Crowned and Moldering

I could feel my muscles thrumming, and I don’t know why the thought came to me, but I remembered that Denise Jones had strong arms, too. Swinging an ax or a sledgehammer—or a shovel—every day could do that for you.

The entire pantry had been attached to the wall by one-by-two-inch wood slats. I used a regular hammer to claw off the slats, and part of the wall came off with them. I wasn’t concerned, because we would have to take the entire room down to the studs, anyway.

But instead of the usual layer of lath beneath the surface plaster, there was a sheet of old drywall. I knew drywall had been around for almost a hundred years; that wasn’t the problem. It just didn’t match the rest of the walls of the house, which had been constructed using the traditional lath and plaster. Had this wall been built later?

Since we’d be rebuilding it anyway, I used the pickax to dig through the drywall and break it up. But instead of finding two-by-four studs beyond the drywall, there was only empty space.

“What in the world?” It was too dark to see anything, so I tore down more of the drywall and then grabbed the big flashlight from my tool chest.

“How’s it going?” Carla asked, strolling over to my side of the room.

“We’ve got a little mystery in here,” I muttered, shining the light through the hole I’d opened in the drywall. I really hoped I wouldn’t find another body. Or rats. Please not rats. I stepped back to give Carla room to look. “Can you see anything?”

“What’s back there?” She peered into the space for a long moment. “Huh. Looks like a staircase.”

“Oh, my God.” A tingle of excitement mixed with fear shot across my shoulders and down my arms. “It is a staircase.”

I grabbed the sledgehammer and slashed away at the rest of the wall. Carla used her gloved hands to tear off a few chunks and toss them on the floor.

Within minutes, we were able to step through the wall and get a closer look at the impossibly narrow, rickety set of stairs that led up to a second-floor landing and then continued up to the third floor. I could see from where I stood that the landing came to an abrupt end at a blank wall. There was no doorway. The entire staircase had been completely blocked off and enclosed by walls.

“This must’ve been the servants’ stairs,” Carla marveled. “I don’t understand why they would cover them up.”

“I don’t, either,” I said, gazing at the dark wooden ba

*   *   *

The guys and Carla were happy to clean up the remains of the demolished pantry while I drove back to town to track down Aldous and tell him what we’d found.

I stopped at the Pla

I decided to walk the same route and finally caught up with him. He was seated on a park bench in the tree-lined grassy center of the town square. His head was bowed and I wondered if he was dozing.

“Hello, Mr. Murch,” I said.

He blinked and sat up straighter. “Well, hello, there. I haven’t seen you in a while, young lady.” He coughed to clear his throat.

“I’ve been pretty busy. But I heard you were out at the mansion, and I was wondering if you needed any help looking for something.”

“I didn’t . . . I wasn’t. . . .” His lips curled down in a frown. “I forget what I was looking for.”

I sat down next to him on the bench. “Maybe this will help you remember.” I held out my tablet so he could see the photograph I’d taken.

He stared at it for over a minute and finally looked up at me. I was shocked to see tears blurring his eyes. “I told you,” he whispered.

“You did.” I felt terrible that I hadn’t taken his word about the staircase. Especially when it seemed to mean so much to him. “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. You were right. We found this staircase behind the kitchen wall.” I slid my finger across the screen and showed him the next photo. “Beyond the stairs we found a little room with this small fireplace. But this whole area was completely closed off on all three floors. And you can’t see this chimney from the outside of the house, so they must’ve taken it down, brick by brick.”

“It was the servants’ parlor,” he murmured, and curled arthritic fingers around the edges of the tablet.

“But why did they close it off? They even went to the trouble of changing the blueprints so nobody knew it was there.”

He pressed one hand against the bench seat and seemed to brace himself before speaking. “A young girl was attacked on those back stairs.” He took another breath and kept talking. It was painful to listen to him struggle for words. “She was a sweet girl, and pretty. Betsy was her name. They hurt her, you see. Badly. She wasn’t the same after that.”

“Did they punish the person who hurt her?”

“No,” he uttered in disgust. “She would never say who did it, but we knew. We knew.”

“You couldn’t do anything about it?”

“Not without her testimony. Frankly, even if she’d testified, they never would’ve prosecuted the evil man who did it. The navy decided to close off that dangerous passageway rather than discipline the man who did those horrible things.”

I patted his arm. “I’m so sorry.”

Aldous shot me a sideways glance. “The man was untouchable back then. He was a high-ranking officer. The one who did all that bad stuff. You understand.”

“I’m afraid so.” The navy wouldn’t want to risk receiving negative PR over one insignificant housemaid.

“I’d like to say times have changed,” he said, “but they haven’t, have they?”

“Some things are changing,” I said lamely, unable to think of anything that would make him feel better.

He reached over and I felt again the crepe-paper-thin skin of his hand as he patted mine in sympathy. “Perhaps you’re right, dear. Things do seem to be changing. Altogether too fast sometimes, if you ask me.” He pursed his lips tightly, and then slowly he seemed to make a conscious effort to smile. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out it was the first time he’d done so in months.

“It’s good you uncovered those stairs,” he said. “Betsy deserves to be remembered, not shut away behind walls and deaf ears.”

I got a chill, but he was right. Finding the stairs would allow us to shine a light on the past.

“My offer to show you around the mansion still stands,” I said. “Whenever you’d like me to drive you out there.”

“I appreciate that. And thank you for showing me the pictures, Sha

“Not you, Mr. Murch,” I said, chuckling. “Not you.”

*   *   *

On my way home, I stopped to visit Lizzie at Paper Moon on the square. “Any word on Cliff?”

“Let’s go get a latte,” she whispered. We both waved to Hal, who smiled and shooed us off. “I can take fifteen minutes.”

We didn’t speak as we walked three doors down from her shop to the coffeehouse, where I bought two lattes. We found a quiet corner and sat to talk. Lizzie took a sip first and then said, “Cliff is still in intensive care but not quite as critical as earlier.”

“Have you heard if they arrested Denise or not?”

“I haven’t heard, which is sad, because why have a stupid police sca

“Why, indeed?”

I filled her in on everything Mac had told me about Denise bashing Cliff with the shovel and the interesting detail of him trying to blackmail her.

“Blackmail?” Lizzie repeated. “What could she have possibly done that would cause someone to blackmail her?”

“I can’t figure it out. Is it something that happened back in high school or is it more recent?”