Mayhem, Mystery and Murder Read online

  A few moments more and I was lost in my research. Denise—I’m sure with an amused smile—left me to my labors. I couldn’t believe what I had found. There was some duplication of the material I already had, and naturally there was nothing on the Lauderfords after 1972, the last date of entry. But at least half of the material was entirely new to me, opening up lateral branches in Washington State, Arizona, and British Columbia. Balboa first sighting the broad Pacific couldn’t have been more excited by his discovery.

  It wasn’t until closing time that I even gave a thought to why Lester Lauderford had abandoned his endeavors and why the library had acquired the fruits of those efforts. When I did begin to speculate, I assumed that death had interrupted what had obviously been a genuine labor of love. As Denise went around reshelving books and turning out lights, she welcomed me along while also filling me in on the material’s background. “It was death that ended the work,” she told me, “but not Lester’s. That was all long before my time. I was a kindergartner then and don’t remember anything about what happened first hand, but it’s all in the old files of the Ipswich Sentinel and in the memories of the old timers. I guess it was the biggest thing to hit the town since the tornado of ’26 or the dairy farmer’s milk strike in ’32.”

  As she had said, she knew only the outline of the event. The year was 1973, the month was January of a bitterly cold, snowy winter. At the time, Lester Lauderford owned the only car dealership in town. He had driven in early to work on a sleet-filled morning, with the understanding that his wife—who was the company’s bookkeeper—would be down later when the weather cleared. She obviously hadn’t waited long enough. Driving the narrow mountain road coming from their home above town, her car didn’t negotiate a curve, crashed into a ravine, and went up in flames. Betty Lauderford had been thrown clear, but her body was still charred virtually beyond recognition.

  The entire matter might have ended there if it hadn’t been for the fact of an outrageously large insurance policy on Betty’s life, with Lester—they had no children—the sole beneficiary. Since Ipswich was unincorporated at the time, law enforcement was in the hands of the county sheriff’s department. Hamstrung by a lack of both expertise and up-to-date investigative equipment, the sheriff could produce little information beyond the fact of the crash. As a result, the coroner’s jury came up with a verdict of accidental death. The community did not entirely agree with that conclusion, especially when Lester quickly sold his home and business, closed his accounts, collected the insurance money and set off for parts unknown. As a parting gesture, he had left his genealogy materials to the town library, clearly implying that his interests had broadened beyond the tracing of his ancestry.

  It was while I was going over my notes at the motel that evening, after deciding to return to the library the following day to photocopy the Lester files—as I now called them—that I went from genealogy searches to sleuthing. Something had been nagging at me, and two spaces marked with question marks caught my attention, adding to the nagging. One was 1917-???? next to Lester Lauderford’s name, and the other was 1927-???? next to Sarah Lauderford’s name. Between Lester’s notes and mine, we had traced down the dates of death or verified the continued existence of all of the Centerville and Ipswich Lauderfords. These two were the only exceptions. I found myself, like Lester, suddenly seeing my interests broadening beyond the tracing of ancestry.

  I had to take a sedative that night. So impatient was I for the next day to begin, I knew I wouldn’t have slept otherwise. Fortunately, Denise arrived at the library a half-hour before the announced schedule, so I had to spend only some fifteen minutes waiting in my rented car for the door to open. I didn’t share any of my real interests with Denise, but I’m sure she had a fair inkling of what I was looking into. As I’d anticipated, she was an excellent reference source for matters beyond, as well as within, the library walls. One of Lester’s younger brothers, Charles, a town attorney, lived just a block away. The sheriff who had done the investigating of the crash was still alive and reasonably well, living in a nursing home in Springfield. The Sentinel’s morgue was definitely open to the public, and Denise’s sister Rita—who worked at the paper—would be only too glad to help with whatever I was searching for. My treasure of a librarian assured me, furthermore, that she would be happy to photocopy the Lester files for me while I was off doing other research.

  Rita was every bit as helpful as her sister, and I needed all the help I could get, since the Weekly Sentinel was innocent of microfiches. The car crash had been as newsworthy as Denise had described. An added bonus was a front-page photo of the deceased, a rather plain woman with dark hair, dark eyes, and a complexion that may have owed some of its rather muddy characteristics to the quality of the newspaper’s color reproduction. Checking my earlier notes, I found that the fatal accident had occurred exactly two weeks after Sarah’s mysterious disappearance.

  Now, armed with copies of all the news items which had trickled on for weeks, I felt more comfortable about trying to contact Charles. The voice that greeted me when I reached him at his office was a pleasant one. Even more pleasant was the quick agreement to my proposal to meet him, ostensibly to ask him for help with the genealogy. I also had the feeling that small town Illinois attorneys didn’t have the kind of schedules kept by the typical California urban lawyer.

  Charles Lauderford was as undistinguished as I had anticipated. Somewhere in his late-sixties, average height, a bit overweight. He gave my hand a vigorous shake, welcomed me into his modest office and waved me to a comfortable leather chair. Though impatient to move on to my major interest—the whereabouts of Lester Lauderford—I managed to restrain myself and only gradually drifted off into that subject on the pretense that I wanted to fill in that blank along with numerous others in my chart. The reluctance I encountered was not unexpected, since the cloud hovering over the accident had probably never completely dissipated.

  “I lost contact with my brother, several years ago. Thirty or so, as a matter of fact. Shortly after he left, he got in touch with me about some property matters he hadn’t settled. He was living in Florida at the time. Once that was out of the way, I didn’t hear from him again. Not too surprising, since we weren’t especially close. He was much older, than I was. Married and left home while I was still in grade school.”

  Rummaging through old files, Charles managed to run down the address that Leonard had given him, but I had to agree with him that, after thirty years, there was only the remotest of possibilities that he was still there. Convinced that the fountain was now dry, I touched on a few genealogical items of mutual interest, shared some of my enthusiasm for the Internet and its astonishing research possibilities, thanked him profusely, and then limped off to my car and my next goal—some sixty miles away in Springfield.

  Former Sheriff Delaney was in a wheel chair and seemed terribly fragile, but his mind was as sharp as any twenty-year-old’s. Best of all, he seemed eager to give me whatever information he could. His first statement about the accident was, “I was never happy with the results of that inquest.”

  He went on to describe the eventful day. “Lester phoned me from a farm house a mile or so from that bad curve. He said his wife had called and said she was coming to work, even though he told her the weather wasn’t showing any signs of clearing. But she insisted, saying there was bookkeeping she had to catch up on. Well, when she didn’t show after an hour and didn’t answer his phone calls, he set off looking for her. He found her all right. Her car had gone off the road and into a gulch on Moncton Hill just north of town. It looked like she didn’t negotiate the curve. The car caught fire and was burned to a crisp.”

  I nodded in agreement at that juncture, having seen Sentinel photos of what looked like a pile of mangled pieces of iron. He continued, “She’d been thrown clear, but her clothes must have been on fire because she was badly burnt. If we hadn’t known it was her, we would have had to go to dental records and that sort of thing.”

/>   “I’m surprised no one saw the accident or the fire before Lester went out checking.”

  “It wasn’t surprising then, but it would be now. They’ve put guardrails up on that curve since then. So many second homes are going up on those hillsides it’s beginning to look like a house orchard out there, and the traffic is pretty steady along that road. It wasn’t that way back in seventy-three. Lester and his wife were about the only ones living up the road, and there weren’t many cars even out on the highway that day because of the weather.” He shook his head. “Nope, it wasn’t that that made me suspicious.”

  It took little prompting on my part for the sheriff to voice those suspicions and the basis for them. “Even before I found out about all that insurance money, I was wondering. But then that maybe comes from being in law enforcement for forty-three years—ten or so back then. The two of them had been in business together for several years. He did a lot of traveling, picking up used cars from around the country. She used to take care of the business while he was out in the field. Word was she was really the brains of the outfit. Whoever was, they seemed to be doing pretty well. And Lester and his missus were lovey-dovey enough. She always hung on to his arm like they were a high school couple on their first date, and he seemed to be just as smitten. But my feeling is that love can go out the window if there’s enough money involved.” He paused as his mind shifted back to the accident scene.

  “There was no question that the car went over the edge at a pretty good clip. No skid marks. So she hadn’t put on the brakes—if she had any brakes. The fire is what puzzled me. Later, Lester admitted, kinda shamefaced, that he carried extra gas in the car. Damn fool thing to do. You’d think a car dealer would know better. Well, that did explain the extent of the fire. Between what was in the gas tank and the five gallons in the container, it wasn’t too surprising that Betty was burnt so bad—probably drenched by gasoline when she was thrown out. That also explained why the car was just a mass of molten metal, still burning when I got there. Maybe these days there might be some way to find out if the brakes had been tampered with, because that was my first thought, but there was no way for me to tell back then.

  “Blood test showed she hadn’t been drinking, so the coroner couldn’t really find anything different than misadventure. Lester’s taking off soon afterwards didn’t lessen my suspicion, but maybe that’s something I would have done too if my wife had suddenly died. You know—just get away from it all. But cutting off all connection with his hometown? That did seem strange. Then again, if you come into a fortune, you’re bound to change a lot. Old friends and acquaintances don’t matter that much anymore.”

  What the Sheriff was telling me ratcheted up my detective instincts several notches. I began to wonder if there might not have been a trip by Lester to Centerville somewhere about the time Sarah went off with her strange man. His genealogical file included her name as well as the rest of the Centerville relatives, but that didn’t mean much. I got a strange look when I asked my next question. “Are you sure that was Mrs. Lauderford who was killed in the wreck?”

  “I had no reason to doubt it. You got a reason?”

  I shook my head. “Just wondering.” I added an ambiguous, “Just wanted to keep my records straight.” It was an answer that obviously didn’t satisfy the Sheriff.

  “I suppose she was cremated,” I added, more as an afterthought than a question.

  A trace of a smile hovered over the Sheriff’s emaciated features. “Seemed she was well on the way already. As a matter of fact, she was. Three days after the accident. So you won’t have even teeth to go by. Might have blood though.”

  I’m sure my eyes showed my surprise.

  The smile became a wide grin. “That blood test I told you about. Now, you won’t believe how the department squirrels away evidence, but I’d be willing to bet that the tube of that blood, all dried up by now, is sitting around somewhere on a dusty back shelf, along with maybe some Civil War muskets. Kinda science tests they have these days where they can tell all about dinosaurs, maybe that blood will do you some good.”

  I did my best to suppress my enthusiasm and not indicate I really intended to follow up on that slender lead, but when I left, the Sheriff asked that he be “kept posted.”

  As it turned out, it wasn’t only the back shelves of the sheriff’s office that were dusty. It was evident that the incorporation of the various towns in the county had reduced this office to one carrying out mainly ceremonial duties. A lone deputy, who was obviously simultaneously serving with little effort the duties of receptionist, file clerk and desk sergeant, greeted me with the same pleasantness that seemed to be a standard response by Ipswichites to strangers making even stranger inquiries. That he also turned out to have Lauderford relatives didn’t hurt either.

  Whoever had done the filing in the past for the sheriff had been, if nothing else, meticulous. Cardboard boxes filled the basement, each clearly identified with marker pencil, both as to dates and as to contents. We zeroed in quickly on January of 1973. In the midst of stray bits of clothing, pieces of farm implements, and a rusty knife, we found a vial of reddish black substance labeled “Betty Lauderford blood sample, 1/12/73.”

  What happened next truly astonished me. The vial ended up in my custody with only the signing of a receipt and my verbal promise to return it when I’d finished with it. Truly the county sheriff’s department had not made it into the twentieth century, never mind the twenty-first.

  The next step was to find a lab to do the testing I wanted, and there I clearly found myself in the current century, and also in Chicago. The first thing the laboratory manager wanted to discuss was price. It was obvious he was not used to dealing with someone just walking in off the street and asking for the lab’s services. My appearance, a not very expensively dressed old codger hobbling around on a cane, did nothing to reassure him. I’m sure he was convinced that the quoted cost would scare me off immediately. When it didn’t, he moved on to exactly what I wanted done—though still somewhat dubious about the whole matter.

  After I’d explained at length my reason for wanting DNA tests, he detailed at similar length the difficulties with what I was proposing. “If I understand you correctly, you want to know if you are related to the person whose blood sample is in this vial?”

  I nodded.

  “And, if I understand your diagram correctly, you are related to this person through a mutual great-grandfather?

  I agreed.

  He smiled. “That poses a problem. Not only is that a rather remote relationship, but you share the same family name with her, so the marital connection may not be a biological connection.”

  At first I was puzzled by that comment, but the expression on my face must have shown that what he was saying was finally penetrating.

  “There’s an old saying,” he went on, “that it’s a wise child who knows his own father. In your genealogical diagram you have what we call five “putative” fathers. If any of the five mothers bore a child, ancestral to either you or your cousin, by someone other than those fathers, then the biological tie is broken.”

  It took me a while to digest what he was saying, and then the solution to the problem dawned on me. It also occurred to me that I’d been trying to solve the wrong problem. I really wasn’t concerned about whether or not the woman in the car was related to me, what I really wanted to know was whether or not she was Sarah Lauderford.

  “Suppose I provide you with a sample of blood from someone I know had the same mother as the person whose blood I think is in that vial.”

  “In that instance, we can provide you with near certainty of the relationship—or lack of relationship.”

  On that note, I wrote out a check as a deposit, told him I’d keep in touch via e-mail, and went off to make arrangements for flying to Texas, after several phone calls to trace down Sarah’s sister. Fortunately, her married name was unusual enough so that I did manage to run her down that very morning.

  Mary
-Anne Kulick, née Lauderford, had been surprised to hear from me and even more surprised that I was going to fly down to Lubbock simply to talk to her about a sister she hadn’t seen or heard from in some thirty years. Her agreement to see me seemed to be prompted more by curiosity than by any interest in either finding her sister or learning what had happened to her. When I met her face to face, that impression was borne out by her very first question.

  Sitting in the front room of a small bungalow at the outskirts of Lubbock, we shared some strange-tasting coffee and even stranger cookies which I wrote off as a peculiar Texas variation of chocolate chips. “Just exactly why is it you are trying to find my sister?”

  I decided to launch off slowly, using my general interest in genealogy as a pad. Mary-Anne showed some mild interest in my hobby, and considerably more interest when I started to question her about her sister’s strange disappearance. She confirmed all the major points I was already aware of. But this was information she had garnered mostly second-hand, having been too young at the time to become personally involved in the search or in the missing-person report to the police. Her impression was that her parents had come to share the view that Sarah had simply gone off with some man, was living in sin, and therefore was reluctant to communicate with any of her family.

  While I’d rehearsed several possible approaches to asking Mary-Anne for a blood sample, I still hemmed and hawed as I tried to put the proposal across, with the assurance that I would pay the costs for having it drawn and would even include an additional sum to cover the inconvenience. Naturally I had to give some explanation for what might have otherwise sounded like some vampirish twist to my mind. I settled for a partial truth, that there had been an automobile accident some thirty years ago where the person who had died couldn’t be positively identified, but was someone I suspected might be Sarah.

  It took considerable persuasion, and a generous “additional sum” before Mary-Anne agreed and, before she could change her mind, I found a nearby clinic in the yellow pages, set up the appointment, and made arrangements to have the blood sample shipped to Chicago. After another of the strange cookies, and a second cup of coffee—I later learned it was a local variation of that beverage containing chicory—I said my good-byes and began what I hoped would be the last lap of my quest.