Daughter of Ashes

SEVEN

‘Delicta maiorum immeritus lues’ – Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers.

Horace, Odes, III, 6

When she called a few days later, I agreed to meet Fran at the High Spot, where we ordered coffee in paper cups and carried them with us to the courthouse. Before making any commitment, I wanted to check out the situation with the records in the basement personally.

The Tilghman County Courthouse dominated the town, sitting like a Grand Dame in the center of the town square. Reminiscent of a Doric temple, it was constructed in the Greek revival style so popular in the first half of the nineteenth century. Four enormous columns marched across its facade, supporting a triangular pediment on which Lady Justice stood, holding the scales of justice in one hand. Lady Justice was blindfolded, perhaps so that she wouldn’t be offended by the ornate fountain her Victorian successors had installed on the sidewalk in front of her, overflowing with carved marble fruit, fish, game and other bounty of the Bay. The whole edifice was topped off, like a candle on a cake, by a clocktower with a gold-plated N-S-E-W weathervane. As we walked up the steps, the tower clock was striking nine.

The day was already warm, so the air conditioning hit us like a blast of arctic wind.

‘Morning, Sam,’ Fran greeted the uniformed guard, then plopped an oversized handbag down on the table in front of him before easing through the metal detector still carrying her coffee. With a nod to the guard, I followed suit, waiting with Fran on the other side of the security barrier while Sam pawed through the contents of my handbag. I couldn’t imagine what kind of trouble they’d be expecting from two mild-mannered senior citizens – dressed as we were in T-shirts and jeans – but in this post 9/11 world you never knew. It paid to be careful.

‘Kim’s office is down the hall and to the right,’ Fran told me once Sam indicated we were free to go.

Although the courthouse was not particularly large, our footsteps echoed along the marble corridor. We passed the courtroom on our left and a library on our right, both with double, elaborately carved wooden doors.

Kimberly Marquis’s office adjoined the library. Behind a door with a window labeled County Clerk in gold capital letters we found her sitting at her desk, an impressive affair of solid oak. She rose immediately when we entered. ‘Fran.’ She smiled.

‘This is the woman I’ve been telling you about, Kim. Hannah used to work for me in Washington, D.C. She and her husband have just bought the old Hazlett place.’

‘So I heard. I don’t usually dress like this for the office,’ Kim explained with a grin, indicating the T-shirt, jeans and jogging shoes she wore. ‘But court isn’t in session, and since we’ll be mucking around in the basement, I thought I’d better come prepared to get grubby.’

She retrieved a small ring of keys from the top drawer of the desk and led us back out into the hallway. ‘We have coffee here,’ she said with a grin, indicating the carryout cups we carried. ‘For future reference.’

Our first stop was a room labeled Staff Only. Inside were three bistro-style table and chair sets, a full-size refrigerator and a microwave. Two well-worn leather armchairs were angled into an alcove, both bathed in sunlight streaming in from lead-latticed casement windows. Kim punched a series of buttons on a state-of-the-art hot beverage machine which began to gurgle and hiss, eventually producing a puff of steam and a perfectly brewed cup of herbal tea. We sat at one of the tables discussing our plan of attack, then tossed our used cups into the trash.

Kim jangled the keys and asked, ‘Ready?’

‘I feel like we’re off on a secret mission,’ I said as Kim led us into the hallway. ‘Perhaps we should synchronize our watches?’

Kim turned to face me and chuckled. ‘You think you’re joking, but when you see what’s down in the basement you may be sorry you volunteered.’ She waggled her eyebrows. ‘Remember, if you are captured or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.’

Just past the restrooms, Kim paused at an unmarked door, unlocked it with one of the keys and motioned us through.

From a postage stamp landing a narrow stone staircase descended. Although she had flipped a switch at the head of the stairs, the staircase remained dark. Kim swore softly, then started down. ‘Where is Frau Blucher and her candelabra when you need her?’ she said.

‘Frau Blucher!’ I hooted, then whinnied like a horse.

Behind me, Fran mumbled, ‘I don’t get it.’

‘It’s from a movie,’ I explained while gripping the railing and trying not to stumble. ‘Young Frankenstein. It’s hysterical.’

‘Oh,’ she said, not sounding the least bit amused.

The further down the staircase we went, the cooler, damper and mustier the air became. At the foot of the stairs the room opened out, but it was hard to see what it contained as the only natural light came from narrow windows cut, slit-like, into the stone walls near the ceiling.

Kim felt around on the wall like a blind man, muttering about another switch. After a moment, two unshaded bulbs screwed into sockets in the ceiling sprang half-heartedly to life, only marginally improving the visibility. ‘Sorry,’ she said, squinting at us in the semi-darkness.

‘Can’t the town afford one-hundred-watt bulbs?’ I asked as I strained to see something – anything – in the shadowy corners.

‘You’d think,’ Kim replied. ‘Sadly, I brought these bulbs in myself.’ She leaned closer to me. ‘Hundred-watters, too.’

As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I noticed that the stone walls had once been whitewashed but were now mottled, shedding paint like skin that’s been badly sunburnt. A row of steel shelving ranged along one wall. On closer inspection, I found they were covered with artifacts – pottery shards, glass bottles, coins, rough-cut nails – likely from an historical dig. A stack of poster boards leaned against the wall nearby. Stick-on letters, some of them peeling off, spelled out TOB CCO HO SHEAD A D PRISE. A shelf opposite held economy-sized packages of paper towels and toilet paper, and several boxes of heavy duty lawn and leaf bags. ‘The storeroom’s over here,’ Kim said, making a hard right turn around a tower of nested trash cans.

‘When I first came down here,’ she explained, ‘I couldn’t even get the door to the storeroom open. Had to get the custodian to remove the hinges.’

The door looked solid. Six wooden panels secured with an impressive padlock. Kim opened the lock with a key, hooked the hasp of the padlock onto a convenient nail then yanked the door open. ‘The custodian cleaned up the hinges, oiled ’em and so on, but they’re still a bit stiff.’

As the door swung open, I was hit by an unmistakable smell. Mold.

Like a mother protecting her child, Fran’s arm shot out, preventing me from entering the room. ‘Wait!’ She delved into her handbag and came up with a small box of latex-free vinyl gloves and a Ziploc bag containing surgical face masks. ‘Put these on,’ she instructed. ‘Kim, you, too.’

‘Where…?’ I began, accepting the mask. I positioned it over my nose and mouth and looped the strings over my ears.

‘Walgreens,’ she said, offering me the box of gloves.

Over Fran’s shoulder, Kim made a face but accepted the mask and gloves, as I did, with a tolerant grin.

We suited up and entered the room.

Just inside the door, Fran stopped so suddenly that I barged into her. I immediately saw why. The floor was littered with file folders, the papers they had once contained scattered over the floor. Boxes that had been stacked five high in one corner had collapsed, spilling their contents everywhere.

‘Is there no humidity control?’ I asked.

‘None,’ Kim admitted, sounding sheepish.

‘Jeesh!’ I said. ‘What moron thought it was a good idea to store documents in here?’ I stepped gingerly around a Seagrams 7 carton so damp that mold grew on it like a garden, fuzzy tendrils reaching out, swaying in the air as I passed. I lifted a corner of it gently with the toe of my shoe. ‘This box is from a liquor store. Haven’t they heard of archival boxes?’

‘Sad, isn’t it?’ Fran commented.

Kim pointed. ‘Over there. That’s the worst of it.’

Against the far wall, under a run of various-sized galvanized pipes, once-handsome wooden shelves sagged under the weight of several dozen leather-bound ledgers, quietly rotting.

‘Oh, no,’ I groaned.

‘That’s where the air conditioning leaked,’ she said. ‘The stuff over on this side isn’t so bad.’

I climbed over two broken desk chairs and circumnavigated a teetering pile of National Geographics in order to take a closer look. The volumes were in no particular order but the spines that remained were inscribed lien records and chattel mortgages. There was a book bound in red with no writing on the spine and several cloth-bound cross indexes of land transactions. One book of liens, I noticed, was shelved upside down.

‘They’ve shoved the books right up against the damp stone,’ I said in disbelief. ‘Lord, what a mess.’

I touched one of the ledgers, saddened that its once elegant leather binding had been reduced to red dust. ‘May I?’

Kim nodded. ‘Of course. Hard to see how you could mess it up any more than it already is.’

Without touching what little remained of the book’s spine, I carefully removed it from the shelf then cast around desperately for a place to lay the heavy volume while I examined it.

‘You see the problem,’ said Fran, scrambling to clear a spot on top of a relatively stable stack of cardboard boxes.

I set the ledger on the spot she had cleared and, as both women watched, opened it to the title page: Tilghman County, Cross Index Land Proceedings.

I turned several pages, stopping about a quarter of the way though. In a neat, perfectly legible hand, some long-ago clerk had written across the page at the head of neat, red-lined columns: Defendant, Nature of Action, Plaintiff, Book and Page. I ran my vinyl-covered fingertips over the rich rag paper, the perceptible ridges of the ink that spelled out the names still as clear and as bold as the day they had been written which was, according to the date at the top of the page, 1852. Most actions, I noticed, were categorized as ‘dower.’

‘I know what dower means,’ I told Kim, ‘but what does it mean in the context of “nature of action?”’

‘Well, back in the day, a widow had almost no rights in the assets of her husband upon his death, especially second wives. The theory was that all property should descend to the children of the deceased, and it was their duty to take care of the widow.’ She laughed. ‘You can imagine how well that worked out. Eventually the laws were changed so that a certain portion of the husband’s estate was supposed to go to the surviving wife, so if she wasn’t happy with the amount left to her in the will, her only recourse was to go to court and claim the statutory share entitled to her by the new dower laws.’

‘So, all these dowers, these widows,’ I said, scanning down a long column of women’s names, ‘were simply trying to keep themselves from being thrown out on the street by their good-for-nothing children or stepchildren.’

Kim laughed into her mask. ‘Exactly.’

‘Does the state of Maryland have copies of these records?’ Fran asked.

Kim shrugged. ‘It’s possible, but nobody knows for sure. My predecessor hasn’t been very cooperative. The only way to find out is to inventory what is here and send the list to the Maryland Archives in Annapolis for comparison.’

‘Even wearing masks and gloves, we can’t work in here,’ I said, stating the obvious.

‘I know,’ Fran said. ‘I’m trying to find a place where we can move the records while they’re being inventoried.’

With some reluctance, I returned the book to its place on the shelf, paused, then thought better of it, moving it back to a relatively dry spot near the door.

‘Has the air in here been tested?’ I asked, my breath hot against the fabric of the mask.

Fran nodded. ‘Awaiting results.’

‘We’re hoping it’s not toxic,’ Kim said.

Molds grow everywhere – I knew that from experience. Open up a petri dish just about anywhere, wait a few seconds, clap the lid back on, store it in a warm place and three to four days later – tah-dah – you’ve got a thriving colony of fungus. It’s what kind of mold you’ve got that matters. ‘Cross our fingers that it’s just aspergillus,’ I told her.

‘Isn’t aspergillus dangerous?’ Kim wanted to know.

‘It could be with prolonged exposure, or for those with compromised immune systems, but otherwise…’

Kim blinked, her green eyes looking enormous over the mask, and I worried for a moment that she might fall into that latter category. ‘In the meantime,’ she asked, sounding a bit desperate, ‘is there anything we can do?’

‘First off, of course, we need to lower the relative humidity in here, get it down to around fifty percent.’ I glanced from wall to wall, silently calculating. ‘A dehumidifier from Sears and Roebuck should take care of it nicely, I think, and they don’t cost more than a couple of hundred dollars. We can set up a window fan near the door to get the air moving.’

Kim frowned. ‘Believe it or not, I don’t have the budget for that.’

‘I have a dehumidifier at home in Annapolis,’ I heard myself volunteer. ‘I’ll be happy to loan it to you, at least until we get this situation under control.’

‘And I can round up a fan,’ Fran added.

‘That’s super, ladies, but what do we do with all the moldy books?’

Fran ran her gloved fingers over a shelf, studied the results and frowned. ‘The experts would use a HEPA vacuum system with filters, but I think we can take care of most of the mold by wiping the books down with denatured alcohol.’

‘Aseptrol would be good,’ I said, following behind Fran as she perused the shelves nearest the door. Boats were mildew magnets. Drawing on my experience helping Connie and Dennis put their sailboat up for the winter, I added, ‘Aseptrol can be bought at any boating supply store, as well as desiccant and mildew control bags. Once we get the dehumidifier going, we can scatter desiccant around to soak up the excess moisture.

‘The next step, as I see it, is to get this place cleaned up. First, let’s get rid of the junk,’ I said, indicating the broken furniture. ‘And we should definitely pick up all the loose papers that are lying about and get them into clean boxes.’

Then Kim asked the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question: ‘When can we start?’

In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought. I squared my shoulders and came to a decision. ‘How about now? I seem to remember some empty trash cans out there.’

While Kim retrieved the trash cans and lined them with plastic bags, I started with a pile of magazines. ‘Guns & Ammo?’ I said when she returned, dragging a trash can behind her. I checked the date. ‘From 1964? Seriously?’

Kim set a trash can next to my right elbow. ‘Judge Porter, may his soul rest in peace, used to read them when things got a little slow on the bench, or so legend has it.’

I deep-sixed the Guns & Ammo, followed by National Geographic, Criminal Justice magazine and a single issue of the Georgetown Law journal, its cover stained with coffee rings.

While Fran and Kim occupied themselves by clearing space on the drier shelves near the door for material we already knew we’d want to save, I selected a cardboard box more or less at random, squatted next to it and looked inside. Labeled Detention Center 1966-67, the box contained a hodgepodge of manila file folders, their tabs marked with neatly typed labels, striped in a variety of primary colors. As I leafed through the folders, whatever adhesive had held the labels in place over the years since some long-ago secretary had typed them gave up the good fight and fell to the bottom of the box in a shower of confetti.

I sifted through the contents of the folders, looking for dates. Those at the top contained arrest records dated 1967, as advertised, but near the bottom of the same box I found check stubs from the 1950s and, at the very bottom, a packet of letters tied up with string, the top one postmarked from Seattle in 1934. I sat back on my heels and sighed into my mask. ‘Looks like we won’t be able to trust what’s marked on the outsides of the boxes, ladies. There’s all kinds of non-Detention Center stuff mixed up in here, and only part of it is actually from 1966 or 1967.’ I waved the packet of letters. ‘Who knows what treasures lie inside these envelopes?’

Fran wandered over and held out her hand, so I put the letters into it.

‘Three cents,’ she said, examining the top envelope closely. ‘That’s what it cost to mail a letter back then. Fabulous stamp. Whistler’s Mother. “In memory and in honor of the mothers of America.” Don’t you love it?’

‘Do you suppose the stamps are valuable?’ Kim wanted to know.

‘I doubt it,’ Fran said, ‘but depending upon who the letters are from, and what they’re about, they could be priceless to a family member.’ She handed the packet to Kim. ‘Put these in a safe place until we have time to look at them.’

‘Well, to paraphrase the Cat in the Hat,’ Kim said, tucking the packet of letters under her arm, ‘this mess is so deep and so wide and so tall, we’ll never get through it, there’s no way at all.’

‘One step at a time,’ I reassured her. ‘As for me, I’m starting with the furniture.’