Privy to the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  I answered him. “We pulled the pieces out of what we think was an old privy beneath the Society. As you can no doubt tell, the original object was broken when we found it.”

  “Noted. How old’s that building?”

  “The current building opened in 1910, but the construction stopped in 1907. There was an earlier mansion there before it. We figure the privy hole is from the mansion’s era.”

  “This stuff’s definitely older than 1910. You two want the quick and dirty version?”

  Marty and I both nodded, so Henry went on. “Looks like brass hardware from the later eighteenth century, and the screws are original and match, so to me that implies the hardware was attached to the original wooden object. You’re assuming the chunks of wood were all part of that piece?”

  “Yeah, seems logical, since they were found together,” Marty said. “What was it?”

  “Imported mahogany. As if you couldn’t tell, Auntie M.”

  “You know I hate that name,” Marty growled. “Yeah, that’s what I figured. Any other analyses we should be thinking about?”

  “If this stuff was in a privy, the privy already hadn’t been used for a long time when it went in. No signs of, uh, liquid damage. Also, it looks like the old wood was brittle enough to shatter in the fall. How’d you find it, anyway?” He looked at me.

  “We’re renovating parts of the building,” I answered. “The privy was in the basement, under a lot of other stuff.”

  Henry nodded. “So it’s old furniture, but dumped sometime before 1907. Looks like it might have been a box, rather than something larger, if this is all you found. You’ve got the one handle here—were there more?”

  Marty and I exchanged glances. “There might have been one more,” I said cautiously.

  Henry nodded but didn’t comment. Then he turned to Marty. “Do you have another question, Aunt Martha?” He looked steadily at her, his expression serious.

  “You think it is?” Marty asked him, without answering his question.

  “I do,” he answered, holding her gaze. Marty nodded once.

  They’d lost me. “Is what? Will you two explain what you’re talking about, please?”

  Marty gave Henry a warning nod. “I want to check one more thing. Nell, Let’s go catch a cab. Henry, you hang on to this stuff—we’ll collect it later.”

  “You want me to run other tests?”

  “Sure, fine,” Marty said. “See what you can find.”

  “Am I getting paid for this?” Henry grinned.

  “Maybe. At least in undying gratitude and a couple of free meals.”

  “Just checking. Give me a day or two to crank up my machines.”

  “Sounds good, Henry. Nice to see you. You’ve got my number,” Marty said.

  “Nice to meet you, Henry, and thanks,” I called out, as Marty all but dragged me out the front door and flagged down a cab. “All right, Marty, where are we going now?”

  “The Art Museum.”

  That made no sense to me, but Marty usually had a reason for whatever she did, so I shut up and watched the city roll by. When we climbed out of the cab at the museum, Marty just said, “Come on.” I followed.

  She stopped long enough to throw some bills at the admissions desk, then set off for the second floor, and I trailed behind. She looped around to one of the side wings without looking at anything else, and halfway toward the back, she stopped abruptly, and I nearly ran into her.

  “Look,” she said. She pointed to a display of furniture and related items arrayed along one wall.

  I paused long enough to read one of the labels and realized she’d brought me to the Terwilliger collection of antique furniture and paintings. I followed her finger and looked at a handsome table with drawers. And the drawers had pulls with escutcheons. And to my eye, they all looked a heck of a lot like the one we’d pulled out of the privy.

  I looked at Marty. “They’re the same?”

  She nodded. “I think so.”

  That made no sense, yet it made perfect sense. And opened up a whole new can of worms.

  CHAPTER 10

  It was easy to see that Marty was troubled, although it wasn’t clear to me why. “Marty, you think that the escutcheon we found in the pit, and most likely the one that Carnell Scruggs found, came from a piece of furniture from the Terwilliger family?” I recalled then that James had mentioned something about a murky family history with that furniture, but I didn’t see where our splinters fit in the picture.

  Marty gave me a one-word reply. “Yes.”

  “And Henry can do tests that will confirm that?” I was reminded that Henry had held on to our “evidence” and Detective Hrivnak probably wouldn’t be happy about that. But she wouldn’t know unless and until I told her, which I wanted to delay until I had gotten more out of Marty.

  “Probably.”

  Since it was still before the rush hour, we had no trouble finding a cab back to the Society. It was a silent ride. We went into the Society and took the elevator up, still without speaking. Outside my office I greeted Eric. “Any messages? Or anything else I need to deal with?” I was afraid to ask if there had been anything new from Detective Hrivnak.

  “No, ma’am,” Eric said, smiling. “Nice and quiet. Of course, it’s Friday, so maybe people don’t want to start something right now.”

  Would a murder investigation wait until Monday? But then, Hrivnak didn’t know we might have a clue. Or not. I still didn’t know what Marty was thinking. “Thanks, Eric.”

  I led Marty into my office, closing the door, and she flopped into a chair while I went around the desk and sat down. “Okay, Marty—talk to me.”

  She stared at me for several seconds, her expression bleak. “Like I said, I’m pretty sure the brass pieces came from a piece of Terwilliger furniture.”

  “I kind of guessed that, when I saw those pieces of furniture at the museum. So?”

  “I think they’re related to my family. My grandfather, probably.”

  Well, that didn’t exactly clear things up for me. “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  I studied her. I had known Martha Terwilliger for a while now, under some pretty intense circumstances. I knew she was honest, often to the point of bluntness. And I knew she cared about the whole Terwilliger family, past and present, and valued their long association with the Society. If the brass escutcheon was what she thought it was, it could possibly link her family to a modern-day death, which might even be a murder. I could see why she would be upset—but I needed more information to make sense of it. “What can you tell me? And why do you think the brass bits are connected to the Terwilligers?”

  Marty avoided my eyes. “I don’t really know anything. If I had to guess, I’d say it has something to do with the Terwilliger Collection at the Society.”

  I was beginning to feel an urge to shake Marty, rather than trying to pull information from her bit by bit. “But we don’t have any Terwilliger furniture here, you know.”

  “Not now.” She stood up abruptly and headed for the door. “Look, I have to think this through on my own.”

  I stood up as well. “Marty, wait! There’s a police investigation involved. You can’t just walk away now, not if you think you know something.”

  She stopped and turned to face me. “How about if I promise you that I don’t know anything that has anything to do with the death of that man?”

  I was troubled by her repeated emphasis on what she did or didn’t “know’; her word choice kind of hinted at evasion. But Marty was also deeply committed to her family connections. I wondered where those intersected. But I could play the same game. “Marty, can you say that not telling me what you guess right now will not affect finding the killer, nor will it put anyone or anything at risk?” Wow, I’d just strung together a very awkward sentence.
But Marty knew what I meant.

  “I will say that this may be an issue that goes back many years, and I’m not sure what that means for the present. Give me one night, Nell. Let me get my head on straight about this, and I’ll fill you in tomorrow, as much as I can.”

  “What about James? You said he might get sucked in.” Although I still had no clue how or why, other than his own family connection to the Terwilligers. This whole discussion was making me increasingly uncomfortable.

  Marty shrugged. “I can’t stop you from talking to him.”

  “Marty!” I protested. “That’s not an answer.”

  “I’m not going to tell you to hide anything from James. But I’m not asking for his help. I’m going home.”

  Without waiting for my reply, she turned on her heel and left. I was bewildered and confused and a bit pissed off that she was dragging me around investigating whatever it was that she wouldn’t tell me about. It put me in a very awkward position, both with the Society and with James, not to mention the police, who still didn’t know about the second escutcheon. If this problem had to do with the Society’s collections, I had some legal responsibility to look into it—although I wasn’t sure what the statute of limitations might be for a long-past event, but that’s why we kept a law firm on retainer. If it somehow had to do with the extended Terwilliger family, they were inextricably intertwined with the Society, so I couldn’t just dismiss the issue. And James was a part of that family, and close to Marty. And now close to me. If I had to draw a diagram of the current situation, everything would intersect with James and me. How could I not tell him?

  While I was still trying to work things out in my head, the phone on Eric’s desk rang, and after picking it up he put a hand over the receiver and said, “Agent Morrison for you.”

  Great, now James is reading minds over a distance of several city blocks. I picked up. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “You want a ride home?”

  I looked at my watch. How could it possibly be after five already? “Sure. I’m ready to go.”

  “Be there in ten.” He hung up.

  So I had ten minutes to figure out how to explain to him what I didn’t understand myself.

  I met him outside of the building when he pulled up, and slid into the passenger seat. “You know, I’m getting spoiled by all this door-to-door service.”

  “My pleasure. Besides, it probably won’t last—something always comes up and our schedules will get crazy.”

  “Are there crime seasons in the FBI? Like more in summer, fewer in winter?” I asked as he threaded the car through the city streets.

  “With street crime, maybe, but white-collar crime? Not so much. By the way, I got a rather cryptic message from Marty, just before I left. She said, ‘Tell Nell it’s okay to talk to you about it.’ Does that make sense to you?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. It can wait until we get home. Can we get takeout?”

  “Sure. What flavor?”

  We bickered cheerfully about what kind of food to get. We were still learning about our new neighborhood, which offered a range of options, most of them very good. We settled on a Thai place and even found parking nearby. I ran in and ordered while James sat in the car, and I emerged ten minutes later with a couple of bags of food that smelled heavenly. “Home, James!” I said brightly when I got into the car, then asked rhetorically, “Where the heck does that phrase come from, anyway?”

  “To the best of my knowledge, it was the title of an old silent film—a romantic comedy where the guy masquerades as a chauffeur.”

  I gave him a look. “Why on earth do you know that?”

  “It’s not exactly the first time I’ve heard the phrase, you know.”

  We arrived home in mutually happy moods, changed into grubby clothes with lightning speed, and settled ourselves at the kitchen table and dove into the Thai food. Our pace of consumption had finally slowed when James asked, “So tell me, what was Marty’s message all about?”

  I took a breath before beginning. “Marty thinks she may know something that may be somehow distantly connected to the death of that man outside the Society. But she isn’t sure, and she doesn’t think she has enough to share with the police, or even with me. It may be clearer to you if I tell you what we did today, and when Marty called you she was giving me permission to share. But you and I also talked about setting boundaries between us.”

  “You mean, keeping the personal and the professional separate?”

  “Kind of. I don’t want to be the type of woman who goes running to a big strong man every time she has a problem.”

  His mouth twitched with amusement. “However, your problems do seem to involve major crimes rather often. That’s not something the average citizen should be able to handle, and in fact, I am an official crime solver.”

  I burst out laughing. “Okay, okay! But I’m not asking for your help, unless it’s to keep me on track or tell me if I’m missing something. Does that work for you?”

  “It does. On a case-by-case basis, maybe.”

  “Fair enough. So here’s what’s going on.” I launched into a summary of the day’s events, starting with Hrivnak’s visit and the information she had imparted, then the sorting through the trash from the pit with my staff, to the discovery of the brass fittings and pieces of fractured mahogany, to the visits to Henry Phinney and the Art Museum, ending with Marty’s reluctance to voice whatever it was she seemed to suspect. James listened silently until I was finished. “Well?” I asked.

  “When most people ask, ‘How was your day?’ they don’t expect anything like this,” he said wryly. “Where do you want me to start?”

  “Well, after thinking about it for a couple of hours, and then telling the story out loud, I’m guessing that there’s some deep, dark, shameful secret that involves the furniture of some departed Terwilligers. Does that ring any bells with you?”

  “I’ll have to think about it. You know I’m not exactly tight with the extended family, right?”

  “I’ve gotten that impression. Do you have a problem with them, singly or collectively?”

  “No, not exactly. A number of them, including my parents, were rather surprised when I chose to work for the FBI, but they’re polite about it. I simply don’t see much of any of them, other than Marty.”

  “You told me earlier that the Terwilliger furniture was valuable.”

  “It is, when it comes up for public sale, which is pretty rare.”

  “But it wouldn’t have been valuable around 1900, right?”

  “No, nowhere near the current value, which these days can run into the millions—if you can find any Terwilliger pieces at all. So if what was found in that pit in the basement of the Society was in fact a piece that belonged to the Terwilliger family, nobody would have thought it was a treasure back then—it was just a box.”

  I gave a start. “A box. Of course! That’s what Henry said, and now it makes sense. Handles, hinges, but not a lot of wood. It would have fit easily into the pit—not like a chair or a dresser, say. And a box could have had something in it. But what?”

  “You didn’t find anything else interesting among the trash?” James asked.

  “Not really. Bits of glass, china. I won’t say we reached the level of an archeological dig, but we looked at what little there was.”

  “Maybe there was nothing in the box,” James said slowly. “If it was a box. Maybe that was the point—there was something removed from the box, and whoever removed it didn’t want people to know it was gone, so he—or she—pitched it in that convenient hole.”

  I considered what James had said. “That would mean that we now have to look for something that’s missing, but we don’t know what. It’s smaller than a bread box, anyway. So now we’re looking for something that maybe was in the box, which was small enough to fit into the pit, which means that whatever was
in it was smaller still. It may have been there before 1907 and been removed. It may still have been there this week, when Carnell Scruggs or somebody else removed it. Or it’s still lying at the bottom of the pit. And it may connect somehow to the Terwilliger family. And somebody may have thought it was worth killing Scruggs to keep it secret. Does that about cover it?”

  “More or less. I’m going to hazard a guess that Marty has some ideas about that.”

  “I think you’re right. She was acting awfully odd today.” I stood up and started clearing our plates from the table. “Well, it’s useless to speculate without additional evidence. Thinking of furniture, are we going looking for some tomorrow?” I was beginning to sound like a nag, but we really needed some more pieces.

  “Sure. Where?” James replied amiably.

  “I have no idea. I’ve never actually gone furniture shopping in my life, except for a bed or two. All the rest I inherited, or picked up here and there, or someone dumped it on me. Do we go to a furniture store? Flea markets? I’m clueless.”

  “What about Lambertville, in New Jersey?”

  “I’ve heard the name. Why? What’s in Lambertville?”

  “They have a lot of antique shops there, and even an auction house. Kind of one-stop shopping. It would be a good place to start, and it’s a nice excursion.”

  “Oh, goodie—a road trip. Sounds perfect.”

  James and I were still experimenting with weekends. Recently I’d been reminded of that song from Camelot, “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” While we weren’t exactly King Arthur and Guinevere, we were kind of at a loss when it came to doing ordinary things together to fill our weekends. Neither of us was obsessed by housework, so we sort of did what we had to and then closed the blinds so we wouldn’t notice the rest. Nor was either of us much of a tinkerer, so we didn’t take on DIY repair projects or pursue elaborate hobbies. James did not tie flies; I did not knit. And though our careers were important, we weren’t serious workaholics, either.