“I found out what the Heritage Heroes and the Evergreen Tree group are up to—they’re trying to force the outcome of the state election. The supreme court justices. They want to control the judicial branch, but I don’t know that they were doing anything illegal.”
“That’s a worry for tomorrow,” Coleman said. “I’ll put in a call to the secretary of state’s election fraud unit and they can see what’s what.”
“There’s been no sign of Graf.” Coleman delivered the bad news, so I didn’t have to ask. “And I cut Olive loose. She was in jail for her own protection, but she doesn’t need safeguarding.” Anger heated his words. “Olive received a series of death threats, which she reported to me. That’s why I stayed so close to her. She wouldn’t take them seriously, but I had to.” Coleman’s temper climbed. “It took me a while, but I tracked down the threats. Olive sent them to herself. This was all hype for her documentary and book. When this is done and Graf is safely home, I’ll pursue action against Twist for wasting my time and the resources of this office.”
“You were never involved with her?” Cece asked. “I wondered how you could be. Dah-link, that would be like a tumble with a role of barbed wire.” She gave him a hug that ended in a pinch on the arm. “You could have told us, you know.”
Coleman cleared his throat. “I’ve asked the highway patrol to set up roadblocks on the main routes to stop Webber. Of course there are dozens of cotton field roads he can use, and he’s familiar with the farm-to-market road system. Why anyone would steal a corpse is beyond me, but if he has the Lady in Red, we’ll recover the body.”
Cece did a runway pivot as if rehearsing for the Black and Orange Ball. “Do you think he’s holed up in some ratty motel with a corpse? Puts a completely different spin on Psycho, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t care about a corpse—I want to find Graf.” Webber and Twist could go hang for all I cared.
“We should start at the B and B. I’ll convince Gertrude to let me search the unused rooms. It’s possible Graf is on the grounds.” Tinkie lifted her shoulders and straightened her back. She had to be as tired as I was, but she found her second wind. “Gertrude will talk to me and she hates you, Sarah Booth. This is a job I can handle and I’ll report back if I find a shred of evidence.”
Tinkie was helping me, and it was more than I deserved. “Thank you, Tink.”
“Take your dog home and check on your cat,” Tinkie said with more kindness than I could have mustered.
“I need to buy a new cell phone first thing tomorrow.” Oscar had retrieved mine, but it was in sad shape.
“Take mine.” Harold handed it to me. “Your friends only want to protect you,” he whispered.
“I have your gun. I didn’t shoot it, but there’s blood on it. I’ll clean it and return it.”
“Worry about such things tomorrow, Sarah Booth. Let’s go. I’ll follow you home to be sure you make it safely. For good measure, I’ll check the house and grounds.”
Even if I’d wanted to argue, I didn’t have the grit. I could only be thankful that my friends cared enough to look out for me, even when I made them worry.
18
When I drew near Dahlia House, I was flagged down by the two guards Coleman had stationed there. They gave an all-clear report and said the horses were grazing peacefully in the back pasture. No one had bothered the house or the animals.
I eased to a halt at the front steps. Harold’s car door slammed in tandem with mine. As we went up the steps, he took my elbow. “Roscoe’s in the car. I could call him in and stay with you for a while. I’m too wired to sleep, and I don’t really want to be alone.” He was worried about me, but he was too smart to rub my nose in it.
“Bring him in to play with Sweetie. Maybe he can soften her heart.” My dog had given me the cold shoulder on the ride home. Highly miffed at being left behind, she let me know it.
Pluto ran around the corner of the house to greet me, and Sweetie yodeled a mournful salutation at him. The cat walked past without even a whisker-twitch in my direction. I gathered Pluto in my arms. He was a rotund kitty, but it was all muscle, with a large helping of brains and courage. “You saved my life,” I whispered as I kissed his head. Pluto didn’t appreciate public displays of emotion, and he leaped from my arms, tail swishing, and led the parade across the porch.
The five of us, Pluto, Roscoe, Harold, Sweetie, and I, stopped in the foyer, gobsmacked. Dead silence echoed through the rooms. Dahlia House had felt this empty only once before—when I returned after my parents’ funeral.
The smell of old furniture, wood polish, and the passage of time permeated the air. The hall clock, an antique grandfather model, ticked ominously. I hadn’t wound it in weeks. Graf must have assumed the chore, but he never even mentioned it. He was like that, doing the small things that meant so much to me.
A sound of distress escaped me. Harold’s fingers clamped my elbow—the steadying hand of a friend.
When he was here, Graf filled the house with a manly scent of spice and forest. His step on the polished wooden floors created a familiar creak and sigh—and I missed those sounds. I wanted Graf home, safe and unharmed.
I pushed forward to the kitchen and brewed a pot of coffee. It was nearly dawn. No point in trying to sleep now. Harold loaded the dishwasher, working with quiet efficiency. We both needed to stay busy.
“Sweetie? Roscoe?” I retrieved two special doggy bones from the freezer and put them in the microwave to thaw. It would take some doing to win my hound’s forgiveness. She sat on the kitchen floor, facing away. When I called her name she wouldn’t even acknowledge me.
Harold sat down beside her and snuggled her into his arms. “She wanted to keep you safe,” he told her. “Don’t be such a hard-ass.”
“Be-yurlllll.” Sweetie’s response, though spoken in hound, was clear. I was in big trouble with her.
“I’ll make it up to you,” I promised as I stroked her long, silky ears. And when she began to thaw a little, I kissed the top of her head. Roscoe cackled—it sounded exactly like the Wicked Witch of the West. Harold didn’t deny the dog was part imp. Maybe half. Roscoe sprang at Sweetie’s face with demonic gusto. She growled and snapped at him—and the game was on. They tore out of the kitchen through the swinging door and I heard them thundering up the staircase.
“Thank you,” I said. Sweetie could never deny a request from Harold.
Pluto was on a special low-cal kitty diet food, but I treated him to an expensive can of kitty cuisine, then poured two cups of coffee.
“Will you go with me to the attic?” I offered a cup to Harold.
“I’d prefer the Casbah,” Harold said drily, “but the attic is a close second.”
His reference to the 1938 classic movie Algiers called to mind a former client, the beautiful and mysterious Hedy Lamarr Blackledge, named for the exotic and mysterious actress who starred in the movie. “If I could close my eyes and wake up in Algiers, it might be tempting to run away.”
“You’re as beautiful as Hedy Lamarr, Sarah Booth. But you’re as loyal as Sweetie Pie. You’re never abandon a friend in need.”
I retrieved two flashlights from a kitchen drawer and gave him one. When we reached the second-floor landing, he tilted his head to indicate the dogs were following us up the stairs. “And you’re as determined to have your way as Roscoe. We’ll find Graf, and everything will be set to right.”
I blinked back the surge of emotion and trudged upward to the attic. I had a reason for wanting to explore the old chest in the far corner that had belonged to my great-great-great-grandmother Alice.
The attic access was behind a closed door that gave onto another flight of stairs. When Dahlia House was built, the attic had served as a ballroom. If I ever had money to spare, I’d renovate the high-ceilinged room and hold a fancy-dress ball. Maybe for my wedding reception. Maybe just this once I’d take the money Graf so generously offered to help with Dahlia House. Maybe I’d show him that I could share my histor
y and my home. If he came through this okay, I’d change my ways.
Our footsteps echoed eerily in the cavernous room filled with furniture, clothes, and Delaney artifacts. When I found the pull string for the overhead light, I flooded the attic with illumination.
“This is a treasure trove,” Harold said. “It isn’t the Casbah, but it’s something else.”
I ignored the plastic-wrapped racks of dresses that dated back to the Roaring Twenties. Alice’s clothing, which I would have loved to possess, hadn’t survived the war. Photographs had captured the antebellum splendor of her wardrobe, but none of the dresses remained.
“Help me open this steamer trunk.” I set down my coffee and flashlight. Harold and I put our backs into the effort, and the lid of the trunk groaned wide. The musty odors of crumbling pages and old sachets made me think of Aunt Loulane. I could almost hear her—“The past is best left in the past.” She had a homily for every occasion, which didn’t mean she wasn’t accurate.
“Are you seeking something in particular?” Harold asked. “Or is this just a side trip down History Lane?”
“I can’t be certain, but I have this fuzzy memory of a journal or letters—records my great-great-great-grandmother kept during the Civil War.”
Harold was quick on the uptake. “And you think this might link to the Lady in Red? Why did you just think of it?”
I couldn’t tell him that Jitty, dressed as a cartoon character, had tweaked my memory. “When I was driving home from Buford’s I was so tired. Exhausted. I was thinking back to the time when my parents were alive and life was so … safe. And then there were those years with Aunt Loulane. I was thinking about her and I remembered the chest.”
“Loulane adored you, Sarah Booth. Did you know she was being courted by a lawyer from Lexington, Kentucky, but when James Franklin and Libby were killed, she declined his marriage proposal and took care of you instead?”
I pushed my straggly hair behind my ears and looked at him. He wasn’t teasing me. He was dead serious. “That can’t be. She could have moved me to Lexington with her. Surely she didn’t give up a chance at marriage and her own family and happiness.” Somehow, I knew this was true, though. The ghost of memory tickled me.
“And take you from Dahlia House? I don’t think so.” His smile was sad. “She never wanted you to know what she gave up. I’ve almost told you a time or two before, but I didn’t want to burden you. Now, though, you should know.”
Not a single time had Aunt Loulane ever mentioned the man she could have married. Not once. Not even when I went off to college. She stayed at Dahlia House, keeping it for me, until she died unexpectedly of a heart attack. “She sacrificed her happiness for me.” Was there no end to the guilt I’d feel this day?
“No, Sarah Booth. She chose happiness with you over marriage. A choice you should understand. Dahlia House was her brother’s heritage. She did it as much for James Franklin and Libby as for you.”
“That doesn’t make me feel a lick better.”
“For someone to love you that much.” He touched my cheek with the gentlest caress. “That should tell you how special you are. When we find Graf, if that man doesn’t marry you, I’ll take you for myself.”
I put my hand over his. “You’re many things in my life, Harold. I appreciate all of them.”
Together we lifted the tray from the old trunk. Near the bottom, beneath the christening gown belonging to the child Alice lost to a fever during the war, was a stack of old letters.
I pictured my mother, on her knees leaning over the ancient trunk, bringing the bundle of letters up from their safe nest. For a moment, I was transfixed as I remembered the pale light from the dusty windows striking her wedding band as her fingers traced the letters.
“One day, you’ll come here and read these. What’s in them remains with the Delaney family, Sarah Booth. The secrets here aren’t ours to tell.”
I had been no older than four, but the image was too strong to be fantasy. I turned to my friend. His wry smile told me he’d anticipated what I was about to say. Harold knew me too well. “I have to do the rest of this alone.”
He offered his hand to assist me to my feet. His kiss on my cheek was warm, creating the tiniest little pulse in my thumb. “Call me if you need me. Roscoe and I will show ourselves out.”
His ability to accept me, without judgment or need to intervene, was rare for a friend and even rarer for a man. I watched him disappear down the stairs with the evil Roscoe at his heels. Had I not known better, I would’ve thought Roscoe had miraculously been domesticated. But I knew his capability for deception—he was merely waiting for an opportunity to break bad.
In the golden light of an overhead bulb, I sat on the dusty attic floor to read. Dawn was breaking outside the window, and there had been no word from Coleman on the search for my fiancé or the missing corpse of the Lady in Red. Unfolding the papers, I stepped into the past.
The letters were to Alice from her parents, from some childhood friends, and—the largest portion—from her husband as he crisscrossed the South as part of a cavalry regiment from Mississippi. The stiff old pages were filled with urgent declarations of love and the lingering sense that Fate would never allow their reunion.
I could guess at the letters Alice had written him—filled with lies about the bountiful crops and the availability of help on the plantation. She would never have added to his worries by writing of the dire circumstances of the women and children across the South. And he spared her the brutal savagery and waste of life in a war that pitted brother against brother.
I’d always been curious about Alice’s and Jitty’s early lives. I was learning more than I’d bargained for. The pain and loneliness and hopelessness, though disguised by the determination of both husband and wife to shade the other from the horrors, were clear to me from the vantage point of more than a hundred fifty years later. Everyone suffered, some just more than others.
Rifling through the documents, I came across one in a feminine hand. The return address was Washington, D.C. The postmark 1860.
“My dearest Alice,” it began.
Since I fled Zinnia, my life has been more than challenging. The details would scandalize the pastor and the church ladies, so I will spare you. Just know I value and miss your friendship, offered with such a generous heart. As you no doubt know, our country is perched on a terrible precipice. I fear war between the Northern and Southern interests is unavoidable, but I intend to try to stop it.
Should something happen to me, I wanted one person to know the truth. I fled the marriage to Percy Falcon for several reasons, but murder is the primary one and my son, Jedediah, is the second. Yes, I have a son. When he is a grown man and able to make his own decisions, he’ll learn his family history, as sordid as it may be. Every man has a right to know his past and decide his future.
My betrothed, Percy, murdered his mother in Georgia. She was an octoroon who belonged to the Falcon family and was the mistress of Fletcher Falcon. She gave birth to Percy, the only male Falcon heir. Percy, a blond, blue-eyed child, was adopted by his white father and raised as a natural son. But the truth will out; it always does. In a society where a Negro has no standing or freedom, Percy could not allow the truth to come forth, so he murdered the only person who could reveal the origins of his birth, his own mother.
I could not marry and conceive children with a murderer, yet Percy took that choice from me. He raped me in a guest room at Magnolia Grove while I was visiting. He said I would soon be his and he didn’t have to wait. He is a brute and an evil man. My life with him would have been worse than that of a slave in chains. So I left, unaware that I carried his son.
I gave birth to Jedediah in Washington and have placed him with a good family. He has grown into a fine boy. I wish you could know him, Alice. He reminds me of your son, and some days when I am bereft and afraid, I pretend they are friends. Your son, the older and wiser, looking out for mine. If war is avoided, perhaps this fantasy can b
ecome a reality.
On different occasions, I’ve returned to New Orleans and other Southern cities as an emissary of the federal government. I hope to see you one day soon, if war can be avoided. I would love nothing more than a visit at Dahlia House with a glass of lemonade and the joy of your company.
Pray that war will not come, because I have no doubt our beloved homeland will suffer terrible defeat and retribution. I have a plan to compensate slave owners that may avert what can only be horrific bloodshed. Keep me in your thoughts and heart.
With great fondness,
Tilda
So this was the high stakes Jeremiah had to keep secret. His Falcon ancestor was a cold-blooded rapist and murderer. And there was black blood in the family. This was what had driven him into the arms of the Heritage Heroes and into a scheme to subvert a democratic election.
My first impulse was to shred the letter. As my fury grew, I wanted to shove it down Jeremiah’s throat. What a bunch of ancient foolishness. What family didn’t have horse thieves or bank robbers or saloon girls somewhere in their past? The Falcons had a brutal, ugly rapist and murderer. And one branch of the family had “passed” as white. So what? Who really cared? If DNA samples were taken, would anyone be able to claim a “pure” heritage? Nope. And what poppycock, anyway.
This was what had driven Jeremiah to kill Boswell and attempt to kill Olive Twist? To hide these moldy secrets? Cece, too, shared this dark past, but she would never take it as her burden. Jeremiah had nothing worthwhile to cling to in the present, so he put his emotions on the past.
The man should be hanged for stupidity.
By the time I retied the letters with the crimson ribbon, my temper had cooled. The day outside had turned from pink to lavender. I repacked the trunk and as I stood, my hand brushed my side and I felt Graf’s keys in my pocket.
I froze.
Image fragments and bits of information swirled around my brain, a kaleidoscope of shrapnel pieces that snapped into one single question: why did Gertrude have Graf’s keys? Coleman should have taken them from her. He or DeWayne should have kept them after searching the Range Rover.
Smarty Bones: A Sarah Booth Delaney Mystery Page 26