Plaster and Poison Page 5

  “What are you doing here?” Shannon wanted to know, her voice low but shrill. She kept shooting glances over her shoulder to her date. Maybe she was afraid he’d sneak out while she wasn’t looking, leaving her with the bill. He looked the type.

  “Shouldn’t that be our question?” Derek retorted.

  Shannon turned to him. “Please don’t tell my mom.”

  “We should.”

  She looked from Derek to me and back, clutching her hands together. “I know what it looks like, but please trust me, OK? I’ll tell her myself, I promise. Just . . . not yet.”

  “When?” Derek folded his arms across his chest and tried to look menacing. Not an easy task since he doesn’t have a scary bone in his body. That’s not to say that he can’t fight, and fight dirty, when the situation demands it, but when it comes to intimidating women, he’s woefully out of his element.

  “Um . . .” Shannon was clearly casting about for an acceptable compromise.

  “Look,” I said, putting a hand on her arm and another on Derek’s. “It’s none of our business what you’re doing. Just don’t do anything stupid. And if you don’t tell your mother about what’s going on in the next couple of days, then chances are Derek will tell her for you. Just something to remember.”

  Shannon nodded, looking grateful. Derek didn’t like the agreement I’d unilaterally offered, but he nodded, too. Grudgingly.

  I didn’t like it much myself, and if Shannon didn’t come clean with Kate shortly, I thought I might just beat him to spilling the beans.

  The next morning, I was back at the Fraser House, where Miss Barnes confirmed that Derek’s assessment had been right: The carriage house had been built more than twenty years after the main house, in the spring of 1918.

  “It’s probably more of a garage than a carriage house, really,” she offered. “By the late teens, the Ritters, being one of the wealthiest families in Waterfield, had probably invested in a car. I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you, though. There was no historical overlay back then; the Ritters didn’t have to secure permission to build or run the plans by anyone.”

  “And of course there’s no way of knowing who worked on it?”

  Miss Barnes shook her head. “My only suggestion is to check the newspaper archives, just in case they made a mention of it.”

  I nodded, said my thanks, and left.

  Waterfield has two newspapers. The Weekly is the oldest, established in 1912. Three years later came the Clarion, which is a daily. Both are still going strong, but over time, the Weekly—being a weekly—has developed more of an emphasis on human interest stories and articles, while the Clarion is more focused on hard news.

  Mrs. Graham, the Clarion receptionist cum keeper of the microfiche, is a sturdy woman in her middle years, with steel gray hair and glasses, and is extremely efficient. I told her what I wanted and soon found myself at the microfiche machine with a couple of boxes of microfiches. I loaded and started looking.

  Since all I was doing was going through a couple of months’ time during one particular spring, it didn’t take long. The spring of 1918 was taken up with horrible news: Between the war and the influenza pandemic, people were dropping like flies. Speculation was that more than a million Greeks had been killed in the Greco-Turkish war, and the final battle of Flanders or Ypres, Battle of the Lys, was raging throughout the month of April. John Joseph “Black Jack” Pershing was commanding the First American Army in Europe, and in England, the Royal Air Force was formed. Closer to home, the USS Cyclops had disappeared without a trace in the Bermuda Triangle, and the 1918 baseball season was under way. Babe Ruth defeated Philadelphia seven to one on April fifteenth, making it his third consecutive opening-day victory.

  On the other hand, Lawrence and Anna Virginia Ritter’s new carriage house was a much smaller matter and didn’t rate a mention in the Clarion. I kept scrolling through microfiche, all the way into June, without finding anything relating to the Ritters or Kate’s B&B, and I was just about to give up and move across the street to the Waterfield Weekly when a name caught my attention.

  Local man done to death was the headline. The one-paragraph article continued, The United States Navy has confirmed that a Waterfi eld man, William A. Ellis, died on June 6th of this year, just days after joining the war effort. Mr. Ellis, recently of Chandler Street, joined the Navy at Elliott on June 3rd, and was accepted as a fi reman, third class. On the evening of June 6th, hours before shipping out for service, Mr. Ellis consumed poison and died instantly. The Navy is investigating the circumstances. Mr. Ellis is survived by his mother, Mallessa Ellis of 34 Chandler Street, one brother, and two sisters.

  I sat back on my chair, gnawing on a fingernail. It’s not an attractive habit, and not one I indulge in often, so as soon as I realized I was doing it, I took the thumb back out of my mouth. But really, this was shocking.

  This, I realized, must be the William Ellis that Miss Barnes had told me about. The young man who had died in World War I, whom Derek’s Paw-Paw Willie was named after. The address was the same as Dr. Ben and Cora’s. Derek’s—I figured in my head—great-uncle? Or second cousin twice removed?

  Whatever. Miss Barnes had told me that William Ellis the elder had died during World War I, but she hadn’t told me he’d been poisoned. Why on earth not?

  Or maybe she didn’t know it, I told myself. Maybe it wasn’t commonly known. Derek hadn’t mentioned anything about it. Maybe one poisoning among so many other casualties—of the war as well as the influenza pandemic—hadn’t seemed worth making a fuss over. I wondered if they’d ever caught who did it. The rest of the microfiche I had didn’t mention it, if so, and I’d requested another box, just to make sure. As I packed everything up, to give back to Miss Graham behind the counter, I wondered if I’d have better luck at the Weekly.

  Just like the Clarion, the Weekly was rife with references to war and atrocity—and baseball—but no information about William Ellis. I did find the information about Kate’s carriage house in the April seventeenth issue: a picture of the Richtfest or topping-out ceremony.

  It was Lawrence Senior who called the ceremony by its German name, and then hastened to assure the reader that he was a proud second-generation American with no German sympathies whatsoever. He may perhaps have protested a little too much, but since that was neither here nor there at the moment, I don’t suppose it mattered much.

  The topping-out ceremony, or Richtfest, took place when the last beam was placed in the roof of the carriage house. The roof itself wasn’t on yet, but the structure, or skeleton, of the building was finished. The tradition, the article explained, had long been an important component of timber-frame building in the Old World.

  Briefly, what happens is that a small evergreen tree, symbolizing growth and held to bring good luck, is placed on the topmost beam of the new structure. A toast is drunk, and the owner often treats the workers to a meal. For obvious reasons, a topping-out ceremony often takes place at lunch; that way the laborers can get right back to work afterward. Since the ceremony doesn’t actually celebrate a finished building, just a finished frame, there’s always plenty left to do.

  I found the custom fascinating. I’d never heard of it before, but since coming to Maine I had occasionally noticed a small evergreen tree decorated with flags and streamers perched on the top of a building under construction somewhere, where no evergreen tree had any business growing, and I’d wondered what it was doing there. Now I knew.

  The picture that accompanied the article was grainy, black and white, and taken from a distance to get the entire building, including the pine tree on top, into the frame. Lined up in front were seven or eight workers in shirt-sleeves and suspenders, bareheaded, and squinting in the bright sun. Their faces were tiny, so it was impossible to see what any of them looked like, but there was a list of names under the picture. I skimmed it. Several men had last names I recognized. There was a Rasmussen; some ancestor of Wayne’s, probably. And someone with a last name of Thomas, who might have been related to Brandon. There was a Stenham; certainly an early
influence on Ray and Randy and their decision to start Stenham Construction. I didn’t pay either of them much attention, though, because there was an Ellis.

  Here he was again. William A. Ellis, who had been poisoned a couple months after posing for this picture. Small world.

  Or maybe it wasn’t that much of a coincidence after all. In a tiny town like Waterfield, smaller still almost a hundred years ago, it wasn’t inconceivable—it wasn’t even unlikely, really—that I should come across the same person twice. Still, it was interesting.

  I counted miniscule heads and matched them to the names in the caption, until I thought I had managed to isolate William. Then I leaned in, until my nose almost touched the microfiche machine.

  It was no use. His head was just a speck; I couldn’t even tell if his hair had been dark or fair. I’d have to ask Derek if the family might have a picture of great-uncle/second-cousin-twice-removed William sitting around somewhere. There was no way around it; I was now invested in the man and what had happened to him.

  There were six other people in the photo, standing at a distance from the workers and closer to the camera. The Ritter family: Lawrence Senior and Anna Virginia, their son Lawrence Junior and his wife Emily, and then Frederick, and finally Agnes, who hadn’t graduated to a long dress yet, but who was wearing a girlish white shift that ended just below her knees, over black stockings and ankle boots. Lawrence Senior was portly, and had a big mustache—it looked like a dark blot on his round face—while Lawrence Junior and Frederick were taller and thinner, with dark hair and what looked like pugnacious jaws. Emily was tall and willowy in a flowery dress and big straw hat that shadowed her face, while Anna Virginia was shorter and stout, with pale hair, either platinum blonde or white, piled on top of her head. Agnes’s was fastened with a big bow but otherwise trailed down her back, and she was as dark as her brothers. Her jaw looked a little stubborn, too.

  All in all, they did not appear to be a friendly bunch. Anna Virginia had the snooty demeanor of someone who was born with a silver spoon in her mouth and who would spit at anything less, while her husband looked fat-cat prosperous and self-satisfied, with a heavy watch chain bisecting his waistcoat. The young men both had that out-thrust-jaw thing going, and Agnes just came across looking spoiled and pouty. Emily was the only one who appeared semifriendly, but maybe that was just because I couldn’t see her face clearly. She reminded me of someone, I realized. Something in her posture: the slightly rounded shoulders and head drawn in like a turtle’s. She seemed to be shrinking away from her husband’s possessive arm around her middle.

  Was it possible, I asked myself, that the initials ER Derek had found in the carriage house had belonged to Emily?

  It hadn’t crossed my mind to ask Miss Barnes what Lawrence’s wife’s name had been, since I hadn’t expected the initials to belong to someone married, but now that I’d seen her—and seen her husband—I couldn’t help but wonder. I mean, here was Emily, and here was William Ellis—WE—and there was the carriage house, under construction, the perfect time to carve two sets of initials in a post, especially if you were one of the crew doing the construction in the first place. . . . It all seemed like too much of a coincidence to be coincidental.

  5

  “I have no idea,” Derek said. “I’ve never heard of Emily Ritter. I didn’t know that Paw-Paw Willie’s uncle died from strychnine poisoning, either. I’m not sure Dad knows.”

  He was busy plastering the interior walls of the carriage house and merely glanced at me over his shoulder, as if the news was of no particular importance.

  “But don’t you think it’s interesting?” I pushed.

  “I’m sure it is. It doesn’t mean that he was murdered, though, Avery. It could have been an accident. Or an overdose. They used small doses of strychnine as medicine back then.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Really?”

  “I’m afraid so. For heart and respiratory complaints.” He smoothed his trowel over the wall and added, dryly, “It works; the only problem is that an effective dose is toxic.”

  “And that would kind of defeat the purpose.”

  “Exactly. Or it could have been self-administered, even.”

  “Suicide, you mean?”

  “Right. If—say—he regretted joining the navy and didn’t want to be shipped out. Got scared. Maybe he gave himself a little dose of strychnine to induce vomiting and ensure he was left behind when the others boarded ship, but he took too much and accidentally killed himself instead.”

  “Or did it on purpose?”

  Derek pursed his lips. “Maybe,” he allowed after a minute, “but I wouldn’t think so. Strychnine poisoning is a nasty way to go. I don’t think anyone would choose it as a method of suicide. Not if they had any other options.”

  I watched him plaster for a moment before I asked, diffidently, “Did you ever see a case of strychnine poisoning while you were doing your medical school residency?”

  His face turned grim, and the trowel stopped. “Once. I think it was in my second year. This guy came in, clutching his stomach. He was pale and clammy, sort of twitchy. Couldn’t sit still. Incoherent. We did everything we could think of to figure out what was wrong with him. X-rays, ultrasounds, blood and urine tests . . . we were getting ready to slice him open when he went into respiratory failure. Turned out his wife had fed him strychnine.”

  “Yikes.”

  He nodded. “It wasn’t pretty. Convulsions, muscle spasms, lockjaw . . . eventually the muscles tire and you can’t breathe.”

  “Ugh.” I shuddered.

  Derek put his tools down and an arm around me. “Why are we talking about this, again?”

  “We were discussing your great-uncle William,” I said, leaning into him. He smelled like Ivory soap and lemon shampoo, with some paint thinner and sawdust thrown in for good measure.

  “Right. Well, maybe death was such a common thing back then, after four years of war and with the influenza pandemic striking people down left and right, that William’s death wasn’t a big deal.”

  “Big enough that the newspaper had an article about it,” I said. “I wonder who did it? If he was murdered, that is, and didn’t do it to himself.”

  “Poison is a woman’s weapon,” Derek answered. “Or so they say.”

  “Right. But why? I mean, why couldn’t a man equally well poison another man?”

  “He could,” Derek said, “and sometimes he does, but men like to hit things. Poison is a safe kind of weapon. You don’t have to be there to set it off, you don’t have to watch the victim die, and you don’t need any particular strength or skill to use it. It’s a great leveler. A smaller, weaker person can bring down a big, strong guy. All someone has to do is bake an arsenic cake or pour some cyanide into a bottle of wine, leave it sitting around for the victim to find, and voila, he’s dying and they’re miles away. Kind of like booby-trapping a basement staircase or puncturing the brake cables on someone’s car.”

  Both of which I had experienced personally over the past six months.

  “Right,” I said, a little shivery at the thought. “Both of those things were done by men, though.”

  “That’s true,” Derek admitted.

  “And he died on the navy base. Where there were mostly men.”

  “Some women, too. Remember the yeomanettes?”

  I nodded. “A lot more men than women, though, Derek. And it would depend a little on how quickly the poison works, too. He joined the navy on the third. He died on the sixth. Could he have taken something before the third that didn’t kill him until the sixth?”

  “Not likely,” Derek said. “There are poisons that can build up for a while before they kill you, but with strychnine, it takes a pretty massive dose all at once. It’s possible it was given to him before he joined up, and he only consumed it three days later.”

  “Maybe.”

  Derek’s voice softened as he sensed my disappointment. “I’m sorry, Avery. This may be one of those things we’ll never learn the truth about. If he was my ancestor, and I don’t know, I don’t know who would.”

  “Can I still ask yo
ur dad sometime?”

  “Sure. And if he doesn’t know anything, we can try to call Paw-Paw Willie. But right now I need your help here, OK?”

  “OK,” I said, mentally relegating both the initials and the matter of William Ellis’s maybe murder/accident/ suicide to the back burner for now.

  The last few days of November sped by, and December started. Shannon continued to spend most of her time away from the B&B, although I’m not sure whether she was hanging out with Paige or with the new guy in her life, or whether she was just avoiding all of us.

  Derek finished insulating the carriage house and cranked up the new HVAC system. We became toasty warm, even when the skies opened and dumped a foot of snow on Waterfield. Aunt Inga’s house looked like a fairy-tale cottage, and Kate took Derek away from work for a half day to help her string lights all up and down the towers and turrets of the B&B.

  The Waterfield Inn is a beautiful building. On one end there’s a square tower, with a mansard roof topped by a widow’s walk, while on the other side, there’s a round tower with an onion dome, like the Kremlin. There’s a bay window on the first floor, a wraparound porch, intricately carved gingerbread trim, tons of narrow, arched windows, and gables sticking out in every direction. A true Queen Anne, it boasts every Victorian excess imaginable. With Christmas lights strung along all the different angles of the roof, and along the porch, and over both towers, the B&B glittered against the night sky like something out of a Hollywood movie. Noel should be quite impressed when he and Mom showed up.

  Speaking of people showing up, Steve didn’t. Beatrice’s husband, I mean. She settled into the guestroom in Cora and Dr. Ben’s house and signed up with a temp agency out of Portland. As it happened, my cousins Ray and Randy Stenham needed someone to fill in for Carolyn Tate temporarily, and that’s where Beatrice ended up, in the office at Clovercroft, one of the Stenhams’ developments. Bea was seriously overqualified for the work they had her do and must have been bored out of her skull a lot of the time, but maybe she enjoyed having something to do again, after living a life of leisure for the past couple of years. And it was only for a few months, until Ray and Randy could hire someone permanently. Or until Steve got his act together and did something about the situation.