My Life Before Me

by Norah McClintock

  “What about Patrice LaSalle’s murder?” I asked.

  The older of the two agents smiled.

  “On top of the charges against Hicks relating to you,” he said, “we have him dead to rights for perjury and tampering with evidence in a capital case. And those photos of LaSalle’s body—the ones that show the body was tied down with cable and that the cable was cut—we sweated Hicks on that too.”

  “Did you talk to Alma, the woman who gave me the pictures?”

  “She’s been cleaning that office for a long time. She cleared out Sheriff Beale’s stuff when he retired, and she found these pictures. But she didn’t know what to do with them. She didn’t trust the sheriff’s office, not after the lynching. She didn’t trust the authorities at all. She didn’t know who to show them to—until you came along.”

  “And?”

  The agent’s smile widened to a satisfied grin. “At a minimum, that’s accessory after the fact. Could even be conspiracy to commit murder. We put them all together for him, told him straight that we don’t think we’ll have much trouble finding a judge who will impose penalties for each crime consecutively instead of concurrently, in which case he could be in prison for the rest of his life, and—”

  “And he cracked,” the second agent said.

  “He knows he’s going away. He doesn’t want to end up somewhere where there are a lot of black prisoners. He wants to make a deal—at the very least, he wants protective custody.”

  “And?” My heart was doing another sprint. Had they really gotten to the bottom of what happened?

  “He gave up the murderer.”

  I glanced at Maggie. She didn’t say anything.

  “He says it was Chisholm,” the older agent said. He gave Maggie a sharp look. “You remember our deal, right?”

  “Not a word of anything you say gets reported until an arrest is made,” Maggie said dutifully.

  The older agent turned back to me. “Patrice LaSalle and Chisholm’s daughter, Ellie, were seeing each other. Ellie kept it secret from her father because she knew how he felt about LaSalle, largely because he was friendly with Jefferson. But he found out. He says he went looking for him. Met up with him along the river, not far from where Hicks lives. Says when he told LaSalle to stay away from his daughter, LaSalle tried to blackmail him.”

  “Blackmail him?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “How?”

  “Didn’t say. Wants to talk to a lawyer before he’ll say another word. But Hicks says, from the looks of it when he got there—”

  “Did Mr. Chisholm call him?”

  The agent gave a wry smile. “That’s the one chance thing. The only one. Hicks drove by on his way home and recognized Chisholm and stopped to see if he needed help. From what he says, it looks like Chisholm really went at the victim with a piece of pipe. Apparently, there was some old machinery abandoned down there at the time. Anyway, Hicks agreed to help him dispose of the body.”

  “With some of that old machinery—a pulley and some wire.”

  The agent nodded.

  “Nobody was supposed to know what happened,” he said. “The idea was that everyone would figure LaSalle had left town.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Why would he help dispose of the body?”

  The agent sighed. “Hicks was in love with Ellie. He thought he was helping his future father-in-law get rid of the competition.”

  “So why did he cut the wire and then say he’d found the body? To frame Jefferson?”

  “He says he did it when he found out that Chisholm had no intention of letting his daughter spend time with, much less marry, a nonentity like Hicks. He wanted to get even. So he cut the wire, ‘found’ the body and went to Beale with the discovery. He thought it would make him a hero to Ellie. He didn’t figure that Chisholm had Beale in his pocket.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Chisholm contacted Beale. Beale made the cable disappear and replaced it with rope. And the two of them cooked up the idea of blaming Jefferson—anything to clear Chisholm. If Hicks went along, Chisholm guaranteed him that he’d back him for sheriff after Beale retired, which is exactly what happened the following year. Hicks claims he was also promised he could take his chances with Ellie. But before that could happen, she died.”

  Something clattered to the floor, making everyone jump. Mrs. Jefferson had dropped a pot.

  “Then it really is true?” There were tears in her eyes. “My son really was innocent?”

  “It looks that way, ma’am,” the older agent said. “We just have to get all our ducks in a row, and then, I can assure you, there will be arrests, there will be prosecutions, and every effort will be made to clear your son’s name.”

  Mrs. Jefferson began to weep in earnest. Daniel did his best to comfort her, but she said, “They’re tears of joy, child. Tears of joy.”

  There was an almost immediate uproar in town. Mr. Chisholm was arrested and denied bail. The town was divided when the picture of the lynching was printed—in Maggie’s newspaper, along with a feature article by Maggie. Some people were shocked. Others thought that because it had happened so long ago, it was best forgotten.

  “There’s no statute of limitations on murder,” Maggie said grimly. “And Chisholm has been charged with two of them. Forget about his political career and his businesses—he’s going to be locked up for the rest of his life.”

  Mrs. Jefferson kept thanking me. When I decided it was time for me to head back to Toronto to write my story, Mrs. Jefferson insisted on making me a farewell supper. It was a sumptuous feast—chicken and three kinds of vegetables, a garden salad, homemade pie and ice cream. I had never eaten so well or so much. Mrs. Jefferson hugged me and kissed me and told me that she’d never been so blessed to meet someone as she was when she met me. No one had ever said anything like that to me before.

  I found Mr. Standish at home, drinking his morning coffee on his back verandah. He invited me to join him and asked if I was hungry. I shook my head and took a seat across from him at the little table. I pulled out the handwritten note I’d found attached to the medical examiner’s report. I knew from all the other handwritten notes in the file that this particular one had been written by Sheriff Beale.

  Mr. Standish scanned it. His face was expressionless when he handed it back to me.

  “You’re a doctor,” I said. “A medical doctor.”

  “Was,” he said.

  “It says there that the coroner requested that you examine the body when it was found, but you refused.”

  “That’s right.”

  I couldn’t even begin to decipher his thoughts. There were no clues at all on his face.

  “Why don’t people call you doctor?” I asked.

  “Because I’m retired. And because I don’t like to be called that anymore.”

  “Why did you refuse to examine the body?”

  “Because I didn’t want to get involved.”

  I stared at him. He didn’t want to get involved?

  “Involved in what?”

  “Involved in whatever happened to that man.” He set down his coffee cup and laid one hand on each knee. “I knew the minute those two arrived in town that there was going to be trouble.”

  “Because of the lynching?”

  “Because of how people felt about Jefferson. Because of the way he carried himself—justifiably, in my opinion. The man volunteered to go and fight in that war. He saw action, and, from what I heard, he acquitted himself well. It’s a fact, even if people didn’t like that.”

  “I don’t understand.” It had been baffling me ever since I’d arrived in town. “Why did people get so upset about someone who just wanted what everyone else had?” The most important of those things, I knew now, was respect.

  “I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times, maybe more.” He looked deep into my eyes, and I sensed there was something he wanted to tell me. But all he said was, “Some people think that the mo
re someone else gets, the less there is for them.”

  “Did you know that Mr. Jefferson didn’t kill Mr. LaSalle?”

  “I suspected it. I couldn’t think why he would. But there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t prove anything.”

  “Maybe if you’d agreed to examine the body,” I suggested.

  “Maybe.” He shook his head. “The way it works here, when a body is found, the sheriff calls the county coroner. In the state of Indiana, coroners are not required to be medical doctors, and most of them aren’t. They’re unqualified elected officials. And in this county, if you want to get elected, you’re beholden to Mr. John Chisholm. It’s up to the coroner whether or not to order an autopsy. Then it’s up to him how to proceed from there. I didn’t see the point of getting involved. All I would have discovered is that LaSalle had been murdered and dumped into the river.”

  “You might have found out something else,” I said. I told him about the cable that had secured the body. “If you’d seen the body, you might have seen that Hicks lied.”

  Mr. Standish looked down for a long time. His expression was somber when he faced me again.

  “I guess you could say that not only did I not want to get involved, but I also didn’t want to know. I had a comfortable living here. Good patients. Decent remuneration for what I did. Nice house.” He glanced around, and I had to agree: it was a nice house on a nice piece of property. The kind of house a lot of people dream of owning one day. “I don’t mind telling you that I’m ashamed of myself. I was a coward, and I know it. But it was all in the past. No one talked about it anymore, and I was able to put it mostly out of my mind. And then you showed up.”

  I wanted to understand. In a way, I thought maybe I did. But I promised myself that I would never commit the same sin. I would never be afraid to do the right thing. I didn’t want to go through life hating myself or regretting decisions I’d made. I got up to leave.

  “Sit a minute,” Mr. Standish said. “I want to tell you something.”

  Curious, I sat.

  “It’s about Ellie Chisholm. You know she was seeing LaSalle behind her father’s back.”

  I nodded.

  “She was completely hysterical when his body was found. Her father told her that he’d paid LaSalle off, that he gave him a lot of money to get out of town and leave her alone. I have no doubt she believed him. John Chisholm was a rich and powerful man then, and he’s richer and more powerful now. Anyway, Chisholm called me to the house. He wanted me to give her a sedative. That’s when I found out.”

  “Found out what?”

  “She was pregnant.”

  I stared at him.

  “She told me it was LaSalle’s baby, but that her father didn’t know yet. She made me promise not to tell her father, even though we both knew that it was only a matter of time before he found out. Sure enough, about two months later, Chisholm announced that he was sending Ellie away for a while, that she needed to get out of town after everything that had happened. She didn’t come back for nearly a year.”

  “When she came back, did she have…?” I couldn’t make myself finish the question.

  “Did she have the baby with her? No. The baby was never mentioned, but later, when I did a routine physical examination of her, it was clear that she’d had the baby. I suppose she put it up for adoption.”

  I could hardly breathe.

  “That would have been her father’s decision,” Mr. Standish said. “Not Ellie’s. When she came back, she wasn’t the same. She was thin and pale. She hardly ever left the house. She made several suicide attempts. And finally she succeeded. Of course, no one knows that. As far as anyone is concerned, her death was accidental.” Before I could ask how that could be, he said, “I signed the death certificate.” I leaned forward. “I didn’t know who you were for sure until you headed for Freemount. You have your mother’s coloring, but you resemble your father—quite a lot.”

  You resemble your father. Those were words that I never imagined I would hear.

  “Do you really think…?” Again, I couldn’t finish. It couldn’t be true. Not after a whole lifetime of wondering.

  “You could take a blood test. I have both of their blood types on record. But I’m as sure as I can be. You’re the right age. And you look exactly like him.”

  I sat for a long time on Mr. Standish’s porch. For a while we were both silent. I couldn’t wrap my mind around what I’d just learned. Then Mr. Standish started talking again. He told me everything he knew about Ellie, which turned out to be a lot because he delivered her into the world. He told me about Ellie’s mother and about John Chisholm. He knew so much about that family after having been their family doctor for a lifetime. He told me, too, what he knew about Patrice LaSalle. It wasn’t nearly as much, but it was a lot more than I’d known.

  “He was a good man,” Mr. Standish said. “A fair man. And he didn’t let anyone change his mind about what he thought was right.”

  I drank in every word. When I got up to leave, Mr. Standish stood too, and before I could stop myself, I was hugging him.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.”

  There were tears in his eyes too, but I suspected that his were tears of regret.

  I had my bag packed and was waiting for the Justice Department agents on Maggie’s porch. Maggie came out of the house with something in a brown paper bag.

  “Sandwiches for the ride home,” she said. “And some cookies. Homemade.”

  I thanked her. There was no avoiding what I had to say, and it was now or never.

  “About that picture, the one of the lynching,” I began. “There was a stamp on the back of it, Maggie.”

  “I know. I saw it.”

  The stamp was in red ink and identified the photo as Ledger property.

  “Daniel told me he once asked your father if he could go through old papers to find out about the lynching. He said he overheard his mother mention it,” I told her. “Your father said okay. But when Daniel looked, there were papers missing. Just like there were papers missing for TJ’s arrest and trial. It could be just a coincidence.”

  “Could be,” Maggie said. She gazed out over the street before turning to me. “My father took that picture, Cady.”

  I stared at her, dumbfounded. “How do you know that?”

  “The writing on the back of the photo. Those are his initials. The same initials are on all the photos in the files downstairs. My father took them all. He only ever kept one print. If someone wanted something printed off a negative, my dad would do it for ten or fifteen cents. But he never signed those ones. Never. So how did Beale end up with it?”

  We looked at each other. I think we both knew the answer. Maggie’s brief smile was followed by a long sigh.

  “You think you know a person,” she said. “Especially when it’s a parent. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years on this earth, it’s that kids know a lot less about their parents than they think they do. When you’re a kid, you only notice certain things. I never knew that a man had been lynched in this town. No one ever talked about it. Now that I know what happened, I’m going to have to try to find out more. I have to find out what role my father played. I don’t know that I want to know, but I need to know.”

  “I’m sorry, Maggie,” I said.

  She hugged me tightly.

  “Send me your story when you’ve finished it. I want to read it. Promise?”

  I promised.

  The Justice Department agents drove me to the jail, where they said I could have a couple of minutes with Mr. Chisholm. They brought him into an interview room and handcuffed him to an iron ring attached to the table, which was bolted to the floor.

  “What do you want?” Mr. Chisholm demanded. He spoke in a tone I imagined he used on his household help. “Come here to gloat, have you?”

  I told myself that I wasn’t sure what I wanted. But that wasn’t true. I wanted to know.

  My voice trembled whe
n I finally asked my question: “Do you know who I am?”

  Mr. Chisholm’s lips curled into a sneer.

  “She should have gotten rid of you. God knows that’s what I wanted. And God knows I wish I’d made sure she did.”

  I forced myself to stay calm. I was going to say what I was going to say. There would be plenty of time to cry later, where he couldn’t see me. Where no one could see me.

  “Did they tell you who found the picture?” I asked.

  “What picture?”

  “The one that either you gave to Sheriff Beale or he found somewhere at the scene.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  But he did. It was in his eyes. Defiance. Not shame.

  “LaSalle had it, didn’t he?” I knew I was right.

  “It was Nearing, the idiot!”

  He meant Maggie’s father.

  “That Frenchie sweet-talked him into a trip down memory lane. Nearing claims he hadn’t been drinking when he produced that picture for him, but if you ask me, that leaves him with no damn excuse for doing it at all.”

  “You told LaSalle you didn’t want him around your daughter; he told you he had the picture. He was going to show it to Ellie, wasn’t he?”

  His face twisted with hatred. I thought he was going to spit at me.

  “He asked me if Ellie really knew what kind of man she was living with.”

  “Everyone I talked to about her said she was sweet. She was nice. She must have been if you were so afraid of what was going to happen if she saw that picture, if she saw the smile on your face in it.”

  He stared at me, silent.

  “You know what you did is wrong. And you didn’t want her to know.”

  He dismissed me with a shake of his head.

  “You turned out to be a troublemaker,” he said. “You’re just like your father.”

  I couldn’t help it. I was proud.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many, many thanks to Teresa Toten and Eric Walters for taking the lead on the Secrets books and for inviting me along for the ride. A special thanks to Andrew Wooldridge for aiding and abetting the endeavor, and to Sarah Harvey, the series editor, whom I am beginning to think of as “long-suffering Sarah.” And, of course, a shout-out to the other authors involved: Kelley Armstrong, Vicki Grant, Marthe Jocelyn and Kathy Kacer.