A Tangled Mercy

by Joy Jordan-Lake

  “I’m sorry . . . what?”

  “For hanging up on you when you called my home number.”

  Too dazed to think straight, Kate stumbled into a leather seat in the conference room at the back of the law office. She waited with her mouth hanging open as Judge Russell instructed the receptionist to hold all calls—and, yes, he assured her, he knew he was due in court.

  Seating himself opposite Kate, he spread his hands. “I only have a moment, but this is important.”

  Kate tried to settle herself into the chair but still found herself perched at its edge. “That was your number I kept calling?”

  “May I ask how you happened to have gotten the number?”

  “I found it in my mother’s handwriting, scribbled at the bottom of an art exhibit booklet, along with a name I couldn’t make out with the ink blurred.” But it certainly wasn’t Elijah, she wanted to add.

  He waited for her to go on, his face a mask.

  “The name above it started with a C and maybe an l or an h after that.”

  “Chloe,” he said decisively.

  “Chloe?”

  “My wife. Late wife.”

  He volunteered nothing else.

  Kate felt her way carefully. “This would have been in 1991, about a year after my parents were married. I think you said you knew my father—though didn’t have a very favorable opinion of him—from your College of Charleston days. Am I right in thinking, then, that your wife, Chloe, knew my mother?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Kate waited.

  “Yes, they were friends.”

  “That would explain her jotting down the phone number, then. Amazing that you still have the same number.”

  He shook his head. “Given that it was after your parents’ marriage, I confess I’m surprised Sarah Grace would have had it.”

  “But if my mother and Chloe were friends . . .”

  Again, he looked away. “I’m not sure that after your parents’ marriage I would have characterized them as friends anymore.”

  A grandfather clock at one side of the room ticked into the silence.

  “Judge Russell, did you know my mother?”

  He nodded. But kept his face turned away.

  “Given that your wife was, at least at one time, a close friend of my mother’s, is there anything you can tell me that would explain her to me? Like maybe whatever it is that Botts wants to protect—some sort of secret she had.”

  Swallowing again, he met her eye. Then glanced at his watch. “I have to be in court in just a few moments. And this is a longer conversation, I’m afraid. Let me make this commitment to you, Kate, in the meantime. I will tell you the truth to any question you ask—when it’s time.”

  “When it’s time? Judge Russell, with all due respect, I’ve waited my whole life to understand what happened between my parents and why my mother ran away from her life here when she loved the Low Country and why she never stopped researching it.”

  Elijah Russell rose slowly. “Forgive me, Kate. The court will not wait. But I will meet with you soon. I am committed to that.” He held out his hand.

  “The Wayside Inn,” Kate blurted out. “In Wadesboro, North Carolina. Would Chloe, if she were still living, have known anything about why my mother would have saved a postcard from there?” Already she was cursing herself: Of all the questions she desperately needed to ask, why that one?

  The judge held out a hand to balance himself on the conference table as if he’d gone unsteady. But his voice was level and slow—like a man who was telling the truth. “I can tell you this much for now. Neither Chloe nor I have been to that place. But, yes, I suspect I know why your mother kept that postcard.”

  For a moment, he squeezed his eyes shut as if trying not to see what his memory had just shown him. Then, he shook her hand quickly. “I will be in touch.” With that, he was gone.

  Dazed, Kate made her way back toward the harbor and tried to sort out what she’d heard as she walked. Nothing about what Elijah Russell had said made any sense. And yet he—and his wife, Chloe—had somehow known things about her mother’s life that no one else so far had. Except possibly Botts, who refused to talk.

  At least the judge had promised to meet. And Kate would make sure that happened. Soon.

  The sun sparkling a hot silver on the water, she dug in her backpack for sunglasses. There, fallen out of its folder, was the photocopy of the old photograph of “My Tom,” a blurred Battery Row behind him.

  A tourist ship was trolling back into the harbor, its passengers pointing and gawking from its deck.

  “That’s it,” Kate muttered aloud as she dug for her phone. “Maybe a little nautical outing would help.”

  She dialed Cypress & Fire. “Dan, it’s Kate. I know this isn’t exactly advance planning, but if Gabe’s walked in yet from school, could I take him with me on a little excursion? I need to do some research by looking at the city from out on the harbor, and I could use my head research assistant, the guy who’s better than anyone at seeing patterns and variations in patterns. Any chance he could meet me at the fountain?”

  She nearly added that she’d just seen his father, the judge, and that his parents had known her mother. But all that could wait until there was time. And maybe until she understood why Elijah Russell had looked so sorrowful as he’d said her mother’s name.

  At the fountain, Gabe barreled toward her, his arms out. Behind him, a figure in jeans.

  “Scudder!” She tried not to look as pleased as she felt. He’d already edged past more of her walls than she’d intended.

  He ducked his head. “Tell me the truth if I’m intruding.”

  “It was my idea, honest,” Gabe said. “My daddy has to finish a piece and ship it today, and Miz Rose kicked my uncle Scudder out from his work there when she left for her meeting.” He lowered his voice. “But if he’s in the way of our research, all you got to do is explain and he’ll leave.”

  “Please tell your uncle that as long as he doesn’t get in the way of my head research assistant helping me figure this out, we’d be honored if he would stay.”

  The pier teemed with tourists, open maps fluttering in their hands like the spread of bright-colored wings. Many were boarding a harbor cruise boat. Scuffing up the gangplank, they milled onto its deck, the ship’s brass and wood all polished to glowing. As Kate and Gabe and Scudder raced up the pier, a sailor in full costume was just pulling a scarlet rope over the gangplank’s lower entrance.

  Probably no more than sixteen, the sailor’s face was pitted and red as a plowed field of bad clay. “Y’all got you a ticket?” Then, remembering his costume, he plucked at the hat a full size too big for his head and shifted into a stilted stage brogue. “Aye, and me captain’s given his orders, me pretty wench. We’re all booked up, that we’d be.”

  “Pretty wench? Look, we really need to get on. For research reasons.”

  “No stowaways, lassie, or it’s into the brig ye go.”

  “Now listen here!—”

  Scudder stepped forward, one hand out to shake the sailor’s hand, the other holding several bills. “I’m so sorry we’re late. Here’s cash for the tickets and a small thank-you gift to you, my good man.”

  The sailor narrowed his eyes at Kate.

  Scudder leaned toward the sailor’s ear. “I understand she’s a good hand in hoisting the sails in a beam sea.”

  The sailor saluted. “Mizzenmast set. You’ve barely arrived before we launch.” With an about-face on one heel, he unclipped the scarlet cord.

  Gabe threw back his head to examine the boat. “All I see is a bunch of decks and—”

  Scudder thanked the scowling teenager and hurried the boy ahead.

  “Blimey awesome of you to help a wench in distress,” Kate said.

  Gabe cavorted up the gangplank and motioned them to follow him faster. The boat rolling on the wake of a passing cruise ship, Scudder followed him to the stern’s rail.

  Kate joined them. �
�I saw this ship on my first morning here.”

  Scudder gestured toward the open ocean. “Circles past an island or two. Owner tries to add a little historical touch with a crew of high school theater students who get to practice their craft.”

  Several teenagers dressed as sailors skittered over the deck, looking earnestly busy with ropes they made a great show of pulling.

  Scudder turned his face into the wind. “There’s nothing like seeing it from the sea. As a kid, I used to think Charleston’s steeples poked holes in the sky.”

  “I can see why.” Kate pulled the photocopy from her backpack, but the boat, still maneuvering past a cruise ship and a tanker, wasn’t close enough to the Battery yet.

  “Gabe, your dad and I used to come out here on the harbor a lot,” Scudder said. “Whatever rowboat or half-sinking dinghy we could beg, borrow, or steal. Holy City.”

  “Holy City,” Kate echoed. “I’d forgotten about that name.”

  “Just what some people call it. Charleston was a refuge, back in the earliest days. Dan and Gabe here tell the stories best.”

  The boy took a step forward, lifting one hand as if he were holding Beecher’s reins.

  “Here’s how it was, folks. There were Catholics running from Ireland. Huguenots running from France. Baptists running from Maine. And Jews running from a whole world that would not leave them alone. So the Catholics and the Huguenots and the Baptists and the Jews all raised their synagogues and their steeples”—he swept an arm toward the city—“to punctuate a skyline.”

  Kate applauded. “Just the kind of commentary every harbor cruise needs.”

  As they churned through the harbor, the steeples behind them turned into a phalanx of soldiers, their spears rising above them, stabbing the sky.

  Kate rested her elbows on the railing. “Funny how much I’ve read about this place for months—pages and pages of history. And no idea how little I knew until I came for myself. So. The Holy City.”

  Gabe placed his elbows beside hers.

  Scudder placed his elbows beside Gabe’s. “Dan likes to point out there was some irony in the name Holy City from the beginning. Charleston had a reputation as a place of tolerance. And a fair shake of hedonism.” His eyes dropped to Gabe.

  “I know what it means,” Gabe whispered.

  “Figured. I don’t need to tell you, Kate, it was a major port for entering slaves. The workhouse. Brothels. Steeples. All here together. Holy City. God help her.”

  Glowing in the gold slant of the sun, the mansions along East Battery stood graceful as ever, their white balustrades winging out, light and loosely tied to earth, over magnolias and palms.

  Kate held up the crumpled photocopy. “Okay, Head Research Assistant. Here’s where I need your help. You and your dad probably know the buildings of the historic district as well as anyone here.”

  “Or better,” Gabe suggested.

  Kate chuckled. “Or better. Of course. So I’ve been trying to make out which houses are in the background behind this man, Tom, in the picture. The thing is, if we could date it somehow, at least eliminate that the photo was taken before or after a certain date, we might be able to know if this could even remotely be Tom Russell in his old age.”

  Gabe and Scudder both studied the photo.

  “A visual archivist here in town was generous with her time, but the quality is too poor in this photocopy to date it very closely purely on the development of photographic technique. We’re sure it’s post–Civil War. And if it is soon after the war, it could be Tom Russell in his late sixties, perhaps. But the later the photo in the nineteenth century, the less likely it could be the same Tom.”

  Scudder nodded. “And you said out at the Isle of Palms that your mom was convinced for some reason this was Tom Russell.”

  “She was sure of it. And for some reason, it mattered to her—personally. But every early American historian on the planet specializing in the Low Country would argue he was already dead. This photo was with one of the Wayside Inn in the middle of nowhere, North Carolina. And if you can figure out the connection between them, you’re way smarter than I am.”

  Scudder’s eyes widened.

  But Gabe lifted the page to his face, just inches away. Kate could see him going down the row of houses, his head nodding as he moved on to the next.

  “I’ve looked up the construction date of each house,” Kate continued, “and as best I can make out, what’s behind him would have been built mostly in the 1840s, ’50s maybe—”

  Gabe looked up suddenly. “Drayton.”

  Scudder tilted his head. “Kate’s last name?”

  Gabe jabbed at the background of the photo. “This house. It’s called the Drayton house.”

  Kate followed where he was pointing. “Right. The one over his right shoulder—with the Victorian embellishments that were added after it got shelled in the war?”

  Gabe shook his head. “Daddy does a tour down the Battery, too. The house that was there got shelled to bits—not much left of it standing. Drayton—some later Drayton after the war, you’d have to ask Daddy—built a new house on the same lot.”

  Kate bent toward him. “Gabe, that’s exactly the kind of information I needed, since I’d gotten it wrong before. So”—she bit her lip—“when was this one built? Because the picture clearly would have been taken some time after that.”

  “Mid-1880s, I think.” Gabe gave a bob to his head for emphasis.

  “Oh no. No, no, no, that’s not good. You think or you know?”

  He cocked his head. “I know. Just try on the fit of the I think sometimes so I don’t sound so much like a smart-ass—aleck.” He grinned impishly.

  Kate leaned dejectedly onto the rail, her chin on her elbows. “That would put Tom Russell, even if he were young—like twenty or twenty-two or so during the revolt—in his eighties at least.” She held up the picture again. “Hard to say for sure. This guy’s no spring chicken. But he couldn’t be in his eighties.”

  Scudder and Gabe bent down again. Both shook their heads.

  “You want me to lie to make you feel better,” Scudder asked, “or agree with what you don’t want to hear?”

  Kate sighed. “Guess I’ll be back to tracking down my mother’s connection with the Wayside Inn. Another dead end.”

  She tried to put on a brave face and threw her arm around Gabe. But the truth of it was, she was devastated to have had her latest theory—and her mother’s—dashed all to bits.

  So the current histories were right after all, were they? So Tom Russell had been hanged with the rest, and there was an end to it.

  Then why did she feel like there was still more she did not understand about this? And why had Sarah Grace, who must surely have seen what Gabe did—the mid-1880s Drayton house behind the old man in the picture—insist on labeling the photograph with Tom Russell’s initials?

  Kate smiled back at Gabe, who was pulling on her to come hear the music. And she tried to look interested in what he and Scudder were saying—but her mind kept drifting back to the scene of Battery Row.

  From inside the boat’s dining room, a brass ensemble launched into another tune. The trumpet and trombone players swung their instruments to the beat.

  “Under the boardwalk,” the Drifters cover band crooned, “down by the sea, on a blanket with my baby is where I’ll be . . .”

  Scudder tipped his head toward her. “If you and Gabe weren’t researching, I’d ask if you’re willing to take another shot at a dance.”

  Her breath caught in her throat. “If I weren’t otherwise occupied, I might accept.”

  Gabe looked from one to the other of them and rolled his eyes.

  “Beach music,” said Scudder, “makes me remember how things seemed like they’d turn out, Gabe—back when your dad and I were stupid and young and hopeful—in high school. Whatever troubles we’d had, whatever ugly past the South had, it let go its hold, like the future had flung open its doors.”

  Some sort of protec
tion had dropped from his face, leaving nothing but the deep sadness of his eyes.

  The sax gave way to a keyboard, this time joined by guitars and drums. Kate recognized a cover of the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where Is the Love?” Kind of an edgy thing, she thought, to play on a harbor cruise for tourists out to forget the world’s troubles—but why not?

  “I like the way Charleston’s skyline is compact,” Scudder was saying. “Distinct. Not sprawling like LA.”

  “LA?” Kate asked.

  “Lived there for a while. Wrote some music for a couple of B movies. A soap opera.” He chuckled. “A laundry detergent commercial.”

  “What happened? I mean . . . if it’s okay to ask.”

  “Friends are allowed to ask questions. I made a living. But I never made much of a life there. I missed the Low Country. Missed being where I was needed.” He rested an arm playfully on Gabe’s head. “It was Chloe, Dan’s mom, who suggested I might want to think about coming back. I didn’t have to think long.”

  Gabe tugged on Scudder’s sleeve. “Show her the picture of Gram at the beach.”

  Scudder pulled his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. “This picture’s old—but it’s our favorite—Gabe’s and mine—of his gram.”

  In the photo, four people ran on the beach toward the camera, their heads thrown back, laughing. Elijah Russell ran at the far left, beside him a maybe ten-year-old Scudder, sunburned and lifting his hand in a high five to a young Daniel, brown curls blown back from a round, open face. At the far right was a woman with close-cropped hair and high cheekbones. She was darker complexioned than either her husband or her son, a petite, remarkably pretty woman with brown eyes that smiled, beaming, directly at the camera.

  “She looks like the very picture of warmth.” Kate held a finger above Daniel’s face without touching the picture. “And he looks so much like his father. The forehead. The build. Everything.”

  “Yeah.” Scudder studied the picture over her shoulder. “Which is pretty crazy, considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  Scudder hesitated. “I thought you knew.”

  “It’s no kind of secret,” Gabe put in. “My daddy was adopted.”