Chapter 23
From behind the big house came the drone of the lawnmower, which had muffled the sound of Allen’s and Mary’s return. The garage doors were open, revealing a new chartreuse VW Bug and a miniature blue and white BMW convertible. The convertible was the kind of car guys always wanted when they were young, but could only afford when they were old. Next to the garage, a dark-skinned woman with dirty bare feet was working in the flower garden, her face shaded by a straw hat with a broken brim. A basket dangled over one meaty forearm, and with the other hand she expertly wielded a pair of scissors, discarding dead blooms into a waiting wheelbarrow and placing perfect ones into the basket. How strange it must be to have hired help, Claire thought, nodding at the gardener as she and Charlie hurried by. The hat dipped in return. They were always there, but not there, rendered invisible by their role. And that made her think of Charlie’s old friend, Tom. What might he have seen or overheard on those long days while he carefully pieced the wall together, just a few yards away from this house?
Charlie lifted the knocker and let it fall. There was a pause, and then the sound of slow footsteps, punctuated by an added thump Claire realized must come from Allen’s cane.
The door was pulled back to reveal a man a few inches taller than Claire. Like Charlie, Allen Lisac had kept his good looks even as he aged. His black eyes were accented by his silver hair, which had been combed back into tiny waves that reminded Claire of the inside of corrugated cardboard. He wore an expensively tailored suit, a crisp white shirt and a plain dark tie. Standing very erect, he held a silver-handled wooden cane loose in his left hand, like an affectation, a stage prop, and not a necessity.
“Yes?” he said. His tone was cool, as though he believed they might be soliciting for Little League or selling magazine subscriptions.
“Hello, Allen. It’s Charlie. Charlie Heidenbruch.” Charlie deliberately didn’t introduce Claire, who stood two steps behind her.
If Allen was surprised at Charlie’s appearing on his doorstep, he didn’t show it except by the faintest narrowing of the eyes. “It’s been a long time. To what do I owe this honor?”
Charlie didn’t answer him with words, just opened her palm to display the ring.
Claire watched the color leach from Allen’s face. He put his free hand to his mouth, and then turned and walked away, his cane stabbing the floor. The door was still open, so the two women followed him into the entryway.
Ten steps in, the entryway opened up into a long living room that ran the length of the house. The room was decorated in Mission-style oak furniture that Claire thought might be the real thing. A huge mahogany beam marked where the entryway merged into the living room. Claire looked at it, and then at Charlie, who nodded almost imperceptibly. Claire couldn’t help but shiver. No matter how Elizabeth had died, whether by her own hand or at someone else’s, it seemed like such a death would echo forever after. Did she simply imagine the air was colder here, where Elizabeth had danced in mid-air?
Allen Lisac fell more than sat on a long leather couch. Claire was suddenly afraid he was going to have a stroke. In a hoarse whisper, he demanded, “Where did you find it?”
Charlie walked toward him to set the ring down on the oak coffee table. Allen stared at it, his upper lip pulled back to expose long yellow teeth. He didn’t look attractive or the least bit young now.
Seeing the ring had definitely stunned him. But Claire couldn’t name the emotion on the old man’s face. Was it fear? Grief? Surprise? Guilt? Shock? A little bit of everything?
A voice spoke from behind Claire and Charlie.
“Allen? Honey, what’s wrong?”
It was the woman they had seen outside, the woman Claire had thought must be a Hispanic gardener. Now she took off her broken straw hat.
Claire started. She recognized the woman, and did a rapid recalculation. Not the gardener then, but Mary Lisac. Without knowing who it was, Claire had seen Mary many times in the neighborhood, shopping at Natures, browsing the new fiction shelf at the Hillsdale Branch Library, carrying a bag of cinnamon rolls out the door of Fat City. When Claire had looked at Charlie’s long-ago photographs, she had thought the horse-faced woman on the plaid blanket had looked familiar. But now Claire realized it been more than the way Mary’s face had resembled her sister Elizabeth’s. She must also have recognized some trace of Mary before she gained one hundred pounds and started dressing like the world’s oldest free spirit.
As always when Claire had seen her, Mary wore loose colorful cotton layers – an ankle-length purple skirt, a red scoop-neck top that showed her ample and wrinkled cleavage, and over that, a faded smock, printed with flowers in unlikely color combinations. She had slipped her feet into Birkenstock sandals. She wasn’t fat so much as sturdy. Her skin had been tanned to leather, her eyes were silver-gray, and she wore her white hair close-cropped as an elf’s.
“Allen? What’s wrong?” Mary repeated with an edge to her voice. He didn’t answer, and she followed his gaze. Claire watched as Mary took in the ring, and then lifted her head to look at the wooden crossbeam. She sat down heavily on the same couch as Allen, but at the other end. She made no move to touch the ring. “Is that what I think it is?”
Allen and Charlie nodded, while Claire kept still and watched Mary. They had decided it made more sense for Charlie to watch Allen, who, Charlie had said, would be better at disguising his emotions. Mary looked as stunned as Allen had. Her mouth hung open and her chin trembled. Her breathing was labored and loud.
“Why do you have Elizabeth’s ring, Charlie?” To Claire’s ears, it sounded as if Mary truly didn’t know the answer.
“My friend here found it in your wall,” Charlie said. “She found it where a chink of mortar had fallen out.” To Claire’s relief, neither Mary nor Allen spared a glance or a question for her. They had eyes only for the ring. “When she showed it to me, I recognized it immediately. What I do not understand is why it was there at all. I thought she broke it off and returned the ring. Is that not what you told us, Allen?”
There was a long silence, and then a heavy sigh. “When I said what I did, I was still in shock over Liz’s death,” Allen said. “I was too … too ashamed to tell people the truth.”
“And what was the truth?” Charlie’s tone was gentle.
Claire kept her eyes on Mary’s face. Mary, who had looked surprised by the ring, but not by her husband’s words.
“Elizabeth never broke off the engagement,” Allen said. “Just before she killed herself, she came to me and told me she was pregnant, begged me to move up the wedding. She was crying and clinging and hysterical. And instead I gave her money to get an abortion. I was –” he sighed and looked down at his clasped hands, “I was afraid of what people would say. Especially my mother.” Another sigh, so deep it rattled. “I know it sounds terrible, as if I deliberately seduced and abandoned Liz. In truth, she was the one who had come to me after I was released from the hospital. She wanted it far more than I did. As if she sensed how far apart we had grown.” His smile was bitter.
Mary gazed at Allen with her lips parted and pulled down at the corners, a look of such sadness for the boy he had been and the man he had been forced to become.
“Why did you not simply move up the wedding?” Charlie asked.
“Because I had decided I could not marry her, although I hadn’t yet worked up the courage to tell my folks. What I had seen and done during the war and afterward had changed me. Elizabeth had stayed the same. We were children when we got engaged, pretending we were really grownups. She was right out of high school and I wasn’t through with college. When I gave her the money for the abortion, she must have guessed. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have done what she did.”
“But you allowed people to think that Elizabeth broke up with you because of your war injuries?” Charlie crossed her arms.
“People came to that verdict themselves.” Allen straightened up, and two spots of color appeared in his cheeks. “What did you want me to do, drag he
r name even further through the mud, tell everyone she was pregnant? I kept silent, and people drew their own conclusions. Then, after Liz … did what she did, the ring wasn’t on her finger in the funeral home. My father questioned the workers, but they denied knowing anything. But I figured one of them had pocketed it. A single stone from this ring was worth more than they would earn in a year.”
“But in truth they did not steal it. It wasn’t on her hand when I found her,” Charlie said. “Instead it was here on the grounds. I do not understand why.”
“Maybe Liz hid it herself,” Mary said flatly.
“Why would she do that?” Claire found herself asking the question before she remembered she was supposed to be silent.
“This ring has been in Allen’s family for generations. Liz knew how important it was to him, and she wanted to hurt him. Maybe she wanted him to go to sleep every night just fifty feet from it, but never knowing it was there.”
There was something strange about Mary’s face, and it took Claire a moment to figure out what it was. All the other times she had seen Mary in the neighborhood, the older woman had been smiling. Now her expression was shuttered, but Claire could see the muscles working in her jaw. How much strength would it have taken to haul a slender girl up with a slip-knotted cord? Mary looked like the task would have been easy for her, even when she had been the thinner version of herself sitting on the blanket beside her sister, the ugly duckling to Elizabeth’s swan. Had Mary secretly coveted this man who could never be hers? Had Mary killed her sister, faked a suicide, and then made sure she was the one to console the newly bereaved fiancé?
“Are you sure Elizabeth died by her own hand?” Charlie asked.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Allen demanded. “You’re the one who found her – you should know exactly how she died.”
Allen’s answer was oddly elliptical, Claire thought, as she kept her eyes on Mary, but the other woman’s face was blank, her eyes shuttered.
“After this ring turned up, I remembered something. There was a wound on Elizabeth’s head, Allen. The blood was old and nearly dry. I believe it happened before we ever cut her down. I am thinking someone may have hurt her, then tried to cover it up by hanging her.”
“Puh!” Allen made a sound of disparagement. “Elizabeth didn’t have an enemy in the world. You’re imagining things, Charlie. She killed herself because she was pregnant and knew I didn’t love her any more. When you cut her down, her head hit the china cabinet. I remember that we were still sweeping up broken glass weeks later.”
“That does not explain the blood. Dead people do not bleed. Nor does it explain the ring.”
Allen opened his mouth to say something, when the doorbell rang. Mary made a sound of impatience, then got up to answer it. Howard came in the door and went straight to Allen, who crossed his arms across his chest.
“They showed me the ring, Allen. They wanted to be the ones who told you, or I would have told you myself.”
“Then you wouldn’t have had a chance to hear Charlie’s little theory.”
“Theory?”
“Charlie now thinks Elizabeth was murdered. Fifty years ago she didn’t say a thing, but now she is sure of it.” Allen waved his hand. “Something about how there was blood on her head, and that it was old. And she keeps talking about how it doesn’t make any sense that the ring was in the wall. As if that is any kind of proof. Who knows what a person will do before they commit suicide? Obviously they are not of sound mind by definition.”
“Show me,” Howard said, turning to Claire and Charlie. “Show me where it was found.”
They walked back to the street. Allen trailed behind them, stabbing his way down the driveway with his cane. Claire pointed out the small niche, and Howard probed it with one long finger. His face was rapt with concentration as he leaned against the wall. “It feels like there’s something else inside. I can just – just touch it.”
“Go get the boy,” Allen told Mary. “And tell him to bring the pickaxe from the garage.”
“The pickaxe?” Mary eyed the wall dubiously. “Won’t the whole thing fall down?”
“This wall is stronger than that. And if it leaves a gap, we can patch it up later.”
Mary reappeared a few minutes later with Matt. A rusty pickaxe was slung over his shoulder. Surrounded by this many adults, he had lost the swaggering assurance he had had in Fred Meyer.
He had to hold the pickaxe awkwardly, about a foot away, in order to aim at the hole. But with each jab, some more of the gray, sandy mortar crumbled. Every few strokes, Matt would stop and probe the growing hole.
And finally, the wall gave up its second secret: a small clasp purse reduced to nothing but it’s metal frame, filgareed with verdigris. Carefully, Matt freed it and handed it to Allen. They all crowded around to look. Trapped inside the framework was a brass lipstick tube that was also green with age. A white rectangle of paper that still showed the ghost of a Social Security number. A single photograph that had been reduced to a gray wash of moiré patterns. But Claire noted that despite what Allen had said about giving Elizabeth money for an abortion, there was no money at all.
The purse seemed as much a surprise to Mary and Allen as it was to Charlie. Charlie and Claire’s eyes met. What was Elizabeth’s purse doing in the wall?
They all started when Howard spoke. He stood with his hand on his chest. “Oh my God,” he said slowly. “Her purse was there, too?” He mouth was open, his chin trembled. “Maybe Charlie’s right. Do you think some thief robbed her?” His eyes widened. “Robbed her and … and killed her?”
Mary slowly nodded her head. “It could be, it could be. What happened to all that money you gave her, Allen? The money to” – she seemed mindful of Matt’s presence – “take care of things? Did you ever find it after she died?”
Looking dazed, Allen shook his head. “I didn’t think about it for a long time afterward, and then I realized it had disappeared after I gave it to Elizabeth. It didn’t matter to me, though. Losing the money was nothing.”
“But a thief?” Charlie protested. “Who would have stolen from Elizabeth?”
“There were workmen in and out of that house,” Howard said. “The men who delivered the rock for the wall, the guy who built it, Warren’s employees. Even her old friends from high school sometimes came over.”
“That does not explain the ring.” Charlie’s voice trailed off. “Why would the ring be there? Why would someone steal it only to hide it?”
Howard said, “Maybe they hid it for a moment, thinking they could come back and get it, and then the next layer of stones was laid down over it. Or maybe they took both the money and the ring, then realized that the ring was too unusual, that they couldn’t sell it without it being recognized. So they hid it with the rest of the evidence.”
Charlie only shook her head, looking confused.
Chapter 24
NOTENOTE
“Do you think a thief killed her?” Claire asked as soon as she closed her car door. “Five hundred dollars would have been a lot in those days, wouldn’t it?” Using one hand to drive, she pulled off the ball cap with the other, and then tugged the rubber band from her hair.
“It was a great deal, but I am not sure it was enough to kill someone over,” Charlie said in a troubled voice. She made a humming noise as another thought struck her. “And there is no possibility Elizabeth would have entertained a stranger dressed in a peignoir. She was very modest.”
“Thieves don’t usually call ahead. Maybe someone had watched Austrid leave after Allen and his father had gone to work, and thought no one else was left at home. If it was a stranger who did it, then you’ll never figure out what really happened.” Claire didn’t add that the odds were good that they wouldn’t anyway. “And why would Allen want to kill her? Since she had agreed to have an abortion, that took away the most powerful reason he might have had to kill her.”
“Ah, but we only have his word for that. What if the reason th
ere was no money in her purse is that there was never any to begin with? What if she never agreed to his demands? If Elizabeth protested that she would go to his parents, make them force Allen to marry her, he may have lost control. Then perhaps once he was himself again, he set about fixing it so that no one would know.”
Claire thought about this. “It seemed to me that Allen may have been telling the truth, at least about not wanting to marry her. He didn’t have to tell us about the pregnancy, but he did. And when he told us about how he got her pregnant and then planned to wash his hands of her, it made him look bad. If he was going to lie, wouldn’t he have made up a lie that put him in a better light?”
Charlie shrugged. “Or he may have guessed that someone else might know about the pregnancy – and hoped that no one knew about the murder.”
Claire’s Mazda was only a few blocks from their home when they were forced to slow down. A small crowd had gathered in the street, their eyes on three emergency vehicles parked in front of a modest house with weathered cedar shakes the color of the overcast sky.
Charlie craned her neck, finally back in the here and now. “My goodness. I think that may be Frank’s house.”
Even though Claire had run down this street hundreds of times, she had never really noticed the house hidden behind a huge fir tree. It was impossible not to notice it now, what with a fire engine idling at the curb, a police car parked behind it, and another cop car parked in the driveway. Claire pulled her car over to the curb on the other side of the street. For a moment, she and Charlie watched what was happening, as did a half-dozen neighbors who had gathered in the street. Two cops stood at the door of the house, knocking and calling, but the door didn’t open and the curtains didn’t twitch.
Claire and Charlie got out of the car and walked over to the knot of watchers. A couple of them held coffee mugs and even though it wasn’t yet lunch time, one man with a pot-belly was sipping from a beer bottle. It was as if real life had gratifyingly merged with entertainment.