Beautiful Little Fools(33)

“What are you doing here?” Her voice trembled a little, breaking on the word here. Maybe she wasn’t seething. Maybe she was afraid. The dog yapped still.

“I was in the area and wanted to pay my respects,” he said, shouting to be heard over the dog. The coroner had approved the request for transport of her sister’s body just before Frank had left the city, and he knew the family planned to bury Myrtle out here in the family plot.

Catherine sighed a little, picked up the dog, walked him away, presumably to another room, because his barking suddenly got muted. Then she came back and opened the door.

She looked different than she had in New York last month. Her red hair was pulled back tightly against the nape of her neck, her face was pale, the freckles across her nose somehow appeared more prominent. Instead of the fashionable dress and heels she’d been wearing the first time he’d met her at the morgue, now she was barefoot and whatever dress she was wearing was covered up by a stained, mustard-colored apron. She held a dish towel and wiped her hands. Then she stepped aside, gesturing for him to come into the house.

He walked inside, his eyes going over the small living spaces, the sparse wood furnishings, the framed photographs on a parlor table of two girls. Babies, kids, teenagers. He picked up one of what looked to be a young adult Myrtle and a teenage Catherine. They were standing in front of the farmhouse wearing matching gingham dresses, arms around each other.

“Our mother sewed those for us to wear to our cousin Lillian’s wedding,” Catherine said. “That photograph was taken the morning Myrtle left for New York. She said she wanted to go into her new life wearing her best dress. I put mine on to match. Father took that picture of us…” Her voice trailed off, caught up in the memory. She raised her finger to the glass, traced the outline of her sister.

“I really am very sorry for your loss,” Frank said, and he meant it. He was.

She took the picture and set it back down on the table. Her eyes snapped up to him. “You didn’t even know my sister, Detective. Why are you really here?”

He opened his mouth, considered telling her the truth, that he’d gone on a long and fruitless journey to talk to Daisy Buchanan in Minnesota, and when that had led him to nothing but more suspicion, he figured he might as well stop here, too, on the way back to New York. But instead he told her another truth. “I had a sister… once.”

“Once?” Catherine asked softly, raising her eyebrows. “What happened to her?”

“She died. Nearly twenty-five years ago now.”

“I’m very sorry,” she murmured.

Nothing had shaped the course of his life more than that one single event, when he was just a boy of fourteen, and his older sister, Lizzie, was murdered. Lizzie had made him breakfast that January morning before they’d both left for school, and then he never saw her again. She turned up dead in a Brooklyn alley the next morning. Just like that. They never caught the guy who did it, and that thought still pained him so much, even to this day, that he barely ever let himself think about Lizzie now, except at Christmas and when he went to church to light a candle on her birthday every May. But Lizzie was why he’d devoted his entire adult life to investigating and solving murders.

Catherine’s face softened and she motioned for him to come sit down in the small kitchen. He took a seat at the round oak table, and he hated himself a little for using Lizzie in this way, for invoking her memory simply to get Catherine to open up to him.

“How’d it happen?” Catherine asked him now.

“She was strangled,” he said quietly.

Catherine shook her head. “That’s terrible.”

He nodded. He was leaving out so much, but he wasn’t here to talk to Catherine about Lizzie. He kind of wished he hadn’t brought her up at all. He started to sweat again, and Catherine stood to get him a glass of water. He thanked her and took a sip. “I was just a kid still, and her murder was never solved,” he said, trying to bring the conversation back around. “But if I’d had someone to blame… say, if a rich guy had run her over… even at the age of fourteen, I would’ve killed the son of a bitch myself.” It was a shocking thing to say out loud. Even more shocking to understand it was the God’s honest truth.

Catherine sat across the table from him, closed her eyes for a moment, and exhaled. “So that’s why you’re here. I should’ve known you didn’t really want to pay your respects.” She shook her head. “Even if I was the murderer you think I am… aren’t you out of your jurisdiction for arrests?”

“I’m not trying to make any arrests here. I just want to know the truth, that’s all. Someone shot a man, point-blank, and from what I hear about your brother-in-law, I don’t know if he was capable.”

“Oh, George was very capable. He loved pistols, don’t you know? Pistols and cars.” Catherine’s voice was caustic, dripping in bitterness. She balled her hands into fists and shook her head. “Myrtle deserved better,” she said. “She deserved so much better.”

He wasn’t clear now whether she meant better than George, or better than what happened to her—her body being crushed out in the road, in the end. But all that was beside the point, and he didn’t ask. He suddenly hated himself for coming here, for picking at her raw wound with more questions. Even if she had shot Gatsby, he might have deserved it.