Murder on Old Main Street (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) (9 page)

“Just a little sugar, please.” I accepted the proffered cup and stirred my tea silently as I struggled to find a way to begin. “Mrs. Griswold, I’m sure you were surprised at my call yesterday, since we don’t know each other and I’m not a member of your church. The truth is, I’m not here to talk about running a fundraiser, but I preferred to tell you the real reason for my visit in person.”

I took an unladylike gulp of my tea. “The fact is, I’m here at the request of Abigail Stoddard in connection with the murder of Prudence Crane. Abby is aware that Prudy was blackmailing you, but she prefers not to share that information with the police unless she absolutely must. We are both hoping that you will discuss this with me so that we can eliminate you as a suspect, rather than suggesting you as one to the police. I assure you that both Abby and I can be trusted. Whatever you choose to tell me will be held in complete confidence.”

I had expected shock, anger, or perhaps stammered denials. What I got was none of the above. For a long moment Mavis sat gazing at me through her long fringe of eyelashes, the sweet smile undimmed. Her brown eyes were tranquil, and I was reminded yet again of a friendly cow.

“I’ve been wondering if anyone would come to ask me those questions,” she commented matter-of-factly, as if I had just asked her where she bought her groceries. “I just didn’t know it would be you.” Then she put down her cup and rose to look out of the window. It had been raised a few inches to let in the sweet autumn air.

“It will seem off the point, I’m sure, and your not being from around here may make it more difficult. You see, I really can’t answer your questions until I tell you a bit about Harriet Wheeler.” She looked back over her shoulder at me. “Have you heard that name before?”

I had. “Being in the real estate business, I’ve learned quite a bit about many of the older homes in Wethersfield, Mrs. Griswold. If I remember correctly, Mrs. Wheeler owned one of the lovely Victorians on Wolcott Hill Road. She was something of a local celebrity—a writer, I think—until her death last winter. Have I got it right?”

Mavis nodded and turned back to the window. Harriett Wheeler was widowed at the beginning of World War II. She wrote a couple of dozen romance novels, very prim, not like the ones you find out there today, that were quite popular years ago. She also raised a daughter, Sarah, by herself. It was just the two of them in that rambling old house. The day after Sarah graduated from high school in 1960, she took off for the West Coast, and nobody seemed to know for certain what happened to Sarah after that. There was a rumor that she had married a man in California and they had both been killed soon thereafter in an automobile accident.”

I sipped some tea and refrained from interrupting.

“The royalties from Mrs. Wheeler’s books allowed her to live out her years in comfort, although nobody saw much of her. She preferred to live in semi-seclusion, tending to her perennial borders, surrounded by her books and music. She died as she had lived, quietly and without a fuss. The rumors of her daughter’s death seemed to be confirmed when Harriett left her house to her neighbor, Will Copeland, a local firefighter who had helped Harriett out over the years. He took care of the lawn and shoveled the snow and generally maintained the exterior of the property.

“Having struggled to raise and educate four children on a fireman’s salary, Will and his wife were delighted with their good fortune. They lost no time converting the house into two flats, upstairs and downstairs. They rented the smaller upstairs unit to Prudy Crane while they worked on restoring the first floor to its original glory. That part was a real labor of love. They planned to sell their house next door and move into the downstairs of the Wheeler house themselves.”

Mavis returned to the chair opposite me and picked up her cooling tea. “As a part of all this, Will worked for weeks to clean out the cavernous cellar where Harriett had kept, along with her personal papers, every word of every draft she had ever written. The back porch of the old house was stacked with cartons waiting for the recycler. Prudy being Prudy, she snooped through them all. In one of them, she found Harriett’s personal diaries, which recounted in detail a high school relationship between Harriett’s daughter Sarah and a local minister’s son. Very soon thereafter, Prudy started demanding money from me.”

I hadn’t seen that one coming. “But why? What did you have to do with any of what you’ve just told me?”

“My maiden name was Sarah Mavis Wheeler,” she replied. “Harriett Wheeler was my mother. Apparently, my youthful indiscretions were all laid out for Prudy in Mother’s old diaries. She was a compulsive chronicler. More tea?”

“Not just yet, thanks,” I said, astounded by this revelation. I struggled to straighten out my face as Mavis returned to her chair. She sat back and continued her story, her eyes occasionally distant as she reached back into her memories.

“My husband Henry, who is now the minister here, succeeded his father in that position. When Henry Senior held the post, my Henry was in high school with me right here in Wethersfield all those years ago, and we fell in love. The fact is, we had a love affair of the sort Mother never would have written about, I’m afraid. Of course, I got pregnant.” She crossed her ankles and clasped her hands loosely in her lap, every inch the composed matron. “Fortunately, I was only weeks from graduating when I found out, so I was allowed to remain here long enough to get my diploma. But the very next day, I was banished to a facility in California, where I stayed until I had the baby, a little girl, and gave it up for adoption.”

I found my voice at last. “And then you came home?”

Her smile was bitter this time. “Oh, that might have been possible in another place and time, but as I’ve said, Wethersfield is a very small town, and it was the ‘60s. My ruined virtue became common knowledge, and Mother simply could not bear the shame of it all. Had it been a different time, a different place, Henry and I would have made different choices, but at the time, my disappearing and giving up our daughter was presented to us as the only option. Mother was a very forceful personality. She forbade me to return, if you can believe it.” Her mouth twisted in remembered pain.

My heart went out to her. “How terrible for you. What did you do? Did you have any friends or relatives to turn to out there?”

“No, no one. Everyone on both sides of our family lived right here in provincial New England. California may as well have been China. But somehow I managed. I was eighteen by then and got a job as a clerk at the state university in San Jose. After I established a year’s residence, I was entitled to free tuition at a state institution, so I put myself through school and got a better job. I lost a lot of weight, dyed my hair brown, and got contact lenses to replace my eyeglasses. Then I went to probate court and changed my name legally to Mavis Wellman. My transformation was complete. As far as people in Wethersfield knew, Sarah Wheeler had disappeared.”

“Who started the rumor that you were killed in a car crash out west? What happened to Henry all that time?” By now I was completely caught up in Mavis’s story.

“To answer your first question, probably Mother herself. She never got over the horror of having an unwed mother for a daughter. It was far preferable to tell people that I had died, which made her a tragic figure instead of a mean old woman, which is what she really was, you know. As for Henry, he suffered in his own way. The shame wasn’t as bad for his family, of course. Even ministers’ boys will be boys, and you know the old double standard. So they just packed him off to a seminary in Oregon, trusting that he would get over his little crush. But in reality, we were always in contact, writing and calling, even visiting each other when he got a break from his studies. When he was ordained, he took a posting in northern California instead of going back East. In 1981, when his father was nearing retirement, Henry was invited to fill the position of senior minister. Since people’s memories had faded and my appearance had been sufficiently altered, I married him and returned not as Sarah Wheeler but as Henry’s bride Mavis, recently of California. So we eventually worked out a happy ending to our story, but it wasn’t tidy enough for Mother. Real life seldom is, I find.”

I was quiet, imagining myself in Mavis’s situation all those years ago. What would I have done in her place? “Please forgive me for asking, but was it really so unthinkable for you to defy your mother? Even in 1960, unwed mothers weren’t exactly being tarred and feathered, as I recall. If you and Henry were so very much in love, why couldn’t you marry and raise your daughter, even if you were young and the baby arrived a bit early?”

Mavis didn’t appear to take offense. She sipped her tea thoughtfully. “It simply didn’t occur to me, I suppose. I was a placid sort of child, a pleaser, I guess you would say. I was seventeen years old, not yet of legal age, and defying Mother was no more an option for me than getting an abortion.”

I winced at the parallel she had chosen to draw.

“Oh, yes, that crossed my mind. Another girl in my senior class who found herself in the same predicament had done just that. But I had been raised to believe that abortion is murder, all the more heinous because the victim is an unborn child. Henry felt the same way.”

Mavis set down her cup and met my eyes. “I wonder if it’s possible for you to understand. You and I don’t know each other very well, I realize, but a minister’s wife is accustomed to observing others. I’ve often seen you with your daughter … Emma, is it? … on your morning walks down to the cove or having coffee together at the diner. You’re always nattering away or laughing about something. You seem very free and open with each other, more like girlfriends than mother and daughter. I don’t imagine that there are many secrets between you.”

My heart dropped as I remembered my last conversation with Emma. “Well, one or two, perhaps,” I protested weakly. “Everyone has secrets, especially from their parents. But generally speaking, Emma and I can talk about most things.”
Except why she was spotted paying off a known blackmailer. Apparently, that topic is off limits.
To cover my confusion, I held out my cup for a refill. What a fraud I was, sitting here questioning Mavis’s long-ago choices and allowing myself to be mistaken for a model mother.

Mavis tipped the old teapot over my cup, replenishing the fragrant brew. The incongruity of our surroundings and our conversation struck me. Here we were in this charming old parsonage, two ladies chatting over our teacups—about blackmail, abortion, and yes, murder. All those straitlaced parishioners in the burying ground behind us must be aghast.

I dragged my attention back to the topic at hand. “Please know that my openness with Emma doesn’t mean I can’t understand your situation. My relationship with my own mother was guarded, to say the least.”

Mavis nodded understandingly. “I’m sure. That was the way it was when you and I were young.” Her eyes grew distant once again. “In my case, it was ridiculous to think the truth would never come out, of course. It always does, and its potential to do damage escalates exponentially with the passage of time. Our story was no exception. By the time Prudy got hold of it, Henry’s parents were long dead, but he and Mother and I had been living a lie for more than forty years. Precisely because it had been kept secret for all that time, our adolescent peccadillo would have achieved the status of a full-blown scandal, one that would totally overshadow Henry’s decades of selfless service to the church and the community, just as he was looking forward to retirement. I simply couldn’t let Prudy do it to him, to us.”

I swallowed hard. “Are you telling me you killed her, Mrs. Griswold?”

Mavis’s eyebrows climbed her forehead. “Why, no,” she replied calmly. “Oh, I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t admit that it crossed my mind. Helping Prudence Crane to meet her Maker could almost be considered an act of compassion. She wasn’t only my cross to bear, after all. She made the lives of everyone with whom she came into contact a living hell. But,” she smiled almost impishly, “the good Lord apparently saw fit to assign the task to someone else.”

I believed her. It was impossible to look into those serene brown eyes and do anything else. I put my empty teacup on the coffee table and groped for my handbag at my feet. “Thank you for speaking with me so frankly, Mrs. Griswold. You certainly didn’t have to, but you’ve helped me enormously. I only hope our conversation hasn’t been too distressing for you.”

“Mrs. Griswold is a bit formal under the circumstances, don’t you think? Please call me Mavis. And on the contrary, I can’t tell you what a relief it’s been to confide in someone after all these years,” she reassured me as we headed for the study door. “I’m really most grateful to you, my dear.”

I could understand her feelings. After decades of allowing others to unburden themselves to her, of keeping their secrets and offering advice, the relief of finally sharing her own story must be exquisite. “Please know that what you’ve told me this afternoon will go no further unless that becomes absolutely necessary, and at this moment, I can’t think why it would.” I frowned as something occurred to me. “Mavis, do you happen to know what else was in your mother’s diaries?”