The grandchildren happily watching TV and playing games on an iPad in the den. Billy scampers in to be with April. The adults wait for Ken to speak as he stares at the fire crackling in the fireplace. I hand him a mug of coffee. We will stay with him until he’s ready to speak. He sips and sighs. Closing his eyes, he is either shutting out the discovery in his mind or recalling it.
“I guess there is a first time for everything,” he starts. “Over the years, I have gone into basements or attics and found things left by the prior owners. I always ask permission of the new owners if they will let me keep anything of value as I sort through the junk before carting it off.”
“I remember you found an entire collection of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries,” Erin says. “They were dusty, but in mint condition. When my kiddos are old enough, I will bring them out of storage.”
I know Ken is physically safe now, but I’ve never seen him this circumspect. I think it was the surprise as much as anything that has him searching for words.
“Didn’t we get one of our toboggans that way, Dad?” Wesley asks.
“Yes, it was from Mrs. Penn’s garage,” he says while staring at the flames. He sips and sighs.
Found treasure, we called it. Recipe books with twenty-dollar bills stuck between the pages. Family bibles which Ken took to the historical society, as the birth, death, and marriage information of generations were better than what you would find on the genealogy databases. Stock certificates stuffed in old Life magazines. Martin acoustic guitars with a string missing. Forgotten treasure.
The porcelain baby dolls, and wedding dresses went to Goodwill. A German luger, swords, knives, and other war memorabilia, my husband sold on consignment at Big Ed’s pawn shop. Some days, Ken would come home from work with a big smile on his face. After dinner he’d make a big deal of his discoveries, setting them among the dessert plates.
Now, he puts down the mug on the coffee table and nervously rubs his hands. “I busted open the paneling. It was hung on two by fours. No insulation. Really cheap. Very easy to dismantle, as it was not a load-bearing wall. The casement windows supplied enough lighting to see the coal furnace, bin, and chute. After we agreed the contraption and duct work were built before anybody even thought of using asbestos, we all breathed in deeply. It sat untouched for decades. The grate for the furnace was rusted shut, a coal shovel next to it. The bin still had coal in it, and next to it sat a steamer trunk standing on its end.”
He seemed hesitant in what to say next. My husband pulled his cellphone from his pocket and began fiddling with it. “I started to move it and the leather straps holding it together disintegrated. Everything spilled out onto the floor, kicking up the coal dust. We waited until the dust settled, then this is what we saw.” He holds out his phone for Erin. “The new owner asked me to snap a few pictures. He didn’t want to believe me until I showed him.”
She examines it closely and enlarges the photo. My husband, freed from the burden, reaches for his coffee, sipping it slowly while staring into the flames.
“What do you see, honey?” I ask her.
“A woman’s skeleton.”
Wesley, my youngest, gasps, “Oh my God!”
“Yeah,” Ken says, “it fell out right at our feet. The building inspector had a similar reaction before he threw up. I wasn’t feeling much better after he did that. My stomach lurched a few times.”
“That explains why you were white as a ghost when you came home,” I say. Wes and I don’t move to grab the phone from Erin. She knows Wes and will show me when she is good and ready.
“Anything in the trunk to identify her?”
“You mean like a note pinned to her dress?” He doesn’t look at me when he delivers that retort.
Ken doesn’t usually smart-ass me or the kids, so I understand it’s because he’s upset. “We all backed off and called 911, then we waited upstairs until Barney came. We called the owner again. A skeleton found in a trunk in a basement was not what he was expecting. After he talked to Barney, I packed up my tools and bolted.”
“Are they treating like a crime scene?” she asks.
He shrugs. “I wouldn’t have a clue.”
Barney is Officer Williams, one of two full-time police officers on the Milford Police Department. He is the daytime weekday officer. Nights, holidays, and weekends are handled by the other officer and two part-timers.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. Erin text me the photos Ken had taken.
The trunk had been lined with crumbling newspaper and drapes. A tattered coat and dress hung on the skeleton’s bones. A patent leather shoe clung stubbornly to the bones of the right foot. An interesting piece of jewelry was draped across the top of the spinal column below the skull.
“Is that a wedding ring?” I ask her, looking at the left hand folded across the right in front of her chest.
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Erin replies.
“It might hold an inscription of the marriage date and their initials,” I say knowingly from my own wedding band.
“Jesus Christ. What’s the matter with you two?” Ken pounds his mug on the table, then gets up. I hear the front door open, then slam shut.
“I’ll talk to him, Mom,” Erin says as she hands the phone to Wes and chases after her father.
He’s not sure that he wants to look, but he refreshes the screen and I get to see my husband’s initial reaction to the scene though my son. “How can you both be so—” he is struggling for the right words “—freaking clinical.” He puts the phone face down on the coffee table next to his father’s mug, probably wishing he never saw the image.
I think back to a time when he and Erin were young. The four of us were going somewhere and we came across a deer hit by a car. The poor thing was splayed across our travel lane, barely alive, blood everywhere. Wesley cried the whole way home and was inconsolable. His nightmares didn’t go away for months.
Freaking clinical. “That’s a pretty fair assessment, dear.” Why didn’t Erin and I get upset? Instead, we are already looking for clues of the identity of the woman stuffed in a trunk and hidden behind a wall. Why are we so freaking clinical? It’s a fair question. Will looking at skeletons and dead bodies come back to haunt us someday?
For thirty-five years, I wiped runny noses, blew kisses on skinned knees, and hugged hurting five-year-olds, all the while trying to teach them how to share, be nice, work together, and have a curious mind. I never gave two thoughts about TV whodunits. My bedstand reading consisted of self-improvement, biographies of inspirational people, and post-apocalyptic dystopian thrillers.
But when Erin and I went to New Haven, Connecticut last year for the true crime symposium, something clicked in me, and all those years of being in the moment of wiping runny noses and mindfully clapping erasers helped me discover this so-called higher purpose. Erin will eventually become an investigator, I am sure. She is committed to both homeschooling my adorable grandchildren and her part-time gig with the FBI for now. I look at her and know that Nancy Drew grew up. But what about me, a bi-racial retired kindergarten teacher? An hour ago, I had complained that small town Milford didn’t have any mysteries.
I look at my son and say, “In the proverbial lifeboat, there are those who row the boat and those who just drink the water. I don’t have a choice, Wes. I must ask who is she? How did she get there? What is her story? If I don’t, I am just drinking the water. Do you understand, honey?”