Perhaps if Papa had fixed the front hall door I wouldn’t have been so quick about closing the dining room door and nothing would have happened to Nell. Perhaps if he had replaced the missing pane with another piece of frosted, quilty-patterned glass . . .
Nell was so pretty. We have a tinted portrait of her, with her dark blue eyes and her chestnut hair. She always kept it tied back with a red ribbon. I’ve preferred to wear my hair up, after the fashions of Charles Dana Gibson. People used to bother me and tell me that the styles had changed, that I looked old-fashioned and queer. But what does it matter? I never leave the house anymore. I see no one but family. I know folks in Elizabeth City think I’m distracted and have thought it for years. It hurt me once, but now, what does it matter? I have a queasy stomach and take sick easily and have no wish to embarrass myself in public. So let the people of Elizabeth City talk as they will. Let the little girls come and try to catch a glimpse of me through the curtains because they’ve heard I’m a madwoman.
I will always dress in the Gibson fashion because it is a handsome way.
I will always grieve for Nellie.
After I closed the door behind her, I sat down and continued a conversation with my caller, Roy Crawford. That was five or ten minutes past eleven. We heard Nell’s and Jim’s steps out in the hall. Roy went on telling me some story or another, and I believe he might have gone on all night, but at half-past I interrupted him and told him it was time to go.
I couldn’t understand Nell’s staying out with Jim so long. She had scarcely looked at him all evening long.
—Don’t get snappy, Roy said to me. Jim and Nell are out there yet.
I thought perhaps they had gone into the front parlor on the other side of the hall for a little more privacy and warmth than the hall allowed.
—I don’t care if they are, Roy. You’ve got to make the first move, I said.
I worried that Papa might wake up and lose his temper. How many times over the years have I heard him say that he wished to God he hadn’t stopped the townspeople from lynching Jim Wilcox when they came to our house with torches and ropes and asked him to lead their march to the jail?
—Well, there’s no good being snappy, Roy said again. While he fetched his coat and hat, I put cups and saucers on the dining room table for Thursday’s breakfast. When I finished, Roy rolled a cigaret and asked to be let out.
The vestibule door with its missing pane was open. The outside front door was open, too, and the screen door was loose and slapping back and forth in the wind. There was no sign of Nellie or Jim, so I thought he must have gone on home and that she was upstairs in bed. It was between 11:35 and 11:40 when Roy Crawford left our home.
I thought it odd, Nell’s leaving me to shut up the house alone. I went upstairs to the front bedroom, the one above the sitting room, and spoke with Carrie, who was still awake. We looked out the large front window and watched Roy walking away in the moonlight toward town, till at last the small red glow from his cigaret vanished in the night. After a bit I went into the upstairs hall and sat unlacing my shoes by the lamp when I heard Papa rolling over and getting out of bed. Carrie’s and my talking must have awakened him. I ran down to the back of the house, to the room over the kitchen which Nell and I shared.
She wasn’t there.
I climbed into an empty bed at quarter to twelve and lay there worrying. I could hear Papa rattling around in the kitchen below after going out to the privy. When the courthouse clock struck midnight, Nell still hadn’t come in. Papa came upstairs just then, and shortly afterwards I fell asleep.
I had been in a doze for a bit, but I woke up hearing the dogs chasing toward the barn barking.
—Get your gun! Uncle Henry called to Papa from downstairs. I sat bolt upright and felt the bed for Nell. She still wasn’t there and I ran out into the upstairs hall crying,
—Papa, don’t shoot! Nell and Jim are down in the front hall yet! Then the whole house was awake and terribly upset and Nell was nowhere to be found.
We searched everywhere, under the house and around the house and all over it, but all we found was a parasol lying on the floor in the cold front hall. We were all crying. Papa told Mama not to worry, Nell had probably eloped with Jim Wilcox. He and Uncle Henry decided to go over to the Wilcox home and find out what had happened.
When they got back, Papa said he’d gone for Chief Dawson since all Jim would say was that he’d left Nell on the front porch. He and Uncle Henry kept searching and calling outdoors, tripping over the barking bird dogs. We watched from inside, trying to make them out in the moonlight.
Before too long there was a knock at the front door, and Chief Dawson brought Jim Wilcox in. Mama begged him to tell her where Nellie was. How could he not know? Jim took hold of one of the drapes and bunched it up in his left hand. Mama held him by the arm and said later that he was shaking.
—Jim, she begged him, for my sake and your mother’s, tell me where Nell is.
He said he left her on the porch crying, that he’d told her to go in the house because she’d catch cold out there with so little on. He said he was going on over to town to meet some men and Nellie answered that she didn’t care. Jim told Mama he could hear Nellie crying yet when he got to the front gate, eight or ten yards from the porch steps. He said it was a mystery to him.
I watched Jim Wilcox’s hand shaking as he held the curtain and talked.
Chief Dawson left, promising to look into it in the morning when he could make out tracks on the ground outside if it were not frozen too hard for that.
Papa and Uncle Henry were halloing and crying out down by the rivershore, and once their calling stepped up so much we all thought Nell must have been found and rushed to the window to see. I could swear Jim hit his fist into his other hand right then. But it was a false alarm. Mama cried and said this just wasn’t like Nell.
And it wasn’t. I tried to remember back just a few hours, when Roy and I were talking, waiting for Nell to return. I hadn’t heard a sound from Nell and Jim after those few steps in the hall, no sound except the wind blowing hard. It wasn’t like Nell at all. She was timid—you couldn’t get her to walk to the back steps without company.
They say that when the wind takes a mind to, it howls up the Pasquotank River like a banshee. I can hear it like that now, though we left that house we called Seven Pines in 1903, over thirty years ago. I hear that banshee wind and my closing the hall door behind Nell and Jim. I hear Roy’s irritated remarks to me and the chinabell rattle of the cups against the saucers as I set the dining room table for a breakfast we never ate.
These details make up the moment which has become my life.
DENIAL
As hard as they asked and begged, just that hard he swore he didn’t know, swore he knew no more than any of the rest there in the house by the Pasquotank River, bathed in moonlight. This was Nell’s suitor and her only sweetheart since her family had moved south from Brooklyn, but he pled ignorance and offered no relief or hope or explanation.
—It’s a mystery to me, Jim Wilcox said, and in so doing exacerbated the as yet unspoken fear that would go forth from the Cropsey house and engulf the town of Elizabeth City, drawing its people into an angry and desperate crusade to find the missing girl whom time and memory have honored: Beautiful Nell Cropsey.
SUSPICION
Jim Wilcox went home with the dawn that rolls into Elizabeth City from the sea beaches of Dare and Currituck, across the North River peach orchards, the potato fields row by row, the sorry-lot realm of the migrants. Almost as soon as he got home, Chief Dawson came and arrested him on general suspicion in the matter of Nell Cropsey’s mysterious disappearance. Jim told his story again, how he left her crying on the porch, and it seemed that he was repeating the same small-change details over and over and he was getting tired of doing it. He finally wore out the Chief, who let him go on dog-tired to his job. By then it was near noon on Thursday, November 21st, 1901, and his girl had been missing for twelve hours.
In those days Jim worked over at Hayman’s Marine Railways, one of the town’s shipyard and drydock outfits that were booming since some Baltimore moneymen had reopened the Dismal Swamp Canal. The Pasquotank River through Elizabeth City was the southern entrance to the canal, which connected the Albemarle Sound with Norfolk and the Chesapeake Bay. Trade through town was up a quarter again over what it had been before the canal reopened in ‘99, and now there were machine shops and boatyards all along the waterfront.
Jim was one of a couple of dozen hands at Hayman’s, and though he carried too much bulk on his 5’2" frame, Hayman said that Wilcox was a right strong bull considering his size. He never had trouble or did any slacking when it came to toting steel-heavy oak timbers about the boatworks. He also ran a small engine there, rigged for hauling boats of every size and condition up the railways into drydock for scraping and caulking and patching and refitting and painting. Hayman said Jim was strong and no slacker.
But he did have a reputation for combativeness and a vile temper. Folks recalled how he carried snakes and toads around in his pockets. He played baseball on one of the town teams and he was a member of a volunteer fire brigade, but he didn’t have much in the way of friends. It didn’t seem to bother him. He knew some people didn’t like him because his family were Republicans. And then there was his uncle James Wilcox that Jim was named for, who had killed a man.
Jim Wilcox had scarcely gotten back to work at Hayman’s shipyard when here came Chief Dawson early in the afternoon with a warrant for his arrest on the charge of abduction of Ella Maud Cropsey, sworn out against him by her father, William H. Cropsey. Jim would be coming, the Chief said, to a hearing that was being set up on the matter right then by Teddy Wilson, the big-eared, fat man Democrat mayor who was also a justice of the peace.
—I’ve told my part already, said Wilcox.
—Well, you’ll tell it again, then, the Chief told him.
Word had begun to get around, and men packed into Mayor Wilson’s offices to hear Jim and Mr. Cropsey and Ollie Cropsey all tell what had happened the night before.
People didn’t believe Jim’s saying that all he knew was what he was telling, that he had gone home to bed where Chief Dawson had later come and found him.
—Why did you leave her on the porch? they asked him.
—I told her to go on in, she’d catch cold if she didn’t, Jim said.
—Why didn’t you see her back to the door and see her safe inside? they asked.
—If I’d a known all this trouble was going to come of it, Jim Wilcox answered, I would have.
I would have.
By the time the hearing broke up on Thursday, November 21st, 1901, everyone in Elizabeth City over five years old was talking about the case of Nell Cropsey. Men who had filled Mayor Wilson’s office went home disgruntled because Jim Wilcox, the ex-sheriff’s boy, had been arrested twice and turned loose twice and the girl was still missing. They had talked to Jim Wilcox all night at the Cropsey house, all morning at the police station, all afternoon at the hearing, and there was no evidence that Jim Wilcox had done anything but leave a girl crying on a porch and go home to sleep.
Chief Dawson sent a wire off Thursday night to a man who lived in Suffolk, Virginia, on the far side of the Great Dismal Swamp. The man called himself a detective, and people said he owned the two best bloodhounds in the whole state of Virginia.
HURRICANE BRANCH
Out of the great swamp to Elizabeth City’s north and east, way before the train’s arrival in town, came its whistling and rumbling and echoing out of the wilderness, as if it were a stout log rolling slowly over a sheet of tin that was the sky, its rumbling soon become a roaring that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
They called it the Elizabeth City and Norfolk Railroad when the line opened in the early eighties, with the steam engine W. G. Dominick that could make the trip between the two towns in an hour. But once the line was extended west to Edenton on the Chowan River, the line’s directors thought they ought to rename the road after the direction in which it was growing—so now they called it the Norfolk and Southern. The citizens of Elizabeth City fumed and blustered at having their town’s name dropped from the railroad line, but the new name stood, and the cash rolled into Elizabeth City as more goods and produce rolled out. The town’s population tripled between the coming of the railroad and the turn of the century. Elizabeth City prospered and forgave the railroad and got used to the rumble that echoed out of the swamp, signaling the approach of the train.
The depot and train yard sat beside the Pasquotank River’s horseshoe bend, with a half-dozen sidings and a big wharf where railway agents dealt with the farm produce brought upriver, the profusion of vegetable baskets, boxes, and barrels come in by mothboat, sloop, and schooner, and with the goods bound south on the side-wheelers and lumber boats toward Albemarle Sound and the hundreds of creeks and glades along its periphery. The train yards were neat and handsome and all landscaped with bushes and willow trees whose long, tapering branches brushed the ground and the fence at the yard’s edge along Pennsylvania Avenue beyond. Over sidings, switches, telegraph poles, stacks of ties, shovels, and crowbars, from early spring to late fall, the great swelling stream from the fields poured in.
By the time the morning train, the 11:40, had pulled to a stop on Friday, November 22d, 1901, a town crowd had already turned out, curious to see what sort of man their popular police chief had telegraphed off for and to see what sort of dogs that man would bring with him.
There was no mistaking any other Norfolk and Southern passenger for Hurricane Branch, who wore a blue-black wool uniform with small brass buttons. Across his front was a brace of pistols.
The citizens of Elizabeth City gave Hurricane Branch a hand as he stepped down off the train, and he smiled at the reception he was getting. Chief Dawson stepped forward to shake hands, and they walked together back to the baggage car. Hurricane Branch knocked on the big door till it rolled open and there was the baggage master holding a tether tied to two big bloodhounds. Branch made the throng back up and clear some space for his dogs and then got them down off the baggage car. A boy turned to his friends, held his hands a foot or more apart, and said in wonder,
—They ears that long.
Hurricane Branch with his dogs and Chief Dawson and his town crowd began the mile-and-a-half trek over to the Cropsey house, their route following the horseshoe bend of the Pasquotank, never more than several hundred yards away from the black river. Pennsylvania Avenue, thick with the piney planing-mill smells, turned into Poindexter Street and crossed Poindexter Creek bridge into one of the main business areas of the town. That was right by the Crystal Ice and Coal Company that blew up the previous July. But look at em now, somebody said, it takes em three wagons to handle all their trade.
Over the bridge there was Poindexter Street’s amalgam of enterprises, including not only a host of dry goods, grocery, and confectionery shops, but also a marble works, a meat market, a cigar factory, a barber shop with a stuffed owl on a stand in the window, a fish market, Munden and Alexander’s Awning Works, two bicycle shops, one of which also specialized in phonographs, White’s Feed and Seed, the Chinese laundry, Crank’s Bowling Alley, Walker’s Millinery, and Tran Harris’s bakery.
Branch’s parade marched south past the shops, past the Cotton Club Dance Hall, on across Main Street, and gathered momentum as shop customers and keepers alike fell in with the excitement that two prize hounds were pulling through the heart of the river town. More came from the post office and joined, more still from the new turreted Citizens’ Bank whose leafy shield high above the street pridefully said 1899. Then by the old opera house, now fallen into disuse—more than one had wondered aloud about a theater built atop of an icehouse anyway.
And then, bearing left, Branch’s parade crossed the Tiber Creek bog and mire with its pools of heavy green scum-covered stagnant water and the smell of sewage even in the cold November. Over the short brid
ge toward Dog Corner, where all hands at W. W. Griffin’s Flour and Grist and Saw Mill, including Griffin himself, rushed to the doors and windows to gaze, not without awe, at the throng bearing down upon them.
—Let’s go see can we help out, boys, said Griffin, and there was no more grinding that day.
And so on over the Charles Creek swivel bridge to what they called Dry Point, past Fowler’s Net and Twine Mill and the collection of marine railways and the Kramer Sawmill. It was after noon as the crowd rambled down the rivershore road behind Hurricane Branch and the bloodhounds on their way to find Nell Cropsey.
Jim Wilcox was sitting on a fence there by Hayman’s shipyard when the crowd passed by. His girlfriend Nell Cropsey had been missing over a day and a half, but of all those who put down their labors to join in zealous search, Jim Wilcox was not one.
The citizens’ army led by Hurricane Branch and Chief Dawson marched past Wilcox and on to the Cropsey house farther down the rivershore road. They stopped and waited at the fence out front. Chief Dawson recalled later that a couple hundred or so had turned out, but somebody else could have sworn that by the time William H. Cropsey stepped onto his wide front porch, there were two bloodhounds and fifteen hundred people that had all come looking for Beautiful Nell Cropsey.
Across the front of the house were two porches: an unbroken railing ran along the upper porch, and there were a half-dozen steps in the middle of the lower. A lumberman named Preyer had built the place in 1891, and they say he took the best logs as they came to him, pulled them out, and saved them for this house. In the very front and center of the house there was a cupola tower with a sharp-rise pyramidal roof. One’s eyes immediately leapt to this decorative tower, and the mind in tow just a moment behind responded—the Cropseys live in a clapboard castle.
Hurricane Branch took it all in. A man, his wife, his brother, his niece, and his nine children were living in the house they called Seven Pines. Why had this man Cropsey, from an established family in a city like Brooklyn, moved this huge family south to a little river town right when several of his daughters were of marrying age? Didn’t he have a pretty good job up north?
The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey Page 2
