With so much running through my mind, I was in no mood for driving very far for what was left of Saturday. I remembered driving past a promising bed and breakfast in southern Arkansas and took a chance they might have a bed for me. Since I was alone, they did. The proprietor was an elderly lady in an old fashioned purple dress and a print apron who looked like she would be happiest in the kitchen fixing biscuits or lemonade. The house was a large two story antebellum affair she could in no way run by herself and it was immaculate, but in my fourteen-hour stay I never saw anyone else. That is, I never saw any other staff. There were three other couples and one family of four spending the night, all of whom introduced themselves at breakfast the next morning.
But Saturday night about six-thirty when Mrs. Chandler showed me to my room, a small corner one on the second floor with a standard double bed and a small private balcony, there was no one else around and that suited me fine.
I wasn’t hungry because of my late lunch, but knew I would want something to nibble on before going to sleep. I offered to pay extra for a snack and my hostess agreed, although reluctantly. Not exactly a bundle of personality, Mrs. Chandler, even if she did look interesting.
It was dark outside but the weather was mild and there were lights on in the garden so I took a stroll. I enjoyed the scent of honey suckle, and the definitive odors of trees and garden plants going to sleep for the winter. Two friendly German Shepherds kept me company. They tried to follow me right into the house when my walk was finished but their mistress stopped them at the door, and obviously they had expected as much. They settled on the porch without any protest.
I collected my glass of lemonade and a small china plate with a generous amount of Colby cheese and crackers on it, thanked my hostess, and went up to my room for the night. There I took a prolonged bath, absently checked the seven channels provided on the television, and thumbed through an issue of Country magazine. The entire time one main question kept going through my mind. Why had Mrs. Marsh expelled Claire from her life after Leonard’s death?
It was getting chilly outdoors but the balcony still looked inviting. I drew an extra blanket around me to serve as a bathrobe and went out to sit in the country night. Absently I heard the sound of a car on a nearby road and a dog barking at a neighboring house. The wind rustled. It was all so peaceful but my mind wasn’t. Even if I found out the answer to that question what good would it do? Surely not keeping anything to remind you of your deceased husband’s sister-in-law didn’t mean she might want you dead. It was absurd, and maybe so was my preoccupation with the whole matter. What did I expect to accomplish? If the police department couldn’t find out who killed Amelia Marsh what chance did I have? And if I was being honest with myself, that’s what I was hoping to do.
Sitting out there feeling discouraged and for the second time seriously considering termination of the whole affair, deep inside I knew I wouldn’t. Elaine had given me some more information and the trail wasn’t a complete washout yet.
Going back inside I took out my notebook and scribbled while nibbling on the cheese and crackers. While my visit with Elaine and Ross Barclay was fresh in my mind, I added impressions and facts to the information taken down during my time spent with Elaine.
A sumptuous breakfast in the morning with the other guests was the high light of my Saturday. Mrs. Chandler did know how to make wonderful biscuits. After checking out I drove all day, eager to get home. I stopped only for essentials and to stretch my legs. Getting off my derriere and moving around was essential for me. By dark it was raining heavily and no treat to be on the road, but I was determined to make it home rather than stop again, and home it was about nine p.m..
Having done nothing strenuous in two days meant nothing. I was exhausted. I wanted to eat, put in a couple of miles on my walker, and call some people. It was too late to call anyone except perhaps Ev and Judy, and they wouldn’t expect to hear from me until Monday. Nothing in the refrigerator looked appealing. As much as I wanted to the walking track looked overwhelming. I unpacked, considered starting a load of laundry, and thought everything could wait until morning.
Within two hours of hitting my pillow it was obvious what was wrong with me. I had an intestinal flu.
After about five trips to the bathroom I wondered if I had food poisoning, but the low-grade fever and the headache that went along with my gastro-intestinal upset indicated a virus was probably the culprit. I tried not to feel too sorry for myself. It had been months since even a head cold had gotten me down.
Finally getting relief about five in the morning I slept until noon. After some tea and toast I started making the phone calls. Judy was home and Everett, predictably on a Monday afternoon, was not. I filled her in on the trip but didn’t mention my physical condition. She listened with interest and promised to relay everything on to her husband. I begged off a long conversation telling her I had more calls to make and she understood. Joel was napping.
Those twenty minutes out of bed made me nauseated again. I went back to lie down and use the phone on my bedside table. Anne Carey was not at home and I left her a message to call me back. I knew George would be working so he got another message. I rang up the lawyers and chatted momentarily with their secretary, who nicely said she was glad I had a safe trip, and assured me she would tell Mr. Harmon I had successfully completed my courier service. I told her they could expect the mailed verification of safe delivery from Elaine Barclay in a day or two. I wondered if they had already contacted her but did not ask. Nor did I tell the secretary I had found a relative, albeit by marriage, of Mrs. Marsh. Perhaps if the person on the other end of the phone had been Mr. Harmon or Mr. Bedeman I would have.
As I was thinking about calling Detective White to tell him about Claire Marsh, I fell back to sleep. Miss Carey’s phone call woke me in mid afternoon.
“Hello, dear,” she chirped cheerfully, “so glad you’re back safe and sound.”
It crossed my mind to ask her to come over, but that was out, of course. Not only did I look terrible, but also it was out of the question to risk exposing an elderly lady to a contagious virus. So we had a lengthy phone conversation. She was very glad Ross and Elaine Barclay were so accommodating and loved hearing my details about the jewelry. Like myself she had never seen any of the pieces except the pearls. I took her step-by-step through my visit, and led her right into the news of a surprise sister-in-law. Surviving the murder of a friend was proof enough to me Anne Carey had a heart strong enough to take the shock.
The sharp intake of her breath was audible over the telephone. “Sally, you don’t say,” she gasped, “you don’t say!”
“I do say, or rather Elaine did, and she had pictures to prove it.” I described the photographs from Elaine’s album. “What’s more,” I continued, “Leonard was a camera buff, and Elaine remembers many photo albums and many more pictures than we’ve seen. You don’t recall the name of Claire Marsh ever coming up in all of the time you knew Amelia?”
“Why never,” Anne Carey stated positively. “ With the question of relatives coming up so often since she died I’m sure I would have remembered. This is very, very odd.” She had a thought. “Is there any chance, now that you have seen what she looks like, that she is someone in the photographs we do have that we couldn’t put a name to before?”
I doubted it and said so. Like Amelia herself, Claire’s face was memorable.
After a pause Anne said, “For some reason we don’t know, Amelia put her life before she moved out here completely behind her. The only exception to that was her friendship with June, and her affection for June’s daughter. Otherwise she cut everyone off, and you know she had friends in New Jersey. Amelia didn’t have it in her to be a hermit. But why?”
“And if we knew the answer to that question,” I mused out loud, “ would we then know the answer to her death? Or are the two completely separate? And what’s more, is there anyone left alive who can tell us?”
Anne couldn’t answer those questions any more than I could, but before we ended our conversation she said she was going back over the letters and the pictures we had taken from Amelia’s house.
I climbed out of bed, took a much-needed shower, and puttered around my house, getting a few small things accomplished. That wore me out, letting me know this bug was going to be an inconvenience for a while longer. With another cup of hot tea, a glass of water, and some soda crackers, I curled up on the couch in the living room in front of the evening news. George called shortly after.
We exchanged the usual preliminary greetings but I could tell he had something he wanted to share.
“You sound like a man with a secret,” I told him.
He was grieved. “How can you know that?” he demanded.
“Some people are meant to keep secrets and some are not. You are the ‘are not’ type. What’s up?”
“Just for being such a smarty,” he said smugly, “you can wait until tomorrow to find out. I need to spend a little more time on this anyway to give you the whole picture. I can do that tonight and tell you everything tomorrow night.”
I thought about that for a moment. Tomorrow night was Tuesday and I was scheduled to work. But George needed to talk to me and I definitely needed to talk to him.
“George, do you know the last time I called in sick?”
“Probably not since Michael’s funeral,” he replied solemnly.
“That’s about it. But tomorrow night that’s what I’m going to do. This bug I came down with last night may be over by tomorrow but they won’t know that at the hospital. It is pay back time. What time can you come over?”
We agreed on six o’clock.
“Speaking of payback, I’ll bring something to eat.”
“No fried chicken, please,” was my only request.
His suppressed excitement was contagious. After hanging up the telephone I felt like a kid wondering what I was getting for my birthday the next day. Little did I know we were both getting a lot more of a surprise than we bargained for.
Many people I know, both professionally and informally, insist troubles come in threes. The next morning the heating element on my dryer went out. I spent half an hour on the phone arranging for the replacement of the part. My first load of clothes was already through the washer, and since the sun was shining I hung it on the line in my back yard. It is a small yard and it is a small clothesline, not intended for so many items. I had to hang my things out in shifts. Getting everything taken care of took most of the day. Almost two days of vomiting, diarrhea, and little food, had left me wobbly, so getting my chores done took twice as long as it normally would have.
About four-thirty I fixed my hair and got dressed, and it was a good thing. George was almost an hour early and he was not alone.
“Hi, Sally, “George said quietly when I opened the front door, “can we come in?”
Stunned, I opened the door wider and let the three of them pass through. After shutting the door I turned around to find them all standing in my living room looking at me. As my Maker is my judge, I almost said, George it looks like you brought two FBI agents with you. Instead I said, “I don’t know what this is all about, but why don’t you all sit down?”
Then George said, “Sally, these two people are from the FBI.”
They introduced themselves, first an attractive woman in her thirties wearing a navy blue pants suit, and a trim male agent I guessed to be close to fifty, attired in a gray pin stripe suit with a conservative tie, Agents Hinckley and Stoner. I was never a fan of the X Files, but later Everett would see some humor in the correlation. I never saw any humor in the situation at all, and especially not then.
The two federal agents approached George at his home office. For once he was there instead of out in the field. They had come right to the point: what was his interest in Leonard Marsh? Being a man of both integrity and at least average intelligence, he told them. His answers led them all to my house. I noticed they must have escorted George home first because he was not wearing his work clothes. I wondered if they had insisted on seeing the computer he used for his research.
Since I am not a complete fool, either, and would not tangle myself in a pack of lies even if I had something to hide, which I did not, I corroborated everything George already said. I made it clear my friend had only been doing his research as a favor to me.
Mr. Stoner did most of the talking. He didn’t seem too impressed by our explanations. I wasn’t even sure he believed us, although how or why we would make up such a story was awfully far fetched. I asked if they knew about the violent death of Leonard Marsh’s widow before their coming to Hanley. They had not.
“You can verify a lot of what we’ve told you with the local police department,” I said helpfully.
Ms. Hinckley said stiffly they intended to do so.
To try and ease the tension I asked if anyone would like something to drink, but nothing doing. George looked like he would like something very much but when his companions declined he shook his head.
The senior agent went on to explain the reason for their presence. When anyone tried to find out information about certain people or certain events pertaining to the U.S. government and national security, even if that information was no longer classified, if the search went far enough bells and whistles went off in the justice department. On Monday they had been directed by Washington to investigate this sudden interest in Leonard Marsh.
“I never knew him,” I pointed out the obvious, “and all of my interest stems from what happened to my neighbor, his wife.”
George and I were told politely but bluntly we should leave such things to the professionals.
“Mr. Stoner,” I asked, equally direct, “have we broken any laws?”
“Mr. Thomas’ query has gotten a little in depth,” the agent answered, looking at me calmly, “but he hasn’t broken any security codes.”
“Then what is this all about?”
George looked like he would like to be back on top of a telephone pole somewhere, but he didn’t try to shut me up.
I continued. “You have come quite a distance to ask what our interest in Leonard Marsh is, and we’ve told you. Your superiors may disapprove of George’s research, but that hardly seems like reason enough to send two of their people all the way out here to look him up. I haven’t heard about it yet, but is the information George has a threat to anyone?”
My guests were very good at asking questions but hesitant to give any answers. Mr. Stoner again said we should leave criminal matters to law enforcement. He strongly advised us both not to pursue any further investigation into Mr. Marsh’s professional life.
I decided to try one more question. “From what you know,” I pressed, “is it possible Leonard Marsh’s professional life had any bearing on his wife’s untimely death?”
“From what I know,” Mr. Stoner replied carefully, “it is unlikely. Leonard Marsh’s day was a long time ago, and he would never have shared his professional secrets with any unauthorized person, even his wife.”
So if Mr. Marsh was decades beyond being important anymore, I reasoned, their visit and our conversation seemed irrelevant. But how could they be certain his past was not a factor in his wife’s death? Hinckley and Stoner both listened without expression—I thought at the time “stone faced” was probably a nickname his subordinates used behind his back—as I went on to tell them about Amelia Marsh’s years in Hanley. I emphasized how she kept her past life almost completely separate from the one she made for herself after settling down as a retiree in a small mid-western town.
“She had friends,” I continued, “several of them, but no one knew much about her. Why not? Why isn’t it possible her death is connected somehow to her years married to your secret agent, or whatever he was? She was murdered.”
Their only response was to say they would drop in and see the officer in charge of the murder investigation before they went back to Chicago. They shook hands with both of us, apologized for any inconvenience, and for the third time advised us not to dabble in the files of dead government agents.
George came to his feet when Mr. Stoner and Ms. Hinckley got up to leave, but as we heard their vehicle pull out of my driveway he sank back onto the couch with an audible gasp of relief. I plopped myself down on the other end of the couch and let out a gasp of my own. The atmosphere was friendly again. We sat there and enjoyed it.
“I was too intimidated to mention the Freedom of Information Act,” I finally said weakly.
“Are you still offering liquid refreshment, because if you are, I could sure use something. You didn’t sound intimidated to me. I didn’t even remember that law.”
“When have you not been welcome to whatever is in my refrigerator?” We dragged ourselves into the kitchen. Without a word I opened the refrigerator door and removed a bottle of wine. George opened a cupboard door and took out two of my four wine glasses.
“You amaze me,” I said, “remembering where the glassware is kept.”
“The only place in this kitchen where I do know what’s what,” he answered solemnly, holding out each glass in turn for me to pour in a generous amount
“To freedom,” I toasted, tapping his glass with my own and taking a sip.
“Amen.” George took a generous swallow and followed me back into the sitting room.
We talked for a while, rehashing our strange visit with the FBI agents. Finally I mentioned finding something to eat. Wine on an empty stomach was making me light headed, which was a big improvement over nausea. The fact that I mentioned food before George did was more of an indication than anything else of how shaken he had been by his interrogation. There had been no opportunity for him to carry through on his promise to bring our dinner. There were a couple of beers at the back of my refrigerator and while George went to get one I ordered a large pizza. It seemed to me if I could drink the wine I could eat a couple of pieces of pepperoni pizza, and it sure sounded good.
It was almost seven when the delivery person arrived with our supper. George rehashed his afternoon ordeal with the government agents and told me some of the information he discovered with his computer-based investigation. He stopped once to call his supervisor and say he was not in custody so he could come in as usual in the morning for work. After I ate two pieces of pizza and George ate four, I told him about my visit to Texas.
George and I would go over everything at least twice that night, and at times he went into great detail to explain what pathways he had taken to find out what he knew. The whole process had taken him many hours over the previous weekend, and a couple more after we had spoken the night before. His journey had taken him into public records in English counties, and archives in Washington D.C.. I apologized a couple of times for all of the hours put into this project and all of the trauma he had endured on my account. As a true gentleman he assured me it was all right.
“The whole thing has been interesting,” he said positively, “even if it included a run in with the feds.”
He almost dropped his current piece of pizza on his lap as I gave a shriek. Before he could ask I explained.
“Miss Carey! How could I forget her? She should be here! What time is it?”
The time was fifteen minutes after eight. It was common for elderly people to retire early and eight was my usual cut off for calling anyone over sixty-five. But Anne had been wide-awake at nine, the night we had dinner together. It was worth a chance. I rang her number. She answered on the third ring. After an apology for the late call and a quick explanation, she responded with assurances and enthusiasm. Of course she would come over. I started to offer to come and walk with her, but offered George’s service instead.
He shook his head and started for the front door, the last of his supper now digesting. “Why not?” He pretended to grumble. “First a danger to the security of our nation, then an escort for sweet old ladies. That’s me.”
They were back in minutes and I had a cup of peppermint tea waiting for Anne and hazelnut decaf coffee for George and myself, if he wanted any. Yippy stayed home. Anne gave me a little hug, inquired as to my health, and clucked that I looked too thin. That done, she settled ladylike into my straight back chair with her tea on a table at her left elbow, and looked expectantly at both of us.
“I assume you have introduced yourselves to each other,” I said politely, getting comfortable myself.
They had and they were ready to get back down to business, which was listening to George repeat all the information he had given first to the federal agents and then to me. He didn’t seem to mind, in fact he got more enthusiastic with telling it all again. In all of the years I knew George he was usually reticent, allowing other people to do most of the talking. I could remember only one other occasion where he talked so long, describing the catch of prize trout. Actually, he was pretty good at it.
Anne Carey was a good listener, too. She sat demurely in her chair, both eyes focused on George in rapt attention. Often she would interject an exclamation such as, “you don’t say!” or, “my word!” which only kept our man fueled.
I was as fascinated as she was. How often do two ordinary women hear about a man married to a friend of theirs, who turns out to have led the kind of life Leonard Marsh did?
In early 1916, Leonard and his brother, Arthur were placed in a New York state orphanage when their parents died. The inference was the parents had died of influenza. The family had newly emigrated from Scotland and there were no relatives to place the boys with. Leonard was the older by five years. Apparently he had been bright, ambitious, and personable. Those qualities put him in the good graces of his teachers and the administrator of the home. They recommended him for scholarships to a New York City college, and he was accepted. By age twenty-one, with a lot of hard work and perhaps a little charm, he was accepted into an officer’s training program and two years later graduated with honors.
Leonard was not one to forget his brother. There was documentation they were close. With his older brother’s mentoring, Arthur too finished high school and went into military service. He chose the navy for his career.
The facts George gave us lined up with Elaine Barclay’s recollections. George’s research also verified another thing Elaine said about Arthur. He had perished at Pearl Harbor leaving a widow and a child.
Leonard did well for himself in the army and made the rank of captain by 1934, after a tour of duty in the Philippines. But two years later his military career seemed to mysteriously end. For the public record he had resigned his commission to become a private consultant for allied countries trying to learn updated weaponry. In reality he had gone underground, into intelligence. Records released fifty years later revealed Leonard never officially left the military at all.
“My guess is, after his brother was able to take care of himself our man was asked to do some more clandestine work and he took the challenge,” George commented. “Evaluations and comments by his superiors suggest he liked taking risks, but they liked the fact he seemed to know when to draw back. Leonard Marsh seemed to have a gift for knowing how far to go.”
“This is all fascinating, just fascinating,” Miss Carey said fervently. “I can’t help but wonder how much Amelia knew.”
“Things were different by the time they met,” George went on. “After his brother died Leonard had no immediate family left. The reports change after Pearl Harbor. Now your Mr. Marsh was becoming a daredevil. He’s reprimanded for it a couple of times, but he got results so the slap on the wrist was only for show.”
I asked George if everything he was telling us was in the records or if he was filling in any blanks. He admitted he had drawn some conclusions, but defended them with all of the data he had seen to support it.
“Did your visitors take your documentation?”
“No,” he admitted, “but they asked to see it pretty forcefully and I was intimidated enough to let them. You won’t be surprised to hear they told me to destroy it. They drew the line at confiscating what I showed them.”
“What you showed them?” I repeated.
He grinned. “They saw my notes, but the disc I have wasn’t labeled. There was much more than they saw.”
Miss Carey wanted to get back to Leonard Marsh’s biography. “Do you know what he was doing when he and Amelia met in London?” she asked.
George grew serious. “There’s no record of how much she knew, but my guess is she knew very little, and you heard what Agent Stoner said, Sally. Marsh certainly had to know how to keep his mouth shut. He wouldn’t have lasted long if he hadn’t, and he was a veteran by then in covert operations. Sometime during the war he became a specialist. In the Navy we called them torpedoes.”
“Torpedoes?” Anne repeated, and my face asked the same question.
“He was a professional assassin.”
No reply seemed worthy of the information. There was a pause of considerable length after George’s announcement, and it would have been longer but he broke it with a continuation of his fact finding.
“Obviously the allies needed these kind of people, and Leonard managed to knock off a few spies and other undesirable members of the Axis. He got out of that when he got married, being the actual hit man, that is. He requested it and had earned the right.”
“Thank goodness,” my other guest said weakly.
“The war was over by then,” I pointed out.
That was so, our narrator concurred. But the cold war was on, and there were still plenty of problems and plenty of demand for a good undercover man who already knew the score. Leonard Marsh’s job description changed but he was very much in the game. He became a finger man, pointing out dangerous individuals who had animosity against America and her allies, making decisions as to who mattered, and training men to do the job he had bowed out of. His wife became an asset. A married man looked much less suspicious. Incredibly, in spite of his years of service and his physical appearance, he remained almost unknown in the murky world of espionage. From the end of the war until shortly before his retirement no serious attempts were made on his life.
That changed in 1966. His wife wasn’t with him. He was in Berlin when it happened, and he dodged the bullet on a fluke.”
“I would love to know all the details of that one!” George declared, “but the case isn’t spelled out in the files I could get to. But Leonard Marsh was now a marked man if he stayed in the field. He was transferred to a desk job in Washington and less than two years later he took his retirement.”
“He was no longer a young man by that time,” Anne pointed out. “Surely he was getting tired of that kind of lifestyle.”
“He certainly lasted a long time.” George stood up and excused himself to go to the bathroom.
I got up also and took our cups to the kitchen. Anne stayed in her chair, deep in thought. She was the first to speak when we were all in the sitting room again.
“Surely it is possible someone with a grudge or hatred for Leonard could have decided to take his revenge on Amelia instead.”
We all looked at each other.
“It can’t be ruled out,” I agreed. “You weren’t here, Miss Carey, or you would have heard me argue that point with the FBI. But looking at that possibility brings up so many more problems. With all of the information we’ve got now we have more and more questions. Instead of getting somewhere in this puzzle, I feel like we just find more pieces.”
“You have to admit the feds had a good point,” George spoke up. “The Marshes are old history now, and like they said, the missus probably knew very little about what her husband did. She may have never known he was a hit man. From what I’ve read and heard about this espionage business it wasn’t done, taking revenge on the family, unless you were a Nazi or within the Russian system, and then it would be to make a statement to someone else. There is no one else. Her husband is already gone.”
We discussed the possibilities for a while. None of them seemed too promising. We all agreed that if Amelia Marsh’s death was related to her husband’s profession it would take more time, effort, and research to investigate than amateurs such as ourselves could put into it, not to mention contacts. But George stuck to his opinion that no one out for revenge against Leonard Marsh from deeds done decades earlier would have tracked his wife to the mid-west to kill her. For the most part I agreed with him. What bothered me was Amelia’s almost complete break with the past when she moved to Indiana. If the past connection with covert intelligence was not the reason, what was it?
Miss Carey did not commit herself. She wanted to consider everything some more. “I will probably be awake for hours thinking about this,” she said ruefully. “Old ladies don’t usually sleep soundly all night anyway.” She beamed at both of us, “This will certainly be a change from the usual things on my mind.”
George escorted Miss Carey back to her front door and left shortly after himself. We all agreed we wanted to talk again later, but set no definite date or time, pending our own private conclusions plus the phone call I knew would eventually come from Detective David White.
I wandered aimlessly around my house and wondered if some c