Photo by Lee Cartledge on Unsplash
Everyone knew about Aunt Martha. And everyone had a different story, each one more terrible than the last.
But who really knew the truth?
As a child growing up in Kansas City with two brothers, she was undistinguished and dropped out of high school and worked a while in the local general store.
Then one day, for no identifiable reason, with no notice or grievance, Martha Ann Grant was up and gone without a trace. The murders began months later. Each murder led the police to my family’s home, rattled their souls and caused great embarrassment. After a while, the family hired an attorney to protect us from the curious, like me.
They say she had killed over a dozen people throughout out the Midwest early during the Great Depression that nearly crushed the life out of the country. Then the killing, her trademark stabbing three times in the heart of her victims, stopped sometime in the mid-1930s.
By my late teens it wasn’t worth a word anymore, so after a while we just never spoke of her.
But I couldn’t let it go. It was as if she was calling out to me from her grave, or was she alive, her soul drained of evil? Or was she alive, unrepentant and waiting for another opportunity to strike? By the time our kids were out of college I was possessed with a passion that threatened my twenty-two-year-old marriage.
“When are you leaving?” Sarah asked after months of painful debate.
“You think I’m crazy to do this.”
“We’ve seen this building for too long to dismiss your pain out of hand. I just fear for our future. Who knows what’s going to happen out there.”
“I’ve been blessed with you and the kids and my job, and I’m at a point where I can’t take the uncertainty to my grave.”
“Please, honey, no more talk about graves.”
I took her in my arms. She was shaking with fear. I had been shaking for months leading up to this moment “This could all be a waste of time and over in a few weeks.”
We both knew that wasn’t true.
###
I will never forget that morning, packed and loaded with a thermos of fresh hot coffee, map in hand, tears in my eyes and Sarah, long overtaken by anxiety, as I pulled out of our driveway.
Gideon Creek, Kansas, was a five-hour drive north. Seemed to take me forever, but when I arrived, Laughton Majors was waiting.
“Glad you made it,” he said, welcoming me into his home.
Clutter was everywhere: books, newspapers, journals, stacks of legal documents scattered everywhere. He brewed homemade coffee, and we settled into what I had been conversing with him by mail these past few months when the grip from Martha’s legend haunted me into a direction I could no longer resist.
“Very kind of you to see me. Must be a bad memory for you.”
Majors had defended my aunt the first and last time she was on trial for murder. He was a larger-than-life Kansas character at well over six feet, with bushy white hair and a western buckle belt that barely kept his three-hundred-pound girth in check. A tooth was missing on the top right side of his mouth. He filled up the hardly noticeable gap with a cigar he was known to smoke even in court.
“Brought back some memories. Some interesting. Most unfortunate.”
“I thought I would start with you since you were the first, and only, attorney to defend her.”
“To begin, can you explain to me again why you’re making this journey over a woman’s probably been killed and buried so long ago for crimes that destroyed so many lives?”
“I had trouble with that in my letters. Been roiling about her and what she meant to our family over these last few decades.”
“You say decades like it was a week. A few decades on earth these days is practically forever.”
“True. But when you’re so overcome with curiosity it’s threatening your marriage, you can look for answers or chock in down.”
“Poison you for sure if you swallow that kind of curiosity whole, kind of like my coffee. Damn stuff has been killing me for more decades then your curiosity has been killing you,” he said, lumbered to his feet, and picked up a carton of papers and briefs from a corner of his living room.
I spent the better part of two days as his guest going through the files and spending time at the municipal court, culling through the State’s evidence. A lot of information, none of which was necessarily helpful. My aunt killed men and women of every age and race and family for no apparent reason. Mostly with a knife the authorities believed she picked up as she drifted from state to state waitressing in remote diners where newspapers were weeks old with the latest inhumanity had to offer.
“So, what’s your next stop?’ Laughton Majors asked, this time over a cold beer.
“I’m going to trace back each murder like we’ve done here. Don’t imagine I’ll find that many cooperative or even interested people willing to open old wounds.”
“I enjoyed your company, Mr. Reilly. You keep me posted and, if I can help and I’m still alive, you’ve earned yourself a friend.”
“Then I’ll leave with heartfelt ‘thanks’ and with more than I had a right to expect.”
###
Dennison, Louisiana, was a bigger, more sprawling version of Gideon Creek, Kansas. The courthouse was twice as large, but the death of Margaret Mead was a thin file with not much for the police to investigate. Seems the woman came home from shopping and found Aunt Martha rummaging around her home, and there was a fight. The neighbors heard the scuffle and called the police.
Margaret Mead, a fifty-one-year-old housewife with a husband on a business trip and two young children at school had been killed with the base of a heavy glass vase which crushed her right temple. She lived for an hour after she arrived in the hospital. My aunt had taken thirty-eight dollars, a cheap pearl necklace, and most of the food in the refrigerator.
###
Over the following weeks I had accumulated a packet of files revealing what cruelty my aunt had met out.
However, as a coroner in Wichita said, “Was no rhyme or reason for all of it. Makes for the worst kind of criminal to investigate because there was no recognizable pattern or motive, unless you limit yourself to extreme psychosis. The only people we know of about your aunt was that there is no record of her ever having killed a child. Still, we only know what we know and there may be other victims out there that will never be claimed.”
I had records of police investigations, copies of memos from a local FBI office, and a decent envelope with photos taken mostly by accident, and strangers who claim they saw a young woman, maybe in her mid-thirties, a thin, gaunt, average-height soul, with an expression most said was “dead” around where someone had been murdered. The few childhood photos I had collected from relatives, all of whom insisted they wanted them back after I returned, were interesting but not revealing.
She looked as plain and common and sane on the outside as you might judge any stranger.
###
I had spent more than I had anticipated on my journey and was concerned for my wife, who I called every night.
“Just tell me you’re okay? I worry so. I get called weekly from our relatives and some of the neighbors asking where you are.”
“I’m sorry for that, but I am more than halfway done after these two weeks, so there is hope on the horizon.” Hope on the horizon. A sentence I’d heard from a local pastor I knew would soothe Sarah.
Of course, it was a lie. The burning in my soul kept consuming flesh and mind and spirit. I was beginning to suspect I would never make it home, and I would be the latest casualty of the Martha Grant trail of tragedy.
By mid-June I was soaked every day in the baking weather, and the wear and tear on our car was also showing its age. I hadn’t taken that into consideration. My wife was without a car and asking neighbors for a lift everywhere she needed to go.
What had I done? What was I going to find out about Aunt Martha that would make a difference to my family, or to those who had lost a part of their family?
###
The pastor in Ellenville thought he understood my aunt, a woman he only read about after Martha killed a local gas station attendant.
“Paranoid psychosis. Seen it before. Seen it in my family.”
After meeting and interviewing dozens of police and lawyers, most of whom didn’t much care about Martha Grant but were uncommonly suspicious of my motives, everyone had a theory, except me.
From Fayetteville, Arkansas, to Jefferson City, Missouri, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, the story was the same: an endless bloodstained trail leading, most often, to those who had lost a loved one and weren’t interesting in resurrecting their grief.
Police in Topeka claimed to have killed her and an accomplice as they held up a grocery store. Bennett Collins, Topeka, Kansas, Chief of Police back then swore he “singlehandedly” put the case to rest after shooting a woman fitting the description of Martha Grant.
“Dead and buried in potter’s field,” he said. “If you want, I can take you out there for a look?”
Topeka, Kansas, newspapers prematurely confirmed an end to the killing spree.
I was questioning myself and my rationale every day now. The calls to my wife were becoming quiet and strained. She didn’t want to hear it anymore. She had worn herself through caring. She had nothing left to support and consumed most of her heart while her husband self-destructed.
I slept in the back seat of our car most nights and stayed in a cheap motel only when I could no longer bear the stink of myself.
###
“Coffee, please.”
“Pecan pie is fresh?”
“Sure. Thanks,” I said, closed my eyes and rested the back of my head against the soiled vinyl seat.
The diner was half full with a wonderful smell coming from the kitchen. Warm and friendly was the only way to describe the place a few hundred miles from my home. I could be back with Sarah by the evening if I pushed my Chevy, which itself wasn’t a smart idea.
The waitress delivered a steaming cup of fresh-roasted coffee that would put Laughton Majors’ and most others to shame. The pecan pie was rich and fresh and settled in my stomach like both were waiting forever to meet each other.
“How is it?”
I looked up and there she was, waiting for an answer that no longer mattered. I opened the folder of photos and speared them out on the table.
“What do you think?” It was all I could think to say.
“Looks something like me.”
“I’m guessing some thirty years back,” I started to say, but she had already moved on to another table.
I watched her first from the side then full face. I wanted to jump up and grab her and ask her about where she came from, who she was, all about her family.
It was her. She had to be Martha Grant.
“Which photo were you talking about,” she asked when she came back in my direction.
She slowly slipped the order pad back into her pocket and set herself down across from me. She picked up each of the eight photos. Two were of Martha Grant as an eleven- and fourteen-year-old child.
Her green eyes darkened the more she stared.
“Everything all right here?” the manager asked as customers hailed for service.
“Got some troubling news, Kenny. I’m needing a few minutes to sort this out.”
He looked me over. “I’ll have Gladys take your tables, but you need to get back to work if you want to get paid.”
“Who is she?” the waitress with the name Beverly embroidered on her blouse said.
“I think, you,” was all I could muster.
Tears welled up and flushed over her worn cheeks. Her mascara ran and stained her wrinkled cheeks. Her hands started to shake. The manager came back and politely suggested we “take it outside.”
###
“Please, whoever you are, how did you find me, and what do you know about my twin sister?”
We were standing in a shaded spot in the parking lot where I recounted a few of the details of my painful journey. “Can’t say I learned that much but, still, I had to do something.”
“Had been wanting to do something all my life. Just never had a starting place and, from what you’re saying about her life, the terrible things she did, I can’t imagine how impossible this has been for you.”
“Talking here with you, I realize it’s been more difficult than I ever imagined, and a cruel absence from my family who is suffering without me.”
“You have to go back to wherever you live. Now. Today, to stop your wife’s anguish. She must believe somewhere in the back of her mind that you, like Martha, might never return.”
“I speak to her every evening.”
“No,” Beverly said, “that’s not what women are about. They need certainty, not promises. Promises are what they have been getting all their lives. If they don’t see it for themselves, feel it in the flesh, they doubt it way down deep. Your wife has been on a journey far more difficult than yours.”
Beverly’s twin sister came alive because of me and a coincidence of fate, if you believe in that sort of thing, in a coffee shop at a moment in time that can’t be imagined, or understood. It was as if I had taken my life in my hands, jeopardized the happiness of my family, not to find the truth of Aunt Martha, but to bring peace and resolution to a stranger, who had been suffering as a lost soul since being separated from her blood at birth.
I went back into the diner and thanked the manager. Beverly returned to her station with the biggest tip I had ever given a waitress. I gave her my address and promised to send her copies of her twin sister’s photos, and told her to stop by whenever she felt the need, or just to say hello.
She asked me not to mention to anyone that she was the sister of a murderer. She feared that she would be tracked down by the police and the families of those Martha crippled, and what remained of her life would forever be compromised.
I pulled over to collect my thoughts blocks away from home. I combed my hair, tried to straighten my shirt. I looked every inch the result of the journey I took. I was aged and worn and defeated. And yet in my defeat, I calmed the urge that had been consuming me and, in a way, saved the life of another.
“Honey, I’m home,” was all it took for my wife to wipe her hands on her apron and come running into my open arms. We both cried for some time before I was calm enough to recount the last few hours of my life.
“Never knew there was a twin. Her mom, my sister, and I were not close when they left for Omaha.”
“She was crying hard.”
“The poor thing,” was all Sarah could muster.
“I apologize for what I have done. It’s been selfish and unnecessary, and I am so, so sorry for what I’ve put you and the rest of our family through.”
Sarah wiped the tears from her eyes, then wiped them from mine.
What a fool I had been.
What a gift I had given Beverly, but at such a terrible price.
Hopefully I had learned what was important in life, and what could only be described as an inexcusably selfish indulgence.
We finished dinner and talked about what I had missed. I listened as though I hadn’t before. My head was clear. My thoughts unfettered. I was fortunate to share life with such a woman.
###
The next day I called long distance to make sure Beverly was all right and got through to the manager, who wasn’t happy to hear my voice.
“Whatever you two were about, it cost me my best waitress.”
“How’s that?”
“She quit last night. Told me some crap sob story about a death in her family and had to go back to Omaha where she was born.”
“All I mentioned was that I knew her twin sister, who had disappeared some years back.”
“Mister, I don’t know what you’re up to, but Beverly Singer, that’s her name, has been working here since 1934.”
I hung up the phone and turned as my wife came into our kitchen. “Who were you talking to?”
“Wrong number. Some guy looking for directions.”
“Sister gave me her new recipe for pecan pie. You up for something delicious?’
“Sure. Sounds perfect,” I said, and stared absently out the window for much of the rest of the afternoon, wondering if I had awakened a sleeping monster that would once again unleash its murderous fury upon the innocent.
Arthur Davis is a management consultant who has been quoted in The New York Times and in Crain’s New York Business, taught at The New School and interviewed on New York TV News Channel 1. He has advised The New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission, the Department of Homeland Security, Senator John McCain's investigating committee on boxing reform, and testified as an expert witness before the New York State Commission on Corruption in Boxing. He has been published in over eighty journals, a collection, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, received the 2018 Write Well Award for excellence in short fiction and, twice nominated, received Honorable Mention in The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. Additional background at www.TalesOfOurTime.com, (https://www.amazon.com/Arthur-Davis/e/B00VF0GDG4) and at the Poets & Writers Organization (https://www.pw.org/content/arthur_davis).