When Wallflowers Die: A Phoebe Siegel Mystery Mass market paperbound - 1997

First line

Memories slumber in dark recesses.

Excerpt

I'd been selective about the cases I was willing to commit to.  When you rub up against or jump into the middle of someone else's life, you end up dealing with the sludge of human misery.  Some of it sticks.  Investigators get dirty. To maintain a balance you have to protect yourself, keep your edge, form no opinions until you have all the facts.  Problem was, I was already forming an opinion about Bob Maitland.  One little statement threw me, turned me off.  He had referred to his wife, murdered wife, as "Ellen, the daughter."

I picked up the box he had brought in with him and piled the folders on my desk as I mulled it over.  Why, after this long, could the memory of Ellen Dahl Maitland bring tears to his eyes but miss the mark on what came from between his lips?

I opened the first file and looked into the face of a younger Bob Maitland, his face frozen in grief, his lips formed in a silent no that screamed off the page.  Disembodied hands, product of a poor crop job, clutched both of Maitland's shoulders as he strained forward.  The headline read:

ELLEN DAHL MAITLAND FOUND BRUTALLY SLAIN IN SOUTHSIDE MOTEL

It was enough to start the most pious of tongues wagging with speculation.  The Dahl name placed in a headline with a southside motel was scandal at its best. The meat of the article was lean on details; her body was found, identified by Maitland, no further details available, and Rosella Dahl was in seclusion.

Other photos, neatly clipped and dated in pen, showed the motel, the Dahl mansion, the chief of police fending off the press in front of the courthouse, the victim.  I had no idea what the murder statistics were back in 1968, but this particular murder must have rocked the state.  I scanned my memory for what I knew of the Dahl family and found very little.  The house was another story.

Everyone in town knew it had been designed by the same architect that designed the Dakota apartment building and the Plaza Hotel in New York City.  Any Billings tour guide knew the name Henry James Hardenbergh.  It was a small sidebar in Montana's history that spoke of better days and separated the old money from the new.  I opened the next file.  A full-page spread, folded neatly in quarters, gave a history of the Dahl family.

Willard Dahl, a rounder with an eye for the women, won the house in a poker game shortly after it was built.  A cattleman who never spent a night on the plains, he lived long enough to spawn a son, Willard II, and leave a widow in the driver's seat of the Dahl fortune.  Willard II was sent out of state to schools in the East, came home an attorney with a proper Bostonian wife on his arm, and laid claim to the family legacy.  The Dahl law firm was founded.  When Willard III was but a babe in arms, Willard II decided to blow a clot in his brain and become the most celebrated coitus interruptus in Billings's brothel history.  The press must have loved it.  Willard III eventually found his way into the arms of an inferior (his mother refused to attend the wedding) by the name of Rosella Moore.  He moved his new bride into Dahl's House the same day Mother Dahl moved into the carriage house.

There were more moves to come.  Willard III moved into the great beyond, victim of a gun-cleaning accident; there was some speculation that had he not been trying to clean the barrel of a loaded twelve-gauge shotgun with his tongue, he would have lived to see his daughter Ellen grow to womanhood.  Oddly, Mother Dahl moved from the carriage house back into the big house the day of Willard's funeral.  It ended there.

The article went on to list the acts of charity with which Rosella anointed the less fortunate on every major holiday.  She furnished three different parks in Billings with play equipment, set up several different scholarships for promising but indigent high school students through the years, and refused to give interviews.  Mother Dahl eventually died of natural causes and moved permanently out of the house.

I moved on to the next file.  Staring up at me, captured for an eternity in an eight-by-ten black-and-white photo, was Ellen Dahl Maitland.  It took me off guard.  Her lackluster eyes focused on mine.  She was hauntingly plain, with features that were unremarkable in every sense of the word.  Her straight, obviously dark, long hair framed her face.  Her bangs were cut straight across and hung low enough to conceal her eyebrows.  She wasn't homely, she wasn't pretty.  She just was.  She wasn't smiling, nor was she frowning.  She just was.  It was the look of the vanquished, the look of someone who long ago bowed before life and said, "Do with me what you will," and life had taken her up on it.

Now she wasn't.  But she had me.  It may have been the only time she had anyone.