by Ellen Crosby
The Romeos, whose name stood for Retired Old Men Eating Out, which pretty much summed up who they were and what they did, were Thelma’s henchmen in the information-gathering business. During their daily sojourns to watering holes, diners, and restaurants throughout the county, they served as her eyes and ears, collecting news—or gossip, if you wanted to be technically accurate—about the good citizens of Loudoun County, which they retold over coffee and donuts at the General Store the next morning. Occasionally names, places, and dates got jumbled up—a few of the Romeos had trouble remembering details—so you were never entirely sure what you were hearing was the gospel truth.
I stared at her. Was that the rumor that was going around? Dominique killed Jean-Claude over a gossip-column story in the Washington Tribune?
“First of all, Dominique did not murder Jean-Claude. It’s just not in her character. She threw Jean-Claude out of the restaurant because of the horrible way he was treating her staff and she couldn’t stand it,” I said. “Besides, she wasn’t the only woman to visit Jean-Claude the morning he was killed.”
Thelma smiled her sweetest “gotcha” smile. “Is that so? Who else was there, Lucille?”
I had fallen for the oldest trick in the book. “I was,” I said. “And I didn’t kill him, either.”
I knew she wouldn’t buy my answer. “How about a nice cup of coffee, child? On the house. You can set a spell and we’ll have a little chat. I got the usuals, and today’s fancy is ‘Bean There, Done That.’ Kind of a mellow one for a change. Plus I’ve got one jelly donut left.” She gave me a sly look. “Filled with raspberry jam. Your favorite.”
When Thelma resorted to bribery, she really meant to interrogate you. But I had questions for her, too, about Charles Montgomery, and I wasn’t going to get out of here until she was satisfied she had squeezed every ounce of information I knew about Jean-Claude out of me.
“All right, just a quick cup of fancy,” I said. “And I’ll take the donut, too. But I insist on paying.”
“Nonsense.” She walked over to a table where three coffeemakers labeled PLAIN, DECAF, and FANCY sat side by side and poured two cups of fancy. “You know how much I always enjoy conversating with you.”
She handed me my donut in a white deli bag along with a couple of paper napkins, and we walked over to the corner of the store where three rocking chairs were placed around a woodstove. Thelma sat in her favorite bentwood rocker and I took the Lincoln rocking chair next to her.
She sipped her coffee and said, “You were about to tell me who else saw Jean-Claude the morning he was killed.”
I wasn’t about to say any such thing. “Surely the Romeos have already told you everything, haven’t they? Honestly, Thelma, no one in Atoka is better informed than you are.”
She gave me a tolerant, knowing smile. “I pride myself on knowing what goes on around here. A person’s got to stay informed, you know. Besides, people love to tell me things and they’re always asking my advice. I think of it as my cervical duty to my community.”
I coughed. “I can see that,” I said and bit into a blob of raspberry jelly.
“Well,” she said, “I did hear that cute little blonde who works for you—Nikki—came by to see him. Apparently Jean-Claude broke her heart when he ended their fling. She wanted to see if they could patch things up, but he told her there was someone else.”
“He did?” I said, through a mouthful of jelly. “Who?”
“I don’t rightly know, but there were rumors about him and Robyn Callahan.” She paused, waiting for my reaction.
I licked powdered sugar off my fingers while I tried to figure out how to respond to that comment. “Robyn’s crazy about Toby.”
“I have no doubt. But Jean-Claude could be quite the Casablanca,” she said. “Just like Humphrey Bogart. A man like that’s hard to resist, Lucille.”
Didn’t I know.
“Bobby Noland’s the detective working on the case,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll find whoever did it.”
Thelma set her cup down on a small table next to her rocking chair and folded her hands in her lap. “I’m sure he will, too,” she said. Then she added in a quiet, ominous voice, “But what worries me is when he does, it’s going to tear this community apart.”
Our eyes met. She rocked back and forth, staring at me as if she were seeing someone else. I wiped my sticky hands on a clean napkin while my brain kept repeating it’s not Dominique it’s not Dominique it’s not Dominique.
“A lot of people wander into vineyards,” I said. “Maybe it’s someone no one has considered yet. Jean-Claude got himself into a lot of trouble in France years ago and made some enemies.”
Thelma tapped her temple with a finger. “No. I know things, Lucille. I don’t know who did it—yet—but I do know it was no stranger.”
I believed her. But I sure wished I didn’t.
“Now,” she said, “something else is on your mind, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Does it have anything to do with the body that was found on your property?”
The expression on my face gave me away because she said, “I thought as much. What is it?”
“Are you related to someone named Charles Montgomery? Did he own this store once?”
It was her turn to look dumbfounded. When she spoke, her voice quivered. “How in the world did you find out about him?”
“In some family papers among Leland’s genealogy records.”
“What was in the papers?”
“A letter saying he was going to marry Susanna Montgomery. I presume they were cousins. Susanna was the daughter of Hugh, my great-great-great-grandfather.”
“He never married her,” she said. “She ran off with someone else, so Charles married my great-aunt. So yes, we’re kin, but only by marriage.”
“How do you know that?”
“That he married my great-aunt?”
“That she ran off.”
“My family kept letters, too, Lucille. It wasn’t a pretty story about Susanna, what she did to her family. To your family. I’m not surprised you didn’t know about it. She became a persona not gracias, as they say. I think your family disowned her.”
The donut settled in the pit of my stomach like a rock. “Tell me. Please.”
“She took up with a black man.”
I thought about my meeting with David Phelps, my half-brother, in half an hour.
“I see.”
“In those days it was against the law. You could go to prison for something like that, so the two of them ran off. They were never heard from again,” she said. “It was a huge scandal.”
I wasn’t about to tell Thelma that there was another theory. Susanna never ran off with anyone and perhaps Charles had killed her. Or someone else had, and he buried her. Either way, it explained the blank spaces for her wedding date and date of death in our family Bible.
“Charles ended up marrying my great-aunt. I believe they were happy,” Thelma said. “Or maybe I’d just like to believe it. There were no children, so after they died the store passed to my grandmother, who was much younger. It stayed in my family ever since.”
“I never knew any of this.”
“Sometimes it’s just best to leave things lay where Jesus flang ’em, Lucille. The Johnsons don’t really talk about it,” she said. “And of course your family didn’t, either. So who is the body in the grave? Does it have something to do with Susanna?”
“We don’t know for sure yet.” It was true, though not honest. Yasmin said we couldn’t be one hundred percent certain until the results came back from my swab and what could be extracted from the tooth and femur of the skeleton. “The forensic anthropologist who excavated the site said it will take some time—maybe even a couple of months—before she can get DNA results from the lab and we know whether the remains belong to someone related to my family.”
Thelma gave me a sharp-eyed look. “Lucille,” she said, “please don’t lie to me.”
&n
bsp; She’d been honest with me. I owed her the truth.
“It might be Susanna—the age of the grave and the age of the remains would fit. And a cuff link with the initials CM were found in the grave. Yasmin—the forensic anthropologist—said it probably belonged to whoever dug the grave.”
“Charles Montgomery.”
I nodded. There wasn’t anything else to say.
“I suspect it’s impossible for you and me to understand—really understand—how Susanna falling in love with … the wrong person, a man of color … could destroy a family in those days. Cause so much trouble for everyone involved,” she said. “Hugh riding with Mosby as one of his Rangers and all, fighting for the Confederacy and Virginia’s right to make our own laws, decide what was right for our own people.” She paused and cleared her throat. “Plus, the truth of the matter is that your family owned slaves. So did mine. It’s not pretty admitting it now, but you can’t rewrite history even if you want to.”
“I know. Nor cover it up.”
She stood up. “Wait here a moment. There’s something you should have.”
When she returned, she was holding a leather-bound book. “Susanna’s name is in the flyleaf,” she said. “You may as well have it, especially after what you just told me. Obviously Charles kept it, though I’ve no idea why.”
I took the book from her and read the title. “The Journal of John Woolman. Who is he?”
“He was an absolutionist,” she said. “A Quaker who was absolutely against slavery.”
“You mean abolitionist?”
“That’s what I said, didn’t I? Apparently Susanna was thinking about becoming a Quaker. There’s an inscription from Samuel Janney, who lived over to Lincoln. He was involved in the anti-slavery movement, helping slaves escape to Canada and the North.”
Lincoln was a Quaker village—more like a hamlet—about twenty minutes from Atoka. “Wait a minute. Are you talking about the Underground Railroad?” I said, stunned.
She nodded. “You know it wasn’t a real railroad, Lucille, don’t you, even though they had conductors and stations and stationmasters and such-like?”
“Yes, of course.” Was Susanna helping slaves escape to the North and Charles found out? Or maybe someone else in the family found out? Her father? One of her brothers?
I opened the book and read the inscription.
To Susanna,
Be instructed and enlightened by the words and deeds of this esteemed man who followed the law of the spirit of life in Jesus Christ as an able minister of the gospel, well-endowed with wisdom and an understanding of the mysteries of God’s kingdom.
Yrs sincerely,
Samuel Janney
If Susanna had been considering becoming a Quaker and had fallen in love with a black man despite being engaged to her cousin Charles, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine why someone might be angry enough to want to stop her from running away. I leafed through the book. Susanna had read it carefully, all right. There were annotated notes in the margins throughout the book that I assumed were hers.
On the back flyleaf I found something that looked like a crudely drawn map. It took a moment before I recognized my farm. Highland House. The cemetery. The pond. The old tenant house—now the Ruins—before Yankees burned it down looking for Mosby. And if I wasn’t mistaken, the little house Eli had discovered this morning was marked on it as well, surrounded by woods just as we’d found it. Maybe I’d been wrong about it being a second hideout for Mosby and his Rangers.
Maybe, thanks to Susanna Montgomery, the little stone house had been a secret stop on the Underground Railroad.
Until somebody found out. And killed her.
Fifteen
When Kit and I were growing up, we often met at the Goose Creek Bridge for teenage angst-filled heart-to-hearts, lubricated by a bottle of wine I filched from the winery. In all the years we’d met there, I think we’d only run into someone else once or twice. If you wanted privacy and solitude, this was a good place to find it.
The two-hundred-foot-long stone bridge with its four arches had been built during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency to carry traffic from Ashby’s Gap Turnpike across Goose Creek. On June 21, 1863, the bridge had been the site of a couple of hours of fighting during the Battle of Upperville as the Confederate and Union Armies moved toward their fateful meeting at Gettysburg ten days later.
But by the 1950s the Goose Creek Bridge fell into disuse when Mosby’s Highway—wider and able to carry more traffic—was built farther to the south over the creek. Eventually the site became overgrown and weed-choked until the local Garden Club took over caring for it. People came by every now and then to pay tribute to the role it had played in the Civil War, and historians gave tours on special occasions. Otherwise, it was quiet and deserted.
After everything I had just learned about my family from Thelma, it seemed fitting to be here just now, the place I always came to escape. I’d had no idea I had a relative who might be connected with the Underground Railroad and, until the other day, I’d had no idea I had a half brother, the child of an affair between my father and an African-American woman.
A navy BMW convertible was parked at the end of Lemmon’s Bottom Road, which was as far as you could go before a gate kept out vehicles and you had to walk a few hundred feet to the bridge. I leaned down and took a look through the windshield hoping I could tell whether the car belonged to David Phelps. If it didn’t, he and I were going to have company. The inside was immaculate except for a glass evil eye hanging on a pendant from the rearview mirror.
I walked toward the bridge down the gravel-and-dirt path that was bordered by a field on one side and woods on the other. My work boots crunched on the stones, the noise eerily amplified in the silence. When the bridge finally came into view I didn’t see a living soul anywhere.
Where was he? My skin prickled and I called out, “Hello?”
He popped up from behind the farthest parapet like a jack-in-the-box. An expensive-looking camera hung around his neck. “Lucie?”
“David?”
As David Phelps walked toward me I couldn’t help looking for something—anything—that reminded me of Leland. Like my father, he was tall and rangy and there was a looseness about him that said he was comfortable in his skin. But unlike my father who had been cocky and arrogant, David seemed confidant, self-possessed. His jet-black hair was short stubble and he wore at least a day’s growth of beard that looked deliberate, not as if he’d forgotten to shave. But it was his charismatic, compelling smile that I noticed most, the way it lit up his face all the way to his eyes.
Until just now I hadn’t thought through how this meeting might go, how I would feel meeting the son my father had never spoken about. Now here I was grinning back at this man who—mysteriously—somehow already seemed familiar and known.
He grasped both of my hands. “This is great.” His voice, warm and rich, was husky and burred with emotion. “This is really great. I’m so happy to meet you, Lucie.”
“I’m happy to meet you, too, David,” I said, my own emotions unexpectedly welling up inside me. Before they could spill over, I added, “I wasn’t sure you were here.”
He looked puzzled and then his face cleared. “I was shooting a few pictures of the bridge while I was waiting. To be honest, I was a bit nervous.” This time his smile was guilty, as though I’d caught him doing something illegal.
“So was I. More than a bit,” I said and we both laughed.
“Well, shall we sit on the bridge parapet and talk?” His eyes strayed to my cane. “Can you … would that be okay for you?”
“It’s fine,” I said. “You don’t need to worry about me.”
“What happened?”
The blunt question, thirty seconds after we met, could have seemed inappropriate or out of line, but it didn’t. It was going to be a no-punches-pulled conversation and that was fine by me. We had a lot of ground to cover. A lifetime.
“A car accident eight years ago,” I sa
id. “I wasn’t supposed to walk again.”
“But you did.”
“I did.”
“Does your bolshie attitude come from Leland or your mother?”
Bolshie. How odd. That was one of Leland’s favorite words. “Leland could be as stubborn as a mule. Plus he used to say ‘bolshie.’”
He seemed surprised. “Well, I guess that’s where I get it, then. The word and the stubbornness.”
We walked over to the bridge. “Do you travel everywhere with your camera?” I asked.
“I do. Not just because it’s my profession, but because I pay more attention to what’s around me when I’ve got a camera in my hand. I guess it’s an occupational habit, but it keeps me from taking the familiar things I see every day for granted.”
I liked his answer. “You would have liked my mother. She was an artist. She was always showing my brother and sister and me some new or unusual discovery she’d made, encouraging us to look around and explore the world, push our boundaries.”
David held out his hand and helped me maneuver onto the parapet. I swung my legs over the side and he caught sight of my diamond ring. “You’re engaged.”
“I am. He’s pretty terrific. He’s also the winemaker at the winery.”
“Wedding date?”
“Nope. Not yet. We’re taking it slow. What about you?”
“No wedding date.” A rueful smile. “No fiancée, or even a girlfriend, which would probably be the first step. Right now I travel too much so I’m kind of a solo flyer.”
We sat side by side, legs dangling over the bridge as Kit and I had done so often. In a few days after Lolita passed through, the creek would be a deafening, muddy torrent roaring over the edges of the banks, but today it made a pleasant gurgling noise as it moved through the rocks and debris in the streambed.
“You must have a lot of questions,” he said.
I did. The first one flew right out of my mouth. “How old are you?”