“Then Florence began making a little money sewing for people in the town, and she bought journals. The first ones were accounting ledgers. I suppose that was what she could find, or what was cheap. She was passionately invested in her own education. She did odd jobs for a local schoolteacher in exchange for personal tutoring in the man’s home at night. A lot of her entries from those years are school exercises, practicing her handwriting, composing little essays on U.S. history.”

  Langford opened one of a trio of large books to show me the accounting headers. The pages were marked off in squares for easy computation. Wheelock had written over the lines, but the ink was faded now, and the squares made it look as though her words were behind bars.

  “When she married, and married a man of wealth, she started buying Italian leather-bound books. It’s three of these that are missing.”

  She patted a row of books bound in a soft red leather. The skin had cracked with age. Langford explained that the family hadn’t kept them in a controlled environment. She seemed almost as upset by that as by the disappearance of three of the volumes.

  Langford wouldn’t let me handle them, but she did measure them and let me photograph the fronts, with my flash turned off. The books were about six by eight inches, and perhaps an inch thick. Wheelock hadn’t written every day, and as time passed, her entries grew shorter, but it was still an impressive record.

  “You think Clarina stole the missing volumes?” I asked.

  “She’s the only person who’s used them in the last five years.”

  “Could they be mis-shelved?”

  Langford clicked her tongue impatiently. “Of course we thought of that, and we’ve done a thorough search, since my colleague told me they were missing. I’m hoping you can look at the Coffin woman’s personal effects. Perhaps she took the covers off to make it easier to smuggle them out.”

  “In that case, you’d have found the covers here, surely?”

  “She could have taken the covers to the women’s washroom and put them in the trash there.”

  “I went through her trailer a week after her death, and the only things I found of interest were the pictures I brought in. As I said, whoever searched her trailer when she died got to them long before I showed up. It’s possible the Lawrence police have them—they wouldn’t share evidence with me, but they’d talk to you if you called and described what’s missing.”

  Langford nodded and made a note.

  I prodded the conversation away from the diaries. “You said your conservator had found something interesting?”

  “Of course. And it is interesting. The loss of these journals has me rattled; sorry.” She made a phone call, and a few minutes later a short, round man trotted in, carrying a cardboard folder fastened with a string around a button.

  “Is this the detective? V.I. Warshawski? Have I pronounced that correctly? I’m Tommy Gellman. Your photograph is unique in my experience, I would say. It’s a great pity it wasn’t properly preserved, a very great pity.” He looked at me sternly.

  “It’s a great pity that the woman who owned it was murdered,” I said. “Thugs who trashed her home are responsible for the damage.”

  “That is sad. I was hoping you could give me more of a provenance. When you looked at it, what did you notice that was unusual?”

  I felt I was back in Ms. Ruttan’s high school English class, trying to cover up the fact that I hadn’t read Return of the Native. “I did wonder about the flowers in her hair. She looks as though she’s in mourning, so the wreath seemed odd. But I don’t know anything about fashion history. Were flowers a part of Victorian mourning?”

  He beamed. I might get an A after all. “When Queen Victoria ordered her court to mourn Albert’s death with her, she decreed that jet was the only jewel that could be worn in court. After that, the demand for jet boomed not just in Britain, but in the States as well. Victoria spawned an industry for mourning jewelry in both countries. Another mourning token that people loved was jewelry made from the beloved’s hair. People wore hair rings and brooches as a sign of love, not merely mourning, of course, as you must know if you’ve read your Austen—” He looked at me severely, and I nodded, pretending I had read my Austen.

  “But what Abby thought she saw I’ve been able to verify. The wreath this woman is wearing is made of hair entwined with artificial flowers. But the hair is from a person of African heritage. A white woman sporting a Black person’s hair—likely a man, since you can see the signs of a pregnancy in her waist and in her face—that is extraordinary.” His face shone with excitement.

  He showed me a magnified segment of the wreath, made as clear as his technology would allow.

  I had to take his word for it. I couldn’t distinguish the threads of hair from the faded stems of dried flowers.

  “You don’t have any way of identifying where the picture was taken?” I asked.

  He shook his head regretfully. “I’m guessing it was taken by an amateur, a family member, someone like that. Professional photographers usually had their names somewhere on the print, and there’s no trace of that.

  “The dress looks to be from the 1870s, when the fashion was for hoopskirts to be flattened in front, as this dress is. That’s what makes it possible to see the outline of her pregnancy.” He used a paintbrush to trace a barely visible bump in the front of the frock. “Any middle-class woman of that era would have owned a dress like this for special occasions, so it’s possible she isn’t in mourning. Women of ordinary means wouldn’t have owned a great many dresses, so this could have been what she wore to any special event, even church services. In those days, getting photographed was a special event.”

  Abby Langford had mentioned that Florence Wheelock had done sewing to make money. I asked if the picture could be of Wheelock.

  Langford said, “We don’t have a record of any photographs. Perhaps Coffin found it inside one of the diaries and didn’t let us know.”

  “In which case it’s the museum’s property,” Gellman said.

  “We don’t know anything about Clarina Coffin,” I said. “She hid her identity amazingly in this age of constant surveillance. This could be a picture of one of her own ancestors. It’s not mine to gift to you. Until we find out who Coffin is, what brought her to Lawrence, and who this woman is, no one can lay a claim to it. I want it back now so that I can show it to people in Lawrence who may recognize the woman in the picture. I’m also going to put it out on social media.”

  “Let me keep the original for safety’s sake,” Gellman pleaded. “I’ll give you a high-res copy that you can show around without harming this. My lab can also restore the damage where that little tear is in the print.”

  I gave a reluctant agreement, demanding a written signed receipt, with the proviso that if I found someone with a legitimate legal claim to the print, the museum had to get their permission to keep the picture. Gellman took me to his office, where he produced the receipt. He also gave me three prints of the woman with the wreath in her hair. He clearly had already planned to keep the original.

  Before I left, I asked Abby Langford if Gertrude Perec had used the collection recently. “She’s a descendant of Florence Wheelock. If there was something scandalous in the books, perhaps even a reference to who this pregnant woman was—an ancestor whose misstep would sully the good Wheelock name—Ms. Perec might want to hide it.”

  Langford shook her head. “I double-checked that to be certain. Clarina Coffin was the only person to request these diaries in the last five years.”

  On my way out, I stopped to look at the donor wall. Gertrude’s name was there among the Bookbinders, people who’d given the museum between one and ten thousand. She was listed as Gertrude Wheelock Perec.

  41

  Gertrude and Cady

  Smoke but No Fire?

  “Now do you understand why it was a mistake to involve that Chicago detective in our affairs?” Gertrude said.

  “But, Gram—Frank Karas told her she had to stay in Lawrence.”

  “He didn’t tell you to invite her to live with us. Even though she’s moved out, she seems to think she has some kind of special right to barge into this house.” Gertrude’s lips had almost disappeared, the line of bitterness was so pronounced.

  “Because she came around with that picture?” Cady said. “Do you know who it was, Gram? Was that Florence Wheelock?”

  Gertrude massaged the sides of her face. Tension had her clenching her jaw so hard that it was painful to move it.

  “I don’t know who it was. And neither does Pat Everard.”

  The detective had gone to the Perec house first. Gertrude had told Cady not to answer the door, or at least to tell the detective they had nothing left to say, no more patience for any insults the woman might spew out. Instead, Cady had spoken to her on the doorstep, and then invited her into the foyer.

  Cady thought the photograph was exciting. A white abolitionist ancestor six generations back who perhaps had had a relationship with a Black man was remote enough to be romantic, not problematic.

  “You know I have several photographs and even a daguerreotype of Great-grandmother Florence. I’ve shown them to you. This picture the detective is waving around doesn’t look the least bit like her,” Gertrude said fiercely, after she’d finally forced Warshawski to leave.

  “Do you know the diaries Vic was talking about?” Cady asked. “They sound interesting, something we should try to publish.”

  “My mother gave them to the Origins Museum while I was away at college,” Gertrude said. “One of the professors in the history department at the university here had been reading in them for some book he was working on. He persuaded Mother that they were falling apart because we couldn’t keep them dry and cool or moist enough or whatever it was. So she gave them to the museum.

  “There were many better ways to do it—a loan, for instance. Even if it helped preserve Florence’s diaries, Mother lost control over an important part of our family’s history by letting that historian into our lives. Once they’re inside your house, your life, outsiders think they have a license to control it.

  “And sure enough, this Chicago detective came trampling right through our privacy. She dared to ask if I’d gone back to Topeka to take charge of the diaries, if they mattered so much to me. A polite way of asking if I’d stolen them.”

  “Do you know what ever-so-Great-grandmother Wheelock wrote in the volumes that are missing?” Cady asked.

  “Unfortunately, I wasn’t interested when I was a teenager. Over the years I’ve gone to Topeka sometimes to read in them, especially around important celebrations in our town’s history. The diaries aren’t of universal interest, unless you are wondering how people celebrated marriages or did their housework.”

  The words were innocuous, but her look was so fierce that Cady didn’t ask any more questions.

  Pat Everard had come over to commiserate: the detective had gone to her house after she left Gertrude. “Did Ms. Chicago ask you why the Coffin woman would have stolen the books?”

  “Oh, yes.” Gertrude sighed. “I told her I thought as little as possible about Clarina Coffin when she was alive and wouldn’t think of her now if people like this Warshawski didn’t keep rubbing my face in her affairs. Anyway, I asked her what those diaries had to do with Clarina’s death. She said until she read them she had no idea, but she was checking to see if Clarina came from Skaneateles. She wondered if I was still in touch with relatives there—after almost two centuries!”

  “She asked me the same—and she knew my people came from Lynn,” Pat said. “It reinforces the argument that what she’s doing is simply harassment, not investigation. In fact, after she left my house, I called Deke and told him that he needed to get Frank Karas to either charge her or send her home. He said I made it sound like training a dog: Go home, Warshawski!”

  Cady suppressed a giggle.

  “Then he asked if I could imagine the outcry if he tried to force her or anyone to leave town for the crime of asking two older women questions about their families.”

  “But he could make it unpleasant for her to stay here,” Gertrude argued. “You know, routine traffic stops, searching her car, checking her insurance. Tickets every time she goes a mile over the speed limit.”

  “Gram! You can’t be serious,” Cady cried. “Those are all the things we protested the police doing to African-American and Indigenous drivers after Michael Brown and George Floyd! You were one of the strongest voices in that struggle. And, anyway, like Aunt Pat said, Vic didn’t ask to stay here. The cops told her to. Or the DA did, at any rate.”

  Gertrude bit her lips and turned her head.

  After a pause, Pat said, “Deke did suggest we get an order of protection. That would force her to stop harassing us. I’m talking to our lawyer in the morning about filing for one. You should, too, Gertrude. And you, Cady.”

  After Pat left, Cady said, “Gram, I know Clarina talked about those diaries with you and Aunt Pat the morning she came to the women’s group breakfast. I was there that morning, remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” Gertrude said. “She’d been reading a number of different diaries. The Fremantle women kept them, the Entwistles, even Arnie Schapen’s great-grandmother, not just Florence Wheelock. The Coffin creature wanted to show me some photocopied pages, but I was too angry with her for inciting the board to fire you to pay attention. I very much doubt if my responding to her inuendoes that morning would have kept her from being murdered. She liked to hint and wink her way around scandal, but it was all smoke if you pressed her.”

  Cady agreed with Gram—Clarina had shown her photocopies of some diary entries when she was trying to butt in on Cady’s syllabus. Not Great-grandmother Wheelock’s, but one of the other pioneers, Augusta Fremantle, who wrote contemptuously about Amelia and Sophia Grellier for not keeping their linen freshly washed and ironed. Maybe worth killing over in 1856, but not today.

  More troubling was what neither Gram nor Aunt Pat had said this afternoon, either to each other or to Deke, let alone V.I. Warshawski. Aunt Pat had come over the Saturday before Clarina’s death, an event so commonplace that Cady didn’t linger downstairs after letting Pat into the house. She’d forgotten her phone, though. When she walked back down to the kitchen, Aunt Pat was exclaiming, “She didn’t!” and Gram was saying, “I assure you, she did. I told her no one would pay attention to such a ludicrous claim. She said, ‘Everyone loves a juicy story, especially one about people who think—’”

  Gram paused, then said, “There’s no nice way to repeat this. She said people like me who think their shit is clean enough to eat.”

  Cady’s lips had pursed in a silent whistle.

  “She said she knew how you and I looked down on her, but by the time our history was splashed all over the internet, we wouldn’t be so high and mighty.”

  And then, three days later, Clarina was dead. And Gram had been at the Dundee House when it happened.

  42

  Auntie Kalina’s Treasure

  Before making dinner, I checked my ad again. I had another four responses, but again, when I looked up the names, I found the missing people relatively easily. Depressing.

  Back in the trailer, I looked into Gertrude’s claim that her family had fought for civil rights in Lawrence. Her mother, Maris Clover Wheelock, seemed to have been as involved a citizen as Gertrude. Among other activities, Maris’s name appeared in the 1950s and 1960s newspapers for taking part in discussions of segregated housing and public facilities.

  Gertrude’s own name began popping up in the late 1960s, when the county and university were in the same throes over civil rights, abortion access, and the Vietnam War as the rest of the country. I saw a picture of Gertrude and Maris dedicating the Clover-Wheelock Women’s Health Clinic in old East Lawrence.

  After her mother’s death, Gertrude created a foundation in Maris’s memory, which chiefly supported the Clover-Wheelock Health Center. Gertrude gave the town sweat equity by helping run a food pantry, an after-school program for low-income girls interested in STEM, and the town arts council, along with service in elected offices, like the county planning commission.

  Gertrude and Pat had received every conceivable civic award available in the county, and many state ones as well. I couldn’t imagine any revelations from a nineteenth-century diary that would make them want to kill Clarina Coffin.

  But what had brought Gertrude to the Dundee house the night Clarina died there? I couldn’t begin to figure that one out, so I went back to my ad. Eleven new responses had come in. Ten were false alarms, but I had a feeling the eleventh was the right one. Lucia Bednarek wrote that she hadn’t seen or heard from her sister for almost two years.

  “You say she was found dead. If you think there’s a reward for finding her, there isn’t, but if it’s her, I guess I need to make arrangements for her funeral, unless she got married or had a kid, which means she has a closer relative than me.”

  She’d attached a snapshot of a stocky woman with dark curly hair who stared aggressively at the camera. It was clearer than Zoë’s shots in the County Herald. Although the woman in the Dundee house cellar had been pale, drained of life, I was pretty sure Clarina was Lucia Bednarek’s sister.

  I wrote that to Lucia, adding, “I’m not expecting a reward, I’m just trying to establish her identity.” I included references, people who could vouch for my not being a scammer, including Deke Everard. “It would be good if we could have a phone conversation, but if you’re more comfortable talking to the police, here’s the main switchboard number for the Lawrence Department.”

  I attached a link to the stories Zoë had run about Clarina’s death. After a few minutes, Bednarek agreed to a phone call. She was at work; she’d phone in the morning.

  I spent a restless afternoon, trying to stay focused on Chicago client reports and not on the clock. I wanted to share Clarina’s identity with Murray and Zoë, but I couldn’t let that genie out of the bottle until I had complete certainty from Lucia.

 

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