Chapter 2 Splintered Mahogany and the Carriage House Corpse
?
The problem with secret compartments in nineteenth-century furniture is that cabinetmakers possessed an irritatingly high opinion of their own cleverness.
"Try pushing the little wooden pinecone on the left fluting," Birdie suggested, peering over my shoulder while balancing a powdered lemon bar on the corner of her aluminum clipboard. "Or maybe twist the carved acorn. In the gothic romances I read, it’s always an acorn."
"This is early American Moravian craftsmanship, Birdie, not a haunted manor in Yorkshire," I said, kneeling on the threadbare Persian runner before the cherrywood secretary. "Moravians valued order, piety, and flawless joinery. They didn’t install booby traps with carved acorns."
"Tell that to the appraiser who just threatened to have your business drawn and quartered," Birdie countered, licking powdered sugar from her thumb. "The man had murder in his eyes, Maggie. Or at least severe, litigation-grade dyspepsia."
I ran my fingertips along the lower rail of the central document cabinet, searching for the telltale hairline gap of a hidden spring. The cherrywood was cool, smooth as pulled taffy, and redolent of the beeswax and turpentine Eleanor Vance had rubbed into it decades ago.
"There," I whispered.
Tucked beneath the interior plinth was a tiny rectangular release catch, barely thicker than a wooden toothpick. I pressed upward with the tip of my brass pocket ruler.
A soft, mechanical *snick* echoed inside the desk.
The entire decorative pilaster shifted outward a quarter of an inch.
Behind it, engineered to slide out like a miniature jewel drawer, was a hollow cavity roughly nine inches wide and twelve inches deep—the classic resting place for family land patents, emergency gold coins, or scandalous correspondence.
Except it wasn't resting quietly.
"Good grief," Birdie murmured, leaning down so close her oversized silver hoop earrings brushed my ear. "Looks like someone took an oyster knife to it."
Fresh, jagged gouges scarred the pale tulip poplar interior of the secret slide.
The yellow wood beneath the aged patina was exposed in raw, pale splinters, unmistakably recent.
A few flakes of dried, lavender-colored sealing wax lay scattered across the bottom like crushed lilac petals, alongside the distinct rectangular indentation of a heavy, leather-bound volume that had rested in that velvet-lined recess for perhaps a century.
I leaned in, catching a faint, lingering aroma beneath the cedar and dust: English lavender wax and a sharp hint of expensive sandalwood cologne.
"Julian Croft," I said grimly, pointing to the lavender wax. "He wears that obnoxious bespoke cologne. You could smell it from six feet away when he sneered at us."
"So while we were downstairs politely directing the moving crew away from the heirloom bone china, Lord Fauntleroy was up here jimmying Eleanor’s secret drawer?" Birdie’s eyes narrowed behind her cat-eye frames. "What was in there?"
"Judging by the wax and the catalog notes Eleanor’s lawyer gave us, the Vance family journal.
The 1845 ledger." I stood up, my knees offering a dry, fifty-two-year-old pop of protest. "Eleanor told her attorney three years ago that the founding deed of the Blackwood valley timber rights was sewn into the binding of that book. If Croft found it, he didn’t just appraise it—he stole it. "
"Then why did he head out to the carriage house looking like a wet hornet?" Birdie asked reasonably. "If I had just swiped a priceless historical document, I’d be in my leased Audi burning rubber down Highway 19 back to Atlanta, not rummaging through old harness straps in an unheated barn."
"Unless he didn't find the whole thing," I murmured, staring at the empty wooden pocket. "Or unless someone beat him to it."
Buster chose that exact moment to trot into the sitting room, carrying an antique embroidered footstool cushion between his jaws. He deposited it at my feet with an expectant whuff, tail wagging like a metronome set to presto.
"No, Buster," I said, trading the cushion for a liver snap from my apron pocket. "We do not sell needlepoint that has been thoroughly slobbered upon. Go lie on the braided rug."
Buster accepted the liver snap with gentlemanly restraint, crunched it once, and collapsed onto the floorboards with a heavy canine sigh that implied he was doing the heavy lifting for the entire operation.
For the next four hours, Birdie and I immersed ourselves in the mundane, comforting rhythm of estate cataloging.
There is a strange, meditative peace to cataloging a dead stranger's life.
You learn the intimate contours of their days: that Eleanor Vance preferred peppermint lozenges, kept every single receipt from the Black Walnut Cove general store dating back to 1964, and possessed an inexplicable, terrifying collection of seventy-eight ceramic owls with rhinestone eyes.
"Lot 114," Birdie called out from the hallway linen press, holding up a quilt with dramatic flair. "Double wedding ring, feed-sack cotton, circa 1935. Hand-quilted by someone who clearly had strong feelings about precision and probably resented her mother-in-law."
"Condition?" I asked, typing the entry into my tablet.
"Immaculate. Not a moth bite on it. We can easily get three-fifty from the folk art collectors in Highlands." Birdie folded the quilt with practiced efficiency. "What about those horrific ceramic owls?"
"Bundle them as a single lot for twenty bucks," I replied. "Call them 'eclectic mid-century kitsch.' Some hipster from West Asheville will buy the lot to display ironically on their open shelving."
"You are an evil genius, Maggie Callahan."
By two-thirty, the light filtering through the leaded-glass windows had taken on the bruised, smoky tint of late autumn in the mountains.
A dense Blue Ridge fog had begun rolling down from the ridge, curling around the mossy trunks of the black walnut trees and erasing the peaks in a blanket of damp white wool.
The temperature inside the drafty stone manor dropped ten degrees in half an hour.
I zipped my fleece vest up to my chin and checked the brass carriage clock on the mantel.
"It’s almost three," I said, slipping the ring of heavy iron skeleton keys off my belt. "Luke said he’d meet us at the carriage house to help stage the wrought-iron patio sets and the carriage lamps. Have you seen Croft come back inside?"
Birdie shook her head, adjusting her turquoise wrap. "Not a peep. Which suits me down to the ground. If that man never darkens my doorway again, it’ll be twenty minutes too soon."
"I’d better head down there before Luke starts hauling those iron settees by himself. He threw his back out doing that two summers ago, and I am not having our best salvage carpenter out of commission during peak estate season."
"Oh yes, purely a business consideration," Birdie teased with a theatrical flutter of her eyelashes. "Nothing to do with the fact that Luke Sterling looks like a lumberjack poet who chops his own firewood and smells of cedar."
"Birdie, hush." I pulled on my leather work gloves. "Stay here and finish tagging the china in the dining room. Buster, stay with Aunt Birdie."
Buster raised one eyelid, evaluated the prospect of following me into the cold fog versus staying near the dining room where Birdie occasionally dropped bits of scone, and promptly went back to sleep.
"Traitor," I told the dog, and let myself out through the side terrace doors.
Outside, the mountain air hit me like a slap of ice water.
The fog had settled thick and heavy over the grounds, swallowing the silhouettes of the boxwood hedges and transforming the sprawling lawn of Blackwood Manor into a ghostly, silent sea.
The only sound was the crunch of wet gravel beneath my boots and the distant, lonely caw of a crow high in the timberline.
The carriage house sat roughly two hundred yards behind the main residence, nestled at the edge of the dense rhododendron thicket where the mountain began its steep ascent toward Vance Ridge.
Built of river rock and rough-hewn chestnut timbers in the 1890s, it had once housed Eleanor’s grandfather’s horse-drawn carriages and, later, a succession of vintage motorcars that had long since been sold off.
As I approached, I noticed that the double sliding barn doors were cracked open about a foot.
A chill that had nothing to do with the October wind prickled the back of my neck.
"Luke?" I called out, stopping on the flagstone path. "You in there?"
No answer. Only the dripping of condensation from the mossy eaves onto the gravel.
I frowned, glancing at the muddy turnaround. Luke’s battered blue Ford F-250 wasn’t parked by the loading ramp. That was strange; Luke was mountain punctual, which meant he usually arrived fifteen minutes before he said he would, thermos of black coffee already in hand.
Julian Croft’s rented silver sedan, however, was parked crookedly near the carriage doors, the driver’s side door closed but unlatched.
"Mr. Croft?" I called, stepping up to the wide wooden threshold. "Callahan & Company is closing up the outbuildings for the afternoon. We need to lock the inventory."
Still, silence.
I pushed the heavy sliding door further along its iron track. The rollers squealed in protest, a harsh, grating screech that sliced through the damp quiet of the afternoon.
Inside, the carriage house smelled overwhelmingly of damp earth, motor oil, dry-rotted hay, and something sharp and metallic that tasted faintly of copper on the tongue.
Pale gray light spilled through the grime-encrusted clerestory windows high above, illuminating thick swirling dust motes and towering stacks of vintage crates, Victorian wicker trunks, and cast-iron harness hooks.
The central aisle was in total chaos.
Cardboard boxes had been slashed open, their excelsior packing material shredded and strewn across the dirt floor like pale straw. An early twentieth-century oak filing cabinet stood with all four drawers yanked open, yellowed land surveys and tax receipts fluttering in the draft.
"What on earth..." I muttered, stepping cautiously inside. "Mr. Croft?"
My boot struck something hard and hollow.
I looked down. Lying in the dirt was an antique magnifying loupe with a cracked glass lens. Beside it lay Julian Croft’s expensive Italian leather folio, its zipper torn open and its appraisal forms scattered like autumn leaves.
My heart gave a hard, erratic thud against my ribs.
I rounded the corner of a towering, black-lacquered leather carriage seat that had been unbolted from its frame and tossed violently onto its side.
There, crumpled between the overturned seat and a stack of antique iron wagon wheel rims, lay Julian Croft.
He was lying face down on the packed dirt floor, his immaculate camel-hair blazer covered in gray dust and cobwebs. One arm was flung awkwardly outward, his fingers curled into the soil as if he had tried to claw his way toward the door.
And resting on the floor just inches from his head was a heavy, blackened 1880s brass beam scale—the kind Eleanor Vance’s family had once used to weigh tobacco and grain. The thick, solid-brass counterbalance ball at the end of the arm was dark, sticky, and wet.
"Julian?" My voice came out as a strangled croak.
I dropped to my knees beside him, my gloved hands shaking violently. "Mr. Croft? Can you hear me?"
I pulled off my right glove with my teeth and pressed two trembling fingers against the side of his neck, beneath the collar of his silk turtleneck.
His skin was already cooling, clammy and waxy beneath my fingertips.
There was no pulse. Not even the faintest flutter.
A cold wave of nausea rushed up my throat. Julian Croft was dead. The arrogant, sharp-tongued man who had been sneering at my apron and threatening my livelihood five hours ago was gone, his skull fractured by a blunt instrument of solid brass.
And then, through the paralyzing terror that gripped the carriage house, I heard it.
Outside on the wet gravel, muffled by the creeping mountain fog, came the steady, deliberate crunch of approaching footsteps.