“The Gardners are good people, and they’ve agreed to look after him. Dale is a Carpenter Center police officer—he helped us out of a problem a few days ago downtown. His wife Sharon works at the college in financial aid. They have a daughter with cerebral palsy, and Dale volunteers at the therapeutic riding program where Andrew goes every week.”
“They’re your friends, then?” Tolman touched his arm. “You’re okay about leaving him with them?”
“As for me being okay about it … best not to think too hard on that one. I’m trying to be better about that. I wouldn’t necessarily say the Gardners are friends. More like good acquaintances.”
“You don’t have many friends, do you, Nick?”
Journey stared down at her. “My life— no, never mind. I’m not going there, not now. I do wish you’d stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Asking me blunt personal questions.”
“Sorry. Well, no, I’m not sorry. The way to find out information is to ask questions, blunt and personal included.”
“The Gardners agreed to stay with Andrew. They’ll even go to my house, so that he can sleep in his own bed.”
“He’s a cop,” Tolman said, “so he’ll have access to weapons. Andrew will be protected. You’re sure he doesn’t still think you’re a suspect in Lashley’s death?”
“He said that no one seriously believes I killed Graham Lashley, and my whereabouts are accounted for at the time of the murder. But the town’s in an uproar over it. It’s a small town—this sort of thing doesn’t happen in Carpenter Center very often.”
“Okay, then. I’m going to request another deputy marshal to go to Wilmington with you, and I’m going to take Darrell with me to the mine. I think he’d be … let’s say, nervous … without me nearby. And frankly, I may need him.”
“I still don’t like it. I’m worried about you.”
“Worried about me?” Tolman punched him on the shoulder. “I can take care of myself, and I’ll have Darrell.”
They both looked at Sharp and Andrew. “He’s taken quite a liking to Andrew,” Journey said. “The way he went after that man who shot Sandra…”
“Yeah,” Tolman said. “Best not to dwell on it. I’m glad he’s on our side.”
The charter owner returned to the office and announced that both planes were almost ready: one to go to Carpenter Center to drop Andrew with the Gardners, then to fly on to Wilmington, North Carolina, the other headed west for the Texas Panhandle.
They gathered their things. Sharp said an awkward goodbye to Andrew, then came and stood beside Tolman.
“Darrell,” Journey said, “I want to thank you—”
“Don’t,” Sharp said. “Don’t thank me for killing a guy.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Journey said. “You—”
“Don’t,” Sharp said, and Journey went silent.
Tolman’s phone rang. She walked a few steps away, talked for a few minutes, then said, “Thanks, Dad,” and rejoined the group. “Kerry’s safe. Duke figured out where she was and called Dad, who happens to have good connections with the Bureau. Two of the RIO guys are going to stay with Kerry while we sort this out. I need to meet this Duke in person sometime.”
They all stood in silence. Andrew rocked on the balls of his feet, then let out a stream of high-pitched laughter, his eyes fixed somewhere over Sharp’s shoulder. He held his father’s elbow and pulled gently.
“Okay, we’re going, Andrew,” Journey said. He looked at Tolman again. “Sandra’s family should be here by tonight. I feel strange about leaving her.” He pulled the silver cross necklace out of his pocket and ran his hands over it.
“Quite a woman,” Tolman said. “I think she gets it.”
“‘Gets it’?”
“Gets you. You should hold on to her. She’s crazy about you.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“She took a bullet to save your son’s life,” Tolman said, her tone turning hard. “I would think that would tell you something.”
“No, I—,” Journey began, then let the sentence fade. “Getting shot could change a person’s mind. She may never want to see me again.”
Tolman pointed at the necklace. “You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t know what I believe. But you’re right—she’s quite a woman. And she understands what’s going on here, how critical this is.”
“Get going,” Tolman said. “We have things to do.” She watched Journey and Andrew leave, then looked at Sharp. “Come on, Darrell. Let’s go open up the Silver Cross.”
CHAPTER
40
The restaurant was called The Oceanic, and it was in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, across the Intracoastal Waterway from Wilmington—and not far from Fort Fisher.
Wrightsville Beach was a tourist town through and through, filled with condos advertising beach access, and bumper-to-bumper summer traffic, with college-age kids and families with young children vying for supremacy. In the rented Chevy, Journey twisted through narrow streets onto Lumina Avenue, with the bodyguard Tolman had arranged for him, a silent deputy U.S. marshal named McCaffree, in the passenger seat. The Oceanic advertised itself as the “only restaurant on the ocean in Wrightsville Beach,” and it was a three-story building meant to resemble a plantation house.
Journey mentioned Brandon’s name at the door, and he was whisked through a noisy downstairs dining room, up to an open-air covered pier running outward from the building over the beach. The view was breathtaking.
Brandon sat at a corner table, away from others, a glass of iced tea in front of him. “Mr. Brandon?” Journey said.
“Dr. Journey,” the man said, and his voice was a resonant baritone. “Sit, please. You’ve come a long way. I trust you had a pleasant flight. Would you like some good Southern-style sweet tea, or something stronger?”
“Tea is fine,” Journey said. “I’ve been doing a lot of traveling the last few days, and I think if I have anything alcoholic, I may fall asleep.”
“Of course,” Brandon said, shifting a cane from one knee to the other. “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering a plate of hush puppies. And you must try the Carolina crab cakes. Have you been to the Carolina coast before?”
“I don’t believe so. I lived in Florida as a teenager, but I’ve never seen the ocean from this perspective.”
“Welcome, then. We are, as you know, rich in history.” Brandon sipped his tea, taking care to be very careful when he put the glass down on the table. He spread his hands apart. “So you’ve come all the way from South Central College of Oklahoma to ask me about the map.”
“You bought it six years ago.”
“I did. And you want to know if I realized what I had at the time.”
Journey smiled.
“Of course,” Brandon said. “I am what you might call a ‘freelance historian,’ Dr. Journey. I keep an eye out for auctions and estate sales, and frankly, the government has been a fine supplier to my collection. They auction off all kinds of documents, artifacts, things they think they don’t need but believe some fool—like yours truly—is crazy enough to buy.” The old man glanced toward the ocean and adjusted his thick glasses. Even though the sun was low, the beach was still crowded. “The map has caused quite a stir today.”
“So it is the same map that Congressman Mercer has,” Journey said.
“Oh yes, Dr. Journey. I once owned the Silver Cross map.”
“How did you come by it?”
“As I’ve said, it was a government auction. And I look for things, Dr. Journey. I most assuredly do look for things. But when I saw the description of this map—one item in a long, long list of thousands up for auction—I knew I had to have it.”
“Did you know its history? If so, how?” Journey leaned forward and plucked a hush puppy off the plate. He realized he was very hungry.
“Let me tell you a story,” Brandon said. “It’s a story about a young British sailor who became
caught up in America’s most horrible war. His name was Charles Roberts, and as a teenager he served on board a ship called the Condor.”
Journey stopped with another hush puppy halfway to his mouth.
Brandon smiled. “So you know the story of the Condor.”
“She ran aground just down the coast.”
“Good, good,” Brandon said. “No doubt you know the name of Rose O’Neale Greenhow.”
“I do.”
“Young Roberts was one of the crewmen assigned to row Mrs. Greenhow to shore the night the Condor ran aground near Fort Fisher. He was closest to Mrs. Greenhow and she gave him something. A letter.”
“And the map?” Journey said.
“No. That comes later. She gave him a letter, from Napoleon III to President Jefferson Davis, promising an alliance between France and the Confederacy in exchange for something called the Silver Cross. Can you imagine what it might have meant, if Mrs. Greenhow hadn’t drowned? The Confederacy might have won the war. The world as we know it might be a very different place, Dr. Journey. Very different indeed.” Brandon waved his hand. “But we’re not dealing with ‘what if.’ Mrs. Greenhow drowned, and young Roberts kept the letter, the letter she told him to protect with his life. So he did, for the rest of his life, for more than fifty years.”
“He never read it?”
“Remember, in that day and age, it wasn’t uncommon for the working classes—including sailors, especially sailors, if you will—to be illiterate. All he knew was that this captivating woman, who had drowned in front of him, told him to protect it with his life. More than fifty years later, Roberts was old and sick and was tended by a young man from his village, a tailor and schoolteacher. The young man’s named was John Brandon.”
Journey leaned forward and Brandon smiled again, the seams in his aged face knitting together.
“My great-uncle. John Brandon read the letter Roberts gave him and knew it was of vital importance. He sent it to his older brother, William Brandon, who had immigrated to Boston around the turn of the twentieth century. Will Brandon was my grandfather. He was a clerk for a Boston lawyer. When he received the letter, he contacted the War Department in Washington. Surely they would be interested in such an artifact.” Brandon thumped his cane on the wooden floor. A strong sea breeze came up and stirred the air.
“What year was this?”
“Very good, Professor. It was in 1917.”
“World War I,” he said. “I’m betting they told your grandfather they didn’t have time to fool around with a paper that was fifty years old and meant nothing to anyone.”
“Rather shortsighted, weren’t they?” Brandon said, and chuckled. “But understandable, given the times. So Will kept the letter. He researched Rose Greenhow, and in 1918 he packed up and moved his family and everything he owned to Wilmington.”
“He moved here because of the letter?”
“Yes, he most certainly did. Because, you see, he believed the Silver Cross was a thing, not a place.”
“I made the same mistake,” Journey said.
“Of course, of course.” The old man’s blue eyes gleamed. “We’ll come back to that. But he settled here, made his fortune here, and he kept the letter.”
“He never tried to find the ‘further documentation’ that Napoleon mentioned in the letter?”
Brandon raised both index fingers and shook them at Journey. “Yes, yes. He spent his life—and quite a lot of money—trying to find them. He died in 1949, and never found them. My father was never interested in history. He lived for the moment, and for whatever would make him the most money in the moment. History meant nothing to him. I was my grandfather’s true spiritual heir, and I swore I would find whatever was out there to be found. But, and this is very important, I was not interested in so-called treasures or in making money from history. History is who we are as a people. The collection of historical data is its own reward. Understanding is its own reward. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes, I do,” Journey said. “You kept the letter, but never tried to find what was out there.”
“I simply wanted it to be complete, to find Napoleon’s other documents, so the collection would be complete, to deepen my own understanding. And money? Bah … I had more than enough money. A rarity in this society, yes? Of course.” Brandon seemed to falter a bit. He took another sip of tea. “The heat gets to me at times. My apologies.”
“Should we go inside?”
“No, no, I love to sit out here. You must try the crab cakes, sir. I highly recommend them.” He nodded to a waiter standing patiently behind Journey. “Two orders of crab cakes.”
The waiter scurried away and Journey said, “So the letter stayed with your family.”
“Yes,” Brandon said. “Until six years ago.”
Journey’s heart raced. “What happened?”
Brandon pursed his lips and looked toward the Atlantic. “I follow what is happening around the world. When you have money and a bit of influence, you can look into places others might not look. I do not mean this to be boastful. Six years ago, I heard that a journal by a French priest had been discovered in a church in Montluçon in central France.”
“Father Fournier,” Journey said.
“Yes, yes. You most certainly have done your due diligence, Dr. Journey. Along with the discovery of this journal was a map that purported to show exactly where Fournier and the soldiers had gone. The Silver Cross mentioned in Napoleon’s letter, and in Fournier’s journal … there was a detailed map. I had to have it. I sent a man to France, but—”
“It had been stolen before he got there,” Journey finished.
“Less than two days before my man arrived, Father Michel reported the map stolen in the night. The journal was hidden in a separate place, but he had left the map on his desk. He’d been looking at it before vespers, and the poor man simply forgot to put it away. Father Michel is not a young man, and he was beside himself. I’d been prepared to pay whatever price he asked. But it was gone.” Brandon slammed a hand on the table. A bit of tea spilled. “And now, I hear Congressman Mercer and Ambassador Daquin saying that agents of our government stole it.”
Brandon looked toward the sea again, and Journey thought he’d lost himself in the story of his family’s relationship with the Silver Cross.
When he looked at Journey again, his eyes were bright. “I thought my chance to complete the collection was gone. You may have noticed that I am not a young man either.”
“You don’t look a day over eighty.”
“Hah! I’m only five years short of one hundred, but we will see. Imagine my surprise when, less than a year after the map disappeared from Montluçon, I saw a map listed for auction on the GSA’s website … a map that sounded very similar. Yes, I use the Internet, Dr. Journey—don’t look so surprised. When I saw the image, I knew that was it and I bought it. I couldn’t believe my luck, to get a second chance.…”
Somewhere on the pier, a child screamed and for one wild instant Journey thought, Andrew? But Andrew was safe with the Gardners in Carpenter Center. “Let’s return to the map. How did it get to St. Pierre’s Church? According to Michel’s article, Fournier never saw the map, or if he did, he didn’t understand the significance of it.”
“Excellent question,” Brandon said. “When I spoke to Father Michel, he said that Father Fournier’s account of the expedition into Texas stopped after they returned to Mexico. Fournier kept other journals, of course, but nothing more was written about this subject. Of course, the French were thrown out of Mexico in another couple of years, and Fournier went home to France. He served churches in Paris for a few years before settling at St. Pierre’s in Montluçon. He hid the journal of his time in Mexico and Texas behind some stones in the rectory—stones that stayed in place until a renovation of the church was begun.”
“Six years ago.”
“Yes. But during the twenty-nine years Father Fournier served St. Pierre’s, he couldn’t forget what he had s
een and heard in Texas. Of course, by 1901, Napoleon III was long dead and France was a very different place. But, an old man by then—though not as old as I am now—Fournier went to Paris, to the national archives. He described the map, he showed them his journal, which proved he’d actually been with the French soldiers on the expedition, and they released it to him.”
“They gave it to him?”
“A different age, Dr. Journey, a different age. He’d proven he was there when the map was created, and for the service he had shown to France, he was rewarded with this one little map, a map that no one deemed significant.”
“But—” Journey was struggling, trying to put himself into the time period. “How did the map get from Fournier’s military unit to France?”
“Ah,” Brandon said. “The archivist in Paris told the old priest that the captain of the soldiers—Prideux, I believe his name was—gave the map to his commander in Sonora. It was then given to an aide to Maximilian, the puppet that Napoleon had put on the throne of Mexico. The aide took it to France and gave it to the emperor. Of course, that’s when he came up with the idea of supporting the Confederacy in exchange for this land. He knew Davis would go for the idea, as Davis was desperate by that point of the war. What was some worthless scrubland in Texas, when the French were dangling military and economic support? Davis sent Rose Greenhow to Paris, and Napoleon sent the letter with her. Once Davis agreed to the deal, he’d send the map.”
“The ‘further documentation’ mentioned in the letter.”
“Exactly. But then the Condor ran aground, Rose drowned … and the Confederacy lost the war. By the next spring it was over.”
Journey tapped his index finger three times on the table. “And Napoleon was out of luck. He’d made the offer to the South when they were losing the war and desperate for assistance from Europe. But after the Union won, there was no need of French help.”
“Napoleon was, as we say, between a rock and a hard place. It always helps to be friends with the winners, and he couldn’t very well reveal that he’d offered to help the losers. There was nothing he could do. He was—as some of the kids of today put it—screwed.”
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