Sister Mary Katherine’s hand shook slightly as she opened the file. The topmost photo was of the Marchbank Foundation headquarters. Frowning, she studied it for some time. “This one looks familiar somehow, but I don’t know why,” she said. “I’ve had dealings with many of the local charitable foundations, but not this one. I never remember going there.”
She put that paper down and picked up my copy of the newspaper photo taken after Madeline Marchbank’s funeral. Sister Mary Katherine stared at it in utter silence for the better part of a minute. As she did so, all color drained from her face. At last she opened her fingers and the photo drifted away like a leaf caught in a breeze. I reached out and caught it in midair.
“You recognize them?”
Sister Mary Katherine nodded. “The man and woman in the picture are the ones I saw that day,” she said in a voice that was barely audible. “The woman in the wheelchair was Mimi’s mother. I remember all of them now. I remember everything. The looks, the smells, the colors.” She shuddered.
Freddy Mac had suggested that seeing the photos might finally unleash the memories Sister Mary Katherine had kept buried for more than fifty years, but I guess I hadn’t really expected it to happen. Alternating waves of shock and horror registered on Mary Katherine’s face. Watching her, I realized she was once again reliving that terrible Saturday afternoon. This time, though, she was doing so without the emotional buffer that had vividly preserved the awful memories, all the while keeping them safely out of conscious reach.
I’m a cop, not a counselor, so while Sister Mary Katherine grappled with this new reality, I sat there feeling like a dolt and fervently wishing Fred MacKinzie were on hand to do and say the right things. For several long minutes she sat with her head bowed and with one hand covering her eyes. I wondered if she was crying or praying. At last she seemed to get a grip.
“It was so awful,” she said at last. “No wonder I suppressed it.”
“Are you going to be all right?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said.
For the next hour or so, over the comforting everyday background noises of clinking glassware and cutlery, we went over everything Sister Mary Katherine was now able to recall from that terrible afternoon-the gory details her conscious mind had concealed for so many years. I took careful notes, but it turned out there was little an adult Sister Mary Katherine could add to the hypnotically induced revelations Bonnie Jean Dunleavy had already made. A lesser woman might have fallen apart during that stressful interview, but once Sister Mary Katherine had regained her composure, she kept it.
At last, exhausted, she leaned back in her chair. “Why?” she asked. “What made them decide to kill her? What could possibly have been so bad or so important that murder was their only option?”
“At least the only option they could see,” I countered. “And the answer to your question is that I have no idea. Desperate people seldom see the world in the same terms you and I do. On the tapes you mentioned several times that the man, Albert, seemed angry when he was talking to Mimi. You said you thought he was asking Mimi for something and that she kept telling him no.”
“Maybe his business was in some kind of trouble,” Sister Mary Katherine speculated. “Maybe he needed money.”
“That could be,” I told her. “Money woes often translate into motives for murder, but as I said before, Albert Marchbank was a big deal in Seattle back then. If he was in any kind of financial difficulty at the time, I should be able to find some record of it. But then again sometimes murders grow out of nothing more than a bad case of sibling rivalry.”
“Like Cain and Abel,” Sister Mary Katherine murmured.
“That’s right,” I said. “So maybe sometimes it’s not such a bad thing to be an only child.”
She shook her head. “The whole idea is awful.”
“Murder is always awful,” I returned. “For everyone involved. No exceptions. Now, if you’re up to it, let’s go back to the murder scene again. Can you tell me anything at all about the weapon?”
“About the knife?” Sister Mary Katherine frowned in concentration before she answered, as though trying to peer at the scene through the fog of time. “It was just a regular knife-an ordinary kitchen knife-but it came from Elvira’s purse. I saw her open the purse and take it out.”
“But the newspaper article said that police thought the knife was most likely taken from Mimi’s own kitchen.”
“Then the article and the police were both wrong,” Mary Katherine declared. “Or if it was Mimi’s knife, it was taken from her kitchen at some time other than on that day. I saw Elvira take it from her purse after she got out of the car. And if they brought the knife along with them when they came to Mimi’s house, wouldn’t that mean premeditation?”
“Yes, it would,” I agreed. “You mentioned Elvira getting out of the car. Let’s talk about that vehicle for a moment.” I returned to the file folder and pulled out a stock photo of a 1949 Caribbean coral Frazer Deluxe, one I had downloaded from the Internet. “Does this look familiar?”
Sister Mary Katherine studied the photo for only a matter of seconds before she nodded. “This is the one,” she said. “Or one just like it.”
“The officer in charge of the investigation was a Seattle Police Department detective named William Winkler. Do you ever remember talking to him about what you had seen?”
“No.”
“And you never spoke to any other police officer about what happened that day?”
“As far as I know, no one ever asked me about any of it,” Mary Katherine said. “They may have talked to my parents, but not to me. They should have, shouldn’t they?”
“If they’d been doing their jobs,” I responded.
Bonnie Jean may have been scared by what she had witnessed and by being threatened by one of the killers, but I couldn’t believe she would have kept quiet if any of the detectives on the case had actually bothered asking her about it.
“What about Mimi’s funeral?” I continued. “Did you go?”
Sister Mary Katherine shook her head. “Not that I remember. My parents probably thought I was too young to understand what was going on.”
“Did your parents attend?”
“I don’t believe so, but I don’t know for sure.”
“But the woman was your friend,” I objected. “It seems to me they would have gone if for no other reason than to pay their respects.”
“It’s strange,” Sister Mary Katherine said. “It’s as though seeing the pictures has reopened that whole chapter in my life. Now I remember it all-not only Mimi’s death, but the rest of it, too. I thought we were friends, but Mother didn’t agree. She said Mimi felt sorry for us because she was rich and we were poor. Mother said that whatever Mimi did for me she was doing out of pity or charity, not out of friendship. But regardless, Mimi was nice to me. She seemed magical, almost like a fairy godmother. She taught me to play hopscotch and jacks. Sometimes she’d read to me from books she brought home from the library. A few times, we even walked up the street to the drugstore and she bought me strawberry sodas.”
Mary Katherine reached across the table and picked up the picture of the Marchbank Foundation headquarters. This time she nodded in recognition. “Now I remember. That’s her house-the one where Mimi used to live. The house we lived in, Mrs. Ridder’s house, was right over here-to the right of this driveway.”
On the tapes, Bonnie Jean couldn’t remember the landlady’s name. Now the name emerged effortlessly.
“How long did you live there?”
“Not very long-a few months maybe. We must have moved out within weeks of when Mimi was killed, but I could be mistaken about that.”
“Any idea where you went?”
Sister Mary Katherine shook her head. “We moved so many times over the years, I’m really not sure.”
The waitress stopped by to refill our cups. “Is Elvira Marchbank still alive?” Sister Mary Katherine asked.