of their parents told me there was a lot of trouble over dividing the homestead.”

“That’s good work, Lottie.”

I smiled at the approving look in his eyes.

“It’s real leg work, too. It builds a picture. One that’s important. There’s only one thing wrong.”

“What’s that?”

“You haven’t uncovered one single thing that changes anything. The evidence still points to Herman.”

Chagrined, I realized he was right. “I’m not through yet. I have a whole list of to-dos connected with this.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“I want to see the old mortgage for one thing, and I want to see Herman Swenson.”

“Won’t do you no good. He can’t talk. Can’t think. Poor miserable son-of-a-bitch.”

“I know, but you can’t tell, there might be something there. He may still be able to hear.”

***

The Sunny Rest Nursing Home is a low single-story brick building with an assisted living center. It’s an unusually large complex for our tiny county and even has an Alzheimer’s Unit and a secured wing.

Bettina had convinced me that some of the residents were happy. Especially older women who had done grueling labor all their lives. They were grateful to the point of giddiness at the chance to rest, to be warm, to be fed good food they didn’t have to prepare, to be kept clean and tidy, and most of all to be around a network of women who cared. They had friends and made few demands. Their arthritic old hands welcomed the peace of jigsaw puzzles and crocheting.

I could stand the women. But the men’s faces broke my heart. They looked betrayed.

I did not want this life for Keith. Not ever. But when I imagined Josie and me in adjoining wheelchairs, it didn’t seem so bad.

Through Bettina, I knew the whole health management field was unbelievably savage. My favorite doctors were the doctors right here in Carlton County. They were the last of a dying breed.

An teenage aide looked at me curiously when I asked to see Herman Swenson. She was irritatingly peppy as she led me down the hallway to the secured unit. Mr. Swenson sat in a wheelchair facing the window.

“He can’t talk to you, you know.”

“I’ve heard he’s been totally mute since the accident.”

“Not totally. He doesn’t say any real words, but he cries out when he can’t help himself. Sometimes it’s in his sleep, and once to warn another resident when an aide lost control of a stack of books she was carrying and nearly dumped them into the old man’s wheelchair. He made a sound. Several people heard him.”

Crying out in his sleep would have been involuntary, but to warn someone of danger demonstrated a high degree of function.

“Thank you,” I moved toward the man.

Not wanting to startle him, I tapped first on the door frame, then walked around to face the front of the wheelchair. I pushed it back from the wall, mindful of the fact this was his room, his chair, his life. He was entitled to his privacy. He didn’t know me from Adam’s off-ox and certainly didn’t owe me a thing. I wheeled him around and sat in a straight-backed chair opposite him.

Herman Swenson was thin, big-boned, and even though he was eighty-six years old, I was aware of the muscles he must have had in his youth. Flabby now and covered by a denim shirt and old chinos, he had the aura of a caged old eagle.

Several of the old men I had seen sitting in the TV room off the corridor had a farmer’s tan: a white brow where it had been shaded from the sun by a straw hat since they were children, walnut-brown baked cheeks and necks. Herman had not farmed long enough to acquire this marking.

I was not prepared for his eyes. They were old age blue, watery and circled with white, but they were also piercing. Alert and bitter, they held a grief so profound Heaven would not have been able to wash away his pain.

I closed my eyes for an instant, ashamed of my desire to pump this tortured old man for information. He who so clearly wanted to be left in peace. His room was as bare as a monk’s. His bedspread was a brown ribbed cotton. There were no pictures, no afghans, no personal possessions other than an extremely worn Bible on his simple pine dresser. On the night stand next to his bed there was a copy of Jack London’s stories. I glanced over at his Bible and noted the location of the ribbon, the worn edges. I yearned to know what section he had been reading over and over. I suspected his marker was in Psalms. The dark ones.

“Mr. Swenson, I’m Lottie Albright. I’m compiling the Carlton County history books and I’ve come to ask you…” Before I could finish speaking, I saw a flicker of rage. It told me what I had wanted to know most of all. He could hear and understand. No doubt, for the last fifty years, people had only wanted to discuss the murders. I cast about in my mind for a safe topic that wouldn’t conjure up painful memories. There were few subjects to pick from.

“I want to ask you a few questions about the Carlton High School football team.”

There was an answering quickness in his eyes, a touch of self-mockery, a nearly imperceptible expulsion of breath. I was stunned by the intelligence he had conveyed with his body language, aware of his momentary relaxation of wariness. He clearly did not trust a soul.

“Sir, was your school able to field an eleven-man squad or did you play with fewer men?”

A hero. He had been a real football hero. His mouth quirked into an ancient imitation of a smile, but he stared down at his lap.

Disappointed, I prattled on about the game. I told him about an article I had read in an issue of
Kansas History
about early athletics.

Clearly agitated, he looked at me fiercely, then down at his lap again. The fingers on one hand were extended, the other curled into a claw with only the index finger pointing outward.

“I must be running along,” I said cheerfully. “I do appreciate the visit.”

Impulsively, I reached for one of his old hands and squeezed it. “Mr. Swenson, I know what a splendid athlete you once were.”

I could feel his eyes following me. A feeling swept over me as I walked away, the same feeling that came to me when I read old newspapers, when I was about to make a connection others had overlooked. I didn’t feel this was an evil man. I couldn’t imagine he would be capable of killing his wife and son.

On the way out I stopped at the desk and spoke to the work-weary nurse, who was trying to catch up her charts.

“I just finished calling on Herman Swenson. Does he ever have any visitors?”

“None for the last five years except reporters from time to time who want to dig up all the old dirt about those murders.”

“He’s never confessed? Never given any details?”

“Nope. All the gory details will go to his grave. He spent ten years in Larned for the criminally insane, another twenty years in Leavenworth. He had a stroke and was transferred here ten years ago. To tell you the truth, I don’t think he gives a hoot whether he’s here or in prison or in the loony bin. He doesn’t mix and doesn’t care. We’ve never been able to get him to take part in any activities. He doesn’t even watch T.V.”

“Can he read?” I asked. “I saw a book on his dresser. Why would he have a book on his dresser if he can’t read?”

“His Bible and that Jack London? They’ve been there forever. Don’t know how he came by them. Maybe one of the volunteers who reads to the residents gave them to him. I do know he watches us like a hawk when we clean. Not many of us have the heart to rip off an old man’s Bible, no matter what you read in the papers about nursing homes.”

I grinned. Even more savage than the health care industry was the press about the health care industry.

“But whatever Herman does, it’s by himself, you can bet on that.”

“Church services? Does he attend any of the church services you have here?”

“Never.”

“His Bible looked well used.”

“So go figure. We have every denomination and he won’t do any of the religious stuff either. You just can’t please some people.”

“Do the residents have to check out books they read?”

“No, they just take what they want off the shelves. It’s not like we don’t have a way of getting them back.” She grinned.

I smiled weakly, shuddered, and left quickly.

I would have given anything to see a list of the books the old man had read in the last fifteen years. It would have told me a great deal about his tastes and interests, his abilities and his state of mind. Josie could have done wonders with it.

***

Strangely ill at ease over the visit, I woke up several times in the night. There had been something important about that old man’s body. Something I was supposed to notice.