by Ilsa J. Bick
I would appreciate any information you might have about the murder and what happened after the fire. Thank you for your time. I would also be happy to speak with you if you’d like to call instead.
I typed out my number, agonized over the closing—should I write “sincerely” or “regards” or . . . ? I chose “Sincerely,” typed my name, and hit Send. I didn’t know if anyone would answer, but it was worth a shot.
My computer chimed. Sarah was online. I told her what I’d done.
sarah13: Hey, that was a really good idea. You never know.
ccage: Yeah. I don’t think I’ll get much, though. I mean, if we’re having this much trouble and we live here.... The only other person would be the president, Mr. Saltzman, and he’d be ancient. Probably older than Eisenmann. He’s probably dead.
sarah13: Maybe he has relatives. Maybe they know something. On the other hand, what is it you want them to tell you that you don’t already know?
ccage: Already know? I want to know why everyone left. I want to know why the synagogue burned down. I want to know
why I keep dreaming about wolves and blood and death
why nobody here seems to know anything. I mean, it’s like you look around and there are lawns and houses and everything looks so normal, only things weren’t normal.
sarah13: You’re focusing way too much on this. I mean, bad things happen everywhere. Murders happen everywhere.
ccage: Yeah. Maybe. But isn’t it weird? That nobody knows anything?
sarah13:
ccage: Uh . . . a lot of people? I’ve even asked the sheriff, and all he knows are a couple facts.
sarah13: Maybe there’s nothing more to find out. Not everything is a conspiracy. You’re just way too paranoid.
ccage: You try spending your life with people looking at you.
sarah13: Are we starting that again? You need to get out more.
ccage: Hah-hah.
sarah13: Look, the reason the Jews left ... hello ... isn’t it OBVIOUS? They were hated—maybe not by everybody, but Eisenmann broke the union and the union got burned out. They had church groups protesting their meetings. I wouldn’t want to stay either.
We went back and forth like that a few minutes more, and then she said I was going in circles, and I told her I’d see her in about a half hour, and we logged off.
So here’s the stupid thing.
Talking to Sarah like that . . . it was kind of fun.
Uncle Hank was in a good mood. He drove me and Sarah to Dr. Rainier’s house and whistled all the way out. “You all are in for a real treat,” he said over his shoulder. “Not many people see something like this up close and personal. TV makes everything look like movie stars do this stuff, and it all goes by real fast. But a lot of crime scene work is detailed and time-consuming and boring.”
“Boring?” asked Sarah.
Uncle Hank nodded. “We’re small enough that each of us knows how to process a scene if our main guy’s busy. You can spend a couple hours sifting through trash, picking up cigarette butts, looking at footprints on a front door from where some idiot’s kicked it in so he can do a smash and grab. Hours of work. Sometimes you solve a case that way, but more likely you catch the guy because he’s stupid enough to talk to his buddies at the bar, and then word gets back to us. Most criminals are stupid.”
I’d heard a lot of this before, and so I tuned out. Actually, I was kind of worried because of what I’d written, about the cemetery. I’d drawn a cemetery too, come to think of it. Sure, Dr. Rainier said that Mr. Witek was dying, and yeah, I’d seen Lucy die in my head and then for real, and so . . .
I knew Mr. Witek would die—and soon. I was running out of time.
Time for what? Well, for one thing, when Mr. Witek died, the past would be gone—at least, the one broadcasting in my dreams. I would no longer have access to it, not in my head and not through traveling back—which I really believed was happening. However I did it, I slipped into David’s skin and his past. So it was possible to go back ... maybe....
And then I had a truly creepy thought. What if David and I were going to, I dunno, trade places or something? Like forever? I’d die in his body, and he’d get to live out my life in mine. What if all this was some kind of dress rehearsal for the main event?
A little voice, not David and certainly not me, sounded in my head: Yeah, but aren’t you the one who wants to go to the other side, to the sideways place and find your mom? Everyone says she’s dead, so what if she is dead and this is your big chance, sort of a short cut?
“Christian?” Uncle Hank’s eyes were framed in the rearview. “You all right? You look a little peaked.”
“I’m fine.” But I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep so he couldn’t read the lie.
I’d never been to the old Ziegler place, mainly because it’s off the main drag about a half mile up a winding dirt and gravel road to a bluff overlooking the lake, and I’ve never had a reason to go there.
As we rounded the last bend, Sarah said, “Wow, that’s beautiful.”
Framed by gnarly oak and maple, the house was silhouetted against the crystal blue of a crisp October morning. The front of the house, which Dr. Rainier said was a Queen Anne-style, faced east. The sun deepened the brownstone a ruddy blood color, accentuated by copper gutters that had weathered to a deep green. There was a large circle drive with a stone fountain in the center that was piled with colorful mums.
“How many rooms are there?” asked Sarah.
“About twenty, I think, counting the servants’ rooms on the third floor.” Uncle Hank grinned. “Wait until you see inside. There are two sets of stairs, back for the servants, front for everybody else. It’s kind of interesting, and Helen’s doing a real nice job in there.”
Sarah picked up on that right away because she turned to me and raised her eyebrows and mouthed, Helen? I pretended not to know what she was going on about, and then she just gave me a look—like DUH.
There were several cars there already including a white panel van that Uncle Hank said belonged to the Madison crime scene people and a truck with the tailgate down and a big Coleman thermos perched on the bed. Off to the left of the house were two guys in coveralls with what looked like survey equipment shouting at each other. A third guy stood by the truck, a Styrofoam cup in one hand.
“Who are they?” I asked as we got out.
“Engineering people contracted by Madison.” Uncle Hank slammed the driver’s door shut and palmed on his Stetson. “They’re marking the grid they’ll use for ground-penetrating radar. Never know if there isn’t something else out here.”
“You mean, like someone buried?”
“Yup. Doubt it, but given what we do have . . . pays to be on the safe side.”
The chief engineer’s name was Mosby. He shook Uncle Hank’s hand, held up his coffee cup, asked, “Want some? Got it in the thermos. Help yourself to crullers too. I already ate three of those suckers.”
“You stopped at Gina’s,” said Uncle Hank. He handed the bag of crullers around. I fished one out and offered the bag to Sarah, who gave the crullers a longing look and then shook her head. Uncle Hank took a bite and then licked sugar flakes from his lips. “When I was a deputy, I musta gained twelve pounds before I learned to not stop in there for coffee.” He nodded at the two men who were laying out yellow string across the sun side of the slope. “How big you going to make that thing?”
“The grid?” Mosby scratched his chin. “Well, if you had a grave, it’d be a lot easier because then we could use it as a central referent. Given you got nothing outside, I picked four points of a rectangle in a hundred-yard block. So figure . . .” Mosby screwed up his nose. “We can probably finish this side of the property in about two days, the back side and gardens in a couple more days. We’re just lucky there aren’t a lot of trees around the main house.”
“Why is that?” asked Sarah.
“Roots’ll sometimes chunk o
ut something that looks like a grave, or maybe sometime in the past, someone started a well or dug out rocks, and then things got covered up. Back’ll be a nightmare with that garden. Trees are the worst, but . . .” He squinted in the morning sun. “We’ll walk the grids. If there’s a grave out here, we’ll find it.”
Inside, the house opened up big with high ceilings, dark wood trim, hardwood floors, and a huge scrolling walnut staircase to the left, just like a movie. Sarah made a lot of ooh and aah sounds, and it was kind of cool, especially later on when we saw the trim around the dining room ceiling, which was walnut carved into bunches of grapes and leaves and apples and barley. The house smelled like coffee and lemon wood polish.
Dr. Rainier met us at the door. She wore a peacock blue sweater that really set off her hair and eyes, and black jeans. Actually, she was beautiful. She showed smiles all around, though I think she held Uncle Hank’s gaze a fraction of a second longer than anyone else’s. “Come on up. Dr. Nichols is just getting started.”
She led us up the back stairs, which were narrow and very plain. The paint in the stairwell was dingy, and there were fingerprint smudges on the corners. “It’s going to take a year or more to get this thing into spec, much less any kind of shape,” said Dr. Rainier. “I’ll have to do it in stages, but that’s okay. Gives me plenty of time to decide and change my mind a few times.”
“A woman’s prerogative,” said Uncle Hank, and she gave a good-natured laugh. Sarah and I traded glances that might have been groans.
The stairway gave onto the end of a long hall on the third floor, the servants’ quarters. The temperature was noticeably colder than the rest of the house. The wallpaper was faded, and a few sections sagged. The doors were plain wood, and there was no ornate wood trim. The light switches were the old push-button kind, and the wood floors up here were scuffed and worn.
“Which room is the body in? ” asked Sarah.
“Servant’s room.” Dr. Rainier tilted her head toward the end of the hall. “This way.”
The room was in the west corner with two shuttered, double-hung windows. Faded foam green striped wallpaper with tiny roses covered the walls. Directly across the door was the fireplace, its back wall blackened with soot, the brick and mortar hearth noticeably lopsided as if the house were listing to the right. Broken bricks and chunks of mortar littered a slate floor that then gave way to a threadbare carpet. The room smelled stale with a faint overlay of old rot.
As we entered the room, a compact woman with cropped brown hair and wearing white coveralls looked over her shoulder. “Ah.” Cradling a tablet PC on which she’d been jotting notes, she pushed up from her crouch, her knees crackling. “Damn this chill.” She came toward Uncle Hank, hand outstretched. “Dr. Denise Nichols, Sheriff. We spoke over the phone.”
They shook hands, and after Uncle Hank introduced us, he said, “What do you think?”
“Come see for yourself.” Dr. Nichols waited as we crowded around the half-dismantled hearth. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting to see—probably something like out of an Indiana Jones movie.
This wasn’t like that at all. If I had to pick something to compare it to, it would be like those reproductions of Neolithic graves in a natural history museum and not even half that interesting. Only the baby’s head and the very top of its rib cage were visible; the rest was still encased in mortar. The leather flesh pulled tight over its skull, giving it the wizened appearance of a dried-up old man. Its thin lips peeled back in a death grin to reveal toothless gums. A thin tuft of brownish hair clung to its scalp. Its eyes were closed, but the flesh over the sockets was caved in, so I knew the eyeballs were gone. There was something wrong with the head, only I wasn’t immediately sure what it was.
Sarah broke the silence first. “Where are the ears?” As soon as she said it, I realized that’s what had bothered me.
“Yeah, that passed by me too, the first time around,” remarked Uncle Hank.
“Good eyes,” said Dr. Rainier.
“Yes, very.” Dr. Nichols nodded her approval, and Sarah beamed. “I know graduate students who would miss that in their first pass. You might think they’d been sliced off, but you’d be wrong. In this case, the pinnae, the external part of the ears, are just tiny nubbins. See?” She pointed to what looked like a raisin on the side of the head. “When it’s bilateral like this, you begin to wonder about a syndrome of some sort, such as Goldenhar or Treacher-Collins. I think it might be the latter. Look at the jaw. It’s quite tiny for a newborn, and although it’s tough to see because of the leathering effect of mummification on the skin, the eyes actually slant down. So, if it is Treacher-Collins, that might help us.”
“How?” I asked.
“Well, with Treacher there’s a fifty-fifty chance of passing on the abnormal gene to a child. So it’s likely a parent would have the same problem or carry the gene but not express the disease. People with this syndrome have normal intelligence, so if they’re only mildly affected, say, small or missing ears, they could get by quite well. They would be deaf, of course, but nowadays, with bone conduction hearing aids, that can be ameliorated.”
Sarah got there way ahead of me. “So maybe whoever put the baby here didn’t want anyone to connect the dots that he or she might be the parent.”
Dr. Nichols nodded. “Another possibility, however, is that the parents or the birth mother interpreted the abnormality as a kind of curse. Killing such an infant wouldn’t be abnormal at all, depending on the time period. Or this might mean nothing, just an incidental congenital abnormality. We’ll know more, I hope, when we get the block back to our lab and can do a proper examination.”
“You’re not going to take the body out here?” asked Sarah. She sounded disappointed.
“We really can’t. It’s much better to do this in a controlled setting. Excavating a body from concrete or mortar is tedious and exacting. We’d be here quite a while. Also, X-rays we’ve taken indicate that the mummification doesn’t extend all the way down. There are several toes missing, and one of the feet has disarticulated. There are many more bones in a child’s skeleton than an adult’s, so it will be a question of painstaking work with dental tools as well. This is more properly forensic archaeology, but we take all comers.”
“Do you know how old the baby was?”
“Judging by the head circumference, about a month old. There is one interesting finding.” Retrieving her tablet, she tapped her way to a photograph. It was an X-ray. The baby’s arms and legs were drawn up toward its chest. The ribs were like the bars of a birdcage. There were several bright, tiny, circular dots over the baby’s torso and another oblong object at the crook of a knee.
Dr. Nichols pointed to the circular objects. “I don’t know what that other oblong thing is, though it might be a charm, but these are most likely metal snaps, and that already helps us date the body. We have no other way of doing so in this situation, and it’s the same principle as if we discovered a grave at some archaeological site. You need artifacts to date things. In this case, metal snaps came into wide public use in the first decade of the 20th century, around 1910. So we know that this child has been here not longer than a hundred years but more likely closer to seventy.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
Dr. Nichols’s eyes sparked. Without a word, she turned over one of the loosened bricks. Stamped into the brick were the words GOLD & BRICK. And a date: 1941.
“Gold and Brick is a very famous company that’s been around since the 1880s. Unlike many other brickmakers, they stamp all their bricks with a date. Even so, we’d be able to tell the approximate date the baby was walled up by looking at the bricks themselves—their composition, how they were made— and the mortar.”
“So that’s the when,” I said. “But that doesn’t answer the why, or how.”
Dr. Nichols’s smile was regretful. “Or who.”
We left Dr. Nichols making preparations for cutting out the section containing the child’s bod
y. On the way downstairs, Dr. Rainier said, “It’s almost noon. I made some sandwiches if you’re all hungry.”
“Starved,” said Sarah. She was grinning from ear to ear. “This is going to be great for my paper. I’d like to hang around and watch them take out the brick block, if that’s okay.”
To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to stay. I guess I’d hoped—expected—that seeing the baby’s body would do something, maybe shake something loose in my head. I was still edgy, like there was something here I was meant to see, but I couldn’t figure out what.
“We can eat in the garden room. There’s a nice view,” Dr. Rainier was saying as she led the way down a short hall toward the back of the house. “The stream is really strange, but I think the original idea was to bring the outdoors inside. Of course, you have to turn off the pump for the fountain as soon as it gets cold, but you can see the garden in the pattern of the stained . . .” Her voice died as she saw my face. “Christian? Christian, what’s the matter?”
I could barely form the words. My heart sounded impossibly loud in my ears. I must have looked as shocked as I felt because Uncle Hank was by my side in an instant and took me by the arm. “Christian. What is it?”
No mistake: There was the empty stone streambed, and above the picture window was the patterned stained glass. Outside, the graceful figure of the stone woman emptied air from her urn into the dry fountain; and to the left, wind stirred the bare spindles of an ancient willow.
It was the garden room of my vision and the same room as in the painting.
The house had belonged to Catherine Bleverton.
XXV
“No.” Sarah shook her head. All of us, including Dr. Nichols, were sitting around the kitchen table, a nearly empty platter of sandwiches between us. “Impossible. There was no deed transfer and no record of a sale. I know. I looked at everything. The Zieglers owned this forever. They rented, but they never sold it.”