Chapter Twenty-Six
I left Sally Ann’s house shortly thereafter and already knew where I was going, even though I didn’t tell anyone. I especially didn’t want to tell Sheriff Martin that I was going back to Peter Crane’s house, since I didn’t know if it was still considered a crime scene and someplace I shouldn’t set foot in.
I drove over to Crane’s house and parked down the street. It had gotten dark while I was at Sally Ann’s, and there was no one out on the street when I arrived. I walked down the sidewalk and around the side of Crane’s house, then I stood in the shadows and watched the street for signs of movement, or for any lights going on in the houses nearby. The house next door was shielded from view by a fence and by several pecan trees that had grown over it.
All was quiet, so I snuck quietly up onto the front porch. The front door was still unlocked and I walked right in. My heart was racing as I closed the door behind me. I had forgotten to bring a flashlight and it was pretty dark in there, though moonlight shone through the parlor windows. I was hesitant about going upstairs, where I had found Crane the night before, so I decided to spend some time looking quietly about the first floor.
I started by taking the first two framed photos off of the wall along the staircase. I went into the parlor and sat under the biggest window, and the moonlight spilled over the photos so that I could see them just fine.
The first photo, the one I had noticed most the night before, showed Crane and his wife in their youth. He was in an Army uniform and she was in a dress of the times, with hat to match. I studied it for a moment, mainly to memorize the faces just in case I saw them in a picture somewhere else. Then I looked at the other framed photos, each in turn, taking in all of the details. I saw other black men and women in two of them, and guessed that they were family members. A young woman was, I assumed, Crane’s daughter who worked at the hospital.
I hung all of the photos back up on the wall and looked around at the parlor. The furnishings were old but well-preserved; I imagined that they hadn’t had much wear and tear in recent years. There were knickknacks on little, dusty tables, and there were crosses and a Bible and religious pictures scattered about.
I went through the dining room and the kitchen briefly but didn’t see anything that struck me as being helpful, so I walked through the darkness back to the stairs. I didn’t relish the idea of going back up, but I went anyway. I paused on the landing at the top of the stairs, then approached Crane’s bedroom, the first door on the right. The curtains were drawn and it was very dark, so I went over and pulled them apart, slowly, just enough to let the moonlight filter in and cast oblique shadows around the room.
There was a Bible on the small table next to the bed, and I flipped through it but didn’t find anything inside. There were some random clothes and shoes shoved under the bed. I opened a closet door and found some very old suits and hats and a pair of black shoes with a thick layer of dust covering them. There was nothing in the old man’s room that would help me, and I was beginning to wonder why I was wasting my time searching his house.
I went out into the hallway and looked to my right, toward the bathroom. I had seen enough of that the night before to last me quite some time. I walked the few steps down the hall to the remaining door and tried the knob again, but it was locked, as it had been the night before. I stopped a moment to consider what I was doing and had a moment of uncertainty. Yet I had come to this house where I knew I shouldn’t be, I had come in and searched a place where I would get in a lot of trouble if I were found. I decided that I had come too far to stop at a little thing like a locked bedroom door, so I gave a hearty push and the lock gave and the door swung open.
The room smelled sour and musty and unused. It was as dark as the other bedroom, and I found my way over to the windows and pulled the curtains open enough to let me take a look around. It was clearly a woman’s room, with a woman’s flowery touch evident in all of the decorations. It hadn’t been occupied for ten years or more, judging from the style of the covers on the bed and the layer of dust that had settled on everything.
It had to be Mrs. Crane’s room, the bedroom of Sally Ann’s Momma Hattie. I imagined that she had died years before and her husband had closed up the room and stayed out of it ever since. There were more framed photos on the wall, and I inspected each one, looking at a young, vibrant Mrs. Crane and her husband and daughter. There was an old address book next to an old black telephone on a small telephone table in one corner of the room, and I flipped through its yellowed pages quickly and put it down. I opened the closet door and saw dresses and hats and, on a shelf, a cardboard box. That was what I had been looking for, and I pulled it out and over by the window.
I sat down on the floor and opened the top of the box. It had that musty smell of old, decaying paper, and inside were photographs and letters and old keepsakes that Mrs. Crane had kept over the years. Something made me go over to the telephone table and get the address book as well, which I put on the floor next to me.
The moonlight filtering through the window cast strange shadows around the room as I began to look through Hattie Crane’s memory box. There was a packet of letters tied together with ribbon. I undid the ribbon and some fragments of paper floated to the floor. I carefully unfolded the batch of letters and began to read the first one. It was dated “June 2, 1932,” and written to “My dear Peter.” It was a love letter, formal and romantic in the way we no longer write, with plenty of misspelled words and bad grammar. It had lots of heart, though.
I paged through the next few letters, and saw that she had kept occasional ones from the following years, presumably during the time of their courtship and engagement. The letters ended in 1936, when I suppose she and her husband were wed and they no longer needed to write to each other. I folded the papers back up, tied the ribbon back around them, and put them gently next to the box. Next I found some souvenirs from the 1930s and early 1940s, all pre-war stuff. There was a newspaper clipping about Paul Robeson. There was a church flyer about a recital. The papers were all old and quite brittle.
Then I found a stack of black and white photographs, about three by five inches, with jagged white borders. And, about halfway through the photos, I knew I had found something. It was a picture of two men, both laughing, standing in front of a building that looked like it could be the original Oak Street Bakery. One of the men was black, and a quick look at the other photos told me it was definitely not Peter Crane. The other man was white, and his facial features and build were amazingly familiar to me. He was a dead ringer for Lester Macaboo III, and I was certain it was Lester Sr.
The two men were standing next to each other in front of the bakery, and the white man’s clothes were of the style they used to wear in the late 1940s--baggy tweed pants and a wide, short tie. The black man was dressed in work clothes that looked like coveralls. The men were not touching, but they were surely sharing a joke. The hands of the white man were fuzzy, as if he had been moving them around when the photo was taken. It had every indication of a picture taken quickly, without preparation or thought. It was certainly not posed.
I studied this photo for a few moments, then put it on the floor in a pile of its own. The rest of the photos were family shots of the Cranes and their daughter; though I looked carefully, I did not see another picture of the black man in the photo. I put everything back in the box and placed it back in the closet, saving the single photo for myself. I was about to leave, satisfied at what I had found, when I noticed the address book I had placed on the floor next to me.
I opened it up and flipped to the page marked “M,” wondering if I’d find an entry for “Macaboo.” There was none. I paged through the rest of the book but didn’t see anything of interest till I got to the back. On a small scrap of paper was written the initials, “F.T.,” and a five-digit number. I put this and the photograph in my back pocket, closed the curtains, and left the room. I closed the door carefully to make it less obvious that I had broken in, and went back downstairs.
I checked around quickly to see that I hadn’t disturbed anything too much, then I closed the parlor curtains and let myself out the front door, closing it behind me. I stood in the shadows on the porch for a few moments, growing accustomed to the night and making sure no one was around. I walked back to my car without being seen and drove home.
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