Isolation

by Mary Anna Evans

  The mysterious woman would have been an adult when Elias Croft went missing. As Courtney Stanton’s wife, she would have carried the surname Delia was seeking. And she would have lived on an island. A woman with a PhD in history could mate this information with Oscar’s oral history and make a compelling case that she had found Elias Croft’s Cally Stanton. Then she could write a hell of a research paper with a title like “Documentary Evidence Supports Oral History: Union Hero Was Kept Prisoner for Years by a Confederate Woman.”

  Even worse, Delia could take her story to the public. With any public relations savvy, and Faye did not doubt that Delia had it, she would make piles of money by publishing a lurid book from Oscar’s point-of-view. The notoriety would bring in well-heeled private clients for the rest of her career. Faye might live to see the nonfiction bestseller listed topped by Imprisoned, Tortured, Sexually Abused, and Murdered by a Madwoman named Cally: My Ancestor’s Story!

  But before all that happened, Delia would come for Faye and she would ask her this: “You knew I was looking for Cally Stanton and that she lived on an island. Why didn’t you tell me that there were Stantons on your family tree and that they lived on your island?”

  Faye wouldn’t blame her if she went on to say “What are you hiding? And why?”

  Faye didn’t know the answers herself. She was acting on instinct, and that instinct was to protect Cally.

  Her instincts were urging her to do something…anything…when Delia reached out a graceful hand toward the keyboard and said, “I’ve been reading some interesting stuff in the Micco County Sun-Record. There was a lawsuit involving the Last Isles and some nearby islands. It made me think I should go back a little further in the census. To 1860, at least.”

  ***

  Faye was never sure how long she sat there watching Delia wade through the 1860 census of Micco County. The younger woman was oblivious to Faye’s misery as she checked her maps and scrolled through on-screen data. Faye sat waiting for her to turn her wide blue eyes on her and ask, “Why didn’t you tell me that you’ve known the answers to our questions all along?”

  Oscar, too, had been oblivious to Faye’s silence as he leaned over Delia’s shoulder to watch her work.

  Faye needed to say something. It wasn’t her way to let trouble lie. She needed to address the problem while she was still in control. She reached for the file holding Delia’s newspaper research. “Did you say that the woman in the newspaper article was named Courtney?”

  Delia nodded, hunching over a map and tracing the route of a river with her finger.

  “My great-grandmother’s name was Courtney. It’s an unusual name for a woman.”

  The finger stopped in mid-river. “Where did she live?”

  “Not far from here, on Joyeuse Island. My home.”

  “When did she die?”

  “My mother was a teenager, so probably in the late 1940s.”

  Delia’s fingers flew to the keyboard and she pulled up the 1940 census. Checking the map to see which Enumeration District included Joyeuse Island, she searched through the names in that district.

  Several minutes passed, then both Delia’s hands dropped into her lap. “Her last name was Wells. She’s the woman who sued for ownership of those islands, and the newspaper said that her maiden name was Stanton. Faye. Your great-grandmother was born with the name Courtney Stanton. ”

  Her statement didn’t demand an answer. By not giving one, Faye was neither confirming nor denying that she had already known her great-grandmother’s maiden name.

  Delia backed through the census records, finding Courtney Wells on Joyeuse Island in 1940, but nobody named Stanton, because Cally had died in the 1930s. Crawling through time, she found no census records at all during the years when Cally would have been in charge of filling out the forms—1920, 1900, 1880. If she’d stopped then, Delia would have had nothing but a woman on an island who had been born with Cally Stanton’s last name. But she didn’t stop.

  Census records from 1860 were on the screen when Delia’s composure finally slipped and she squealed out loud. As Faye had already known, the first Courtney Stanton had been scrupulous about filling out his census forms, at least when it came to reporting the existence of people who weren’t slaves.

  “What is it?” Oscar asked.

  “There was a man on Joyeuse Island in 1860. His name was Courtney Stanton, also. The female Courtney Stanton doesn’t show up, because she hasn’t been born yet.”

  “But no Cally?” Oscar asked. “You don’t see her name there?”

  “This is the next best thing. In two years another Courtney Stanton will be born, probably on the same island where she will live for the rest of her life. She didn’t drop from a cloud. She had a mother, and that mother would be the right age to be your Cally Stanton. Make that Elias’ Cally Stanton. And, like your Cally Stanton, she would have lived on an island. I don’t know why she’s not on the census—maybe they weren’t married yet?—but I think the woman who married Courtney-the-man and birthed Courtney-the-woman is the woman we came here to find.”

  Oscar pulled Delia up out of the chair and gave her a hug. “You found her! The U.S. Census missed her, but you didn’t.”

  He turned to look at Faye. “We need to go out to your island. If we see the place where Elias Croft suffered, maybe we can get to the truth of what happened to him. That’s all I want. The truth.”

  Faye was being completely honest when she said, “I don’t know the truth.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Faye couldn’t believe she had spilled her guts. She had told Oscar and Delia everything she knew about Cally Stanton.

  Well, no, she hadn’t. She was emotionally damaged these days, and she’d never been much good at lying, but she wasn’t stupid. Faye had told Oscar and Delia some of what she knew about Cally Stanton. She’d given them the highlights, so to speak.

  She’d told them that Cally had been a slave to a man who was probably her own father. When he died in the Last Island hurricane, ownership of Cally had passed to his son-in-law Courtney, who eventually fell in love with Cally, freed her, and married her.

  “Was that legal back then? She was a slave, so I guess she wasn’t white.” Delia had asked, though she should have known that the answer was no.

  “No, she wasn’t white and their marriage wasn’t legal, but they considered themselves husband and wife. She wore his ring and ran his household.”

  “When?” Oscar had wanted to know. “After the Civil War?”

  “During and after.”

  “So she could be the one. The one who sent my great-great-grandmother her husband’s sword.”

  Oscar had leaned closer to her, closer than Faye had wanted him to be, and he had studied her face as if he were hoping to find Elias Croft’s murderess there. His eyes crawled all over Faye’s face. Most likely, he was studying her mid-brown complexion and imagining that biracial Cally had looked like Faye.

  Faye only knew of one photo of Cally, taken when she was in her nineties. Minus fifty years of sags and wrinkles, she probably had indeed looked like Faye, but this was none of Oscar’s business.

  An odd moment had passed, while the old man got up in her face and the young historian hung back, regarding them with narrowed and thoughtful eyes. Faye willed herself to hold still, even though his nearness made a primitive part of her want to run. He said nothing.

  Delia, too, said nothing, but her gaze unsettled Faye. Did she realize that Faye had been withholding information? Was she angrier about it than she’d been willing to admit? Or was she jealous? Was she thinking about the moment when she had watched Oscar trail an unwelcome finger down Faye’s arm?

  And then the moment had passed. Oscar had said brightly. “Well, this is just wonderful. Now we need to come out to your island and take a look around.”

  And that was the extent of the con
versation about what Faye knew about Cally Stanton. They both seemed to assume that she’d been utterly upfront with them. They’d jumped to the conclusion that she hadn’t known her ancestors’ full names, and thus she couldn’t have realized they were looking for her great-great-grandmother. This gullibility had let the conversation steamroll past the question of “Why haven’t you been helping us?” and go straight to “Let’s go to your house and see if we can find some skeletons in your closets.”

  And now Faye had to decide. Was she going to extend Delia a little professional courtesy and let her take her client on a historical tour that included her own home? Or was she going to cling to her obsession, probably irrational, with keeping Cally’s name clear? How did Cally’s actions in eighteen-seventy-whatever affect Faye?

  They didn’t. Even if Cally was a coldblooded killer, her sins didn’t reflect on Faye, but she wanted to come to her own rational and provable answer to the mystery of Cally Stanton and Elias Croft. In particular, she wanted to do it before Oscar and Delia scraped together a cockamamie story that confirmed their preconceptions but was just flat wrong. She decided that she might learn something by letting Oscar and Delia tour Joyeuse Island, but that she wasn’t obligated to tell them everything she knew. She would let them find out what they could on their own, and she doubted it would be much more than what they knew now.

  “Okay,” she said. “I love showing my home off to people who appreciate history. We have hours until dark. Let’s go now.”

  ***

  It had been a quick trip back to Oscar’s rental house where Faye’s boat was waiting. Her text to Joe, telling him that they were coming, had prompted a single-character text in return:

  ?

  She had just responded,

  Tell you later.

  and started the motor. Her home was remote enough that she was usually able to keep from revealing it to people she didn’t know and like, but not lately. The week had begun with the invasion of environmental contractors wanting to empty her bank account with their enforced cleanup. It had been dotted with visits from law enforcement officials. And now it was ending with an invasion of people who wanted to turn her family’s history into something tainted and ugly.

  She felt like she should announce to the world, “Here’s the password to my savings account and the key to my bedroom. Come on in!”

  Instead, she pointed the boat toward Joyeuse Island and pushed it harder than necessary. She planned to aim it for the biggest waves she could find. She had weighed all the facts and come to the conclusion that it was time to show Oscar and Delia around Joyeuse Island. This didn’t mean that she didn’t intend to treat them to a very bumpy ride on the way.

  ***

  The dock at Joyeuse Island was clearly marked “Private,” and Faye had counted three “No Trespassing” signs before she got there. The signs were copious all around the island, because Faye had made sure of it. Faye knew Joe hated all those ugly signs. She often saw him adjusting himself so that his eyes fell on nothing that was not natural. She had even seen him walk a few steps off a path, just to keep a tree between himself and something he didn’t want to see.

  Despite the fact that her nature-loving husband didn’t like Faye’s signs, they usually kept the number of unwanted visitors way down. Not today.

  She helped Oscar and Delia out of the boat and asked, “Can I offer you some lemonade?”

  Oscar wasn’t interested. He seemed to have forgotten that Delia’s body was probably stiff and sore. Faye’s own wrists hurt in sympathy whenever Delia’s bruises and abrasions peeked out from beneath her cardigan sleeves. Who knew what injuries hid under her clothes?

  “Would you like a tour of the house?”

  Oscar didn’t answer Faye and he didn’t give Delia a glance. He just stood on the dock, eagerly squinting through the trees at Faye’s home. “Where do you think she kept him? In the basement?”

  Delia said, “You told me that the letters said he was being held in a cabin.”

  “Oh. Right. We should start outside.”

  He looked around. Joyeuse Island went on in all directions, as far as he could see.

  If Faye hadn’t been under such stress, she would have been amused by his confidence that he could find the site of a cabin that had rotted down a century before. What’s more, Oscar was confident that he could do it in an afternoon. No tools. No library research. No ground-penetrating radar, which would have been prohibitively expensive for Faye but maybe Oscar could afford it. He seemed to think he would magically know when he walked over the right spot.

  Granted, this was how Faye had been conducting her work over the past few weeks, but at least she knew when she was being an idiot.

  Delia put a hand on Oscar’s shoulder. “Faye offered to give us a tour of her house. We should start with that.”

  The gesture was possessive. It also looked for all the world like a married person silently handling a spouse’s social blunder. The words unspoken were “Dear, it’s rude not to accept an invitation into someone’s home.”

  Oscar looked down at her hand and said, “Yeah, okay, that’s a good idea.”

  So Faye took them across the same front lawn where Cally had met Captain Croft and offered food to his men. The rules of hospitality said that Cally had also ushered him up Faye’s entrance stairway, brought him inside, and offered him something to drink. In wartime, she’d probably had nothing to give him but water.

  Faye showed Delia and Oscar around the main floor, designed as a public area for entertaining, and thought, “Cally and Captain Croft probably lingered at the door before sitting here in this parlor, or maybe that one, to hammer out a truce that would feed his men without starving her people. She probably walked him through the dining room and the ballroom, pointing out the hand-blocked wallpaper imported from France before the war. There would still have been draperies around the windows, pictures on the wall, rosewood furniture, and brass chandeliers designed to hold candles.”

  Faye told Oscar and Delia about the wallpaper and the chandeliers, but her gut told her to keep Captain Croft to herself. She listened to her gut.

  Then she took them up the spiral staircase that she and Joe had worked so hard to rebuild after the hurricane. She showed them the hand-painted murals in the bedrooms and the music room. She took them into the cupola, but she didn’t tell them that Courtney Stanton Wells had told Faye’s grandmother that she remembered seeing The Monster Man’s cabin from there.

  From the cupola, they came down the ladder, down the sneak staircase, and took a quick tour through the basement.

  Oscar latched onto every detail and made it lurid. “The sneak staircase…she could have used it to get Elias away from anybody who might hear him being kidnapped,” was quickly followed by “Once she got him into that concrete-walled basement, there would have been no getting out unless she wanted him to get out. It would have been like a dungeon.”

  Faye responded mildly. “Tabby. The basement walls are tabby. It’s like concrete, but made with shells and sand.”

  Delia kept patting Oscar on the arm to calm him down. Between pats, she admired the view from the cupola and asked Faye to show her how the house’s casement windows worked. She was fascinated with the way the louvers shading the entire back porch had been designed to keep out heat and let in breezes.

  After Oscar realized that the basement had been the business center of the plantation—office, storeroom, classroom, and butler’s pantry, and all of them full of people by night and day—he knew that it would have made a terrible dungeon, so he was ready to go. Faye’s tour had taken him past the living room where her family sat among their books and toys, but he didn’t speak. He refused Faye’s second offer of lemonade, and Delia gave him the warning look that wives saved for erring husbands.

  Delia tried to make up for his rudeness, asking Faye questions about the basement door and
its hand-crafted hardware, but Oscar was hustling her out of the house. Faye saw that it was time to take Oscar on the tour of Joyeuse Island that he wanted so badly.

  But it was a big island. Where should she take him? Faye paused in the open area behind the house, which had been the work yard where Captain Croft’s men were probably fed their hominy and sweet potatoes. Paths led into the woods in three directions.

  She dithered about which one she should take. In the end, she led them down the one leading straight back behind the house first. It took them to the rows of slave cabin foundations she had excavated. Faye had always considered them an impressive sight, stretching for hundreds of feet in two straight lines.

  Delia asked, “Can you tell me how they made the tabby cement for the foundations?”

  Oscar interrupted Faye’s answer with his own demand. “Did anybody live here after the slaves were freed?”

  “Yes. Most of the freed people stayed on as paid workers.”

  “Then she wouldn’t have kept my great-great-grandfather prisoner here, in front of all those people. Let’s move on.”

  They walked to the second trail, which led left toward the remnants of the old outbuildings—kitchen, barn, smokehouse, grain bins, and chicken houses. Delia looked like she would happily amble around the ruins all day. Faye had a soft spot for people who liked old stuff as much as she did.

  Oscar was not inclined to linger. He said, “She wouldn’t have kept him here. People worked here. They would have seen him.” So they moved on.

  They took the third trail, a long path winding to the right, through the eastern part of the island. The island had slowly gone to trees as first Cally and then her daughter, Courtney, had farmed less of its land over time. This end of the island had returned to nature first.

  After young Courtney died in the 1940s, Faye’s grandmother had moved to Tallahassee to take a job as a secretary, and farming on Joyeuse Island had come to an end. Even its youngest trees had been growing for a long time. Nothing on Joyeuse Island except the house could possibly look much like it did in the years just after the Civil War. Faye wasn’t sure what Oscar thought he was looking to find, but this wasn’t it. He was obviously bored as they hiked through endless trees.