I slept deeply, dreaming of a vortex in deep space, into which all matter—even thoughts, ideas—was being sucked, then vaporized, never to be seen again. The vortex looked oddly familiar, emitting a faint gray dust as it circled endlessly in the void. As soon as I woke, I realized I had been picturing the hole in the Barton kitchen wall. Would Mary’s diaries elucidate anything about that strange chapter in the house’s history? Did she know the identity of the man who had fallen face-first through time, waiting a hundred years to meet us on the other side of a hobbyist’s spy camera? Would she even have known about him? It was still possible that Henry had done something nefarious and kept it from her. I didn’t want to think this was true, but I couldn’t rule out anything, given how little information we had.
I dressed and walked downstairs to find Carroll seated in the kitchen, applying peanut butter to a banana and staring dreamily at the sunlight coming through the house’s front windows. As soon as we had both eaten and washed up, a glance between us confirmed the next move: back to the diaries. We resumed our positions in the sitting room, the blinds drawn.
Mary Barton was a good writer: not showy or terribly descriptive when it came to physical detail, but basically competent at recording the events of her time. And there were many events to recount. From the end of the war, her life had radically transformed; she had married Henry, given birth to three children, seen her husband’s business grow until she was wealthier than she could ever have imagined as a child. Her mother died from what sounded like some type of abdominal cancer, though Mary’s language about it was veiled and allusive, a sign of the time. At last, it seemed like the renovation of the old farmhouse was imminent. Carroll, who had abandoned her insistence on chronological reading and leapfrogged to the diary ahead of the one I was on, let out a sorrowful moue from the chair beside me.
“What?” I asked.
“The children,” she said, suddenly near tears. I stood and perched myself on the arm of the large leather chair she was sitting in and read over her shoulder. Mary had written, in a shaky hand:
The children woke today with a ghastly expression: eyes gray and sunken, red cheeks, and begging for water. I have been bringing it all day, pitchers by the bedside, and applying cool cloths to their heads, but nothing will comfort them. They will not eat and have only expelled that which was taken in.
We read silently, in horror, as the children suffered under this mysterious illness. By the third day, they had all died. Carroll carefully placed her bookmark and shut the diary, and we both sat silent for a long time.
“Poor Mary,” she said at last. “There was nothing she could do.”
“And things were going so well!” I added. “They had such a beautiful life together—all the money they could want, and a big piece of land to develop. They were expanding the garden and beginning plans to renovate the house. I just read this interesting part about a scheme Mary came up with to irrigate their garden crops. They’d just dug a well by the edge of the property, and she had the workers dig a trench—”
“A new well?” Carroll broke in. “I was wondering about that. This illness sounds a lot like cholera. People got it from contaminated water sources, and it killed them in days—sometimes even hours. Terrible. Just be glad you’re alive today, when we’ve figured all this out, and not back then.”
“Oh, I am,” I said softly, thinking again of that talk with my aunt all those years ago. We returned, somewhat more somberly, to our separate reading. A hush fell over the whole house as Carroll and I hunted for clues of the past. An hour later, I was startled back to the present by a knock on the front door. When I opened it, Josh walked right in.
“I’m taking a break from writing. Too quiet over there. Where have you been? You aren’t picking up your phone. What’s this—Barton book club?” He stood in the parlor doorway and looked at Carroll, still engrossed in the tiny volume in her hands. I hadn’t told Josh—or anyone else, for that matter—about the existence of the diaries. Of course, this sort of personal writing wasn’t exactly in Josh’s academic wheelhouse, but I figured he should know sooner or later.
“It’s sort of a secret at the moment,” I told him. “Bethany found these under a floorboard at the mansion, in what must have been Mary’s bedroom. Diaries. They go through many years of her life in the house.”
He stood up straighter, his body at attention looking something like an exclamation point. “Personal accounts? That’s huge!” To my relief, he didn’t seem annoyed to have been left out at first, but genuinely excited to hear about the find. This pleased me, as I wanted us all to work together. “I hope you’ll let me get my eyes on them someday,” he said.
“We’ll think about it, Professor,” Carroll shot back with a smirk. When she returned her eyes to the page in front of her, she startled. “Gotcha!”
“Gotcha what?” I asked.
“Bill. They just hired a new guy to work at the house. His name is Bill. There’s our second servant.”
“Aha! So what was he hired to do?”
“It sounds like they brought him on as a sort of all-purpose handyman: keeping the horses, tending the grounds, fixing up the gardens.”
“Wasn’t Mary into overseeing the gardens?” I asked.
“It seems like she never quite recovered after the children died. She might’ve had a milder case of cholera—she made it through alive, but she was changed after that. The way she writes about her days, she sounds … tired. Like that sadness just kept following her. So she’s not doing much gardening at this point in the account—she doesn’t appear to be going outside at all, actually.”
“Poor Mary. Is there anything else about Bill? Was he working there long?”
Carroll flipped through the pages in the volume, scanning for further mentions of the mysterious groundskeeper’s name. There didn’t seem to be much. She stopped on a page near the end, reading silently.
“Well,” I asked, eager for news. “What are you seeing?”
“He doesn’t come up much, honestly. There’s a long period where it’s just brief accounts of the weather that day, sometimes what Henry’s up to at the factory. Her friendship with Florence. It sounds like Florence and Mary could talk to each other—that’s nice. But—oh, there’s this little note here: Mary seems to be annoyed with Bill. I can’t tell if they had a confrontation, but she implies that he’s been poaching fruit from their little garden orchard. She sees him from her bedroom window, collecting it into bushels—but also pocketing a bunch of it.”
My mind turned its gears at the mention of fruit.
“Wait, Carroll—when the body was removed from the staircase, we found those fruit pits in the space. Probably cherrystones. The medical examiner told me there were also some in the dead man’s pocket.”
“You don’t think…?” She looked up from the volume, and I could see her own mind at work.
“I think old Bill might have been the man behind the wall.”
We sat in stunned silence for a moment, until Josh came back into the room, having wandered off to the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea.
“What’d I miss?” he asked, blowing steam off the hot beverage.
“Good timing, Professor.” I filled him in on the clue of the fruit pits, and our guess as to what it meant.
“That can’t be the whole story, though,” he said. “Why was he killed? If we think he was killed. Stealing some fruit from your employer’s gardens is not usually cause enough for murder.”
“Certainly not,” said Carroll, “but we may not know the whole story yet. There are more diaries left to read.” We looked at each other gravely, deciding without words to forgo lunch in favor of finding out what had happened, if we could. There was no guarantee this was a full account. People often tired of diary writing, or grew too ill to keep up, or simply forgot. Samuel Pepys, the famed English diarist Carroll had told me about, had stopped writing after ten years, when his eyesight began to fail him. We could only hope Mary had been a diligent recorder.
But did she even know what happened to Bill, such that he ended up inside the kitchen wall? There was still the possibility that Henry had done it and kept it from his wife. This was especially possible if she had stopped leaving her room by that point. I picked up the next volume in the chronology, and Carroll took a place by my side to read along. We wanted to be on the same page now, literally and figuratively. Josh sat across the room, sipping his ginger tea—he was forbidden to get too close to our primary sources with anything that might spill—and awaiting any news.
After a few uneventful entries on weather and banal news of the town, I turned another page, and stopped. The next entry, dated from late 1879, was clearly longer than the ones that had come before, and more detailed. It looked as though Mary had decided to record one particular episode, and she wanted to get it right. As if intentionally leaving a record of the event. I didn’t say anything to Carroll, but we both started reading carefully, almost holding our breaths. It began abruptly:
Florence is with child. The baby will be Henry’s. He has not told me, but I have only to look at Florence and it is clear. She will give him what I cannot, now, and I bear no ill will against her. She has been a good friend. The child will be born in the new year, though I may not be here to see it. If I am still living then, I will claim the child as my own, and Henry will be glad. The house may thrill again with laughter and small footsteps.
She went on, remembering what she missed about having her children in the house. I wanted to cry—what an unexpected arrangement. Had it been Mary’s idea? She had so loved their children, had wanted to give them the beautiful life she didn’t have growing up—and she had lost them all. But apparently she’d given her blessing to Florence in her place.
But what had happened to Florence and Henry’s child? Had it been born? Had it lived? Was there any public record? I leafed through the following pages of that diary, and then jumped ahead. And I found … something. Not an answer, exactly, but another piece of our growing Barton puzzle. It was one more overlong page, on which Mary’s handwriting appeared increasingly small and shaky. It read:
An awful thing has happened. The stable hand Bill has attempted to do Florence harm, to violate her body, thinking her a loose woman, for her condition has become clear. He seized Florence in the bedroom last night and tried to force himself upon her, believing me asleep in my room. But I heard her shriek and came out to confront them, to protect Florence, and Henry’s child. The man was strong, accustomed to heavy work, but I brought down a pewter vase upon his head and wrested Florence from his grasp, and he fell down the old kitchen stairs. His neck was turned, and we knew he was dead. Florence and I returned to my room and held each other close until Henry returned from the factory. We told him all that had happened, and he has resolved to take care of this in silence.
There was a gap of several pages after this entry, and then Mary had added one more brief statement:
Henry has sent Florence away to her family several towns away, to have his child. Florence was frightened badly by Bill, but we pray the child will be healthy, even if the baby will not live with us. Henry will furnish them with whatever they need to make a happy life. Now we are two again in this airy house. Henry promised that he would conceal what happened to Bill, and the man was never seen again in Asheboro. I suspect that he lies in Eternity somewhere on the grounds of our home, but I prefer not to ask. No one will know. As I have feared, I much doubt that I will survive long enough to greet Henry’s child, if ever Florence should return to our home. It is just as well. The child will not bear Henry’s name, to preserve his reputation in the town, but will take that of Florence’s family, Simmons. Henry is a good man, and he has helped us through this great difficulty. I miss our children terribly, remembering at the close of each day their faces as they played in the garden, weaving among the trees. Would that our lives had been different, would that they had stayed.
That was essentially the end of Mary’s writing. It was clear that she was failing rapidly, and that her last act had been for Henry’s sake—and for the safety of Florence, her friend. Henry had never told, nor left a record, of what had happened with the maid and the baby. Nor had anyone ever mentioned Florence’s child—though apparently Henry had given her family money to raise it in a level of comfort not guaranteed to the average farmer of that time. I flipped through the rest of the volume, and it was mostly empty. There was one more diary in the box, which Carroll then picked up and paged through. It was entirely blank, which I had somehow failed to notice before. And thus we came to the end of Mary’s story, as she told it. I closed the book in front of me and pushed it away on the little table it rested on. Carroll and I stood and headed silently toward the kitchen, beckoning Josh to come along. We found a bag of mixed nuts deep in the pantry, and stood around the kitchen island, snacking while silently mulling over all that we’d read.
And then I remembered something. I took out my phone and began to dial.