Killing Cousins (3 page)

Sunday morning broke with brilliant sunshine and a barge creeping up Old Man River. I rolled out of bed, took a shower, made breakfast—even though I was reminded by my children that my pancakes were not as good as my mother's and my eggs were too done—and got the kids dressed. Then I returned to my gingham blue bedroom upstairs and to my computer. Rachel and Mary went outside to ride their bikes, and Rudy and Matthew were downstairs watching the pre-pre-game show to some sporting event.

I had recently broken down and jumped on the information highway. I now understood the addiction to the Internet. It was incredibly convenient, and I could e-mail all of my scattered family for nothing, rather than pay the long-distance phone bills. Being the researcher that I am, I found the endless access to information (on any number of subjects) just too enticing to ignore. While doing research, I'd connected with people from branches of my family tree that I'd never even known existed. One man even sent me a scanned photograph of one of my great-great-grandparents whom I'd never seen a photograph of before. Amazing. And I had no idea at all how any of it actually worked. I just pressed this button and that button, and that's all I needed to know.

And yet there was still a part of me that really liked the personal touch of the handwritten letter, something that could be kept forever.

I logged on and that stupid voice declared, “You've got mail.” I could see the little flag. I knew I had mail without the moronic voice telling me so. I looked to see whom it was from. Colette sent a Web address on postpartum depression to check out. I deleted it. My cousin in Colorado sent me an e-mail telling me all about her eighteen hours of labor. Luckily, Matthew had only taken about six hours to bring into the world. A friend of Rudy's sent something, and there was a note from Rudy's sister. As much as I have become accustomed to the Internet, since most of these people lived within a few miles, I had to ask myself the question: Doesn't anybody use the damn phone anymore?

I went to Google and typed in “Catherine Finch.” Of course there were sites that weren't for my Catherine Finch, so I typed “singer” after her name. It brought up a few different Web sites, and I printed out the relevant pages. I didn't really have time to stop and read them right now. I would do it later. While the pages were printing, I got my camera together and found my notebook and pen. Once I had printed out what looked like about forty pages' worth of information from several different sites, I logged off, turned off the computer and went downstairs.

I grabbed my keys, slipped on the sandals that were sitting by the door, and kissed Rudy and Matthew each on the head.

“What about dinner?” Rudy asked before I made it out the door.

“What about it?”

“What are we having? Should I lay something out?”

“We'll go to Chuck's for pizza.”

“Okay,” he said.

Before I could make it out of New Kassel on this postcard-perfect August day, Eleanore Murdoch stopped me in the middle of the road, as she had a habit of doing. She just walked out into the middle of the road and then waited for me to roll down the driver's-side window.

“You know, Eleanore, I have an office in this town. A home, a telephone and e-mail. Why must you insist on stopping me in the middle of the road?”

Eleanore, a woman in her late middle years, top-heavy and broad, had a knack for being irritating. Of course, that was probably what she thought about me as well, so I shouldn't have been so quick to judge. She had a small gossip column in the town newspaper and fancied herself a literary genius. Which was hysterical because she often spoke like a thesaurus on acid. She and her husband, Oscar, owned and ran the bed-and-breakfast known as the Murdoch Inn. She always stuck her nose where it didn't belong, and she always thought she should be the first to know everything. There I go describing myself again. Why was it more irritating when she did it?

“This couldn't wait,” she said to me, with her big purple plastic earrings clanking together. Eleanore loved costume jewelry, the bigger and brighter the better. And, it seemed, the noisier the better, too. “Have you heard?”

Her expression was serious, which made me sober up a bit. Eleanore was certainly the Drama Queen of New Kassel, but somehow her expression seemed genuine. “What?” I asked.

“They've put the riverboat casino on the ballot.”

“What?” I asked, dumbfounded. This
was
serious.

“Bill wants to bring riverboat gambling to New Kassel.”

Bill being Bill Castlereagh, the mayor. Funny, his name had come up quite a bit lately.

“And evidently, he got the go-ahead from the gaming commission and it's going to be voted on,” she finished.

“No way,” I said. This was a catastrophe. An abomination. It wasn't possible. New Kassel was a historic town. And although I realized that New Kassel was a tourist trap—the town is the commodity—a flashy casino was not the type of trap that New Kassel was all about. New Kassel was about going back in time and learning something about the days before Internet and satellite dishes. It was about history, antiques, crafts and good food. A casino would just…I don't know, ruin the mood.

Eleanore kissed two fingers on her right hand and stuck them up in the air. “I swear.”

“But, that's…that's…”

Honk. Honk.
That's the bad thing about stopping in the middle of the street to gossip. Some jerk always comes along and wants to use the road to drive on.

“Lucrative,” she said, disgusted.

“Ludicrous, Eleanore. Ludicrous.” I looked in the rearview mirror. It was nobody I could recognize right off the bat. “I've got to go.”

“But what are you going to do about it?” Eleanore asked.

“What can I do about it?” I said, although I was already thinking about what I was going to do about it. Bill was my neighbor. I was sure he'd put aside his petty grievances about my chicken coop and my chickens long enough to have a sensible conversation about how a casino would change the town. Right? I would talk to him this evening when I got home.

“Torie, you have to do something” I heard her say as I drove away.

The Finch estate was technically in New Kassel, but not within the city limits. It was off a two-lane road winding south between New Kassel and Greenwich. In between the two towns were farms, a few of those pop-up subdivisions in the middle of a field, thanks to low interest rates, and government land that I was hoping the government would forget it had. The front of the estate faced west and the back of it east, overlooking the mighty Mississippi.

The house actually sat in a valley between two large hills. A huge sandstone wall edged around the estate, separating it from the rest of the world as if it were a lonely green island. An elaborate “F” was curved in wrought iron on the gate. I got out and opened the gate, pulled my car in the drive and then shut the gate behind me.

As I drove up the driveway, I noticed that the house was three stories high, made out of what looked like the same sandstone as the wall. It reminded me of a small French château, complete with one turret that curved out from the south wall. This was going to be one of those buildings that had more rooms than I could find uses for.

I got out of the car and put the key in the lock of the front door. It was a red door that was rounded on top with an oblong window in the center. The key didn't work. The door wouldn't open. Great. I was going to be really upset if I had driven all the way down here for no reason. I walked around the building to try and find the back door.

An overgrown flower garden nearly assaulted me as I rounded the corner. The grounds had been kept mowed, so it surprised me that the garden had been left to Mother Nature. Who would have done that? A few bumblebees settled on the hollyhocks that were as tall as I was, and a butterfly floated somewhere above the black-eyed Susans. Unfortunately, there were as many weeds in the garden as flowers, and it took me a second before I could find the small red-bricked path that would lead to the back door.

The key worked on the back door and I was happy. I don't know what I was expecting on the inside of the house, but what I found wasn't it. Everything had been left just as it had been five years ago when she died. There was a five-year-old newspaper on the kitchen table, unopened mail scattered on the counter, dish towels hanging on the oven door. I held my nose and peeked in the refrigerator, which had been emptied. So, I assumed that somebody had come in just long enough to clean out the perishables and then locked the place up. I opened the dishwasher and inside were clean dishes.

Suddenly the thought of going through every item in this house seemed unfathomable. I made a mental note to make sure that when I got old I should just start giving stuff away so that nobody would have to come along after I died and do it for me.

To me, it seemed as though the bathroom would be the easiest place to start. Most of the things in the bathroom could be thrown away, especially given the date of most of the items. As if anybody would want or could use five-year-old shampoo. So I found the trash bags under the sink and then went into the great expanse of Catherine Finch's house to find the bathroom.

Finding the bathroom took a long time. I had to make it through a lot of house first. The great room was…well, great. A large cathedral ceiling with dark wooden beams was the canopy above a rather rustic room with a bearskin rug and a stuffed jaguar. On either side of the fireplace were two shelves of books. Cool. Books were good. A gorgeous stained-glass window lined the entire east wall. The stained-glass window depicted several fairies in different positions of flight, hovering above flowers or dancing amid the trees. It truly was one of the most gorgeous things I'd ever seen. I was awestruck, trying to imagine that it was actually made out of little pieces of painted glass.

Eventually, I found three bathrooms, two downstairs and one on the second floor. I started with the one downstairs closest to the kitchen. I opened the medicine-cabinet doors and just threw everything away. Under the vanities I did the same thing, except for a hair dryer and hot rollers that I found in the upstairs bathroom. Colin might be able to sell those. The washcloths I put in a bucket to use as rags and the towels I put in a pile on one of the beds. In no time at all, I had the bathrooms finished, with only a small pile of things to keep. Obviously, I pitched the personal-hygiene items. The woman loved Coral Mist lipstick and blue eye shadow. Her favorite perfume was Windsong, because the five bottles of it I found in the house were all half empty, whereas all the other perfumes were still mostly full. Funny that she was wealthy beyond my comprehension and her favorite perfume could be bought at Walgreens.

I opened my notebook and dug a pen out of my purse and wrote down a list of things to bring tomorrow: radio with batteries, fifty-to-sixty boxes, notebooks, packing peanuts/bubble wrap, travel playpen, crayons and coloring books for the girls.

I did not go up to the third floor, nor did I go into the basement, but I did take a quick glance through the rest of the first and second floors. There were no less than six bedrooms, a dining room, kitchen, great room, family room, den and, sure enough, three unidentifiable rooms. If pressed, I'd say that they were living rooms one, two and three. I couldn't imagine what was on the third floor, or what could possibly be in the attic.

In living room number two, on the second floor, was a black baby grand piano, and hanging above the fireplace was an oil portrait of a woman I assumed was Catherine Finch. In the portrait, she stood next to a fireplace in one of those long-waisted flapper dresses; her blond hair was bobbed short and curved under her ears. She wore bracelets on each wrist and a large necklace. Her smile was composed but, somehow, seemed all-knowing.

In the middle of the room a crystal chandelier hung too low, I thought, but what did I know about decorating big fancy houses? All along the mantel and the piano were silver and bronze frames filled with pictures taken in the twenties and thirties.

Yes, it all seemed quite daunting.

And the most daunting thing of all was the thought creeping in my mind about confronting the mayor about the gambling boats. But I loved New Kassel and I was not going to let the mayor bring in the casino. No way. I thought about that a second standing in the middle of living room number two. Even though I had this job to do for the sheriff and a job for Sylvia, my thoughts had meandered back to the threat of a casino. It was too important to me not to do something, but I wasn't sure what to do. I supposed it would depend on what the mayor had to say to me.

I made sure I had my list for tomorrow, picked up my purse and headed downstairs to return to New Kassel.