Tressed to Kill (17 page)

She seemed to drift away again, and I gave her hand a sharp squeeze. “You do more than cut hair,” I told her when she looked at me. “You take care of people. Remember when Jamie Southerland ran away and you stayed up for two nights with her mom? Or when Minna Jackson needed a job that time her husband walked out and you trained her to do shampoos? And you raised all that money for the Farleys when their house burned down. You’ve helped keep a community together. That
is
a calling.”
“You really think that?” she asked, a note of hope in her voice.
“Absolutely. C’mon.” I stood up and tugged on her hand.
“Where are we going?”
“To the harbor. We’re going to rent a paddle boat for an hour and forget all this. I’ll never forget that time when I was a junior and I stumbled over Hank making out with Sally Preston and we broke up. And I hid in my bedroom and cried and cried until you told me a little exercise and sunshine would help and dragged me down to the harbor.”
“We must have paddled for three hours that afternoon,” Mom said, a real smile lighting her face. “I could hardly walk the next day, my legs were so sore. It was all Hank Parker’s fault. You should have dumped him then and there.”
“I did. But then I took him back. I’m a slow learner.”
“No, Grace Ann. You have a big heart,” she said fondly.
She let me pull her up, and we hugged for a long moment. Both of us were a bit teary eyed when we broke apart.
“Get your hat and your sunblock,” I said. “And let’s get paddling.”
STICKY WITH SUNBLOCK AND SWEAT, BUT PLEASANTLY tired and much less stressed, I dropped Mom at the house two hours later before heading to my apartment and some too-long-put-off gardening tasks. I figured I might as well deadhead the azaleas, since I was already a sweaty mess. Twenty minutes later, with browning blooms at my feet, I heard a voice call my name.
“Back here,” I yelled from behind my apartment. I snipped another azalea from a bush as Marty Shears appeared around the corner. I swiped my forehead with my arm, feeling scruffy in my crumpled outfit in the face of his crisp Bermuda shorts and turquoise cotton shirt. Sunglasses dangled from a lanyard around his neck.
“I’ve got a line on Martina Rowan,” he said, holding up his steno pad. “She initially moved to Richmond, where she had family, but then remarried and followed her new husband to Newark. I’m catching a flight up there this afternoon.”
“Wow,” I said, impressed. “That was quick. Why don’t you call her?”
“It’s too easy to duck a phone call,” he said. He brushed away a fly buzzing around his neck.
“You must really think she knows something that will help you get Lansky.”
“A gut feeling,” he said. “I’ve learned not to ignore it over the years. Anyway, I’ll be back tomorrow evening, in time for the Rothmere gala.”
“Are you going?” I asked, surprised. Since he wasn’t from St. Elizabeth, it never crossed my mind Marty would attend a fund-raising function for a local landmark.
“I bought a ticket yesterday.” He grinned at my surprise. “Save me a dance?”
The warmth in his eyes as he looked down at me threw me into confusion. “Uh, sure,” I stammered, clicking the pruning shears open and closed.
His smile broadened. “I’ll look forward to it. By the way, have you discovered anything new?”
I told him about the sword turning up in Mom’s closet, which he’d already heard about, and my interview with Philip. “Del Richardson was there when I arrived,” I said, “and it looked like he and Philip were up to something.”
“What kind of something?” Interest flickered in his eyes.
“Some sort of deal. Richardson implied it had to do with the Morestuf.”
“I wonder . . .” A crease appeared between his brows.
“What?”
“Could Philip DuBois be Richardson’s conduit to the governor now that Constance is gone? That would make sense,” he answered his own question. “Lansky’s too high-profile now to risk a face-to-face meeting. Now that everyone has a cell phone with a camera, you never know when you’re on
Candid Camera
.”
“They talked at Constance’s viewing,” I reminded him.
He waved it away. “Too public. They can’t risk that kind of encounter more than once. No, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced there’s a go-between.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to run or I’ll miss my plane. Here.” He wrote on a page of his notebook, tore it out, and handed it to me. “My cell phone number. Call me if you find out anything interesting.”
I tucked it into my pocket. “You do the same.”
He leaned down and kissed my damp cheek. “See you tomorrow.” Without waiting for a reaction, he trotted down the sidewalk and eased into the MINI Cooper.
I stood there for a moment, feeling the imprint of his lips on my cheek, wondering how I felt about it. Pretty good, I decided with a slight smile. I was looking forward to the ball.

Chapter Seventeen

FINALLY FINISHED WITH THE GARDENING, I DESPERATELY needed a shower. Two days’ worth of pent-up heat rolled over me when I unlocked my door. Ugh. I turned on the window air-conditioning unit and went straight to the sink. The tap sputtered for a moment when I turned the faucet, then spit out some rust-colored liquid, before running clear. Hallelujah. I showered, enjoying the ping of the water against my skin. As I shampooed my hair, a thought came to me. I had meant to follow up on Althea’s story about William and Carl Rowan’s disappearance, but I’d never made it to the newspaper archives. With half the afternoon in front of me, and no job to occupy my time, I decided to see if I could find the old newspaper stories.
Wrapped in a towel, I dried my hair, shaping the light brown strands into a bell around my face. I would get highlights, I decided, studying my reflection in the mirror. I’d have my mom do them tomorrow before the ball. Throwing on a pink tee shirt and a pair of madras shorts, I turned off the air conditioner, opened a window to let the fresh air flow through the apartment, and hopped back in my car.
The
St. Elizabeth Gazette
had its offices in a squat, two-story building in a light industrial area that dated to the 1960s. The sand-colored bricks of the façade were pitted from the fury of various hurricanes. Glass doors opened into a small lobby with linoleum floors and fluorescent lighting. The air inside was dry and cool. I glimpsed a labyrinth of cubicles through the open door on my right and heard the sounds of CNN overlaid by the clickity-click of several keyboards. A young woman with frizzy hair and cat’s eyeglasses directed me to the morgue in the basement and a Mrs. McGowan.
Expecting dimness and dust, I was pleasantly surprised by the well-lit staircase and clean basement. Mrs. McGowan turned out to be a lanky woman in her sixties clad in jeans and a Western shirt with pearl snaps. She sat at a large metal desk positioned under a window well that let in natural light. Her hair was an unlikely shade of red cut in a shag that had last been popular in the ’60s, and the aroma of cigarettes hung around her. A butt smoldered in the ash tray she quickly shoved in a drawer when she caught sight of me. A half-guilty, half-defiant expression gave way to a smile when I introduced myself and told her what I was looking for.
“Piece of cake, hon,” she said in a raspy voice, pushing back her chair and leading me to a small room with two microfiche readers in study carrels. “You wait right here and I’ll get the films you need.” She returned within minutes to hand me a stack of open-topped envelopes with the translucent brown of microfiche flats peeping out. “I brought you all of 1983 and 1984.” She gave me a brief tutorial on operating the microfiche viewer and walked out, saying, “Holler if you need anything else, hon.”
After a few minutes, I got the hang of zipping across the card. Althea had said William and his buddy disappeared in February of 1983 so I started at the beginning of the month. A headline about the paper mill laying off workers . . . a paragraph about a Rothmere relation being buried in the family plot . . . half a page about potential development of beach property . . . The headline “Local Men Disappear” caught my eye. It was published on an inside page two days after the men’s disappearance, since the
Gazette
came out weekly on Thursdays, and the article was relatively short.
“Two local men, William B. Jenkins (32) and Carl G. Rowan (37) were reported missing by their wives Tuesday morning after neither one returned home Monday night. Witnesses say the men left a poker game together at eleven o’clock. Police are investigating but say there is no reason to suspect foul play at this point. They urge anyone who may have seen either of the men to call their stop crime number, 847-5463 (TIP-LINE).”
Uninformative, I thought, scooting the microfiche to the next week’s issue. Birth announcements . . . results from a local fishing tournament . . . a local boy drowned . . . This time, the men’s disappearance rated several paragraphs on page one, beneath the drowned boy. The article repeated the information from the previous week, detailed the police’s efforts to locate the two men (interviews with locals and disseminating the men’s descriptions to other law enforcement agencies), and provided photos that were too grainy for me to tell anything other than one man was white and the other black. By the third week after their disappearance, the reporter had to fall back on interviews with the wives and friends of the men, since the police had “no further leads.” In Althea’s interview, she announced her conviction that the men had been killed and urged the police to continue investigating. There was no mention of the DuBois family or of Carl Rowan’s land development deal gone sour, either because Althea hadn’t brought it up (unlikely) or because the paper hadn’t cared to annoy a major advertiser.
The interview with Martina Rowan yielded nothing but a photo of her—a plump blonde with Farrah Fawcett hair winging away from her face—and the news that she was leaving St. Elizabeth. “This town has too many memories,” the article quoted her as saying. “I don’t feel I can raise my children here where people will forever be saying that their father deserted us.”
I skimmed through several more issues, but the articles got shorter and shorter until they petered out altogether under the weight of no new developments and waning public interest. Sifting through the slick microfiche flats, I located the one for February 1984 and found a brief follow-up article on the anniversary of the men’s disappearance. It noted that their disappearance remained a mystery, that Martina Rowan and family had left the area, and that Althea Jenkins still maintained the men were murdered. The reporter wrapped up with the results of an informal poll she took on the streets of St. Elizabeth: three out of four people didn’t even recognize the names William Jenkins and Carl Rowan. “If ‘no man is an island’ as the poet maintains,” the reporter concluded, “what does it say about our community that two men can vanish without a trace and be so quickly forgotten by the police and the citizenry?”
What, indeed? I slid back up the article to find the byline: Adrienne McGowan. Hm. Sorting the microfiche envelopes back into chronological order, I sought out Mrs. McGowan at her desk. She looked up from her computer screen as I approached. “Find what you need, hon?”
“Maybe,” I said, handing over the microfiche. “One of the articles I read was by an Adrienne McGowan. Is that you?”
She nodded, her fringe bobbing. “Yep. Call me Addie.”
“So you used to be a reporter?”
“Still am, when I feel like it,” she said. She dug the ashtray out of her drawer and lit a cigarette. “You don’t mind?”
I shook my head.
Blowing a stream of smoke out her nostrils, Addie said, “But I got tired of covering the brangling at city council meetings and the good deeds at Elk Club meetings. Meetings, meetings, meetings. And when something exciting did happen, like the youth minister at Sunrise Methodist getting caught with that fifteen-year-old, or those men vanishing, the publisher was too inclined to kowtow to the powerful men around here, rather than let me tell it how it was. So, I still do some reporting when the mood strikes me or the story’s right, but mostly I’m happier down here in the morgue.” She leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms over her thin chest, and exhaled smoke at the ceiling.
I wondered why she hadn’t moved to a bigger city for more opportunities as a reporter but knew it would be rude to ask. “So, did you find anything while you were reporting on the disappearance that didn’t make it into the articles?”
She gave me a considering look. “Why are you so interested?”
I explained about Althea’s relationship to our family and my interest in Constance DuBois’s death.
“You think there’s a link between the men’s disappearance twenty-six years ago and Constance’s death?” She sounded intrigued rather than disbelieving.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, hitching my hip onto the edge of her desk. “But this reporter I’ve been talking to from Atlanta, he thinks it might be related, that there might be a tie between the DuBois family and the governor and some shady land deals.”
“I always thought Lansky was on the take,” she said, stubbing out the cigarette. “When Althea Jenkins told me her suspicions about what happened with Carl Rowan’s land and Philip DuBois Senior, I knew Lansky was involved somewhere. But I never found proof, and my editor wouldn’t even let me put Philip’s name in an article unless I preceded it with ‘the revered’ or ‘the upstanding citizen’ or some such pig slop. No way was he going to let me hint that DuBois had ruined Rowan on purpose to steal his land. I nosed around for a couple of years, but after DuBois had his heart attack, I let it drop. By then, Lansky was in Atlanta as a state representative and well on his way to the governor’s mansion. I didn’t vote for him.”
“Was there anything else you discovered that you couldn’t print?” I asked. I surreptitiously slid the overflowing ashtray away from me.
She hesitated, twisting her mouth to one side. Finally, she said, “I always thought the boy knew something.”
“What boy?” I straightened in my excitement and slipped off the edge of the desk, bruising my hip. “Ow.”
“Careful,” Addie said with a slight smile. “Rowan’s boy. He must have been eleven or twelve when Rowan disappeared. The girls were younger—ten, I think, and eight. The mother wouldn’t let me talk to the kids, and I’m pretty sure the police didn’t interview them, either. Well, why would they? But I’d catch him looking at me while I was in the house, talking with his mom, and it was just a feeling I got, that’s all.”
“What was his name?”
“I don’t remember. Maybe he’d talk now,” she said, sitting up straighter. Her pale hazel eyes sparkled, and I knew she must’ve been a pistol in her younger years. Probably still was. “If we could track him down. Wouldn’t that make a doozy of a story if he could shed some light on the disappearances all these years later?”
I caught some of her enthusiasm, although it seemed unlikely that the kid would remember anything from a quarter century ago, even assuming he knew something at the time. “I could look up his birth certificate to get his name,” I suggested. “And you could research it.”
“Done!” Addie crowed. “I’ll let you share the byline.”
I raised my hands to shoulder height. “Oh, no. I don’t want my name in the paper. I’m just curious to see what he has to say.”
“Give me a call after you’ve been to the town hall,” Addie said, handing me a business card.
MY ENTHUSIASM DIMMED SOMEWHAT AS I RE - turned to my car and headed toward Bedford Square. I felt like I was getting sucked into Althea’s tragic mystery without getting any closer to finding out who killed Constance so I could clear my mom’s name. The two cases seemed to overlap on several levels, with the DuBois family firmly embroiled in each case and iffy development speculation—with Rowan’s seafront property twenty-six years ago and now with the Morestuf deal—playing a role both times, too. Was it a coincidence that Althea Jenkins’s name was front and center in each case? I winced at the thought and gripped the steering wheel more tightly. Revenge is a dish best served cold. The line—was it Shakespeare?—ran through my mind and I couldn’t dislodge it. Althea wasn’t the vengeful type, I told myself, and really, would anyone wait a quarter century before settling a score?
As I was telling myself the idea was ludicrous, I parked in front of the town hall. Greeting a couple of people I met on the stairs, I stopped in front of a third-floor door with frosted glass on the top half stenciled with the word “Records.” Inside, a counter topped with Plexiglas barred access to the room. Row upon row of sliding files stood behind the counter. No one was in sight. I dinged the bell and waited, reading the notices posted under the Plexiglas, including the charges for copies of records.
“Yeah?” A ponytailed young woman appeared on the other side of the counter. Maybe twenty or twenty-one, she had serious freckles across her cheeks and forearms, and chewed gum with a loud smacking sound.
“I’m looking for a birth certificate. The last name is Rowan and the boy was born between 1972 and 1974.” I thought a three-year span would cover whatever margin of error there might be in Addie’s estimation of the boy’s age. “Can you look that up?”
“Nope.”
Smack, smack
went the gum.
Her response took me aback. “Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t.” She looked bored.
“Why not?” Her unhelpfulness was irritating.
“Because we don’t have those records.” A trace of triumph erased her boredom, and I figured she was pleased to have a good excuse not to do her job.
“Where are they?” This was like pulling teeth.
“Burned up.” She pronounced the words with relish.
“Oh.” That stopped me for a moment. “What happened?”
“They put the records from the seventies in storage when they renovated this place—put air-conditioning in, I think,” she said.
Smack, smack.
“The warehouse burned down. So, if you got born, got hitched, or kicked the bucket in St. Elizabeth in the 1970s, there ain’t no record of it.” The thought seemed to bring her pleasure. “I guess it’s almost like you don’t exist,” she added.
Creepy thought. Accepting the dead end, I said, “Thanks for your help,” and turned to go.
“You know,” the girl called as I turned the doorknob, “you’re the second person this month that’s come in looking for the Rowan boy’s certificate. Isn’t that weird?”
Beyond weird. I turned back to her. “Who else wanted it?”
“I don’t know his name,” the girl shrugged. “Just like I don’t know yours.”
“Grace Terhune,” I volunteered.
“I’m Kayla,” the girl said. Still no smile.
Smack, smack
with the gum. “Anyways, I told him what I told you, about the records being burned and all. He had an exact date, though.”
“For what?”
“The birth. August 20, 1973. I remember because my mom’s birthday is August 21.”
I tried to think of something else to ask Kayla and fell back on, “What did he look like?”
She puckered her brow. “Tall, blondish, kinda old.” The muscles of her jaw knotted and released, knotted and released in a hypnotizing rhythm as she chomped the gum.
I wasn’t sure what that meant to a twenty-year-old. “ ‘Kinda old’ like in his thirties or like in his sixties?”
“I dunno. Somewhere in between?”
Maybe it was Marty. The description fit. That made sense. The researcher who located Mrs. Rowan must have turned up information on the kids, too. But why hadn’t he mentioned it to me, if it was Marty? I experienced a sudden pang of anxiety that made me uncomfortable.