"I knew it wasn't Peter," Kathy said dreamily.
"Sheer irrational romanticism," her father grumbled.
"Maybe," Mark said. "Maybe the idea came from… somewhere else. Anyhow, once we had decided Peter wasn't the ghost, we had to find another candidate. Mary Jane was a distinct possibility. That's why I was so mad when you didn't buy her letters." He gave Josef a sidelong glance, and added, "The book filled in the missing pieces in Susan's story, and gave us the final clue. Only I was too dumb to see it at first."
"The clue was the fact that Mary Jane was a Confederate spy," Kathy explained. "Remember the reference to Cousin Alex? That was Colonel Alexander. I told you about him-the man who escaped from Fort McHenry and broke his leg when he jumped from the parapet. The book said he was passed on from one Confederate sympathizer to another. One of them was Mary Jane. She had to be careful when she referred to him, in case her letters to Cordelia were intercepted."
"And how do you suppose she got those letters to Richmond?" Mark asked. "Enemy territory, in wartime?"
Josef gave Pat a hunted glance. He was being beaten back on all fronts, but he fought every step of the way
"Okay, I'll buy the spy part. But how you got from that to Mary Jane's illicit passion for her brother
"The letters reeked with it, Dad," Kathy said, in a fair imitation of Mark's most superior tone. "And, like Mark said-"
"As Mark said," her beleaguered father interrupted
"As Mark said, she was always spying on the kids and tattling to their parents. She was the one who caught Susan and Peter-you got that, didn't you?"
"Well, I-"
"Susan said in her diary that someone must have seen them together," Kathy persisted. "And Mary Jane bragged about being the one who saved Peter from the fatal consequences of-"
"All right, all right." Josef put his head in his hands. "I'm dizzy trying to follow your logic. Let's see. Given the fact that Mary Jane was a spy, you leaped to the conclusion that there was a secret room in the house."
"That was really dumb," Mark said. "I should have thought of that much earlier. The houses were twins, weren't they? There was a tunnel in the Bates house-
"But I assumed that was constructed by Mr. Bates, years after the house was built," Pat exclaimed. "It wouldn't follow that there was a matching tunnel-
"Not necessarily, no," Kathy said. "But I was reading a book about old houses, and secret rooms and passeges weren't uncommon in architecture of that period. It was all part of the fake Gothic stuff. There was a place called. Pratt's Castle, near Richmond, built in about 1850, that had a secret spiral staircase and a hidden room where guns and ammunition were stored during the Civil War. And Mary Jane would have to have someplace to hide fugitives, especially with the Bateses so close. Mark is right, we should have figured it out sooner."
This time Josef made no objections. The certainty in Kathy's voice overruled simple logic. Pat knew that he had been convinced, not by the girl's reasoning so much as by his own irrational sense that this theory somehow fit-not the facts of the case, but its atmosphere.
"I'll buy it," Pat said. "But, Mark, how did you know he-his body was still there? You did know, didn't you? You couldn't have identified those poor anonymous bones unless you expected to find them."
"Come to think of it," Josef said, recovering. "They still haven't been officially identified. Have you any solid evidence on that, Mark?"
"It's rather complicated," Mark said patronizingly.
"Translation: he hasn't got any evidence," Josef said, in an audible aside.
"I'll try to simplify it," Mark went on, without appearing to hear the comment. "The fact that Peter Turnbull's body was never found has bugged me all along. Then there was the discrepancy in the stories of how the Turnbulls were killed. One said it was at Gettysburg, the other that it happened during a minor skirmish. So I-I mean, Kathy-got the idea that maybe there was some truth in both stories, but they got garbled, as history often does. We know the Turnbulls were alive in late June of 1863, just before Gettysburg.
"Not all the men who died in the war died in the famous battles. The cavalry especially was running around the countryside all the time. So we thought, suppose Peter was killed in a skirmish after the battle, during the retreat? We looked up Company K, the unit we thought the Turnbulls might have joined. And…" Mark reached for one of the books that always surrounded him, and opened it. "The unit fought at Gettysburg, all right. It also skirmished heavily at Williamsport while covering Lee's retreat. This is Manakee's Marylandin the Civil War. He says: 'For more than a week after Gettysburg, Maryland roads were alive with soldiers, all the way from Washington County to Baltimore and Washington Con-stantly ranging between the two armies were cavalry units of both sides. Often they clashed in small, briefly fought engagements.' " Mark looked up from the book "By July seventh, the Confederate army had reached the area near Hagerstown, but they couldn't cross the river because Union cavalry had destroyed their pontoon bridge, and the river was swollen by heavy rains.
"Now that campaign was Lee's last invasion of (he North. If Peter was killed 'somewhere in Maryland,' it had to be during that period, since we know he was alive in June of 1863. If you consider the retreat part of the Gettysburg campaign, well, you could say he was killed 'at Gettysburg.' "
Mark paused. He looked meaningfully at his mother and then directed his gaze toward the kitchen. She remained oblivious, and with a pained sigh Mark went on.
"This part is-well, I admit it's somewhat hypothetical. But, I mean, like, you have to have a theory so you can search for evidence that will prove or disprove it, right?"
Josef looked as if he were about to expostulate at this peculiar description of the scientific method, but Mark swept on.
"The trooper who told about Peter being shot didn't actually see him fall. Suppose-just suppose-that he wasn't killed. Suppose he was only wounded."
"But he did disappear," Josef argued. "He'd have reported to his unit, or been identified as a prisoner of war, if he had survived."
"Well, we know what happened to him, don't we? I mean, Mr. Friedrichs, all this is Monday-morning quar-terback stuff. I'm just trying to explain how I- we-figured it out in advance.
"I kept thinking about the fact that all this happened in Maryland. Not so far away from here, really. And I thought, suppose it was me. I'd try to make it home if I was hurt." He looked at his mother; and although she knew quite well that Mark was deliberately working on her emotions, her eyes grew moist. "I mean," Mark went on pensively, "care of the wounded in those days was grim, even in regular hospitals, and the Confederates were on the run. They piled wounded men into springless wagons and bumped them along those muddy roads… Maybe, even, Peter was cut off from his men and couldn't get back. So-he started home. He knew about the tunnel, and the secret room, and Mary Jane's work with the spy ring. He'd figure he could get back to his unit via that route, after he had recovered. Can you picture that journey? It must have been terrible for an injured man. But he made it -into the arms of his loving sister… who killed him."
"Wait a minute," said Josef, after he had recovered his breath. "This isn't history, this is straight out of Sophocles or Euripides. How do you know the poor kid didn't simply die of his wounds?"
"He did," Mark said. "I never claimed she actually murdered him. She let him die, when she could have saved him-or at least made a good try at saving him. Oh, for God's sake, it's so obvious! If she didn't have something to hide, why did she brick up the hidden room, with his body still in it? They didn't hang enemy corpses over the city gates, the way they did in the Middle Ages. Peter would have been buried properly, in the family graveyard with his father, and with the conventional religious rites. That sort of thing meant a lot to people back then. It would have meant a lot to Mary Jane. She could have raised a big corny gravestone over him, with some sloppy epitaph on it. Yet she left him on the bed where he died like a-a dead animal. She shoveled the dirt over the trapdoor-it had to be her, there was nobody else to do it-and ordered the slaves to lay the brick floor. Why? Why would anybody do a thing like that, much loss Pe-ter's adoring big sister?"