Golden Years Read online

  Neither of them were exactly looking for a mate. Indeed they approached most possibilities of intimacy with a guarded suspicion. Yet when they met at a seminar in which Joseph was lecturing about the difficulties the real estate industry might face in the future, they were instantly and powerfully attracted to each other. It was, Joseph said, like a flame leaped out of me at the podium and her in the audience and set the whole world ablaze. I would have taken her to bed that night if she had not been much wiser than I was. We’ve got to take it slowly, Joe. Too much too fast won’t be good for either of us and we might ruin the possibilities in our relationship. He realized that was what a girl from his neighborhood in Chicago might say.

  Raftery agreed with her, though by his own admission reluctantly. Did I want an explosion of passion with her as object or did I want a wife with whom I could share my life? I wanted both, but I was aware that this might be my last opportunity.

  So they dated cautiously and carefully and discovered that they both wanted the same things in life, that they shared the same religion in which she was more devout or at any rate more punctilious than he.

  The ardor between them became unbearably intense. One night she said to him, Joe would you be after planning to marry me. Next week he said. Then come to bed with me before we both perish with the heat. Their union, Joe reported, was relaxed, considerate, graceful. He knew that he could not let her get away. They were married a month later.

  Their common life developed as naturally as had their physical love. They both respected each other, were careful of each other’s feelings, and dealt with problems forthrightly. I would try to hide my complaints, Joseph told us; she wouldn’t let me get away with it. I was in a permanent state of sexual arousal until the day she disappeared. As far as I can tell she responded to me with similar emotions. We both wanted children but it took us a while to conceive. I became uneasy about this little invader who made my wife sick in the morning and who was distorting her lovely body. But once Samantha was born, she made the bond between us stronger than even Then the dream stopped.

  When members of a family are murdered, an investigator immediately suspects the survivors. In this case one must ask what Joseph Raftery had to gain by the (presumed) death of his wife and child. He was a rich man. While the money that he might inherit from Bride Mary was not insignificant, it would add comparatively little to his net worth. Their vineyard was moderately successful, but their lifestyle did not depend on it. He had financed it with his own money, so they had no apparent debts. We carefully investigated all possibilities but could find no motive for him disposing of his wife and daughter.

  The circumstances of the crime are equally baffling. Joseph left their home at the edge of the vineyard to drive to San Francisco at ten o’clock in the morning. A fruit salesman stopped at the house at eleven. It was a routine stop by a man who had sold fresh fruit to them for a couple of years. At that time of the year there were no workers in the vineyard. At twelve-thirty one Raul Gonzalez, the foreman of the vineyard workers who worked at St. Brigid’s Winery as it was called, stopped by to discuss plans for the coming season with Mr. Raftery. He found no one at home. Mr. Raftery’s car was not there, but Mrs. Raftery’s was present She was not in the house nor in the vineyard offices. Mr. Gonzalez assumed that all three had gone somewhere, probably to San Francisco together.

  The Raftery home was at the end of an unpaved road some two miles into the vineyards from State Highway 121. The Gonzalez family lived at the intersection of the two roads. Mrs. Gonzalez was in the house all that day and swore that the only car to come out of the vineyards and come back in were her husband’s car and Joseph Raftery’s car. She also swore that he had stopped at her house a little after ten and said if he missed Raul, he wanted to talk to him that evening.

  Raftery had in fact driven to San Francisco to discuss with his business advisor the sale of land he owned beyond the Berkeley Hills to a developer who wanted to construct a new subdivision. The advisor, a John Chamberlain, told him that the developer did not have a good reputation and would probably make a mess out of this precious land. Raftery agreed and drove back to the St. Brigid’s Winery, arriving about three-thirty in the afternoon to discover that his wife and child were missing. The time frame of his return fit what would be required for a drive into the city and back with a lunch in between the two trips.

  Immediately the State and Santa Rosa County Police began urgent investigations. They suspected that a group of hippies had come in from the hills behind the vineyard, robbed the house, and taken the mother and child away with them for their own amusement However, there were no signs of a struggle in the house and nothing had been stolen, not even Mrs. Raftery’s jewelry. Moreover, a careful search of the area revealed no bands of wandering hippies. The press speculated about another Patty Hearst kidnapping but at that time there were no revolutionary communes in that part of California.

  The local authorities and State Police carried on widespread investigations with professional diligence, especially because the media coverage was extensive and persistent. At first they had made Joseph Raftery an instant suspect but his “alibi” was airtight. Even now some of the detectives who worked on the case and keep the file on it open suspect Mr. Raftery, but they do so only because of their conviction that it is ALWAYS the spouse. At one point they dug up some twenty mounds in the vineyard searching for bodies but found nothing.

  Having followed Bride Mary O’Brien from Ballinasloe to the valleys north of San Francisco, we have found nothing to explain her disappearance. We append the documentation we have collected and the photographs of her at various stages in her life.

  We conclude that she and her daughter Samantha Brigid Raftery are probably dead. Otherwise, we would have heard something about them from someone. However, probably does not mean certainly.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Rosemarie

  “Something wrong, Rosie?” Mary Margaret asked when she returned from classes at Rosary. “You look spaced-out.”

  I was in fact daydreaming about passion with her father. I could hardly tell her that, though heaven knows she might suspect.

  “I was thinking about a lot of things,” I said, “instead of working on this Russian manuscript.”

  It was a perfect early October Indian summer day.

  She flopped down on the couch in my office.

  “All right if I use the pool?”

  “Whenever has it not been all right?”

  “Ask Erin to join me?”

  “I didn’t know she swims.”

  “She doesn’t but I’ll teach her.”

  “What strange social-class sensitivity made you think I’d say no?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t but I thought I’d ask.”

  “Well we can’t have Seano falling in love with a nonswimmer, can we?”

  Mary Margaret laughed.

  “Poor Erin doesn’t know how closely we’re watching them.”

  “Tell me, daughter of mine, did you adopt that poor waif as a possible sister-in-law?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time, someone in the family did that, would it?”

  “And with happy results!” I said as I blushed.

  “I can’t dispute that.” She grinned. “Hey, why don’t you join us?”

  “If not today, then tomorrow.”

  I worry about Mary Margaret. She’s tough and sophisticated but also kind and generous. She thinks she has everything under control. I never thought that at her age. I knew my life was out of control. I suspected even then, I think, that I was an alcoholic. She has many advantages I didn’t have. She has spent her whole life in a cocoon of family love and support. I don’t begrudge it. I am part of it. She says she can take care of herself and I don’t doubt that she can. At her age if you can’t take care of yourself, no one can. Her mother can’t protect her any longer. But mothers worry just the same. It goes with the job description … I couldn’t protect her from crazy Aunt Jane. We could
have lost her, oh, so easily. We didn’t thanks be to You. But I still worry.

  She is also a conniver, worse even than Aunt Peg, who connived with April to unite Chuck and me. But what if they were wrong. We came awfully close over my drinking. Or maybe it wasn’t close at all. What if Seano and Erin are not suited for each other? You take a terrible chance if you try to set up romances. Yet how else can many young people, however attractive, find spouses unless their friends connive? I would certainly not be able to talk Mary Margaret out of her conniving. Erin is a sweet, pretty young woman who loves kids. Like I say, mothers worry. That’s what they’re for.

  I had a terrible crush on Chuck in those years so long ago when they lived in that terrible two flat on Menard Avenue. I still have a crush on him. Did I have any hint of what that crush would lead to, especially my drinking? If I had known, I would have run. What if I had a hint of the games we play with each other now? I would have been terrified, but also perhaps a little curious. I still might have run. Foolish speculations … As I think of the games, of the laughter, the surprises, the cries, and the enormous pleasure, I dream of Chucky inside me and my body begins to prepare. I feel heavy, sinking into a delicious lassitude …

  The phone rang and stirred me out of my reverie. It was Ted McCormack, poor dear man.

  “I heard that Mom was in the hospital over the weekend …”

  “She apparently had two heart attacks, one quite serious. However, she’s off the ventilator and out of intensive care. Her color is improving and she seems peaceful. She’ll probably be in Oak Park for several more days.”

  “Long-term prognosis?”

  “Guarded.”

  “I’m sorry, Rosie.”

  “We all are.”

  “I’m sure that Jane’s episode might have caused the attack …”

  “It didn’t help, Ted. But we don’t blame you or her. Things happen.”

  “Please keep me informed … She’s a magic lady.”

  “All of that … How’s Jane doing?”

  “Still pretty much of a vegetable. When they try to take her off sedation, she becomes manic, refuses her meds, demands that they let her leave, threatens them that her son Chris will file suit.”

  “Will he?”

  “He doesn’t like me very much, Rosie. He might. He’d lose but it’s the kind of trouble our family doesn’t need right now.”

  I remembered the old days when Chucky and I were allies in fighting off Ted’s father when he wanted to prevent the marriage. Who could have known?

  I promised Ted I would stay in touch. I felt a little guilty about not calling him over the weekend.

  The intercom buzzed from the darkroom. My husband in a manic mood, not the sort of mania that suggested sexual hunger.

  “Rosemarie, are you busy?”

  “I’m always busy, Chucky Ducky.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Daydreaming about you.”

  That was true, but I suspected at the moment irrelevant.

  “Could you come down here for a moment?”

  Boy child wanting to show something to Mom. Or maybe now to Grams.

  “I’ll be right down.”

  I knocked on the door to the office, which was an antechamber.

  “Come in!” he bellowed.

  Chucky glanced up at me as I entered the office. In one swift glance he tore off my clothes and reveled in my nakedness, ravaging me in his imagination. Husbands are not supposed to look at their wives that way—not after thirty years of marriage. However, he had other things on his mind.

  “Did anything strike you as peculiar in the file on Bride Mary O’Brien?”

  “The whole file is peculiar,” I said, sitting down at the metal table that served as his desk.

  “Any dramatic changes as the story went on?”

  I pondered.

  “Well, it seems to me to take on a different tone after Bride Mary quit Berkeley and became a real estate agent. She calmed down and became an adult very quickly.”

  “Precisely,” he said, pleased that I had spotted the same anomaly he had. “Almost as if she was another women?”

  “Is she another woman?” I asked, spooked a little. The waters were getting deeper.

  “I was looking at the pictures,” he said, his hands on two prints on the table, facedown. “Suddenly I realized that this woman”—he turned up the photograph—“is the Bride Mary O‘Brien of Ballinasloe, County Galway, and this woman”—he turned over the second photo—“is the Bride Mary O’Brien of Santa Rosa County, California!”

  The photos were blowups of the faces.

  “The second one is blond …”

  “Sure, sure,” he said eagerly, “but different noses, different chins, different foreheads. Both pretty, but not the same woman.”

  There was no arguing the point.

  “Curiouser and curiouser … What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know … There was some kind of identity change after this one”—he lifted up the woman with the long black hair—“quit Berkeley and this woman began to sell real estate in Marin County.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll have to figure it out. They both may be dead, for all I know … Yet if I’m Joe Raftery’s wife and I want Joe to understand what happened to her, I’d bug him to talk to his high school buddy who is a photographer and likely to spot the differences in the pictures.”

  “Living or dead?”

  “Probably dead … It’s the kind of trick the Feds would play, as we learned from the cowboys who infested the embassy in Bonn when we first arrived there. Give a woman a new identity because she knew too much. Then become worried that she might spill the beans. Lift her from her home, probably in a chopper, take her a hundred or so miles over the Pacific, and push her out the door. You remember from our days at Bonn that they were doing that sort of thing back then. Why change?”

  “You put a stop to it.”

  “All that meant was that they covered their tracks better so I didn’t find out … I don’t know what’s happened. I have to presume that all three of them are dead. This is all instinct, Rosemarie, I smell a trick … Besides the Bride Mary of Ballinasloe and the one Joe married seemed like different people even in the story.”

  “What happened to the first one?”

  “If they follow their usual tricks, she’s dead too. Both Bride Marys are dead.”

  “Why kill the little girl?”

  “Why not? These people are thorough. She could have told them that some men in dark suits came and took their mother away.”

  “Maybe they’re holding the child as a hostage so that her mother won’t try to escape.”

  “That assumes they didn’t kill her. I can’t imagine why they didn’t if they viewed her as some kind of threat. They don’t take chances out of pity.”

  “Maybe they owed her. Maybe their bosses said that they couldn’t kill a woman who had done good work for them …”

  “Maybe.” He thought about it for a moment. “You can never tell what the bosses will do and when they mean what they say.”

  “What can we do about it?”

  I felt very sick. We’d learned in Bonn how brutal some of our “cowboys” could be, killing some of their own people on thin evidence that the victims had been “turned” by the other side.

  He sighed.

  “Right now, it doesn’t seem like we can do much. We don’t have enough evidence to create a public scandal. I don’t know how we can get it. Moreover, if Bride Mary O’Brien and her Samantha are still alive, we might endanger their lives. I’ll have to work on it.”

  “We’ve always been a team on these things, Chucky.”

  “I know that.”

  “No moves without me.”

  “I understand,” he said reluctantly.

  It sounded dreadful and dangerous. We had pulled capers off before, but we were too long in the tooth for it these days.

  I stood up to leave.

>   “Where you going?”

  “To swim with the girls.”

  “Which girls?”

  “Mary Margaret, Erin, and Shovie.”

  “We let the babysitter into our pool now!” He feigned shock. He knew as well as I did that she was afraid of the water.

  “Mary Margaret is teaching her how to swim. And it’s my pool!”

  He stood up quickly and took me in his arms. Holding me close with one arm, he slipped his hand under my tee shirt and captured my breast.

  “Chucky, you’re groping me!”

  He probed underneath my bra and found some warm flesh, then a firm nipple. His fingers were demanding, but so tender, so delicate. Unbearable sweetness surged through me.

  “Stop it!” I protested weakly.

  Then he kissed me, oh, so gently. I became putty to which he could do anything. Chuck’s great skill as a lover is that he treats my body like a chalice.

  “Just a taste for tonight,” he said, aware of his power and confident of it This was all too much.

  “I can hardly wait,” I said sarcastically as I slipped away from him.

  “It’s all your fault. If you weren’t so beautiful, I wouldn’t want to play with you every time I see you.”

  “You’re gross!” I said, leaving the room and closing the door firmly.

  He laughed. He knew how he had turned me on and delighted in it. Now it wasn’t merely screwing the poor defenseless matron, but keeping her on an edge for much of the day.

  This has to stop. He strips me mentally every time he looks at me and gropes whenever he sees the slightest chance. I must tell him that it has to stop.

  I won’t because I love it.

  I leaned against the outside wall of the darkroom and tried to control my breathing. I would have to wait till night. That was all right. There is joy in waiting.

  So I put on a swimsuit and a robe and rushed downstairs to the pool. Shovie was sitting on the side screaming instructions at Mary Margaret, who was trying to teach Erin to float. Both young women were wearing bikinis. Erin had a gorgeous little body which her drab clothes usually hid. More sweaters were in order if Mary Margaret’s plot were to succeed. She and the children she would bear would be interesting additions to my growing family of grandchildren.