A Killer Past (3 page)

‘What did you get her for her birthday?’

‘I gave her that pin, the one you saw the day you helped me take Harry’s clothes to the Salvation Army. And, of course, money. What else can you give a teenager nowadays? Shannon has definite ideas of what’s cool and what’s “Oh, so last year.”’

‘Did she like the pin?’

‘I think so. I… .’ The sound of her doorbell stopped her, and Mary felt her heart start racing. ‘Someone’s here,’ she said, suddenly very tense. ‘I’ll … I’ll call you back later.’

T
HE
FRONT
DOOR
opened a-ways, a safety-chain holding it in place. Through the opening, Jack could see a white-haired woman on the other side, wrinkles etching the corners of her blue eyes and around her mouth. ‘Yes?’ she said, frowning slightly.

‘I’m looking for Harry Harrington,’ Jack said. ‘Is he home?’

The woman’s frown turned into a smile. ‘He’s in his eternal home.’

‘Eternal…?’

‘He’s dead,’ she supplied. ‘My husband died two years ago.’

‘Oh.’ It was Jack’s turn to frown. He turned slightly and pointed to the west. ‘The car. It’s registered to him.’

‘Oh, yes, the car.’ She sighed and cocked her head to the side. ‘And you’re?’

‘I’m sorry.’ He pulled out his identification. ‘Sergeant Jack Rossini. And you are…?’

‘Mary Harrington. I know I should have gotten the registration on the car changed, but …’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know, seems like every time I was going to do it, something came up. But I will get it moved. I—’

‘Could I come in?’ he asked, interrupting her. ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions.’

‘You want to come in?’ She hesitated, making him wonder if she might say no, then she pushed the door shut.

He was about to yell at her through the door when he heard her disengage the chain. Once again the door opened.

Jack wasn’t quite sure how to categorize the woman standing in front of him. Her outfit – the bright orange sweatpants, black turtle-neck top, and fluffy pink bedroom slippers – reminded him of
the attire worn by some of the residents at the local nursing home, and her long, white hair could certainly use a good brushing, but the way she was looking at him indicated an alert mind. He guessed her height around five-five or -six, and she didn’t slouch, as so many older women did. She also didn’t have a midriff bulge and probably didn’t hit a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet.

Although she wasn’t wearing any makeup, and gravity had turned one chin into two, he had a feeling she’d been quite stunning in her younger years, and he wondered how old she was.

‘Come on in,’ she said and motioned toward the kitchen. ‘I was just having a cup of tea. Would you like some? Or maybe coffee?’

A wooden table with orange jack-o-lantern-shaped placemats sat to the side of a marble-topped counter. He saw a mug on one of the placemats, an ice pack next to it. A few feet away, one of those single-cup coffee makers sat on the counter. Since he didn’t like tea, his decision was easy. ‘Coffee would be great.’

‘Light roast, medium, or dark?’ she asked, pointing at a carousel with a variety of small containers.

‘Oh, I don’t care.’ He watched her limp over to the coffee maker. ‘Did you hurt yourself?’

She gave him a quick glance, and for a moment he thought he saw a look of fear, but then she shrugged and smiled. ‘Tripped coming down the stairs.’

He could see a staircase, just off to the right of the entryway. ‘Those are pretty steep stairs. Are you all right?’

‘A little bruised up,’ she said. ‘That’s all. Go ahead. Sit down. Take off your coat.’

Jack pulled out the wooden chair on the side of the table opposite the placemat with the mug and ice pack. He shrugged out of his overcoat before he sat down, and from the inside pocket of his wool jacket removed a three-by-five notebook and the stub of a pencil. ‘Is there a reason you parked your car on Archer Street?’ he asked as her coffee maker began spewing coffee into a purple mug.

‘It stopped running,’ she said.

‘And what time was that?’

‘Hmm… .’ She brought the mug over and set it on the placemat
in front of him. ‘I’m not sure. Do you take milk or sugar?’

‘Neither.’ He shook his head, all the while watching her. ‘Morning, noon, or night?’ he asked, even though he already knew from reading the interviews of the neighbors that the car hadn’t been there until after dark.

‘Around ten, I guess. Ten or ten-thirty.’ She sat across from him and smiled. ‘At night.’

‘Really.’ Ignoring his coffee, he sat back and stared at her. The boys had said an old lady beat them up, but he hadn’t believed them, and he still couldn’t fathom how someone Mary Harrington’s size and age could take on the boys. ‘Two, ah… . Two young men were attacked in that area last night. Would you know anything about that?’

‘My neighbor called and told me about it,’ she said, looking him directly in the eyes. ‘In fact I was on the phone with her when you rang my doorbell.’ She shook her head. ‘Ella said a ninja beat them up. Is that true?’

‘Where’d she hear that?’

‘From one of the nurses at the hospital. Are the boys all right?’

‘They’ll survive. And no, I don’t think it was a ninja.’ Jack glanced at the ice pack on the table. ‘The incident happened about the time you say your car stopped running.’

‘Oh, my.’

‘Where were the boys when you left your car?’

She smiled. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see any boys.’

‘You’re sure?’ According to the report Jennifer had handed him before she left the station, more than one of the neighbors said the boys had been sitting outside of the abandoned house for over an hour. From where the Chevy was located, they would have been easily visible. ‘The boys were wearing sweatshirts. Hoodies.’

‘I guess I was simply focused on getting home.’

‘When I arrived last night, the boys said a woman beat them up. An old woman.’ He kept his gaze fixed on her face, waiting for her reaction.

‘Not a ninja?’

‘No. An old woman.’

She gave a stilted laugh. ‘And what where
they
smoking?’

‘How did you know they were smoking anything?’

She shook her head. ‘I didn’t, but really, an old woman beat them up?’

‘This woman might be in danger.’

‘How’s that?’ Her voice and eyebrows lifted slightly.

‘They’re members of a gang.’

‘Ah.’ She nodded. ‘Ella … my neighbor … and I were just talking about gangs. Wasn’t there another gang-shooting last night?’

‘Different gang,’ he said, unwilling to allow the conversation to be diverted. ‘This gang, the one the two boys belong to, is a particularly nasty group. Image is very important to them, and they would think nothing of killing someone they felt didn’t show respect. They wouldn’t want it getting around that a woman, much less an old woman, beat them up.’

‘So why aren’t they in jail?’

‘So far no one’s willing to testify against them.’

She gave a slight nod and then shrugged. ‘Well, from what you’ve told me, the ones doing the testifying would be the gang members. They were the ones beat up. Right?’

‘But maybe there was a reason for the beating.’ He waited, hoping she’d give him one.

‘Maybe,’ she said and lifted her mug of tea and took a sip.

‘Such as?’

She shrugged and set her mug back down. ‘I guess you won’t know until you find who did it.’

‘I think you know who did it,’ Jack said, irritated by her casual attitude.

‘Me?’ Again she shook her head. ‘No.’

He studied her for a moment, trying to figure out why she would hide the truth; finally, he decided it was fear. ‘You’re not going to get into trouble, you know. Even if they did press charges, no judge would believe you went out of your way to attack those boys. And, as of this morning, they’re not pressing charges. But if we could get them off the street… .’

He let the idea hang out there.

‘I’d like to help you,’ she said, oh so sincerely, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t.’

He pointed at her right hand. ‘I think that’s where you got those bruises, why you’re limping this morning.’

‘Oh, come on.’ She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her chest in a protective – or maybe defensive – manner. ‘I’m seventy-four years old. I have arthritis. Do I look like someone who could beat up two boys in their prime?’

He had to admit, the woman seated in front of him looked more like a grandmother than a fighter, but he knew things weren’t always as they appeared. ‘Have you ever studied the martial arts, Mrs Harrington?’

‘I’ve done a little tai chi at the gym,’ she said. ‘They say it’s good for your balance.’

‘I’m not talking about tai chi. The way the boys said it went down, you were delivering kicks and karate chops like a pro.’

‘Well, I can assure you, I’ve lived in this town for forty-four years and not once have I taken a class in martial arts.’ She pushed her chair back. ‘Is there anything else, Sergeant? If not, I need to call my son and see if he can come over and get my car running.’

‘I told you the boys aren’t pressing charges,’ Jack said and stood, ‘but that doesn’t mean they don’t plan on retaliating.’ He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out his business card. ‘Keep your doors and windows locked and give me a call if you see anything unusual.’

‘Unusual like…?’

‘Like groups of boys hanging out on the street corner, or cars going by your house real slow. Whatever you do, don’t open your door for anyone you don’t recognize.’

She took his card, gave it a glance, then slipped it into the pocket of her orange sweatpants. ‘There is one problem,’ she said and smiled.

‘And what’s that?’

‘It’s Halloween. I’m going to have lots of little strangers at my door tonight.’

‘You know what I mean,’ he grumbled and grabbed his overcoat.

R
OBERT
H
ARRINGTON
DIDN’T
arrive until 12.15. By that time, Mary had brushed her hair back into a twist, put on some makeup, and had downed enough tea to feel halfway decent. She didn’t, however, change out of her turtleneck, sweatpants, and slippers. Not only was the outfit comfortable, it covered most of her bruises.

She smiled when she opened the door and saw both her son and granddaughter. ‘Trick or treat, Grandma,’ Shannon said. ‘Dad’s taking me to lunch. Do you want to come, too?’

‘Oh, honey, I would love to, but I had a late breakfast,’ Mary lied. No need to chance Robby or Shannon noticing her limp or bruises. ‘No school today?’

‘Just this morning,’ Shannon said. ‘Teacher in-service this afternoon … or something like that. Are you sure you can’t come with us?’

‘I’m sure.’ Mary looked at her son. ‘Did you see the car?’

‘Not yet. What I need to know is what do you want me to do with it?’

For Mary, the answer was obvious. ‘Get it running.’

‘You know I don’t know anything about cars. That was Dad’s forte.’

‘Then have it towed somewhere where they can fix it.’

‘Mom, why beat an old horse to death? Get a new car. Or a new used car. They say that’s the wisest way to buy a car.’

‘Get something sporty, Grandma,’ Shannon added. ‘Something red, like mine.’

‘Or purple?’ she asked, knowing how her son would react.

Robby rolled his eyes. ‘Please, no.’

She grinned. The older Robby got, the more he looked and acted like his father. As the town dentist, Harry had always been aware of the image he projected, and their son had adopted the same attitude. At the moment, Robby was wearing a tailor-made pinstriped suit that emphasized his height and slender physique and gave him an aura of self-assurance. She knew, as a financial advisor, image was
critical. If you were going to handle a client’s money, you needed to look like you knew what you were doing. And it undoubtedly helped if your mother appeared respectable.

‘OK, no purple cars,’ Mary said. ‘Let’s see if we can get the old Chevy fixed.’ She pointed the direction of Archer Street. ‘It’s just two blocks over. Call Triple-A, they’ll tow it somewhere.’

‘Don’t you have a Triple-A card, Grandma?’ Shannon asked.

‘I do, but you have to be with the car, and I don’t feel like walking over there.’ She didn’t want to chance someone recognizing her from the night before, and her ankle still hurt.

Robby caught her hand as she brought it back to her side. He gently pushed her sleeve back from her wrist, but Mary couldn’t help flinching as the bulky knit rubbed over her bruise. ‘Now what have you done, Mom?’

‘I sort of ran into something.’

His gaze immediately went to the stairway behind her. ‘You didn’t fall down the stairs again, did you?’

‘No … I … I just sort of hit something.’

‘Like what?’

‘Something. It was dark.’

Her son gave a deep sigh. ‘Mom, what are we going to do with you?’

‘You don’t have to do anything.’

Again he looked behind her, at the stairway leading to the upstairs bedrooms. ‘It’s not safe for you to live here alone.’

‘I’m fine.’ She grinned, remembering her experience the night before. ‘I just ran into something I didn’t expect.’ To change the subject, she turned to her granddaughter. ‘I see you’re wearing the pin I gave you. Do take care of it.’

Shannon looked down at the small, diamond-encrusted gold box pinned to her sweatshirt. ‘Oh, I will. I love it.’

‘That was quite a gift,’ Robby said. ‘After you left last night, Clare looked it up on the Internet. You were right. It is called Pandora’s Box, but it’s not made by that company that makes the charms.’

‘Mom was really impressed,’ Shannon added. ‘She said it’s quite valuable.’

Robby looked at the pin on his daughter’s sweatshirt and then at Mary. ‘I don’t remember ever seeing you wear it.’

‘I haven’t. Not for years.’

‘Did Dad give it to you?’

‘No,’ she admitted, remembering the day her former partner gave her the pin, along with a passionate kiss. ‘It was a gift from a man I knew years before I met your dad.’

‘I’ll take good care of it,’ Shannon said. ‘I promise. I’ll treasure it for the rest of my life.’

Mary smiled. Those were almost the same words she’d said more than forty-four years ago. Back then, after that kiss, she’d wondered if she’d been a fool to keep David Burrows at arms’ length, if there might have been a chance for them. Two years later, she met Harry Harrington and knew she’d made the right decision. David would have given her passion and excitement; Harry gave her love and security, along with a child … and years later, a granddaughter.

Such a precious grandchild.

In many ways Shannon reminded Mary of herself. Whereas Robby had his father’s brown hair, brown eyes, and lean physique, Shannon had inherited Mary’s ash-blonde hair, blue eyes, and willowy figure.

Well, Mary thought, her hair used to be blonde and her figure used to be willowy. Over the years the color had faded to white and gravity had caused some of those curves to sag. Not that she cared at her age.

‘Did you two want to come in for a minute?’ she asked and took a step back.

The moment she put weight on her bruised ankle, pain shot up her leg, and she grimaced.

‘Are you OK, Mom?’

‘I’m fine,’ she lied, forcing herself not to groan. ‘It’s just my arthritis kicking in. And I suppose you two do want to get going so you can have lunch.’

Robby glanced at his watch. ‘It is getting late.’

‘So will you have time to call Triple-A today? I hate to leave the car parked on the side of the street for long. Especially tonight. Who knows what might happen to it.’

‘I’ve taken the afternoon off,’ he said. ‘After we have lunch, Shannon and I will take care of the car.’

‘Just let me know where it’s towed, and I’ll take it from there.’

Her son sighed. ‘Mom, why don’t you simply move into Shoreside? Then you wouldn’t need a car. They have vans that take residents wherever they want to go.’

They’d had this argument before. ‘I am not moving into a nursing home and taking a van wherever I want to go.’

‘It’s not a nursing home, it’s a—’

‘Forget it.’ They could call it a residential facility if they wanted, but she knew what Shoreside was, and she didn’t want to go there.

‘Mom, if it’s the idea of riding in the van that bothers you, one of us could always drive into town and pick you up.’

She shook her head. ‘Honey, I’m just not ready to go into one of those homes. They say today’s seventies are yesterday’s fifties.’

‘Maybe so,’ he said, ‘but you weren’t bumping into things in your fifties, and now that Dad is gone, I worry about you.’

Mary appreciated his concern, but thinking of the night before, she smiled. ‘Thank you, Rob, but I think I can still take care of myself.’

Back at the station, Jack tried to put Mary Harrington out of his thoughts. No charges had been filed by the two teenaged gang members, so there was no case to follow up on. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t have anything to do. As the town’s one and only special investigator his caseload didn’t allow time for pet projects.

But something wasn’t right.

Call it a gut feeling, intuition, or the result of thirty-four years of interviewing people, but Jack couldn’t shake the idea that Mary Harrington was involved in what had gone down the night before.

But how?

In a fight, guys in their teens or twenties could easily inflict the damage those two gang members had suffered, but a woman Mary Harrington’s age and size? It didn’t make sense. Yet she had those bruises, and her car was in the area where the boys had been attacked, left there according to her, just prior to the attack. Add in the testimony of Cora Black – iffy as that might be – and the
evidence certainly pointed to Mary Harrington being involved in some way or another.

During his lunch hour, just out of curiosity, he started searching through his computer for information about Mary Harrington. That’s when he came across the article and pictures of her in the
Kalamazoo Gazette.
She was one of three women profiled in the article. At age seventy-four she was the youngest of the three, the other two in their eighties. The picture of Mary showed her in Spandex shorts and a halter top lifting barbells, and Jack realized the bulky black sweater and orange sweatpants she’d had on when he interviewed her had hidden a well-toned body. Maybe gravity had added a sag here and there, and time had turned her hair white, but looking at the picture, he would have taken her for a much younger woman. Maybe not a twenty-year-old, but someone around forty or fifty. A well-conditioned forty or fifty.

The article touted how exercise could slow the aging process and ward off dementia, and how senior citizens who regularly exercised had fewer medical problems. There were quotes from each of the three women. The one attributed to Mary Harrington caught his attention. ‘Working out with the weights has improved my balance, as well as my strength.’

He grunted and looked back at her picture. She’d said she’d fallen down the stairs, that the fall had caused the bruising on her arm and was the reason for her limp. ‘You lied to me,’ he murmured to the picture.

‘What?’ the officer in the cubicle across the aisle asked, leaning back in his chair to look at Jack.

‘Nothing,’ Jack said and bookmarked the article. ‘Just talking to myself.’

He continued his search into Mary Harrington’s background by checking for a military record. Lifting weights wouldn’t have given her the skills to take down the two last night, not with her being a good six inches shorter than one of the boys and the other twice her weight, but military training might have.

He found no record of her ever having been in any branch of the service.

He also found no record of any arrests, no outstanding warrants,
and her driving record was clean, not even a parking ticket. Going back two years, he found an article announcing the death of Harry Harrington, a retired dentist. It listed Mary (Smith) Harrington as his wife, Robert Harrington as his son (married to a Clare Worthington), and one granddaughter, Shannon Harrington, all living in Rivershore. Harry also had a sister in Montana, and an uncle in Chicago.

The next mention of Mary Harrington was in a short article announcing that Robert (Rob) Harrington, son of long-time residents Harry and Mary Harrington, had joined a brokerage office in Rivershore. As far as Jack could tell, that was the last mention of Mary’s name until forty-two years earlier, when he found the record of her marriage to Harry Harrington. As in her husband’s obituary, Mary’s maiden name was listed as Smith.

Mary A. Smith.

Again he grunted. How common a name could you get?

Using her social security number, he narrowed his search for Mary down to the Mary A. Smith who opened a bookstore in Rivershore forty-four years ago. He found only one article about the store’s opening. There were quotes from Mary Smith, a picture of the storefront and another picture showing a mother and child looking at shelves of books, but there were no pictures of Mary herself. Six years later, a blurb appeared in the paper stating the store had been closed. Again, no pictures.

Other than the photos in the article on aging and exercise and on her driver’s license, Jack found absolutely no pictures of Mary A. Smith or Mary A. Harrington. And when he looked for anything about Mary prior to opening the bookstore, he came up empty-handed.

It was as though Mary A. Smith, later to become Mary A. Harrington, sprang to life at the age of thirty.

Witness Protection, he wondered.

Jack leaned back in his chair and considered the possibility. Forty-four years ago Rivershore was primarily rural: blueberry, apple, and grape crops were the area’s main source of income. Over the years the town had grown, but it was too far away from Lake Michigan to attract many tourists, and too far away from any major
interstate to lure major industry. Only recently had an environmental group cleaned up the river, bringing kayakers and canoers to Rivershore.

If Mary A. Smith did indeed witness a mob murder or political corruption, the government might have decided Rivershore was a safe place to hide her. She’d certainly kept a low profile. If he hadn’t stopped by her house that morning, he never would have known she existed.