“So get this,” Theresa told Frank while shifting her niece’s one-year-old to her other hip. She had driven directly from work to her cousin’s middle child’s tenth birthday party in Parma, and now stood in an overwarm, overcrowded house with a marauding horde of sugar-crazed children, a passel of widowed aunts, and the harried generation-her generation-caught in between. As long as she ignored the claustrophobic air, the warmth felt good, and her mother beamed to see her at a family function. She had avoided far too many of them in the past nine months, and family was everything to her mother. Everything.
“Jillian’s grandparents left a huge amount of money to her baby, Cara. Like a million and a half huge.”
Frank shoveled another spoonful of potato salad into his mouth despite having made the comment earlier that potato salad was a summer dish and there was something weird about eating it in March. “So Jillian was rich? Then she didn’t marry for the money.”
Theresa’s niece reappeared and collected her son. He took a handful of Theresa’s hair with him, but at least the danger of a spit-up had passed. Theresa began to rethink the glories of a large family gathering. “According to Drew, she’s never drawn on the money. It’s sitting in an account, waiting for Cara. Jillian paid her bills with her salary from Beautiful Girlz. Her parents disowned her, more or less. They didn’t care for her choice of careers, and they certainly didn’t care for her having a baby and not only not marrying the father, but not even telling them who he was.”
Theresa’s daughter, Rachael, chose that moment to dart in for another piece of her grandmother’s cheesecake, and Theresa took the opportunity to add, “As any parent wouldn’t. Something all daughters should keep in mind.”
Rachael just laughed in response and carried her prize off to a corner of the living room, rejoining the daughters of Theresa’s cousins. The girls burst back into conversation. Theresa’s heart gave a contented sigh to see her daughter laughing; perhaps she had managed to keep up enough of a show at home that Rachael’s life, at least, had gotten back to normal. She did wish the kid would eat something other than dessert, like potato salad, though the cheesecake actually had more nutritional value. “But Jillian’s grandparents felt sorry for her and slipped her money now and then. They died, three days apart, two months ago. They left all their assets to Cara.”
“Hmm. Lucky kid.”
“She’s now an orphan.”
“Okay. Poor kid. Very rich poor kid.”
With some difficulty, Theresa turned her back on a plate of brownies. “And now it will be Evan’s. Or will it? He’s not Cara’s father.”
“A man married to the mother is considered the father unless a court rules otherwise,” Frank recited around the potatoes.
“Unless the biological father shows up and sues for custody.”
“Obviously that mystery man hasn’t heard about Cara’s nest egg. Though isn’t it all tied up in trusts or whatever?”
“No. Her grandparents thought Jillian would need the money now, so that Cara wouldn’t starve to death before she reached her majority. They didn’t have much faith in either Jillian’s job or her fiancé, according to Drew. No trusts or mutual funds for them, just a big ole pile of money with no strings attached.” She watched Frank chew thoughtfully, no doubt deciding what he could do with a million and a half.
One of their aunts nudged him out of his daydream before Theresa could, placing a birthday cake festooned with pink-frosting roses among the other dishes. Theresa moved bowls out of the way to make room while the aunt grilled Frank about his latest girlfriend and when they could expect to hear some news. She did not give Theresa the same treatment. The nice thing about being a divorcée in a large Catholic family was that no one encouraged you to remarry. Oh, they had supported her engagement to Paul and planned to attend the wedding. They would be happy for her again if the same situation occurred, but they didn’t actively encourage the idea, an attitude for which she felt only gratitude. She had enough thoughtless coworkers encouraging her to “start dating again.” The thought made her want to gasp for air.
As a bachelor, however, Frank remained fair game.
“What about the phone number in her pocket?” Theresa asked him.
“The main line for some place called Delta Dynamics. They do data processing for trade shows. Don’t ask me what that means, but neither the receptionist nor the manager had ever heard of Jillian Perry.”
“Trade shows. She could have worked one of theirs.”
Frank said, “Yeah, and one of their employees slipped her his number. Maybe Jillian did take on side jobs.”
“Why? She obviously didn’t need the money. It could have been for a number of reasons, for that matter-a future contact for Georgie, or even Evan. He’s sponsoring a tech show at the factory tomorrow. I got that off his Web site.” As her aunt lit tiny pastel candles, Theresa asked, “What if Drew tried to get custody of Cara?”
“Applied for guardianship? Why would he do that? Does he want the baby?”
“Probably not. He seemed more interested in Jillian than her child.”
“He’d have to prove that Evan is unfit, or at least that he’d be a better guardian than Evan would.” He sneaked a finger into the frosting before his aunt could slap it away.
“You haven’t heard him discourse on the many ways in which he truly loved Jillian and Evan truly didn’t.”
“He’ll need more than that. This guy sounds like a loony tune.”
“He’s harmless,” Theresa said, but without conviction.
“Jeesh, Tess, how do you figure that? What you’ve described sounds exactly like your classic call-twenty-times-a-day, leave-notes-on-your-car stalker.”
She knew this to be correct, but still felt oddly protective of the weepy man. “Because I dated guys like him. Nerdy, sweet, too shy for their own good. The biggest mistake I made was marrying the one who wasn’t nerdy and shy. I don’t think Drew’s dangerous.”
Frank considered this, since he had met every boy she had ever dated, but still shook his head. “You don’t know that. Obsession can be a very dangerous thing.”
They paused to sing “Happy Birthday,” a chorus of happy and only slightly off-key voices. Theresa stammered through the third line; she had forgotten whose birthday it was, but consoled herself with the thought that the lack of oxygen in the room had starved her brain cells.
The birthday girl ripped into the wrapping paper like a human chain saw. Theresa’s aunt returned to cut the cake. Theresa didn’t envy her the job of dividing the swirls of colored frosting among close to fifteen panting children with strong views on the particular decoration to which they were entitled. She turned again to Frank. “Yes, obsession can turn violent. But so can greed, and the idea of that much money makes me look at Jillian’s marriage in a new light. What happened when you told Evan?”
“I said we found her body, he started crying, that was about it. I offered victim-assistance services, he declined. He asked all the standard questions, where, when, how did she get there. The usual.”
“And he said she disappeared while he was at work on Monday?”
“Yeah. She was doing the breakfast dishes when he left at nine thirty, gone when he got home about three.”
“What had she been wearing?”
“He couldn’t remember. At least not when I spoke to him today-it might be mentioned in the initial missing-person report.”
“Strange.”
“Not really. Do you remember what Rachael wore to school today?”
Theresa handed a slice of cake to a redheaded boy. “The same shirt she has on now, but her black jeans, which are way too tight and I hate them.”
“Yeah, but you’re female. I wouldn’t be able to recall what my date wore the last time I went out even if you promised me Indians tickets to do it.”
“But you’re not married to her,” Theresa argued.
“Married?” the aunt asked.
“Indians tickets?” the redheaded boy asked. Theresa stuck a fork in his cake for him to use and ushered the next child forward.
She said again, “It just seems weird. This guy marries an escort who’s had someone else’s child, someone else’s very wealthy child, and three weeks after the wedding the wife is dead?”
Frank snagged a piece for himself, earning a glare from the next child in line. “Am I missing something here? Jillian wasn’t murdered.”
“We don’t know that yet.”
“You said yourself there wasn’t a mark on her. She committed-” A sharp glance from their aunt stopped him. Children’s birthday parties were not the place to discuss suicide. “She did it herself.”
Theresa persisted, disinclined to stifle herself for a traditional family gathering. The last traditional family gathering she had attended had been Paul’s funeral, and memories of the warmth, the crowd, the discomfort filtered back to her. “I won’t be positive until the toxicology results come back. What if she had too much stuff in her bloodstream to walk, much less walk two miles?”
“If she did, I’ll look into it. Until then, there’s nothing I can do. You really think the husband murdered her?”
“He said ‘had.’”
“Beg pardon?”
“When I complimented the decorating. He said Jillian had talent, not has talent. We didn’t even know she was dead and he’s already using the past tense?”
“Some people always mix up their tenses.”
“True. And I’m not discounting that this Drew guy worshipped a woman who just married another man. But a million and a half is one heck of a motive.”
“Evan Kovacic seems to have plenty of money, and according to the tech geeks at work, he will soon have so much of it he could buy IBM.”
“Yeah, I figured that out from his Web site too. Apparently Cleveland has become the Silicon Valley of the East, lots of companies I’ve never heard of and can’t figure out what they do. Hence the career day tomorrow.”
“A million and a half is probably a drop in the bucket compared to what investors have given him. I’d still bet on Georgie-he always gets my radar pinging. But I can’t do anything for the next day or two. The chief put me on the Cultural Gardens homicide because Sanchez and O’Malley are swamped, so I’ve got fifteen witnesses to interview tomorrow.”
The last child stepped up, a look of disappointment on her face to see that all the pink roses had already been claimed. “I know it’s unlikely for all those reasons, but just suppose for one minute that somehow Evan killed his wife for Cara’s bank account. What now? If he’s automatically Cara’s next of kin and he’s willing to kill for money, where does that leave this kid’s life expectancy?”
“That’s quite a leap.” Nevertheless, he wore an unhappy expression as he folded up his paper plate. He didn’t like coincidences any more than Theresa did, and a strange death occurring in conjunction with an overwhelming motive was one hell of a coincidence.
“I mean, do you know how easy it is to kill an infant? You just put a pillow over its face. You don’t even have to press down.”
A ripple of silence moved outward from the aunt and the girl with the last piece of cake, to the children playing cards nearby, to Theresa’s mother and two cousins seated on the couch. If suicide did not seem an appropriate topic for a child’s birthday party, infanticide ranked somewhere off the charts.
Theresa gulped, grateful she had grown too old to be sent to her room.
The snow drifted down in small but constant flakes, bursting into brilliant white under the streetlights but fading to a hazy gray as it receded into the dark. It would have been pretty if Theresa hadn’t been trying to drive in it. She hit the brakes a little too hard for a red light and slid the last three feet to the stop line.
“Your aunt Claire asked me about that boy you found in the woods,” her mother, Agnes, said.
“Mmm.” Sometimes Theresa told her mother and daughter more than she should about open cases. Sometimes she said nothing and hoped they wouldn’t catch the news that day. Child deaths always fell into the latter group.
“She wanted to know if it had anything to do with the girl in the Cultural Gardens.”
“Huh? No, of course not-that wasn’t a girl but a grown woman, and she was strangled. The boy wasn’t.”
“But they were both outside, propped up against something. And now you’ve got this third woman. Claire thinks it might be a serial killer.”
“Claire’s imagination is running away with her.”
Rachael chimed in from the backseat. “No, they said that on the news too.”
The approached another red light. This time Theresa gave herself plenty of stopping distance. “The news media likes serial killers. They sell papers and increase ratings.”
“So it’s your testimony, Ms. MacLean, that we do not have a ravenous murderer on the loose in Cleveland, Ohio?” Rachael asked with the cadence she had picked up from one semester of Business Law.
“I deny it categorically.”
“He was near the zoo?” her mother asked. “I used to go swimming there when I was little.”
“They had a swimming pool at the zoo?” Rachael asked. Theresa merely nodded, having heard the tales of her mother’s childhood, tales from a time when children could roam the city without cell phones or worried parents.
“The only place to go swimming was Brookside Park. They had a round cement pool, and you had to pay a dime or something to get in. My brothers and sisters would take me along. We’d walk all the way from Natchez Avenue.”
“Even Aunt Claire?”
“Aunt Claire turned all the boys’ heads.”
Rachael was silent for a while, no doubt trying to picture a hot summer in 1935, and her grandmother as a little girl. “That was a fun party.”
Theresa agreed while becoming deeply suspicious. Whenever her teenager expressed such an old-fashioned sentiment, it meant she wanted either to borrow the car or go on a ski trip with her numerous first cousins once removed.
Rachael continued, “Dora’s going to come to the talent show next week, even. I need to hang with her more often. We haven’t been to her mom’s in, like, forever.”
“We stopped by at Thanksgiving.”
“Mom, that was four months ago.”
“Oh.” Had it really been that long?
“We need to get out more.”
How diplomatic. The we instead of you. “I know.”
Theresa’s mother, in the passenger seat, said absolutely nothing. Theresa, no doubt, had often been a topic of conversation between Rachael and her grandmother; this struck Theresa as both heart-warming and deeply humbling.
Into the silence, Theresa asked, “Are you still thinking about electrical engineering?”
“Huh? As a major?” Rachael caught up to the leap in topics. “Yeah. Those guys make bucks. Why, do you have another college to check out?”
Theresa explained about the high-tech career expo at Kovacic Industries. Rachael could not be defined as a video-game junkie, but she would be majoring in science, and any sort of career-development exposure could not hurt for a high school senior currently working on picking a college.
“Oh.” Rachael slumped a bit into the gloom of the backseat, only her eyes visible in the rearview mirror. “You want to use me as cover to investigate a guy in one of your cases.”
Was that what she was doing? If so, Frank would kill her…though attending a public career fair could hardly be considered either an official investigation or bad parenting…“I thought of it as killing two birds-more like multitasking. You’ve been debating about engineering instead of the natural sciences.”
“Yeah. It’s just that you haven’t voluntarily left the house, except for work, church, and the grocery store, for months. And now, all of a sudden-”
Nine months, to be exact. Theresa concentrated mightily on a red light, avoiding her daughter’s all-too-knowing and compassionate stare. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve been out of it…” Her tongue stumbled over the useless euphemism for grief, for the selfish desire to make the world go away by ignoring its occupants, including the one she had brought into it.
Agnes said, “That sounds like fun. I have the afternoon shift at the restaurant tomorrow anyway. You two could eat out.”
That decided Rachael, her eyes in the rearview mirror regarding her mother as carefully and without judgment as a doctor, a therapist-or a parent. As if she were the mother and Theresa the child, to be guarded and cared for until strong enough to take care of herself. “Sure. I think that’s a good idea.”
To help the case? Theresa thought. Or me?