Hemlock Read online

  “Rose,” Dorothea said, “this is my friend, China Bayles. She’s come to stay with us for a few days. China, this is Rose Mullins. She and her husband Joe have worked at Hemlock House for—how long, Rose?”

  There was a silence, as if Rose was deciding whether to answer. Her gruff mountain twang was dark with suspicion when she said, “Pert near thirty years now.” She forked the bacon out of the skillet and onto a plate, drained some of the grease into a tin can, then began breaking eggs into the skillet, scrambling them.

  Before Dorothea could explain who I was, I spoke up with my just-invented cover story, designed to give me the maximum latitude—and creative flexibility—in framing my questions.

  “I’m writing a magazine article about Miss Carswell, Mrs. Mullins. She had such an interesting life, with her gardens and her books. Would you have time later this morning to talk with me?” If I was asked which magazine I was writing for, I would say that I was a freelancer and that I was querying several editors.

  Rose put the plate of bacon on the table and returned to the stove to stir the eggs. She was frowning, but I wasn’t sure whether it was a response to my request or a perpetual expression on her dour face.

  “Reckon I can,” she said at last, with obvious reluctance. “But it’ll have to be later. I’m fixin’ to commence on the wash.” To Dorothea, she said, “The eggs’ll be done in a minute, Miz Harper. There’s biscuits in the oven, orange juice in the icebox, coffee in the pot.”

  And off she went. Was she just naturally brusque or was she avoiding me? I was about to ask Dorothea, but at that moment, Jenna breezed in, looking like springtime itself in a sunny yellow sweater over jeans. She was carrying a handful of Johnny-jump-ups from the garden.

  “Oh, so pretty,” Dorothea said. “So sweet and gay.”

  “In Elizabeth’s time,” Jenna said, “Johnnies were a remedy for children’s tummy aches.” She put the blossoms in a glass bowl in the middle of the table, where their purple, yellow, and white faces smiled, a cheerful sign of a mountain April. She stepped back, admiring the flowers. “In lotions, they were used to treat rashes and itching. In poultices, to heal cuts and scrapes. People have forgotten that.”

  “People have forgotten lots of things,” I said. “In Elizabeth’s time, plants were the only drugs. The trick was knowing which ones worked for what. Like scurvy grass.”

  “Which is exactly why Elizabeth’s Herbal was so popular,” Jenna said with satisfaction. “It was meant for apothecaries to share with their customers, and for ordinary people to use at home. Her drawings are easy to match to the plants—almost like photographs, which of course they wouldn’t have for another hundred-plus years. And her descriptions are written in plain English, no Latin, no jargon. No superstitions, either, not like other herbals of her day. Nicholas Culpeper, for instance, loads his with medieval astrology. He wants people to know that scurvy grass is ruled by Jupiter and that violets belong to Venus.” She chuckled. “Elizabeth’s was the first illustrated herbal to include just the facts, as they were understood in her day. Clear. Easy to understand. Almost photographic.”

  Dorothea took the biscuits out of the oven. “Jenna, could you get the coffee, please?”

  As Jenna poured coffee, I thanked her for letting me read her first three chapters. “I admire the way you’ve drawn Elizabeth,” I said. “And your descriptions of eighteenth-century London are incredibly detailed. You must have done tons of research.”

  “The research is the fun part,” Jenna said with a grin. “You’ve seen that old map of London over my desk in the workroom? I use it a lot. And there are wonderful books and websites crammed with period details. But I just wish I knew Elizabeth better.”

  “Really?” I was surprised. “You write as though you know her very well.”

  Jenna shook her head. “For me, her character is full of ambiguities, especially her relationship to that ne’er-do-well husband of hers. There’s no concrete evidence for it, but I believe that he spent her dowry before he racked up that mountain of debt. If she were like us—modern women, I mean—she’d be mad as hell. Wouldn’t you be, if your husband went out and charged the family credit card past the limit—over and over again?”

  Dorothea put the biscuits on the table, with a pot of strawberry jam. “But maybe eighteenth-century women were resigned to their husbands calling the shots,” she said. “Maybe they thought that was the way it was supposed to be.”

  “Entirely possible.” Jenna paused, reflecting. “On the other hand, Elizabeth was a Scotswoman, and they are said to have been more independent than Englishwomen.” She went to the refrigerator for orange juice. “I’m making her up as I go along. It’ll probably take me three or four drafts to get her right.” As she took glasses out of the cupboard, she added, “Actually, I don’t think I’ll ever be sure what ‘right’ is. The men who wrote about her admired her wifely ‘devotion’ to Alexander and seemed to think that she did it all just for him. I think it was a lot more complicated than that. I think she was thoroughly out of patience with him. And out of love, to boot.”

  “I hope there are more chapters to come,” I said.

  She poured the juice. “I’ll email you another batch. But I’m still doing research. I think Elizabeth’s story will mostly stay the way I have it, but I may have to adjust the timeline. For instance, A Curious Herbal was originally published in weekly installments, four pages at a time. When she had produced sixty-three or sixty-four installments, she had it printed as a bound book. That was in 1737. Meanwhile, she kept on printing those installments until she had a total of one hundred and twenty-five.”

  “A persistent lady,” I said admiringly.

  “Absolutely,” Jenna said. “But I haven’t been able to find out exactly when the first installment appeared, which is important to the story.” She put the glasses on the table. “And I don’t know when she was able to bail Alexander out of prison. Even though he didn’t deserve it,” she added under her breath. She pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “In your view,” Dorothea prompted gently.

  “In my view, definitely,” Jenna replied. “If I’d been Elizabeth, that man could have stayed in Newgate the rest of his natural life.”

  As we dug into our breakfasts, I let Jenna in on my cover story: I was a freelance magazine writer working on an article about Miss Carswell—her gardens, her library, and the foundation she had created to carry on her work. I planned to use the story, with variations, when I talked to people in town. I was hoping to pick up some information that might point me in the direction of the missing Herbal, although I had to admit that it felt like a long shot. Still . . .

  “If you or Dorothea are asked about me,” I added, “please play along.”

  Buttering a biscuit, Dorothea said, “I’m glad you thought of that strategy, China. It will encourage people to talk. And you’ll get a chance to hear different sides of Sunny’s story. Some people liked her, others thought she was a tyrant—or a little bit nuts.”

  I looked down at my jeans. “I’ll be going down to Bethany later this morning. Do I need to change into something dressier?” I glanced at Dorothea, who looked like a proper librarian in a silky white blouse, caramel-colored cardigan, and dark brown tweed skirt. “Silly me. I actually own a skirt, but I just didn’t think of bringing it.”

  Jenna laughed. “Writers like to be casual. And Bethany is a down-home town. You’ll fit in perfectly.”

  Breakfast over, Dorothea and Jenna took me to the library and showed me the glass display case, now empty, where Elizabeth’s Herbal had been kept.

  Apologetically, Dorothea said, “I know it’s not much of a lock. I had suggested to the board that we get a proper display case with a real lock. Now, of course . . .” She let her voice trail off.

  “Like locking the barn after the horse is stolen,” Jenna said dryly.

  “And where is the
key?” I asked.

  “Right here, on a hook.” Dorothea took it out from under a nearby shelf. “I suppose I should have hidden it. As you can see, the lock isn’t jimmied. Whoever did this had to have known where to find the key.”

  “Hiding it wouldn’t have helped,” I said. “That’s a very simple lock. It can probably be opened with a paper clip.” I noticed traces of fingerprint powder on the lock and the glass. “Looks like your sheriff dusted the box for prints. Did he say whether he came up with anything?”

  “He found mine,” Dorothea said with a sigh. “And Jenna’s too—but mine were on top of hers because I put the book away on that Friday afternoon.” She shook her head. “I imagine that’s one of the reasons he suspects me.”

  “And me, too,” Jenna put in quickly. “He suspects both of us.”

  “He even asked us both the same questions,” Dorothea said, now sounding offended. “He wanted to know where I would try to sell it, if I had taken it.”

  “And he asked me to show him how the plates had been cut out of the other books and where I would unload them, if I’d done it.” Jenna shifted uncomfortably. “He didn’t come right out and accuse either one of us, but I’m sure he was thinking that we—Dorothea and I—might have teamed up to loot the library.”

  I looked from one to the other, wishing they could see this as the sheriff must have seen it. But of course they couldn’t. Nobody could blame them for feeling nervous and uneasy about being accused, even if the accusation hadn’t resulted in a criminal charge—yet.

  And looking at it from the sheriff’s point of view, I had to admit that this had all the earmarks of an inside job. A clumsy one, at that, marking the two of them as prime suspects. And what was that sheriff likely to think if he found out that Dorothea had called me in as an investigator? It now occurred to me that he might think I was here to divert his attention—and maybe even that I was complicit in Dorothea and Jenna’s suspected theft. I was beginning to feel apprehensive. Why hadn’t I thought of this before I agreed to come?

  “I’m sure he’s only trying to be thorough,” I said, pushing my uneasiness away. “What about the door to this room? Was it locked?”

  Dorothea shook her head. “The outer doors have locks, but not the interior doors. We’re so far away from civilization that it never seemed to be an issue—not for Miss Carswell and not for us. Until this happened.” She frowned at the case as though it were at fault.

  I thought of something else. “Has the house been searched? Maybe somebody took the Herbal out of the case and put it in another room.” I couldn’t think why a person might do this, but I supposed it was possible. “Have you looked?”

  Dorothea sighed. “That’s the first thing we thought of, actually. All of us searched—Jenna and Rose and Joe and I. And after the sheriff arrived, he had the house searched, too.” She chuckled wryly. “While they were at it, they looked for the secret room, but they didn’t find it either.”

  “There really is such a thing?” The only secret rooms I have ever encountered are fictional, like the one hidden behind the fireplace mantel in Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase. They add a nice twist to a mystery, but in real life, they must be few and far between.

  “Rose swears there is,” Dorothea said, “and Jenna thinks so. But I find it a bit Nancy Drew-ish. Don’t you?”

  “I find it . . . interesting,” I said. “You discovered some other things missing, didn’t you?”

  “Too many,” she said with a sigh. “Miss Carswell had one of Redouté’s volumes of Lilies. Eight plates are gone from that book. And John Forbes Royle’s rare 1839 book on the botany of the Himalayas—ten hand-colored plates are missing from that one. There are two or three others, including some valuable colored prints of fungi by Beatrix Potter—you know, the Peter Rabbit lady. Of course, we don’t know when the plates disappeared. They might have been missing when Miss Carswell acquired the books.”

  “The value of those items?”

  “Gosh, I don’t know.” She chewed on her lower lip. “Original prints from the Lilies are going for anything from a thousand to six thousand. And Christie’s sold a copy of Royle’s book last year for nearly seven thousand dollars, so I’m sure the individual plates are quite valuable.” She did a quick mental calculation. “Somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy or eighty thousand, I would guess.”

  Which put the value of the theft—including the Herbal—at nearly two hundred thousand. I was remembering that under the federal Theft of Major Artwork Act, the theft of a cultural item stolen from a museum and more than one hundred years old or worth more than $100,000 was a felony, punishable by a hefty fine and up to ten years in prison. I’d have to look up the act’s definition of “museum” to be sure that Hemlock House qualified, but I thought it did. The Herbal was certainly old enough and valuable enough to qualify.

  What’s more, it wasn’t the local gendarmerie that had primary jurisdiction under the statute. It was the FBI. One of the things I might do here—maybe the only thing I could realistically do—was to make sure that this theft was properly reported. Which meant convincing Mrs. Cousins and the board to do the right thing, and if they refused, finding a way to work around them. If the FBI got involved, their art crime team might have a real chance of finding the thief. And A Curious Herbal might find its way back to Hemlock House.

  “Of course we’re still looking for other missing plates.” Dorothea’s frown deepened into a scowl. “The thief must have had a busy day of it. But since Miss Carswell didn’t leave an inventory or even a shelf list, we have no way of knowing what should be here.”

  A busy day of it. There was another explanation, of course. “Have you ever thought,” I asked, “that the missing Herbal might just be the latest in an ongoing series of thefts?”

  Jenna seemed startled. “You’re suggesting that this . . . this stealing has been going on for some time?”

  “Well, think about it. Even when Miss Carswell was alive, there doesn’t seem to have been much attention to security. There may have been even less after she died. There was someone else for a while—”

  “Margaret Anderson,” Jenna said. “Miss Carswell’s friend. For three or four months.”

  I nodded. “And then you two came. But if someone was stealing from these shelves, you wouldn’t have known it unless you happened to see them or some evidence that they’d been here. Or until they took something that was in frequent use. Something you noticed.”

  “I’m afraid you may be right,” Dorothea said grimly. “We realized that the Herbal was gone because Jenna was working on it. The pages cut from the other books—that might have been done at any time. Weeks ago. Months ago.” She blew out her breath in sudden despair. “He could have stolen hundreds of items.”

  “Or she,” I said. “There’s no reason a woman can’t have done this.”

  Jenna stared at me. “Margaret? Are you thinking of Margaret?”

  I nodded. So far, book theft has generally been a man’s game, but there’s no reason that this kind of thievery can’t be an equal opportunity employment. “Do you have the books you identified as missing some plates?”

  “They’re on a shelf in the workroom,” Dorothea said. She glanced at Jenna. “But maybe we’d better find a place to lock them up. Securely.”

  “That would be a good idea.” Fingerprints, maybe? I pulled out my cell and checked the time. “I’d like to talk with Rose before I drive down to Bethany. It would probably be better if you and Jenna weren’t there. Okay?”

  “Fine with me,” Dorothea said. She hesitated. “I have to go to town myself, to pick up some groceries.” She turned to Jenna. “I forgot to tell you—Joe got the minivan running yesterday. He says it still needs work, but it’s drivable.” To me, she added, “I’d offer you a ride, China, but I have to make a quick trip, and you’ll probably want to linger. We’d better take separate vehicles.
”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I’m planning to talk to Carole Humphreys and Margaret Anderson. And there’s no telling who else I’ll run into.”

  I was saying a true thing, although I didn’t know it. I couldn’t have predicted just who I would run into—or where it would lead.

  • • •

  Rose Mullins was slow to open up, which I thought might be due to a natural suspicion of outsiders who came into her mountains. But as we settled down at the kitchen table over a cup of tea and a toasted biscuit with jam, my questions were gentle and nonthreatening. It wasn’t long before the words were flowing easily.

  The gist of Rose’s story was that she and her husband had lived at Hemlock House since Miss Carswell’s daddy was alive. When he passed, Miss Carswell kept them on, along with most of the others—a cook and a couple of maids and kitchen helpers indoors, as well as an outdoor staff of five. Now, she and Joe lived in the gatehouse, not the main house. And there was just Joe outdoors, doing his best to keep the roof and the old well pump repaired and the trees trimmed and the driveway and the lane plowed in the winter. They hired a few local people to spruce things up when the gardens were about to be opened. And now, indoors, there was just herself, Rose.

  Yes, she remembered the names of the folks who had worked for Miss Carswell, at least the ones that had been here when Miss Carswell died. She spelled them out for me, all local folk, not hard to track them down. And some of them might tell me stories about Miss Carswell that I could use in my magazine article.

  No, she and Joe had never had any children, although Joe’s nephew Carter—a real smart boy, loved to read books—always came up from Charlotte every so often. Miss Carswell had paid Carter to unload book boxes for her and Joe paid him to help build shelves, because every time a box of books came in, Miss Carswell needed more shelves, which is how all those rooms got filled up with books. Yes, Carter still visited. In fact, he’d spent Christmas with them. But he was in college now at Appalachian State, over at Boone, and busy with girls and books and studies and such like.