Carroll and I trooped up the grand front staircase to the second-floor landing, then rounded the corner, shuffled past several closed bedroom doors, and approached the attic entrance. I extracted from my pocket the extensive ring of keys that came with the house, and when I unlocked the old wooden door, it immediately swung open. We both gazed up into an ascending blackness.
“No light up here?” Carroll asked.
“A couple of bare bulbs hanging from cords,” I said. “Remember, when we had the high school football team load all the Barton documents out of here and into the public library, how we had to have several people stationed up there as flashlight holders so nobody would fall and break their neck? It’s not wired for much, still—and I can’t say that’s high on the agenda. I don’t imagine we’ll want the public to view this part of the house as an exhibit.”
“Depends on how you angle it,” she replied. “It might be an interesting reference, especially for kids, who don’t remember a time when a lot of people—even middle-class people—regularly employed servants in their homes. Very Upstairs, Downstairs, don’t you think?”
“I guess so. Except it’s not a grand estate with dozens of servants, just two or three people, we think. Plus, the maid’s bedroom is in the attic, not the lower level, so it’s more of an Upstairs, Upstairs situation.” I fell silent, and we both stared up into the dark passage. “You know more of this history than I do. Was it customary then for servants to be living in people’s homes?”
“For wealthy people, yes,” Carroll said. “Although the quarters generally weren’t very appealing. After all, female servants were supposed to be working from dawn to dusk and beyond. You know, emptying the slops, cleaning out the ashes in the fireplaces and starting new fires in the morning, preparing meals, cleaning up—which wasn’t exactly easy in the past. Whoever lived up there might have gotten off work on Sunday mornings to attend church, but otherwise, it was all labor. So the bottom line was, she didn’t need more than some blankets to sleep on, and probably no light—she’d have to bring her own candle. People made do on a lot less back then—especially if they didn’t have Barton-level wealth, which was basically everybody.” She took her phone out of her pocket and turned on the flashlight function. A little white circle of light appeared on the dark steps in front of us. “But enough talk. Let’s get up there!”
The stairs were steep, made of unpolished wood, and creaked as we climbed. Once we got to the top, I had to reorient myself—besides standing in near-total darkness, I hadn’t been up here in a while, and I’d lost my bearings. Shafts of white light came in through the dormer windows at the front and sides of the house, but they were only bright patches peering into utter blackness. I couldn’t make out much.
Suddenly, Carroll pulled the string hanging at the center of the ceiling, illuminating the single bare bulb that hung there, and the attic was bathed in a dusty gold glow. She pointed toward the gable at the back end of the house. “I think that’s the door there. When we first came in here, I assumed it was only a storage room of some sort, but if I remember right, it’s a rudimentary bedroom.”
Finding the door locked, I took out my ring of keys once more. I was fumbling among a dozen or so, my body casting a shadow over them as I stood facing the door, when a thump came from below us. And then another. Footsteps. Carroll and I both startled, looked at each other, and peered down the dark stairway. We couldn’t quite see the bottom from where we stood.
“Hello?” My voice was a croak.
“Hello, ladies? Are you up there?” The cheerful figure of Morgan Wheeler bounded up the tall steps, change and small tools audibly jangling in his pockets. “I thought I’d lost you. Taking a look at the upper floors, are we?”
“Hello, Morgan. Yes, we were just going to check out the maid’s room. I haven’t seen it in a while. Now, if I could only find the right key. Was this locked before? I don’t remember having to open it last time.” I felt a prickly annoyance rise in me. It was stuffy on the third floor, and I was beginning to sweat under my clothes.
“Don’t worry about that,” Morgan said, fishing some tools from his pocket. He inserted a thin metal rod into the lock on the door, then another at an angle to the first, and after a bit of jiggling, the lock popped, and the door swung open with a drawn-out creak.
There was no lighting inside the room beyond a small window in the far wall, allowing in some dusty sunlight. A row of hooks hung on the wall to our right, presumably for clothes, and there was, too, a tin basin that might have been used for a rather minimalist sponge bath. A bed frame with a sadly thin mattress stood along the left wall, and there was a battered Bible on the floor next to the bed. A chamber pot protruded slightly from under the far end of the bed. And that was all. No light, no heat, one window, and a coating of dust on every surface.
“Henry wasn’t particularly generous with the hired help,” I commented.
“It could have been his wife who dealt with a servant,” Carroll replied. “Hard to say right now; I haven’t come across any specifics on the help in this household. But honestly? This was probably as good as it got in those days. This place wasn’t exactly Downton Abbey.”
“Hardly,” I said. “Well, at least there isn’t a body lying on the bed. One a week is plenty.”
“Right,” she said. “Let’s not make a habit of that.” She walked to the end of the small room, pointing her phone’s flashlight here and there. She lifted a corner of the thin mattress with one hand, and, seeing nothing under it, let it fall back to the frame. A small puff of dust issued as it landed. She produced a pair of thin cotton gloves from her pocket—the mark of a true librarian if I had ever seen it—and put them on, then picked up the Bible from the floor. It looked heavily dog-eared. She flipped through it carefully and then opened it to the page marked by the crumbling ribbon placeholder. She paused, and the room felt heavy as she read.
“Whoever lived in this room underlined in pencil this little passage from Isaiah. ‘Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, here am I, send me.’ What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “I’ve never been much for Bible study, honestly.”
“It means you don’t always choose the work that comes to you,” Morgan volunteered. “But when a task is presented, you go where you are called. At least, that’s how I hear it.”
“I can understand that,” I said. In fact, it sounded a lot like my whole sojourn here in Asheboro. “Are you a religious man, Morgan?”
“Spiritual might be the better word,” he replied. “Quaker.”
“I see.” Carroll leafed through the book a bit more and didn’t seem to find anything of interest. She replaced it carefully in its spot, a crisp, dustless rectangle on the floor. Perhaps that spot hadn’t had a particular significance in the life of this room’s inhabitant, but when something’s been sitting in one place for a century, that place can seem like hallowed ground. The sun was turning gold and sinking outside the small round window at the end of the room. We all looked at it for a moment.
“I should head home,” Morgan said. “The missus requested fried chicken for dinner, and I am but a humble servant.” He smiled and began to exit, but turned back to face me. “I assume you won’t be needing me in the morning, what with the police investigation. I can put together my estimate and some rough ideas about what to do with the kitchen, and when you get the go-ahead from the police, we can recommence, what say?”
I smiled back at him, grateful that Morgan was still on board after our rather morbid morning, and that he seemed as dedicated to this project as I’d hoped our contractor would be.
“That makes sense,” I replied. “I think we’ve all had a long day, and we can regroup tomorrow or the day after. I don’t think Detective Reynolds will have any reason to hold us up. But I’ll be in touch. And please let me know when you’ve got the crew lined up, so we can arrange a walk-through of the site as soon as it’s cleared.”
“Will do, Miz Hamilton.” He tipped his faded green ball cap to me and to Carroll and then all but bounded down the attic stairs. Carroll and I remained standing in the maid’s tiny bedroom a bit longer, both of us seemingly uncertain as to the next step. Finally, we walked back out into the attic’s main space, and I locked the door behind us, though there wasn’t much of value to protect in there.
“So, what have we learned here?” I asked, turning to Carroll. She gave a little shrug, casting her eyes around the mostly empty attic space.
“Well, there’s a bedroom, and someone lived there. Someone who subsisted on very minimal means inside this lavish house, and who was perhaps religious. Although, you know what…” She trailed off, looking back toward the closed bedroom door in thought.
“No, Carroll, I don’t know. What?”
“Why wouldn’t she take that Bible? That would’ve been the only book many people owned, back then—working people anyway, not highly educated, not people of many possessions. The clothes are gone, which makes sense, and I didn’t see any keepsakes, but why didn’t she take the Bible?”
“Maybe she left in a hurry,” I said.
“Huh. Maybe.”
“Is there any chance that man in the staircase was the person who lived in there?”
“I doubt it. It was much more common for maids or other women servants to occupy the upper quarters in a house of this size. She’d have to be up at dawn and working long past the bedtime of the house’s owners, so it was to everyone’s advantage to have her on-site up here. The servants’ stairs in this house probably saw a lot of traffic: hauling water, laundry, supplies. I bet she was up and down all day. A hard life, for sure. So, no—I think if the guy in the wall were a servant, he would more likely have been quartered in the rooms above the carriage house.”
“I guess that makes sense. But we don’t know who he is yet, in any case. He didn’t look expensively dressed, if that’s any hint. He seemed to have a beard. Was that typical for people of a certain social rank back then?”
“This may shock you, but historical facial hair is not actually an area of my expertise, Kate.” She smiled at me in the dim light. “But I’ve seen illustrations and photos of various different types of men in history, and I will say that lots of them had beards. The beards on rich guys were just … better combed. But if this guy was killed, and if there was any sort of struggle, he might naturally look a bit unkempt. And thus any beard-grooming clues would have been lost to history.”
“I suppose so. Did you find anything in your research identifying the help in this house?”
“Not yet, no. I’ll dig some more tomorrow.”
“Good.” I struggled to think of what else to ask. My eyes were perhaps glazing over a bit. “Well, shall we call it a day? I’m exhausted.”
“Fine by me.”
Carroll pulled the cord in the ceiling, and the room went dark. We stalked back down the steep stairs, tracing along the walls with our hands for balance. Once back on the second floor, I locked the attic door, and we descended to ground level. Carroll took my keys and stepped out to wash up in the carriage house, which stood empty with Josh back in the city for a few days.
Still feeling a bit groggy—that garret bedroom was not fabulously well ventilated—I strode into the house’s front parlor. What did we know? Someone lived up there, two people lived in the rest of the house, and there had been a dead guy walled up in the kitchen. Clear as mud, as my mother liked to say. I ran my hand along the arm of a sofa in one corner of the room, feeling the dense pile of its fabric shift under my fingers. I stepped out of the parlor and exited the house onto the front porch. I paused there, closing my eyes tightly and wishing for a wicker chair and a bit of ease to end the day, but nothing appeared. I saw Carroll approaching on the lawn, striding through the shaggy grass—there was no one to cut it lately, with Josh’s term as caretaker completed. Carroll stooped to examine the thin stalks of native flowers here and there, and crouched over low patches of wild strawberries, the fruit as tiny as pearl buttons. I tried to picture that same lawn crisscrossed with rows of fruit trees, their branches bounteously full and leaning toward the ground, toward the reaching hands of …
Then I remembered that there had been no children here—none who survived, anyway. What had happened to them, the small, lost people now resting with their parents in the far back lawn of the property? And how would we sum up the complex life of this house to show it to the visiting public? Carroll finally got close enough that I could see the handkerchief she clutched daintily in her hands, the corners gathered up to contain something inside.
“Did you know there’s a grapevine out behind the carriage house? I never noticed before. This house sure is full of surprises.”
“You are right about that.”
“I’m tired, and I need a real shower. Let’s blow this Popsicle stand!”
“Gladly.”
We locked up, piled back into my car, and headed into town.