Grace Against the Clock (A Manor House Mystery) (16 page)

I turned to look at the door. “I’m surprised David Cherk wasn’t more interested. Seeing as how he’s the chief photographer for Emberstowne’s history, it seems like this sort of project would excite him, too.”

“Yeah,” Wes said. “I don’t get it. He’ll come around, though. He gets upset in a flash then settles down pretty quickly. Before you know it, he’ll be at your house—all smiles and sweetness—and you won’t be able to get rid of him.”

“Ooh,” I said with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “I can’t wait.” I checked the time. “I’m sure you have plenty of things you’d rather be doing than hanging out at work after hours,” I said, “but if you wouldn’t mind me taking a quick peek at Marshfield’s floor plans before I go—”

“I keep the historical society open late a couple nights a week. This is one of them, so no worries. And I think we can safely assume that David won’t be back tonight.”

“By the way, I meant to ask you about that jar we saw here the other day.”

Wes carried the scrapbooks across the room and slid them onto a high shelf. Turning to face me, he repeated, “Jar?”

“The one you thought was David Cherk’s developing liquid.”

I watched understanding dawn. “Oh yeah. I remember. What about it?”

“Did he ever say what it really was?”

“I never thought to ask him about it. Maybe you should, next time you see him.”

I gave him a withering look. “Oh sure. That’ll go over well.”

“The thing is, everybody in town knows about your reputation for finding answers when the police can’t. Your tenacity is legendary.”

“Give me a break.”

“I’m serious. I told you before that David is odd, but I don’t think he’s a killer. Still, if he’s taking pains to avoid you, you may want to tread carefully.”

I’d come to the same conclusion myself. “We’re changing the subject, right now. Let’s look at those Marshfield blueprints.”

Wes walked across the entire length of the room again, this time with keys in hand. I followed until he stopped behind a glass case that held an assortment of Marshfield memorabilia.

“Wait,” I said. “The plans have been on display all this time? How did I miss them?” I walked around to the front of the case. “Where are they?”

He bent forward from the waist and unlocked the back of the display. “We keep them in a drawer underneath. There’s too much chance of sun damage otherwise, and besides, blueprints are meant to be pored over. There’s no joy in looking at them through glass.”

He pulled out a set of plans that had to be three times as big as my house’s were. Bound in cracked blue leather, they were at least two feet long by eighteen inches wide.

Wes’s strained voice gave me an idea of how heavy the book must be. “This is one set. Take a look.” He gestured with his eyes as he carried the plans over to the countertop, the only place in the office that was big enough to open it on. “There are separate books for each section of the house and grounds.”

I walked around to the back of the case and crouched to peer in. There were at least five other leather-bound sets of plans inside. “Wow,” I said. “This is like finding hidden treasure.”

“You’ve never seen these?”

I joined him at the counter. “We do have floor plans at Marshfield. Lots of them. But they look nothing like this.”

He opened the cover, sending a quick burst of mustiness up to tickle our noses. “I’m sure your boss, Bennett Marshfield, has a set or two in that mansion of his.”

I leaned over to peek at the drawings. “What part of the house is this?”

He pointed to faint lettering at the top of the page. “This says E
NTRANCE
H
ALL
. We may have to go through a few of these before we find the one for the basement area where the party was held.”

I felt a pang of guilt. “Am I keeping you from anything?”

He waved a hand at me. “Not at all. I live for this kind of stuff.” Bending down, he pushed his glasses higher on his nose and began turning the enormous pages, very slowly. His head came up. “Am I keeping
you
from anything?”

“My cat, Bootsie, is probably waiting for me, but otherwise I’m clear.”

He nodded. “Good. Now, let’s see what we have here.”

It turned out that the first of the Marshfield blueprint books we’d chosen was the right one. “Here,” I said when we were about halfway through it. Little by little, I’d gotten better at deciphering the handwriting on each page, and when we reached the first page of B
ELOWGR
OUND
, I paid closer attention.

There were schematics of all sorts, and the two of us, heads together over the open book, tried to make sense of it all. The office was silent, save for the buzzing of the overhead fluorescent lights and the gentle turn of pages.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m no expert, but take a look.”

I shifted my attention from reading margin notes to the spot he indicated. “What is that?”

We were open to a page that held the plans for the room we’d used as an auditorium—the room where Leland Keay had died. Wes pointed to a rectangle set in the narrowest part of the room. From what I could tell, it would have been positioned behind the temporary stage Cherk had set up.

“I don’t know,” he said very slowly. His finger traced along the plan to the outer margin, where a scissor-like contraption was drawn, twice, from different angles. Reminding me a lot of an oversized, old-fashioned car jack, it was attached to a rectangular platform in both pictures. One showed the scissor mechanism extended, the other showed it condensed.

“It says W
OOD
E
LEVATOR
,” I said.

“A wood elevator?” Wes repeated. As though we could read each other’s minds, we straightened and looked at each other. Wood elevators were sometimes installed in the homes of the very well off so that servants wouldn’t be required to lug fireplace timber in from outside. It saved the servants from having to brave the weather whenever replenishment was required, and it saved the wealthy residents from having to witness the task as it was being completed.

Marshfield had several wood elevators that I knew of. There was a large one in the banquet hall, and others scattered in first-floor rooms. Marshfield had far more basement space than we’d used for the party and the wood for these other elevators was loaded from those locations.

Such elevators weren’t precisely the same as secret passages or hidden rooms, but this—if it existed in the room itself and not just on paper—would provide access to the auditorium in a way no one had known about. Not only that, but because supplies were to be loaded from below, that suggested there was another level beneath the auditorium. One I was unaware of.

“Oh my gosh,” I said as the implications became obvious.

“Bennett didn’t know this existed?”

“Apparently not. Or he forgot. If it fell out of use when he was young, he may have never even known it was there.”

There were additional pages showing the device from every angle. Clearly, this drawing would have been instrumental to the builder, if the mechanism had been built, that is.

Wes kept shaking his head. “You know what this means, right?”

“That there might be another way in, yes,” I said. “But who could have known about it?” I thought about the workers at Marshfield. We’d had a staff meeting the day after the murder and we’d asked them all to come forward with any leads. No one had.

“Maybe no one did,” Wes said. “Maybe this is a coincidence.”

In my heart, I didn’t believe it was. My brain was reeling with possibilities. “I’ll have to check with Bennett to see if he knows where Marshfield’s plans are kept. Someone may have accessed them right under our noses. Or—” I pulled my hair high atop my head as I thought of another possibility. “You said that David Cherk had been studying these recently.”

Wes blinked slowly. Nodded. “Yeah, he has.”

“I have to let Flynn know about this.”

Wes stared out the door. “Do you really think David is guilty?”

I held up my hands. “Has anyone else been in to study these plans?”

He shook his head. Then said, “Wait.”

I waited.

“Someone else
has
been studying these.” His eyes were wide, as though he didn’t believe it.

“Who?”

“Joyce Swedburg,” he said, looking as surprised to say her name as I was to hear it. “She came in several times and requested these. Now that I think about it, the fact that she, or David, had this book out last is probably why it was on top. Why it was the first one we pulled out.”

Breathless, I said aloud what I knew we were both thinking. “That means Joyce Swedburg could have stolen into the party, after all. Joyce may have killed Keay.”

Chapter 21

Bennett, Frances, and I gathered in the party room of Marshfield’s basement the next morning. The space, which had been so bright and glittering the night of the fund-raiser, was now bare and quiet. Even though there were only three of us here at the moment, the patter of our steps echoed in the naked space as we made our way into the auditorium.

I’d asked Wes if I could borrow the blueprints and he’d been happy to oblige. The giant books were, in essence, binders. Working carefully last night, we’d managed to extricate the important pages from the heavy leather volumes. We’d replace them later. Pointing at them now, I said, “Take a look here.”

Bennett stood over my left shoulder, Frances my right. Having donned her glasses, she held them low on her nose, using the fingers of her right hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s a bunch of lines.”

Bennett ignored her. “I see,” he said, drawing a finger along the rectangle’s perimeter. “This looks like it was part of the original plans, but I have no recollection of it being used, and certainly no knowledge of it even being here.”

Frances scoffed as she stepped away. “Look at this place. It’s solid.” She stamped a heel on the ground as though to emphasize her point. The fact that she wore soft-soled shoes lessened the impact.

“Starting without me? Why am I not surprised?”

We all turned at the sound of Flynn’s voice.

“Yes, we’re investigating this all by ourselves,” I answered in kind. “That’s exactly why I asked you to come down here this morning. So you could catch us in the act.”

“I wouldn’t put it past you,” he said. With a particularly malevolent glare at Frances, he added, “Any of you.”

“Now that we’ve gotten our day’s quota of insults in, can we get started?” I asked.

Flynn gave a bony shrug, as though nothing I could say would ever matter to him. “What, exactly, are we looking at here?”

I explained what Wes and I had found in the blueprints the prior evening. “It’s a wood elevator,” I said. “A platform designed to be lowered, loaded with wood, and then raised again. The top would blend in with the floor well enough for it not to be noticed. Most of the wood elevators installed in mansions are set up to bring their supplies to living rooms, dining rooms, and studies. Having one in the basement is a bit unusual.”

“Skip the history lesson,” he said. “Where is it?”

“We haven’t found it yet,” I said. “We waited for you to show up. Remember?”

I hated the fact that Flynn and I were at each other’s throats nonstop. Still, he was eager to solve this murder and he’d brought information to me even when he didn’t have to. I wasn’t fooled into believing he viewed me as an equal. It served his purposes to keep me in the loop, but I appreciated the inclusion nonetheless.

“Let’s see.” He held his hand out and I gave him the blueprints, expecting him to ask for clarification. After a few moments of study, however, he surprised me by looking up and saying, “If this apparatus is still in place and functional, this may be exactly the lead we’ve been looking for.”

“I’m glad you agree,” I said, relieved that he hadn’t pooh-poohed my contribution the way he normally did.

He pointed downward. “What’s under here?”

Bennett’s hands opened then spread, as though he were trying to lift the answers from the ground beneath. “When Grace called me to arrange this meeting, I had my butler, Theo, summon the engineering staff in the entrance hall. I asked them, point-blank, if they were aware of any space, or access, beneath this part of the basement.”

“And?” Flynn asked.

Bennett held up both index fingers and tilted slightly to address the young detective. “We have other sections of the home with multiple subbasements, some of which are key to proper maintenance, and some of which are never used anymore. This section, however, has no other access that they know of.”

Perhaps reacting to the question that he knew Flynn would ask next, Bennett continued, “The engineering team consists of one director, two managers, and a staff of twenty. I spoke to the three in charge. I trust these individuals, and they trust their subordinates. They have, however, assured me that they will question each and every employee to find out what he or she might know.”

Flynn took in the information. “Have you asked them to search for the access point?”

Bennett shook his head. “One thing I’ve learned from you, Detective Flynn, is that crime scenes must be protected so that any evidence they possess can be preserved and processed correctly. My staff is available to assist if you need them, but Grace and I believed that the investigation would be better served with you in charge.”

Flynn’s brows jumped fractionally. He cleared his throat and reclaimed his scowling demeanor. “That was good thinking.”

“I would suggest,” Bennett said, “that we attempt to locate this wood elevator from in here. I am utterly stumped as to where to search for access to an underground area beneath this room.”

Flynn must have used up all his positive reinforcement for the day because he turned to Frances and snarled. “What are you here for? To take notes?”

She’d dropped her glasses to her chest when Flynn had arrived. Now they swung side to side from their jeweled chain as she took two lumbering steps toward him. “Do you really want to get into a battle with me, young man?”

Flynn’s face changed, yet again. As though calculating how much he could get away with. I wanted to remind him that she was a world-champion gossip, and if there was anything in his life that wasn’t perfectly squeaky-clean, she’d find it and use it to her advantage. He wasn’t afraid of her, but maybe he should be. Or maybe he was always squeaky-clean.

Note to self: Ask Frances what she knows about him. Not that I’d ever use it, of course.
Fingers crossed behind my back, I smiled.

“What’s with you?” Flynn asked.

“Ready to start searching is all,” I said, then added, “It’s funny, isn’t it? We stumbled upon a passage in my house that I never knew existed and here we’re looking for a specific one that we’re not sure was even ever installed.”

“Hilarious,” Flynn said. Still holding on to the plans, he paced out a rectangle based on where it looked to be on the blueprints. He bounced his heel against the wood floor and grimaced at the solid sound. “That doesn’t tell us much.”

“If there is a wood elevator in here,” Bennett said, “there would be a mechanism to activate it from within the room.” He glanced around. “Probably on one of the walls. In the other areas, our controls are at about this height.” He indicated a spot on the wall between his shoulder and elbow.

This was the narrowest part of the large room, the section that had been screened by the temporary curtains and that had served as backstage. I thought, again, about how David Cherk had insisted on setting up the presentation area at this end. While it made sense aesthetically to do it that way, the fact that Dr. Keay had disappeared in this spot now added a potentially malicious intent behind the eccentric photographer’s choice.

Bennett began searching the stage-right wall, Frances the one at stage left, and Flynn the one between. They were solid brick and, to my untrained eye, looked perfectly set. I couldn’t detect an aberration or misplaced block anywhere. I focused on the floor. We hadn’t discussed who would do what; we’d all simply started in.

“Who puts a wooden floor in a basement?” Frances mumbled to herself.

“Rich people,” Flynn replied without turning. “People who don’t have to worry about their basement flooding every time there’s a thunderstorm.” Still skimming his fingers along the wall, without looking at me, he added. “Nothing suspicious about that, of course.”

Bennett made eye contact with me. “I’m relieved to hear you say so.”

I remembered thinking about how the floor in this part of the basement reminded me of the top floors of an old-fashioned department store. Creaky and old, they were not so scarred as to make them unsightly. In fact, wear gave them character. I thought about the squeaks the floor made when stepped on in certain areas. Wouldn’t noise suggest an air pocket beneath? Wouldn’t a wooden floor installed on a solid foundation remain silent?

I didn’t know. I wasn’t a builder and there was no one in the room with enough expertise to ask. Concentrating on where the top of the platform ought to be if the wood elevator had been installed according to the plans, I got down on my hands and knees to look closer.

Tucking my skirt in behind me, I lowered my face sideways to the floor. I was hoping to spot a perfect rectangle of unevenness, sticking out like a car door that hadn’t closed all the way. No luck. The wooden slats of the floor weren’t precisely aligned, or even, but I couldn’t detect an out-of-place pattern. To me it looked like a well-worn floor, spied sideways.

I scooched around to try from another angle. Still nothing.

Bennett and Flynn were very quiet as they worked. Frances, however, let loose with regular, exasperated sighs. I ignored her.

Maybe I was going about this the wrong way. I got to my knees and stared down. The oak boards that made up the floor were of varying lengths. They had beveled edges, and that made finding a pattern where boards might split among them all the more difficult.

For some reason this wood elevator—if it existed—was different from the rest of those in Marshfield Manor. The rest of them blended into their floors, but were fairly easily spotted, even if you didn’t know what to look for. Why not this one? Was it because Bennett’s grandfather
wanted
it to be hard to find?

Flynn interrupted my thoughts. “I’ve been over this wall twice and there’s nothing. This is a waste of time.”

I opened my mouth to chastise him about giving up too easily, but Bennett spoke first. He walked over to the detective. “Tell you what, young man. My eyes are older. I may have missed something on my wall. Why don’t you go over it and double-check me?”

Flynn didn’t argue. “Fine. You can check that other wall while I’m at it, but I’m telling you there’s nothing there.”

“I believe you,” Bennett said. “Frances, how is it going over there?”

She made a noise, but didn’t turn around. Bennett gave me a “What did I expect?” look and began scrutinizing the wall Flynn had just left.

They went silent again as I returned to my ruminations. What if this elevator was not meant to be used for wood? What if it had been identified as such in the plans, but its purpose was something more guarded? That would help explain why it was proving difficult to find and why Bennett didn’t know about it.

I got to my feet and slapped my hands together to clear off the dust.

Flynn turned. “Giving up?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Give me a minute,” I said. We’d left the plans on the floor nearby. I picked them up and paid closer attention to the distance between the wall and where this wood elevator was supposed to be. I might be a few feet off, I realized. I moved closer to the back wall and decided to try again.

A thought occurred to me. What if the rectangular platform wasn’t a true rectangle? What if the designer and the crew who’d installed it had followed the shapes and edges of the wood slats that made up the floor in order to make it blend in better? If they’d done that, there would be virtually no way to detect it if you didn’t know where it was.

I felt a rush of excitement. “Does anyone have anything solid, like a pen or a heavy keychain, with them?” I asked.

Flynn turned, his face impassive. “What have you found?”

“Nothing yet,” I said.

Bennett pulled a Swiss Army knife from his pants pocket. “Will this help?” He handed it over.

“I didn’t know you carried this,” I said.

“Old habits die hard.”

Flynn had stopped to watch. Keeping the knife closed, I resumed my spot on the floor and began tapping the edge of it against the boards.

“Try this instead.” He pulled out a black, cylindrical piece of plastic, about eight inches long and an inch or so wide with several raised ridges. He brought it over to me.

“What is it?”

He yanked the tip, extending it. “You’ve never seen a police baton?”

I took it from him. “It’s heavy.”

“It’s supposed to be.”

I returned the knife to Bennett and resumed my floor-tapping. I looked up to find the three of them watching me. “It’s an experiment,” I said. “You can keep working on the walls if you like; I want to try this for a while.”

Using the blueprint as my guide, I returned to tapping the floor with the edge of the baton, slowly moving in a straight line perpendicular to the back wall, listening for changes in sound.

“I thought you said you had no idea how a floor would sound if there was nothing under it,” Frances said.

I stopped long enough to send her a look of disdain. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” I said. “How do I know what I don’t know? Maybe I’ll figure it out. The only certainty is that I’ll never know if I don’t try.”

She scowled.

Tap, tap, tap.

My mind floated with random thoughts. Flynn and Frances were such crankypants. Maybe that’s why they got under my skin so often. And then I thought about Adam. Quite the opposite personality.