Page 29

TWENTY-SEVEN

“Grand larceny?” I said, loud enough for several admonishing heads to snap in my direction. But when they saw that I was already face-to-face with the chief enforcer of library decorum, they smugly went back to what they were doing.

Beth put a finger to her lips and guided me over to a table in a far corner.

“Did she stick up a bank?” I asked, dropping my decibel level dramatically.

Beth smiled. “No, that would be armed robbery. Larceny simply means she was charged with taking someone’s property without permission. Grand larceny means that the property was worth more than X dollars. The amount varies from state to state.”

“And she did it in three different states?”

“Georgia, Texas, and Maryland.”

I was dumbfounded. “I thought she lived in Florida.”

“That’s debatable. I didn’t find a record of her in Florida. At least not yet, but I’d kept you waiting so long that I decided I had more than enough to tear myself away and confirm that your instincts were spot-on.”

“Did she go to jail?” I asked, and the image of Connie hunched over her Thanksgiving dinner flashed in my mind.

“Not the first time. But in 1985 she was sentenced to three years in prison in Texas. She did eighteen months and was released. In 1989, she was sentenced to five to seven years in Maryland. She did four and a half and was released a year ago.”

“What did she steal?”

“Money and things she could sell for money,” Beth said. “But what’s interesting is whom she stole it from.”

“Who?”

“Her husband.”

“What?” I said, my whisper getting louder and harsher. I caught myself and adjusted the volume. “She robbed him three times? Why did he take her back?”

“Nobody took her back. She didn’t rob one husband three times. She robbed three different husbands.”

I held up three fingers and waved them frantically at Beth. It was the closest I could get to a shout.

Beth stifled a laugh and nodded her head violently. We were silently screaming in the library and getting away with it.

“She said her husband who died was a yacht broker in Florida,” I said softly. “I assumed his last name was Gilchrist, but maybe it wasn’t. Were any of her husbands named Steve?”

Beth shook her head.

“Did any of them sell boats?”

“Nope. And they’re all still very much alive.”

I stared at Beth, trying to put the puzzle pieces together. “So she just lied about everything?”

“Not quite. LexisNexis did verify that her maiden name is Connie Gilchrist, and she did graduate from Hunter College with an MFA in studio art.”

“What did they say about her husbands?”

Beth’s eyes lowered. “This is going to be painful, so try to stay calm. Each one of them had been a widower before she married them, and according to the court records, she married them less than six months after she met them. In one case, they were married in two months.”

I sat back in my chair, tipped my head up to the ceiling, and closed my eyes. That had been my mother’s worst nightmare, and now it was my reality. By the time I sat up straight and opened my eyes, Beth was flipping through the pages of the computer printout. She found what she was looking for and read it to me.

“Husband number one was David Lowry from Athens, Georgia. Mr. Lowry is an architect. Number two was Dr. Henry Tanner, an orthodontist from Dallas. The third one was Malcolm Griffin, who owns a car dealership in Baltimore.”

She refolded the document and handed it to me. “The sordid details are all in here.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“All I did is what I do every day for a lot of people. I helped you research a project. The question is, what are you going to do with the information?”

“I... I haven’t thought about it. What do you think I should do?”

“Tell your father and let him take it from there.”

“He’ll be pissed that I mucked about in his private life, and he’ll be even more pissed that I dragged you into it.”

“Maybe so, but considering what you dug up out of the muck, I would think he’d forgive you. As for my involvement, just don’t mention my name. If he asks, you did it all on your own. I know how to keep a secret.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

She took the computer printout back and wrote something on the last page. “That’s my home phone number,” she said. “If you can think of any way that I can help you, call me there or here.”

“It would help if you could bring my mother back,” I said. “She’d know what to do.”

Beth rested her hand on mine. “Your mother was an incredible woman—strong, smart, and extremely brave. I know that you have a lot of her in you. I’m sure you’ll figure out what to do.”

“Thank you.”

“One last thing, Maggie. Just in case you don’t want to wade through the entire report, you should know that all three of the men divorced Connie.”

“Can you blame them?”

She smiled. “That’s not quite what I was getting at. My point is that the sooner you talk to your father the better, because legally Connie Gilchrist is free to remarry.”

“The fuck she will!” I bellowed.

A chorus of shushes reverbed through the library.

Beth stood and held up her hands to everyone in the room in a gesture that both apologized for my outburst and at the same time let the shushers know that she had it under control.

Then she leaned over, took one more quick look at the computer printout of Connie’s crimes, and whispered in my ear, “The fuck she will.”