Electric Blue. Nancy Bush
Besides, I like to ration them out, and not just because of the price. Binkster’s supposed to be on a diet as she’s about as wide as she is long. Okay, that’s an exaggeration…but not by much.
While we both munched, my eye fell to my report on the Purcells. With Dwayne’s admonitions still rolling through my mind, I decided to remind myself what I was getting into. Tucking a last bite of sandwich into my mouth, I read:
Jane Kelly, Durbin Investigations
Purcell Family History
Mental illness runs in the Purcell family. Their history bears this out. When James “Percy” Purcell arrived in Oregon in the early-to-mid-1800s he came with dreams of building a giant city at the juncture of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. Other men joined in his vision and Portland was born, though Percy still managed to put his individualistic stamp on a lot of the city’s architecture. To this day more than a few buildings have scrolled “P’s” embedded into their stones and bricks.
Percy appears to have been sane enough (if you count marrying six times as sanity). Wives one and two died from unspecified diseases. Wife three ran off when she learned Percy was determined to leave Boston for Oregon. Wife four signed on in St. Louis as Percy was making his way west, then fell overboard to her death when the Purcell’s Conestoga half-slipped off its raft as it swiftly floated down the Columbia River. Percy himself, and apparently most of his belongings, made it safely to the new and frantically growing city of Portland, Oregon, in one piece. He spent the next several decades building up what has since become a huge fortune by buying up every scrap of real estate he could get his greedy hands on. During these years he remained determinedly single; some felt he was past marrying. But at the youthful age of seventy-two he took Wife #5 who promptly bore him two sons: Garrett and James Purcell Jr., his first and only children. As soon as Junior came squalling into the world, Wife #5 began hemorrhaging violently. She slipped into a coma and into the next world. Percy Junior was handed off to a wet-nurse whom Percy hurriedly married. Wife #6 tended to both Garrett and Junior.
I finished off the rest of my sandwich and set the plate on the floor for Binks. She inhaled the scattered, teensy pieces of leftover bread as I reflected on how much different life was now. A wet-nurse? No thank you.
By all accounts Wife #6 was thin, wiry, ill-tempered and nothing much to look at. Whether Percy loved his sons or not is unclear. He did not love Wife #6, however, and took to whoring around the riverfront bars. He died in the arms of a lusty Madam who went after his fortune tooth and nail. Percy, however, had the foresight to leave everything to his sons. Wife #6 jealously took control of the two boys and sought a share of the estate, but she could never quite get the money for herself. She was still immersed in a legal battle she couldn’t win when she was thrown from a horse, cracked her head on a stone and died at the age of thirty-nine.
By this time Garrett and Junior were in their teens. Always quiet and artistic, Garrett made it to his twenty-first birthday as a near recluse. But on that noteworthy day of his birth he walked to the center of the Steel Bridge, stood for a moment with his arms in the air and his face toward the heavens, then stepped into the Willamette River—some hundred feet down. Upon his death twenty-year-old James Purcell Jr. inherited everything. James waited ten more years before finding the woman of his dreams, Willamina Kersey. Willamina bore James a son and a daughter: James “Percy” Purcell the Third and Lilac Grace.
I surmised this, then, was the beginning of the whole flower thing.
Lilac was slow to develop and saw visions. James Junior and Willamina died in their midsixties, about six months apart from each other. Heart trouble in James’s case; a loss of interest in life in Willamina’s now that her beloved James was gone. Lilac Grace Purcell, unmarried and odd, moved into the family home where she spent the remainder of her life resting on a chaise longue, writing stories in a language of her own. She was in her forties when she died, eyes wide open, still on her chaise. The last words that she wrote—at least anything anyone could read—were prophetic: The End.
Weird, weird and weirder, I thought. Not a lot of happiness floating through the years.
Percy III inherited the entire Purcell estate. He also inherited his grandfather’s interest and savvy in real estate. Throughout his adult life, even while his parents were still living and Lilac was growing older and odder, he steadily increased the family fortunes. He married Orchid Candlestone who bore him five children: Garrett (again), James Purcell IV, Dahlia and Lily, who was sent to a sanitarium as a young woman and died there several years later.
Orchid, currently in her eighties, is the surviving matriarch of the Purcell family. Her husband, Percy III, suffered from heart trouble. He died in his late fifties when, after driving home one night from his downtown Portland office, he climbed from his car and collapsed onto the ground outside the Purcell mansion. Orchid discovered him the next morning while she was getting ready to drive her daughter to school. She never remarried.
Orchid has several grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. James IV, a painter, has never married and seems to be a bit of a recluse. (Like Lilac Grace and Garrett I? Let’s hope not.)
Daughter Dahlia married Roderick and gave birth to two children, Benjamin and Rhoda (could this be short for rhododendron? The mind boggles) who died from SIDS as a baby. Benjamin is alive and well, in his early thirties, unmarried and still lives with his parents. He has no discernible employment and/or income.
Garrett and his wife Satin (as if all the flowers weren’t bad enough) have one daughter, Camellia—or Cammie Purcell Denton, Dwayne’s client. Cammie has a daughter Rosalie with soon-to-be-ex-husband Chris, who, working on being a bigamist, also has Blossom and Jasmine from his “other” marriage.
Lily Purcell gave birth to Jasper Purcell while she was institutionalized at the tender age of sixteen. Jasper and his wife Jennifer—who died this past December in an automobile accident—have Logan, who is currently about twelve years old.
I hadn’t known Jasper called himself Jazz when I’d written the history. Now I tacked on that information as a footnote, intending to put it into my laptop later on. I also counted up the middle-agers and realized Dwayne was right: there were four, not five. I corrected my report and set it aside.
The rest of the day I debated on calling Jazz, but every time I picked up my cell phone I hesitated. I’d told him I would meet with his grandmother. All I needed to do was set a time. But talking to Dwayne had set me back a bit. He’d emphasized the fact that the Purcells weren’t exactly the poster family for mental stability. Still, I couldn’t see how meeting Jazz’s grandmother could be such a problem. What were my exact duties, anyway? Check to see if she was crazy or not? By my own standards? Maybe try to talk her into seeing a doctor for a professional opinion?
It wasn’t like this was a pass/fail assignment.
So thinking, I picked up my cell phone and dialed Jazz’s cell number, chastising myself for my ambivalence. This was easy money.
He answered on the third ring. “This is Jazz.”
“Hi, it’s Jane Kelly.”
“Oh, hi, Jane,” he said warmly.
It was more than enough to bolster my confidence. “We never set an exact time for me to meet your grandmother.”
“Well, when can you do it?”
“Pretty much any time,” I admitted. My calendar wasn’t exactly overextended.
“Tomorrow evening?”
“Sure.”
“You have the directions I gave you? Why don’t you meet me at the house around five? Might as well get this show on the road, right?”
“Right.” If my voice lacked a certain amount of enthusiasm it was because I’d gotten used to having my evenings to myself and was in the habit of curling up on the couch to watch TV with the dog. Binkster had a tendency to lay her chin on my leg and pretend an interest in whatever comes on the television. She never fights me for the remote.
I realized I could be in a serious