by Julie Hyzy
Wes cocked his head. “Hmm.”
“What?” I asked.
He ran a hand down his beard. “This hidden tunnel in your house gets me thinking. You don’t suppose there was any other way into the party, do you?”
“I asked Bennett,” I said. “There are plenty of secret passages at Marshfield, but he said he doesn’t know of any in that part of the basement.”
“Okay,” he said, but appeared unconvinced. “Tell you what, after I show you what I found here, we’ll take a look and see if there are any clues in the Marshfield Manor blueprints.”
“You have them?”
“Some,” he said. “David had me pull the plans out before the benefit and was using them to help design his presentation.”
“What I wouldn’t give for a look.”
“I can help with that,” he said. “Let’s talk about your house first, though.”
Fifteen minutes later, I’d learned that my house and Todd Pedota’s had been originally built by two brothers. The scrapbooks Wes had pulled out contained photos, newspaper clippings, letters, and other snippets of information that helped us determine that the homes had been built about a decade before the Civil War. By piecing the story together, we gathered that the two men had constructed the tunnel as a shortcut between their homes.
“Because they wanted their families to spend time together?” I asked.
“That’s what it looks like.” He pulled out the blueprints we’d studied before. “These are not originals from when the house was built. Chances are, those are long gone.”
I was a little disappointed. “If the originals are missing, how can you be sure the tunnel was built the same time the homes were?”
“I can’t,” he said with a wry smile. “I’m surmising. Both brothers were bricklayers, so that would account for the quality of construction we found. The two men moved out of their respective homes at the same time. After they sold, there’s no mention of the passage. Seems to me that might have made news in tiny Emberstowne.”
“I’d been hoping to uncover a more historically significant reason for the passageway. I wanted it to have been a safe haven for the Underground Railroad.”
Wes made a so-so motion with his head. “Want to know what I think?”
“Sure.”
“My guess is that the brothers did use it for that very purpose.”
“More surmising on your part?”
“Think about it. Maybe there’s a very good reason why we don’t have the homes’ original plans. If the passage was used to protect slaves, then the two brothers might have destroyed the original blueprints so that no one would know the passage existed.”
“I like that theory,” I said. “If I ever get time, I’ll do some homework on the brothers. Maybe I’ll be able to find what brought them to Emberstowne in the first place. I’d love to believe that my home played an important part in history.”
“I’ll bet it did,” he said. “By the way, I don’t mean to pry, but how uncomfortable is it having direct access to your neighbor’s home and—more pointedly—him having access to yours?”
“You’re not the first person to ask me that,” I said. “It’s disconcerting, for sure. The good news is that the metal doors are self-locking. I can’t get into his house and he can’t get into mine. Believe me, that was the first thing I checked after we visited his side.”
“That’s got to be a relief.”
“For the short term, yes. I’ll be looking into a more permanent solution once you’re finished excavating the area. You’re still willing to help with that, right?”
“I deal with papers all day, every day.” He sighed. “Mind you, I firmly believe this is all great stuff. There’s a wealth of information here. But, the opportunity to find pieces of history where the town’s early settlers left them? The opportunity to dig for buried treasure? That’s not to be missed.”
I turned to look at the door. “I’m surprised David Cherk wasn’t more interested. Seeing as how he’s the chief photographer for Emberstowne’s history, it seems like this sort of project would excite him, too.”
“Yeah,” Wes said. “I don’t get it. He’ll come around, though. He gets upset in a flash then settles down pretty quickly. Before you know it, he’ll be at your house—all smiles and sweetness—and you won’t be able to get rid of him.”
“Ooh,” I said with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “I can’t wait.” I checked the time. “I’m sure you have plenty of things you’d rather be doing than hanging out at work after hours,” I said, “but if you wouldn’t mind me taking a quick peek at Marshfield’s floor plans before I go—”
“I keep the historical society open late a couple nights a week. This is one of them, so no worries. And I think we can safely assume that David won’t be back tonight.”
“By the way, I meant to ask you about that jar we saw here the other day.”
Wes carried the scrapbooks across the room and slid them onto a high shelf. Turning to face me, he repeated, “Jar?”
“The one you thought was David Cherk’s developing liquid.”
I watched understanding dawn. “Oh yeah. I remember. What about it?”
“Did he ever say what it really was?”
“I never thought to ask him about it. Maybe you should, next time you see him.”
I gave him a withering look. “Oh sure. That’ll go over well.”
“The thing is, everybody in town knows about your reputation for finding answers when the police can’t. Your tenacity is legendary.”
“Give me a break.”
“I’m serious. I told you before that David is odd, but I don’t think he’s a killer. Still, if he’s taking pains to avoid you, you may want to tread carefully.”
I’d come to the same conclusion myself. “We’re changing the subject, right now. Let’s look at those Marshfield blueprints.”
Wes walked across the entire length of the room again, this time with keys in hand. I followed until he stopped behind a glass case that held an assortment of Marshfield memorabilia.
“Wait,” I said. “The plans have been on display all this time? How did I miss them?” I walked around to the front of the case. “Where are they?”
He bent forward from the waist and unlocked the back of the display. “We keep them in a drawer underneath. There’s too much chance of sun damage otherwise, and besides, blueprints are meant to be pored over. There’s no joy in looking at them through glass.”
He pulled out a set of plans that had to be three times as big as my house’s were. Bound in cracked blue leather, they were at least two feet long by eighteen inches wide.
Wes’s strained voice gave me an idea of how heavy the book must be. “This is one set. Take a look.” He gestured with his eyes as he carried the plans over to the countertop, the only place in the office that was big enough to open it on. “There are separate books for each section of the house and grounds.”
I walked around to the back of the case and crouched to peer in. There were at least five other leather-bound sets of plans inside. “Wow,” I said. “This is like finding hidden treasure.”
“You’ve never seen these?”
I joined him at the counter. “We do have floor plans at Marshfield. Lots of them. But they look nothing like this.”
He opened the cover, sending a quick burst of mustiness up to tickle our noses. “I’m sure your boss, Bennett Marshfield, has a set or two in that mansion of his.”
I leaned over to peek at the drawings. “What part of the house is this?”
He pointed to faint lettering at the top of the page. “This says ENTRANCE HALL. We may have to go through a few of these before we find the one for the basement area where the party was held.”
I felt a pang of guilt. “Am I keeping you from anything?”
He waved a hand at
me. “Not at all. I live for this kind of stuff.” Bending down, he pushed his glasses higher on his nose and began turning the enormous pages, very slowly. His head came up. “Am I keeping you from anything?”
“My cat, Bootsie, is probably waiting for me, but otherwise I’m clear.”
He nodded. “Good. Now, let’s see what we have here.”
It turned out that the first of the Marshfield blueprint books we’d chosen was the right one. “Here,” I said when we were about halfway through it. Little by little, I’d gotten better at deciphering the handwriting on each page, and when we reached the first page of BELOWGROUND, I paid closer attention.
There were schematics of all sorts, and the two of us, heads together over the open book, tried to make sense of it all. The office was silent, save for the buzzing of the overhead fluorescent lights and the gentle turn of pages.
“Hey,” he said. “I’m no expert, but take a look.”
I shifted my attention from reading margin notes to the spot he indicated. “What is that?”
We were open to a page that held the plans for the room we’d used as an auditorium—the room where Leland Keay had died. Wes pointed to a rectangle set in the narrowest part of the room. From what I could tell, it would have been positioned behind the temporary stage Cherk had set up.
“I don’t know,” he said very slowly. His finger traced along the plan to the outer margin, where a scissor-like contraption was drawn, twice, from different angles. Reminding me a lot of an oversized, old-fashioned car jack, it was attached to a rectangular platform in both pictures. One showed the scissor mechanism extended, the other showed it condensed.
“It says WOOD ELEVATOR,” I said.
“A wood elevator?” Wes repeated. As though we could read each other’s minds, we straightened and looked at each other. Wood elevators were sometimes installed in the homes of the very well off so that servants wouldn’t be required to lug fireplace timber in from outside. It saved the servants from having to brave the weather whenever replenishment was required, and it saved the wealthy residents from having to witness the task as it was being completed.
Marshfield had several wood elevators that I knew of. There was a large one in the banquet hall, and others scattered in first-floor rooms. Marshfield had far more basement space than we’d used for the party and the wood for these other elevators was loaded from those locations.
Such elevators weren’t precisely the same as secret passages or hidden rooms, but this—if it existed in the room itself and not just on paper—would provide access to the auditorium in a way no one had known about. Not only that, but because supplies were to be loaded from below, that suggested there was another level beneath the auditorium. One I was unaware of.
“Oh my gosh,” I said as the implications became obvious.
“Bennett didn’t know this existed?”
“Apparently not. Or he forgot. If it fell out of use when he was young, he may have never even known it was there.”
There were additional pages showing the device from every angle. Clearly, this drawing would have been instrumental to the builder, if the mechanism had been built, that is.
Wes kept shaking his head. “You know what this means, right?”
“That there might be another way in, yes,” I said. “But who could have known about it?” I thought about the workers at Marshfield. We’d had a staff meeting the day after the murder and we’d asked them all to come forward with any leads. No one had.
“Maybe no one did,” Wes said. “Maybe this is a coincidence.”
In my heart, I didn’t believe it was. My brain was reeling with possibilities. “I’ll have to check with Bennett to see if he knows where Marshfield’s plans are kept. Someone may have accessed them right under our noses. Or—” I pulled my hair high atop my head as I thought of another possibility. “You said that David Cherk had been studying these recently.”
Wes blinked slowly. Nodded. “Yeah, he has.”
“I have to let Flynn know about this.”
Wes stared out the door. “Do you really think David is guilty?”
I held up my hands. “Has anyone else been in to study these plans?”
He shook his head. Then said, “Wait.”
I waited.
“Someone else has been studying these.” His eyes were wide, as though he didn’t believe it.
“Who?”
“Joyce Swedburg,” he said, looking as surprised to say her name as I was to hear it. “She came in several times and requested these. Now that I think about it, the fact that she, or David, had this book out last is probably why it was on top. Why it was the first one we pulled out.”
Breathless, I said aloud what I knew we were both thinking. “That means Joyce Swedburg could have stolen into the party, after all. Joyce may have killed Keay.”
Chapter 21
Bennett, Frances, and I gathered in the party room of Marshfield’s basement the next morning. The space, which had been so bright and glittering the night of the fund-raiser, was now bare and quiet. Even though there were only three of us here at the moment, the patter of our steps echoed in the naked space as we made our way into the auditorium.
I’d asked Wes if I could borrow the blueprints and he’d been happy to oblige. The giant books were, in essence, binders. Working carefully last night, we’d managed to extricate the important pages from the heavy leather volumes. We’d replace them later. Pointing at them now, I said, “Take a look here.”
Bennett stood over my left shoulder, Frances my right. Having donned her glasses, she held them low on her nose, using the fingers of her right hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s a bunch of lines.”
Bennett ignored her. “I see,” he said, drawing a finger along the rectangle’s perimeter. “This looks like it was part of the original plans, but I have no recollection of it being used, and certainly no knowledge of it even being here.”
Frances scoffed as she stepped away. “Look at this place. It’s solid.” She stamped a heel on the ground as though to emphasize her point. The fact that she wore soft-soled shoes lessened the impact.
“Starting without me? Why am I not surprised?”
We all turned at the sound of Flynn’s voice.
“Yes, we’re investigating this all by ourselves,” I answered in kind. “That’s exactly why I asked you to come down here this morning. So you could catch us in the act.”
“I wouldn’t put it past you,” he said. With a particularly malevolent glare at Frances, he added, “Any of you.”
“Now that we’ve gotten our day’s quota of insults in, can we get started?” I asked.
Flynn gave a bony shrug, as though nothing I could say would ever matter to him. “What, exactly, are we looking at here?”
I explained what Wes and I had found in the blueprints the prior evening. “It’s a wood elevator,” I said. “A platform designed to be lowered, loaded with wood, and then raised again. The top would blend in with the floor well enough for it not to be noticed. Most of the wood elevators installed in mansions are set up to bring their supplies to living rooms, dining rooms, and studies. Having one in the basement is a bit unusual.”
“Skip the history lesson,” he said. “Where is it?”
“We haven’t found it yet,” I said. “We waited for you to show up. Remember?”
I hated the fact that Flynn and I were at each other’s throats nonstop. Still, he was eager to solve this murder and he’d brought information to me even when he didn’t have to. I wasn’t fooled into believing he viewed me as an equal. It served his purposes to keep me in the loop, but I appreciated the inclusion nonetheless.
“Let’s see.” He held his hand out and I gave him the blueprints, expecting him to ask for clarification. After a few moments of study, however, he surprised me by looking up and saying
, “If this apparatus is still in place and functional, this may be exactly the lead we’ve been looking for.”
“I’m glad you agree,” I said, relieved that he hadn’t pooh-poohed my contribution the way he normally did.
He pointed downward. “What’s under here?”
Bennett’s hands opened then spread, as though he were trying to lift the answers from the ground beneath. “When Grace called me to arrange this meeting, I had my butler, Theo, summon the engineering staff in the entrance hall. I asked them, point-blank, if they were aware of any space, or access, beneath this part of the basement.”
“And?” Flynn asked.
Bennett held up both index fingers and tilted slightly to address the young detective. “We have other sections of the home with multiple subbasements, some of which are key to proper maintenance, and some of which are never used anymore. This section, however, has no other access that they know of.”
Perhaps reacting to the question that he knew Flynn would ask next, Bennett continued, “The engineering team consists of one director, two managers, and a staff of twenty. I spoke to the three in charge. I trust these individuals, and they trust their subordinates. They have, however, assured me that they will question each and every employee to find out what he or she might know.”
Flynn took in the information. “Have you asked them to search for the access point?”
Bennett shook his head. “One thing I’ve learned from you, Detective Flynn, is that crime scenes must be protected so that any evidence they possess can be preserved and processed correctly. My staff is available to assist if you need them, but Grace and I believed that the investigation would be better served with you in charge.”
Flynn’s brows jumped fractionally. He cleared his throat and reclaimed his scowling demeanor. “That was good thinking.”
“I would suggest,” Bennett said, “that we attempt to locate this wood elevator from in here. I am utterly stumped as to where to search for access to an underground area beneath this room.”