There wasn’t room in the kitchen to get too close. Besides Detective Reynolds and Meredith, the medical examiner, two uniformed cops had made their way in, along with a tech Meredith had brought to assist, a photographer, plus Morgan and me. We made quite a crowd, and the room was heating up, as much from the activity of heavy equipment the group had brought in as from the Maryland summer now ramping up to full effect. I was glad to see that the people handling the body were being careful—they moved slowly, examining every angle before making a decision—and the hole in the wall didn’t look too bad. Maybe we’d want to take out this wall anyway in the final assessment—would tourists want to come through and see the “murder staircase,” if that’s what it was? Or could we appeal to a niche market of architectural historians who’d be thrilled to see a piece of an old farmhouse preserved inside the Victorian manse? I pushed aside those thoughts and focused on the action in front of me.
Meredith was holding the gurney in place while two men—her assistant and one of the uniformed officers—jockeyed for space to reach into the staircase and get ahold of the body. It seemed to move easily, so it hadn’t been tied down or anything. Had he just lain where he fell, for all of the last century? The head end emerged first, and the guys slid the rest of the stiff body out easily, while Meredith maneuvered the gurney to receive him. It was done quickly, and we all got our first glance of the Dead Man in the Wall.
The photographer snapped more pictures, and then Meredith measured the body. She described what she was observing, probably for the benefit of Detective Reynolds, but we all leaned in to hear the updates.
“Looks like he was about five feet eight inches, though he might have shrunken a bit over time. Appears to be wearing ordinary clothes, possibly work clothes.” With gloved hands, she deftly felt assorted parts of the body. “Visible skull fracture, and a possible broken neck. There may be other breaks, but it’s hard to tell before I get his clothes off. Either the head or neck injury could have killed him, but I’ll have to look more carefully to see if I can determine in what order they happened.” The sweat on my forehead suddenly felt cold.
“Can you tell how old he was?” I asked from across the room.
“I’ll have to check his teeth and bones. Not old, but past his teens, I’m guessing. For the moment, we can guess between twenty and forty. But don’t quote me on that.”
“Anything in his pockets?” the detective asked.
“What, you want to see if he has a driver’s license?” Meredith smiled, then felt in the man’s jacket and pants pockets. “Sorry, no. Look, I’ll be able to tell you more once I get him back to the lab. Kate, do you want to come meet the man in your wall, up close and personal?”
I hesitated. No, I didn’t, but I felt I should. Now or never, Hamilton. The policemen stepped back and let me approach, until I was standing at the near end of the gurney. The man looked small, shrunken. His hair was reddish, and he had what looked like the beginning of a beard. No jewelry—or at least, no rings. When had wedding rings for men become popular? In short, there really wasn’t much to see. I didn’t feel much for the man—not disgust, not pity, not sympathy. Shallow of me, but at the moment, he was an inconvenient object getting in the way of my plans. I promised myself that Carroll and I would work toward giving him a name and a reason for lying dead in front of me.
“Seen enough?” Meredith asked.
“I think so. How long will your autopsy take?”
“A couple of days, maybe.”
“I’ve got a friend working on the genealogy and histories of the people who lived in this building in its heyday. If you find anything notable about this man, or if we can offer you any clues, please let me know.”
“Will do.” She turned to the other policemen, and then to Reynolds. “Okay, guys—let’s get him back to the lab. Brady, I’ll be in touch.” Then she followed the gurney out the door.
The tech set to unplugging the stand lights that had been placed around the hole in the wall, and the photographer fiddled with his equipment on the large kitchen table, fitting a very expensive-looking lens into a foam-lined case. Morgan and I stood looking at the hole, not saying much, and eventually the workers left and we found ourselves alone in the kitchen again. I was about to open my mouth to suggest we get a Shop-Vac on-site sooner than later, when Detective Reynolds walked back into the room, surprising us both.
“Thank you for letting us barge in on your project space today, Kate,” he said. Like I’d had a choice. “We’ll let you know if we discover anything of interest.”
“How far back do your records of missing persons go?” I asked.
“Not far enough for this gentleman, unless he was a former president, or something like it. I’m afraid you’re on your own.”
“We’ll manage. I hope you’re not going to make some announcement to the public.”
“There’s nothing to be gained. No one alive today is going to remember him.”
“That works for me. I want to get my mind around the history here before I start getting calls about this. Or we could think of it this way—let me write it up when we know more, and we’ll both benefit. But anyway, thanks for your help. That went as well as it could have, I guess.”
“You’re welcome. Try not to find any more bodies this week.”
“I’ll do my best.” I followed him to the front door and watched him march to his unmarked car in the driveway, then returned to Morgan in the kitchen. He was poking minutely at the exposed plaster in the wall with a pocket comb, and looked up when I came in.
“Everybody gone now?” he asked.
“Yup. That didn’t take as long as it might have, but I’m exhausted.”
“I understand.”
I turned on my heel and walked back into the dining room, then took out my phone and called Carroll. She picked up on the third ring, sounding a bit dazed.
“Hi, Kate. How’s it going over there?”
“They’re gone. With the body. There was nothing awful or disgusting, and the poor man didn’t fall apart when they extracted him from his hiding place. He had both a skull fracture and a broken neck, but nothing that would identify him. The pathologist will get back to us if she finds anything, and I said you might be able to help if she hits a dead end.” I paused, feeling a little dazed myself, wondering what our next move should be. Everything felt uncertain. “Speaking of which … find anything interesting?”
“Hold on to your bonnet, Hamilton, because I’ve got some news. Mary news.”
“Do tell! I could use some good news right about now.”
“I told you before, I think we have a pretty good handle on Henry’s overall story, although there were a lot of blanks for other parts of his life. Since we know he started in Massachusetts, I figured I should work out how he ended up in Maryland and then stayed.”
“Makes sense to me. And?”
“I started with two questions,” Carroll continued. “One, was it the war that brought him here? And two, how and when did he end up with this property? So I looked at war records, which are available online. It’s a little harder to pin down deeds when you’re starting with not much information, but I made a few phone calls to friends who were likely to have access to that information. And I got answers.” I could hear her grin through the phone. “I’ll start with his war records. I can give you Henry’s unit and so on, although he never made it past corporal. So if you were hoping for a three-star general, you’re out of luck. His unit was posted down this way for some of the major battles you hear about, and he was wounded in one of the last ones, close to the end of the war.”
“I assume there’s more?”
“Of course. Henry’s injuries were serious enough that he had to spend some time recuperating, and by the time he was well enough to travel, the war was pretty much over. So he ended up recuperating in Maryland.”
“Here?” I breathed.
“Bingo. Right here, in fact—that is, not just in Asheboro but in the very house where you stand. Of course, it was a shabby farmhouse back then. The owners took in wounded soldiers to make a bit of money from the government. The only child at home was a young woman, who did the nursing and such. And—”
“Her name was Mary,” I whispered.
“You got it.”
“Wow.” I sat with that thought for a moment. There was something almost cloyingly romantic about it, but I liked the story anyway: young Mary nurses wounded soldiers in her family home, falls in love with one of them, marries him, and becomes the lady of the grand house, which just happened to have been her own house, before the boom. Of course, it was a romance story largely composed in my own mind—but the facts were coming together. “That does shift the perspective a bit. Anything you can tell about her personally? More details?”
“You don’t get much sense of someone’s personality from a census. But reading between the lines, I have some guesses…” She trailed off.
“Well? What?”
“It’s not about Mary, exactly. But her family—her father, specifically. By the end of the war, he seems to be gone from the house, with just Mary and her mother, Annelise, running the place.”
“Where’s the father?”
“I found a death certificate. Cause of death is given as ‘acute mania.’”
“Mania?” I furrowed my brow. “Like what? He got so excited, he ran into a wall?”
“No, not exactly. It can mean a few things—medical terminology was a little fuzzy in Victorian times, and certain terms were politely used to avoid saying certain other terms. Mania might mean mental illness, alcoholism, DTs. Hard to say. But it’s where he died that’s the kicker.” She seemed to pause for effect, but I heard a shuffling of papers in the background, so perhaps she was only finding her reference. “Clear Brook. Mary’s father died in 1872 in the Clear Brook Hospital for Mental Diseases, a little ways west of here. It seems to have been a pretty big place. I couldn’t find any records about his time there—there was a fire in the ’20s—but the time line seems to indicate he went in there when Mary was a teenager and never came back.”
“Oh, that’s terrible.” I put my hand to my mouth. “So it was just the two of them, Mary and her mother, running the place?”
“For some years, it looks like. That’s probably why they started taking in wounded soldiers—subsistence farming was pretty tough with no man in the house.”
“Mary didn’t have any brothers who could help?”
“Nope. It looks like she was the only child. Unusual, for that era.”
“And then Henry came along. I’m glad they found each other.”
“Me too.” She sighed and didn’t immediately say anything else. She sounded tired, and that was how I felt too. I walked back to the door I’d come through and angled my head toward the kitchen. Morgan was in there taking measurements with a long tape and furiously scribbling into his notepad. I was glad to see the project was still on his mind.
“Listen, Carroll, I’m beat. You want to meet up and eat lunch?”
“Capital idea. My eyes are glazing over anyway. Shall I meet you at the mansion? I can grab something for us on the way over—unless you’ve magically installed a mini-fridge stocked with pop and cold sandwiches since I last saw you.”
“What do you think?”
“Very well, then. How about I stop by Ted’s lunch counter and get us some burgers?”
“Perfect. Or—no, wait. That fast food from last night is still too much with me. Do you think Ted does salads?”
“He might have … coleslaw? Or baked beans. Is that a vegetable?”
“Do your best to find some vitamins on the menu. Really, though, I’m famished—whatever you show up with, I’m eating it. And Morgan’s here too. Just get a pile of food, and we’ll figure it out.” I hung up and looked around the elegant dining room I stood in. How much of this had been Mary’s creation—a chance to make a beautiful place as an adult, after a strained and impoverished childhood? Had she relished the finials and fine draperies, or were her tastes more modest? And how long had she gotten to live in this jewel box before she died and left Henry here with his money and his inventions, all alone?