Blood Relations

by Rett MacPherson

  “Whom did you first hear it from?”

  “Wilma and I had helped a woman out of the water. She … she was a prostitute. You could tell by the way she dressed and the way she behaved. She all but seduced Doc Hallam when he examined her. She said that she had seen a large case of diamonds in one of the guest’s rooms,” she said.

  “What was her name?”

  “Don’t know. That’s the funny thing. As soon as Doc Hallam checked her out, she simply walked out of town, and none of us ever saw her again.”

  “Huh,” I said, mulling that over in my head. “Did she say what guest’s room she had seen it in?”

  “I think she might have, but, Victory, it’s been eighty years and I really don’t remember,” she said.

  “What else do you remember?”

  “Bodies washing ashore.”

  “Ugh.”

  “There was a child who said he’d heard the captain fighting with somebody up in the pilothouse,” she said.

  “Makes me wonder if they could have been physically fighting, as well.”

  “Possibly.”

  She was quiet a moment. “You know, the funny thing is, the ones who jumped off into the river, most of those people died. When the steamer stopped in the cove, the whole boat didn’t fill up with water right away. People were able to get out. But those who jumped into the water were just ever seen again.”

  I found it hard to believe that none of the people who had jumped in the water were ever seen again. What were the odds that all of them would be lost? You’d think one or two would wash ashore a few miles downriver. I convinced myself that Sylvia was being a little melodramatic, which, in and of itself, was odd. Sylvia was never melodramatic.

  “Anything else?”

  “Just the bodies and debris washing ashore,” she said. “That was a ghastly sight.”

  She was quiet again, reflecting on something. I assumed it was the floating bodies. Finally, she handed the photograph back to me. “They’re buried over at the Lutheran cemetery.”

  “Who is?”

  “The seven recovered bodies,” she said. “We couldn’t bury them in the Santa Lucia Cemetery, because we didn’t know if the victims were Catholic. So Doc Hallam and a couple of the other officials decided to bury them out at the Lutheran church. Down Highway P.”

  I knew the church she was referring to. It isn’t really within the city limits of New Kassel, but it is just a few miles south of town, off Highway P. I was a little astounded by this information, because I had never heard it before. All the years I’d lived and worked here and I hadn’t known it. I felt like the girl in school who knows nothing about the party after the big game on Friday night. How’d I get left out of this juicy piece of information?

  “Back then, there was no quick way to get bodies back to loved ones, even if we had been able to identify all of them,” she said. “So we just buried them here. What else were we supposed to do?”

  “I never knew that” was all I said.

  “Well, you don’t know everything, Victory,” she said. “Contrary to what you may think.”

  I ignored her; I was used to this from Sylvia. “Did you ever hear anything about the Huntleigh heiress?”

  “Only that she went down with the ship. Her body was never found,” she said. “Jessica Emeline Huntleigh was her name.”

  “Why was she on board?”

  “She was returning from a holiday in New Orleans,” she said. “She caught The Phantom in Memphis, because the steamer she’d originally been on had broken down and couldn’t take her the rest of the way to St. Louis. Once in St. Louis, I think, she was supposed to take a train back to New York. It’s all fuzzy now.”

  “Talk about bad luck.”

  “I know,” Sylvia said. “She was only a few hours from her destination.”

  “What was the original steamer that she’d been on?”

  “Oh, I think the papers said it was the Louisiana Purchase,” Sylvia said. “It was one of those luxury liners that rich people took vacations on all the time.”

  “So, how did we determine that the Huntleigh heiress was actually on board The Phantom? If she didn’t survive, how do we know she was on board at all?”

  “One of her suitcases washed ashore, I believe. And then Doc Hallam received a telegram the next day from Jessica Huntleigh’s father.”

  “But if she switched steamboats in Memphis, how did her parents know she was on The Phantom?”

  “Well, she wasn’t traveling alone,” Sylvia said. “That’s it—now I remember. Her companion survived and contacted the family.”

  “And then what?”

  “It was like a circus here. For weeks after the boat went down the Pinkertons were here. Mr. Huntleigh had hired them to try to find his daughter. Or her remains.”

  “With no luck,” I said.

  “That is correct. Other than her suitcase, nothing was ever found of Jessica Huntleigh.”

  “Okay,” I said. “This is a long shot, but are any of the survivors still alive? Any you would know of?”

  She walked over to a filing cabinet of mine and pulled out a file. “This is a list of everybody who was on board,” she said. “Judging by how long ago it was and the age of most of the survivors, I’d say you have about a three percent chance of finding anybody still alive. But at least you have a place to start,” she added, pointing to the paper.

  I glanced down at the list of names. “Is this taken from the manifest?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “It’s from the list of names taken in port in Memphis.”

  “Jessica Huntleigh is not on here,” I said.

  “I noticed that, too.”

  “But she was definitely on the ship,” I said. It was more a question than a statement.

  “Yes,” Sylvia replied.

  “This makes no sense.”

  “Unless she didn’t want anybody to know she was on board The Phantom,” Sylvia said.

  “Why?”

  Sylvia only shrugged.

  “Her companion…” I ventured.

  “Yes?”

  “Was her companion male, female? Do we know his or her name?”

  “Her cousin, Matilda O’Brien,” Sylvia said, and pointed to the paper once again.

  With that, she left the room. She was finished talking, either because she had nothing else to say or because she was too tired to continue. With Sylvia, you never know. For one thing, she rarely volunteers information. She could have had plenty more to say to me about the wreck. Maybe I just hadn’t asked the right questions. That’s the way she is. It’s almost as if she wants to see how smart I am. Yeah, it’s definitely a love-hate relationship.

  I dashed off an e-mail real quickly to an associate in Tennessee. We often swap favors with each other. Believe it or not, it is easier to have somebody in a specific area go and look something up for you than it is to write to the courthouses. Not to mention cheaper. So I look up things for him in eastern Missouri, and he looks up things for me in western Tennessee. I had built quite a network of research buddies since getting on the Internet.

  Dear Ian,

  Could you check the shipping and docking and manifests for a ship called the Louisiana Purchase and see if there was a woman on board named Jessica Huntleigh. It would have been January 1919, heading from New Orleans to St. Louis. The ship broke down in Memphis and she switched ships then, getting on a ship called The Phantom for the duration of her trip. I’m trying to track her movements from New Orleans. For some reason, she doesn’t actually show up on any lists of names for The Phantom, but it is widely accepted that she was on board when the boat sank. If you could just varify that she was on the Louisiana Purchase, I would be forever in your debt.

  —Torie

  I hit the send key and then turned off the computer.

  Seventeen

  I like the fact that there are still places in Granite County where the two-lane roads are bordered with nothing but trees and pastures. More and more
civilization has encroached, and half of the drives I used to take through the countryside are now drives through the land of subdivisions. But the particular stretch of Highway P just south of New Kassel is still country. New Kassel is situated with the Mississippi River to the east and Wisteria directly to the west. To the north are a few miles of woods, until you reach the next town, and to the south is rolling pasture, the occasional woods, and lots and lots of farms.

  I was about five minutes out of town when I came to the Granite Lutheran Church on my left. Don’t ask me why I felt the need to come out here and look at the graves of the wreck victims, but I did. I suppose it was because I never knew this piece of information before and it bugged me. I am a historian. It’s my job to know these things, and yet somehow, I had never bothered to find out, or else this fact had just slipped my notice. Helen Wickland, a few other people, and I had compiled a publication on all of the cemeteries of Granite County a few years back. My only consolation was that Granite Lutheran had not been one of the cemeteries I had traipsed through and cataloged grave by grave. One of the other volunteers had done it. But still, I felt like I should have known the wreck victims were buried there.

  Granite Lutheran is a beautiful little church, built of red brick, with four arched windows on each side. Each one of the windows has a blue stained-glass background with a brownish cross in the middle. Rounded oak doors are hung on large black cast-iron hinges and creak when opened. The most beautiful thing of all, though, is its location. Situated on a slight incline, it can only be reached after you cross a creek and covered bridge. Trees seem to rise up behind the church and cradle it, but without smothering it. And today, with the heavy white snow … well, you just couldn’t get any more postcard-perfect than that.

  I pulled my van into the parking lot and parked away from the church and the few other cars in the lot. These probably belonged to Earl Kloepper, the minister, and maybe his assistant. I got out and grabbed the disposable camera I’d bought at Wal-Mart. I always keep a few of them on hand at the Historical Society, because I just never know what’s going to come up. I snapped a picture of the church and the lot from where I stood next to the van.

  I wrapped a scarf around my neck, tucked one pants leg down in my boot and the other down in my house slipper, and headed for the graveyard, which is situated to the southeast of the church. I didn’t take my crutches because they were a pain in the butt in snow; plus, my foot was getting better. I listened to the snow crunch under my feet as I went, the silence interrupted only by my breathing and the hawk that circled around the trees behind the church. Finally, I reached the cemetery, yanked open the big black wrought-iron gate, and entered.

  Before leaving my office, I had looked through the Granite County Cemeteries publication that we had compiled. It told me what row the victims were buried in, so I didn’t have to go up and down every row. Depending on the size of the cemetery, some could have taken the whole day to cover. Granite Lutheran is a small to medium-sized cemetery, however, so I could walk it and look at every tombstone in about an hour. But still, with my ankle the way it was, and the fact that snow was leaking down into my house slipper, I just wanted to go straight to the victims’ graves.

  When I shut the gate, I noticed that somebody else had been in the cemetery recently. Well, at least since Sunday night, when the snow had fallen. So sometime in the last forty-eight hours. Could have been the minister, although unless somebody had been buried recently, Earl probably wouldn’t have been wandering through the cemetery. I thought no more about it and headed toward the row that had been designated for the wreck victims. The hawk I’d heard earlier swooped down and scared the bejesus out of me. He landed on a tombstone at the end of the cemetery. I noticed the footprints in the snow led down the very same row I was turning into.

  I scanned the cemetery and the surrounding woods for another person but saw no one. It felt like eyes were watching me, but that had to be my imagination. I’m fairly impressionable, I’ll admit. I turned down the row, and there were the seven headstones, all next to one another, with a paddle wheel carved into each. They simply read: FEMALE. WRECK OF THE PHANTOM, 1919, or MALE, as the case might be. All seven tombstones were identical, other than designating the deceased as male or female. And somebody else had stood right where I was now, looking down at these same stones, in the last day or so. The footprints turned back on themselves and led out the way they had led in, back to the parking lot.

  Snapping two pictures of the tombstones, I listened for any change in the world around me. The hawk screeched from several rows away, a car passed by on Highway P, and my breathing had become more labored from the trudge up through the snow. I snapped a picture of all of the footprints, and one of the church and surrounding area, as well. All together, I probably took six pictures. And then I ran like hell back to the van.

  You’d think as much time as I spend in cemeteries that I would have learned not to let my imagination run away with me. But it happens every now and then, just the same.

  Words cannot express how difficult it was to move quickly when only one foot worked correctly. I sort of ran, hopped, leapt, and said, “Ooch, ouch” the whole way.

  As I was getting in the van, Earl Kloepper came wandering down the front steps of the church. He is about fifty-five and walks with a pronounced limp, usually with the aid of a cane. It worried me that he was walking down the slippery steps without his cane, so I postponed leaving and made my way toward him.

  “Reverend Kloepper,” I said. “You need some help?”

  He looked down at my slipper-clad foot and laughed. “The blind leading the blind?”

  “Well, if we fall, at least we’ll fall together,” I said.

  He made it to the bottom of the steps just as I reached him. “Where are you headed?” I asked.

  “Goin’ into town to get some salt for out here,” he said. “Lotsa traffic lately. The shipwreck, you know.”

  I walked beside him as we headed to the parking lot, making sure that he didn’t fall. “Where’s your cane?”

  “Left the dern thing at my mother’s when I went to see her at the home yesterday,” he said. “Gotta pick it up while I’m out. What brings you here?”

  “Oh, uh…” I glanced toward the cemetery.

  “The shipwreck,” he said.

  I nodded. “You have a lot of people coming out to look at the graves?” I asked, feeling a little bewildered by how other people in town knew that the graves were here but I hadn’t.

  “More than usual,” he said. “Had some reporters a few days ago. Some townsfolk. Even Helen Wickland stopped out there to see ’em when she was here Monday for the Bingo chili supper.”

  Helen had compiled the information on this particular cemetery for the country records, so it made sense that she’d know about the graves. “Well, you be careful, Reverend Kloepper,” I said. “It’s pretty slick in town.”

  “I will,” he replied.

  He waited for me to return to my van and then he started his car. He put it in reverse about the time I was crossing the bridge.

  Eighteen

  I sat in my favorite booth at Fraulein Krista’s. I’d come early so that I could be there waiting for Stephanie Connelly. For some reason, if I had arrived and she had already been here, I would have felt awkward. Even though it’s my town and my booth, I still would have felt like the outsider. I know, I was just being a jerk. I’d brought some pictures along for her to see. Pictures of Dad growing up, pictures of Grandma and Grandpa Keith, and pictures of me through the years, and my kids. She might not care at all, but if I were in her shoes, I would love it if somebody brought me pictures of my family for me to see.

  Just like a scene out of a movie, Stephanie entered the restaurant almost in slow motion. Looking around, her gaze landed on me in the back of the room. She smiled, tucked her hair behind her ear, and walked toward me. I seemed to be in a vacuum as she approached. Suddenly, it was as if there was nobody else in the restaurant a
nd no noise in the universe. I was looking at my sister. My sister. It was just too surreal.

  She sat down with a swoosh of Estée Lauder and put a package on the table next to her. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  She noticed my crutches leaning up against the booth. “Did you break your leg?”

  “No, just sprained my ankle. But I sprained it really good,” I said.

  “How’d you do that?”

  I thought it would be best if I didn’t tell her that I broke it while trying to identify a dead body. It might scare her off. “Slipped.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  We both started talking at the same time, both gushing apologies. “You go first,” I said.

  “No, you.”

  “I, um, just wanted to apologize for the way I reacted the other day when you came into my office,” I said. “I didn’t know what to do or say. I felt extremely betrayed. And I acted like a jerk. It took a lot of guts for you to come and see me.”

  “It’s all right,” she said, and shrugged. “It’s not as if I just blurted it out. I was a little chicken.”

  “No, it’s not all right. I shouldn’t have acted that way. I considered nobody or nothing except myself. I mean, you really threw me. I just thought that if my dad had fathered a child, I’d know about it. And there you were, standing in front of me in the flesh, and I didn’t even know about you,” I said. “I guess it was a real blow to my ego.”

  “Your ego?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I take great pride in knowing everything,” I said, and laughed. “Or at least I think I know everything. Then every now and then, something or somebody comes along and proves me wrong, and it knocks me on my butt. That’s what I get for having an ego in the first place, I suppose. God’s revenge.”

  She laughed for a minute. “Well, I am very sorry I upset you. But it became pretty clear that Dwight was never going to tell you. And I … just couldn’t wait any longer. After my daughter was born … well, she just made me more aware of what was missing in my own life.”