Clause & Effect Read online

  “What we should emphasize is the diversity of the people who settled here,” I said. “Many of the new arrivals had distinctly different backgrounds from the founders, most of whom were descended from Dutch ancestors living in the Hudson River Valley or English settlers from various New England states.”

  “You need to include the founding of the Feldman,” Sunny said.

  Stacy put down her cell phone. “I know all about that.” She began to tell us, in detail, how small, family-run boardinghouses evolved into internationally known resort hotels. The withering look Sunny sent her way went right over her head.

  “While all that’s true,” I said, interrupting Stacy in mid-sentence, “the Feldman isn’t in Lenape Hollow. Feldman is a separate hamlet in the town of Lenape Hollow. I hate to split hairs, but this pageant is supposed to be about the history of the village.”

  Stacy looked put out, but Sunny didn’t take offense. Instead she pointed out that, in spite of the fact that her family’s hotel was outside the village limits, it had exerted a tremendous influence on downtown businesses. I had to concede her point. During the heyday of the Feldman, the influx of seasonal employees and tourists caused our population to more than double every summer. As a kid, I hadn’t been attuned to statistics, but I’d certainly noticed that a second movie theater opened every Memorial Day weekend and that there were a lot more people around. In the winter months, lines at the grocery store and post office were almost unheard of. In the summer, they were the norm.

  By the time I went home that night, I was actually looking forward to working on the pageant. Yes, I’d committed myself to a bigger job than I originally wanted to take on, but I’d also been assured of help with the project. Darlene and I, with Shirley as backup, would tackle the first half of the pageant. Sunny and Stacy would write the part about more recent events. I’d edit the whole. Onslow would recruit musical talent to augment various sections with appropriate tunes. Diego Goldberg, in addition to directing, would contrive to beg, borrow, or rent all the necessary costumes and props.

  It wasn’t until I was ready for bed that I remembered why an emergency meeting of the board had been held at Ronnie’s house in the first place. I could be forgiven for the oversight. No one had so much as mentioned the reason the historical society’s headquarters was currently swathed in yellow crime scene tape.

  Once recalled, what had happened only that morning refused to leave my thoughts. Every time I closed my eyes, vivid images of plastic-wrapped bodies danced in my head.

  Chapter 9

  The next day was a busy one. After I completed my obligations to my paying clients, I worked on the script for the pageant. It wasn’t all drudgery, and there were even bursts of inspiration, but I found myself wishing the board hadn’t opted for an outdoor venue. It would have been nice to have a slideshow running in the background. Only excluding the earliest history of the village, there were plenty of photographs to show what things looked like in the good old days.

  Darlene had volunteered to concentrate on the Civil War era. We planned to meet at her house at four to compare notes, but in the middle of the afternoon she called me on my cell phone to ask a favor.

  “I’ve found an intriguing bit about recruitment,” she said. “Would you mind stopping at the library on your way here to verify it?”

  “Verify how?” I had my phone wedged between shoulder and ear as I fumbled in the cabinet for a fresh can of cat food. From the look Calpurnia was giving me, she wasn’t prepared to wait patiently for me to feed her. “You aren’t starving,” I mouthed at her.

  My hearing aid chose that moment to squeal and momentarily cut out. It does that when I press it too hard against something solid.

  “Sheesh, Mikki, Will you take that darned thing out?”

  “I can only do three things at once!”

  Prioritizing, I set the phone aside while I dished up an early supper for the cat. That done, I removed the offending hearing aid and carried it, my cell, and my third cup of coffee of the day to the dinette table. I took a long swallow before I resumed my interrupted conversation with Darlene.

  “What is it I’m supposed to be looking for?”

  “When I was head librarian, I oversaw a project to digitize all our local newspapers. They were already on microfilm, but the idea was to make everything available online. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way. There was simply too much information and not enough staff or money to finish what we started. All I can call up from home on the year I want is the index on the library’s web page. Here’s the citation.” She rattled off information in what sounded like an elaborate code.

  “Hold on.” I fished pen and paper out of a drawer and sat down again. I managed two swallows of coffee before asking her to repeat what she’d said.

  “Just give that call number to the librarian and she’ll show you how to find the right issue of the newspaper on microfilm. Scroll down looking for any article or advertisement related to joining the Union army. It shouldn’t take you more than fifteen minutes.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She was assuming I wouldn’t go off on a tangent while I searched for the item she wanted. Whether I’m Googling online or thumbing through musty old volumes of history, it’s all too easy for me to be drawn into following one thread after another. If I’m not strict with myself, I can end up losing hours at a time.

  After promising Darlene I’d do my best, I hung up, fished an apple out of the refrigerator, and caught up on the news of the present day while I ate it. An editorial in the nearest thing we have to a local rag lambasted the police department for their failure to provide sufficient information about the remains found at the historical society.

  I wasn’t surprised Detective Hazlett didn’t have details to share. If no one had reported a missing person at about the same time that wall went up, he didn’t have much to go on. DNA from the corpse wouldn’t help unless he had someone else’s DNA to compare it to. Without a name, how could he hope to find a relative? The same caveat applied to dental records. The police needed a starting point before they could get anywhere, and they didn’t appear to have one.

  I frowned, considering the situation. I’ve read enough detective fiction to understand that even bare bones can provide some information. By now, the police knew whether the victim was male or female. I wondered why that nugget, at least, hadn’t been given to the press.

  Calpurnia butted her head against my leg, reminding me that I’d better get a move on. Self-employed people don’t get to play whenever they want to. We don’t even get to take weekends off. If I was to have any hope of accomplishing everything on my to-do list, I couldn’t afford to waste any more time.

  Working for myself, at least in my case, translates into “always working.” There is an upside, of course. Although I can’t always choose how many hours I work in a week, I do get to pick which ones. I could wait until after supper to finish the editing job I’d started that morning. Plus, if I wanted to, I could work on it in my nightgown, sitting up in bed.

  At Lenape Hollow Memorial Library, a fairly new structure built right next door to my old elementary school on North Main Street, the head librarian who had replaced Darlene knew exactly what I was looking for. She set me up at a workstation in the basement and left me happily scrolling through a newspaper from the 1860s. It didn’t me take long to find the issue in question. As Darlene had predicted, the confirmation she hoped for was right on the front page in the form of a recruitment notice.

  I made a copy and then, since I still had more than an hour before I was due at Darlene’s, I conducted a small search of my own. My grandfather once told me that his father enlisted to fight in the Civil War as soon as he was old enough, but that the war ended while he was still in boot camp. Personally, I was glad he never had to fight. I might not exist if he’d gone to war. On the maternal side of my family, one of my great-grandmothers lost her first husband at the Battle of Fair Oaks. If not for that tragedy, she�
�d never have married my great-grandfather as her second husband. No second marriage. No me. Funny how things work out.

  I was frustrated in my search for information about the boot camp Grampa had mentioned. I thought I remembered him saying it was in Bloomingburg, but nothing turned up for 1864 or 1865. Disappointed, I exited the newspaper files from the 1860s. I was about to head for Darlene’s house when my gaze fell on the row of icons on the newspaper’s index page. They were broken down by decade and covered not only the nineteenth century but also the twentieth.

  It’s valid research, I told myself as I clicked on the link for the 1990s. I might find it inspiring to read about the performance of the original pageant. To be perfectly honest, I was also curious to see if the newspaper had reported on the construction going on at the historical society just prior to the bicentennial.

  This search yielded pay dirt almost at once. There was a nice article, complete with a photo, announcing that Grace Yarrow, a local playwright, had agreed to provide the script for the pageant. Grace looked very young, although I couldn’t make out much of her face. She’d turned away from the camera, as if reluctant to pose for the photographer. I read, not without envy, that she’d had almost a year to work on the project. I printed a copy of the piece and then scrolled through succeeding issues of the newspaper to see what else I could find.

  The next item of interest was an advertisement announcing the upcoming bicentennial. It listed all the events, including the pageant. A glance at the date told me that the ad had been published a little more than a week before the big day. I started to scroll down to the next issue—the paper was biweekly back then—when a headline on page four caught my eye: HISTORICAL SOCIETY RENOVATIONS NEARLY COMPLETE.

  Naturally, I stopped and read the article.

  There had been a great deal more work done on the building than I’d realized. At that point, it had only been owned by the historical society for a couple of years and the organization had grandiose plans for the future. The board of directors envisioned permanent exhibits on the ground floor, which just happened to be the performance venue for the pageant, and climate-controlled archives at the top of the building. That didn’t quite jibe with what Shirley had told me about cut-rate paneling, but then newspaper accounts aren’t always accurate, especially if their source is trying to make himself, or his institution, sound good.

  To start with, the board had concentrated on the basics. They’d hired a contractor, John Chen, to replace all the old windows with new, energy-efficient ones and blow insulation into the walls. Apparently, there was considerable controversy over the decision to close off and wall up an old fireplace. Fred Gorton, a local historical preservation diehard on the board of directors, thought it should be left as it was for its historical significance.

  A photograph of the hearth showed some attractive tiles and an elaborate mantel with a mirror above it. To my untrained eye, there was nothing special about it. In fact, it looked vaguely familiar, which probably meant I’d seen other old fireplaces of a similar design. The name John Chen rang a bell, too. Chen and Sons was one of the contractors who’d given me a bid on repairs for my house. I was suddenly very glad I’d gone with another firm. Chen couldn’t have been too bright if he’d walled up that opening without ever noticing there was a plastic-wrapped body stuck up the chimney.

  Chapter 10

  That evening, I was in my living room going over some notes I’d made—a change of location sometimes stimulates the brain cells—when an odd tapping noise caught my attention. Only Calpurnia’s tail stuck out from behind a chair, but it swung back and forth in a way that indicated she was intensely interested in something. I abandoned my work and got up to investigate.

  My first thought was that there was a mouse in the baseboard, even though I’d seen no sign of mouse droppings anywhere in the house. I have nothing against mice, but I’d just as soon not have them deposited on my bed while I’m asleep. That happened far too often when I lived out in the country, and with cats other than just Calpurnia. James and I always had at least one furry housemate.

  I shoved the chair to one side and looked down. Calpurnia paid no attention to me, but now I could see that the sound I’d been hearing came from her sharp little claws striking wood.

  “If you catch it, you eat it.” I started to shove the chair back into place when a stray memory surfaced.

  I turned back, frowning, to stare at the wall. Had it looked like that years ago? I seemed to remember an upright piano positioned in front of it when I was a teenager. My father, who played rather well, bought it in the belief that I must have inherited some of his musical talent. Wrong. I lasted through two years of lessons and one recital before we both threw in the towel.

  What about before that? When I was very small, could there have been a fireplace? I closed my eyes, trying to call up elusive memories, and what popped into my mind was a Christmas card, one of the picture-postcard variety. The photograph was of me at age five or six, sitting on a stool in front of a hearth and holding a doll. A stocking with my name on it hung from the mantel, a mantel that had been painted white and which my mother used, at other times of the year, to display her collection of Hummels and other small knickknacks.

  I concentrated harder and another detail emerged from hiding. Behind this mini-me I saw that tiles decorated the fireplace. They were very like the ones in that newspaper photo taken at the historical society. No wonder they’d looked familiar!

  My parents were not the ones who’d closed it in. They’d needed a place for the piano and hadn’t been using the fireplace, but they’d simply placed the instrument on the hearth. It had been just the right size to hide everything behind it. Someone who’d owned this house in the years between then and now had been responsible. They’d hired someone to wall up the fireplace, just as the board of directors at the historical society had paid John Chen to conceal the one in their exhibit room.

  Well, not just as they had.

  Calpurnia continued to worry the baseboard.

  “Please let it be a mouse,” I whispered.

  Hearing my own words, I shook myself. What were the odds that someone had gone around stuffing bodies up chimneys all over Lenape Hollow? I was letting my imagination run away with me.

  Unfortunately, now that I’d recalled the existence of our old fireplace, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I went upstairs to my office and dug out the file folder in which I’d put miscellaneous paperwork left behind by previous owners.

  The last time I’d opened it, I’d been hunting for dates when the roof had been repaired. It had been obvious that it needed replacing, either that or use all the saucepans I owned, and then some, to catch the drips every time it rained. Once I’d found the receipt I was looking for, I hadn’t bothered going through the rest of the documents.

  This time around, I did a better job of evaluating the contents of the folder. I skimmed each page and did a little sorting while I was at it. At the very back, I found a bill for walling in a fireplace.

  I was still staring at it when Calpurnia wandered in to see what I was doing. I scooped her up and cuddled her, feeling a sudden need for warm and fuzzy. I knew perfectly well I was reacting foolishly, but it creeped me out to discover that John Chen had been the contractor hired to cover up the hearth. Even more unnerving was the date. The work in my house had been done twenty-four years earlier, within a year of the similar job Chen did at the headquarters of the historical society.

  “I am not going to tear that wall down to find out what’s behind it,” I said aloud.

  Calpurnia nuzzled my hand.

  “I am not going to start imagining things.”

  Unfortunately for my peace of mind, that ship had already sailed.

  As I shoved papers back into the file, I continued to give myself a stern lecture. Chen and Sons had a reputation for good work and honest dealing. I’d hired a different contractor for the necessary upgrades and repairs on my house only because his estima
te of the total cost had been lower.

  If I’d had such a thing in the house, I might have made myself a soothing cup of herbal tea when I went back downstairs. The thought made me grimace. Bad enough to be a woman of a certain age who talked to her cat. I didn’t need to make myself into any more of a stereotype. I pulled a Sam Adams out of the refrigerator instead. I’m not a big beer drinker, but I do like the occasional cold one, especially on a sultry summer night.

  Bottle in hand, I returned to the living room and the notes I’d been working on before Calpurnia started scratching the baseboard. They concerned possible additions to the pageant. I’d made a chronological list of significant events. Darlene and I had already made decisions about most of them.

  “Time frame,” I muttered, and took another sip of the beer.

  Of its own volition, my gaze returned to the wall.

  “Time frame,” I said again, but I was no longer thinking about plans for the village’s 225th anniversary.

  Twenty-five years ago, John Chen must have been rushing to complete the renovations at the historical society in time for the pageant to be performed there. Since it had been presented on schedule, he must have met his deadline. I winced at my poor choice of words before returning to my mental list-making.

  The author had left town for bigger things.

  I paused on that item, realizing that I didn’t know exactly when she’d departed.

  Ronnie had called her unreliable.

  I thought about that while I finished my beer, a vague suspicion beginning to grow in my mind. Setting the empty bottle aside, I reached for the phone. It was late, but not that late, and I knew Ronnie was a night owl. She answered on the third ring.

  “Why did you characterize Grace Yarrow as unreliable?” I asked without preamble.

  “Hello to you, too. Do you know what time it is?”

  “If you didn’t want to take my call, you didn’t have to pick up.” Ronnie checks the caller ID on her landline every time her phone rings, just as I always do. We have something else in common too—we habitually ignore calls from anyone we don’t know or with whom we don’t wish to speak.