Daughter of Ashes

by Marcia Talley

  ‘Ronald Nightingale,’ the man said, extending his hand. Pastor Nightingale wore a white polo shirt tucked into a pair of green-plaid Bermuda shorts that ended just north of two knobby knees. From his tawny complexion I suspected it was Ronald, not Bernadette, who was responsible for the orderly garden.

  Bernadette glared at her husband. ‘Hat!’

  Ronald’s cheeks flushed. ‘Be right back,’ he said. When he returned, an Orioles baseball cap had been pulled on over his bald head. A few wispy white hairs stuck out of the opening at the back.

  Once we were settled around the table with glasses of tea, Bernadette spilled the beans. ‘Hannah is here about Nancy Hazlett.’

  If Ronald was surprised, his face didn’t show it. ‘When I read about the baby in the chimney, I was afraid …’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘There’s been no positive I.D.,’ I said softly, ‘but the child was wrapped in a newspaper from 1951.’

  Bernadette stole a look at her husband. ‘I told you we should have taken her with us.’ There was nothing accusatory in her tone, simply anguish, raw and deep.

  Ronald seized her hand and held it tight against his thigh. ‘We can’t second guess ourselves now, Bernie. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’

  My attention had been focused on Ronald, so I didn’t realize, at first, that Bernadette was quietly crying. She turned her tear-stained face to me. ‘Nancy was just starting her senior year and she’d gotten the lead in the school musical,’ she sobbed. ‘It seemed cruel to drag her away to Angola.’

  ‘Angola?’ I was losing the plot.

  ‘In 1951, God called us to the EUB mission station in Quéssua, Angola,’ Ronald explained. ‘Bernie taught nursing and I ran the agricultural station.’

  ‘We were there for a year,’ Bernadette added.

  ‘Was Nancy a parishioner, then?’ I asked.

  ‘In a manner of speaking, she was,’ Bernadette said.

  Ronald returned his wife’s hand to her own lap and patted it. ‘Let me tell the story, Bernie.

  ‘When we were young, still in our twenties,’ Ronald began, ‘we got the call to United Brethren here in Sturgis. I was fresh out of seminary.’

  Bernadette leaned forward. ‘We couldn’t believe our luck.’

  ‘Yes,’ her husband agreed, then grinned. ‘They must have been desperate to hire a newbie like me. Anyway, we needed a person to clean the church and someone recommended Mary Hazlett. Her husband had been killed during the war, you know.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Mary came twice a week …’

  ‘On Mondays and Thursdays,’ Bernadette chimed in.

  ‘On Mondays and Thursdays, yes, and we grew close to her.’

  ‘So, that’s how you met Nancy.’

  Ronald nodded. ‘Mary would sometimes bring Nancy along while she worked. Bright as a button, that little girl was.’ Ronald smiled at the memory. ‘Wasting away in that dreadful all Negro school down near Pocomoke. A crime, really. Nobody’d put up with it for a minute these days, but times were different back then.’ He took several long swallows of tea, his Adam’s apple bobbing, then set the glass down on the tabletop. ‘Even before we lost Mary …’ He leaned forward, whispered, ‘cancer,’ then forged on, ‘… Bernie took Nancy under her wing, tutored her here at the parsonage, mostly in math and science. But Nancy’s real talent was music. That was obvious from an early age. She played the piano and sang in our choir.’

  ‘And solos,’ Bernadette interjected. She closed her eyes, drifted somewhere far away and began to sing, ‘Oh, sometimes I feel like a motherless child …’

  Ronald squeezed his wife’s apron-covered knee. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart.’

  Ronald waited patiently for Bernadette to finish the stanza, her ruined soprano wavering, slowly dying away, before continuing, ‘One day, Bernie and I had a long discussion and decided we had to do something about it.’

  Ronald’s eyes cut sideways. ‘Have you seen any photographs of Nancy?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Ah, well you understand, then.’ He coughed and cleared his throat. ‘So one day, with Mary’s permission, I put Nancy in my car and drove her up to the high school in Elizabethtown. Registered her as my niece from Chicago, my late sister’s child. It was a lie, of course, but one I know God will forgive me for.’

  ‘Nancy was such a talented young girl,’ Bernadette said. ‘She would have languished in that poor black school. “Separate but equal!” What a crock. Rundown buildings, untrained teachers, ancient textbooks, no extra-curricular activities to speak of.’

  ‘They asked for her transcript from the school in Chicago, no surprise, and I told them it was on the way,’ Ronald continued. ‘The principal telephoned me about her missing records again about a month later, but by that time he’d heard Nancy sing and I don’t think it mattered much anymore. Just a freshman, and they gave her the lead in the school musical …’ He paused to consult his wife. ‘What was the show, my dear?’

  ‘Gilbert and Sullivan,’ she replied. ‘Nancy played Yum-Yum in the Mikado.’

  ‘She was making straight As, too,’ Ronald added.

  ‘Wouldn’t they have written to the Chicago school directly for the transcript?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, they did!’ Bernadette glanced sideways at her husband, as if waiting for permission to go on.

  He laid a gnarled hand on her arm. ‘It’s OK, Bernie. It was a long time ago, and Marilyn’s been gone for years. She won’t mind. Tell her.’

  Bernadette leaned forward and spoke quietly. ‘The school secretary, Marilyn Daniels, was one of our parishioners. She figured out what we were doing and confronted me about it after church one day. I panicked!’ She pressed a hand to her chest. ‘But you know what? She understood. Completely. And she made the whole transcript problem go away. It simply vanished – poof! We never heard one more word about Miss Nancy Hazlett’s school records from Chicago, and nobody ever suspected she was passing for white.

  ‘And then, just before Nancy’s senior year, we left for the mission station in Angola,’ she said.

  ‘Bernie wanted to take Nancy with us,’ Ronald said, ‘but Nancy and I talked her out of it. Nancy planned to finish her senior year and apply for a music scholarship at Peabody in Baltimore, and Marilyn convinced me her chances of that were slim to none if she missed out on her last year of high school.’

  ‘But if Nancy was pregnant …’ Bernadette choked on the word.

  ‘Did Nancy have any boyfriends?’ I asked as gently as I could.

  ‘She had lots of friends,’ Ronald said, ‘but I don’t remember any one in particular.’

  Bernadette tapped her temple with an index finger. ‘At our age, the hard drive is pretty full. If I could just get rid of all those advertising jingles from the fifties, or reruns of I Love Lucy, I’d be able to store more information up here.’

  ‘Nancy was a popular girl,’ Ronald said. ‘Until she got her driver’s license it seemed I was always picking her up after one extra-curricular event or another.’

  ‘Oh, why didn’t she confide in us?’ Bernadette wailed. ‘We could have helped!’ She jumped up, threw open the screen door and disappeared into the house.

  ‘Bernie has always blamed herself for Nancy’s suicide,’ Ronald said softly once his wife was out of earshot.

  Feeling like a voyeur, I stood. ‘I’m sorry. Maybe I’d better go.’

  ‘No, stay. Please. A nice long cry will do Bernie good. It’s been sixty years in coming.’

  ‘Did Nancy continue to live here while you were in Angola?’ I asked once I’d retaken my seat.

  ‘Oh, no. There was an interim pastor, a single man. Nancy convinced us that she could manage on her own at the farm and we’d given her our car to drive, of course. She was almost eighteen, after all, and very mature for her age.’

  ‘Her brother showed me a photograph, and I’d have to agree.’

  ‘Ah, yes, poor Thomas, coming home to …’ He paused. ‘We
ll, to nothing. Three years in a prisoner of war camp can mess with your mind, then to lose your mother, your sister and the family farm all in one fell swoop the minute you step off the plane.’

  I shuddered.

  ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  ‘Cap, uh, Thomas mentioned a wife.’

  ‘Tanya. A real prize, that woman. Thomas got himself a job at Clifton Farms and Tanya worked in the office there. Came into his life at just the right time, Tanya did. Gave him the stability he needed.’

  ‘Did they have any children?’

  Ronald shook his head. ‘Some medical issue, I understand. Sadly, Tanya’s been gone for a couple of years now, but we’re all getting old. Some days I wonder how I can keep putting one foot in front of the other,’ he chuckled. ‘Use it or lose it, as they say.’

  Me, too, I thought. We seemed to be straying off target, though, so I guided him back as gently as I could by asking, ‘How did you find out about Nancy’s death?’

  Ronald sighed heavily. ‘We wrote to Nancy every week. At first, we’d hear back, but after three months her letters stopped coming. We didn’t worry at first. I thought it was just the usual difficulty with getting mail delivered in a third world country. But when I finally got to a telephone and was able to reach Marilyn …’ His voice trailed off. ‘Oh, we simply couldn’t believe it! Suicide! No way. Not our Nancy.’

  ‘Passing must have taken a toll on her,’ I suggested kindly. ‘Always looking over her shoulder, always afraid that someone would find out she was black. How she must have longed to be white.’

  ‘Oh, no, you don’t understand at all, Mrs Ives. Nancy didn’t want to be white. Nancy just wanted to be free.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, can never willingly abandon it.’

  Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791

  Kim and I were sitting in her office, drinking coffee out of proper cups and saucers, discussing my findings in the library and what I’d learned from my visit with the Nightingales when there was a knock on the door behind me. Before Kim could rest her cup in its saucer, the door swung open and Clifton Ames eased into the room, his signature cigarillo clamped between his teeth.

  The tip glowed red as he sucked air through the roll of noxious weed. When he removed it from between his lips long enough to say, ‘Good morning, ladies, I hope I’m not interrupting anything,’ gray smoke curled toward the ceiling.

  Kim wrinkled her nose.

  I made a production of fanning smoke away from my face.

  ‘You can’t smoke in here, Mr Ames,’ Kim told the Chicken à la King.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Sorry.’ He waved the cigarillo around a bit helplessly. ‘Ashtray?’

  Kim snatched the saucer from under her cup and pushed it across the desk.

  Ames snubbed the offending cigarillo out, then grabbed a straight-back chair from the corner, dragged it over next to mine and sat down in it. ‘Mrs Ives.’

  I was impressed that he remembered my name. It had been several weeks since Kendall’s party.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr Ames?’ Kim wanted to know.

  ‘I’ll get right to the point,’ he said. ‘I was talking to Fran Lawson at Kendall’s shindig a while back and she told me about the work the historical society is doing in the basement here. Now that Kendall’s gone, I’m wondering if you need someone to pick up the tab on the office space, the computers and such.’

  I’d been wondering about that, too, and it was, in fact, one of the questions I had for Kim on my list, so I was relieved when she replied, ‘I think we’re in good shape there, Mr Ames. Fortunately, Kendall paid the rental on everything in advance, so we’re good for another three months at least. After that …’ She shrugged. ‘Perhaps after that I’ll give you a call. It’s thoughtful of you to volunteer.’

  Ames rubbed his lower lip, seemingly uncomfortable without his familiar cigar. ‘What you got down there anyway?’

  Kim smiled warily. ‘We’re not exactly sure. That’s where Fran Lawson and Hannah here come in. It’s our very good fortune that they live in Tilghman County and that they’re both trained records managers.’

  ‘We’re making a complete inventory, Mr Ames,’ I explained. ‘Once we know exactly what we have we’ll share the list with the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis. Some of the material will undoubtedly be transferred directly to them. The rest? Well, we’ll see.’

  ‘According to the records retention schedule established by Maryland law,’ Kim added, ‘most of what we found belonged to various county offices and could have been discarded in the 1960s and 70s.’

  ‘Why didn’t they? Destroy them, that is?’

  Kim twirled a pencil between her fingers, as if considering how to answer his question. ‘In 1975, the courthouse was extensively renovated. The funds became available rather suddenly – end of year money, I suppose – so everyone had to hustle to clear out their offices before the painters arrived. They needed a convenient place to store their files temporarily, so they moved them into the basement. But after the painters left, the records never went back.’

  ‘Can’t you just give them back to the various offices now, let them deal with it? What are we talking about anyway? Traffic tickets?’

  Kim smiled. ‘The historical society would hardly be interested in traffic court records, Mr Ames. No, there are some indexes going back to the nineteenth century that we think will prove invaluable to genealogists. Land records, marriage indexes, chattel mortgages … material like that.’

  ‘There are some real treasures in those boxes,’ I added. ‘We found a packet of letters written home by a local soldier during World War One.’

  As I spoke, Clifton Ames’s eyes never left my face.

  ‘Some of the material is too water damaged to save, I’m afraid,’ I said, shifting uncomfortably in my chair.

  He continued to stare. What was the man’s problem?

  A light flashed in my brain. It flashed on so brightly and with such an audible click that I feared, for a second, that Ames might have heard it, too.

  This is all about the early 1950s. Clifton J Ames the Second, the man presently giving me the hairy eyeball, had been young back then. Sixteen, seventeen tops? But what about his father, Clifton J Ames the First? It was he who had set up a shadow company, Liberty Land Development, specifically to buy up land from small, predominately black farmers like Cap Hazlett’s mother, Mary Hazlett, land on which the sprawling Clifton Farms processing plant now stood. What if there had been something fishy about those transactions? What if we were, quite literally, sitting over the evidence of his father’s shady deals? If they should come to light, it would reflect negatively on the family, and might even put the kibosh on Jack Ames’s promising political career.

  I shot the Chicken à la King a toothy grin. ‘Thank you so much for your offer, Mr Ames. And if Fran and I run into any trouble, you will be the first person we call.’

  After he left, another thought struck me like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. In the early 1950s, Clifton J Ames the Second had been too young to negotiate land deals, but I knew from the Tilghman Tigers yearbook that he had attended high school with Cap’s sister, Nancy. He’d starred in a musical with her. What if …

  I plucked a tissue out of the box Kim kept on her desk and used it to retrieve Ames’s cigarillo from the saucer. ‘Kim, do you have a paper bag or a box or something I can put this into?’

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘I’m in love with the man,’ I said, dangling the disgusting object between my thumb and forefinger over the saucer while Kim scrabbled around in her desk drawer. ‘I want to keep his cigar forever, in a locket around my neck, close to my heart.’

  Kim laughed out loud. ‘You are a nut.’ She held up a Ziploc sandwich bag. ‘Will this do?’

  ‘No, it can’t be plastic.’<
br />
  ‘Because …?’

  ‘I can tell you don’t watch enough CSI,’ I said. ‘Because it might spoil the DNA results.’

  Kim stared. ‘My God, you’re serious.’

  ‘Deadly,’ I said.

  Kim opened a drawer, reached in, and upended a box over her desk blotter. Columns of staples tumbled out. ‘This should work, right?’ she asked, handing the empty box over.

  ‘Perfectly,’ I said, sliding Ames’s distinctive Bonnie and Clyde cigarillo into the box. ‘Now I just need to convince Andy Hubbard that I’m not a nutcase.’

  The Elizabethtown Police Station sat on the edge of town near the railroad tracks, adjacent to the train station that had been restored and converted into a charming florist shop named the Watering Can.

  Inside the single story brick building I found myself in a boxy waiting room, with a water cooler in one corner and a gumball machine sponsored by the local Lion’s Club in the other. A uniformed police officer sat at a desk behind a glass window on the right, talking on the telephone and taking notes. I waited until she finished the call, then tapped on the glass. ‘Excuse me?’

  She looked up. ‘How can I help you, ma’am?’

  ‘I’m here to see Sheriff Hubbard,’ I said. ‘Is he in?’

  ‘He’s on the phone. Who should I tell him is here?’

  ‘It’s Hannah. Hannah Ives.’

  A few minutes later, I sat on one side of Hubbard’s gray metal desk and he on the other. My makeshift paper evidence ‘bag’ lay like an exclamation point on the desktop between us.

  It’s fair to say that Andy Hubbard was not impressed with my sleuthing skills. ‘And you want me to have this analyzed, why?’

  ‘I suspect that Clifton Ames was the father of Baby Ella. If you could have the lab compare the DNA on this cigar with the baby’s DNA …’ I shrugged. Even to my ears it sounded lame.

  ‘May I remind you that, according to the medical examiner, the baby died of natural causes.’ It was a statement, not a question.