The Meriwether Murder

by Malcolm Shuman

  “What about Clark?” Pepper asked.

  “Jefferson made him territorial Indian agent. He and Lewis were too close by now to go their separate ways. But Clark seems to have avoided the acrimony between Lewis and Bates. In fact, he even tried to act as intermediary, though it didn’t work: Bates was too petty, too jealous. He was from Virginia, too, and he’d applied for the position as Jefferson’s secretary several years before. The fact that Lewis had gotten the job and then went on to glory obviously grated on him. So he set out to undo Lewis in every way he could.”

  “Old story,” I said.

  “I’m afraid so. What made matters worse was that by the time Lewis arrived as governor, in 1807, Jefferson’s term as president had expired and he’d been succeeded by James Madison. The Madison administration decided on a program of austerity and when Lewis began submitting expense vouchers to the War Department, his vouchers started getting rejected. Most of the expenses were quite legitimate. The reasons given for rejecting them were usually that Lewis hadn’t gotten permission for the expenditure from Washington first. Not very practical when you consider that, as governor, he had to make decisions on the spot and Washington was weeks away by mail.”

  “Sure he wasn’t working for the Corps of Engineers?” I asked.

  “Just the usual clerks in the War Department,” Deeds said. “But they were carrying out the orders of the Secretary of War, William Eustis. And when they’d finished, poor Lewis was ruined financially. Oh, not that he didn’t make some risky investments while he was governor, and he may have had a bit of a drinking problem, but what he had to deal with would have driven anybody to drink. Finally, in desperation, he packed up copies of his vouchers and set out with his servant, a man named John Pernier, to go to Washington and confront the people in the War Department in person.”

  “Hear, hear,” I said.

  “But he was killed on the way,” Pepper said. “Is that right?”

  “Well, something happened,” Shelby Deeds said. “But historians have never known just what. He started downriver, with the plan of reaching New Orleans and then taking the coastal route by sea until he got to Washington. But when he got to Fort Pickering, at what’s now Memphis, he changed his mind and decided to take the overland route instead.”

  By now I was caught up in the saga.

  “Does anybody know why he changed his mind?” I asked.

  Deeds walked over to the fireplace and stared at the grating as if the answer might be there. Then he turned back to face us and shook his head.

  “Ostensibly it was to avoid being captured by English raiders. He had all his notebooks from the expedition with him. But there’s a lot of confusion about that, because the officer in charge of Fort Pickering, a Captain Gilbert Russell, later said Lewis was so distraught when he reached Pickering that Russell had to guard him to keep him from killing himself. Supposedly, Lewis had tried to kill himself on the trip downriver by boat before they got to Pickering. But after a few days at Pickering he recovered, allowing him to start out on the Trace, with his servant and an Indian agent named Major James Neelly, who just happened to pop up at Fort Pickering while Lewis was there and who offered to look after Lewis on the Trace.”

  “Are you saying this Neelly …?”

  Deeds shrugged. “Nobody knows. The point is that if Lewis had continued downriver to New Orleans by boat, he might have run smack into somebody else who was coming upriver. Somebody who was already in trouble because of his dishonesty and incompetence, who was on his way to answer charges in a military court.”

  “General Wilkinson,” I said.

  “Number Thirteen,” Esmerelda said. “He was here when Lewis changed his mind and decided to head overland, via the Trace.”

  “Here?” I asked.

  Esme nodded and gave her cat’s smile.

  “In Baton Rouge.”

  FIFTEEN

  It was my turn to walk over to the window and stare out, trying to see through the darkness and into the past.

  “So Lewis took the Trace instead,” I said.

  Shelby Deeds nodded and reached for another cigarette. “And that brings us to Grinder’s Stand, seventy miles south of Nashville, on the afternoon of October tenth, 1809. It wasn’t much more than a couple of cabins linked together with a makeshift breezeway and a barn some distance to the rear. It was just off the Trace, which ran alongside the clearing where the Grinder house was located. The people who lived there were Robert Grinder; his wife, Priscilla; several young Grinder children; and two slaves, a boy named Peter, thirteen, and a girl named Malinda, twelve years old. That evening, Robert Grinder was twenty miles away at their other farm, on Duck River.”

  I tried to visualize it: a lonely homestead, not even on the main track, a woman with crying children, her husband gone, and only a pair of young servants to help her with chores …

  “A mail rider would have passed every few days,” Deeds went on. “Other than that, the only visitors would have been unannounced travelers on horseback. Also, since they were on the edge of Indian territory, there were roaming bands of Chickasaw Indians, which couldn’t have made Mrs. Grinder feel that comfortable, especially since the Indians probably were hoping to find liquor to trade for.”

  “Not exactly the bright lights,” I allowed.

  “Just before sunset on that day, Mrs. Grinder looked up and saw a horseman coming up the path. He wore a white, blue-striped gown, or duster. Usual riding garb for those days,” Deeds said. “It was Lewis, riding alone. Later, it came out that Neelly had stayed at their last camping place to round up some packhorses that had strayed. And Lewis had outpaced the two servants, his own and Neelly’s, who were behind him a half hour or so.”

  I nodded. So far, so good.

  “According to what Mrs. Grinder later said, Lewis acted deranged and walked around talking to himself. Since her husband wasn’t at home, she was scared, so she put Lewis up in her cabin and slept in the other one, which served as a kitchen. The two servants slept in the barn, two hundred yards behind the cabins.”

  I watched Esme make a steeple of her thin fingers.

  “Around three in the morning,” Deeds went on, “Mrs. Grinder heard two shots from Lewis’s cabin. The servants woke up and they all went in and found Lewis wounded. He’d been shot once in the head and once in the chest. He begged for water and she gave him some. He died a little while later. When Major Neelly came up, some time after dawn, Lewis was already dead.”

  “Any last words?” I asked.

  Deeds laid aside his cigarette. He picked up a book and opened it to a marked passage.

  “When they went into the cabin and found him he’s supposed to have said, and I quote, ‘I’ve done the business, my good servant. Give me some water.’”

  “Convenient, huh?” Pepper said. “But how many suicides do you know of who needed two bullets to kill themselves?”

  “A point,” I said, “though with the guns of that day misfires were pretty frequent.”

  “True enough,” Deeds admitted. “Anyway, Major Neelly says he saw to the burial, gave Lewis’s servant, Pernier, fifteen dollars for travel, and then continued on to Nashville with Lewis’s effects. When he got to Nashville he reported to the local Army official, a Captain Brahan, who wrote letters to Jefferson and to his own superior, the Secretary of War, based on what Neelly told him. Then Neelly himself wrote a personal letter to Thomas Jefferson, who was in retirement at Monticello.”

  “What did Jefferson have to say about it?” Pepper asked. “It seems to me that’s a key point.”

  Deeds shrugged. “He took Neelly’s word that it was suicide. And so did Lewis’s best friend, William Clark, who’d accompanied Lewis on the famous expedition.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “They knew Lewis better than anybody and if they thought it was suicide …”

  “Maybe,” Esme said then. “But remember, they were going on what they were told. And they also knew Lewis was under tremendous pressu
re. The man was upset and depressed, or he wouldn’t have taken off for Washington to plead his case. The bureaucracy really had ruined him financially.”

  Deeds nodded. “And don’t forget that Jefferson was a politician. It might not have been in his interests to stir up a scandal. The country was on the eve of war with Britain, and Spain was lurking on the borders, ready to snatch anything it could get. The Spanish had even sent out an expedition from Santa Fe to try to intercept Lewis and Clark during the exploration, on Wilkinson’s recommendation, no less! Jefferson was the kind who might have wanted to let sleeping dogs lie, even at the risk of leaving his friend unavenged, especially if Wilkinson was involved. How would it reflect on his administration if everything about Wilkinson came out?”

  “You think Lewis had evidence of Wilkinson’s treason?” I asked.

  Deeds pursed his lips. “I don’t know.”

  Outside, the fog had thickened into a soup and smothered the surface of the lake. I tried to visualize the dying Meriwether Lewis lying on the cabin floor in the chill morning of that long-ago October day.

  I turned around to face them. “So what are we saying? That the official account’s wrong and Lewis somehow managed to find his way down here two years later, with amnesia?”

  Pepper rubbed her hands against her thighs. “I think we’re saying somebody else was buried at Grinder’s Stand and that most of the so-called witnesses were wrong about who it was.”

  Shelby Deeds and Esme both nodded agreement.

  “Was the body ever disinterred?” I asked.

  “Supposedly,” Deeds said. “In the middle of the last century, the Tennessee legislature appointed a commission to erect a monument at the grave site. But you’d hardly call it a study in forensic pathology.”

  “So now,” I said, “we’re proposing to reopen the case on the grounds that whoever is buried there is the wrong man.”

  “Exactly,” Deeds said, putting the remains of his cigarette in the tray.

  I raised my palms, frustrated. A headache was starting to throb somewhere behind my eyes.

  “But all we really have is the handwriting,” I said.

  Esme looked over at Shelby Deeds and the old man nodded for her to respond.

  “There’s a little more than that,” she said. “There are the resemblances between Meriwether Lewis and the man who lived at Désirée, as recounted in John Clay Hardin’s journal.”

  “Oh?”

  Esme picked up a sheet of paper with handwriting and I saw it contained a numbered list.

  “First,” she said, “the man at Désirée was about the same age as Meriwether Lewis. Second, the man at Désirée was noted for his knowledge of natural science and Meriwether Lewis was an excellent self-taught naturalist. Third, he had a knowledge of herbs; the real Lewis’s mother was known as an herbalist and a healer. Fourth, Meriwether Lewis was mechanically astute and we have references to Désirée’s Louis repairing cotton gins and guns. Do you remember the reference to the iron boat? I think Hardin mentions it as something Louis talked about when he was delirious with fever. Well, Thomas Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis designed a boat with an iron frame, that was to be collapsible and that could be used on the expedition. It never worked, but it makes sense of what the old man was raving about. Fifth, old Louis slept on animal skins, on the floor of his cabin. That was something Meriwether Lewis was known to do—a habit from his trip with Clark. Sixth, there was Hardin’s report of how Louis reacted when he found out about Thomas Jefferson’s death: The real Lewis had been Jefferson’s secretary, a member of his household, one of Jefferson’s most trusted confidants. It would have been in character for the real Meriwether Lewis to have reacted to news of his benefactor’s death, even if most of the memories stayed buried. Seventh, Meriwether Lewis tended toward the depressive—what they call a bipolar type these days. Energy alternating with feelings of hopelessness. He may have had an alcohol problem. In fact, his behavior was erratic enough during his trip from St. Louis to Grinder’s Stand that his death was considered suicide at first. Hardin mentions Louis being melancholy and once suspects he may have been holed up in his cabin, drunk.” She looked at her fingers, which she had used to tic off the points.

  “Don’t forget the scar,” Deeds said.

  “That’s right,” Esme said. “Hardin writes that his Louis had a scar on his head. Meriwether Lewis was reported to have been shot in the head at Grinder’s Stand.”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s all interesting, but it isn’t proof.”

  “No,” Esme said. “But look at the handwriting.” She brought out the Vardis Fisher book. “This is one of the last letters Meriwether Lewis is known to have written. It’s a letter to President James Madison, dated September sixteenth, 1809, less than a month before Lewis died. The handwriting’s almost the same.”

  “Similar,” I said. “But handwriting tended to be more uniform back then, because of the way people were taught cursive.”

  Esme started to protest, but Shelby Deeds held up a hand.

  “He’s right to be skeptical. But it would be hard to imagine all these coincidences not meaning something.”

  “You know there’s only one way to prove it,” I said.

  “Yes.” Pepper nodded. “We exhume them. Both of them.”

  SIXTEEN

  I felt their eyes on me. They were right. There was only one way to prove the case.

  “Of course,” Pepper said, “we’d have to get some descendants to give blood samples so we could make DNA comparisons.”

  “And we’d have to have the right kinds of remains,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Esme asked. “I thought you could do it on bones.”

  “You have to have the right parts of bones,” I explained. “You need material from the medullary cavity—marrow, in other words. Long bones—the legs, the arms—are best, but teeth are good, too, if there’s pulp left.”

  “Is there likely to be any so long afterward?” Deeds asked.

  I shrugged. “It’s hard to tell. In this area the soils are pretty acidic. There might not be anything left. On the other hand, if he was buried in a cypress coffin or in an iron casket, the bones might be in pretty good shape.”

  “And the grave in Tennessee?” Esme asked.

  “Another problem,” I told her. “It’s part of a national monument. That means we’d have to get permission from the National Park Service.”

  “That may be a real stumbling block,” Deeds said.

  “I agree.” I picked up the photocopy of the will. “I think the sooner we can establish that the will is genuine, the better. And we need to have your expert look at the Hardin journals, too.”

  “Absolutely,” Deeds said. “And then there’s the little matter of pinning down our man’s whereabouts between October of 1809 and 1811.”

  “But how?” Esme asked. “Where in the world would you look?”

  Deeds blew his breath out slowly and his mustache rippled.

  “I think I’d start in Tennessee. Maury County, to be precise.”

  “You mean where he was killed?” Pepper asked.

  “Yes. It’s a favorite research topic there. I’ve already taken the liberty of calling someone I know in Columbia, the county seat.”

  “A historian?” I asked.

  “A retired librarian, Dorcas Drew. She knows the literature on Lewis’s death better than anyone alive.”

  “But what could she have that hasn’t already been published?” Pepper asked.

  “I don’t know,” Deeds said, “but when I talked to her today she seemed surprised. She said I was the second person who’d called her about it.”

  The room went silent and a thin whistle of wind came from the fireplace.

  “Who was the first person?” I asked.

  “She couldn’t remember the name. She said it was five or six years ago. This man was supposed to come up and see her, but he never showed and she forgot about it until now.”

  “Well, i
t could have been anybody,” Pepper said.

  Deeds smiled. “I don’t think so. Because I explained what we were interested in—the possibility that Meriwether Lewis hadn’t died at Grinder’s—and she said I was the second person to raise the issue. She wanted to know if I was working with the original caller, since we were both from Louisiana.”

  “Jesus,” I whispered. “But she remembers it was a man?”

  “Oh, yes. And he was asking about records of the Grinder family.”

  “The people who owned the inn where Lewis died?” I asked.

  “Yes. He seemed especially interested in Robert Grinder, the absent husband of the woman who supposedly witnessed Lewis’s death. And he asked several times what evidence there was that the body buried under the monument on the Trace is really Lewis’s.”

  “So maybe we have our murderer,” Pepper said.

  “Maybe we have both of them,” Esme corrected. “The person who killed Brady Flowers in 1998 and the person who killed Meriwether Lewis in 1809.”

  “Okay,” I said, getting up again. “But what’s the motive? The box? Is our present-day killer looking for the metal box because it may have the information he was looking for in Tennessee?”

  “It makes sense,” Esme said.

  “Then why,” I asked, “did he wait until we started our research to resume his? It doesn’t make sense. The box, if it’s there, has been there since 1861. Why did this person call the Drew woman in Tennessee and then never contact her again? Why is it that our visiting the plantation suddenly triggers his interest after so many years? And what about the piece of paper in Flowers’s hand? Was that paper from the box? Does that mean the killer’s found the box already?”