Kate blinked at the child. “Adopted?”
“Proud of it, too,” he added. “Means you got picked special.”
Kate laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’re right. Of course. It is special.” Her face swung toward Scudder. “But all Rose Pinckney’s obsession with the DNA tests . . . her finagling to get a DNA sample from Gabe with the candy.”
Scudder nodded. “You may have seen me trying to talk Miz Rose out of the thing. I know you saw me trying to talk sense into Botts that one day at the inn on the porch, when you showed up to see him. It’s not like the judge or Dan or Gabe, any of us, wanted anything to do with her money. What’s genetics matter, anyway? I’m as part of the Russells as if I’d been born into it. Dan was Chloe and Elijah’s son. Pure and simple. But, yeah, he was adopted. Toddler, I think, at the time.”
Kate studied the faces. “You see that sometimes with adoptions: a child that’s not biologically related ending up looking an awful lot like a parent. And Daniel at this age looks so much like you do now, big guy. Those curls. The eyes.”
Scudder bent closer to the photo. “It was this picture—along with what Chloe said—that made me come back.”
“How so?”
“Here was Gabe, pretty much the age I was when the Russells took me in time after time. And here was Dan raising Gabe by himself—with Elijah and Chloe to help, but still.” He shrugged. “I can sell songs from a distance. And I can pick up contractor work anywhere. But I couldn’t help make a family for my best friend’s kid from the opposite coast.” He opened his wallet to slip the picture back in.
Kate pulled his hand to her but didn’t force it open where it had curled over the picture. “Scudder,” she asked, gently turning over his hand so that it was palm up, “could I see the picture again?”
Watching her face, he opened his fingers.
“Daniel’s curls,” she said.
Scudder nodded grimly. “Stuck out from under his football helmet. Drove the ladies mad.”
“The shape of the eyes, too.”
Kate ran a finger above the face, then thrust the picture back at him. “It’s a crazy thought, but . . .”
Her mind was racing, pieces of a great puzzle seeming to fly in front of her eyes, some falling into place. A few pieces fitting, connecting for perhaps the first time.
On her phone, she googled the Wayside Inn, the article on its closing that she’d skimmed before. And this time, a handful of words popped out:
. . . suspicious activity, drug deals, abandoned children, and sordid assignations . . .
“Oh my God,” she said. Kate’s pulse was racing even as the boat’s speed slowed to a drift as they neared the wharf.
Distracted, Kate stepped away to try to think as Gabe pulled on Scudder.
“Daddy lets me walk by myself up to Mother E sometimes on a Wednesday, and he comes to pick me up later.”
“I know he does. You wanting to walk there now? Want us to walk with you?”
“Rather walk by myself, if it’s all the same.” Gabe leaned in. “Kind of need to be alone for a while to sort out the sad. Don’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“No feelings hurt, big guy. Listen, if you want to go now, you’ll be there long before dark. But use my phone to ask permission from your dad just in case, huh?”
As they disembarked, Gabe hugged Kate around the waist, waved to them both, and jogged away.
Scudder held up his phone, to which Daniel had just texted back. “It’s a Wednesday night. Plenty of daylight to walk the few blocks. Lots of church ladies to fawn over him—have him eating peach cobbler with cream by the time we get there. We’ll pick him up in a bit.”
Kate nodded, only half listening.
“Kate, you okay? You seem real far away.”
“I’m just . . . I think I need to go talk with Judge Russell again. Like, tonight.”
When they reached Cypress & Fire, Daniel was just completing a sculpture. He waved to them as they entered and was washing his hands when he focused on Kate. “You okay?”
She blinked at him. “Yeah. I think so.”
He exchanged glances with Scudder. “You two want to walk with me up to Emanuel? Nice night for a walk, and we got plenty of time before Gabe’s done being fussed over.”
On Church Street, Scudder pointed up at the steeple of St. Philip’s Church. “I’ve always loved that steeple at night, those circular windows, like portholes. As a kid, I thought St. Philip’s was a lighthouse somebody built a few blocks too far inland.”
But Kate hardly heard. She looked up and down the elegant street, the Dock Street Theatre there in the old Planter’s Hotel, its wrought iron balustrades like yard upon yard of gray lace. Not hard to picture it as it must’ve been in Emily’s day—and Tom Russell’s: the street teeming with beaver top hats and silk skirts and goblets of red Planter’s Punch that sloshed in and out of the hotel.
They strolled along, Kate wanting to speak, wanting to put order and words to the patchwork of her thoughts—but not ready yet.
The sky overhead was losing the last of its navy blue, the two-century-old buildings looking down on both sides, their Corinthian columns and carved cornices looking stately and proud. But not aloof, somehow, tonight.
It was as if, Kate thought, somehow this street, in all its storied strength, had seen sorrow before and was braced for it again.
She stopped in midstride. What an odd thing to think.
She shook her head.
Daniel had stopped, too, and was scrolling down his phone. “Something’s happened somewhere on Calhoun, somewhere near the library. Or . . . Mother Emanuel.”
Scudder stepped closer to read the text on the phone along with him. “What is it? Car wreck?”
Dan shook his head. “Looks like some sort of . . . nobody knows yet but . . .” His eyes rounded with horror, and his voice broke. “Gunfire was heard.”
The three of them broke into a run.
Chapter 41
1822
The prisoners, two dozen or so in all, were paraded down Meeting Street in carts, including the prisoner most recently caught: the blacksmith, captured in a blackwater swamp.
“Weapon maker, as it turns out,” Jackson Pinckney said to his daughter, lifting one of the dueling pistols from the inside pocket of his morning coat, “of the heinous plot. Apparently I picked a smithy who did indeed know how to attach a bayonet spring. And knew what it might be used for.”
Tom Russell and the other men, all shackled, their chains clanking against the wood boards of their carts, were being rolled north down the street toward the Lines, the sky over the harbor a cloudless blue, the midday summer sun searing.
Emily walked by her father but did not take his arm for support, despite her head’s beginning to swim. By contrast, her maid, Dinah, moved taller than ever, chin high above her long dancer’s neck. If Dinah had heard Jackson Pinckney, she gave no sign of it. Emily stole glances at her, but Dinah’s face was a mask, her steps behind Emily graceful and sure, despite her belly’s protrusion.
“Not yet,” Jackson Pinckney went on, answering questions Emily had not asked. “Wherever the devils stockpiled the weapons for their bloody purposes, we’ve not yet found them. But it will not be long. Mayor Hamilton will see to that. No stone of this city will go unturned. We did, however, intercept more than a score of canoes loaded with rebels from the coastal islands. They will be dealt with accordingly.”
The crowd at the Lines swelled, pressed in, tense and ill-tempered in the heat.
“I suspect Hamilton did not anticipate a crowd of this number,” Pinckney observed.
“I wish, Father”—Emily kept her voice low, her head turned away from her maid—“that you’d not forced Dinah to come. She’s approaching her time. I see no possibility that her being here could be other than horrific.”
Pinckney let his eyes swing back to Dinah. Let them rest there. “Perhaps the horror of the day will be just what she needs.”
Emily i
gnored this. Tried locking her knees to keep her legs from buckling.
The crowd jostled. People began shouting at one another above the general jeers. A child shrieked. Fists flew. A horse shied back from the vortex of panic, the screams. And then he reared, front hoofs beating over the heads of the crowd—and landing in it.
The militia beat the crowd back. At the feet of the horse that had reared lay a dark-skinned body, unmoving.
“Dear God in heaven.” Emily, suddenly faint, gripped Dinah for support. But Dinah seemed to see none of this, her eyes glazed, her back straight as the gallows as she walked ahead.
The captain of the guard spit sideways, his horse shying. “Bloody mob. Keep up this damn chaos and we’ll see something of value hurt next.” He spun his rifle to his lap.
When the militia calmed the crowd enough to proceed and the dead man was carted away by his friends, the prisoners were prodded with the muzzles of guns to mount the low gallows.
A long line of crude structures, planks nailed hastily together, had been erected for today’s purpose.
One by one, twenty-two men stepped up onto makeshift stools—in some cases shipping crates, the flimsiest sort that a single kick might destroy.
One by one, each bent his head for the noose.
At the front end of the line, Tom Russell was scanning the crowd. His eyes found Dinah and stayed there as the rope passed over his head.
Chin high, Dinah moved toward him.
Emily wavered. But then, feeling the stares of the crowd, feeling their censure—Why is that Pinckney girl tagging along after her maid? Why are they moving so close to a dangerous man?—she laid a hand on Dinah’s back and followed.
Only feet from the prisoner, they stopped. Dinah lifted an arm toward Tom.
A horseman pushed forward. Brandished a battered musket.
But if Dinah saw him, she did not move, her arm suspended, tears beginning to spill onto her cheeks.
The blacksmith’s gaze stayed on Dinah when the first signal shot was fired.
The crowd hushed. Tom’s lips moved, but no sound came out. Emily’s fingernails dug into Dinah’s arm, a cry rising in her throat. Jackson Pinckney, adjusting the silk cravat at his neck, scanned the long line of ropes and of men attached at the neck.
As if, Emily thought suddenly, he were surveying his rice along the Ashley and watching his golden fields bow to the sickle. He is that calm.
Now a second shot. The footing was kicked out from under twenty-two men. The gallows groaned as twenty-two bodies dropped.
But not far enough to snap a neck or render a man unconscious.
Vesey’s longer drop from the skittish colt must’ve severed some sort of vital cord, Emily realized, the revolt leader’s death nearly instant.
Here, though, twenty-two men, wrists bound behind them, were choking slowly to death—in agony. As the crowd jeered and laid bets.
Dinah threw herself to the ground beneath Tom’s dangling feet. His face swelled and contorted, eyes bulging.
Emily clamped a hand over her own mouth, only a small, desperate whine escaping her. Here writhed a man that she knew, the man Dinah loved, and he was dying before them, one tortured breath at a time.
The whole crowd had gone mad. Horses were spooking, guns were shot in the air, and everyone was shoving—both forward to see the chaos firsthand and back from the horror. A full ten minutes churned by, and only one condemned man had stopped breathing.
Now two more.
Emily sank to the ground beside Dinah, the crowd roiling around them.
Tom’s cries for mercy came in shreds of sounds, gasps.
A horse with no rider galloped toward them, his eyes rolled back to white, stirrups flying.
Flailing to her feet to keep from being trampled, Emily gathered her skirts, her new yellow silk. And saw her skirts had gone red. Gone bright, brilliant red. And wet.
For a moment she thought she’d been injured and too panicked and sickened to feel it. But then she saw Dinah beside her—bloodier still.
A sound came from Dinah then. Not so much a scream as a stifled, dying thing: a moan. Around where she’d collapsed on the ground at Tom’s feet, the crushed shell puddled in water and blood. The coarse blue of her skirt had gone nearly black and was soaked.
Dinah’s time had arrived, the baby she carried choosing this day, this moment, this place, surrounded by suffering, to make its entrance into the world.
James Hamilton pushed forward from where he’d joined her father and put out a hand to restrain Emily. “Don’t involve yourself in this mess, Miss Pinckney. You’ll sully your hands.”
Emily shoved past him and dropped to Dinah’s side, water and blood everywhere. She took Dinah’s hand.
It’s going to be all right, Emily wanted to say. But the strangling cries of the dying men and the taunts of the crowd and Dinah’s moans and her own tears, none of them would let the words be spoken aloud.
Time slowed, as if the pendulum swing of the twenty-two bodies had reset some celestial clock and turned moments to hours.
Down the line of the choking forms, another mounted guard rode. Here and there, he answered a scream for mercy by aiming his rifle, its silver frizzen and sight polished to gleaming, at a man’s head.
But then did not shoot.
“Hate to cut short your last minutes on earth,” he sneered.
One by one, the writhing bodies hung still.
Except Tom.
Jackson Pinckney pulled his dueling pistol from his morning coat pocket. Triggered its bayonet spring. Then he raised his hand to the guard, who was just reaching the end of the line.
Pinckney nodded toward Tom Russell, the last one convulsing there on his rope. “This one I’ll take care of myself.”
Chapter 42
2015
Gabe had meandered up East Bay. At number 321, he’d paused to squint up at the three-story clapboard house where the Grimké sisters had lived. You had to wonder what it was like to live way back then.
Which was why, he’d thought with a rush of pride, his momma had loved the Gullah Buggy idea: to help people take a peek into what it was like.
Gabe had turned left on Calhoun and walked to Mother Emanuel, where he passed the Vesey memorial kids in black marble and tipped his head to them, just like his momma had done every time she walked past Mother Emanuel’s ground-floor entrance. Above where he stood, a big arch pointed up like it was making bold. He’d always liked that about this building, the way nothing about it was too soft, too weak, nothing about it bent over like the back of an old woman, and it had none of the fancy filigree prissiness of some other churches built a long time ago when people thought carving curlicues and swirlimigigs got the attention of God.
Gabe kicked at the linoleum as he made his way down the hall. A couple of the older church ladies, gentle and strong and alltime smelling like cobbler and kindness, called to him, but he ducked out of sight. It was the reverend he wanted right now. And nobody else.
Pulling his Rubik’s Cube from his pocket, Gabe stumped along the hall and kicked at a baseboard.
Voices from the next room.
The colors shifting under his fingers, helping steady him up, Gabe paused outside the door.
“Others, like seed sown among thorns . . .”
The Bible study was still going.
If he stepped in right now, the folks in the circle would pat his head and ask if his daddy or his granddaddy knew where he was and shouldn’t he be nearing bed and was he hungry, because he was sure looking thin. Or they’d make him sit down, and someone would put an arm around him and tell him how his momma had loved this one of the parables, how she loved coming here to this place—such a fine woman—and ask how he was doing and how that hardworking daddy of his was bearing up now and if there was any way, any way at all, they could help.
He could not sit still and listen to all that tonight. Through the crack in the door where its hinges held on to the wall, Gabe could make out Tywanza
Sanders there in the room—he was young, college maybe, or just out—smiling at Gabe right now through the crack. But he wouldn’t be calling Gabe out. Instead, he winked friendly at him, then looked back respectful at the woman leading the study. Gabe’s momma had loved that about Mother Emanuel, how it brought people up, women and men, trained and ordained for the ministry.
And there was a young girl—Gabe couldn’t make out her face good, but he knew who she was—her feet swinging loose from the folding chair and her grandmother holding her hand.
And there was a white boy—or undergrown man—in the circle of chairs. Shoulders hunched forward. Dark circles under the eyes. Dirty-blond hair cut in a bowl.
One of the church ladies reached now and patted the boy-man on the shoulder. Not interrupting the study, just a we’re glad you’re here, hon kind of pat.
Gabe would just sit here behind the door with his cube and wait. Catch Pastor Clem when it was done.
Slumped in the hall near the door, Gabe’s head rested against the wall. He’d assembled all the white squares on one side of the cube. But the reds were a mess. He spun the rows. Red. Red. Red. His fingers flew.
From the next room, that smooth-rolling current of the voice leading the study: “They hear the word, but the worries of this life . . .” Gabe let the voice buoy him up and along for a while as the lesson flowed to its close. Through the crack at the door’s hinges, he could see the circle of heads bow for prayer.
He let the cube rest on his lap. Let his eyes shut. Let the silence settle around him.
A bang ripped through the quiet. Gabe shot up straight from his slump. A crack of thunder, maybe, right overhead. Must be. Lightning smacking the steeple, ripping clear to the ground.
A shout then: “He has a gun!”
A flood of screams. Like they’d washed up over his head. Like he couldn’t breathe for the screams.
His heart seizing up in his chest, Gabe peered through the door’s crack and saw a figure—a man, an older man—diving in front of Pastor Clem. The kindly, elderly minister Daniel Simmons. Gabe saw it as if it were all in a blurred and grainy slow motion: the old reverend launching himself like a rocket over the body of the younger pastor to shield him. Convulsing. And falling. The body behind him, the man he’d tried to protect, falling, too.
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