All the Secret Places

by Anna Carlisle

  Next to the bus, two county police cruisers were parked end to end, effectively sealing off the approach to the site. Behind them were two news vans and half a dozen other vehicles, including Jake’s truck parked next to one of the unfinished houses in what would have been the driveway. Reporters appeared to be trying to interview the protestors as several cameramen filmed the action.

  The county officers didn’t appear to be doing anything other than watching. There were no Trumbull police present that Gin could see.

  She spotted Jake, on the opposite side of the site, standing on what would be the porch of one of the unfinished homes. Even from a distance, Gin could read the fury in his body language. He stood ramrod straight, his fists clenched at his sides. He was glaring at the reporter interviewing a paunchy middle-aged man in an ill-fitting officer’s uniform, complete with shiny brass buttons and an ornamental sword. The call letters on the equipment the cameraman was using identified a Pittsburgh station, and the female reporter looked familiar. Gin edged forward to hear what she was saying.

  “. . . embattled local building contractor Jake Crosby, who was a person of interest in the Lily Sullivan case that plagued this town last year. Though cleared of murder charges in that case, Crosby is once again finding himself under scrutiny of law enforcement in this bizarre case of arson and murder. Rumored to be facing financial devastation, Crosby is suspected of setting the blaze to his half-finished project himself.

  “And in a truly shocking twist, a body discovered on this property is rumored to belong to a soldier who fought for the Union during the Civil War. Joining me now is Tim Pagano, a reenactor and amateur Civil War historian from Chambersburg, who made the three-hour trip here today to, in his words, make sure that history isn’t sacrificed to greed. Welcome, Mr. Pagano.”

  The protestor nodded stiffly. “Thanks, Melanie.”

  “You’ve written a book on the Battle of Hanover, which you published yourself, about a chapter of the war that you believe has been unfairly overlooked by historians, is that correct?”

  “Well, first, Melanie, let me start by saying that we prefer the term ‘living historian’ to reenactor. We feel that by recreating historically accurate—”

  “But now the body of a soldier may have been discovered just a few yards from where we’re standing,” the reporter interrupted smoothly. “Some experts believe that this site overlooking the Monongahela River may in fact have been a burial ground for soldiers who were too gravely injured to make it home. How likely is that, in your opinion?”

  “What you have to understand is that there’s a lot that never got recorded back then,” Pagano said. “Communications in general just didn’t happen. It’s not like there was CNN or Facebook or what have you. In the Battle of Hanover, for instance, and you can read all about this in my book Hell in Hanover, which you can get on Amazon, Confederate Major General Heth’s infantry division literally ran smack into Buford’s Union cavalry. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t—”

  “Right, but in terms of the body discovered here. It was dressed in what is reported to be a Union infantry uniform. Would it have resembled the costume you’re wearing today?”

  Pagano goggled at the reporter, seemingly astonished at her question. “This isn’t a costume; it’s a historically accurate replica. And it’s an officer’s uniform. The braid and insignia here mean that I’m a first sergeant.”

  “I see. And just one more question for you.” She attempted to arrange her smooth, Botoxed features into an attitude of concern. “If protected status is conferred every time a historic artifact is discovered, a great many homes and businesses could be threatened. What would you say to those who stand to lose a great deal of money if that comes to pass?”

  “It’s for the greater good,” Pagano said witheringly. “I’m not talking about slapping a ‘Lincoln Slept Here’ sign on some motel. This is a sacred resting place for a soldier who lost his life in one of our nation’s great conflicts. And he might not be the only one. This area should be examined carefully and respectfully, not paved over so that a millionaire can put in a tennis court.”

  “Mmm. How long do you and your group plan to protest?”

  “Until the decision is made to respect history. As long as it takes.”

  “All right, well, thanks for speaking with us, and stay warm out here.”

  She stayed motionless, grinning at the camera, for several seconds and then abruptly switched off her mic and handed it to the cameraman, dropping the smile. She headed back to the news van, while Pagano wandered back to join the other protestors and picked up a sign reading, “What Is the Price of History?”

  Jake had made his way over to Gin while the interview was going on. “Did you talk to your mom?”

  “I left a message,” Gin said. “She’ll probably call me back this afternoon. She’s got—”

  “If people pay attention to this, it’s not even going to matter if it’s true or not.” He raked his hand through his hair in frustration. “And that’s assuming I can convince them that this emergency injunction is bullshit. If they get that past a judge, I’m sunk.”

  “Jake . . .” Gin hadn’t been planning to bring it up, but Jake seemed to be starting to panic. “I was just wondering, I talked to Brandon Hart the other night. He happened to mention that he knows a banker you worked with and—”

  The flash of anger in his eyes stopped her. “What were you talking about?”

  “I’m sorry. Never mind.”

  “No, tell me. What does a guy who barely knows me, who I’ve talked to a total of maybe four times in my life for more than a hello, have to tell my girlfriend about me that she doesn’t already know?”

  The word girlfriend caught Gin’s attention. They’d never put their relationship into words, not since they were teens. Though they’d once said I love you every single day, neither of them had since reuniting. It was as though she had become so leery of commitment that even the words were off limits.

  “Look, Jake, I’m just worried about you, okay.”

  “Worried enough to ask someone besides me about my finances? That’s what you were doing, right?”

  It was pointless to correct him when he was so angry, so Gin didn’t bother to explain that Brandon had volunteered the information. “Listen, Jake—I know none of this is your fault. I know you couldn’t have predicted any of it. I want to help. Just for now, just until you get this all straightened out. We could put it in writing if you want, you could decide on the terms—”

  “No. Gin . . . I’m sorry, and I know you’re trying to help, but I just can’t.”

  Jake turned and walked away, his words hanging in the air against a backdrop of chanting voices.

  * * *

  An hour later, Gin was waiting quietly outside her mother’s office, listening to her talking on the phone. She’d beaten a hasty retreat from the jobsite when several reporters recognized her from news coverage of previous cases and badgered her for an interview. Gin knew that her connection to the case would be speculated on in the media, but she had no intention of making the reporters’ jobs any easier.

  It was strange to hear her mother—who had once tested Gin on her Spanish vocabulary words, who had sung soprano in the church choir for over a decade—speaking with such authority to a caller whose hopes were clearly being dashed.

  Finally, she finished the conversation with “I’ll remind you that you said that when the new reserve expenditure report comes in.”

  Gin poked her head in the door. “Got a few minutes?”

  Madeleine gave her a tired smile. “For you? Absolutely. I’ve made eleven calls this morning already, I’ve got fourteen more to go, and none of the committees are meeting their budgetary targets. If I’d known I’d have to wear so many hats, I might never have gotten into this.”

  “Aw, you love it, Mom,” Gin said. “You’re a natural. Listen, I was wondering . . .”

  She described the situation at the jobsite, leaving out Jake’s
reaction and the perilous state of his finances. “I just wondered if you’d be able to, I don’t know . . .”

  “Suppress free speech?” her mother asked, lifting an eyebrow. “That’s generally frowned on, I find.”

  Gin sighed. “I know. I’m not even sure how you could help. I’m just . . . well, I’m worried about Jake. He isn’t handling the stress well.”

  Both women were silent for a moment.

  “I’m worried about your dad too,” Madeleine finally admitted. “Retirement isn’t exactly agreeing with him. What is it with these guys?”

  At the time of Richard’s abrupt retirement, he claimed he wanted to spend more time gardening, playing golf with the retired judge who lived across the street, and writing some articles for professional journals. But with the onset of winter, he’d put the gardening tools and golf clubs away in the garage and had yet to even begin doing the background research for the writing he claimed to want to do. Instead, he spent most of the day reading in his office, sometimes napping before dinner.

  “I don’t know, Mom. It’s been a hard time for both of them.”

  “You know what I think? Men are ill equipped for the challenges that we women are forced to take in stride.”

  “Maybe. But you know that if you ever retired, you wouldn’t be able to stay away. You’d be right back here the next week, offering to do the same job for free.”

  Madeleine grimaced. “I practically do it for free already.”

  “And if a bunch of protesters tried to stop you from getting your work done?”

  Madeleine set her jaw. “I guess I’d just keep doing it—right up until they hauled me off to jail. Is that what you’re worried will happen to Jake?”

  “I don’t know,” Gin said. “I’ve never seen him like this.”

  “Gin. Right now you’re focusing on things you can’t do anything about. Jake will let you help or not. The protesters will get their way or not. Meanwhile, you’re wasting time sitting here talking to me. If you really want to help, what else can you do?”

  Gin blew out a breath in frustration. “I already talked my way into the autopsy by claiming to have skills no one else in the ME’s office had. This time, though, I just sat there with everyone else going yeah, I have no idea how he died, but he suffered blunt force trauma to the skull, which was totally obvious because he’s missing all his teeth. And the one thing I noticed that other people missed turned out to be unhelpful.” She briefly described the evidence of a fracture.

  “So maybe it’s not the autopsy that you need to concentrate on. What else is going on in the investigation?”

  Gin thought. “Well, they sent the uniform to a professor up at the University of Pittsburgh. I’m supposed to meet with her when she’s had a chance to examine it.”

  “Don’t wait,” Madeleine said. “Put some pressure on her. Besides, academics love it whenever anyone asks for their opinions.”

  “Good point. And we got some of the soil analysis back, but there’s nothing unusual about it. High acidity, as we expected, and the usual gamut of mineral and organic features.”

  “Okay, well, I guess you better do what I do, then,” Madeleine said, picking up her phone. “Pound the pavement and kick some ass. Now excuse me while I raise my quota of hell for the day.”

  * * *

  Dr. Pia Farrar was as pleased to hear from Gin as Madeleine had predicted. Her office was located in the basement of a beautiful old brown-brick building in the original campus. “They offered me an office in the new liberal arts building,” she said as they walked down the stairs. “State of the art everything. But I’d miss this place. It’s usually quiet as a tomb down here, and this is where we store a lot of the oldest materials after they’re digitized. Any time I want to experience that library smell that you can’t get in libraries anymore, I just step next door.”

  “Reminds me of my med school days,” Gin said. “I used to study in the old Harper Memorial Library at the University of Chicago. I could get lost in the history of that place.”

  “Well, I can’t promise you anything like that, but I took over an unused office for this project. Come this way.”

  Pia grabbed her laptop, led Gin down the hall, and unlocked a heavy wooden door. She stepped inside, snapping on a bank of fluorescent lights that sputtered to life. On a long wooden library table marred with a century’s worth of graffiti, the remains of the uniform belonging the dead man were arranged on a white fabric surface, sections marked with fine pins and brightly colored tabs. Pia opened her laptop and turned it so Gin could see, scrolling through a long, dense document’s text that was interspersed with photographs of the evidence.

  “Radiocarbon dating has been around since the forties, as you probably already know.”

  “Care to give me a recap as it relates to this?”

  “Well, it’s actually pretty simple. The parts of the uniform that survived were made primarily of wool, which is an organic material. The minute the sheep was relieved of its wool, it stopped exchanging carbon with its environment, and from that moment on, the amount of carbon it contains began to decrease in a process called radioactive decay. The older the sample, the smaller the amount of carbon remaining.”

  “Yes, of course. I should have explained my background.” Gin gave Pia a brief summary of her work. “But I don’t know much about textiles.”

  “Oh, okay. Well, I put a tiny fiber sample under the microscope. Wool’s morphological features are pretty distinctive.” She scrolled to a magnified image of dull gray fiber. “You see the scalelike areas here. And this—the slightly darker column here—this is the medulla, or the central air space that runs along the length of the fiber shaft.

  “Once I established that it was wool, I used fluorescence to determine what the original dyes might have looked like. You’re familiar with the technique?”

  “To some extent—the analysts I’ve worked with have used it to track blood stains on clothing, for instance.”

  “Right. Well, I simulated daylight, ultraviolet light, and infrared, and photographed the fragments with special film and light-filtering equipment. You can see the result here.” She scrolled down to a photograph of a fragment—in a beautiful cornflower blue, the same shade as the reenactors’ uniforms.

  “Federal blue, I believe it’s called,” Pia said with satisfaction. “A term that dates to the Civil War.”

  “So you’re certain,” Gin said. “There’s no way someone could have faked the age of the fibers?”

  “No, there really isn’t.”

  “What about if they’d come across a vintage uniform? I spent a little time online, and I saw that you can buy all kinds of Civil War memorabilia on eBay.”

  “Sure. Buttons, maybe. Anything made of metal . . . including some of the metallic embroidery threads and braids. But to find an entire uniform . . . it would be difficult.”

  “But people stumble on old uniforms in trunks up in their attics all the time.”

  Pia smiled. “Not all the time, but you’re right; they do turn up now and then. But they’re usually pretty fragile. I’m not sure anyone would deliberately expose them to the stress of everyday wear. Listen, if you don’t mind me asking, is there really any question that the remains are authentic? Judging from what’s been on the news, I thought it was pretty open and shut.”

  “I suppose,” Gin said. She didn’t want to explain her special interest in the case, so she settled for saying, “As a consultant on the case, my job is to investigate every loose thread.”

  “So to speak,” Pia said, giggling. “Sorry, can’t help it—anthropology humor. Listen, there is one more thing . . .”

  She picked up a tray from the counter. “They sent over a soil sample that I understand was taken from the burial site.”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  “Well, it didn’t really shed any new light on the textile analysis. But I discovered something you’ll probably find interesting.”

  She set the tra
y down on the table. In the center, nested against the white fabric, was a small rounded lump of bronze-colored metal.

  “I believe that’s a musket ball,” Pia said. “Not my area of expertise, but I had a colleague take a look at it. It’s definitely consistent with munitions of the era, apparently. It was lodged in that sample you sent over, completely covered in dirt, but it could easily have traveled from the body to the soil as decomposition progressed. So maybe you found your cause of death after all.”

  Gin examined the ball, which looked like a misshapen iron marble. “May I take this?” she asked.

  “Sure, I guess. They said they’d send someone to pick this all up, but they didn’t say when.”

  “I’ll make sure to let them know,” Gin promised, not meeting Pia’s eyes.

  They walked back to Pia’s office and said their good-byes. “I really appreciate everything you’ve shared with me,” Gin said.

  “It’s been my pleasure. Come back anytime.”

  As Gin walked up the old marble steps, their surface polished and worn from thousands of footfalls, she fingered the lump of metal in her pocket.

  What was it her mother had said? “Pound the pavement and kick some ass.”

  Maybe Madeleine had a point.

  * * *

  When she got to her car, she called Baxter.

  “Hi, Gin,” he said guardedly. “Look, this isn’t really a good time, so unless this is something important—”

  “It is. Look, I called you because I don’t trust the county cops to follow up. I’ve got the bullet that may have killed our unidentified soldier. Or I guess I should say, the musket ball.”

  There was a silence, and then Baxter said, in an entirely different tone, “Where?”

  Gin quickly explained her visit to the university. “I’m afraid if I turn this over to them, they won’t even follow up, given how eager they are to wrap this all up. I was wondering . . . do you know anyone who could tell us if it’s real?”