He did not describe it in any letter to his sister that was preserved. Cassie Peele, when she returned to the house that evening, found the front door unlocked, the shotgun standing in its usual place in the umbrella stand, unfired, the boy Thaniel sitting in his usual chair by the fire, and Sheriff Wickham sitting at his writing desk, apparently absorbed in his correspondence, and appearing to her no different than he had appeared that morning. But over the following weeks, according to Peele's later testimony, Wickham began to change. He grew thinner.
His hair, which had been iron gray, began to whiten rapidly, and by the end of May, it was the color of milk. He slept less and less. He wrote long letters at night that he burned in the parlor grate before morning, and he refused, categorically, and without explanation, to allow anyone in the household to speak the boy's name aloud.
On the 15th of May 1902, the boy Thaniel disappeared from the sheriff's parlor. He had gone to bed the night before in the small room off the kitchen that Wickham had set aside for him in the presence of Cassie Peele, who had tucked him in and left a candle burning on the dresser. When Peele entered the room the next morning to wake him, the bed was made. The candle had burned out normally.
The child's borrowed clothing was folded on the chair, and the child himself was not there. The window was closed and latched from the inside. The door to the kitchen was closed. There was no sign of any intruder.
Peele called for Wickham, who came from the parlor, examined the room in silence, and then walked outside and stood in the yard for a long time. When he came back in, according to Peele, he told her in a voice she said she would remember to her dying day, “The boy was not taken. The boy was called home.” Wickham continued as sheriff for another 11 months. He performed his duties.
He answered his correspondence. He appeared, to those who did not know him well, to be simply an aging man in visibly declining health. And no one in the county except Cassie Peele and Dr. Cade connected his decline to the events of April and May. He died in his sleep on the 22nd of April, 1903, one year, almost to the day after the boy Thaniel had first spoken to him about the ones below.
His sister traveled from Ohio for the funeral. She retrieved from Cassie Peele the oilskin packet from the smokehouse wall. She took the packet back to Ohio with her, and she deposited it, according to her own later correspondence, in a safe deposit box at a bank in the town of Marietta, where it was to remain until such time as she or her heirs determined it was safe to bring the contents to light. The sister died in 1929.
Her heirs, two nieces, and a nephew, opened the safe deposit box in 1930 and inventoried its contents. The oilskin packet was there. It was, according to their inventory, sealed with wax, and marked in Wickham's handwriting with the words to be opened only in extremity. None of the three heirs felt that any extremity had yet occurred.
The packet was returned to the box. The box was retained. In 1947, the last of the three heirs, the nephew, died. His widow, following the instructions in his will, transferred the contents of the safe deposit box, including the oilskin packet, to the Ohio Historical Society, where they were entered into the collection as the Wickham papers, and assigned a catalog number.
The catalog record for that number exists. The physical materials do not. When a researcher named Delphine Watts requested the Wickham papers from the Ohio Historical Society in the summer of 1963, she was informed that the papers had been transferred in 1959 to a private collection whose owner had requested anonymity and that the historical society was no longer able to make them available to researchers. The private collector has never been identified.
The papers have never resurfaced. Dr. Ephraim Cade, the physician who had examined the boy on the day of his arrival and who had ridden out to the ridge in the buggy, was found dead in a creek bed about three miles north of Pickens on the 11th of October, 1903. His mouth showed evidence of deliberate mutilation. His boots had been placed neatly on the bank of the creek beside his body.
There were no other marks on him. The county coroner, who had by that point been appointed to replace Cade himself, ruled the death a homicide by person or persons unknown and closed the case within 6 months for lack of evidence. Cade's private journal, in which he had recorded his observations of the boy and his notes on the trip to the ridge, was not found among his effects. His widow, who had inherited the entire practice, sold the house and moved to Maryland within the year.