Micanopy in Shadow

by Ann Cook

  Caleb Stark’s name appeared in a fulsome article praising his remodeled dry goods store. He had recently acquired the building, according to the article. It included a paragraph about merchandise he planned to stock: clothing, kitchen utensils, dishes, linens, and canned goods. He appeared as a stout, blurry figure, posing hat in hand at the front door and grinning.

  Brandy wrote a summary in her notebook, but she didn’t see that she’d advanced her knowledge. She did have a clearer picture of life in Micanopy when Ada and Hope arrived. She expected to learn more at the University of Florida library.

  * * *

  Early Thursday morning Brandy called her grandmother to report that Snug still refused to sell, that she’d checked the local archives, and would next drive to Gainesville to search the ones at the University of Florida library. Her first chore would be researching World War 1 veterans.

  Again she entrusted Brad to Kyra’s capable care and drove down four-lane U.S. 441, passing Paynes Prairie State Preserve, Lake Wauberg, and the Ecopass observation platform that looked out on the watery prairie. A concrete tunnel under the highway gave animals from alligators to bobcats a safe passageway from one section of the prairie to the other.

  A few minutes later she left her car in a visitor’s slot near the maroon brick Smathers Library on the university campus.

  The Florida special collections departments awed Brandy: row on row of cataloged clipping files, periodicals, and ponderous volumes that dated from the earliest days of the Spanish conquest. An efficient-looking gentleman with wire-rimmed glasses at the front desk explained where she could find the names and records of Alachua County World War I veterans. In a few minutes she sat at a table under the high, gothic windows and basked in the odor of old books. Before her lay three heavy Florida Department of Military Affairs volumes from Special Archives.

  A total of 42,030 Floridian men served in the United States Army during the Great War. Although 1,046 were killed in overseas action, far more died of diseases like lobar pneumonia. The men fought at places like Chateau-Thierry, the Marne, Verdun, and the Argonne, and won eighteen Distinguished Service Crosses for gallantry. Because they often replaced earlier troops, they frequently were transferred.

  By diligent inspection of long lists, she finally zeroed in on three men whose place of residence was given as Micanopy. She expected the first two. Caleb Stark Sr. had enlisted in Georgia and served in infantry Company M 324 at Chateau-Thierry. He’d been slightly wounded and discharged in 1919. Ezekiel Wilson, the esteemed town marshall, also enlisted in Georgia and served in infantry Company H 38 at Champagne-Marne, St. Mihiel, Meure-Argonne, Aisne, and Chateau-Thierry until his discharge in 1919. A veteran of many battles, he was awarded one of the rare Distinguished Service Crosses for gallantry at the Marne. No wonder he had a hero’s reputation.

  The surprise came with the third and last: Adrian Adcock Irons enlisted in Gainesville in 1917 and served as a captain in the infantry. He was severely wounded serving with the 2nd Artillery Brigade at the French town of Cantigny on May 27, 1918. More than a year later, he was discharged from a hospital, as still recuperating.

  All three veterans trained near Macon, Georgia, at Camp Wheeler. A photograph in another volume showed non-commissioned officers from Company H, 124th Infantry at Camp Wheeler in 1917. As Brandy looked at the infantrymen, standing ramrod straight in their high-necked, long-sleeved khaki uniforms and broad leather belts, the tragic deaths of so many young men struck her like a blow.

  She thought of her grandmother’s theory—that somewhere in the loaf of time, all of them exist, even now. She hoped that it was so. After all, Einstein said time is an illusion. Rock weathers and flesh withers, but energy cannot be created—or destroyed.

  She pulled herself back to the here and now. Was one of those Micanopy veterans Ada’s correspondent? Had she come to Micanopy to see him?

  Brandy made her customary careful notes. She needed to follow up on Georgia hospitals, see if she could discover where Ada’s mother worked during the influenza epidemic when it reached Georgia in 1918. The carnage in Europe had finally ceased. If she could identify Ada’s mother, she could identify Ada herself.

  A helpful librarian guided her search of Georgia hospitals in the World War I time period. Thirty minutes at a computer terminal yielded a hospital name that matched “Grady M” on the doll’s label. It operated during World War I—Grady Memorial Hospital of Nursing Training in Atlanta. It was established in 1892 and expanded shortly before the war. This location could explain the Martha Chase cloth doll used to train nurses. Before Brandy gathered up her notebook, she took down a phone number, hoping records of World War I hospital trainees and nurses still existed. A map of Georgia showed the hospital was near Camp Wheeler. Brandy suspected these young men would make their way to Atlanta to meet girls.

  Early that afternoon she again drove down Cholokka Boulevard. Micanopy seemed eerily quiet after the university’s chattering students and the whir of traffic on 441. She had passed the town library when she remembered that Montgomery and Lily Irons were leasing a house on a nearby street. She needed to ask a few questions about Adrian Irons.

  White pillars flanked the front door of the couple’s temporary home, a one-story white frame cottage with a broad screen porch. Brandy rang the bell and listened until the babble of a television talk show ceased, and she heard the telltale click of high heels on wooden floors. Lily Lou swung open the door, wearing a filmy emerald pants suit with low neck. Her round blue eyes widened in surprise, but her smile seemed genuine.

  “How precious of you to drop by, Mrs. Able!” She stepped aside and enveloped Brandy in the sweet scent of her cologne. “Do come in. Monty’s gone. Some business in Ocala. I’m simply bored to death.” A note of restrained petulance crept into her voice. “If we were still in Naples, I’d be at the Club.”

  “Call me Brandy, please.” Brandy edged onto the thick Oriental rug while Lily Lou gently closed the door. “I had some quick questions about your husband’s family,” she said. “Maybe you could answer them.” Lily Lou had flung a Cosmopolitan aside on the chaise lounge and set a glass on the end table beside it. Brandy added, “Am I interrupting anything?”

  Her hostess perched on the edge of the lounge. “Goodness, no. Can I get you something cool to drink?” She giggled. “I’m having a gin and tonic myself. Do sit down.” She reclined again.

  Brandy shook her head—she had to drive home—and sat opposite Lily on a sofa with a carved Victorian frame. “Do go ahead with yours.”

  Lily Lou took a small sip. A delicate gold bracelet set with tiny diamonds slid down one wrist. She leaned back. “And your investigation of Ada Losterman? Going well?”

  Brandy was pleased Lily Lou still was interested. It made questioning her easier. “I just discovered your husband’s grandfather was a World War I veteran—Adrian Adcock Irons. He lived in Micanopy at the time of Ada’s visit.”

  Lily Lou glanced at Brandy’s small notepad and pencil, but seemed to accept them and nodded her perfectly coiffed head. “Oh, yes. Monty’s father said he’d been badly wounded in the war and spent a long time in the hospital. We all talked about how he and his wife took up a collection to bury the poor woman. He even headed the Chamber of Commerce fund drive.”

  Brandy tapped her pencil thoughtfully on the pad. “I’m trying to learn as much as I can about life here soon after the war. Does your husband have any family photographs? Mr. Irons showed my husband pictures of their family homestead taken about the same time.”

  As Lily set her glass down again, Brandy admired her perfect manicure. The coral nails might, of course, be artificial. Brandy tended to forget the endless possibilities a woman of such leisure had to indulge herself. Lily looked like the sort who took frequent spa vacations. Even at home alone, her hair was stylishly bouffant. Now she rose, went into an adjoining room, disappeared into a
closet, and emerged carrying two large, leather-bound volumes, dates stamped in gold on the binding.

  “Monty would just adore for you to see these, I know.” She dropped onto the sofa beside Brandy. “He’s awfully proud of his family you know—both sides—lovely people—although, of course, the Montgomeries lost their fortune during the big citrus freeze of the late 1800s. His mother’s people, of course. He’s named for them. But they stayed on in the area, many of them.”

  Brandy understood Southern people’s dedication to family. It could work in her favor with Lily Lou and Montgomery.

  Lily’s long slender fingers were turning through the first heavy album. The photographs were carefully mounted in large, white-framed ovals on acid-free, archival pages, and held in place by sheet protectors.

  “This is the founder of the family in Florida,” Lily Lou said, pointing to the long, solemn face of a bearded gentleman with bushy eyebrows and narrow head. “He’s the veteran of the War Between the States, almost killed at the Battle of Atlanta. Came from the Macon area. The Yankees took almost all the family cotton and everything else.” She shook her head mournfully. “Property that was left went to his older brothers. He’s the one settled in this area. The government had cleared out the Indians and opened it up for settlement. Oh, he carved out acres and acres of land around here.”

  The Civil War veteran had an interesting face, Brandy admitted, but he was too early to be of help.

  Lily Lou flipped to the next page. “Here’s Monty’s grandfather and his wife.”

  For the second time Brandy gazed down at Adrian Irons’ long nose, neatly clipped hair, and trim black mustache. The first photograph showed him in a heavy khaki uniform, his head and neck erect, the same lean face, the same somber eyes. In the second he wore a white scarf looped about his neck and a black hat. A faint smile curved his lips, but the eyes belied it. In the archives photograph she had not noticed his dark, haunted eyes. What had Adrian Irons seen to engender that look? But after all, he’d been severely wounded in France. The photograph in the archives would be a later one, after he had a baby son. But in neither could she honestly say she found a resemblance to Hope.

  “And here’s his wife, Sybil Ann. Like I said, she was a Montgomery. Lovely family. They were quality, even if they’d lost their money.”

  Brandy looked with interest at the face of the woman who had been kind enough to raise funds for her great-grandmother’s burial. She had noted earlier the firm chin. Sybil Ann Irons must have had courage. Her expression was grave, like most portraits made in those days when subjects had to pose for lengthy periods. She had severely cut dark hair, fair skin, and a broad, foreshortened face. Her eyes were almost as intense as her husband’s, her lips down-turned. No one could have called the woman pretty, but perhaps handsome. She had chosen to wear a high-necked white blouse with frills down the front and embroidery on the raised collar.

  “She looks like a woman who would accomplish whatever she set out to do,” Brandy said.

  Lily Lou tittered. “She set out to marry Adrian. That’s what she accomplished. The story is, people say, that Sybil Ann set her cap for him in dancing class when they were in seventh grade. He liked dancing about as much as most boys his age. They’d all rather be out hunting in the piney woods. They say she started her hope chest then. By the time she married Adrian after the war, she already had her Francis I silver and all her table linen. Of course, the families were both delighted with the match.”

  Brandy wondered fleetingly if Adrian—home from a brutal war and not long out of the hospital—had much to do with the decision to marry. Of course, he must have.

  “They were engaged—or at least had an understanding—before he left. Sybil planned it all from the beginning.”

  A true Southern belle, the proverbial steel magnolia, Brandy thought, rather like the present Mrs. Irons. Brandy had never believed Lily Lou was as frivolous as she appeared. Underneath that facade, a bright curiosity could surface.

  “And did Montgomery’s father have brothers and sisters?”

  “No. An only child, you know, like Monty, and our own son. The Irons men only seem to father sons.” She made the remark with pride, as if siring males was proof of virility. Lily Lou hurried through a few more pages, and Brandy caught a glimpse of a small photograph of Adrian standing beside a car.

  “Hold on a second,” Brandy said. “I’d like a better look at the last picture.” She studied the four-door, black car with square body, headlights, and running board. “What make of car is that? Do you know?”

  Lily turned on past it. “Monty says it’s an Oldsmobile. He says his grandparents bought it in 1920.” Brandy made a note.

  Her hostess closed the album. Her huge eyes glanced up searchingly. “But you haven’t told me what you’re finding out about, you know, when Ada Losterman went to her reward—I mean, how it happened.”

  Southern belles did not speak directly of death. People “passed on,” “went to their eternal rest,” “departed this life,” or as in this case, “went to their reward.” Ada’s reward was paradise, according to the monument donor, unlike her tormentors, who would go “below.”

  “Haven’t learned much yet,” Brandy replied, not quite truthfully, folding over the cover on her notepad and tucking it back into her canvas bag. “But I’m on the track of a few leads. Discovering Ada’s identity is key. I’ve got the name of a hospital where her mother might have worked. If they still have records, I could discover her parents’ names. Also a man—probably a soldier—wrote her an affectionate letter during the war. I need to check further about that. There’s another possible lead. A black maid might have witnessed the drowning and been afraid to talk. I’m hoping to meet someone in her family.” Brandy paused. “We know that the dry goods store owner, the senior Caleb Stark, met Ada. Suspicious activities took place at the store in those days. I’m also curious about the town marshall, Zeke Wilson. He also spent time with Ada, although he didn’t tell the Sheriff. I wonder why?”

  “I don’t know much about the Wilsons,” Lily Lou said, shaking her head. “But the Starks are tacky-tacky. Nothing but Florida crackers. I hope she didn’t have anything to do with any of them.”

  “Not voluntarily, I’m sure,” Brandy said. She agreed with Lily Lou’s assessment, at least of the old man. Even so, the Starks did seem a literate crew.

  “Adrian was an educated man, I guess?”

  “Goodness, yes. He went to one of the best prep schools and then to the Citadel in Charleston. He served as an Army officer.”

  Brandy’s mind turned back to Caleb Stark. “Could I look at your phone book a minute?”

  Lily Lou nodded and rose gracefully. She set the volumes on a maple drop leaf table in the corner. It held a framed photograph of a young man in a blue uniform. Lily Lou followed her gaze. “Monty Jr. He’s at Camden Military Academy in South Carolina.” Brandy recognized his father’s heavy features, as yet without jowls. “He’ll be home for Thanksgiving.”

  Lily Lou disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a phone. While she carried the albums back into the closet, Brandy turned to the page that listed the Starks. She quickly found Caleb, pulled her notepad out of her canvas bag, and jotted down the few other Starks in Micanopy

  “May I borrow your phone, too? I’d like to speak to someone in the Stark family besides the drug store owner and his grandson.” She held out her list of names. “Could you look at this list and tell me who’s the oldest family member on it, besides old man Stark?”

  Lily Lou wrinkled her nose prettily, but she accepted Brandy’s notepaper. “Goodness.” She studied the first name. “That’s Caleb Stark’s youngest granddaughter. I once saw her sitting on the back of a motorcycle and smoking. How tacky is that?” She looked further and set one coral nail on the third name, Cora Mae Stark. “Well, I think this is Caleb Stark’s elderly sister-
in-law.” Brandy recognized the address on a street well removed from Cholokka Boulevard, where people of “quality” lived.

  Brandy dialed. The woman who answered sounded halting and querulous. At first she seemed to speak to herself. “Can’t stand these blamed things. Family made me put one in. Hello! Hello! Can you hear me?”

  Brandy affirmed that she could. “Mrs. Stark,” she said quietly, “I’d like to talk to you. I’m a writer who’s working on a story about the history of Micanopy.” She glanced over at Lily Lou, but her hostess had stretched out on the chaise lounge again, picked up the Cosmopolitan, and did not appear to be listening. She might not have caught Brandy’s only partial truth.

  After a pause the thin voice said, “I reckon. Ain’t got nothing better to do this afternoon.”

  Brandy fell back into the Southern idiom she’d almost eliminated. “I’ll be there directly,” she said.

  When she hung up and handed the phone back, Lily Lou sighed. “You’ve learned a lot already. It’s all so exciting! Do you think that law officer’s murder had anything to do with your investigation? The paper said you had an appointment with him.”

  Brandy stood to leave. “I think his death was related to Ada Losterman. I think her death was the first murder.”

  She only wished the Sheriff’s Office agreed.

  TEN

  Cora Mae Stark lived in a small, white frame house with win dows on both sides of the front door. A giant oak spread over the roof and yard, softening its plain façade. Brandy mounted the lone concrete step and rang the bell. A white-haired woman, badly bent with osteoporosis, opened the door. She looked up at Brandy with a pair of shrewd, bright blue eyes. A loose-fitting smock shrouded her misshapen body, and she wore frayed bedroom slippers.