I Still Dream About You

such a pretty lady a ticket if he didn’t have to.

As they drove away, Brenda looked at Maggie with brand-new admiration. “You’ve got more nerve than God. How did you think up that story?”

“I don’t know, but never mind that; what about the foot?” Maggie asked.

“Forget the foot; we can find the foot in the morning, but… I swear, you deserve an Academy Award for that performance. Honey, Meryl Streep has nothing on you!”

Although she enjoyed the compliment, Maggie figured she had probably offered the officer far more information than she should have. Still, she had seen too many episodes of Cops not to know that if you had something in your car you shouldn’t have, it was best to tell the police before they found it. Of course, she had lied to an officer of the law about it being plastic, but it had kept them out of jail. For the moment, at least.

They managed to get over to the storage bin without another mishap and stashed the skeleton behind a chest of drawers.

After Maggie dropped Brenda off, she couldn’t help but wonder about life. She was certainly not a philosopher by any means, but the fact that the very day she was planning to jump in the river was the exact same day she found out that the house she had loved all of her life was for sale was ironic, to say the least. Of course, finding that skeleton had certainly been a shock. She just hoped that she and Brenda were doing the right thing.

Now, the big question was, who was that dead man and what was he doing in the trunk? Who or what had killed him? And where in the world was his foot? What had they gotten themselves into? She hardly slept all night, worrying about the missing foot. And just when she had been sleeping so well, too.

Another Big Puzzle

Thursday, November 6, 2008

THE NEXT MORNING, MAGGIE WAS BACK UP AT CRESTVIEW BY SEVEN A.M., looking for the foot, and the first place she looked was the bottom of the trunk, where she found a shoe, but no foot. Brenda arrived by a quarter to eight, and together they retraced their steps from the attic to the car and back again. They then looked all over the yard, but no luck. Maggie was worried, but Brenda said, “Look, as long as the foot’s not in the house, we’re all right. Besides, we don’t know for sure if he ever had one. Maybe he was put in there without a foot. And even if it did fall off in the yard, a dog has probably gotten it by now and already buried it. So, we have nothing to worry about.”

Maggie didn’t like the idea of a dog trotting around the neighborhood with a foot, but what could she do? She was relieved when the building inspector’s report was finished. Other than a few minor things, the house was declared to be in great shape. No mold, minimal termite damage, no corrosion in the pipes, no moisture in the walls of the basement.

“They don’t build them like they used to,” the inspector said.

Later that afternoon, after he left, Maggie had to run back down to the river and pick up all the things she had hidden. There was no telling how long it would be until the house sold, and she couldn’t take a chance on anyone finding them. It took her two trips to drag all the things back to the car, and the mud ruined her brand-new Ferragamo shoes in the process. When she got back home, she remembered something else she had to do and called Dottie Figge and told her that the unit in her building she had thought would be for sale would not be available as soon as she had thought.

In keeping with Hazel’s method, Maggie wanted to put Crestview’s best face forward and get it sparkling clean and ready for next week’s showing; the last thing in the world she wanted was for it to linger on the market. Thanks to Mrs. Dalton, the gardens were in great shape; the ivy on the side of the house was green and healthy; the English box hedges that lined the driveway were strong and sturdy. All it really needed was a good cleaning. As she stood on the terrace, Maggie tried to imagine what it must have looked like when it was the only house on the mountain. She knew a Scotsman named Angus Crocker had built it in 1887 for his son, Edward, and that Edward had been lost at sea, but that was about all she knew.

LATER, MAGGIE WAS standing out on Crestview’s front porch, looking at the big door to see if it should be sanded and revarnished. She decided it was fine. All they needed to do was clean the small glass window in the middle and maybe have someone come over and power-wash the stonework in the front. That always freshened up an old house. As she was looking up, she noticed three small words carved in the stone archway over the door: THIRLED NO MORE.

Thirled? What did that mean? She had never heard that word before. Had it been misspelled? Was it supposed to be “Thrilled no more”? But that didn’t make sense. Was it a family name?

When Maggie got back to the office, she asked Ethel and Brenda, but neither knew what “thirled” meant. Then it occurred to her that since the man who had built the house had come from Scotland, maybe it was a Scottish word. Brenda went to her computer, sat down and Googled “Scotland, Thirled.” What popped up surprised both of them, especially Brenda.

Thirled: a term used to describe men who worked in the coal mines of Scotland. A thirled man was bonded for life to a company and wore a metal collar around his neck with the name of his owner stamped upon it. These workers stood deep in the pits and cut coal that their wives and children then carried to the surface in baskets. They were paid two shillings and sixpence (sixty cents) for twelve hours of work, and out of that, they paid for their own keep and were not supplied with food, shelter, or medical care. To survive, many families were forced to work all day and into the night in the freezing and dirty coal mines of Scotland. Thirled men were serfs, and if one removed his brass collar and ran away, he was captured by the sheriff and returned to his owner. His punishment was by the lash. He was punished for having stolen himself and his services from his master. This was the law in Scotland as late as 1799.

Brenda, who had majored in history, had never read anything about this before and said, “No wonder the poor man was happy to be thirled no more.”

A Crocker Family History

WHAT MOST PEOPLE HADN’T KNOWN WAS THAT THE CROCKER family had descended from a long line of thirled men, and even after the practice had ended in 1799, in the ensuing years, they had not fared much better.

Angus Crocker had been cold, dirty, and hungry much of his life, one of twelve children raised in a filthy hovel that sat outside the coal mine where his father worked, barely scratching out a living. Angus had been a good student, but just like his brothers, when he was ten, he had been sent down into the mines. A boy of his class, with no money, had no hope of ever rising higher than a miner, but when Angus was fifteen, fate stepped in and changed his life. In 1863, during the Civil War in America, there was a shortage of men to work the mines of Pennsylvania, and when a letter was posted that a mining company there was hiring and paying good wages, Angus jumped at the chance. He worked the night shift in the coal mines outside of Pittsburgh and sent himself through school during the day. Within eight years, he had worked himself up to mine boss, then to shop foreman, then to superintendant. Ambitious and smart, he caught the eye of a few men at the top. Impressed by Angus’s ability to strike a bargain and control his men, they promoted him to a management position, and he was soon traveling to and from Scotland to negotiate the company’s interests there. Kicked up in social status, he was on one of these