Excerpt From Jo Grant’s Journal:
…I was watching this woman in the checkout line, worn hard and tired looking, who probably works on one of the farms, and another woman a little younger, who spoke well and wore a suit – both of them reading the gossip magazines while standing by the check-out – when I suddenly thought, “We’re like a herd of schizophrenics.”
We love reading about movie stars and incredibly rich people. We’re fascinated by how they live, and most of us fawn all over them – if we get to be around one. But we’re envious too and jealous, and we can’t wait to see them fall painfully in public.
A fair number of us seem to assume that anyone with money is dishonest and despicable (unless it’s a movie star or some kind of sports figure) even without evidence, when assumptions lead to dangerous places, as everyone knows. Especially Toss, of course, who’s famous for saying, “Assume makes an ass-out-of-u-and-me.”
There are definitely thieves and manipulators in business, just like in politics. But people like the Franklins and the Harrisons, and the Smiths with their hardware store, and the Wetzells with their dry cleaners (and Dad and Toss, now that I think about it) have worked themselves hard for lots of years to get a business off the ground, and from what I’ve seen it’s more about love of what they do, and being obsessed with doing it well, than it’s ever been about money.
But will folks be looking for them to fail in some public and embarrassing way if they ever do start to make a lot of money? Probably. Being who we are. The kind who complain about manna in the desert. And hobble horses on the track…
Monday, May 21, 1962
So many people were in and out that day, Jo and Alan spent a lot of time afterwards – as did other family and friends, including the county sheriff – wondering if one of those comings and goings had happened five minutes sooner or later, murder could’ve been prevented.
They all knew it was unanswerable. But the ones who sat and debated it were so shocked and disoriented, they found themselves scouring their own souls to see if there’d been something they could’ve done or shouldn’t have overlooked.
That’s one of the outriders of murder. That it makes survivors feel guilty for no reason. And abandoned unfairly too.
First thing that Monday morning, just before eight-thirty, Peggy James pulled up to Alice’s house, bringing the dictation she’d done on Friday for Alice to read and sign, along with the mail from the office that she hadn’t brought over Friday.
When she got out of her car and walked toward the front door, she noticed a car parked across the street that looked vaguely familiar. There was someone sitting behind the wheel too, which seemed odd to her, but the driveway was so long she couldn’t see to recognize him. And it did look like it had to be a man. The head and shoulders above the dashboard were too tall and broad to make her think it was a woman.
But she didn’t spend anytime dwelling on it, because she and Alice went and sat on the gallery and chatted the way they usually did, about what was happening at the office, and how their families and animals were doing – Alice’s horses and Peggy’s labs – and how when Peggy’s puppies were old enough, Alice and Booker would get their pick of the litter.
She told Alice she’d be back at seven that night to bring her mail from the office, and pick up any correspondence Alice had ready. She had to feed the kids dinner early and drop them off at two different school events, and then she’d be out.
Alice smiled and said she knew what that was like. And then told Peggy, just before she left, that she didn’t think she’d dictate much that day, but she wanted Peggy to leave the Dictaphone just in case, then pick it up that night and get the heads cleaned at the office.
Alice said she planned to paint most of the morning, and lie down awhile in the afternoon, then paint some more after dinner. So when Peggy came again at seven, she should just walk in the front door, and leave the mail and correspondence in the study, and take the Dictaphone then. Mary would be bringing her groceries in the afternoon, and a casserole too, so she wouldn’t have to cook, and could concentrate on her work.
Peggy questioned her closely, because Alice was still walking more gingerly than normal, and bending over a little when she stood, as though her abdomen still hurt. And Peggy knew Alice well enough to worry that she was working too hard.
The phone rang, and Peggy could see Alice was being careful with whoever it was, but pleased too by the call. And Peggy waved and walked out the front, forgetting to look in the car across the street as she drove south toward Versailles, and the Lexington road East.
By nine-fifteen Alice had one of the canvases she’d already primed (a rectangle, two feet by three) set up vertically on her easel, and had started in with a palette knife.
She wanted it to be fluid and abstract, thick layers and thin, maybe, to create a sense of the layered hills that rippled away in the distance around Lexington (which made her get in her car every few weeks and drive all over Woodford, County, and down the river toward Shaker Village, and south and east of Berea too, to Boone National Forest).
She worked, and then put her feet up till lunch. Then lay down and read, and dozed until almost three, when she went back to work.
She’d wanted to approach this painting entirely intuitively, the color palette and the impasto too, and as she looked at what she’d done that morning, and laid on a horizontal sweep of a Thalo Green/Prussian Blue/Titanium White tint, she felt a flush of intense exhilaration – that ended when Richard hollered at her from inside her front door.
“I’m in the gallery, Richard.” She worked until she could feel him behind her, his back to the basement stairs, his eyes hot on her shoulders.
“You’re supposed to be resting.”
“I rest. I’m painting for limited periods.”
“I was hoping we could talk.”
“Sure. Just one second.” She laid three more streaks of midnight blue in the center-right of the painting, and scraped them down to the canvas, exposing the texture under the paint, and laid the palette knife down. “You want a glass of tea, or water?”
“Water’s fine. I’ll get it myself.”
He did. And then sat, in the easy chair without the footstool where Tyler had been the day before.
He crossed his legs and turned the glass on the table and looked as tense as Alice had ever seen him. And she sat too, her legs on the ottoman, with an uneasy flutter in her stomach, waiting for him to begin.
“I’m sorry you’ve had the medical problems, with the blood clot complication and all. It’s nothing to take lightly.”
“No.” Her reading glasses were on the top of her head, and she took them off and set them on the table to have something to do with her hands.
“I see it as another indication that you and Dad should take things easier.” Richard wasn’t looking at Alice. He was pleating the crease in his trousers as though it actually mattered, or he was trying to look nonchalant about something that meant a great deal.
“Do you?” Alice was gazing at the painting, studying it from a distance, preparing herself for what was coming, the confrontation he’d come there to have that she’d read on his frayed-looking face.
“You don’t need the stress of running the business. You could paint all the time, and do what you like best.”
Alice sat for a second, taking a breath and letting it out, before she picked up the gauntlet. “Richard, can’t you see how much I love the business? Building it with your father has been the most significant accomplishment in my entire life. I love to paint as a… I don’t know. It satisfies a different side of me. I have to do it some time every year to express that visual part of who I am. But the business matters. There are living, breathing people at stake. People we supply, people we work with, people who depend on what we do. It’s dynamic. It’s organic. It’s fascinating to Booker and me, and the people who work at Blue Grass Horse Vans deserve our dedication. I’m not ready to retire, Richard. And neither is your dad.”
“You don’t trust me to run it well!” His skin had flushed a mottled pink, and his hands gripped the arms of his chair as though they needed to be controlled.
Alice studied him for a minute – the small-boned face, the formless chin, the eyes that rarely looked at you directly, the soft sedentary body. “Richard, no one has ever told you that you would take over for Booker. We don’t know what we’ll do. It would depend on what the business is like when the time comes, or what we think it can be in the future, and what kind of leadership it needs to get there. We might bring in someone from outside with more extensive business experience than any of us in the family has.”
“No, you’ll let Spencer run it!”
“Nothing has been decided. And I don’t think now is the time to—”
“You’ve never loved me. You’ve never taken me seriously, not like you have Spencer!”
“Richard, please—”
“And he’s the one who got engaged to the slut from accounting!”
“How can you—”
“Dad even holds it against me that I couldn’t go in the army like Spencer, when I wanted to fight and couldn’t because of my heart murmur!”
“That’s not true, Richard, your dad—”
“I want to prove myself to you and Dad. I want Lily to see what I can do, and that you two have faith in me!
“It’s not that we—”
“At least make me a V.P. now, and get Dad to retire next year. I can do the job, I know I can, and Lily would be wonderful as V.P. of Personnel.”
“So is this you or Lily asking?”
“Why do you always say that! You’ve never given me a chance. You’re too demanding. And you’re harder on me than anyone else!”
“We don’t demand more of you than we do Spence. But family has to work harder, and do a better job, Richard, than anybody else. We have to set the example. Being in charge isn’t glamorous, you know. Not if you do it well. There’s more stress. The worst decisions are yours. And you have to be a servant. A good leader really does have to serve. More than you can imagine. And I don’t think recognizing that and being able to do it is something that can be taught.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“No?” Alice rubbed the side of her right knee and then wrapped her hands together in her lap. “You want me to tell you what I really think? The way I would another employee?”
Richard looked unnerved for a second, taken aback and uneasy, as he stood up and walked toward the painting, then turned stiffly, and nodded.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not really interested in the business. You love ham radio and model trains. You can’t get enough of talking to people all over the world on your radio, and most of those conversations are about trains of one sort or another. Modern trains, antique trains, model trains most often. You don’t even travel anywhere that isn’t connected to trains. Theoretically you care about the business, but you don’t. Not really. Not like you do your trains.”
“That’s not fair!”
“I think it was a mistake for you to not work other places before you came to work for us. If you had, you would’ve known more about what you want, and what your talents are, and what your limitations are too. And what it means to have to please a boss who isn’t your father or mother. It was our fault as much as yours. We should have insisted.”
“What difference would that have made? I only—”
“And now I’ve come to the crux of the issue. You still want to hear what I think?” Alice was looking straight at him, quiet and self-contained, committed to doing what she thought she should’ve done years before this.
“I don’t know. Do I?” Richard stared out the back for a minute, then turned and said, “I thought I heard someone in the kitchen.”
“Mary’s brought the mail. She’ll drop it off and go. So?”
“Go ahead. Finish what you were saying.”
Alice paused and drank some water, then looked Richard in the eye again. “I don’t think you’re suited to running the business. I think you’d be better off doing something you love, the way Booker loves this. You’re not an engineer. You don’t like horses, or understand what they need. Maybe you took the easy way out. Thinking that if you went to work for your dad you’d always have a job, and promotion would be easy.”
“Wait a minute—”
“There’s more to life, Richard. Maybe you should think about working for some business that has to do with trains. A commercial train manufacturer, or a train museum maybe, or a model train maker. Something that really gets you excited. You know a tremendous amount about all those areas, and you could do a great job. Even something connected to ham radio, I don’t know. I’m talking to you the way I would anybody else who wasn’t happy in his job. I’m risking saying something that will hurt you because I love you very much, and I want you to be satisfied and feel good about what you’re doing.”
Richard’s face was white and waxy-looking. His hands had clenched against his sides. His mouth hung half-open, and his eyebrows had crushed against his eyes in what looked like horror and fury. “How can you say that to me?! After all the years I’ve worked for you! How can you throw away everything I’ve done as though it’s utterly worthless!”
“It’s not at all worthless. It’s just not what you love. And it’s not making you feel fulfilled.”
“Why do you say that! How do—”
“Because I love you, and I think it’s true.”
His chin was trembling and his eyelids were edged with red when he picked up Alice’s palette and slammed it onto the floor. “Lily’s right! Neither of you appreciate me for what I do! All you can see is that Spencer is like you two!” He picked up a coffee can of soapy water and threw it against the far wall.
“Richard, stop!”
“Shut up! I wish you’d died from the blood clot!”
Alice was trying to get up out of her chair, pushing the ottoman off to the side, when Jack Freeman ran across the terrace and in through the French doors. “Are you alright, Mrs. Franklin?” He glanced once at Alice from between her and Richard, having braced himself to stop Richard, if he made a move.
“I’m fine, Jack. Thank you. But I do think it might be better if we talked about this later, Richard.”
“It’s none of your business, Freeman. You’re the hired help, remember? This is between my mother and me!”
“Your mother asked you to leave.” Jack spoke calmly, but he didn’t blink or budge.
Richard glared at Alice for half a minute, then back again at Jack, before he walked across the gallery toward the front hall.
“I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, Richard. But real good can come out of this. We’ll talk about it again, alright?”
“Oh, I’ll be back! You can count on that! When we can talk alone!”
Two hours later, Mary Treeter came in the back door bringing Alice her groceries, and a Tupperware bowl of her special tuna salad, along with a loaf of homemade bread.
It was quiet this time. No raised voices and arguing. And she figured Alice had lain down again to put her legs up before dinner.
Peggy James got there at seven, expecting to walk in the front door, and found that it was locked. It wasn’t that that didn’t make sense. Alice could’ve changed her mind. It was nighttime, and she was alone. Why shouldn’t she lock her doors?
Peggy used the key Alice had given her and laid Alice’s office mail and typed correspondence on the desk in her study. She didn’t hear Alice moving around, but she didn’t expect to when Alice was painting. She just picked up the Dictaphone and went out the front door, locking it behind her.
Mary Treeter called Alice at eight, not wanting to wait till later in case Alice went to bed early, the way she surely should. She needed to ask Alice what time she wanted her there the next morning to clean the house and do the ironing.
There was no answer. And it troubled her. Alice could be in the shower. That might explain it. Anywhere else she’d be near enough to a phone that the fifteen rings would’ve given her time to get there and answer.
’Course she couldn’t ignore Richard’s voice that afternoon, when she’d taken Alice’s mail in and heard them in the gallery. The way he’d talked to his own mother, that had been real upsetting. And she hoped Alice hadn’t been hurt by it, or suffered a bad turn.
Mary told her husband, Carl, she was fixing to walk over to the Franklins’ again to make sure Alice was alright.
She went in the back door, using her own key, and stood in the kitchen listening. She called Alice and got no reply. And walked on into the dining room, then turned left into the back hall (which was open on the left the whole length of the gallery), intending to check in the bedroom.
The basement door was standing open halfway across on the right, and that seemed real peculiar. The light was on in the basement too, falling out on the hall floor turning the flagstones yellow.
Mary stood on the dining room rug and stared straight ahead for a minute, with a thundering in her chest and a sick feeling in her stomach – even before she walked on across and looked into the basement.
Alice Franklin lay in a twisted tangle on cold concrete at the bottom of the wooden stairs, blood dried at the corner of her mouth, her eyes wide open.
Mary Treeter whimpered as she started down – not screaming, even at the bottom – but keening as she hurried on, certain in the marrow of her bones before she got to the foot of the stairs that Alice Franklin was dead.
Mary’s husband, Carl, got there a minute after she phoned him, and Dr. Nesbitt ten minutes after that. He called Earl Peabody, the county sheriff, and Richard Franklin, who seemed stunned and thoroughly confused, before he said he’d call Booker and Spencer wherever they were in England.
Mary phoned Peggy James, knowing how much Alice meant to her, while they waited for Peabody – milling around, repeating themselves, wishing there was something they could do.
Peabody had his men photograph the scene, including the bottles of prescribed medication set out on a table on the gallery. There was a half-drunk cup of coffee, and a glass of water beside it, and bottles of Warfarin and codeine too, prescribed after her surgery.
“It don’t make sense, Earl.” Mary was wiping her eyes with a rumpled handkerchief she’d found in the pocket of her housedress, as she pointed to the codeine tablets sitting by the glass on the table. “Alice didn’t take pain pills once she got home from the hospital. Just that first afternoon. The day she got home. We talked about it more than once. Codeine made her queasy and all, and dizzy, and she wanted no part of it. Said they made her real depressed and weepy like too, and she hated that more than anything. Said she’d rather be feelin’ a whole lotta pain, than want to burst into tears.”
Earl Peabody watched Mary for a minute – the short, plump, kindly-looking woman with the frizzy brown hair and pale hazel eyes and soft sincere looking mouth. “You’re sure, Mary? You know for a fact she wasn’t takin’ ’em?” He was a tall man, heavy but strong looking, with thin brown hair, and thick black framed glasses, and a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt pointing at the bottle.”
“You’ve known me since the second grade, Earl Peabody. Would I say it like I was sure if I wasn’t?” Mary looked like a small ruffled hen by the time she finished.
Earl put a hand up as though he were appeasing his mother or stopping a nervous horse. “I know, and I trust you. I was just makin’ sure. It’s a real important point.”
“And why would she fall down the stairs? She wasn’t s’pposed to be climbing stairs yet, and she’d have no reason to go in the basement. And even if she did, she’d know to hold on to the railing and take her time. She was moving around real careful all the time, ’cause she knew with all the blood thinners she was takin’ she couldn’t afford to risk a fall and start her brain or her insides bleedin’.”
“So you’re sayin’ you reckon she was pushed.”
“I am. It stands to reason.”
“You got anybody in mind?”
Mary stood there and looked at her husband, who rubbed her shoulder as though he were encouraging her to go ahead and get it said.
“Her son, Richard. He was here this afternoon. I brought her mail in a little before four and left it in the kitchen, and they were in the gallery here, and he was real upset. I couldn’t hear what he was saying too clear, but he was mad, I know that, and talking to her in a mean voice, and it made me real disgusted.”
“But you don’t know what he said?”
“That’s what I just told you. The new yardman was here too. Jack. Freeman, I think it is. He might could tell you more. He was clipping shrubs by the terrace when I was walking home.”
Tuesday, May 22, 1962
Jack got a call from Peggy James before six, and called Jo at seven that morning to tell her about Alice, and what Richard said the afternoon before about wishing she’d died from the clot. Jack said he was on his way to talk to the police but thought she’d want to know.
Jo called Peggy James at her house at seven-thirty. Jo’s mother had been a good friend of Peggy’s, and Jo wanted to hear her version of what had happened. Peggy told her what she knew about the day before. And that she’d eventually figured out that the car that was parked across the street belonged to Michael Westlake, an employee Alice had fired for drinking on the job – a big man who’d acted violent when she let him go.
Peggy told Jo she was going to tell the Sheriff about Westlake being there, and about the phone call Alice had gotten the morning before too, though she didn’t know who’d called.
The autopsy was done that morning in a hospital morgue in Frankfort, Kentucky, and the preliminary results were reported later in the day. More complicated tests would take longer, but they did find high levels of both codeine and Warfarin in her system. And she did die of bleeding in the brain. So the “death by unknown cause” investigation went forward as expected.
The fact that Midway and Versailles were very small towns made investigation easier in certain ways. Lexington itself was a small town too, in the sense that in all three communities’ generations of people seemed to know each other, plus distant relations, and all personal business as well (hidden or exposed) with encyclopedic thoroughness and nearly total recall.
That didn’t necessarily lead to accuracy and proper perspective, but in the case of Alice Franklin’s death it brought people forward with a willingness to pass on information that sped up the process.
Peggy James went to see Earl Peabody at eight thirty Tuesday morning, when he was talking to Jack Freeman who’d presented himself at the station to tell him about Richard’s confrontation with Alice, and that he’d said he wished she’d died from the blood clot.
Peggy told Earl about the phone call Alice got at nine the morning she died, and everything else that had passed between her and Alice, and her return at seven the night before when the front door was locked. She told him about seeing the car parked across the street, and that she’d finally remembered it belonged to Michael Westlake, who’d been fired by Alice, and been violent at the office, and might bear a grudge.
Michael Westlake came to the station at ten-thirty that morning to tell the chief that he’d gone to see Alice the morning before. He’d talked to her after Peggy left and thanked her for letting him go. He’d told her that that had been the shock he’d needed, and that being arrested in Lexington and spending more than three weeks in the hospital had dried him out and given him the opportunity to talk to someone who helped. He’d joined A.A. and had a mentor he respected, and he’d since set about making beneficial changes in his life. He’d asked Alice to consider taking him back, and she’d said she’d think about it and talk to Booker when he phoned from England. They’d parted on very friendly terms, just as Jack Freeman had come in the house to get her instructions for the day, so he’d be able to corroborate that.
Jessamine Collins, who’d been a good friend of Alice’s, and who ran her house as a B&B, stopped by to see Earl Peabody right before lunch. Alice had sent her a guest on Sunday night, a man named Tyler Babcock who’d grown up with Alice in Virginia. He’d had dinner with Alice Sunday and stayed in Jessamine’s B&B Sunday night, then had called Alice Monday morning about nine. Jessamine had heard his side of the conversation, since he’d phoned from the kitchen when she was making breakfast for her other guests.
He’d thanked Alice for talking to him and said that he’d been thinking about what she’d said. That he’d stay on the Cape for now and tell his wife where he was. And he’d call Alice in a few weeks and tell her what he’d decided. He finished the call and left shortly thereafter. Where he was going Jessamine couldn’t say, but she did have the address in North Falmouth, Massachusetts he’d left on her guest registry and the license plate of his car.
She gave that to Peabody and went to see Peggy James. She thought Peggy should know about his visit and decide what to tell the family.
Jo heard that from Peggy in the afternoon and wished that Alan were back from Cincinnati. She kept worrying about Spence and Booker, and how they must be taking the news, knowing from her own experience what it’d been like to lose her father and Tom too soon, and not get to say good-bye.
When Jo was walking down her drive to get the mail after dinner, she was thinking about her parents, and the differences between Spencer and Richard Franklin, and The Death of Ivan Ilych too – the sense he’d had of being shunned by his family as the cancer got worse, and what her mother might’ve been feeling when she still knew what was happening.
And then Jo opened the mailbox and found a small white envelope addressed to her in big block letters.
She turned it over. And over again. And opened it up as she walked toward the house.
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID
I WILL MAKE YOU PAY
The words were cut from a magazine and glued on heavy paper. And Jo stopped in the middle of the driveway, twenty feet from a cluster of yearlings who were swishing their tails in a cloud of flies, staring soberly at her as her stomach stuck in her throat.
Wednesday, May 23, 1962
Seven hours later, about two o’clock that morning, Toss was awake and restless, lying in bed with the windows open next to him, staring out at the stars and planning his getaway a few hours later when friends were coming to take him fishing up west of Louisville to some other fella’s lake – when he thought he heard a car start up somewhere down the lane, almost up to the road.
He grabbed his walker and dropped into his chair and wheeled across to the phone in the front hall and called Buddy at the tenant house. He told him to check the horses in the paddocks and all the barns too.
He sat there, wheeling himself back and forth from the hall to the dining room and into his bedroom, then back again to the hall – till he grabbed the phone after the first ring to keep it from waking Jo.
All the horses seemed fine. There was no sign of any intruder. The only thing that seemed different at all was that way over in the stallion barn, where Tuffian and Sam were stabled during the day, the cabinet in the feed room where they stored medications and first aid supplies – the cabinet door that didn’t fit right, that you had to know how to jimmy with – wasn’t closed all the way. But that might not mean much. Buddy could’ve done that himself without noticing it wasn’t closed.
Toss thanked him and told him to get some sleep. Then lay awake, thinking about his trip, till it was time to get up.