Marcia Talley - Daughter of Ashes

The final photograph, however, caused me to sit up straight. On May 25, 1950, the Tilghman county clerk had issued marriage licenses to three couples.

Dean Kelchner, 39, to Deborah Dutton, 39.

Joe Jacobs, 22, to Alison Markwood, 21, and… My heart stood still.

Clifton Ames, 18, to Nancy Hazlett, 17.

Math was not my strong suit. My husband had once given me a T-shirt that read: 4 Out Of 3 People Have Trouble With Math. But even I could do the math on this one. Using my fingers, I counted forward. If Nancy Hazlett had been pregnant in May 1950, or gotten pregnant shortly thereafter, her child would have been born in February 1951, making the baby around six months old in August of that year when, according to the medical examiner, Baby Ella had most likely succumbed to polio.

That Clifton J Ames the Second had been the father of Nancy Hazlett’s baby I now had no doubt. Had being in possession of that information almost cost Rusty his life?

It depends, I thought, on what he did with it.

I’d already violated too much of Rusty’s privacy to start feeling guilty. I snooped on, trolling through his text messages, then his email.

It took only a few minutes to find the answer in his outbox. Rusty had forwarded the photograph of the marriage license notice in the newspaper to his mother – Kendall, not Grace. What do you know? he’d written. I’m sure you can put this to good use .

Suddenly the significance of one of the text messages that had popped up on Rusty’s phone at the scene of the accident hit me like a sledgehammer. It was Kendall – ‘Ken’ – who had texted her son, ‘Got it. Stay cool.’

Sadly for Kendall Barfield, staying cool seemed to have proved fatal.

So much for Rusty’s claim that he wasn’t close to his biological mother. He hadn’t wanted Grace to see the contents of his iPhone. This must have been the reason why. Grace, a woman who was deeply involved in charity work and her church would hardly have approved of Rusty’s role in what seemed like a blackmail scheme.

Before I could change my mind, I forwarded copies of Rusty’s photos to my own email account, then erased the evidence of my crime from Randy’s sent file. One thing was certain: I needed to talk to Rusty Heberling – and quick. The question was what, if anything, the young man remembered?

‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between , 1953

When I arrived at the hospital, the volunteer at the visitors’ desk informed me that Rusty Heberling had been moved to a rehab facility. A quick call to his father, Dwight, told me where.

Bayview Health and Rehabilitation Center sat on several rolling green acres on the outskirts of town, although there was no ‘bay view’ that I could see.

I found Rusty in his room, a comfortable single furnished more like a hotel room than a hospital, with a bay window overlooking an ornamental lake.

He was seated in a wheelchair by the window reading a Kindle in a large-size font, but looked up at my ‘Hello,’ and seemed genuinely pleased to see me.

‘Mrs Ives!’

‘How are you doing?’ I asked.

Rusty closed the Kindle and slipped it between his thigh and the arm of the chair. ‘As you see, having a bit of trouble getting the stupid legs to cooperate.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

He shrugged. ‘The Nazis in the PT department work me over pretty good. I need to get well just to get away from them, you know?’

‘How’s your mom?’ I asked.

‘Grace?’ Rusty smiled. ‘It’s spay and neuter day, so she’s out at the animal shelter. Sometimes I think she cares more about the animals than people.’

‘Actually, I’m glad she’s not here because there’s something I need to talk to you about.’ I reached into my handbag for his iPhone and held it out to him.

‘Damn! You found it!’ A frown clouded his face as what I had just said sank in. ‘What?’ he asked, withdrawing his hand without touching the phone. He eyed me suspiciously.

‘Your phone had been badly water damaged, but I was able to dry it out,’ I began. A spare chair sat at the foot of his bed. I dragged it over so I could sit down next to the wheelchair and talk to him face-to-face.

Without confessing to snooping in his phone, I said, ‘I’m worried about you, Rusty. Did it occur to you that whoever was driving that black Mustang intended to kill you?’

Rusty seemed to be studying the silver medallions on the wallpaper and refused to meet my eyes.

‘You know who it was, don’t you?’

He turned his head, sucked in his lower lip and nodded silently.

‘For God’s sake, who?’

‘The only dude I know who drives a badass car like that is Tad Chew.’

I couldn’t place the name. ‘Who is Tad Chew?’ I prompted.

‘Clifton Ames’s grandson. The youngest kid of his daughter, Annette Chew.’

Ah! I remembered the showoff in the yellow Speedo at Kendall’s picnic, the kid who’d told the sheriff he’d seen Caitlyn… the Mustang in Kendall’s parking lot. I caught my breath. Whoa! So, Clifton Ames was sending his grandchildren out to do his dirty work for him. What rock had he crawled out from under?

‘Just because he wears J Crew and Banana Republic and starts at Princeton in the fall, Tad thinks he’s hot shit.’ Rusty was on a roll. ‘Works for his uncle Jack part-time, too. Dude doesn’t need the money, so what’s that all about, I wonder?’

I flashed back to the day of Jack Ames’s visit to Our Song , pictured the preppy, college-aged kid who’d slid out of the driver’s seat of Ames’s Acura. Hadn’t Jack called his young chauffeur ‘Tad?’ So, maybe it wasn’t Clifton Ames who wanted to silence Rusty. Maybe it was his son, Jack, the owner of the face smiling out at the world from political billboards all over Tilghman County. If Jack Ames had aspirations to occupy the Oval Office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a family scandal might very well derail his plans.

‘Look, Rusty,’ I said, moving on. ‘What puzzles me is that you were sharing this information with Kendall. It seems to me that your relationship with your biological mom was a lot closer than you wanted anyone to know.’

‘The last couple of years…’ Randy began, then he shrugged. ‘I guess Kendall was on a guilt trip or something. Calling me up, giving me presents. I didn’t want to hurt Mom’s feelings. Grace, I mean.’

I set the iPhone on Rusty’s knee and held it there. ‘You need to show these photos to the police. If what you say about Tad Chew is correct, whatever Kendall did with the information most likely got her killed.’

‘I know.’ His head lolled against the back of his chair. ‘I am such a shit!’

‘What did she do with it?’

Rusty took a deep breath and blew it out slowly through his lips. ‘You were at her picnic?’

I nodded.

‘Then you saw that boat, that swimming pool?’

‘I did. Pretty hard to miss.’

‘Kendall didn’t pay for all that like everybody thinks. Cliff Ames did.’

I sat back, stunned. ‘But why?’

‘About ten years ago, Cliff and Kendall had an affair. She was way younger than him, of course, so I was kinda surprised when she bragged about it one night at the Crusty Crab after she’d had a bit too much to drink. Somehow, while they were still sleeping together, she found out that Clifton’s old man had rigged it so that he could buy up a bunch of small farms that were being auctioned off for delinquent taxes.’

‘Kendall was already working in real estate by then, wasn’t she, so she might have stumbled across records of the transactions,’ I suggested. Just as I had.