Copycat Killing: A Magical Cats Mystery (21 page)

I made lemon coffee cake to take to Roma’s and while it baked I put in a load of laundry and washed the kitchen floor. And since Owen was still outside I played an entire Barry Manilow CD, which meant Hercules followed me everywhere, bobbing his head, grooving to the music. We made a pretty darn good pair of backup singers for a little black-and-white cat and a librarian who couldn’t carry a tune if it came in its own bag with a handle.

Roma’s small, gray house was at the far end of Mayville, out past the marina. She smiled when she opened the door and she seemed more relaxed.

“You talked to Eddie,” I said.

Her cheeks got pink and she nodded.

Roma’s mother and her father—I couldn’t think of Neil as anything else—were in the living room.

Neil Carver, even in his seventies, was the type of man who always commanded attention, imposing without being intimidating, if that made sense. His hair was on the longish side, white and waving back from a high forehead and the proverbial steely gaze. His beard was mostly white as well, and closely cropped. And he had a beautiful voice, not surprising since he’d had a long and successful career as a TV journalist.

Neil got to his feet and we shook hands. “Hello, Kathleen,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.”

“It’s good to see you too, Neil,” I said.

I turned to Pearl. She had the same warm smile as her daughter but other than that they looked nothing alike. Pearl was tiny and wore her hair short, very similar to Maggie’s, with the same kind of beautiful, natural curl. She was soft-spoken and serious and on the two previous times I’d met her I’d gotten the impression that she thought carefully about every word before she spoke.

“Hello, Pearl,” I said, meeting her smile with one of my own.

“Kathleen,” she said. “I’m so glad you could join us.” She tipped her head—Roma often used the same gesture—and studied my scraped forehead. “I hope that feels better than it looks.”

“It does. Thank you,” I said.

We talked about everything but Wisteria Hill and Thomas Karlsson over supper. Roma had made a chicken and rice dish and salad with lettuce and tomatoes
from her kitchen window garden. Everything was delicious.

We moved into the living room for dessert. Roma sat on the edge of a brown leather tub chair and I took the matching seat beside her. I’d seen that look of determination on her face before and I knew the conversation was about to get a lot more personal.

“I know it can’t be easy,” she began. “But we need to talk about my father.” Her gaze went to Neil. “Thomas,” she added.

“You can ask me anything,” Pearl said. Neil’s hand slid over hers but he didn’t say anything.

Roma swallowed hard and I wanted badly to do something to make it easier for her. “Did you lie to me about him? About Thomas?” she asked her mother.

“Yes,” Pearl said, nodding almost imperceptibly.

“Was there…” Roma cleared her throat. “Was there anyone who would have wanted to kill him?”

“Yes,” Pearl said again.

Roma’s eyes never left her mother’s face. “Who?”

“Pretty much anyone who knew him,” Pearl said.

T
he words hung in the air like a fine haze of smoke from a cigar. Pearl edged forward on the sofa. “I’m sorry, sweetie,” she said. “I shouldn’t have put it so bluntly. It’s just that Tom made a lot of enemies.”

“What do you mean?” Roma asked. There was no emotion in her voice, but I could see her left hand, against her leg, clenched into a tight, knotted fist.

“For a while Tom worked for Idris Blackthorne.”

“Ruby’s grandfather.”

“Idris Blackthorne was the town bootlegger,” Pearl said. “Tom delivered and drove for him. There was some kind of dispute about money.” She shook her head slowly. “Idris wasn’t the kind of man to take kindly to being cheated.”

“Who else?” Roma asked.

“He had some kind of fight—not just words, punches—with old Albert Coyne. Albert had been cutting pulp up beyond Wild Rose Bluff for years. A couple of days later
someone put bleach in the engines of every one of his vehicles.”

“Tom,” Roma said.

“No one could prove anything, you understand,” Pearl said. “But it was the kind of thing he’d do.”

Neil picked up his wife’s cup and handed it to her. Then he looked at Roma. “Are you sure you want to hear all this?”

She smiled. It just didn’t quite make it to her eyes. “I do, Dad.”

He nodded and didn’t say anything else but I could see the pain this was causing him in the tight line of his jaw and the rigid set of his shoulders.

Pearl took a sip from her coffee and set it down again. Roma had picked up her own cup. She toyed with it, shot me a sideways glance and then, finally, looked at her mother again. “Do you have any idea why Tom might have ended up buried out at Wisteria Hill?” she asked.

Pearl rubbed the back of her narrow, gold wedding ring with her thumb. “I’ve been thinking about that since you called,” she said. “The only thing I can tell you is that Tom was a day laborer at Ingstrom’s for a little while. I don’t think they were working at Wisteria Hill. I think they were out at the old boat club, but I don’t remember for sure. And then Tom did something, or got in an argument with someone and they let him go. So he wasn’t working when he disappeared.”

She looked away for a moment. “I mean, when he died,” she added softly.

Roma stared at the floor, her lips pressed tightly together. Finally she lifted her head. “Why…why did you
accept that he’d just run off so easily? Weren’t you suspicious, even a little bit?”

Pearl took a breath and let it out. She was still fingering her wedding ring. “I probably should have been,” she said. “But Tom was the kind of person who didn’t deal with things head on. He passed the blame or he did something sneaky, underhanded.” Roma was about to say something but Pearl lifted a hand to stop her. “It wasn’t all his fault, either. I want you to know that.”

Neil still had his hand over hers. She gave it a squeeze. “I told you that Tom played baseball,” she said.

Roma nodded. “They were state champions his senior year.”

“That’s right,” Pearl said. “Your…Tom was good. Very, very good. And in those days baseball and hockey were a big deal around here. He’d started playing when he was about six. By the time he was twelve he was a summer league star. There’s no doubt it went to his head.”

“The high school team had never even been to the regional championships,” Neil said. “Let alone state. Tom could belt a pitch into the parking lot.”

“As long as he was hitting, no one cared about how he was behaving or whether he passed algebra,” Pearl added.

“So if he was that good, why wasn’t he playing professional baseball?” Roma asked. She took another drink of her coffee.

“He was invited to spring training by the Milwaukee Braves,” Pearl said. She looked at Neil beside her on the sofa. He smiled, but like Roma’s smile it didn’t go all the way to his eyes. “He only lasted a week and a half.”

“He had the ability,” Neil said with a shrug. “There’s
no doubt about that. He just didn’t have the discipline to play pro ball.”

Roma propped an elbow on the arm of the leather chair and leaned the side of her head against her hand. “Why did you marry him?” she asked. “Was it because of me?”

Pearl looked at me. “Kathleen, Neil and I are in the spare bedroom. There’s a small box on the bed, tied with silver ribbon. Would you get it for me please?”

“Of course,” I said. I stood up, gave Roma what I hoped was an encouraging smile, and went down the hall to the room she used as a guest bedroom.

The box looked like an old stationery box, the kind that a set of pretty sheets of writing paper and matching envelopes had come in. It was tied with a wide silver ribbon, more to keep the lid on and the battered box together, than for decoration. I took it back to Pearl.

“Thank you Kathleen,” she said. I sat back down and she untied the satin bow and lifted the top of the box. She took out two documents and handed them to Roma. One was Roma’s birth certificate. The other was Tom and Pearl’s marriage license.

“I know my birthday,” Roma said.

“I know you do,” Pearl said. She sat back a bit and moved just a bit closer to Neil.

Roma studied the marriage license. Then she held it out to me. I did the math in my head. “Nine months and two days,” I said.

Pearl nodded. “There was no shotgun at our wedding, Roma. And you weren’t there either, my dear.”

I handed the document back to Roma. Her gaze went from it to her mother and back again. “I thought that…” She let the end of the sentence trail away.

Pearl reached across the space between them and patted her daughter’s knee. “I’m sorry, sweetie. If I’d realized, I would have shown you that years ago.”

“So why did you marry him if you didn’t have to?” Roma asked. She seemed more relaxed now.

Pearl leaned all the way back against the sofa cushions. “I was the good girl. Tom was the bad boy.” She and Neil exchanged warm smiles and their obvious connection seemed to somehow chase away a lot of the tension in the room.

“I got straight A’s and sang in the church choir,” Pearl said. “He was handsome, charming and just a little reckless. It was exciting at first.” Her smile faded. “Then it got old.”

Roma leaned forward, both elbows on her knees, chin propped on her laced fingers. “Why did you stay?”

“I didn’t,” Pearl said. “The night before Tom disappeared, I left him.”

“Y
ou left him? Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Roma asked. There was no anger in her voice, just curiosity.

Pearl folded her hands in her lap. “Because he was your father. I didn’t want you to ever believe his mistakes were somehow part of who you were.”

“But where did you—where did we go? I don’t remember being somewhere else and then coming back to Mayville.”

Something changed in Pearl’s expression. Her eyes were suddenly wary. “We didn’t really go…far,” she said.

I knew what she wasn’t saying. “The Ladies Knitting Circle,” I said.

Pearl turned her gaze to me and her cheeks were tinged with pink. “I’m not sure what you mean, Kathleen,” she said slowly. Roma was looking at me as well.

“I know that The Ladies Knitting Circle didn’t actually knit very much. I know that Anna Henderson and a
few of her friends were helping women in”—I hesitated, looking for just the right word—“difficult circumstances.”

“You mean like some kind of underground railroad?” Roma said.

I nodded. “Yes.”

She looked at her mother for confirmation and after a moment’s hesitation Pearl nodded as well. “I was going to take you and disappear, with some help from Anna and the others.”

“Pearl, who told you about The Ladies Knitting Circle?” I asked.

She frowned. “You know, I don’t remember. I’m sorry, Kathleen. That’s a long time ago.”

“Why then?” Roma asked. “What happened? What changed for you?”

Pearl shrugged. “I don’t have an answer for that, either. So much happened in such a short amount of time, there are some blank spots in my memory. I can tell you that we were about to be kicked out of the little house we were renting. We were behind in the rent and Tom hadn’t kept up the place. He was in a dark, ugly mood that night. He decided he was going to drive over to Red Wing to buy beer. I knew he’d be gone for a couple of hours. I knew Anna would take us in. I grabbed some things and walked over there with you.”

She twisted her wedding ring around her finger. “We hid out at Wisteria Hill for close to a week. I thought Tom would look for us—you for certain—but he’d disappeared. They found his car abandoned out by the highway and it looked like he’d decided to hitchhike.”

“You didn’t wonder why he didn’t come back?” Roma asked.

“No,” Pearl said with a shake of her head. “It sounds
silly, doesn’t it? I didn’t want…I didn’t want to run away, change our names, and always be looking over my shoulder. With Tom gone, I felt I could stay. Every day that went by, life got better. Eventually I saved enough money to divorce him and start again.” She smiled once more at Neil.

“Someone found Tom’s car abandoned out on the highway?” I asked.

Pearl nodded. “Sam Ingstrom and another man on their way to a landscaping job found it early the next morning. You know where the road turns off to Wild Rose Bluff? It looked like Tom had run out of gas.”

All roads may have led back to Wisteria Hill, but Sam Ingstrom seemed to be doing the driving, so to speak.

Pearl’s expression turned thoughtful. “I’ve been thinking about those days since Tom’s body was found and I think now that he had to have died that night after I left. And before you ask, there’s no way Anna or any of those women had anything to do with it.”

I had to agree with her. I’d seen pictures of Anna Henderson and of Rebecca’s mother, Ellen. They’d both been tiny women. How could they have killed Tom out behind the house? Based on what I’d heard about Wisteria Hill in those days, there was always someone around and it wasn’t like he would have obligingly bent down so they could hit him over the head.

Even if he’d been killed elsewhere, there was no way Anna and Ellen could have carried Thomas Karlsson’s body across the field behind the carriage house, up onto the ridge, then dug a hole and buried it. Why would they? And even if they could have come up with a way to move the body of a man twice their size, someone would have seen something or heard something.

Pearl and Roma had been hiding at Wisteria Hill.
Carson was coming and going. Everett was there. Rebecca was at the house a lot with her brothers. It wasn’t like the women could have killed Tom—for whatever reason—rolled him up in a rug and carried it on their shoulders across the yard without anyone noticing.

“Do you have any idea what might have happened?” I asked.

“I truly don’t know,” she said. “I mentioned that Tom worked for Idris Blackthorne for a while and I can tell you that those woods behind Wisteria Hill were a short cut to a hunting camp Idris had. And there was another camp nearby, more of a shack really, where some of the men in town used to go to play poker and get drunk. The fact that it was so close to Idris’s place made it very convenient. Tom was pretty much a regular at those games for a time, until he got caught cheating.”