Betrayal of Trust

Chapter 9

We went back to the hotel. It wasn’t that late, but it had been a long day, and my knees were killing me. I took some Aleve and went to bed. Mel was still at the desk in the corner checking her e-mail when I drifted off to never-never land, thinking about Gerry Willis’s grandson, Josh Deeson.

Mel is more of a night owl than I am. That doesn’t mean she’s a slugabed in the morning, because she’s able to function on far less sleep than I do. I went to bed early, she went to bed late, and we both got up at the same time.

Don’t try to tell me that God doesn’t have a sense of humor, because S/He does. Just the morning before I had been pondering the joys of having separate bathrooms. The next day dawned with us ensconced in the Olympia Red Lion with only a single bathroom in sight. And, in the world of bathroom use, men and women are definitely not created equal. Women win; men lose.

The bathroom had a single washbasin and what would have been an adequate countertop had Mel been there alone. I found a place in among her bottles and potions to put my shaving kit on a temporary basis. I’d had the good sense to shower while Mel was out on her morning run and had my shaving kit safely back in my luggage when she came back. Once she disappeared into the bathroom to shower and do her makeup, when a need arose, I had to take myself down to the lobby and make use of a men’s room down there.

I was back in the room, seated at the desk, and had just booted up my computer when she emerged from the bathroom looking like a million bucks. Not so long ago, her appearing like that within touching distance would have caused me to whisper sweet nothings in her ear and try talking her out of the clothing she had just put on.

Not on this particular morning. I believe I may have mentioned that I hate having bad knees. They interfere with far more important activities than just going up and down stairs.

“Did you check your e-mail yet?” She asked the question while slipping on a fetchingly dangly pair of earrings.

Like purses, earrings are something else that must be chosen by the person who will wear them rather than by the person purchasing them. At this late date I have finally concluded that bringing Mel along on the shopping trips is a foolproof way of making sure all her birthday and Christmas presents are perfect.

On that morning in Olympia, what floored me was that she performed this tricky operation-putting what looked like chandeliers into tiny holes in her earlobes-without having to look in a mirror, even though one of those was there on the wall right next to her. And please do not ask me to explain why someone who has been shot more than once would turn squeamish at the idea of putting on a pair of pierced earrings. All I can say is I’m glad the earrings were destined for Mel’s ears and not for mine.

As for e-mail? Yes, we’re on the same account, so we can both see the list of each other’s new mail. But it’s like using the bathroom together. It’s just not done. I don’t read hers and she doesn’t read mine.

I scrolled through my list of new mail, including any number of male enhancement messages, until I found the one with the subject line of Beaumont. I opened it and read the following:

Dear Mr. Beaumont,

My name is Sally Mathers. I believe you are my cousin, my mother’s brother’s son. I hope you’ll forgive me for writing to you like this, but time is of the essence.

My mother, Hannah Greenwald, is in her eighties now and not doing very well. I am her only child. At her insistence, I’ve been sorting out the house here in Beaumont, Texas, where she has lived all her life. The house originally belonged to her parents, my grandparents, Frederick and Hilda Mencken, and my grandmother lived there with my parents after Grandpa Mencken died in the early sixties.

I knew from stories I heard as a girl that my mother had a brother named Hank. His full name was Henry Russo Mencken. Russo was my grandmother’s maiden name. From what I gathered over the years, Hank joined the navy in World War II, went away, and never came home. He died in a motorcycle accident before being shipped overseas.

There were a lot of men who didn’t come home after the war. I had a number of girlfriends whose fathers either didn’t come home at all or who came home as decorated heroes. From what I could gather around the dinner table, Hank wasn’t one of those. He was a bit of a scalawag-sort of the black sheep of the family-who was given a choice between joining the service and going to jail. Compared to jail, the U.S. Navy must have seemed like a reasonable option.

As I said, according to my mother, Hank was a bit of a wild thing. By the time he joined the service, he had been in enough trouble that my grandparents, and especially Grandpa Mencken, pretty much washed their hands of him. You probably can’t imagine a parent doing something like that to his own child. Most people can’t, but Grandpa Mencken wasn’t an easy person to get along with.

Actually, in that regard he and my grandmother were a matched pair. My father always said of Grandma Mencken that she was “as mean as a snake,” but he only said it when he was well out of earshot. I think it’s a miracle that, growing up the way she did, my mother turned out to be such a nice person. You can believe me when I tell you that she and my dad made a lot of sacrifices over the years in looking out for Grandma when other people probably would have walked away, but Mother was Hilda’s only surviving child. There wasn’t anyone else to do it.

I had to stop reading just then because my eyes had misted over. Unfortunately, I could very well imagine a parent washing his hands of his own child. It was the same thing my mother’s father, my other grandfather, had done to his own daughter when he learned she was pregnant with me.

“What is it?” Mel asked. “Is something wrong?”

She was seated in the chair directly behind me, the so-called comfortable one, with her own computer open on her lap. I’m sure she saw me mop my eyes, and she must have wondered what was happening.

“Just a minute,” I said. “Let me finish reading this.”

I returned to the text of the e-mail:

Grandma Mencken lived with us the whole time I was growing up. She was over a hundred when she died. With her it’s the opposite of the good dying young. Somehow I don’t think Mother will make it that long, probably because she used up so many of her good years in looking after Grandma.

At any rate, Mother and Hank were close growing up. They were brother and sister, but they were also good friends. As far as I can tell, after he joined the service, she was the only member of the family who wrote to him regularly. There may have been other letters, but I only found the ones he sent to her. In them he mentioned receiving her letters and told her how much he appreciated hearing from home. He never mentioned letters from anyone else.

Mother said she kept all his letters, tied together with a ribbon. Shortly after the war ended, the packet disappeared. My mother mourned losing those letters; she always blamed herself for being so careless. It turns out they weren’t lost at all. I found them up in the attic, hidden away in the back of one of the drawers in Grandma Mencken’s pedal sewing machine when I took it to the local historical society.

I already mentioned that my grandmother was mean. She once lay down on the floor and pretended to be dead because my mother didn’t buy the kind of cookies she liked. It was only AFTER Mother called 911 and the ambulance was on its way that Grandma got up off the floor and told her, “See there? I fooled you.” I’ll say!!!

But I think hiding Hank’s letters tops that trick. The truth is, my mother never lost Hank’s letters. Grandma Mencken took them. Big difference. Once I found them, I read through them all, one by one. Hank wrote to Mother about a wonderful girl he had met in Seattle. He said that her name was Carol Ann Piedmont, although in his letters Hank always refers to her as Kelly. He told Mother that he was in love, that he had bought Kelly a ring, and that he hoped, after they got married, that she’d come back home with him and live right here in Beaumont. The letters stopped because he died in a motorcycle accident.

After he died, my grandparents refused to get in touch with the girl. Mother was still living at home at the time and couldn’t bring herself to go against their wishes. By the time she was ready to do something about it on her own, the letters had disappeared-until I found them a few months ago.

I didn’t mention finding them to Mother because I didn’t want to get her hopes up that we’d be able to locate Hank’s long-lost Kelly. I used the Internet and searched the available records for your mother’s name. I was surprised to learn that she had never married. It made me sad when I found her obituary, like that was the end of it right there, but that’s when I discovered she had a son.

When I saw your name there in her obituary I had goose bumps. Suddenly it seemed possible that you might be Hank’s son and that your mother had given you at least that much of your father’s history, his hometown, because, I’m sad to say, she had nothing else of his to give you.

Please don’t think I’m a stalker, but I managed to track down your high school photo. I put it side by side with Hank’s senior photo the year he graduated from Beaumont High School. The two of you could have been brothers or even twins. I can scan the photo and send you a copy if you like.

If you’re still reading this, you probably see my writing to you now, after so many years of silence, as an unwelcome invasion of your privacy. I can hardly blame you for that, and if you choose not to answer, I’ll certainly understand. After all, my family betrayed both of you. For your mother, struggling to raise a child on her own in the aftermath of World War II couldn’t have been easy.

It’s possible that my grandparents didn’t know you existed. I hope that’s true, but I’m probably being too charitable. Otherwise, how could they have turned their backs on your mother when I’m sure she could have used their help, to say nothing of their considerable financial resources, to raise their only grandson? That’s what you are, by the way-their only grandson. I have two granddaughters and a grandson, but that makes him a great-grandson. You were then and still are their only grandson.

So here comes the asking part of the letter-the one you’ve been dreading and the thing this whole exercise has been leading up to. I’m hoping I’ll be able to convince you to come to Beaumont to see Mother while there’s still time.

This would be at no cost to you, of course. I’d be happy to pay your way. If you’re married, I’ll pay your wife’s way, too. I hope you’ll consider it. Mother loved your father so very much, and being able to lay eyes on you would be a gift beyond anything I could ever give her. It would fill an empty spot in her heart that has been there ever since she lost her beloved brother Hank.

I’m putting my contact information at the bottom of this page so you can be in touch if you so choose. Again, I understand that you have every right to be angry with my family, but please don’t take it out on Mother. What happened between Grandpa and Grandma Mencken and Hank was their fault, not hers.

Sincerely,

Sally Mathers

For a long time after I finished reading, I didn’t move. Couldn’t move. At my age, it was astonishing to me to hear someone-a stranger-refer to my mother by her given name. Once my grandmother died, there was no one left in my life to do that. Carol Ann-Kelly-Piedmont was always just Mother to me, and of course that’s where my daughter’s name comes from-my mother’s name.

It seemed astonishing to me that Kelly Piedmont had gone out in the world and found a man whose parents were as difficult and as judgmental as her own. Of course, maybe that was part of the attraction. She and Hank both knew what it was like to try to live their own lives with parents who regarded their children as puppets and who stayed just out of sight, offstage somewhere, pulling their kids’ strings for all they were worth. No wonder Hank Russo Mencken and Carol Ann Piedmont had bonded. And if Frederick Mencken and Jonas Piedmont had ever had occasion to meet, they probably would have gotten along like gangbusters. After all, birds of a feather do flock together.

“Beau,” Mel said. She spoke from behind me, her voice full of concern. “Did you hear me? Are you all right? What is it-someone claiming to be a long-lost relative and trying to put the bite on you?”

“No,” I said quietly. “It seems like exactly the opposite.”

I passed her my open computer and waited while she read Sally’s letter. “Wow!” she said finally, when she finished. “That’s an amazing story. Do you think any of it is true?”

Mel is a cop. Her first instinct is always to question-to wonder if someone is lying, and if so, why. But I knew as soon as I read the words that this was all true, every bit of it. Everything Sally Mathers had said in her letter corroborated what my own mother had told me. J. P. Beaumont wasn’t an orphan. I still had an aunt, one I had never met. I still had a cousin, a cousin who was reaching out to me, and some grandnieces and a grandnephew, too.

“What do you think she wants?” Mel asked. “Maybe she’s figured out that you have money and she’s looking for a handout.”

“That’s not what she said,” I responded. “She claims that the only thing she wants is for me to come visit a dying woman she believes to be my aunt, a woman who’s supposedly my father’s sister. But don’t forget, she also offered to pay my way there. If she had any idea that I had money, she wouldn’t have done that.”

“All the same,” Mel said, “before you go hopping on the first plane to Beaumont. . Now that you mention it, where the hell is Beaumont, Texas?”

“Near Houston,” I said.

When my mother told me my name had come from a city, I had looked Beaumont, Texas, up on a map. As a kid I spent years wondering what it was like and how it would be to live there.

“So,” Mel continued, “before you go hopping on the next plane to Houston, how about if we have Ralph Ames make some inquiries for us and find out if this woman is on the level?”

I probably would have argued with her right then, but the phone rang. Caller ID was blocked, but I answered it anyway. At first all I could hear was sobbing-a woman sobbing.

“Hello,” I said. “This is J. P. Beaumont. Who’s calling, please? Is something wrong? If this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911.”

“It’s Marsha,” she managed. “Marsha Longmire. The cops are here and the ambulance, but he’s gone. Oh my God. He’s dead!”

I had visions of Gerry Willis’s heart giving out from the strain of everything that had gone on the day before. And I couldn’t help but remember that one of the last things Marsha had said to Mel and me before we left the house-that if anything happened to Gerry because of Josh’s misbehavior she would murder the kid herself. I hadn’t taken the threat seriously then, and I didn’t now. It’s the kind of empty threat parents make from time to time-a variation on a theme of “ain’t it awful.”

So I have to admit that my first thought was about Josh. At age fifteen the poor kid had already been abandoned time and again, by his no-good parents and by a child protective services organization that had let him go back to a horrible situation. Now he was being robbed of a grandfather who was, as far as I knew, Josh’s only surviving blood relation. Marsha Longmire had taken on the guardianship more as a duty than as an act of love. From what I had seen of her, she had been less than enamored of the boy to begin with. Now, if she saw Josh as the proximate cause of Gerry Willis’s untimely death, I could well imagine the kind of anger she’d feel toward the kid, to say nothing of the kind of guilt she’d dish out.

“How’s Josh taking it?” I asked.

Marsha practically screamed at me. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I said? Josh is dead. I found him just a little while ago, hanging from the closet door in his room. He had strung together a bunch of Gerry’s old neckties. Then he tied it to the doorknob on one side of the door, threw the rope of ties over the top of it. He stood on a chair, put the noose around his neck, and then kicked the chair out from under him. He’s dead, and I can’t believe it happened! Damn! Damn! Damn!”

“Who’s there?” I asked. “Who responded?”

“I called 911. Olympia PD showed up with the ambulance, but since it’s the governor’s mansion, they weren’t sure about jurisdiction. They said someone should probably call the Washington State Patrol and I’ve notified my security detail, but after yesterday, I decided to call you as well.”

“Thank you, Marsha,” I said. “Good thinking.”

Mel was already out of the chair and slipping on her shoes.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Come on,” I said. “We’ve gotta go. It’s Josh Deeson. He may have committed suicide last night. Olympia PD is responding, but since it’s the governor’s mansion, they’re deferring to the Washington State Patrol. Governor Longmire decided to call us in as well. It’ll be a horse race to see who gets there first.”