The houses were a grab bag of two-story Victorians and wooden-frame bungalows. Some had been bought by young couples and renovated, but others needed paint. The house I was looking for was in the latter category, not exactly dilapidated, but in need of a minor face-lift.
I verified the address by the brass numbers beside the door and noted a brown Mercury wagon in the drive. If I’d had any doubts before, now I was sure.
I circled the block and pulled in two houses away, where I could watch.
It didn’t take long. A beige Honda Accord whisked up the street past me and screeched to a stop at the curb. A stocky black woman in white got out, carrying a satchel, and hurried up the steps to the front porch. She knocked and the door opened and then shut behind her.
I hunched in my seat and waited.
The sound of a slow-moving car came from behind me and a white police cruiser slid slowly past.
All I needed was for him to stop, ask for my license. Kech might have a warrant out for me by now.
The cop car vanished into the mist and I heard a door close. I looked toward the house. A figure was getting into the station wagon, but the angle made recognition difficult.
The station wagon pulled out of the drive and then drove away up the street.
I took a deep breath and told myself it was time.
I opened my door and walked toward the house, dragging an invisible ball and chain.
For a long time I stood in front of the big oak door. There was a little peephole and I wondered if somebody inside was watching me.
I knocked and waited.
Thirty seconds later I heard the sound of a bolt sliding free and a chain being unfastened. The door swung halfway open, revealing a black woman in nurse’s white.
“I came to see Mr. Prescott,” I said.
The nurse stared at me.
“Mr. Prescott don’t see nobody,” she said. “He sleeping.”
“It’s important,” I persisted. “My name is Dr. Alan Graham.”
“You’re a doctor?”
I nodded. Sometimes a minor deception is required.
“Just a minute.”
She closed the door and I waited.
Two minutes later the door opened again.
“Mr. Prescott say you can come on back.”
I followed her through a darkened room that smelled of mothballs. In the gloom I could barely make out a couch, chairs, a coffee table, bookshelves, and an old-fashioned gas space heater.
We went down a hallway to a room at the end and the nurse stood aside.
The big bed was empty and at first I thought he’d disappeared into the bathroom. Then I saw the big chair in the corner and the shriveled figure, with a book in its lap.
“Dr. Graham,” the figure said in a reedy voice. “You tricked my nurse, didn’t you?”
“Guilty,” I said.
“Guilty?” The word ended in a wheeze. “What a choice of words.”
He must have been eighty, and the skin was drawn so tightly over his bones it was hard to see how his blood could circulate. Then I realized that he was fully dressed, with a rich scarlet vest and matching tie, and the book in his lap was a Bible.
“You’re very persistent,” he said.
I shrugged. “Somebody was threatening to kill me.”
He sighed. “That was a mistake.”
“There’ve been other mistakes, haven’t there, Mr. Prescott?”
“Yes,” he said. “How did you find out?”
“Luck. Intuition. The way things fit together. And I talked to a man at the printer’s who remembered you.”
Prescott closed his eyes as if he’d been struck by a sudden pain.
“Of course,” he said finally, opening his eyes. “Herman Dugas. But that was before I moved. How did he know where to find me?”
“He didn’t. But it’s hard to disappear these days.”
“Not like two hundred years ago. People could disappear completely then.”
“Why don’t you tell me about it?” I asked.
“Why not?” He put his hands over the Bible and his eyelids closed halfway. “Dr. Graham, do you know how lucky you are? You get to do exactly what you want. You studied to be an archaeologist and you are one. But what if you had to do something else? Sell shoes, or real estate?”
“I wouldn’t be any good at it,” I said.
“But if you had to support your family, you’d have to do it anyway.”
“Is that what happened?”
When he spoke again it sounded like tearing parchment.
“I was an accountant with the state Agriculture Department. Thirty-five years. I kept track of swine and cattle. Thirty-five years. Swine and cattle. Do you know what that’s like?
“Year in, year out. Swine and cattle and sometimes horses. How many tons of fertilizer were used in a year. Do you know how I kept sane?”
Somewhere in the house a board creaked.
“History. I had an active imagination. I went through the motions, I kept the books, I answered the audits, I went to the office parties and picnics. But I wasn’t really there.” He was looking through me now, as if I weren’t in the room. “I was somewhere else, with all the things I was reading, about the famous people who came this way. William Bartram, the naturalist. John James Audubon. James Bowie and his brother Rezin. Mike Fink, the keelboat man. Andy Jackson, marching up and down the Natchez Trace. Old Jamie Wilkinson, the traitor.”
I heard a soft rustle behind me and turned to see the nurse.
“Everything okay, Mr. P.?”
“Fine, Adele. You can go back to what you were doing. Dr. Graham and I were just talking.”
The nurse vanished as quickly as she’d come.
“I always thought I could have done as good a job as the professors at the university,” Prescott went on. “The only difference, besides their degrees, was that they had access to the sources. But nobody takes you seriously without credentials.”
“How did you meet Charlie Hardin?” I asked.
“We both belonged to a hunting club up near Raccourci. Hunting was my other passion.”
I nodded. “He told you he had some family papers.”
“Exactly. I remember the day, the hour, the place. It was about fifteen years ago, a couple of days after Christmas. We were sitting under a big hickory tree, freezing, waiting for a couple of the others to leave their stands and come out of the woods. Charlie and I didn’t know each other, but I passed him my bottle and we started talking. He was surprised I knew the history of the land we were hunting on. He invited me to his place and said he wanted to show me something. That was the first time I laid eyes on the journals. After I read them, he took me to the cemetery behind the house and showed me the graves. That’s when he said he wanted me to get his collection in shape so he could donate it to the school.”
“How long did it take for you to figure out about Lewis?”
“Two months, well into my cataloguing. But even then there wasn’t any proof.”
“You saw the letter in the Tennessee archives,” I said.
The old man looked puzzled. “What letter is that?”
I explained and he straightened in the chair, as if he wanted to get up.
“Imagine that! My God, what I would have given to know about that. But, you see, that was part of the problem. I didn’t have the budget of a professional historian. I couldn’t ask a university for travel funds to visit all the places where documents might be stored.”
“Is that where the will comes in?”
“I know I shouldn’t have done it. But I was desperate and it seemed like such a little thing, and so much good would come of it.”
“So you forged it.”
“It was to use as leverage. I knew no public foundation would give me money for research, but there are private donors out there.” His hand came down on the arm of the chair with what little force he could muster. “I knew the man at Désirée was Meriwether Lewis, but I couldn’t
prove it without more evidence. If I showed them something that linked all the evidence, they’d be more likely to give me money for research into the true story of the death of Meriwether Lewis.”
“It would have made you famous.”
“Yes. Oh, I know the professional historians would’ve sneered. So what? I could have gotten a major publisher, once I had everything documented. Once I’d hired an archaeologist to exhume the remains.”
“It was an excellent job,” I said. “You must have spent a lot of time putting it together.”
“It was hard. I made a lot of mistakes at first. But when I was satisfied, I just put it in with the other documents and gave it a number and briefly described it. Charlie never saw it.” He sighed. “Charlie never knew what all he had.”
“But someone would have discovered the will was a forgery.”
“Would they?” The thin shoulders twitched. “Maybe. Or maybe it would have disappeared. Been stolen. A great loss. But once I had evidence from other sources, once I’d found the evidence I know is in other places—like the letter you mentioned—the will wouldn’t be necessary, would it?”
“No,” I said.
“Then, of course, Charlie died. I lost my access to the materials. And I had my first stroke. For a long time I couldn’t move or speak. When I recovered, the materials were all in the library.”
“Except for the journals,” I said.
“Yes. His daughter claimed them.” He looked away and seemed to shrink back into his chair. “It didn’t matter. By that time I was too sick to do anything about it. My son moved me to a nursing home.”
“Your son?”
“Junior. That’s what we called him. Adrian, Junior.” In another room a television went on. Good. I didn’t want us to be interrupted again.
“He took care of you.”
“Oh, yes.” There was a hint of bitterness in the chuckle. “My wife died while we were still in Broadmoor. I only had the children. My daughter got sick. That only left Junior.”
“Who took you out of the nursing home?”
“I didn’t belong there.” Another sigh. “I don’t belong here, either. I belong with my wife. There’s not anything I want anymore.”
I didn’t have anything to answer. When he spoke again I had to step closer to understand him.
“There’s all kinds of ways to be sick, Dr. Graham. Look at me: I’m just bones now, ready for the grave. But there’re other kinds of sickness. People walking around. You wouldn’t know to look at them.”
I wasn’t sure where he was going, but all I could do was listen.
“They say it’s a gene. I don’t know. Or maybe it’s something that happens to somebody when they’re young. All I know is it’s a sickness, just the same as my not being able to get out of this chair.”
“Who, Mr. Prescott?”
But he didn’t hear me.
“You’d never have known, either. Such a happy child. So normal. Until that third year in high school. That was when it happened.”
“Your child, Mr. Prescott?”
“They called it paranoid schizophrenia. ‘Throw us your insurance policy and we’ll do a snake dance. Pay us a little more, and we’ll sign something that says cured.’”
Two tears leaked down his face and he made no attempt to wipe them away.
“Of course, we told everybody it was boarding school. But they knew.”
Someone turned up the volume of the television and then, with a shock, I realized the voices didn’t come from a television at all.
“You have to understand,” the old man begged. “It isn’t her fault.”
There was movement in the hall behind me and I turned.
Rosemary Amadie was standing behind me, an enigmatic smile on her face.
“Well, Alan. I didn’t really expect you so soon.”
“Rose—” the old man began but the woman cut him off.
“It’s all right, Papa. I’ll take care of it. I take care of everything. I’ve always taken care of everything, haven’t I?”
“Please,” Prescott wheezed. “She’s not responsible.”
“Papa, you’re getting excited.” She shook her head sadly. “Alan, you really shouldn’t have come here. This is too much of a strain for him.”
“I imagine he’s been under a lot of strain after the murders.”
“Murders?” Prescott croaked. “Rose, what’s he saying? You said there was just Flowers.”
“Papa, don’t worry. I did what I had to.” Her fists clenched as she faced me. “Alan, you have no right to upset him.”
“It sounds like you’ve already upset him, Rosemary.”
“No! I’ve protected him. I spent all my life protecting him. I took him out of that nursing home where my brother dumped him when he moved to California. I brought him here, to live with me. And when Flowers called about what your people were doing at Désirée, I had to keep other people from getting the credit Papa deserved.”
“That was why the E-mail threats, the break-in, and trashing my car,” I said.
“I was hoping to make my point,” she said.
“It must have been a shock when you found out the will was a fake,” I said dryly.
“You don’t know how hard it was to tell her,” Prescott said. “But after that man died, I had to tell her, to keep it from getting worse.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rosemary said quickly. “My father was driven to it.”
“And you were driven to kill Flowers because he knew about your father’s research and was willing to sell what else he’d found to the highest bidder.”
“He was there when I was working on the original collection,” Adrian Prescott said. “When I figured out who old Louis really was and read about the box, I went out one night and did some digging. Flowers caught me. I told him I was looking for some buried money. I paid him off. But after that he knew there was something valuable out there.”
“And when we started doing the levee survey, it triggered him,” I said.
“Yes.” The old head gave a half nod. “I’d kept in contact with him over the years: I told him I’d pay him if he ever found anything interesting. So he called me and said some other people were looking for things.”
Rosemary walked past me to stand beside her father. “I never meant for him to die. He called again, said he had something. He said he’d found the box, and he wanted money for what was inside.”
“The cipher.”
“Yes. He figured it was directions to a treasure.” Her mouth curved downward in disdain. “He wanted more money than we had and I told him so. I decided to go get it for myself. I had no idea he’d call you and the girl when I turned him down.”
“You didn’t expect to see us there.”
“No. If it hadn’t been for you, I would have gotten the rest of it. As it was, I left a piece of it in his hand. But it doesn’t matter.”
“You have the paper,” I said.
“No,” Prescott wheezed, clutching his Bible closer to his body.
“But you need the map, too,” I said.
“Map?” he asked.
“We found the box,” I said. “There was a map inside.”
The hand on the Bible jerked.
“You saw this map?”
“Yes.”
“For God’s sake, Dr. Graham, tell me what it showed.”
I stared at him for a long time.
“You haven’t broken the cipher, have you?” I asked.
“We will!” Rosemary cried. “It’s a well-known type of cipher. It just takes knowing the key word or phrase.”
“But you don’t know it, do you?” I asked.
“No. But we’re very close. If I can just—” The old man coughed and closed his eyes. For an instant I thought he was dead. But then the breathing resumed and he folded his hands over the Bible and pressed it to his midsection as if he were stanching a hemorrhage.
“Jefferson,” he said. “It has to have been Jefferson’s i
dea. He invented a cipher machine, you know.”
“Did he? Well, I’m not surprised.”
“But—”
“We’ll solve it, Papa. You can solve it if anybody can.”
“May I see the piece of paper?” I asked.
Prescott’s knuckles were white now, as he clutched the book to him. Rosemary shook her head. “I don’t think so, Alan.”
“I just thought I’d ask,” I said. “Tell me, why did you kill Sarah Goforth?”
Prescott’s hand came out, grasped his daughter’s arm, and she laid a hand on his own.
“Now, Papa, it was necessary. She came here looking for you. She’d been talking to Nicholas DeLage. She knew.”
“And she had the journals,” I said.
She turned her head slowly to look at me. “Did she? Well, that’s one more reason. Papa was the one to recognize what those journals were. She had no business with them.”
“You shot her.”
“It was necessary, Alan. Surely you see that.”
“What did you do, hide in her car?”
“I followed her to that bar. When she left I drove after her. She ran off the road and got stuck in the bayou. I just got out and shot her through the window. Then I put my bumper against hers and pushed her the rest of the way into the water.”
“You’re pretty handy with a shotgun,” I said.
“Shotgun, pistol, rifle.” She patted her father’s arm. “Papa used to call me his little tomboy.”
“Rose,” the old man groaned. “My God—”
“It’s all right, Papa. It was that old Remington twelve-gauge you haven’t used in years. There’s no record of it. I dropped it off the bridge afterward. There’s no evidence at all.”
“You have to understand,” Prescott said. “She isn’t responsible. Rose was always different. They told us she was cured, and I thought when she married it would be all right, she’d grown up …”
The Meriwether Murder Page 24