Silver Cross

by B. Kent Anderson

  Gardner raised his eyebrows in surprise. Journey heard Sandra draw in a sharp breath. A murmur went up from the bystanders. Journey wiped his face, struggling to hold his voice down. “Andrew, that’s not appropriate. You don’t spit. Come on, let’s go back to the car.” He reached out for his son’s hand. Andrew raised both his hands and raked his fingernails down his father’s arm. A red line of scratches appeared running from Journey’s elbow almost to his wrist. He let out a sharp noise. “Andrew, no!”

  Andrew responded to his father’s raised voice by trying to scratch him again, but Journey caught his hands at the wrists and lowered them to the boy’s sides, Andrew fighting him all the time.

  He heard Sandra’s voice: “Nick, what can I do?”

  Sandra was a problem solver … always looking for solutions, and still trying to learn what Andrew was all about. Problem was, Journey didn’t have the solutions either. He shook his head. “I need to get him up on the sidewalk. Come on, Andrew.”

  Andrew kicked at him, but Journey dodged, still holding his son’s arms. They struggled toward the curb. People moved out of their way, gave them a wide berth, some staring, some talking in low tones. Journey heard one voice whisper, “If that were my kid…”

  Gardner tried to help him, but Journey shrugged him off. “I can do it,” he said. Andrew kicked his leg again, harder. Then the aggression stopped as quickly as it had begun. Andrew relaxed, looked at the ground, and started to whistle the three-note melody he always whistled.

  Journey felt his heartbeat finally begin to slow. He closed his eyes and let out a breath. Andrew was a paradox—his functional age was about three years old, he was nonverbal, but he still had the body of a thirteen-year-old, which meant adolescence. And for Andrew, the physical changes in his body manifested themselves in aggression. So far, aside from one incident at school, the aggression had always been directed at his father. But this was the worst episode yet.

  “You’re bleeding,” Sandra said, looking at the scratches on Journey’s arm.

  Journey looked down at the line of scratches. They were pretty deep. “Maybe it’s time to trim his fingernails again,” he said, trying for humor.

  “I can help you clean up,” Sandra said. She didn’t look at Andrew. Journey wondered if she was thinking, What have I gotten myself into?

  “No, it’s okay,” Journey said. “They’re not too bad. We should take you home soon, though.”

  The crowd broke up, and Journey, Andrew, and Sandra walked to his old silver minivan. Andrew settled into the backseat and Journey buckled him in. Andrew continued to whistle. In the front, Sandra said, “I picked up your phone.”

  Journey had almost forgotten about the phone call that started all this. “What did Meg say?”

  “She wanted you to call her as soon as possible. She sounded stressed.” Sandra handed him the phone.

  “Thanks.” Journey pressed the redial button and in a moment Tolman’s voice was on the line. Journey had worked with Meg Tolman eleven months ago, piecing together a harrowing conspiracy that almost toppled the entire U.S. government. Tolman had shot a man to save Journey’s life, and he’d reluctantly agreed to become a consultant to RIO on any cases with a historical component. He wondered what Meg could be calling him about.

  “What’s up?” Tolman said. “Sandra said you had a problem with Andrew.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “He ran out into traffic, then there was a little incident with the driver who almost hit him. After that Andrew got aggressive with me.”

  “Aggressive? What’s that mean?”

  “It means aggressive. It happens sometimes. Sandra said you wanted me to call back soon. Is something wrong?”

  “Why do you always change the subject when I talk to you about anything personal?”

  “You didn’t call to chat about Andrew’s development. What’s going on?”

  Tolman sighed. “You ever hear of Fort Fisher in North Carolina?”

  “Of course,” Journey said. “It was a major Confederate stronghold in the war. It was the last port to fall, a few months before Appomattox. Why?”

  “You’re on the clock, Nick. You’re a consultant … time to consult.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, dammit, that I need your help. I’m in North Carolina now. I need to know everything about the fort, both historic and contemporary. I’ll take care of the contemporary part.”

  “Okay.” Journey glanced in the rearview mirror at Andrew. The boy was looking out the window at the square, very calm. The scratches on Journey’s arm started to hurt a bit. “I’m not teaching this summer, so my time is flexible. I can do a workup on Fort Fisher for you.”

  “Does ‘the rose and the silver cross’ mean anything to you?”

  “No. Should it?”

  “Maybe. Connect it to Fort Fisher if you can.”

  “‘The rose and the silver cross.’ I’ve never heard of the silver cross, and the only rose I can think of offhand connected to Fort Fisher was Rose Greenhow. She was a famous Confederate spy who drowned just off the coast.”

  “A spy? They had female spies in the Civil War?”

  “Lots of them,” Journey said. “And Rose Greenhow was the most notorious. But what am I looking for, with regard to Fort Fisher? It would help if I knew which directions to look.”

  “Look everywhere,” Tolman said. “I don’t know yet.”

  “So this is a RIO case?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Meg?” Journey said.

  “Yes and no,” Tolman said. “I’m making it a RIO case. But this is also personal.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  Tolman spent three days in Wilmington’s Hilton Garden Inn—the same hotel where Dana Cable had stayed. She and Larry Poe interviewed a staffer of the Fort Fisher Museum, who recalled seeing Dana Cable a few hours before her death. But Tolman didn’t remember Dana ever having any interest in history, much less the Civil War.

  Poe released Dana’s room to Tolman. The letter marked “In case of emergency” answered no questions—it only instructed that Dana was to be buried in her family’s plot in the cemetery in her hometown of Cassville, Missouri. Tolman contacted the funeral home in the small town and asked if Dana still had relatives in the area.

  “No, she’s the last of that family,” the man at the funeral home told her. When Tolman asked what he meant, he told her she’d soon see, if she were accompanying the body to Missouri.

  The autopsy showed that Dana Cable died of blunt trauma to the head.

  So someone bashed her head against those rocks, Tolman thought.

  The medical examiner also confirmed her blood alcohol level and said she had traces of bourbon on her clothes, arms, and torso.

  As if someone forced her to drink, spilling the booze on her in the process.

  Clumsy, Tolman thought. Very clumsy.

  But she was still no closer to understanding what had happened and why.

  Three days after arriving at the airport in Wilmington, she boarded another plane, this one bound for Springfield, Missouri. She called RIO and told the office she’d be away a few more days, but that she was now on an RIO case. Then she called her father and asked him to continue looking after Rocky, her cat. Tolman watched Dana’s casket being loaded onto the plane, then took her seat for the flight to Missouri.

  * * *

  She’d arranged for a hearse from the funeral home in Cassville to meet the plane, and she rode in it for the sixty-mile trip to Cassville. The body was taken directly to the little cemetery on the edge of town. There was to be no funeral, per Dana’s instructions, only a simple graveside service. Her letter had been adamant that she be buried in her family plot.

  Cassville was deep in the winding hills and forests of the southwest Missouri Ozarks. Signs at the city limits billed it as home of Roaring River State Park. The funeral director had notified the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Cassville, the church in which Dana an
d her brothers had grown up. A handful of other people, perhaps twenty in all, hovered around the cemetery.

  The minister approached Tolman as she climbed out of the hearse. “I’m Don Davison,” he said, shaking her hand. “I was Dana’s pastor when she was a girl here. You’re her friend from music school?”

  “Yes. Meg Tolman. I live in Washington, D.C., now.”

  The minister cocked his head a bit. “Oh. So did you know Barry, too?”

  “Barry?” Tolman’s memory played an annoying game of hide-and-seek with her. Then she had it—sitting in the bar after rehearsal one day, she and Dana talking about their respective screwed-up families. Dana had always been impressed that Meg’s father was a Secret Service agent.

  “But my oldest brother lives in Washington,” Dana had said, sipping her Coke. “Barry’s a minor bureaucrat, nothing glamorous. He’s an accountant, a bean counter. He doesn’t understand me at all.”

  “No,” Tolman said. “I didn’t remember that he lived in Washington until you mentioned it. Did you or the funeral home notify him? And what about the other brother? I don’t think I ever knew his name, but I remember Dana said he was a college professor. Engineering, I think.”

  Davison looked down at her. He was at least a foot taller than Tolman, with a long face and large nose that made him look a bit like a hawk perched atop a fence post. “I gather you hadn’t been in touch with Dana for a while.”

  “No, I hadn’t. I was surprised she listed me on her insurance as an emergency contact.”

  The minister put a hand on her shoulder. “Nothing surprises me about that family.”

  “What?”

  The casket was being offloaded. A few men from the community grabbed the silver handles. A few others looked Tolman’s way.

  “Let’s walk over there,” Davison said.

  They walked to the family plot, and Tolman looked at the mound of freshly turned earth. Her eyes slid to the left, to the other two headstones there. She assumed they were Dana’s parents. Then she read the rose-colored stones.

  EDWIN BARRY CABLE.

  The birth date was August 24, 1976.

  The death date was April 19 of this year.

  Dana’s oldest brother.

  JAMES AARON CABLE.

  Birth: November 2, 1978.

  Death: June 27 of this year.

  Her middle brother.

  “My God,” Tolman whispered. “What … what happened to them?”

  “So you didn’t know,” Davison said.

  “I … no.” Tolman stared at the graves. Dana and her two brothers, all dead in less than four months. “What happened? Accidents or illness or…”

  Davison lowered his voice. “You remember that shooting in Washington last spring? Bunch of guys calling themselves April 19 broke into this government office and shot up the place?”

  Tolman tore her eyes from the grave markers and looked up at the minister. “April 19—I remember the date. That was the same date as the Oklahoma City federal building bombing all those years ago. They were a bunch of antigovernment nuts, said they wanted to continue McVeigh’s ‘work.’ But it was a low-level office. It was”—“Barry’s a minor bureaucrat. He’s an accountant, a bean counter.”—“an outlet of the Government Accountability Office. Barry worked there?” She had a flash of memory of the TV coverage of the attack, and she remembered the name of the dead man: Edwin Cable. “Edwin. I never made the connection from the news reports.”

  “He never liked the name Edwin,” the minister said, nodding. “Always went by Barry. Edwin was his father’s name and he didn’t care for his father. But of course, the news media couldn’t have known that. Those terrorists must have picked the office because it was an easy target. Who’d think a bunch of bookkeepers needed security?”

  “But the shooters were captured right away, weren’t they?”

  “And they surrendered as pretty as you please. ‘Martyrs for the cause,’ they said.”

  Tolman swallowed, looking down at the grave markers. “What about the other brother?”

  Davison’s expression grew even more somber. “Jimmy took his own life. You’re right, he was an engineering professor down in Oklahoma. He was upset about his brother’s murder. He’d also lately been through a divorce. Bad one, so I hear. Hanged himself from a beam on his back porch.”

  Davison watched Dana Cable’s casket lowered into the ground beside her two brothers. “I tell you, young lady, that I don’t believe in curses. But if any family ever was, it was the Cables.”

  * * *

  Ann Gray talked on her cell phone as she drove along Missouri Highway 413 outside of Springfield. “Her name is Margaret Isabell Tolman,” she said. “She’s the deputy director of the Research and Investigations Office.”

  “What the hell is that?” growled the man on the other end of the call. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Look it up,” Gray said. “A simple Google search will tell you quite a bit. Tolman’s father is a Secret Service agent, mother died in a strange car accident in D.C. when Margaret was sixteen. Margaret—she’s known as Meg, by the way—went to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. She is quite a talented pianist.”

  “Why do I care about this?”

  “Because I care about this,” Gray said. “Please do not interrupt me. She met Dana Cable at Curtis, then later tried to make a living as a musician and it didn’t work out. Her father’s connections admitted her to the Federal Law Enforcement Academy, and she joined RIO after graduating. She’s been there nearly six years. She was made deputy director late last year. Apparently her star is on the rise.”

  “Can this RIO possibly be a threat to us?”

  Gray paused. “I can’t answer that.”

  “Take her out,” the man said.

  “Just like that?” Gray said.

  “Just like that. Not having another attack of conscience, are you?”

  “Don’t try to bait me. You’ve engaged me to do a very specific job, and I do it well, and I’ve protected and managed the investment well so far. If there’s a threat to the investment, I deal with it, as you know. But I do not employ violence for fun.”

  “Take her out,” the man said. “Deal with it now. I don’t want to take any more chances, and I don’t want to have to clean up after you.”

  The man clicked off. Gray drove on toward Cassville. She hoped she would be in time to catch Tolman at the cemetery. She was already days overdue, and she wanted to go home and spend time with her family.

  * * *

  The graveside service was brief, Davison quoting Psalms and Ecclesiastes and talking in short sentences about Dana’s life as a musician, and the joy she derived from playing cello. He spoke of all the Cables being “at peace,” and that one family should not have to experience so much tragedy in this life, but now they were in a place where such worries and tragedies were beyond touching them.

  Davison asked Tolman what she planned to do, and it struck Tolman that she had no way to get to the airport in Springfield, and she didn’t hold out much hope that there was a car rental agency in Cassville. “I need to get to the airport,” she said.

  The minister smiled. “I’d be pleased to drive you, young lady. Dana must have thought highly of you.”

  “I suppose so.” The crowd broke up and began to move away. Tolman heard cars starting, low voices … an indistinct drone of white noise. Dana Cable—on a seawall in the middle of the night with her head bashed in, whiskey poured in her to make her appear intoxicated. Clearly, she’d been murdered, and the murderer had gone to some length to make it appear accidental; but yet, the killer was sloppy. The unnatural positioning of the body … the bourbon on her clothes …

  One brother, dead in D.C. in an attack by a homegrown terrorist cell. One brother, dangling from a rope in Oklahoma. And Dana, on a slim wall between river and ocean … then, almost with her dying breaths, asking for Meg and talking about a rose and a silver cross.

  This is crazy, Tolman th
ought, but she closed her eyes, trying to think of music again. In Dana’s memory, she tried to remember the pieces they’d played together. The Beethoven sonata, of course, but they’d also partnered with a violinist and played trios by Haydn and Mendelssohn. They’d played the Chopin cello sonata, the only piece the composer ever wrote for cello. Now Tolman wished they had made more music together.

  The music faded, and she was standing in the August heat of a rural Missouri cemetery. Reverend Davison had retreated to his air-conditioned car. The rest of the mourners were gone.

  Except one.

  A tall, well-dressed woman in her forties was walking toward her.

  “Pardon me,” she said, and her accent wasn’t the laid-back drawl of the Ozarks. She sounded urban, northern.

  “Yes?”

  “You were a friend of hers?”

  “I was. I brought her body back here. And you?”

  “A casual acquaintance. This is all quite tragic.” The woman swept a hand at the graves. “Her family … very tragic. Very difficult.”

  “Yes.” Tolman wanted the woman to leave.

  “I have something for you.”

  “For me? What?”

  The woman handed her a manila envelope. “You may find some enlightenment there.”

  “What is it?”

  The woman moved away, walking to a dark four-door parked at the gate of the little cemetery. Tolman undid the clasp on the envelope, pulled at the flap, and shook out a single piece of paper encased in a plastic sleeve. She looked up in the direction the woman had gone.

  “Hey!” Tolman shouted. “Who are you?”

  Tolman heard a group of cicadas singing, a car engine ticking, a little bit of a breeze. She began to trot after the woman, but she was already backing her car out of the cemetery. It turned right and was gone. With some effort, Reverend Davison climbed out of his car, an ancient Plymouth, and looked at her. She held up a hand—wait.

  “Did you know that woman?” Tolman called to him.

  “Can’t say that I do,” Davison said. He smiled. “Cassville may be a small town, but I don’t know everyone.”

  “I don’t think she was from Cassville,” Tolman said. She turned away from the minister and looked again at the envelope.