The Man on the Wall
Monday, November 10, 2008

ON MONDAY MORNING, THE CLEANING CREW MAGGIE HAD HIRED was crawling all over the house, so when Brenda came in after lunch with all the comparables in the area for them to go over, they went into the library to get away from the noise. Brenda sat down at the desk and opened her briefcase. “Did you know that eight out of ten of the houses that sold last year were Babs’s listings?”

“I’m not surprised,” said Maggie.

“How does she do it? She’s like a shark: eat and swim, eat and swim.”

As Brenda was busy getting all the papers in order, Maggie happened to glance over her shoulder at the oil portrait hanging above the fireplace. She had seen it several times before, but this was the first time she realized that the man in the portrait was dressed in the same formal Scottish kilt as the skeleton.

“Oh, my God! Brenda, look.”

Brenda looked up. “What?”

“Just turn around; look. Is that what I think it is?”

Brenda looked.

Brenda said nothing, but she stood up and went over and peered more closely. “It’s the same outfit, all right.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes. Right down to the buckle on the sash.” Brenda turned to Maggie with wide eyes. “Honey, we’ve got Mr. Edward Crocker himself over in storage.”

“But it can’t be him. Mrs. Dalton said he had been lost at sea; they never found him.”

“Well, I can’t help that; the gold plaque right here says ‘Edward Crocker,’ and I don’t know about you, but I’ve got to get out of here. Bones is one thing, but looking at that man when he was alive is another!”

Maggie followed Brenda out of the room, still wondering how a man said to be lost at sea could wind up in a trunk. What next?

Later that afternoon, after Brenda left, Maggie went back into the library and looked at the portrait again. The man in the portrait, who appeared to be at least in his forties, had clear blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and sandy-colored hair and was standing by a tree, with a golf club, in a stiff formal pose. Although he was gazing off into the distance, as she looked closer at the face, she saw something about his expression that intrigued her, a slight softness around the eyes. All she knew about Edward Crocker was what Mrs. Dalton had told her and the things she had read about him in school: that he had been a rich and powerful iron, coal, and steel man and had done a lot for the city. Of course, she couldn’t be a hundred percent sure the skeleton in the trunk was Edward Crocker, but still, there was something in his eyes that made her want to know more about him. “Who was he?” she wondered.