Quiet Dell: A Novel

This novel is based on the true story of a crime that took place in Quiet Dell, West Virginia, over eighty years ago. The names of the characters whose lives the crime claimed or influenced are real: their thoughts, perceptions, and relationships are imagined. Their letters, the trial transcript, and various excerpted newspaper articles are quoted exactly from original documents. Minor day/date discrepancies reflect discrepancies in the original coverage or documents.

This book is intended to be of wholesome helpfulness to mankind, and not to engender morbid desire or taint human souls.

—E. A. Bartlett,
Love Murders of Harry F. Powers (Beware Such Bluebeards)

(Special)—In the backyard of the Eicher home at Park Ridge, a suburb of Chicago, stands a little marker, with the inscription, “Graveyard for Animals,” scribbled in the childish handwriting of Annabel Eicher, 9. There the Eicher children had buried a bird, playmates said.

—
The Clarksburg Telegram,
December 9, 1931

Cost of Living, 1931

New house ..............................................................	$6,796.00
Average income per year ..........................................	$1,858.00
New car ..................................................................	$640.00
Average rent per month ...........................................	$18.00

—
Remember When . . . 1931, A Nostalgic Look Back in Time

Christmas Eve
December 24, 1930
Park Ridge, Illinois
Annabel Begins

When the year turns, there are bells on the wind. All the old years fall on the ground in lights. When you walk across those lights, it sounds like walking on all the piled-up leaves of giant trees. But up high the bells are ringing for everyone alive. There are silver and gold and glass bells you can see through, and sleigh bells a hundred years old. My grandmother said there was a whisper for each one dead that year, and a feather drifting for each one waiting to be born.

My mother says that’s just a story, but I always do hear the bells, even in my sleep, and everything in front of me is all white and open like a field. Then I start dreaming.

The trees in my dream sparkle. It’s quiet in the dark, and I’m indoors, on a stage. The trees are behind me but they are alive, touching limbs and stirred just so. A silent spirit seems to move among them, and the light has found me. It’s a large theater, rows and rows before me, and a balcony I glimpse through a gleam that dazzles me. The audience is quiet, waiting for me to speak. Perhaps they are watching a play, my play, or a play in which I perform. I can’t make out faces beyond the footlights, but I see the tilt of heads and the shapes of ladies’ hats, and a glow seems to float amongst them. There’s a hum of admiration or excitement, and a swell of whisper like applause. Then the lights on the stage darken. I hear people weeping, so moved are they by the production.

Grandmother used to say that I might find myself upon a stage
one day, as an actor (“don’t say ‘actress,’ ” she told me, “the word garners no respect”), or the author of a play. Grandmother admired the suffragettes and said they would open all fields of endeavor to women. If she were younger, she said, and not required at the bosom of her family, she would have joined their movement, to help them fight their war of argument and reason. She was required because Heinrich died. Her “beloved Heinrich” was my father, an only child. We called him Papa. He called Grethe “Miss” or “Missy,” and he called me “little Nell,” though my name is Annabel. I try very hard to remember him, but I don’t, not really. Papa is his portrait, in the gold frame over the parlor mantel (“That is not a photograph, my dear, that is a portrait in oils”), and he is the man in the wedding picture with Mother. One day he didn’t come home. I was four years old. Nothing was said that evening to alarm the children. Betty, our nursemaid, sat with us at dinner and put us to bed, for the police had summoned Mother and Grandmother.

Papa was struck by a streetcar in the Loop, just after dusk. He was walking from his club to the station.

I believe there was a crowd, jostling and shoving, distracted by the siren of a passing fire truck, or startled by sudden rain. He was a fine designer of silver in our own backyard workshop, and an actuary for Metropolitan Insurance and Casualty Company of Chicago. He advised on odds and probabilities. This was the irony, Grandmother said, for no one could ever have predicted the sudden death of a man so strong and healthy, who never smoked or drank and was well liked and much respected. He did business at his club because that was where business was done, and was an artist at evenings and weekends, a man known for his talent and easeful charm. He performed in theatricals at university and sang a fine tenor, but pursued mathematics. One job his entire working life, Grandmother says, and head of actuaries when he died, as well as Mother’s adviser and manager in the art of silver design. One home from the time Grethe was born, and Grandmother sold their Chicago apartment to relocate with the family. Papa wanted fresh air for the children, and fine schools, and a garden with a barn for
his workshop, and a stable for a pony, and the park nearby, where we float our boats and walk through forest paths to the meadow. The meadow is high in spring and mown in summer, and Papa helped us fly kites.

I think I do remember the kites.

Grethe was eight then, and he told her to take off her glasses and run, run straight out and follow the tug of the string; there was no one in the meadow but us and the wind was high. I was little and he held me on his shoulders, clasping my knees, while the kite went up and up. The string played out in his hand against my leg.

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