1 News from Dead Mule Swamp

by Joan H. Young

  I skipped over several cases. “I’d love to look at everything in detail, but I guess I’ll just look at a few things today,” I apologized.

  “I understand,” Cora said.

  In the far corner was a bedroom set, arranged so as to create the room, even though there were no walls. It was roped off with green velvet strung through brass posts, reminiscent of an old movie theater. The rope had a tag attached. “Starlight Movie Theater, 1916-1955;” I had been right about its source. The antique bed had tall head and foot boards. A matching washstand and bureau were placed against opposite “walls.” Men’s clothing had been laid over a valet chair, and a silver-topped, dark walking stick leaned against it. Books filled a case near the bureau. Facing me, just inside the velvet rope was a placard on a stand bearing the picture of a man with sideburns and a full beard.

  The Honorable Judge Reuben Pierce Oldfield. This is his own bed, in which he was shot to death by Zeke Bradley, November 23, 1924. Judge Oldfield had recently sentenced Zeke’s wife, Nora, to the state penitentiary for repeated thefts from Vogel’s General Store. Zeke’s rationale was that no gentleman could send a lady to prison. He seemed to believe that if he were also sent to prison he would be allowed to stay with his wife. It was a sad week for Forest County.

  I looked at Cora, and she was definitely beaming. I suspected that not many people got to see the results of all her careful efforts.

  “Well! You want to find that paper, not gawk at all my silly labels. I know it doesn’t mean much to you, but local folks remember those events. Most residents here are related to the people in more than one of these displays.”

  Looking at all of this local history made me realize again how much of an outsider I was, but even so, I was sure that Vogel’s General Store had been owned by an ancestor of Adele, and I already felt a connection because of my friendship with her.

  Chapter 18

  Cora had been following me around—enjoying my pleasure in her hard work. But now she headed for some shelves ranged along the other long wall. The cases appeared to be custom built, and they were filled with thin, tan boxes with metal-reinforced corners. Each was obviously the size of a flat newspaper. Although there were a lot of them, it didn’t look possible that they could hold copies of every Cherry Hill paper printed since 1876. Not surprisingly, each exposed end had a label affixed. It looked as if some had layers of labels.

  “I don’t have complete archives,” Cora explained. I’ve just been collecting issues whenever I can get my hands on them. The recent ones are no problem. I’m only missing a couple of papers since 1954. That was the year of the fire, you know.”

  I nodded.

  “That year, I was shocked into making sure I had a complete set. They have all of these at the library, and the paper office, too. But the fire reminded me how easily one whole collection can disappear. It’s also because of the fire that the Herald became a weekly.”

  “1954! How old were you then?”

  “Oh, I was ten. My collection of old ‘stuff’ was already fairly extensive, but I hadn’t figured out a very good way to keep track of it. My mother was surprisingly supportive of my compulsive behavior. She bought me a set of drawers to hold four-by-six inch cards for my next birthday, several packets of cards, small numbered stickers, and a set of colored pens. I became obsessed with filling one whole drawer before I turned twelve, and I succeeded. You can see where that led.”

  I smiled at Cora’s admission.

  “Many of those early acquisitions weren’t very valuable, but I was learning to identify odd gadgets and to date things with some degree of accuracy.”

  “You must have been a whiz at school.”

  “Hmmm. Not really. I didn’t care much about anything except my collections. My education expanded like ripples around the epicenter of my interests. I learned math so I could keep a ledger of my expenses. History was a no-brainer, except for events that had no relation to local happenings. For example, I was very interested in the World Wars because we had local men and women who were involved, but Ancient Rome is still pretty hazy in my mind.”

  She chuckled, so I did too.

  “English was important because I wanted to write letters to curators of real museums, and to read books by local authors.”

  “Amazing.” I couldn’t think of much else to say.

  “Anyway, back to the papers. My collection, pre-1954, is spotty. I’ve found stacks of old papers at estate sales, and an odd copy here and there. That’s why some of the labels have to be changed from time to time. These archival boxes are fairly expensive, and I only buy new ones as I need them. I just hope I have the paper you are looking for. Some of the issues aren’t complete. Some just have a front page, or maybe a clipping that I can date.

  “I wish I had all of this cataloged in the computer. That would make it easy to look up. But documenting the papers is an incredible amount of work. Not only does each paper have to be entered, but every local story needs to be read and noted too. That way the database can cross-reference the names of the people mentioned with other items in my collection. It’s very interesting, but I’m afraid I’ll never finish in my lifetime. It wasn’t even remotely possible before I started building the database.”

  “You need someone to help you, Cora. How on earth do you pay for all this?”

  “I’ve sold some nice items to big museums over the years, and I don’t have many other interests. It’s mainly financed by the settlement from John’s accident.”

  “John?” I asked.

  “Tom’s father. There was an explosion at the canning factory. It was the end of an era for Cherry Hill. Seven people were killed, and the company was found negligent. The insurance paid some hefty amounts to the families of the victims, but the factory never recovered from the equipment losses and was forced to close.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I began.

  “Oh, don’t be.” Cora’s voice was slightly defiant. “It was a long time ago now, and John and I were never a good match. I didn’t hate him, but honestly, the nicest thing he ever did for me was to get blown up. I made some good investments, and my life’s work is secure.” She swept out an arm. “My biggest problem now is mice, even in a metal building. I had to have special flashing installed, but despite that added protection, I have to be vigilant. They are very persistent little creatures.” Her lips were thin and tight.

  With each revelation I understood more about how important this all was to her. As Cora had been explaining about the mice, her index finger had ranged along the ends of the boxes, tracing from label to label. She pulled the next to the last box from the shelf, and carried it to a clear table in the middle of the room. My pulse quickened.

  “Let’s look in here,” she said, lifting the large cover from the base of the box.

  “That’s the banner! That’s the way the paper looked.” I could hardly keep from jumping up and down like a little girl.

  Cora pulled a pair of white gloves from a plastic box under the table, slipped them on, and carefully lifted the corners of the papers on the side where the fold was. She checked dates as she dug deeper and deeper. Soon she reached the bottom of the box.

  “Darn it!” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s not here. Wait... don’t look so crestfallen. We have one more chance. See this note?” She pulled a piece of notebook paper from beneath the newsprint. “It says there is a whole box of uncatalogued 1896 papers upstairs.”

  “Wow, ok… let’s go up.”

  “There’s one small problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t have the key.”

  “What do you mean? How can you store things up there with no key?”

  “Oh, Ana, I own a key, but I lost the spare. So, I asked Tom to take it to town and make a copy. I didn’t know we were going to need it this weekend.”

  “Let’s call him. I’ll drive anywhere you like to pick it up.”

  “It’s no good. He’s g
one to the big mushroom festival. It’s a three-hour drive, and you’d never find him anyway. He won’t be home till after midnight, tomorrow. We’ll just have to wait till Tuesday.”

  Chapter 19

  I helped Cora put the box of papers back and glanced at a few more items in cases, but I was too disappointed to really have much interest. Cora seemed to understand, and she patted me on the arm.

  “Let me offer you one more cup of tea before you go.”

  “Maybe another time, Cora. I want to go home and think about things for a while.”

  “All right. Maybe you’d be willing to go by Teeter’s Tuesday morning and pick up the key to the upstairs from Tom. I’ll call him and leave a message, so he’ll be sure to have it with him.”

  “I’d be happy to do that. I’ll get that spare made for you, too.”

  “They can do that right at Teeter’s, in the garden store, if Tom hasn’t already made it.”

  “Good enough. See you Tuesday morning. Shall I call first?”

  “Just come on out. I’ll be here, either in the house or the barn.” Cora smiled at me, and I knew I’d made another good friend, even if we hadn’t found the paper I wanted so badly.

  I drove home slowly, noticing the colors of the trees, their spring leaves almost unfurled. Before living in the country, I’d never realized how many different shades of green there could be. Some trees appeared almost white. The red maples were pink; that one I knew from a distance. Other fuzzed-out branches were yellow-green, and even the green ones weren’t all the same. The oaks didn’t have leaves at all, yet. Like shades of people, I thought.

  It was hard to focus on anything for the rest of the afternoon. I sorted a pile of mail and wrote a couple of checks for bills that were due.

  My renovations had been coming along nicely before the weekend. I’d gotten all the downstairs drywall up, and had paid Gorlowski Construction (which turned out to be owned by Robert Gorlowski, the uncle of Justin from the grocery store) to come do the ceilings and all the taping. A pang of guilt hit me; Cliff had asked for a job to help with this, but I’d chosen to hire a professional. I couldn’t regret my decision—the walls never look right if the seams show, but if I’d spent more time with Cliff he might have told me why he cared about that old paper so much.

  I shuffled through a handful of paint sample cards, but the colors refused to mentally move to the walls. I thought about the roof. I’d never gotten back to it after I started ripping out walls. The shingles were curled and shredding. So far, there was only one small leak, and I had it under control with a bucket in the attic, but I knew I couldn’t afford to ignore the roof much longer. I should call the lumber yard and price shingles. Maybe I should consider a metal roof. But, it was Sunday. The lumber company was closed, so I couldn’t do that anyway. If I was going to add an upstairs porch, shouldn’t I do that before the roof? I tried to concentrate on the house, but roof and rooms and projects kept skittering off into the corners of my mind, and an image of a newspaper kept appearing.

  Seeing the correct banner at Cora’s had jogged my memory a bit. I could see the headline about the school play spread across the width of the paper just below “Cherry Hill Herald.” The headline on the right, below that, was in bolder, but smaller, type. Suddenly it came to me. It was about Roentgen discovering the X-ray. What could that have to do with local events? Anything? Had an X-ray of someone or something revealed a hidden secret: some sort of abuse shown in an image of previously broken bones, or a treasure box inside a wall that everyone had forgotten but was never retrieved? Those ideas seemed rather unrealistic uses for early X-ray machines.

  Why was it so difficult to track down this paper? Everyone seemed to be putting me off, keeping me from finding it. I had finally found the right track and then Cora couldn’t, or wouldn’t, produce the key to where the paper might be located. Was she trying to protect Tom from something? He was still on my suspect list for taking my bag. When I went to get the key from Tom, would it have mysteriously moved somewhere else?

  I knew this line of reasoning was silly. The paper was over a hundred years old and I’d only been looking for a copy for two days. In truth, I’d done very well to come so close, so soon. But I still felt as if I were getting nowhere. I tried to focus on what else had been on the front page of that paper, but the harder I concentrated, the less I could recall.

  I went to bed early. Thoughts of Roger tried to intrude, as they always did when I wasn’t doing something distracting or physical. I really didn’t want to think about him any more, but supposed that I probably still needed to. For the seventy-hundredth time I wondered how I could have been so dense that I missed the import of all the times I got his voicemail at work, when I knew he should have been at his desk. All the self-recrimination for not checking with Sheila, his secretary, about the too-often, out-of-town weekends flooded in again. Images of him and Brian using our bedroom were too painful to bear. I forced my mind to turn elsewhere.

  I focused instead on the relationships between the people I had recently gotten to know. Clearly, Adele did not like Cora very much. Adele was not one to mince words, or keep anyone’s secrets private. I didn’t know how Cora felt about Adele, but she had absolutely no use for Jerry Caulfield, who had seemed like a very nice man to me. However, it was definitely odd that he hadn’t mentioned Cora’s stash of papers to me as a way to continue my search. The way that his own great-great-grandmother’s death was linked to the purchase of new presses made it unlikely that he didn’t know that date. So, was he also trying to keep me from reading that paper? Was the issue I was looking for locally notorious in such a way that everyone knew exactly what was in it, and they didn’t want an outsider to find out? But an item of common knowledge wouldn’t have resulted in Cliff’s death. Ridiculous! I scolded myself and looked for another line of reasoning.

  But nothing else came to mind. I tossed and turned and finally drifted off to sleep with alternating visions of my upstairs porch, cups of warm tea or coffee served by new friends, and Cliff’s pale dead face flickering in my brain.

  Chapter 20

  Monday morning, I slept a little later than usual, and awoke to a gray and drizzly sky leaking rivulets down the window panes. I quickly climbed the steep, narrow stairs to the attic to make sure the pail was situated directly under the drip, and to ascertain if I needed more buckets. For now, things seemed to be holding steady at one leak.

  Over a cup of coffee and some cereal, I thought about what I could do today to find out more about my mystery, instead of anxiously fretting over a key I couldn’t get for another twenty-three hours. I remembered the tote bag, and decided to see if Tracy would dust the handles for fingerprints. Perhaps she had questioned that little girl who had brought it in. I could pick up some groceries, too.

  As it so often turns out, errands seemed to chew up a great deal of time. I stopped at a farmhouse on the way to town and bought some rhubarb from their roadside stand, chatting a few minutes with the farm wife, who introduced herself as Myrna Bidwell. I filled the Jeep with gas at Aho’s Service Station, bought an extra quart of oil, and checked the air in my tires. At the Post Office I bought a book of stamps and mailed the checks I’d written the day before. It was already 11:00 when I pulled into the parking lot beside the police station. The rain had stopped and there was a hint of sun and warmth in the damp air.

  For once, I seemed to be having some luck. Tracy was at her desk, and she greeted me with a smile. The part-time office boy was tapping busily at a computer keyboard. He was probably about 25, but he looked like a boy to me.

  Chief Jarvi looked up. “Ana, what brings you in today?”

  “Hi, Tracy. How are you?”

  “I keep busy enough, that’s for sure, even in this small town.” She replaced some papers in a file folder. “Shoplifters today, nothing as serious as another death, fortunately.”

  “I’ve been thinking about my tote bag, the one that was taken on Saturday.”

  “Yes?
”

  “Is there any chance there might be some fingerprints on the plastic handles? I put it in a shopping bag as soon as I thought of it, and I have the tote here.” I laid the package on her desk.

  “It seems like there would be a lot of prints on there by now. Yours, mine, Bella Hanford’s...”

  “Yes, that’s the girl’s name. You said we might be able to talk with her. Do you think we really could?”

  Tracy glanced at the clock, and I wondered if she was secretly trying to think of a way to get rid of me. I had to stop imagining this small-town conspiracy scenario.

  “It’s just about lunch time at the middle school. Let me call the gas company and we’ll see if she can come in.”

  “What?”

  “Her mother’s a secretary at the gas company. If she agrees, maybe she can pick Bella up and they can come here right away.”

  I still found it incredulous that everyone in Cherry Hill seemed to know where everyone else was all the time, but I was grateful for the current plan. Tracy made the call and Jennifer Hanford agreed to take an early lunch herself, and come by with Bella. In the meantime, Tracy carefully slid the tote out of the plastic bag, with gloved hands, and laid it on a counter. She opened a jar of fine black powder and using a wide brush applied it to the plastic strip, just as I’d seen it done on TV.

  “We can’t test the fabric here,” she told me as she worked. “If you really think it’s important, we can send it off to the county lab, but you’ll have to pay for the test. Since you have the bag back, with nothing missing, really, there’s no real crime involved and the taxpayers won’t fund curiosity.”

  “OK. How much would that cost? I don’t know if it’s worth it or not. I mean, I was definitely threatened, but no one has called or bothered me since Saturday night.”

  “I’ll have to contact the lab about the pricing. There are a couple of prints here. Mostly smudges, though. I need to take yours, to eliminate them.”