Family Skeletons: A Spunky Missouri Genealogist Traces A Family's Roots...And Digs Up A Deadly Secret (8 page)

Everybody on the street stopped to look at me as I got in his car. People stood in the windows of the shops on the street and watched me. Heck, I think even the dead over in the Santa Lucia cemetery were watching.

I shook my head as we pulled away from the Gaheimer House and took off for Washington, Missouri.

It was a pleasant day, the sky was azure, and the foliage was bursting with life. These kinds of days erase all of the ugly things that fill one's life. Life is tricky. It lulls you into a false sense of beauty and hope, and then hits you with lightning.

The drive out Highway 44 was nice, if not enjoyable. Basically, we talked about how I got involved in genealogy and history. Some people find it hard to believe that a “young” person can be interested in those sorts of things. I suppose a greater percentage of family historians probably are over forty. But there are a great many young people just as enthusiastic about their heritage.

I had called the four numbers that I had, until I figured out which one was Louise Shenk. Finding her house was easy. It was a cute little two-story white bungalow, complete with a porch swing and roses. The yard was perfect and completely cluttered with several blooming plants.

My stomach was jittery. I'd never done anything like this before. Sheriff Brooke exuded calm. He walked with an air of superiority, his shoulders thrown back. He was close to forty. He was by no means ugly, but not exactly handsome either. It would be difficult, I knew, for him to take the backseat during our visit.

I rang the doorbell and waited. A robust old woman answered the door. Her eyes were bright, and the hair that wasn't white was of a dark color.

“Louise Shenk?” I asked. I gave a big, bright smile.

“Yes,” she answered, unsure and out of breath.

“Hi, my name is Victory O'Shea. I'm tracing the Counts family tree, of southeast Missouri. Could you answer a few questions for me?”

She hesitated, looking from Sheriff Brooke back to me. I sensed her unease. “We can sit here on the porch. Just a few minutes.”

She took the chair on the front porch and motioned for Sheriff Brooke and me to take the swing.

“This is Colin Brooke,” I said. “A friend.”

They nodded at each other, and that was it. Each one was measuring the other. My tape recorder was running in my pocket, and I had my notebook and pen ready.

“Mrs. Shenk, I've been working on the Counts family tree for a couple of months—”

“How are you related?” she asked quickly.

“I'm not, directly. I was hired to do it.” I shifted through my notes, making it look as though I had to look something up.

“Could you tell me what your father did for a living?”

“He was a farmer, and a Methodist minister.… He had several churches that he preached at: New Mullen, Avon, Pine Branch.”

“Pine Branch? My great-grandpa helped build that church,” I said, genuinely surprised. “Back in 1912. He was about twenty then.”

“Well, my lands!” she exclaimed. Don't ask me what that phrase means. My grandfather was always full of what I call Americanisms. One of his favorites was “The dickens, you say.” I don't think he had any idea what it meant.

“That was actually the second time that church had been built,” she went on. “The original burned.”

Sheriff Brooke rolled his eyes, as if he didn't believe a word of what I or she was saying. “Anything else you can tell me about him would be a great help. Anything interesting?”

“One time, we housed a band of Gypsies for the night. Mama thought for sure that they were gonna steal us blind. Next morning the only thing they'd took was my little brother,” she said. “Dad rode for hours at a hard run to catch 'em. That was when we only had the two horses, and both were old and you had to lean 'em up against a fence post when you weren't using them. We was real worried that he would kill Bertha riding her that hard.”

Her breath was labored, and she stopped several times in between words. I found myself being overly aware of every breath I took, in reaction to her labored breathing.

“When Papa caught up to them, he asked them how come they took his son? They said they didn't take him, they let him come along,” she said. She laughed at the memory of it. “Them Gypsies have unique ways of saying things.”

“Your little brother? Would that have been Eugene?”

“No, Bobby,” she said. “There was Ruthie, me, Bobby, Eugene, and Edith,” she said. She marked each one with one of her fingers.

“Now Eugene, he fought in the war, right? World War II?” I asked, and hoped that I wasn't too obvious.

“Yes,” she answered. She showed no outward emotion at the mention of this. She only looked from me to Sheriff Brooke.

“Where was he stationed?”

“All over Europe, you know … France, Germany, not sure.”

“Did he ever get married?” I asked as I wrote everything down.

“Not to my knowledge. Though he was going to once,” she said. “Sweet girl, named Viola.”

Norah's mother, I thought. I had filled Sheriff Brooke in on Norah's family tree, so at the mention of Viola, he sat to attention.

“Do you know why he didn't marry her?” Brooke asked.

“No,” she said.

I cleared my throat, unable to say what it was I really wanted to say to her. How do you ask somebody if her brother got his girlfriend pregnant? Nowadays it isn't that big a thing. But for her generation, it would be improper for me to just ask that sensitive a question.

“Did he have any children?”

“No, but I often suspected that Viola might have been carrying,” she said with no emotion. “She moved up to St. Louis shortly after he went to war. She'd come down now and then to see Mama, but she came alone and we only saw her once a year, maybe.”

“For how long?”

“Just a couple of hours.”

“No, I mean how many years did she do this?”

“Till Mama died.”

Till Mama died?

That thought was heartbreaking. To think that Viola went to see Eugene's mother every year until she died. Why? Was she secretly wishing that Edith Counts would ask her if she had given birth to Eugene's child? Or was it that she was still hoping that somebody would tell her something of him, after all of those years? Her loyalty was admirable. All of that time, even though she had married somebody else, she still waited for somebody to tell her what had become of him, or why he'd dumped her.

“Mrs. Shenk, I will be honest with you. Viola did have a child by Eugene. A daughter. It was her daughter who hired me to trace his family tree,” I said, still shocked that I just came out and said exactly what I was thinking. After all, I usually do say what I'm thinking, but not when I know it could hurt somebody this badly.

I suppose I expected her either to fall out of her chair or throw us off of the porch. She did neither. She only smiled to herself, at some inward thought or memory.

“Not surprised,” she said.

“I'm sorry for the deception, but I wasn't sure how you would take being told that you had a niece that you knew nothing about.”

She waved a hand toward me. “It's okay.”

“Well, the real reason I came to visit,” I said, delighted at her willingness to talk, “is that Norah, his daughter, had been wanting to meet with him. How do you think he would react to that?”

“Don't know,” she said. “Ask him, if you can find him.”

I glanced over at Sheriff Brooke; both of us realized the hidden definition in her statement.

“What do you mean, if we can find him?” asked Sheriff Brooke. A muscle in his jaw flexed as he prepared to pounce on any shred of evidence.

She played with her wedding band, contemplating an answer. When she finally looked up at me, her eyes were filled with tears. “I've not laid eyes on him since he walked up the dirt road in front of Mama's house. He walked to town to catch a bus to go fight Hitler,” she said. Her voice was quiet with pain. “He never came back. He wrote to us for a while. He wasn't killed and he wasn't missing in action. He survived the war. But he never came home.”

I was stunned. “Do you mean to tell me that he came back to America and never even came to see his mother?”

“He might have stayed in Europe. But, yes to your question. He never saw Mama, and it killed her. One day she told me that she had failed as a mother, because no good son would do that to their mama. She had accepted the fact he'd never come home. The day that she accepted it, she died on the inside. The life ran out of her.”

I didn't know if Eugene had lived in Vitzland at the time of his mother's death or not. But how was I supposed to tell Louise that he could have lived there the whole time and never gone to see his mother? They had been nursing the idea that maybe he just never came back from Europe. I could burst that bubble for her, too.

“They say that war changes a man,” she said coldly. “But enough to walk away from his family? Enough to walk away from his mama? Everything that he knew and loved?”

She was bitter, and I didn't blame her. I was so angry with Eugene Counts, I could have strangled him, and I was no relation.

“Where is he at?” she asked, surprising Sheriff Brooke as much as me. “You wouldn't have asked how he would feel about meeting his daughter if you didn't know where he was,” she said.

I had to be honest with her. She was entitled. She was also very perceptive, and I couldn't have got by with trying to lie my way out of it.

“Vitzland,” I said, ashamed for Eugene.

Saying nothing, she stood and disappeared into her house. I shrugged at Sheriff Brooke, thinking that was the end of our interview. She returned, however, just as Brooke and I had stood to leave, with a photo album. She flipped through it, pulling out a few photos as she went. It was as if she had the photo album memorized. She knew what photos were on what page.

“Give these to his daughter,” she said. “I have no use for them anymore.”

I stared sullenly at the pile of photographs. I had brought her such pain this day and I felt guilty as hell. Who did I think I was, that I could just waltz up to somebody's doorstep and pour salt in her wounds?

“She died, Mrs. Shenk,” I said. “His daughter died.” After everything else that she had learned today, I wasn't going to tell her that Norah had been murdered. “But I will give them to Norah's daughter.”

“Thank you,” was all that she said. “I'm tired.”

I took that as a cue to leave. Before I stepped off of her porch, I stopped and met her eyes. “I am truly sorry,” I said.

“So am I.”

We were halfway to our car when Sheriff Brooke stopped and went back to the foot of the steps. It reminded me of how he had done that to me, the day that Norah had been killed. I knew the detective in him wouldn't let him leave without asking her some police type of question. There was too much potential with this character witness, too much that he could learn from her.

“Ma'am,” he began. “Do you have any idea what changed him? Do you think that maybe he had been deformed in the war? You know, too embarrassed to come home?”

“No. I can't say for sure, but he had a friend in the same unit. He was a native of Ste. Genevieve County. I think maybe he had an influence on Eugene. But not enough to change a boy that was as good as Eugene. He was such a good boy,” she said. Her breathing grew steadily worse. Her chest rose rapidly and I didn't know if it was from asthma or something like congestive heart failure. Either way, we had bothered her enough.

Sheriff Brooke watched as she made it safely inside her door. I heard everything they had said, not being more than a few feet behind the sheriff.

“You drive,” he said.

“Why?”

“I want to write some notes,” he said. “While they're still fresh.”

When we were in his car, I adjusted the mirror and his seat.

“If something changed a man enough that he never came to visit his mother ever again, do you think it could make him a murderer?” he asked.

I think the sheriff was simply thinking out loud to himself, rather than asking me directly, but I decided to answer him just in case. “Normally, I might agree with your line of thinking. But Eugene Counts didn't even know about Norah. He did not know that he had a child,” I answered.

“How do we know he didn't?” he asked with a “let's get 'em” look.

“Is that it? Case closed? A man doesn't come home to his family after the war and that makes him a butcher of his own daughter?” I was furious with him, even though I secretly thought back to the newspaper ad that Norah had placed. Could he have seen it? Could he have known that she existed? But so what if he had seen the ad? Why kill her?

Something in me wanted to find an excuse for Eugene.

“What if he had a reason? Like some illegal reason. He didn't want anybody to know where he was, and she found out?” Sheriff Brooke asked.

“Then why move back to Missouri at all? Why not stay in Europe? Why not Florida or Arizona, where it's warm all the time?” I argued.

He looked at me as if I were the stupidest thing to walk on two feet.

“What about the ex-husband?” I asked.

“He's clean,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

“What you mean to say is, he is an untouchable,” I said as I started the engine. I slammed the car into reverse and then forward again once we were out in the street. I enjoyed watching his head snap back and forth.

“I'm not stupid,” I said at the stop sign. “I'm very aware of who Zumwalt is.”

“Who?” he asked.

“Harold Zumwalt, of Zumwalt and Macklintock. A big-shot law firm, and I'm guessing you've been told to lay off.”

The cars behind me had lined up, waiting for me to go. They were honking, so I obliged them. I gunned the car and watched Sheriff Brooke's head snap back on the headrest once again.