The House That Got a Lump of Coal for Christmas by David Healey

Author:David Healey [Healey, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Intracoastal
Published: 2015-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

• • •

The police car in front of our project house drew a crowd. By the time two more police cars showed up, and then the Maryland State Police Crime Scene Unit, the street was full of curious town residents. As the police did their job, I stepped out on the front porch to talk with some of our neighbors. There was Carl Batzer, who ran the Bohemia Café, and Maggie Delpino, who had an antiques shop called The Magpie. Iver Jones had an antiques shop and Pete Morrison was a painter who specialized in Chesapeake Bay historical scenes.

Several of the faces in the crowd belonged to Cosdens. You could pick them out because they all had a kind of family scowl that only grew more pronounced with age. It was the same fierce expression worn by Captain Ezra Cosden in a photograph that hung at the town museum. I saw old Edith Cosden, tall and lean as a whip, standing next to her daughter, Sarah. It had been Edith who sold the house out of the family when the upkeep and repairs got to be too much. She and Sarah now lived in an apartment in town above one of the shops.

There were a couple of male members of the clan present as well, snowy-haired Francis Cosden and his nephew, Rory Cosden. Early on, Rory had been particularly interested in our project. He had come around the house many times but no matter how friendly I was, he always greeted me with that Cosden scowl. Big and hulking, Rory couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight or so—a young man from my point of view—but he hoarded his smiles as if they were gold.

The truth was that I had tried to reach out to the Cosdens in hopes that they would be as excited about seeing their old family home restored as I was, but they were a sour bunch whose family fortunes had crested decades ago when Captain Cosden was the town’s leading citizen. And yet the Cosdens remained a force to be reckoned with because they were the thread that ran through the fabric of town life: a Cosden sat on the town council, another worked at the post office, several were members of the fire company and a Cosden ran the only gas station and garage for ten miles around. The people who had the studios and shops and restaurants were all newcomers, but old town families like the Cosdens were the ones who kept their cars running and put out the fires.

“Tom, what’s going on?” Pete asked. He must have come right from the studio because his shirt was flecked with paint. “We heard you found a body in there.”

“Somebody from about eighty years ago,” I said. “He was inside a wall.”

Quickly, I summed up the details for Pete and the others, who pressed closer to the porch—all except the Cosdens, who kept their distance. Everyone was asking me questions at once. I was answering them

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