Past Malice

by Dana Cameron

  Again, the students exchanged another look. “Emma, I’m pretty sure we all have cell phones,” Dian said. “This is the twenty-first century, after all.”

  The others nodded, looking at me quizzically.

  “I happen to know what you all get paid, so you’ll excuse me if I’m a bit surprised. You mean I’m the last kid on the block to have one?”

  “I don’t have one,” said Rob, “but I mostly rely on sticking close to Dian and screaming really loud if I have to.”

  “You do have a computer, right?” Dian asked me. “How about television? You heard of that?”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “Smartass. Okay, that’s agreed then, and a very good suggestion on Joe’s part. And we just all keep an extra eye open for trouble then, and we’re all set.” I told them about Brian’s idea about moving into the main house and said that it was pretty much a deal-breaker for me. They readily agreed to it, and I thought I saw a look of relief cross Joe and Dian’s faces. Good, I thought. They’re taking this seriously too. They invited me to share another beer before they began the move into Brian’s office, but I declined, saying I needed some time by myself.

  I went up to my office and shut the door. As always in the summer, it was hot up there, under the roof, and I went through a ritual of turning on window fans to get the air moving. I rifled through my CDs, a small but growing collection since I’d purchased a portable player for my office—a real splurge for me—until I found something that suited my mood. Or rather, the mood I wanted to have; I was still in turmoil, but needed to get some work done and reclaim some peace of mind. I finally decided on J. S. Bach as I turned on the computer and plopped myself down in the chair. There’s nothing like listening to the music of a period for putting you in that time’s mindset. Without knowing anything about the correct musicological terms, there was something about the framework, the structures of the music that helped me think about non-tangible things: Motion, emotion, behavior, all seemed to be keyed in with the cadence and the sound of the antique instruments. It worked for me, anyway.

  I didn’t even look at my notes or drawings, I waited for the music to take over and began to jot down my ideas: a brick structure that was not part of the dwelling, an irregular surface of planting holes with a lot of rodent disturbance, glass shards of too wide a diameter and too fine a thickness to be a drinking or serving vessel. A rage for symmetry, and none where there should have been some. Trouble in town, and possibly on a wider scale.

  I leaned back, my eyes closed, and waited for the allegro passage of his concerto in D major for three violins to end before I started to add it all up. Okay, if I went with my initial instinct of it being a garden, something that was put up after the fire, that was still okay. The glass could be bell jars, used to protect fragile plants, although those might have been better used in a greenhouse. I’d have to look it up and double check that. The bond of the brick structure seemed to be similar to that of the house—although the bricks were a different color and texture from those in the house—perhaps that suggested a garden wall? Built to be a balance to the other wing, the one undamaged by the fire? That was fine, but why not just rebuild the lost wing?

  I dug out my field notes and tried to do a rough estimate of a date based on the pottery and other artifacts that I recalled seeing. The redware wasn’t much help—made since time immemorial and still made today—and without a vessel form, it’s sometimes tricky to pin down its exact time of manufacture. But there were a couple of pieces of creamware and one tiny bit of porcelain that might be dateable by its decoration. Okay, the “garden” wall was certainly built after the fire; the sherds and such also postdated the fire, at least by a short time. So the sequence was the wing burning, the debris being cleared away, and the wall and a garden being installed after that, then used for a long time before the wall was dismantled and the garden eventually abandoned.

  I flipped to the front of the notebook, where I’d begun a rough timeline of what was going on in the household and what was happening in the town. I’d have to check other sources to see what was happening in the regional and global spheres, but this was a start. Here we are: Margaret had the last two of her eight surviving children earlier in the year that Nicholas died and a new barn was built to house the new carriage—that was listed on the tax bill as well the following year. Another year goes by, and a neighbor’s diary discusses the Chandler’s work on a new house on the point. Now, did this simply mean that they had begun work on the garden wall, or was this a different house altogether, possibly the Mather House? I knew that they had built many houses in Stone Harbor through the years, the parents and then the succeeding generations, both to live in themselves and to rent out. I felt like I was on the edge of something, if I could only keep pushing along these lines….

  The fire in town in 1738 hadn’t really reached as far up as the Chandlers’ house, which was the only one built that far north at that time. They owned the whole point up there, where the Bellamy House and the Mather House were now too, selling off the two outside lots sometime after Matthew Chandler’s death in the late eighteenth century. Was the fact that the wing of their house had been destroyed a coincidence or was there some connection between the two events? I tried to recall what I’d read about the fire in town, which was described as starting during a scuffle in one of the seedier places in town; it was generally viewed as God’s wrath against license gone too far, but it also threatened a good number of the ships and wharves. If Matthew Chandler had been a justice, was it possibly some retribution against him too? He had a wharf and shares in many ships…but I was probably reaching. I needed better proof that there was a connection.

  For the moment, I was happy with the garden theory, although its existence as such a prominent structure was still a puzzle. The Chandler family was growing and could have used another wing of their house easily. Aha—but the addition and its rooms! They would have provided the needed space! Even though the downstairs had been renovated into a ballroom of sorts in the nineteenth century, the ell had been built to provide more serviceable space in the eighteenth. But why build toward the water? Why not balance the house’s architecture?

  Brian was still downstairs reading when I decided to knock off. He said he’d be up in a while, but he didn’t show any signs of moving. I tossed and turned for a while, then fell asleep, finally, just as I’d decided there would be no sleep that night.

  Chapter 12

  BRIAN REMINDED ME TO BRING MY CELL PHONE with me the next morning, when I reminded him that I’d be visiting the museum at Boxham-by-Sea. I replied rather shortly that it was already in my bag; I was capable of learning a new trick, even at my advanced age. I guess my feelings were still hurt that he didn’t come up to bed when I did the night before. After he got out the door, I pulled myself together, and dropped Bucky off in downtown Stone Harbor, telling her I’d meet her at the library around noon, before I headed off to Boxham-by-Sea.

  Business was thriving in Boxham today, I noticed as I walked along the water; good. Then I frowned: A car honked at a tourist who had paused in the middle of the street to get a better picture of the harbor. As I had recently moved into the area, I understood what drew people to these historic towns: the beauty, the history, and the people were well worth the visit. But, lapsing into the complaint of locals everywhere around the world, why did tourists leave their common sense behind when they went on vacation? The laws of physics do not also go on holiday; cars do not pass through you because you are a visitor, the sun does not burn less brightly because you have the day off. I wished they would take the care that they took when they were at home.

  Just like you do when you are on vacation? a little voice inside my head asked. Like stalking strangers through cemeteries at night and going into bars in the bad part of town? And what about the time that you—?

  Shut up, I told myself amiably and reasonably. I turned down Shield Street so that I could find my way to the museum.

  As hard
as I tried, I still wasn’t on time. After I gave my name to the receptionist at the desk, I tried to stop panting and pull my sweaty shirt away from my back without being obvious about it. A few minutes later and I started to wonder whether Dr. Spencer wasn’t just making me wait because she was put out with me for being late. Eventually a harassed-looking woman in a nice blue suit came striding purposefully toward me. As she drew closer, I could see that she was probably my contact—the badge around her neck was one clue—and that her day wasn’t going smoothly either. Her blonde hair, longer than mine and reaching well below her shoulders, was loosely caught up in a barrette behind her head, but it seemed to be slipping, letting little tendrils escape, curling from the humidity. She stuck out her hand and began introducing herself before she even made it up to me.

  “You must be Dr. Fielding, hello, sorry I’m running a little behind.” She pumped my hand briefly, twice, and immediately turned around to head back to where she’d emerged from. I had to trot to catch up with her again. “Mary Ann Spencer. Actually, I forgot your appointment was this morning. Good thing I was just working on some cataloging, or it would have been a bigger problem.” She looked down at her left hand, which was covered with drying blue ink. “Damn. I guess that pen is dead.” She pulled out a crumpled linen handkerchief, and before I could protest, started to rub at the stains vigorously. “Well, it’s still blue, but no longer wet.” She stuffed the ruined handkerchief back into her pocket, without noticing that she’d left a smear of dark blue ink on her periwinkle suit.

  I snuck a peek down at my right hand, to make sure she hadn’t gotten any ink on me.

  “Right, we’ll just head back to my office, and you can show me your find.” She showed her badge to another guard, led me past a door that said STAFF ONLY, and we went down a corridor of anonymous closed doors. Presently she stopped in front of one of the doors, pulled out a key, and opened it. In the office, there was a desk that was barely visible under piles of folders; even the phone and desk lamp were covered with Post-It notes. The rest of the room, another table, three other chairs, the window ledges, and the radiator cover, were all stacked with books, papers, folders, and empty diet soda cans—at least I hoped they were empty. It was like the kind of bookish chaos I’m always apologizing for in my office, but this place had even me squirming with unease.

  She cleared off a section of the table by removing a pile of papers and sticking them on top of another pile on the floor, which immediately slid over. She cleared off two chairs the same way, and invited me to sit.

  “Ow!” The straying barrette had finally shaken loose and was now dangling off one strand of hair. She unfastened it, untangled it, and then, impatiently, gathered up all of her hair and clipped it again. It was a pretty messy job, with strands of hair humping up in disarray, but at least now it was all out of her way. She sat down and immediately kicked off her shoes. Apparently, things were pretty casual in Dr. Spencer’s office.

  “Let’s get a look at your hook, then.” To my infinite relief, she pulled a pair of clean white cotton gloves from a boxful, and pulled them on. “Don’t want to let the skin oils damage the metal,” Dr. Spencer announced didactically.

  Not to mention the ink, I thought. I pulled out the box and removed the plastic bag with the hook and its two links. The third, twisted link lay at the bottom of the bag.

  She took the bag and held it up to the light. “Oh, yes, I see what you mean. It certainly looks like silver, doesn’t it? Something gave this a good hard wrench, to pull it apart so. May I?”

  I nodded, and she carefully slid the metal hook out of the bag and onto a small square cushion that looked as though it was stuffed and covered with flannel. She trained a strong light down onto it and pulled over a magnifying glass on an arm, delicately beginning to examine the hook and its plain links.

  “I think you’re right. It is silver, and I’d be willing to guess that it’s come from a chatelaine. Probably something that belonged to a woman, judging by the fineness of it; I think it is probably too small to have been for a watch or a man’s seal or anything like that. I’m also guessing that it was part of a multiple-element chatelaine, not the kind that was made for carrying the household keys or a large pair of scissors. It was meant to carry a variety of small items—a thimble, perhaps, an etui or needle case, maybe a small pencil, that sort of thing. Decorative and useful at the same time. The meaning changed over time—you know they date back to the Roman and Egyptian times?—but since this is eighteenth century, it’s meant to be more decorative and petite. Some of the examples you see from the later nineteenth century are huge, real monsters.”

  I nodded. “So it would have been valuable as a piece of jewelry?”

  “Oh, yes. In fact, I think you were very lucky to have found it. For one thing, there is the value inherent in the metal, not to speak of the fineness of the workmanship. Probably lots of sentimental and symbolic value too; if you think of these things as a cross between a Swiss army knife and a charm bracelet, you’ll get a good idea of how they were viewed. For another thing, if whoever had owned it had lost more of it—the clasp or the main jewel—she would have turned the place upside down looking for it.”

  “The way that someone will look harder for a gold coin, but won’t bother so much over a copper one,” I said.

  She nodded. “It might have been a gift from a husband, and it was emblematic, if you will, of a lady’s position as queen of her household.”

  “Queen of little enough, in those days,” I said half to myself. The light caught the silver and gleamed brightly.

  But Dr. Spencer disagreed. “I don’t like to write that off so easily. Don’t forget, there was tremendous power to be found in the home. People like to think of colonial ladies being immured in the house, but just stop and think what was going on at all those endless tea parties. Gossip, matchmaking, a political hint dropped from one husband to be transmitted to another over the tea and via their wives—no, I think there was quite a lot going on that we just don’t know about. It just wasn’t written down all that often. Who’s going to give any attention or credence to women’s gossip, after all? But it had its uses, and its power too. Remember Dangerous Liaisons?”

  She picked over the links and squinted at them carefully. “Okay, definitely sterling silver, most likely of English manufacture—”

  “How can you tell? Is there a mark that I missed?”

  “No, no mark. It’s just that it feels English to me, as opposed to Continental or colonial. You just get a knack, develop an instinct after a while, you look at enough things. Where did you find it?”

  “At the Chandler House.”

  “Was it from a good…I don’t know what word you’d use.” She ran her fingers through her hair and smoothed out a tangle. “We’d say provenance, to describe where a thing was found and how it might have gotten there—who owned it, that sort of thing.”

  “We use the English pronunciation—provenience—or context. All they mean is where it was found and what it was found with and how old it is.”

  She nodded recognition.

  “Yes, I think so,” I said. “I think it is an early-eighteenth-century stratum.”

  “And there were wealthy women there at the time? That was the first generation of Chandlers, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded. “Margaret Chandler might certainly have been rich enough and important enough to have had such a thing. I think she was the only one old enough and rich enough to have had one at the time.”

  Dr. Spencer looked out the window a while, thinking. “I can recommend a few books to look at, if you like, to compare this with other chatelaines. Of course, those won’t have been broken and buried, like this one was.”

  “Oh, I know. Museums prefer to deal with whole objects.” I looked over her shoulder and studied the object. “I wonder what would have been attached to that hook.”

  “Difficult to say. A lot of objects were made attached right to the chain, not meant to be removed. Per
haps a key to a cupboard or a clock or a jewelry box? A seal? Something pretty and personal and valuable.”

  I looked through the magnifying glass at the little bits of metal. Smooth, silver-gray, rounded, and shiny, they were actually pretty plain, but when you knew what they were a part of, suddenly they contained all sorts of meanings.

  “We don’t even know if it belonged to the Chandler family, do we?”

  I shook my head. “It might have belonged to a guest or a visitor.”

  The curator looked at the links. “I don’t know how you can stand not to have the whole thing, now, not be able to study it all, to touch it, get to know it.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “You’ve got the light of greed in your eyes, Dr. Spencer.”

  “Please, call me Mary Ann. Of course I do. It’s the best job in the world, this one. I get to have all the things. And pretend they’re mine.” She shrugged again, but she was smiling this time, which did a lot to mitigate the squalid ambience of her room. “Of course, I get to use all those gorgeous, yummy adjectives too, to describe them. It’s all things and words, with me.”

  “Come out to the site some time. I’ll be happy to show you how we make do with just the broken pieces.”

  “Oh, thanks. I couldn’t.” She heaved a theatrical sigh. “All those poor, fractured darlings out there, lost in the ground, lost to time? It would break my heart.”

  I was pretty sure she was kidding, but you couldn’t ever be certain. I replaced the chatelaine fragment in its bag and gathered my map and my pack, making ready to leave, when Mary Ann Spencer’s sudden question stopped me.

  “Tell me, how’s Perry Taylor doing? I heard she had some trouble a week or so back? Actually, I won’t beat around the bush. I heard the whole Historical Society is having the heaves, even before the other murder was announced on the news last night.” She looked at me. “You don’t know anything about that, do you?”