Three Keys to Murder

by Gary Williams

  Mayes knelt beside Ustes, pinching his nose to quell the stench. To the side of the victim’s ear on the coquina surface were small, neatly printed letters in blood.

  A MAN CAN DO

  A-MAYES-ING

  THINGS BEYOND

  THE GRAVE

  CHAPTER 34

  Fawn awoke Friday morning at 6:35. It was barely daylight, but she was unable to fall back to sleep, so she lay in bed thinking. Her inability to reach Mike the night before was discouraging. So she focused on the treasure, considering the keys. The one key with the MH inscription was locked in Mike’s safe, another key was most likely hidden within the Amelia Island Lighthouse, and the third key was inside the skull of Osceola.

  The skull of Osceola.

  She wondered what had possibly become of it. The trail had started with Osceola’s death when Dr. Frederick Weedon had severed it from the great Indian’s body, embalmed it, then kept it for years before it eventually surfaced in an exhibit at a medical museum before allegedly being lost in a fire. It was possible, but not probable, Dr. Frederick Weedon had found the key while the skull was in his possession.

  Fawn rolled over and continued her mental summation of Osceola’s skull.

  A strange thing happened to Coyle Courtland on his return trip to Florida after he presumably obtained the skull in 1865: he became a murderer. After killing some people in the Carolinas, he was wounded by a posse and made it as far as Charleston before burying the head in Osceola’s grave outside Fort Moultrie and then succumbing from his wound.

  Then there was the letter Sarah Courtland had mailed to Coyle’s home in Fernandina that went unopened and unread until 1969, when Elizabeth Courtland’s father, Lawrence Courtland, discovered it between the pages of a book in his attic. Motivated by the search for treasure, he then made his way to Charleston, presumably exhumed the body, and took the head of Osceola. For a second time, a man not known for violence went on a killing spree. Lawrence Courtland was convicted of multiple murders in 1969 and even admitted his crimes to his 16-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, adding he did not know why he had committed the murders, fueling the notion of a curse on the male offspring of Osceola.

  Then, when Fawn had discovered the secret room in Fort Clinch, the very fort where Sarah Courtland had worked in during the 1850s, she was sure she had found the head of Osceola sitting beside Sarah’s 1865 letter to her son Coyle. However, conclusive evidence proved that the skull could not have been Osceola’s. The dental technology—specifically the gold filling—proved the time period was some 15 to 20 years after Osceola’s death.

  Fawn’s eyes flew open. She stared at the ceiling in the dim light. The answer to what had happened to the skull of Osceola crystallized. At some point along its bizarre journey it had been swapped. Obviously, this was done to deceive someone, but the questions remained as to who was responsible. The notion that someone had come across this information and discovered the trove years ago was disheartening. It might even have been gone long before Lawrence Courtland found Sarah Courtland’s unopened letter in 1969.

  Fawn chose to remain optimistic. A find of that significance could never have been kept a secret. Surely a story like that would have become public knowledge.

  Fawn rose from bed and made a phone call to Dr. Curt Lohan. She requested another meeting. He consented.

  Then Fawn called Ralston, waking him from a sound sleep. Once he was coherent, she requested he perform an online data search based on specific word criteria that she provided to him.

  ****

  A short time later, Fawn picked Ralston up at the coffee shop on Centre Street. He piled into her car with doughnuts and coffee for the drive to St. Augustine. Then he handed Fawn a folder, which she placed in the back seat.

  Fawn used the drive time as an opportunity to share a new theory she had regarding how a second iron box onboard the SS Pearsaw had found its way onto shore.

  “Ralston, I re-listened to my own recording from what I could recall of Sarah’s letter the morning after I had found the secret room in the fort.

  “In telling how he had come upon the Navy man, Richard Simpkins, being interrogated by Black Caesar, Osceola had said that he and the other Indian were out hunting and had arrived along the coast only to find ravaged woods and sections of wood littered about the landscape.

  “We know from Captain Whimoor’s message on the bottom of his pet tortoise, Bugle, the encounter occurred in October 1820. Considering the time of year, Osceola’s description of the land, and the fact Whimoor’s message mentions ‘Storm coming,’ I’d say there’s a strong probability the SS Pearsaw ran into an Atlantic hurricane that had reached the Gulf of Mexico.”

  Ralston was silent for a few seconds. “You think the ship was destroyed in the hurricane, maybe broke apart, sending the one iron container to the bottom of the gulf, but the other wrecked onto shore?”

  “Or the crew dumped the one worthless iron box to lighten their load. More likely, it was ripped out of the ship, which would have created a massive hole, dooming the vessel.”

  “Is that why we’re going back to see Dr. Lohan?” Ralston said.

  “I was thinking about the keys this morning, which brought me to Osceola’s skull. We know the head from Fort Clinch was not Osceola’s. I now believe it was switched at some point in the past as a means of deception.”

  Ralston spoke. “Have you considered it may have been switched recently?”

  “It’s possible, but unlikely. Remember, we can date the skull by the dental work. It’s from the mid 1800s. If someone were going to replace the skull of Osceola today, they wouldn’t do it with a 150-year-old skull. Which is why I want to focus on Dr. Frederick Weedon, the attending U.S. Army physician, who took Osceola’s head after death in 1838 without anyone’s knowledge. I want to know if Dr. Lohan has any further insight into the man.”

  For several minutes the car was quiet.

  “I couldn’t get hold of Mike last night,” Fawn cut the silence. “He wasn’t registered at his hotel.” Her voice had weakened. She reached for her cell phone on the console.

  Ralston audibly exhaled, and Fawn stared at him. “What is it?” she asked, pausing with the phone in her hand.

  Ralston slowly turned toward her. He seemed hesitant to speak, his expression a conflict of soft intensity. “I really don’t know if this amounts to anything, but I know you’ve felt disconnected from your fiancé ever since Elizabeth Courtland’s funeral.”

  Fawn swallowed hard waiting for Ralston to continue. A sudden uneasiness resonated within her.

  Ralston continued hesitantly, “I did some research on Mike Roberson.”

  She glared at him with an accusing look. “Research on Mike?”

  “Were you aware Mike donated a kidney in 2002?”

  “Did wh…Donated a kidney?” Fawn asked. She felt a rush of resentment.

  “Look, Fawn. I wasn’t trying to pry. Just concerned after everything we’ve been through. The fact is, you yourself told me he’s been acting strange. Now you tell me you can’t reach him, and he wasn’t at his hotel.”

  “Ralston,” Fawn started, suppressing her anger. “Let’s leave Mike out of this. We have enough to chase after. He’s not even in the state. It’s my personal business, and I’ll handle it.”

  “Sorry,” Ralston said.

  Fawn never did call Mike. She no longer felt the need. Besides, he was in class. She was sure of it.

  For the remainder of the drive, she and Ralston listened to the radio without speaking.

  A seed had planted in Fawn’s mind when she was unable to reach Mike and discovered he was not checked into his hotel last night. That seed had just gotten a full dose of water, and was sprouting uncontrollably.

  They arrived at the house in St. Augustine at 8:45 a.m. Curt opened the front door and extended a hand to Fawn, then to Ralston, and invited them
inside.

  “Coffee?” he offered, taking a seat in a chair. He retrieved his half full mug on the end table.

  Fawn and Ralston declined in unison. “No thanks.”

  Curt motioned for them to take a seat on the couch. “What brings you back to St. Augustine?”

  “Well, again we could use your help,” Fawn said with a smile. “I hope it’s not an imposition.”

  “Not at all. You’ve got me intrigued. If you don’t mind me being blunt, the curator called and said you were on some sort of scavenger hunt to qualify for a TV show. Not to be rude, but I have my doubts.” Curt’s eyes narrowed.

  Fawn could see cunning intelligence in his gaze. She knew her act wouldn’t fly with him. “We’re looking for information regarding a doctor who lived in St. Augustine in the 1800s.”

  Curt paused. “Is this related to the inscription on the guard room wall at the Castillo de San Marcos we discussed yesterday?”

  Fawn hesitated. Her inclination was to covet the secrets she and Ralston had learned. She also suspected Curt would read right through a lie. “I prefer not to say. We seem to be involved with something that carries an element of danger. I wouldn’t want to put you at risk.”

  Curt eyed Fawn for a moment then turned to the man. Fawn sensed he was concerned about Ralston’s presence. Then she understood.

  “He can be trusted. He’s not the danger,” Fawn began. Her eyes held Curt’s. “We’re after something my father searched for most of his life.”

  “And the danger?” Curt prodded.

  “As with the search for anything of value, there are others interested in reaching it first,” Fawn replied frankly.

  Curt gave a knowing nod, even a slight chuckle. “That’s a concept I’m very familiar with. By the way, it doesn’t involve a fish, does it?”

  Fawn slowly shook her head, no, confused by the question.

  For a moment the room was quiet, and Fawn thought she had said too much. She was afraid he would keep pressing her for information.

  Curt finally spoke. “Well, you haven’t done anything to quell my intrigue; just the contrary, but I will respect your need for privacy…with one contingency.”

  Fawn and Ralston waited for Curt to continue.

  “If you find whatever you seek, I’d like to hear the story when it’s all over.”

  Fawn gave Curt an affable smile. “Deal.”

  Curt continued. “So exactly what 19th-century St. Augustine doctor are you interested in, and I’ll see if I can help?” He began to stand, probably to make his way to the rows of books and historical literature neatly arranged on the inlaid shelves in the near wall.

  Fawn watched him move as she spoke. “Ever heard of Dr. Frederick Weedon?”

  Curt stopped. A grin beamed from his lips as he returned to his seat. “I thought you had a challenge for me. This is one I can answer off the top of my head. What exactly do you want to know about Dr. Weedon?”

  “We know Dr. Weedon’s career was defined primarily by his interactions with the famous Seminole Indian Osceola after his capture in late 1837,” Fawn forged on as if Curt had not spoken, “and that he befriended Osceola while in captivity in St. Augustine. Upon Osceola’s request, Dr. Weedon transferred to Fort Moultrie to attend to Osceola as his personal physician when he was moved there.

  “We also know that, in a most bizarre act shortly after Osceola’s death, Dr. Weedon secretly severed the Indian’s head then closed the coffin so no one would discover it was missing. Dr. Weedon then made off with Osceola’s head, taking it with him to his home in St. Augustine.”

  “I don’t think you need my help,” Curt smiled. “Unless you want me to elaborate on the ultimate fate of Osceola’s skull.”

  Fawn gave him a wry smile as she continued. “We know that one, too. Dr. Weedon embalmed the skull and, for some time, kept it in his residence in St. Augustine. There are stories he actually hung the skull on his sons’ bedpost when they misbehaved.”

  “Which is intriguing in a Rob Zombie sort of way,” Curt added.

  Fawn smirked, shrugged, and continued. “Eventually, Dr. Weedon gave the embalmed head of the famous Indian warrior to his son-in-law in New York, who subsequently donated it to a doctor who put it on display in a medical museum until the skull was said to have been lost in a fire when the entire museum burned to the ground in 1865.”

  “That’s the history book version,” Curt stated matter-of-factly. “Clean and simple. Of course you’re looking for something more or you wouldn’t be here.”

  Fawn and Ralston nodded concurrently.

  “History tells us what happened,” Ralston started. “What we want to know is why? What was Dr. Weedon’s motive for severing Osceola’s head and taking it home with him?”

  “That’s an excellent question, and if you’ve come to me looking for the answer, I’m afraid I can offer you nothing definitive…except for one obscure bit of information. It’s speculative at best.”

  Curt rose and this time reached the inset bookshelves. He ran his fingers along the collection on the second shelf and withdrew a thin, black folder. He walked back to his chair.

  He began. “My friend who lived here was a professor. Not long before his death he was teaching part-time at Flagler College in town. Several years ago, he asked a group of college history majors to do a report. Each had to select a minor historical figure from a pool of names he had assembled. One student, I’ll just call her Patty, became very animated at the end of class upon discovering Dr. Frederick Weedon was one of the historical figures that had been assigned to another male student. For some reason, which the professor didn’t discover until later, she desperately wanted to do her report on Dr. Weedon, but the male student was unwilling to give the good doctor away.

  “Now, Patty was an attractive co-ed, and I won’t sit here and speculate by what means she obtained Dr. Weedon as her assignment, but by the next class, the male student had agreed to trade with Patty.

  “Four weeks later, the reports were turned in. Most contained benign facts. Information easily obtainable over the Internet or from the college library. No earth-shaking revelations, nor had the professor expected there would be.

  “Before I give you the details of her report, have you ever heard of the Dr. Peck House on St. George Street here in St. Augustine?”

  Fawn and Ralston responded negatively.

  “The Dr. Peck House is one of the many structures in St. Augustine listed on the National Historic Register. The stone walls of the building predate 1750. It served as the home of Governor John Moultrie during the British Colonial Period. Then, in 1837, the same year Osceola was captured and imprisoned in the fort in St. Augustine, Dr. Seth S. Peck purchased the house and restored it. It remained in the Peck family until willed to the city in 1931.

  “As it turned out, five years before the professor had asked his class to write their reports, the student, Patty, had worked a summer job in the Dr. Peck House on St. George Street. Even as a teenager, Patty had been enthralled with history, and when a high school teacher got her a job cataloguing some innocuous medical files left by Dr. Peck, who worked out of his home, she jumped at the opportunity.

  “The 29 boxes of files, which sat in the basement of Dr. Peck’s last remaining relative’s house in Minnesota, had been willed to the Florida Historical Preservation Society to be maintained as part of the preservation of Dr. Peck’s name.

  “Initial perusing of the documents proved interesting but not exciting. So the Preservation Society had contacted high schools looking for future history majors who might be interested in cataloguing experience…without pay, of course.

  “For weeks and weeks, Patty and two other high school students had labored over the documents. Dr. Peck had been a man who loved the pen. Not only had he kept detailed records for every person he had treated—which meant the students had to build a d
atabase of the patient names—but he kept page after page of his interactions with town folks, thoughts about politics, rules for rearing his children and, so it seemed, an early, and private, version of the town gossip. You might say Dr. Peck was a reporter for an early-day National Enquirer.

  “It was one of these pages, dated November 21, 1853, that specifically caught Patty’s eye. In it, Dr. Peck talked of Dr. Frederick Weedon—a contemporary and a colleague. In the paper, Dr. Peck gave commentary regarding Dr. Weedon’s acquisition of Osceola’s head. Ironically, he had no moral issues with what Dr. Weedon had done. Phrenology, the study of the shape of a person’s head to determine intellectual capacity, attributed to the great number of skulls collected by physicians in the 1800s. So it was quite common for a physician to collect and research human skulls en masse.

  “Dr. Peck’s documented criticism—which was probably never shared with anyone publicly—centered around the fact Dr. Weedon’s use of the head was disassociated with any scientific research. Other doctors in St. Augustine and Florida knew this as well and pressured Dr. Weedon to turn the famous skull over to others who could examine and perform essential tests, thereby advancing phrenology. In the end, he gave in, but instead of giving it to a local doctor, Weedon had passed it on to his son-in-law in New York. Of course, this confused and angered the local medical community.”

  To Fawn, this seemed to be a long, drawn-out story going nowhere.

  Curt must have read her expression. “I’m getting to the juicy part. Patty, so she claimed, had the gift of photographic memory. In her college paper, she included Dr. Peck’s writings and opinions regarding Dr. Frederick Weedon. In it, she made a startling point; a revelation she quoted from Peck’s writings.

  Dr. Curt Lohan read from the folder, “In 1853, three months after Dr. Frederick Weedon had purportedly shipped the skull of Osceola up to his son-in-law in New York with a letter of authenticity, Dr. Peck claimed to have seen the skull in Dr. Weedon’s office. He knew its distinguishing features well. In his writing, he was adamant Osceola’s skull remained with Dr. Weedon.”