There Was an Old Woman
The lawyer was late. Skye narrowed her eyes and crossed her legs. She hated being kept waiting when she had an appointment. If she didn’t have to ask this jerk for a favor, she would be out of there so fast. But she needed to find out the details of her grandmother’s trust and, according to her mother, this bozo was the one who had drawn it up.
Another fifteen minutes passed and Skye could stand it no longer. She put her purse and book on the chair and went up to the desk. “Do you know how much longer Mr. Ginardi will be? I have other appointments this morning.”
“I have no idea.” The woman didn’t look up from her magazine.
“Would it be possible for you to check?” Skye gritted her teeth.
“He doesn’t like to be interrupted.”
Before Skye could think of anything else to say, a man poked his head out of the doorway behind the woman. When he saw Skye looking at him he flushed. “Ah… you must be Miss Denison. Come in.”
Skye followed him and sat in the chair he indicated.
He spoke to her without making eye contact. “I’m Bob Ginardi. I’m afraid we’ll have to be quick about this. I need to leave in a few minutes.”
Skye clenched her teeth. What nerve. First he made her wait over half an hour, and now he was going to rush her in and out. Still she couldn’t afford to offend him, yet. “I’ll try not to take up too much of your time.” Skye got out a notepad and pen. “Since you have only a few minutes for me, let’s get down to business. What I need to know is how my grandmother’s trust works.”
The lawyer frowned. “I really can’t talk to you about it since you’re not named in the trust.”
She reached in her tote and handed him an envelope. “That’s from my mother, who is a part of the trust, allowing me to act on her behalf.”
“It’s not notarized.” He slid the paper back to her, a look of relief on his face. “You’ll have to make another appointment.” Ginardi took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
“No.” Skye realized this man not only didn’t want to talk to her, but was afraid to talk to her. What was he hiding?
The lawyer’s features registered surprise.
“I’m not leaving without this information. We are not talking state secrets here. All I need to know is how my family’s Bypass Trust works. If you feel you can’t tell me, I will call my mother and she’ll ask the questions.” Skye looked at her watch. “But that may take some time.”
Ginardi laughed nervously. “You can’t hold me hostage.”
“Maybe not, but are you willing to call the police to get rid of me?” Before he could answer, Skye continued, “Because if I don’t get answers today, the next time I come here will be with my mother, our attorney, and an auditor.”
He swallowed. “Okay, no need to get so upset. I have to protect confidentiality.” After using his handkerchief again he went on. “I guess I can explain the trust to you, at least in broad terms.”
“Fine.”
“A simple Bypass Trust means half of the estate goes to the surviving spouse at the time of the other spouse’s death. And the other half goes into a family trust with the income from that half going to the surviving spouse, as well.”
“So, except for Grandma, no one got a dime while she was living.” Skye tried to ease him into being more specific.
“Right.” He stared at a point above her head. “In the case of your grandfather’s estate, most of the value was in land. The land could not be divided except to pay for Antonia’s care, as long as your grandmother lived.”
“Was that being considered?” Skye clarified her question. “Selling off some of the land to pay for Grandma’s care?”
“We had been deliberating about the sale of some of the land, yes.” He looked at the contents of the file. “No decision would have needed to be made until fall. It depended on what kind of year the farm had, and how much the crops were sold for.”
“I know my uncles and my father do all the actual farming of the Leofanti land. Do they get any of the profits?”
Ginardi became fascinated with the crease in his pants. “Yes, the business is set up as if they were sharecroppers. They put in the labor, your grandmother put in the land, and the profits were divided, fifty percent to her and fifty percent among your father and uncles.”
Skye made a note. “What happens now?”
“The heirs can do what they wish as long as they all agree.”
“And if they all don’t agree?”
“Then the land will have to be sold and the money divided equally.”
Skye took a shot in the dark. “Is that what my Uncle Dante wanted to know when he was in to see you?”
Ginardi squirmed in his seat.
Skye continued to look him in the eye. She had found that pretending to know more than she actually knew could be very enlightening at times.
“Yes.”
Skye’s next stop was the library. She used the card catalog to locate the Dewey decimal number for poisons and found several books on the subject. She sat down at a table and tried to find a match for the name her mother had mangled.
After she read a few sections she found a likely suspect. Jatropha curcas. The common name was Barbados nut. It was found in southern Florida and Hawaii and the raw seeds had a pleasant taste. There would have been no difficulty getting her grandmother or Mrs. Jankowski to eat them mixed into brownies.
Farther down the page she found the symptoms. Difficulty breathing, sore throat, bloating, dizziness, vomiting, diarrhea, and drowsiness. Wally’s guess was right, the murderer must have cleaned Grandma up. She needed to ask the chief if vomit and stool were present when they found Mrs. Jankowski.
The entry ended by saying that the poison, once ingested, took only fifteen to twenty minutes to kill.
When Skye got back to her car she noticed that there were still two hours before she was supposed to pick up Trixie to go swimming. She decided to see if she could take the local doctor to lunch.
Doc Zello was semiretired, working only half-days, but she headed to his office anyway. His was the only car in the lot.
As she walked up the familiar concrete steps and through the waiting area that smelled of antiseptic and cough drops, she felt as if she were ten again. Skye knocked on the closed dutch doors.
Doc Zello’s voice bellowed in answer. “I’m not here unless this is an emergency.”
She pushed her way in and found him at his desk. “It’s an emergency. I’m starving and I’m taking you to lunch.”
He looked at her over his glasses. “Looks like you could stand to skip a few lunches.”
“Looks as if you could stand to see a barber.”
His wild white hair stood on end. He absentmindedly ran his fingers through it, making it worse. “Okay, so why do you want to take me to lunch?”
“I want to pick your brain.”
“You know I can’t tell you anything confidential.”
“I’ll work around it.” She took him by the arm and they walked to her car.
After they had driven to the Feedbag, been seated, and had given their order, Skye started her questions. “You’ve practiced medicine in Scumble River for how long?”
“Over fifty years. I’ve lived here all my life.”
“Do you remember a nurse by the name of Esther Prynn? She was around here in the mid-sixties.”
He stroked his beard. “Can’t say as I do, right offhand. Why do you ask?”
Skye didn’t want to explain, so she ignored the question. “She might have done private duty nursing. Maybe for people who had what they used to call nervous breakdowns.”
“That was a long time ago. Are you trying to find her?”
“I don’t want to say too much until I’m more sure of my facts, but I think there might be some link between this woman and my grandmother’s murder.” Unless, of course, Uncle Dante or Hugo did it for the land. Or the twins for the jewelry. Or one of her other relatives for reasons she had yet to discover.
“Your best bet is to check with the nurses’ licensing board. They might have an address for her.” He held up a hand mottled with age spots. “But if she doesn’t practice anymore, then she probably didn’t renew her certificate.”
“Could you check for me?” Skye turned her head to one side and looked at him through her lashes. “You know, a well-known doctor such as yourself would get a lot better results than a nobody like me.”
“Okay.” Doc Zello slapped her lightly on the cheek. “But don’t think you’re fooling me for one minute. I just want whoever killed Antonia to be brought to justice.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
They sat quietly while the waitress delivered their order and refilled their iced teas.
The meal was almost over when Doc Zello spoke again. “You know, I might have been your grandfather.”
“What?”
“I dated your grandmother before she married Angelo. I always regretted not asking her to marry me. She was an amazing woman. You remind me a lot of her. Once she got an idea into her head, she’d never let go until she was satisfied. And she always wanted things to be fair.”
“Mom said the same thing right after Grandma died, but I never noticed a similarity between us.”
“Antonia saw it. That’s why she was telling you the family history.” He pushed his plate away.
“It did seem important to her that some kind of permanent record be made.” Skye used her napkin and put it aside. “Too bad it’ll never be finished now.”
“History is never finished.”
Trixie was full of conversation and high spirits, halting her chatter only long enough for Skye to show the man at the Scumble River Recreational Club her identification card.
They drove down a narrow gravel road toward the beach. The lane was bordered by grassy areas dotted with trees and picnic tables. Most of them were occupied by young women and small children.
Locker rooms bracketed a crude pavilion that contained a soda machine and a pay telephone. They changed quickly into their swimsuits; neither wanted to linger in the slimy, mold-filled building.
The beach wasn’t crowded. Skye had noted early on that most families seemed to swim in the morning. She and Trixie climbed down the concrete steps and walked along the shore until they found a relatively isolated spot.
After helping Skye to smooth out an old bedspread on the sand, Trixie peeled off the oversized T-shirt she was wearing. Underneath, a cherry-red bikini glowed against her tan skin.
Skye glanced down at her pale limbs. “Trixie, how’d you get tanned already?”
“Tanning booth at your brother’s salon. How come you don’t use it?”
“No time, I guess.”
“Want to take a dip?” Trixie was rocking from foot to foot on the hot sand.
“Sure. Race you to the raft.” Skye tossed her cover-up on the blanket, revealing a dark purple one-piece maillot.
Trixie made it to the float a millisecond before Skye and they both flung themselves, panting, on the bleached wood.
“When did you get to be such a fast swimmer?” Trixie asked. “I was on my college swim team, and you nearly beat me just now.”
“I swim a lot. Here when the weather is nice and at the high school when it gets cold.”
“Oh. Cool. Now that I’ll be on staff we can swim together.” Trixie rolled to her side and rested her head on her hand. “So, have you found out anything else about your grandmother’s murder?”
“Some.” Skye was uncomfortable sharing information. She was out of the habit of exchanging casual gossip because most of what she heard at work was confidential.
“Do you suspect Hugo and Victoria?”
“Well, Grandma’s farm would be worth a lot of money if it could be subdivided into a housing development. And while Hugo wouldn’t get the money directly, I’m sure Uncle Dante would be very generous to his only child.”
Trixie shook her head and water flew from her gamin-like haircut. “Yeah, but didn’t you say Dante wants to continue to farm?”
“True, but he is sixty already. Maybe Hugo felt he could talk his dad into his way of thinking.”
“So, is Dante in the clear?”
Skye squeezed the moisture from her chestnut curls. “No, I knew Grandma’s care was costing a bundle. I mean, do the math. Mrs. J was there twenty-four hours, six days a week. They were only paying her five dollars an hour, but that’s still over seven hundred a week. Plus a couple hundred for the woman who stayed on Sundays. So that’s over four thousand a month, or nearly fifty thousand a year. Because of that, it turns out they might have had to start selling off pieces of the farm to support her. The lawyer said it would have all depended on how the crops were this year.”
“Wow, it’s a good thing my mother-in-law didn’t need to have someone take care of her for too long.” Trixie grimaced. “Oh, that reminds me, how’s your Aunt Minnie? Do you think she attempted suicide because she felt guilty about killing your grandmother?”
Skye scooted to the edge of the raft and dangled her feet in the water. “She’s still in the hospital. And actually I’m wondering if her so-called suicide attempt wasn’t really a murder attempt.” Skye told her about Minnie’s aversion to pills.
“Why would anyone want to kill her?”
“Maybe she knows something. I’ve been doing a little asking around and there’s a lot more to her past than I ever knew.”
Trixie shaded her eyes. “I thought your grandmother was telling you the family history.”
“She was, but we didn’t get to my aunts’ and uncles’ generation.”
“How about Minnie’s daughters?” Trixie eased back into the water.
“They certainly thought there were more jewelry and valuables than there turned out to be.” Skye followed Trixie into the water and they headed slowly back to shore. “Their husbands spilled the beans about their misconception at Grandma’s funeral lunch.”
“Of course you don’t suspect your own mother or brother.”
“No, thank goodness they have alibis. And I really haven’t found a motive for Aunt Mona, besides the fact that she’s a mean-spirited, sanctimonious bitch.” Skye filled in Trixie about the essay contest at school as they emerged from the water and crossed the hot sand.
“What a horrible thing to do to a child. And to have to sacrifice all your hard work with him. How awful for you too.”
Skye settled on the spread and began to apply sunscreen. Trixie joined her and oiled her own limbs.
Skye lay down in the bright sun and was almost asleep when Trixie’s voice woke her. “I know how to check to see who filled Minnie’s prescription.”
“How?”
“My cousin works at the pharmacy in town. She can check the records for us.”
“But isn’t that illegal?” Skye asked.
“Only if we get caught.”