No way out

Chapter Twenty-eight

When I pulled up in front of Roni Chase’s house, I double-checked the address, wondering how a bookkeeper afforded a mansion, even one that had to be at least a hundred years old. The three-story asymmetrical design was topped with eyelid dormers on the third floor, set beneath a steeply pitched roof offset by a two-story turret on the northeast corner that was capped by a witch’s-hat roof. An ornate wooden rail framed the porch extending across the front of the house.

It wasn’t quite as impressive close up. The exterior paint was faded and chipped in places, wood rot evident around the windows, the floorboards of the porch creaking and sagging. The house needed a lot of work.

Roni answered when I rang the bell and led me inside through a set of double doors into a small foyer, through another set of carved wooden doors and into a wide space with a high vaulted ceiling, a white flagged floor, and stained-glass windows on the stairway landing leading to the second floor. I raised my head at the ceiling, rotating my gaze. Yellow watermarks and spidery cracks in the plaster were more evidence that the house would soon turn into a money pit if it hadn’t already.

“They call this the receiving area,” Roni said.

“Who does? The tour guides?”

She laughed. “The people who put this place on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s a Queen Anne-style house. A rich lumberman built it in 1886 for his new wife who was living in Europe, but she died before she ever set foot in it.”

“How’d she die?”

“Do you ever stop playing the cop?”

“No.”

She shook her head. “It must be weird to live like that, to wonder if every bad thing that happens is a crime.”

“I never thought it was weird.”

“How do you think of it?”

“Me? I wonder what happens when things go wrong, especially when people think no one is watching. Sometimes it’s a crime, and sometimes it’s just life.”

“That’s pretty depressing. I’d rather wonder what happens when things go right, like falling in love.”

“Well, Brett Staley will be ready when you do. Can’t get more romantic than wanting to buy your funeral dress?”

She gave me a wistful, uncertain smile. “It’s his way of saying he wants to spend the rest of our lives together, but I’m not sure. We grew up together. I was five years old the first time he told me he loved me.”

“But you’re not in love with him?”

“More comfortable than in love.”

“Don’t settle for comfortable. You can get that with an easy chair or a dog from the pound.”

“I know what you mean, but he’s all I’ve got.”

“You don’t strike me as someone who’s afraid she can’t do any better than the boy she grew up with. You’re smart enough to run your own business, pretty enough to turn heads, and ballsy enough to carry a gun and use it. That’s a powerful combination.”

She blushed, dipping her chin. “I guess we don’t always see ourselves the way others see us.”

“And a philosopher to boot. So what went wrong with the wife who never saw the house her husband built for her?”

“The ship she took to America sank. The husband lived in the house for a couple of years, but he was too heartbroken to stay. He set up a charity named after his wife, Rachel, and turned the house into a home for unwed mothers and orphan girls called Rachel’s House for Women.”

“How did you end up with it?”

“It’s Grandma Lilly’s, not mine. She was one of the girls who lived here. Her mother left her some money, and Grandma hung on to it and used it to get an education. She got into selling houses and did well enough to buy this place twenty years ago when the charity went broke. My mom and I lived in a duplex off of Lexington, but we moved in here after she had her stroke so Grandma could help me take care of her.”

“This place is big, but it doesn’t look big enough for very many unwed mothers and orphans.”

“There was a dormitory attached to the back, but Grandma had it torn down.”

“You haven’t said anything about your grandfather.”

“I never knew him. Grandma won’t talk about him. She got pregnant with my mom while she was a teenager living here, but she never got married. Whenever I asked her why, she said that she’d give up a lot for a man, but the one thing she wouldn’t give up was her name.”

“Did you mention that she could have gotten married and kept her last name?”

She laughed. “Yes, and when I did she said the moon is pink.”

“The moon is pink? Why?”

“It’s what she always said if she thought I wasn’t listening or didn’t understand what she meant, like she just as well have said the moon is pink for all the good it did.”

“That’s what you told Frank Crenshaw after you shot him.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I picked up a few things from my Grandma.”

“How about your mother? How did she feel about not knowing anything about her father?”

Roni took a breath. “She said everyone is entitled to their own mysteries and that was Grandma’s.”

“Did she ever try to solve it?”

“No. She said she didn’t want anything to do with a man who wasn’t good enough for Grandma. My mom never got married either, except she waited until she was a lot older to have me.”

“What about your father? Is he in the picture?”

She shrugged. “Almost the same story as Grandma. Mom says they dated for a week between Christmas and New Year’s. He took off before Mom knew she was pregnant. She didn’t know how to reach him, so he never knew about me. Mom said it was just as well because he wasn’t the kind to stick around.”

“You ever try to find him?”

“No. Half of my friends’ parents were divorced, so it was no big deal living in a one-parent home. One of my friends was adopted and made a big deal about finding her birth parents. When she did, they didn’t want anything to do with her. That’s when she realized her real parents were the ones who raised her. I know that there’s a piece of me that’s missing, but I don’t see how a stranger who doesn’t know I exist can fill it in. Grandma likes to say you can’t fix your past but you can make your future.”

“So where does the funeral dress figure into the family tradition.”

She chuckled. “You’ll be glad to know it starts with a criminal, my great-grandmother Vivian Chase.”

“That’s okay. Everyone has at least one relative that climbed out of the wrong side of the gene pool.”

“She was a robber back in the 1940s, banks, drugstores, anyplace with cash. She left Grandma at Rachel’s House when Grandma was eight years old because she knew she couldn’t raise her and rob banks too. But, whenever she could, she came to see Grandma, and she always gave some of the money she stole to Miss Moore, the lady who ran the home, to make sure they took good care of Grandma. One night after she dropped off some money, her partner showed up. They got into a gunfight right out on the curb and shot and killed each other. Miss Moore used some of the money to pay for my great-grandma’s funeral and for the dress. Grandma named my mother after her. And this,” she said, fingering the gold chain and cameo around her neck, “belonged to my great-grandmother.”

“That’s a nice keepsake.”

“She left it to my grandma, who gave it to my mother, and she gave it me. It keeps us connected.”

“You must have told that story to Brett Staley a hundred times when you were growing up.”

“Didn’t have to. His grandfather Bobby Staley drove my great-grandma Vivien to the hospital the night she died and dropped the dress off at the funeral home the next day. He and I grew up hearing the same stories.”

“And you ended up with the house.”

She did a slow turn, one arm extended, fingers tracing a pattern on the wall. “Sometimes I think we’re trapped in this house.”

“It’s just bricks and mortar. You can always sell it.”

She shook her head. “Grandma says it would never sell, not in this economy and not with all the things that need to be fixed that we can’t afford to fix.”

“Can’t you borrow against the house to pay for the repairs and pay the loan back when you sell it?”

“Not now. Grandma borrowed against it to pay my mom’s medical bills. There’s not much equity left, if any, the way home values have dropped.”

“Well, I guess you’ll have to ride it out until the economy gets back on track.”

She shivered, wrapping her arms across her chest. “I hope we can. Sometimes this place feels like ivy wrapped around my ankles, creeping up my legs, and one day it’s going to strangle me if someone doesn’t take me away from here.”

“I thought you didn’t want to be rescued.”

She tilted her head to one side and loosened her arms, a sad smile capturing her ambivalence. “I don’t, but if that’s the only way out, I wouldn’t turn it down.”

“Why not just leave?”

“And go where? Do what? I’ve got to take care of my mom, and sooner or later, I’m going to have to take care of my grandma, and they will never leave. I’m stuck, so I’ve got to find a way to make it work, one way or the other.”

The doorbell rang. I looked at my watch. Quincy Carter wasn’t due for another fifteen minutes.

Roni left me in the receiving area, returning with an older man, his eyes beaming, grinning like a pauper who’d been invited to see the prince. He was tall, his hair sand and silver, his features fine and handsome. He was missing the top third of his right ear, his only visible defect. Roni made the introduction.

“Terry Walker, say hello to Jack Davis.”