Part Six

A couple of days later, Trixie received an unexpected visitor in the form of Honey. She had been visiting her parents next door and dropped in on her way home.

“You’ll never guess what’s happened!” Honey’s voice was breathless. “I can hardly believe it myself.”

“What?”

“I told my mother about our theory on Mrs. Protheroe and, well, she thought that Mrs. Protheroe was never a gossip before and that it sounded out of character, but then she went and spoke to her and heard one of the rumours from her very lips, and it was even worse than the one that you told me that last time, and Mother was so shocked that she confronted Mrs. Protheroe about it and she – Mrs. Protheroe, I mean, not Mother – burst into tears and confessed to spreading rumours and Mother managed to calm her down until she could explain why she’d done it and Mrs. Vanderpoel was right about Mrs. Protheroe’s grandfather.”

“And?” Trixie prompted.

“And what?” Honey asked.

“Did she say anything else about it?”

“Well, a little. She confirmed the story in the obituary, about his putting flowers on the grave twice a year. Mrs. Protheroe felt that he thought more of Edith, who’d died, than of the family he had, who’d lived. She still resents Edith and wants Edith’s family to suffer and – since the nearest family still alive is Edith’s sister’s grandson – she’s taking it out on Principal Stratton.”

“That’s kind of sick,” Trixie commented.

Honey made a noise of agreement. “Mother thinks that she’s convinced her to stop spreading the rumours. I think they talked for a long time about healthy outlets for emotions and that sort of thing.”

“Well, then, I hope this part of it is out of the way. I really want to get to the truth and all of this stuff was getting in the way.”

“About that…” Honey’s voice sounded hesitant.

“I know you think it’s impossible,” Trixie answered, “and I know I can’t prove it, but I think we’ve got a good chance of hitting on the solution, if we can only find out enough.”

“Yes, I agree, after a fashion.”

Her friend giggled. “After a fashion? Hon, you’ve thought all along that I had no hope.”

“I think it’s possible that you might get the right solution, and be sure that it’s right, but I also think that you might get the wrong solution and be sure that it’s right, only there’s no way to prove whether it’s wrong or it’s right, but you’ll be sure and then you’ll tell Molinson what you think and maybe he’ll be sure that you’re right, whether you are or not.”

“That’s really… convoluted,” Trixie settled on, after a moment’s thought. “I know that there’s no knowing for sure, but I also know that we can know a lot more than what you’d think.”

Honey stared at her for a long time, then burst into laughter. “Okay, Trix. I’ll believe you, so long as you stop trying to explain it.”

Trixie joined in the laughter, but agreed to the sentiment.

“Actually, that wasn’t what I was going to say,” Honey told her, when they had lapsed into silence. “I was actually wondering whether it really was in the way, or if it’s really all linked together.”

Her friend contemplated this for a moment. “Well, the trouble with the rumours was that they got the stories all muddled together. It was like trying to do three jigsaws at once, with no picture for any of them.”

“True. But it was the important bits of the different stories that kept getting picked out.”

“Yes, I guess so.” Trixie frowned. “Something tells me that the whole business with Ethel and Mrs. Protheroe’s grandfather is almost separate. I can’t tell you why I think that just yet, but I hope I will when we have a little more to go on.”

“So, what’s next, then?”

Trixie’s brow creased. “The tricky part. If Claude’s family really did cover up his murder, then there must have been some reason for that. I’m sure it must have been something big, but I don’t really have anything to go on to find out what it could be.”

“Nothing at all?”

She waved a hand back and forth. “Well, I have a couple of clues. For one thing, if it’s something that he did, I know it must relate to the time before he disappeared and a reasonable amount of time after he was born. I’ve noticed a few references to him in the papers when I’ve been looking for other things, so maybe once I really start looking something will jump out at me.”

“That doesn’t sound like a very productive sort of strategy.”

Her friend shrugged. “It’s the best I can come up with. Sometimes you just have to keep digging until you find what you’re looking for.”

“So long as you’re not digging up the Preserve,” Honey commented, smiling. “My father might have something to say about that.”

Trixie found the next phase of the investigation – that of searching for a motive for the murder – the most tedious. She set aside as much time as possible for it, but at first seemed to be getting nowhere.

On her third attempt at searching for a potential crime, she came across an article that grabbed her attention. From the tone of the article, there was no suggestion that it was anything more than a terrible, tragic accident, but the mention of Claude Brouwer’s name caused her to examine it more carefully.

One night, a few weeks before his disappearance, Claude had been on the scene of a house fire, in which an entire family had died. Other bystanders commended his bravery in trying to enter the burning building, but his efforts were futile. All inside at the time perished.

The article hinted at a friendly rivalry between Claude and a young man of similar age who was among the dead. It also contained a quote from Claude, lamenting his friend’s passing.

Trixie sat back and thought about this for a time, then decided to print a copy of the article. She went back to her search. She found no evidence of other potential crimes, but the article about the fire brought other matters into perspective. She noted other occasions when Claude had interacted with the dead man, including one where they had both been in a sporting competition and the other man had won. To her interest, the prize had been a medallion.

Something about this circumstance began to remind her of something and she paused to think for a few moments.

“Oh!” she exclaimed aloud. “That’s it.”

She dug through her notes for a few moments, until she found what she was looking for.

“The same name,” she murmured. “Coincidence? I doubt it.”

The young man who had died in the fire, and who had beaten Claude in a contest, appeared to be the same one mentioned in a couple of letters to Miss Henley’s mother. Trixie resolved to go back and read them again, in the hope that they might make more sense this time.

She finished what she was doing and returned home without finding anything else of note. When she sought out the letters, they made only a marginal amount more sense than they had the first time. Jessie, who had written them, had a difficult style to interpret. She read over a certain passage a couple of times, but still felt confused by it.

‘Why can’t he see that she would rather die an old maid? If it wasn’t for what happened – and how sorry I am that it did, when he was so much nicer – she would be marrying young Mr. Brockhurst now. I can’t tell you how glad I was that he won out, even if it was one of the last things he did. I feel distinctly sorry for both of you, having to live out there near them. I wouldn’t feel safe near him.’

The ‘he’ in question Trixie had identified from the context to be Claude Brouwer. The girl was not identified, but the letter was written in such a way that it suggested to Trixie that the recipient would have known to whom it referred. She wavered over the idea that perhaps the girl was the other half of ‘both of you’ but could not decide whether that was the case.

“I wonder,” she murmured aloud, as she stared at the letter.

She resolved to do another search of the newspaper, this time with some different dates in mind.

This time, she was searching for something very specific, on known dates, which expedited matters. She soon found what she sought: an In Memoriam notice for the young man who had died, signed with the initials A.A. She sat back and considered what this meant. From her notes, she knew that there had been a Miss Alice Adams, who was of similar age to the main players in the drama. There was no proof, but Trixie considered that this might tie all of the elements together.

As she tidied up her notes, satisfied in her own mind, she made the decision to only share this particular piece of the puzzle with a select few. Honey would appreciate the romantic aspect of the case, but certain others would not.

When Trixie thought that she could go no further with the investigation, she put in a call to Wendell Molinson and invited him out to her place to hear the results. He was his usual gruff self on the phone, but accepted the invitation readily enough. He arrived on her doorstep exactly on time and she ushered him inside. He declined her offer of refreshments, so she got straight to the point.

“I think I know what happened.”

He eyed her for a long time, then urged, “Tell me.”

She nodded. “First, am I correct in understanding that you knew Jacob Wise, whose son Bernard married your mother?”

At once, anger and pain crossed his face, to be replaced by a stony expression. “How did you find that out?”

She selected from her pile of papers the copy of Bernard Wise’s obituary. “The Sun gave a location and so this was easy to find. It gave me everything I needed to trace him.”

He nodded, looking wary. “What about it?”

“I have good reason to believe that this Jacob Wise was the same as the Jack White who was recognised upstate and the Jacob Weiss who worked for Obadiah Fletcher and was blamed for his missing money.” She started laying out various documents. “It’s not proof, but it’s a solid case. So, if I can repeat the question, did you know him?”

Once more, he nodded. “He was the only grandfather I ever knew.”

She smiled. “I can’t prove it, but I believe he was innocent.”

“Then where did the money go?” he demanded. “Who killed Brouwer?”

“Can I start at the beginning, please? I think it will make more sense.”

“If you must.”

She suppressed a smile. “I think it began sometime before Obadiah Fletcher hired either Jacob Weiss or Claude Brouwer. Now, I haven’t been able to get much in the way of contemporary accounts of him, but the way stories about him were told, Obadiah Fletcher was an untrustworthy man.”

Molinson nodded. “There may have been a note or two to that effect in the police files.”

“I’m not surprised. Mrs. Vanderpoel described him as a scoundrel. Her information was only second-hand, while almost all of the rest was third- or fourth-hand.” She chose another page from her pile. “I can’t really tell for sure why, but I think Fletcher held a grudge against the Weiss and Brouwer families. There’s just a little hint of it in this article, dated about ten years before the two young men went to work for him.”

“Old sins cast long shadows,” Molinson muttered.

“They do. Some of them from a hundred years ago are still casting shadows.” She rearranged her papers again. “So, he hires the two and I’m speculating that he did it with a plan in mind. He cooked the books to make it look like there was an embezzlement happening. If anyone embezzled the money, it was Obadiah himself, but I think it was all an illusion.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Of course not!” She shook her head. “There’s almost nothing left in the way of direct proof. This is as close as I can get to it. I have the evidence of Fletcher’s character, the evidence of Jacob Wise’s character – and the indirect evidence that he was the same person as Jacob Weiss – and the evidence of what was discovered after Fletcher’s death.”

“Which is?”

She pulled out another document. “This is a report on the investigation that the Country Club made into Fletcher’s estate. Fletcher left them an enormous legacy, with complicated instructions on how to obtain it, only after they’d gone through a large amount of rigmarole, there was no money to be found. The money has never been found.”

“And why is that?” he asked.

She smiled and flipped to the conclusion. “Obadiah Fletcher was a genius at falsifying financial records. There never was any money. A man who was very skilled at discovering that kind of thing was involved in the Country Club and he spent hours going through the records. This is the report he gave to the club’s board.”

“How did you get this?”

“Oh, that was easy. I just asked my mother-in-law.”

He looked away. “In that case, there should be evidence connected to the earlier crime.”

“I’m not sure that there is. It happened more than twenty years earlier. I don’t think the records went back that far.”

“Figures. What else?”

“We need to jump back a bit to just before everything went wrong. The two young men were working there, Fletcher’s trap was just about to be sprung and then something goes wrong: Brouwer doesn’t show up for work. Fletcher didn’t know it, of course, but the reason he wasn’t there was because he was dead.”

“Yes, and I want to know about that, too. Don’t just gloss over it.”

“I won’t,” she promised. “I’ll come back to it in a minute. I’m going to deal with the whole financial thing first, and get it out of the way.”

He nodded reluctant agreement. “Hurry up about it, then.”

“So, I’m guessing that Fletcher was intending to make it seem that the two were in it together and that they’d targeted him on purpose while he was selflessly letting bygones be bygones. When Brouwer disappeared, he probably decided to spring the trap earlier than intended, in the hope that Brouwer’s absence would work in his favour.”

“I imagine it did.”

“Me, too. Weiss knew that he hadn’t embezzled any money. I’m almost certain that he guessed who was responsible and… well, he was young and had no proof, so he ran.” She moved the papers again. “He lived upstate until Fletcher found him there. He’d gotten married in the meantime and started a family. He moved them all to Maine until he heard that Fletcher had died, then came back closer again.”

He thought about all of this for a few moments. “Makes sense.”

“And it aligns with what you knew of him?” she wanted to know.

Molinson nodded. “It does. He had some… idiosyncrasies, I guess you could call them, to do with financial things. And I never would have believed that he took the money and ran.”

“Everything that I could find out about him suggests that he was an honest, upright man.”

“That’s how I remember him.”

Trixie smiled. “I’m glad.”

“What about Brouwer?”

She rearranged her papers again. “I’ve thought all along that it was him buried near the shack and I haven’t come across anything to contradict that. I can’t find any trace of him ever again. He might have taken a false name, of course, but I haven’t found it if he did.”

“For what it’s worth,” Molinson added, “we found some records on Claude Brouwer concerning an accident he was involved in. There was a doctor’s report detailing his injuries, which included a couple of broken bones. Expert opinion is that it’s him in the grave.”

“I was pretty sure it was. There were some other reasons why I kept coming back to that idea.”

“Who do you think killed him?”

“His father.” She shrugged. “I know this is where I started and I’ve tried lots of other ideas, but this is what makes the most sense. The family covered it up. I’m pretty sure they all knew what had happened and why. They all took the knowledge to their graves.”

“Motive?”

She grimaced. “That was the part that had me stumped for a long while. I thought at first that it might have been connected to Ethel’s baby, but I’ve identified its father. Incidentally, his granddaughter is the one who’s been spreading vicious rumours. I think we’ve convinced her to stop.”

“Good grief! It’s been a hundred years. How did she even know?”

“There’s something about it mentioned in his obituary.” She took it from the pile and pointed to the place. “The connection was common knowledge, if not the detail of the lost baby. And, when you think about it, people knew about that, too. The family tried to keep it quiet, but that poor little baby has featured in rumour after rumour over the years.”

“Well, I hope you’re right and she has stopped. So, motive.”

Trixie looked away. “I kept thinking that it must have been something really awful for a father to want to do that. So, I went looking for some terrible crime that he might have committed… and I think I’ve found it.”

She slid a copy of a newspaper article out of the pile, detailing the deaths of eight people in a house fire. “It wasn’t thought to be a crime, at the time. It’s reported as a terrible tragedy. I think, though, that Claude Brouwer was responsible. You can trace the rivalry between him and a young man who lived in the house back for several years. I’ve found evidence in the papers of the people who once lived here at Rose Cottage that Claude tried to start a relationship with the dead man’s girlfriend almost as soon as he was dead. And I think the medallion you found belonged to him and Claude stole it from the house while it was burning.” She hesitated a moment, then added, “I can’t prove it, of course, but I suspect that he went into the house to make sure the other guy was dead, not to try to rescue anyone.”

Molinson picked up the article on the fire and studied it. “It was hushed up. It’s on our files as arson, but the chief of police at the time decided not to make it public knowledge. I never understood why and I’m not sure I understand now.”

“You know about this?” Trixie asked.

He nodded. “We do review our old files every now and then. This one really worried me and I read it carefully.” He closed his eyes for a moment and then looked at her. “Please, don’t say a word about this to anyone. I don’t want it known that the police turned a blind eye to a crime like this.”

Trixie’s eyes widened. “And then turned a blind eye to Claude Brouwer’s murder as well. He knew.” She frowned. “Who was he?”

Molinson thought for a moment. “Name of Jorgensen, I think.”

Trixie snapped her fingers. “Claude’s mother’s maiden name. I’d need to check it out, but there might be a connection.”

“Very likely.” Molinson sat back in his chair and stared at nothing. “So, that’s it.”

“As best as I can tell, yes.” Trixie began to tidy the papers. “I don’t know that a jury would believe it…”

“I believe it,” he interrupted. “I’m sure this is right. It fits with… well, other things that I know.”

“I don’t suppose you’d like to share them.”

He laughed, without much humour. “Well, this has been an educational experience. Thanks for telling me about it.”

“My pleasure.”

“I don’t suppose you could have done it without trawling through my past?”

She shook her head. “You don’t need to ask that, really, do you? The more recent evidence on Jacob Weiss is what nailed it.”

He nodded and stood up. “I’ll be going now. And not a word to anyone, you understand?”

Trixie smiled. “Except my nearest and dearest. Some of them helped with the investigation.” At his frown, she held up a hand. “I’ve already sworn them to secrecy. As far as any outsiders are concerned, the story of Jacob Weiss ends when Fletcher found him upstate.”

“Okay, I guess.”

“Anything else I can do for you?”

“No,” he answered.

Trixie grinned. “If that’s how you feel…”

“Good night, then.”

“Good night.”

After he had gone, Jim entered the room.

“I never would have thought I’d hear a conversation like that between the two of you,” he mused. “It still doesn’t seem quite possible.”

His wife shrugged. “He’s actually a decent human being, with real feelings and curiosity of his own.”

Jim hesitated. “That’s not quite what I was getting at. I meant that he asked you to find something out for him, which is almost an admission…”

“That I have certain skills that he hasn’t? Well, I should by now. I’ve been doing this sort of research for years, now, and I’d bet that he hardly ever has to investigate anything that’s more than a few years old. A hundred years ago is like some strange foreign country.”

Jim nodded. “So, you’ve got a solution here that most people who hear it will like. Is it real, or have you…”

“Interpreted the facts for my own convenience?” She stopped and thought for a short time. “I don’t think so. I’ve tried to be as objective as I can, and I’ve left out the more sensitive bits, but… well, when you’re dealing with things that long ago, some of it just has to be theory; the facts are just not available.”

“I suppose that’s fair.” A smile lingered on his lips. “You did a really good job on this, Trixie. I didn’t think you’d be able to find out anywhere near as much as you did.”

She returned the smile and then stretched up to kiss him. “It just shows what you can do if you try.”

The End