arthritis in both grossly swollen knees made getting up difficult, much
less trying to move herself around. Her back was permanently bent and
the lungs were dense and unforgiving after fifty years of tar and
nicotine bombardment. She was counting down to the end; her body had
carried her about as far as it could. Longer than her daughter’s had.
She fingered the letter that she kept in the pocket of her old, pink
dressing gown that failed to completely cover the red, blistered ankles.
She figured they would show up sooner or later. After Wanda had come
back from the police station, she knew it was a matter of time before
something like this happened. The tears welled up in her eyes as she
thought back to the last few weeks.
“It was my fault, Momma.” Her daughter had sat in the tiny kitchen
where, as a little girl, she had helped her mother bake cookies and can
tomatoes and stringbeans harvested from the strip of garden out back.
She had repeated those words over and over as she slumped forward on the
table, her body convulsing with every word. Edwina had tried to reason
with her daughter but she was not eloquent enough to dent the shroud of
guilt that surrounded the slender woman who had started life as a
roly-poly baby with thick dark hair and horseshoe legs. She had shown
Wanda the letter but it had done no good. It was beyond the old woman to
make her child understand.
Now she was gone and the police had come. And now Edwina had to do the
right thing. And at eighty-one and Godfearing, Edwina was going to lie
to the police, which was to her the only thing she could do.
“I’m sorry about your daughter, Mrs. Broome.” Frank’s words rang sincere
to the old woman’s ears. A trickle of a tear slipped down the deep
crevices of her aged face.
The note Wanda had left behind was given to Edwina Broome and she looked
at it through a thick magnifying ghm that lay on the table within easy
reach. She looked at the earnest face of the detective. “I can’t imagine
what she was thinking when she wrote this.”
“You understand that a robbery took place at the Sullivan home? That
Christine Sullivan was murdered by whoever it was that broke in?”
“I heard that on the television right after it happened. That was
terrible. Terrible.”
“Did your daughter ever talk to you about the incident?”
“Well of course she did. She was so upset by it all. She and Mrs.
Sullivan got along real well, real well. It broke her UP- ”
“Why do you think she took her own LIFE?”
“If I could tell you, I would.”
She let that ambiguous statement hang in front of Frank’s face until he
folded the paper back up.
“Did your daughter tell you anything about her work that might shed some
light on the murder?”
“No. She liked her job pretty much. They treated her real well from what
she said. Living in that big house, that’s real ifice.”
“Mrs. Broome, I understand that Wanda was in trouble with the law a
while back.”
“A long while back, Detective. A long while back. And she lived a good
life since then.” Edwina Broome’s eyes had narrowed, her lips set in a
firm line, as she stared down Seth Frank.
“I’m sure she did,” Frank added quickly. “Did Wanda bring anyone by to
see you in the last few months. Someone you didn’t know perhaps?”
Edwina shook her head. That much was the truth.
Frank eyed her for a long moment. The cataract-fined eyes stared
straight back at him.
“I understand your daughter was out of the country when the incident
happened?”
“Went down to that island with the Sullivans. They go every year I’m
told.”
“But Mrs. Sullivan didn’t go.”
“I suppose not, since she was murdered up here while they were down
there, Detective.”
Frank almost smiled. This old lady wasn’t nearly as dumb as she was
making out to be. “You wouldn’t have any idea why Mrs. Sullivan didn’t
go. Something Wanda might have told you?”