The Journal in the Walls

The county medical examiner was a woman of sixty who drove up from Burlington and spent forty-five minutes in the cellar and came up agreeing with Hatcher: probable accidental fall, injuries consistent with impact from height. She was professional and thorough and she wrote it down and shook Jo's hand and drove back to Burlington.

Jo waited until everyone had left and then went back downstairs.

She was not a detective. She was very clear about this. She was a former pastry chef who had pivoted to food consulting work after the restaurant closed, which had been a perfectly reasonable career decision for six years until the company she'd been consulting for went through a reorganization that eliminated her position. She had no particular skills in investigation. She had skills in observation, mise en place, and the specific patience required to produce food that took twelve hours to make correctly.

She looked at the scene from the top of the ladder.

The ladder was positioned against the right-hand wall. A fall from the top would put you in front of the shelving, not at the far end of the room. She did not move anything. She took photographs with her phone from the ladder's top step, six photos from six angles, noting the distance from the ladder base to where Tom Fielding had been found. Approximately twelve feet.

She went back upstairs and sat at the kitchen table and ate shortbread and looked at the photographs.

Then she got up and started looking through the inn.

Not for evidence — or not consciously. She was ostensibly doing the walk-through she'd meant to do that morning, before the discovery had reorganized her day. She went through the rooms on the first floor, then the second. She photographed ceilings and floors. She opened closets. She opened the built-in cabinet in the upstairs landing and found: extra linens, a flashlight, a box of the same kind of heavy paper flour bags her aunt had kept in the kitchen, and behind the flour bags, wedged against the cabinet's back wall, a notebook.

She pulled it out. It was a Moleskine, the large ruled kind, half-full. The cover was unmarked. The first page had her aunt's name inside — Margot Bellamy — and a date from three years ago.

She sat on the upstairs landing and opened it.

It was not a personal journal. Or it was, but not the kind you kept to record your feelings. It was the kind you kept to record facts.

September 4: R. at the property again, third time this month. Told Diane he was just "looking at the neighborhood." Diane says she doesn't see a problem. I see a problem.

October 12: The thing T. told me about the Grange meeting. That's two sources now. Writing it down.

November 3: Asked H. directly. He denied it. He was very polite when he denied it, which is the part I want to note.

January 17: P. came by the inn. She wasn't asking about the room. She was checking.

The entries continued in this vein — observations, initials, dates, the particular note-keeping of someone building a case she hadn't yet decided to present. Jo read to the last entry, three weeks ago, five days before the attorney's letter arrived.

October 1: Found it. It is exactly where T. said it would be. I have photographed it. If something happens before I can take this to someone I can trust, the photographs are in the brown envelope in the false bottom of the linen chest, spare room, north end. I am not being dramatic. T. agrees this has gone further than either of us expected.

Jo looked up at the landing wall. She looked back at the notebook.

She sat for a moment in the specific stillness of someone who has just understood that the ground has shifted under them.

T. Tom Fielding. Her aunt and the town groundskeeper had been investigating something together. Tom Fielding was now dead in the root cellar. Her aunt had died of natural causes six weeks ago — a heart attack, the attorney's letter had said, sudden onset, nothing suspicious.

She went to the spare room at the north end.

The linen chest was cedar, old and good, the kind that smells like a promise. She lifted the tray of linens and pressed the base and found the panel her aunt had described — wood, hinged, with a simple push latch. Inside: a manila envelope, large, unsealed.

She took it to the kitchen table and opened it on the kitchen table where the light was good.

There were photographs — twelve of them, printed on regular paper, the kind you print at a drugstore. They showed a building she didn't recognize from the road but would learn later was a converted carriage house on the east side of town. The interior of the carriage house, in the photographs, contained things that should not have been in a carriage house: filing cabinets, a large safe, what appeared to be surveying equipment. In one photograph, visible through a gap in the filing cabinets, was the corner of a map. In another, papers spread on a table with specific sections circled in red.

She couldn't read the circled text from the photographs.

But in the last photograph, facing the camera, apparently unaware of being photographed, was a man she recognized.

She had met him that afternoon, in her root cellar.

Sheriff Hatcher.

Jo set the photograph down. She looked at it for a long time. Then she got up, found Margot's recipe card box on the kitchen shelf, and selected a recipe for honey cardamom rolls that required two rises, which meant she had at least three hours of meditative work ahead of her to think.

She set out flour, butter, honey. She bloomed the yeast.

She read the journal again while she worked.

On the fourth page, in an entry from eighteen months ago, was a sentence she had missed the first time through: T. says there's a list. Names and dates. Some of the dates haven't happened yet. He says he's seen it. He says the last name on the list is mine.