“Suzanne and Eleanor.” Jimmy grinned as he repeated the names.
It was Tuesday, and early; I thought I was the first one in, but Jimmy beat me. He looked fresh as a daisy. I on the other hand felt heavy with fatigue and bloated from too much Chinese food. Luckily, Grace had already seemed markedly better and I felt comfortable leaving her with Clementine for the day.
“And they are?” I slipped off my coat and put my things away.
“Ives Farmington’s two daughters. They’re in their sixties, neither of them ever married. They live together, just a few blocks from here. They said you’re welcome to stop by anytime.” Jimmy paused, added, “They also invited me. I hate to intrude but I sort of feel like I should go with you. You know, since I tracked them down and made the initial contact?”
I was already pulling my jacket back on. “Come on. Maybe they’re up and about.”
The two Farmington sisters were not only up and about, but they were just starting in on a feast of a breakfast. Eggs, biscuits, gravy, bacon, and fresh fruit, along with hazelnut coffee and a pitcher of ice-cold orange juice, were laid out on an enormous dining room table, alongside elegantly patterned china, heavy silverware, and sparkling crystal goblets.
Suzanne, the elder sister, a tall, stately woman with white hair neatly pinned back, invited us to join them. Jimmy grinned. “You don’t have to ask us twice. I bet Gemma could eat you both under the table. A spread like this is right up her alley.”
“A skinny thing like you?” Eleanor reached over and pinched my arm, harder than I would have liked. Her eyes were huge behind the thick glasses she wore. She was half the height of her sister and three times as wide. Unruly gray curls sprung from her head in every direction. “I don’t believe it. In fact, I’ve got some sweet rolls in the freezer. I should put them in the oven; they’re just the thing to fatten you up.”
“Please, we’re fine. This will be plenty,” I said, rubbing my arm and shooting a discreet but definitive glare in Jimmy’s direction. “We’d like to ask you about your dad, Ives.”
Suzanne smiled. “Now there was a one-of-a-kind guy. Talk about a hero; they just don’t make them like that anymore. What specifically did you want to know?”
I set down my cup of coffee. “Did he ever talk about a man named Josiah Black?”
Eleanor coughed. She and her older sister stared at one other, some unspoken thought moving between them. Finally, Eleanor nodded to Suzanne, who responded with a deep sigh and a brief nod of her own.
Suzanne turned to me. “Dad died fifteen years ago from cancer. At that time, he said his greatest regret in life was not proving Josiah Black’s innocence. Of course he talked about that man. In some ways, that was all he talked about. I exaggerate, but at least once a week, usually on Saturday evenings after he’d had a few beers, Daddy would get to talking about the war, and our mother, who passed away when we were just girls. He’d take these long strolls down memory lane and inevitably, the Black family name would come up.”
“He felt just terrible about how Josiah and Millie had been treated,” Eleanor added. “He said she’d been run out of town like a wolf who’d been in the sheep’s pasture, but she was as much a sheep as anyone else in town. And Josiah had been the subject of a witch hunt, just like all those years ago in Salem.”
“Why was your father so convinced Josiah was innocent?” I asked. “Was it just because they’d been friendly in school and then served together?”
Suzanne laughed and added another few slices of bacon to her plate. “Oh, heavens, no. In fact, it was the opposite. They hated each other. They were rivals, not friends. Sports, women, music … They were the two best-looking boys in town, the most athletic, the most popular. Cocaptains on the baseball team.”
“So what was it, then?” Jimmy asked impatiently. He tore a biscuit in two and shoved half in his mouth. “These are delicious, by the way.”
“Thank you, we make them from scratch. Dad was a good cop. He loved police work. Resigning from the force was the hardest thing he ever had to do. But he couldn’t stay in a place that he felt had covered things up. He was convinced the targeting of the victims had nothing to do with the war and everything to do with corruption in Cedar Valley. All three of the victims—the doctor, the bank guard, and John Sven, the pub owner—had at one time or another been the subject of police investigations into illegal dealings. After the war, things here were like the Wild West. Widows were taken advantage of, financially and otherwise; businesses suffered.”
I sat back, thinking. “And Ives believed the victims were killed by someone bent on revenge.”
“Someone or some people. Dad never thought there was a single killer operating alone. He thought it more likely that a couple of men got together and decided to take matters into their own hands.” Eleanor picked up the carafe. “More coffee?”
We declined. Jimmy said, “John Sven wasn’t the only person killed at the pub that night. Eleven other people died, including his wife and brother. That’s a lot of collateral damage.”
Suzanne agreed. “The pub was closed to the public that night, as it always was on Mondays. But John Sven held a weekly private poker night in the back room for his friends. The killer must not have known about that.”
“Tell her about the other thing,” Eleanor prompted. “The ‘incident.’”
“Something happened when Josiah and Dad were overseas. Dad said the two of them witnessed a commanding officer interrogating a Japanese prisoner of war. Things turned rough and after, when Josiah and Dad were back at their camp, Josiah was terribly ill, vomiting repeatedly.” Suzanne paused, smoothed back an errant strand of hair. “Dad assumed it was a stomach virus, until Josiah explained that he abhorred violence, couldn’t stand the sight of someone being hurt. Being involved with the war was slowly killing him, he said. Dad said it was that look in Josiah’s eyes, more than anything, that convinced him all those years later that Josiah couldn’t be a killer.”
A few hours later, I hung up the phone and pushed back from my desk, my eyes bleary. I had a stack of notes, a lot of questions and fewer answers. On the screen in front of me was a map of Utah, specifically the border region and the canyon lands the state shared with Arizona, zoomed in to one small town in Utah: Harvey.
I’d spent the last thirty minutes on the phone with a feisty city clerk in Harvey and now I called Finn over to share what I’d learned. He looked relieved at the opportunity to step away from his own computer.
Jimmy, once again smelling blood in the water, meandered into the room and pulled up a chair behind me. The intern had a small bag of corn nuts in his hand and every few minutes, another terrific crack of his teeth against a nut had me cringing. I couldn’t believe he was hungry; even I was still full from brunch with the Farmington sisters.
“Josiah Black was released from prison in 1995. He was seventy-three years old, in relatively good health. He bummed around Cedar Valley for a few months, then made his way to Utah. Specifically, this tiny border town of Harvey.” I pointed at the map on the monitor.
“Why Utah?” Jimmy asked. He cracked another nut on his molars and I resisted the strong urge to turn around and slap the bag from his hands.
“Josiah was trying to find his wife, Amelia. Millie. It appears that she fled Cedar Valley shortly after Black’s trial and made her way southwest. She spent a number of years in Harvey, but the city clerk’s files show that by 1970, she’d left town. The trail grows cold, but the clerk said she’d reach out to the post office and see if their records indicate a forwarding address.” I checked my notes, doing the math. “So Amelia had been gone from Harvey for twenty-five years by the time Josiah Black arrived. Josiah must have run out of money then, or close to it, because he rented an apartment and took up employment at a gas station. He was only there a few months. This is how small Harvey is: the city clerk that I just spoke to was Josiah’s landlord in the nineties. She remembers him well; he reminded her of her grandfather. Josiah talked a lot about his wife, the clerk said, and how he hoped to find her someday.”
“So he stayed and worked long enough to earn funds to keep tracking Amelia and then he left?” Finn asked.
“No. Black died while hiking in the desert. He was caught in a flash flood, in a place called the Blue Rose Canyon; he drowned.”
“Pretty name for a place to die,” Jimmy said with another crunch and crack. “This is all fascinating, but how does knowing any of it help us catch Ghost Boy?”
I wasn’t the only one who’d nicknamed the killer, it seemed. “I haven’t told you the best part. The city clerk boxed up all of Josiah’s belongings after his death. She’s kept them in her storage unit all these years. She said she’s always hoped someone would come asking about Josiah. She’s going to get the box, call me back, and open it while I’m on the line.”
“Great work, Gemma,” Finn said and held up a sheaf of papers. “We’ve got wheels turning on the Mike Esposito murder as well; turns out old Mikey was quite busy, between his job, his softball league, and the marijuana grow house he kept on the north end of town.”
I was surprised; the insertion of drugs into an investigation has the tendency to get nasty, fast. “Marijuana? How’d you discover that?”
“Moriarty got a tip. He’s headed there now with a couple of officers. Depending on how much Esposito was growing, we could be looking at a drug deal gone bad. It’s big business these days. Maybe Esposito’s killer got word of the comic book left at the Montgomery scene and decided to throw us off the scent by planting a similar one at the bank,” Finn replied. He shrugged. “Or maybe the house will turn out to be nothing. Couple of plants, a home hobby. But … if we find ties between a drug dealer and Judge Montgomery, well … heads are going to roll.”
Jimmy smirked. “I’ve got friends that found jobs in Denver in the marijuana tourism industry. Some of them are making six figures. And they get free weed.” He noticed our looks and quickly added, “Not that marijuana is my thing. Can’t stand the smell. Never touched it. I told all my students to just say no.”
I was about to respond when Renee, the city clerk in Harvey, called me back. I put her on speaker. She spoke slowly, knowing that I was taking notes. “There wasn’t much in Josiah’s box. A couple of paperback novels, and this funky old blue-and-white glass vase. He said his wife had made it for him and it was one of the few things he had left of her. The day he died, he’d left his wallet at home, so I’ve got that, too. There’s a driver’s license and some photographs inside. I donated his clothes to charity, hope you don’t mind that. I did empty his pockets first but he was orderly; that must have been from his time overseas.”
I paused in my note-taking to ask, “Did he talk much about his years in the service?”
“Oh, here and there it would come up. He never went into too many details, though; it seemed to make him sad. Okay, so, books, wallet, vase. Oh, he liked to collect arrowheads. He had about twenty or thirty. I’ve got them in the storage box, too. Someone might pay a few bucks for the collection.”
“Renee, tell me about the photographs in his wallet. Can you take them out and describe them one at a time, please?”
“You bet. Okay, the first photograph is of a young woman and a man. The man is definitely Josiah, though he hardly looks older than twenty. This is a wedding portrait, so the woman must be Amelia.”
I jotted down a few things. “Renee, is there a date on the photograph?”
“No, though judging by the fashion of their clothes, this was early 1940s.”
“Great. How about the next photograph?” I asked.
The city clerk gasped. “Oh boy. Or … girl. I can’t tell.”
“What? What are you looking at?”
She was excited and spoke quickly, eager to aid in my investigation and put together the pieces of the life of the man she’d briefly known. “Well, there’s a child. Amelia is holding a toddler! And there’s a date on the back of this photograph; it says 1950. Well, I’ll be. The baby must have been Josiah’s. He never talked about a child, though he’d had to have known. He had the baby’s picture in his wallet, after all.”
I exhaled and sat back, feeling as though the wind had been knocked out of me.
Josiah and Amelia had a child together, born sometime after his trial. I thought back to the articles I’d read; the trial had been quick, his sentencing immediate. It was entirely possible that Amelia had been newly pregnant at the time of Josiah’s arrest.
Then, after the trial, after a few more months of trying to live with the constant wrath of her neighbors, Amelia fled in search of peace and safety for herself and her unborn child.
I did the math; that child would now be in his or her late sixties. On the other end of the line, from somewhere deep in the deserts of Utah, Renee was thinking the same thing. She muttered, “Little tyke would be a senior citizen now. Imagine that. Say, you don’t think the child has anything to do with your investigation, do you?”
“At this point, nothing is out of the realm of possibility.”
“Oh!” Renee sounded as though she’d been electrocuted. “Well, would you look at that. For heaven’s sakes, there’s another baby!”
I sat up. “There were two babies? Twins?”
“No, no. The last photograph in Josiah’s wallet is a picture of a much older Amelia, a young woman, and a toddler on the woman’s lap. They’re standing in front of an amusement park ride. The young woman is the spitting image of Amelia. The back of the photograph reads ‘Christmas Eve, 1983. Grandma Millie, Debbie, and Casey’s first time to Disneyland.’”
So Josiah Black not only had a daughter, he had a grandchild as well.
I glanced at Finn and Jimmy; the huge grins on their faces must have matched mine. “You’ve struck gold, Renee. This is an incredible break in our case.”
“This is so exciting! I love a good mystery. Oh, I hear a fax coming in. That might be Amelia’s last will and testament. I haven’t even told you about that yet. I tracked Amelia down to an itty-bitty town in Texas on the coast. Poor dear, she died in the early 1990s; but bless her heart, she filed paperwork with the county a few years before. I sweet-talked the clerk into faxing it over to me,” Renee said.
“You are an angel, Renee.”
“Okay, here we go … last will and testament, blah, blah, blah, legalese, more legal speak. Ah-ha! Amelia Black left everything to her only living child, one Debbie Jo Black of Seaport, Texas. Looks like the whole family relocated there.”
“This is wonderful, Renee. I can’t thank you enough.”
“As I said, it’s my pleasure. I’ll get this will, and the photographs, scanned and emailed to you. I know you’re hot on the trail.”
I hung up slowly, certain that what I’d expressed earlier was true: we were chasing down ghosts.