Killing Cousins (11 page)

Wisteria General Hospital's waiting room was empty save for the collection of New Kasselonians that had gathered there later that evening. Rudy, Colin, my mother, Chuck Velasco, Vada and I were all waiting our turn to visit Wilma Pershing. The room was small and stuffy, its walls and floors graced with that characteristic tan color that was so popular in 1970, when the hospital was built. Even the furniture was just a shade darker than the walls, vinyl and sticky. It didn't matter how much the air-conditioning pumped, it always seemed as if my legs stuck to vinyl furniture.

All in all, a very boring and depressing room.

Vada came over and sat next to me. “Deputy Miller said that you wanted to talk to me about the Blues Festival,” she said.

“I did? Oh, yes, I did,” I said. I had forgotten that I had told Deputy Miller that the day I was trying to read the Finch file. See, my mother always says that if you lie, you have to tell twice as many lies to cover up the first lie, and then, before you know it, everything you say is a lie and you can't remember to whom you told what. And then you get caught. My mother is a smart person. “I just wanted to tell you that my grandmother had a request that you ask that one band back from last year.”

“Which band is that?” Vada asked. She was about fifty-five, a heavy smoker who was thin as a rail. She was one of those women who never changed. Her hair was still teased every morning and worn in that hairdo Tammy Wynette had made famous.

“The one that went last.”

“The Tennessee Trio,” she said. “Oh, yeah. Got my eye on that lead singer, I do.”

“That's sort of what my grandmother said, too,” I answered. And in truth, she had said something to that effect. Only more crude.

“Don't worry, honey,” Vada said. “They've already agreed. Don't forget, though, it's the second weekend of September this year.”

“I won't forget,” I said. How could I? My town would be overrun with music lovers, which actually are better tourists than just your average tourist. They buy more in the way of food and souvenirs and always come back.

“But we may have it on the church grounds this year, instead of the civic center.”

“Why?”

“Because Ruthie at the civic center said that all those people did too much damage to the grass,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. I was about to tell Vada that I would put a good word in for her with the nuns and Father Bingham when a nurse came to the doorway and called my name. She held a clipboard in her left hand and wore an expressionless look on her face. It must have taken years of practice to master that look.

“Victory?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Sylvia wants to see you,” she said.

The words sent shivers down my spine. I looked over at my mother, who gave me the chin-up sign and nodded. My mind raced with all the worst-possible scenarios that I could face once I got to the end of the hall. And they all came back to one. Wilma was dead. That was the worst-case scenario.

I followed the nurse down the hall, where she pointed to Wilma's room. Once she had shown me to the room, she walked over to the nurse's station to go back to work. I paused a moment, peeking in Wilma's room through the doorway. The only things I could see were her feet covered with a sheet, and Sylvia standing at the foot of the bed.

As I had feared, it was the worst-case scenario. I entered the room quietly and stood beside Sylvia. She was so little and so frail. And she stood at the feet of her dead sister.

Wilma lay peacefully in the hospital bed, her plump hands lying at her sides on top of the sheet. I remembered those hands twirling her hair around her fingers. Those same fingers and hands had made my mother's wedding dress. Her eyes were closed, her long white hair brushed over one shoulder.

“You must deliver her memorial,” Sylvia said.

“Oh, Sylvia,” I muttered. I managed to stifle the sob that threatened to burst forth. I breathed deeply, the tears spilling down my cheeks. I wiped at them, succeeding in smearing the tears all over my face. “I can't.”

Sylvia instantly turned on me. “Don't tell me what you can't do, Victory. You must.”

My hand reached out and touched Wilma's arm, caressing it for only a moment. “Father Bingham will do a wonderful memorial. You know he will.”

There were no tears on Sylvia's face, no hint that she had cried or grieved in any way. Her demeanor was silent and grim. My guess was that she was waiting until she was alone to grieve. Ever the businesswoman, Sylvia knew there was business to attend to in a death. There were casket colors and sizes, plots to pick out, flowers to send, a tombstone to order. Even the wording on the little memorial cards would be left to Sylvia. There was nobody to share the burden with. It was all hers. And it had to be done. It had to be done before any grieving could take place.

“It would be better coming from…a friend,” she said.

“I think you should have somebody more removed give the memorial, Sylvia. Wilma's character will suffer at the hands of my blubbering,” I said.

“She loved you, Victory. Do not insult her love.”

Why did this woman succeed in manipulating me? What was it about her? Was it what she said as much as the way she said it? Did I give in and do as she bid out of respect? Fear? Sometimes I thought it was because I saw in Sylvia what I did not want to be. A lonely and bitter old woman, afraid of emotion. Afraid of showing or feeling emotion. Was that it? Was I humoring her? Was I pitying her? I don't know, but with Sylvia it almost always worked.

“Of course,” I said, against my better judgment. “I'll do it.”

“Thank you. Now you must go and tell everybody,” Sylvia said.

Just like that, she dismissed me. Still, no emotion from her. No hint of grief. As I walked out of the room, I looked back over my shoulder and saw Sylvia lay a hand upon Wilma's foot. A brief gesture from the woman who had shared nearly every moment of her life with Wilma. And that was it.

Now I had to go and tell the waiting room full of people that Wilma Pershing was dead.

At seven the next morning I was once again awakened by a knock at the door. Only this time Rudy was in the shower, so I had to answer the door all by myself. I was practicing how to say “No comment” as loudly and with as much venom as I could when I opened the door to Sheriff Brooke.

He stood in full uniform with a large box in his hand. Sheriff Colin Brooke had become such a part of our personal lives, whether I liked it or not, that seeing him in full uniform was a little disturbing. He was a large man to begin with, a decade younger than my mother, but it was clear that my mother's cooking was already beginning to settle in places it shouldn't. His uniform was taut around his middle. I couldn't even take pleasure in the fact that he was getting soft, because I knew he was having the time of his life being pampered by my mother.

“What do you want?” I asked. I took a moment to look down at myself to make sure that I was dressed decently. Sometimes, when it's hot, I'll sleep in just a slip. Luckily this time, I had slept in a pair of lime-green shorts and a T-shirt with a large dragon on the front. “Do you have any idea what time it is? Of course you do. You had to get up, get dressed, and drive over here. Couldn't you have used the phone?”

He just stared at me.

“Is there something wrong with my mother?” I asked, suddenly concerned.

“No, no. She's fine, Torie.”

“Then to what do I owe this before-the-birds-start-singing visit?”

“I brought you something,” he said. “But if you're going to be such a brat, I'll just take it back.”

“Oh, brat, huh? You think because now you're my stepfather that you can start talking to me like you're my stepfather? Just who do you—” I stopped mid-sentence. “What did you bring me?”

“Are you gonna ask me in? What are you trying to do? Cool the whole neighborhood? You're letting all the air-conditioning out.” He smiled from ear to ear. “Did that sound enough like a parent?”

“Not too shabby, Mr. Sheriff. Not too shabby,” I said and gestured for him to come in. “But you have to sound as if you're irate over the fact that I'm air-conditioning the whole neighborhood. Put some oomph into it.”

“I'll remember that next time,” he said. He walked straight into the kitchen. I mean, it's not like he was a stranger here or anything. He knew where every room was, where we kept the extra toilet paper and where Rudy's favorite fishing lures were. Come to think of it, that was pretty creepy.

He put the box on my table, careful not to knock over the juice that Mary had left in her Togepi glass the night before. She never puts anything away. One time she had an apple for a snack. I found the core in between the cushions on the couch.

“What's that?” I asked.

“It's a box inside a box,” he said.

“Okay, it's too early for riddles. You can leave now.”

He laughed and took the lid off of the box. Inside was indeed another box that he took out and I recognized right away. It was the box that I had tried to remove from the basement of the sheriff's office the other day. It was the file on the Finch kidnapping.

“Is this a trick?” I asked.

He shook his head no.

“All right. What do you want?” I asked.

“Coffee,” he said.

“Coffee I can make, although I don't drink it, so I have no idea if it's any good,” I said, heading to the coffeemaker and the canister. “But, if Rudy is any indication, as long as you can't see the bottom of the cup it's good.”

“That'll be fine by me.”

As I made the coffee, I also pulled a glass down out of the cabinet for me. Then I got out a can of Dr Pepper, popped the lid and poured the soda into my glass. My caffeine. I sat down at the table.

“Okay, what gives?” I asked.

“I want you to tell me everything that has happened, starting with the night Jalena and I left for Alaska. Then I want you to tell me everything that you've taken from the Finch estate,” he said.

I started to protest that I had done no such thing when I realized that I had taken a journal, some photo albums, and that sort of thing. To my credit, I blushed. “All I took were things that I'm using for research for the biography. It will all be returned,” I said.

He nodded.

“Actually, if it's all right with you, I was wanting to know if we couldn't give a few of the really personal items to her children,” I said.

The sheriff looked at me oddly.

“You didn't know she had any living descendants?”

“I thought it was just nieces and nephews,” he said.

“No, she has two daughters. And I'm not sure how many grand-kids,” I answered.

He studied me a minute. “All right, we can do that. We'll ask them what they want,” he said. “When this is all over.”

“Of course.”

Rudy walked downstairs then, tucking his blue oxford shirt into the waist of his pants. He didn't seem too surprised to see Colin. But then, Colin had nearly become part of our furniture in the months before the wedding. But when Rudy saw the coffeepot perking, he stopped in his tracks. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph. How did you get Torie to make coffee?” he asked.

“A bribe,” Colin said.

“Oh, I figured it had to be something like that.”

I just sat there for a moment letting them have their fun. “Okay, sophomores, you finished?”

Rudy got out two mugs, filled them and handed one to Colin. Spying the box on the table, he said, “What are you getting my wife into now?”

“Well, since your wife does such a good job at knowing everybody's business, I thought she could help me. I mean, I've never seen
anybody
as nosy as she is. She is the knower of arcane things.”

Yup, twenty years from now I'd be wearing big plastic jewelry and big neon clothes, after I'd gained forty pounds, of course. I was becoming Eleanore. When I thought about it, though, I actually liked the way I was. Did I care that I was becoming Eleanore? Not really. Because I was going to be a better Eleanore than Eleanore was. And I just couldn't wait to irritate some young whippersnapper who thought she was The Knower of Arcane Things.

I let them laugh a few minutes. Then I told Colin about the person we had seen running out of the Yates house and how it had appeared that he had been hacking away at the wall. The very wall behind which we would later find the skeleton of Byron Lee Finch. Then I told him about identifying Patrick Ward and so on. He sat and listened to everything I said, slurping occasionally from his coffee mug.

“Then we've had reporters calling,” Rudy added.

“Yeah,” I said. “Oh, and a man came by…an antique dealer. I can't remember his name. Newton, that's it. He wanted to know if you would sell him a piece of jewelry from the Finch estate, exclusively. You know, he didn't want anybody else to have a chance at it. The necklace had supposedly once belonged to the Romanovs.”

“Really?” Colin said, raising his eyebrows.

His reaction told me two things. First, as I suspected, he had never dreamed that Catherine Finch would have anything of that caliber in her estate; and second, he was seeing dollar signs dance in front of his eyeballs. It was like watching an old Warner Brothers cartoon.

“Otherwise, the cataloging of the estate is going well. I hope you've got a storage facility lined up, because there is no way you can fit even the one floor of her stuff into your shop. I am finished with the ground floor, by the way. But I swear, this house is just like it was in 1938. I mean, Byron's nursery is exactly like it was,” I said.

“How do you know? I mean, how can you compare it? You weren't there in 1938,” the sheriff asked.

“Well, his clothes are still folded in the drawers, clean diapers in the changing table. Everything is dust-covered, but otherwise it looks like a fully functional nursery. The whole house is like that,” I said.

“Huh” was all the sheriff said.

“So…do I get to read what's in the box?”

“You have as long as it takes me to make myself some breakfast and finish that pot of coffee. Oh, and of course, as usual, you have to tell me the minute you find out anything. If I'm sharing with you, you're sharing with me,” he said.

“But you inhale your food,” I protested. Dare I say, I even sounded a little whiny.

He looked at the clock.

“Look, Wilma is being laid out at three
P.M
. I have to start getting ready at two. Why don't you give me until then,” I said.

“I'll give you until lunchtime.”

“Are you going to be here the whole time?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. Ooh, he was smug.

“Good, then you can watch the kids while I read.” I picked up the box and grabbed my soda with the other hand. I have to admit that I live for moments like these.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To my office,” I said. “Matthew has a bottle in the refrigerator, and Rudy can show you where the diapers are.”

“Diapers?” Colin asked with a fearful expression.

“Grandpas have to learn to change diapers.” I smiled all the way up the steps to my office.