by Kathi Daley
“No, I don’t think so. She thinks her father killed her PI. I got the impression that she is sorry she ever looked for the man in the first place and really has no interest in meeting him. It sounded like the file was sent to her based on Denton’s instructions before he died. Still, once she really lets everything sink in, who knows?”
“I guess we should find out what we can, and then keep an eye on the situation.” Tony turned back to his screen. “Should we tell Mike?”
“No, at least not yet. Mike is the sort who will definitely not leave it alone if he thinks our father is a killer. If he knows, he will probably just make things worse.”
Chapter 19
Saturday, October 26
Tony and I had worked late into the night trying to learn what we could about Star Moonwalker, her adoptive parents, the woman who had given birth to her, the man who dropped her off at the church, and the nun who took custody of the baby in the first place. To be honest, it totally blew my mind that this man who’d been going by the name Grant Tucker, would go into hiding with the mother of his child only to witness her death and then, after abandoning their child, would turn around, change his name, marry my mom, and then have Mike and me. Wouldn’t a man who had lost the mother of his child after she’d been shot, presumably by someone who was actually after him, go into deep hiding rather than moving a few hundred miles north and establishing another family less than two years later? The whole thing made no sense.
“I need to meet with Austin Wade,” Tony informed me shortly after we’d finished breakfast. “I meant to mention it last night, but then you told me about Star, and I got distracted.”
“Why are you meeting with Austin?” Austin Wade was the patriarch of one of the richest families in town. His grandfather, Dillinger Wade, had established the town along with his business partner, Hank Weston, in nineteen forty-five.
“After I realized that the skeleton whose identity we have been trying to establish most likely lived and worked in White Eagle during the forties, I called Austin to see if he had copies of the old local paper that used to be published monthly back in the forties. He said he did have copies, so I asked if I could look through them, and he said he was fine with that, so I’m heading over to his house in less than an hour. You can come if you want.”
I’d slept in and had only consumed one cup of coffee so I knew I should decline but found myself agreeing to go. It would be interesting to look through the old newspapers and if it would help us identify our skeleton, even better. It was beginning to look as if the man in the walled-in room had been a lumber mill worker who’d lived and worked in the area right around the time the Westons and the Wades were striking it rich. If one of the local workers had turned up missing, maybe the man who put out the monthly paper would have reported about it.
If I was going to go with Tony, I needed to hurry up and get ready, so I poured a second cup of coffee and then ran upstairs to shower while Tony walked the dogs.
“So do you think that if this man went missing, his disappearance would have made the newspaper?” I asked as we drove toward Wade’s mansion.
“Yes, I think something like a missing person would have made the newspaper.”
“But why would this lumber mill worker even be at the Vandenberg house?”
Tony turned onto the country road that would take us out to the Wade property. “My theory is that this man, whom I am assuming at this point engaged in manual labor of some sort, came to the area to find work, and somewhere along the way, he met Ethel Vandenberg. I imagine that Ethel was lonely living in the big old house with only her abusive father for company, so when she met this young man, she struck up a friendship. Maybe they even fell in love. In one scenario, Edward was not at all happy with the fact that his upper-class daughter had found love with a common laborer, so he killed his daughter’s suitor and hid the body.”
I smiled. “That sounds like the plot for a historical romance.”
“Fictional plots are based on someone’s reality. It’s a bit fantastic as far as theories go, but at the present time, it’s the only one I have. I don’t suppose you have a better one?”
“What if the man was a servant of the house? A groundskeeper or a stable hand as we discussed before. Maybe he witnessed Edward beating Ethel, so he tried to protect her and was killed for his effort.”
“I suppose that works as well,” Tony admitted. “Of course, I suppose we should keep in mind that the killer wasn’t necessarily Edward. For all we know, he’d gone back to England by the time this man died, and the killer was Ethel.”
“Okay, then maybe this stable hand tried to come onto her, and she stabbed him and then hid the body.”
“Perhaps,” Tony agreed. “Really, unless we are incredibly lucky and stumble onto something concrete, the reality is we’ll probably never know the skeleton’s identity or his story.”
It made me sad that Tony was probably right. I guess all we could do at this point was to keep looking and hope that we stumbled onto something.
Wade was waiting for us when we arrived. He showed us into the library where someone had laid out the leather-bound books containing the newspapers. He offered us a beverage, instructed us to ring the bell should we need anything, and then left, promising to check back in with us in a bit. I’d been inside the Wade library on one other occasion and had to admit the place was impressive. There were floor to ceiling bookshelves with ladders that slid along each wall, a huge rock fireplace, dark wood tables and chairs, and a truly impressive desk.
“So where do we start?” I asked Tony after we were both seated.
“I guess we just start going through the books and if we see an article that seems to have promise, we’ll pause and look at it together.”
I settled in with the first book I’d selected, and Tony settled in with his. It really was pretty interesting to look at the articles that had been written all those years ago. There were a lot of mentions of the Weston and Wade families, but there were also mentions of other old-timers I’d heard about from the older folks in our community.
“Did you know that fourteen lumber mill workers died in a fire after they were cut off from the road while out surveying and marking the area for a future harvest?” Tony asked.
“No. I hadn’t heard,” I answered. “I suppose that there might have been a lot of tragedy back then. Harvesting trees is not easy work. If I had to guess, the odds of being hurt or killed while working in the field must have been pretty high. The equipment they had to fight a forest fire once it got started would be nothing like what we have nowadays, and there are still a lot of deaths due to uncontrolled fires.”
Deciding to move on from this depressing subject, I returned my attention to the book I’d been looking through. I found I enjoyed the articles about births, marriages, community picnics, and barn dances a lot more enjoyable than the reports of deaths and other local tragedies. Of course, I guess that was true even today.
“Oh, look. Here is a photo of a new community church. I know it no longer stands, so it must not have stood the test of time, but I love the feel of the tiny building that was apparently erected in a single weekend by a group of volunteers.” I continued to look at the photo. It looked like the entire town had come out. I focused in on the caption beneath the photo. “Apparently, Ethel Vandenberg donated the money to buy the materials to build the church.”
Tony stopped what he was doing. “It lists her name specifically?”
“It does.”
“That seems to indicate to me that Edward was already out of the picture whether he’d gone back to England, or died, or whatever. If he’d still been in the picture, then chances are he would have been named as the benefactor and not his daughter. When was the church built?”
“June of nineteen forty-eight.”
“Okay. That helps us narrow things down. Does the article say anything else about Ethel?”
I continued to read. “No. Not really.” I focused in on th
e photo. “Although, this woman in the center of the pack could be her. She is dressed nicer than everyone else, and the woman in the photo looks to be in her late thirty’s. Ethel would have been thirty-seven when this photo was taken.”
Tony got up and came around the table. He looked over my shoulder. I pointed to the photo.
“It does look as if this could be her,” he said. “Who is that standing next to her?”
I searched for a name but didn’t see one. “I have no idea, but it does appear as if they might be together. See how their shoulders are touching? And it sort of looks like he has an arm around her waist, but there are so many people crammed into one small area that it is hard to tell.”
Tony frowned and walked back around the table to the book he’d been looking at. “Hang on. I think I know something.” He flipped back a few pages and then carried the book around the table and set it next to mine. “Doesn’t this guy,” he pointed to a photo in his book, “look like he could be the same guy as this guy?” he pointed to the man standing next to Ethel in the photo in my book.
I looked at both photos. “It does look like the same guy.”
“The newspaper I am looking through is from August of nineteen forty-eight. The photos are of the men who lost their lives in the fire. It appears as if Ethel’s friend’s name was Conway Crockett.”
I glanced at Tony. “So this man who looks to be a friend of Ethel’s is killed in the fire that killed fourteen men. That’s so tragic.” I paused to roll the idea around in my head. “Does it say how the fire started?”
Tony looked at the article. “Arson.”
“So maybe Ethel figured out who started the fire and went after them. Maybe the body in the secret room was put there by Ethel as retaliation for killing this man who was her friend.”
Tony looked doubtful. “I don’t know. Even if Ethel did figure out who was responsible for the fire and desired to make him pay for what he’d done, how did she get him to the house? How did she get him up into the attic? And how did she overpower and stab him? And even if Ethel did kill this man, why entomb him in the house where she continued to live for more than a decade? Why not just bury him somewhere?”
“Yeah, I guess the idea is pretty out there. If you really think about it, it would have been pretty creepy for Ethel to have continued to live in the house knowing there was a dead body just upstairs.”
Tony sighed. “We must be missing something that would explain why the body was in the sealed secret room which provided the only access to the clock tower other than the ledge which connected the clock tower and the widow’s walk.”
A thought occurred to me. “Do we know how long ago the clock stopped working?”
“I have no idea. Why?”
“Maybe the fact that the body was encased in a room which eliminated access to the clock tower and the fact that the clock stopped working are related. I know the clock hasn’t worked for as long as I’ve been around.”
“So you think the clock stopped working when the man died and was entombed in the room, and someone, probably Ethel, sealed up the secret room and the entrance to the clock tower in a room with no means of access?”
“It’s a theory.”
“Okay, so who is the guy, who killed him, how did his death stop the clock, and why did whoever sealed the guy in the room do so rather than just burying him?”
“I have no idea.”
I got up and began to pace around the room. The idea that Ethel entombed the body really didn’t work if you took into account the fact that she continued to live alone in the house for a lot of years after the body would have been left there. Even if she had killed someone and wanted to hide the body, there had to have been a better place to hide it. We suspected that Edward might have sealed off the narrow staircase that led to the widow’s walk after his first wife fell or was pushed from it. If that were the case, the clock tower would have still been accessible from the ladder in the attic, assuming the secret room had actually been built in the forties and did not exist until quite a bit after the staircase was sealed. I’d been told that Ethel’s mother, Barbara, fell down the stairs and died in nineteen eighteen, leaving Ethel in the house alone with her father. Of course, Ethel would only have been seven when her mother died. It really didn’t make sense that a rich man such as Edward Vandenberg would raise his young daughter on his own. There must have been servants living in the house as well.
“I just had a crazy thought,” I said.
“And what is that?” Tony asked.
“We know that Ethel’s mother died in nineteen eighteen and we know that Edward continued to live in the house for some amount of time after that. We still don’t know when he disappeared from the scene, and to tell you the truth, that is a piece of information I’d be interested in finding, although when he left or was killed or whatever is not the point I am trying to make. The point I am trying to make is that based on what we know of Edward, he does not appear to have been a celibate man, yet a third wife is never mentioned. What if Edward had a mistress? Maybe even more than one. What if his dalliances resulted in the birth of a child? A bastard child? What if Edward kept this child locked up in the house until he died when he was in his twenties?”
“Why would he do that?” Tony asked. “He was a single man after his wife passed, so there would have been no reason to hide a child conceived out of wedlock.”
“I guess that’s true. Unless the man in the room was Ethel’s son.”
Tony frowned. I could tell he was considering the idea. If Ethel had a son early in life, say during her teens, then conceivably she could have had a child in his late teens by the late nineteen-forties when we suspected the room had been constructed. “Do you think Ethel bore her father’s son?”
“It’s an unpleasant thought, but we’ve heard rumors that Edward abused Ethel. What if his abuse was not confined to beatings? What if, as a teen, Ethel became impregnated, and the result of that pregnancy, was a child that was forever hidden from the world?”
“Okay, say that very disturbing thought is true. If the son died as the result of a stab wound, who killed him? Edward?”
“Perhaps. Let’s keep looking and see if we can narrow down the timeline a bit.”
It took us another full hour to find the next clue, which came in the form of a small side note to an article about expansion at the lumber mill owned by Weston and Wade. The note related to the fact that Edward Vandenberg had actually been the one to first bring logging to the area, but that he’d shut down his mill in nineteen forty-two when he returned to England. If Edward was gone from the scene in nineteen forty-two, could he have killed the man in the attic before that? Assuming that Ethel would have had to have been at least thirteen when her baby was born, if that is even what happened, the baby would have had to have been born in nineteen twenty-four or later. If he’d been born in nineteen twenty-four, he would have been eighteen when the populace of what was to become White Eagle last saw evidence of Edward Vandenberg in the area. Tony called his guy in DC, who confirmed that in his opinion, the skeleton sealed in the secret room had been between sixteen and twenty-two when he died. The timeline fit. Of course, the fact that the timeline fit in no way constituted proof, and to be honest, I had no idea how we were ever going to get that.
“We need to speak to Bella Bradford,” I said.
Bella Bradford was one of White Eagle’s oldest residents and one of the only people who would have been both alive and old enough to remember what might have been going on at the Vandenberg house in the nineteen-forties.
Chapter 20
Bella Bradford lived in a cheery house that had wonderful curb appeal. I didn’t know her exact age and wasn’t inclined to ask, but my best guess was somewhere in her late eighties or early nineties. Either way, she would have most likely known Ethel in some capacity since Bella had lived in White Eagle her entire life.
“Sure, I remember Ethel. She was a very nice woman who lived a tough life but still
managed to give back to the community. I don’t know whether you’ve come across this in your investigation, but once Ethel’s father left the area and Ethel was free to do what she chose, she donated a lot of money to help support projects in the community.”
“I did read that she’d donated the money to build the church and some other structures which, unfortunately, were burnt down not all that long after.”
Bella nodded. “It is true there was an arsonist in the area for a while. Such a tragedy.”
“Do you remember when Ethel’s father left White Eagle?” I asked.
Bella tapped her chin with her index finger. “Hmm. Let me think about this. I know the man lived in that big old house when Ethel was a child. He used to beat her, you know. Everyone in the area knew what was going on in that house, but no one took the initiative to stop him. I know that Ethel’s mother died when she was seven or eight, and it seems as if Ethel’s father stayed around until she was an adult.” Bella paused, and her eyes narrowed. She took a sip of her tea as if allowing her mind time to work out the timeline. “I think Mr. Vandenberg had left the area by the time Ethel started openly dating Conway, which was just shortly before she donated the funds to build the church.”
“The man who died in the fire?” I asked.
“Yes. You’ve heard of him?”
“We found an old newspaper article which listed the names of all the men who died in the fire. We recognized Conway from the photo of Ethel and a group standing in front of the newly constructed church before it burned down.”
“Ethel and Conway were good friends even before they started dating. I’m not exactly sure when they met, but Conway’s father worked for Mr. Vandenberg, and it seems to me that the two knew each other from the time they were children. Of course, Mr. Vandenberg would have nothing of Ethel dating anyone while he was around, so the poor woman was into her thirties before she was allowed to spread her wings and enjoy all that life had to offer.”
