Daughter of Ashes

TWENTY-FOUR

‘For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.’

Ecclesiastes, 13

After a three-day sleepover in the bag of rice, Rusty’s iPhone arose, like Lazarus, from the dead.

In the weeks since he’d last turned it on – or I had, rather, as I knelt by his side at the edge of the road – only a handful of people had called. Not surprising, since nearly everyone in town knew Rusty was hospitalized and in a coma.

Since I was ‘just testing’ to make sure the phone was in working order – that’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it – I tapped the photo icon and began to thumb my way through the images in Rusty’s photo gallery. Either Rusty didn’t take a lot of photographs or he downloaded them routinely to his computer at home. There were only thirty in the folder to choose from. Several photographs of a brunette, attractive in an MTV sort of way, wearing a tank top with more than the usual complement of underwear straps showing. A selfie of that same young girl posing with her head on Rusty’s shoulder, in a bar, most likely. The Crusty Crab? I wondered if the girl were the Laurie who had texted Rusty about going to the movies on the night of his accident.

There were ‘before’ photographs of our living and dining room walls, the brickwork on the chimney and closeups of our bathroom plumbing.

I paged on to a photo of our dock taken looking back toward the house, paged forward again and then gasped, instinctively pressing a hand flat against my chest in an effort to control my breathing: Baby Ella.

I flashed back to an image of Rusty kneeling by her mummified body, aiming his iPhone and clicking away. But there were many more photos of the dead infant than I remembered him taking before his father had aimed a discouraging blow to the back of his son’s head. Rusty had managed to photograph the child from every angle, probably when he left the kitchen in order – he claimed! – to check on the grout. The last three pictures were closeups. My heart did a somersault when it occurred to me that Rusty was focusing on the newspaper and not on the mummified baby.

The first closeup was too blurry to read, as was the second. By his third attempt, Rusty had managed to hold the camera steady long enough to focus. From the publication dates printed on the top margins of the newsprint fanned out for his camera, I realized, for the first time, that Baby Ella had been wrapped in three separate issues of the Tilghman Times, layer upon layer.

We had all noticed the issue for August 1951 which had been on top. But when the bundle was photographed from the opposite side, one could see that issues for May and November of 1950 had been used to swaddle the child as well.

Rusty’s next photograph zoomed in on the May 1950 issue. Tucked between the advertisements for local merchants were several columns of public notices. By tilting my head and squinting I could make out the notice for a public hearing in June on a request to change the zoning on a piece of property from residential to commercial. The next photo showed a list of delinquent tax properties. Using my thumb and forefinger, I swiped the photo to enlarge it, wondering if the Hazlett property was listed as delinquent, but unless there was something I didn’t understand about the legalese, it wasn’t. Another photo captured the court proceedings of the previous month, May 1950, much to the embarrassment, I was sure, of the town residents who had been cited for shoplifting, drunk and disorderly conduct, discharging a firearm within the town limits, running a red light or speeding. Had anyone I know been one of them? Again, no names that I recognized.

The final photograph, however, caused me to sit up straight. On May 25, 1950, the Tilghman county clerk had issued marriage licenses to three couples.

Dean Kelchner, 39, to Deborah Dutton, 39.

Joe Jacobs, 22, to Alison Markwood, 21, and… My heart stood still.

Clifton Ames, 18, to Nancy Hazlett, 17.

Math was not my strong suit. My husband had once given me a T-shirt that read: 4 Out Of 3 People Have Trouble With Math. But even I could do the math on this one. Using my fingers, I counted forward. If Nancy Hazlett had been pregnant in May 1950, or gotten pregnant shortly thereafter, her child would have been born in February 1951, making the baby around six months old in August of that year when, according to the medical examiner, Baby Ella had most likely succumbed to polio.

That Clifton J Ames the Second had been the father of Nancy Hazlett’s baby I now had no doubt. Had being in possession of that information almost cost Rusty his life?

It depends, I thought, on what he did with it.

I’d already violated too much of Rusty’s privacy to start feeling guilty. I snooped on, trolling through his text messages, then his email.

It took only a few minutes to find the answer in his outbox. Rusty had forwarded the photograph of the marriage license notice in the newspaper to his mother – Kendall, not Grace. What do you know? he’d written. I’m sure you can put this to good use.

Suddenly the significance of one of the text messages that had popped up on Rusty’s phone at the scene of the accident hit me like a sledgehammer. It was Kendall – ‘Ken’ – who had texted her son, ‘Got it. Stay cool.’

Sadly for Kendall Barfield, staying cool seemed to have proved fatal.

So much for Rusty’s claim that he wasn’t close to his biological mother. He hadn’t wanted Grace to see the contents of his iPhone. This must have been the reason why. Grace, a woman who was deeply involved in charity work and her church would hardly have approved of Rusty’s role in what seemed like a blackmail scheme.

Before I could change my mind, I forwarded copies of Rusty’s photos to my own email account, then erased the evidence of my crime from Randy’s sent file. One thing was certain: I needed to talk to Rusty Heberling – and quick. The question was what, if anything, the young man remembered?