Mary Jane's Grave

by Stacy Dittrich

  I waited for more, but Walt stayed quiet, staring off into space. I hoped he wasn’t on the verge of falling asleep in the chair. I wanted to keep him talking.

  “Walt, is there more?” I asked quietly.

  “Not that I’m able to say. I’ve told you all I’m allowed. People have kept quiet for over a hundred years, and it was meant to stay that way.”

  I couldn’t help it. I was getting frustrated. “Walt, for crying out loud, you said yourself you’re not superstitious. Why can’t you just tell me everything?”

  “You still don’t get it, do you?” He sighed deeply. “There’s only one thing I can tell you…. If you want to find out everything, start with Ceely Rose.”

  I was now thoroughly baffled. “Ceely Rose, as in the Malabar Farm murderer Ceely Rose?”

  “That’d be the one. That was one evil woman. She’s the one responsible for this whole mess.”

  I was shaking my head. “Walt, please, I’m really confused.”

  He began standing up and reaching for his walker. “Sorry, young lady. I may have said too much already, but if you’re as smart as you look, you’ll figure it out on your own.”

  I looked at him, incredulous, as he made his way to the front door. I didn’t want to leave yet. He had me so puzzled I almost wished I hadn’t come. As he stood at the door, I finally got off the couch. When I went to walk out, Walt put his hand on my arm.

  “Listen, young lady, I like you. You’re good people—I can feel it in my bones. No matter what, just remember to be careful.”

  “Thank you, Walt, you take care of yourself, too,” I said, disappointment obvious in my voice.

  I sat in my car for a long time going over everything Walt had said. I had taped the entire conversation, but I didn’t need to listen to it right now; everything was still fresh in my mind. I think what threw me off guard the most was the mention of Ceely Rose.

  I didn’t know much about her except the basics. She had lived with her family on Malabar Farm back in the 1800s. Malabar Farm was a large, rolling estate nestled within the foothills. Bought by author Louis Bromfield in the 1930s, Malabar Farm served as the wedding site for Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Bromfield left the entire area to the State of Ohio upon his death. Now a state park, it sits less than a mile from Mary Jane’s Grave.

  The Ceely Rose ghost has also been a local favorite. However, her story was quite real. Ceely Rose, a physically unattractive woman, lived with her family and had no friends or acquaintances. She was befriended by a local boy who felt sorry for her, and she mistook his friendship for a marriage proposal.

  Not wanting to hurt her feelings, the boy said he couldn’t marry her because her parents didn’t approve of him. Angry and distraught, Ceely took flypaper, soaked it in water to extract the arsenic, and poured it over her family’s cottage cheese. They all died. The county sheriff cornered her and got her confession, and she lived out the rest of her life in a mental institution in Lima, Ohio, where she’s also buried.

  The story goes that Ceely’s ghost haunts the farm. If you drive past the house where she and her family lived, you can allegedly see her in the upstairs window. I remember taking a field trip to the farm in the first grade and hearing the story. It became so popular that a play was written and shown at the farm every year. It was simply called Ceely.

  The first year the play was put on, the actors and actresses began to claim unusual experiences in the barn where the play was held. People got depressed, seemingly out of the blue, and they found that certain places in the room were colder than others—and I mean really colder. Sometimes the actors would have to wear sweaters in one area and take them off when they moved off to another one. Ghost-hunters tend to report that extreme cold seems to indicate the presence of other-worldly visitors. I say it’s all a crock, but regardless of my opinion, Malabar Farm is regarded as one of Ohio’s most haunted places.

  Trying to put Walter’s information together with Mary Jane Hendrickson and then attach it to my murder was just too much for me right now. Maybe Walter Morris was nothing but a crazy old man who liked to tell ghost stories. It was the first time I’d heard of a connection between Ceely Rose and Mary Jane, but it was a possibility I just couldn’t afford to ignore.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was too late to go to the Health Department to get the birth and death certificates, so I started for home. I found myself rubbing my temple and clenching my jaw as I drove. I usually do one or the other—or both—when I’m into information overload. I had so much to analyze I was tempted to disregard all of it and just focus on our present-day murder. Exploring the past made my head spin, especially since there was an extremely high probability that it had nothing to do with the current murder.

  I had a pounding headache by the time I got home and went straight for the medicine cabinet. I was struggling to open the aspirin bottle when Michael stood in the doorway of the bathroom.

  “Bad day?” He grabbed the bottle from me and popped the lid off on the first try.

  “Not bad, just jam-packed is all.” I poured four pills into my hand, grabbed the cup off the sink and filled it with water.

  He looked at the obvious overdose of medicine. “Those may help your headache, but they’ll also do wonders for your stomach and liver.”

  I ignored him and took the pills anyway. He shook his head as I brushed past him and into our bedroom to change my clothes.

  Michael headed back downstairs. “You want a glass of wine, Cee? I’m going back to the office.”

  What a sweetie, I thought gratefully. “That sounds wonderful. I’ll be there in a minute.” I was so glad to be home. After I put on some comfortable clothes, I checked each child’s bedroom and found the kids in Sean’s room playing video games. They all ran to hug and kiss me when they saw I was home.

  “Selina, do you have homework?” I stroked her hair.

  “I did it on the bus.” She didn’t look away from the screen, focusing on jerking her joystick violently back and forth.

  I was too tired to look at her homework anyway, so I padded down to Michael’s office. He handed me a glass of wine before sitting on the small sofa that ran along the farthest wall. I sat next to him and noticed that he had a file on his lap.

  “You still preparing for that trial?” I asked, stifling a yawn.

  “Not really, just a couple of things to go over. Tell me about your jam- packed day,” he asked attentively, reaching up and tousling my hair.

  I told him everything, and I even had him listen to the tape recording of my conversation with Walter Morris. After the tape was finished, Michael continued looking at the recorder. His casual manner had been replaced by tenseness—I could always see it in his eyes.

  “Well, Michael, what do you think? Is he crazy?” I asked eagerly.

  Despite himself, he began to chuckle. “I’ve got to tell you…I have absolutely no idea, Cee.” He handed the recorder back to me. “I can’t begin to make heads or tails of what he’s saying, but honestly, he doesn’t sound confused or deranged to me. By the way, the alien and Jimmy Hoffa comment was really pretty funny.”

  I had almost hoped Michael would declare Walter Morris a stone-cold mental case so I could put the entire matter out of my head. I lay back against the couch, let out a loud sigh, and accepted my defeat.

  Michael was sympathetic. “Honey, don’t throw in the towel just yet. Check into this Ceely Rose person and see what you can find out. Who is she, anyway?”

  I briefly told Michael about the murders that Ceely Rose had committed, as well as the haunted farm.

  “There sure are a lot of so-called haunted places in this area,” he said. “Richland County must be quite an attractive retirement center for wandering ghosts.”

  I had to laugh, which felt damn good. Michael went on to tell me that, as far as the history of the grave went, I was on the right track by checking the birth and death certificates. Sure, I knew that I was an excellent investigator, and people like
me leave no stones unturned. But as usual, Michael made me feel much better about what I was doing. As soon as the aspirin kicked in for my headache, I drank the last of my wine and was more than ready for bed.

  Tomorrow promised to be another significant day—and I needed my rest.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  First thing in the morning, I headed over to the Health Department, waiting impatiently for them to unlock the doors at 9 A.M. When I had spoken to the employee who faxed me the list of elderly people in the county, I had also told her I needed all of the birth and death certificates from the Hendrickson family.

  The clerk had said she would try to have everything ready by this morning. When I gave my name at the front desk, I was promptly handed an envelope containing the birth and death certificates of Joseph, Mary Jane, Ezra, Madeline, and Maryanne Hendrickson. Ezra was apparently Mary Jane’s infant son, who had died, but there was no death certificate for him.

  Briefly glancing at them, I noticed that there was no birth certificate for a child of Maryanne Hendrickson, at least under that name. Yet Walter had claimed she’d had a child.

  Back in my car, I flipped through the certificates before driving to the police department. I was stopped at a red light downtown when I suddenly had one of my staggering insights. I felt a surge of adrenaline as I sped into the nearest parking lot, cut the engine and grabbed the envelope. This was too important to wait until I got to my office.

  I sorted through the certificates until I saw the one for Mary Jane Hendrickson. I looked at the date. Her birth certificate showed she had been born in 1855, not 1825 as her obituary had read. If the dates on the obituary were wrong, then Mary Jane Hendrickson would have only been forty- three years old when she died. This made more sense, as Madeline would have been born when Mary Jane was twenty-seven, not the superhuman age fifty-seven that I’d previously calculated.

  Assuming the year in the obituary was not a misprint, why had Mary Jane been aged? Dying at forty- three wasn’t all that unusual back then, unless it had been the circumstances of her death that someone had tried to cover up.

  I hurried back to my office and spread all the certificates on my desk in chronological order, birth to death. As I examined them more closely, I noticed that many of the dates seemed inaccurate. I wrote them all down on my notepad and listed them in order:

  (infant son) Ezra Hendrickson—Born Sept. 1897, no d.c.

  (father) Joseph Hendrickson—Died Nov. 1897, no b.c.

  (mother) Mary Jane Hendrickson—Died March 1898, born Aug. 1855

  (daughter) Madeline Hendrickson—Born April 1882, died March 1953

  (Madeline’s daughter) Maryanne Hendrickson—Born Nov. 1898, died March 1985

  Ezra had been born only two months before Joseph died and seven months before Mary Jane had died. I wondered if he hadn’t died shortly after birth. Madeline and Maryanne both had their maiden names on their death certificates, with no sign of a husband anywhere. Sixteen-year-old Madeline had given birth to her daughter the same year her mother had died. If I counted back, she would have conceived the same month her mother had died. And lastly, all three women had died in March. Coincidence? What was I missing here?

  I sat back in my chair and stretched my arms. Walter had said that Maryanne Hendrickson was pregnant around World War II; that would’ve put her in her mid- to late forties. I remembered reading an article that said Mary Jane Hendrickson had relatives in Holmes County, two counties away. I spent the next hour calling all the surrounding counties and their surrounding counties, looking for any marriage certificates for Madeline and Maryanne Hendrickson. I knew it would take quite a bit of time, but I had plenty of that right now.

  Next on my agenda was finding information on Ceely Rose. I scoured the Internet looking at newspaper archives and finally found a website devoted strictly to her. There wasn’t much more on it than what I already knew. I had a few more websites to check when I glanced at the date of the Ceely Rose murders. I felt every nerve in my body jolt into life and I gasped, “Oh, my God!” to my empty office as I stared at Mary Jane Hendrickson’s death certificate.

  Mary Jane’s date of death was listed as March 3, 1898. Ceely Rose had murdered her family on March 3, 1897, exactly one year earlier to the day. Still looking at the dates, I realized I had my hands over my mouth and was breathing fast. What all this meant, I had no idea, but I knew I was getting closer to what Walter had been trying to tell me. What I had a hard time believing, other than the dates themselves, was that no one else had ever put all this together.

  “Hey, Cee, what’s the matter? Are you sick?” I looked up to see Coop standing in my doorway, a faint look of alarm on his face. I still had my hands over my mouth and he probably thought I was going to throw up, so I lowered them and grabbed Mary Jane’s death certificate.

  “Coop, you have to look at this!” I handed him the paper and sat back, feeling pretty proud of myself. A modern-day Sherlock Holmes, I was.

  I had forgotten that Coop didn’t know anything about the Ceely Rose connection I’d gotten from Walter, so I quickly filled him in. Then I brought him up to speed on why I had given him the certificate. I reached over to my computer and turned the screen to face Coop, the website on Ceely Rose still displayed.

  “Look at the date of the murders,” I said. Coop’s eyes narrowed as he read the fine print of the old article. When he finished, he looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Evidently, he didn’t get it yet.

  “For crying out loud, Coop,” I snapped. “Look at the dates! Mary Jane Hendrickson died on the same day Ceely Rose killed her family, only it was a year later.”

  He sat down and peered more closely at the death certificate. I started rubbing my eyes in frustration, trying to suppress the urge to call him a moron. I really adored Coop and he was a fantastic detective, but sometimes he could be pretty dense.

  “It is weird, I’ll give you that,” he admitted, handing the certificate back to me. “But I still don’t see what it has to do with the Kari Sutter murder.”

  “Maybe nothing. Most likely nothing, but there’s that slim chance that all of this will lead me somewhere.” I slapped my stack of files, elated at my newfound discovery, and decided to go home for the day. It was the first time in a while I had gotten out of work at a normal hour.

  I stopped at the grocery store on my way home and grabbed some things for dinner. I rarely cooked. In fact, I downright hated to cook. Luckily, I had found two men who liked cooking more than I did, so Michael, like Eric before him, usually made dinner.

  My discovery made me so high, I decided to cook dinner. Sean was going home the next day, which made all of us sad, and I didn’t have to work, so to night would be special.

  Michael started laughing as soon he walked into the kitchen after getting home from work. I was elbow deep in tomato sauce, splatters of it on my face, while I made lasagna. Since I didn’t cook very much, I hadn’t exactly mastered the art of doing it neatly.

  “You’re supposed to make the dinner, hon, not wear it,” he mused. “You’re cooking? Congratulations on solving your case.”

  “Very funny.” I glared, wiping at my face. “I did make a discovery, though. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  Michael couldn’t help coming to my assistance. He rolled up his sleeves and essentially took over. I slipped away to let him roll out the rest of the meal. I set the table instead and a lovely job it was, too, if I say so myself.

  Since it was a rare occasion for us all to sit down and eat together, the kids had a good time, laughing and telling stories. They were thrilled when Michael took us out afterward for ice cream. We had to carry the children upstairs to bed after they’d fallen asleep during the second video we had rented.

  I was finally able to tell Michael about my small but interesting breakthrough. He was dumbfounded. “You’re sure it was the same date?”

  As I had with Coop, I didn’t know whether to laugh or slap him at moments like this. Why neither of them
thought I could read was a question I couldn’t answer. Nevertheless, I kept my mouth shut and handed Michael my handwritten birth and death timeline, along with the certificates and the website page on Ceely Rose. He looked over each one carefully.

  “I’d say, without a doubt, you’re onto something,” he murmured, still looking at the pages, hesitating at Mary Jane’s birth certificate. “This gives old Walter’s story a little more credibility.” He put the pages down. “I’m trying to figure out why they changed the age of death. Her obituary reads that she died of cancer and dropsy at age seventy-three.”

  “Affirmative,” I cracked.

  He stared straight ahead, and I knew his wheels were in motion. Michael was thinking, and he was thinking hard.

  “Find out how obituaries were obtained back then,” he finally said. “See if people just filled out forms, wrote letters or what. There should be a local historian who could tell you that. You easily obtained the obituary, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find the rest. It looks to me like the newspapers back then didn’t verify much, so you need to find out who wrote her obituary and lied about her age. And good luck, because without that information, you’re nowhere.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I lay awake in bed for a long time thinking about what Michael had said and what I had learned that day. I even got up a few times to check my notes for things I wasn’t sure of. Eventually, I fell asleep and when I woke up I was surprised to see that it was almost noon. Michael, the sweetie, had let me sleep in.