Plaster and Poison (4 page)

“Really? ”
“I believe so. Kate bought the place from someone named Ritter, anyway. Some old lady who went to an old-folk’s home afterward.”
“What was her name?” We skirted the fence around the B&B and crossed the driveway. “Elizabeth? Erica? Maybe she was ER.”
Derek shrugged. “You’d have to ask Kate. Or Miss Barnes at the Historical Society. I can’t remember.”
“I’ll see if the Fraser House is open tomorrow,” I promised.
The Fraser House historic home is where the Waterfield Historical Society is located. Miss Barnes is the docent. She’s also Derek’s old history teacher from high school. Like all women of a certain age—above three and still breathing—she adores him. I added, “Do you want to come? ”
“I wish I could,” Derek said, “but I think I’d better work on getting the carriage house insulated. They’re forecasting snow this weekend.”
“Great.” I shivered. Derek grinned and put his arm around my shoulders.
Down at the corner, a pair of headlights appeared. A smoky gray car passed us, pulling to the curb across the road from the B&B. The passenger door opened, and a tall young woman in a dark coat and high heels got out. She exchanged a couple of words with the driver before hurrying across the street and up the driveway to the bed and breakfast, coat flapping around her calves. The car idled at the curb for a moment until she was safely around the corner, and then it glided off down the street. I caught a glimpse of the driver’s profile, sporting what looked like a self-satisfied smirk, before the tinted glass window cut off my view.
“Who’s that guy?” Derek wanted to know, squinting through the dark.
I shrugged. “No idea. Never seen him before in my life.”
“That’s all we need,” Derek said. “Shannon sneaking around with some guy old enough to be her father.”
“Those weren’t Maine license plates. He’s probably just someone’s dad, up for the holiday. Maybe one of her friends was in the back seat.” Maybe that was why she had been making herself scarce lately. There was a new boyfriend in the picture, and she was keeping him to herself.
“That’s possible,” Derek admitted, looking a little happier. “So you’ll stop by the Historical Society tomorrow? To try to track down those initials?”
“I’ll do my best. Anything to make Kate happy. After all, she’s paying us.” I smiled. Derek smiled back and squeezed my shoulders. We continued our walk toward Aunt Inga’s house.

Miss Barnes is narrow-nosed and gray-haired and as dry as an old mummy, with pinched nostrils and sharp eyes. She’s taller than me—the better to look down her nose—and always very properly dressed in a tweed skirt, twin set, and pearls, even in the middle of summer. Today, the mustard-colored sweater under the cardigan had a turtleneck and she had added a pair of thick, brown stockings inside her sensible shoes, but other than that, she looked the same as she had every other time I’d seen her.
“Miss Baker.”
And of course she remembered me. The old bat had a mind like a steel trap.
“Hi, Miss Barnes,” I said politely. “How are things?”
She smiled tightly, her eyes straying over my shoulder. “Are you alone today?”
“Derek’s working on Kate McGillicutty’s carriage house,” I said.
Kate’s B&B was only three or four blocks from the Fraser House, so Miss Barnes knew all about the renovations. The Historical Society had had to approve the changes, since Waterfield Village has one of those preservation overlays that dictate the ways in which one can and cannot modify the properties in the historic area. No one is allowed to tow in a double-wide trailer, for instance, and make it a permanent structure by taking off the wheels, just as no one is allowed to build one of those low-slung brick duplexes, or turn one of the existing houses into a multifamily home. And the Historical Society has final say on things like whether the color you want to paint your house is historically appropriate or the fence you’re thinking of putting up is in keeping with the time period. We’d had to jump through hoops during the renovation of Aunt Inga’s house.
Derek is on board with the whole preservation thing anyway, but sometimes, the stringent guidelines rub other people the wrong way. Like my cousins, the Stenhams. Before Aunt Inga died and made me her heir, they’d been all set to level her house and build a small community of condos and townhouses on the lot. When I inherited instead of them it all became moot, but I happened to know that they’d had to modify their building plans several times before the Historical Society would give them approval for the project. They may have had to grease some palms, too, to get it pushed through. It’s the kind of thing they’d do. The Stenhams don’t always play by the rules.
Miss Barnes nodded. “And how is the carriage house progressing? ”
I removed my fuzzy, candy-striped gloves and stuck them in the pocket of my puffy, powder blue jacket. “As far as I know, just fine. I haven’t been there a lot. Derek’s been doing the heavy work while I’ve been running around ordering kitchen cabinets and countertops and bathroom fixtures and such.”
“And what brings you here today, Miss Baker?”
“I’m looking for information on the family that used to own the B&B.” I unwound the loopy knit scarf from around my neck and pulled down the zipper of the jacket.
“The Ritters?”
I nodded. The final step was plucking the warm hat off my head and squashing it into the other jacket pocket. Winter’s a drag.
“The first Lawrence Ritter built the house that belongs to Miss McGillicutty,” Miss Barnes said, rooting through her old-fashioned file drawer. “He came here from New York and married Anna Virginia Cabot. The Cabots were one of the founding families of Waterfield. Anna Virginia was the daughter of Captain John Cabot and his wife Mary. She was born in the 1870s, and married Lawrence Ritter in . . . let’s see . . . 1895.”
“Did they have any children?”
Miss Barnes nodded. “They had three: Lawrence Junior, Frederick, and Agnes.”
“No one with a name that starts with
e
?” I wanted to find an ER and a WE.
“Not in that generation,” Miss Barnes said. She brought out a folder, which she placed on the counter. Down the front of it ran a list of all the Ritters. Miss Barnes put her finger on a name. “Lawrence Junior was the eldest, born in 1896. He perished on August 27, 1918, when the
USS SC-209
was sunk off the coast of Long Island.”
“By German warships?”
“By friendly fire,” Miss Barnes said. “The
SC-209
was a submarine chaser. She was mistaken for a German U-boat and shelled by the
USS Felix Taussig
, manned by the United States Coast Guard. It was the only time a submarine chaser was sunk by friendly fire in the Great War.”
“Wow.” It was quite a story.
“Lawrence Junior left a wife and a son,” Miss Barnes continued. “The boy’s name was Lawrence, as well.” She moved her finger to stab another name. “Next we have Frederick Ritter. Second son. Two years younger than Lawrence. Enlisted in the army in 1917 and went to France. Survived the war only to succumb to the influenza pandemic in late 1918. No children.”
“I guess he didn’t have time to have any.” People got married early in those days—Lawrence’s wife couldn’t have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two when she found herself a widow—and Frederick hadn’t been more than twenty-one, either, when he died.
“Likely not,” Miss Barnes agreed. “Agnes was the youngest of the Ritter children. She was born in 1902 and survived the war. She also survived the influenza pandemic and went on to marry Philip Grant in 1924. They had four children: Elizabeth, Katherine, Philip Junior, and Charles.”
“Elizabeth?” Here, finally, was an
e
.
“Elizabeth Grant,” Miss Barnes nodded. “Born in 1929. Married Frank Brown in 1952. Died in her bed at sixty-nine. Cancer.”
“Great.” So Elizabeth wasn’t ER after all; not if her last name had been Grant and not Ritter. That left only Lawrence’s son carrying on the name. “What happened to Lawrence Ritter? The third Lawrence. Junior’s son. I guess he was the one who took over the house?”
Miss Barnes nodded. “He was born in January 1919—several months after his father perished—and he married Helen Simmons in 1942, just before enlisting in the army to fight in World War II.”
“Did he survive?”
“He did. He came back in 1945 and went to Barnham College on the GI Bill. He became a CPA, and lived in what is now Miss McGillicutty’s bed and breakfast until he was killed in an auto accident in the early 1980s. I remember him well.”
“Did he and . . . what was her name, Helen? Did they have any children?”
Miss Barnes shook her head. “They were not so blessed. Or maybe it was by choice. After Larry died, Helen converted the house into apartments. Back then, the Waterfield Historical Society didn’t have regulations in place to prevent such a thing. Helen stayed in one of the apartments herself and rented the other two. That way, she could live for free. After Miss McGillicutty bought the house, Helen Ritter went to a place near Brunswick.”
A “place” being a euphemism for an old-folks’ home, I assumed. An assisted-living facility.
“Is she still alive?”
“We weren’t close,” Miss Barnes said, “but I haven’t heard that she has passed, so I imagine so. She would be almost ninety years old by now. May I ask why you’re inquiring? ”
“Oh.” I shrugged. “It’s a matter of some initials carved in the carriage house wall. A WE and an ER. I’d like to know who they belonged to.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” Miss Barnes said. “None of Anna Virginia and Lawrence’s children had a first name that started with an
e
, and the line died out with Larry and Helen. Although of course we have other families whose surnames begin with
r
in Waterfield. Rasmussen, Roberts, Rinehart . . .”
“And just as many that begin with
e
, I guess? ”
She nodded. “In addition to the Ellises, there’s the Edmonsons, the Elliotts, the Erskines, the Elys . . .”
“I get it. So WE could be almost anyone, and so could ER.”
“I’m afraid so,” Miss Barnes agreed. “Dr. Ellis’s first wife was born Eleanor Roberts, and his father’s Christian name was William. So was William’s uncle’s. William Ellis the elder died during World War I as well.”
Another victim of the influenza pandemic, probably. Or someone else who got shot accidentally by his own side. I didn’t even want to know.
“You can’t think of any kind of combination of the two sets of initials, can you? Like, Derek’s granddad, William Ellis, married someone named Elizabeth Rinehart? Or Wayne’s father, Eric Rasmussen, used to date Wendy Edmonson? ”
“I’m afraid not, Miss Baker,” Miss Barnes said. “Police Chief Rasmussen’s father was called John, not Eric, and I don’t think the Edmonson family ever had a girl named Wendy. And William Ellis Junior married Charlotte Bohannon. I’m sorry I can’t be more help.”
“That’s OK,” I said.
“If you like,” Miss Barnes offered, “you can see the census records for the past one hundred years and go through them for combinations of those initials. It won’t take more than a few hours.”
“Really?” I checked the time. Nowhere near lunch yet. “Sure, I’ll do that.”
Miss Barnes dug out a stack of paperwork the size of a telephone book and shoved it across the desk toward me with a smile. “Enjoy yourself, Miss Baker.”
“Thank you,” I said, grabbing it. “I will.”

4

“How did it go?” Derek wanted to know during dinner at the Waymouth Tavern that night. “Did you find WE and ER?”
I rolled my eyes. “Did I ever! I had no idea there were so many people in this town with names that start or started with those initials. Including your mother—Eleanor Roberts—and your grandfather, William Ellis.”
“Paw-Paw Willie.” Derek grinned. “You need to meet him sometime. If he ever makes it back up here.”
“Back up from where?”
“Florida,” Derek said. “He moved to Fort Lauderdale when he retired. Sick of the cold, he said.”
“How old is he?”
Derek thought for a moment. “Dad’s almost sixty, so I guess Paw-Paw Willie is over eighty-five. Closer to ninety, even. He’s healthy as a horse, though. Practiced medicine up until just a few years ago, and plays golf and chess. He’ll probably live to be a hundred.”
“He must have been born after World War I, right?”
Derek nodded. “Early 1920s. My great-grandfather made it through in one piece, though. Why?”
I shrugged. “No reason. Miss Barnes was talking to me about the Great War earlier today. She knew a lot about it.”
“She knows a lot about a lot of things,” Derek said. “Retired history teacher, remember? And I think her mother was one of the first Yeomanettes.”
“What are they?”
“Yeoman (F)s. Female yeomen. Yeowomen or yeomanettes. Miss Barnes can tell you more about them than I can, but I think I remember the basics.”
“Go ahead.”
“Well, during World War I, women were admitted to the navy for the first time. Not at the front, but in clerical positions at home. Some of them stayed with the navy for years afterwards. Miss Barnes’s mother worked at the Portsmouth navy shipyard at Kittery, I think.”
“Interesting.”
“It must have been. But you had no luck tracking down WE or ER, huh?”
I grimaced. “Too many people with those initials. If I had some kind of idea when the initials were carved, it’d be easier, but it could have been any time in the past hundred and twenty years or so, since the carriage house was built.”
“Actually,” Derek said, “the carriage house wasn’t built as early as the main house. The B&B is a Queen Anne. The carriage house wasn’t built until ten or even twenty years later.”
“Really? I wish you would have told me that. Maybe I can cut a half dozen people out of contention. That leaves just . . . oh . . . five hundred or so.” I rolled my eyes.
Derek grinned. “Considering that the initials are carved in the side of the post facing the wall, the most logical time for someone to have carved them is when the carriage house was in the process of being built. Hard to get to that side of the post otherwise. If you can track down that date, it’ll help you.”
“I’ll go back to the Historical Society tomorrow morning and see when the carriage house was built. And then maybe I can visit the newspaper archives, just in case.”
“You do that,” Derek said. “But in the meantime, are you finished?” He glanced at my plate.
“I can be. Why?”
“Got something I want to do.”
“Really? What?”
He smiled.
I blushed.