thirteen

“Forty-eight.”

“Fo’ty-eight.”

“Forty-nine.”

“Fo’ty-nine.”

“Fifty.”

“Fiddy.”

“Now what do you say?”

Bitty Sam, the smallest Keystone, tipped back his head and shouted at the top of his impressive lungs. “READY OR NOT, HERE I COME!”

The staircase in the main hall was base. He and Death had both been hiding their eyes against the newel post, a large golden head bent over a smaller one, while Death helped him count. The ex-Marine stepped back now and patted the four-year-old on the back as he launched himself off in search of his siblings and various degrees of cousins.

“Isn’t it kind of mean,” Death asked when the boy was out of sight, “making the littlest one be ‘it’?”

“We’ll help him if he needs it,” Leona said, unconcerned. She and Wren were uncovering and cataloging the pictures and artwork on the walls. “Better than letting him hide. He’s so little, last time he was missing for three days before we found him giggling in the bottom of the laundry hamper. Might still be missing if we hadn’t had to do the wash.”

“Really?” Death stared at her, aghast.

She gave him a long, level look. “No.” She turned to Wren. “He’s pretty, but he’s gullible.”

“It’s a fair trade,” Wren grinned. She uncovered another framed piece of artwork in the entry hall. “Oh, Death! Look. It’s our favorite artist.”

He crossed the room to peer over her shoulder. “I like his other artwork better. This is one of his political cartoons?”

“It must be. Something about Maryland. Not sure I understand it.” It was a pen-and-ink drawing of a mighty tower. One of the foundations stones was emphasized and was clearly the outline of the state of Maryland. “Oh, I see. Sort of. The tower must be the United States and the foundation is a map of the original thirteen colonies.”

“It probably made more sense at the time. Like I said, I like his other work better.”

Wren smiled and blushed.

“So do I,” Leona offered, voice wry. “So, by the way, does Mother Weeks. I really would avoid her if I were you,” she told Death. “She gave poor Roy a finger hickey on his butt that will be sore for a month.”

“You showed those letters to Mother Weeks?” Wren asked.

“I personally didn’t. We decided to scan them into the computer so we could keep the originals in a controlled environment and still, ahem, study them. Somehow she got hold of a copy.”

“There are copies?” Death asked, interested.

Leona grinned. “I’ll get you a printout. Though I’d be very disappointed to think you needed help coming up with ideas in that department.”

“Pretty sure he doesn’t,” Wren said, voice sly.

Leona raised her eyebrows. “A perfect man after all?”

“Well, we’re getting there, I think.”

Death, who had the feeling they were talking over his head and wasn’t sure if he should like it, moved to the next frame, undid the straps holding the cover on and eased it loose. “This is another of his,” he said.

“Well, he was an ancestor,” Wren said. “It makes sense that they’d have lots of his artwork around the place.” She came over to study the new picture. “Oh, this one I think I get. It’s about the War of 1812. Or the buildup to war, probably.”

The second cartoon showed a British naval vessel on the high seas, flying the Union Jack and with the officers and crew standing proud at attention in their fine uniforms, but the ship’s reflection in the water showed the officers brandishing whips over a chained crew of bedraggled men in ragged, Revolutionary War–era American uniforms. The flag in the reflection was a tattered rendition of Old Glory.

“I think I remember something about that,” Death said. “The British were boarding American ships and forcing the sailors to serve on British ships. British-born sailors, I think, and some Americans who had never been British got caught up in it. The Brits didn’t recognize their citizens’ right to emigrate and become nationalized Americans, so when they needed sailors to fight their war with Napoleon, they took them off American merchant ships.” He gave Wren a cheesy grin. “Do I get an A in history, Teach?”

Wren had moved on to the next picture. “I’ll give you an A+ and a gold star if you can explain this one to me.”

He went over and stood behind her, resting his chin on her head. “Buncha guys acting girly?” The third picture showed a tailor—obvious from the pins in his clothing and the tape measure around his neck—holding up an animal skin to a man dressed like Daniel Boone while a second frontiersman held another animal skin up in front of himself and admired himself in a mirror.

Wren shrugged. “I know men in the early nineteenth century wore elaborate clothes, usually. And trappers and explorers and whatnot didn’t. So, I’d guess old Obadiah was making fun of somebody, though I couldn’t tell you if it was the frontiersmen or the male fashion plates. I’ll have to remember to ask Doris about it. She’s our art expert. We’re just uncovering these for her.”

Death moved on. “This one’s plain enough,” he said. In the last picture on the east wall a group of men in fine suits and white wigs were milling around a conference table, lining up to sign some sort of document. Though the men were all smiling and shaking hands, they were also all holding knives behind their backs.

“That’s plain?” Wren asked.

“Sure. It’s politics. Two hundred years and it hasn’t changed a bit. Well, except they have more teeth when they smile now and they’ve traded the knives for semi-automatics.” He looked around. “Is it just me, or is it way too quiet in here considering the number of kids we turned loose?”

“It’s not just you,” Leona confirmed grimly. “If those little monsters aren’t up to something, I’ll eat my best hat.”

Leona had brought over seven small Keystones, ranging in age from four-year-old Bitty Sam up to eleven-year-old Levi. Her instructions to them had been simple and straightforward: Stay on the ground floor; Stay out of the pantry, with its dangerously rickety shelves full of strawberry jam; Don’t break anything.

Death found Bitty Sam in the bathroom, kneeling in the bathtub and peering up the faucet. “Anyone in there?” Death asked him.

“I can’t see no one. It’s awful dark, though.”

“Yeah, I bet. Why don’t we go look somewhere else?”

He tucked the toddler under his arm like a football and carried him out into the hallway, where they met Leona dragging nine-year-old Matthew along by one arm and scolding him furiously.

“I swear! You have as little sense as your grandfather! You’ve got that filthy stuff all over your clothes and you put your dirty feet on the racks—”

“Hey!” he protested indignantly. “You can’t scold me for it gettin’ me dirty and me gettin’ it dirty. That ain’t fair!”

“Isn’t fair,” she corrected. “And I can scold you for anything I want to scold you for. I’m the grandma. What would you have done if someone had turned it on, hmm?”

“Got out when it got hot?”

“Don’t you sass me, boy!”

“You hid in the oven?” Death asked with a grin.

“It was a good place. Nobody found me.”

“Gramma found you,” Bitty Sam told him. “You ‘it’!”

“She wasn’t playing. That don’t count.”

They found Wren standing bewildered in the middle of the morning room. This room was lightly furnished with delicate furniture. The tall secretary was too narrow to hide even a child. The two sofas were too low for anyone to crawl underneath and the chairs and coffee table were too open. There were no closets or cupboards, only a bay window with a boxy window seat, the window covered with light, gauzy curtains.

“I could swear I heard children giggling in here!”

“Maybe it was ghosts,” Matthew suggested. “You know this place is haunted. There’s a lady in white and some dead kids and a Confederate soldier. And I bet that naked guy’s here too, staggering around with his head on crooked.”

Death smacked the boy lightly on the back of the head, like his father used to do to him and Randy. “Don’t be so helpful.” He crossed to the window seat, lifted the cushioned lid and peered inside, but the cavity below was empty. “Maybe they’re in the parlor or the sitting room,” he suggested. “This place has pretty screwy acoustics.”

They went back into the hall and were halfway to the parlor when the door to the morning room burst open behind them and all five missing kids thundered out, stampeded across the hall and piled into the staircase, laughing hysterically.

“Okay,” Death said. “Spill.”

“It’s magic!” Mercy Keystone was a rare girl in a boy-dominated family. She was a mixed-race child with coffee-colored skin and shining black curls and a beautiful smile. “D’ya wanna see?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

They followed her back into the morning room and she lifted the lid of the window seat and climbed inside. “I’m gonna do a disappearing act. You gotta count to ten and say ‘abracadabra’ and then you can open the lid.”

She curled up in the box and pulled the lid closed and Death turned to Wren. “Would you like to do the honors?”

With a smile, she obliged, counting slowly while muffled thumps and scraping noises came from the box and the other children hid grins behind their hands. “Abracadabra!” she finished.

Death was still holding Bitty Sam and he dangled him over the window seat. “Lift up the lid, buddy.”

The toddler pulled the lid open and they all peered into the empty chest. Mercy popped up outside the window, pressed her nose against the glass and stuck out her tongue.

“Well,” Leona said dryly, “I think we know now how Declan Fairchild got in.”

_____

“Bernie Kopek remembered the picture,” Cameron said, passing over a five-by-seven color print of Ava Fairchild’s obituary picture.

They were back at Wren’s, sitting around the coffee table. Death had been picking flowers again and there was a big bowl of iris and daffodils and something spiky and blue-purple.

“Bernie’s the staff photographer,” Wren said.

“He said he took it at the Chamber of Commerce Christmas party, the week before Christmas. He remembered because Ava was all excited and she wanted him to be sure he got a good picture of her necklace. She told him that she expected to have exciting news soon, but the next time he saw her she was upset and told him to forget it. It had just been a mistake.”

“When would that have been? Any idea?” Death asked.

Cameron shrugged. “Not too long. Winter is a slow news time, so we’re always looking for stories. And Bernie’s not known for being patient at the best of times. I know it was before Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. That’s when Ava announced that she was leaving her house to the historical society.”

“The third week of January,” Death said. He lay the obituary photo beside his picture of the stolen necklace. Seen in color it was obvious the two pictures were of the same piece of jewelry. “So, at the end of December she finds the jewels hidden under the stair and thinks they’re Carolina’s jewels from the Civil War. She probably had just found them, within a day or two, before the Christmas thing. She wore one to the party and dropped hints, but she didn’t want to announce that she’d found them until she’d had it confirmed. She went to Josiah Halftree, probably the week after Christmas.”

“Why the week after Christmas?”

“She’d have wanted to go as soon as possible, but I can’t see her taking a bunch of jewels out in public during such a busy shopping time as the last week before Christmas. I could be wrong, but that’s my guess.”

“Okay.”

“Anyway, Halftree told her the jewels were too modern to be from the Civil War.”

“But he didn’t report to anyone that she’d brought them in,” Wren objected. “Wouldn’t jewelers have been sent descriptions of the stolen jewels and asked to look out for them?”

“Yeah, but remember, the robbery had been a couple of years before that, so it wouldn’t have been fresh in his mind. And this wasn’t just some random person bringing valuable jewels to him for appraisal. This was one of his oldest and most trusted clients. Probably she said she must have just forgotten buying them or something and he passed it off as senility setting in.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, so she finds out the jewels aren’t the Civil War jewels and realizes that they must be from the robbery, which means that her closest living relative is a murderer. She changed her will on the fifteenth of January. I looked it up. Her health started going downhill after Christmas and in early March, she died.”

“Did we tell you about the secret passage?” Wren asked Cam.

“This is off the record,” Death interjected.

“You can’t do that,” Cam protested. “You have to say it’s off the record before you say it. Once you say it, you can’t go back and make it off the record. It doesn’t work retroactively!”

Wren reached over, got Cameron by his immaculate tie, and pulled his face down until he was eyeball-to-eyeball with her. “It’s off the record,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am! Off the record. Absolutely! Anything you say!”

“We found a secret passage,” Wren repeated. “Well, actually, the Keystone children found it. There’s a window seat in the bay window in the morning room and one end opens to a short slide that lets out in the crawl space under the house. A sliding panel opens from there to under the verandah. Death booby-trapped it. Now the trap door only opens from under the house and the window seat lid only opens from inside the house. If Fairchild tries to get in that way again, he’ll be stuck in the window seat until the police come to take him out.”

Wren had supper cooking in the kitchen. There was bread in the oven, filling the house with its delicious, warm scent, an apple pie cooling on the windowsill and a pot of stew bubbling on the stove. She got up and excused herself to go check on it.

“Okay, question,” Cam said.

“Shoot.”

“If Declan Fairchild knew there was a secret entrance to the house, why did he send Flow Whitaker in the window, where he could fall down and break his neck?”

“Good question. I’ve been thinking about that myself and I’ve about concluded that he probably didn’t. We’ve been assuming that Fairchild broke out of prison because he heard that Whitaker had been killed, but I talked to prison authorities. He actually escaped before the newspaper with the story of Whitaker’s death was delivered to the prison library.”

“So you think … ?”

“Still off the record?”

“Sure.”

“I think maybe Whitaker was working with whoever killed Josiah Halftree. We’re guessing that was probably one of Ava Fairchild’s cousins. Most people would have no idea how to go about selling stolen jewels. Declan Fairchild’s cellmate could well be the only fence the killer had any knowledge of.”

Wren appeared in the kitchen doorway. “If you guys want to eat, you’d better come and get it while it’s hot.”

Cameron stood and stretched, sighed regretfully. “I wish I could, sweetie. I remember how good your cooking is. I have to be at a town council meeting in a few minutes, though. There’s a company trying to get a permit to put an adult bookstore in the old telephone company building, right downtown, on Main Street.”

“That’s a bad idea,” Death said.

“You think so? Some people are saying it will bring in jobs. It’s one of those big, warehouse-type businesses like you see on the highway.”

“It’ll bring in jobs until it goes bankrupt,” Death shook his head. “Place like that, you need to hide it somewhere so people can sneak in without the whole town knowing what they’re up to. Especially in a small town like this. I mean, hey. I kissed Wren at the donut shop this morning and fifteen people called her wanting the details.”

“He knows,” Wren said dryly. “He was one of them.”

Cameron had the grace to blush. He turned for the door, but then turned back, hesitant.

“What?” Death asked.

Cameron cleared his throat. “I don’t want you to think I was snooping or anything …”

“For wanting to know about a kiss?”

“No, not that.” He shifted uncomfortably. He had picked up the folder he’d carried the obituary picture in and he fiddled with it and studied the floor. “I was … curious about you. And I wanted to know what kind of man was hanging around Wren now. So I … did a little research. I came across something. I don’t know if you’ve seen this. Probably you have. But I thought, if you hadn’t, or if you didn’t have a copy, you might like to have it.”

He handed over the folder.

Death looked at him for a long minute, then opened the folder while Wren hung back, studying his face.

“Oh, wow,” he said. “I hadn’t seen this. Wow. Thank you. Thanks a lot.”

Cam half smiled. “It’s no problem. I happen to know Wren has a huge collection of interesting frames, if you want to frame it. I’d bet she could find you one that fits it perfectly.” He nodded to them both, then, and left, and Wren came over to lean against Death’s arm and see what he was looking at.

It was a printout of the front page of the St. Louis newspaper. The feature story was headlined “FIRE SAFETY DAY AT RIDGEWOOD ELEMENTARY” and a series of photos underneath showed schoolchildren climbing over a fire engine and listening, rapt, to a group of firefighters. One shot in particular showed a smiling young paramedic explaining something to a handful of kids.

“That’s your brother?” Wren asked.

“That’s Randy.” He checked the date on the paper and swallowed hard. “Less than a week before he died.”

“I’m so sorry! He was killed in a fire?”

“He died in a fire. The coroner said the actual cause of death was an aortic embolism. He must have had it all his life. Kid was basically a walking time bomb. I still can’t believe we never knew. Firefighters have to be in really good physical condition, you know? They said it was just one of those freak things. But they said he went quick. He didn’t suffer.”

Wren traced her fingers lightly over the picture. “It says ‘B. Bogart on his name tag. Shouldn’t it be R. Bogart?”

Death grinned. “Our mother was an English Lit professor,” he explained for the second time in three days. “Randy was short for Baranduin. It’s from Tolkien. It was the proper Elven name of the river the hobbits called ‘Brandywine.’ Of course, I used to call him Brandy. He hated it.”

“Brandy, you’re a fine girl?” Wren guessed, singing softly.

“What a good wife you would be,” Death agreed, not singing. He sighed. “I used to spend half my life coming up with new ways to torment my little brother. I wish he was still alive so I could do it some more.”