Weddings Can Be Murder (27 page)

Even so, between smiles in Ron’s direction,
I could tell she had something on her mind. I decided there was no
time like the present.

“Are you thinking of Al Proletti’s claim
that he’s your father?” I asked.

She’d only mentioned it that one time, when
she first told us of the break-in. Now she nodded. “There was a
phone call, a few days before. I’d nearly forgotten it. The man who
called introduced himself as my father and I thought it was a crank
call—I didn’t want to believe him. If only I’d taken him
seriously.” A look of regret crossed her face.

“I have some of his features, don’t I?” Her
fingers played with the edge of the afghan, nervous little
tweaks.

“It’s true. The police identified him
because of a parental DNA match with your blood.”

“They tested my blood?” She seemed equally
upset with that bit of information.

“When you went missing … there was blood
here in the room. They just wanted to see if it was yours or the
assailant’s. I supposed it could have made a difference to the
outcome of the investigation or the case, in court.”

She nodded slightly. “I suppose.”

“Anyway, some brilliant computer came up
with the match to Proletti.”

“So my mother lied, all those years.”

“To protect you, I’m sure. She figured out
his crimes, maybe. I guess she thought coming to New Mexico put the
two of you a lot of miles away from him.”

“It wasn’t enough,” she said. “He found
me.”

I still wanted to know how that happened.
Jane Morgan had been dead a long time, Al Proletti in prison. What
bit of information had started him on the quest and led him to
successfully locate Victoria?

“I dreamed about it last night,” she said.
“The box. I remember what it looks like—flat, like stationery used
to come in, covered in some kind of bright paper. Lime green comes
to mind. While I was out on the streets time passed in strange
ways. I can’t remember how I got where I was … days and nights went
by … I’m still fuzzy on that part of it. I had a fever, was half
out of it, and these weird scenes would happen as if I were right
there. The box—it kept coming back to me but I didn’t know
why.”

“This is good,” I said, sounding far too
bright and cheery after what she’d just said. “I mean, knowing what
we’re looking for is a big help. Did any of these visions show you
where you put the box?”

She shook her head sadly.

“Okay. Well, after breakfast Ron and I can
start searching for it.” Even as I said so I realized how difficult
it would be. Proletti and his man had pretty well ripped through
the whole house. More than likely they’d already found it. If that
was the case the evidence was long gone now.

A clatter of metal came from the kitchen and
I looked up to see Ron working to get the muffins from the pan,
managing to bang it against the stove burners as he nearly lost the
whole batch over the edge. Good thing I hadn’t brought Freckles
with me this morning. She would have known exactly what to do with
anything fallen to the floor. I joined him, suggesting he look for
plates and find the butter while I managed to successfully transfer
the rest of the muffins to a basket and cover them with a
cloth.

Over breakfast, I brought up the subject of
the evidence and the box again.

“I really have no idea where it could be,”
Victoria said, shaking her head woefully. “I’m usually so organized
but I’m drawing a blank on this.”

Considering her recent ordeal and the fact
she was critical in the hospital only a few days ago, I could
certainly understand.

“Okay, looking at it logically,” Ron said,
“if it was in any normal hiding place in the house, the men would
have found it, so let’s start with the places they didn’t search at
all—the garden shed out back, maybe? The garage?”

The outdoor thermometer had barely topped
forty when we finished breakfast but Ron and I decided to buck up
and get busy on the task. He had the heavier winter coat so he drew
the garden shed. I’d never been out there but I imagined it to be
the same model of organization as the garage, which had precisely
labeled boxes and small tools hanging from pegboard on the
walls.

Vic offered to come out with me but I
immediately quashed that idea. She had no business climbing around
or lifting anything. She picked up a magazine, looking guilty for
doing so, and I parked her on the sofa with the afghan over her
legs before I put on my coat and headed to the connecting kitchen
door.

All those neatly labeled boxes filled
shelves which ran floor to ceiling in the garage. I spent a good
five minutes staring at her precise handwriting, hoping, you know,
that one of them would say Stuff My Mother Kept Secret. No luck on
that.

With no better system in place, I began at
the east wall, lowest shelf, and worked my way up and over. One
entire section was filled with white banker boxes of business
records—the requisite seven years’ worth, and then some. The labels
said so, right there. To be on the safe side, though, I pulled each
one down, lifted the lid, thumbed through folders well enough to
know no lime green box was among the goodies.

Same thing with a box marked College
Records. Tell me, fifteen years or so after graduating, what does a
person need with transcripts and such? We’ve all gotten on with our
lives once school is out of the way. I supposed Vic is just one of
those thorough people who likes to be able to put her hands on any
random piece of paper when needed. I restacked the boxes I’d moved,
wondering if one hour into the job I could legitimately call a
coffee break. Decided not—if I lost momentum I wouldn’t want to
come back to the chore.

The next section held a more miscellaneous
collection. Two boxes of old clothing—perhaps for charity? I didn’t
recognize any of the items I pawed through as being things I’d ever
seen Victoria wear. Could it be possible she had a fat-clothes box?
Hard to imagine her as ever being other than her current petite
size.

On to some canning jars and the huge kettle
used for sterilizing them, along with instructions and recipes for
home canning. Who knew this was an interest? Then there was a shelf
full of camping gear—down sleeping bag and pad, bright yellow
backpack in a frame, a drawstring bag that seemed impossibly small
to contain a two-person tent (according to the label). Again, a
surprise to me that these were among Victoria’s interests.

I came down from the ladder and stared
toward the middle of the garage. I recognized a bunch of Ron’s
things stacked in the center of the floor where Victoria’s car
normally stayed. I knew he’d been steadily moving in but hadn’t
thought about what all that entails—golf clubs, motorcycle helmet
from the days when he rode, power tools, boxes of music CDs and
stereo equipment. I wondered if he would keep it all and cram it
into the existing space or if he’d decide he could live without a
lot of the outdated stuff. At any rate, nothing Victoria hid away
years ago would be among his junk so I turned back to the shelves
against the wall.

Christmas tree—miraculously well fitted into
the box it came in. I always wondered how people did that. I could
take it inside and help set it up. Christmas was less than two
weeks away, I realized with a bit of a jolt. I carried it into the
living room, noting that my brother had no qualms about taking a
coffee break.

“I’m done with the shed,” he said. “Doesn’t
take long to look through garden tools and a lawn mower.”

I made a face at him, vestiges of the
big-brother/little-sister relationship always lurking just beneath
the surface.

“Since you’re lounging around, you could set
up the tree,” I told him. “There are a few boxes of ornaments out
there—I’ll bring them in.”

Victoria brightened at the sight of the tree
and offered to help, but Ron told her to stay put, at least until
he got the lights and garlands on and was ready for the simple
ornaments.

Back in the garage, I pulled two boxes
labeled Christmas from the highest shelf and carried them one by
one indoors. The third had managed to get shoved against the far
wall and it was a tippy-toe operation for me to get my hands on it,
but at last we should have everything Victoria and Ron would need
for a perfect tree.

Ron had made good progress. The branches
were in place and Vic was sitting up, directing him where to place
it—near enough to the electrical socket, far enough that it
wouldn’t block the TV set. I set my box down, ready to postpone any
more dusty garage duty in favor of helping with decorations.

“Let’s see what we have here,” I said,
shedding my coat.

Going through someone else’s collection of
ornaments and trims is so much fun. It’s practically like having
Christmas morning come early because each little bundle of tissue
or bubble wrap reveals some new delight. Of course you don’t get to
keep them, darn it. Victoria had some beautiful Waterford and the
kind of gorgeous pieces I love to look at but would never spend the
money to own. I set them aside and found strings of lights for Ron
to work with first.

Victoria had left the confines of the sofa
and joined me. “Oh, that last carton … I don’t normally use those.
I think all that’s in there are school-project decorations I made
as a kid. You know, construction paper covered in glitter,
popsicle-stick frames with my own picture in them.”

I could envision it. My own second-grade
photo with snaggletoothed smile and a horrid boyish haircut still
haunts me.

“I haven’t had it open in yea—” Her eyes
went wide as she had the same thought I did.

We both pounced, pulling off the strip of
barely-viable cellophane tape and folding back the cardboard flaps.
She was right about the ornaments—the artistic hand of a child
clearly at work—and we lifted them out carefully. Beneath it all,
flat on the bottom of the carton was exactly the box she had
described—length and width about the size of a sheet of typing
paper, depth of about two inches, made of lightweight cardboard
with a papered lime-green pattern worthy of the seventies.

“You open it,” she said. Given the shaky
timbre of her voice I suggested we carry it to the couch and sit
down.

Ron had abandoned the Christmas lights and
stood behind the sofa, watching over our shoulders as I opened the
little treasure.

“This is definitely it,” Victoria said in a
hushed tone. “I remember that cassette tape.”

She lifted a couple of the topmost sheets of
paper. “Look—there’s writing in Spanish on these flimsy ones.”

Below those were two folded sheets of ledger
paper about two feet wide and twelve inches tall, the old-fashioned
kind with super narrow columns bookkeepers and accountants used to
use. No matter how much my computer frustrates me at times, I’m
thankful not to hand write and manually balance these old pages. I
unfolded and smoothed the paper but couldn’t make much sense of
what the written entries meant.

The next item in the box was a photograph.
The colors had faded, but Victoria gasped when she saw it. “Mom,”
she whispered. “Look how young you are.”

The informal snapshot had been taken at an
arcade or carnival somewhere. A booth with a sign “Shoot The Ducks”
was visible in the background. Beside Vic’s mother stood a handsome
man with dark hair. Albert Proletti.

This seemed the final bit of proof.

Vic stared at the picture for a long time,
barely breathing. At last she placed a very gentle kiss on her
mother’s face and set the picture aside.

“What’s next?” she asked, her voice a little
too chipper.

I reached into the box again.

Below the various pages was a steno
pad—another dinosaur from an era before word processors. I pulled
it out and opened the sturdy cover on its horizontally hinged
spiral. It reminded me of an old Doris Day movie in which she was a
secretary—again, just a bit before my time—I’d never actually seen
one of these in use. Inside the cover was a neatly penned name,
Juliette Mason. It appeared some of the sheets had been ripped out.
The printed cover on the notebook claimed it contained a hundred
pages, but now there couldn’t have been even half that many. The
same neat handwriting filled the remaining lined sheets.

“That’s my mother’s handwriting,” Victoria
said. “I always admired the slightly backhand way she made her
loops.”

This book contains my observations of the
actions and crimes of a man named Albert Proletti from Miami,
Florida
… the written text began.

“I want to know what’s on the tape,” Ron
declared.

“We need to call Kent Taylor and turn this
ov—”

He wasn’t listening to me—he’d already knelt
in front of the television stand and was poking through the
electronic components there.

“Don’t you have a cassette player?” he
asked.

Victoria and I both gave him a
what-do-you-think stare. Everything is digital these days.

“Never mind. I do.” He headed for the garage
where I imagined him diving into that pile of old junk in the
middle of the room.

Vic and I remained side by side, reading the
neatly penned pages. In true good-secretarial practice, the first
page was dated:
August, 29, 1979.

I began work for Mr. Al Proletti at
Pro-Builder Construction in the fall of 1978. My duties involved
transcribing taped dictation, filing most of the business
correspondence, taking calls and scheduling appointments for Mr.
Proletti. By the end of the year, we had become lovers …

Pieces began to snap into place.

“Her name was Jane Morgan,” Victoria
protested. “Why is this written as Juliette Mason?”

I shrugged and kept reading, but before I’d
come to the end of the page Ron was back with a small cassette tape
player in hand. He brushed off a good ten years’ worth of dust and
found a wall outlet. He picked up the tape we’d found and inserted
it, pressed Play, adjusted the volume.