The RagTime Traveler

by Larry Karp

  ***

  Alan turned left from Mt. Herman Road onto a narrow, hilly, dirt driveway and parked in front of a modest house. Before he could get out, a small woman with a smile like the sun dashed out of the house to stand at the side of the car. Alan slowly pried himself out of the driver’s seat, then the two exchanged a brief hug.

  “Well, Alan Chandler,” the woman said. “Can you imagine how surprised I was to hear your voice on the phone? Whatever are you doing in Sedalia in September? I’ve never known for you to be here any time besides for the Joplin Festival in June.”

  “I’ll explain, Betty.”

  “Well, of course. But not standing outside like this. Come on in. I’ve got coffee and some of my own sticky buns.”

  ***

  Betty led Alan to the kitchen table, poured him a cup of coffee, then listened, wide-eyed, to his story. “Oh, my goodness!” she breathed. “I’ve been reading about that in the papers. You say you think I can help you somehow? I’ve never been involved in a murder investigation, but you know if there is anything I can do, I will.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly helped me with a lot of research for my books and articles for a lot of years. And I think maybe you can do some very important research for me now. I…don’t exactly know how to say this, but as weird as it sounds, I think I might actually have traveled in time—gone back to 1899, talked to Scott Joplin…”

  For the first time, Betty’s smile faded. “Alan, I’ve known you for a long, long time. And I have to say, you’re as sensible a man as I’ve ever known. But I’ve got to admit, that is just a little hard to swallow.”

  “I’m sure. And—Betty, I’ve got cancer. Prostate. They’re giving me chemotherapy for it, and it could be that either the disease or the treatment is doing funny things to my mind. But whether this is real traveling in time or my imagination, I am learning things about people in ragtime from more than a hundred years ago that seem to be related to those stories you’re reading in the newspaper. And right now, I need some help, tying ends together.”

  While Alan was speaking, Betty had begun to cry quietly. She dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, then reached across the table to pat Alan’s hand. “Oh, Alan, I am so sorry.”

  Alan shrugged. “I’m eighty years old, and when you get to our age, you have to know that stuff is going to happen, and you deal with it. Now, if I can find that music—and find out who killed my friend—that will be the biggest thing that ever will have happened in my life.”

  Betty sat up straight. “Well, I can understand—I’m eighty-four. Okay, what is it I can do for you?”

  “With all the books you’ve put together on genealogies in the Sedalia area, you’re the perfect person for what I need. I’m betting you can get me information that might tie together a couple of families in Sedalia—the Blackstones and the Nowlins—”

  “The Blackstones? You mean Charles Blackstone, the Democrat editor?”

  “The same. And also, there’s some confusion about the other family’s name. Look for N-O-L-A-N-D and N-O-W-L-I-N. I’m hoping you can tie them together. Let me explain.”

  ***

  Betty walked out to the car with Alan. “Okay,” she said. “You’re at the Bothwell, right? I’ll call you as soon as I have something to tell you. I don’t think it’ll take very long.”

  “Thanks so much, Betty.” The two old people hugged again, then Alan slid into the car, waved, and drove off.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Alan thought Blackstone wasn’t sure how to deal with the three people facing him across his desk. The editor began with a light touch. “You people might not have anything else to do,” he said quietly. “But I have a job that takes a bunch of my time every day. It’s not easy to have you constantly barging in, looking for information.”

  Tom, Saramae, and Alan glanced at each other, then Alan spoke. “I’m sorry, Mr. Blackstone. We’ll try to take as little as possible of your time, but I think what you can tell us may be very important in finding a thief and a murderer, and retrieving some music that people will still think is important a hundred years or more in the future.”

  Blackstone leaned back in his chair and guffawed. “You’re still all about that music, aren’t you? Okay, go on. What is it today?”

  “Two things. One, can you please check with the K.C. Star, and see what they can tell you about a man named Jarvis Nowlin, who suffered a head injury yesterday. Is he alive? Conscious? In the hospital?”

  The editor lost his smile. “‘Nowlin’? God in heaven! Those lousy Nowlins again. All right. Can you give me a little more information? Some background?”

  “Whatever you need. We all went to Kansas City yesterday and found out the stolen music was being hidden at Mr. Nowlin’s house. So we made an attempt—unfortunately, unsuccessfully—to find it. Even more unfortunate, Mr. Nowlin came home while JJ was…uh, inside, looking around, and Mr. Nowlin was carrying a gun. He was about to shoot JJ when Tom snuck up behind him and hit him with a fire iron.”

  “Jesus Christ on purple roller blades,” Blackstone murmured. He shot a glance at Saramae. “And where was my daughter during this break-and-entry and possibly lethal assault?”

  Alan motioned Saramae silent. “She was in the car with me. I told you we wouldn’t expose her to danger.”

  “Oh, good. Just great. Chandler, if your grandson there killed Nowlin, my daughter’ll get thirty years as an accessory.

  “Only if the law knows she was there. And no one who knows would tell them.”

  The editor snatched up his phone. “Leah, please get K.C. on the horn. Find out if they have anything from last night about a Jarvis Nowlin—N-O-W-L-I-N—who was attacked in his house and had a head injury…right. There may be a local interest angle we can use…Yes, thanks.”

  He set the receiver back into the cradle, then turned heavy eyes onto Alan. “I’m sure I’ll regret asking, but you said you had two things to talk to me about?”

  “Yes.” Alan took a deep breath. “Mr. Blackstone, I’ve found out some history that has a connection with this robbery and murder, and right now I have a very capable historian tying up the loose ends. But you may be able to give me information that will really put things together. Let’s start in the 1970s. If I’m right, there was a duffel bag with a good number of Scott Joplin’s compositions, and it was in your father’s possession. But Big Jack Jackson stole it from him for a man whose name he thought was Raney. Mr. Raney paid him with a clout from a baseball bat and years in an asylum. But the man’s name really was—”

  “Nowlin. Richard Nowlin. Jarvis’ father. You’re right on, Mr. Chandler.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Blackstone. Can I ask you this: how did your father get hold of that duffel bag?”

  Blackstone held up a finger in a “hang on” gesture. After a minute, he blew out a mouthful of air. “I can’t give you much detail—remember, I was only four or five years old then. What I’ve put together over the years is that there’s been bad blood between the Blackstones and the Nowlins going all the way back to Joplin’s time. I don’t know how it got started, but I do know it had something to do with a little hanky-panky in a marriage, and the Blackstones ended up being pro-Joplin and the Nowlins anti-Joplin.”

  Alan felt a little dizzy. Either I really have been traveling in time, or I’ve got one hell of an imagination.

  “My father got a call from a lawyer in K.C. who had a duffel bag of music. He said he had gotten it from the Steadman estate and it might have been written by Joplin. Since he knew about the Blackstones and the Nowlins, he set up a little auction between them. My father and grandfather won. No idea what they paid.”

  “Amazing,” Alan breathed. “But why didn’t your father do anything with the music?”

  “He and my grandpa were working on it, but they weren’t in a hurry; they wanted to do things right. Keep in mind—they happened
to buy that music in 1970, right before Joshua Rifkin’s recording brought Joplin back into the public eye. All of a sudden, a bag with original, unknown Scott Joplin manuscripts was very hot stuff. The Nowlins were beside themselves, tried everything, no matter how far-fetched, to persuade Pop and Grandpa to sell them the manuscripts, or at least let them in on a deal. Relations between the families went from bad to completely impossible. While all the feuding was going on, Pop and Grandpa were looking into having Rifkin verify the music as Joplin’s, and then they were going to copyright it—and that was in 1973, when The Sting came out. At that point, the Nowlins gave up any pretense of legality. Richard got Big Jack to steal the duffel bag out of our house.”

  Blackstone smiled, not pleasantly. “So they were forty-some years ahead of you, Mr. Chandler.”

  “And you’re saying the duffel bag has sat in a Nowlin house for all this time?”

  A knock at the door interrupted the conversation. Blackstone called, “Come in.” His secretary entered and passed the editor a sheet of paper. He gave her a perfunctory thanks and started scanning the page before she was out of the room.

  By the time he finished reading, Blackstone was chortling. “You’re gonna love this,” he said, and passed the paper to Alan. “World War Three starts in Kansas City, Missoura.”

  Saramae’s and Tom’s heads clonked together as they both tried to read over Alan’s shoulder at the same time. He held up a finger at them and read silently. After a minute, he looked up. “Well, Tom, guess you didn’t kill him. Listen to this: ‘At eleven o’clock last night, police were called to the home of Abigail Nowlin on Virginia Ave. to break up a domestic dispute. Ms. Nowlin’s cousin, Jarvis Nowlin, reportedly broke into her house and accused her of hiring a thug to rob and beat him. He then allegedly assaulted Ms. Nowlin, inflicting major bruises to her face and knocking out three of her teeth. Ms. Nowlin denied any knowledge or involvement in the incident at Mr. Nowlin’s house several hours before. The two combatants were taken to St. Luke’s Hospital, where their injuries were attended to; then Mr. Nowlin was removed to the police station and booked on charges of first-degree assault.’”

  Saramae giggled. “That take Mr. Jarvis outa the picture for a while. An’ ain’t no cops gone be watchin’ his place, neither.”

  “We’ll have to think about that,” said Alan. “Mr. Blackstone, you’ve been really helpful, thank you. I might want to come back after I’ve talked to my historian friend, and I hope you’ll accommodate me.”

  Blackstone chuckled. “Your historian friend wouldn’t happen to be Betty Singer, would it?”

  “How’d you—?”

  “A historian in Sedalia who can trace family relationships back to General Smith’s days? There are only two possibilities, Betty and Rhonda Chalfont. I guessed and got lucky.” He sighed. “I think I’m in with both feet now. Yes, I’ll accommodate you, Lord help my sorry soul.”

  He looked at Saramae. “If I’d known this was going to get you mixed up in committing felony assault and worse, I’d never have written that note for your school.”

  Then the editor turned a baleful gaze onto Alan. “If you let anything happen to my daughter, it’ll take more than God to help your sorry soul.”

  ***

  At the solid triple knock on the door, Alan and Tom looked at each other and grinned. Tom checked his watch. “Four-fifty-eight. You called it.”

  Alan pulled himself out of the desk chair, walked slowly to the door, and opened it. Miriam, a small suitcase in her hand, her face a mask of uncompromising disapprobation, gave her husband a quick up-and-down.

  Alan leaned forward to peck her cheek, took the suitcase from her hand. “Don’t just stand there. Come on in.”

  As Miriam walked into the room, Tom gave her a hug and a kiss. “Glad to see you, Gramma.”

  She tried, not altogether successfully, to suppress a smile, then flopped into the padded chair. “Jesus, getting older isn’t easy. I’m whipped. Used to be, a trip from Seattle to Sedalia was a piece of cake.”

  Tom walked into the bathroom, came out with a glass of water, which he pressed into Miriam’s hand. She swallowed half of it in one gulp, then blew out a long sigh. “All right, thank you, Thomas. Now the two of you can bring me up-to-date on what’s going on here. What’s new since you talked to me last night?”

  Tom made a point of avoiding Alan’s eyes.

  Alan suppressed a snicker.

  Oh, nothing much. A good meeting with Tom Ireland and Lathan Blackstone. Eventually, Lord help me, I’m going to have to tell her about my time-traveling…but not now, not right off the bat. Think, man. Tell her something to keep her satisfied for the time being.

  Alan took close to three-quarters of an hour telling Miriam about Mickey’s death, the hunt for the music, and his research into the tangled histories of a couple of families, when the room phone rang. He waved Tom off, then walked across the room and picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?…Betty—I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon.”

  ***

  Betty Singer smiled as she hung up the phone. She had never thought of herself as a proud woman, but right now, she found herself thinking she’d better be careful she didn’t take a fall. How many people, for how many years, had poked fun at all the time she spent with her nose in hundred-year-old newspapers and books, and prowling through cemeteries with gravestones so ancient that some of them were unreadable? But here was Alan Chandler, the most prominent ragtime historian and musician on Earth, needing her help finding both a bag of lost music written by Scott Joplin and a murderer—and in just a few hours, she had the information he wanted.

  She checked her wristwatch: just a bit before five. She had two hours to get dinner together and onto the table—tight squeeze, but far from the tightest she’d dealt with in her eighty-four years. Not enough time to make the pork roast she’d prefer to serve, but no one had ever turned up their nose at her ham and cheese casserole. And how lucky she’d baked a bunch of apple pies that morning for the meeting of the Scott Joplin Foundation. Three would have to be enough for that.

  ***

  As Alan pushed his chair back from the table, he loosed a monster belch, then covered his mouth with his napkin. “Sorry,” he muttered. “The chemotherapy does that. I can’t stop them.”

  Tom winced. Betty and Miriam nodded sympathetically. “I hear that in China, that’s supposed to be a compliment to the cook,” Betty said. “I’ll take it that way.”

  “If you do, that would be perfectly appropriate,” said Miriam. “The meal was delicious, thank you so much.”

  Betty smiled. “My pleasure. In all the years you, Alan, and Tom there have been coming for the festival, there’s never been time for a dinner here, what with his performance and practice schedule.” Quickly, she piled the dishes and carried them to the sink, then returned to the table with a couple of books and several pages of note paper and copies of newspaper articles. “Let me show you what I found,” she said. “If I’ve missed anything, I’ll go back and find it.”

  She set a notepad page in front of Alan. “Here’s a pedigree—a family history—of the Blackstones, the Nowlins, and the No-lands.” She pronounced the final name as two words. “See, it goes back to the turn of the last century. The central figure is Angeline No-land Blackstone, here. She lived from 1876 to 1951. She was married to a man named Lathan Blackstone, but, well…let’s say she didn’t take the marriage vows terribly seriously.”

  Betty laid a newspaper article next to the pedigree. “She played piano in less-than-reputable places in Sedalia, and took up with some of the men she met there. Her husband found out about one of them. There was a nasty scene which led to the end of the marriage.”

  Tom’s eyes widened. “The whole mess made the newspaper. And, wow! Pretty blunt!”

  Betty chuckled. “Yes, newspapers then didn’t hesitate to publish loca
l scandals—the readers couldn’t get enough of them. And the reporters and editors did not mince words. They must have loved Angeline. Did you see this line? ‘Scandalizing local society since her arrival this summer.’ Doesn’t say where she came from, though. If it did, I might be able to trace her family back further.”

  Alan waved a hand dismissively. “Doesn’t matter. It’s what happened after she got here that’s important right now.”

  “Saramae might like to know,” Tom pointed out.

  “Fair enough. Betty, if you stumble on anything, pass it along, but don’t put in too much time. I don’t want you to feel obligated.”

  “Oh, it could be fun to try. But let me show you the rest of what I did find. For a few years, Angeline seems to have traveled around the Midwest playing piano, but then she came back to Sedalia.”

  Betty laid another couple of newspaper articles in front of Alan. “Angeline was at least a little unbalanced. Sometimes in her later years, she created scenes, shouting about Scott Joplin, how he’d stolen her music to write “Maple Leaf Rag,” and claiming that the reason he’d moved to St. Louis was to avoid the lawsuit she was planning to slap on him.

  “Now,” Betty pointed toward the pedigree, “Angeline started two family lines. She and Lathan had a son, William, who stayed with his father when his mother left town. And three generations after William, here you see Charles Blackstone, city editor at the Democrat. The Blackstones have all been highly respected people here in Sedalia, at least since William’s day.

  “On the other hand, here are the Nowlins. The first of them is James. There’s no way, I’m afraid, to find out with any certainty who his father was, or where he was born. James was just a baby when Angeline returned with him to Sedalia, so I’d guess whoever the father was, he’d abandoned Angeline not long after James was born.”

  Betty set another newspaper article in front of Alan. “From the time she came back to Sedalia with her baby, she lived here for the rest of her life, and as James got older, Angeline became more and more of a problem for him. In 1933, he petitioned to have his name and the names of all his family changed from No-land to Nowlin, to try to spare them the embarrassment his mother was causing them. Now that ragtime was over and the…places she played at were closed, she’d taken to begging on street corners and asking for money. But in a way, Sedalia’s a small town, and the name change didn’t do much by way of distancing the Nowlins from Angeline. So a couple of years later, James and his wife and children moved to Kansas City. But wherever they set down, the Nowlins seem to have been a wild bunch: one of James’ grandsons was killed in a bar brawl and a daughter died under suspicious circumstances—according to one article I found, the police suspected her husband might have been involved in her death.”