Murder, She Edited
Page 14
“I tell you what, Bella. When Illyria finally gets back from her travels, I’ll talk to her about your concerns.”
“Tell her I want to meet her face-to-face.”
“That’s going to have to be up to her, but I’ll put in a good word for you.”
“You’d better do more than that. You’d better convince her to agree.”
The belligerence was back, and Bella was growing more agitated with every word she spoke, to the point where I didn’t think it would be prudent to say anything to upset her further. Suggesting that she seek professional counseling was obviously out of the question. To be truthful, at that moment all I really wanted was to get away from her.
“I’ll try my best,” I promised, “but you’ll have to be patient. She’s not even in the country right now. Remember? I told you that before.”
“I just want to meet her.” With jerky movements, Bella got to her feet and walked away from me. I rose more slowly and stooped to pick up my tote, once again holding my house key at the ready. I froze when she reached the top of the porch steps and stopped. Slowly, she turned her head and glared at me over her shoulder.
“I’ll be back,” she promised.
Even Arnold Schwarzenegger couldn’t have made that phrase sound more alarming.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Once I was safely inside the house, the first thing I noticed was that there was a new message on my answering machine. I hesitated before pushing PLAY. The last thing I needed to hear was another diatribe from Bella.
Instead, I got an earful from Darlene. The gist of it was that she needed a favor. A big one. Despite all I owe her, I almost turned her down. Then I reconsidered. Maybe spending an entire day doing something completely different was just what the doctor ordered. I was more than ready to be distracted from my concerns about the Swarthout farm. I could afford to take a mini-vacation—eight hours or so—away from editing manuscripts for my paying clients. And if I wasn’t at home tomorrow, Bella wouldn’t be able to nag me about setting up a meeting with her idol.
At eight the next morning, a Friday, I boarded a bus in the company of two other chaperones and the twenty youngsters, aged eight to twelve, who were enrolled in the library’s summer reading program. The field trip had been arranged weeks before, and a photo essay about the event was scheduled to go into the library newsletter, the one I was supposed to be editing in my spare time. At the last minute, the library assistant who’d volunteered to take the pictures had been forced to bow out. She had a good excuse. She’d taken a bad fall and broken her ankle. That left me holding the bag . . . and the camera.
My fellow chaperones were Pam Ingram and Darlene herself. It wasn’t until we reached our destination and were met in the parking lot by two horse-drawn wagons and a surrey, our transportation to the site of the living history center a half mile distant, that I wondered how my arthritic friend was going to manage the terrain.
“Not to worry,” Darlene assured me. “They knew I was coming. That’s why there’s a second wagon, so they have room to transport my scooter up to the house. They’ve even offered to hoist me up to the second floor in the dumbwaiter, but I think I’ll pass on that.”
“Shouldn’t there be an elevator? I thought the law—”
“There are exceptions for historic sites. The whole idea is to experience what living here would have been like in the eighteen nineties. The kids are really excited. Several of the books in their summer reading program are set in that era. One of the stories, about a city girl sent to live with her country cousins, takes place right here in Sullivan County.”
“I didn’t think kids their age were interested in history.” The young teens I’d taught in Maine certainly hadn’t been.
“Maybe it’s a new trend.”
“One can only hope.”
It was at that point that a young man of college age approached us. He wore a linen shirt with an open collar and rolled up sleeves. His blue denim trousers were held up by brightly colored suspenders. They’d been hand-embroidered with an eclectic selection of flowers, some of which didn’t resemble any species of plant life I’d ever seen in nature.
“They’re called braces, not suspenders, ma’am,” he corrected me when I admired this accessory. His eyes were bright with good humor behind wire rimmed glasses when he turned to Darlene. “I’m Clyde. I’ve already loaded that fancy contraption of yours into the wagon. Some kind of bicycle, is it? Are you going to need me to carry you to the surrey?”
“Just your arm will do.” To judge by her wide grin, Darlene was enjoying Clyde’s role-playing.
Personally, I’d have preferred to be swept off my feet. Whether they were due to workouts in a gym or from doing real chores on this reconstruction of a nineteenth-century farm, Clyde had muscles that looked equal to the task of hefting even what my late husband used to call a BMW—a “big Maine woman.”
The ride lasted about ten minutes and ended at the site of a real nineteenth-century farm whose owners, like the Swarthouts, had taken in summer boarders. To accommodate even more paying guests, the Westbrook family had added a large, rectangular annex to the original building. As architecture, the result wasn’t particularly pleasing, but the additional space would have done wonders for their bottom line.
Embracing my assignment, I took tons of pictures, starting with one of the costumed reenactor who greeted us in the kitchen of the house. She smiled throughout her presentation, despite the fact that she had to be sweltering in the dark blue, floor-length dress she wore. She explained that her clothes were too fancy for the everyday attire of a typical farmer’s daughter, but that she about to leave to participate in a quilting bee at a neighbor’s house.
Turning so we could admire the small bustle at the back, she went on to say that the dress was made of a fabric called cashmere and was trimmed in silk. She held up one arm so everyone could see that the three-quarter length sleeve was decorated with silk braid and had white lace at the cuffs. The hem of her skirt, which just cleared the ground, was adorned with two rows of the same silk braid. Sturdy ankle-high boots on her feet and a small cameo brooch worn at her throat completed the outfit.
“Would anyone like a drink of water?” she asked, and proceeded to demonstrate how to work the hand pump in the sink.
Since she had but one tin cup to offer us, no one took her up on her invitation. Belatedly, I understood why everyone in our party had been handed a bottle of water as we left the bus.
Two more reenactors appeared to split our group into three smaller ones. Pam went with the young people who were to start their tour at the schoolhouse and participate in a shortened version of a typical school day.
From reading the center’s brochure, I knew it had opened in the 1990s, the brainchild of a professor at Sidwell, a tiny but prestigious liberal arts college in Strong-town, halfway between Kingston and Monticello and about an hour’s drive from the site. He’d modeled his program on one developed decades earlier by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Since the farm buildings took up only a small portion of the two-hundred-acre site, a replica of a mid-nineteenth-century one-room schoolhouse had later been built in a far corner of the property. Visitors walked there in order to get a feel for the distance children once traveled to obtain an education.
Darlene’s group remained in the house to learn about the chores done by the womenfolk in the family. I ended up herding seven noisy, hyper kids along the dirt path that led to the outbuildings and animal pens.
I have to admit it was an interesting experience, and it certainly offered plenty of opportunity to take pictures. I posed my young charges with Buck and Bill, the oxen used to pull a plow. We toured the barn, meeting horses and milk cows, peeked inside the pigsty and the chicken coop, and did our best to stay upwind of the fenced-in area that held the goats. We also visited a smokehouse and a washroom—a special shed used for doing laundry—and ended our tour at a small structure that turned out to be a three-hole privy.
To render the outhouse usable by visitors to the center, minor compromises had been made with historical accuracy. Personally, I’d have been happier if they’d hidden a row of Porta Potties behind a nearby stand of birch trees, but no one had asked my opinion.
Our entire group reassembled for lunch, which was served in the dining room in the annex. There was space for all of us to sit with plenty left over. According to the reenactor who served us, an older woman in a rust-colored dress with a big white apron over it, the Westbrooks could feed up to fifty people at a time.
“I should be able to manage on level ground with my scooter,” Darlene said as we spooned up the most delicious homemade chicken soup I’d ever tasted. “I’m looking forward to seeing the animals and you’re going to love the house tour.”
“We’re headed to the schoolhouse first.”
“Then you’ll have saved the best till last.” She smiled to herself and resumed eating.
I sent her a questioning look. Something was up, but I didn’t have a clue what it might be.
After my group spent an hour pretending to be nineteenth-century schoolchildren, with authentic lessons from that era given to them by a reenactor who introduced himself as their teacher, we returned to the farmhouse. By then I was close to my saturation point when it came to living history, but I pasted an expression of polite interest on my face to greet our tour guide. The woman who’d been our waitress at lunch began her presentation by demonstrating how housewives in the 1890s judged whether the temperature in an oven heated by a wood-burning stove was hot enough to bake bread. Several of my charges gasped when she thrust her bared arm inside.
As they had when the “farmer” described the perils of mowing hay with a scythe, the young people listened with rapt attention to a story about a long skirt set ablaze by a stray ember and another detailing the terrible burns a maidservant sustained when she carelessly tried to pick up a cookpot with her bare hands.
All children are bloodthirsty at a certain age. Some never grow out of it.
As the tour of the farmhouse commenced, I tuned out the narration, but I couldn’t help but notice some of the little touches that had been added to make the place look authentic. A wooden darning egg lay on a side table, a sock with a hole in it positioned so that its purpose would be clear even to the most modern youngster. In the sitting room, an eclectic assortment of pictures hung on the walls, everything from prints and charcoal sketches to watercolor landscapes and portraits of family members. Scarcely an inch of what was behind them showed. Only here and there could I see that there were faded pink cabbage roses on the wallpaper. They looked remarkably similar to the ones decorating the front room at the Swarthout farm.
We trooped through the downstairs rooms in the main house and out into the annex by way of what our guide called the writing room. Summer boarders had availed themselves of the desk, paper, pen, and ink to write letters home. Casually abandoned on a chair was a Sears mail order catalog from 1893.
At the far end of the dining hall, a flight of stairs led up to the six bedrooms in the annex and, through a door and down two steps, back into the main house. The “bath room” turned out to be just that—a room in which one could take a bath. The dumbwaiter Darlene had mentioned was located nearby, since it was used to carry up buckets of hot water from the kitchen below.
“Before the annex was built in 1880,” our guide informed us, “only the bedrooms in the main house were rented out. The family made room for paying guests by moving out of their own rooms. The women and girls slept in the attic during the summer months while the menfolk camped out in the barn loft.”
A narrow stairwell much like the one at the Swarthout farm took us back down to the first floor.
“As I mentioned when we were in the bedrooms,” our guide said, “there are no closets. We hang our clothes on wall pegs or in free-standing wardrobes. But the builders of this house disliked the idea of wasted space, so there is a closet of sorts under the stairs we just descended.”
She led us around the corner and pointed to what at first appeared to be a blank wall. On closer inspection, one of the boys spotted a finger pull. My attention, which had been wandering, was suddenly riveted.
“Go ahead,” the guide said. “Open it.”
To the delight of the entire group, doing so revealed a compact storage area hidden behind the paneling. A few items of clothing hung from a bar that ran across the width of the opening while others were neatly folded on the shelf above it.
“It’s a cabinet under the stairs,” an eight-year-old girl exclaimed. “Just like in Harry Potter.”
“It’s a cupboard,” the boy standing next to her said. “In the books it’s called a cupboard under the stairs.”
I didn’t give a fig for Harry Potter. Darlene’s smile finally made sense. She’d known I’d make the same connection she had between the Swarthout farm and this one. The two farm-boardinghouses weren’t identical, but they had many similarities. I could hardly wait to get back to Swan’s Crossing and find out if there was a cupboard under the Swarthout stairs.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Since it was nearly dark by the time we got back to Lenape Hollow from the field trip, I waited until the next morning to investigate. Ten a.m. Saturday found me confronting the blank wall that closed in the underside of the first floor stairwell of the Swarthout farmhouse. It wasn’t paneled like the one at the living history center. Here the surface was solid wallboard—or is it drywall? I’m never sure of the correct term, even though I’ve looked it up more than once. Whatever it’s called, it had been plastered over and painted an unappealing off-white that had dulled nearly to gray with the passage of time.
Feeling a trifle foolish, I ran my fingertips over every inch of the wall, searching for the slightest suggestion of a dip or bump. It was a futile effort. There was no hidden door. It had been a long shot. I’d known that from the start, but logic failed to diminish my sense of disappointment.
I had work waiting for me at home. For one thing I had to write up a piece on the field trip for the library newsletter and choose several of the best photos to go with it. I had a rapidly approaching deadline for that project and several regular editing jobs cued up, as well. Even so, I was reluctant to give up my search for more diaries. What if this house did have a secret storage cupboard, just not in the same place as on the Westbrook farm? The little closet-sized space that connected the back room to the middle room also contained a door leading to the basement and those stairs were located directly beneath the steps that ran from the first floor to the second.
A few minutes later, I stood on the landing looking down. The light from a single bare bulb gave me a clear view of the cellarway and the underside of those treads. Nothing had been closed in. There was no hiding place there.
Unwilling to give up, I descended into the cellar and looked under the steps, but once again I found only open, empty spaces. Frustrated, I returned to the landing and stamped my feet on the floor, not in a childish tantrum, although I felt like throwing one of those, but to make certain there were no loose boards. There weren’t.
I even took a hard look at the ceiling. If there had been tiles, I’d have pushed them up to investigate the space above my head, but it was plaster, as were all the ceilings in the house. Unable to think of anywhere else to search, I called it a day and went home.
Chapter Twenty-nine
I spent the rest of the weekend putting the finishing touches on the library newsletter and editing Estelle’s journal. If there were any further clues to be found, I missed them.
Sunday night was another hot, sticky one, making me grateful I had an air conditioner in my bedroom window. I wouldn’t have
survived a summer sleeping in the attic at Westbrook Farm.
We don’t get a great many scorching days in the foothills of the Catskills, but there are enough of them with temperatures in the nineties to make sleep impossible without something to cool things down to tolerable levels at night. My ancestors were hardier individuals than I am. I like my modern creature comforts, and at my age I’m entitled to them.
I woke up on Monday morning well rested and determined to put a stop to the runaround Leland Featherstone had been giving me. I had an appointment with him in two days, but that was longer than I was willing to wait for answers.
It would be a stretch to claim I’d already fulfilled the condition Tessa had set in her will. Singular and plural aren’t the same, so I still had at least one more diary to find. It stood to reason that Featherstone could help with that. He had to know more than he’d told me.
Even if the lawyer couldn’t legally name names, I hoped he’d be willing to tell me if the farm was slated to go to an individual or an entity in the event of my failure. If Tessa’s second choice was a charity or some other organization, especially one that would have little use for the place, I could safely abandon the theory that the residuary heir was someone who might have gone to the house and stolen one or more diaries to make certain I wouldn’t find them.
At the law offices of Featherstone, De Vane, Doherty, Sanchez, and Schiller, the same receptionist who had been giving me the runaround on the phone once again informed me that her boss was not available. She appeared to be somewhere in her late twenties. In keeping with the conservative vibe of the law firm she worked for, she wore a tailored suit and had styled her hair in a way that added age, if not gravitas, to her features. Her nameplate read CHARLAINE GOLDING.
“That’s a pretty name,” I said. “Unusual.”
“My mother named me after one of her favorite authors.” Her cheeks went slightly pink at the admission.