Clean-up goes smoothly, and Ken and I decide to finish the wine bottle by the fire. Billy is snuggled between us and is getting a double belly rub. Somebody is in doggie heaven. I know Ken wants to hear how things went today, so I start out slowly. “I almost pulled the plug today. Emelina told me that her nephew suspected that Antoinette had a boyfriend, but that he swore her to secrecy. She wouldn’t tell me who the boyfriend was.”
“Like Antoinette’s secret of being pregnant and the baby most likely not being Andrew’s,” he replies.
I say, “That’s right. I asked her if she was prepared to not find out who killed them if it meant keeping secrets. She basically told me that she made a promise, she was going to honor it, and she could drive me home if I liked.”
“Even if the promises were made to murder victims?” he asks.
“Emelina is a very private person. I am not sure why she didn’t marry or have children. What do we really know about her? In all the years that I have known her, I never saw a gentleman suitor. She was the former kindergarten teacher, and I was the new one. Besides being a scratch baker with irrepressible energy, what do we know about her? She is there for all of us and never wants to be beholden to another single human being. If you tell her a secret, she will take it to her grave.”
“She did give you two clues,” Ken says. “Andrew couldn’t make babies, and he suspected a boyfriend.”
“True. Also that he was going to take that information to Chief Kenrick.”
“Who’s been dead for how long?”
“1979, a couple of years after he retired and moved to Florida.”
“So you can’t ask him. How about any detectives working at the time?”
“All dead.”
“What’s left to do?” he asks.
“We have some people who left the Milford area who were prominent in town at the time. We have about a dozen calls there. Shafer told me that the drapes you saw in the steamer trunk were imported from Italy and that there were horse hairs embedded in the inside of the trunk. One other thing. The coal chute for the furnace was bricked over, but it was wide enough for the carpet to slide from the outside into the coal bin.”
“That’s important?”
“Yes,” I say after swallowing the rest of my wine. “A strong man could tip the carpet into the top of the coal furnace, and an unsuspecting person could help the killer drag the steamer trunk into the basement. We first thought that the killer needed an accessory to do both.”
“You really think things through,” he says.
“Actually, Emelina and I talked the scenarios through with Shafer and Barney.”
“They are making nice?”
“We are ahead of them and are turning over our cards as they turn over one for us. Erin would call this a separate and concurrent investigation. We are not working with them, and they aren’t working with Milford’s older version of Nancy Drew.”
“I always had the hots for her,” Ken says.
“How about the older version?”
“Definitely.”
Talking time is over. We gently lift Billy from the couch and the three of us go upstairs, he to his crate and us to our bed.
Ken comes downstairs in the morning to a cheddar cheese omelet with a side of bacon and rye toast breakfast. He tells me about his day with several handyman jobs that shouldn’t be too hard. The Devlin mansion project is now just a fart in the breeze, as our Sicilian friends would say. He is doing what he normally does in the winter when it’s too cold to work outside.
As he digs into his breakfast, I pour a second cup of coffee and tell him, “Besides those phone calls I told you about, I am going to the library to look through the newspapers back at the time the Bidwells went missing to learn who was doing oil deliveries. I have a meeting next Tuesday at the Historical Society to do some more digging into Milford Coal & Ice.”
“You are not ready to say that their neighbor might have done this?”
“No. I am still fixated on who built the partition to hide the bodies. I can’t see Murphy having the wherewithal to pull that off.” Ken is completely up to date on the case. He’s much more receptive now than when that bag of bones spilled out on his toes. “Erin is taking the digital newspapers searches further with some of the information we’ve learned from our interviews, so we aren’t completely finished. After that, I won’t have much more to do, other than handing everything over to Shafer and telling him good luck.”
“At least Emelina will share most of her secrets with you,” he says. I know he is talking about the baking now.
“She’s a great teacher. She has me write down the ingredients list and then the instructions. We work side by side on two batches following the recipe. Then she watches me make the next batch and tells me what I did right and wrong. It is a fantastic way to learn. We will be going non-stop Sunday and Monday for the Chamber of Commerce party.”
“Hey, I’m a member,” Ken remembers.
“Stop by the Chamber and buy a ticket. You will get to sample almost all of her goodies.”
“Maybe Grammy LeGrande can babysit the grandkids and Erin and Darren can go to,” he says.
I tell him, “That’s a great idea. Maybe he can pick up some more clients from Milford.” Darren is a financial planner and wealth manager, specializing in transplants from the city who are looking to live in a quieter location with a slower pace of life. “I’ll call Erin this morning after meditation and yoga.” Glancing at the clock, I add, “I’ve gotta scoot. You have Billy as your helper today?”
“Yes, Mrs. Strong,” he says, mimicking the sing-song way my kindergarten class would respond to me over the years.
None of the kids ever got the kind of hug or kiss I plant on my guy before running out the door.
I see my first robins of the year. A flock is working over the birdseed on the ground put out by my neighbor. Forget groundhogs seeing their shadows—my harbinger of spring is my first robin sighting. I know that mid-February is about right for them to show up around here, even though there is plenty of bad weather still in store for us.
The sunrise is spectacular, with a band of orange above the tree line across the river. The breeze is not cold. It must be a southern breeze. Soon the geese will be winging their way north.
As I walk to Abe’s studio, I round the corner and see a familiar car parked in front. The headlights blink at me, and I approach from the passenger side along the sidewalk. The window rolls down and Detective Shafer asks, “Do you have a minute, Gwen?”
I didn’t think we were on a first name basis. “Sure.” I look inside the studio and see that everyone hasn’t settled in yet. “Just for a minute.”
“That’s all it will take. Hop in.”
His black SUV is warm, and I undo my scarf, remove my knit hat, and let my parka breathe.
“We had the son of a bitch,” Shafer starts.
“Who?”
“Murphy. I ran him in our system. We had a felony warrant out on him. Some felony warrants never expire.”
A lovely day just got darker. He doesn’t want to be seen talking to me. This must be serious.
“It was a rape complaint,” he adds.
“When?”
“June 30th, 1970. He must have gotten wind of it and flown the coop.”
“That’s probably when he began drifting south,” I say.
“Yep.” Shafer is none too happy with the prospect that a very bad man got started in his backyard. Never mind that Shafer hadn’t even been born yet—he carries the badge of an organization that let Murphy slip away, so it’s personal. “I talked to a guy in records who pulled the paper file first thing this morning. We haven’t gotten back that far in digitizing them.”
“And?”
“Murphy was dishonorably discharged from the Service. He was accused by a German citizen of the same thing. She dropped the charges when the Army offered to send him back to the States.”
“That explains why his DD-214 wasn’t in the county archives,” I say.
“Correct. No VA benefits for him. He wouldn’t want his dishonorable discharge papers to be in the public record.”
“Who accused him?”
He opened his brown folder tucked between the console and his seat. “Gloria Michaels.”
“She goes by Gloria Kennedy these days,” I say. I fog his windshield with a deep exhale.
“You know her?” He looks at me with raised eyebrows but recovers quickly. “By now, I shouldn’t be surprised by anything you tell me, Mrs. Strong.”
“I do know her. She was Antoinette’s maid of honor.”
“Holy moly,” he says.
“I know.”
“The attack happened about the time the steamer trunk was hidden behind the partition,” he says.
“She’s lucky she’s alive,” I say. “I can take you to her house if you’d like. She should be home.”
“Please.”
It feels natural to be riding with Shafer to interview Gloria today. I can introduce them, and we both can hear what she says. I debate telling him that Emelina let it slip to me that her nephew suspected Antoinette of having a boyfriend. By proxy I will keep her secret… for now.
Gloria opens the door, and her smile quickly fades as I introduce her to Detective Shafer, who tells her about the felony warrant that was never canceled. The authorities in Florida never got around to contacting the State Police when they arrested Murphy.
“I never should have said anything to you, Mrs. Strong,” she says. Her anger grows as she learns that Murphy was tied to killings and more sexual assaults below the Mason-Dixon line. She hisses at Shafer, “Maybe your people should have taken me more seriously.” She wags an arthritic finger at him. The wounds are deep and raw now. Her anger is reaching a boiling point. It’s painful to hear her recall what happened that summer night, but Shafer is gentle with her. It comes out that she knew him before the attack.
“Oh my God,” I mutter.
We wait. The tumblers click on the safe holding back her memories, and she slowly opens the vault. She tells us, “He worked with Antoinette.”