by R. Jean Reid
“Pregnant?” Nell clarified.
“Yes. And that might be judgment number one. And judgment number two might be that she didn’t keep the baby.”
“She had it adopted?” Nell asked, sensing something in the woman’s words.
“No, aborted. Back then it was all very hush-hush. My father wasn’t about to have his youngest daughter bear a child out of wedlock.”
“I make no judgment, certainly none of the kind you might be worried about,” Nell told her.
“I’m telling you this so you can understand why the family didn’t raise hell and high water to search for her. She went off to college at eighteen but didn’t take to studying, claimed she wanted to see the world first. She managed a year in Europe, but then came back and went out to California, working as a waitress to ‘get to know San Francisco,’ she wrote to me. She came by to visit one time with two scruffy men and a VW Bus that didn’t look like it could make it across Boston, let alone the country. She sent me postcards from places like Alaska and San Juan. We were close, at least as close as two sisters can be who live completely different lives. More than that, I didn’t understand her life and she didn’t understand mine.
“She came for a visit—her last one—I guess I finally know that now. It was such a hot day, in the summer of 1963. My father was very ill then. She stayed long enough to go to his funeral and then left, said she was heading for New Orleans. I did get a letter from her telling me she was working in Mississippi, trying to help blacks register to vote.
“Then I heard nothing. That wasn’t so unusual; she could go months with no word, then a letter or postcard from somewhere totally unexpected. It was six months before we got truly worried. Then I spent days and days calling everyplace from the NAACP to the Citizens’ Council trying to find her. All I found out was she was seen last in some place with a weird spelling.”
“Tchula, with a T?” Nell asked.
“Yes, that sounds like it. I talked to law enforcement down there. They said she’d been seen getting on a bus and that was all they knew. I’d been married a few years then, had three young children, my husband was struggling to establish his practice, and there seemed nothing else I could do—except hope she would turn up. About twenty years ago, I hired a private detective, but he found nothing more than what I had as a harried housewife between bottle feedings. I had to assume she’d ended up as too many young girls ended up. I could only pray it was quick.” The woman let out a wavering breath.
“Ma’am,” Nell said, realizing she only knew the woman as Aunt Gwen, and that didn’t seem appropriate. “Did Dora have any injuries, like broken bones, anything like that?”
“Dora? No, for all her wild tomboy ways, she always landed on her feet. She’d had her tonsils out, but that was all. Why do you ask?”
“Although we can make a reasonable guess these remains might be hers, it will be hard to positively establish identity without something more,” Nell said as gently as she could.
“Ah. Of course. But I might have something better—more useful, that is, than broken bones. My husband is a dentist. He cared for Dora on several occasions. A few years ago, when he retired, he brought her file home. He’d kept it all those years, in case … in case of something like this. We still have it. We couldn’t … just throw it away. Would that be helpful?”
“Very helpful,” Nell agreed.
“It’ll take me a day or so to find it … but I suppose time isn’t a factor here.”
“No, but the sad fact is, if we can identify Dora, then it increases the chance the two other people who were supposed to be on the bus with her can also be identified,” Nell said.
“Of course. I’ll start looking tonight.”
Nell got the woman’s name, Gwen Kennedy (not related to those other Boston Kennedys, she added almost automatically), and contact information and promised to call her in the morning with where to send the dental records.
“Thank you, Mrs. Kennedy,” she said. “I know it can’t be easy to open old wounds like this.”
“I can at least bury my sister before I die. That is a comfort for an old woman.”
After putting the phone down, Nell sat looking out the window, the shadows of evening turning a deep blue in the dusky gold of the last sunlight. Finally she jerked herself out of her reverie and glanced at her watch. The library would close soon and she didn’t want her two children out on the streets.
She quickly left the office. She was the last one, and she paused to scan the square before locking the door. The bones and the blood are old, she reminded herself, then remembered that Thom’s blood wasn’t old, nor was the threat from the Jones brothers.
Get my children, get home, Nell told herself. She marched across the square to the still brightly lit library.
fifteen
Lizzie pretended she wasn’t being dropped at school by her mother, like she was adult enough to have transported without anything resembling a parent involved. Josh ruined Lizzie’s pretense by waving back at Nell. For his kindness, he received a not-gentle sisterly cuff on the shoulder. Nell hoped it wasn’t a sore spot.
She headed back to the Crier office, thinking about yesterday, both exultant at finding the evidence that could give answers and sad that fate had dealt such a cruel hand to a woman who, whatever her mistakes, had a zest for life and enough of a sense of right and wrong to have come to Mississippi during those times.
As usual, dropping her children at school got Nell to the office first. Gwen Kennedy’s revelations had brought up a conundrum: could she trust Sheriff Hickson enough to give him dental records that might be damning? Even if he wasn’t a blatant racist, or connected to the murders or to those who gained from the property scams—some major ifs—Nell still wondered if he would use it as a political football, trade favors to the highest bidder. And she doubted she had much to offer him in that currency.
Inspiration hit and she turned around, heading out of the office. She hoped Harold Reed, the Assistant DA, was an early morning man, or at least had children who adhered to school hours.
When she caught sight of him at the coffee stand just inside the courtroom lobby, Nell wondered if he wouldn’t also be too much of a political animal to not use this as it best benefited him. Was she hoping that his being black would dispose him to carry the burden she wasn’t willing to trust the white sheriff with? She suddenly worried this was something she should have discussed with Marcus before coming here. I have to trust someone, Nell reminded herself, unless I want to do a quick course in forensic dentistry.
She strode over to him. “Mr. Reed, may I have a word with you?” She kept her tone cool and professional.
“Of course, Mrs. McGraw. My office?”
She nodded and followed him down a long hallway, then through a walkway that led to the district attorney’s offices.
Once they were settled in, he fixed her with an expectant gaze. Nell noted he was conservatively dressed: three-piece gray suit, lawyerly horn-rimmed glasses. She wondered if this style was required for a black man to have a chance at be taken for a lawyer instead of someone in need of one.
“Mr. Reed, I presume you’ve heard about the three skeletons that were found in the woods?”
“Yes, I have. I know you were one of the first people to see them,” he said, offering her little information save that he was well aware of what was going on.
“Marcus Fletcher has been assisting the Crier recently, and, as you may or may not know, he used to publish a newspaper for the African-American community. Fifty years ago, three civil rights workers disappeared. The sheriff at the time claimed they had been seen on a bus leaving town, but according to Mr. Fletcher’s sources, no one in the segregated part of the bus station saw them, and they left behind everything they owned save the clothes they were wearing.”
“Very interesting. But you must know how hard it will be to
establish proof of identification.”
“It may not be that hard,” Nell said. “That’s why I’ve come to you. Mr. Fletcher was able to put names to those faces, from a long-ago photograph in his paper. One of the women was from Boston and had an unusual last name. Last night, I took a chance and cold-called people with that name. I was able to trace the woman’s sister.”
“DNA? That will be hard with just skeletonized remains that old.”
“The sister married a dentist.”
Harold Reed sat up straight, clearly seeing where Nell was going. “They kept records after all these years?”
“Yes. Her husband knew how important dental records could be, so he kept them, even after he retired. As her sister said on the phone last night, it wasn’t something they could just throw away.”
“What a damn lucky break!” he exclaimed, then added, “Sorry for the language.”
“Don’t worry, I’ve heard and said more than ‘damn’ in my life.” Nell then added, “And I’m coming to you … because I’m leery of turning this over to the sheriff’s office.”
“Records can get lost so easily these days, can’t they?” he said with an acerbic look. “You know what this can turn into?”
“Yes, I do. And I’m aware of how many people want this left in the past.”
“I might be mangling the quote, but wasn’t it Faulkner who said, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’?” He got back to business. “How soon can you get me those records?”
“I told the woman I’d call her today with an address. She had to find them, although from our phone conversation, I’d say this is an important thing for her.”
“Ask her to overnight them,” Harold Reed said.
“How soon could we get a comparison?”
“Depending on what fires I can light—and I’m owed a few favors in that department—it shouldn’t take long. An x-ray of the skull, compare that with the dental files. If it’s a match, we have our answer.”
“Who are you going to tell about this?” Nell asked.
Harold Reed thought for a minute, then said, “You know, I think I’m going to tell everyone. Once I’m sure the dental records are where they should be, I’ll maneuver Buddy into a press conference—maximize the glory and play down the heat—but I think the more people know, the harder it will be to play any games.”
“Half a century is a long time,” Nell said, “but it doesn’t mean the murderer isn’t still out there.”
“That is part of it, isn’t it? And it’s almost got to be murderers.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Think about it. Three healthy young people. They had to know they weren’t being led out to the woods for a picnic. If it was you or me, don’t you think we would have attacked him? One person couldn’t shoot us all at once. I’m not much of a betting man, but I’d bet on at least three or four and quite possibly more.”
Nell slowly nodded her head. “That makes it … not just the blatant hatred of one person.”
“Just the blatant hatred of a whole society.”
With a shudder, Nell realized how right he was. Even five people, if that was the number of direct murderers, wasn’t that many, but it had taken the complicity and blindness of just about every person in power at the time to allow them to get away with it.
Harold Reed was writing on a slip of paper. He finished and handed it to Nell. “Sym Luchowski, a forensic dental specialist I know over in New Orleans. Why don’t you have those records sent directly to him? Just be vague about when we arranged this, so I can pretend to go through the official channels. At worse, he can make copies, just so nothing gets lost. But I think I can arrange for him to be the one to handle the comparison.”
“Thank you, Mr. Reed,” Nell said as they both stood up. “I think your idea about telling everyone is good, but it makes me nervous.”
“Maybe they’ll go after Buddy Guy instead of us.”
“Or even Sheriff Hickson,” Nell added.
Harold Reed gave her an enigmatic smile as he held open the door. “I’ll call you as soon as Buddy has something to report.”
When Nell got back to the office the rest of the staff was there, save for Carrie.
“Meeting time,” Jacko called as she walked through the door.
Nell smiled at him, hastened to her office to throw off her jacket, and rejoined everyone back in the main room. “Marcus, why don’t you go first?”
Like he had earlier, he laid out his papers and told their tale. It took a while, with everyone examining the fragile sheets.
“So now we know who those lonely bones might belong to,” Ina Claire said softly.
“And we may well have some proof soon,” Nell said, and then filled everyone in on her telephoning yesterday and her visit that morning with Harold Reed.
“Reed was a good choice,” Marcus said when she finished.
“Okay, my turn,” Jacko said. “Pelican Property was owned by Bo Tremble, B. Brown, Frixnel Landry, Albert Dunning, Lamont Vincent, and A.J. Smyth. It was dissolved in 1965, the year that both Brown and Dunning died, with half of its holding distributed among the remaining principals and the other half sold to Andre Dupree.”
Nell breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t clean, but at least Aaron’s father hadn’t gotten his tainted land by directly stealing.
Jacko continued. “Two years later Tremble died and his widow also sold her property to Andre Dupree, so by 1967 he ended up owning most of the property surrounding the east side of the harbor, as well as the back bay property. I have the exact numbers, but they mostly make sense: no big increases either way until he developed it, put the nice houses on the lots and then made a lot of money. I did some more looking for Pickings, but it seemed whatever windfall they made was mostly from leasing the land to the paper mill. In fact, according to the gossip, it’s lean pickings for the Pickings. His Honor has been trying to sell the property, but no one wants his price until it’s guaranteed cleaned up. Ms. Bonier has a sister who works over at the bank and she, of course, couldn’t outright say, but hinted that the Pickings accounts were going in the wrong direction.”
“Guess he really needs that mayor’s salary,” Dolan interjected.
“What she didn’t hint at, but said outright, was that about a month ago, Mr. Mayor deposited several thousand dollars cash in his account. Last week, he deposited a few more thousand in cash.”
“Bribery? Hush money? Blackmail?” Nell speculated.
“Somehow I don’t see Hubert smart enough to blackmail anyone, not to mention he certainly has a few things he might not want coming out lurking in his past,” Dolan said.
“Bribery seems the best fit,” Ina Claire said.
“He’s been doing what he can to suppress the investigation, sending Whiz Brown to shut down the dig, requesting I not run the stories,” Nell said. She suddenly wondered if the lack of progress on the investigation into Josh’s attack could also be part of this.
“But is he doing that for himself or for someone else?” Dolan asked.
“Possibly both. His family’s hands aren’t very clean on the land swindle,” Nell answered.
“How could that have anything to do with the bones in the woods?” Dolan asked.
“They got away with cheating people out of their land because no one here dared protest,” Nell said. “What happened if outsiders came in? Willing to take on those in power? What would have happened to the property scam if, say, some reporters from the New York Times and a few lawyers from the Justice Department found out about it? What might they do to stop it?”
“Murder three people and bury them where they might never be found,” Marcus answered.
“Maybe, but that’s a long leap,” Dolan pointed out.
“And one we’ll probably never be able to prove,” Nell admitted. “The wors
t of the violence was taking place upstate—Jackson, McComb, Ole Miss—not so much here on the coast. They disappeared in the fall of 1963. Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman weren’t killed until the massive voter registration drive in the spring of 1964. The killer decided they could get away with it. Clearly the sheriff at the time was in on it, or at best, in on the cover-up. The press, the one paper that bothered to report it, parroted his view and never did even the basic research Marcus did.” She added, “There’s no report in the Crier.”
Marcus spoke up. “Certainly, if they wanted to get rid of them, they could have put them on the bus. Many people were frightened away. There may not be a link with the property scams, but isn’t it odd that those two things happened here at the same time?”
“I guess,” Dolan conceded, “but proof is going to be hard to find.”
“Very hard,” Nell agreed. “But I still want to look.”
Carrie chose that moment to arrive. “Sorry I’m late,” she said with no sorry in her voice.
“What’s happening with the candidates?” Nell asked her as she crossed to her desk to put her jacket and purse down.
“Give me a minute, let me get settled.”
“Ethics require I take a walk around the square,” Marcus said, using Carrie’s settling time to leave.
Nell let the silence hang, recognizing Carrie’s seemingly innocent words for the battle of wills they were.
Not exactly hurrying, but not openly dawdling either, Carrie finally joined them.
“I’ll repeat my question. What’s going on with the candidates?” Nell said.
“Everett Evens’ comment on the bones was ‘evil forces have been unleashed by the ungodly behavior of the women’s libbers and the homosexual agenda.’”
“Did you point out that the bones were dead before either of those was alive?” Jacko put in.
“You try talking sensibly to Evens,” Carrie shot back at him.
“What about the rest of them?” Nell asked. “How did Pickings react to your questions?”