The Reservoir

by John Milliken Thompson

  “And you didn’t see either of them again?”

  “Nosuh.”

  Richardson turns back to Slim. “Anything else you remember about her or any visitors she might have had?”

  “Nosir,” Slim says, eyes wide right. “I don’t remember another thing.”

  • CHAPTER SEVEN •

  TUESDAY EVENING Tommie and Mr. Evans are back in the sitting room at the Tappahannock Inn. The Sunday paper is there and Tommie helps himself to it. The article is on the front page. He had hoped there would be nothing, but it’s right there, staring at him, “Woman’s Watery Grave.” He gulps it in. It doesn’t say much, only that an unidentified young woman was found dead in the old city reservoir. The pregnancy is mentioned, the coroner, an autopsy to be performed, a lonely place to commit suicide, a detective. Why bring in a detective for a suicide? He reads it over again and then scans the rest of the paper. Something more troubling appears in a short paragraph at the bottom of the fourth page. A woman’s clothes bag was found at the coal docks; a pair of underwear was labeled F. or T. Madison. The paragraph concludes, “Perhaps the bag may furnish a clue to the mystery of the girl found in the reservoir.” How can they leap to such a conclusion, Tommie wonders. It’s irresponsible.

  He glances up at Mr. Evans, enjoying his cigar, apparently lost in thought. He smiles at Tommie. “Anything interesting?” he asks.

  Tommie’s blood races. “Just the usual,” he says. “Robbery in Manchester, Catholics celebrating St. Patrick’s.” He peruses the other headlines and passes the paper on to Mr. Evans, who is eager to check on the baseball scores and his railroad stocks. “We should raise a glass to St. Patrick ourselves,” Tommie says, brightening. The thing to do is forget about it, to relax, he tells himself.

  “Indeed we should, Tommie, indeed we should. Go order us a couple of bottles of lager.” As Tommie gets up, Mr. Evans shakes his head. “You see this about the girl found at the reservoir?”

  “The suicide?”

  “Yes, it’s a sad business.”

  Evans reads from the paper. “Coroner suspects suicide … but evidence to the contrary … articles of clothing belonging to the woman were found elsewhere on the grounds.”

  Tommie sits back down. “How do they know they belonged to the woman?”

  “Good for you, Tommie.” Mr. Evans taps the side of his head, obscured in a haze of cigar smoke. “Where’s the hole in their argument? You always have to be alert to these things.”

  “There’s no proof of any connection.”

  “True,” Evans says, one hand going to his paunch. “You know how they write these things up to sell papers. People like a mystery—takes them out of the humdrum. They get credit if they’re right. If not, oh well, everybody forgets about it. The language is cagey—they don’t come right out and say this bag belonged to her. They just suggest it. That’s good courtroom technique.” He pokes his side and winces, “Dern bowel flare-up. Forgot to take my powder.”

  When Tommie returns with the lagers Evans goes on. “Richmond’s gotten so big I don’t hardly recognize it. Why, you can walk down Main Street and not see a soul you know.” He then tells about a cousin of his who killed himself by jumping off a cliff to make it look like an accident. “Said he was just going out for a walk. What he didn’t know was that his own brother saw the whole thing.”

  Tommie nods, smiling, not paying much attention, even though Mr. Evans is a good storyteller. What he’s thinking is that since no paper comes out on Monday, he’ll have to wait two more days for further news. Unless Tuesday’s happens to come on Wednesday. It sometimes only takes a day. Meanwhile, the lagers and forget about it.

  Two pints later Mr. Evans is deep into a story about a midget who was the sergeant at arms when Evans served in the state legislature; he stood on a chair and used a megaphone. Then he moves on to telling about when he was an engineer in Cary’s Brigade, retreating with Lee to Appomattox Court House. Tommie is amazed at the fund of entertaining stories Mr. Evans has at his command and how they can make one feel that the best years to have lived were the ones he knew. The hum of other conversations fills the room, and a sense of well-being suffuses Tommie’s veins.

  Slim Lane shakes himself like a dog as he steps out of the clerks’ office. Richardson’s interrogation has left him harried and suspicious. His eyes shoot left and right, then grow large as he nearly walks into an enormous man wearing a long black coat and holding a notepad that looks about the size of a cracker in his meaty hand. “William Lane?” the man says. Slim nods. “Detective Wren. Mind if I ask you a few questions?” Slim shakes his head. Wren puts a paw on his shoulder and guides him out to the hallway, then just outside into the alley off Eleventh. The clopping sound of carriages from Main is muffled back here, the air sour with the stench of garbage.

  “Hunt tells me you carried a note to a girl in Room 21 from a gentleman. Is that right?”

  Slim glances down to Wren’s shoes. They are as large as boats, and there’s mud on the soles. The man wearing them is asking him a question in a quiet, friendly way that doesn’t really seem friendly. “Yessir, that’s right.”

  “And she sent one back?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Who was the gentleman?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see him. A yellow boy took the note.”

  Wren widens his stance so that he’s eye to eye with Slim. “What yellow boy?” he demands.

  “I don’t know his name. I’ve seen him around.”

  Wren corners Slim’s eyes into looking straight at him. “You can find him for me, though, can’t you?”

  The big man’s face is right in front of Slim’s; his breath is heavy with onions and some foul kind of fish that white people eat for breakfast. He’s nothing like a wren—more like a bear without all the fur, and a skritchy voice like a fox. Slim adds two random numbers in his head to calm himself: 3,586 + 4,567 = 8,153. “I don’t know if I can,” Slim says. “I’ll be working most all the time.”

  “I’ll see about your job,” Wren tells him. “Don’t worry about that.”

  Don’t get mixed up in white folkses’ business, Slim Lane. Don’t you do it. Your mama would slap you across the room. He tries to say something, but his mouth won’t work.

  “If you can get me his name in a day, there’ll be something extra in it for you.”

  Slim sees an opening and dodges his eyes left. “I don’t know.”

  Wren places a hand against the wall right beside Slim’s face. His nostrils open up like caves, and Slim imagines running up into one and hiding. He begins to burst into laughter, and pretends to have a coughing fit. Wren waits for him to finish. “Let me put it to you this way, son. You like your job at the hotel, don’t you?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Good, I thought so. The manager’s a good friend of mine. So’s the owner. I do favors for them. You do this favor for me and they’d be mighty pleased. I’m going to speak to both of them about it directly. You take the afternoon off and start hunting for that boy, and when you find him you come running to my office and don’t stop for anything until you talk to me. You understand?”

  Slim nods, glancing briefly into Wren’s sharp eyes. Don’t get messed up in no business, he tells himself. But suddenly Wren is gone, and Slim is messed up in the very business he wanted not to get messed up in. And not a thing he can do about it.

  Tommie and Mr. Evans leave on Wednesday morning, hoping to get home in time for dinner. They make a stop at the Trace crossroads store; the eastbound stagecoach has just arrived, carrying, among other things, mail, freight, and Richmond newspapers. But nothing from Tuesday yet. They head out in the carriage again.

  It’s warmer out today than it has been. The rank, fecund odors of skunk cabbage and newly plowed earth mingle in the air, and the faint buds of dogwoods are wedding lace along the roadside. The grinding carriage wheels suggest a rhythm. Tommie opens his mouth and begins singing: “Ching-a-ring-a-ring ching ching, ho-a-ding-a-ding k
um larkee …” He whistles awhile.

  Mr. Evans looks up from his paper, inhales the scents of spring, and absently takes up the verse: “Brothers gather ’round, listen to this story ’bout the promised land.”

  Then together they go. “You don’t need to fear if you have no money, you don’t need none there to buy you milk and honey.” Lustier now, “There you’ll ride in style, coach with four white horses, there the evenin’ meal has one two three four courses.”

  Mr. Evans compliments Tommie on his singing and tells him a story about minstrels traveling through King and Queen when he was a boy. “The best music I ever heard. The grown-ups were a little less appreciative—I didn’t understand it at the time. They were free coloreds—in the company of a white manager—but folks were afraid it would give the slaves ideas. Of course, we had free negroes in King and Queen, so I don’t know why they were worried.” Tommie is reminded of his first trip to Richmond. His father took him on the train and showed him the burned-out Spottswood Hotel where he’d seen Jefferson Davis, and when they walked across Capitol Square two old negroes were singing and strumming a banjo. A policeman told them not to disturb the governor, and they moved on, singing more softly, “Why do I weep, when my heart should feel no pain?”

  They arrive in King and Queen Courthouse before noon. Tommie bids Mr. Evans good-bye and continues on to Little Plymouth, where Aunt Jane hugs him and fusses over him again as if he has been gone two weeks instead of two nights. An hour later he’s sitting down to dinner with her and Willie. She tells him a letter arrived from Lillie. He had forgotten the letter, and for a moment he says nothing.

  Jane continues, “She says in it that she’s going down to Point Comfort to take care of a friend’s sick aunt. Can you imagine? Here I am, with you boys away all the time, and she can’t come here and spend some time with me. After all I’ve done for her. My health hasn’t been anything to brag about this winter, as I’ve told her.”

  “She’ll probably stop by, if she can,” Tommie says.

  “It would be out of her way,” Jane says, shaking her head. “I don’t want to be a bother to her, but you’d think if she took the trouble to write she could spare me a day or two. What I don’t understand, though, is why she didn’t ask me for anything. Not even a dollar. It’s strange.”

  “She probably just wanted to keep you up with her doings,” Tommie suggests. Willie glances at him, but doesn’t say anything.

  “Well, you read it for yourself and see what you can make of it.” She looks at him over the top of her eyeglasses, which are secured around her neck with a gold chain. Tommie knows the look as one of worry, but he cannot help reading accusation in it.

  He peruses the letter and nods, as though he doesn’t already know its contents. Then he mentions the nice weather and asks Willie about the crops, and he repeats a story Mr. Evans told him about a farmer who worked for his father. Animals kept eating the front row of beans, so Mr. Evans’s father told him, “Looks like you should quit planting that front row.” The farmer nodded and turned, and about halfway back to the field he suddenly got it. He chuckled so hard his shoulders went to his ears.

  “You’re in a fine humor today,” Willie tells his brother. “Lawyering suits you, I believe.” He smiles and takes in his brother’s entire countenance in a glance, and Tommie knows he is being scrutinized. Did something ring false in his speech or his manner? After dinner he talks to Aunt Jane for a while, then goes out to the machine shop where he finds Willie sharpening mower blades. He likes watching his brother work. Though manual labor never had appeal for Tommie, he takes comfort in the skill and care with which his brother goes about the job.

  “Let me take over for you,” Tommie says.

  Willie looks surprised but yields his stool. Right away, Tommie cuts his thumb on the blade. “I’m out of practice,” he says, sucking the crescent of blood. He lights a cigarette to steady his hands, leans back, and mentions the cottage in Little Plymouth he’s interested in. If he could just get to that point, he thinks—say, a month from now—then maybe the storm will have passed.

  And he’s there, smoking a cigarette and talking about the house he wants to buy, when he hears the back porch bell ringing and Jane hollering, “Boys, oh, Lord, boys come quickly.”

  Justice Richardson heads over to the cheap boardinghouse where Mr. Madison and his brother-in-law have spent the night. He goes in and finds the brother-in-law, Lillian’s uncle, finished with breakfast and ready to go. The father seems in no hurry to get out to the almshouse and identify his dead daughter. Nor does he seem particularly distressed. He’s a stout man, with a thick sinewy neck, white hair, and a grizzled beard, his hands strong and worn as leather. His wrinkled necktie bunches his collar so that when he swallows, his Adam’s apple bobs up as if for air. Walker is thin, clean-shaven, and at least a decade younger than Madison. Both of them wear old, cracked boots.

  When they get there, the almshouse superintendent pulls back the sheet. Mr. Madison nods and says it’s his girl. The uncle stands back and peeks, while gripping tight to his slouch hat. A kind of strangulated noise issues from his throat like a rusty hinge, and he smears the corner of his eye with a thumb knuckle. Richardson regards them both—you never know how people are going to react to the sight of a dead loved one.

  He asks them if they know anything about a scar above the girl’s left breast.

  Madison nods. “A fever blister when she was little,” he says. “Didn’t heal properly.” He’s not inclined to say much more, but Richardson accepts the identification now as complete. He takes the two men into an office, gives them coffee, which only Madison takes, and asks about Lillian. Mr. Madison tells him that she was not yet twenty-one years old. She lived with her aunt Jane in Little Plymouth for about five years starting when she was fourteen. She moved there because she had become “difficult to handle.” She went to Bruington Academy for a while, but Mr. Madison and his wife thought it was not good for her, that she was putting on airs, and so they wouldn’t let Jane send her back. Then, not quite two years ago, she moved in with her grandfather and uncle, who lived only a few miles from her parents.

  While Madison talks, the uncle, George Walker, sits there fiddling with his hat and looking forlorn and out of place. Richardson instinctively trusts him more. When asked about Willie Cluverius, they agree that he and Lillian were fond friends. “And were they intimate?” Richardson asks. Madison seems to take offense at the question, while Walker only looks puzzled.

  “Were they sweethearts that you were aware of?”

  “Not that I was aware of,” Walker says. “No sir.”

  Madison adds, “She was well brought up. She wouldn’t let a man do her just anyway he pleased.”

  “Are you suggesting she was raped?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything.”

  “I know this is hard on you, Mr. Madison,” Richardson says. “But I’m trying to get at what happened. She was pregnant, as you know. The coroner suspects she was murdered.” He lets that sink in. Madison sits back in his chair, seemingly unsurprised. Walker tightens his lips as though he’s about to cry; he glances toward the door. “Now is there anyone you suspect could be responsible for either getting her pregnant or wishing her dead, or both?” The two men shake their heads, Madison with his hat still on. “She was not romantically involved with anyone you know of?”

  “I don’t know of anybody except that Tommie Cluverius.”

  “Tommie Cluverius?”

  “Yeah, he wudn’t particularly fond of me. Seems like he took every opportunity to shun me. He’s high and mighty with me. I don’t know why.” He suddenly looks irritable, the broken veins on his nose going purple and his Adam’s apple bulging.

  “Her cousin Cary mentioned a Willie Cluverius. Is this the same person?”

  “No, that’s the brother. Tommie’s the lawyer.”

  “Do you know his middle name?”

  “Judson.”

  Richardson takes some notes,
then directs his attention to Mr. Walker. “Were they sweethearts, Miss Madison and this Tommie Cluverius?”

  “No sir,” Walker says, looking puzzled, “not as I know of. Many a night he spent at air house on court days. I’d say they was good friends, but I can’t speculate on the rest.”

  “So there was an opportunity for a seduction to occur?”

  “She slept in a room by herself,” Walker says. “He slept with me when he stopped by air place. There was a empty room between.”

  “Locked?”

  “No. It has the old string latches, but ’twasn’t locked, ever.” Walker thinks a minute. “I remember twiced he got up in the middle of the night. I don’t remember him coming back to bed. In the morning he said he had bowel trouble.”

  “I see, but were they alone together?”

  “They might a went out walking together once or twiced, and I believe they went riding once, with a picnic. I wasn’t a-watching them every second of every day and night, but I don’t think he’d a-done such a thing. He cared too much for her.”

  “All right, thank you, Mr. Walker, and was there anyone else who saw her that you know of?”

  Walker glances at his brother-in-law, then at the hat in his hands. “Not that I know of. But she did write to some fellers.” Madison stiffens in his chair, then leans and spits a gout of brown juice into Richardson’s brass spittoon. His eyes are small, red-rimmed, and hard for Richardson to see into.

  “Did you have something you wanted to add?” Richardson asks.

  “No, I do not,” Madison snorts. “But that Cluverius boy, now, he’s the one you ought to bring in here and question.”

  “Thank you for your advice, Mr. Madison,” Richardson says, trying not to take too authoritative a tone with the father of a dead girl. But it bothers him that the man seems unsurprised that his daughter ended up in a reservoir. “Is there anything else either of you would like to tell me about Miss Madison?”