The Death of Perry Many Paws (44 page)

I opened the trunk and leaned inside. There was more stuff in here than under Abbey’s bed. I pushed a bag of empty soda cans to the side and ran into a plastic bag filled with plastic bags. Then came the magazines, books, three unmatched gloves, an orange silk scarf, an unopened package of press-on nails, a tiger print beach towel, a piece of firewood, a red plaid metal lunch box, several containers of gas, a salt shaker, four combs, one yellow espadrille, a coloring book, a bunch
of paper and, finally, a plastic bag labeled “Confidence, Women’s Size X- Large.”

“Got them!” I pulled out two and handed them to Sybil who had caught her breath and come around to the back of the car to help me look.

“Thank you. I can’t make it back to the party. I’m going to run into the coffee shop across the street and change. Come with me. I’ll buy you a hot chocolate.” Sybil started across the street and I reached up to close the trunk and follow her. I gave the Buick junkyard one last look and my eyes fell on the pieces of paper. They were spread out all over the floor of the trunk and a “
See Here
” caught my eye. I moved them around and saw the words “Camden Woods” and “kidnapping.” My hands froze and slowly I straightened up and looked over at Sybil. She was halfway across the street and turned to see why I wasn’t coming. She froze.

I was rooted to the spot, my hand still on the lid of the trunk. She began to walk back across the street, staring at me. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. She came right up to me and slammed down the trunk.

“Get in the car, Tamsen.”

“I don’t want …”

“Get in the car. We need to talk.”

She grabbed my arm and pulled me to the side of the car, yanked open the passenger side door and pushed me in. I landed sideways on the seat and she had to stuff my dress and my legs in before slamming the door and getting in on the driver’s side. I was still trying to untangle myself from my skirts when we went squealing out of the parking space like Jeff Gordon after a pit stop.

y the time I was able to sit up, we were heading out of Birdsey Falls. Every time I started to ask a question Sybil would eyeball me into silence. I felt like I had with Syra when I thought she was poisoning me with hot chocolate. Once again, I was being overly dramatic. I wasn’t even sure that was Franklin’s manuscript in the trunk. It could have been something Sybil wrote. The
See Here
could be a coincidence. She could have pages
23
-
50
back there, too, for all I knew. There was lots of stuff back there. I probably hadn’t seen half of it. As to why she was acting like this, there could be a lot of reasonable explanations. By now she had probably wet her pants so she wanted to go home to change, although we were going in the opposite direction of Ashland Belle. Maybe we were going to my house to change. It was the right direction for that. She probably didn’t want to talk to me because she was embarrassed. Next Halloween we would be laughing about the whole thing. I just needed to stay calm and not overreact or do anything to make her think I suspected her of anything more serious than a weak bladder.

“Are those Franklin’s papers in your trunk?”

Sybil never took her eyes off the road but her hands clenched on the steering wheel. “Why would you ask that?”

“Because I saw a bunch of pages including a
See Here
in your trunk. I found
See Here
of something he was writing in his desk but the rest were gone. Those are his papers, aren’t they? How did you get them?”

“He gave them to me.”

“Why? What are they?”

“Just an old man’s ramblings about his life. He wanted me to put his thoughts in some kind of order for him. He had trouble concentrating.”

“I didn’t know you went out to the cottage to see him.”

“I rarely did. Claudia didn’t like to go because it made her too sad to see him like that so I went once in a while to check on him, bring him something, talk to him a little. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist. The last time I went he gave me the papers.”

“Oh. You know, you have a lot of junk in your trunk. Were those full gas cans you had back there? Those are dangerous to store in your car.”

“I know. I just got them today. I keep running out of gas. Something is wrong with my gauge. Once I get it fixed, I’ll get rid of the cans.”

“Where are we going in such a rush? We’re driving around in circles. We just passed my house.”

“I need to talk to you about the ransom money you found. We needed to get away from the party and all the people.”

I glanced around at the woods and the blackness of the road ahead. “Aren’t we far enough away now?”

“I suppose so.” Sybil pulled the car to the side of the road and turned off the engine. “There are some things you need to know about that money. What I’m going to tell you, you are free to tell the police now that Franklin is gone. Then you need to let the whole thing rest and get on with your life. Let Claudia move on. Do you swear you will?”

“I’m not sure what I’m swearing to. But yes, I would like to get on with my life. Tell me the story first and then I’ll swear if I can.”

“It’s pretty simple, really. Ernie Whitcomb worked at the Behrends house doing yard work. He got to talking one day with Franklin about the games we were all playing under his direction. Franklin told him about the maps and how we had to go out and look for things, our versions of treasures. Apparently Ernie thought that was pretty interesting and asked Franklin to make him a map to a place in Camden Woods, a tree with a deep hole under it. He said he was going to show it to a friend of his and see if he could follow it. It was sort of a challenge, Ernie implying that no one other than kids could follow one of Franklin’s maps. Franklin took a lot of care with it, going back and forth to the tree several times and mapping it out in great detail. He said Ernie thought the map was great and even gave him a dollar for it. In 1938, a dollar was a lot of money, especially for someone in Ernie’s position. Franklin was surprised he was willing to part with that much money …”

“Because he had no idea that Ernie was expecting to use that map to get $10,000.”

“Right. So that was the end of it until the morning when they found Raymond Ketchum’s body and everyone started talking about the missing ransom. I was totally oblivious to all this at the time. Remember I was only six. I never heard this story until ten or eleven years later …”

“Franklin told you?”

“Yes. Within a few days, reading the newspapers and watching the police in the woods, Franklin realized the part he had inadvertently played in the whole crime. Once things had calmed down Franklin went to the tree that Ernie had asked him to make the map to. Sure enough, the ransom money was there.”

“How? How could they miss it? Did the brother take it there after Raymond had been shot? Why?”

“No, that idiot Ernie Whitcomb had shown Franklin the tree he wanted him to make a map to but had gone to the
wrong
tree to pick up the ransom. Ernie had given the map to Fletcher Ketchum and then, without a map for himself, gone to the wrong tree. The man was incompetent.”

“So he killed Raymond Ketchum and the ransom money was there all the time, only in another location?”

“Yes. Franklin realized Ernie had made a mistake. He didn’t know what to do but he felt guilty about making a map for a crime that ended in murder, so he took the ransom and hid it in his house.”

“Why not tell the police? He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“He was fifteen. He made a map telling a man where to make a ransom drop and the whole thing had ended in murder. He was scared to death and wasn’t sure if he had committed a crime or not. He didn’t dare tell anyone; he just hid the money …”

“And spent the rest of his life tortured by it.”

“Yes.”

“That’s horrible. And he was writing about it in those papers he asked you to look at?”

“Yes. I guess he finally needed to let the whole story out.”

Sybil and I sat and stared at the dark road ahead. This is what Franklin’s future must have looked like to him after he found the ransom money. I remember reading an article many years ago about the human brain and how it doesn’t finish developing until our twenties. It pointed out that teenagers make a lot of stupid decisions because of this lack of development. They just don’t think things through the same way an adult does.

“Sybil, who do you think killed Franklin?”

“I don’t know. At least they don’t think it’s Grace’s step-son anymore. If the police can’t figure it out, I doubt we will.”

“That’s not a satisfactory answer.”

Sybil reached over and held my hand. “I know it’s not. You’re still young and need to know all the answers. When you get to my age you realize that you can wait for a while because you don’t have a long time until all the answers will be known to you. Have patience, dear.” Sybil turned sideways, looking directly in my face and continued to hold my hand. “Remember earlier tonight when you asked me about having children?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’ve always felt that Claudia allowed me to share motherhood with her and that Cassandra and Cam were almost like my own children. Then you came along and I had another child. If I had had a daughter I would have liked her to be just like you.”

I could feel tears welling up as I reached over and hugged Sybil, suddenly so appropriate in her Mother Goose outfit. “I’ve always wished you were my mother-in-law, Sybil …”

“Don’t sell Claudia short …”

“I’m not. I’ve always given her the benefit of the doubt but she has consistently been mean-spirited and selfish and self-centered …”

“She is who she was brought up to be, Tamsen. Maybe with different parents and a different society and time she would have been more like you want her to be. But she was a success in everyone’s eyes. I was the failure making one disastrous marriage after another and going on the stage …”

“I like you better.”

“Thank you dear. I hope you like me enough that when I’m gone you’ll be kind to Claudia and protect her from the ugly things in life.”

Sybil was so sincere that I didn’t want to tell her that Claudia
was
one of the ugly things in life and I was the one who needed protection. She obviously saw a side of her that I’d never seen, which maybe didn’t even exist. But she meant well.

“I’ll try,” I promised.

“Good. Thank you. Now it’s time to stop all this crying and sentimentality and get going. I really do need to take care of the personal hygiene issue we started to take care of a while ago. Can you reach into the backseat and get one of those pads for me?”

“Of course.” I leaned over the seat and grabbed one off the seat where Sybil had thrown it when we made a quick and dramatic getaway from town.

“And, if you don’t mind, would you just step out of the car for a few minutes so I can change? I know it’s cold but I promise to be fast. Please? An old lady needs every shred of dignity that she can get.”

“Sure.”

Once again she reached over and gently squeezed my hand. I scrambled out of the car in my long skirts and moved to the side of the shoulder to give her some privacy. She started the car, probably to get the heat going again. I looked up at the stars. The night was unbelievably clear. I felt like I was at a planetarium and shortly different constellations would light up and a voice would explain to me what they were. I entertained myself describing the beauty of the autumn night sky and the constellations that were visible in all their glory at this time of the year. Suddenly I heard the gears shift in Sybil’s car and she spun its wheels, spraying dirt at me as she drove down the shoulder and bounced back onto the blacktop, tail lights racing away.

I was still standing there, dumbfounded, when I heard a terrifying crash and a loud explosion, and the woods burst into flames. Fire shot toward the sky like some kind of macabre fireworks display. I hitched up my skirts and began running toward the fire, screaming
Sybil’s name. If Grace had been there I know she would have serenely closed her eyes and felt the presence of Sybil’s spirit as it rose above the flames and shed all its worldly worries and pain. My spirituality is not as finely tuned as Grace’s, so I ran around screaming, heading toward the fire and then backing up as the heat rushed out to me like some poisonous snake flicking its tongue in warning. Finally I moved away, praying that the crash had killed her instantly and she had been gone before the car exploded and burned.