9

The story was told in a straightforward fashion. The previous morning, a Monday, Gwendolyn DeMont Spanning had been found dead of multiple-stab wounds. The body of the sixty-two-year-old heiress to the De-Mont sugar beet fortune was discovered in her bed by her housekeeper, Mrs. Ann Coughlin. No weapon was found at the scene. Time of death was uncertain, but Detective Harold Richmond of the Los Alamitos Police Department told the reporter that police estimated Mrs. Spanning died late Friday night or early Saturday morning. The home, which was surrounded by strawberry fields-the only crop now raised by the family-was somewhat isolated. Nothing appeared to have been stolen and the motive for the murder was unknown.

Police were trying to locate her husband, Arthur Spanning, who was apparently out of town on business. According to the housekeeper, Mr. Spanning had been home when she left the house on Friday. However, she told police, he traveled frequently. She was unable to say where he might have gone on his most recent trip.

The Spannings had no children; Mrs. Spanning was survived by an uncle, Horace DeMont, and three cousins, Leda DeMont Rose, Douglas DeMont and Robert DeMont, all of Huntington Beach.

I glanced at my watch. I needed to leave soon to get home in time to walk the dogs before dark. I raced through the issues that followed, seeing the stories about the murder getting more and more play. I made copy after copy of articles I told myself I could read at home, and tried not to be lured by lurid headlines:

Murder of Reclusive Heiress Stuns Quiet Community

Spanning Alibi Is Bigamy: Husband of Slain Heiress Admits He Led Double Life

Bigamist Not Charged with Wife’s Slaying

DeMont Family Brings Suit: Seek to Prevent Bigamist from Inheriting

I thought of shy Briana, suddenly the object of this type of scrutiny. Of Travis, at eleven, certainly old enough to read these headlines. I rewound the reel of microfilm and shut the machine off.

Later that night, I sat on the living room floor, surrounded by the boxes from Briana’s house. Cody, my cat, was eyeing the piles of paper with twitching tail; I tensed as he tensed, and saw him ready to pounce. As on all his previous forays, I was able to shoo him off before he did much damage, but the scuffle woke the dogs. Worn out from a long run on the beach, Deke, a big black Lab, quickly went back to sleep, but Dunk, the shepherd, decided to gently sniff at all of the boxes again. Apparently satisfied, he lay down with a paw across my ankle and went back to sleep. This show of possessiveness was oddly comforting. Technically, he’s Frank’s dog, and like his master, he was soon snoring.

I stretched a little, then went back to work. The phone calls to Briana’s former neighbors hadn’t been of much use; only two of the neighbors remembered her, and neither knew what had become of “Mrs.” Maguire or her son. They told me that she and her son had kept to themselves, had been polite but very private. After reading the headlines, it was easy to understand why Briana and Travis had sought privacy.

I made notes based on the articles I had copied, recapping what I had learned, putting the information in chronological order.

As Mary had remembered, Gwendolyn DeMont was raised by her grandfather after her mother’s death. Gwendolyn’s father, who died a hero’s death in World War I, was one of two sons, but apparently her grandfather had quarreled bitterly with his surviving boy, Horace DeMont. When the old patriarch died, this son was left only a small monetary bequest; the bulk of the estate, including all the DeMont lands, was left to Gwendolyn.

At the time of her grandfather’s death, Gwendolyn was forty-five years old. Within a month of his death, and to her uncle Horace De-Mont’s shock, she married one of the few men who had ever made her acquaintance: the estate’s sixteen-year-old gardener, Arthur Spanning.

In the articles, her uncle made much of the fact that throughout her life, Gwendolyn seldom ventured outside the family home. She was shy of strangers, especially male strangers. It was Horace DeMont’s contention that Arthur Spanning had connived his way into the household and then taken advantage of her grief. That Arthur bore no real affection for her was now proven by his illegal second marriage. Greed and impatience, DeMont said, had led Arthur to murder his rich wife.

This was vigorously denied by Arthur’s older brother, a man named Gerald Spanning. Gerald Spanning had once been Arthur’s legal guardian-like Gwendolyn, Arthur had lost his parents at an early age. He speculated that this might have been one reason Gwendolyn felt drawn to Arthur, who had worked on the estate from the age of twelve. Perhaps she took advantage of a young man’s first crush, but Gerald Spanning had consented to the marriage of his underage brother because Arthur’s heart was set on it.

However set Arthur’s heart had been at sixteen, it roved by the time he was twenty-two. Briana, who was then working in a nursery and landscaping supply company, was courted by and married the charming young man she knew as Arthur Sperry. His landscaping business required frequent absences.

The articles in the Express supplied few details about this business, but apparently Gwendolyn had indulged her young husband’s whim to have his own business, to earn his own money. If this business required him to travel, she did not seem upset by her days alone.

The cook and housekeeper, Mrs. Coughlin, was interviewed. She had worked for the Spannings for twelve years. She worked there every weekday, with weekends off, and did not live on the premises. She declared that the Spannings had always seemed to be a happy couple, that Arthur was an attentive husband. True, she admitted, they slept separately, but she had never heard them argue or complain of one another. Mrs. Spanning seldom ventured away from the house, and was rarely seen outdoors except in her own very private garden-a garden Mr. Spanning tended for her. No, Mrs. Coughlin was sure Mrs. Spanning had never had the least idea of Mr. Spanning’s other life.

Police said that Mr. Spanning’s claims concerning his whereabouts on the evening of the murder were borne out both by emergency room personnel at Las Piernas General Hospital and the Las Piernas Police Department. At the hospital, Travis received treatment for a severely lacerated hand. The boy said he had been sleepwalking and thrust his hand through a back-door window. To add to the upheaval in Mr. Spanning’s life, his car had been stolen from the hospital parking lot. Ironically, police had taken the report of a stolen vehicle for “Mr. Sperry” and later, when Gwendolyn Spanning’s body was discovered, this report was used to further back Mr. Spanning’s claims regarding his whereabouts on the night of the murder.

Not much was revealed about Arthur Spanning’s double life, possibly because Arthur was able to engage excellent legal help, but also because Arthur, Briana and Travis refused interviews. The “double life” article was largely conjecture, but not wild conjecture. The reporter noted that although Las Piernas and Los Alamitos border one another, they are separated by a county line. It was theorized that this division helped Arthur to keep his two identities separate-many tax, business, birth, marriage and other records were maintained separately in each county.

Arthur Spanning was a man unknown to his neighbors, not active in the community in any way, a person who lived behind high fences and strong gates, and who dealt with most others through his lawyers. Mrs. Coughlin and the lawyers were the only persons who saw much of either of the Spannings. With the exception of rare and rather strained contact with the families of Horace DeMont and Gerald Spanning, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Spanning shunned the world around them.