Dana Stabenow - A Taint in the Blood

“I want you to get my mother out of jail,” she said.

Johnny was in the shower in the three-quarter bathroom downstairs, and from the sound of things he wasn’t coming out anytime soon. Proscribed by the unwritten law of Park hospitality from booting out even an uninvited guest without offering them refreshment first, Kate had made a pot of coffee and unearthed a package of very stale Oreo cookies. She punched holes in her last can of evaporated milk, filled the sugar bowl with the last grains from the bag, and added both items to the growing list stuck to the refrigerator door.

The refrigerator door. It was still hard to believe that those three words had any real meaning to her life. She would still order groceries twice a year, spring and fall, but now she could get a half-gallon container of half-and-half, and if it didn’t last a month, at least it wouldn’t go sour before she used it up.

She paused in the act of pouring Muravieff’s coffee. Maybe she should get a freezer. She had a back porch with an overhang now, not to mention an exterior plug-in. No more climbing the ice-encrusted pole ladder to the cache in the dead of winter when she wanted roast moose for dinner. Wow. She sat down quickly, before her legs gave out, and poured her own coffee.

It took both of Charlotte Bannister Muravieff’s frail wrists to lift the heavy porcelain mug, which looked like it had been hacked out of the side of a bathtub. She took a cautious sip and, it appeared to Kate, by force of will refrained from wincing. Kate liked her coffee strong enough to smelt iron. She took Muravieff’s mug and emptied half of it into the sink. She’d had a sink before, so that wasn’t as big a thrill as opening her refrigerator door or listening to the shower. She wondered if the propane tanks would hold out, and if there was some way she could cut off fuel to the hot-water heater before that happened. Preferably while Johnny was still in the shower with the water on full.

Meanwhile, the silence around the table began to grow heavy. Kate shoved the half-full mug toward Muravieff again. “Try it with some milk.”

“Thank you,” Muravieff said in a faint voice, and stirred in three spoons full of sugar, as well. Her impeccably plucked brow smoothed out after the next sip, and she even went so far as to pick up a cookie. When Kate cleared the table after Muravieff left, the cookie was still there, nibbled around the edges to the frosting and no further. You can never be too rich or too thin, some divorcee had once said, and Muravieff seemed to be taking the dictum to heart. The rich only listened to the other rich.

Kate hooked a toe beneath one of the four matching dining chairs that surrounded her table like the advance troops for an upscale interior decorator and crossed her feet on the seat. She had her shoes off, she told herself, and it was her damn house. “Ms. Muravieff-”

“ Charlotte, please.”

“Okay, Charlotte, and I’m Kate. You want me to get your mother out of jail. I’m guessing she’s been convicted of a crime, as opposed to just having been arrested?”

“Yes.”

“What was she convicted of?”

Charlotte hesitated, licked suddenly dry lips, and said in a low voice, “Murder.”

With difficulty, Kate refrained from rolling her eyes. “Who did she kill?”

“She didn’t kill anyone.”

Kate realized that she was dealing with someone who actually believed in the benefit of the doubt. “Okay, who didn’t she kill?”

Again, Charlotte hesitated. She dropped her eyes to the mug clamped between her thin fingers. This time when she spoke, her voice was so low that Kate couldn’t hear her. “I beg your pardon?”

Charlotte raised her eyes. They were her best feature, large, gray-green, and thickly lashed. The gold of her hair made a nice frame for them. Probably Charlotte ’s stylist had already pointed this out to her, so Kate didn’t. “My brother,” Charlotte said finally.

Kate stared. “I beg your pardon?”

“My mother was convicted of killing my brother.”

Kate absorbed this in silence for a moment. Okay, even she had to admit that this was a bit out of the ordinary. If anything, it made her even less inclined to listen to Charlotte ’s sob story, but the other woman was still drinking Kate’s coffee, so she said, “How?”

“They said she burned down the house with him in it.”

Arson, Kate thought. One of the easiest crimes to detect, given the current state of forensic technology. It was next to impossible to hide even the most minuscule remnants of a timer, no matter how unsophisticated, from an experienced arson detective with a good lab tech behind him, to say nothing of the dogs trained to sniff out accelerants. “How did they decide it was her?”

Now that the worst of the story was out, Charlotte was eager to speak. “It was mostly circumstantial. She lived in the house with us, she’d just taken out insurance policies on all our lives-”

“All?” Kate said.

“All three of us.”

“There was a third child?”

“Yes, my other brother, Oliver.”

“Where was he?”

“He was in the house, too.”

“But he survived.”

“Yes. He got hurt getting out, but he survived.”

“Where were you?”

“I was with my mother. We were coming home from my uncle’s house. There was a party that went on a little late.” Charlotte paused. It was obvious that the memories were painful. “When we pulled into the driveway, the house was already on fire. And then Oliver fell out of one of the upstairs windows.”

Kate was forcibly reminded of the night the previous May when she had driven into her clearing and found her cabin on fire. The cabin her father had built for her mother, the cabin in which she had been conceived and born, the cabin where she had lived most of her life following their deaths. Johnny had been camping at the Lost Wife Mine, or she could have come home to something far more horrible than a pile of smoldering embers. In spite of herself, she sympathized with the pain she saw in Charlotte ’s eyes. “Was he badly injured?”

“Yes. His right leg shattered on impact. He still limps.” Charlotte ’s voice was stronger now, the words coming as if by rote, as if she had said them too many times before. “It wasn’t until the next day, when the firemen were able to go into the ruins, that they found William’s body. We were hoping he’d slept over at a friend’s house and just hadn’t heard about the fire at home.”

“One thing I don’t understand,” Kate said. “You’re not exactly a kid, and I’m assuming your brothers aren’t, either. What are you all doing still living with your mom?”

Charlotte looked surprised. “Oh, we aren’t.”

“Well then, I really don’t understand,” Kate said. “Were you all home on a visit? Did this happen over the holidays, or what?”

“Oh, no,” Charlotte said, “it was in the spring.”

“This last spring? April, May?”

“Oh, not this spring. The fire and my brother’s death happened thirty-one years ago.”

Charlotte said it in such an offhand way that it took a moment for her words to sink in. They caught Kate with her mug halfway to her mouth. “You,” she said finally, “have got to be kidding me.”

“No,” Charlotte said, her lips firm now, her mouth a straight, determined line. “I’m not kidding. She didn’t do it, she has served thirty years for a crime she did not commit, and I want you to get her out of jail.”

“Thirty years,” Kate said.

“Almost thirty-one,” Charlotte said.

“Oh,” Kate said, “almost thirty-one. Of course, that changes things completely.” She knocked back the rest of her coffee, ignoring the scalding slide down her throat, and blinked the resulting tears away. She got to her feet. “I’m sorry, Ms. Muravieff. I can’t help you.”