A Killer Crop (33 page)

“Poor darling, I can see that. All right, we’ll give it another couple of hours, and if we don’t turn anything up tonight, we can start again tomorrow with fresh eyes. Susan, does that work for you?”

“Sure. I want to see where this goes—for Daniel’s sake.”

Meg woke the next morning to the sound of rain. She allowed herself a guilty moment of relief: no picking today, which was good news for the Emily hunt. Meg figured that her mother and Susan hadn’t made any important discoveries the night before, because surely her mother would have woken her to share the news regardless of the hour. Meg vaguely remembered hearing Susan’s car start up and pull away sometime during the night.

She’d called this a wild-goose chase, and a hunt for a needle in a haystack. They were looking for some pieces of paper that, if they even existed, hadn’t been seen in a century. Paper was fragile, easy to destroy or lose. What were the odds that anything had survived, undiscovered, all these years? Slim to none.

But still, Daniel Weston had been killed, presumably over these mysterious letters. Where did that fit? He was a dedicated scholar, so it was at least conceivable that he had gone haring off to a locked building in the middle of the night, in search of what he believed were these lost documents. Maybe. Meg had trouble getting her head around the idea that academic discoveries could inspire enough strong feeling that someone would kill for them. But nobody had any better theories, including, it seemed, the police. Daniel had been dead nearly two weeks, and no one had been arrested.

With a sigh, Meg hauled herself out of bed and dressed. Downstairs she found her mother in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading the paper, Lolly purring on her lap. Meg poured a cup and joined her. “So, no big breakthroughs?”

“No, not yet. It’s complicated, isn’t it? You’d think censuses would get things right, but the spelling of people’s names changes from one to the next, and their birth years are all over the place. Do you think people lied to the census takers? Or maybe they were all deaf.”

Meg smiled. “I sometimes wonder that myself. So, what’s on for today?”

“Susan said she’d be coming back around ten. Are you picking today?”

“I doubt it, given the rain, but I’ll wait for Bree to tell me. You know, I was thinking about Ellen Warren. From what I’ve learned about the Warren family in the nineteenth century, there’s nothing to eliminate her as a candidate for the Ellen who wrote to Emily. Ellen Warren lived here all her life with her parents, and she had brothers. I’ll have to show you her father Eli’s will—it’s very funny. It sounds as though the family was a bit dysfunctional.” Meg swallowed some coffee. “Although I won’t hold my breath about finding the letters. Hold on a minute.” Meg went to the dining room and retrieved her printout of Eli Warren’s family tree. “Here, these are the people we’re talking about. Ellen Warren was Eli’s daughter by his first wife. Her father remarried and had some more kids. After her father died, Ellen ended up living in the house with her stepmother and a passel of half-siblings. So let’s put ourselves in the head of a fifteen-year-old girl, back in those days. She’s living in a crowded house—this house—most likely sharing a room with a few siblings. Say she wants to keep something secret, something personal. What would she do?”

“Shouldn’t we wonder why she would have met Emily Dickinson in the first place?”

“We can work that out later. But right now I’m more interested in what a girl would do with her treasures.”

“Hide them from prying eyes, you mean? Somewhere in the house . . . Darling, how much of the house has changed since her day?”

“Not much. Ellen’s brother’s grandchildren ended up with the house—Lula and Nettie. You know how little they did to the place. Then you rented it out, and nobody made any real improvements. Some cosmetic stuff, most of which I’ve stripped away. I should ask Seth—he knows more about old houses, including this one, than either of us. He can probably tell us which bits are original and which are replacements. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that physically everything here is much the way it was in Ellen’s day. Where would she hide something?”

“Where snoopy siblings wouldn’t find it? Out of sight. In the floor or walls. The attic, the basement. Probably not in an outbuilding, because there it would be vulnerable to the weather.”

Meg nodded. “Good. I’d rule out the basement, because it’s dark and damp, and I can’t see a girl tiptoeing down there to visit her treasures.”

Phillip ambled into the kitchen. “Good morning, ladies. You look like you’re plotting and scheming.”

“We are. We’re trying to get into the head of a girl in 1855, and where she might have hidden something.”

Phillip poured himself a cup of coffee and joined them at the table. “So you’re going forward with your theory that there are letters hidden in this house?”

“Let’s say we haven’t eliminated the possibility,” Meg said.

Bree clattered down the back stairs and drained the remains of the coffeepot into a mug. “Meg, you’re off the hook for picking today. What’s up?”

“I think we’re planning to go on a treasure hunt. We have a theory that letters from Emily Dickinson might be hidden somewhere in the house.”

“Cool,” Bree said. “Is that what the professor was looking for?”

“Maybe. Susan thinks it’s possible.”

“What’s she going to do if you find them?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask. Announce the discovery herself, since he can’t?”

“Convenient, isn’t it? Nice way to make a name for yourself.”

Meg stilled. Her mother turned back from the stove and met her eyes. “You don’t think . . . ?” Elizabeth said.

Phillip picked up her thought. “That we should take a harder look at Susan?”

“But how? And why? Why would she want to kill Daniel? She said herself that his death only makes things harder for her. Didn’t she need his support if she ever hoped to find a teaching job?” Elizabeth’s forehead furrowed.

“Wouldn’t a significant discovery like some lost letters of Emily Dickinson be a big boost for her job search? What do you know about Susan?” Phillip went into his lawyer mode once again.

“She’s a graduate student at UMass, writing a dissertation about Emily Dickinson, and Daniel was a member of her thesis committee—but one of several.”

“And she has had access to Daniel’s office, his home, and to this place.”

“She had been here before the break-in,” Meg said slowly, “and she did know we were working on our genealogy.”

“And maybe she knows more about these letters than she’s told us,” Elizabeth added.

“Did the police interview her?” Phillip asked.

Meg shrugged. “I don’t know. They may have, but I never thought to ask. Bree, you’re closer to her age than we are. What do you think? Can you see any reason why Susan would have wanted Daniel Weston to die?”

Bree sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. “Huh. That’s a tough one. He was on her thesis committee, but that’s usually not enough to drive someone to murder—although I’ve heard some students say they’d like to kill their advisors when they ask for one more piece of research or one more rewrite. Not that anybody’s rushing to jump into the job market these days, so there’s no hurry to finish their degree. But Mr. Corey has a point. If she did something newsworthy, she’d get attention, and it might make it a lot easier to find a job.”

“Which gives her an incentive to find those letters. It comes back to the letters that she’s so eager to find,” Phillip said. “She’s planning to come back here this morning?”

“Yes, that’s what we arranged,” Elizabeth replied.

“Then perhaps we’d better look around before she arrives,” Phillip said. “Meg, you were going to ask Seth if he could help?”

“Right—I’ll see if he’s in his office.” Meg went out the back door and crossed the driveway to Seth’s office, dashing through the steady drizzle and up the interior stairs.

Seth looked up when she came in. “Hi. What’s up?”

“Listen, I need your help for a treasure hunt. Or wild-goose chase. What do you get when you combine those?”

“Got me. A goose that lays golden eggs? What’s this about?”

“We’re looking for letters from Emily Dickinson, and there’s a chance they’re in the house somewhere.”

“That sounds like a lot more fun than these invoices. What do you need me for?”

“Advice. If a sneaky teenager wanted to hide something from her family in a crowded house during the 1850s, where would she put it? I thought you might be able to tell us which parts of the house date to the right time period, and what’s been muddled around with.”

“I’d be happy to help.” Seth stood up and put on a waterproof jacket. “Lead the way.”

Back in the kitchen, Elizabeth was piling scrambled eggs and stacks of bacon on a platter. “Good morning, Seth,” she said. “Did Meg explain what we’re up to?”

“She did. I’m intrigued. But how likely is it that these letters are in the house?”

Elizabeth pulled toast out of the toaster. “I’m not sure. Susan and I spent yesterday afternoon working out who the Ellen who wrote to Emily Dickinson might have been, and we narrowed it down to a list of perhaps twenty possibilities in this general area, one of whom, Ellen Warren, turns out to have lived in this house. And if it was her, whether she might have had—and saved—letters from Emily somewhere in the house.” She hesitated a moment before adding, “I’m beginning to suspect that Daniel may have covered the same ground, and that might have triggered his belated interest in renewing contact with Phillip and me. It did seem to come out of nowhere.”

Meg wondered how hard it was for her mother to admit that. Elizabeth had hoped for something different, and now she had to face that Daniel could have been using her and nothing more.

Her thoughts were interrupted when Seth asked, “Because he knew, or at least suspected, that it was your daughter, Meg, who was living in this house?”

“One of the small bonuses of local notoriety,” Meg deadpanned.

Elizabeth set the platter of bacon and eggs on the kitchen table. “Please, dig in. And I’m afraid there’s more to the story.”

“What?”

Meg answered for her mother. “We’re beginning to wonder how long Susan may have been aware of this, and if she might have had something to do with Daniel’s death.”

Everyone was silent for a few moments. Finally Meg spoke again, “So, Seth, what we need to know is where the likely hiding places in the house might be.”

“Interesting question,” Seth said, taking another helping of eggs. “Colonial houses are fairly simple in construction. Assuming Ellen wanted reasonably easy access to whatever she was hiding, she wouldn’t have put it behind a plaster wall, for instance. That pretty much leaves the woodwork.”

“Has much been changed since 1860?”

“Yes and no,” Seth said. “Eli Warren was the carpenter, and he did some renovations in the later nineteenth century. You know, Meg—he’s the one who reconfigured the fireplaces and added the existing stairway in the hall.”

“Eli was Ellen’s father. Should we figure that anything he worked on is ruled out, because he would have found Ellen’s cache?”

“Probably, unless she found a new spot after he was finished. How big a stash are you thinking?”

Meg and her mother exchanged glances. “We hadn’t thought about that,” Elizabeth said. “A wooden or metal box, about the size of a shoe box, I’d guess? I can’t imagine that she would have kept the letters loose, or just bundled up with a ribbon.”

“Okay, so you had four bedrooms upstairs—five, if you count the room that’s now a bathroom. Do you know who was living in the house at the time?”

“Ellen, her father, her stepmother—who was apparently pregnant for most of the 1850s, so lots of other halfsiblings—and her older brother.”

“So most likely the parents had one room, with maybe another serving as a nursery, and the rest of the kids would have had the other two. The fifth room—Bree’s room—was probably for a hired hand or two who helped with the farm.”

“When did the indoor plumbing go in?” Phillip asked.

“Sometime after 1900, and I’d guess that went into what had been the nursery. But you’re right—that would have disrupted some part of the rooms upstairs. When did Ellen die?”

“Before the 1920 census,” Elizabeth replied promptly.

“Then she was likely still here when the bathroom was built. She probably would have remembered her childhood cache and moved it, if that was a problem. It seems less likely that Ellen would have hidden something downstairs initially, since those were the public rooms, and there probably would have been someone around most of the time.”

“So you’re saying we need to look at any wooden moldings or structures in the upstairs bedrooms,” Elizabeth said, “and skip over the bathroom?”

“That’s about right. Loose boards, dead spaces in the walls, built-ins with false floors or backs, anything like that. Who knows what we might find?”