“Are you kidding?” Alec Pelley asked. He sounded almost shocked.
“No.” Even with the case as effectively dead as Terry himself, Bill Samuels would be furious if he found out Ralph had told Marcy and Marcy’s lawyer about A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township, but he was determined not to let this meeting end without getting some answers.
Alec whistled. “Holy shit.”
“So you know he was there!” Marcy cried. Red spots were burning in her cheeks. “You have to know it!”
But Ralph didn’t want to go there; he had spent too much time there already. “Terry mentioned the Dayton trip the last time I talked to him. He said he wanted to visit his father, but he said wanted with a funny kind of grimace. And when I asked him if his dad lived there, he said, ‘If you can call what he’s doing these days living.’ So what’s the deal with that?”
“The deal is Peter Maitland is suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease,” Marcy said. “He’s in the Heisman Memory Unit. It’s part of the Kindred Hospital complex.”
“So. Tough for Terry to go see him, I guess.”
“Very tough,” Marcy agreed. She was warming up a little now. Ralph was glad to discover he hadn’t lost all of his skills, but this wasn’t like being in an interrogation room with a suspect. Both Howie and Alec Pelley were on high alert, ready to stop her if they sensed her foot coming down on a hidden mine. “But not just because Peter didn’t know Terry any longer. They hadn’t had much of a relationship for a long time.”
“Why not?”
“How is this relevant, Detective?” Howie asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s not. But since we’re not in court, counselor, how about you let her answer the damn question?”
Howie looked at Marcy and shrugged. Up to you.
“Terry was Peter and Melinda’s only child,” Marcy said. “He grew up here in Flint City, as you know, and lived here all his life, except for four years at OSU.”
“Where you met him?” Ralph asked.
“That’s right. Anyway, Peter Maitland worked for the Cheery Petroleum Company, back in the days when this area was still producing a fair amount of oil. He fell in love with his secretary and divorced his wife. There was a lot of rancor, and Terry took his mother’s side. Terry . . . he was all about loyalty, even as a boy. He saw his father as a cheat, which he was, of course, and all of Peter’s justifications only made things worse. Long story short, Peter married the secretary—Dolores was her name—and asked for a transfer to the company headquarters.”
“Which were in Dayton?”
“Correct. Peter didn’t try for joint custody or anything like that. He understood Terry had made his choice. But Melinda insisted that Terry go to see him from time to time, claiming that a boy needed to know his father. Terry went, but only to please his mom. He never stopped seeing his father as the rat who ran away.”
Howie said, “That fits the Terry I knew.”
“Melinda died in 2006. Heart attack. Peter’s second wife died two years later, of lung cancer. Terry kept on going to Dayton once or twice a year, to honor his mother, and kept on reasonably civil terms with his father. For the same reason, I suppose. In 2011—I think it was—Peter began to get forgetful. Shoes in the shower instead of under the bed, car keys in the refrigerator, stuff like that. Because Terry is—was—his only close living relative, it was Terry who arranged to get him into the Heisman Memory Unit. That was in 2014.”
“Places like that are expensive,” Alec said. “Who pays?”
“Insurance. Peter Maitland had very good insurance. Dolores insisted. Peter was a heavy smoker all his life, and she probably thought she’d inherit a bundle when he went. But she went first. Probably from his secondhand smoke.”
“You speak as if Peter Maitland is dead,” Ralph said. “Is that the case?”
“No, he’s still alive.” Then, in a deliberate echo of her husband: “If you want to call that living. He’s even stopped smoking. It’s not allowed in the HMU.”
“How long were you in Dayton on your last visit?”
“Five days. Terry visited his father three times while we were there.”
“You and the girls never went with him?”
“No. Terry didn’t want that, and neither did I. It wasn’t as if Peter could have been grandfatherly to Sarah and Grace, and Grace wouldn’t have understood.”