The Aberforce Murder

      Most kids in high school spent their summers at the pool or on vacation, but I preferred to spend mine in a library.

Mind you, this wasn’t just any library. This was a good old-fashion card catalogue extravaganza of county birth recordings, cemetery records, drawers of family archives, and an unholy number of biographies on Abe Lincoln. It smelled of must and brewing coffee, and the ceiling creaked like a ghost was moving in the attic. I loved it.

It was there that I first encountered Cyril Aberforce. Years after the fact, I wondered if I remembered his name because it was so strange, but likely not. It had more to do with the words Murderer Convicted over his head in bold newspaper print.

In April of 1838, this Mr. Cyril Aberforce was found in a pool of his wife’s blood in their kitchen, a butcher knife still in his hand. His wife Maggie, was Mr. Aberforce’s only relative in hundreds of miles. They had no children nor were likely to, being in their sixties.

The fragile, yellowed newspapers read that it was the result of a drunken rage, for the man was prone to take moonshine in his bad harvest seasons, and the rain hadn’t shown many signs of coming, so maybe he was planning ahead. Other chronicles said a demon had come over him as punishment for his past sins.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t precisely discover what these past sins were. That was understandable given that sixty years of not the best recorded history had preceded the murder, but I couldn’t help but question it all. I was reading a lot of romances at the time—Austen, Gaskell, Heyer—and I couldn’t believe a man would murder his wife. And of course, there was the fact that Cyril swore he didn’t kill her. He said he’d come in and found her lying in her own blood and was so upset he took the knife and laid beside her until one of the farmhands found him.

I was still considering all of this on the drive home when a sudden thought struck me. I turned my mom’s car around and drove to the largest house in the town, owned by the brittle, tightfisted Julia Erford. I knocked for nearly ten minutes before the door was opened. The ancient creature herself answered, more than making up for her four feet seven inches with a stare like an iceberg and a voice as shrill as a crow.

She wasn’t happy to see me, and I doubted she would’ve been happy to see anyone, but when I asked if I could look through her collections of old papers, her eyes lit up. Mrs. Erford had long since hoarded a collection of letters and other documents from her family, who had lived in the town for nearly two hundred years. She refused to give them up to the museum, saying those greedy Democrat monsters would photocopy them to high hell and sell them to the highest bidder. I let all this pass without comment, and the only account of myself I had to give was that I indeed was not what she considered the most deplorable of occupations, an academic, but merely a teenager interested in the past.

Mrs. Erford’s study, where she kept all of the papers, might as well have been the library, as it smelled just the same. Still, an hour in I was missing the tidy card catalogue as I sat beside mountains of deteriorating parchment. I heard the click of her cane down the hall outside and she opened the door.

“Find what you were looking for?”

“No, unfortunately not.”

“Might I ask what was so important that you threw off my dinner time?”

I looked up guiltily. “I wanted to find out more about the Aberforce murder.”

“Mmm, ah. Nasty business. My family preferred not to talk about it.”

Cocking my head, I asked, “Why’s that?”

She looked down at me like I was an idiot. “Because the Aberforces were my relatives! Erford is a derivative we took after the Civil War so people would stop banging on the door asking to see where Maggie died.”

My eyes widened. “Maggie died here?”

“Are you quite sure you’ve read about this? My family has owned these thirty-five acres since John Aberforce laid his claim in 1805. He was Cyril’s father, you know. The house was always in the same place.”

“But Maggie didn’t actually die in this house? I saw the cornerstone on my way up the porch. It said 1847.”

Mrs. Erford sized me up, new respect in her eyes. “Yes, so it was. No, she died in the original farmhouse. It burned down, and my great great great great great grandfather built this mansion.”

For a moment, I was caught off guard, wanting to laugh at the thought that maybe there weren’t so many greats in between then and Mrs. Erford, but I controlled myself.

“So the line’s been continuous since then?”

She puffed out her chest a bit. “It has.”

“Wait,” I said, holding up one finger. “How’s that? The papers said Cyril had no family, not even children. Did a family member come from somewhere else and take up the line?”

Mrs. Erford hesitated. I could tell she was reconsidering the wisdom of letting me into her home. “Well, yes and no,” she said at last. “My ancestor, Henriette Aberforce, came with her husband and son, but they also came for another reason.”

“Which was?”

She sighed resignedly. “To care for Cyril’s child.”

“But you said—“

“Oh child, how old are you, eighteen?” she snapped. “A man doesn’t have to be married to a woman to impregnate her!”

I rolled my eyes. “You might have just said so. But that still doesn’t add up. Why wouldn’t the papers have given a clue to that as a motive? Who was the child’s mother?”

“Twenty-year-old Beth Smith. A charity orphan turned nurse who’d come to take care of Mrs. Aberforce in her sickness. The baby wasn’t born until after Cyril had been hanged.”

I cringed. “That’s disgusting! She was young enough to have been his daughter!”

“Men are men,” Mrs. Erford said with a saturnine smile. “Now, I expect you’re going to be wanting the letters of Henrietta Aberforce.”

“How would those help?”

“How should I know? You’re the one playing detective, making free with my family’s history.”

“It’s history in general, Mrs. Erford,” I argued.

“And I didn’t ask for your opinion! Now do you want the letters or not?”

Not ten minutes later, I was sitting at the study desk, unwrapping the dusty bundle. Lacking the latex gloves of the library, I had to be especially careful opening and turning pages. Making out the spidery, feminine script of the mid-nineteenth century was nearly impossible. I was on my twenty-something letter, nearly about to pack up and leave, when I caught sight of the date at the top, April 13, 1838. Not only was it the day of the murder, the letter was addressed to Maggie! Though most was of no importance, a passage caught my eye.

What nonsense you are talking! You certainly are no longer in the prime of life, but I will not hear of you speaking of your death in this way. And stop saying Cyril will not miss you when you’ve gone, for I’m certain no husband could be more devoted to his wife! Did he not engage a village girl to look after you in your ill health? I look forward to meeting her, anyone who looks after my dear relatives so well is worthy of the highest respect! You may expect me only a few weeks from the time you get this letter!

I looked up as the letter returned to domestic inanities. Maggie had known she was going to die? Did she know her husband had been chasing another girl? Had Beth or Cyril killed her to get her out of the way?

“Did you find anything interesting?” Mrs. Erford’s voice startled me out of my morbid reflections.

“Yes!” I said excitedly, repeating to her the passage and my thoughts on it.

“Hmm. I wonder if the answer lies in Maggie’s diary.”

“She kept a diary?” I asked, barely concealing my joy.

“Supposedly,” she said. “No one could find it. If they had, no doubt it would have been key evidence in the trial. But my cousin Hetty’s journal of the goings on at that fiasco bears no mention of it. And before you ask, I’ve read them and there’s no mention of Beth Smith. I don’t think they wanted the scandal, and Hetty’s letters show she didn’t know the child was Cyril’s until it was a few years old. After that, she took it in as her own when Beth died.”

 “So the baby wasn’t used as motivation for the murder? Then what was?”

Mrs. Erford scoffed. “The story from the trial was that he had become violent from too much to drink and lost his head.”

“So he took a butcher knife to his wife?” I asked incredulously. “I don’t care how drunk a person gets, that makes no sense.”

“Well I don’t see how you can work it out now. The thing happened almost two hundred years ago.”

“I know. It just bothers me. He swore his innocence.”

“Mmm, yes,” she agreed, pushing up her wire glasses. “His innocence was always taken as gospel in this house, but that was because Beth’s child, my ancestor David, said his mother knew he was innocent.”

“But did Maggie know about Beth’s pregnancy?” I asked, my mind working at fast. “Even if the court didn’t know, she might have, and someone killed her to keep her quiet.”

“You think it was Beth?” Mrs. Erford asked, pursing her lips.

“That’s who my money is on. If only I could find that diary!”

“Good luck with that. None of the original buildings remain, save the old outhouse.”

“Why’s that?”

Mrs. Erford laughed, a harsh, grating sound. “It was the only building that greedy historical society could get the paperwork for before it was demolished! Everything else is gone.”

“Could I look around there?” I asked hopefully.

The old woman stopped laughing and eyed me curiously. “I’ve never seen a child so interested in the past.”

“It just doesn’t sit well with me, a man murdering his wife or being hung for something he didn’t do.”

“Hanged,” Mrs. Erford corrected me. “Well, I suppose you can take a look at the outhouse, but not tonight. Come tomorrow morning.”

***

I was up bright and early the next day, barely pausing to grab breakfast before jumping in my car and starting for town. Before going to the Erford mansion, I briefly stopped at the library to check a hunch and, being right, arrived at the house ready to go.

“The rains weren’t bad in 1838!” I practically shouted as the front door opened.

“What the?” Mrs. Erford scowled at me.

 “Cyril had been a farmer all his life,” I went on buoyantly. “He would’ve know what the signs for a good season were. He couldn’t have been drinking because of that!”

 “Do you know how old I am? Do you want to give me a heart attack?”

I grinned, wanting to suggest that I didn’t see her dying of something so pathetic, but I merely apologized and let her lead me through the house and to the backyard. The grounds consisted of a swimming pool, covered despite the season, and large gardens, overgrown from lack of care. The outhouse was precisely what I expected, a molding shack surrounded by weeds. The door creaked as it gave way to my determined pull, throwing light into the putrid square of blackness.

“Ugh, it stinks like bad water,” I said, realizing the obviousness of the statement too late.

“Maybe I overestimated your intelligence,” Mrs. Erford said flatly, also wheezing a little from the smell. “I’ll be in the house. Don’t bother me.”

I looked around the exterior of the little shack, checking for anything strange on the walls. Then, I went inside, covering my face with the collar of my shirt and using my phone’s flashlight to look at the interior. The only other option seemed to be digging. Finding a shovel wasn’t hard, and I quickly took to the task, grateful that my early start was allowing me to beat the heat of the day.

The soil smelled worse the deeper I went, and I tried not to think about what gases and other things had been released in hundreds of years from human excrement. Some time passed, and I was just regretting my decision to turn down going with a friend to the movies when the shovel hit something solid.

Forgetting the smell for the moment, I knelt down and reached into the two-foot deep hole. A flat, smooth surface greeted my palm. I quickly dug around it and felt it to be some kind of box. Thankfully, lifting it out was not difficult as it was about the size of a shoe box and not heavy. I used water from a hose to clean away the filth and found a large MA was carved into the top. Unfortunately, the box was locked, and no amount of years had harmed its integrity. Despite her apparent indifference, Mrs. Erford’s eyes lit up when she saw the strong box in my arms, and she padded away, saying she needed to get something. She came back with an ancient ring of keys.

“These have been passed to each head of the Erford family for generations,” she said, handing it to me. “Try them out.”

We sat in what she called the breakfast parlor, methodically sticking each of the fifty or so keys into the lock. On the twenty-eighth, it clicked, slowly, reluctantly, but it clicked, and the lid lifted. Within was a single sheaf of papers, bound with a leather sleeve and cord. This too had an MA inscribed.

My instincts made me go to the last page, dated the same day as the murder. Perhaps it was my excitement, perhaps because my eyes had become acclimated to old time cursive, but whatever it was, I made out the entry in a few seconds. My eyes widened.

“What does it say?” Mrs. Erford asked nervously. “Does she guess at her killer?”

I shook my head.

“But she knew about the baby?”

I nodded. “And she knew who her killer would be.”

“Who?!” Mrs. Erford’s knuckles were white on the table.

“Herself,” I breathed.

The old woman blinked uncomprehendingly.

“Maggie Aberforce killed herself,” I explained. “She says here, ‘I’ve planned it tonight, as that little slut will be gone, so Cyril will take the blame. When he’s hanged, hopefully the shock kills his Bathsheba and her spawn of the devil.’” I leaned back in my chair and took a deep breath. “What a psycho.”

A silence descended for a minute, as we each pondered this revelation. Then, Mrs. Erford, who had been so tense before hearing the truth, stood up and said in a calm voice, “I don’t know. The Aberforce and Erford women have been doing things to protect the family name for centuries.”

“But this was so evil!” I cried, aghast at her rationalization. “You would never do something like this!”

The old woman smiled and shrugged, saying nothing more.