“This is Helen Carmichael,” a woman’s voice said. “I got your message. Tomorrow works for me. I’ll get there as close to noon as possible and should be out of your way long before five. Thanks.”
The voice sounded much as I remembered it—crisp, businesslike. She sounded like a professor—which she was, though not at UVa. No clue from her voice that she and Michael had once—
“To repeat this message, press one,” the phone company’s recorded voice said. “To save it, press two. To delete it, press three. To send a copy—”
“Save it,” the chief said.
“Yes, sir,” I said, pressing two.
“So what’s in these boxes you were giving her?” he asked.
“Papers,” I said. “Letters. Old newspaper and magazine clippings. Photos. Documents. Most of it from the 1800s and early 1900s. It’s all stuff we found in the house. The previous owners’ heirs didn’t want it, and we had no use for it. We didn’t want to throw it away—not without letting someone more knowledgeable look through it to see if any of it was potentially valuable.”
“Show me,” he said.
“No problem,” I said. I meant it—I felt downright cheerful about the possibility that he’d seize the boxes as evidence and finally get them out of the house. I led him to the front hall and pointed to the twenty-three copier-paper boxes stacked neatly in one corner of the foyer.
“All these?” he said.
I nodded.
“Good Lord,” he said.
He lifted the lid of one box and examined the top few papers. A small bundle of letters tied with a faded ribbon lay on top. A program from the town’s 1871 May Day band concert. A sepia-toned photo of a dozen men in stiff collars who scowled into the cameras as if they really didn’t trust such a newfangled contraption not to explode in their faces. The chief glanced up at me.
“You really think something in one of these boxes was worth killing her over?”
“I don’t even know if anything in any of those boxes was worth the trouble of picking up the boxes and shoving them in a car,” I said. “Certainly no one from the Caerphilly history department thought so, and I warned the woman before she came all the way from Charlottesville that it might just be a pile of useless junk.”
“All the way from the other side of West Virginia, actually.”
“True,” I said. “Not that I knew about West Virginia until last night. I thought it was Charlottesville.”
The chief nodded absently. He stared at the boxes for a few minutes.
“My people are pretty tied up with the search,” he said with a sigh. “The state crime lab’s swamped with all those mallets and hammers.”
“You don’t want to impound the boxes so your people can go through them when they’re finished searching?”
Obviously I didn’t hide my disappointment well enough.
“I think we’ll leave them here for now,” he said. “I don’t want anyone touching them.”
“Right,” I said.
“They’re off-limits.”
“Understood.”
“And I darn well want to see anything you find in them that could have a bearing on this murder!” he barked.
“Anything we find while not touching the off-limits boxes,” I said. “Got it.”
He looked at me over his glasses, shook his head, and returned to the kitchen.
“I’m locking them up!” I said. “So no one will mess with them.”
“Good,” he called back over his shoulder.
Chapter Fourteen
I deduced from the chief’s manner that he didn’t think the twenty-three boxes were of any importance. My first impulse was to sit down and go through every scrap of paper until I could prove him wrong. That impulse lasted about ten seconds.
I liked my second impulse better—to lock them in the shed. In addition to the house and the barn, we still had seven other structures on the property, of various sizes and in various stages of disrepair, any of which would ordinarily qualify for the name shed, but we’d officially bestowed that title on one of the better-preserved outbuildings. It had once housed some kind of livestock, to judge from the small pen outside its door. We’d fitted the shed with a padlock; I’d made decorative but functional grates to secure the windows; and we used it to keep poisonous house and garden chemicals out of the hands of visiting children and Christmas presents away from the prying eyes of visiting relatives. It could keep the boxes secure for now.
I went in search of labor, following the sound of the bells until I located the students in the front yard. They were attempting to teach some dance steps to two of the Shiffleys. All the better.