The House on Tradd Street

by Karen White

  He led the way into a partitioned space separated from the living area with a Japanese screen. The large mahogany partner’s desk, with a Mac computer perched in the middle of a mound of paper, took up most of the area, the brick walls covered in modern steel bookshelves filled with books. A muted Persian rug covered the wood floor, warming the space and making it the perfect writer’s retreat. A suede camelback couch was pushed against one wall, and I assumed this must be his napping spot when he had writer’s block—assuming he ever did. The Jack Trenholm I knew never seemed to be at a loss for words.

  “Over here,” he said, indicating the couch. He picked up a roll of art paper and unfurled it before placing it on the floor. He kneeled on one side and held down two corners, and I did the same on the other side. “This is the actual rubbing I did of the clock—and, as you saw before, none of it makes sense.”

  I looked at the crinkled paper at the top and the black crayonlike marks of various letters in no apparent order: IFANKRNGMFEFIVEEMNROQNPDKNIASRKE.

  “As you can see, at the top here I placed the letters in columns according to the order they appeared on the face. Starting at twelve o’clock—which is logical, considering it’s the beginning of the day.”

  I examined the paper, noticing this time that at the very bottom was the actual alphabet written from beginning to end across the width of the paper. The paper beneath these letters was nearly rubbed through with erasing from, I assumed, Jack’s attempts to find a workable keyword.

  “How does this work?” I asked, thinking it looked familiar. My grandmother had loved puzzles of all kinds, and she’d enjoyed making up her own for me to solve. My room in her house had been filled with puzzle books, and I had missed them for a long time after I’d gone to live with my father. I assumed my puzzle books were either somewhere in a box in the attic in the house on Legare or they’d been thrown away long ago.

  “If you know the keyword, you simply write it below the alphabet, starting with the letter ‘A’ so that each letter of the key word has a corresponding letter in the alphabet. Then, after you write the keyword, you start the alphabet right after it—skipping the letters already found in the keyword.”

  I watched as he picked up a pencil from his desk and wrote “CERCA TROVA” beneath the alphabet, being careful to line up the letters in each column. “You’re not supposed to have any repeating letters in the key word, but I’ve seen it done where you just eliminate the repeating letter the second time it appears.” He crossed off the “A” at the end of “TROVA” since it had already appeared in the first word, “CERCA,” and wrote the rest of the alphabet following it, making sure not to repeat any of the letters used in the keyword. When he was done, he looked up at me expectantly. “All right, read out the letters from the clock to me slowly, one at a time.”

  I glanced at the top of the art paper, where Jack had written the jumbled letters and read them out loud to him. “I, F, A, N, K, R, N, G . . .”

  “Hang on, let me catch up.” He began to transpose the letters into the cipher by finding the letter in the actual alphabet, and then finding its corresponding letter in the new alphabet he’d created using the keyword “CERCA TROVA.” I bent over his shoulder to see if I could make out any words. BTCIFMIO stared up from the page. Jack tossed the pencil down. “Damn. It’s not the right code word. None of these letter combinations make a single word.”

  “Maybe Mr. Vanderhorst scrambled the letters so that after the cipher was solved, whoever had solved it had to unscramble it to get the real answer.”

  “That could be it, but this message is too long and without any spaces between words, which would make it almost impossible. And this was meant for his son—to keep it from prying eyes and not trip up a cryptologist.” He scratched his head. “I’ll finish the rest of the letters in the cipher just in case we have to come back to it and see if we need to do some jumbling.”

  “Scootch over,” I said, moving books to the corners to hold down the paper and sitting down next to Jack. “Let’s just sit here and think of as many words or phrases as we can that Robert Vanderhorst might have used. We’re bound to turn up something.”

  “Fine. Let me get another beer first. Can I get you one? There’s no alcohol in them, but they’re pretty good.”

  “Might as well, but just one. I can’t imagine this will take very long.”

  He raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything, just left to go to the kitchen and grab a couple of beers.

  Three hours and three beers later, Jack and I had scribbled on every notepad in the office, using every possible keyword we could think of up to and including “piazza,” “Civil War,” “Magnolia Ridge,” “Louisa,” “Nevin,” and even “General Lee.”

  Jack sat on the floor, his back against the bookshelves, and threw his pencil across the room. “We’re bound to turn up something, huh?”

  I rubbed my tired eyes with the heels of my hands. “Maybe we do need to unscramble the letters we got when we used cerca trova.”

  Jack shook his head, then closed his eyes. “Where did I see those words before? It’s driving me nuts.” He looked at his watch. “It’s getting late, and the Historical Society library closes at four. Let’s head out and maybe something else will pop out at us.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said, allowing him to pull me up. I wasn’t excited about meeting his library friend, and my brain was beginning to hurt, but I continued to see Mr. Vanderhorst’s face from that last time I’d seen him, and I felt an urgency that had eluded me until now.

  “Where are we going?” I asked a short while later as he pulled the car up to the curb on Market, nowhere near the vicinity of the Historical Society.

  “I’ve got to get flowers. Yvonne loves them and will be disappointed if I show up empty-handed. I’ll be right back.” He winked at me before stepping out of his car.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and mimicked the name “Yvonne” silently in the privacy of the car.

  Jack brought back a bouquet of yellow roses and asked me to hold them. “Yellow’s her favorite color,” he added helpfully.

  I held the flowers on my lap until we reached the Fireproof Building on Meeting Street, where the South Carolina Historical Society was located. Jack’s luck at always finding a parking spot at the curb ran out, and we had to park in a garage. I was still carrying the roses as we approached the Palladian-style building with the imposing Doric porticoes. We were halfway up the steps before I realized it and pushed the flowers at Jack to take.

  The interior was hushed, and smelled of polish and old books. A cantilevered three-story stone staircase dominated the oval stair hall and was lit by a cupola at the top. I silently applauded myself for not only recognizing but knowing what “cantilevered” and “cupola” meant, thanks to Sophie’s books. It also didn’t pass my notice that I was actually admiring the beauty of the architecture in a structure that was built prior to the twenty-first century.

  “There she is,” said Jack, and I waited and watched as he approached a woman with her hair held back in a bun sitting at a long table, studying a large, open book. “Yvonne,” he said as he reached her. She turned to him and smiled one of those genuine smiles you rarely get when you surprise an acquaintance in a place you wouldn’t expect to see them. He handed her the flowers, and she pressed her nose into them.

  Jack pulled back her chair and helped her stand, then beckoned for me. I nearly stumbled as I made my way over, noticing for the first time the cane leaning against the table within arm’s reach. “Yvonne Craig, I’d like you to meet Melanie Middleton.”

  Yvonne stuck out her hand and I took it, amazed at the strength of her grip. She was petite and beautifully dressed, and she had sparkling, intelligent brown eyes. She was also about eighty years old. She smiled, displaying perfect white dentures. “So you’re the lucky one who inherited Nevin’s house. I always wondered what he would do with it after he passed on. Middleton, did you say?”

  “Yes,” I said, eager
to avoid the next inevitable questions regarding my parents. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said. “Jack’s told me so much about you.”

  Yvonne surprised me by snorting. “Ha! I bet he led you to believe I was some young thing after his affections. Not that I wouldn’t jump at the chance, of course, but I think his energy would kill me, if you know what I mean.” She winked and I couldn’t help but laugh. “Hand me my cane, will you, sweet boy?”

  As Jack handed her the cane, I mouthed behind her shoulder to him, Sweet boy? He just waggled his eyebrows.

  “Yvonne likes to pretend she’s an old woman, but everyone who knows her agrees that there’s a feisty twenty-year-old lurking very near the surface. I’ve been waiting for years to get my chance, but the throng of suitors is too much competition for me.”

  Yvonne swiped at his leg with her cane. “Remember, young man, that flattery will get you everywhere.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jack said. “So, were you able to find out anything about Susannah Barnsley?”

  “Yes, actually, I was. And I’m sorry it took me so long but somebody came in this morning and used the book I needed and then shelved it themselves—which they’re not supposed to do,” she said to me with a sidelong glance. “And the ignorant person shelved it in the completely wrong place—just pure laziness, if you ask me. I found it by some miracle as I was looking up something else for another patron. And there it was, stuck in between bound eighteenth-century maps, of all things.”

  “Probably some kid,” said Jack, absently.

  Yvonne shrugged. “I have no idea since I wasn’t here this morning. I only know somebody was here looking at it because Priscilla told me when I asked her if she’d seen it.

  “This way,” she said, indicating a table in the corner of the room with several thick leather-bound volumes stacked on top. We made our way over and waited until she’d opened up the book on top. “You’re very lucky, you know. Some kind soul about seventy-five years ago decided he wanted to find the descendants of all the slaves who once lived at Barnsley Hall plantation down by Dauphuskie. He was the grandson of the blacksmith, and I suppose he wanted to find out if he had any relations still living. Because of Susannah’s last name, I figured this would be the first place I should look.” She winked. “And, as usual, I was right.” She gently opened what appeared to be a ledger book, and we found ourselves staring at impossibly tiny handwriting filling every line in the book.

  “Don’t panic, dear,” she said to me. “I already found the information you needed and photocopied it for Jack’s file. It’s not really detailed—just who her grandparents and parents were—most notably that her grandfather was white. She grew up in North Charleston, where her mother was a laundress. That’s all we know about her childhood. The last bit of information was the most relevant, I believe, as it stated that at the age of nineteen she moved to Charleston and lived in a house on Chalmers. A nice house, considering she was a woman with no education and little means.”

  Yvonne pursed her lips. “Since you’d already given me her last known address, I didn’t have any trouble searching the ownership records for the house. And this bit of information might be a little . . . titillating if I do say so myself.”

  She slid a manila folder across the table to me. “I think that Miss Middleton should be the one to see this first.”

  I looked at Jack, and he nodded. I flipped open the cover and saw within photocopied pages filled with laborious handwriting.

  “It’s the one on top, I believe,” said Yvonne.

  I picked up the top page and studied the document. “It’s a lease agreement,” I said, scanning down to the bottom, where the lines for signatures were. And there, in thick black ink, was the signature for Augustus Middleton.

  I jerked back and Jack took the paper from me. “That’s . . . that’s my grandfather. Why would he be signing a lease for Susannah Barnsley’s house?”

  Both Yvonne and Jack looked at me with identical expressions of surprise mixed with amusement. I blinked as the reason dawned on me. “Oh. He. Oh, I see.” My first reaction was one of relief—relief that Robert Vanderhorst hadn’t had a mistress. On the other hand, I hadn’t known my grandfather and felt neither embarrassment nor surprise to learn that he’d had at least one vice.

  “They were apparently together for ten years—that was when the house was leased to somebody else, at any rate. She moved out in September of nineteen thirty.”

  Jack placed the paper back inside the folder. “Any idea where she might have gone?”

  Yvonne smiled brightly. “I knew you were going to ask me that—so I already did a little bit of research on my own to see what I could find out.” She smiled like a Cheshire cat, and I knew that she’d hit the mother lode. She picked up the folder and began to flip through the pages. “Just because we’re all about South Carolina here at the Historical Society, doesn’t mean there haven’t been plenty of times that we’ve had to ask for information—and likewise—from our sister societies around the country. And it’s a good thing, too.”

  “Why is that?” Jack prodded.

  “Well, first I checked the post office records for any forwarding address. Nothing there—which in itself is interesting. Made me think she was trying to hide or something. Anyway, I thought that most places require a security deposit and that you get it back when you move out. It was worth a try, anyway, to see if a check was mailed after Susannah moved out. Chances are it was sent to Augustus, since he paid for the place. But what if it wasn’t? She’d lived there for ten years. Maybe the landlord thought the money belonged to her.”

  “So, what did you find out?” Jack sat on the corner of the table, his impatience visible only by the tick in his jaw.

  “Lucky for you, the landlord kept meticulous records—including the addresses where he sent any correspondence to former tenants.” She gave us a self-satisfied smile as she riffled through the pages in the folder, and pulled out a plain piece of copy paper with a handwritten address. “I thought you might like to have it for easy reference, so I copied it down for you. While I was waiting for you to come, I went online and looked up her phone number. I took the liberty of calling it and asking for Susannah. The woman who answered must be a nurse or companion or something because she told me that Susannah was taking a nap but could call me back later. I told her no, thank you, and hung up.” Her eyes sparkled brightly. “I guess that means she’s still alive.”

  Jack took the paper from her and looked at it. “Susannah Barnsley, one-oh-two Orchard Lane, Colchester, Vermont.” Our eyes met, and I knew we were both remembering the piece of envelope we’d found in the picture frame, the part of the envelope that had Susannah’s name but only the words “Orchard Lane” on it.

  Still clutching the piece of paper, Jack slid off the table and enveloped the old woman in a huge hug—something she apparently liked, judging by her soft smile and the way her fragile hand patted his shoulder. “You’re amazing, Yvonne. It would have taken me weeks to find any of this information.” Jack settled her back down on her feet.

  “You just need to know where to look, sweet boy.” She glanced up at him and actually fluttered her eyelashes. “I think this means you owe me dinner.”

  “Blossom again or would you like to try something new?”

  “Blossom, it is. I’ll call you with my schedule.” She winked at me. “And Miss Middleton is more than welcome to join us.”

  “I’d like that,” I said, taking her hand in both of mine and squeezing. My cell phone began ringing in my purse, and I excused myself so Jack and Yvonne could say goodbye, and left the building to answer it.

  By the time I got outside, the call had switched to voice mail. I hit the button to replay and listened to Marc’s voice as he asked for a rain check for our date later that night because of a last-minute out-of-town trip that had come up. His smooth voice was so different from Jack’s. Much more controlled and sexy, but almost deliberately so. I snapped the phone shut, wondering w
hy in the world I was comparing their voices.

  As I was putting my phone back into my purse, Jack emerged from the building. “Marc just called,” I said. “He has to go out of town and had to cancel our plans for tonight.”

  “What a shame,” said Jack, his voice and expression saying anything but. “I guess that gives us more time to work on the cipher. And to make plans for our trip to Vermont.”

  “We’re going to Vermont?”

  “Well, I guess you could stay here, but you might find it more interesting meeting Susannah in person than hearing me telling you all about it later.”

  “True, but can’t we just call her on the phone?”

  “We could, but my years of research have taught me that you learn a whole lot more visiting your source. It’s up to you if you want to come with me, but I’m definitely going.”

  I thought for a moment, recalling that I didn’t have any pressing business and that Marc would be out of town, too. “Sure,” I said as I followed him down the steps toward the street, realizing that the thought of solving the cipher and meeting somebody who might have known Louisa and Robert, and who had definitely known my grandfather, was a whole lot more exciting to me than having dinner and watching fireworks with Marc. “I hear the foliage is lovely this time of year in New England.”

  Jack winked at me. “That’s my girl. Now let’s go back to my condo and get busy.”

  I raised my eyebrow as he opened the passenger-side door for me.

  He shook his head in mock indignation. “To work on the cipher, of course. Get your mind out of the gutter, Mellie.”

  “I think I’m going to have to ask for dinner at Jestine’s in return for my help, though.”

  “Have you been talking to Yvonne behind my back?”

  “Not at all,” I said, concentrating on the street in front of us. “I’ve just developed a sudden craving for coconut cream pie.”