Page 29 of Killing Time

“More often than you’d think,” I replied. Yes, my friends had lucked out, and the man renting the house up on Sullivan Avenue had turned out to be the real deal, but I’d heard plenty of horror stories from people who hadn’t done their due diligence.

The clerk returned, and Seth hurried back to the counter. Even I knew this was way before the invention of copy machines, so I wasn’t too surprised when the man handed over a piece of paper covered in quick, slanting handwriting.

“This should be everything you need,” he said. “Are there any other properties you need me to look up?”

Seth glanced over his shoulder at me, and I shrugged. Maybe we might need to return for something else, but I wouldn’t know that for sure until we had a chance to look over what the clerk had given us.

“That should do it for now,” he said. “Thank you for your help.”

“It’s no problem, sir.”

Precious paper in hand, Seth came over to me, and together we took the stairs down to the lobby.

“Now what?”

“Let’s go back to the hotel,” I said. “We’ll have more privacy there to see what all this says.”

Seth seemed amenable to that suggestion, because he folded the piece of paper and put it in his pocket before linking arms with me so we could walk the half-block to the Weatherford. Once we were in our room, he brought out the paper again and smoothed it against the top of the small table by the window.

I came close so I could read the dense handwriting in better light. According to what the clerk had written down, the houseon Hutcheson Street had been purchased by Jacob Wilcox in April 1905, and appeared to have been handed down to his son and then finally to Jasper.

What had made Jacob want to leave the house where he’d spent his youth? Had he been living somewhere else after he came of age and gotten married? Had his wife been the one to ask for a new house, something possibly bigger and grander than the Victorian on Park Street?

If that turned out to be the case, I doubted she’d stuck around to enjoy it for very long. Theprimus’swives of the past weren’t known for their long and healthy lives.

But I couldn’t worry about that right now. The main issue to explore at the moment was whether Jasper’s house contained any possible places where he might have stashed Ruby.

Even on paper, the place sounded pretty impressive. It was a little over four thousand square feet and sat on nearly an acre of land, and although we hadn’t been provided with blueprints or the architect’s elevation drawings or anything like that, I got the feeling it was more modern than the Victorian where Jacob had grown up, maybe Craftsman in style.

I really wished I could see it. However, even I knew that idly driving past Jasper Wilcox’s home without a clear plan in mind wasn’t a very good idea.

No mention of a basement or any kind of outbuilding. Was that because those weren’t the sorts of details the assessor’s office kept track of…or simply because they didn’t exist?

“There isn’t a lot of detail here,” Seth said.

He sounded disappointed, and I couldn’t blame him for that, not when I’d been hoping for some information we could really sink our teeth into.

“It’s a start, though. What about Adam’s house?”

That purchase seemed a lot more straightforward. He’d bought the place only two years before, in October of 1945. Thedate made me wonder if he’d served in the armed forces and had decided to buy a house after he was safely back in the States.

Then again, I had to think that Jasper wouldn’t be too keen about letting any of his relatives serve in the war. It sounded as though the McAllisters had made those sacrifices, but Jasper might have been more worried about making sure all the eligible males in his clan stayed out of harm’s way than caring about how patriotic they looked.

However Adam had ended up in his house, though, it looked like a recent purchase, not something he’d inherited from a family member. That happened all the time — people would strike out on their own after college or after getting married or any other life changes, and if they ended up inheriting property later on, they’d either move into it or sell it or keep it as income property, just like Margot had with the bungalow that was once Seth’s and had become my home base in Jerome.

Which meant we should probably focus on Jasper’s house.

“We can also try the planning office,” I suggested, and Seth looked up from poring over the piece of paper the clerk in the assessor’s office had given us.

“Why would we look there?”

Again, I was only going on what I knew of how these things worked in my own time and had to pray like hell they’d be valid in 1947.

“If Jasper — or his father or grandfather — made any improvements to the house that went beyond cosmetic changes, they might have had to file paperwork with the city. I know a friend of mine’s parents went through that in high school when they wanted to knock down some walls and then add a master suite on the ground level. But it’s hard to say what might be required now.”

That small demurral didn’t seem to affect Seth too much, since he immediately appeared much more enthusiastic.

“So, if Jasper or someone else who owned the house had done something like that, then the city would have the blueprints on file?”

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