The Meriwether Murder

by Malcolm Shuman

  “Good.”

  “And that woman whose class you talked to brought arrow points for you to identify. Said her school kids had dug ’em up over the years. I told her you’d be glad to look at them and get back to her. She has a thing for you, in case you didn’t notice.”

  Poor Rosemary Amadie.

  Finally, I called my home phone, but there were no messages, for which I was just as glad.

  We found a tiny café that served chicken-fried steaks and catfish.

  “I was thinking,” Pepper said, cutting into her fish filet. “Considering what Dorcas told us—”

  “You think it was Neelly,” I said.

  “You’re doing it, too,” she told me.

  “What?”

  “Reading my train of thought.”

  “Sorry.”

  She jabbed me gently with a finger. “Listen to what I’m saying: Neelly is the only logical one. He turned up at Fort Pickering when he had no business being there. According to Dorcas, Neelly owed General Wilkinson for his job. And don’t forget that Captain Russell, the commander at Pickering, wanted to escort Lewis himself, but Wilkinson wouldn’t give him leave.”

  I shrugged. “They didn’t have a telegraph. Russell would have to have sent a rider south, or send someone downstream in a boat. It would have taken days to communicate with Wilkinson and Lewis wasn’t there all that long.”

  “It was long enough for Russell to ask and be denied,” she said. “And if Russell sent such a request, it would have alerted Wilkinson to exactly where Lewis was.”

  “There’s another possibility,” I said. “He may just have sent a rider to Fort Adams. That was closer, between Natchez and Baton Rouge. We don’t really know the chain of command at this point.”

  “Pooh. I guess you think it was Pernier.”

  “Lewis’s servant? He had opportunity and, if Mrs. G.’s last story has any weight, motive. A lonely cabin is a good place for a robbery.”

  “He could have stolen Lewis’s clothes after the fact. After somebody else did him in.”

  “Neelly wasn’t even there,” I reminded her.

  “That’s what he said. And maybe he wasn’t. But he could have arranged it with somebody else and then, to cover himself, conveniently stayed away until it was over.”

  “Grinder,” I said.

  “Grinder,” she repeated. “Remember what Dorcas said? That the locals suspected him? I put more weight on what local people think than by what historians say years later.”

  “Hearsay,” I countered. “They could probably tell you where he buried his treasure.”

  “Skeptic.”

  “Absolutely.”

  That night I stared at the ceiling and tried to make sense of it all. The room was cozy and warm and had a safety chain. There were people in some of the other rooms and the courthouse with the sheriff’s office was just a few blocks away. Such a contrast to the lonely clearing, and the woman with a couple of squalling brats and two servant children, that night when the man in a blue-striped duster had ridden up. In his cabin, the logs had been unchinked and anyone could look inside.

  So what had the Grinder woman seen?

  As I drifted off, the tall finger of the monument hovered in my dreams like an exclamation point. I was walking across the cold, gray stones set in the earth, and I was staring at one that said UNKNOWN.

  I heard someone calling my name then, but when I turned around there was no one there.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The next morning, after a breakfast of hotcakes and eggs, we drove over to the one-story red brick library just north of the courthouse. The attractive, gray-haired librarian listened when we told her what Dorcas Drew had said about the recent inquest and nodded.

  “I’ll have to find the newspaper story,” she said. “I’ll bring it to you in the reading room.”

  She indicated a doorway just to the left of the main desk. I followed Pepper to the entrance and then bumped into her when she halted suddenly.

  “Look.”

  He was on the wall, in full color: Meriwether Lewis, in a copy of the famous painting by Charles Willson Peale. The same painting that I’d seen in black and white, in the frontispiece of the book Shelby Deeds had shown us. Only in color, Lewis looked alive, as if he were posing for an artist in this very room.

  A table occupied the center of the room, but the wall just left of the portrait was covered by a shelf filled with volumes.

  “These are all on local history,” Pepper said. “A history of Lewis County, a genealogy—”

  “Here you are.” The librarian swept back into the room with a newspaper. “The County Herald, June of last year.”

  I stared down at the story on the front page.

  CORONER’S JURY REQUESTS EXHUMATION OF LEWIS’ BODY

  One column, near the top, was devoted to a display of artifacts and photographs associated with the Lewis case and at the bottom was a photo of the coroner’s jury itself, eight local men and women, with the coroner in the middle.

  I read the story:

  After almost two days of testimony, a coroner’s jury meeting at the National Guard Armory ruled, that it is not known what caused the death of Meriwether Lewis. At the request of internationally known forensic scientist Dr. Marcus Pringle, who assembled a team of experts, the jury voted to issue an order for the exhumation Of the explorer’s body. The order will be forwarded to the National Park Service, as part of a petition.

  I skimmed the rest of the story, which outlined what was and was not known about Lewis’s death and listed the members of Pringle’s team. It was an impressive crew, with credentials from prestigious universities and laboratories.

  I took the newspaper out to the main desk and asked the librarian to copy it.

  “Any chance they’ll exhume Lewis’s remains?” I asked.

  She smiled sardonically. “Lewis’s descendants were for it. They hate the idea that he may have committed suicide. But the National Park Service wouldn’t agree.”

  I got my copy, paid the fee, and returned to the reading room.

  “You need to see this,” Pepper said, pointing to a book open before her on the table. “This is a county history. Look what it says about the Lewis grave …”

  I sat down and read where she was pointing:

  There must have been some kind of settlement at this point where Swann Creek crosses the Trace, because a discussion arose at the time the state of Tennessee appropriated money to build a monument to Meriwether Lewis, as to whether or not Lewis’ grave was at this place or a mile south on top of the ridge near the site of Grinder’s Stand. At this time there were a number of graves at this point. And this is why the graves were entered and parts of the skeleton of Meriwether Lewis were identified. Further precautions were taken and the blacksmith who made the nails that went into the coffin, identified the nails.

  “So you see?” she said, excited. “It’s not really certain the monument marks the grave of Lewis. And with unknown graves near his, they could easily have dug up another skeleton by mistake. It was forty years later. The skull was in bad condition.”

  “But the uniform buttons?”

  “Half the male population had uniforms. And as far as a blacksmith identifying his own nails after forty years, that sounds pretty questionable: You’ve seen iron nails after a few years in the ground. They rust to the point where all you can make out is their general shape and the heads.” She shook her head. “My God, Alan, they weren’t even sure they were within a mile of the right grave site.”

  We leafed through the volume, marking relevant pages. There was a report by the Park Service, giving the dimensions of the Grinder house, and several excerpts from newspapers and history texts. When we were finished, the librarian made our copies and we thanked her and wandered back out into the sunlight.

  “Where now?” Pepper asked.

  “I think we have all we’re likely to get from around here,” I said. “But you know …”

  “I do,
too,” she said, finishing my thought. “I’d like to see it in daylight.”

  The air was crisp when we got out in front of the cabin. A handful of motorcyclists had pulled up in front of the monolith, two hundred yards to the north, and I heard a raucous laugh.

  “I wonder what the governor would have thought,” Pepper mused.

  I shook my head.

  The ranger’s office was closed and, just as Dorcas had told us, the little display in the “museum” side of the cabin added little. We walked over to the ring of stones that marked the real Grinder house.

  “From what I read, it was oriented north-south, like the replica,” Pepper said. “Lewis would have slept in the south cabin, and the kitchen, where Mrs. G. slept, would have been in the north half.”

  I looked south, in the direction that the stable would have been. The stable where the servants either did or didn’t sleep.

  I tried to imagine Mrs. Grinder sending a child to get them, tried to imagine the wounded Lewis crawling on this very ground and falling against a now-gone stump. Tried to imagine …

  But it was no good. The daylight, the closely cropped grass, the paved parking area … it wasn’t the same, and might never be, except just at twilight or right before dawn.

  We walked over to the plinth and I counted my paces.

  “The figures we read are about right, as far as the distance from the grave to the house,” I said, as the bikers watched curiously. We walked through the cemetery, looking down at the graves and reading the inscriptions on the sides of the monument.

  “You think they’ll be willing to move this to Désirée?” Pepper joked.

  I smiled. “Where Nick DeLage can charge tourists for a look?”

  In answer, Pepper brought out her camera and I stood by the obelisk while she snapped pictures.

  As she put the camera away, the motorcycle engines roared into life and the cyclists thundered off.

  When the last echo had died away, Pepper turned to me.

  “The Park Service will have to agree now, won’t they? I mean, if our evidence shows that he isn’t buried here, they’ll have trouble not agreeing to help settle the issue.”

  I nodded. “I think you’re right.”

  She gave a wistful little smile. “It’s a pity, in a way.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Sometimes I get the feeling there are some questions that aren’t meant to be answered.”

  We took Highway 64 to Memphis and then headed south on 1-55, arriving in Baton Rouge just after eight. During the trip back I sensed Pepper’s mood changing so that by the time we reached home she’d withdrawn into herself. I wasn’t sure if it was a strange empathy with the hero whose death we were trying to unravel or whether the questions surrounding Lewis’s death had reminded her of the mystery in her own life—a brother she’d traced to Louisiana and then never seen again. Though she seldom spoke of it, her brother’s disappearance had done things to her she didn’t like to admit. They’d been close, she told me once, and when he’d vanished she’d felt abandoned for the second time. The first time was when her father had died.

  I knew how she felt because I’d fought the same battle. So, despite wanting her insanely, I knew that the best thing was to let her work through the mood.

  There were no messages of importance on my machine and Esme didn’t answer, so I placed a quick call to Marilyn.

  “David called in and said he’d need an extra week in the field,” she reported, “which means another twenty-five hundred dollars out of the project.”

  “But it was budgeted,” I said.

  “It was budgeted in case it was needed. It would have been nice if it hadn’t been. To defray some of the unbudgeted trips some people take.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that.

  “Nothing else?”

  “Not unless you count the doings of the competition.”

  “Oh?”

  “Freddie called up and demanded that his person, whoever that is, look at this will he claims you’re examining. I told him to talk to you. He was all sugar and cream at first, but when I told him no, he got ugly.”

  “That’s Freddie.”

  “And your friend DeLage had a story in the paper. He’s bringing in a big name to exhume the remains at Désirée.”

  I felt a sinking feeling. “Let me guess. It wouldn’t be—”

  “Dr. Marcus Pringle,” Marilyn said with disgust. “He’s scheduled a news conference tomorrow at twelve-fifteen.”

  There was a silence while I took a couple of deep breaths.

  “Alan, are you still there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tomorrow’s Friday. You will be in, won’t you?”

  “Yeah. Tomorrow. Thanks.”

  I had trouble sleeping, and only partly because Digger had a loud dispute with the possum. For, as if to taunt me, the images of Nick DeLage and Freddie St. Ambrose leaped into my mind and I once more had to confront the bitter realization that, no matter what we found out with our investigations along the periphery, the important aspects of the Lewis investigation were out of our hands now. Freddie would work with Pringle to exhume whatever remained of the burial atop the Indian mound at Désirée, and together they would pressure the Park Service to allow the grave in Tennessee to be reopened. They would smile from newspaper feature stories and give interviews on the Today show. Publishers would bid for the rights to their book and they would publish learned papers about the solution to the Meriwether Lewis mystery. Fifty years from now, textbooks would have their names in the footnotes and people would trickle in through the gates of the restored plantation and pay their fee to see where a great American had finally come to rest.

  It made me a bad person to be around the next morning.

  So much for the archaeologist as cold, objective scientist.

  I watched the clock tick toward twelve like Gary Cooper in High Noon.

  According to the morning paper, the news conference was to be held at Désirée.

  Just before noon I turned on the small black and white TV that I kept on a shelf in my office and Marilyn, Gator, Frank, and the Mahatma crowded around it as I sat back in my chair, gritting my teeth.

  “Maybe it won’t be on,” Gator suggested. “Some murder may have bumped it.”

  Marilyn skewered him with her gaze: “They scheduled it at twelve-fifteen so they could get any other stories out of the way first.”

  Usually I didn’t hope for murders or other tragedies, but this time the petty part of me was hoping a juicy shooting or, better, the arrest of a politician, would pop out to preempt DeLage’s production.

  But it wasn’t to be. After three minutes devoted to complaints about interstate highway repairs in the middle of the city, and stories on a scam by a group of traveling con artists, the Peale portrait of Meriwether Lewis flashed on the screen and I heard the male commentator giving a not-too-scrambled version of Lewis’s last trip along the Trace.

  “And now,” he proclaimed, “a local businessman is funding a project to determine if the famous explorer survived that night on the Natchez Trace and managed to live out his life on a plantation in West Baton Rouge Parish.”

  I held my breath, waiting for Sarah Goforth, but instead I saw a tall blond woman with closely set eyes who explained that she was at the Désirée Plantation and a news conference was just starting.

  The camera panned to a small group of men standing in the center of the cemetery. I recognized Nick DeLage, looking self-confident; a smug Freddie, adorned in a safari outfit he must have bought yesterday; and a lank, bald man with a beak nose, bow tie, and nervous smile who I knew was Marcus Pringle.

  DeLage began by reading from a prepared paper that I was sure he’d already handed out:

  “DeLage Insurance has contracted with Pyramid Consulting to make historical and archaeological investigations at Désirée Plantation. Because there is reason to believe that the famous explorer, Meriwether Lewis, may be interred on the gro
unds, and that he may have thus escaped assassination at Grinder’s Stand in Tennessee, it will be necessary to exhume the remains at Désirée and a petition will also be sent to the National Park Service to allow exhumation of the remains now located at Meriwether Lewis National Monument and said to be those of Lewis.” DeLage paused to lick his lips and then started to read again:

  “Pyramid Consultants is owned by Dr. H. Frederick St. Ambrose, who is well-known and respected in the field of historic archaeology. Dr. St. Ambrose has hired the world-renowned forensic scientist Dr. Marcus Pringle to assist with the actual disinterment and analysis of the remains.” DeLage looked up, his eyes radiating sincerity. “DeLage and Associates will sponsor this vital work and take it wherever it leads. Pending the outcome of the investigation, we plan to develop the site as a park commemorating the life of the explorer Meriwether Lewis, the man who explored the Louisiana Territory.”

  That was bad enough, but when he described Freddie St. Ambrose as a widely respected archaeologist I felt my gorge rise. And when he introduced a smiling Marcus Pringle it was all I could do to stay in my chair.

  Then Nick added the coup de grace:

  “As you probably know, one of my employees died here last week, and the authorities are still investigating. We’ve terminated the firm originally involved and are confident now that Dr. St. Ambrose and his colleagues will allow us to obtain the maximum data.”

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” Gator snarled. “He makes it sound like we had something to do—”

  “Calm down,” I said. But I was hardly feeling calm myself, as Pringle described what an honor it was to be associated with a man of Dr. St. Ambrose’s stature.

  But it finally ended and as the camera went back to the blond reporter I stood and switched off the television.

  “They won’t have any luck with the Park Service,” Gator opined.