A Killer Crop

by Sheila Connolly

  “That’s my guess. I’m pretty sure that Daniel had some copies of the ones she sent. We didn’t see them when we went through his stuff, Elizabeth, but I may have seen them earlier. Maybe someone took them?”

  “So now what? We do a search for everybody named Ellen in several counties over a couple of decades?” Meg knew it was possible, but it would take a lot of time.

  “No, Meg, I think we can narrow it down a bit further,” her mother jumped in.

  Susan pushed a couple of photocopies to Meg. “Take a look at the handwriting—it’s kind of immature, don’t you think?”

  Meg flipped through the pages. “If you say so. I don’t know much about nineteenth-century handwriting.”

  “I’ve seen plenty. I’m guessing this is a girl or young woman, maybe fifteen to twenty, with some education—she probably attended one of the local academies. You can see that she can spell. From what she talks about, though, it sounds as though she lived on a farm, rather than in a city or town. But what’s more valuable is the other people she mentions. Yes, I know—mostly it’s ‘mother’ or ‘father,’ but she does refer to brothers and some friends or relatives. So that narrows the age range, and gives us other family members to look for. This Ellen was living with her parents and at least two brothers in a rural community at the time she was writing. So now your search is for an Ellen who would have been between fifteen and twenty sometime before 1860—when Emily stopped leaving her house—with some connection to Emily Dickinson.”

  Meg was impressed by Susan’s logic. “You sound like a detective. Do the letters tell you much about what kind of terms she and Emily were on? Was the tone familiar, casual? I know Emily wasn’t a celebrity at the time, so it’s not like a fan letter, but do you think they knew each other well? Was this Ellen a relative of hers?”

  Susan smiled. “Could be, but not necessarily. Ellen did seem comfortable writing to her.”

  “Over what time interval—months, years?”

  “I don’t know. As I said, the letters aren’t dated.”

  “But you’re guessing what? The eighteen fifties?” When Susan nodded, Meg added, “Okay, that means we can search censuses. Starting in 1850 they include a lot of family information—ages, relationships. And they’re search-able, so if you want to find an Ellen born in Massachusetts between a certain age range, you can do that. Do you want me to show you?”

  “Please, dear. I’m afraid my eyes are crossing,” her mother said.

  Phillip interrupted. “Do you need me for this, or shall I go find us something to eat? Susan, will you be staying for dinner?”

  Susan looked startled by the unexpected invitation. “If you want me to.”

  Meg said, “The more, the merrier. And I expect that Bree will be joining us, too, so that’s five. I’ll cook, Mother, if you want to keep going once I show you how the census hunt works.”

  “That’s fine. Give your father a detailed list—he tends to forget the essentials and come home with capers and smoked salmon, but no main course.” She smiled fondly at Phillip.

  “You cut me to the quick,” he responded, returning her smile. “Meg, let’s check what you have, and then I’ll go and let you get back to your searches.”

  In the kitchen, Meg opened her refrigerator and stared helplessly at the meager contents. “What do you feel like eating, Daddy?”

  “Whatever’s simple. Do you have a grill?”

  Meg shut the refrigerator and turned to him. “I do. Burgers and the works?”

  “I think I can manage that. I’ll get some charcoal, too. Now, how do I get to the market again?”

  Meg explained and sent him on his way. She returned to the dining room, where Susan and Elizabeth were waiting patiently.

  “Okay, give me the laptop.” Meg logged on to the site and wove her way through the options until she reached the 1860 census search page. “Okay, let’s put in first name ‘Ellen,’ birth year 1845 plus or minus five years, born in Massachusetts, lived in Massachusetts, gender female, and see what we get.” She hit the search button and then sat back and laughed. “That gives us over four thousand possibilities. Looks like Ellen was a popular name.”

  “We can’t possibly go through all four thousand,” Elizabeth said, dismayed. “Can you narrow the search?”

  “I can. Let me put in Hampshire County.” Meg did that, hit search again. “Much better. There are about one hundred and seventy-five Ellens of the right age in Hampshire County including, uh”—she keyed in a few more details—“sixteen in Amherst.”

  Elizabeth sighed. “That’s still a lot of names. How do we look at each one?”

  “Just click on the record, and a list of household members will come up. You can eliminate the ones who are living in boardinghouses or with someone who isn’t a family member, at least for the first pass. And someone who’s married, probably. Courage! Who said this was going to be easy?”

  “Can I look, too?” Susan asked.

  “Not at the same time. I’ve got only the one subscription, and I can’t log in twice. But you can look over Mother’s shoulder and help her eliminate possibilities.”

  Susan and Elizabeth focused on the computer screen in front of them, and Meg went back to the kitchen. She fed Lolly, then started hunting for condiments and plates and such. Should she ask Seth to join them? No, he’d probably be bored silly by all this genealogy talk. Funny how this turned out to be a lot like a detective search, as she’d told Susan. Of course, you had to make assumptions to narrow the search, and there was always the possibility that you had inadvertently eliminated a likely candidate. But you had to start somewhere.

  Her father returned, laden with goodies, and they spent a companionable half hour assembling burgers. He’d bought potato salad and coleslaw, and he’d even remembered buns. He volunteered to get the fire going, and Meg directed him to the grill in the covered shed. Elizabeth and Susan remained engrossed in their chase, and Meg heard a steady stream of low comments issuing from the dining room.

  Bree emerged from the barn and greeted Phillip. “Hey, something smells good. Am I invited?”

  “Of course. We’ve made enough for an army,” Meg heard her father say. “The others are inside looking at census records.”

  “Hi, Meg,” Bree said when she walked into the kitchen. “I’m parched.”

  “There’s plenty of stuff in the fridge,” Meg said. “Dad did the shopping. I think he was worried about us starving to death—we may not have to shop for a month.”

  “Sounds good. Where we going to eat? The kitchen table’s kind of crowded with five of us.”

  “Good point. I’ll see if Mother and Susan can clear off the dining room table.”

  When Meg went to the door leading to the dining room, she almost collided with her mother. “Whoa! You look excited.”

  “I am!” Elizabeth said triumphantly. “We’ve gone through all the local Ellens and found a few likely possibilities. But guess what? One of them, Ellen Warren, lived right here, in this house! What are the odds of that?”

  Meg wanted to share her mother’s elation, but at the same time she felt an unexpected sense of foreboding. Could Daniel—or whoever had broken into her house last week—have come to the same conclusions? If Daniel had laid hands on Ellen’s letters, and had covered the same genealogy ground, would that have pointed him to the Warren house? And was that why he had suddenly contacted Elizabeth after so many years—to get to this house?

  She couldn’t bring that up now; she needed time to think about it. Meg plastered on a smile. “That’s intriguing. You’ll have to show me. But Dad’s itching to put the burgers on the grill, and we need a place to eat. Can you clear off the table, just for a while?”

  “I guess so.” Elizabeth’s good cheer was not diminished. “And after we’ve eaten, we can show you what we found.”

  Over dinner Elizabeth and Susan recapped their deductions and the results of their search. Bree was properly skeptical. “Give me a break. How likely is it
that you’d find whatever it is you’re looking for right here? I mean, it would be nice, but you’ve got to look at the other possibilities.”

  Meg agreed; it did seem far-fetched that some Warren daughter had carried on a correspondence with Emily Dickinson. Why would she have known her? Meg comforted herself with thinking that they really needed to find that link before focusing solely on that one person. But Daniel Weston’s sudden rekindling of interest in her family just before his death troubled her. Susan seemed to think that he had known about the letters for some time. He had certainly seemed sure of his results, if he had planned to announce his find at the symposium.

  “You’re quiet, Meg.” Phillip’s voice interrupted her meandering thoughts.

  “I’m just trying to work out what else we need to know. I love the idea that Emily knew this house, but why would she? Mother, you said you’d found some Dickinsons up the line, but none of them were particularly close.”

  “I know, dear—we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We don’t even know whether any letters from Emily to Ellen exist, and if they do, where they might be—if they survived. But this Ellen Warren is at least a possibility.”

  “Was there another Ellen connection at the Dickinson Farm Stand?” Could that explain why Daniel was there in the middle of the night? They’d already proved that “Ellen” was a very common name at the time.

  It occurred to Meg that apparently Daniel had been working under multiple assumptions: that Emily’s letters to Ellen existed; that Ellen had kept them; and that somehow, somewhere, the letters had survived. There were buildings at the farm stand that looked to be old enough to come from the right time period, but what had Daniel hoped to find? Letters stuffed in the wall? It seems unlikely that they would have survived there, in a shed.

  “And even if there was an Ellen there,” Meg said slowly, “are we really supposed to believe that this Ellen left the letters in a wall somewhere, and Daniel was going to find them just waiting for him? Susan, was he that obsessed, or did he have something more to go on?”

  Susan shrugged. “I really don’t know. Obsessed? Maybe. He’d spent most of his life doing research, talking, publishing about Emily. He took pride in knowing even the smallest details about her. I mean, he was the expert. Maybe he had more pieces of the puzzle, which he didn’t share with anyone else.” She drooped in her chair. “Maybe this is all just castles in the air. Maybe he’d finally lost it, lost his grip on reality.”

  Elizabeth laid a hand on Susan’s arm. “I don’t think so. I spent time with him, and he seemed quite rational. Funny, charming, interesting. And we didn’t even talk about Emily, except in passing. So I wouldn’t call him obsessed.”

  “Then he had to know something else,” Meg said. “And maybe it was based on the genealogy.”

  The plates were empty, and it was dark outside. Meg was tired, and her brain was working slowly, which didn’t bode well for working out complicated nineteenth-century family relationships.

  “I thought you’d be more excited, Meg,” her mother said almost petulantly. “And don’t forget—if we can figure this out, we might know why Daniel was killed.”

  Who was she to rain on her mother’s enthusiasm? “Okay, here’s what I’d suggest. I’ll clear the table, and then you can show us who was related to who, and maybe we’ll see a connection. You’ve got a lot of information, between the censuses and the maps. If nothing jumps out at you, then maybe we can go a level deeper—tomorrow, I’m afraid. I’m wiped out.”

  “Poor darling, I can see that. All right, we’ll give it another couple of hours, and if we don’t turn anything up tonight, we can start again tomorrow with fresh eyes. Susan, does that work for you?”

  “Sure. I want to see where this goes—for Daniel’s sake.”

  27

  Meg woke the next morning to the sound of rain. She allowed herself a guilty moment of relief: no picking today, which was good news for the Emily hunt. Meg figured that her mother and Susan hadn’t made any important discoveries the night before, because surely her mother would have woken her to share the news regardless of the hour. Meg vaguely remembered hearing Susan’s car start up and pull away sometime during the night.

  She’d called this a wild-goose chase, and a hunt for a needle in a haystack. They were looking for some pieces of paper that, if they even existed, hadn’t been seen in a century. Paper was fragile, easy to destroy or lose. What were the odds that anything had survived, undiscovered, all these years? Slim to none.

  But still, Daniel Weston had been killed, presumably over these mysterious letters. Where did that fit? He was a dedicated scholar, so it was at least conceivable that he had gone haring off to a locked building in the middle of the night, in search of what he believed were these lost documents. Maybe. Meg had trouble getting her head around the idea that academic discoveries could inspire enough strong feeling that someone would kill for them. But nobody had any better theories, including, it seemed, the police. Daniel had been dead nearly two weeks, and no one had been arrested.

  With a sigh, Meg hauled herself out of bed and dressed. Downstairs she found her mother in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading the paper, Lolly purring on her lap. Meg poured a cup and joined her. “So, no big breakthroughs?”

  “No, not yet. It’s complicated, isn’t it? You’d think censuses would get things right, but the spelling of people’s names changes from one to the next, and their birth years are all over the place. Do you think people lied to the census takers? Or maybe they were all deaf.”

  Meg smiled. “I sometimes wonder that myself. So, what’s on for today?”

  “Susan said she’d be coming back around ten. Are you picking today?”

  “I doubt it, given the rain, but I’ll wait for Bree to tell me. You know, I was thinking about Ellen Warren. From what I’ve learned about the Warren family in the nineteenth century, there’s nothing to eliminate her as a candidate for the Ellen who wrote to Emily. Ellen Warren lived here all her life with her parents, and she had brothers. I’ll have to show you her father Eli’s will—it’s very funny. It sounds as though the family was a bit dysfunctional.” Meg swallowed some coffee. “Although I won’t hold my breath about finding the letters. Hold on a minute.” Meg went to the dining room and retrieved her printout of Eli Warren’s family tree. “Here, these are the people we’re talking about. Ellen Warren was Eli’s daughter by his first wife. Her father remarried and had some more kids. After her father died, Ellen ended up living in the house with her stepmother and a passel of half-siblings. So let’s put ourselves in the head of a fifteen-year-old girl, back in those days. She’s living in a crowded house—this house—most likely sharing a room with a few siblings. Say she wants to keep something secret, something personal. What would she do?”

  “Shouldn’t we wonder why she would have met Emily Dickinson in the first place?”

  “We can work that out later. But right now I’m more interested in what a girl would do with her treasures.”

  “Hide them from prying eyes, you mean? Somewhere in the house . . . Darling, how much of the house has changed since her day?”

  “Not much. Ellen’s brother’s grandchildren ended up with the house—Lula and Nettie. You know how little they did to the place. Then you rented it out, and nobody made any real improvements. Some cosmetic stuff, most of which I’ve stripped away. I should ask Seth—he knows more about old houses, including this one, than either of us. He can probably tell us which bits are original and which are replacements. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that physically everything here is much the way it was in Ellen’s day. Where would she hide something?”

  “Where snoopy siblings wouldn’t find it? Out of sight. In the floor or walls. The attic, the basement. Probably not in an outbuilding, because there it would be vulnerable to the weather.”

  Meg nodded. “Good. I’d rule out the basement, because it’s dark and damp, and I can’t see a girl tiptoeing down there to visit her treas
ures.”

  Phillip ambled into the kitchen. “Good morning, ladies. You look like you’re plotting and scheming.”

  “We are. We’re trying to get into the head of a girl in 1855, and where she might have hidden something.”

  Phillip poured himself a cup of coffee and joined them at the table. “So you’re going forward with your theory that there are letters hidden in this house?”

  “Let’s say we haven’t eliminated the possibility,” Meg said.

  Bree clattered down the back stairs and drained the remains of the coffeepot into a mug. “Meg, you’re off the hook for picking today. What’s up?”

  “I think we’re planning to go on a treasure hunt. We have a theory that letters from Emily Dickinson might be hidden somewhere in the house.”

  “Cool,” Bree said. “Is that what the professor was looking for?”

  “Maybe. Susan thinks it’s possible.”

  “What’s she going to do if you find them?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask. Announce the discovery herself, since he can’t?”

  “Convenient, isn’t it? Nice way to make a name for yourself.”

  Meg stilled. Her mother turned back from the stove and met her eyes. “You don’t think . . . ?” Elizabeth said.

  Phillip picked up her thought. “That we should take a harder look at Susan?”

  “But how? And why? Why would she want to kill Daniel? She said herself that his death only makes things harder for her. Didn’t she need his support if she ever hoped to find a teaching job?” Elizabeth’s forehead furrowed.

  “Wouldn’t a significant discovery like some lost letters of Emily Dickinson be a big boost for her job search? What do you know about Susan?” Phillip went into his lawyer mode once again.

  “She’s a graduate student at UMass, writing a dissertation about Emily Dickinson, and Daniel was a member of her thesis committee—but one of several.”

  “And she has had access to Daniel’s office, his home, and to this place.”