that hinted there might be more to the story, and it turns out there was. “Lenora was always bright, but like I said, not only was she mean, she was also on the uppity side—thought she was better than anybody else. She went off to college, got her degree, and has been looking down on her West Seattle roots ever since. Although now that it’s turned into something of a gold mine for her, she may have had a change in attitude if not a change of heart, at least as far as West Seattle is concerned.”
“A gold mine?” I asked.
“According to what I heard, Lenora didn’t bother waiting around until poor Agnes was in her grave before selling the properties right out from under her.”
“You’re saying Lenora is the one who arranged the Mayfield Glen deal with the developer?”
“That’s my understanding,” Hilda said. “There’s supposed to be an estate sale at Agnes’s place next weekend—not this weekend but the one after this. Once that’s over, all four of the houses will be bulldozed to smithereens, the trees will be clear-cut, and a whole batch of those ugly box houses will be going up. So long to my view, such as it is.”
“And you don’t remember her last name?” I asked.
“Nope,” Hilda declared. “If I ever did know it, I blocked it out long ago. She got married at some fancy church over on the Eastside. Clyde and her father were the best of friends, but we weren’t good enough to be invited to the wedding. Pete never would have stood for our being treated like that, but he was gone by then, and Lenora always ran roughshod over her mother. So Clyde and I didn’t go, and I haven’t had a single thing to do with Lenora ever since.”
Obviously there was no love lost there, probably not on either side. I might be able to dredge the woman’s name out of property records, but the most direct route would be to stop by the developer’s office and ask. I paused long enough to write a reminder to myself to that effect.
“Anyway,” Hilda continued, “I would have hated to be in Agnes’s shoes with my end-of-life arrangements in the hands of that snot-nosed bitch, pardon my French! And once Agnes passed on, Lenora didn’t even bother to let us know so her friends could attend her services. Can you imagine? Unforgivable, if you ask me.”
Lenora No Last Name certainly sounded like a piece of work. “What about Lenora’s brother?” I asked. “What became of him?”
“Poor Arthur,” Hilda murmured sadly with a shake of her head. “Coming behind an older sister who was such an all-star would have been bad enough, but Arthur was, well . . . slow. He was a cute kid, skinny as a rail, but when it came to school, he was a real dunce. He got held back a couple of grades in grammar school and was always in the principal’s office because he was too busy being the class clown to bother doing his schoolwork.
“Agnes was in her forties when she had Arthur,” Hilda added, “and babies with older mothers sometimes have problems. I asked Agnes a couple of years ago if it was possible that Arthur was dyslexic. Nobody knew much about those kinds of things back in the old days. Arthur dropped out of school when he was a freshman in high school. Never was able to hold much of a job, drank too much, and turned into a loser through and through. I’ve always thought the same thing was true of Petey—that he was just a chip off the old block. I’m sure that’s why Agnes always looked out for him the way she did, but then she mostly raised him, so what else would you expect?”
“She raised him?” I asked.
“Pretty much,” Hilda replied. “Arthur was nineteen when he got his seventeen-year-old girlfriend pregnant. Sadie wanted to give the baby up for adoption. Agnes wouldn’t hear of it. The kids got married in your basic shotgun-style wedding. Clyde and I were invited to that one, but the marriage didn’t last. A couple of years later, Sadie ran off with someone else. She left Petey behind, ostensibly in the care of his dad and grandmother, but the truth was, he was mostly with Agnes. Arthur was in and out of Petey’s life for a while, but he died in a car wreck when the boy was in his early teens.”