Regarding Anna (4 page)

I think my parents loved me—each in their own way—even if they weren’t my real parents.

I studied my old house for several minutes until the recurring image of their bodies lying on the basement floor compelled me to turn on the car engine and start driving away. Fifteen minutes later, I was on Belle Plaine Avenue, a tree-lined street with well-maintained older homes on decent-sized lots. The newspaper articles had referred to Anna’s residence as an apartment, which I never did understand—this was a neighborhood of single-family homes.

Arriving at the address, I pulled over and parked across the street in a spot where I had a good view. Anna’s home, the place where she died, looked like every other house on the street. It was an old white clapboard house with green shutters, two-stories, almost a perfect cube in shape. A variety of bushes, evergreens, and small ornamental trees landscaped the yard.

When I eased my car past the house and driveway, I was surprised to catch a glimpse of an outside stairway in the back leading up to the second story, something I had never noticed before. A ride around the block and into the alley allowed full view of the back of the house. The stairs were situated ten or so feet away from the house and led up to a deck that provided a partial cover for the ground-level patio. It was only then I understood the references to Anna’s apartment—the house was a two-flat.

I rolled down my window, took a few pictures, and drove back to the front of the house where I took a few more. I couldn’t wait to get them developed—it was helpful to have visuals when trying to solve a case.

A sharp rap on my passenger-side window startled me. The older woman I saw through the glass couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. The shawl she wore carelessly wrapped around her chubby little body looked like something she’d grabbed before rushing out the door.

I reached over and rolled down the window nearest to her. She bent forward a bit to get a better look at me, her facial expression hostile.

“What are you doing here?” Her clenched fists rested on her hips, or maybe that was her waist. It was hard to tell.

“Um, nothing really, I was just admiring these homes.”

“And taking pictures. Who are you?”

Something pinched inside my stomach. She was small but looked like she could throw a good punch if she had to.

“I’m Ginger Godfrey.” I’d been taught in one of my college classes to use a fake name in some circumstances. I figured this was one of them. “I love this house,” I told her. “I was just driving down the street and said to myself, ‘If I ever get married and have a family, which I’m not sure I’ll ever get to do given the string of loser boyfriends I’ve had lately. Anyway, if I do, this is the type of house I want to have. You know what I mean?”

One interrogation technique I had learned was that if you sensed someone was going to give you a hard time, you should try to distract them with personal information about yourself. I hoped it was okay just to make stuff up. I didn’t remember if we had covered that.

Her face contorted into a sneer, and for a moment I thought she was going to blow a gasket or something. She swiped a wisp of her mousy brown hair off her forehead and took a step closer to my car.

“You don’t own that house, do you? I must say you have a real gem there if you do. Yep. I’ll bet it’s gorgeous on the inside too. But I’m sorry. You must be getting cold. It’s even cold in here, so you must be freezing.”

“Get off my block. And stop taking pictures, or I’ll call the police.”

“May I ask you just one question?”

Her glare didn’t waver.

“That beautiful bush in your front yard...is that a winterberry bush?”

I wasn’t sure how long I should wait for her to say something.

“The only reason I ask is because my parents—they’re deceased now—my mother tried many times to grow one in our backyard. She would try everything to keep them alive, but they never did survive, and when each one died, well, she was heartbroken. That’s the only reason I asked. You must have given yours some pretty special attention.” I didn’t have to make up that story about my mother. It was true.

She took another step closer and poked her head in. Her face softened.

“The trick is in the watering,” she said in a completely different tone. “They don’t like to go to bed with wet feet.”

“Go to bed?”

“At night. They don’t like to be watered at night.”

“Really? My mother used to water them every evening.”

The woman gasped.

“Worst thing she could have done?”

“Oh, my…yes.”

“It’s cold. I better let you go.”

She gave me a sympathetic look. “Would you like to see it up close?”

Bingo!

“Yes. That would be lovely.”

I got out of the car and triumphantly followed her across the street.

“They do better a little farther south, but if you know what you’re doing, they can thrive up here too. They like full sun, you know.” She glanced over at me. “But not midday. That’s when I pull down the canopy, so it’s in the shade. And then when the sun reaches about two o’clock, I pull it back up.”

Up close, the bush
was
beautiful, nothing like the ones I’d seen my mother struggling with.

“They can get twelve feet high and just as wide if you don’t trim them.”

“No kidding.”

She caressed one of the branches. “They’re like my children.”

“Well, it shows. Your landscaping is beautiful. You do all this yourself?”

She nodded.

“Someday, when I have a house of my own, can I come to you for advice?”

Her expression melted into a soft smile. “Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee, Miss Godfrey?”

I had a feeling someone who cared so well for a winterberry bush couldn’t be all bad.

FOUR

Rumors

“A cup of coffee would hit the spot, Mrs...”

“Lawless. But please call me Minnie. And may I call you Ginger?”

“Yes, of course.”

I followed her up the front steps and into the foyer. It wasn’t often that a real-life situation in investigative work turned into a textbook example of how to do it right. I was proud of myself—this stranger had just invited me into her home. But then it occurred to me that all I’d offered her were lies, and that didn’t seem right. They hadn’t covered
that
in class.

Minnie pointed to the living room. “Please make yourself comfortable. I’ll put a pot of coffee on for us.”

While she was in the kitchen, I took in as much as I could—even things that didn’t seem important right then could have meaning later on. I made notes on a small pad of paper I kept in my purse.

It was eerily quiet in the living room—the faint sounds of Minnie fussing around the kitchen were all I heard. I couldn’t even hear a car go by, and the street couldn’t have been more than thirty feet from the house. With the windows closed, it was possible no one would have heard a commotion going on in there, like the day Anna had been murdered.

A fireplace flanked by built-in bookcases that held more knickknacks, photographs, and houseplants than books took up most of one wall. Leaded-glass doors beneath the shelves revealed cabinets filled with cardboard boxes.

I took a seat at one end of the long upholstered sofa in front of the three windows facing the street. On the other side of the room were two cushioned side chairs separated by a large round two-tiered end table. The soft blue and brown tones in the furniture’s fabric made the room warm and inviting.

The throw rug in the middle of the room looked familiar to me, but the pattern was common—blue borders, maroon and blue flowers, beige background—so I figured I had probably seen similar ones before. I must have stared at it too long—it made me a little uneasy.

My eyes were drawn to the far wall where there hung a handmade tapestry depicting a long, narrow cobblestone walk meandering through a lush summer garden. A black cat sat on the walk three quarters of the way into the garden, seemingly taking pleasure in the essence of the flowers. There was a feeling about the room that reminded me of our old living room.

“You have a lovely home, Minnie,” I practically shouted so she could hear me in the kitchen.

A minute later, she reentered the living room, and as she neared me the unmistakable scent of Cashmere Bouquet talcum powder tugged me back to my childhood when my mother used to hug me close to her chest and say, “I’m so glad you’re mine.” I never thought anything about it then, but now I wondered what she had meant by that.

“This is just how I pictured this house inside…warm and cozy. Did you raise a family here?”

She gave me a blank stare.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“So, Ginger, are you from around here?”

“I live near Six Corners, not too far from here.”

“And what brings you to this neighborhood?”

I was prepared for that question but didn’t feel good about telling yet another lie.

“I went to school with a girl who now lives in Minneapolis but was in town visiting her cousin who lives just a few blocks from here. We had a nice visit.”

“Oh, really? What’s her name?”

“My friend? Susan Grady.”

“No, I meant her cousin.”

“Well, her first name is Charlotte, but I don’t think I ever heard her last name. Nice girl.” I took a sip of coffee, which I never did like. I didn’t much like myself just then either.

“Don’t know anyone named Charlotte in this neighborhood.”

“Well, maybe she hasn’t lived here that long. I didn’t ask.”

“A few blocks in which direction?”

“Um, let’s see.” I twisted the upper half of my body around to glance out the window and buy some time. “I seem to be a little turned around. I think it’s that direction,” I told her, pointing across the street. “But I’m not sure now.” With my luck, she knew who lived in every house within a two-mile radius.

“No, it can’t be there, unless of course, they just moved in, and then it could be the old Jefferson house. I heard there are new owners, but they’re older, maybe in their seventies.”

“I didn’t see anyone else in the house, but maybe they were out. In fact, I’m sure of it. Charlotte was pretty young to own that house all by herself.”

“Hmmm.”

Minnie’s facial expression told me she may have been thinking about how she could find out more about who bought the Jefferson house. All I could think of right then was a line from some poem I had to read in school: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave...”

“Have you lived here long, Minnie?”

“I bought this house in 1943. May 29. The day Rosie the Riveter was on the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post
.” She beamed. “I know what events happened on important days of my life. Like on the day I was born, right at the beginning of World War I, Germany declared war on France that day.”

She was quite a character.

“That winterberry bush,” she said. “It looked like it was about to take its last breath when I bought this place. If I hadn’t come along, it would have died for sure.”

“You must have a way with plants.”

She appeared to be silently reminiscing, so I gave her several seconds to come back to the conversation.

“I bought this house after I lost my daughter and husband.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I couldn’t bear to keep living in the house we had when we got married, so I sold it and bought this one. I was so lonely, and that’s what attracted me to this place. I thought maybe the boarders would be company for me.”

“Boarders?”

“When I bought it, there were three boarders upstairs. Four rooms, three boarders. But not for long. One by one, they left, and I didn’t bother replacing them. Turns out they weren’t company at all—just a bunch of weirdoes. One of them even died up there.”

It was hard to think with my heart racing so fast. “I just assumed this was a single-family home. It looks like—”

“This house was originally built as a single-family home, but someone who lived here before me must have turned the upstairs into a boardinghouse. That’s why there are outside stairs in the back. They were added so the boarders would have a separate entrance.”

The story was getting more interesting by the minute.