17

A few hours passed, in which I was able to concentrate very little on the task in front of me. Then Lisbeth called again, and I picked up.

“Hi, Lisbeth. Is everything all right?”

“Oh yes, no trouble here. It’s just that Phil’s gone out with the kids for the afternoon—I thought you might like to come over for a late lunch. Are you free? Carroll can come too. And I’ve just spoken with Frances from the paper—since she missed the board meeting at the mansion, I figured we could fill her in too. Oh, it’ll be a girls’ lunch! I can make gougères, fruit salad, mimosas…”

I listened to her speak, her tone almost giddy at the prospect of the gathering. If I were to be honest, I’d tell her I felt terrible, that things were not going well, and all things being equal, I’d most prefer to curl up in a ball and go back to bed. But I thought better of that. A change of scenery might help. I took a deep breath.

“Sure, Lisbeth. How about an hour from now? I’ll see about Carroll too.” I hung up and practiced my best cheerful face for the luncheon ahead, but it quickly crumpled. Oh well. I walked into the parlor to find Carroll seated in an armchair, squinting at her laptop. On the screen was what appeared to be a blown-up scan of a historic document. Carroll was focused intently on a particular marking on it.

“Who could read that? That is not useful, Mr. Record Keeper,” she grumbled.

“What’s this now?”

“I found a ledger from Henry Barton’s household accountant, back in the boxes from the library. It lists two servants living in-house; one of them it doesn’t bother to name at all, and the other is called … squiggle.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“No, it’s not. We’re looking for names here, people. This may be a dead end, but I’ll keep searching. Based on this document, it looks like he at least paid them pretty well, for the time. Must’ve been hard work, but that helps.”

“That’s something. Hey, Lisbeth just called and invited us to lunch. Want to go? This day is beyond weird, but a good meal and some distraction might help.”

“Sure. Just let me wrap up here.”

I did a few errands to keep myself busy—contacting Carroll’s web designer friend, doing a desperately needed load of laundry—and the next time I looked up, it was time to head over to Lisbeth’s. I collected Carroll, and we piled into my car. As I drove toward Lisbeth’s house, I tried to remember the last time she and I had visited or even talked by phone—really talked, as friends. How had I become so obsessed with the Barton project? It had been my sole focus for the last few months in town. The work was a new sort of challenge for me, requiring me to stretch my imagination. I liked that. The swanky hotels I was accustomed to handling in Baltimore were interesting, but the projects had a sameness to them. Not that I hadn’t enjoyed that work—I had, and I’d been rather handsomely paid for it, a fact that was enabling this small-town sojourn in Asheboro.

But the Barton house was a different animal. Not only did this project involve historic preservation, but it called for public interaction—in a broader sense of “public” than I’d been thinking about when working on luxury hotels. We wanted families to come here—adults, kids, retirees, history buffs, and novices—and all find something compelling in the display. I knew I felt compelled by the house. But how would I translate all that we’d discovered—and what we hadn’t—into an interesting story for visitors?

My mind drifted to Josh too. I looked forward to our talk about his “participation in the project” with a mix of interest and dread. Just focus on the day ahead, Kate. “Here am I, send me,” et cetera. Carroll, too, seemed to be lost in thought. After a few minutes’ drive, we arrived at Lisbeth’s house, a modest bungalow-style on a tree-lined residential street. I parked and turned to Carroll before getting out.

“Listen, I don’t think I’m going to tell the others about Steve’s death—at least not right away. They’ll find out eventually, but I don’t even know if Reynolds would approve of me divulging the fact of an open case to anyone else at this point. And aside from that, I think having a normal social call might help lift my mood today.”

“I hear that. Fine, no Steve talk.”

We nodded to each other and walked up the neatly paved driveway. When I knocked on the door, Lisbeth opened it immediately, as if she’d been standing right there waiting all morning.

“Kate—you’re here! Carroll, welcome! Come in, come in. I’m so glad you could make it. I love my kids madly, but sometimes I really do like to talk to grown-ups. Are you hungry? Thirsty?” She was going a mile a minute, a quality I found simultaneously endearing and exhausting about her.

“Hi, Lisbeth. Yes and yes.” I laughed. It was good to see her. I looked back and saw Frances’s car pull in behind mine in the driveway. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.” We waited for Frances to approach, and then we all stepped into Lisbeth’s carpeted foyer.

“Iced tea? Mimosa?” Lisbeth offered. “I warn you—I have my position as an upstanding citizen of Asheboro to consider, so if you have more than one adult beverage, I’ll have to appoint a designated driver or get Phil to drive you home when he gets back. But seriously, I have champagne.”

“Duly noted,” I said. “I’m not in much of an imbibing mood anyway. How about just the orange juice?”

“You got it, lady. Follow me,” Lisbeth said. And we did, like an obedient flock of sheep.

We sat around the kitchen table, each with a glass of juice or tea in hand, and shot the breeze about this and that. Small-town life in Asheboro. From what Lisbeth and Frances said, I couldn’t see that the place had changed much since I was in high school. It made me sad to think about that gorgeous mansion sitting empty and silent out in the country, hiding its secrets. And there certainly were secrets—starting with that body in the staircase that nobody seemed to have known about. But mostly the talk was general. At one point, we meandered into a discussion of the search for a new town librarian, which had been tabled until the fall. Or maybe forever, if Mayor Skip couldn’t find some funding for it in those budget meetings. Lisbeth brought out a heaping tray of homemade cheese rolls, fresh fruit salad—the strawberries were just perfect—and small cookies, for good measure. The mood was quietly cheerful, and we were all well fed. It really was a relief to have a casual conversation after such a strange week. The talk turned to town history, and Frances seemed to arrive at something she’d wanted to tell us.

“I think I’ve mentioned to you before that memories in the country are long,” she said, sipping a tall glass of iced tea. “This may not seem like ‘country’ to you now—it’s been quite built up in my lifetime—but a hundred years ago, it was plenty of farmland on all sides. And no, I’m not talking about my childhood a hundred years ago—I’m not that old. But it’s all in the papers, if you know how to look. After the Civil War ended, there were a lot of poor people, just trying to get by. Subsistence farming, in many cases, not making a profit but surviving, more or less. They might have owned the family land—that was more than could be said for people just freed from slavery—but still, it was hard to make a living, especially if the family was large. Henry Barton was sitting on a nice piece of land here, but at some point, he stopped farming it and turned his interests to industry in one form or another. There may well have been farmers around here who resented that. Who was this man from Boston, muscling in on their town? He wasn’t one of them. That could have contributed to his isolation. The men in town welcomed the jobs he created, but they might also have had some hard feelings.”

“You’re getting this from the town paper?” Carroll asked.

“Not exactly. It’s a broader feeling I have—from reading the papers, yes, but also from living here all my life. Hearing people talk. You see the dynamics in the town over generations, though they’re hard to pin down with footnotes, the way you might need to for academic purposes.”

“So what did you find in the town paper?” Carroll pressed on, clearly hoping for some hard facts.

“Well, now that you ask, there was an interesting series of articles I had never come upon before. I assume you’ve heard of the Hatfields and McCoys?”

“Only in a general way,” I answered. “Some kind of family feud, right?”

“Yes, in the West Virginia–Kentucky area, right after the Civil War and for a good many years after that. It lasted for generations. Family members on both sides died. You don’t need to know the details, but you should know that it was not an isolated incident, only the most famous one.”

“You’re telling me that things like that happened in other places? Places like Asheboro?”

“Yes,” Frances said. “Your family arrived too late to have any part in all that, but there are lots of families around here who never left, and they remember. They don’t talk about it much, certainly not with out-of-towners—which, for all practical purposes, is what you are, given that you moved to the city years ago. But they haven’t forgotten.”

“Wow,” I said, and fell silent for a few moments. “Frances, I assume you brought this up for a reason, other than it makes a good story. Does this have something to do with our project or with Henry Barton?”

“Not exactly. Barton had no local connections with any feud. It doesn’t seem that Mary’s people did either, from the little I’ve read.”

“So,” I continued, “why does this matter now?” When Frances began speaking again, I thought for a moment that she’d changed the subject, but that wasn’t true.

“Since I’ve had plenty of time on my hands at the paper, I’ve read through many decades of issues, cover to cover. There were never dramatic stories about shoot-outs or killings on the edge of town, and no names named, but if you pay attention, over time, you begin to notice details. Who was mentioned, or not mentioned—at church, or local events, or even buying a new horse. Who didn’t sell a plot of land to whom, and who didn’t hire whose brother-in-law to work it. Ordinary, everyday events in a small town—but certain names come up in connection, for years. It’s subtle, and most people don’t go looking, but it’s there. So when I heard that Morgan Wheeler had hired Steve Abernathy to work on the Barton house, it set off a little alarm in my mind.”

I finally saw where she was going with this. “You’re saying Morgan and Steve are the latest addition to two families like the Hatfields and McCoys?”

“Maybe. I couldn’t swear to it, but I do believe Steve’s family’s been in plumbing and building for generations around here. I don’t know Morgan well, truth be told. But…” She hesitated, seeming to assemble her words carefully. “There was some kind of an ugly spat between two local men when I was a girl, and it led to an old barn on someone’s property being burned to the ground. It was ruled an accident—luckily, no one was in the barn, or it would’ve made a much bigger story—but my folks always thought there was something fishy about it. So, I turned up a few notes on the incident in the papers. The men in the argument? Abernathy and Simmons—which, if I recall, was the surname on Morgan’s mother’s side. So that fire might live on, in some form, in the crew you’re now working with.”

Oh no. I tried to recall all the interactions I’d seen between Morgan and Steve. There hadn’t been many, of course, before Steve’s untimely end. But there had been that strange tone the night before at the mansion—a struggle for dominance in the Barton project? Or was it something older than that? Could things have turned violent? I thought Morgan seemed like a peaceable type, being Quaker and all—or so he said. Steve had struck me as a wild card, but now he was dead, so there was nothing more to be learned about his character. Carroll and I exchanged a glance. I was determined to keep this lunch light and sociable; I didn’t want to tell them about Steve’s death unless it was absolutely necessary.

“Frances, this is all good to know. I’ve actually been wondering if there was a personal problem between Morgan and Steve.”

“Oh, dear—is there trouble between them?”

“Well … it’s hard to say,” I said, prevaricating. I flashed back on a memory of Steve’s arrogance toward the other people around him: disrespect toward Morgan, his rather dismissive attitude toward Bethany, and the sniping jokes he made toward his own brother. “Steve seems like a competent worker, but he rubs people the wrong way.” I glanced at Carroll again, unsure if I had her permission to tell Frances what she’d told me about her incident with Steve. “He made some women on the project uncomfortable, and he was having a shouting match with Morgan and Bethany last night after we left the mansion.”

“My. What about?”

“I didn’t get the whole thing, but it seemed to be about authority, in part—who was giving the directions, and who had to take assignments.”

“That sounds about right.” She clucked her tongue. “You see some strange battles for power in this sleepy little town. I wouldn’t think there was so much to fight over, but there’s always someone with not enough, and someone he thinks has more.”

I wanted to say something dismissive, to consider this notion frivolous—could anyone care what happened between some farmers a hundred years ago? But Steve’s body at the foot of the basement stairs might speak otherwise. To say nothing of the older body, walled up in the kitchen.

“Frances, are you thinking about the body we found in the wall in relation to this old feud?”

“Maybe. We don’t get many murders around here.”

I gulped. The scenes of the two deaths in the mansion tangled together in my mind. Were they related? And was Steve’s fall a mere drunken accident, or was a killer now at large?

“Maybe there’s more we can learn here,” I said. “Carroll?”

“Yes?” she said, about to crunch into a cookie. She looked attentive, but confused.

“When you get back to the library, could you look up Steve Abernathy’s family in or around Asheboro and see who the family members were? I bet there’s something in the genealogical records in that town history room. If his family has been here in the trades for generations, there must be some records of them. We should have his date of birth on the work papers Morgan sent me.”

“Sure thing. But why?”

“Well, I think Frances has proposed the idea that the body in the staircase is somehow related to Steve. Or his family.”

“Wow. Okay, I’ll see what I can find.”

“Try to do it discreetly. There’s still an investigation open on the old body, though it’s something of a formality, but I don’t want to publicize that we’re pulling documents related to existing families in the town. Luckily, the library’s not open to the public these days—or rather, that’s lucky for us, unfortunate for the townspeople. But at least it means you won’t run the risk of meeting up with any town gossips in the stacks. But see what’s up with the Abernathy family—as far back as you can find. Were they dirt poor or comfortable? Where did they live in relation to the Barton mansion? I’d like to know if he’s been trying to sabotage the project because of some ancient blood feud, for instance.”

“Happy hunting, ladies,” Frances said. “It sounds like you’ve got plenty to look into. Now, I’d better get to the office. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve discovered Intern Troy asleep at the scanner.”

“Perish the thought,” Lisbeth said, grinning. “Frances, you’ll teach the youth of Asheboro journalistic rigor if it’s the last thing you do!”

“I will indeed,” Frances said, returning the smile. “Kate, do stop on by if you’d like to look through some old issues, will you?”

“Definitely. I can see there’s more to be learned here.”

After some more mild chatter, Frances, Carroll, and I all hugged our host and made our way back out into the sunshine of the day. Indeed, my mood had lifted a bit, though Frances’s revelation had left me with a list of new questions.