What the Dead Leave Behind

by Rosemary Simpson

  He made sure that Russell Coughlin, who wrote for the New York Herald, knew about his morphine purchases, and then denied none of the stories that made the rounds. Ned Hayes is on the slide. The bottle. Smoking a pipe. Taking it rough. The needle. It won’t be long. Too bad. He was a good man while he lasted.

  Barricaded inside the house his mother had abandoned a year into the war when she took herself and her sixteen-year-old son and only child to her family home in South Carolina, Hayes picked his way into his memories through a veil of bourbon. Soothed himself with the white powder that could be smoked, sniffed, rubbed along the gums, or cooked down to an injectable solution. When he had finished with his own life, he pored over the lives of others, reading his way book by book along the library shelves that had been impressively stocked by his bibliophile father. He did not find the answers he was looking for. Only contradictions and more questions. He drank more bourbon and resorted more frequently to the lovely powder until he became the addict everyone already believed him to be.

  He was saved by the body servant who had suffered his descent with tears in his eyes and gentle remonstrances that went unheeded. Until the day Ned Hayes very nearly died when the bourbon and the morphine met in his body in epic proportions and fought over which should ultimately kill him. Tyrus Hayes, who had taken his master’s last name when freedom came, reluctantly tied Master Ned to his bed, then sat down beside it to wait for consciousness and the terrible drug hunger to return.

  When they did, he bathed the man he still thought of as a child in cool water every half hour, straightened his limbs after each bout of the convulsions that abraded his skin beneath the restraints. Ned railed, pleaded, threatened, and wept for release. The old man who had loved him since the day he was born stuffed cotton in his ears and didn’t loosen the ropes by so much as an inch. Day after day for a week, Ned woke and slept, soiled himself and was cleansed, twisted and rubbed his limbs raw against the ropes, screamed his desperate need for the powder and the drink. It didn’t matter how close he came to death, or how many times he yearned for it, Tyrus was determined that it shouldn’t be granted him. Not this way.

  The cure was not one that many survived, but within a month after Tyrus had tied his master to his bed, it was complete. Ned could barely stand, could not walk without support, and was thinner than the ancient ex-slave who was very nearly skin and bones. But he was free. His body was free, though his mind never would be. From that day on he measured and monitored every ounce of bourbon he swallowed, every pinch of morphine he allowed himself. If he didn’t, there was a black shadow standing just over his shoulder who did. “I think that be enough for now, Master Ned,” the voice would say as the callused, bony hand reached for glass or needle. And Ned would stop. Wherever he was in his memories or his suffering, he would stop.

  Perversely, because heroism had never appealed to him, he allowed the stories of his addictions to continue to spread, growing more and more lurid with each telling. It came to be an undisputed fact that the once promising Ned Hayes was a drunk and a drug fiend. Since he was never seen in public, never tossed into the street from a bar or a brothel he’d set out to trash, never picked up and escorted home by policemen who would be well paid for the service, he gradually faded from discussion. Too many men, and not a few women, disappeared into their bottles every day for Ned Hayes’s case to be remarkable. He’d had his moment of notoriety when he saved Billy McGlory’s life. There were some reporters who thought he was already dead. So be it.

  The only spark of life Ned had shown in over a year of near sobriety had been when Geoffrey Hunter knocked on his door and asked for help in getting to Billy McGlory. Something about that visit stirred him out of his lethargy, awakened the old detective instincts. And now Hunter needed him again. It was almost enough to make him want to quit drinking altogether. Tyrus had a smile on his face nearly as broad as the one on the muzzle of that ugly white horse Danny Dennis drove around.

  “I’m going to give you the story of your career,” Ned told Russell Coughlin, who nearly spewed out the beer he was drinking when Hayes sat down beside him in the Easy Shamrock saloon. “But you’ve got to keep it under wraps until I give the word.”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Detective!” Coughlin sputtered.

  “I’m not in the department anymore, Russell.”

  “You look like hell, pardon my saying so.”

  “Looks can be deceiving.”

  Russell Coughlin could smell a story a mile away. The sweet stink of someone else’s scandal was hanging all around Ned Hayes, making the reporter’s fingers tingle for the pencil stub and pad of paper in the breast pocket of his threadbare tweed jacket.

  Hayes handed him a list of thirty-seven names and dates. “Start with Patrick Monoghan, accused of murder in September 1873. Charges dismissed.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Every man on this list has a story. You’ll have to dig around in the Herald archives, but they’ll all be there. You’ve got twenty-four hours to find the who, what, where, when, and why of every mother’s son of them. I especially want to know if they’re alive or dead, and where to find them. When you’ve got the information, take it to Roscoe Conkling’s office in the United Bank Building down on Wall Street and Broadway. Give it to Josiah Gregory and then walk away. You’ll get a call when it’s time to write the story, but if what you’ve done leaks, you’ll get nothing.”

  “I’m guaranteed an exclusive,” Coughlin stipulated.

  “How else?” Hayes smiled, the handsome man he had once been shining through and lighting up the bar stool he occupied. “One more thing. The last set of dates and initials on the list may be more important than some of the others. Follow the story to its end, whatever that is, especially if the man died in Sing Sing. Check up on his relatives, find out whatever you can about them.”

  “I’ll do it,” Coughlin said.

  “No leaks. Do we have a deal?” Hayes asked.

  They shook on it.

  In her comfortable bed on Fifth Avenue, Victoria MacKenzie had no idea that her past life was catching up to her.

  Nor had she reckoned on someone else’s past crossing paths with hers.

  * * *

  Danny Dennis’s cab waited in the alleyway behind the MacKenzie mansion.

  “Kincaid said he’ll give the note to a maid he called German Clara. She doesn’t speak much English, but all she has to do is find and give it to Miss MacKenzie. He’s waiting for her in the courtyard.” Dennis paced impatiently beside the cab, acutely aware that anyone looking out one of the mansion’s upper-story windows would wonder what a hansom cab was doing parked in the alley. He leaned into the cab again. “I think she’s coming, Mr. Hunter. I heard a door open.”

  Moments later Kincaid appeared, leading a veiled figure in black past the stable block.

  “You’d best be out of here,” he said to Danny Dennis as he helped Prudence into the hansom and retied the curtain that had been drawn down to hide the vehicle’s occupants. He glanced up at the mansion’s rear facade. “I don’t think anyone’s spotted you.”

  Dennis nodded his head and clucked to Mr. Washington.

  Kincaid watched the cab disappear down the alleyway and said a quick prayer of thanks that everyone in the MacKenzie household knew that German Clara didn’t understand half of what was said to her. It wasn’t much protection for the girl, but it was better than nothing.

  * * *

  “We’ve been invited to Mrs. Cavanaugh’s Wednesday Afternoon At Home,” Geoffrey Hunter explained. “Ned arranged it.”

  “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss MacKenzie.” Ned Hayes raised his top hat and bowed as gracefully as the crowded interior of the hansom permitted.

  “And I yours, Mr. Hayes. I don’t think we’d have been able to get to Billy McGlory without your help.”

  “It’s a pleasure to be able to serve so lovely a lady.”

  Hayes thought Geoffrey was right about the late
Judge’s daughter; she was indeed a rare one. Unconcerned about admitting to an association with the most notorious saloonkeeper in the city and as at ease unchaperoned in a hansom cab with two men as if she sat in her own parlor. Pale gray eyes that looked directly at you unafraid of what they would discover, a smile that came from the heart, and with it the kind of rock-solid single-minded determination you seldom saw in young society women. A rare one indeed.

  “Mrs. Cavanaugh is leaving the city at the end of the week to take the waters in Saratoga Springs. She suffers cruelly from dyspepsia.” Geoffrey smiled. “When you see her, I think you’ll understand why.”

  “You’d better tell me what this is about,” Prudence said, settling herself against the tufted leather of the seat. Danny Dennis was as good a driver as there was, but even he couldn’t smooth out the cobblestones.

  “Mrs. Cavanaugh is a widow in her early seventies,” Ned began. “Her father was a banker here in New York City who took his family to White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, instead of Saratoga one year. To your Grand Central Hotel, in fact, where his daughter Laura, the present Mrs. Cavanaugh, met her husband. They married, and from what I understand she quickly became more Southern than Geoffrey or I could ever manage. To make a long story short, Colonel Cavanaugh lost everything during the war, including his life.

  “Mrs. Cavanaugh’s father was elderly by that time, but he was lonely, too. So he traveled down to the ruins of what had been a fine plantation and took his daughter and her three adult children North. Rescued them from penury and almost certain death from starvation and disease. The son, another Colonel Cavanaugh, had been badly wounded; he lost an arm and has to use a cane to get around. The two daughters were widows like their mother, but childless. The father was so incensed at the conditions he found them living in that he vowed his daughter and her family would never go back. So when he died, he left everything to Laura, including the house we’re going to today, but with the stipulation that unless she and her heirs continued to live in it, the rest of his fortune would go to charity. Remember, he was a banker. Rich as Croesus.”

  “They’ve been in New York ever since?”

  “With an occasional trip to Saratoga or White Sulphur Springs to take the waters. The father made sure the South Carolina plantation was lost to taxes long ago.”

  “I think I understand now,” Prudence said.

  “Miss Lydia was right,” Geoffrey added. “The Lost Cause is alive and well in the widow Cavanaugh’s parlor. Every Confederate who can prove his pedigree is welcome to her Wednesday Afternoon At Home.”

  “And that’s where you think we’ll find someone who can identify the man in the wheeled chair. Who might even have met Victoria or Donald at the Grand Central Hotel?”

  “I believe it’s the best chance we’ve got.”

  “I don’t have a Confederate pedigree, Geoffrey,” Prudence reminded him.

  “You do now,” he said. “We’re distantly related cousins.”

  “Kissin’ cousins, Miss MacKenzie,” explained Ned Hayes. “That’s what we call them down home.”

  She stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing.

  “I can’t imitate the accent,” she finally said.

  “It’s something you’re born with, like freckles or a gap between your front teeth,” Geoffrey assured her. “Not necessary for you because although male members of your family fought for the South, you’ve always lived in the North. The fewer lies you have to remember, the easier it is to make them believable.”

  To Prudence’s uneducated ear, the two men now sounded exactly alike. A fellow Southerner could have told in an instant which state each man claimed as his own.

  “How did you manage to get invitations, Mr. Hayes?” Prudence asked.

  “Kissin’ cousins, Miss MacKenzie,” he answered, twinkling his blue eyes at her. “Kissin’ cousins.”

  By the time Danny Dennis stopped his cab to let them out, Prudence was as comfortable in her new identity as she was likely to get. And relishing the challenge.

  * * *

  Mrs. Laura Cavanaugh’s lavishly appointed home was as grand as any of the new showplaces being built along Fifth Avenue by Vanderbilts and Astors. The ceilings were high, coffered, and gilded, the windows heavily curtained and draped, the polished wood floors dotted with priceless Turkish carpets. Freshly cut spring flowers stood in Chinese porcelain vases on tables and sideboards, their light scents cutting through the fog of perfumed women and pomaded men promenading through three parlors separated one from the other by doors that slid back into the walls.

  The butler who ushered them in held out a silver tray to collect their calling cards, but after that familiar beginning, this At Home was unlike any Prudence had ever attended.

  A fair sprinkling of the men were in full dress Confederate uniform, though little of what they wore resembled the worn and often bloodstained uniforms of the last days of the war. These were marvels of the tailor’s art, hand stitched and fitted, beribboned and hung with medals, finished off with epaulets, gold curlicues, double rows of polished brass buttons, fringed sashes, and scabbarded swords.

  “They’re like wax figures in an exhibition come to life,” Prudence breathed.

  “It’s The Lost Cause being recreated in a new and better image,” Geoffrey corrected her. “If these people and others like them have their way, the South will pass into history as a glorious era to be yearned for and never forgotten.”

  “I was there,” Ned snapped. “No war is glorious.”

  A handsome man in his early or mid-fifties limped toward them, the left sleeve of his gray uniform pinned across his chest, his right hand wielding a gold-handled burled walnut cane.

  “I’m delighted you finally decided to join us,” he said to Ned Hayes, bowing stiffly and quickly to avoid the embarrassment of not having a free hand to shake.

  Introductions were made. Geoffrey was apparently also a kissin’ cousin, though much further removed than Ned. Prudence wondered if everyone in the South belonging to a certain social class was related. The colonel’s sisters, one very thin, the other so excessively round that she tilted from side to side as she walked, escorted Prudence toward the parlor where most of the ladies had gathered around their hostess.

  Mrs. Cavanaugh held court from a gold silk brocade cushioned settee meant to accomodate two people, now amply filled with her considerable bulk. She motioned to Prudence to come sit by her, a gesture not lost on the thin daughter, who set a chair close by her mother’s settee. By the time Prudence finished her first cup of tea, Mrs. Cavanaugh had extracted her entire life history from her, or at least the story concocted by Geoffrey and Ned. Tiny, crustless sandwiches no wider than the width of a finger appeared and disappeared with amazing rapidity, iced cake squares came and went just as quickly. Laura Cavanaugh was past mistress of the art of speaking and eating at the same time without mangling a word or dropping a crumb.

  “Ned told me you’ve been puzzling over something I might be able to help you with,” she finally said, touching a tiny linen napkin to her lips.

  It was the opening Prudence had been waiting for. She took the photograph she had found hidden in Donald’s suitcase and handed it to her hostess. “It was in with my late father’s personal correspondence. Just lying there in the drawer loose, like he’d thrown away the letter it came in, but maybe decided to keep the picture a little longer. When I showed it to Cousin Geoffrey, he said he thought he recognized the Grand Central Hotel veranda by the chandelier hanging over the front door. There’s not another one like it anywhere; they had to reinforce the roof so they could hang it. You can just make it out right behind the man seated in the wheeled chair.”

  Laura Cavanaugh peered at the photograph through the lorgnette she wore pinned to her bodice. “That’s Colonel Nathaniel Jamieson,” she declared confidently. “He got shot off his horse right before Appomattox. He probably would have preferred to die, but he didn’t. Sat in a wheelchair the rest of his life, su
ch as it was. Lord help us, he was well past fifty years old when the war started, but he wouldn’t stay home like most men of his age. I think his wife was dead by then and he had grown up children; he never did marry again.”

  Prudence looked politely puzzled. “I just assumed the lady standing beside him there was his wife, though much younger of course, and the other man perhaps his son.” She turned the photograph over and pointed to the date written on the back. “But that doesn’t make sense, does it? This says 1881, so if his wife was already dead and he didn’t remarry, is this his daughter? The reason I ask is that I thought if I found out who the gentleman in the wheeled chair was, I could send the photograph to his family. Just in case.” So many family mementos had been forever lost.

  “That’s got to be her, Mama,” the thin daughter said, pointing at Victoria. “She had gall, I’ve got to give her that.”

  “I’d forget about sending this photograph anywhere but into a good, hot fire,” Mrs. Cavanaugh said crisply. She passed it to the daughter whose chubby hand reached across the back of the settee. “What do you think, Bethann?”

  “Well, we never did meet her, of course, but we heard all about her. There’s nobody else would pose with Colonel Jamieson like that, and the date is right. I’d say she’s got to be the one.”

  Prudence waited for Mrs. Cavanaugh to decide whether she should reveal what she knew to the stranger sitting opposite her. Both daughters looked as if they were about to burst with the effort of holding back. Prudence decided they needed a little prodding.

  “I’m sure I can find an address for Colonel Jamieson or one of his children,” she said. “I know I’d be forever grateful for a memento like this.” Nothing too definite that she’d have to explain. Just hints at losses too painful to be discussed.

  “I don’t suppose it would do any harm to share what we know,” Mrs. Cavanaugh mused, “Colonel Jamieson being dead and all. Nothing ever came of it, and the woman in question had the common sense to disappear.”