He shook his head. “No.”
It was her turn to stare at him. “It’s a crime-scene re-creation based on a real case. Surely you’ve heard of Frances Glessner Lee.”
“I really have no idea what you’re talking about,” Gibbes said.
Her lips clamped together, like a teacher disappointed with a star pupil’s performance. She took a deep breath. “Edith’s father was a detective in the Walterboro Police Department, and she was always interested in his work and probably would have become a detective herself if she’d been born later. In those days it was unheard-of for a woman to have such a profession. But she was quite artistic and studied art in college. It was there that Edith found out about Frances Glessner Lee. Frances founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936—a precursor to modern forensics in this country.”
She looked at us, expecting us both to nod our heads in recognition. When neither of us did, she continued. “Frances created her crime-scene boxes in order to train detectives to assess visual evidence. She called them the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, after a well-known police saying: ‘Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.’ Edith, with her background in art and her knowledge of detective work, began making her own for her father’s cases and then, after her marriage, for the local police department.”
Gibbes and I moved closer to study the contents of the shoe box. It was a 1950s-style office, with no electronics in sight, but with a black telephone on the corner of a wooden desk, its coiled cord neatly wrapped around the neck of a male doll lying on an Oriental rug next to the desk. A miniature pencil holder had been upended on the desk, tiny pencils scattered on the surface like toothpicks. A framed photo of a woman with two children was placed prominently in the center of the desk, right in the middle of the pencils. The man’s eyes protruded slightly from his cloth face, the knot of his necktie still taut around his blue-stained doll neck.
“In this particular case, the man was stepping out on his wife with his secretary, and she caught them together. The wife came into the office when her husband was working late at night and made sure that he wouldn’t be doing that anymore. She would have gotten away with it, too.” She pointed to the framed photo. “That was the biggest clue—the placement of the frame, obviously done after she’d strangled him. Notice how his chair is facing away from the desk. She was able to overpower him because of the element of surprise.”
Gibbes and I regarded Deborah Fuller with renewed interest.
“You’re very familiar with my grandmother’s work?” he asked.
The older woman nodded. “I dropped out of law school and returned to Beaufort to nurse my mother in the last years of her life. Edith and I became good friends, even though she was closer to my mother’s age than my own. That’s how I first learned about her work for the police. She was very private about it.”
Gibbes shook his head. “I had no idea.”
“Yes, well, not many people knew. She kept it mostly to herself. Her husband didn’t approve, you see. There were more, but after Cal left she asked the police department to return them to her. She never told me why. This one was being used at a police academy in Georgia, which is why it was left behind. I was hoping that perhaps you’d find the rest in the house.”
She looked at me with hopeful eyes.
I swallowed. “Yes. We found them. In the attic. I’d say about ten of them. It was quite a surprise.”
“They’re extraordinary, aren’t they?” she said. “And the attention to detail is really remarkable. Pencils actually write, rocking chairs rock back and forth to the exact degree as the original, and every detail—a newspaper headline, blood splatter on the wall, an outdated wall calendar—becomes a potential clue to the crime.”
Remarkable wasn’t the word I would have used, but I let it go. “You’re welcome to stop by and take a look at them,” I said. “It’s hard to sleep at night knowing they’re up there.”
“Just consider them works of art,” Deborah said. “And I’d love to come see them. I suppose I could have just asked whether you’d found them, but it’s rather hard to explain. Better to see it in person.” She pressed her hand over her heart. “Finally, after all these years, we know what became of them. I had the horrible feeling that she’d destroyed them.”