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Monday, December 23rd
Charlotte thought about how the town had changed over the past twenty-five or thirty years, as she sat at a window table in The Coffee Grove. There were certainly more people, and more different kinds of people. Back when she was in college, there was only a handful of non-Caucasian residents and students, her friend Hannah among them. She would never forget the remarks intended to be overheard as they would walk to a booth in a local restaurant, usually fired off by white men in gimme caps, which to this day caused her to automatically think “racist” and “sexist” whenever she saw a man wearing one. Hannah didn’t even tell her about the more outrageous and frightening incidents she personally experienced until many years later.
Barnes told her that between the economic downturn, terrorism, and people willing to call for help, the hate crimes division of the State Police was busier than ever. The local white people, he said, couldn’t tell the difference between one darker-skinned person and another, no matter if they were from Chicago, Kingston, Mumbai, Addis Ababa, Manila, or Mexico City. That the economic problems were mostly the work of men just as white as themselves never seemed to be part of the equation—just too abstract. They remembered their daddies and granddaddies having the utmost confidence in assigning blame for the world’s ills to anyone nonwhite, non-American, and non-Protestant, and they wanted to have that certainty, too, even if they had to pick and choose the facts to keep up the illusion.
“Why so gloomy, dear Charlotte?”
She snapped out of her reverie and looked up at Jimmy, who sat down across from her. He looked the same today as he had nearly twenty years ago, with his gray ponytail and wire-rimmed Lennon glasses. Well, maybe there was a little more gray in the eyebrows. But always, the same gentle demeanor and soft tenor voice.
“Thinking how much Elm Grove has changed, and yet hasn’t.”
“Whoa.” He considered it for a moment, looking out at the street, the cold light of the cloudy day bringing out the gray in his hair and the silver of his glasses. “That’s a rabbit hole worthy of several dissertations.”
“Do you think it’s changed?”
He nodded. “Quite a bit, at least superficially. It’s like people have finally learned how to interact by watching commercials on television.”
She laughed. “Cynical. You don’t think it’s a friendly town?”
“Yes and no. It’s not actually easy to make friends here, unless you belong to something, like a church, a business group, a school, some such context for making conversation.”
“There’s an awful lot of churches in this town,” agreed Charlotte.
“I have this theory,” said Jimmy, leaning forward over his coffee cup, “that Elm Grove is actually a town full of atheists and agnostics who belong to a church just to have someone outside of work and family say hello to them.”
“Why is that? What makes it like that?”
He shrugged. “Fear, I guess. Fear of outsiders, and now there are a lot more outsiders.”
“If that’s the case,” said Charlotte, “how can anyone do business or make a living here if they weren’t born here? I mean, you’re not originally from Elm Grove, are you?”
He smiled. “No. I’m from Detroit. Looong time ago.”
“But you are able to get more things done with a single phone call than seems possible.” Charlotte recalled ordering cable Internet and TV for her apartment, and was told it would take a week. Jimmy made a phone call and her service was live within two hours.
“That’s the result of accepting the need to join business associations. But that is not something exclusive to Elm Grove. Every culture and subculture has its way of doing business and having a good support network.”
Charlotte was surprised. “I never realized the business groups were more than just an excuse to have martinis for lunch.”
“If you can pay the fees, and walk the walk, talk the talk, you become one of the local businesspeople and they are no longer wary of you.” He took another sip of coffee, then pointed to himself. “Even if you look like a clean hippie. And if you play your cards right and invest generously in their charitable projects, you become one of the people to whom other people owe favors. And that’s—” here he brought his index finger down on the table, “how to become a successful business person, how to get the advantages a business needs to thrive despite fluctuations in demand and the price of materials. You become part of a network where somebody knows somebody who knows somebody, and the higher you are in that network, the more likely you are to get what you need. Even cable TV in a hurry.”
Charlotte took this in, and realized she preferred her old fantasy of Jimmy’s success due to his being a secret dot-com millionaire or something similarly independent.
They sat quietly for a few moments, watching the people go by.
“You seem a little at loose ends,” said Jimmy. “No Simon lately, I notice.”
She nodded and explained what was going on, including some of the phone call the night before.
Jimmy rarely frowned, but he clearly didn’t like what he heard. “There might be a good reason for whatever he’s doing, but I can understand how it would feel unsettling.”
“Jimmy, do I seem uncomfortable in my own skin to you?”
“No more than anyone else. People who are uncomfortable in their own skin are not easy to be around. You’re very easy to be around.”
She smiled in appreciation. “Thanks. I needed to hear that.”
“You can hear it from all your other friends, too—Helene considers you the daughter she never had. Diane doesn’t suffer fools gladly and if you were uncomfortable in your own skin, you wouldn’t be able to handle being around her. And Donovan—he thinks you’re the best thing since sliced bread.”
She laughed. “I like him a lot. He’s easy to talk to and he’s interested in just about everything.”
“Well, there you go, then. Spend time with the people it’s easy to be with. Things will sort themselves out just fine if you don’t fight your own nature. You’ll see.”
He looked past Charlotte at someone, and smiled. “Here’s one of the easy people, now.”
“Another murder!” Diane’s brown eyes were wide open behind her large tortoiseshell glasses.
Charlotte shrugged. “Afraid so.”
Second coffees were needed by the time Charlotte filled her friend in about the murder, the cross-burning, Alexa’s need for a kidney, and missing the plane to Aspen.
“Still, though, another murder mystery—are you on the case?”
Charlotte thought about it a moment. “I’d say I was. In fact, after last night, I feel as compelled to help Gani as I do Alexa. Maybe more, now that she seems to be reconciled with her mother.”
“Maybe it’s just me,” said Diane, “but you seem a bit uncertain about Alexa.”
Charlotte nodded, still thoughtful. “When she called me on Friday, she sounded a little desperate. By the time I saw her at Penn House, she seemed quite a bit more composed, but then almost panicky again when we got to her parents’ house. She reconciled with her mother almost immediately, but she hasn’t shown any grief about her father, even after finding him shot. She’s different, somehow, than the Alexa I used to know.” She described Alexa’s reaction to her apartment and change in circumstances. “She used to have such a generosity of spirit, enthusiasm for finding the good in just about anything, but that seems to be gone. Maybe it’s her illness and the shock of her father’s murder.”
Diane shook her head. “Just about everyone I’ve ever known who’s lived with a life-threatening illness seems to become more generous, or at least they do if it hasn’t affected their brains, then all bets are off. It’s as if seeing the possible end of the road makes everything in life more precious, even the less than perfect things. But of course I don’t know her. Until you learn more, I think you’re kind of forced to give her the benefit of the doubt.”
“Yeah, different people react different ways to illness and death. Even Janice is remarkably cool and collected.”
Jimmy, who had gone to the kitchen to see that everything was ready for the lunch crowd, came back to pour them some more coffee, but Charlotte put her hand on her cup to stop him.
“I gotta pace myself. Seriously.” The tremor in her hand wasn’t a joke.
He set the pot down on the table. “Are you ladies ready for my New Year’s Eve party?”
“Yes!” Diane almost shouted. “I am so looking forward to it!”
“Me too,” echoed Charlotte. “Where, though—in here or up in your apartment?” She pointed at the ceiling, as Jimmy’s apartment was on the entire second floor of the coffee shop’s building.
“My apartment. I’ve had a small elevator put in,” he pointed to the metal door next to his office, “so now I don’t feel like I’m going to put some of my guests through an ordeal to get up there. Helene and Donovan are both coming.”
Charlotte wondered if Simon would be going, given his current situation, but said nothing. What will be, will be.
Barnes’ remark that even the Indiana State Police did not know what group was responsible for the burning of St. Andrew’s crosses sparked Charlotte’s curiosity, so she went back to her apartment and spent the rest of the morning researching online. St. Andrew was crucified on an X-shaped cross—called a saltire—because he purportedly did not feel worthy of being crucified on the same sort of cross as Jesus. White clouds forming this cross evidently appeared in the bright blue sky during a battle between the Scots and the Angles in the ninth century. The Scots won, resulting in the saltire being adopted as the symbol of the Scots.
The only specific local reference to the burning of this type of cross was an archived article in the local newspaper, which itself was part of a series of articles about the state of racism in Chicago and its surrounding suburbs twenty-five years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. Other search results were about the more typical style of crosses, and other forms of hate crimes, such as harassment, graffiti, slurs, etc. Elm Grove, however, was mentioned as the site of “several unusual cross-burnings” in the 1980s that were never associated with a particular hate group. The burning of a St. Andrew’s cross was considered an “outlier,” just as likely to be a juvenile prank or some kind of pagan or satanic ritual as a racist message. Charlotte made a note to look it up in the archives in the newspaper’s office.
There were, however, more results for her search about the Ku Klux Klan’s attempt to purchase Elmhurst Normal School, as well as E. M. Corton’s efforts to stave them off. Janice Garibaldi’s account of her grandfather seemed to be correct, but as Charlotte followed up on one link after another, she had an even more complete history, not only about the man, but about the town she lived in.
To understand the context of a crime, she thought, you need to know the essential nature of a place and its people, which means you need to know something of its history. Charlotte got up and stretched, surprised to find out she’d been immersed in research for over two hours without a break, and thought over what she learned while feeding the cat and making herself a snack.
Elm Grove was once two towns, Elmhurst and Penn Grove. Elmhurst was the first one, built up on a series of hills, a kind of outpost from which one could see Lake Michigan with a telescope in one direction, and tornadoes coming with the naked eye in most of the others. It grew into an attractive town whose equidistance from several larger cities made it the perfect location for a teacher’s academy, or Normal School. When a new railroad came through on its way to Chicago, it made a bypass around Elmhurst, on land that was already flat, and built a stop about a mile away near woodlands and several small lakes. They called it Penn Grove, and before long it acquired a proper station, an adjoining hotel—Penn House—and soon there was a full-fledged town with saloons, markets, liveries, and all the other things travelers and workers needed.
In time, everyone got together and realized they were better off sharing assets than not, and agreed to form one town, Elm Grove. That was the official line. In practice, Elmhurst annexed Penn Grove, and the city government conveniently remained in and around the Elmhurst County Courthouse, as did the jail, the justice of the peace, and the hospital. The name change was pure politics.
The town grew steadily and peacefully until after World War I, when two different trends of the time intersected: Prohibition and campus life.
Edward Mansfield Corton was one of the early 20th-century teachers and administrators of the venerable Elmhurst Normal School. He was a man who, like most of his friends and colleagues, enjoyed a drink or several, despite the strong temperance laws in the state. The town itself, like many others, did not strongly enforce the laws. This look-the-other-way policy, however, made such towns and individuals vulnerable to the more rabid, vigilante Prohibitionists. One such group was the Ku Klux Klan, who often resorted to violence to enforce dry laws and expose bootleggers and speakeasies.
Around the same time, post-war prosperity made the lifestyle at traditional colleges and universities much more attractive than the utilitarian local teacher’s academies, and Elmhurst Normal School’s enrollment began to suffer. The new 20th-century accreditation standards were also now a problem—Elmhurst’s credits couldn’t be transferred to other institutions. Modernizing would take a lot more money than the school had in its modest coffers. The town fathers grew concerned, since the school’s staff and students had a great impact on the local economy. Perhaps, they asked, the school could be sold to someone who could invest in upgrading it?
To their surprise, the Klan quickly said it would be happy to oblige, and to make Elm Grove a center of their operations. It was not an entirely unpopular idea—the town had its fair share of hard-line churches and Temperance Movement adherents, and wives who firmly believed everything wrong in their families and marriages was due to Demon Rum. E. M. Corton, in contrast, not only had a justifiable fear of the Klan’s extreme methods of enforcement, but also of their regressive interpretation of history and science, plus their intent to control educational curricula at every level. He wanted to avoid having the Klan on his school’s—and town’s—doorsteps at all costs. He came up with the idea of forming an association of local men of influence in order to buy the school themselves—and raising the money by bootlegging. Elm Grove’s central location between Chicago, Indianapolis, and South Bend, once the Normal School’s advantage, would now enable the fast and efficient distribution of its bootleg liquor. The big money in town, all fellow drinkers, liked the idea and successfully financed the purchase.
Their confidence in Corton’s bootlegging project was facilitated by an element peculiar to the original town of Elmhurst: tunnels that interconnected several buildings on campus with the larger mansions, and with buildings that housed Masonic-type secret societies common at the time. Some of the older tunnels had even been used in the Underground Railroad, and were just as well-hidden. The associates were sworn to secrecy, and pooled their personal liquor recipes.
Corton brought in miners from Appalachia to extend and shore up the oldest tunnels and to make new ones where needed, such as downhill toward the new highway. In time, not only did the investors get all their money back, they all made a profit. While the Klan did well in a great number of communities in Indiana, and even had a presence in Elmhurst County, the businessmen and academics of Elm Grove played it neutral; a few joined for the sake of appearances and to keep abreast of what was going on.
After the leadership scandal in 1925 that ruined the Klan’s appeal in Indiana, Corton’s supporters celebrated by turning the Normal School for teachers into a full-fledged college (many of them on the first board of trustees, of course), and honored him by naming it after him. It was also, however, the same year that the state enacted the Wright “Bone Dry” law, making bootlegging more necessary than ever for another few years.
After the tunnels were completed, Corton tried his best to find jobs for the miners who wanted to stay, such as at the steel mills and automobile factories, but when the Great Depression set in, they were pretty much left to fend on their own. This actually suited many of them just fine, as they were clannish and did not mix well with the townsmen, preferring to live on the various pocket farms surrounding the city limits.
The tunnels were eventually blocked off or filled in after a couple of collapses, floods in the low-lying ones, lost children, and criminals found hiding out in them. The Great Fire of 1957, which nearly destroyed several of the grand old Elmhurst mansions, started when one of the owners was having his tunnel converted into a fallout shelter, a project which didn’t require a building permit. After that, the tunnels were pretty much forgotten; the remaining mansions were eventually sold to new owners who never knew about the tunnels, and some of the old Normal School buildings were torn down and replaced, their tunnels blocked off for good.
Many of the things Charlotte read online cited old newspaper articles and books by local historians. After discovering that the local newspaper office no longer had archives of anything older than 1997, the only recourse was the local History Museum, which was closed during the holidays, or the public library, which was luckily open.
There was little more information about either the tunnels or the hate groups than what she had already found online. The books and files on Corton, however, were plentiful, particularly the photographs and related stories. One large group photo showed E. M. Corton with the crew of tunnel workers and their families at a reunion picnic in 1932, ten years after they were brought in to do the work. The legend that accompanied it was an outline drawing of all the men, with numbers where their faces would be, and then their corresponding names in the list of numbers below the drawing. Many of the names were common ones in town.
Charlotte zeroed in on the two gentlemen labeled as “E. Sawyer,” and “B. Sawyer.” The heavier-set one, “B. Sawyer,” looked something like Hewey, but so did the light-haired “D. Mahon,” who was standing next to B. Sawyer. And next to D. Mahon was E. M. Corton himself. Corton didn’t have any family members next to him. She found his 1920 wedding announcement, with his picture in one frame and his wife, the former Winifred Stewart, in the other. Other images and newspaper clippings included E. M. Corton at various community events, greeting dignitaries and politicians, cheering on the team at football games, accepting accolades as the university increased in accreditation and enrollment, and breaking ground for new dormitories and academic buildings. One poignant Memorial Day photo showed him standing, head bowed, at his son’s grave. He held his hat in one hand, and his little granddaughter Janice’s hand in the other. Even then, her hair was palest blond and wavy, and came almost down to her waist. She was holding a small bouquet of flowers, and was leaning forward to set them near the headstone.
Charlotte’s phone rang, and she felt herself getting nervous while fishing around in her purse for it. What now? More arguments with Ellis? More mayhem at the Garibaldi’s? She looked over at Mrs. Carol’s desk, but no one was there, so she chanced taking the call in the library.
It was Donovan. “Hey, Charlotte, it, um, dawned on me that tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and since your plans fell through, I wondered if you’d like to come by and we’ll have a pizza or something? Come early, say around five?”
Her spirits lifted considerably. She loved Shamus, but human company on Christmas Eve was preferable.
“I’d love to! That’s so thoughtful of you. Want me to pick up some beer or wine or salad or dessert?”
“Let’s live large. I’ll take care of everything. It’s Christmas Eve, after all, and I’m in sore need of cleaning up my act around here. What’s your favorite wine?”
She laughed. “I like red wine, but I’m not too fussy. What about you?”
“I like alcohol in any and all forms. Doesn’t always like me back, but that’s another matter.”
“I hear ya, Donovan. Thanks again, and see you tomorrow.”
She felt considerably more cheerful, as if something of a holiday was restored. Helene had invited her to a Christmas Day buffet hosted by some of her former colleagues at the university, but she had mixed feelings about it, as she did about most university gatherings. Diane and Jimmy had family gatherings out of town, and of course Simon was still in Chicago with Philippa. And Ellis was still in Aspen. But for Christmas Eve, at least, she would have good company.