Chapter 18
Dear Sophie,
My mom took in her nieces and raised them with her own children until her death. Do we list them as survivors, or is it only appropriate to mention those who were actually born to her or adopted?
Oldest Sister in Looneyville, Oregon
Dear Oldest Sister,
By all means include the children whom she raised as her own. They will be pleased, and she undoubtedly would be, too.
Sophie
“Trula Dixon?” I asked to be absolutely certain we were talking about the same person.
“Yes, ma’am. Four cans, just like Mrs. Haberman. We joked about it because we can go months without selling one can of the stuff. And those two ladies wiped us out within minutes.”
He must have thought I’d lost my mind because I just stood there thinking wild thoughts about Trula. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”
I wandered out, feeling a little bit dazed. Trula. Was there some kind of rift between Parker and Hollis? Did Parker have a reason to want to knock off Hollis? Maybe we had been too quick to laugh off the possibility that Parker had gotten rid of both of his law partners, Hollis and Gage. Was Trula helping him?
Who would have information about Gage’s death besides Madison? Pondering that, I turned off King Street and headed for Duke Street. There were quite a few blue houses in Old Town, but I couldn’t recall having seen an octopus door knocker. I found the place within fifteen minutes.
It was a narrow older house. The oval plaque designating it as a historical building was proudly displayed on the wood wall. A single dormer window jutted from a roof that slanted a bit too much and appeared to be in need of repair. Next to the stairs that led to the front door, a basement window no larger than one foot by one foot was beside a door so tiny that a hobbit couldn’t have fit inside. It must have replaced the original ice cellar door. The mail slot in the front door meant there was no mailbox with a name on it.
The house shared walls with the houses on the left and the right. The house on the right was significantly larger and three stories tall. I counted the number of houses to the corner and walked around the block to see if there was an alley.
I was in luck. Maybe the rear of the house would give me a clue about the owner or tenant. I counted again to make sure I had the correct house from the rear. I was about two narrow houses away when a Mustang with a rusted-out driver’s side door whipped by me. Angus Bogdanoff was driving it.
That couldn’t have been a coincidence. Was it Francie who had suggested that Kelsey was having an affair? Maybe she was right.
I continued to the small parking pad from which the car had emerged. The rear of the house was white and much more modern than the front, which wasn’t all that unusual in Old Town. But I was certain it was the same house because of the shabby roof and the fact that the next house over was taller.
I didn’t know exactly what I had expected to find, but it sure wasn’t this. Kelsey mentioned visiting Angus in the hospital the day he had been stung. Had she gone to his house during the daytime, I might have assumed she was bringing him food or checking on him. But she went there by herself at night after her husband went to bed and was probably fast asleep.
I stared at the rear of the house, trying to put it all together. Hollis had suspected Kelsey of poisoning him. Maybe she was on to him and switched to another type of poison.
There had been two problems with the bee spray. It was difficult to imagine that Hollis wouldn’t have awakened if Kelsey had sprayed it in his face while he slept. And even Jay Charles had said it was unlikely a few whiffs of it would have killed him. But bug bombs were another thing entirely. If they had been set off while Hollis was fast asleep, maybe he could have inhaled too much of the stuff.
How long had Kelsey been seeing Angus? Had she met him when he was hired as the Haberman handyman, or had she known him all along? Had she married Hollis for his money, planning to murder him and make a life with Angus?
It was too depressing to imagine this had been a grand scheme and they had actually managed to pull it off. Poor Hollis. She had sucked him right into her arms and then stung him. The woman I hadn’t wanted to imagine doing something like that had ruined the lives of a happy family. Hollis was gone, and things would never be the same for Cindy or Gavin.
I was turning to leave when I heard a scream and a crash. Unless I missed my guess, they came from Angus’s house. I ran through the parking pad and short backyard.
“Hello?” I called. I listened but didn’t hear anything. “Hello? Do you need help?”
I heard a low moan and the sound of knocking. Thunk, thunk, thunk. I stepped back and examined the rear of the building. It was tiny. There was a back door and only one window on the first floor. The basement was underground on this side.
“Where are you? Do you need help?”
More thunking. The old townhouse butted directly against the houses beside it. There was no access on either side. “I’m going around to the front,” I yelled as loud as I could.
I ran along the alley and around the corner, wishing I could call 911 while I ran. In front of the house, I dashed up the few stairs to the front door and knocked with the octopus. “Hello? Can you hear me?”
I heard the thunking again, this time quite faint. I didn’t waste any more time and called 911. “I don’t actually know if this is an emergency,” I blathered. “But I heard a crash and a scream, and someone makes a knocking sound when I call out.” I gave her the address and knelt to see through the tiny window to the basement. It was too dark to make out anything.
“I’ve called for help,” I shouted. I paced in front of the house, hoping someone would arrive soon. When a police car drew up, I ran to it, delighted to find Wong inside.
She moved quickly but calmly as I explained what had happened.
“Weird knocker,” she muttered before banging it. “Police!”
The strange thunking sound came again.
“You know who lives here?” she asked.
“I think it’s Angus Bogdanoff.”
“So it’s probably Angus making that banging noise?”
“I saw him drive away.”
She threw me a curious glance. “When we get Angus or whoever out of there, we’re going to have a little talk about what you’re doing here.”
The ambulance arrived next. Since she didn’t know what she might find, Wong called for backup. The entire process took far too long in my opinion. They finally opened the front door.
Wong pointed at me. “Stay out here, Sophie. I mean it. You hear me?”
I was itching to go inside with them, but I understood that it could be dangerous and that I could interfere, making their job more difficult, so I waited by the front door. A crowd was gathering on the sidewalk in front of the house.
I could hear them talking inside.
“Where are you?”
“Tap again!”
The next thing I knew, an EMT fetched a stretcher.
Wong finally returned to the stoop. “It’s the Haberman kid.”
“Gavin? Is he okay?” It was a stupid question. If he was fine they wouldn’t need a stretcher.
“It appears that he was hiding in a closet and fell through a rotted hatch to the basement.”
They were bringing him through. Wong and I left the stoop and stood aside. Gauze wrapped Gavin’s head, but blood had seeped through. “Noooo,” I breathed.
“You have his mom’s number?” asked Wong.
I nodded and pulled up the number for the library on my phone.
Wong called Cindy and informed her about Gavin’s accident. I heard Cindy scream through the phone.
I walked over to the stretcher and took Gavin’s hand in mine. His eyes were closed. The angle of his leg made me wince. I leaned over him. “Gavin, it’s Sophie Winston. You’ll be fine. We’ve called your mom, and she’ll meet you at the hospital. You’re going to be okay, kiddo.”
His fingers tightened on mine, and I knew he’d heard me.
Wong and I stood by and watched as he was loaded into the ambulance. It drove away, and the crowd dispersed.
“Now,” said Wong. “Suppose you tell me what Gavin was doing in a closet in this house and how you happened to be outside. Please tell me you weren’t waiting for him.”
I told her the whole story about Gavin following Kelsey to Angus’s house. “And it appears Gavin may have been correct all along. I can’t think of a good reason for Kelsey to come here in the dark of night when she should have been at home in bed with Hollis.”
“I’ll notify Wolf,” she said. “I imagine he’ll want to talk with you.”
I left her there to deal with finding Angus and notifying him that they had entered his house. I walked home slowly, sick about Gavin and angry with Kelsey.
Nina was standing on the sidewalk in front of my house. “Where have you been?”
We went inside. I told her all about it while I poured tall glasses of iced tea. I handed her one, slugged mine down, and refilled my glass. Not at all ladylike.
“It’s all so obvious,” said Nina. “Kelsey must have thought no one would see her go to Angus’s house.”
I hated to concede that everyone else was right, but it certainly looked that way. “I’m going over to the hospital. I didn’t like the way Gavin looked.”
“What was he thinking going into someone’s home like that?”
“Probably the same thing I was. He wanted to know who lived there.”
Nina and I drove to the hospital, parked, and hurried to the emergency room. We found Cindy in no time.
She waited by herself, crying, a knotted tissue in her hand. She hugged both of us. “I can’t believe this happened. They’re taking him to surgery!”
“His leg is broken?” I asked.
She sniffed and nodded. “You knew, Sophie. You warned me about this. I didn’t even have time to talk with him about not getting involved. He was supposed to be at home!”
“How’s his head?” I asked.
“He has a concussion. They said he fell through a trap door and hit an old brick half wall in the basement before he fell to the stone floor.”
“Is there anything we can do?” asked Nina.
“I don’t know. My head is spinning. Oh! Yes, Gavin is blood type AB, which is the rarest blood type. They said only three or four percent of the population has AB positive and that if I know anyone with that blood type, I should ask them to donate.”
Cindy looked at us hopefully.
“Gosh, I’m so sorry. I’m type A,” I said.
Cindy nodded. “Me too.”
“I’m type O . . .” Nina didn’t finish because a woman who bore an amazing resemblance to Cindy rushed through the door. Cindy ran to her. They held each other and sobbed.
“I’m guessing that’s a sister,” said Nina.
Immediately behind them, Parker, Trula, and Madison showed up. Cindy hugged them as though they were a receiving line. Everyone asked how Gavin was doing and what had happened to him.
The door opened again and more people rushed in. It was apparent that other members of Cindy’s family had arrived.
We asked Cindy to keep us informed and left her to explain everything to her family.
When I was parking the car in my garage, Nina said, “People are still leaving food on Kelsey’s doorstep. I guess I’d better buy something.”
Does one bring funeral food to a murderer, I wondered? Was there an etiquette rule for that? Probably not. Besides, she hadn’t been convicted or even arrested.
Nina hurried off. I went inside and poured myself another tall glass of iced tea. I carried it back to my tiny home office.
Mochie ambled along and jumped up to my desk when I sat down at the computer. I needed Kelsey’s maiden name. I could just ask her, of course. But that might make her clam up. Alex would probably have it, but I knew him well enough to know that he would treat any information he had like it was gold in Fort Knox. And sneaking a peek in his office just wasn’t my style. It was important to him to keep his clients’ business private.
I tried an online record search of marriage licenses under Hollis’s name but didn’t turn up anything. It required the exact city where the license was issued. They could have gotten it outside of Alexandria.
Besides, what if Kelsey had changed her name? If her stories were true, she had been on the run from the police when she was a teen. I typed in murder Delilah Jean. While there were a surprising number of hits, none of them seemed right or referred to a person called Delilah Jean, which I thought fairly distinctive. Kelsey said she was eleven years old at time. I guessed at the year and typed it in along with the name Delilah Jean and murder.
To my amazement, a website with dedications to those who had lost their lives to domestic violence popped up. And there it was.
In memory of our beloved mother Delilah Jean Doshutt, who was taken from us by her abusive ex-husband. Let no one forget her name or her love for her children and nieces.
It was a simple jump to the obituary, which listed after the names of her six children, “her nieces Kayla Brooks and Kelsey Brooks.”
Brooks wasn’t an uncommon family name. I could only hope that the very sad deaths of Kelsey and Kayla’s parents made their obituaries stand out somehow. A quick Google of the girls’ names turned up their parents’ obituaries. But more interestingly, it also led me to an article about the death of Kelsey Brooks.