CHAPTER 8

SATURDAY, JUNE 29

Vik had the contents of several folders spread out on his desk when Marti arrived at work. She sniffed. No coffee. Cowboy and Slim hadn’t arrived yet. They didn’t always come in early on weekends. Most Saturdays there was enough Friday-night vice action to necessitate a trip to weekend court for bail hearings.

There was a strudel, filled with apples and raisins, on Vik’s desk.

“Mildred and Helen baked yesterday,” Vik said. “She warmed this one up this morning.”

Marti wondered if that meant that Mildred, Vik’s wife, had had a good day, or if her spinster sister was the one who had baked. Mildred had MS. Helen had moved in with them a few months ago.

“Is she doing okay?” Marti asked. Vik hadn’t seemed as worried lately.

“It’s stabilized again.”

“That’s good. What are you working on?”

“I was talking with Stephen last night about some of this construction stuff.”

“I take it Stephen is not a chip off the old block.” Vik had come in less than a month ago with a sore thumb because he had hit it with a hammer.

“Stephen takes after my brother, not me. He’s good with his hands, worked construction all through college.”

“Did he come up with anything?”

“He had some ideas. He said the cellar might have had a roof with a wooden framework and sod on top, or they could have rolled logs close together. He also said the roof would have to be replaced maybe every eight to ten years.”

“And that’s why it isn’t there anymore.”

“Yeah, but some things didn’t make sense to him.”

“What?” Marti sat at her desk and reached for her mug. Then she remembered it was empty. Where the hell were Cowboy and Slim?

“It’s too deep. Too hard to access. No ventilation.” Vik threw up his hands. “Then he explained a lot of stuff I wasn’t much interested in. The gist of it was he didn’t think it was a root cellar.”

“Oh?”

“Because of the way it was constructed. But he got me thinking. There were no backhoes back then. Why would anyone dig that deep with a pick and shovel? And, according to Steve, at least three of the walls should have been dirt. When you think about it, getting all of those fieldstones down there and in place took a hell of a lot of time or manpower. It was built more like a fortress than a storage place, maybe as some kind of defense against the Indians.”

“No,” Marti said, “the Indians were used to white men by then and they got along okay.”

“There is something else. We’re assuming that there were steps leading down and a door at ground level. Caleb didn’t find anything like that.”

“I never thought about how anyone got down there,” Marti admitted. “Maybe they threw something down there? But what? And why?” She thought for a moment. “Something valuable and/or illegal. Guns, maybe,” she guessed. “Maybe old Idbash was a gunrunner.”

“Hell, I bet half the folks heading west could have been called that. If Linski found some bullets, whoopee.”

“We need to know why Larissa Linski died.”

“Maybe there is no why, Marti. Maybe this was an accident. The Smiths have had stranger things happen out there.”

“An unlucky root cellar? A haunted dig? Come on, Jessenovik, this hasn’t looked like an accident since we saw those fieldstone walls.”

*   *   *

When the phone rang, Marti looked up from the reports she was going through. She was surprised to see that it was almost three o’clock. Probably someone else was calling about the picture of the facial reconstruction. So far today, there had been seven calls. Six of those callers were not even seeking an American Indian. Three were looking for a missing woman. As they spoke, most hesitantly, a few belligerent, she could hear the bleak and terrible desperation that had made them pick up the phone.

This time it was Mary Ellen Channon. “Someone has been in the house.”

“Where are you?”

“Upstairs.”

“Leave now,” Marti told her. “Go to your car, turn it on and sit there with the doors locked and the windows up. If anyone approaches you, leave. I’ll have a uniform there right away.”

It took Marti twenty minutes to drive to Grayslake. She would have used the siren or the Mars light, but two local officers had been dispatched right away and their arrival confirmed within minutes.

Ms. Channon was sitting on the porch and seemed calm. “I took Larissa’s family to the airport,” she said. “Everything seemed fine when I got back, until I went upstairs. Two doors were ajar. I know they were closed when I left. They’re always closed.”

“How did they gain entry?” Vik asked.

“We never lock the doors during the day.”

“That might be a good idea from now on.”

“You could be right,” Ms. Channon conceded.

“Which doors were ajar?”

“Mother’s, hers is the first room on the right, and Larissa’s room … the guest room … right next to it.”

As they went upstairs, Vik said, “Note that two closed doors were left ajar. Could this be Christmas in June? What do you want to bet Santa left us a present?”

“A relatively small present,” Marti agreed.

They found it in the closet. A corner of the carpet had been pulled up and made to look as if that had hidden it from sight.

“Looks like an animal hoof,” Vik said. “But not a relatively small hoof.”

He was wearing latex gloves and put it into a plastic bag which he held up. “And”—he shook the bag—“It rattles. A toy. It was Santa.”

“He could have left us a new toy. This one has dirt on it.”

“Bet I know where the dirt came from. No telling where they found the toy.”

“We’d better get it to the lab, Vik, so they can hurry up and tell us what we already know.”

On the drive back they decided to keep their distance from the Smith family.

“Somebody knows Larissa found something,” Marti said. “Realized that our expert could have figured that out too. What didn’t occur to them is that we could guesstimate the size of the find. Let’s just sit on this. See who comes to us.”

*   *   *

Isaiah had come to love the Jewish rituals. He loved the prayers, the traditions. He kept the Sabbath. “So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that He had done in creation.” Every Friday evening Isaiah walked to the synagogue for Shabbat. He went back on Saturday morning for Shacharit—morning prayer, then Torah, and Musaf. Afterward he usually stayed for Kiddush, sharing a glass of wine with the other members of the congregation. Even though he was the only Black, he felt welcome there, at home in a way that he had never felt in any other religion. Sometimes he tried to explain why he had become a Jew, or, as he believed, returned to the religion of his ancestors when they were in Ethiopia. Although he could not prove that his ancestors came from there, he wanted that to be true. Solomon, after all, had a son, Menelik I, by the Queen of Sheba, a black woman. His children humored his wishful thinking, but they respected his commitment.

He kept the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, on a small table in the living room. On Shabbat he lit two candles and placed them on either side of the book. Two Sabbath candles burned in his den also, the room that had once been Grandma’s. He had placed a small doily that Juanita, his wife, had crocheted, under Grandma’s basket of herbs and the braid made from Great-Grandmother Reba’s hair. He was not just remembering them, but the Creator who had made them. He was celebrating all the times they had been happy together. He was honoring his ancestors and giving thanks to the God who gave them life.

Over the years, Grandma’s house had changed, not all at once, but gradually—a chair here, a sofa, a table, a lamp. The living room had become the place where Isaiah remembered. Grandma’s china cabinet with all of her special plates and serving dishes was here, and her sideboard, still filled with real silver tableware and monogrammed linens. He had refused to scrape off or paint over the red-flocked wallpaper on the upper half of the walls or replace the dark oak paneling on the lower half. Two sepia-tinted photos in oval frames hung above the sideboard. Grandma was wearing her favorite Sunday hat, the one that made Isaiah think of what she must look like in heaven. The center of the hat was a little white cap with a large rhinestone brooch pinned to the front. Layers and layers of white organza ruffles trimmed with silver ribbon fanned out like angels’ wings. The other photo was of his parents, who he could not remember: his mother seated in a fragile, ornate chair, and his father standing behind her with one hand on her shoulder. Pictures of Juanita, their children and grandchildren were on the other walls, and, since Floyd had come home, photographs of his family as well.

For Isaiah, the Sabbath was a time to remember. His wife had passed less than a year after Grandma and if his life changed when Grandma died, it almost stopped when Juanita passed away. He wasn’t sure what would have become of him if he hadn’t had children to raise. On the Sabbath he talked to Juanita, not out loud, but in his mind. He recalled things their four kids had done, the times they had celebrated—the graduations and birthdays and weddings, the births of their three grandchildren. He had felt Juanita’s presence during those times, just as he did now. He believed she was always near, in a dimension just beyond his line of vision.

Today, he talked with Grandma, too. He told her about Samuel, runaway slave of Thatcher. He asked for her help. He had looked up more slave owners named Thatcher, but had not been able to find another one with a slave identified as Samuel. Finding the name of any slave was difficult to impossible. Slaves were not citizens. There were no birth records, marriage licenses, land deeds, or anything else to tie them to a place or a time. They were counted in census records, but not named. Recently, he had heard that some owners had insured their slaves, and that those records had names, but were not yet available.

He had found a marriage license for Edward Thatcher and Mellie Bishop. Eventually he found birth certificates for Edward and Mellie. Edward had been born in 1868. Samuel Thatcher was his father, and Cynthia, no last name, his mother. Edward had a daughter named Reba. She was Isaiah’s great-grandmother. He had found a few of Reba’s relatives, and a marriage license indicating Reba had married Theodore Gardner in 1910, but when he tried to go back in time and identify someone related to Edward Thatcher, it was as if they didn’t exist. That was where he was now. Lost. The only clue that he was on the right path was Grandma’s name, Ruby Thatcher Gardner. The only thing he knew of that might help him determine if this was the right Samuel was to get a copy of Edward’s marriage application. That document would have required the most information about Edward’s family history. Getting a copy meant a trip to Chicago, and although Chicago wasn’t that far from Battle Creek, it was a longer trip than he could manage. They were having a guest speaker at his genealogy club meeting tonight. Someone who specialized in searches that preceded 1870. Perhaps this speaker would speak on something that would help him, or maybe he would ask him a few questions. He could almost hear Grandma’s voice. “In due time,” she said. “In due time.”