With the gloves on his hands, Oscar finished unwrapping the sword, folding the linen and laying it beside him on the sofa cushion. Pulling the sword from its sheath, he held both sheath and sword out toward her on flat palms, as if he were a servant offering it to a master going to war.
“It’s a Model 1860 Light Cavalry Saber. Brass guard. Steel scabbard. Most of the leather wrapping the grip is still intact.” He laid the sheath in his lap, turning it over to show her the other side, then he leaned over the sword. Still gazing at the sword, he ran a gloved finger lovingly across the flat side of the blade and the grip.
Faye didn’t think he realized that he was too close to her. He seemed less like a lecher than like a man with no sense of personal space. She would guess that this deficiency had gotten him slapped a few times.
“Custer carried a sword like this. So did Jeb Stuart.”
Faye pulled away from him, but he and the sword leaned forward into the space she’d vacated. She wondered what he would say if she called his attention to the fact that Custer and Stuart had both died of battlefield injuries, but this would have been unfair. Their swords might not have been to blame for the famous generals’ sad ends.
Instead, she said, “You told me that Cally Stanton sent this sword to Elias’ wife. What did you say that her letter said?”
“Only that Elias had used his dying breath to ask Cally to send his sword home to his wife, and that he had asked her to send his love with it. I couldn’t tell you why Cally Stanton was there when he died, not unless the other letter-writers were right. If she had imprisoned him and tortured him and killed him, she would have been there at the end.”
Faye’s eye raked over the slight curve of the saber’s blade. She was speaking more to herself than to Oscar when she said, “But why would she have written his wife to send her his love? Wouldn’t a woman so evil have taunted her? To tell you the truth, I don’t think somebody evil would have sent his wife anything at all. True evil would have left her wondering for the rest of her days.”
Something about the pile of linen was drawing Faye’s eye. There was a stroke of green across one end of it, made out of silk thread with tiny even stitches. The fabric had been adorned with a garland of embroidered leaves, and Faye had seen this pattern before.
She was about to ask him to let her take a closer look at the old linen, but she was startled silent when one gloved hand reached toward her. Oscar touched her hand, then slowly brushed the back of his index finger up her bare arm. Oh, yes. This man was completely aware that he was invading her space.
She jerked her arm away from his finger and leaned back until the sofa’s arm caught her in the lower back and she could go no farther. Even then, this man was too close to her.
She heard the sound of a door opening behind her, and Oscar cried, “Delia! How was your nap? Are you feeling better?”
He was immediately out of Faye’s personal space and into Delia’s. Taking the young woman by an arm, he guided her into an easy chair. “Can I get you something? Some tea? A sandwich?”
Unlike Oscar’s unmarked wrists and forearms, Delia’s arms did show battle wounds. Her hands were bruised, and the skin around her wrists was raw. Another bruise showed on her forehead, beneath a fluffy fringe of hair. Delia hadn’t had bangs before. The thought of Delia in front of the bathroom mirror, snipping just enough hair to hide her wounds, went straight to Faye’s heart.
Oscar patted the brand-new bangs tenderly, saying, “Faye came to talk to us about the sword and about Cally Stanton. Do you feel up to joining us?”
“Yes. If you’ll get me a cup of tea.”
Delia smiled and Faye was impressed with her resilience. Faye herself had shown a noticeable lack of resilience lately.
“You can help us track down Cally Stanton?” Delia was indeed resilient. She was already looking Faye coolly in the eye, while backing her into a commitment she didn’t want to make.
“I’m afraid I can’t do any more than what you’ve already done. You’re the historian, so your skills at tracking down primary sources are at least as good as mine. I haven’t found any trace of Cally Stanton in public records. Have you?”
“No. But if I know Oscar, we’ll be living in this house until somebody does. You don’t pile up accomplishments the way Oscar did without being willing to chase your goals longer than you probably should. He’s really a very impressive man. Don’t you think?”
Faye wanted to say, “Impressively sleazy,” but Oscar arrived with a cup of hot water and a tea bag, saving Faye from having to answer. She studied Delia as the woman reacted to Oscar fussing over her tea.
Delia hadn’t drawn back when Oscar leaned too close. She had worn a tender twist of a smile while she watched him stir sugar into her tea. Most telling of all, she had accepted the cup with an open hand that lingered on the timeworn hand offering it.
Faye might have been disturbed by Oscar’s inappropriate invasion of her space, but Delia was not. This meant that his manner toward Delia wasn’t inappropriate at all. She liked it. She liked him.
Faye needed to think again about Oscar’s relationships with Liz and Emma and, given his excursions into her own personal space, with Faye herself. Mostly, though, she needed to revisit her prejudices about Oscar’s relationship with Delia. So he was forty years older than she was. Big deal. Some people would remind her that it wasn’t all that usual for Faye to be eight years older than her husband.
“I’m glad you were able to come talk to Oscar about our research, Faye,” Delia said. “I know you’re busy, but is it possible you could meet us at Mrs. Everett’s museum sometime? She has access to some databases there that are way too expensive for me to buy on my own. Besides, only a fraction of her collection is on display and she’s given me access to the archived pieces. So many of those artifacts was found right here in Micco County. There could be things in Emma Everett’s museum that Cally Stanton herself touched.”
“Or Elias Croft.” Oscar stroked Delia’s hand absentmindedly as he spoke. Delia let him.
Faye and several crops of interns under her supervision had curated everything in Emma’s museum. If Delia found a relationship between Cally Stanton and any physical object in that museum, Faye would eat that object.
But she couldn’t swear that there wasn’t something in the museum that was related to Elias Croft. She’d never even heard of him before Oscar and Delia showed up in Micco County.
“We can go over there now.” As she spoke, Faye remembered what had happened to Delia that morning. She almost added, “If you’re feeling up to it,” but she remembered at the last minute that she wasn’t supposed to know anything about Delia’s attack.
Delia set her mug down so firmly that a little tea sloshed over its rim. “If I have to sit here for another minute in this house with its locked doors and its fully armed alarm system, waiting to hear whether the police have arrested anybody, I will scream.”
So Delia didn’t mind admitting that she was the woman whose story had been all over the news that morning. This meant that Faye could stop worrying about accidentally revealing that she had known this for hours.
Delia pulled the sleeves of her cardigan down, but they weren’t long enough to fully cover the red marks on her wrists. “Shall we go?”
Faye watched Oscar spread the old linen across the ottoman in front of him, carefully laying the sword on it. It looked like a piece of a bedsheet. As he swaddled the weapon like a baby, she got a close look at the green leaves embroidered along one edge of the linen in a pattern that she’d seen before.
They formed a garland, caught up at intervals with flowing yellow ribbons to make a scalloped design. She owned a few pieces of china, all of them old and most of them broken, with that design painted along their rims. Stamped on the bottoms of those teacups and plates were the words “Turkey Foot Hotel.” Most of them had been found buried among th
e ruins of the hotel owned by Cally’s husband Courtney Stanton. A few of them were uncovered by a hurricane that came more than a hundred and fifty years after the one that destroyed the hotel.
Faye had tracked down the china company who had made them, and she knew that they had been designed and custom-made for the hotel. There were no others like them in the world. She tried not to stare as she tracked back through the only reasonable sequence of events that put a piece of linen from the Turkey Foot Hotel into Oscar Croft’s hands.
The Turkey Foot Hotel had died young. It had stood on Last Island, which had been so close to Joyeuse Island that Faye could see its remnants from her cupola, and the hotel hadn’t survived the great hurricane of 1856. Neither had the island. Last Island had been blown into so many pieces that the area was now called the Last Isles.
In her oral history, Cally had clearly said that she attended the grand opening of Courtney Stanton’s hotel as a slave in 1856. While she was still on the island, probably within days of the grand opening, a hurricane destroyed the hotel and killed most of the people in it, including her master and mistress. Courtney Stanton had been her master’s son-in-law, and he had inherited Cally, all the other slaves on Joyeuse Island, and the island itself. Eventually, Cally had become his common-law wife, living with him in Faye’s house on Joyeuse Island until he died sometime after the start of the Civil War.
There was almost no way that a piece of linen carrying the Turkey Foot Hotel’s crest could have survived the hurricane. Perhaps someone had found it floating in the Gulf afterward but, more likely, a shipment of linens had arrived after the hotel was destroyed. Even a week’s delay in shipping would have meant that a shipment of sheets could have outlived the hotel.
Cally’s husband Courtney would have found himself poorer by the value of a hotel and the island it sat on, but very rich in bedsheets. Faye imagined that even the slaves in their cabins slept wrapped in sumptuous linen.
Cally, frugal to the bone, would have used those sheets for years. Then, when it came time to send Elias Croft’s sword home—two decades after the 1856 hurricane? three?—she would have used the worn but still serviceable fabric to cushion it for the trip.
Was she looking at a scrap of fabric that Cally had held in her hands, washed and hung out to dry, and maybe even slept under? Resisting the urge to reach out a hand and snatch it, she answered Delia’s question. The words “Shall we go?” had just left the young woman’s lips, even though Faye had spent that instant traveling to 1856 and back.
She dragged her gaze away from the linen, met Delia’s eyes and said, “Sure. Let’s go check out Emma’s museum.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Faye had come to her meeting with Oscar by boat, so it made sense for the three of them to ride together to the museum in Oscar’s car. She sat in the backseat and listened more than she talked.
Oscar teased Delia while she smiled indulgently. “Do you think you could cram more paper into that briefcase?”
She laughed and teased him back. “If you’d focus on family mysteries that don’t go back a hundred and fifty years, there would be a lot less paper and I’d be working a lot less. If you’d contain your curiosity to things I can find on the Internet, I could eliminate the paper altogether.”
“But then you might finish your work quicker, and I’d have no excuse to keep you around.”
“We can’t have that!’ She patted the hand resting on the stick shift between them.
This was not the kind of relationship that Emma had described during their endless conversations about Oscar and Delia and how to keep them out of Faye’s personal business. Maybe Delia’s near-escape had brought the two closer together.
At any rate, Faye needed to focus less on gossip about the feelings of people who were old enough to make their own decisions. The question at hand was not “Does Delia care for Oscar?” It was “Could Oscar have killed Liz or broken Emma’s window or—and this was an awful thought—attacked Delia in a way designed to drive her into his own arms?”
Knowing the contents of Delia’s heart couldn’t answer that question for Faye. Nobody knew its answer but Oscar, but Faye was hellbent on finding it out.
***
Emma looked startled to see Faye enter the museum with Oscar and Delia, probably because she was the one who had been listening to Faye babble for weeks about how badly she wanted to avoid the two of them. Faye gave her an I’ll-tell-you-later glance and settled herself at the work station next to Delia’s.
Oscar left them to their work, taking a seat in Emma’s office and launching a conversation with the not-creative gambit of “So…how’ve you been?” If Emma minded him interrupting her work, Faye couldn’t tell it. She could see Emma listening intently. Sometimes, Oscar even took a breath and let her talk.
Whenever a new woman came into view, Oscar was captivated, at least for the moment. Did this bother Delia? Not that Faye could tell.
Sitting down to a computer, Faye logged into the museum’s collection catalog and typed in a search term that she’d used many times before: “Cally Stanton.” As a curator of the museum, she had access to more data than Delia, so Delia was hoping for new information. She was destined to be disappointed. Delia didn’t know that, but Faye did.
Once Faye’s computer screen showed the expected “No matches found” message, which she very helpfully showed to Delia, Faye was free to watch the other woman work. Delia certainly did know what she was doing. Faye could tell that Delia already knew about the Micco County courthouse fire in the 1890s, because she was ignoring local records and focusing on records from the U.S. Census. Faye would have done the same thing.
With a portal to the census records open on her screen, Delia pulled a file from her briefcase and unfolded several large copies of old maps. She smoothed their creases and spread them across their shared workspace. On them, Delia had highlighted every visible island in Micco County. Most of the islands were in the Gulf but, damn, the woman was thorough. She had even marked small islands in rivers and lakes, all over the county. If an island was visible at the scale of any of her maps, she had highlighted it in yellow.
Next, Faye watched her unfold another set of maps, one for every publicly available census after the Civil War, ending with 1940. When Faye saw what Delia had done with these maps, she stopped being impressed and started panicking. Delia had used detailed historical maps, along with the cruder census maps, to figure out which of the censuses’ Enumeration Districts had contained islands.
This was huge. Delia was no longer looking for Cally Stanton on a list of everybody who had lived in Micco County over an eighty-year stretch. Now Delia could focus her laser-like attention on lists of people who had lived on islands in Micco County in those years. How many could that possibly be? A hundred? Two hundred, tops.
Delia still wouldn’t find Cally herself. Faye already knew she wasn’t listed in any census report. But there was one faint thread that could possibly take Delia’s search to Joyeuse Island. And then to Faye, who would have an interesting time explaining why she had failed to mention that she had inherited her island from ancestors named Stanton.
Cally was invisible to history for so many reasons. She had been a slave without a birth certificate. Her “marriage” to her legal master, the first Courtney Stanton, had been an illegal thing forged between two people who loved each other, so there was no marriage certificate.
Courtney Stanton had torn up the deed showing his ownership of his wife, so it was long-gone. For the rest of her life, Cally had retained her suspicion of the government that had let people own her, so she had never once filled out a census form. In Cally’s day, it had been possible to get away with that when you lived on a remote island.
Since she had never had a birth certificate, there had been no pressing need to get her a death certificate. Her daughter, the second Courtney Stanton, had buried her on Joyeuse and he
r grave marker had washed away in a hurricane before Faye was born. Faye knew of no document in existence that gave Cally the surname of Stanton. She had never had any legal surname at all. Faye was as sure as she could be that there was no paper trail to lead Delia to Cally Stanton.
This was not true of Joyeuse Island.
Cally’s daughter had been more law-abiding than her mother. She appeared as a resident of Joyeuse Island in the 1940 census, the first one taken after Cally’s death. This was not a huge problem, as she was listed under her married name, Courtney Wells.
Faye’s problem lay in the archives of the Micco County Sun-Record. Courtney Wells had been in a highly publicized court battle to keep property she had inherited, all of which had been located on islands off the coast of Micco County. It was not possible that a researcher with Delia’s training and determination who was looking for an island in Micco County had missed newspaper coverage of a battle over ownership of most of its offshore islands.
Cally’s name did not appear in the newspaper coverage—Faye had checked—but the name of Cally’s husband Courtney Stanton did appear and he was identified as Courtney Wells’ father. Oh, how Delia’s eyes would light up to see someone named Stanton associated with a lawsuit over islands.
After reading that article all Delia had to do was reach back a single generation and look for the first Courtney Stanton. More accurately, all she needed to do was to reach back a single census report. She had to do something not obvious—look for a man named Courtney Stanton living on an island years before Elias was supposed to have been imprisoned by someone named Cally Stanton.
If Delia looked at the 1860 census, she would see Courtney Stanton living on Joyeuse Island. Pairing this with the knowledge from the newspaper article that Courtney Stanton had a daughter named Courtney Wells who was making trouble in court in the 1930s would give Delia almost everything she needed. She would have a set of data with a single fascinating, woman-shaped hole: Who was Courtney Wells’ mother?
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