They had agreed that Andy would investigate tax and property records while Meg looked up old newspapers. American history was not her forte, but every schoolchild knows about Ben Franklin and the printing shop in Philadelphia; so Meg was not surprised to find Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette flourishing in 1740. The association had microfilm copies, and Meg found the reference she wanted without difficulty. She copied it and then, her duty done, abandoned herself to amusement. The old gazette was fascinating, even the advertisements.
“Run away, on the 15th Instant, a Dutch Servant Man named Paul Clem, about five feet high…”
There was a reward offered for the return of Paul to his irate master. Meg hoped he had gotten away. He wasn’t even as tall as she was, poor boy.
At noon she met Andy in the lobby and they went out for lunch. Andy had had a frustrating morning; he had spent most of the time trying to figure out the system used in recording. He bemoaned his ignorance over a hamburger and coffee. Then Meg produced her copy of the newspaper article.
“It’s so uninformative,” she complained, while Andy read it. “Almost as if they were trying to cover up something.”
“You’re getting paranoid,” Andy said, still reading. “To Philadelphians this was rural, backwoods news. And the paper was a weekly; by the time it was published the search for the girl had been abandoned and the self-styled jury had already met. Did you notice the date?”
“Yes,” Meg said reluctantly. “You were right. October eleventh.”
“Another coincidence that can’t be coincidental.”
“I’m not so sure about that. We saw the murderers on the eleventh; but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there before. Or that they won’t be there—”
“Don’t say it… They searched for three days, then gave it up. Doesn’t seem very long.”
“Long enough. If she was alive and unharmed, she wouldn’t have gone far from the house. If she was injured, exposure would finish her. Anyhow, there was another tragedy. One of the searchers tripped over a tree root and shot himself. That probably discouraged the others.”
“Yes, I see. The report seems fairly complete; why do you say it’s uninformative?”
“There’s no description of the weapon. You would think they could guess that. No description of anything. Just that the house was in disorder. How? What kind of disorder? Was the furniture knocked over, or actually broken up? They don’t say what happened to the cat, either.”
Andy looked sharply at her. The restaurant was almost empty. It was a big place, with booths instead of tables, and the waitress had abandoned them to their own devices.
“What cat?”
“A black cat. It was lying on the hearth. I think it belonged to the old servant.”
“I remember seeing a black heap that might have been an animal. Why not a dog? Or a pile of rags?”
“It was a cat.”
Andy started to speak and then changed his mind. He glanced at her copy again.
“Look at the names of the jurymen. Solid Pennsylvania Dutch all the way. Emig—my ancestors were all over the place—Hamm, Stauffer, Neesz. I wonder how you pronounce that—an N and a sneeze? Here’s a Huber, too. Wonder if he was any relation.”
“It was a common name.”
Andy reached for his wallet. “Let’s go. Unless you want another cup of coffee.”
“No, thanks. What are you going to do this afternoon?”
“Find the original land grant and the name of the owner, if it kills me. How about you?”
“I’ve got some shopping to do,” Meg said carelessly. “Then I’ll come back to the Historical Association. Meet you there—what time?”
“I want to be home before dark,” Andy said.
“Five o’clock?”
“Make it four thirty.”
The separated at the door of the restaurant. Meg had not told Andy what she was planning to do. She felt guilty, wasting time with trivia while Andy racked his brain over dusty records, but not guilty enough to give up her hobby. She had found the address of a needlework shop in the telephone book at the museum. A pedestrian gave her directions.
Since this was Meg’s first attempt at embroidery, she decided to admit her ignorance and ask for help. She explained the project to the girl behind the counter; by the time she had finished, the other customers were unashamedly eavesdropping. Meg was accustomed to the casual camaraderie that unites women who are shopping in the same store; even in Manhattan she had often struck up a conversation with another shopper as they mutually moaned about high prices and shortages. But me enthusiastic response of the women surprised her. She was overwhelmed with advice and suggestions.
It had never occurred to Meg to calculate how much thread of each color she would need; but as one of the women explained, she ought to buy all of it at one time, since new dye lots sometimes varied slightly in shade. Another customer advised her about embroidery hoops and proper needles; a third helped her match the colors on her sample page with the silks. When Meg left, carrying a paper bag, she was followed by a chorus of farewells and wishes of good luck. She smiled as she walked along the street. A few more months of this sort of thing and she would lose her big-city cynicism and start to believe in the goodwill of her fellow man.
The shopping had taken much longer than she had expected. It was after three when she got back to the Historical Association. Looking into the library, she saw Andy hard at work. His face was smeared with dust, his hair stood on end, and he was scowling ferociously as he turned the pages of a huge ledger that lay on the table in front of him. Meg tiptoed quietly past the door.
Since she had already wasted most of the afternoon, she decided to finish off the day in style and visit the museum of the association, which was on the lower floor. There were several samplers, which she studied with patronizing interest. None of them were as nice as hers. The Pennsylvania Dutch furniture attracted her too. There was nothing like it in the attic. Probably it had been thrown away by the nouveau riche nineteenth-century Emigs.
She ended up in the little museum office, where publications of the society were for sale, and where she was received with remote courtesy by the elderly, well-dressed woman in charge of the place. Once again Meg’s new hobby broke the ice. When the old lady saw the name of the shop on the bag Meg was carrying, she thawed perceptibly. She herself did needlepoint, and she told Meg all about the twelve dining-room chairs she had just re-covered, describing the patterns in detail. Meg explained her project, and the woman’s capitulation was complete.
“How nice to see a young person who appreciates old things. I myself am a member of the Historical Association—a volunteer, of course; we all help out at the museum.”
She needed little urging to lecture on the early history of the colony. Elbows on the counter, chin propped on her hands, Meg listened intently. The old lady was no dilettante, she knew her history; but Meg suspected she had a tendency to glamorize the hard frontier life and her family’s participation in that life.
Mrs. Adams’ ancestors had been among the First Purchasers, and Meg gathered that in Pennsylvania that was the equivalent of a Mayflower ancestor. These sterling characters were English Quakers, the first settlers of Penn’s grant in the New World in 1682. Mrs. Adams implied that the later German settlers, the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, were admirable people too, though not as top-drawer as her ancestors. She painted a glowing word picture of the earthly paradise into which the early settlers had come. The rolling, fertile fields and the hardwood forests; the brilliantly plumaged song birds, the babbling brooks of clear crystal water; the peaceful days and quiet nights, far from the vice and corruption of the city…
“Did you ever hear of a murder case?” Meg asked abruptly. “A family named Huber, back in 1740?”
Mrs. Adams’ thin lips clamped together. “That was a rare exception,” she said, a hint of frost entering her voice. “No, my dear, I am not interested in crime.”
Meg had to apologize
for several minutes. She felt it necessary to give the offended old lady a censored version of her interest in the Huber family—someone had told her, she explained vaguely, that the old house had once stood on the site of the house she was presently inhabiting.
Mrs. Adams relaxed. “I suppose it is natural that you should be interested,” she said, more graciously. “But you must understand that the present owners of the land would not advertise its unsavory history. Facts of that sort do not add to the value of a piece of property. Possibly the house was abandoned after the tragedy. Being built of logs, it would quickly deteriorate. Fifty years later, even the fallen stones of the chimney would be overgrown, and the location of the house would be forgotten.”
She smiled pleasantly, and Meg smiled back. She was willing to bet that Mrs. Adams knew more about the murder than she would admit. But it was unladylike to dwell on murder and offensive to local pride to recall unpleasant incidents of the past.
In an effort to propitiate Mrs. Adams, Meg bought several of the society’s pamphlets. One of them, on early land grants, looked as if it might be useful. Another pamphlet, on Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs, started them on a fresh subject. Mrs. Adams explained earnestly that these painted geometric decorations were purely ornamental.
“Hundreds of years ago the more ignorant farmers did believe in such superstitions,” she said, her aristocratic nose in the air. “The signs were to ward off witches. No one believes in witchcraft nowadays, of course; and I am sure the educated classes never did.”
Little do you know, Meg thought, with an inner smile.
She asked about historical needlework, and Mrs. Adams produced a book on early samplers and show towels that Meg immediately coveted. The show towels tickled her; exquisitely embroidered, they were hung over the grubby family towels when company came—and woe to the dirty little son or husband who used them to dry his hands.
They were discussing the book when Andy looked in. He was scowling hideously. When Meg glanced at her watch she understood his annoyance. It was twenty minutes after the time they had agreed to meet, and Andy had probably been all over the museum looking for her.
She introduced Andy to Mrs. Adams, who looked doubtfully at his patched jeans and shabby jacket; and then Andy swept her away, mumbling apologies.
“Shame on you,” Meg said, when they were outside. “I was civil, wasn’t I? I felt like slugging you. Do you know what time it is? We’re going to be caught in rush-hour traffic.”
“We’ll be back before dark.”
“We’d better be. If the monsters get me, I’ll come back and haunt you.”
He was only half joking; they drove home at a speed that made the car shake like a cement mixer, and Meg kept expecting to hear the scream of a siren. But Andy’s luck held; they met no traffic policemen, and they pulled up in front of the house before he had to use the headlights.
Dinner was a joint project. They discussed their discoveries while they worked and ate.
Andy had found some of the information he was after. The plot of land had been part of a farm of 230 acres, sold in 1728 to a Christian Huber. After mat the records seemed to be incomplete. There was no further transfer of land until the end of the nineteenth century, when the Benjamin Emig who had built Trail’s End had disposed of two hundred acres and given up farming for industry. The remaining thirty acres constituted the estate on which the house was located, but how it had come into the possession of the Emig family Andy could not ascertain. A man named John Emig had owned the adjoining farm, but there was no record of any sale.
“So the Emigs were neighbors of me Hubers,” Meg said.
“You couldn’t call them neighbors. The houses were probably miles apart. The point is, how did the Emigs get this place?”
“What about tax records?” Meg suggested.
“Look, it took me all afternoon to get that little bit of information. You know, it takes more time to get nowhere than it does to get—”
“I don’t think that metaphor is going to get anywhere either. Naturally it takes time to eliminate possibilities. But the tax records—”
“Are probably in Harrisburg—if they paid taxes in those days. I guess we could see what they’ve got in the state archives.”
“Fine,” Meg said enthusiastically. She had several more colors of embroidery thread to match. Harrisburg, the state capital, probably had a good needlework shop.
“Did you have a nice time chatting up the old lady? You’re getting to be a regular small-town gossip.”
“I did enjoy it. But I had an ulterior motive.”
She told Andy what Mrs. Adams had said about the Huber house. He was not impressed.
“A log house, abandoned after the crime… Logical guesses. Doesn’t mean she knows anything.”
“It wasn’t what she said, it was the way she said it. If Huber had no heirs, the property would revert to the state, wouldn’t it? Probably your ancestor bought the farm from the government.”
“They why wasn’t the sale recorded?”
“Lost,” Meg said sweepingly.
It was dark outside by the time they had finished cleaning up the kitchen. Andy was in a silly mood, juggling dishes and making up impromptu limericks.
As they headed for the library, Meg said maliciously, “Want to go for a walk? It’s a beautiful night.”
“Ha ha,” said Andy flatly.
“Well, at least we could look out the front door.”
“As you said so eloquently last night, I don’t care what’s out there so long as it stays out. I have come to the conclusion,” said Andy, “that the experience of last night was either a product of our diseased brains or else a phenomenon caused by the recurrence of the vital date. It won’t happen again.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
Andy sat down at the library table with the pamphlets Meg had bought at the museum. Evidently he had had enough of murders, fictional or real. Meg hovered.
“Wouldn’t you be more comfortable in the leather chair?” she suggested.
Andy, leafing through the pamphlet on hex signs, looked up in surprise. “Why the sudden concern for my comfort?”
“Well, uh—I was going to work on the table myself.”
“Plenty of room. Want one of these pamphlets?”
“Well…”
“For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know,” Meg said irritably. “Why should I care if you see what I’m doing?”
There were cupboards under the bookshelves. Meg had appropriated one of these for her embroidery materials; she had added her purchases in Reading to the collection when they came home. Now she began to carry them to the table. The pattern, on graph paper; the rainbow pile of embroidery silks; the square of fine linen fabric; and finally,thesampler,initsrough glassframe.Andy watched, his jaw sagging. “May I ask what in Hades you are doing?” “You should have figured it out by now,” Meg mumbled, sorting her silks. “Damned if I can. Unless… Oh.” The change in his voice made Meg look up. He was staring at her with an expression she had seen on his face several times before. It was an expression she particularly disliked, and now she realized why. It was a look of intense suspicion.
“I’m going to embroider,” she said defiantly. “I want to make a copy of the sampler. Is there anything wrong with that? What are you looking at me that way for? Haven’t you ever seen anyone do embroidery?” “Yes. I have.”
“I’d be surprised if you hadn’t. It’s very popular.” “Is it?” After a moment Andy’s face relaxed. “Yes, I guess it is. I didn’t think you were the type, though.”
“What’s the type? Everybody does it. Needlepoint, crewel, bargello—most of my friends have workbags permanently attached to their right arms.”
Andy grunted and returned to his book. Meg went on sorting thread, comparing the colors to the originals on the sampler. She had done quite well; only two of the shades failed to match. A little more brown in that rose-pink, a softer
yellow… She would try again in Harrisburg. Threading her needle, she started to hem the linen square. That was something she wouldn’t have thought of doing if one of the friendly ladies in the shop hadn’t suggested it.
It gave her some satisfaction to have begun working, but this part of the process was pretty dull. Meg yawned. After a while she glanced up and caught Andy’s eye.
“What’s the matter now?”
“I thought you used that colored thread,” Andy said.
“I will, for the pattern. I’m just hemming the edges so they won’t ravel.”
House of Many Shadows Page 15
