“The thorny issue as I see it,” Evans tells Tommie, “is how you account for yourself that day. We don’t have to do that, you understand. But it’s a big hole in our case.” Now Evans leans in closer and assumes a friendlier, less judicial attitude. “I just need to find somebody who can verify without a doubt that you were at that play—what was the name of it?”
“The Chimes of Normandy?”
“Right. Somebody who saw you there that night. This fellow Henley, I can’t locate him. He’s apparently in New York, staying with friends. I’ve written to him. Is there anybody else from that night who could help us?”
“I’ll have to see if I can remember,” Tommie says. “This happened more than two weeks ago—I can’t always remember things I did three days ago.”
Evans pulls back and raps the table with his knuckles. “Well, you have to. Your life could depend on it.”
The next day a grand jury indicts Thomas J. Cluverius for murder. There are five separate charges, all of them amounting to the same thing, that Cluverius “upon one Fannie Lillian Madison, unlawfully, feloniously, willfully, and of his malice aforethought did make an assault, and that the said Thomas J. Cluverius then and there, with force and arms, and in some manner and by some means to the grand jurors unknown … did strike, beat, and hit in and upon the right side of her face, over the right eye … causing one mortal blow, bruise, and wound of which said mortal blow, bruise, and wound, she, the said Fannie Lillian Madison, then and there instantly died.” Another count puts it that he “did cast, throw, push, and knock the said” etc., in the old reservoir, causing suffocation and drowning. A third count has him using his fist and then drowning her; the fourth brings up the possibility of a blunt instrument; and the final charge combines the first two into one.
When Tommie sees the indictment he is upset. “How can anybody kill a person with a blow to the head and then kill her again by drowning her?”
“It’s just to cover the possibilities,” Evans tells him.
“But aren’t they just fishing?”
“Yes, they don’t know how she died any more than we do.”
“Has to be suicide, doesn’t it, Mr. Evans? The conductor said she told him she wished the train would run off the tracks. She could’ve gotten those bruises falling in, or when her body was dragged out of the reservoir. The footprints could’ve been anybody’s—all those people wandering around the next morning.”
“Have you come up with any other names?” Evans asks.
“There was somebody else at the theater that night, but I can’t think of his name.” Tommie considers for a moment; he has tried to fish up another face from the afternoon’s performance, someone who might casually remember him. “We were acquaintances at Aberdeen. I can’t remember his name. I saw him at the intermission, but I got distracted by a little boy who fell while he was holding his mother’s hand.” There had, in fact, been a falling boy, and some time before that Tommie had seen somebody who reminded him of a schoolmate, though he wasn’t sure if it was the same person.
That night Tommie prays for strength. I can make something worthy of my life, Lord, if you’ll give me another chance. He looks at the chipped black paint on the iron ceiling, and sees a croaking raven with a bent wing, or is the wing a woman’s dress twisted at some unnatural angle? He misses Lillie. He feels her absence so deep within himself that it’s a concrete, almost mathematical, revelation: He has never loved anyone nearly as much as he loved her. He doesn’t know if he loved her because she desired him and held him in high esteem, or because she was so desirable herself that he melted at the thought of the smallest part of her body. Now that she’s gone it seems that, whatever his life is to be, it will lack the one person who could make him happy. Is that not punishment enough? The wing on the ceiling is feathered and veined; it’s flying over the river, its shadow gliding upstream in the afternoon light, west to the mountains and beyond.
Shortly after delivering the amethyst-crowned gold key to Crump, Willie takes the precaution of moving the little tin of letters from Tommie’s trunk. He has already locked his brother’s trunk and secured the key in his own. Aunt Jane and Miss Hillyard—one in fear, the other in excitement—would no doubt conduct their own private searches of Tommie’s room when they could, but they would not find any letters.
After dinner one afternoon he removes the box and sits with it on his lap. A beam of light strikes through the western window, illuminating the floorboards at his feet. Cupids with bows dance along the sides of the box; the top is decorated with green and gold curlicues and the name “Antoni’s Confections of Richmond.” The corners are dented and worn from use.
Willie takes the lid off and flips through the letters. There are several from girls whose names he barely knows, if at all. They’re filled with gushings about how sweet and adorable Tommie is and how thoughtful he was to write. One includes a lock of golden hair, bound with red thread. She writes that as soon as she turns eighteen she’s going to get on a train and come right out from Richmond to see him. Another warns him that if he’s writing to other girls he had “better count on losing me forever, for Tommie, I give my heart only to one boy at a time and when I do you’ll know it for sure!” Another, named Georgiana Lee, mentions that he’s a good kisser and she can hardly wait until she sees him again because she has some big news involving a family member. There are easily two dozen letters from five or six different girls. Only two are from Lillie.
They are down near the bottom of the tin, and Willie’s heart skips a beat when he sees them. Perhaps there had been more, and Tommie destroyed them. These two were left or forgotten, or maybe were the only ones she wrote him. The best thing, Willie thinks, would be to take them out and burn them—no one need ever know their contents. It occurs to him that Aunt Jane already knows; maybe she has been reading his mail for years. If so, there’s nothing damning in them.
One letter is postmarked from Manquin, April 6:
Dearest Tommie,
Now I know what it is to be loved now I have a purpose to my life. I have to confess, Tommie dear, that I lied about your brother—I was not with him like that but in a different way which I will explain the next time you come if you want to know. I have prayed almost all night and I have an answer this morning and that is we did not sin because we love each other and do you know as soon as I was sure of this I saw the sun coming up over my windowsill and the whole window lit up like a rainbow and I think it was a promise to me. And you won’t believe this but as I sit here writing in my room the sun through the crab apple tree out my window is making a shadow on my wall that looks like a T it really does … When will you come back?
Love your loving, Lillie
Willie stuffs the letter back into its envelope and crams it deep into his pocket. He can hardly bear opening the next, postmarked February 9 from Millboro’ Springs:
Dear Tommie,
Please forgive my last letter being so short with you its on account of how lonely I do get out here sometimes, though I have made some jolly friends. I don’t know why you would say I should marry that boy who I hardly even know I only mentioned him because we met at church and went walking on the mountain, not alone but with my friend Ella Kinney and another boy. I have to go now because little Mattie is calling for help with her ciphering. I will see you soon,
Love, your Lillie
Strange, Willie thinks, how there is no mention in the more recent letter of anything between them, just “Love, your Lillie.” He folds the letter back up and pockets it. He then takes the tin of letters and returns them to his brother’s trunk. For an hour he carries the letters around with him, wondering who his brother is and what he has done and not done. And when at the end of the hour he still doesn’t know any more than before he found the letters, he goes into the machine shop and strikes a match and lets them burn on the dirt floor. When they are nothing but ashes, he sweeps them out and lets the wind push them toward the pasture.
That night he ask
s Aunt Jane if she knows of any letters anybody has written to Tommie in the past year that might be important to him. She thinks a minute, then says, “He took to having his letters held at the post office so he could get them faster. He was traveling so much for Mr. Evans, you see. It was easier for him.”
Miss Hillyard, who is looking at her plate, shakes her head. “I don’t see how that made it easier for him,” she says, her tightly bunned hair stretching her skin so that to Willie she is a skull with eyes and a tongue.
“Rosa,” Jane admonishes, “he couldn’t always know when he’d be coming down here or when it would be easier to pick his mail up in King and Queen. So he told Mr. Garland to always hold it for him. What is your point?”
“Oh, I see,” Miss Hillyard says. “My brain’s turned to mush. I think it’s the blood pills Dr. Dixon gave me.” She helps herself to another of Jane’s cheese biscuits and says nothing more about the mail.
It’s the next day that Epps and Birney come out with a search warrant. Epps pushes his way through the house, his thick neck and beetling brow giving him a peremptory look, while Birney smiles and nods, apologetic at the intrusion. Willie gives them the key to Tommie’s trunk. After going through the letters in the little tin they ask if his brother had any other letters. “Not that I know of,” Willie says. “I believe he kept them all in that tin.” They take the letters, as well as Tommie’s two spare steel watch keys, some issues of Ogelvie’s and other magazines with dog-eared pages, photographs of Tommie and Lillie, papers with Tommie’s writing, and a penknife. “That’s mine,” Willie tells them. “He shaves his pencils with it.”
“That so?” Epps says curtly. Birney, hands in his pockets, whistles and tries to look unobtrusive. Epps wants to take Jane’s cork-handled fountain pen, but Willie convinces him it has just come from Philadelphia and nobody has used it but she. When they’re finished, Jane gives them a packed lunch and wishes them a safe journey home.
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN •
JUDGE HILL, who at forty-three looks and acts sixty, opens the trial, telling the defense he’ll tolerate reasonable delays if they need to hunt down a witness. He pauses to rearrange wisps of hair over a mottled, bald patch, a remnant of his vainer, more ambitious days. The clerk then calls on Tommie to rise. Tommie stands, steadying himself with one hand on the bar. It takes five minutes for the clerk to get through the indictment, after which he says, “What say you? Are you guilty or not guilty of the felony whereof you stand indicted?”
“Not guilty,” says Tommie loudly. He lowers himself into his chair.
Tommie is asked to rise while the jury—half of whom are from out of town, so many locals were biased—is sworn and charged. Then the clerk intones, “Gentlemen of the jury, look upon the prisoner and hearken to his cause. If you find him guilty, you are then further to inquire whether it be murder in the first degree or in the second degree …”
Tommie listens to words that nothing in law school or private practice have prepared him for. Second-degree murder carries up to eighteen years; surely they would find a lesser degree. Voluntary manslaughter, no more than five years. Involuntary manslaughter, no more than twelve months and a fine not exceeding five hundred dollars.
“… If you find him not guilty, say so and no more. So hearken to the evidence.”
If they find him guilty of anything, Tommie decides, it will be voluntary manslaughter—no intention to kill. What keeps nagging him is whether he should break down and tell Crump everything he knows. But would anybody be sympathetic to it? The real problem, of course, is that now it would look as if he were trying to wriggle out—the public would feel justified in thinking him a depraved and despicable creature. If he gives them an opening, they’ll pounce. He cannot count how many times he has lain awake at night, confessing to God, then risen in the morning feeling almost—but not quite—free of his burden.
The first day of witness depositions begins where the story began for the public—at the reservoir. Prosecutor Meredith calls Lysander Meade and asks him to describe his job and what he found on Saturday morning, March 14, at seven o’clock. Very few people know Charles Meredith yet, nor his ambition to run for lieutenant governor in the fall. But a good showing here could make his reputation. In his early thirties, he is short, barrel-chested, and has a pugnacious thrust to his clean-shaven chin.
Even Meade, his own witness, seems intimidated by him at first, but Meredith smoothly recalibrates his demeanor and continues teasing out the facts. Meade, wearing a natty little checked bow tie his wife selected for him and his navy-blue superintendent’s jacket, all buttoned up and showing the double row of buttons, launches into meticulous detail on the dimensions of the reservoir. Meredith guides him toward a recital that shows off Meade’s extensive knowledge, letting Meade’s natural proclivity for numbers seem useful instead of eccentric. That Meade’s eyesight was so bad he was still a drummer boy at eighteen during the war need never arise. Yet when Meredith asks him if he could tell right away that something wasn’t right about the path, Meade blurts out, defensively, as he has done many times over the years, “Well sir, my eyesight isn’t so good, but once I was up close I saw where the walkway was rucked up right smart.” Meredith quickly moves on to what Meade actually saw.
Colonel Aylett for the prosecution has a few follow-up questions. “Mr. Meade, are the reservoir’s surroundings of the sort that would invite a young lady to venture there alone at night?”
“Is that not a leading question?” Crump complains.
“We withdraw it.”
“But you shouldn’t have asked it.”
“Your Honor, I’m bound to frame my questions by my own brains, not those of the defense.”
The crowd murmurs its approval. This is the kind of smart comeback they’re here for, cramming themselves into every available space, one spidery man even climbing atop the stove before being shouted down by a deputy. Colonel Aylett’s roots in King William County, Lillian’s home, are as formidable as his oratorical wizardry. His great-grandfather was Patrick Henry; he fought in twenty-two engagements during the war; he has served numerous terms as a commonwealth’s attorney. And if there is anyone who is a rhetorical match for Crump, it’s Aylett. He has sharp blue eyes that need no correction and silver hair slicked back over his collar. Every inch the country gentleman, he keeps a wide-brimmed hat on his table and he wears a double-breasted coat and an old-fashioned black stock cravat. His goatee comes to a point and his twisted white mustache frames a polished set of teeth that flash like a wild beast when he talks.
On the cross-examination, Evans says, “You say your vision is imperfect, Mr. Meade. How far can you see, exactly, with your glasses?”
Meade, who has been on the witness stand for forty-five minutes, thinks, then says, “Ninety-five million miles. They say that’s how far the sun is.” The court erupts in laughter, and Meade enjoys his brief celebrity.
Evans then asks Meade in which direction the reservoir flows. Meade has clearly not thought about the reservoir flowing at all. “I imagine what drift there is is toward the outflow pipe, to the east.”
“So something that entered that side of the reservoir wouldn’t go very far, would it?”
“No, sir,” Meade says, a little confused. Tommie smiles at how easily Evans has erased the picture the prosecution is trying to paint of a body being thrown over the fence on the side nearest the walkway. If the footprints indicate a struggle, and the bruises a mortal blow, then the murderer would naturally carry or drag her the shortest possible distance; carrying her all the way from the path down and around to the south side of the reservoir would make no sense.
Aylett whispers something to Meredith, then takes to his feet. “That gate in the picket fence,” he says on redirect, “was it there for the public to use?”
“No,” Meade says, “it was there so workers could get to a water pipe.”
“Would it be difficult to find that gate in the dark if you didn’t know where to look?”
“I imagine it would be. Besides which, I kept it locked.”
Tommie imperceptibly shakes his head at this.
“Are the palings sharp?”
“Yes, they are.”
“Now, Mr. Meade,” Aylett says, “Would a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy have a hard time climbing over a fence like that, nine inches shorter than she?”
“We object!” Mr. Crump shouts.
“Very well, we’ll withdraw the question.”
“But you put a question and then withdraw it,” Crump says. “I ask the court to rule on that type of question, so they won’t be asked again. It’s obviously an improper question.”
“I thought I could please the defense by withdrawing the question. I certainly want Your Honor’s views, but not in advance of any questions I might put.”
Judge Hill nods, lips drawn into a tight smile—he knows Crump and Aylett quite well, and all their tricks. But though they are legends with Confederate honors trailing their names like sacred robes, he is determined to manage this trial in the proper way. The publicity it is receiving all the way from Charleston to New York worries him, and he will not let the city his father died defending, the city of Chief Justice John Marshall, be dragged in the mud in the dawn of its return to life. “The court will not rule on questions before they’re put,” he says.
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