Catherine and Andy have decided to decipher Alice’s message. They want to find out if Alice’s appearance has anything to do with the murders tied to the house for almost 125 years.
“I’ve been doing one of my favorite things to learn more about this case,” Andy said.
“Googling!” Catherine said. “What did you find? Anything about Alice?”
“No, but I learned something she might have witnessed, something that may have set all this in motion.”
“Exciting. Show me. Tell me.”
Andy handed his smartphone to Catherine.
“From the Alameda Daily Encinal,” Catherine said. “Body found in hills identified. Oh, this is how they found the Judge. This is great stuff, Andy.” She read on. “Oh my, it was ruled a homicide from the start. Not according to his sister.”
“Aunt Minnie?” Andy asked.
“Yes, the family says that she told everyone it was a suicide,” Catherine said. “Most of the family says the same thing, even today.”
Andy took the phone and scrolled a bit. “Wait until you read this.”
“Arrest made in Oakland murder,” Catherine said. “From the Oakland Tribune. Oh, the Sunday paper. October 2, 1904. They arrested James Paul Rutland for the murder of, oh, the Judge. Who is this guy?”
Andy took and the phone, swiped to the next page, and handed it back to Catherine.
“January 4, 1905. The Tribune again. “Andy! ‘Man confesses under pressure.’”
“Read on.”
“James Paul Rutland told the District Attorney that he had shot and killed Judge Alexander Wexlar,” Catherine read. “Rutland said he shot the judge in retaliation for the judge shooting his brother Christopher in 1903. The DA told the Tribune that he could find no 1903 case to substantiate James Rutland’s claim.”
“They found no case because the Judge didn’t report it,” Andy said.
“And Aunt Alice?”
“She could not have disappeared with a man her husband had already shot and killed.”
“So, where are Alice and Christopher Rutland? Downstairs?” Catherine said. “How do we find out?”
“I have an idea,” Andy said.
“I knew you would.”
“We need to take up a piece of floor tile and figure out how thick the concrete is. If it’s not very thick, say four inches, we can look through the concrete with ground-penetrating radar. I have a friend in San Francisco…”
“Should we involve others, Andy? And it’s Wednesday. Dad’s movers are coming on Friday.”
“We don’t have to tell him anything about dead people, Catherine. Just that we are thinking about redoing the floor, and we need to see what’s underneath there. Amos is my friend with the GPR thig-a-ma-jig. I called him already. Wait, though, we only have today and tomorrow. Let’s go and see what we can figure out.”
“Andy, where would you have put the bodies?” Catherine asked.
“There,” Andy said, pointing with his drill to the farthest corner on the left.
“Let’s see what we find here,” Catherine said. She removed one square of tile, and Andy drilled through the concrete.
“That was quick,” Catherine said.
“Yes. This is great. The floor is only two inches thick. Good news.”
“Shouldn’t it be thicker?”
“Nowadays, yes. When they put this floor in, nobody cared. Looks like just poured the bare minimum over some gravel.”
The Judge called a concrete company. He not only knew the owner but had gotten him out of a sticky legal scrape.
“The entire floor will cost $65, Your Honor,” Thomas Krumb said. Judge Wexlar handed Krumb $165.
“As far anyone else is concerned, I’ve decided to put in a concrete floor. Nothing more. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” Krumb said, tucking his windfall into his pocket. “I will do the floor myself. My son will deliver the gravel and mix the concrete. He is the only other person involved.”
“Level. With gravel. Especially where I showed you.”
“Yes, Your Honor.
Catherine’s eyes filled with tears
“Andy,” she whispered. “Vanilla.”
Hairs on Andy’s neck stood at attention. Hairs on his arms responded.
“We’re on to something,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Remember this?” Andy said when he returned. He was holding the sledge hammer that he found on the side of the road a few months ago.
Catherine laughed. She had needled him for spending money on a new handle for his prize.
“Let’s take some more tile up.”
Catherine removed ten more tiles. Andy put his hammer down, spit into his right hand, rubbed his hands together, and picked up the hammer. He went to work on the floor. The sound of the hammer echoed in the nearly empty basement. The concrete crumbled and mixed with the gravel. Andy got on his hands and knees and began clearing his prize hammer’s work away.
“Why is all this stone here?” he wondered out loud. He stood up with two large rocks that had seen the work of a mason. “Look, there’s more,” he said.
As he cleared the stone away, he found himself creating—or recreating, he thought—a hole. Then he saw them.
“Catherine, look what’s here.”
He stood and pointed at two human bones.
“Our hunch was right,” Catherine said. “The far-left corner. And the concrete so thin. We’ve found her.”
“Yes. That explains the vanilla scent. We’ll have to call the police, I’m afraid,” Andy said.
An Alameda police officer arrived. By then, Andy had emptied the hole of all but the bones and piled the stones he found into four neat piles.
“There she is,” Andy said to the officer, who leaned into the hole.
“It looks like someone dug a hole, about three-feet deep, I reckon,” the officer said. “Whoever did this neatly lined the bottom of the hole with those stones, placed the body into the makeshift grave, and covered it all with dirt.”
“This certainly did not happen yesterday,” the officer said. “I will have to alert the coroner.”
Two hours later, four deputy sheriffs from the coroner’s office arrived. Andy and Catherine showed them to the basement and let them do their work.
About an hour and a half passed. Then, one of the deputies came upstairs.
“Deputy Sanchez, ma’am,” she said, handing Catherine her card. “It’s a male. Been dead, I’d say, more than 75 years. So, we have no crime scene here. We’ll take the remains with us. Please leave the grave as it is, for now.”
The grave, Catherine thought, in my house, just as I suspected.
As soon as the deputies left, disappointment flooded over Catherine and Andy. They cried in each other’s arms.
Catherine looked up.“Andy, where’s Alice?”
Part 3 will appear on Tuesday, October 31.
Dennis Evanosky is the award-winning Historian of the Alameda Post. Reach him at [email protected]. His writing is collected at AlamedaPost.com/Dennis-Evanosky.
