Time Well Spent as a Ghost

Chapter 13

That evening, I drove to The United Church of Christ and was welcomed into the rectory by the young priest who had talked with Mrs. Biddle that afternoon. With an unmistakable note of pride in his voice he explained that this parish is the oldest in the county, dating back to the sixteenth century, and although the building itself had been rebuilt several times due to fires and weather damage, the records of its parishioners and a large collection of family bibles had been carefully preserved. I looked around again and observed remnants of the stoic, traditional past being surrounded on all sides by modern technology.

I had been able to scan several pages from the Crickler bible onto my laptop. Unfortunately, the only thing I found, besides the drawing of a daisy, was that after the July 28 fire, it wasn't just the women left to manage the farm. There were birth and death records of two sons-in-law and their wives and children as well. That started me thinking about how full the house must have been. They would have shared rooms with each other growing up, and then in later years as they married they would have to swap around so that spouses had their own space together. So, the large room Cody is in probably wouldn't have been a nursery back then.

I walked around the upstairs and tried to envision how it could accommodate three generations of a family comfortably. Probably, there would've been a crib in the parent's room for a newborn and then a smaller room for young kids to share until they were old enough to be moved in with older brothers or sisters. Besides the large room Cody was in, the other bedrooms were roughly the same size. The upstairs bathroom, though, was actually quite large and could have been a small bedroom. It was positioned equidistant from both ends of the house, ironically convenient for either a nursery or a bathroom.

I started in Cody's room. We'd put him in the room at the top of the stairs, the first door on the left. It was the largest and had bright, airy windows and light blue wallpaper, and had seemed to be the natural choice for a child's room. I stood in the center of the room trying to discern what parts of the floor, walls, and ceiling were new and what had remained unchanged from the time the Crickler family had lived there. As I looked carefully at the woodwork around the closet door I found something unusual, a clue that could very well be a connection to the drawing next to Benjamin's name in the Crickler family bible. The woodwork had been primed and painted a clean antique white before we moved in, so the tiny carving in the upper left-hand corner of the closet door was practically unnoticeable. This had to be significant because it was so out of place. It was clearly the same figure, though, a daisy flower with a smaller bud connected to it's stem. Unlike the drawing from the Bible, the bottom of the stem on the carving had a small arrow pointing to the right. I opened the closet door and pushed the clothing aside, but the walls were painted the same antique white as the door frame. I turned on my flashlight and ran my hand along the paint but there were no markings of any kind, or if there were they'd been covered up long ago. There was no access to the attic and nothing unusual about the plank floors. I wasn't even sure what I was supposed to be looking for.

Next, the bathroom, the room in any house that usually gets renovated the most. Panels of sheetrock had been installed over the original plaster walls in this room, and they'd probably been painted over a few times. The flooring was practical linoleum and the bathroom fixtures had a brushed nickel finish that looked both old fashioned and updated at the same time. The woodwork had all been darkened with stain and sealed with a high gloss varnish. Then I found it. Another one. On the lower half of the linen closet door frame was a carving of a small daisy, and below that, hash lines with a number engraved next to each one. A child's height chart maybe? Benjamin's? Crouching down I could see the highest line had the number five carved next to it. According to the family bible, and his grave stone, he'd been five years and ten months old when he died.

The arrow at the base of the stem pointed to the right again. I stacked the towels on the sink behind me and removed each shelf from the one-inch strip of wood they were propped on. The strips of wood nailed into the drywall were easy enough to pry off. I carefully punctured the dry wall and started removing large chunks, placing them in the bath tub. I'd started with the wall on the left and immediately found what I think I was supposed to be looking for. I had no idea what it meant but I ran downstairs for my sketch book.