What I remembered, but hadn’t been able to verify, was a graduating class that was about 50 percent Jewish and maybe 30 percent Catholic. The rest of us were affiliated with various Protestant denominations. Why did I think that? Because school always closed for the Jewish holidays—half the class, we used to say, would have been absent anyway. I also had a vivid memory of big gray marks on every Catholic forehead on Ash Wednesday. Don’t get me wrong. Religious differences weren’t any big deal in my youth. They were just a fact of life in Sullivan County in the 1960s. Another was that faith was a bigger part of one’s identity than race or ethnic origin.
My musings ceased when I reached the premises of Chen and Sons, located above a hardware store. Belatedly, I wondered if they were open on Saturday, but the door was unlocked and there were lights showing. I stepped into a tiny outer office crowded with file cabinets and storage units for house plans.
Two men stood beside a drafting table, deep in conversation over a set of blueprints. They looked up at the sound of the door opening. I had the distinct impression that they didn’t get a lot of walk-in business. That made sense. When I’d contacted Chen and Sons the previous year, I’d done so by phone. I recognized the younger man as George Chen. He was the one who’d come to the house to give me an estimate.
“Hey, I remember you,” he said. “Ms. Lincoln on Wedemeyer Terrace, right? We bid on a job to put on a new roof for you.”
“You have a good memory.” It didn’t seem to bother him that Chen and Sons had not been awarded the contract. “Now I’m thinking of remodeling my attic.”
That wasn’t entirely a lie. I just didn’t plan to hire anyone to help me redecorate those two big upstairs rooms.
I’d tentatively identified the other man even before he stepped forward to introduce himself as John Chen. I put his age at early sixties, but his hair was still as black as his son’s and the bright-eyed, intelligent, friendly look in his dark eyes mirrored the younger man’s expression. He was of medium height and stocky build and the big hand that shook mine was laced with scars. I imagine nicks and scrapes are an occupational hazard for anyone in the building trades.
“I’m Mikki Lincoln. Nice to meet you.”
He released my hand and gestured toward the back of the room. “If you’ll come with me, I’ll check the schedule, but I expect someone will be available to take a look in the early part of next week.”
I followed him into a closet-sized space containing more file cabinets, two chairs, and a desk where a computer monitor took up most of the available space. The faint aroma of lemon-scented furniture polish hung in the air.
Still standing, Chen tapped a few keys and studied the screen. I sat down and cleared my throat.
“I believe you were the one who walled up the fireplace in my house.”
“Wedemeyer Terrace?” He hesitated, then said, “That was a long time ago.”
“Yes. It was well before I bought the house. But I remember that fireplace from when my parents owned the place. I was wondering—would it be possible to open it up again?”
Although I hadn’t previously considered the possibility of a working fireplace, it wasn’t a bad idea. We’d always had a wood stove for backup heating when I lived in Maine. It would be pleasant to sit before the hearth on cold winter days, and I’ve always loved the smell of burning applewood.
Again he paused before answering. “I’ll have to look it up in my files. See how much we removed.”
I expected him to riffle through a file cabinet or call up the information on his computer. Instead, he seated himself behind his desk and stared at me.
His scrutiny wasn’t at all frightening, but it did unnerve me a little. It was as if he saw right through my flimsy excuse for asking about fireplaces. Acute embarrassment had me focusing my gaze on my hands where they rested uneasily in my lap. Why on earth had I thought I could barge in here and discover something Detective Hazlett had not?
I felt my face warm to an uncomfortable degree and began to fidget. The silence between us stretched until I could no longer stop myself from blurting out a question.
“Have you been questioned about the fireplace you closed in at the historical society?”
“Talking to the police was unavoidable.”
I risked a glance at his face, but his expression was closed and told me nothing.
“I realize you have no reason to extend the same courtesy to me, but I was there when the wall collapsed and shortly afterward I discovered that you were the one who walled up both that hearth and mine.”
After another long pause, he responded in a strained voice. “I can assure you, Ms. Lincoln, that your wall is structurally sound. Similar jobs I undertook after the one at the historical society were properly done.”
My head snapped up and I stared at him. “Are you telling me that wall wasn’t sound?”
His grimace was answer enough.
“I think you’d better explain yourself, Mr. Chen.”
He shrugged. “There isn’t much to tell. The historical society job was the first time I ever closed in a fireplace. It was a rush job, too. I didn’t know I was supposed to provide ventilation to the chimney space. As a result, moisture built up and caused damp areas, eventually affecting the entire wall.” He cracked a wry, self-conscious smile. “To be honest, I’m surprised there wasn’t a serious problem much sooner. You have no need to worry, though. By the time I did the work at your house, I was well aware that I needed to build in what’s called an air brick. That’s—”
“A serious problem?” I interrupted. “Like finding a body in the chimney?”
Intense emotion flashed in his eyes, but it was gone so quickly that I couldn’t tell if it had been anger, frustration, or something else. The temperature in the office seemed to drop a good thirty degrees.
“I can assure you, Ms. Lincoln, that there is nothing similar hidden behind your wall, but if you want it taken down to make certain, Chen and Sons will be happy to oblige.”
I stood, prepared to leave. “That won’t be necessary.” I’d insulted him, but as the saying goes, in for a penny, in for a pound. “How could you have worked that close to a dead body and not notice the smell?”
He sighed deeply, his expression bleak. “Don’t you think I’ve been wondering about that myself? The only answer I can come up with is that the poor soul must have been pushed well up into the chimney and secured there right before I bricked in the opening. I plastered over the face of the bricks, then put up Sheetrock. The final step was paneling and skirting board. The very next night they performed the bicentennial pageant in that room. No one noticed any foul odors then, either.”
And afterward, I thought, there was probably a lengthy delay before they started to erect displays in that space, time enough for the stench to dissipate.
“I’m sorry to have troubled you,” I said. “I hope that someday we will all know what really happened.”
“On that we can agree.” He rose to walk me out. On the threshold, he paused, a frown creasing his forehead. “You say you were there when that wall collapsed?”
“I was.”
“May I impose upon you to tell me what you observed?”
“There was debris everywhere. Chunks of wallboard. Sheetrock?”
He nodded.
“Some bricks. A lot of dust. I think the paneling may already have been removed. At first the remains looked like a person, as if someone had been knocked unconscious when the wall came down.”
He looked puzzled. “Not bones?”
I shook my head. “No. Some parts were mummified. You see, the entire body was wrapped in heavy-duty plastic held together with duct tape.”
He gave a bark of laughter, although there was no humor in it. “There’s your answer, then. The plastic kept the smell from reaching me. No wonder I never knew the body was there.”
Chapter 14
The building that housed Chen and Sons was only a block away from O’Day Antiques. Since I
was so close, and since I’d been meaning to stop by ever since I realized Tom and Marie owned the place, I turned my steps in that direction. Besides, I wanted to know what they thought of my newly cleared backyard. The arborist had finished the job late the previous afternoon.
The front windows contained a display of dolls and teddy bears. Most of them looked very old indeed. Some were in excellent condition. Others appeared, for lack of a better description, to have been well loved by their previous owners.
Marie caught sight of me while I was still on the sidewalk and beckoned to me from the other side of the glass. “Tom,” she called as soon as I set foot inside. “Mikki Lincoln is here.”
“Be right out,” came his booming voice from somewhere in the back.
The shop was crowded with treasures and when I inhaled I caught a whiff of the distinctive smells I always associate with old wood, old cloth, and old books. I read somewhere, quite possibly in an online meme, that the aroma given off by old books—what most people identify as a combination of grass, vanilla, and almonds—is actually the smell of the chemicals released when paper, ink, and glue degrade. Of course, some old books just stink, especially if they’re been exposed to dampness or once belonged to a heavy smoker.
A primitive painting of a girl with a cat caught my eye. How could it not? The cat was a calico. I stepped closer to examine it and beat a hasty retreat when I caught a glimpse of the price tag.
Tom appeared, beaming, behind the sales counter. “Good job on the trees,” he said.
“Yes, it does look much better,” Marie agreed.
I smiled back at them, but I was thinking that they’d better be pleased. Ever since I moved in next door to them, they’d been nagging me to do something about the virtual forest behind my house.
“I love the selection you have here,” I said, offering a compliment in return.
“Feel free to browse,” Marie said.
“Thanks. I’ll just poke around a bit. I’m not really looking to buy anything today.” And, I added silently, I probably can’t afford your prices.
Despite my good intentions, I soon spotted something in a back corner of the shop that intrigued me. Suspecting what the large, plain case contained, I reached out and opened it. My guess was confirmed. Inside was an antique—I use the term lightly—typewriter.
“That’s one serious machine,” I murmured.
Tom laughed. “An Olympia. They don’t make them like this anymore.”
“On the other hand, back in the day, every office had dozens of them.”
“And most of them went on the scrap heap when something better came along. I never learned to use one myself.”
Of course not, I thought. Tom was considerably my junior, but I was willing to bet that the personal typing class when he was in high school had been almost exclusively a girls’ club. It certainly had been in my day.
“I had an old Smith Corona portable that I took to college with me back in the 1960s,” I said. “I earned extra money by typing other people’s papers.”
“You must have been good at it.”
I waggled one hand back and forth. “Not fast and not even terribly accurate, but I knew how to use correction fluid to fix my mistakes.”
“I understand,” Tom said, “that there are typing clubs in some of the bigger cities. Apparently, people who don’t much care for computers go there to meet other like-minded souls.”
“How interesting.”
I was only being polite. I have many fond memories of life a half century ago, but composing on a typewriter is not one of them. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know my own writing has been greatly improved by technology. In the old days, if I realized there was a better way to express something I’d written on page one of a long document, I would resist changing it because, if I did, I’d have to retype the whole darned thing. These days it’s much easier to add text and move things around, and it’s blessedly simple to correct spelling and grammar mistakes. To be perfectly honest, if we were still using typewriters, I wouldn’t be a freelance editor.
“We’ve had this item for a long time,” Tom said. “If you’re interested, I can give you a good price.”
I started to decline the offer, but he was still talking.
“The only thing wrong with it is one key that strikes a little above the line.” He indicated the A.
I stared at the machine. “Upper or lower case? Or both?”
“Upper.”
Although I felt certain this had to be a coincidence, it did seem odd that Tom’s typewriter had the same wonky key as the one on which Grace Yarrow had typed her manuscript. I was intrigued enough to ask where the machine had come from.
Tom hesitated.
“Don’t worry,” I said after an awkward moment. “I won’t care if you tell me you got it at a yard sale for a pittance. I’m just curious.”
“If I remember correctly, it came from an estate auction, although not everything in those sales always originates in the same place. It was quite a few years ago. I could look it up if it’s important, but our records won’t have much beyond the date of the transaction and how much we paid for it.”
“So there’s no way to trace its original owner?”
“Why would you want to?” He looked genuinely puzzled. “It’s critical to know the provenance of a Ming vase or a painting by one of the old masters, but this is just an old typewriter.”
“A typewriter you’re selling as an antique,” I reminded him. I hadn’t dared look at the price tag attached to the handle of the case.
“The word is vintage, and this isn’t one of the cheap models everybody and his brother used to own. You can find those for twenty dollars or less, but this is a precision instrument.”
“With a wonky key. Do you have a piece of paper?”
After a bit of hunting, he came up with a sheet of white, twenty-weight, all-purpose paper plucked out of the tray of the printer in his office. I rolled it into place and typed “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” That sentence supposedly uses all the letters of the alphabet—I’ve never actually checked to see if it does—and is universally used to test how well the keys on a typewriter work. I typed the words a second time with all caps. The effort reminded me, once again, of how much easier it is to work on a computer keyboard.
It also convinced me that this typewriter was the one Grace Yarrow used to write the script for the bicentennial pageant. Whether it had belonged to the historical society or to Grace herself, it suddenly seemed important to gain possession of it.
“How much?”
Tom took off his glasses and made a production out of cleaning them with a pristine white handkerchief while he considered how to answer me. He held the spectacles up to the light, frowned, breathed on the right lens, and swiped at it a second time with the cloth. Finally satisfied, he returned the spectacles to the bridge of his nose, looked down at me through them, and smiled.
“For you, a hundred and fifty dollars.”
I couldn’t hold back a grimace. “Too rich for my blood, but I’ll go as high as seventy-five.”
We settled on a hundred if he’d deliver it. No way could I carry something that heavy home with me. I’d collapse under the weight before I was halfway up the first hill.
The triumphant grin splitting my face when I walked out of the shop faded fast. What on earth had come over me? I needed an old manual typewriter like I needed a hole in the head. So what if it might have been used by Grace Yarrow? It wasn’t as if the thing could talk.
By the time I reached home, I was overheated, out of breath, and out of patience with myself. I had accomplished exactly nothing and taken way too much time away from my work. If John Chen was a murderer, I’d eat my hat. And when the typewriter arrived, it was going straight into storage in the attic.
Chapter 15
“Do you mind carrying it upstairs for me?” I asked Tom when he and Marie brought the typewriter that evening.
“No
problem.” He hoisted it as if it weighed nothing at all.
I went up first, pausing in the upstairs hall when Marie, who’d been in the house when the previous owners lived in it, remarked on the changes I’d made. Tom, taking it for granted that I wanted the typewriter in my office, went ahead and deposited it on my desk while I was distracted. I didn’t bother to correct him, in part because Marie had gone to look out the window, her body language all but shouting that there was something she didn’t like about my backyard.
“The forest has been felled.” If I sounded a trifle defensive, it was understandable. They were the ones who’d been after me for months to get rid of those trees.
“It is an improvement.”
Hearing a but coming, I rushed into speech. “I asked the arborist to leave the big maple to provide a bit of shade late in the day.”
My house faces east and I often work in my west-facing office in the afternoon. Keeping that tree meant there would be only a few times of year when I’d have to pull my shades against the glare.
Tom removed his glasses and went through his polishing routine while Marie continued to stare at the scene beyond my window. Clearly, something was bothering them, but I had no clue what it could be. I wished they’d just spit it out. I hate waiting for the other shoe to drop. I was barely able to stop myself from responding to Tom’s delaying tactic with a visual display of my own, signaling “impatience” by crossing my arms, tapping one foot, and glaring at the two of them.
“We never realized before that the houses up there on the hill were so close to us.” With a jerk of his head, he directed my attention to the far side of my property line.
What will eventually be green lawn is far from level. There’s a flat area right outside my back door, but then the terrain rises steadily. A steep bit sweeps past the other tree I’d insisted upon saving, a tall spruce that might have been around when I was a child. Still climbing, but more gradually, my backyard stretches up to a sort of no-man’s land where a thicket of saplings and underbrush marks the edge of my lot. Before the arborist did his bit, the houses on Champlain Street hadn’t been visible and their view of my property and the O’Day lot had been blocked.
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