Draw the Dark (19 page)

There were several cars there already including a white panel van that Uncle Hank said belonged to the Madison crime scene people and a truck with the tailgate down and a big Coleman thermos perched on the bed. Off to the left of the house were two guys in coveralls with what looked like survey equipment shouting at each other. A third guy stood by the truck, a Styrofoam cup in one hand.

“Who are they?” I asked as we got out.

“Engineering people contracted by Madison.” Uncle Hank slammed the driver’s door shut and palmed on his Stetson. “They’re marking the grid they’ll use for ground-penetrating radar. Never know if there isn’t something else out here.”

“You mean, like someone buried?”

“Yup. Doubt it, but given what we
do
have . . . pays to be on the safe side.”

The chief engineer’s name was Mosby. He shook Uncle Hank’s hand, held up his coffee cup, asked, “Want some? Got it in the thermos. Help yourself to crullers too. I already ate three of those suckers.”

“You stopped at Gina’s,” said Uncle Hank. He handed the bag of crullers around. I fished one out and offered the bag to Sarah, who gave the crullers a longing look and then shook her head. Uncle Hank took a bite and then licked sugar flakes from his lips. “When I was a deputy, I musta gained twelve pounds before I learned to not stop in there for coffee.” He nodded at the two men who were laying out yellow string across the sun side of the slope. “How big you going to make that thing?”

“The grid?” Mosby scratched his chin. “Well, if you
had
a grave, it’d be a lot easier because then we could use it as a central referent. Given you got nothing outside, I picked four points of a rectangle in a hundred-yard block. So figure . . .” Mosby screwed up his nose. “We can probably finish this side of the property in about two days, the back side and gardens in a couple more days. We’re just lucky there aren’t a lot of trees around the main house.”

“Why is that?” asked Sarah.

“Roots’ll sometimes chunk out something that looks like a grave, or maybe sometime in the past, someone started a well or dug out rocks, and then things got covered up. Back’ll be a nightmare with that garden. Trees are the worst, but . . .” He squinted in the morning sun. “We’ll walk the grids. If there’s a grave out here, we’ll find it.”

Dr. Rainier met us at the door. She wore a peacock blue sweater that really set off her hair and eyes, and black jeans. Actually, she was beautiful. She showed smiles all around, though I think she held Uncle Hank’s gaze a fraction of a second longer than anyone else’s. “Come on up. Dr. Nichols is just getting started.”

She led us up the back stairs, which were narrow and very plain. The paint in the stairwell was dingy, and there were fingerprint smudges on the corners. “It’s going to take a year or more to get this thing into spec, much less any kind of shape,” said Dr. Rainier. “I’ll have to do it in stages, but that’s okay. Gives me plenty of time to decide and change my mind a few times.”

“A woman’s prerogative,” said Uncle Hank, and she gave a good-natured laugh. Sarah and I traded glances that might have been groans.

The stairway gave onto the end of a long hall on the third floor, the servants’ quarters. The temperature was noticeably colder than the rest of the house. The wallpaper was faded, and a few sections sagged. The doors were plain wood, and there was no ornate wood trim. The light switches were the old push-button kind, and the wood floors up here were scuffed and worn.

“Which room is the body in? ” asked Sarah.

“Servant’s room.” Dr. Rainier tilted her head toward the end of the hall. “This way.”

The room was in the west corner with two shuttered, double-hung windows. Faded foam green striped wallpaper with tiny roses covered the walls. Directly across the door was the fireplace, its back wall blackened with soot, the brick and mortar hearth noticeably lopsided as if the house were listing to the right. Broken bricks and chunks of mortar littered a slate floor that then gave way to a threadbare carpet. The room smelled stale with a faint overlay of old rot.

As we entered the room, a compact woman with cropped brown hair and wearing white coveralls looked over her shoulder. “Ah.” Cradling a tablet PC on which she’d been jotting notes, she pushed up from her crouch, her knees crackling. “Damn this chill.” She came toward Uncle Hank, hand outstretched. “Dr. Denise Nichols, Sheriff. We spoke over the phone.”

They shook hands, and after Uncle Hank introduced us, he said, “What do you think?”

“Come see for yourself.” Dr. Nichols waited as we crowded around the half-dismantled hearth. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting to see—probably something like out of an Indiana Jones movie.

This wasn’t like that at all. If I had to pick something to compare it to, it would be like those reproductions of Neolithic graves in a natural history museum and not even half that interesting. Only the baby’s head and the very top of its rib cage were visible; the rest was still encased in mortar. The leather flesh pulled tight over its skull, giving it the wizened appearance of a dried-up old man. Its thin lips peeled back in a death grin to reveal toothless gums. A thin tuft of brownish hair clung to its scalp. Its eyes were closed, but the flesh over the sockets was caved in, so I knew the eyeballs were gone. There was something wrong with the head, only I wasn’t immediately sure what it was.

Sarah broke the silence first. “Where are the ears?” As soon as she said it, I realized that’s what had bothered me.

“Yeah, that passed by me too, the first time around,” remarked Uncle Hank.

“Good eyes,” said Dr. Rainier.

“Yes, very.” Dr. Nichols nodded her approval, and Sarah beamed. “I know graduate students who would miss that in their first pass. You might think they’d been sliced off, but you’d be wrong. In this case, the pinnae, the external part of the ears, are just tiny nubbins. See?” She pointed to what looked like a raisin on the side of the head. “When it’s bilateral like this, you begin to wonder about a syndrome of some sort, such as Goldenhar or Treacher-Collins. I think it might be the latter. Look at the jaw. It’s quite tiny for a newborn, and although it’s tough to see because of the leathering effect of mummification on the skin, the eyes actually slant
down
. So, if it
is
Treacher-Collins, that might help us.”

“How?” I asked.

“Well, with Treacher there’s a fifty-fifty chance of passing on the abnormal gene to a child. So it’s likely a parent would have the same problem or carry the gene but not express the disease. People with this syndrome have normal intelligence, so if they’re only mildly affected, say, small or missing ears, they could get by quite well. They would be deaf, of course, but nowadays, with bone conduction hearing aids, that can be ameliorated.”

Sarah got there way ahead of me. “So maybe whoever put the baby here didn’t want anyone to connect the dots that he or she might be the parent.”

Dr. Nichols nodded. “Another possibility, however, is that the parents or the birth mother interpreted the abnormality as a kind of curse. Killing such an infant wouldn’t be abnormal at all, depending on the time period. Or this might mean nothing, just an incidental congenital abnormality. We’ll know more, I hope, when we get the block back to our lab and can do a proper examination.”

“You’re not going to take the body out here?” asked Sarah. She sounded disappointed.

“We really can’t. It’s much better to do this in a controlled setting. Excavating a body from concrete or mortar is tedious and exacting. We’d be here quite a while. Also, X-rays we’ve taken indicate that the mummification doesn’t extend all the way down. There are several toes missing, and one of the feet has disarticulated. There are many more bones in a child’s skeleton than an adult’s, so it will be a question of painstaking work with dental tools as well. This is more properly forensic archaeology, but we take all comers.”

“Do you know how old the baby was?”

“Judging by the head circumference, about a month old. There is one interesting finding.” Retrieving her tablet, she tapped her way to a photograph. It was an X-ray. The baby’s arms and legs were drawn up toward its chest. The ribs were like the bars of a birdcage. There were several bright, tiny, circular dots over the baby’s torso and another oblong object at the crook of a knee.

Dr. Nichols pointed to the circular objects. “I don’t know what that other oblong thing is, though it might be a charm, but
these
are most likely metal snaps, and that already helps us date the body. We have no other way of doing so in this situation, and it’s the same principle as if we discovered a grave at some archaeological site. You need artifacts to date things. In this case, metal snaps came into wide public use in the first decade of the 20th century, around 1910. So we know that this child has been here not longer than a hundred years but more likely closer to seventy.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

Dr. Nichols’s eyes sparked. Without a word, she turned over one of the loosened bricks. Stamped into the brick were the words
GOLD & BRICK
. And a date:
1941
.

“Gold and Brick is a very famous company that’s been around since the 1880s. Unlike many other brickmakers, they stamp all their bricks with a date. Even so, we’d be able to tell the approximate date the baby was walled up by looking at the bricks themselves—their composition, how they were made— and the mortar.”

“So that’s the
when
,” I said. “But that doesn’t answer the why, or how.”

Dr. Nichols’s smile was regretful. “Or who.”

“Starved,” said Sarah. She was grinning from ear to ear. “This is going to be great for my paper. I’d like to hang around and watch them take out the brick block, if that’s okay.”

To tell you the truth, I didn’t want to stay. I guess I’d hoped—expected—that seeing the baby’s body would
do
something, maybe shake something loose in my head. I was still edgy, like there was something here I was meant to see, but I couldn’t figure out what.

“We can eat in the garden room. There’s a nice view,” Dr. Rainier was saying as she led the way down a short hall toward the back of the house. “The stream is really strange, but I think the original idea was to bring the outdoors inside. Of course, you have to turn off the pump for the fountain as soon as it gets cold, but you can see the garden in the pattern of the stained . . .” Her voice died as she saw my face. “Christian? Christian, what’s the matter?”

I could barely form the words. My heart sounded impossibly loud in my ears. I must have looked as shocked as I felt because Uncle Hank was by my side in an instant and took me by the arm. “Christian. What is it?”

No mistake: There was the empty stone streambed, and above the picture window was the patterned stained glass. Outside, the graceful figure of the stone woman emptied air from her urn into the dry fountain; and to the left, wind stirred the bare spindles of an ancient willow.

It was the garden room of my vision and the same room as in the painting.

The house had belonged to Catherine Bleverton.

“So it’s possible that Catherine Bleverton rented the house, right?” I’d only picked at my sandwich, and now I pushed the plate away. I couldn’t really
tell
everybody why I’d reacted the way I had; not even Dr. Rainier knew about the time trip to the garden room. Thank God there’d been the painting in Mr. Witek’s room. That, along with
Katarina at Sunset
(which Sarah knew about so I didn’t look completely nutzoid), was enough to explain my reaction.

I said, “I mean, she lived in Milwaukee before. Eisenmann lived
here
, and he wouldn’t move to Milwaukee if his foundry was in town. So they’d probably want to build a house or something, but she couldn’t live with him. They didn’t, you know,
do
things like that back then.” Actually, I didn’t know what people did in 1945, but I seemed to be in good company because everyone sort of looked at one another and nodded like they thought it was a good-enough explanation.

Then Dr. Rainier said what we all thought: “Makes you wonder if she was living here when that baby was walled up.”

Sarah said, “Or if Catherine Bleverton was the mother. If she was, then the father . . . could it be Mr. Eisenmann’s kid?”

Uncle Hank screwed up his face. “I don’t see it. They were gonna get married. They could’ve gotten married earlier, if it came down to it, then go away somewhere, come back when the baby’s been born, and people might talk, but so what?”

“Unless Eisenmann couldn’t leave,” I said. “He had a business to run. The war was just over, and there’d be a lot of rebuilding to do, tons of opportunities. I don’t see how he could run his business by remote control. It’s not like they had computers.”

“Well, we’re not talking the Dark Ages here. They did have telephones and telegrams, and people would direct their affairs from overseas all the time,” Dr. Rainier said, with a smile. “But here’s the other problem. We know that Catherine Bleverton died in 1946, and we know that they weren’t married yet, and Mr. Eisenmann was on the boat with her. Maybe it’s a question of digging deeper into the newspapers of the time, but I would think that a pregnancy would’ve been hard to hide. The illegitimate baby of an heiress would’ve made
all
the headlines.”

“You said the engagement was announced in the spring of 1945. Given that the child’s only a month old, Miss Bleverton would’ve been pregnant throughout the latter part of ’45, early 1946. You could check the social columns, see if she dropped out of sight, but that’s not the sense I get.” Dr. Nichols took a big bite of her second sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and said: “I think this baby belonged to somebody else.”

I could feel my theories doing a real flameout. “You’ll do DNA on it, won’t you?”

She nodded, chewed some more, followed that with a swig of water, and said, “We’ll see what we can extract. The body appears to be in good condition, however, so that shouldn’t be much of a problem.
Our
difficulty comes in knowing where to go next. If there
are
relatives of Miss Bleverton’s still living— and assuming we can locate them—we will ask for samples. That’s no guarantee we’ll get them, however. There’s been a crime committed here, certainly, but there’s no hard evidence linking Miss Bleverton to this house. I know . . .” She held up a hand when I opened my mouth in protest. “I know. You say there’s this painting of Miss Bleverton with this room as a backdrop. But consider this: This house is beautiful. I’m sure this room was known, and painters, as well as their subjects, look for exotic locations all the time. She might have suggested this as a backdrop for her portrait. That’s very different from actually living in the house. In addition, we have no idea if Mordecai Witek didn’t just paint this from memory. He might have seen the room, sketched it, and then filled it in when doing the portrait in a studio.”

I knew this wasn’t right, but I couldn’t contradict her either. “So you can’t force them.”

Dr. Nichols shook her head. “Nor am I about to suggest to Mr. Eisenmann that he give us a swab either. There is, in fact, more to implicate the Zieglers, the original owners, and then renters than either Eisenmann or Bleverton. I’m sorry. I wish it were easier than it is, but . . .” She shrugged.

“She’s right. I can’t see how Eisenmann can be forced to provide DNA, with no evidence,” said Uncle Hank. “Unless there’s something else to date that baby, all we know is it was put there sometime after 1941. Coulda been anyone.”

I nodded like I understood and agreed, but I was already thinking about what I’d experienced and thought:
Yeah, but what if it wasn’t just anyone?

And what if Charles Eisenmann’s not the father?

When they were done, Dr. Rainier looked at the ruined masonry and said wryly, “Well, I never much cared for brick anyway.”

Hello, I’m calling in reference to an e-mail sent by Mr. Christian Cage to the Wisconsin Jewish Museum in Milwaukee. Mr. Cage, my name is David Saltzman, and your message was forwarded to me by the archivist at the museum. I thought to call you because I wasn’t sure when you’d look at your e-mail next. I am Albert Saltzman’s grandson, and I would be very happy to speak with you about what I know about Beth Tikva and the events sur
rounding the murder of Mr. Brotz and Mr. Witek’s subsequent disappearance. It’s about noon here; if you can call back before four thirty, we can talk. Otherwise, this will have to wait until Saturday night around eight or Sunday morning.

He rattled off his number, which I jotted down on a slip of paper. When I hung up, Uncle Hank said, “It’s four fifteen now. You can just catch him, I’ll bet.”

I dialed, heard the phone ring at the other end, and then a woman picked up: “Hello?”

I identified myself and then asked, “May I speak to Mr. Saltzman?”

“Of course. One moment.” She must have covered the phone because all I heard then were muffled voices and then the sound of someone putting down the phone, approaching footsteps, and then the man’s voice that had been on our answering machine: “This is Rabbi Saltzman.”

Rabbi? I hadn’t been expecting this. “Uh . . . Rabbi, this is . . . ah . . . Christian Cage? From Winter?” I heard my voice rising in a question at the end of each sentence—our English teacher hates that—and muscled back my nerves. “You called me back about Mr. Witek.”

“Ah, Christian, yes, thank you. I’m sorry that there won’t be much time for us to talk today. It will be Shabbos soon—our sabbath—and I can’t speak on the phone until Saturday night.”

“Okay.”

“Anyway, I want to caution you that I know some of what happened from back then but not a lot. There are many things people want to forget, and I believe Winter is one of them. In fact, the community dispersed after Beth Tikva burned and the congregation decided to relocate. Then, too, there’s been a lot of attrition over the years. More and more young people are choosing to settle somewhere other than Wisconsin, and most of the people from that time are dead.”

“Except David—Mr. Witek.”

“Yes, I was astonished to hear that. He’s one person the community had lost all contact with. You said he has Alzheimer’s? Where is he living?”

I told him and then added, “He’s not doing very well.”

There was a pause. “By not very well, you mean . . . what, exactly?”

I pulled in a breath. “He’s dying. The doctor here said he probably has only a week or two at this point.”

Rabbi Saltzman was quiet a few moments. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry to hear that.” Another pause. “Look, I have to go. May I call you on Sunday?”

After we hung up, Uncle Hank said, “This keeps getting more and more interesting. You know, I finally located the old files on the murder, and there’s barely anything there. Interviews with Witek’s family, of course....”

My ears pricked. “Interviews? What did the son say?”

“Nothing.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “You mean, he said he didn’t see anything?” That would be a lie, only I couldn’t very well explain how I knew that. Not yet, anyway. I didn’t have a clue why David would lie.

“No,” Uncle Hank said. “He said
nothing
. Literally. My grandfather—your great-grandfather Jasper—saw the child, and that boy was totally mute. They sent him down to Madison finally, and the psychiatrist who saw him had spent time in England with the orphans there from the war. His report’s in the record. He said the boy was suffering from some kind of extreme mental trauma, like you saw in kids who’d lived through the Blitz or having their towns bombed.”

“Post-traumatic stress?”

“We’d call it that, yeah. They say
shell-shocked
in the record. Anyway, they never did figure out why. The boy stayed in the hospital for months, and when he finally quit being mute, the doctors said he had no memory for the night of the murder. The last thing the boy remembered was going to school two days before. Traumatic amnesia is what they said. Only here’s the thing that stuck in my grandfather’s mind.” Uncle Hank gave me a significant look. “Trauma over
what
?”

Now if I could just figure out how to make sense of what David had seen before it was too late.