Candy Cane Murder (Hannah Swensen #9.5)(89)

“Who did?” It popped out before Lucy could stop herself.

“Papa did. He took her by the shoulders and told me to lift her by the ankles. He said she wouldn’t, she couldn’t be very heavy, not after being sick for so long, but she was heavy. We kind of bumped her up the stairs, two long flights. And then he sent me back downstairs to sweep up the glass and tidy the basement while he put her in a fresh nightgown and tied her hair with a ribbon and tucked the covers around her, CANDY CANES OF CHRISTMAS PAST

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folding her hands around a Bible and laying them on her chest.” Miss Tilley looked her straight in the eye. “Then he called the doctor.”

Lucy found her eyes going to the portrait over the mantel.

The stern, righteous man pictured there suddenly didn’t look quite so respectable. That gleam in his eye, was it the light of truth and justice, or was it something more sinister?

Lucy thought of her own great grandfather Tobias. He wore flannel shirts and khakis in the house, where he spent his days reading and watching baseball on TV from his armchair in the living room and making wooden furniture in his basement workshop, but he never went outside in such casual clothes. He put on a starched white shirt, a dark suit, shiny black shoes and a hat for the short walk down the street to buy the newspaper. “Times change,” said Lucy.

“When I was a little girl I wore white gloves to church. And my great grandfather wouldn’t go out of the house without a hat.”

Miss Tilley nodded. “Straw between Memorial Day and Labor Day, felt for the rest of the year.”

“Exactly,” said Lucy, smiling. “So it’s not surprising that your father would want to protect his family from gossip.

Every funeral’s the same: everybody wants to know all the details. Did she smoke? Was it expected or was it sudden?

Did she suffer? I can see why he wanted to keep some things private. He wanted to preserve your mother’s dignity, even in death.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Miss Tilley. “Mama rarely got out of the house except to go to church on Sunday even before she got sick. She may have looked like a fine lady then, in her silk dress and her flowery hat, but at home she worked like a slave. Everything had to be just so for Papa.

She even ironed his morning paper before he read it.”

Lucy had never heard of such a thing and her eyebrows shot up.

“Oh, yes,” continued Miss Tilley. “He had to have fresh 302

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linens on his bed every night, fresh towels every day, starched napkins and those shirts of his.” She rolled her eyes. “The slightest little wrinkle, even a pucker from the iron and he’d have a fit. My goodness, the hours my poor mother spent at the ironing board. There was no permanent press then and if there had been Papa certainly wouldn’t have allowed it.

When I think of her, before she got sick, I think of her standing at that ironing board, her sleeves rolled up and her hair falling down, her face shiny with sweat.”

“She didn’t have any household help?”

“Not until she got sick.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she got sick on purpose,” said Lucy, attempting a joke.

Miss Tilley’s eyes widened. “Oh, no, she would never do that. It was the doctor who insisted that she needed bed rest and even then she would try to get up and make sure everything was just as Papa liked it.”

“Perhaps that’s what she was doing the day she fell,” said Lucy. “She was probably weak and collapsed.”

“An accident?” Miss Tilley looked at her empty glass and reached for the bottle, sighing when she realized it was empty.

“I don’t think it was an accident.”

Lucy glanced at the portrait. “You don’t?”

“There was a tense atmosphere in the house that morning.

That’s why I went skating. I wanted to get out.”

“Did they have an argument of some sort?” asked Lucy.

“No. I never heard them fight, but I’d know that something was wrong. Papa would be very abrupt, his tone would be very sharp, and Mama would watch him anxiously, as if she were afraid of him.”

“Oh dear,” said Lucy, remembering the scene she’d witnessed the day before, with Kyle and Dora.

“I’ve always suspected that Papa pushed her down the stairs.”

Lucy gasped. “That’s a terrible thing to think about your father,” she finally said.

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“Yes, it is,” agreed Miss Tilley, looking up at the portrait.

“I loved him, I still do, but every time I look at that picture I have the same dark suspicion. If only I could know for sure what happened that day.”

Lucy thought of the book she was reading, Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time about a British police inspector who attempts to solve the fifteenth-century murder of the Little Princes in the Tower of London. “Maybe we can try to solve the mystery,” she said. “Just like Inspector Grant.”

“I thought you’d like that book,” said Miss Tilley. “But it’s fiction. This is real life.”

“But that mystery was hundreds of years old. Your mystery is much more recent.”

“But the princes and Richard III were historical figures, things were written about them, there were documents and books.”