by John Dunning
“I said a lot. Sometimes I say too much.”
“I’ve been thinking about one particular thing.”
I didn’t have to tell him, he knew what it was. “Hal Archer’s never told me a lie of any kind, not that I’m aware of. How many friends have you had that you can say that about?”
Not many, I thought. Maybe none.
He shuffled uneasily. “If that’s all, let’s get out of here.”
Fifteen minutes later we were across the Cooper River, heading for North Charleston. None of us said a word the whole way across.
My rental was still where I’d parked it. Dean didn’t offer to shake hands and neither did I. He drove out of the lot and turned back toward Charleston and a moment later we went the other way, north to Florence.
CHAPTER 39
There were towns along every road now. There was sprawl that had never been part of any town at all. There were long fingers of commerce and drugstores and housing developments where only forests and swamps and farmlands had been in that earlier time. Then there had been occasional outposts to comfort a traveler in the wilderness; now there were motels and gas stations, Dairy Queens and Burger Kings, Piggly Wiggly and Winn-Dixie supermarkets and antiques malls. There were X-rated magazine stands and gunsmiths and temples of any god a man wanted to pray to. There were places to stop and get quietly drunk or get a car fixed after a sudden breakdown. No one would ever go hungry or thirsty, get horny or spiritually deprived for more than a few minutes in any direction. What had then been a two-day trek in 1860 was two hours now in air-conditioned ease. But there were still stretches of wilderness where the pines grew thick and the way resembled nothing more than a tunnel with sky. Imagine this on a dirt road at night, I thought: imagine 120 miles of it. As we traveled upcountry I followed the odyssey of Richard Francis Burton and Charles Edward Warren in my head. As I slumped in the backseat reading Burton’s words, I could almost see them coming down from the north, and I could still get some faint, faraway sense of what it had been.
We reached Florence in the early afternoon. From then on our journey was charmed. If anything, it was too easy.
A librarian knew right away what we were looking for. That junction where the roads had intersected was still called Wheeler’s Crossing. It was out of town a stretch and there was nothing there now. A roadside sign would show us where it had been.
The library had a number of Wheeler papers: letters, some of the old man’s ledgers, even a few menus in Marion’s hand. The Wheelers had all been buried in an old graveyard near the crossroad. Marion Wheeler’s mother had been put there before her; her father, who had outlived them both, died in 1881. “Look at this,” Koko said. “She died in childbirth, just like her mother…exactly nine months after Burton and Charlie would’ve been there. Her father made no attempt to cover it up.”
Her son had lived. Her father had honored her deathbed wish, named him Richard, and raised him as his own.
Richard Wheeler. One sketchy account existed of his youth: no more than a few lines in a letter written near the end of the old man’s life. His schooling, three years in a classroom, was probably average for the time. He was fair with numbers but brilliant with language. He had learned Latin on his own, becoming fluent in six months, and had been studying Spanish. He was a good and energetic dancer and girls loved him. In that passage he was described as tall and dark with a keen sense of honor.
A lady killer.
He went to sea at sixteen and that was all that was known of him.
We arrived at the site of Wheeler’s inn late that afternoon. It was a bend in the road now, marked by a simple state highway sign that said wheeler’s crossing. The graveyard was on a dirt road not far away. It was dusk when we found the Wheeler plots: the father and mother side by side, Marion a few feet away. The simple stone said, here lies marion wheeler, beloved daughter, who departed this earth january 30, l86l, aged twenty-four years, eleven months, fourteen days. Koko took notes and in the waning light tried desperately to take pictures.
I had to pry her away.
Now for the first time she asked my opinion of Burton’s journal. It looked real, I said. By then I didn’t need to add the line about my own lack of expertise. Most impressive were the scores of Negro spirituals and slave songs that Burton had written down, word for word, in dialect, as he and Charlie had traveled through the South. He had rilled page after page with them, adding extensive notes on where he had heard them and what he suspected their African roots might be.
There was a full account of Burton’s first meeting with Charlie. It jibed with what we knew and added color to Charlie’s tale. There was a detailed description of the day they went walking in Charleston. Burton had made a sketch of Fort Sumter from the Battery, and had written with fond amusement of Charlie’s outrage at the slave auction. Best of all, he told of having their picture taken outside a dentist’s office on East Bay Street.
We headed west into the night.
At Camden we turned north, picking up Interstate 77. From there it was a straight shot into Charlotte, but we stopped in Rock Hill, taking two rooms in a motel overlooking a river. Erin called Lee in Denver and told him the news. She called my room and suggested that we meet downstairs for a drink.
“Lee is ecstatic,” she said.
“That’s good,” I said flatly.
“What’s wrong with you? In case you hadn’t noticed, we won.”
I made the obvious excuse: I was tired after last night. But there was something else and she sensed it.
“It’s Denise, isn’t it? She’s been forgotten in all this fuss.”
“Not by me.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know yet. Something.”
“You had your chance at Dante and let him go. Is that what’s bothering you?”
“No. I told you, I’m just tired.”
But it was more than that.
We turned in but I still couldn’t sleep. At midnight I thought of Dean Treadwell, and for the hundredth time about his strange friendship with Archer. Again I thought the unthinkable, pushing it away at once, but it was there now and it kept me awake. I must’ve slept at least a few hours because I opened my eyes suddenly and knew I had been dreaming. I had dreamed of Archer and his mother Betts, and it took me a while to remember that Betts hadn’t been Archer’s mother at all.
In the morning we had a quiet breakfast in the cafe. Lee had already called Erin and they had discussed air passage. “We can get a flight to Atlanta at seven o’clock tonight. It’ll be tight, but we should just make the connecting flight to Denver. Lee wants me to put all three fares on my credit card and he’ll reimburse me.”
“No,” I said. “You cover your own, I’ll take care of Koko and me.”
She insisted. “Cliff, he wants to do this.”
“Well, he can’t.”
We went into Charlotte and found Orrin Wilcox. Libby had been painfully accurate in her description of the ghoulish old bookscout and the incredible clutter of his store. He gave the impression of a guy who didn’t give much of a damn about anything, but he responded eagerly enough to the sight of my money.
“I believe you quoted Mrs. Robinson a thousand dollars,” I said.
“She should’ve taken it then. It’s fifteen hundred now. I got overhead, y’know.”
“Two prints,” I said.
“Two-fifty for the second print. Plus lab expenses.”
We went to a studio not far from his store. I wanted my continuity unbroken; I needed to keep that glass plate in my sight and see the prints being made. The photographer liked the color of my money and I stood at his side in the darkroom and watched Burton and Charlie come to life in the soup. Slowly Burton materialized…first the vague shape of him, then the street and a tree and some kids beyond them. Burton’s scars appeared suddenly like two cuts slashed on the paper. Then came the hat, then the eyes…and there was Charlie beside him, the man I had never seen but
had always imagined looking just about like that. The contrasts were stark, the clarity superb. They stood on the street enjoying a day long vanished but now immortalized, the affection between them almost palpable. Burton had a look of amused tolerance, Charlie one of happy friendship. Two black children stood near the palmetto tree on the walk, gawking at the photographer and his strange apparatus, and half a block away a dog was crossing the street. In the distance a horse was pulling a wagon toward us, and people were coming and going, in and out of the Exchange Building. I saw all this but my eyes kept coming back to Burton. His face was as clear as if it had been photographed only yesterday. And in his hand, draped over Charlie’s shoulder, was the notebook I had just been reading.
I put one of the prints in an envelope and addressed it to Libby Robinson at Fort Sumter. A few hours later we dropped off our rental car, I paid the extra tariff, and we caught a plane for Atlanta, hoping to get on a 9:38 flight to Denver.
Denver
CHAPTER 40
The plane was crowded and we felt lucky to squeeze in from standby. Our seating was scattered: I sat three rows behind Erin, mashed against the window by a bad-tempered fat woman who sprawled across all three seats, and Koko was out of sight, somewhere near the front. Once we were in the air Erin spent ten minutes on the airline telephone, talking to Lee again, I learned later. “He wants to see us all tonight if you’re up to it,” she said as we worked our way through the crowded Denver terminal. “It’s nothing urgent, so please don’t think of it as a command performance. He just wants to say thanks and offer us a drink. And maybe convince you to let him pay for the trip.”
“A drink would be good,” I said.
A bumpy three-hour flight had put us into Stapleton Airport at half-past eleven, Mountain Time. We caught a cab and arrived in Park Hill just after midnight. I looked at familiar houses drifting past and at shady familiar streets, and somehow they all seemed different. I rolled down the window and tasted the dry air. Home: it felt like a long time since I’d been here.
I paid the cabbie over Erin’s objections and we walked up the path to the judge’s front door. I could see his silhouette in the doorway. He opened the door as the night-light came on, illuminating the front yard, and he met us at the top step of his porch.
“God, it’s good to see you people.” He hugged Erin and gripped my hand fiercely. I introduced him to Koko and we were shuffled into his library, taking soft chairs in the friendly environment of great books. He moved to the bar and asked our pleasure. Erin took something sweet, Koko asked for water, and I had bourbon on the rocks.
“Miranda’s sorry she had to miss you,” Lee said. “We had an old friend here late last night and she was dead tired. Our timing was lousy but it had been planned for weeks. No rest for me these days: I’m still mired in a case that’s testing all my patience, and I think—I hope—she’ll be happy to have me back again when it’s over. Then we can all get together.”
Erin took Burton’s journal out of her bag and gave it to him.
“Well, you did it,” he said. “I can’t imagine how you persuaded him.”
“It wasn’t us,” I said. “Dante beat him up pretty badly. Didn’t Erin tell you?”
“Yes, of course. I still find it all hard to believe.”
We socialized for a while. Lee and I talked books, while Erin showed Koko the library.
“You’re a good detective, Cliff. I always knew that.”
“I was pretty good,” I said with my usual modesty. “I had good juice, a good feel for the work. Maybe I still have. Maybe I haven’t left it all between the bookshelves.”
“I’m not sure what that means exactly, but if it’s a requirement for—”
“It means you get a hunch. You keep after it even when the facts you’ve gathered won’t quite support your hunch. Even when you don’t like what you’re finding.”
I almost let it go then. I wanted to let it go, but Lee asked one more question and the unthinkable wafted up between us.
“What do you do when that happens?” he said. “How do you just ‘keep after it’ when it doesn’t want to fit?”
“It always fits, Lee. Usually when it doesn’t seem to it’s only because you’re missing something. So you keep asking questions, you become a pain in everybody’s ass. Most of all you think about it, day and night. You keep asking questions till the fat lady screams.”
“That almost sounds like you’re still at it.”
“I am. I can’t help myself. I want to let it go. I want to be done with it. It would be so easy to let it go, but I can’t.”
He looked away.
“Lee?”
“I’m sorry, I just lost my concentration. It’s this case, it’s got me punch-drunk.”
“I wonder if I could ask you a few questions.”
“You mean now? Tonight?”
“This shouldn’t take long. Otherwise, you see, I won’t be able to sleep, and if there’s one guy in Denver who’s as tired as you, that’s probably me.”
Suddenly the air in the room changed and was charged with conflict. Lee said, “Then by all means go ahead,” but his back had stiffened and the skin around his mouth tightened. I had seen that look many times, when a man says something and means exactly the opposite.
“Archer says the book was his all along,” I said. “He made a pretty convincing case for that to a Baltimore bookseller we met. But the way Erin was negotiating, it’s almost like you all knew he had stolen it.”
“Did Erin tell you that?”
“Erin told me as little as possible.”
“What exactly did she say?”
I found myself losing patience. It was late, I was tired, I was in no mood to be stonewalled. “Are you and Archer somehow related?”
His eyes opened wide. “What on earth does that have to—”
“Just something that occurred to me in the last twenty-four hours. Archer had a grandmother named Betsy Ross. At some point something was mentioned about your own grandma Betts. That would be fairly unusual, two grandmas with such similar names.”
“We’re cousins. This is not exactly a big dark secret.”
“But it’s not something either of you go out of your way to promote.”
“Why should we? What difference does it make?”
“Maybe none at all.” But I pushed ahead. “Betsy Ross married old Archer, but it was her second marriage, is that right? Her first was your grandfather.”
He didn’t confirm or deny: he just looked at me.
“And when the Archer men died young, Grandma Betts got control of the estate. Which included the books.”
Erin had caught the drift of the conversation and now she moved in close. “Is this going somewhere?”
I smiled at her. “That sounds very lawyerly, Counselor. Just calm down. Lee and I are only trying to put this thing to bed.”
“I thought it was to bed.”
“Not as long as there’s an unanswered question.”
“Which would be what?”
“Who killed Denise, and why.”
Lee turned away and went to the bar. “Well, Cliff,” he said, refilling his glass. “I don’t know what more I can tell you. I don’t even know what you’re looking for.”
“I’m looking for a killer, Lee.”
“This is a strange place to be looking for him,” Erin said.
I bypassed her and looked at Lee. “I woke up this morning thinking about Archer and his grandma Betts. Then I remembered that Grandma Betts was actually your grandmother. It took a while but I finally remembered—that first night we met him, Archer told us how you had inherited the books from your grandma Betts. What a dear old gal she was. But the way he said that was anything but dear. He was bitter, almost like he couldn’t stand the thought of her.”
“Hal’s bitter about everything. Nothing new there.”
“Then in South Carolina I found out about his grandmother, Betsy Ross, through a routine check on his background. That
was new.”
“So they were cousins,” Erin said. “What are you trying to make of this?”
“Did you know they were cousins?”
She said nothing but I sensed an answer and the answer was no.
“That might put a new light on these books.”
“I don’t see how.”
“I’ve been wondering, Lee: What kind of woman was Betsy Ross?”
“She was…” He gave a little laugh. “Oh God, she was a powerhouse. Nobody pushed Betts around, not the Archers or anybody. And she really loved her daughter.”
“From the first marriage. And I imagine she loved her daughter’s son as well.”
“Yes, she did.” He smiled. “They all said I was the apple of her eye.”
“And your mother?”
“The world’s sweetest woman. There was nobody who didn’t love her. All she lacked was Betsy’s strength.”
“What did Grandma think of her grandson on the other side?”
“Hal was always the odd man out with all of them—most of all with her. It’s not that Betts didn’t love him in her own way, she just couldn’t show it. In her eyes, he never made a right decision. He was shiftless, lazy. She had no idea how hard he really worked at what he wanted to do.”
“Cliff, you must have a point here somewhere,” Erin said. “Can we please get back to here and now?”
“Yeah, let’s do that. Only five of us knew Denise had that book. You said you went up to the mountain the next day and never told anyone. But that’s not true, is it?”
“She discussed it briefly with me,” Lee said.
“So what difference does that make?” Erin said. “I told him in confidence—what are you trying to make of it?”
“Yes, what’s your question?” Lee said.
“Did old Archer hire Treadwell to rook Josephine’s mother out of those Burton books? What happened to all those letters and papers?”
“How would I know that?”