The Lincoln Deception

by David O. Stewart

  They lowered themselves to the water down the rope. Cook’s left arm was no good. He could barely feel it. Fraser went into the river with a splash, but then came up again. Two colored fisherman watched them from a nearby dinghy. A white man without a coat. A Negro wearing a jacket but no shirt. The fishermen slowly rowed near where both men were trying to swim. Those fishermen held their fate.

  “Get on the far side of the boat,” said the man handling the oars. “Hang on there. We’ll move down to where there’s not so many people.” Cook and Fraser did it. “Keep your heads down,” the man said. They did that, too.

  Chapter 22

  Cook and Fraser drowsed in the narrow late-morning shade of the shed. The September sunshine unlocked sweet grass smells. The earth, soft with recent rain, yielded to their weight, which had grown over three days of rockfish, muskrat stew, and fresh corn. Women worked in the garden nearby. A breeze carried their voices, then dropped them. The men had left before sunrise to check crab traps and trail lines for rockfish or trout or bluefish. The children tried not to bother the two men staying in the shed.

  Cook rested his bad arm on a wooden crate. Fraser had sewed the gash together with ordinary needle and thread. The wound was too deep to heal on its own. The stitching had to hurt, but Cook refused laudanum, insisting he couldn’t afford to addle his wits any more. Fraser, whose own wits felt scrambled after being etherized, didn’t insist.

  They didn’t provide much explanation to their saviors, Rafe Washington and his brother, Gabriel. Cook said they were on the run from some rough types, which Rafe and Gabriel surely knew already. They had only defended themselves, Cook added. Fortunately, the Washington brothers were disposed to help folks in trouble, especially colored folks.

  Sleeping in the shed was fine, though closer to the outhouse than ideal. Fraser tried to give Rafe some money, but Rafe wouldn’t take it, so Fraser started doctoring the family. He drained a cyst for Gabriel’s wife and prescribed quinine for Rafe’s fever, which had come and gone for years. He wasn’t sure quinine would help, but it shouldn’t hurt.

  Mostly, Cook and Fraser had lazed around the small farm on Pine Chip Road, across the river from Chestertown. They slept heavily at night and napped in the day. They worried there would be an investigation of the killings on board the Georgia. In town, Rafe reported, the talk was that no one knew who killed those two white men. He couldn’t ask about it, though. It wouldn’t do to seem too curious. Fraser offered to help on the farm, but Rafe made a face and told them to stay out of sight.

  When Fraser tried to talk about what happened on the ship, Cook acted like Fraser hadn’t spoken. Fraser had a jumbled memory of struggling, of grunts and heavy breathing, a blood-slick floor, sprawled bodies. A knife protruded from a chest. A face stared vacantly. Fraser knew what they had to mean, but he couldn’t string them together, link cause and effect, and then the next cause and the next effect.

  Fraser plucked a long stem of alfalfa with feathery white blooms at the top. He chewed one end. “Not sure I’ve ever seen so much trouble grow out of something that started out honest and true,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out a killing, not get people killed.”

  “Some people,” Cook said, “need killing.”

  “You think God will hold those against us?”

  Cook sighed and pulled his legs up at the knees. “You thinking I’m going to hell for that?”

  “Not you, us. It was killing. It’s on our heads.”

  “Not on mine. I saved a life—yours.” He looked over at Fraser. “What d’you think hell is like? Big vat of boiling oil? Devils with tails and pitchforks poking you in the behind?”

  “Yeah, when I was a boy. What else?”

  “Well, we ain’t kids now.” When Fraser said nothing, Cook added, “So if there’s some men need killing, who’re going to kill a friend of mine, I ain’t going to lose sleep over how those little demons with pitchforks’ll think about it.”

  “I said thank you, more than once.”

  With his good hand, Cook clapped Fraser on the thigh and squeezed it. “You did. So we need to get out of here, let these people get on with their lives without desperadoes like us around their necks.” Cook let a smile play on his face. “It’s possible Stoneman had so many enemies they can’t know who actually killed him.”

  “These people know it was us.” The women were gathering up their tools, the tomatoes and squash they’d picked.

  “They’re country Negroes. Nobody thinks they know anything. If they say they don’t know nothing, white folks believe it. It’s the good part of having people think you’re stupid. I’ve played stupid a time or two.”

  “Couldn’t have been very convincing.”

  “Doesn’t have to be. White folks just know I’m naturally stupid.”

  “Whoever was paying Stoneman’s going to send someone else after us.”

  Cook shrugged, his gaze locked on the tall weeds that bent before the wind. “If coming after us involves getting killed, they may find it’s getting harder to get good help.” He turned his head to Fraser. “So, we going through with this whole business? I’m not feeling the fire coming off you, not like it used to. Getting too rough?”

  “I took up this quest—” he smiled and shook his head. “Maybe that’s too dramatic. No, okay, I took up this quest because it seemed so important, and what I was doing had stopped seeming that way. This mattered. But now, it’s turning out to be more than I bargained on, and I’m thinking about Eliza, too. She’s changed how I think about things. We set out to solve a puzzle, not refight the Civil War, end up running from men trying to kill us.”

  “A man’s got to choose what matters to him,” Cook said. “I made my choice. This matters.” He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder, behind him, toward the Washingtons’ two-room house. “I went inside that house, here on this tired-out land. These folks’ve got nothing, or next to nothing, but you know the one framed picture on the wall? Abraham Lincoln, Father Abraham himself. He mattered. The people who took him away, they cheated a whole nation. That’s what they meant to do, and they did it. But they especially cheated me, and Rafe Washington and his people, and all our people. That matters to my babies back in Steubenville, to the world they’ll live in. And I aim to even that score.” Cook stabbed the air with the index finger of his good hand, his voice low and intense. “So, Dr. Fraser, you need to choose. You in or you out?”

  The silence stretched out. Fraser knew he should be weighing the pluses and minuses of his decision, gauging the risks against the likely benefits. Yet his mind felt empty. He felt the warm air on his face. He looked over at Cook, who had leaned his head back against the bleached wood of the shed. Fraser’s eye followed a hawk gliding on the wind, turning circles in the high white sky.

  “We know,” Fraser said,” that Barstow bankrolled John Surratt.”

  “Yeah? How we know that?”

  Fraser described what Anna Surratt Tonry had told him. It meant, Fraser said, that Barstow paid for Booth, too. Cook objected. He was jumping past the evidence, that woman wasn’t ever going to testify to anything, and they had missed their chance to talk to John Surratt.

  This time Fraser objected. “He was never going to talk to us.”

  “Okay,” Cook answered, “but what about Sam Arnold? Shouldn’t we try him?”

  Fraser didn’t answer right away. “I guess so,” he finally said. “We should.”

  But what Fraser wanted to talk about was Barstow’s game. He’d been thinking about their dinner at Delmonico’s. The old fox expressed real regret that George McClellan didn’t become president, that the Union and Confederate armies hadn’t conquered the rest of North America. Had that been the purpose of the Booth conspiracy, to reverse the results of the 1864 election, install McClellan as president and embark on continental conquest?

  Cook wouldn’t buy it. First, he pointed out, the last thing the United States needed right then was more territory. The Civil War started because
of the argument over spreading slavery into new lands. More territory would have meant more arguments.

  Fraser was ready for him. Canada would be non-slave, and Mexico would have slaves. It would be like all those compromises from before the war, with slavery south of some line and no slavery above it.

  Cook grew exasperated. After three years of war, he insisted, the North wasn’t going to give up on slavery, just let it keep on. Union troops already occupied Louisiana, much of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Slaves had been freed wherever the Union troops went. Lots of them made themselves free, just walked away. The Emancipation Proclamation took effect. No crazy foreign invasion was going to undo all that, certainly not one that involved killing Abraham Lincoln.

  Cook gestured with his good arm. “Why would you believe anything Barstow said? When you and him were at that fancy restaurant, he had to know who you really were, what you were really about. He stuck you on top of that bridge just two days later. Why would he tell you the truth about anything?”

  Fraser had no answer.

  After sundown that night, Rafe joined them out behind the shed. Cook and Fraser explained that they would leave separately. They figured that some men would still be looking for a white man and a Negro, both large, traveling together. Rafe suggested that Fraser leave on one of the ferries that crossed the bay. With his beard growing out, he could put on some country clothes and pass for a laboring man, so long as he kept those soft hands in his pockets. Fraser should leave the Washingtons’ place before dawn; Rafe would row him to the other side of the river and he could walk to the wharf.

  They agreed that Cook should wait a couple more days to heal up. Cook didn’t stand out so much on the farm. He could cross the bay on a boat with some of the Negro watermen, who would set him down in a quiet inlet. Rafe shook hands and went to join his family.

  Fraser and Cook went back over their plans. Fraser would go to Sam Arnold’s place in little Friendship, Maryland. That was where Townsend, the writer, said he lived.

  “Now that man, Townsend, that’s something we got to talk about,” Cook said. “I’ve been thinking on him. There’s a string of coincidences we’re piling up.” Cook had a serious tone. “Okay, so we go see him at that strange castle, whatever you want to call it, and you head off to Indiana, just like he says, right?”

  Fraser nodded.

  “And there’s two rough customers there who beat you bad, right?”

  “I was probably pretty conspicuous there,” Fraser objected, “and I was going to see Weichmann every day.”

  “But why on earth was anyone looking for you there in that nowhere town? You think these people just watch whomever Weichmann talks to, every day of the year?” Cook didn’t wait for an answer. “No, they were looking for you. Okay, then you get back home and decide to head back out, this time I’m along for the ride. What do you do first? Check in with Townsend about where that Creston Clarke is. And what’s waiting at Lake Erie? That nigger-lover letter. We go on to New York, which Mr. Townsend knows, and we have us a high old time there, almost die in interesting ways. When we decide to leave, first we ask old Townsend how to find people in Maryland. Shoot, we weren’t learning, were we? We met that fellow on the train, remember the one at the depot in Elizabeth, the one you thought I was mean to?

  “So now, we’re getting careful, even crafty. We get on those mules and ride through the country, dodging shadows, but we go straight to where Townsend knew we were going, to Mrs. Anna Surratt Tonry. And where does Stoneman find you? Two blocks from her house.”

  Fraser’s mouth felt dry. “So,” Fraser said, “you think he’s been tipping them off, that he’s in with Barstow and his Sons of Liberty? That would mean he was bought long before we ever turned up.”

  When Cook didn’t answer, Fraser reminded him how Townsend’s books and articles were completely devoted to the lone-madman theory. “If you’re right, that means that those men who killed Lincoln not only remade history, but then they paid him to write them out of it. And they aim to stay out of it.” Fraser shook his head. “We might as well have worn bells around our necks.”

  Cook nodded. “If we stop telling Townsend what we’re up to, this business might get easier. Worth a try.”

  That night, as they settled on the straw in the shed, Fraser pulled out the banknotes in his money belt. He had dried them since dropping out of the Georgia into the Chester River. By lantern light, he counted out forty dollars to leave for Rafe. Cook said he’d leave it where Rafe’s wife would find it. She’d have more sense and less pride about keeping it.

  Fraser split the rest of the banknotes between them. Over the last two weeks, they’d made a pretty heavy dent in his funds. Fraser didn’t regret that the money was going. That’s what he meant to do with it.

  Cook said he wouldn’t linger in Chestertown any longer than he had to. He told Fraser to watch his step. “That Arnold may know you’re coming, may know all about you. He, what, grew up with Booth?”

  “Went to school with him.”

  Fraser planned to take a room at the National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. That was a sentimental choice. John Wilkes Booth slept there on the night before he killed Lincoln. Cook said he’d find someplace less conspicuous.

  In Washington, Fraser continued, they could talk to that Hale woman.

  Cook smiled. “The one whose daddy was a senator, was supposed to be engaged with Booth?”

  “Yes, she traveled with him in New England the week before the killing, then had breakfast with him on the morning of the assassination. He had her picture in his wallet.”

  “Didn’t he have pictures of four other women, too?”

  Fraser shrugged. “She was the only one he was supposed to marry. Also—” he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the leather frog book. He showed how the cover opened to the drawing of the frog, the outlines of which had blurred, but the other pages were wadded up, permanently stuck to each other. “When you wore my jacket into the river, this went in with you. It’s dry now, but we’re never going to get to read it again. Tried slicing the pages apart with a knife, but they just tear up.”

  “Why didn’t you leave that in the luggage?”

  “Had it in my pocket to study.”

  Fraser handed it over to Cook, who tried to thumb the pages apart. “Hell, we couldn’t make any sense out of it before. No chance now. Might as well dump it, I guess.”

  “I don’t know. It may be more important than we thought. Barstow and those Sons of Liberty knew we were on to the Booth and Lincoln business, but they didn’t actually try to kill us. They only got really rough, with the bridge and the steamboat, after we got this frog book. I wish I knew what it was about.”

  Cook handed the book back to him and he put it back in his jacket pocket.

  “You just be sure you get to Washington.”

  “Don’t you worry. The Clarke theater company’s going to be there, and I’m hoping to attend a performance or two.”

  Chapter 23

  Employing a new level of caution, Fraser spent much of the day watching the Arnold farm from a grove about 200 yards downwind of it. The white-haired gentleman, wearing a battered hat, moved stiffly through his chores in a fenced yard. He finished them by the time the sun was in Fraser’s eyes, about midafternoon. Small of stature, with a yellow-white beard that drifted well down his shirt, Sam Arnold had an elfin quality that belied his involvement in the crime of the century. His only company was a half-dozen dogs and a like number of cats. They seemed to regard Arnold as a peer.

  The old man settled in a rocking chair on the front porch, a book in his hand and a jug next to him on the floor. One cat sat in his lap and another on the arm of his chair. The dogs arranged themselves at varying distances, rising to investigate the few passersby with unhurried curiosity and occasional woofs. No one stopped, and Arnold hailed no one.

  Fraser slipped down to the road and walked to the village store three miles away. The storeowner led him to
the back, where he produced a gallon jug of apple liquor. On his way back to the Arnold farm, the pink sunset streaked the sky. Fraser tried the liquor. It burned, then warmed, then began to dizzy. He should have bought something to eat. His plan for approaching Arnold was close to no plan at all. Perhaps the liquor would produce one.

  The gate latch taxed him. It looked like a simple wire looped over the fence post, but a mechanism held it shut. It didn’t spring free when Fraser lifted the lever. He took a step back. He looked at it. The gate hung at an angle. Fraser wedged his foot under the gate and lifted it, then freed the lever. The gate swung open. His sense of pride was way out of proportion to the accomplishment.

  Some of the dogs greeted him, sniffing and circling. A brown mutt of medium size thrust her snout into his private parts. Fraser waited. She snorted and moved aside.

  “Evening,” Fraser called up to the porch. Arnold regarded him with a level gaze, then took a swallow from his jug and set it back down. Fraser walked slowly toward him. “Mind some company? I’m new around here.” He stopped at the porch steps.

  The old man seemed to lack the need to blink. “Anyone drinking Hansen’s liquor is new around here.”

  Fraser grinned affably. “A mite rough, but it gets the job done.”

  “You weren’t invited.” It wasn’t a question.

  “No, sir, that’s right. Just—”

  “Dogs watched you in those trees all day. So you’re either a thief or someone wants to pester me about John Wilkes Booth.” Tilting his head slightly, Arnold added, “You look soft for thieving.”

  Pointing to the step to the porch, Fraser said, “Mind if I set down?”

  “Some, but go ahead. You’re welcome to waste your evening. I don’t talk about the past.”

  Fraser took a swallow from his jug. The brown dog came back and settled near him. Arnold’s gaze returned to his book. Fraser took another swallow and started describing his investigation. He realized he was scrambling things and started over, beginning with Mr. Bingham on his deathbed. Arnold looked up sharply at the sound of Bingham’s name.