‘Sheriff Hubbard,’ the officer said, removing his broad-brimmed ranger’s hat as he stepped through the front door. ‘But everyone calls me Andy.’
Sheriff Hubbard’s prominent nose descended in a straight line from his backward-sloping forehead. Except for a tidy fringe of hair around his ears, he was completely bald and his reddened scalp spoke more eloquently than words of many off-duty hours spent in the sun. He turned to acknowledge his companion in the gray suit. ‘I’ve asked Doc Greeley to come along, to verify exactly what we have here.’
I directed the two men to the living room. As we stood around in a semi-circle, Doc Greeley hitched up the legs of his trousers and squatted. He withdrew a slim metal object from his inside breast pocket and used it to explore the bundle lying on the hearth before him, gently prodding, pulling aside each delicate layer.
‘It’s a baby, all right,’ the doctor announced after a minute. ‘By the teeth, I’d say six to seven months old.’
‘How did she die?’ I asked.
‘She?’ The doctor looked up, an eyebrow raised.
‘The blanket,’ I said.
‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘Observant.’ He rose to his feet. ‘Hard to say exactly how she died. We’ll have to wait for the medical examiner on that.’ He nodded at Sheriff Hubbard.
Hubbard pulled a cell phone out of his breast pocket and punched in a number. ‘Sylvia? Will you tell Wicks he’s needed at the old Hazlett place?’ He paused and listened. ‘Yeah. Tell him we’ve got a body.’
NINE
‘Tar-baby ain’t sayin’ nuthin’, en Brer Fox, he lay low.’
Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus and his Friends, 1892
It’s astonishing how small a box you need to pack up a baby.
Paul had ordered some hiking boots from L.L. Bean and they had arrived the day before. The box they had come in sat empty and clean on top of the recycling bin, so when the doctor asked me if we had ‘a box of some kind,’ I excused myself to fetch it, then handed it over.
While we watched from the sidelines, like mourners at a funeral, he lined the box with one of our pillowcases fresh from the dryer and laid the precious bundle gently inside. As he secured the lid over the child’s wizened face, he said, ‘I don’t imagine it will get top priority, so it may be a while before we know something.’
‘She ought to have a name,’ I said. ‘It seems wrong to keep calling her “it.”’
Paul’s arm snaked around my shoulder and pulled me close. ‘What about Baby Ella?’ he said.
Doc Greeley raised an eyebrow. ‘Ella?’
‘Short for Cinderella,’ Paul said simply, his face grave. ‘Little girl of the ashes.’
‘Wicks’ turned out to be the local undertaker. He arrived in an unmarked black limousine, gave Sheriff Hubbard some papers to sign, placed the box containing Baby Ella on the floor of the passenger side of the car and drove away.
‘Where’s he taking her?’ Rusty asked as the limousine disappeared around the corner of the cornfield.
‘Baltimore M.E.,’ Hubbard said.
Rusty frowned. ‘But even if the kid was murdered, the person who did it must be, you know, like really old, or dead. So what’s the point?’
I knew that by Maryland law, all unattended deaths within the state had to be reviewed by the Baltimore medical examiner. I wondered if, after all this time, they’d be able to determine a cause of death. And if it turned out that the child had died of natural causes, would the police make any effort to establish who the child had belonged to? Somehow it seemed important to me to find her family.
I thought about all the people who had lived in our house over the past two hundred and thirty-some years. Was the baby Julianna Quinn’s? I had no idea how long Julianna and her late husband had occupied the house, but in a house that dated to the 1750s, except for us they were clearly just the last in a long line of previous owners. I decided to call our realtor, Caitlyn Dymond. Caitlyn, I knew, would have ordered a search to establish a clear chain of title before she sold us the home.
She answered her cell in the middle of her son’s soccer game. ‘The Quinns owned the property for as long as I can remember,’ Caitlyn told me over someone – presumably a parent on the sideline – screaming Pass it! Pass it! Pass it! ‘We have clerks to do the title searches, so I’m not exactly sure how far back they had to go, but it’s dead easy to do, Hannah. All the land records are on file at the county courthouse.’
I was due to work in the courthouse basement the following day, so early the next morning, before donning my mask and plastic gloves, I stopped by Kim’s office. I told her about Baby Ella and, after she had sufficiently recovered, I asked for help in tracing the ownership of our property.
‘We trace deeds back using the liber and folio numbers,’ she informed me. ‘In plain English, that’s the book and page numbers. If you have a copy of your property tax assessment, or the actual deed, the liber and folio numbers will be printed right on it.’ Using a pencil, she jotted something down on an index card and showed it to me: ABC 123 456.
‘The letters are the initials of the clerk.’ She grinned. ‘In recent years, that would be me, KCM. The numbers that follow are the liber and folio numbers.’
‘Ah,’ I said, quickly catching on. ‘Those were the reference numbers we saw recorded in some of the leather-bound index volumes we examined in the basement yesterday.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Hopefully my husband kept a copy of our deed here in Elizabethtown,’ I said. ‘Otherwise…’
Kim held up a hand, cutting me off. ‘Completely unnecessary, Hannah. Welcome to the twenty-first century. All that information is public record, most of it online.’ Kim explained how researchers could type any Maryland street address into the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation Real Property Database and find out all sorts of useful information, like the price someone paid for a piece of property and its current value as well as the liber and folio numbers. ‘Once you have those numbers,’ she continued, ‘you have the magic key. Just go to MDLandRec.net. You use the two numbers to pull up a digital copy of the actual deed.’
‘No way,’ I said, promising myself that I’d never complain again about how Maryland was squandering my tax dollars.
‘We keep microfilm copies here, of course, but the Maryland State Archives houses the originals.’
I perked up at that. Our Prince George Street home in Annapolis was about a mile from the Maryland Hall of Records. I was mentally reviewing the route I’d walk – Prince George to College Avenue to St John Street – when Kim added, ‘And the beauty? You don’t even have to visit the courthouse or the archives to consult the deeds. You can access digital images of them over the Internet from the privacy of home.’
When I explained that we were still waiting for the Comcast cable guys to stop lingering over their coffee at the Hot Spot and show up to install the Internet at Our Song, Kim walked me into the law library and introduced me to one of the courthouse computers. ‘If you’re going to do a lot of searching,’ she said as I sat down in front of the terminal, ‘you’ll want to register with our network and set up a password. That will allow you to save your search results and come back to them later.’
Following Kim’s instructions, I created an account, waited for the confirmation email to show up in my Gmail account, then clicked on the link the archives provided to activate it. ‘Now you’re in business,’ Kim said, patting me lightly on the back.