The Death of Perry Many Paws (7 page)

“Franklin used to spend hours making those maps. Hours and hours.”

“And other times they were soldiers fighting the American Revolution and Hetty would run around with a lantern screaming, ‘One if
by land. Two if by sea.’ And the boys would come rushing out of the woods with guns and sabers and fight with the trees. It all seemed pretty silly to us but they always had a good time. I think they were in the middle of making a new pirate adventure when this picture was taken. Remember, Claudia?”

Claudia nodded, her eyes still glued to the picture. “Yes. I remember Franklin was always up late into the night making maps and my dad would scold him about going to bed. When he was interested in something, he would totally immerse himself in it. He was a very focused and creative boy.”

“What happened to him?” I asked. We all had accepted Franklin for the recluse that he was and never really thought about the fact that he had once been a normal, energetic boy. To me Franklin was always the old man I saw through the window. “What changed him, Claudia?”

“I have no idea. I was so young and …” Claudia began.

“When you’re six, your whole world revolves around your toys and your playmates. Older siblings and their friends are annoyances,” Sybil added. “When Franklin was with Edmund and Hetty they were all especially annoying. I think Claudia and I were too ladylike for them.”

“Franklin just seemed to fade away into himself until he was totally gone. I don’t think anyone ever knew why. I just don’t know,” Claudia sighed wistfully. The three of us sat silently looking at the photo in Claudia’s hands.

“You should keep this picture, Claudia. Everything in his cottage is more yours than it is Cam’s or mine. And are you sure you don’t want any of the books?”

“No, I’d rather they go in the library at the house. That’s where they belong.” She looked at the photo again and then returned it to me.

“Was there anything you found at the house besides the books and kitchen things?” she asked.

“There were bed linens and clothes, a pile of newspapers …”

“Those should be thrown out.”

“Probably, but there was something curious about the newspapers.”

Sybil clapped her hands gleefully. “I love anything curious! What was it?”

“They were all dated April 1. There was only one paper for every year since 1938 and each paper was the April 1 edition. Any idea why?”

“That date has no significance that I can think of other than the obvious. And Franklin was hardly interested in April Fool’s Day …” Claudia replied.

Sybil cut in. “Maybe not now, dear, but he certainly was as a boy. Remember all the tricks he used to pull on us? He had a great sense of humor and could be quite inventive in his pranks.”

I pictured the shell of a man who had stared out the window at me for twenty-five years and never even acknowledged my presence. A prankster? It seemed impossible. Hearing what he had been like as a boy made his life even sadder and more difficult to understand. Maybe modern medicine could have helped him lead a more normal life. As far as I knew he hadn’t been to a doctor since Cam and I were married. At the bottom of all this was the most obvious question. Who would want to kill a man who was a recluse and hadn’t spoken to anyone but his sister in decades? The only valuable things he had owned were those first-edition books, and they hadn’t been touched. Nothing in the cottage had been touched. It appeared totally random and senseless and, most of all, motiveless.

Sybil had gotten Claudia laughing about some April Fool’s joke Franklin, Edmund and Hetty had pulled on them when they were young girls. I got the impression that it was one of those things that is funnier in retrospect than it was when it happened. As they were reminiscing, something interesting occurred to me. I waited until there was a break in their conversation.

“Did you say the girl in the photo was named Hetty Foster?” I asked.

Sybil nodded, wiping away tears of laughter with her sleeve. “Yes. Her real name was Henrietta but everyone called her Hetty. She always seemed more boy than girl to me.”

“Very unladylike,” Claudia chimed in. “I don’t know why her parents didn’t get her in hand …”

“She came from a good family, although her parents traveled a lot as I recall …”

“You expect boys to be able to run wild but certainly not a young lady. I don’t think she ever even took piano or voice lessons.”

I wasn’t sure this was really such a major faux pas in parenting, but let it go. It wasn’t Hetty’s lack of social polish I was interested in. “You said her last name was Foster. Was she related to Syra and Bing?”

“Hetty was certainly related to Syra and Bing although I’m sure they never mention her. Hetty was their mother.” It took me a full minute to absorb this information.

“But her last name was Foster and their last name is Foster …”

“Exactly. That is why I’m sure they never mention her. She wasn’t married when either Syra or Bing was born. I told you she was a wild and very unladylike girl,” Claudia informed me.

“No one else we knew had children out of wedlock. Shocking, really,” Sybil added.

It was true that neither Syra nor Bing talked about their parents but I assumed it was because they were dead. They didn’t seem like people who would be ashamed of having an unwed mother. They were both in their late forties. Surely this wasn’t still a sore point with them.

“And obviously they have different fathers,” Sybil added. “Syra is tall and shaped like an ironing board, like her mother. Heaven knows what Bing’s father must have looked like. It’s hard to imagine someone
built like Hetty having a passionate affair with a man who came up to her shoulders and was built like an overweight penguin.”

“Well, Hetty was different from other girls and I suppose there is no accounting for taste when one’s baser instincts rule one’s life,” Claudia proclaimed in her best high society voice. It was times like this that I especially didn’t like her.

“What can you expect from a girl who never had piano or voice lessons?” I said. In a sad commentary on my inability to successfully express sarcasm, both Claudia and Sybil nodded in agreement.

Sybil reached over and patted my hand, “You are so right, dear.”

“Did you know, Tamsen, that both Syra and Bing were named after exits on the New York State Thruway? I don’t know if that is where they were conceived or where they were born.” Claudia informed me.

I didn’t really care about where or how they were conceived but very interested in the origin of their names. “What exits were they named after?”

“Syracuse and Binghamton. I believe those are their actual given names. Ridiculous names for children. For all we know, Hetty had all kinds of children and the only way she can remember who their fathers are is by naming them after the town they were conceived in.”

I remembered a trip Cam and I had taken with Abbey to see the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York. Nearby was a town named Painted Post and another named Horseheads. Thank goodness neither Syra nor Bing had been born there.

I thought Cam and I were pretty imaginative when we had named Abbey. I would never have told my mother-in-law that we had gotten the name from Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset, England. And I certainly would never tell her that her granddaughter had been conceived in the historic George and Pilgrims Hotel in Glastonbury on our sixth wedding anniversary after a shared bottle of French wine. Some things are best kept to oneself.

Shania Twain started singing from my purse and I started digging for my phone, knowing it was Grace. She is a big fan of Shania. I let all my friends pick their own ring tones—that way when I can’t find my phone before the ringing stops, I at least know whose call I missed.

As soon as I said hello, Grace said. “Tamsen, you have got to get over here. I found something, something awful. I need for you to see this. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what it means …” She began sobbing and I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Grace wasn’t much of a crier, so hearing her sob was disturbing. I told her I was on my way. I took a hasty leave of Claudia and Sybil, yanking on my jacket and telling them Grace needed me.

“Who
was
that singing,” Sybil asked Claudia as I let the door shut behind me.

egally it should have taken me twice that long but I made the drive to Grace’s house in ten minutes. Her front door was open and I walked in, calling her name.

“In Ryan’s bedroom,” she yelled back and I ran up two flights of stairs to the attic, where Hugh had made Ryan a private sanctuary away from the rest of the house. I could barely breathe by the time I reached the top. I needed to get more exercise. I was only forty-seven, for heaven’s sake. Grace emerged from Ryan’s bedroom and grabbed my arm, pulling me into the room.

There was a pile of books by the unmade bed, a few car-related magazines scattered on the bureau, several action movie posters haphazardly taped to the walls, and some damp towels draped over the open closet door. I flashed back to my bedroom when I was fifteen and the chaos that had ruled in my mini kingdom; this wasn’t bad at all. While I surveyed the room, Grace moved nervously to the closet door.

“In here,” she whispered, which really freaked me out. I hate the sound of whispering, especially when my nerves are already on edge. She pointed at the floor.

On the closet floor lay a pile of clothes. Grace bent down and gingerly picked up a gray t-shirt that looked like a red pen had exploded all over it. She dangled it in front of my face for a few seconds and then threw it back on the closet floor as if it was burning her fingers.

“It’s blood,” she pronounced.

I flashed back to the image of Franklin, sitting in his chair, staring at me, the blood covering his shirt and puddled on the rug beneath him. “Oh Grace, you can’t possibly be thinking that Ryan …”

“Of course that’s what I’m thinking,” she shrieked. “What else could I be thinking? He’s been acting stranger than ever the last couple of weeks and this t-shirt has been wadded up in the closet until it’s all stiff. How did it get like this? It couldn’t be Ryan’s blood. There’s too much. If he bled this much we would’ve known. He would’ve needed a doctor. Oh God, Tamsen …” Grace collapsed on Ryan’s bed, sobbing into her hands. I bent down and picked up the shirt and looked at it more closely. It did look like dried blood. And it was spattered all over the shirt as if it had spurted out …

“What the hell are you doing in my room?”

I hadn’t seen Ryan for a while and was amazed at how much he had grown in that short time. Suddenly he didn’t seem like the skinny awkward boy I remembered. He was taller and heavier and, right now, with his hands on his hips and his face white with anger, very threatening. I dropped the t-shirt and moved over to Grace.

“What are you two doing in my room?” He turned to Grace. His hatred filled the room and made it difficult to breathe. “I don’t go in your room and wave your gigantic underpants around, do I? What right do you have to come in here with your friends and look at my stuff? What the hell kind of person are you? Get out. Now.”

“Wait just a minute, young man. You can’t …” My voice trailed off. There was no way I could deal with so much negative emotion. I’d only make things worse for Grace. I reached down and tugged at her hand.

Still glaring at us, Ryan slowly moved away from the doorway and Grace and I silently hurried out. We were both terrified of this angry
outraged young man that neither of us really knew. We stumbled down the stairs.

As we stood in the living room, she looked me in the eye. “I don’t want to stay here. I need to get out,” she sniffed, fighting back the tears. “I’m afraid Tamsen. Look how much he hates me. I’m afraid of that t-shirt and what it means. Please, help me pack. I’m going to stay at the bookstore.”

“Grace, you can’t stay at the bookstore. You have to come home with me. We have loads of room and you shouldn’t be alone. We’ll sort it all out.”

She enveloped me in a huge hug worthy of Perry Many Paws and we hastily packed her suitcase and headed out into the autumn sun, the sound of angry pacing over our heads.