Daughter of Ashes

by Marcia Talley

  ‘Darling,’ I interrupted, ‘white is white. Pick one.’

  ‘Then there’s canvas, cinnamon, and silver,’ Paul continued as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘Mauve, rose, wheat, cocoa, cayenne, smoke, cadet blue and something called Navajo.’

  ‘Navajo? What kind of a color is Navajo?’

  ‘Kind of a warm beige. But you can see why I need you here.’

  ‘Paul …’ I began, thinking about the mountains of refuse we still had to dispose of in the cluttered courthouse basement.

  ‘I’m leaning toward evergreen myself, maybe black,’ he continued.

  I had to laugh. ‘I’m sure. But you’re right – we’re going to have to live with the grout for a long time. Tell Rusty I’ll be home in about twenty minutes.’

  Down in the basement, I apologized to Kim and Fran. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

  ‘Not a problem,’ Kim said, wiping her hands on her jeans. She checked her watch. ‘Three o’clock. I’m ready to call it a day anyhow. How about you, Fran?’

  Before coming to work that morning, after stopping at Walgreen, Fran had visited Office Depot and purchased several dozen bankers’ boxes. ‘Not archival quality, acid-free and all that, but they’ll do in a pinch,’ she’d said with a sniff. She was busily unfolding one now, and looked up with some annoyance. ‘I’ll just finish assembling the boxes, then. You two go on,’ she said, her face behind the gauze a mask of martyrdom.

  ‘See you in the morning?’ I asked, looking directly at Kim.

  ‘Sure thing,’ she said.

  I trudged up after her. At the top of the stairs, the county clerk paused, whipped off her mask and said, ‘I’ll be getting a set of keys made for both you and Fran so you can come and go as you please.’

  ‘That would be terrific. Thank you.’

  After thoroughly washing my hands and face, I bid goodbye to Kim in the courthouse ladies’ room, lobbed my paper towel into the wastepaper basket just inside the door and headed for home.

  The bathroom tiles were a glass mosaic named ‘beachy blue.’ After spending five minutes in the master bath with Rusty and the grout samples, I consulted with Paul and we agreed on an off-white grout called ‘pearl.’ ‘Go for it, Rusty,’ I said, handing back the sample.

  Decision made, I checked in with Dwight who was working on the fireplace, then headed out to the kitchen and poured myself a tall glass of iced tea. I was gulping it down like a thirsty camel when somebody screamed. Short, sharp and painful, like a man being bitten by an alligator.

  I rushed into the living room, nearly colliding with Paul as he dashed in through the screen door from the porch.

  Dwight, his face ashen, pointed. Rusty, who had come running downstairs to help when his father called, looked ill.

  On the hearth sat a small bundle of newspapers, brown and brittle with age. ‘I found it on the smoke shelf,’ Dwight said, his voice quavering. ‘I can’t believe I touched it.’ He stared at his hand as if it were an alien thing.

  ‘What is it?’ Paul asked.

  ‘Maybe it’s a doll. Like one of those shriveled apple head things they sell at Cracker Barrel.’ Dwight poked gingerly at the newspaper with a soot-stained index finger. ‘Made out of suede, you know.’ He sighed, stood and took a step back. ‘But I’m pretty sure it’s a baby.’

  ‘Awesome!’ Rusty whipped out his iPhone and leaned closer. I heard the simulated whirr of a camera shutter, then another.

  Dwight slapped his son on the back of the head with the flat of his hand. ‘Show some respect, asshole.’

  ‘Damn,’ Rusty said, rubbing the sore spot briskly. ‘It’s not every day you see something like this, Pops.’ He took another picture just to show who was in charge, then tucked his phone away.

  ‘Why would anyone put a doll up a chimney?’ Dwight asked.

  Next to me, Paul shivered. ‘Why would anyone put a baby up a chimney?’

  Heart hammering, I knelt down for a closer look. Dwight had peeled back the newspapers far enough to reveal what looked to me like the shriveled mummy of an infant, its skin dark and leathery. The features were sunken, but its button nose was intact and each tiny eyelash remained visible where the eyelids closed against its cheeks. My heart twisted painfully when I noticed two tiny teeth peeping out over the child’s shriveled lower lip. ‘Oh, Paul,’ I said, sagging against his leg. Focusing through a mist of tears, I noted a cloth diaper, folded in a triangle and secured with a tarnished diaper pin, and a white cotton shift, now grey with soot. The baby was nestled in what remained of a flannel blanket. I wanted to pick up this child and hold it to my breast, comfort it by rocking.

  ‘What’s a smoke shelf?’ Paul asked the contractor.

  ‘It’s a shelf just behind the damper. Catches debris, like bird shit falling down the chimney. Helps the chimney draw.’

  ‘And nobody noticed …’ I began.

  ‘Even if you stuck your head clear up the chimney, Mrs Ives, you wouldn’t be able to see the smoke shelf because it’s blocked by the damper.’

  I looked up at my husband. ‘It’s definitely a baby, Paul. We have to call somebody, but who?’

  Rusty answered me first. ‘The sheriff, I reckon.’

  ‘How long do you think it’s been there?’ Paul asked as Rusty stepped into the kitchen to make the call. His father stood quietly by the door, as if prepared to bolt.

  I cocked my head, trying to read the print on the newspaper. It appeared to be part of the classified section – legal notices, jobs wanted, ads for Motorola TVs on sale at Hechts, ladies summer dresses for five dollars. ‘It’s wrapped in a Tilghman Tribune from August of 1951,’ I told him.

  ‘Good Lord. If it is a baby, the poor thing has been stuck up our chimney for more than sixty years.’

  I squatted next to the bundle again, looking closely but not touching. ‘Somebody loved this child,’ I said.

  ‘How can you tell?’

  I pointed. ‘Look how her hands are folded. How securely she was wrapped.’

  ‘She? How can you be certain it’s a girl?’

  I looked up at my husband, tears again distorting my view. ‘The blanket has rosebuds embroidered on it, Paul.’

  While we waited for the sheriff, Paul, Dwight, Rusty and I sat around the kitchen table like zombies at a wake. Rusty left for a few minutes to rescue the grout he’d been mixing up in the master bath and, when he returned, I offered everyone something to drink. Only Rusty took me up on it.

  I’d just popped a K-cup into the Keurig to brew Rusty a second cup of Hazelnut when a white Dodge Charger pulled up outside, its light bar flashing. ‘Sheriff’ and ‘Tilghman County’ were painted on the doors, the words separated by a jaunty blue racing stripe. A pale green Honda pulled in behind the police car and a middle-aged man dressed in a gray business suit climbed out.

  ‘Sheriff Hubbard,’ the officer said, removing his broad-brimmed ranger’s hat as he stepped through the front door. ‘But everyone calls me Andy.’

  Sheriff Hubbard’s prominent nose descended in a straight line from his backward-sloping forehead. Except for a tidy fringe of hair around his ears, he was completely bald and his reddened scalp spoke more eloquently than words of many off-duty hours spent in the sun. He turned to acknowledge his companion in the gray suit. ‘I’ve asked Doc Greeley to come along, to verify exactly what we have here.’

  I directed the two men to the living room. As we stood around in a semi-circle, Doc Greeley hitched up the legs of his trousers and squatted. He withdrew a slim metal object from his inside breast pocket and used it to explore the bundle lying on the hearth before him, gently prodding, pulling aside each delicate layer.

  ‘It’s a baby, all right,’ the doctor announced after a minute. ‘By the teeth, I’d say six to seven months old.’

  ‘How did she die?’ I asked.

  ‘She?’ The doctor looked up, an eyebrow raised.

  ‘The blanket,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘Observant.’ He rose to h
is feet. ‘Hard to say exactly how she died. We’ll have to wait for the medical examiner on that.’ He nodded at Sheriff Hubbard.

  Hubbard pulled a cell phone out of his breast pocket and punched in a number. ‘Sylvia? Will you tell Wicks he’s needed at the old Hazlett place?’ He paused and listened. ‘Yeah. Tell him we’ve got a body.’

  NINE

  ‘Tar-baby ain’t sayin’ nuthin’, en Brer Fox, he lay low.’

  Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus and his Friends, 1892

  It’s astonishing how small a box you need to pack up a baby.

  Paul had ordered some hiking boots from L.L. Bean and they had arrived the day before. The box they had come in sat empty and clean on top of the recycling bin, so when the doctor asked me if we had ‘a box of some kind,’ I excused myself to fetch it, then handed it over.

  While we watched from the sidelines, like mourners at a funeral, he lined the box with one of our pillowcases fresh from the dryer and laid the precious bundle gently inside. As he secured the lid over the child’s wizened face, he said, ‘I don’t imagine it will get top priority, so it may be a while before we know something.’

  ‘She ought to have a name,’ I said. ‘It seems wrong to keep calling her “it.”’

  Paul’s arm snaked around my shoulder and pulled me close. ‘What about Baby Ella?’ he said.

  Doc Greeley raised an eyebrow. ‘Ella?’

  ‘Short for Cinderella,’ Paul said simply, his face grave. ‘Little girl of the ashes.’

  ‘Wicks’ turned out to be the local undertaker. He arrived in an unmarked black limousine, gave Sheriff Hubbard some papers to sign, placed the box containing Baby Ella on the floor of the passenger side of the car and drove away.

  ‘Where’s he taking her?’ Rusty asked as the limousine disappeared around the corner of the cornfield.

  ‘Baltimore M.E.,’ Hubbard said.

  Rusty frowned. ‘But even if the kid was murdered, the person who did it must be, you know, like really old, or dead. So what’s the point?’

  I knew that by Maryland law, all unattended deaths within the state had to be reviewed by the Baltimore medical examiner. I wondered if, after all this time, they’d be able to determine a cause of death. And if it turned out that the child had died of natural causes, would the police make any effort to establish who the child had belonged to? Somehow it seemed important to me to find her family.

  I thought about all the people who had lived in our house over the past two hundred and thirty-some years. Was the baby Julianna Quinn’s? I had no idea how long Julianna and her late husband had occupied the house, but in a house that dated to the 1750s, except for us they were clearly just the last in a long line of previous owners. I decided to call our realtor, Caitlyn Dymond. Caitlyn, I knew, would have ordered a search to establish a clear chain of title before she sold us the home.

  She answered her cell in the middle of her son’s soccer game. ‘The Quinns owned the property for as long as I can remember,’ Caitlyn told me over someone – presumably a parent on the sideline – screaming Pass it! Pass it! Pass it! ‘We have clerks to do the title searches, so I’m not exactly sure how far back they had to go, but it’s dead easy to do, Hannah. All the land records are on file at the county courthouse.’

  I was due to work in the courthouse basement the following day, so early the next morning, before donning my mask and plastic gloves, I stopped by Kim’s office. I told her about Baby Ella and, after she had sufficiently recovered, I asked for help in tracing the ownership of our property.

  ‘We trace deeds back using the liber and folio numbers,’ she informed me. ‘In plain English, that’s the book and page numbers. If you have a copy of your property tax assessment, or the actual deed, the liber and folio numbers will be printed right on it.’ Using a pencil, she jotted something down on an index card and showed it to me: ABC 123 456.

  ‘The letters are the initials of the clerk.’ She grinned. ‘In recent years, that would be me, KCM. The numbers that follow are the liber and folio numbers.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, quickly catching on. ‘Those were the reference numbers we saw recorded in some of the leather-bound index volumes we examined in the basement yesterday.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Hopefully my husband kept a copy of our deed here in Elizabethtown,’ I said. ‘Otherwise …’

  Kim held up a hand, cutting me off. ‘Completely unnecessary, Hannah. Welcome to the twenty-first century. All that information is public record, most of it online.’ Kim explained how researchers could type any Maryland street address into the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation Real Property Database and find out all sorts of useful information, like the price someone paid for a piece of property and its current value as well as the liber and folio numbers. ‘Once you have those numbers,’ she continued, ‘you have the magic key. Just go to MDLandRec.net. You use the two numbers to pull up a digital copy of the actual deed.’

  ‘No way,’ I said, promising myself that I’d never complain again about how Maryland was squandering my tax dollars.

  ‘We keep microfilm copies here, of course, but the Maryland State Archives houses the originals.’

  I perked up at that. Our Prince George Street home in Annapolis was about a mile from the Maryland Hall of Records. I was mentally reviewing the route I’d walk – Prince George to College Avenue to St John Street – when Kim added, ‘And the beauty? You don’t even have to visit the courthouse or the archives to consult the deeds. You can access digital images of them over the Internet from the privacy of home.’

  When I explained that we were still waiting for the Comcast cable guys to stop lingering over their coffee at the Hot Spot and show up to install the Internet at Our Song, Kim walked me into the law library and introduced me to one of the courthouse computers. ‘If you’re going to do a lot of searching,’ she said as I sat down in front of the terminal, ‘you’ll want to register with our network and set up a password. That will allow you to save your search results and come back to them later.’

  Following Kim’s instructions, I created an account, waited for the confirmation email to show up in my Gmail account, then clicked on the link the archives provided to activate it. ‘Now you’re in business,’ Kim said, patting me lightly on the back.

  With Kim kibitzing over my shoulder, I navigated to the Maryland tax assessment database, selected Tilghman County and let the database know I intended to search by street. On the following screen, I filled in Our Song’s house number and street name, then clicked Next.

  ‘Wow!’ I flopped back in the chair, totally awed. Everything you ever wanted to know about our little home away from home – with the possible exception of where I hid the dark chocolate-covered caramels – was suddenly laid out on the monitor before me.

  ‘Magic, huh?’ Kim said.

  ‘Darn right. I’m used to government websites that are slow, make you enter the same information half a dozen times, freeze and then kick you offline with a “Sorry, try again.” Kudos to whomever designed this one. Not the lowest bidder, obviously.’

  Kim tapped the screen. ‘Here are the deed reference numbers I was telling you about. You should jot them down.’

  I made a note of the liber and folio numbers for our property on a scrap of paper, then navigated over to MDLandRec.net. From there it was a simple matter to type the numbers into the blanks set aside for ‘book’ and ‘page’ – et voila! – a digital image of the actual deed for Our Song filled the screen.

  ‘Excellent!’ I said.

  ‘The information you want is down here,’ Kim told me, leaning closer, ‘after all the “witnesseths” and “in consideration ofs,” the paragraph near the bottom where it says, “being the same property conveyed by deed dated May 31, 1968 and recorded among the Land Records of Tilghman County Maryland in Liber 3088 Folio 201 which was granted and conveyed from Charles T. Quinn and Juliana C. Quinn, husband and wife unto the Grantors herein,” which would be you.

/>   ‘Now you navigate back to the home screen,’ she instructed, ‘but this time you plug in the numbers 3088 and 201. When that deed comes up, it will list the previous owners, too. Keep going back and back and back until you’ve gathered the whole ownership chain, or the documents run out – whichever comes first.’

  ‘That might take a while,’ I said with a grin. ‘Dwight Heberling thinks our property dates to the mid-1700s. Was King George II or George III on the throne back then?’

  Kim grinned back. ‘Google it. Might even have been James II.’ She checked her watch. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then. You’ve got half an hour before Fran shows up.’ She winked. ‘And if you’re very nice, I won’t tell her you’re already here.’

  ‘What’s the report from the courthouse today?’ Paul asked when he returned to the eastern shore from Annapolis later that evening.

  I eyed the battered briefcase he carried, bursting at the seams with paperwork.

  ‘Why don’t you put your briefcase down and I’ll fix you a drink. Gee and Tee?’

  ‘Wine, I think.’

  ‘White or red?’

  ‘Whatever’s already open, sweetheart.’

  ‘I’ll meet you on the porch,’ I said as I headed for the kitchen. ‘We can toast the Canada geese. They’ve been super noisy today.’

  A few minutes later I joined him on the porch, carrying two glasses of chilled Sauvignon blanc. ‘The house goes back to the middle of the eighteenth century,’ I said, handing him a glass. ‘Just as everyone suspected.’ I settled into the lounge chair next to Paul and adjusted a pillow behind my back. ‘It was built by a guy named Josiah Hazlett and seems to have remained in the Hazlett family until early 1952 when it and twenty acres of surrounding land was sold to Liberty Land Development Corporation for a pittance, at least by today’s standards.’

  ‘Land development?’ Paul looked puzzled. ‘Why aren’t we sitting in the middle of a cluster of waterfront condos, then?’

  I shrugged. ‘Sewer? Water? Who knows? Whatever plans they had must have gone bust because LLDC held the property for about ten years, then sold it off to an outfit called Heartland Enterprises, Inc. Charles and Julianna Quinn bought the property from Heartland in 1975 for twenty-thousand dollars.’