The 15th Star (A Lisa Grace History - Mystery)

by Lisa Grace

  Whoever had left the letters to the Smithsonian over fifty years ago had carefully placed them in one of those blue and white textured boxes for cataloging. In the space on the front someone had slid in a cut index card saying, ‘letters approx. 1812 - 1819, L. Armsted.’

  Keiko got to work. She opened the box and saw the letters were still in their envelopes, true to form. From this time period they were brittle with age. She sat down and opened her desk drawer to take out her reading glasses. She wouldn’t need them for the first hour or two, but after that, eyestrain would kick in and Keiko would be glad to have them. Her coffee was on the small table behind her. She never kept it on her desk in case of a spill.

  She put on gloves so the natural oils from her fingers wouldn’t do any further damage to the delicate aging paper before removing the letters from the box. As Keiko examined the first one on top, she noticed the name was not L. Armsted as written on the outside of the box, but Louisa Armistead.

  Keiko sat back and thought a minute. She knew that name.

  Keiko leaned over and took her laptop out of her bag. She plugged it in and waited for it to come up. As much as Keiko hated to do it, she went to the American Histories Department website and put the name and year in the search engine. Sure enough, the letters were to Louisa Armistead, wife of Major George Armistead. George Armistead was the Major who commissioned the flag which inspired the song by Francis Scott Key, The Star Spangled Banner. The flag flew over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812 and was now kept upstairs in its own special case in the rotunda built just to hold it.

  This might be interesting after all. Keiko looked at the front address on the outside of the envelope and her heart quickened. The address looked familiar. She checked the website again just to be sure. NO. 60 Albemarle Street, Baltimore, Maryland.

  It was the original address of the house known as the “Flag House.” Mary Pickersgill’s house.

  Mary Pickersgill was as famous as Betsy Ross in colonial American circles. She had learned to make ship flags, standards, and colors while working for her mother’s company and eventually took it over.

  As a second-generation flag maker, Mary was highly respected. Her daughter Caroline was known to have worked side by side with her mother, carrying on the tradition and befriending other well-known people in history. Reading this set of letters might not lead to any breakthroughs, but learning the private thoughts of some of the women who helped to shape our country wouldn’t be as boring as Keiko had feared. Keiko carefully removed the letter from the envelope.

  The first letter was from a Grace Wisher.

  May 17, 1818

  Dearest Louisa,

  I count you as a true and dearest friend, I be getting long, though I miss yous. I misses what could never be. I knowd he better off where he is. Buts I miss part of my heart. It be wid him. Longs I see him in heaven some day. I wonder if he will no me. Please writ me soon. I learn better from your letters. Sen me word. I pray happiness for him. No one no. thank ye again and God bless. You an angel on erth.

  Grace Wisher

  Wow. Highly unusual. Someone not educated writing to Louisa, and calling her a friend? Writing about a dead or missing son, husband, lover? Possibly a young soldier who was under her husband George’s command? Keiko again went back to the museum website and ran the name, Grace Wisher. Keiko’s memory was correct. Grace Wisher was the African-American indentured girl who worked for Mary Pickersgill. This was very interesting, an indentured servant, a friend of someone in high social circles like Louisa. Highly unusual and interesting. Maybe there would be mention of the flag in some of the other letters. Grace had worked on the flag along side Caroline who was Mary’s daughter, and two of Mary’s nieces, Eliza and Jane Young. It took the five of them six weeks to sew the flag. Keiko would keep searching for any mention of their time with the flag. This search was going to be fun. Little was known about Grace as slavery was still in practice in Maryland during the 1818 time period. Emancipation would not happen in that part of the country for about another thirty years. In the history books, Grace was called an indentured servant, but was that a formality on Mary Pickersgill’s part?

  The letter was about Grace being torn apart from someone she loved. Unfortunately, in 1818 for a slave, or indentured servant, involuntary separation would not have been uncommon. Keiko logged the names and dates on her laptop then put the letter on the scanner. She hit save and burned the information to a thumb drive on her computer. Keiko then sent the information by email to the Smithsonian’s backup site. This way if the redundancy of the stored files on her laptop were lost, there was still a backup kept at a third party online records storage company, plus the copy on her thumb drive. It never hurt to be too careful. As an undergrad she had learned the importance of backing up files when her laptop had quit halfway through a term paper. Explaining to the professor and then recreating all the lost work had been a nightmare. Thank God she’d kept paper notes to help her reconstruct her lost work. That was the year of nightmares. Her parents…forever gone. Now was not the time to think about it. She shoved the painful memory back into her mental archives. She wasn’t going to think about it. Not today, not now.

  Keiko got up, stretched her legs, and looked at the clock. 8:00 a.m. The rest of the department should be drifting in. She picked up her mug and walked into the hallway which led down to Dr. Writer’s office to make a pot of coffee. The good doctor’s real name was Writer, and he’d heard every lame attempt of a joke in the department. He was a jovial history buff and the President of a local reenactment group. His office was twice the size of most of the offices, which gave him the honor of holding the department coffeepot. Most of the old offices only had two power outlets and would easily overload. Doc’s office had the luxury of eight and he kindly shared his extra outlets for the coffeepot, a microwave, and small fridge for the brown baggers.

  As Keiko entered the hall she saw Julian. His back faced her as he walked away from her towards his office. You could hardly tell he was missing a leg at all. The way he walked had a fluidity to it that was all his own. Keiko found her rhythm as she sipped her coffee and enjoyed the brisk pace she had to maintain to keep up with the view. Dr. Julian Lone Wolf was the hunk of the department. Make that the hunk of the Smithsonian. He was the department head of the Colonial American-Indian Studies Department. He did not fit the stereotypical mold of a Smithsonian professor. No bow tie, corduroy jacket, or pocket pencil protector for him. The unofficial uniform of most of those who held doctorates in the building. Where did they find that stuff anyway? Antique stores? She wondered if they had special catalogs they ordered their clothing from. Today, Dr. Lone Wolf was wearing his customary blue jeans and a flannel shirt. He looked more the part of a lumberjack than a museum professor. Julian could wear whatever he wanted, because when you looked as good as he did, did clothes matter?

  Julian still looked like the fit soldier he was just a few years ago. Rumor had it an IED in Iraq exploded under his Humvee putting an end to his leg and his military career. He went back to school and completed his doctorate. Obviously, they forgot to send him the geeky doctor clothing catalog, Keiko joked to herself.

  While his bearing was regal, his hair was not. He had let it grow long, just past shoulder length. Keiko prayed he wouldn’t look back and see her watching him. She had to work on controlling her attraction and separate that part of her from who she needed to be. Besides, he probably had a girlfriend. Washington was known for an excess of attractive brainy assertive women. Someone like him would have had plenty of tempting offers and Julian would not be into an intern still going for her masters. It was hard to see him everyday and pretend indifference. But if she wanted to keep her internship, Keiko knew she had to prove herself. The last thing she needed was a reputation as a schoolgirl with a crush on one of the professors. Her mental energy needed to be focused on finding something new in colonial history. Something she could expand into a thesis for her masters and expound upon for a doctor
ate. When she received her doctorate, she would not be signing up for the geeky clothing catalog either, though it would be nice to get a decent salary so she could wear prettier clothes than the basic black ones she normally chose because they hid the dust and coffee stains she seemed to attract.

  Keiko reached Doc’s office and entered.

  Doc was rarely in his office as he was the leading expert in Colonial Americana. His expertise was needed for restoration projects all over the District of Columbia. Even the White House called him for matters as important as consulting on the rearranging of furniture and paintings in the public and private rooms.

  One of the reasons Keiko loved it here so much was because Doc was a wonderful mentor and colleague. His excitement everyday for what he and they did was contagious.

  She went in to start a fresh pot of coffee as the rest of the department would be drifting in any minute. Since Keiko was one of the first to arrive every morning, she thought it was the polite thing to do. Keiko heard Dr. Writer enter and turned around to greet him,

  “Good morning, Doctor.”

  “Hey ho, Keiko! What a blustery morning. Can you imagine the troops out on a day like today? Oh the wonder of brick and mortar walls, the things we take for granted. Again, today, I am in awe of what our past has wrought.” He put his briefcase down, removed his overcoat, and came over Keiko’s way to pour his own mug, and stir in a few spoonfuls of creamer with two sugars.

  Keiko laughed. You never knew what Doc was going to say. Each day brought a new appreciation of some modern marvel. Doc reminded Keiko of her father. He didn’t look anything like him, but the way he found joy in everyday experiences made Keiko’s heart warm and ache. Keiko had been adopted from Japan when she was only six months old. She was one of several baby girls dropped off that year at an orphanage working with an American charity to adopt out the healthy ones. The lucky ones.

  Keiko’s luck started to run out her freshman year in college. Her parents were killed in a car crash. Hit by a drunk driver while returning home from dinner. The offending car had been stolen and the driver never found. The cops surmised the driver was drunk because of the half empty whiskey bottle left in the abandoned wreck.

  She didn’t find out until early the next morning. Keiko had stayed late at the library, well after midnight, studying. She chose to remember her parents the way they were and pretended they were still alive. As long as she was in college going for her masters, living in the same place, their brownstone, she could pretend that nothing had changed. Their life insurance was enough to pay off the huge mortgage and have enough left for future taxes and the expenses associated with finishing her degree, if she were frugal.

  Everyday she played the game that her parents would walk in the door any minute. They were just out for a late dinner or there was an emergency at the hospital where they both worked. They would come home after she was in bed.

  In the morning she played the same game. Mom and Dad had gotten up early and left before she was awake. It was easier not to face the pain. The horror and anger that the police had still not found the driver or made an arrest was unbearable and unthinkable. Just knowing she may never know who took them away from her wasn’t fair. The truth was important. The truth drove Keiko.

  “So what are you working on, Keiko?” Faced with Doc’s enthusiasm she could pretend she was telling her dad, “Oh, I’m archiving a box of correspondence that was donated. It’s been sitting in the basement about fifty years now.”

  “Well Keiko, you put us all to shame, toiling from dawn to dusk while history has a way of racing ahead day by day, new chapters being added. Yet while it races ahead, it also waits patiently to be discovered and remembered by us. What a conundrum! And with all the cuts we’ve suffered, most of it will patiently wait some more.”

  “I like remembering. To me they are more than memories or history. I feel close to them. They were real people. They should be remembered. The box I’m working on now was donated by a distant relative of the Adam’s family.”

  “Ah, ha! The mischief makers of the colonial set.”

  “It looks like they came into possession of some Armistead letters. And there seems to be a connection to Pickersgill, which might prove to be interesting,” Keiko said as she sipped her coffee while warming her hands on either side of her mug.

  “Mary, Mary, such a hard worker, always living in the shadow of Betsy Ross. I wonder if that irked her?” Doc looked up as he sat down with his mug.

  Keiko shrugged, “I never really thought about it.”

  Doc sat behind his desk and spoke, “Oh, the story behind the history, the truth behind the mystery.

  We conjecture and bring to light, whether it made the difference,

  Turning left, instead of right.”

  “Waxing poetic again?” A deep voice asked, as Dr. Julian Lone Wolf entered the room. Three-quarters American Indian, proud of his heritage, and an expert in Indian survival during the era of Colonial America.

  He was in charge of all exhibits pertaining to the history of the American Indians.

  Keiko loved looking at him. He looked the part of an Indian warrior. Being an ex-soldier he was a warrior. Sometimes he wore his long black hair pulled back in a ponytail or at other times, like today, hanging straight. While walking through the public areas upstairs the school kids who spotted him would whisper excitedly, “Look at the Indian!” Julian ate it up. Anything to get the kids hooked and coming back. His knowledge of all things Indian was encyclopedic. His pet project at the moment was recording the ancient language of the Cherokee and putting it on and integrating it into an interactive display for the kids. Julian also was coordinating a recording of song and chants with an English translation, plus the dance moves broken down. The board of the department figured it could be a big seller in the gift shop and online store. Rumor was, they were signing a contract to turn it into a Wii game and an Apple App. A certain amount of the proceeds would go directly to his department. Julian was a natural at marketing.

  “Hey Doc, Keiko,” Julian nodded.

  Keiko asked, “How’s it going, Julian?” Keiko never knew what to say to Julian Lone Wolf. He was so striking it was hard for her to take her eyes off of him. She’d never been so attracted to a man in her life. Because Keiko was afraid everyone else would notice her attraction, she avoided him as much as possible. She was here to work. No one in the department called him Doctor or even Dr. Lone Wolf. Everyone called him Julian and so did she.

  “Great, seeing some real progress.”

  He went to the mini fridge and grabbed a Coke.

  “Well guys, my work is calling. I’ll be back later for a refill,” Keiko announced as she headed for the door.

  “Enjoy, Keiko, enjoy,” Doc said.

  “Bye Keiko,” Julian said with a slight smile. She had the feeling he was watching her walk away, but she was too chicken to look. Besides, anyone like her who could convince herself that her parents were still alive had an active imagination that did not concern itself with reality.

  Keiko headed back down the hall glad she hadn’t made a fool of herself when Julian walked in. She always felt like she was staring at him and she was worried he would notice. The problem was she couldn’t help herself. But at least today she was eager to get back to work and see what the next letter held.

  As she went through the next two or three letters, nothing jumped out. Some were from relatives and others from neighbors. Just the everyday ramblings between friends.

  Tiring of the slow pace and eager to learn more about Grace, Keiko rifled through the envelopes, nothing.

  She went to the trunk and skipped to the next box, and saw it was a year later.

  Just for kicks, she took the cover off and skimming through the letters. Voilà, she found one near the bottom dated 1819. A year after the last one she’d read.

  June 13th, 1819

  Dearest Louisa,

  I so scared, I do not no who to tell. If I die soon, I was kilt. He a
fraid I tell. I hid a letter an the star to proof I tells the truth. He kilt someone today. I saw him come out a her house, and she found dead. Why now? Why after all this years? I no not why. Mrs. Louisa I hide the letter an the star. So I did, but if I don tell someone where’s it hid, My safety die wid me. I sen him letter to tell him its hid an people no the truth. To ples lev me alone. Pray to God to keep me safe.

  Miss Grace

  Keiko put the letter down and read the second sheet.

  Member’s where I sayd we sat an talk an sew the flag?

  Where the flag resting place

  How many states by provens

  Point from the star to a star

  Could it be? Keiko’s heart started to race. She read the letter again.

  It couldn’t be. But if it wasn’t, what other explanation could it be? Could Grace Wisher have been in possession of the missing star? The fifteenth star?

  Keiko stood up and paced back and forth in her tiny office trying to contain her excitement.

  Louisa would give parts of the flag known as the Star Spangled Banner to those she thought deserving. In later years Louisa gave away almost eighteen feet of the flag, but that honor would have been reserved for heroes. Why would Louisa give a two foot by two foot part, a whole star, surely coveted by others, to Grace who was a thirteen-year-old African-American indentured servant when she worked on the flag? Had Grace done something heroic? Also, according to the historical record, Louisa would have been giving pieces of the flag away a little later. The mostly complete flag was thought to have been on display in 1824. This was a good five to six years earlier than that.

  She read the letter again. The second sheet had to be a clue to the missing star.