Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November 1993 | Volume 44, Issue 7
A House By Any Other Name
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
When I interviewed for a vacant seat on the local historic-preservation board, no one mentioned a word to me about intrigue, romance, and murder. I was told that the board met once a month and that its primary job was to protect the city’s best historic buildings. I would serve with a group of fourteen other citizens that included lawyers, teachers, architects, and courtly Dexter Davidson, a former state senator. It all sounded very straightforward.
No one warned me I’d also be asked to avenge poor, dead Captain Flagg.
It began when someone named Alice Flagg, a gaunt woman in her late forties, asked to speak to the board. “It’s the house on Overhulse Street,” she said. “It makes me so angry I want to spit.”
The house she meant was a frothy confection of fish-scale shingles and spindle work, one of the rare Queen Anne houses built in this buttoneddown town. A few years back it had been placed on the local historic register and marked with a round bronze plaque that called it “The Joshua Martin House.” It wasn’t the house itself that had worked Alice into a passion; it was the name on the marker.
“Joshua Martin,” she declared, “was a two-faced coward and thief.”
According to Alice, he had never even owned the house. It had belonged to a widow named Clara Flagg, the grandmother of Alice’s husband, whom Martin had courted and married. He had moved in after the wedding and may have thought of her home as his castle, but Clara Flagg Martin had never actually put his name on the deed.
“Why should he be remembered in bronze,” Alice demanded indignantly, “when Captain Flagg never got so much as a decent Christian grave?”
As a rule our meetings are pretty sedate. We do not go looking for trouble. But Alice Flagg looked like trouble, and somehow she had found us.
Before we knew it, Alice had whipped out a sheaf of sepia photographs. “This is Captain Ezekiel Flagg, and this is his tugboat, Cheyenne .” She had a leatherbound ship’s log as well, and a look on her face that warned us she was about to drop a bombshell.
“Joshua Martin was Flagg’s first mate.”
She paused to let that sink in.
“One day the Cheyenne came back to port without Captain Flagg on board. Martin said he’d been lost in a storm, that no one had seen him go. Then Joshua Martin married Flagg’s widow, moved into her house on Overhulse Street, and took command of the tugboat.”
Well, you could see why the plaque upset her. Although the Flaggs hadn’t owned the house for more than three generations, seeing Martin’s name on the place was salt in an old family wound. Joshua Martin had never been brought to trial for the captain’s murder, but clearly Alice did