Tolman and Journey were back on the street in five minutes, mingling with the increasing crowds along Fourth Street Live. The clouds had broken somewhat, and small rays of light pierced the pedestrian mall’s roof, casting little squares onto the walkway. A bluegrass band was playing on a stage in the middle of the street, doing a blistering acoustic cover of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride.” Under normal circumstances, Tolman might have stopped to listen. She liked the vocal harmonies and the interplay of the mandolin and banjo in bluegrass music.
She watched the crowd as they passed the stage. “It’d be hard to pick up a tail in this kind of place.”
“They’re here,” Journey said. “They want the pages. The first page says that all the pages, including the signatures, have to be intact for the document to have the force of law.”
Tolman stepped around a pair of tables that sat in front of a Borders bookstore. “Forgive me for saying so, but these people don’t seem overly concerned with the force of law, if they’ve really assassinated Vandermeer and Darlington.”
“No, it makes a kind of strange sense. These Glory Warriors came into existence with the writing of this document, something that Grant and Lee supposedly agreed to at the same time as the Appomattox surrender. Several of the eyewitness accounts at Appomattox said that the two generals were alone in the house, just the two of them, for several minutes before the staffs were allowed in to witness the actual surrender. Until those rifles and the G.W. pin and the first page of that document were dug up, no one ever thought anything of it. But the Glory Warriors want to justify themselves. It’s like the KKK trying to use the Bible to justify white supremacy. The documentation is important to these groups. Never mind what they’re willing to do on the way to whatever their goal is. Once they get there, they all crave legitimacy in the eyes of the people.”
“So this thing has become something of a holy grail for them.”
Journey nodded. “Someone’s behind them—someone who has money and resources to do all this, to keep looking for the holy grail year after year.”
They walked in silence for a few steps, passing the bowling alley and out from under the roof. “I’m sorry about what happened to you,” Tolman said. “The attack, the campus police officer, the man you killed. It’s a lot to process.”
“What do I say to that? Yes, it’s a lot. They put me into that position. And because of it, Pete Parsons is dead, and the man who shot him and was trying to shoot me is dead. They’re waiting around for me to find that page and take it from me, and then probably kill me.” He put his hands in the pockets of his khakis. “Can’t let them do that.”
“No, we can’t,” Tolman said, but she wondered why she hadn’t heard anything about her backup.
* * *
They turned the corner from Fourth Street and walked a block. To their right, just before Fifth Street, was a quiet garden courtyard. A brick building sported a blue awning that read CENTER FOR INTERFAITH RELATIONS. Several people sat in the garden, reading. They crossed the street to a dusty glass storefront. Journey checked the address on the notepaper Janine Pierce had given them.
“This is the place,” he said.
There was no sign on the door, only a business card taped to it. The card read
ASSOCIATION OF MINOR LEAGUE ENTHUSIASTS
Evan Lovell, Executive Director
An address, phone number, and Web address followed.
Journey and Tolman looked at each other. Tolman pulled on the glass door and they went in. The small corner office was furnished with a single desk. It seemed to be wood, but only small patches of it showed. The rest of the space was piled with papers, books, and magazines. Baseball posters were tacked to the walls. Baseball cards spilled out of envelopes and boxes and cartons.
A man in his mid-thirties sat at the desk. He had a round body and string-straight brown-blond hair that hung in a ponytail to the middle of his back. His bushy mustache was a little darker than the hair, and he wore round glasses. He was wearing a Louisville Redbirds T-shirt and a Sacramento River Cats cap.
He looked up at them, as if he weren’t used to visitors. “Hi. Do you need directions or something? Fourth Street is that way.” He pointed back the way they’d come.
“Are you Mr. Lovell?” Journey asked.
“That’s me,” the man said. “Do I know you?”
“I don’t think we’ve met. My name is Nick Journey, and I’m from—”
“Oh my god!” Lovell stood up, and a few papers fluttered around him. “Nick Journey, left-handed pitcher, Tigers organization, 1989 to 1994. Incredible progress through the ranks to AAA Toledo. Record of fourteen and five in 1993, ERA of two-point-eight-one. Opposing hitters hit two-thirty-six that year. The next year you had elbow injuries and were two and ten, ERA of six-point-zero-two. You retired after that. Nick Journey.” He stopped for a moment. “You’re the same Nick Journey, right?”
Tolman was looking at Journey. He thought she was almost smiling.
“Yeah,” Journey said. “You … you follow the minors.”
“That’s what we do here. We track the players who never make it to the big leagues. We have supporters all over the world. Our Web site gets over half a million hits every day. Can I interview you?”
Tolman stepped between the two men. “I’m sorry, Mr. Lovell. I’m Meg Tolman.” She showed her ID. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Shit. Oh, shit … IRS. You’re IRS.” He looked at Journey. “You retired from baseball to join the IRS?”
“No, actually I’m a history professor, and she’s not IRS,” Journey said. “We understand your father was writing a book that had to do with the history of First Commercial Bank.”
Lovell looked at both of them. “That’s why you’re here?”
“Yes,” Journey and Tolman said together.
“Nick Journey, right here in my office, and he wants to talk about the book my dad was always going to write.” Lovell waved at two dusty folding chairs. “Just toss that crap off those chairs. He never wrote it. He spent forty years gathering material, but he never would write it. He got all kinds of people to give him all kinds of stuff, and he went over it and over it, but he never wrote a word of it down. Finally it got to the point that all he did was look at that stuff. Wouldn’t do anything else. My mother found him keeled over dead in the middle of all those papers, eleven years ago.”
“So the book was a history of the bank itself? We’re really more interested in the family that founded the bank.”
Lovell barked out a laugh. “Of course you are. You want to know what happened to Sam Williams.”
Journey leaned forward.
“Dad never solved it,” Lovell said. “He spent forty years researching it, and he never realized that no one even cared anymore. You’re the first people who’ve come around asking.”
“What do you mean, your dad never solved it?” Tolman said.
“You mean you don’t know? I don’t get it. Then why are you here?”
“You tell us,” Journey said.
Lovell put on a sly look. “Will you autograph some cards for me?”
“As many as you want.”
Lovell smiled like a kid on Christmas morning. “I just need to find the key to that locker where I put all those papers. You can have them all, if you want. It was a big deal at the time, but you know how things are. People forget after a while. It gets to be a hundred years or more and people really forget. No one cares about what happened to a banker in Louisville way back then.”
“I do,” Journey said.
“Wow. Yeah, it’s really something else. Sam Williams was this rich guy, his family started the biggest bank in Louisville, and they owned a lot of land. Lots of old money there. When his old man died, Sam took over the bank. He had been in the war that came before the Civil War—the Mexican War, I think—and some people said he’d been a spy for the army before he came back here. So he inherited all that money and the bank and everything.
Then … poof!” Lovell clapped his hands together suddenly. A little plume of dust rose from the desk. “He disappeared in the fall of 1864, while the Civil War was still going on. Gone without a trace … No one saw or heard from Sam Williams ever again.”
CHAPTER
32
The noon Mass at Cathedral of the Assumption, across Fifth Street, had just let out, and Dallas Four Gold stopped to take a few photographs of the gorgeous 1852 church with its tall white spire. He nodded to a few of the parishioners as they exited the cathedral, and he took a few more pictures with his small digital camera.
Then he turned and walked back to the corner, facing the dirt- and grease-streaked window of the Association of Minor League Enthusiasts. He had watched Journey and the woman go in, had seen them talking to the heavyset man with the mustache and ponytail. He was growing impatient and tired.
Hands on his camera, pretending to look at the image of a photo he’d just taken, Gold glanced again at the building across the way. The man behind the desk had just brought out several cardboard boxes and placed them in front of Journey and the woman. His pulse quickened, and he reported to Bronze, who talked with Chicago base, who had jurisdiction over the Louisville area.
Gold fiddled with his camera a little more and walked back toward the cathedral. He had to stay alert now.
* * *
“Oh, he was obsessed with it,” Lovell said as he pulled the lid off a cardboard box labeled WILLIAMS 1958–1963. “And to be fair to the old man, it was sort of a famous unsolved mystery around here way back when. My dad was really into Louisville history, and he thought he was going to solve it and write a bestseller and make a lot of money and go on the Today Show. You know, that kind of crap. He got lots of stuff the first few years, mainly old newspaper clippings, but there were even some police reports from the early twentieth century when it was still technically an open case. It kind of fell off after that, but he’d get two or three new things a year. Then finally, not too long before he died, the bank released a bunch of papers. Turns out they’d been in the vault for a long time and no one ever did anything with them. The bank’s new CEO wanted all that crap out of there. Can’t say that I blame him. So it all came back here.”
“What do you mean, back here?” Tolman said.
“This place,” Lovell said. “It was the old man’s real estate office. He left it to me. I live upstairs. Don’t ever have to leave if I don’t want to.”
Journey laid his hand over a bulging envelope. “Do you mind?”
“Go ahead. I’ve got stuff to do. But you promised to sign cards before you leave.”
“I will.”
He unfolded a yellowed newspaper clipping dated October 1, 1914. HALF CENTURY MYSTERY, the headline read, with the subhead, SCION OF LOUISVILLE FAMILY WAS MISSING DURING CIVIL WAR.
It was a short piece marking fifty years since prominent banker Samuel Benjamin Williams disappeared from his Louisville home, never to be heard from again. There were tantalizing tidbits: Williams was reputed to have been a member of Major McCulloch’s renowned company of army “scouts”—a euphemism for spies, Journey knew—in the Mexican War of 1846–1848 before returning to Louisville high society. Further intrigue: a longtime employee of the bank swore he’d seen Williams walking out of the bank late one night “about six months after he went away.” The man, in his eighties in 1914, was not believed to be credible, and was rumored to have “imbibed generously in spirits.” Journey smiled at the language of the period journalism.
Paper-clipped three pages down was a smudged photocopy. Journey stopped cold when he saw the handwriting.
I wear no uniform, but I am no less a warrior, a warrior to reclaim the glory of this American land. I leave all to my younger brother, John, who has crossed the river to join the Federals.
“This is his writing,” Journey said.
Both Tolman and Lovell looked up, Tolman from her own box, Lovell from his computer monitor and a small assortment of Nick Journey baseball cards he’d scavenged from a filing cabinet.
Journey dug in his backpack and withdrew his copy of the page from Fort Washita. He placed it on one knee, the page he’d just found on the other knee. Tolman looked at both, smoothing the pages on Journey’s knees. Lovell looked at them with mild interest, then went back to clicking his mouse.
“Look at the shapes of the letters,” Journey said.
“Are you really that much of a handwriting expert?” Tolman said.
“No, no, but when you read a lot of original documents from a period, you get used to analyzing them. It’s the same.”
Tolman ran her finger along the top of the page that had just come out of the box. In the same script was written the date, 1 Oct 1864.
“You know what it reminds me of?” she said. “A suicide note. Like he was telling the world he was leaving.”
“But a suicide without a body. Aside from one admittedly dubious sighting, no one ever saw him again after this. According to the 1914 newspaper story, he simply didn’t go to the bank that day. His house was neat and orderly, all his clothes were in the closets, even his watch was on his dresser. His housekeeper said everything looked exactly as it should look, except for the note—this note—on the dresser. He was just … gone.” Journey shook his head.
“Where was he between October first and the end of the war?” Tolman asked.
“Maybe getting close to the generals. Maybe putting the Glory Warriors apparatus into place. Here’s something to think about: This newspaper story says he was one of McCulloch’s ‘scouts’ during the Mexican War. Lee and Grant were both in Mexico—most Regular Army officers were. It’s not inconceivable that Williams could have met both Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee nearly twenty years earlier.”
Tolman looked at the newspaper clipping. “And he was from an influential family.”
Journey nodded. “Not just an influential family, but one from a strategic city in a border state. That, plus the fact that they would consider him a ‘brother officer,’ a Mexico veteran, might have made them willing to meet with him. If he’d been just some obscure civilian Kentucky banker, they probably wouldn’t give him the time of day.” He shook the note Williams had written. “He even mentions being a ‘warrior to reclaim the glory.’ And maybe the dubious sighting wasn’t so dubious after all.” He picked up the 1914 clipping again. “This bank employee, supposedly after locking the bank one night a few months after Williams disappeared, said he saw him coming out a side door. Maybe this really was Williams after all, on his way from Appomattox to Indian Territory.…”
“And he locked the page in the vault of his own bank.”
They looked at each other.
Lovell stared over his computer at them. “So you guys think you really know what happened to Williams? I mean, my old man never solved it, in all those years. He let his real estate business fall off, he pissed off his whole family … and you really think you know?”
“I’m not sure,” Journey said. “It’s a lot of maybes. But the time frame is right. Just like I told Sandra, he could have ridden here from Virginia, placed the page in the bank—right under everyone’s noses—then taken boats from here to Fort Smith, bought a horse there, and ridden to Washita.”
“And where else would be more secure than a bank vault?”
“His bank vault, no less. And that was what he was trying to tell us with The Poet’s Penn. He was telling us who he was, telling us that he came home to Louisville before heading to the frontier for the last phase of the plan.”
They were silent a moment; then Tolman picked up the note. “What about his brother? John?”
“I can answer that one,” Lovell said. “My old man mentioned him a few times. He was a lot younger than Sam, and he joined one of the Indiana regiments. He was killed in the war. That’s no mystery. He didn’t work in the bank and didn’t want anything to do with it. He was a blacksmith, but he got killed in the war.”
“So he left the bank to his brothe
r,” Tolman said, “but his brother was killed in the war. That’s when the cousin took over, and the strange disappearance of Samuel Williams just faded out of everyone’s consciousness after a while.”
Journey looked at Lovell. “Evan, did you say that the bank donated a lot of papers to your father just before he died?”
Lovell nodded. “Yeah. They cleaned out their old vault.”
Journey and Tolman looked at each other again. Neither one spoke for half a minute.
“Then more than likely,” Tolman finally said, “the pages we’re looking for are somewhere right here.”
CHAPTER
33
Journey and Tolman sat on the floor and began sifting through the dusty cardboard boxes. Lovell watched them while continuing to work at his computer and answering an occasional phone call.
Hours passed. The piles grew. Thomas Lovell seemed to have collected every possible scrap of paper that had anything to do with the disappearance of Samuel Williams, though there did not appear to be much of a filing system. A letter from Estes Atwood, Williams’s cousin who eventually took over the bank, rested alongside a copy of a newspaper photo of Williams. The picture showed a man of medium height and build, with dark hair parted in the middle, and a dark mustache. He wore the black frock coat of the times and a string tie. The photo was unremarkable, Journey thought. Samuel Williams looked average, a man no one would notice in a crowd.
Journey put the photo aside, atop the “leaving” letter. At the bottom of a box, Tolman pulled out a manila envelope, opened it, and withdrew a single, brittle sheet. “The seal,” she said.
Journey looked up. “What?”
“You were telling me about the seal of the Glory Warriors? I think I found it … but this is no treaty.”
“What is it?”
“Looks like a receipt of some sort.”
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