Murder at Monticello

by Rita Mae Brown

  He softened. “I get your point.”

  “And who slept with Medley?” Mrs. Murphy flicked her tail. “If she was as pretty as she is reputed to have been, she would have turned a white head or two.”

  “What a loud purr.” Kimball admired Mrs. Murphy.

  “You should hear her burp.” Tucker wagged her nontail, hoping to be noticed.

  “Jealous.” Mrs. Hogendobber said matter-of-factly.

  “She’s got your number, stumpy.” Mrs. Murphy teased her friend, who didn’t reply because Kimball was petting her.

  “Is it me or is there a conspiracy of silence surrounding Medley Orion and her child?” Harry, like a hound, struck a faint, very faint scent.

  Both Kimball and Mrs. Hogendobber stared at her.

  “Isn’t that obvious?” Kimball said.

  “The obvious is a deceitful temptation.” Mrs. Hogendobber, by virtue of working with Harry, picked up the line now too. “We’re overlooking something.”

  “The master of Monticello may not have known about whatever Medley was up to or whoever killed that man, but I bet you dollars to doughnuts that Martha did, and that’s why she took Medley. She could easily have been sold off, you know. The family could have ditched this slave if she became an embarrassment.”

  “Harry, the Jeffersons did not sell their slaves.” Kimball almost sounded like Mim. It wasn’t true though. Jefferson did sell his slaves, but only if he knew they were going to a good home. Jefferson’s policy demonstrated more concern than many slave owners evidenced, yet the disposal of other humans seemed both callous and mercenary to some of Jefferson’s contemporaries.

  “They could have given her away after Thomas died.” Mrs. Hogendobber shifted in her seat, a surge of energy enlivening her thoughts. “One or both daughters protected Medley. Martha and Maria.”

  Kimball threw his hands in the air. “Why?”

  “Well, why in the hell did not one family member suggest they pack off Sally and Betsey Hemings? My God, Jefferson was crucified over his alleged affair with Sally. Think about it, Kimball. It may have been two hundred years ago, but politics is still politics and people have changed remarkably little.” Harry nearly shouted.

  “A cover-up?” Kimball whispered.

  “Ah”—Mrs. Hogendobber held up her forefinger like a schoolmarm—“not a cover-up but pride. If the Hemingses were ‘dismissed,’ shall we say, then it would have been an admission of guilt.”

  “But surely keeping them on this hill fed the gossipmongers too,” Kimball exploded in frustration.

  “Yes, but Jefferson didn’t buy into it. So if he’s mum, what can they do? They can make up stories. Any newspaper today is full of the same conjecture posing as fact. But if Jefferson levitated above them all in his serene way, then he stole some of their fire. He never sweated in front of the enemy is what I’m saying, and he made a conscious decision not to bag the Hemingses.”

  “Harry, those slaves came from his mother’s estate.”

  “Kimball, so what?”

  “He was a very loyal man. After all, when Dabney Carr, his best friend, died young, he created the family cemetery for him, and would lean on his grave and read to be close to him.”

  Harry held up her hands as if asking for a truce, “Okay. Okay, then try this. Sally and Betsey’s mother, Betty Hemings, was half white. The skinny from the other slaves was that her father was an English sea captain. Thomas Jefferson freed Bob and James, Sally and Betsey’s brothers, in 1790. Except for another daughter, Thenia, who was acquired by James Monroe, all the Hemingses stayed at Monticello. They had a reputation for being good workers and for being intelligent. Sally was never set free, but her daughter was, by Jefferson, in 1822. At least, that’s what I’m getting out of all these papers.”

  “I know all that,” Kimball fretted.

  “I don’t.” Mrs. Hogendobber made a sign indicating for Harry to continue.

  “Jefferson made provision for Sally’s sons Madison and Eston to be freed upon reaching the age of twenty-one. Now, he wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t think these people could earn a living. It would be cruel to send them into the world otherwise. Right?”

  “Right.” Kimball paced.

  “And the lovers of Sally and Betsey may not have been the Carr brothers. The slaves said that John Wayles took Sally as, what should I say, his common-law wife, after his third wife died, and that Sally had six children by him. John Wayles was Martha Jefferson’s brother, T.J.’s brother-in-law. Jefferson took responsibility, always, for any member of his family. He loved Martha beyond reason. His solicitude makes sense in this light. Of course, others said that John Wayles was the lover of Betty Hemings, so that Sally and Betsey would have been Martha’s cousins. Guess we’ll never really know, but the point is, Sally and Betsey had some blood tie, or deep-heart tie, to T.J.”

  Kimball sat back down. He spoke slowly. “That does make sense. It would force him into silence, too, concerning the paternity slanders.”

  “John Wayles wasn’t equipped to handle this kind of scrutiny. Jefferson was.” Mrs. Hogendobber hit the nail on the head. “And even though they hurt Jefferson, the slandermongers, they couldn’t really abridge his power.”

  “Why not?” Kimball was perplexed.

  “And flush out all those white jackrabbits in the briar patch?” Mrs. Hogendobber laughed. “The question is not which southern gentlemen slept with slave women, the question is which ones did not.”

  “Oh, I do see.” Kimball rubbed his chin. “The Yankees could fulminate properly, but the Southerners shut up and rolled right over, so to speak.”

  “Hell, yes, they wouldn’t have nailed Jefferson to the cross for their own sins.” Harry laughed. “The Northerners could do the nailing, but they never could quite catch him to do it. He was far too smart to talk and he always sheltered those weaker than himself.”

  “He had broad, broad wings.” Mrs. Hogendobber smiled.

  “And where does that leave Medley Orion?” Kimball stood up and paced again.

  “She may or may not have been related to the Hemingses. Obviously, from the description of her as ‘bright,’ she was one quarter white if not half white. And her lover was white. The lover is the key. He was being protected,” Harry said.

  “I disagree. I think it’s Medley who was being protected. I can’t prove it, but my woman’s intuition tells me the victim was Medley’s white lover.”

  “What?” Kimball stopped in his tracks.

  “The Jeffersons extended their grace to many people: to Wayles if he was the amour of Betty Hemings or her daughter, Sally; to the Carrs if they were involved. The corpse in Cabin Four wasn’t a family member. His absence or death would have been noted somewhere. Someone had to make an explanation for that. Don’t you see, whoever that man is—or was, I should say—once the Jeffersons found out, they didn’t like him.”

  She paused for breath and Kimball butted in. “But to countenance murder?”

  Mrs. Hogendobber dropped her head for a second and then looked up. “There may be worse sins than murder, Kimball Haynes.”

  32

  Warren Randolph buttoned his shirt as Larry Johnson leaned against the small sink in the examining room. Larry was tempted to tell Warren it had taken his father’s death to force him into this check-up, but he didn’t.

  “The blood work will be back within the week.” Larry closed the file with the plastic color code on the outside. “You’re in good health and I don’t anticipate any problems, but”—he wagged his finger—“the last time you had blood drawn was when you left for college. You come in for a yearly check-up!”

  Warren sheepishly said, “Lately I haven’t felt well. I’m tired, but then I can’t sleep. I drag around and forget things. I’d forget my head if it weren’t pinned to my shoulders.”

  Larry put his hand on Warren’s shoulder. “You’ve suffered a major loss. Grief is exhausting and the things that pop into your mind—it’ll surprise you.”

&
nbsp; Warren could let down his guard around the doctor. If you couldn’t trust your lifelong physician, whom could you trust? “I don’t remember feeling this bad when Mother died.”

  “You were twenty-four when Diana died. That’s too young to understand what and whom you’ve lost, and don’t be surprised if some of the grieving you’ve suppressed over your mother doesn’t resurface now. Sooner or later, it comes out.”

  “I got worried, you know, about the listlessness. Thought it might be the beginning of leukemia. Runs in the family. Runs? Hell, it gallops.”

  “Like I said, the blood work will be back, but you don’t have any other signs of the disease. You took a blow and it will take time to get back up.”

  “But what if I do have leukemia like Poppa?” Warren’s brow furrowed, his voice grew taut. “It can take you down fast. . . .”

  “Or you can live with it for years.” Larry’s voice soothed. “Don’t yell ‘ouch’ until you’re hurt. You know, memory and history are age-related. What you call up out of your mind at twenty may not be what you call up at forty. Even if what you remember is a very specific event in time, say, Christmas 1968, how you remember it will shift and deepen with age. Events are weighted emotionally. It’s not the events we need to understand, it’s the emotions they arouse. In some cases it takes twenty or thirty years to understand Christmas of 1968. You are now able to see your father’s life as a whole: beginning, middle, and end. That changes your perception of Wesley, and I guarantee you will think a lot about your mother too. Just let it go through you. Don’t block it. You’ll be better off.”

  “You know everything about everybody, don’t you, Doc?”

  “No”—the old man smiled—“but I know people.”

  Warren glanced up at the ceiling, pushing back his tears. “Know what I thought about driving over here today? The damnedest thing. I remembered Poppa throwing the newspaper across the room when Reagan and his administration managed that Tax Reform Act of 1986. What a disaster. Anyway, Poppa was fussing and cussing and he said, ‘The bedroom, Warren, the bedroom is the last place we’re free until these sons of bitches figure out how to tax orgasms.’ ”

  Larry laughed. “They broke the mold when they made Wesley.”

  33

  The graceful three-sash windows, copied from Monticello, opened onto a formal garden in the manner of Inigo Jones. The library was paneled in a deep red mahogany and glowed as if with inner light. Kimball sat at a magnificent Louis XIV desk, black with polished ormolu, which Samson Coles’s maternal great-great-great-grandmother was reputed to have had shipped over from France in 1700 when she lived in the Tidewater.

  Handwritten diaries, the cursive script elegant and highly individualistic, strained the archaeologist’s eyes. If he stepped away from the documents, the writing almost looked Arabic, another language of surpassing beauty in the written form.

  Lucinda, the consummate hostess, placed a pot of hot tea, a true Brown Betty, on a silver tray along with scones and sinful jams and jellies. She pulled a chair alongside him and read too.

  “The Coles family has a fascinating history. And the Randolphs, of course, Jefferson’s mother’s family. It’s hard to remember how few people there were even at the beginning of the eighteenth century and how the families all knew one another. Married one another too.”

  “You know that America enjoyed a higher rate of literacy during the American Revolution than it does today? That’s a dismal statistic. These early settlers, I mean, even going back to the early seventeenth century, were as a rule quite well educated. That common culture, high culture if you will, at least in the literary sense and the sense of the living arts”—he rubbed the desk to make his point—“must have given people remarkable stability.”

  “You could seize your quill and inkwell, scratch a letter to a friend in Charleston, South Carolina, and know that an entire subtext was understood.” Lulu buttered a scone.

  “Lulu, what was your major?”

  “English. Wellesley.”

  “Ah.” Kimball appreciated the rigors of Wellesley College.

  “What was a girl to study in my day? Art history or English.”

  “Your day wasn’t that long ago. Now, come on, you aren’t even forty.”

  She shrugged and grinned. She certainly wasn’t going to correct him.

  Kimball, at thirty, hadn’t begun to think about forty. “We’re youth-obsessed. The people who wrote these diaries and letters and records valued experience.”

  “The people who wrote this stuff weren’t assaulted on a daily basis with photographs and television shows parading beautiful young women, and men, for that matter. Your wife, hopefully the best woman you could find, did not necessarily have to be beautiful. Not that it hurt, mind you, Kimball, but I think our ancestors were much more concerned with sturdy health and strong character. The idea of a woman as ornament—that was off waiting to afflict us during Queen Victoria’s reign.”

  “You’re right. Women and men worked as a team regardless of their level of society. They needed one another. I keep coming across that in my research, Lulu, the sheer need. A man without a woman was to be pitied and a woman without a man was on a dead-end street. Everyone pitched in. I mean, look at these accounts kept by Samson’s great-grandmother—many greats, actually—Charlotte Graff. Nails, outrageously expensive, were counted, every one. Here, look at this account book from 1693.”

  “Samson really should donate these to the Alderman’s rare books collection. He won’t part with them, and I guess in a way I can understand, but the public should have access to this information, or scholars at least, if not the public. Wesley Randolph was the same way. I ran into Warren coming out of Larry Johnson’s office yesterday and asked him if he’d ever read the stuff. He said no, because his father kept a lot of it in the huge house safe in the basement. Wesley figured that if there were a fire, the papers would be protected in the safe.”

  “Logical.”

  Lulu read again. “Whenever I read letters to and from Jefferson women I get totally confused. There are so many Marthas, Janes, and Marys. It seems like every generation has those names in it.”

  “Look at it this way. They didn’t know they were going to be famous. Otherwise maybe they would have varied the first names to help us out later.”

  Lulu laughed. “Think anyone will be reading about us one hundred years from now?”

  “They won’t even care about me twenty minutes after I’m gone—in an archival sense, I mean.”

  “Who knows?” She gingerly picked up Charlotte Graff’s account book and read. “Her accounts make sense. I picked up Samson’s ledger the other day because he had laid it out on the desk and forgot to put it away. Couldn’t make head or tails of it. I think the gene pool has degenerated, at least in the bookkeeping department.” She rose and pulled a massive black book with a red spine out of the lower shelf of a closed cabinet. “You tell me, who does the better job?”

  Good-naturedly, Kimball opened the book, the bright white paper with the vertical blue lines such a contrast from the aged papers he’d been reading. He squinted. He read a bit, then he paled, closed the book, and handed it back to Lulu. Not an accounting genius, he knew enough about double-entry bookkeeping to know that Samson Coles was lifting money out of clients’ escrow funds. No broker or real estate agent is ever, ever to transfer money out of an escrow account even if he or she pays it back within the hour. Discovery of this abuse results in instant loss of license, and no real estate board in any county would do otherwise, even if the borrower were the president of the United States.

  “Kimball, what’s wrong?”

  He stuttered, “Uh, nothing.”

  “You look pale as a ghost.”

  “Too much scones and jam.” He smiled weakly and gathered the papers together just as Samson tooted down the driveway, his jolly red Wagoneer announcing his presence. “Lulu, put this book away before he gets here.”

  “Kimball, what’s wrong with y
ou?”

  “Put the book back!” He spoke more sharply than he had intended.

  Lulu, not a woman given to taking orders, did the exact reverse, she opened the account book and slowly and deliberately read the entries. Not knowing too much about bookkeeping or the concept of escrow even though she was married to a realtor, she was a bit wide of the mark. No matter, because Samson strode into the library looking the picture of the country squire.

  “Kimball, my wife has enticed you with scones.”

  “Hello, dear.” He leaned over and perfunctorily kissed her on the cheek. His gaze froze on the account book.

  “If you two will excuse me, I must be going. Thank you so much for access to these materials.” Kimball disappeared.

  Samson, crimson-faced, tried to hide his shock. If he reacted, it would be far worse than if he didn’t. Instead, he merely removed his ledger from Lulu’s hands and replaced it on the lower shelf of the built-in cabinet. “Lulu, I was unaware that my ledger qualified as an archive.”

  Blithely she remarked, “Well, it doesn’t, but I was reading over your umpteenth great-grandmother’s accounts from 1693, and they made sense. So I told Kimball to see how the accounting gene had degenerated over the centuries.”

  “Amusing,” Samson uttered through gritted teeth. “Methods have changed.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “Did Kimball say anything?”

  Lucinda paused. “No, not exactly, but he was eager to go after that. Samson, is there a problem?”

  “No, but I don’t think my ledger is anybody’s business but my own.”

  Stung, Lulu realized he was right. “I’m sorry. I’d seen it when you left it out the other day, and I do say whatever pops into my head. The difference between the two ledgers just struck me. It isn’t anybody else’s business but it was—funny.”

  Samson left her gathering up the scones and the tea. He repaired to the kitchen for a bracing kick of Dalwhinnie scotch. What to do?

  34

  Mrs. Murphy, with special determination, squeezed her hindquarters into Mim Sanburne’s post office box. From the postmistress’s point of view, the wall of boxes was divided in half horizontally, an eight-inch ledge of oak being the divider. This proved handy when Harry needed to set aside stacks of mail or continue her refined sorting, as she called it.