A Deadly Snow Fall (21 page)

“So, a full investigation is underway?” I
asked, feeling pleased.

“Yup, nobody missing in town at that time,
but we’ll reach wider for missing persons who might have been
visiting here around sixty years ago.” James pulled me into a big
hug. “Got to hand it to you, Liz. You have the mind of a
sleuth.”

I smiled, pleased that there just might
eventually be justice for the miserable old man and punishment for
his killer. I kept mum, however, on my next plan.

“Oh, I forgot to ask. Did you ever check with
the bank to see if Edwin made any large withdrawals or wrote any
large checks?” I asked James.

“I checked and he didn’t. In fact, the man
lived on almost nothing. Took out forty dollars a month in cash and
all in small change. Drove the teller nuts. Brought in an old ratty
canvas sack to pick up his coins. Dead end if he was being
blackmailed. I’d say he managed to avoid paying.”

“So, he must have fended off the blackmailer
somehow. Makes sense that the blackmailer would have been pretty
frustrated, and murder might have been the result. The thing that
sounds strange, however, is the description of Edwin looking smug
and almost amused by the blackmail attempt. At least, according to
Mario at Sal’s Place. A rather odd reaction, wouldn’t you say? I
mean, who is amused by blackmail?”

“Only the odd, I’d say.”

Wednesday morning found us at Mary Malone’s
cozy house sitting in comfy chairs with antimacassars. I had
weakened and decided to share my plan with James. After all, the
Edwin Snow death was now officially a possible murder case. In
addition, with arson, blackmail and a cold case torso in Mary
Malone’s garden, it seemed we ought to achieve more working as a
team.

Patton had just been bathed and coiffed at
veterinarian Taylor Eastman’s pet grooming parlor where mostly dogs
but the occasional cat came out looking “best in show.” Patton was
grinning from ear to ear looking spit and polished and seemed to be
seeking compliments. “Oh Patton, you are so handsome. What a fine
looking fellow you are.” This got me lots of wet, doggie kisses.
Mary laughed and it was obvious that she was enjoying her new
companion.

We had come to discuss a female partial
skeleton found in her garden, but Mary appeared undisturbed.
Greeting us at her front door wearing a butter yellow sweater set
with a pearl necklace, a matching skirt and old lady sturdy white
tie shoes, she might have stepped out of a children’s book. A
beloved grandmother. Greeting visitors for tea.

“Come in, children; come in. Isn’t it a fine
day? My flowers are coming up daily. I love this season, don’t
you?”

“So nice of you to have us, Mary, and, yes,
it is a grand day indeed.” The lilt of James’s voice spoke of four
leaf clovers and warm from the oven Irish soda bread. The man was
certainly a charmer. But a charmer as solid and sincere as the
rolling green hills of Eire. Definitely a keeper.

“I wonder, dear,” she said to James, “if
you’d put this fellow out into the backyard. He’s needing a bit of
fresh air; been in all morning keeping me company. Now that you are
here, it’s time for him to go and frolic about a bit. Such a good
companion he’s become to me.”

James led Patton to the back door and out he
went, but instead of frolicking the dog walked to the very center
of the fenced-in yard, lay down with his chin on his paws and gazed
in the direction of his former home. Of course, there was nothing
to see but a raked-over blackened scar on the land. I wondered if
tears were running down the handsome white and black face spoiling
his body coiffure.

“Coffee or tea, dears?”

“Whatever you are having Mrs. Malone.
Thanks.”

The conversation took off on its own
independent course as Mrs. Malone told us stories about the old
days in town and about some of the old town characters. She told us
about the fish weirs just offshore that trapped tinker mackerel and
how she and Edwin, when they were youngsters, would go out to buy a
bucket of them from the old fisherman who tended them. “His name
was Harry Mutt, so all the children made fun of him calling him Dog
Man and Mixed Breed. Children are often not very kind.”

“Was Edwin a good friend to you, Mrs.
Malone?”

“It’s just Mary, dear. And, yes; we were the
best of friends all through childhood but later…when he came back
from Yale, he’d grown mean. Just like old Ned, his father.”

“Do you recall anything odd going on over
next door, Mrs. Malone, way back?”

“Odd, you say? Well, dear, you’ve come to the
right place. There were a lot of odd things going on over there all
the time. I know everything about that balmy family. You see Edwin
and I are, well, we were, until he died, the same age. I was born
in this house on a stormy November day and two months later Edwin
was born next door. Didn’t run off to the hospital back in those
days to have babies. Well, the closest hospital was in Plymouth
anyway so why set out to drive a hundred miles and just have the
little one on the way? Better for a woman to stay snug in her own
home and her own bed with the local midwife there to attend to her
in her important moment. Ours was Maggie Crocker. She delivered
ninety-six babies in her long career. Imagine that? Everyone called
her Mother Goose, just like in the nursery rhymes. Because she kept
geese.”

“What wonderful memories you have, Mary.” I
was fascinated and wanted to hear more. I nearly lost track of why
we’d come, but the afternoon was young and all I had waiting for me
was an eight bedroom inn waiting to be prepared for the long busy
summer season. C’est la vie.

“My mother survived, but Edwin’s did not. The
poor little motherless tyke was nursed by my mother. She told me
how she’d have one on one side and the other on the other side, and
that is why we grew up more like siblings than just neighbors. My
mother never understood why sweet Annabelle Jenkins ever married
that nasty thieving Ned Snow in the first place. But once he had a
son, my mother at least expected him to take some interest in the
tiny innocent baby. But he couldn’t have cared less. So poor Edwin
spent most of his childhood in our house. My mother took him in
like a stray cat. Fed him, made sure he put on his boots and
mittens, made his school lunches and patched up his skinned knees.
Edwin loved my mother like she was his own. Old Ned Snow just went
about his business stealing land for back taxes and putting people
on the street with never a fare thee well. Never even knew where
his son slept of a night. Imagine?”

“So, you and Edwin probably had no secrets,
then?” Time to detour the fascinating trip down memory lane at this
juncture before we got too far off of a winning tack. Mary’s
lead-in seemed a good opportunity for me to take the tiller.
James’s eyes said, tread carefully.

“You know how it is, Liz. When you get to the
teen years, boys get weird.” That brought laughter. Mary put out
her hand and lay it on James’s hand. “But, probably not you, dear
boy. I suspect you’ve always been sweet and reliable.” James
actually blushed.

“What I mean is,” she turned toward James,
“boys are so silly and immature and such…what is it my nieces say?
Oh yes, dorks. Well, that was when Edwin and I began to drift
apart. However, the drift became a chasm when he returned from Yale
and just stayed. He had no ambition. He was wasting all that fine
education. I blame that strange group he joined at Yale--Skull and
Bones.”

“Did you talk after that? When he came home
and just hung around?” I hoped she would tell us why he made such
an odd life choice.

“No. Well, by then I had met my
husband-to-be. Although I had loved Edwin for all of my growing up
and actually believed he loved me and that naturally we’d marry one
day, I finally realized it was not going to happen. My Charles was
a good man. I decided not to wait so I married Charles.”

“Did his father mind his being home again?”
James asked.

“From what I could tell, Edwin and old Ned
just sort of bumped along on their separate roads through life as
they always had. Lived in the same house but they might have been
living in different towns.” Mary looked toward the place where the
house once stood.

“Did his father support him?” I asked.

“Didn’t need to. Edwin had a sizable trust
fund. However, until he turned twenty-one, he received only a
small, monthly stipend. Later, when he came of age, he had control
of his own money. Up until then, however, the old man paid for
school and books and such, although most reluctantly. I do remember
letters to me from Edwin when he was still at college complaining
about how he had to beg his father for money when his monthly
stipend didn’t stretch far enough.

Her eyes misted over and we looked away to
give her time to gather her emotions.

“His letters to me were few and far between
by then, but I do know that there were times at Yale when he went
hungry. I started sending him care packages. Son of the richest man
in town and I was using my allowance to send him cans of baked
beans and Spam and boxed cookies.”

“Can you tell us about Edwin and Rosita
Gonsalves?”

“Always liked Rosita. That is, until she left
poor Edwin standing at the altar feeling like a fool. I was there
that day and my heart just broke. I suppose that time stands pretty
much alone as a day when the entire town felt pity for poor Edwin
Snow. Over the years I’ve thought about how strange it was that the
two women who caused havoc and loss in Edwin’s life were
Portuguese.”

“Edwin’s mother was Portuguese, Mary?”

“No, no, dear. It was his father’s kept girl.
That tramp, Estrella. She came to live with old Ned while Edwin was
away at college. No shame at all. It was she who convinced the old
man to cut his own flesh and blood out of his will and leave his
millions to her. Traipsing around like she did half naked in front
of proper neighbors. Well, she got her just desserts, now didn’t
she?”

Silence. James and I shared a look of
confusion. Had Estrella’s just desserts been murder, I wondered? I
could feel James having a similar thought. So, Edwin had come home
and killed the interloper who was after his father’s wealth. Made
sense. Then, afterwards he gave up on any plans he’d had for a
career and just slipped into a miasma of guilt and ennui. He lost
all interest in life and since every one expected him to be like
his father anyway, why not fulfill their expectations? A
psychologist’s dream patient. I pulled my mind back from my
sleuth’s daydream. It seemed we might have the answer to the cold
case. Edwin as murderer of his father’s wild gold-digging
mistress.

I opened my mouth to speak but James put his
finger up to his lips and we sat silent. I knew he feared
interrupting the flow of the story. Once again, Mary picked up
where she’d left off.

“Ned, of course, had no concern for the
scandal he was involved in. He lived with her openly and she
flaunted her flashy clothes and jewelry all over town.”

James had said the arson squad found a trunk
full of women’s flashy clothes in Edwin’s office that survived the
fire. So, they belonged to old Ned’s mistress. But, why would Edwin
have kept them? Well, no accounting for the deranged mind of a
killer.

“When Edwin found out that the old man had
written him out of the will in favor of his girlfriend he came to
me. Knew I’d never judge him and always be there to put a band-aid
on his wounds. Just like my mother. But, I wanted to be more than a
surrogate mother to Edwin.” Mary sighed deeply. “I remember him
sitting in my kitchen just seething. Why, I thought his head would
go up in flames, he was that mad.”

“What did he do? Did he move out of his
father’s house?”

“No, he just dug himself in like a mole,
refusing to leave his room. But I knew he snuck out after dark and
went into town to drink with his pals. The few pals he had left.
Then one day, like a miracle, Estrella was gone. There at breakfast
and gone by midnight. Everyone just figured she and the old man had
quarreled and she left to punish him.” Mary grew quiet,
contemplative.

“If she was a local girl, Mary, hadn’t
someone missed her? Wasn’t Estrella reported missing?” James’s mind
grabbed onto this story like a tick on a deer.

“She was a half-breed. That’s what the
Portuguese-Indians were called back then. No longer politically
correct, according to Bill Windship. But, you know what I mean.
Estrella was sort of adopted by a local family. Norm and Millie
Tavares over to The Point took her in. Never legally adopted her
but just as well. Estrella was a wild thing. Nothing but trouble
from the day they gave her a home. She was pure blooded Wampanoag
on her mother’s side and her father was from Portugal. Both of them
drowned on a trip back from Boston on a coastal schooner, but the
baby was found floating on top of a trunk in the bay. Everyone else
drowned. After she turned sixteen she took her mother’s Indian
name, Proudfoot. Princess Proudfoot she called herself. The old man
only encouraged her by watching her dance around like a wild Indian
in the backyard.”

Proudfoot. Princess Proudfoot! The name
ricocheted around in my brain as if it was a squash court. Then it
came to me. Emily, or Eloise, had contacted a Princess Proudfoot.
Nosy Emily would probably have picked up that Estrella was related.
She made it her life’s mission to know everything about everyone,
even going back into the history of the village. Was her story
about the old sacred tribal burial ground just a ruse to put me
off--or a solid clue? Did Emily know that Edwin killed his father’s
mistress? And if she did know, then it made sense that she might
have been blackmailing him with this knowledge? But why? What could
Emily have hoped to gain and now that he was dead why not tell what
she knew? I couldn’t wait to share this with James.