by Loretta Ross
“I could swear I heard children giggling in here!”
“Maybe it was ghosts,” Matthew suggested. “You know this place is haunted. There’s a lady in white and some dead kids and a Confederate soldier. And I bet that naked guy’s here too, staggering around with his head on crooked.”
Death smacked the boy lightly on the back of the head, like his father used to do to him and Randy. “Don’t be so helpful.” He crossed to the window seat, lifted the cushioned lid and peered inside, but the cavity below was empty. “Maybe they’re in the parlor or the sitting room,” he suggested. “This place has pretty screwy acoustics.”
They went back into the hall and were halfway to the parlor when the door to the morning room burst open behind them and all five missing kids thundered out, stampeded across the hall and piled into the staircase, laughing hysterically.
“Okay,” Death said. “Spill.”
“It’s magic!” Mercy Keystone was a rare girl in a boy-dominated family. She was a mixed-race child with coffee-colored skin and shining black curls and a beautiful smile. “D’ya wanna see?”
“Oh, absolutely.”
They followed her back into the morning room and she lifted the lid of the window seat and climbed inside. “I’m gonna do a disappearing act. You gotta count to ten and say ‘abracadabra’ and then you can open the lid.”
She curled up in the box and pulled the lid closed and Death turned to Wren. “Would you like to do the honors?”
With a smile, she obliged, counting slowly while muffled thumps and scraping noises came from the box and the other children hid grins behind their hands. “Abracadabra!” she finished.
Death was still holding Bitty Sam and he dangled him over the window seat. “Lift up the lid, buddy.”
The toddler pulled the lid open and they all peered into the empty chest. Mercy popped up outside the window, pressed her nose against the glass and stuck out her tongue.
“Well,” Leona said dryly, “I think we know now how Declan Fairchild got in.”
_____
“Bernie Kopek remembered the picture,” Cameron said, passing over a five-by-seven color print of Ava Fairchild’s obituary picture.
They were back at Wren’s, sitting around the coffee table. Death had been picking flowers again and there was a big bowl of iris and daffodils and something spiky and blue-purple.
“Bernie’s the staff photographer,” Wren said.
“He said he took it at the Chamber of Commerce Christmas party, the week before Christmas. He remembered because Ava was all excited and she wanted him to be sure he got a good picture of her necklace. She told him that she expected to have exciting news soon, but the next time he saw her she was upset and told him to forget it. It had just been a mistake.”
“When would that have been? Any idea?” Death asked.
Cameron shrugged. “Not too long. Winter is a slow news time, so we’re always looking for stories. And Bernie’s not known for being patient at the best of times. I know it was before Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. That’s when Ava announced that she was leaving her house to the historical society.”
“The third week of January,” Death said. He lay the obituary photo beside his picture of the stolen necklace. Seen in color it was obvious the two pictures were of the same piece of jewelry. “So, at the end of December she finds the jewels hidden under the stair and thinks they’re Carolina’s jewels from the Civil War. She probably had just found them, within a day or two, before the Christmas thing. She wore one to the party and dropped hints, but she didn’t want to announce that she’d found them until she’d had it confirmed. She went to Josiah Halftree, probably the week after Christmas.”
“Why the week after Christmas?”
“She’d have wanted to go as soon as possible, but I can’t see her taking a bunch of jewels out in public during such a busy shopping time as the last week before Christmas. I could be wrong, but that’s my guess.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, Halftree told her the jewels were too modern to be from the Civil War.”
“But he didn’t report to anyone that she’d brought them in,” Wren objected. “Wouldn’t jewelers have been sent descriptions of the stolen jewels and asked to look out for them?”
“Yeah, but remember, the robbery had been a couple of years before that, so it wouldn’t have been fresh in his mind. And this wasn’t just some random person bringing valuable jewels to him for appraisal. This was one of his oldest and most trusted clients. Probably she said she must have just forgotten buying them or something and he passed it off as senility setting in.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, so she finds out the jewels aren’t the Civil War jewels and realizes that they must be from the robbery, which means that her closest living relative is a murderer. She changed her will on the fifteenth of January. I looked it up. Her health started going downhill after Christmas and in early March, she died.”
“Did we tell you about the secret passage?” Wren asked Cam.
“This is off the record,” Death interjected.
“You can’t do that,” Cam protested. “You have to say it’s off the record before you say it. Once you say it, you can’t go back and make it off the record. It doesn’t work retroactively!”
Wren reached over, got Cameron by his immaculate tie, and pulled his face down until he was eyeball-to-eyeball with her. “It’s off the record,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am! Off the record. Absolutely! Anything you say!”
“We found a secret passage,” Wren repeated. “Well, actually, the Keystone children found it. There’s a window seat in the bay window in the morning room and one end opens to a short slide that lets out in the crawl space under the house. A sliding panel opens from there to under the verandah. Death booby-trapped it. Now the trap door only opens from under the house and the window seat lid only opens from inside the house. If Fairchild tries to get in that way again, he’ll be stuck in the window seat until the police come to take him out.”
Wren had supper cooking in the kitchen. There was bread in the oven, filling the house with its delicious, warm scent, an apple pie cooling on the windowsill and a pot of stew bubbling on the stove. She got up and excused herself to go check on it.
“Okay, question,” Cam said.
“Shoot.”
“If Declan Fairchild knew there was a secret entrance to the house, why did he send Flow Whitaker in the window, where he could fall down and break his neck?”
“Good question. I’ve been thinking about that myself and I’ve about concluded that he probably didn’t. We’ve been assuming that Fairchild broke out of prison because he heard that Whitaker had been killed, but I talked to prison authorities. He actually escaped before the newspaper with the story of Whitaker’s death was delivered to the prison library.”
“So you think … ?”
“Still off the record?”
“Sure.”
“I think maybe Whitaker was working with whoever killed Josiah Halftree. We’re guessing that was probably one of Ava Fairchild’s cousins. Most people would have no idea how to go about selling stolen jewels. Declan Fairchild’s cellmate could well be the only fence the killer had any knowledge of.”
Wren appeared in the kitchen doorway. “If you guys want to eat, you’d better come and get it while it’s hot.”
Cameron stood and stretched, sighed regretfully. “I wish I could, sweetie. I remember how good your cooking is. I have to be at a town council meeting in a few minutes, though. There’s a company trying to get a permit to put an adult bookstore in the old telephone company building, right downtown, on Main Street.”
“That’s a bad idea,” Death said.
“You think so? Some people are saying it will bring in jobs. It’s one of those big, warehouse-type businesses like you see on the highway.”
“It’ll bring in jobs until it goes bankrupt,” Death shook his head. “Place like that, you need to hide it
somewhere so people can sneak in without the whole town knowing what they’re up to. Especially in a small town like this. I mean, hey. I kissed Wren at the donut shop this morning and fifteen people called her wanting the details.”
“He knows,” Wren said dryly. “He was one of them.”
Cameron had the grace to blush. He turned for the door, but then turned back, hesitant.
“What?” Death asked.
Cameron cleared his throat. “I don’t want you to think I was snooping or anything …”
“For wanting to know about a kiss?”
“No, not that.” He shifted uncomfortably. He had picked up the folder he’d carried the obituary picture in and he fiddled with it and studied the floor. “I was … curious about you. And I wanted to know what kind of man was hanging around Wren now. So I … did a little research. I came across something. I don’t know if you’ve seen this. Probably you have. But I thought, if you hadn’t, or if you didn’t have a copy, you might like to have it.”
He handed over the folder.
Death looked at him for a long minute, then opened the folder while Wren hung back, studying his face.
“Oh, wow,” he said. “I hadn’t seen this. Wow. Thank you. Thanks a lot.”
Cam half smiled. “It’s no problem. I happen to know Wren has a huge collection of interesting frames, if you want to frame it. I’d bet she could find you one that fits it perfectly.” He nodded to them both, then, and left, and Wren came over to lean against Death’s arm and see what he was looking at.
It was a printout of the front page of the St. Louis newspaper. The feature story was headlined “FIRE SAFETY DAY AT RIDGEWOOD ELEMENTARY” and a series of photos underneath showed schoolchildren climbing over a fire engine and listening, rapt, to a group of firefighters. One shot in particular showed a smiling young paramedic explaining something to a handful of kids.
“That’s your brother?” Wren asked.
“That’s Randy.” He checked the date on the paper and swallowed hard. “Less than a week before he died.”
“I’m so sorry! He was killed in a fire?”
“He died in a fire. The coroner said the actual cause of death was an aortic embolism. He must have had it all his life. Kid was basically a walking time bomb. I still can’t believe we never knew. Firefighters have to be in really good physical condition, you know? They said it was just one of those freak things. But they said he went quick. He didn’t suffer.”
Wren traced her fingers lightly over the picture. “It says ‘B. Bogart on his name tag. Shouldn’t it be R. Bogart?”
Death grinned. “Our mother was an English Lit professor,” he explained for the second time in three days. “Randy was short for Baranduin. It’s from Tolkien. It was the proper Elven name of the river the hobbits called ‘Brandywine.’ Of course, I used to call him Brandy. He hated it.”
“Brandy, you’re a fine girl?” Wren guessed, singing softly.
“What a good wife you would be,” Death agreed, not singing. He sighed. “I used to spend half my life coming up with new ways to torment my little brother. I wish he was still alive so I could do it some more.”
fourteen
“Ow! Ow! No! No! Stop! Don’t do that!”
Wren turned loose and Death rolled away from her and tried to pretend he hadn’t just been shrieking like a girl. He was dressed in loose gym shorts and a tee shirt and she was wearing a low-cut tank top and spandex tights.
“That’s not nice,” he scolded.
She grinned, crouched like she was getting ready to spring and flexed her hands like lobster claws.
“I’m only following advice,” she said.
“Whose advice?”
“Mother Weeks, remember? Pinch butts now, while you’re young, because no one will appreciate it when you’re old.”
“That wasn’t my butt.”
Her grin turned feral. “I know.”
He leaned in and kissed her, using it as cover to reach around and pinch her butt. She shrieked and he backed away quickly, laughing. “Actually, you know what? That’s a damn good move. Not to use on me!” he amended hastily, fending her off. “But if you ever get into a real fight with a guy, get hold of him like that and he’ll be at your mercy.”
There was a knock on the door and Chief Reynolds stuck his head through. “You two okay in here? Hope I’m not interrupting anything?”
They pulled themselves and one another up from the floor.
“Death’s teaching me hand-to-hand combat,” Wren explained.
The cop nodded. “Good idea, but you might want to go a little easier on her, son. I could hear her yelling clear down the street.”
Death blushed and Wren snickered, but neither one of them corrected his assumption.
“Come on in,” Wren invited. “Would you like some coffee?”
“Oh, I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”
“It’s no trouble. It’s already made.” She went into the kitchen and returned with a cup of coffee for the chief. “I looked up ‘care and feeding of a Marine’ online and it said to always keep a steady supply of coffee handy.”
Death went to the kitchen to refill his own coffee and brought Wren a cold bottle of strawberry soda and they all settled around the coffee table to talk. “Got any word on Fairchild?” Death asked.
The chief shrugged and shook his head. “Not really. He stole the motorcycle outside a biker bar, which was either really ballsy or really stupid. In either case, I think he’d better hope we find him before the guy who owns it does.”
“What about Josiah Halftree?”
“We followed up with Ava Fairchild’s cousins—the ones we could get hold of. One of them is dead now and another’s in a care facility for Alzheimer’s patients. The ones we talked to all got phone calls from Halftree about the jewels he claimed he saw. These are all elderly people and I don’t see any of them being personally involved, but all of them say they mentioned the phone calls to other people, family and friends and whatnot. There are probably several dozen people who could have heard about it and any one of them could have connected the jewels Halftree saw to the robbery Declan was suspected of.”
Death hesitated, not wanting to step on the cop’s toes. “We kind of had an idea about that,” he offered.
“Death did,” Wren corrected. “Death’s the idea man. He’s the brains of the operation. I’m just the muscle.” She raised her arm and made a fist, her bicep tiny next to Death’s.
“Don’t laugh,” Death said, though he was smiling himself. “She looks harmless, but then so does that atlatl over there if you don’t know what it’s capable of.”
Chief Reynolds laughed but didn’t comment. Instead, he said, “so you had an idea, then?”
“Uh, yeah, if you don’t mind my suggesting it?”
“Fire away.”
“We found a secret entrance to the Campbell house. Well, Mercy Keystone found it. But we figure that’s how Fairchild got in to sneak up on us when we were … uh …”
“Reading papers?” the chief suggested slyly.
“Yeah, that. Anyway, it’s a lot easier way to get in than climbing through that tiny little window, so we wondered, if Whitaker was working with Fairchild, why didn’t Fairchild send him in that way? And then we thought maybe Whitaker wasn’t working with Fairchild after all. We thought, maybe he was working with whoever killed Josiah Halftree. If you have an idea of who Halftree talked to, and who they talked to, maybe you could check Whitaker’s phone records and see if he was in touch with any of them. I mean, I know it wouldn’t prove anything, but—”
“But it might give us somewhere to focus our investigation. That’s a good thought. That’s a real good thought.” He drained his coffee and stood up. “I’m going to go get right on that. Thanks for the coffee and good luck with the hand-to-hand combat training.” He started to leave, then turned back to lean over and speak to Wren in a stage whisper.
“Be careful not to damage anything you
might want him to use later.”
_____
“There’s no mention of any jewels in the will,” Death said.
Wren, absorbed in the book she’d found, was still listening but distracted. “You didn’t really expect there to be.”
“No, I just thought it wouldn’t hurt to double check. There’s something about all this that bothers me. Something about the timing, or the sequence of events. Something I’ve seen or heard that doesn’t fit in, but I just can’t put my finger on it. She found the jewels in the middle of December. She found out they were the stolen jewels and not the Civil War jewels at the end of the month. She changed her will in mid-January. She died in March. What am I missing?”
“I don’t know. But I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” She turned the page and snuffled a bit and Death turned his full attention on her. She could feel the force of his concern.
“What are you reading?”
They were sitting in the research room at the Historical Society. Millie Weeks had provided Death with their copy of Ava Fairchild’s will and the table was stacked with historical documents and photographs relating to the Campbell house.
“Jenny Halifax wrote her memoirs.”
“Jenny who?”
“Halifax. Remember Jenny, the slave who sat with Carolina while she was dying? Her last name was Halifax. She got it because that was where she was born. She had a daughter who was sold to another family when she was seven and Jenny never found out what happened to her. She wrote down her life story in case her daughter ever found out who she was and wondered about her past. It got published in the 1890s and the local paper reprinted it in 1976.”
“Seven? God, I don’t understand people. How could anyone do that to someone? The Campbells did that?”
“No, it was before she came to them. She and her family belonged to an old man who’d never married or had kids. When he died, his relatives came and sold his house and all his property at auction, including his slaves. She and her husband and daughter were all sold to different people. After the war she managed to find where her husband had gone, but he was dead. He died during a scarlet fever epidemic in the 1850s.”