Strangled Skein Page 3

  “Wait,” I said, “Mountain laurel is poisonous?”

  “Very,” Mark said. “It’s beautiful, but if you’re raising any kind of animals, like goats, you can’t have it near them. It can kill them quickly, and humans too, as I understand it.”

  Mariah nodded. “That’s right. I remember the extension agent telling us that if we were going to pasture goats near the woods we’d have to cut all the mountain laurel out.” She sighed. “We decided to forgo the goats.”

  “Apparently, Mrs. Sumner knew it was poisonous,” Santi said as he scanned the pages of the journal now in front of him. “She had some rather elaborate ways of slipping it into food for consumption.”

  “My favorite was plum pudding,” Ms. Lewis said with a wink at me. My friend wasn’t usually the playful sort, but I could see she was putting Santi on a bit.

  Santi shook his head. “I see why this would be disturbing, but did you see anything else that indicated she might have actually poisoned anyone? Particularly her husband?”

  “Keep reading,” Ms. Lewis said and then looked down at her notes. “The entries for the third and fourth of June will be of particular interest, I believe.”

  Santi turned a few pages, picked the book up and held it so his shadow didn’t fall across the faint handwriting. Then, he began to read out loud:

  My dear husband has fallen deathly ill after dinner tonight. It appears that our machinations have been successful. Yet, had I known he would groan so, a more expeditious means might have been chosen, perhaps a broken neck from a fall off his favorite horse. But there is nothing to be done for that. We must all simply endure until he no longer does so.

  * * *

  I let out my own far less painful groan. “Well, that does sound remarkably like a confession,” I said.

  Santi turned the page and read again:

  The night was arduous but just before dawn the haunting sounds of his cries ended, and I felt as if the angels themselves were singing. I know that is not true. We shall suffer for what we have done, but for now, we have peace. All of us. Each of us. Peace again.

  * * *

  “She doesn’t sound contrite at all,” Mariah said. “Wait, Ms. Lewis, you said something earlier about postpartum depression. What do you mean?”

  * * *

  “Well, I am expert neither by training or experience, but it seems to me that Mrs. Sumner was feeling quite, shall we say, down after the birth of each of her children,” Ms. Lewis said. “In many of her journal entries, she talks about her deep sadness and about how she doesn't know if she will be able to survive another day.”

  * * *

  “That does sound like my experience of postpartum depression,” I said, not really wanting to elaborate further.

  * * *

  Mariah shook her head. “You mean like that woman who drove the car with her children into the lake? That was terrible!”

  * * *

  I sighed. “It was terrible, but also probably preventable. We are not good as a society at dealing with women's mental health.”

  “Are you thinking that her illness had something to do with her husband's death?” Santi asked as he studied Ms. Lewis’s face. “Do you think she might have killed him because of her depression?”

  Ms. Lewis shook her head. “I don't know, Sheriff. But it might be worth exploring that question. That is, if you're going to investigate this murder.” She bowed her head gently.

  I looked at the faces of every person in the room and wondered if I was ever going to get a salvage job that didn't involve a murder investigation. At this point, I doubted it.

  * * *

  Santi began taking notes on the journals. Ms. Lewis continued to sort the papers. I decided to see what Sawyer was up to. needed a little break from the darker parts of history. When I asked Mark where I might find the boys, he said they had gone down to the river, and I decided to look forward to the walk across the fields.

  * * *

  The day was hot, but a little less humid than usual and there was a breeze coming up off the water that made it almost pleasant to stroll. I watched the clusters of no-see-ums flying through the air and studied them. There were bobbing patterns of sparrows under the brush along the roadbed, and I forced myself to take deep breaths. At least this murder wasn't recent. At least I hadn't discovered a body this time.

  * * *

  When I reached the bank above the water, I could hear the boys’ laughter, and when I looked down, my son was ardently splashing his friend in the face with river water. For his part, Wyatt was laughing with glee and Belinda was standing by, ankle deep in the water, a smile on her face too. The scene was quintessential summer.

  I decided to keep my presence to myself for a little while and sat down on the riverbank, slightly obscured by a tree. There I could see Saw laugh and splash and run around in the shallow water without interrupting.

  * * *

  It had taken a couple years before I could really feel the joy of his childhood. While I had loved that boy from the moment I held him just after he was born, the struggle of my pregnancy and his birth had left me in some shadowy places for a while. I still had enjoyed his first laugh and watching him cruise around the house on his hands and knees. But the sharpness of those experiences just wasn't there. That's what postpartum depression had done to me, sort of dulled my experience of my son's infancy.

  * * *

  But now? I saw his joy and felt my own with the crispness I’d hoped to feel. They felt more real and powerful than anything else I’d experienced. Seeing him laugh and fall and gallop through the water without any sense of the hard things in the world was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life, and I was profoundly grateful for it.

  * * *

  After a few minutes, I decided to walk down the rest of the way to the water and dip my own feet in. I knew this was going to mean that I would be soaking wet shortly, but the heat of the day was catching up with me, and I decided that would be fun too. So for the next little bit, I splashed the boys and tried to protect Belinda from their games while she took a break on the shore. But of course, by the time we were done, all of us were soaked through, and all of us were laughing.

  * * *

  It was time for lunch, so I helped Belinda corral the boys up the hill and back to the house, where sandwiches and chips and those crazy juice bottles with animal faces were ready. I gave Saw a kiss on his forehead and went back upstairs, drying my hair with a towel Belinda had gotten me from the bathroom.

  When I returned to the bedroom, Santi was carrying the last of the paper boxes out of the room to his car, and Ms. Lewis was making a final inventory list of what she had collected for Mark and Mariah. “I’ll formalize this after I review the material an additional time,” she said. “But I don’t want to take the material without leaving you some sort of written record of what you donated.”

  * * *

  “All done.” I asked. “Did you find anything new?”

  * * *

  Ms. Lewis shook her head. “Not as far as I could see. But the sheriff did make some notes for his own purposes.”

  * * *

  I nodded. “Well, with the paperwork handled, how do you feel about me continuing on in other levels of research?” I turned to Mark and Mariah again.

  * * *

  “Fine with me,” Mark said, “but can I treat everyone to lunch first?”

  * * *

  I hadn’t wanted to admit how hungry I was, especially after my swim in the river. But the mention of lunch made my stomach growl audibly. I blushed. “I guess you know my answer.”

  * * *

  Mark smiled. “Come on down to the kitchen. And I’ll whip us up some salads. I think there’s still half of the tiramisu I made yesterday in the fridge, too.”

  * * *

  No one had to suggest tiramisu to me twice, and I led the way down the stairs.

  3

  Over lunch, we talked about what each of us knew of the Sumner family. I had gone to school with some of the descendants. And Ms. Lewis had done a fair amount of research about this prominent family for the Historical Society. But when we really started to examine what we knew, it turned out most of our information was pretty general. More like oral history than historical fact. Now, I was never one to discount oral history as valid and useful, but it came with the mystery. That seemed odd for a family as prominent as the Sumners. Even the most withdrawn and quiet wealthy white family in this area typically had a fairly extensively documented history available. That was just the nature of running a plantation. When you had that many people to do your work for you, you had plenty of time to write letters, record information, and keep ledgers. Basically, wealth gave you the privilege of recording your own history, as Ms. Lewis said.

  But in the case of the Sumners, this history was light. Scant, even… until today. It seemed nothing personal had ever really been shared about the family. I'd heard the Sumner kids talk about this big house in show-and-tell sometimes. The house had been part of garden tours in the late twentieth century. But we didn't have the sort of storied familiarity with the Sumner family that we did with other families from Octonia. It's kind of odd now, that I thought about it.

  “Maybe they were just a private family,” Santi suggested.

  I considered that. “Or maybe we just haven't had any real information about them because it's been tucked away in closets all these years.”

  “Maybe both.” Ms. Lewis said. “It might be useful to consider that none of these papers have ever been seen publicly before.”

  She had a point. “You think they were hiding something?”

  Ms. Lewis shrugged. “Some people’s secrets are other people's gold mines.” Upon imparting that bit of wisdom, Ms. Lewis stood a
nd thanked our hosts for the opportunity. Then she excused herself and left.

  Mariah turned to me once Ms. Lewis was gone and said, “she's quite a woman.”

  I laughed. “That she is.”

  After we all helped with lunch clean up, Mariah led me up to the attic and suggested I work my way down. “You'll need this though.” She handed me a paper surgical mask. “The dust could kill you.”

  Something about that phrasing set my nerves a little on edge, but I forced a smile onto my face and said “Thanks” before making my way to the furthest, darkest corner. It always been my life philosophy to start with the hardest thing and work to the easiest. The hardest thing up here seemed like that corner.

  Most of the boxes were full of what all of us keep in our attics: Christmas decorations and photo albums full of images of people we’re probably related to but don't know how. There were a couple of really great boxes of vintage clothes that I tugged over to the opening of the of the attic because they would be great to sell in the shop. I found a steamer trunk full of shampoo samples that spanned several decades and decided that might be worth keeping not only for the trunk, but for the Instagram photo opportunities with the packaging.

  But it was the standing wardrobe in the high eaves near the center of the house that most fascinated me. Maybe because of what we'd found in the other wardrobe a floor below, or maybe it was my continuing fascination with Narnia. But the whole time I worked my way forward, I kept my eye on that piece of furniture. It was going to be my reward for all this dust and hard work.

  By 3:30, I had made it through most of one side of the attic. I knew that Sawyer, as much fun as he was having, was going to be ready to go home soon. So I treated myself to opening the wardrobe.

  I wasn't disappointed. Inside were two perfectly intact Confederate soldier uniforms. The gray wool smelled of body odor and dust. And when I carefully lifted each hanger off the wooden dowel in the middle of the cabinet, I could see that these were uniforms that had been worn, not just collected. Sweat stains under the armpits were still visible, and there was a rip in the arm of one of the jackets. These were treasures.

  They were also worth a lot of money. And while I knew I could hold Mark and Mariah to the terms of our agreement and keep these for myself, I didn't feel like that was the ethical thing to do. I promised myself I would tell them about the uniforms as soon as I finished going through the rest of the wardrobe. And I hoped that they would still let me keep them. Because this kind of find could put a real dent in Sawyer’s college fund.

  The right-hand side of the wardrobe had six small drawers in it. I tried to imagine the kinds of clothing a man would keep in these drawers. Stockings. Garters. Did men wear garters? Wigs. Could there be powdered wigs in here? I clearly had no knowledge of historical clothing.

  But it turned out I didn't need that knowledge, because the drawers were full of what I think of as the tiny things of life. There were cufflinks and a couple of medals that looked like they could have come from some sort of military service. 2 shoehorns. A variety of cravats, I think would be the term we call them. And bow ties. All of it was fascinating.

  The bottom drawer, though, held what most intrigued me: stacks of loose photographs. Some of them were tintypes. And given that a couple of the men in those were in gray uniforms, I figured they might be family photos of the people who wore the uniforms. Some were much more recent, probably from the 1940s or 50s with the deckle edges -- family snapshots of picnics and birthday parties. But it was the ones that were sepia toned, not daguerreotypes, but similar, that fascinated me the most because they were all portraits of children. As best I could tell, they weren’t the same children over and over again, even though there were dozens of these pictures.

  In some of the images little girls had ringlets that hung to their shoulders and fancy lace collars from what I imagined was the Victorian era. And in others, children were in knickers and what we would now call tank tops, and appeared to be posed as if they were playing. In others, infants were resting, sleeping quietly in their cradles, tiny bonnets over their heads. All of them were beautiful. And all of them were creepy.

  I couldn't begin to figure out why I found the images creepy. Maybe it was because the children looked so posed or stiff in ways that Sawyer would never look. Or maybe it was the sort of blank expression in the children's eyes. I still wasn't sure, but I set the photos aside after flipping through them quickly because they gave me goosebumps.

  I carefully gathered all the items from the wardrobe, including the uniforms, into an empty basket I found on the other side of the attic and carried it down the stairs. I was going to need help getting the bigger things down, but I wanted to talk to Mark and Mariah about these things first.

  I found my hosts in the dining room with tumblers of whiskey and snack plates in front of them. And suddenly my stomach did its annoying thing of rumbling so loudly that Mark started to laugh.

  “Join us, Paisley?” Mark asked. “The boys have just gone to town with Belinda to get ice cream. And we are enjoying the peace and quiet.”

  “That obvious, huh?” I said as I set my armful of treasures down on the table.

  Mariah laughed. “Well, you have been working hard,” she said as she stood and got me a glass of my own drink and a small plate. “Did you find anything?”

  I took a deep breath. “I did.” I carefully unfolded the two uniforms and laid them across the table. These,” I said, “you will want to keep. They are incredibly valuable, I expect.”

  Mark shook his head. “That's great, Paisley, but they are yours by the terms of our agreement. I'm glad to get to see them though.” He studied the fabric. “Confederate.”

  I nodded. “Definitely. Are you sure you don't want to keep them?”

  Maria shook her head. “No, you keep them. We don't have the time to do the research to sell them properly anyway and we made commitments to you. We will honor that”

  I smiled. “Is it bad to say I hoped you were going to say that?”

  Mark and Maria laughed. “No, not at all,” Mariah said. “What else did you find?”

  I laid out the other things I'd found in the wardrobe and explained that I would need to do research to understand more about what each of the things was. But then I pulled aside the top photos from the twentieth century and spread out the images of the children.

  Mariah gasped. “These are memorial photos.” she said quietly.

  I studied her face, then admitted, “I'm sorry, I don't know what memorial photos are.”

  She carefully lifted an image close to her face and ran a soft finger over the child's cheek. “They’re photos that were taken of people, especially children, after they died.” she sighed. “It was a tender thing to do at the time. But now? They're pretty terrifying. Just because of our cultural practices around death.”

  I looked from her to Mark.

  Mark said, “Mariah has been interested in memorial photos for a long time.”

  I waited for him to say more, but he didn't. And I looked back at Mariah.

  She said, “My grandmother had a picture of her little brother who died in infancy. When I was about eight, I found that picture in her drawer and asked about it. My grandmother always told me the truth, so she explained what it was. It didn't scare me then. They still don't scare me now. But I do feel a lot of sadness when I see them. So many children died so early.”

  I swallowed hard. “Maybe you would like to keep these?”

  Mariah looked up at me then. “If you don't mind, I would, but just for a little while. I have studied these so intensively. I can date them by the clothing and the posing pretty easily. Maybe that would help tell more of the Sumner story.”