Daughter of Ashes

by Marcia Talley

  ‘Shameful.’ Kathy wagged her head. ‘So,’ she chirped more brightly a heartbeat later, ‘do you know which high school you’re looking for?’

  ‘Black, I think.’

  Kathy pointed to a short row of tall, narrow, red-bound volumes. ‘Harriet Tubman H.S.’ was embossed on the spines in gold letters. Graduation dates – 1948, 1949, 1950 and so on – had been affixed to the lower edge of the spine by someone on the library staff using black pen on a white label covered with clear tape.

  ‘You planning a reunion or something?’ she asked.

  I had been studying the bindings and only half heard what she said. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘There’s been a flurry of interest in the old yearbooks recently. I just wondered if someone was planning a reunion.’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ I said, and left it at that. If I looked like I might be organizing a reunion for a black high-school class from the early 1950s, I should probably schedule a facelift and get serious about the SPF in my sunscreen.

  ‘Well, let me know if you need anything,’ Kathy added before returning to the short line of patrons waiting impatiently for her at the reference desk.

  Left on my own, I plopped my handbag down in a nearby study carrel, dug around for my notebook and pen and got started.

  Based on the information I’d gleaned from Nancy Hazlett’s tombstone, I figured she would have been a high-school freshman in 1947 or 1948, so I reached for those volumes first.

  After browsing through the yearbooks covering 1947 through to 1950, scanning class after class of smiling black faces, it was clear that Nancy Hazlett had not attended Harriet Tubman High. Had she gone to school at all, I wondered, or had she dropped out after junior high, perhaps to help her mother?

  I returned the volumes to their proper place on the shelf, then turned my attention to the section where the white yearbooks were shelved.

  The Tilghman County High School yearbooks were tall, bulky volumes, bound in blue buckram. In 1932, someone had decided to change the binding to a dirty tan, but apparently thought better of it because, the following year, they’d reverted to blue.

  Tiger Tales 1947–1948 had been embossed on the front cover of the first volume I selected, the title arched over an image of a tiger, the school’s mascot.

  It didn’t take me long to find Nancy, smiling out of a one-by-one-and-a-half-inch black-and-white photo, bookended between John Haley and Mary Hendricks.

  I flopped back in my chair. Well, well, well. Miss Nancy Hazlett had been passing for white.

  As I leafed through the yearbooks, I watched young Nancy mature from a gawky fourteen-year-old into a beautiful young woman. In the tiny photograph allotted to each freshman, Nancy wore bangs and the rest of her hair had been scraped back from her face and gathered into two high, stubby ponytails. Two years later, as a junior, a larger image showed that she was parting her hair on the side in a shorter do, and giving free rein to the curls that massed over her ears and cheeks. She was strikingly beautiful – today, we would say she had movie-star quality – and I could understand why any young man might fall, hard, for that sweet smile and those pale blue eyes – or were they green? It was hard to tell from the black-and-white photographs.

  Nancy had been a member of the Future Homemakers of America and the French Club, and she’d sung in the Glee Club. One of the club photos showed her standing in front of the group, dressed in a choir robe. Eyes closed, head thrown back, she clutched a microphone and I could almost hear the solo she must have been belting out when the photographer pressed down on the shutter.

  As I browsed through the pages, a familiar face leapt out at me: Clifton Ames in his pre-chicken à la king days. Even without consulting the captions, I would have recognized his photo because of the striking resemblance he bore to his son, Jack.

  Clifton Ames had been a year ahead of Nancy in school. In the 1949–1950 yearbook his senior picture showed a fresh-faced, handsome lad with a full head of gleaming blond hair, parted on the right side and slicked back. Cliff’s face popped up all over the place – he played football and baseball, was president of the Debate Club, raised a calf with 4H … I wondered when the boy had time to study. He played chess with the Chess Club, was in the French Club, served as assistant editor for the school newspaper and … I paused, then paged back for a second look at the members of the French Club that year. There he was, two rows above Nancy, posing in the back row along with three other boys, all sporting goofy adolescent grins.

  Clifton Ames and Nancy Hazlett were pictured together no fewer than three times, participating in the school activities they both must have enjoyed. As I stared at a photo of the two attractive teens posing side by side for the Oklahoma! cast photo – Cliff’s Curly to Nancy’s Laurey – the chemistry between them seemed unmistakable. Still, reading anything more into the relationship was somewhat of a leap.

  By 1950, though, Cliff had graduated and Nancy had dropped out of school, presumably to have her baby. ‘Oh, Nancy,’ I thought sadly as I ran a finger gently over a photograph taken – according to the caption – at a talent show in her junior year. Nancy was dressed in gingham as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz and singing – I could almost hear it now – ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ She was surrounded by a chorus of Munchkins. They wouldn’t have been smiling, I mused, if they’d known she was black.

  I swallowed hard and began leafing idly through the remaining pages of the yearbook, hoping to stumble across other candid shots of the pair. Perhaps there was an index? I flipped quickly through a large section of ads from local sponsors – Quality Star Auto Parts Congratulates the Class of 1950! – until I reached the back, and there it was. An alphabetical list of students at Tilghman High, the page numbers where their pictures appeared and – incredibly! – their home addresses.

  I sat back, stunned. How times had changed.

  I quickly located the entry for Nancy Hazlett and was surprised to find not the address that I knew so well because it was my own, but a street and house number in Sturgis, a seaside village about twenty-five miles to the east. Carrying the yearbook, I returned to the reference desk where I stood in line behind a woman inquiring loudly about the Cape May–Lewes ferry schedule. When she moved on – Forty-five dollars! Highway robbery! – I quickly took her place.

  ‘More like piracy,’ I said.

  ‘Agreed. It can’t be highway robbery if you’re on the high seas.’ Kathy grinned and ran fingers through her silver bangs. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

  ‘I did.’ I laid the yearbook, open to the index, on the desk in front of her and turned it the right way round to face her. ‘I can’t believe they published the students’ home addresses,’ I told her.

  ‘Kids were safer then,’ she said in a voice tinged with nostalgia. ‘Mom used to turn me loose after lunch and I wouldn’t come home until she rang the bell for dinner. Sometimes not even then.’ She grinned. ‘But then I’d get my ass whupped.’

  ‘Do you have any old criss-cross directories?’ I asked.

  Her eyes widened in surprise. ‘Gosh, nobody’s asked for one of those in years. Nowadays reverse lookups are all online.’

  ‘I’m curious who is listed at this address in 1949 or 1950,’ I said, tracing Nancy’s entry in the book with my index finger.

  ‘I’m not sure that the directories for Tilghman County go back that far,’ she said, ‘but let’s have a look.’

  I followed Kathy through an unmarked door into a room crowded with desks and carts piled high with books in various stages of processing. Metal shelves at the far end of the room held ancient reference books double-shelved, one row in front of the other, to save space. I recognized most of them from their bindings – Contemporary Authors, Science Citation Index, Book Review Index – a format that had been made obsolete, first by microfiche or microfilm, then DVD databases, and finally by the Internet. Kathy knelt, ran her hand experimentally over a series of dusty books on one of the bottom shelves, s
aid, ‘Ah ha!’ and produced a Polk’s Directory for Tilghman County, Maryland from 1952. Carrying the squat, fat volume, she crossed the room, cleared a pile of newspapers off a nearby computer table, set the book down and gestured for me to join her. Standing beside her, I watched as Kathy leafed through several sections of colored pages, each marked with a tab before selecting the section that was arranged alphabetically by town, street and house number: Sturgis: Oysterbay Road: 308: Ronald and Bernadette Nightingale.

  In 1952, according to the demographic data, Ronald and Bernadette were twenty-eight and twenty-six years old, respectively.

  ‘Here’s something interesting,’ Kathy said. ‘House numbers 310 through 312 are listed as belonging to the Free Methodist Church.’ She glanced up at me over the top of her reading glasses. ‘Do you suppose Ronald Nightingale was its pastor?’

  ‘I’d like to think that Nancy was taken under somebody’s wing after her mother died,’ I said as I jotted down the information in a notebook I’d brought with me. ‘She was only sixteen. A minister and his wife.’ I grinned. ‘What could be better than that?’

  Kathy flipped to another tabbed section and ran her finger down a dense column of numbers. ‘Won’t do you much good today, I’m afraid, but their phone number back then was TRinity 87. Isn’t that a hoot?’

  While Kathy had been searching for the phone number, I did a quick calculation. If the Nightingales were still living, and that was a Big If, they’d be in their mid-eighties. And as a pastor, Ronald would long since be retired.

  ‘I wonder who lives at that address now?’ I asked the librarian.

  Kathy turned to the computer keyboard, tapped a few keys. ‘Your wish is my command,’ she said as she waited for the screen to refresh. ‘The county pays for access to a whole range of business-related databases.’ She paused, leaned closer to the screen. ‘Well, how about that?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  Behind her glasses, her brown eyes flashed amber. ‘Seems like the Nightingales are still living there!’

  Kathy hit a key. A printer on the far side of the work room beeped and after a few seconds, a screen print spewed out. ‘Thank you,’ I said when Kathy handed the printout to me.

  ‘All in a day’s work,’ she said. ‘Are you going to pay them a visit?’

  My heart was trying so hard to escape from my chest that I didn’t answer. What was I going to do with this information?

  Kathy picked up the yearbook and handed it back to me. ‘My advice? Just drop by.’

  Carrying the yearbook clutched to my chest, I followed Kathy out of the work room. When I asked, she directed me to a photocopier where I slotted in my Visa card and made copies of the yearbook pages that featured Nancy. The last photocopy plopped, face up, into the paper tray – Nancy’s junior class picture. Wearing a dark cardigan with a white lace-trimmed Peter Pan collar, Nancy’s head was tilted up and to the left, away from the photographer; she was smiling at something just out of camera range.

  It seemed unthinkable that such a beautiful and vibrant young woman had had only one more year to live.

  TWENTY

  ‘Often, while contemplating works of art … I have felt entering into me a kind of vision of the childhood of their creators. Some little sorrow, some small pleasure of the child, inordinately inflated by an exquisite sensibility, become later on in the adult man, even without his knowing it, the basis of a work of art … Genius is nothing but childhood clearly formulated, newly endowed with virile and powerful means of self-expression.’

  Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises, ‘An Opium-eater, VI. The Genius as a Child,’ 1860

  By the time I got back to Our Song from the library, it was after three – too late to pay a visit to the Nightingales, as much as I wanted to. I considered telephoning and had actually picked up my cell phone to do so when it began to vibrate in my hand. I checked the caller I.D.: Fran.

  ‘Steve and I were wondering if you and Paul would like to come back to the house for a drink after the concert tonight,’ she said.

  Concert? What concert?

  ‘We should wrap up at St Timothy’s around eight or eight-thirty,’ she continued.

  ‘Right,’ I said as the light slowly dawned. Dang! Did I have to purchase tickets in advance?

  ‘I’ve arranged for comp tickets. They’re holding them at the door,’ she barreled on before I’d had a chance to embarrass myself by admitting that the event had completely slipped my mind.

  ‘Thanks, Fran,’ I told her, ‘but I’ll need only one. Should have told you that Paul wasn’t able to come this weekend. Teaching sailing to the plebes.’

  ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘See you later.’

  ‘Can I bring anything?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Fran said. ‘It’s all taken care of.’

  I’ll bet, I thought as I hung up the phone. My brownies probably wouldn’t have passed her rigid ten-point inspection anyway – color, texture, moisture level, quality of nuts and who knows what else.

  I took a quick shower and changed into something more appropriate – a sundress with a lightweight jacket – although I wasn’t completely sure what the citizens of Elizabethtown would consider appropriate for a seven o’clock Saturday evening concert.

  At six-forty, I parked in my usual spot behind the county courthouse and walked the two blocks to the church, a classic brick colonial with an impressive white wooden steeple. St Timothy’s sat well back on a generous lot with mature trees and well-trained boxwood hedges that only two centuries of loving attention can achieve.

  The pews were three-quarters full when I entered the sanctuary and the usher told me they were already out of printed programs. Would I mind sharing? I wandered down the aisle looking for a seat next to someone I knew, close enough to hear the music but not so close that I’d be blasted out of my seat by the trumpet section. Frantic waving up front near the baptismal font caught my eye – Caitlyn Dymond, dressed in black jeans, a white shirt and a festively embroidered Mexican vest was trying to attract my attention. She pointed to an empty spot in the pew next to her and mouthed, For you.

  Rather than crawl over the ten concertgoers already comfortably seated in the pew, I headed up the side aisle to join her. ‘Thanks,’ I said as I slid into place next to her. ‘I was hoping there’d be someone here that I knew. They ran out of programs.’

  ‘Golly,’ she said, ‘I think the whole town is here.’

  Caitlyn was right. Once I got settled in I realized there were many familiar faces in the crowd. Councilman Jack Ames, for example, arm stretched lazily over the back of the pew behind his beautiful wife, Susan. ‘Sit any closer,’ I said, indicating the pair, ‘and he’d be past her.’

  Caitlyn snorted, then handed me the program.

  As Fran had promised when she first told me about it, the concert opened with Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 in D major, a piece in three movements being performed that evening by a soloist named Thomas Glass, an eighteen-year-old freshman at the local community college. The piece was only twenty-five minutes long, so there was no intermission before the Mendelssohn, only the longish pause for extended applause while young Thomas took four well-deserved curtain calls.

  ‘The program says that Mozart wrote that concerto when he was only nineteen,’ I commented in the break between pieces. ‘And the Italian Symphony was begun when Mendelssohn was only twenty. Factor in our eighteen-year-old violinist, and do I detect a theme?’

  ‘Prodigies,’ Caitlyn whispered. ‘It’s scary. When I was nineteen all I worried about was clothes and makeup and whether the captain of the football team was going to ask me to Homecoming.’ She squeezed my arm. ‘He was gorgeous!’

  While the conductor waited in the wings for the orchestra to retune, I noticed that Jack Ames and his wife were taking the opportunity to glad-hand up and down the pews. ‘Tacky,’ I whispered. ‘And where are their children, I wonder? And the dog?’

  ‘I don’t know about the dog, Hannah, but there’s a n
ursery in the church basement,’ Caitlyn said. ‘My kids are down there now, probably running their teenage sitters ragged.’

  Dwight sat in a front pew with Grace, of course, as the concert was a benefit for the humane society shelter. I was glad to see them; they certainly deserved a break, and Rusty would not be lacking for caregivers at the hospital. Kim Marquis and the young man who must be her steady boyfriend, Will, gave me a wave, as did Penny, the cashier at the High Spot.

  I craned my neck to take in the rest of the sanctuary. At the back, leaning against a rack of pamphlets, arms folded across his uniformed chest, stood Sheriff Hubbard.

  ‘I wonder if they’re any closer to finding out who strangled Kendall?’ I whispered to Caitlyn.

  ‘Half the people in this room had a motive.’ She grinned. ‘You. Me.’ She jerked her head in the direction of the Ames. ‘Jack, too.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, they look all lovey-dovey now, him and Sue, but last year at the real estate office there was a huge blowup.’

  ‘Oooh, tell me about it.’

  ‘Well, Kendall’s got this tract of land north of town. It’s zoned agricultural, but if she could get the city council to zone it commercial, she’d make a killing. She’s been contributing heavily to Jack’s campaign. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, you know. She told me a couple of weeks ago that the zoning was in the bag.’

  ‘The blowup?’ I reminded her.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Well, Jack had been spending a lot of time with Kendall at the office. One night I was working late putting up new listings in the front office window when Sue barged in breathing fire.’ Caitlyn leaned in and lowered her voice even further. ‘Jack was with Kendall in her office with the door shut.’

  ‘Were they having an affair?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Who knows? But I hardly think they’d be screwing in there with me in the next office with my ear pressed to the wall. So to speak.’ She paused. ‘I think they used to have a thing going, but that was way back in high school, before Jack even met Susan. I honestly don’t know how she did it.’