I thought about the fire at Maggie’s and Sheriff Hicks’s theory that it was because of me. If he was right—and I suspected he was—then I’d caused Maggie enough trouble. I turned to face the mob, telling myself that surely they wouldn’t hurt me on a quiet residential street where anyone could look out a window and see what they were doing.
The men formed a tight circle around me. One of them pressed so close that I smelled the tobacco and beer on his breath. He looked at me with contempt.
“You got no business in this town. If you’re here to stir up trouble like those college kids down south, then you’re going to get trouble, you’d better believe it. We don’t need any strangers, especially any New Yorkers, telling us what we should and shouldn’t do.”
“I’m not here to make trouble.” I tried to sound calm and reasonable, but it was impossible to hide the tremor in my voice.
“You’ve been hanging around with that boy, the one whose brother was a murderer.”
“I thought this was a free country,” I said. “I thought people could associate with whomever they please.”
The whomever was a mistake. When the ringleader heard it, he repeated it jeeringly.
“We got a genuine college student here, come to tell us what’s what.” He stepped even closer, so that our noses almost touched. I recoiled automatically—and bumped into the man directly behind me. That did it. If their mission was to scare me, they had succeeded. I looked frantically around, but there wasn’t another soul on the street. And it was getting dark.
“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get out of town,” the ringleader said. “The sooner, the better—for you.”
The men crowded closer, as if they intended to smother me with their bodies. I balled my hands into tight fists. I had no idea what they were going to do to me, but I intended to fight back.
A bright light struck the knot of men. A teenager on the outside of the group raised a hand to protect his eyes. I heard a vehicle and a familiar voice.
“What’s going on there, fellas?” It was Mr. Standish—I was sure of it.
The circle grew ragged at the edges as a couple of the men stepped back.
“This is nothing for you to be concerned about, doc,” the ringleader said without taking his eyes off me.
I heard a truck door open and close. Leather-soled shoes slapped the cement sidewalk. The circle parted to admit Mr. Standish.
“I see.” He shook his head and let out a heavy sigh. “Come on, young lady. I’ll give you a lift home.” He sounded like a weary father who had just found his naughty offspring doing something she shouldn’t be—again. He turned and came face-to-face with a wall of men. He didn’t say a word but looked at each man in turn. A couple of them bowed their heads as if they were ashamed and shuffled out of his way.
I had to shoulder my way past the ringleader, who scowled at me. No one else gave me trouble. I followed Mr. Standish to his tired old pickup truck. Most of the group trailed after us, but Mr. Standish didn’t hurry or betray any nervousness. He circled around to the passenger-side door and opened it for me. He drove me up the street to Maggie’s and pulled over to the curb.
“You want to watch those boys,” he said. “They may act like idiots, but they’re dangerous idiots. You understand what I mean?”
I said I did, and I wondered where he situated himself. Was he with the mob or against it? Were his words a warning for me to get out of town, or was he genuinely concerned that something might happen? I couldn’t tell.
“I heard you were out at the old folks’ home,” he said. “Heard you were pretending to be Lorne Beale’s granddaughter.”
“That’s not true.” I was grateful that he’d rescued me but furious at his question. How did he know where I’d been? Had he followed me? Was there some kind of spy network in this town?
“I know people who work out there.” Mr. Standish turned in his seat to look at me. “You were there, all right.”
“But I never said I was his granddaughter.”
“I knew it was you the minute I heard a girl went to see him. That granddaughter of his wouldn’t come within a hundred miles of here, not after what her mother told her. Jane—that’s the mother’s name—made it known when she left here that she wanted nothing to do with the old man. The house in town, his cabin—she said to sell them and burn the money, for all she cared.”
That piqued my interest. “Because of what happened to Mr. Jefferson?”
“Because of what happened long before that. Lorne and his daughter never saw eye to eye. I think Jane must have poisoned the girl against him. Then, if you ask me, Lorne made a mistake letting the girl go to a fancy boarding school up north after her mother died. She became a different person entirely. She butted heads with Lorne every time she came home, until pretty soon she stopped coming altogether. She didn’t invite him to her wedding. Didn’t even tell him she was getting married. He heard about it from one of his wife’s old aunties.”
“I never said I was his granddaughter. People just assumed.”
“And you let them.” But there was no reproach in his voice. “What are you doing here, Cady?”
“Minding my own business.” I reached for the door handle.
“You best be careful.”
I jumped down from the truck. Maggie was sitting outside reading. She looked up when the truck stopped at the curb and frowned when I stepped under the porch light.
“You’re so pale. And goodness, you’re shaking. Are you all right?” She looked at the truck driving away. “That was Miles Standish, wasn’t it? What’s going on, Cady?”
I told her.
Maggie sank back into her chair.
“You have to be careful, Cady. People around here have some pretty set ideas. It’s going to take a lot to change the way they see things.”
“But I’m not hurting anyone. I just want to find out why everything about Mr. Jefferson’s trial is missing.”
“That may seem like nothing to you. But there’s a reason I left this town, apart from it being too small and offering girls no opportunities other than matrimony. People here think and do exactly what their parents and grandparents thought and did. They’re comfortable with things the way they are, and they’re not comfortable with anyone trying to make changes.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“I know that, and you know that. But those men who followed you don’t know that. All they know is that a bunch of what they would call foreign agitators have gone down to Mississippi, where they’re trying to change the way things have always been. They don’t even like it when Washington tells them they have to let black kids go to the same schools as white kids or that black people can sit anywhere they want on a bus. You already know what they thought of Thomas Jefferson when he came back from the war and objected to being treated like a second-class citizen.”
“But—”
“There was a time not so long ago when the Ku Klux Klan was active here.”
I’d been wondering about that ever since I looked at the newspaper clipping Mrs. Hazelton had given me. I knew a little about the KKK, but I’d always thought of it as a southern phenomenon. Maggie set me straight.
“Back when I was born, there were probably three or four million Klan members across the country. They had 250,000 members right here in Indiana. They say that one in three white males in this state were members. In some towns, you couldn’t get elected to public office without Klan support.”
I was stunned to hear this.
“Just because there are no segregated drinking fountains here doesn’t mean that everyone treats everyone else equally. That day will come, God willing, but it isn’t here yet. And right now people are nervous about what’s going on in Mississippi and Alabama. They think if one race gets something, then the other loses. That’s not true, of course. But that’s the way people think.” She studied me in the light from overhead. “I know you think this Thomas Jefferson thing is important,
and maybe to you it is. Maybe it will turn out to be important for this town. But you have to tread softly, Cady. People aren’t going to change overnight just because you think they should. Change takes time.”
I didn’t have time. I couldn’t stay down here forever. And I didn’t intend to go back to Toronto without a story, one with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Chapter Fifteen
I VISIT THE SCENE OF THE CRIME
I DID HOUSEWORK all morning and then told Maggie I had to run a few errands. It was a lie, but I didn’t want her to worry about me. She didn’t ask where I was going. All she said was, “Be careful.”
I met up with Daniel, and he led me to where Patrice’s body had been found. It was downstream from some rapids formed by a narrowing of the river.
I stared into the roiling water. What wasn’t foam was the color of milk chocolate.
“Has the water always been so muddy?” I asked.
“Far as I know.”
A length of tree branch swirled past us, moved quickly through the rapids and vanished.
“If you dumped a body here, wouldn’t the current carry it away?”
“If you mean Patrice’s body, it wasn’t just dumped. It was weighted down. I told you that. The killer chose that place because the water is so deep, and because of the rapids people don’t come here very often.”
“If the body was weighted down, then how was it found? I can’t see anything in there. And if people don’t come here often, why would anyone think to look for it here?”
“There was a big storm just before they found him. Everyone says if it wasn’t for that storm, he might never have been found.”
“What do you mean?”
“His body was tied to an old metal pulley, a really big one. But the rope broke during the storm, and he floated to the surface.”
I shuddered at the thought.
“The body floated to the surface,” Mr. Standish said. I’d found him in the first place I looked: the diner, talking over coffee with Mr. Selig and Mr. Drew. He waved me into a chair—clearly, there were no hard feelings from the night before—and ordered me a cup of coffee.
“Way I heard it, the rope didn’t hold,” Mr. Drew said. “Seems to me they didn’t teach those boys proper knot tying while they were in the army.”
“Knots are for the navy,” Mr. Standish said mildly.
“Bad luck though,” Mr. Selig said. “If he’d tied the rope good and proper, he might have got away with it. It wasn’t like anyone was going to check where that fella had gone. If anyone gave him a second thought, they’d think he finally smartened up and got himself back where he belonged.” He sipped his coffee. “Yes sir, if I was that boy, I surely would have checked that knot.”
I had another question.
“Was someone looking for Mr. LaSalle? Or did someone just find him accidentally?”
Mr. Standish frowned thoughtfully. Mr. Selig shook his head. Mr. Drew said, “The Jefferson boy was looking for him. He came by the store and asked if he’d been around.”
“Marcus owned a feed and seed store back then,” Mr. Standish explained. “His nephew runs it now. That one and two more. A regular chain.”
“A short chain.” Mr. Drew laughed.
“So only Mr. Jefferson was looking for Mr. LaSalle?” I asked. “Nobody else?”
“Can’t think why anyone else would,” Mr. Selig said. “He was a stranger in town. The only thing we knew about him was that he was Jefferson’s friend.”
“And a Frenchie,” Mr. Drew said.
“And a soldier,” Mr. Standish said.
“All adds up to a whole lot of not much,” Mr. Selig said stubbornly. “Why would anyone look for a stranger?”
But I couldn’t help thinking, Why would Mr. Jefferson have looked for Mr. LaSalle? If he really had killed him, tied his body to a pulley and dumped it in the deepest, muddiest part of the river he could find, why would he go around town looking for him? Wouldn’t that just call attention to the fact that Mr. LaSalle was missing? Why didn’t he keep his mouth shut and if the subject came up (unlikely, according to these three old men), tell whoever asked that LaSalle had gone back home? Nobody would have questioned that.
“Who found the body?” I asked.
“Sheriff Hicks. Of course, he was just Deputy Hicks back then. I guess he would have been on the job for about two years at the time.”
It was after dark, and I was in the kitchen waxing the floor—it needed it—when I heard a swoosh. A large manila envelope slid under the kitchen door and halfway across the floor. Printed on the front were the words For the girl staying at Maggie’s. I pushed open the kitchen door and stepped out into the heavy night air in time to see someone—a black woman—hurrying down Maggie’s driveway. I called out, but she didn’t stop.
I went back into the kitchen and opened the envelope. Inside was a file folder. I slipped it out and opened it. It contained three black-and white-photographs. The first made me flinch. It was an eight-by-ten police photograph of a body, badly bloated, its hands and ankles bound. Something was wound around its waist. I stared at it. There was a river in the background. It looked like the same place Daniel took me to—the place where Patrice LaSalle’s body was found. I shuffled the photo to the bottom and looked at the next one.
It was a close-up of…of what, exactly? It looked like a piece of heavy equipment—like a giant pulley. Which was exactly what it was. It was the pulley Daniel had told me about, the one that had been used to weight Mr. LaSalle’s body and keep it hidden beneath the surface of the muddy water. I moved to the next picture.
The third and last photograph showed the body with the pulley beside it. Where had these pictures come from? Who was the woman who had delivered them? And why had she left them for me? To scare me? To warn me of what might happen to me if I continued to ask questions about Mr. Jefferson and Mr. LaSalle? Did that group of men put her up to delivering them?
I was slipping the photos back into the envelope when something caught my eye. I stepped directly under the overhead light and studied the third photo again. I flipped back to the second one. Was I really seeing what I thought I was seeing? If I was, what did it mean?
In the first picture, the body’s hands and feet were bound with rope. It was as plain as day. But the binding around the waist—that wasn’t rope. It was some kind of wire, but it was thick, like cable.
I flipped to the second picture, and then the third. There was no doubt about it. One end of the cable was attached to the body, the other end to the pulley. But the cable wasn’t in one piece. It looked as though it had been cut.
I sat down at the table, spread the three photos out in front of me and tried to estimate how much cable there was altogether. It didn’t look very long. Maybe three or four feet.
Daniel had said the river was deep where the body was found. But how deep was deep? Surely more than three feet. At three feet, a man could stand up and the water would hit the top of his thighs, or maybe his waist if he was short. The river had to be a lot deeper than that. So if the body had been attached to the pulley by cable, and if the pulley was at the bottom of the river, then there was no way the body would ever have bobbed to the surface.
One of the old men—was it Mr. Selig or Mr. Drew?—had said that if Mr. Jefferson had been better at tying knots, the body would never have been found. But you tie a knot in a rope, not in a cable. And besides, this was a crime-scene photo, I was sure of it, and the cable was still wrapped around both the body and the pulley. There was no knot. Yet somehow the cable had ended up in two pieces. There was only one way that could have happened: someone must have cut it. But when? And why? Why cut the cable and leave the body floating in the river where someone might find it? That was the question that ate at me all night.
I was up and out of Maggie’s house at sunrise the next morning. I planted myself on a bench across the street from the sheriff’s office and watched until I saw a familiar figure get out of a car.
The sheriff, his uniform shirt crisp at the beginning of what promised to be a hot day, the crease in his pants knife-sharp, squinted into the rising sun at me.
“Cady. You still in town?”
“I need to ask you a question.”
I saw a flicker of impatience in his eyes. “Shoot,” he said.
“It’s about the man that Mr. Jefferson killed.”
“What about him?”
“I heard you were the one who found the body.”
There was a tick of hesitation before he answered, and I couldn’t help thinking that he was wondering how I knew that. He nodded.
“Where did you find it?”
“In the river.”
“In a deep part of it, where the rapids are, right?”
“I don’t recall exactly. It was a long time ago.”
“Someone showed me the spot.”
“Well, that person has a better memory than I do,” he said. “I’d have to look it up.”
“Okay.” I looked expectantly at him.
“But I’m not going to do that,” he said. “In the first place, like I told you, the records from that time were destroyed in the flood. And in the second place, I have a lot of work to do. I don’t have time to worry over cases that were closed before you were even born.” He locked his car and started for the stairs.
“Can I ask you one more question?”
“Would it make any difference if I said no?”
“How did you find the body?”
“What do you mean?”
“How did you find it? Were you out looking for Mr. LaSalle?”
“I don’t recall that anyone was looking for him. He’d supposedly left town.”
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