Then, he began to read the letter. As Lucy watched with some apprehension, Beau read the entire letter without a reaction, all the way down to the very end, the end that’d had Lucy sobbing the first time she’d read it. Then, he clearly read it again, starting from the beginning. When he’d finished it a second time, he looked up at her from over the top of his readers.
“I don’t even know what to say about this,” he muttered. “This is… wow….”
Lucy nodded as she took the letter back. “I know,” she said. “That was my reaction. Wow.”
He lifted his eyebrows in agreement, slowing pulling his readers off. “Ragsdale,” he said thoughtfully. “I know that name. In fact, we have a clerk at the station with that last name. It’s not an uncommon name around here for African American families.”
Lucy carefully folded up the letter. “I hardly slept at all last night after reading this,” she admitted. “I mean… what a story. The daughter of the wickedest man in the county having a biracial baby? And murdering the wrong man as a result? It sounds like a movie plot, doesn’t it?”
Beau had to agree. “It does,” he said. “That’s an incredible story.”
“And you’ve never heard anything about it?”
He shook his head firmly. “Not a thing,” he said. “Not even a hint from my gossiping mama.”
Lucy chuckled softly at the quirky way he’d accused his mother of being a gossip. “That’s good, then,” she said. “It means that there’s nothing out there to shame my grandmother. But… but I feel compelled to carry out her last wish. She wants me to find the child she gave birth to.”
Beau could feel the burden she’d been tasked with and it wasn’t even his burden. He sat back against the seat, his expression pensive. “That might be difficult,” he said. “From what I know of your great-granddad, the fact that his own daughter had a half-black child out of wedlock… honestly, I’m surprised she lived to a ripe old age. I’m surprised he didn’t kill her when he found out.”
Lucy nodded. “From what I know about him, I would agree with that,” she said. “But that’s part of the problem – my dad won’t really talk about him so I don’t even know who to ask. First off, would anyone even know about Mamaw’s illicit pregnancy? And if anyone did, they’re probably dead by now. But the baby… she says a Dr. Latling took it away, but I think that’s an assumption. Do you think Laveau Hembree might have killed it? It would have solved the problem – it would have put an end to his shame and no one would ever know about the mulatto child. Maybe that’s why you never heard about this – because that baby was killed from the start.”
Beau was nodding, swept up in the speculation of that powerful letter. “Very true,” he said. “Your grandmother mentions my great-grandfather, Sheriff Meade, as being part of the whole situation.”
Lucy nodded. “I know,” she said. “And that whole part about the rape and the murder… God, I didn’t even want to ask you if you think there’d be a record of such a thing.”
Beau shook his head. “Not formally, no,” he said. “A lot of those vigilante actions were never recorded in any fashion. They were just buried and forgotten. If you talked about it, then something similar might happen to you, so those kinds of things were kept hidden. We’ll probably never know just how many murders took place back during the days of Laveau Hembree and Terhune Meade, and even before. That’s part of the history down here that remains shameful to this day.”
Lucy watched something flicker across his face, regret or disappointment or something. “Do a lot of people feel that way?”
He shrugged. “Old folks, probably not,” he said. “They’re still entrenched in the mindset from those days. But younger folks – there’s a sense of outrage. You can see it all over the place. People look at cops like the enemy these days and for good reason. There were days past when men like my great-grandfather were the enemy.”
“And you bear that name.”
He looked at her, his pale eyes glimmering. “Much like you, I have a family name to clear.”
That was very true, in more ways than one. Lucy was starting to feel a kinship to this man that she couldn’t even begin to understand. All she knew was that she felt oddly close to a virtual stranger. She looked down at the letter as she put it back into the envelope.
“I never knew how much it needed clearing until the past couple of days,” she said. “Ever since I read this letter, there’s an entire world for me to clear up. Not just with that poor man who was murdered, but with the baby my grandmother had. That really seemed to be her entire purpose behind the letter – to find that child. But something tells me she isn’t alive anymore. I’m really thinking that she never even made it out of that house. God, that makes my stomach hurt to think that.”
Beau thought on that very grim possibility. “That could very well be true,” he said, “but she does mentions Dr. Latling being at the delivery. As the attending physician, he’d have to fill out a birth certificate.”
“Even on a baby no one wanted to admit existed?”
He shrugged. “It depends,” he said. “Was he more afraid of Laveau or was he more loyal to his Hippocratic Oath and the laws of the state? I will admit that I’m inclined to believe that there’s no record of that birth.”
“Me, too,” she said glumly. “Too bad we can’t ask the good doctor.”
“Maybe not directly, but there’s a Latling family in Pea Ridge, a very old family.”
Lucy perked up at that information. “Do you think they’re part of the doctor’s family?”
Beau shrugged. “It has to be,” he said. “In small towns like this, there are no coincidences. But my grandmother might know. She wasn’t born here but when she married my grandfather, she came to know people in the town. She knew Terhune and I would assume she knew Victory and Hardy to a certain extent, although I’ve never really asked. In fact… she might know something about this.”
Lucy couldn’t even dare to hope. “Do you think it would be too much to ask her?” she asked. “I don’t want to impose, but I’m just trying to get to the bottom of this. Mamaw never really asked anything of me, but this letter… her request… it’s a big one. I want to do what I can to see it through.”
Beau nodded, thinking on that terribly poignant letter. “I don’t blame you,” he said. “I think the first place to start would be to talk to people who might have been around during that time, people like my grandmother. Do you have any relatives who were around at that time who are still alive?”
Lucy cocked her head thoughtfully. “In fact, I do,” she said. “One of Mamaw’s cousins is still alive, Aunt Dell. She tells a lot of stories and we don’t know what’s bullshit and what’s truth, but she might know. But I’m afraid if I ask her, she might say something to my dad. I don’t want him to know about this until I have some answers or at least know more about it. Dad took Mamaw’s death hard and I just don’t want to upset him with this right now.”
Beau understood. “Then let’s start with my grandmother,” he said, sitting back as the waitress brought their food. “What are you doing for dinner tonight?”
Lucy’s eyes widened at the hubcap-sized plate with all of the food piled on it. “Getting sick after eating all of this.”
Beau snorted. “After you get sick, then.”
Lucy picked up the salt. “Having dinner with my parents, I suppose. Why?”
Beau collected the hot sauce and dumped it all over his eggs. “How’d you like to have dinner with me and my grandmother?”
She looked up at him. “So we can get her liquored up and pump her for information?”
He laughed softly. “You’re talking about a very old woman,” he said. “We don’t liquor her up. Well, at least not in public. Anyway, how about if I come pick you up at your hotel around six and we’ll see what my Lovie has to say.”
She looked at him strangely. “Your Lovie?”
He grinned, peppering his eggs heavily. “That’s what we call my
grandmother, Ms. Hollis Meade,” he said. “Lovie. My kids call her that, too.”
Kids. That meant marriage. Lucy’s heart sank a little, suddenly feeling very stupid that she’d let herself feel giddy over the man. Idiot! “How many kids?” she asked with forced politeness.
“Three,” he said. “Two boys and one girl. My sons, Gage and Ford, and my daughter, Georgia.”
Lucy was feeling more foolish by the moment. “Nice,” she said. “How old?”
“Nine, seven, and three.”
She looked down at her food at that point, unable to look at him. “That’s awesome,” she said, although she didn’t mean it. “How long have you been married?”
He plowed into his eggs. “I’m not,” he said. “She decided she didn’t want to be part of the family right after Georgia was born and left. My folks have been helping me raise the kids.”
Now, Lucy was feeling foolish for quite another reason, foolish because she was feeling hopeful again. She was glad his wife had left him. “That’s too bad about their mother,” she lied, “but it’s great you have your parents to help out. I’m sure you’re all doing a great job with them. But back to your grandmother – if you think it wouldn’t be too hard on her, I’d love to meet her and see if we can casually get on to the subject of Victory Hembree and what she might have known of my grandmother from back in the day. Maybe she knows something.”
Beau nodded, thinking he’d been rather clever about how he’d gotten her to go out on a date with him, using his Lovie as bait. Still, this was serious business. “Maybe,” he said. “But I have to admit that I feel as if I need to help you with Ms. Victory’s request considering my great-grandfather was evidently part of the problem. She said it right in that letter. Remember how we apologized to each other last night about our families and their mutual coercion?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe… maybe I can help undo what he did in a small way.”
She looked up at him. “Part of clearing the family name, eh?”
He nodded, meeting her eye over the steaming food. “You have your reasons,” he said softly, “and I have mine.”
That was good enough for Lucy. At six o’clock that evening, she was armed and ready.
CHAPTER TWELVE
~ Let the Dead Lie ~
“Vickie! Let me in!”
The hissed voice came from the east-facing window of Victory’s bedroom, the side of the house that faced a grove of trees and beyond that, fields of sorghum. It was very late at night beneath a full moon as Victory sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes, thinking she might have imagined the voice. But there it came again, a female whisper, and tapping against the glass.
Victory leapt out of bed.
“Dell?” she said in disbelief as she wrenched open the window. “Girl, what are you doing here?”
Victory’s cousin, Dell, slithered in through the window and ended up falling to the floor with a thud. Victory winced, fearful that someone would hear the sound as she pulled her cousin off of the floor.
“I had to come and see you,” Dell said. A pale girl with curly red hair, she was the chatty and anxious sort. “Nobody’s seen you in months! People are saying you’re dead!”
Victory shook her head, glad to see her cousin but also torn about it. She didn’t want her daddy to discover Dell in her bedroom.
“I’m not dead,” Victory said. “But you’d better leave. I don’t want Daddy to see you.”
Dell wouldn’t be pushed away. “What’s wrong?” she demanded. “Why hasn’t anybody seen you lately? What is Uncle Laveau punishing you for?”
Victory didn’t want to tell her, mostly because she knew that Dell would run amok in the town, telling everyone what she knew. Dell was that way.
Dressed in a flowing, lightweight house coat, her six-month-pregnant belly wasn’t terribly evident so she made sure that the fabric didn’t bind up against her. She kept her arm in front of her as an extra measure of protection.
“Don’t ask, Dell,” she said, turning to sit on the bed. “Please don’t ask. Go home, okay? I’m not sick and I’m not dead. Just… go home.”
Dell was greatly concerned and greatly curious. “Why won’t your daddy let you come out anymore?” she asked again. “The girls at school think you’re a prisoner. Are you?”
Victory frowned; she didn’t want to answer any questions. “Dell, please,” she said. “I… I’m fine. You know how Daddy is – he gets something stuck in his mind and it’s hard to change it. This is one of those times. You get out of here, ya hear? You don’t want Daddy to catch you. He’ll lock you up, too.”
That was the truth. Dell knew that Laveau could do anything he wanted to do and she didn’t want to be imprisoned like her cousin obviously was. Frustrated, she turned for the window.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked her cousin.
Victory nodded, refusing to look at her. “I am,” she said. “Dell… wait a minute.”
“What?”
Victory was hesitant. “How… how is everybody at school?”
Dell came back towards her. “We’re all fine,” she said. “We’re just worried about you. Mr. Franklin won’t talk about you. He says he don’t know nothin’, that your daddy pulled you out of school and didn’t tell him why.”
Victory’s heart sank. “Daddy’s mad at me,” was all she could bring herself to say. “Just don’t ask any more questions. He’s mad at me and I’m not going to tell you why. How… how is Eulalie?”
Dell sat down on the bed beside her. “She’s fine,” she said. “She cries about you all of the time. Does she know why you’re here?”
Victory shook her head. “No,” she said. “How… how is Mr. Franklin? And Belle, the cook? And… and Lewis, the groundskeeper? Are they all okay?”
Dell continued to nod. “They’re all fine,” she said. “Except I don’t see Lewis around anymore. I heard that Mr. Franklin discharged him.”
It was like a knife to the heart and Victory tried not to weep over it. “Why?” she couldn’t help but ask. “Mr. Franklin liked him.”
Dell shrugged. “No one knows,” she said. Then, she lowered her voice. “But we think it has something to do with his brother being killed. Is… is it true, Vickie? My daddy said that his brother was killed by Uncle Laveau.”
Victory couldn’t help the tears now, but she struggled against them. All she could do was nod, once, listening to Dell emit a ghastly hiss.
“He was?” she asked. “Sweet Jesus, Vickie, did… did you see it? Is that why your daddy has you locked up here? Because you saw him do it and he doesn’t want you to tell anyone?”
That was as good a reason as any to force Dell from her bedroom. Maybe if Dell thought Laveau was trying to cover up a crime by keeping his daughter locked up, she’d go away and never come back. Swiftly, Victory nodded her head. “Get out of here,” she said. “Don’t you ever come back. And if you tell anyone about this, I’ll tell Daddy that you came here and you’re the one telling people he killed a man.”
Dell’s eyes widened in terror. She bolted up from the bed but as she did so, her arm came into contact with Victory’s torso and landed across the young woman’s swollen belly. In that instant, Dell saw the pregnancy and her hands flew to her mouth in shock.
“My God!” she cried, pointing to Victory’s belly. “You… you…!”
Victory grabbed her cousin by the arms. “Keep your mouth shut,” she hissed. “You didn’t see anything here tonight. You don’t know anything, ya hear? If you tell anyone about anything at all, Daddy will know about it and he’ll come for you. Do you understand? Keep your mouth shut and don’t ever come back!”
Dell was in a panic. She fled to the open window, trying to make her way down the climbing rose vine on the side of the house with all due haste. But in her rush, she got tangled up halfway down and fell, landing on her right arm and snapping the bones.
She never did tell her mother the truth about how she broke her arm.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Present
As Lucy found out, Beau really didn’t know how old his grandmother was because women from her generation were so used to hiding their age that, he suspected, Ms. Hollis didn’t even know how old she was. She didn’t have a driver’s license so he couldn’t look her up in the Department of Motor Vehicles records and could, therefore, only really guess at how old she was.
Beau knew she had married Terhune Meade’s son in nineteen hundred and forty-five, so he figured she was at least in her late eighties. Once Lucy met the woman at the New Orleans Bistro in downtown Pea Ridge, she had to agree. She was darn near ancient.
But the woman was a riot. She seemed to be quite sharp for her age and she dressed as one would have dressed in one’s prime – in her case, from the nineteen fifties. She wore a powder blue suit, a wig, a hat, gloves, all the way down to the lip rouge and matching pocketbook.
With a grandmother’s entitlement, she fawned over her grandson, much to his embarrassment, and after one Manhattan – surprising that she loved liquor living in a conservative southern town as she did – she was seemingly drunk and Beau cut her off at one drink. Lucy found it hysterical.
“Ms. Lucy,” Lovie said from across the table after the dinner dishes were cleared. “I’m tired of talking about myself. Talk, talk, talk, all through dinner. You know all about me now. But I want to hear about you. My grandson doesn’t date women, you know, so you must be very special. What do you do, my dear?”
She was waving her hands around as she spoke. Lucy looked at Beau, who was sitting next to Lovie and struggling not to appear too chagrinned at his grandmother’s blunt nature. She fought off a grin.
“I’m a lawyer,” she said, rather loudly because Lovie couldn’t hear very well but refused to use a hearing aid. “Remember? When you and I first met, Beau told you I was a lawyer from California.”
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