A Deadly Snow Fall (26 page)

“I’m afraid so. She’s as closed as a clam at
low tide. The doctors cannot get a word out of her. Her mind has
slipped entirely. Probably a good thing. Less suffering that way.
But, I’ll tell the Chief what you’ve reported, good citizen.”

Daphne and I met for breakfast at Beasley's
two days later. James had been busy wrapping up the case and I did
not expect to see him for a few days. Time to bring my bff up to
speed. Daphne had been in Boston hanging her work in a friend’s
gallery and returned to find the mysteries all but put to bed.

All the doors and windows were open to the
gentle warm sea breeze. Customers were wearing shorts and flip
flops and the pretty colorful flowers spilling out of the window
boxes affirmed that the village had made it successfully to yet
another summer.

James took me totally by surprise when he
opened the door to Beasley’s, spotted us, and came in. Dee Dee was
delivering a fresh pot of Earl Grey tea. She grabbed another cup on
her way by the coffee station.

“Hi, gorgeous women. Any place for a stray
male on his coffee break?”

I patted the bench beside me and he sat.

“I come bearing news.”

“Oh, goody; now that the crime wave has
abated, I’m feeling bored with this quiet town. I liked it when it
was still a small town but had big city crime to take the dull edge
off,” Daphne said as she looked around to see what other customers
were eating.

“Daphne, you are absolutely certifiable.
Let’s just enjoy the peace and absence of mysterious conundrums
that have plagued us for weeks and weeks. Give it a rest, will
you?”

Daphne stuck her tongue out at me and dove
into her pancakes topped with bananas, strawberries and a
monumental mound of whipped cream. In fact, the Beasley’s clever
marketing-major daughter, Mia, had named this breakfast offering
the Monumental Breakfast. Bill Windshsip had applauded the honoring
of his beloved Monument but refused to try and eat one.

“Do you eat like that everyday, Daphne?”
James asked.

“You have no idea James; the woman is a trash
compacter in designer clothes.”

I reached for his hand under the table and
squeezed it. We had tickets for that night for Bob Ballard’s talk
on searching for shipwrecks, particularly the Widah that the pirate
Black Bellamy had captained and sunk. My inn manager, Katy Balsam,
was due to arrive the next day and I was preparing to cook
magnificent breakfasts for the coming three months. The mysteries
solved and the cases closed, a nice warm sense of completion had
settled over me.

“Okay, what is this news, big boy?” Daphne
asked between huge bites.

“A special delivery letter arrived late
yesterday afternoon for Emily. It was addressed to Edna Gonsalves
Snow from a law firm in Asheville, North Carolina. Naturally, no
one at the post office recognized the name, but since the address
was Emily’s closed and locked shop it was decided to bring it to
the Chief. Of course, the Chief knew it was for Emily Sunshine aka
Edna Snow. It turned out to be a pretty important announcement,
although unfortunately it may have arrived far too late.”

We put down our forks and focused on the
handsome James. I was braced for not having much time for him in
the coming months. However, once the summer rush was over, we had a
lot to talk about.

“The letter announced the death of Rosita,
Emily/Edna’s mother. She passed away in Asheville, North Carolina,
just a few days ago. Left her daughter one million dollars.” James
waited for our reactions. He was not disappointed.

“Wowzer! That confirms that there is indeed
damned good money in pigs and corn. I had no idea.” Daphne stopped
eating and just stared at James.

“Oh my goodness, James, where did Rosita get
the million? Is there really that kind of money in corn and
pigs?”

“No, it seems that miserly Edwin evidently
suffered a stroke of conscience a couple of months ago, despite the
hard time he was evidently giving Emily. He hired a detective to
find Rosita and to give her a check for a million. For Emily aka
Edna after they both were gone, according to Edwin’s instructions.
For some reason Rosita never told Emily...er...Edna.”

“To think that all of this could have been
avoided. If Emily had known that her father had relented, she would
have backed off. Even if he refused to strike up a cuddly,
father-daughter relationship with her at least she would have had
some sense of closure. But why didn’t Edwin tell her what he’d
done? He put himself in harms way on purpose, it seems. I guess
that’s just further proof that he was a very peculiar man
indeed.”

“That’s an understatement, pal,” said Daphne
as she finished off more food than I ate in an entire day.

“Hey, wait a minute; I hadn’t even considered
this….” Daphne tossed her fork onto the greatly diminished waffle
tower.

“Daphne, what?”

“Does this mean no murderer, no manuscript?”
Daphne’s look of disappointment caused James and me to laugh.

“Aha, there lies the rub. No, actually the
attorney contacted me early this morning. It seems our dear James
here notified him of what had transpired. Then, dear James
suggested to him that solving the mystery was just as good as
finding a murderer. Thus, the codicil demands ought to be honored.
I will have the manuscript by tomorrow; it is being sent by
overnight mail and then we can all read it and see what we missed
back in the forties when the town really rocked. Imagine being here
with Eugene O’Neill, John Reed, Louise Bryant and Max Eastman and
then later with the Grangers and their crazy New York friends?”

“I venture to say, Daphne,” said James, “that
you missed a great period in the history of the village when you
would have fit the town’s atmosphere like the proverbial
glove.”

“I know. Damn, wouldn’t time travel be gobs
of fun?’

The next morning, I was making my breakfast
when the special delivery package arrived. Sitting in the sunny
sitting room, I tore into it and began reading.

An hour later, I called both James and Daphne
promising cappuccinos and cranberry lemon muffins and, a big
surprise.

They arrived and we sat at the old pine
kitchen table that had been my aunt’s. The tattered, very shop
worn, yellowed pages of Edwin Snow III’s manuscript lay on the
table in front of me. My pals all but drooled waiting to hear about
the secrets and scandals the old man had been storing up for
decades.

“Okay, are you ready?” They nodded their
bobble heads. “All right, here goes. I read it through twice just
to be sure I didn’t miss anything important. He had only written a
hundred and two pages, so it wasn’t that daunting.”

“Okay. So, how many great scandals did he
expose? How juicy were the secrets of those dudes back in the
forties when a milk toast novel like Forever Amber got banned as
porn, eh? I mean, after all, compared to what people get away with
today, how bad could their behavior have been?”

My Mona Lisa smile lingered too long and my
audience jeered.

“Come on. Don’t do this to us, Liz. Spill the
beans.” Daphne.

“Hey love, before I grow too old to laugh
without cracking a rib, please.” James.

“Daphne, James, I am here to tell you, the
first people to hear it, that after two readings I declare the work
of Edwin Snow III to be….”

“A masterpiece? The great American biography?
What, Liz? Come on, you are killing us here. Sock it to us,
girl.”

“Gibberish. Total, unqualified rubbish. The
ramblings of a very disturbed mind. Not one iota of scandal or
secrets, just on and on, ad infinitum grumblings about all the
insults and unfair treatment, rebuffs and snubbing he’d received
over his lifetime in Truro and Provincetown.”

Groan. “Damn, Liz, what an anticlimax. Aren’t
you disappointed?”

“Not really, I guess it is what I sort of
suspected, all along.”

“Ruins my day, let me tell you. Such a long
wait for this; nothing juicy at all. Damn that old man; he could
have given us something to talk about.” Turning to face James,
Daphne asked him, “So when will the DNA test come back to prove
conclusively that Edwin was Emily’s PaPa?”

James looked confused. “There won’t be a DNA
test. Doesn’t seem necessary since everything checks out. Why would
you think it necessary with all that we have to support her story,
that we need a DNA test, Daphne? Edwin admitted his paternity when
he sent that million to Rosita for their daughter. ”

I blurted out before Daphne could
respond.

“Blimey, Daphne, you are so right. Why didn’t
I think of that?”

James looked from Daphne to me, totally
mystified.

I reached out and put my hand on his. “James,
when Rosita named her baby daughter Edna she might have named her
for either Edwin Snow or Edward Granger. Without positive
scientific proof we will never really know.”

James looked perplexed.

“I suppose it doesn’t really matter. What
difference would it make at this point? If Emily’s lawyer manages
to get her off with something less that a manslaughter charge, she
will be a very rich woman. I doubt that it will matter to Emily.
Oops, sorry, Edna.”

The bobble heads shrugged.

Epilogue

Dear, sweet, grandmotherly Mary Malone spent
six weeks in a private, very up-scale, well-respected mental
hospital north of Boston where she underwent observation. It was
determined by the experts that she had suffered a complete
breakdown that had erased every memory of everything that had
happened. In fact, Mary, on a daily basis, believed that she was an
assortment of different characters. A new personality emerged
nearly every day. At various times, Mary had told her doctors and
the other patients that she was Betty Grable, Harpo Marx, Abraham
Lincoln and Raggedy Anne, among others.

From there she was transferred to a hospital
in up-state New York where she passed away gently, in her sleep, a
month later. Her home was sold to a nice young couple from
California who’d always spent their summers in Truro. They opened a
homemade ice cream shop, Ye Olde Penny Candy and Ice Cream Shoppe
in the vacated Fairies in the Garden shop space. A pretty
old-fashioned name for such new age flavors as cinnamon-bacon,
celery-ginger-raisin and lavender-macadamia.

Patton came to live with me as did Emily’s
cat Jasmine. They were often seen sitting side by side or lying
close to one another; their friendship obvious to anyone. If cats
and dogs share a secret language, as I hoped they did, they
appeared to be entertaining themselves on some good old stuff.

Daphne, however, was sure that there was more
than friendship at work. “Don’t you see, he, Patton, was Emily’s
father’s dog and she, Jasmine, was Emily’s cat. Thus, since Patton
was, in effect, Emily’s half-brother and Jasmine, in that same
vein, Emily’s child, Patton’s would be Jasmine’s half-uncle. There
is a real family bond there. Particularly since they both ended up
rootless.”

“Right.” Best not to encourage Daph when she
went off on a tangent like that, I’d learned.

Emily’s case dragged on and on. She went
through four lawyers until she found just the right one. In the
end, it was determined that when she’d reached out to Edwin in his
distress after the long climb, her intentions were to be helpful to
the old man. In addition, her latest lawyer stressed the fact that
when Emily raced down the stairs after Edwin’s tumbling body she
truly meant to try and save him if she could.

Where the judge came down hard was on the
matter of Emily deceiving old Edwin with the promise of a journal
awaiting him up in the top of the Pilgrim Monument. Naturally, this
strenuous climb resulted in his death. Or had it? That became a
slightly shady area that helped the little woman escape a far more
dire fate.

On the stand, both the coroner and the
medical examiner concurred. Edwin was pretty much a dead man anyway
when he climbed all those icy steps. He could have refused but he
hadn’t. Nearly ninety and in frail health with a serious heart
condition and a tumor pressing on a vital part of his brain, he
might not have lived another day one way or the other. Not that
this totally washed away Edna’s aka Emily’s guilt regarding
tricking the old man. (I don’t think I will ever get used to
calling her Edna.)

The coroner stated that “The man suffered a
massive heart attack in unison with the explosion, in laymen’s
terms, of the tumor pressing on his brain. Either occurrence alone
would have been fatal.”

Neither of us had attended any of the trial
before the final day. Life had been hectic in busy Provincetown and
we’d both been far too busy. In fact, neither of us had even read
the newspapers’ accounts of the trial during that time. Coming out
of our caves in early November, we decided to drive up-Cape to
Barnstable to hear the summation of the murder trial of Emily
Sunshine aka Edna Gonsalves Snow.

As I said, Emily went through lawyers like
Grant through Richmond and on that day we were there to witness
something that it took us months to fully digest. In fact, we were
still talking about it a year later and were no closer to
understanding if it had been pure coincidence or something else.
There are those who believe that there are no such things as
coincidences. I, however, disagree. I had learned, since coming to
Provincetown, that even the most earnest scientist must be open to
quirks, now and then, in the fabric of space and time.

The latest lawyer had come on the scene just
days before, but she’d inserted herself into the picture like she’d
been born for the role. Sitting in the courthouse waiting for the
judge to make his appearance I picked up a Boston newspaper that
someone had left beside me on the bench. The front page article on
the trial that was due to finish up that day, all but the
sentencing, pulled it all together neatly for me.