Jewels in the Juniper - Dale Mayer Page 0,62
the same information though. She took screenshots of each, so she had the information for later, sending them off to her email. With that done, she went back and searched through the papers about Aretha’s life, her parents, and then tried to find something on Abelman. She didn’t have much about him yet.
Apparently he was relatively new to Kelowna, and his parents were from the lower mainland. In one of the articles though, she caught note of a sister. But the article was written so ambiguously, she wasn’t sure if it was his sister or somebody else’s. It came up several times, but still Doreen couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Sometimes people wrote without defining who the subjects were clearly enough. She took a picture of it, so she could mull it over later. Nowhere else had she ever heard mention of a sister.
And, sure enough, none of the other articles said anything. She found nothing about the divorce, but there was a note about the car accident. It was just a simple black-and-white statement about the loss of an iconic local family. Both parents had perished in the crash. As Doreen kept reading on several years later, she very nearly missed it, but she found a byline in the obituary about Reginald Abelman. It didn’t say suicide specifically though.
She frowned at that, took another photo, and kept going. She would have to confirm with Mack if it was a suicide. And she didn’t know that Mack even had that information available. But who knew? In her heart she felt terribly sorry for Aretha’s circumstances, but she also understood Nan’s position about how Aretha, being a mean and difficult person, likely deserved everything she got.
Because of her own life, Doreen could understand how hard a shift it would have been, going from being a wealthy and prominent and well-respected woman, to suddenly being a nobody, now surrounded by scandal and drama.
Speaking of which, Doreen scrolled through, looking for mention of the insurance company. She found a few mentions of Hobart’s Insurance Company but nothing major. Nothing about a court case either.
She wasn’t at all surprised since that was hardly newsworthy, and, if the insurance company hadn’t wanted anybody to pick it up, it probably would have been pretty easy to squelch a story. They obviously wouldn’t pay a claim, or a lawsuit, if they didn’t have to, and those million little footnotes on insurance policies would get them out of having to pay for all kinds of things. She did find a marriage notice for Aretha again, just a simple little notification. She took a photo of it though because it gave Doreen dates and times, and she marked it all down on her notepad.
She scrolled aimlessly for another forty-odd minutes, then realized she just wasn’t picking up anything new. And once she ran out of microfiche, it would go to digital anyway. She took another big sip of her coffee, packed her notepad away into her big purse, then lifted the cap off her coffee and drank the last of it, since it was cool now.
Stowing the cup in her purse, she got up and decided she probably ought to pick up a couple books. At least something to justify her time here.
As she wandered up and down the aisles, she thought she heard somebody whispering. She peered through the books to the other side to see two women with their heads together, both gray-haired ladies, talking. As Doreen got closer, it was like they sensed somebody was here, and they broke apart.
Doreen came around the corner with a bright smile. “Oh, look, I’m not alone after all,” Doreen said happily. “This place seemed like a graveyard this morning.”
Both women just looked at her.
She smiled, shrugged nonchalantly, and said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you,” and she went past them, looking down more aisles of books.
They happened to be in the biography section. Something she had never really gotten into. She couldn’t understand why she should read books about other people’s lives. It would just make her feel worse about her own. It always seemed like other people were doing things, living life, whereas she was just existing. Too bad there wasn’t a biography section for local Kelownians—now that would have been interesting.
On that note, she walked over to the librarian and asked if there was such a section. The woman looked at her in surprise and then nodded. “We do have a small group of