Home For the Homicide (A Do-It-Yourself Mystery) (7 page)

Of course.

“Can we keep working?” I asked, and Derek gave me a surprised look.

“Are you sure you want to, Avery? That you wouldn’t rather get out of here? Go home for a while?”

“I want to stay busy,” I said, since at home, all I’d be able to do was sit and relive the moments in the attic and the sad discovery.

“Sure,” Wayne said. “There’s no point in us looking at the rest of the house. Not after all this time.”

“What about the . . . that?” I looked at the crate, unable to call what was left inside it a baby, but not quite able to bring myself to call it a skeleton, either. “What will happen to it?”

“It’ll have to go to the medical examiner’s office in Portland,” Wayne said. “I doubt they’ll find much, but maybe they’ll be able to extract some DNA or something. If we’re lucky, we can come close to finding out who this is. Was.”

“Surely it’s obvious? The Greens have lived here for seventy years. It must be a Green, don’t you think?”

“You’d think,” Wayne said and fitted the lid on the crate. “I’ll be in touch.”

He hoisted it carefully and headed down the stairs to the first floor. I followed, so I could lock the front door behind him. With one thing and another, I was feeling just a bit spooked. “When should we expect Brandon?”

“As soon as I can get him out here,” Wayne said as he passed through the front door onto the porch. He turned on the doormat to look at me. “Not a word about this to anyone, if you please, Avery. We don’t need news cameras and a stampede on the doors. Let’s try to keep this quiet until we know more.”

“No problem.” I didn’t want the cameras and the stampede any more than he did.

I closed the door behind him, and stood and watched until he’d placed the crate carefully into the squad car and had driven away before I headed back to Derek.

My husband was still standing where I’d left him, in the middle of the upstairs landing, staring at nothing. I nudged him. “Are you OK?”

He jumped, startled, and then gave me a faint smile. “Fine.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“That,” Derek said, nodding at the stairs. There was nothing there, so I assumed he was talking about Wayne and the crate that had just made their way down.

“Do you have any idea what it was Wayne talked about?”

It took a second before he remembered what Wayne had said. Then—

“The missing baby?” He shook his head. “I think I’ve heard that at some point in time, someone’s baby went missing. But it’s a very long time ago, maybe as much as a hundred years, and I don’t know any of the details. If I did, I’ve forgotten.”

“If it was a hundred years ago, it couldn’t be this baby. The house hasn’t been here that long.”

Derek nodded.

“Do you think I should go try to find out?”

“How would you do that?” Derek asked.

“Newspaper archives? The
Chronicle
and the
Daily
have been around for a long time. And if someone’s baby went missing, I’m sure it would be front page news. Don’t you think?”

“I’m sure it would.” He hesitated, and then relented. I guess maybe he was curious, too. “Wait until Brandon gets here. Then you can go. You’re not doing anything pressing at the moment anyway. Just let him in so I don’t have to interrupt what I’m doing to do it.”

“Sure,” I said.

“And bring me back some lunch.”

“No problem. Lobster rolls OK?”

“Fine,” Derek said.

“I’ll wait for him downstairs. Take a look at the other rooms and try to come up with some idea for how we can make this place shine.”

“I’ll be up here,” Derek said, “if you need me.”

I headed down the stairs again, while he walked off into the bathroom once more.

The
Waterfield Chronicle
has been around since 1915, while the
Weekly
has them beat by three years.
Since 1912
, it says on the plaque beside the door.

They were located across the street from each other on Main Street, just up from the harbor and down from Derek’s old apartment. I’d spent quite a bit of time at both offices since moving to Waterfield. I’d done enough research at each newspaper to learn that the
Weekly
specialized in human interest stories, while the
Chronicle
was the place to go for harder news—or as hard as news got in a small, quaint town like this one. I figured I’d start there, since a missing baby had to have been news, no matter when it went missing. The
Weekly
, with its slower release schedule, wouldn’t have as much information.

Of course, I had no idea what I was looking for—or more accurately, at what point in time to start looking. The archives were all on microfiche, chronologically by date, and I didn’t fancy starting in 1915 and working my way forward to present day.

“Would you know anything about a missing baby?” I asked the archivist behind the counter, a round-faced woman in her fifties who adores Derek. Most women in Waterfield do. Most women do, period.

She looked startled, of course, as well she might, after that kind of question.

I clarified. “I heard that, at some point, there was a missing baby in Waterfield. A long time ago.”

She tilted her head, birdlike, dark eyes bright with interest. “Who told you that?”

“Wayne,” I said, and bit my tongue, just a second too late.

“The chief of police?”

I nodded.

She waited for me to elaborate. When I didn’t—because I was afraid of what else I might let slip—she continued reluctantly, “He’s right. There was a missing baby. I can’t remember exactly when it happened, though. A few years after World War II, I think. Late 1940s, maybe early ’50s. Before I was born. Before the chief of police was born, too.”

“There’ll be something about it in the archives, don’t you think?”

“Certainly.” She sounded offended, perhaps at the idea that the
Chronicle
might have ignored such a momentous incident. Or perhaps just because I wasn’t being forthcoming about why I wanted to know. She could probably smell that there was more to it than idle curiosity, but Wayne had asked me to keep our discovery quiet, and I was doing my best.

“Could I take a look at the years between 1945 and 1955, then?”

She sniffed, but brought them out. A few minutes later I was set up in front of a microfiche machine in the back, scrolling through front pages. (A missing baby would be front page news, I figured, and not something relegated to the back pages.)

There was nothing in 1945. Nothing in 1946. A headline in 1947 had me all excited, until I realized that it referred to a painting that had gone missing from the Fraser House, of a young Fraser child. I scrolled by 1948 with nothing doing. I started 1949, bored out of my skull by then, and wondering whether I would have to go back and start over. Maybe a missing baby wouldn’t make the front page. Maybe I’d have to redo the search from the beginning, and scan every single page as thoroughly as I had the front ones.

I would have dismissed Wednesday, September 7, 1949, too, if it hadn’t been for two other big happenings taking up the front page that day, catching my eye. First on Tuesday the sixth, Allied military authorities had relinquished control of Nazi German assets and restored them to Germany, and second, in Camden, New Jersey, a World War II veteran named Howard Unruh—ironically, his last name was the German word for unrest—had shot thirteen of his neighbors to become the first single-episode mass murderer in United States history.

Between those two headlines, Waterfield’s missing baby was almost an afterthought. All the way down in the corner of the page was a single column headed by one word—GONE!!—in capital letters with several exclamation points after it.

Missing
, the article said,
from North Street in Waterfield: Arthur Green, seven months old.

The article was brief but informative enough, at least to start. Arthur Green, the youngest child and only son of Lila and Arthur Senior, had been removed from his baby carriage by person or persons unknown on Tuesday afternoon around one o’clock. The police would appreciate any information about any strangers anyone might have seen in the vicinity of the Greens’ house on North Street. The matter was extremely urgent.

And no wonder. Missing children are always urgent.

Only . . . if those were the remains of Arthur Green we had found upstairs in the attic, he hadn’t really been missing at all.

So had someone lied? But if so, who? His mother? His father?

And why? Had someone killed him—accidentally or on purpose—and then lied about it, because they didn’t want to pay the piper?

I forwarded to the front page for the next day, Thursday the eighth, when another big headline overwhelmed the search for the missing baby. The day before, the Federal Republic of Germany had been founded, with Konrad Adenauer as chancellor, and that was of enormous interest to the rest of the world—and probably to Germany, too—four and a half years after World War II ended.

The search for the missing baby continued, yet again relegated to the part of the front page that would have been below the fold in a normal paper, on the bottom half of the page.

On September 9, Canada was in the news. World War II veteran Edwin Alonzo Boyd committed his first career bank robbery in Toronto, while someone blew up Canadian Pacific Airlines Flight 108, killing everyone onboard: four crew and nineteen passengers, among them several children.

Scrolling forward, I looked for information about that as well as about the Green baby. And I slowed down and checked not only the front pages, but the rest of the newspaper as well.

I didn’t find anything else about Arthur Green—the case just petered out, it seemed, with no new information and no discoveries—but two weeks later, there was a notice that Quebec City had arrested Albert Guay for the airplane bombing. Guay’s wife, Rita Morél, had been among the passengers, and since Albert had found himself a young mistress, he wanted his wife out of the way. He took out a life insurance policy on her, adding insult to injury, and then hid the bomb in her luggage. He had planned for the bomb to go off while the plane was over the Saint Lawrence River, something which would have made it impossible for forensic scientists to discover what had happened, but because the plane was delayed five minutes, it exploded over land instead.

So that was an interesting detour, but nothing to do with what I was looking for. I kept scrolling through the rest of the year. The People’s Republic of China as well as the Democratic Republic of East Germany were recognized in October, and the Republic of Indonesia in November, the same month dancer Bill Robinson—Bojangles—died. Little Arthur Green wasn’t mentioned again, at least not where I could see.

I could have kept going, I guess, on the off-chance that I’d hit on something else in 1950, but what I was doing was time-consuming, and I’d already spent quite a bit of effort on it. It was several hours since I’d left North Street. Derek must be getting hungry. I handed the microfiche back with a thank-you.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” the archivist inquired, bright-eyed and keen.

I shrugged. “Some of it. The Green baby was stolen out of his baby carriage in September of 1949. I couldn’t find any mention of him being found again.”

She shook her head. “It’s always been just Ruth and Mamie Green, for as long as I can remember. Neither ever got married. They just lived together in that big house. I never knew anything about a baby.”

Me, either.

I thanked her again and walked off, up the street and around the corner to the little hole-in-the-wall place that has the best lobster rolls in Maine, at least according to Derek. Not coincidentally, it’s also right around the corner from his old place, where he lived before we got married, in a loft above the hardware store on Main Street. Very convenient location for a handyman.

I had ordered and was perched on an orange plastic seat by an orange table waiting for the sandwiches to be ready when the bell above the door jangled and Cora walked in. I guess maybe Dr. Ben had a hankering for lobster rolls, too.

She made her order at the counter and then came over to greet me. “Hello, Avery. What are you doing out in the middle of the day?”

“Lunch run,” I said. “It isn’t like he locks me in, you know.”

“The boys do love their lobster rolls.” She smiled indulgently and took a seat on the opposite side of the orange table.

I nodded. “Derek says they’re the best lobster rolls in Maine.”

“Voted to be the last four years running,” Cora said, indicating a framed award over by the door, one I had never even noticed.

I stared at it. “Huh.”

“What’s Derek up to?”

I returned my attention to Cora. “Oh, he’s still working. We couldn’t both leave, what with Brandon—”

Oops.

“Brandon?” Cora said. “Brandon Thomas?”

I nodded. “He’s over at the house.”

“Uh-oh. I guess I really wasn’t wrong about that light last night, was I?”

I grabbed at the excuse like a drowning person. “Actually, no. Mamie Green was asleep on the floor in her old room. Holding the baby doll I’d rescued from the basement.”

And now that I thought about it, maybe Mamie’s fondness for the doll had something to do with the skeleton in the attic, or at least with the fact that she’d lost a beloved baby brother at a young age. It made me wonder whether she’d always been a little touched in the head, or whether that was something that had happened after little Arthur went missing.

“Oh dear,” Cora said.

I pulled myself back to the present. “Yeah. She was pretty cold when we found her. Asleep, you know, so she didn’t realize it, but her body temperature was too low. We took her back to the nursing home where she lives, and dropped her off, and then Brandon took over.”

“And now he’s at the house,” Cora said.

“Right.”

“What’s he doing?”

I struggled for a moment. Less than a moment—2.5 seconds maybe. When Wayne said to keep the news about the baby skeleton quiet, surely he hadn’t meant that I couldn’t tell Cora? I mean, she was family. Right?

I lowered my voice. “We found a baby skeleton.”

Cora stared at me blankly. I repeated it louder.
“We found
a
baby skeleton!”

“I heard you the first time,” Cora said. “Where?”

I lowered my voice again. “Attic. In a crate. I’ve been down at the
Chronicle
doing research.”

“What did you find out?”

“That there was a third Green child. A little boy named Arthur. He went missing in September of 1949. Or so his family said.”

“And you think the skeleton is Arthur?”

“Unless you know of any other babies who have gone missing from Waterfield, who might have ended up in the attic of the Green house, I think it’s safe to say that it is. Don’t you?”

“I guess,” Cora said.

“You weren’t around in 1949, were you?” She was still in her late fifties, as far as I knew. Derek’s dad was a few years older.

She shook her head. “I was born in ’54. And I didn’t grow up in Waterfield. I came here after I got married.”

“So you don’t know anything about it.”

“No,” Cora said.

“It must be horrible, not to know what happened. Bad enough when someone dies, you know? Especially a child, I guess. But at least you know where they are.”

Cora nodded.

“Dr. Ben would be about the same age as Arthur, right? Would you ask him if he knows anything about it?”

“I can ask,” Cora said, “but he’ll have been too small to remember anything, Avery. Whatever he knows will be from later, things his parents told him when he was a child maybe.”

“I just want to know if there were any rumors about what happened.”

“I’ll ask,” Cora said again, and got to her feet when both of our to-go bags landed at the cash register at the same time, “but I don’t think he’ll know anything that’ll help.”