The horses finished eating, and I turned them out, then went in and made Aunt Loulane’s cathead biscuit recipe. While they baked, I took a shower and got ready for the day. I wasn’t exactly eager to start, but it had to be done. The fact that it was nine o’clock and Tinkie wasn’t beating the door down told me Oscar had filled her in about Tilda Richmond and the possible link to the Lady in Red.
Tinkie wasn’t the kind of person who let the past define her, but Tilda’s story was a sad one. It would hurt her heart, and she would also feel Oscar’s pain. That his ancestral aunt might have been a madam in a brothel, whether in D.C. or the Wild West, was no big deal. That she’d been Lincoln’s lover—in the Old South view that would be sleeping with the enemy, literally—also had no sting in this day and time.
If Tilda had been involved in assassinating a president—that was a mark of shame, especially if she used sex as a tool to get close to Lincoln, only to betray him. Those tactics were dishonorable. Somehow, though, none of this possible historical scandal coalesced into a motive for murder. Olive might kill if she felt betrayed. And the Heritage Heroes would stoop to throwing tomatoes and trying to run Olive out of town. But murder? Now, money—that was a good motive for murder. And if Olive’s boasts of financial gain to be made from her “research and book” could be believed, I had a lead worth pursuing.
I took a tray of biscuits, sausage, sawmill gravy, and fresh, hot coffee upstairs to my fiancé. To earn his rakish grin, I would have hoed a row of cotton.
“Where are you off to?” he asked, savoring the aroma of the coffee.
“To find Dr. Webber. I think it’s time I had a sit-down with him alone. If he knows something definitive about the Lady in Red, I need to know what it is.”
“He’s a handsome man.” Graf pretended to pout.
“And he can’t hold a candle to you.” I leaned down and kissed him long and deep. “Wait here for me. I’ll be back.”
The day promised plenty of sun, and I let the top down on my mother’s old Chinese red Mercedes roadster and took off for Ole Miss.
To the north and east of Zinnia, the Mississippi terrain changes radically. The flat stretches of the alluvial delta buck up in small hills. The change is sudden and dramatic, and the hills rise up on the horizon like a wall of green. While I loved the delta, I also appreciated the different topography of the state.
Zinnia is a small farming town, and Oxford is an upscale college town. They might have developed on separate planets. Oxford is the home of the University of Mississippi, or Ole Miss as it is fondly called. It is also the home of William Faulkner, a man whose employment in the postal service sometimes led him to burn the mail rather than deliver it. Faulkner’s stated attitude—just because a man had the money to mail a letter didn’t mean he had anything worthwhile to say—appealed to me.
Whether the story was true or not, I enjoyed it. And I applauded his ingenuity.
I drove to the Ole Miss campus and parked in the shadiest place I could find. The campus was beautiful, but the asphalt lot was at least ninety-eight degrees. The walk to the history department left me sweaty and breathless. I could only hope that, after all this effort, Richard Webber would be in his office. I hadn’t tried to make an appointment—I was afraid he’d dodge me if he knew I was coming.
The secretary gave me a knowing look when I asked where to find the professor. I wondered how many women had tried to track down the wily historian. I probably couldn’t count that high. As far as I knew, he’d never been married.
After following a rat’s maze of narrow corridors, at last I knocked on his closed door.
“Who is it?” an annoyed voice asked.
“Sarah Booth Delaney.”
Rustling and the sound of furniture moving put me to wondering if he was barricading the door. It swung open as he shrugged into his jacket. Seersucker and very Southern male. He cultivated a distinct image—distinguished, bookish, a bit disheveled, and manly.
“Ms. Delaney,” he said, inviting me in with a crook of his finger. “Come in. And close the door.”
His office reflected his persona. Dark bookcases were filled with leather-bound volumes. A beautiful old globe gleamed in sunlight flooding in from two windows with plantation blinds half closed. There was an air of studiousness and intelligence in the room.
He pointed to a sofa, motioning for me to sit. A big leather sofa. I looked at it, and I looked at him. He clearly read my thoughts, and his grin widened.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“Tell me about the Lady in Red and your research.”
“I like a direct woman.” He rolled his office chair close. I caught a whiff of cologne. Something Calvin. He crossed his legs, ankle on knee, the picture of casual ease. “I hear Dr. Twist got her exhumation.”
“She did.”
“Folks are mighty pissed, I’m sure.” And he was mighty pleased.
“That’s old news. You accused Olive of stealing your research. How did she do it?”
He went to a filing cabinet, dug through some files, and brought out The Aggregate of Past Events magazine. He found the article he wanted and handed it to me.
The headline read: “Mississippi Grave Holds Secrets to Civil War.”
I scanned the article, which pretty much put forth the same hypothesis Olive espoused—that the Lady in Red was Lincoln’s mistress during the thick of the Civil War. I wanted a copy of the article for Tinkie to read. “But you published it, Dr. Webber. It’s public knowledge. Olive didn’t steal it if you put it out there.”
His face held pity and contempt. “There’s a code of honor among academics. Hell, among journalists and scientists and even novelists. When a colleague is working on a premise, others stay away. It’s an unwritten rule. Once a claim is staked, it’s forbidden for a peer to jump the claim. Everyone abides by this. Except Olive. She’s a vulture picking the bones of any scholar with an original thought because she has none of her own.”
“I didn’t see a connection between the Lady in Red and local Sunflower County families in your article.”
He harrumphed. “I didn’t include them because I intended to work with the Richmond and Falcon families. Their cooperation would have streamlined my research. That was to be phase two of my work.”
So, he meant to deceive Oscar and Cece into helping him and then lower the boom on them in print. Nice.
“So how did Olive find out about local connections? I mean, the Lady in Red could have been anybody. And still could. There was a Tilda Richmond, but there’s no proof she’s the woman Olive exhumed.”
“I made the connection. I heard the story of this red-haired firebrand who swept into Washington and was accepted into the inner circle of political figures. A woman. At a time when women weren’t given credit for thinking. Olive called to congratulate me on the article in the Aggregate. We chatted for a long time, and I was lulled into complacency. I mentioned the local connection.”
The fuzzy picture sharpened. Webber was blowing hard about his project and had let too much slip. Olive jumped on it. “When you were talking with her, were you aware of her interest in the Lady in Red?”
“Academia is a small world. I’ve been familiar with Dr. Twist for a time. She told me she was researching slavery in the Northeast. Something about the power of the female slave in nonagricultural households. Turns out that was just a smoke screen. Twist knows damn good and well her entire premise is built on my research. She’s poached my work and now she’s stolen the body right out of the cemetery.”
I wasn’t familiar enough with academic standards to know if Webber had a legitimate legal claim or was just whining. But I would be pissed if I was working on a case and another private dick jumped into the middle of it.
“What do you know about Twist?” I’d read her CV and several articles she’d written. None of it had impressed me, but she worked in a different world.
“She’s a carnivore. She eats historians for breakfast and picks her
teeth with their bones. She’s hated at her hoity-toity university. When she showed up down here, I made a few calls. Let’s just say none of her colleagues would cry if she disappeared.”
I was enjoying this academic boil-busting. It almost made me like Olive. Almost, but not quite.
“Is she a respected academic?”
“A long time ago she wrote a paper focusing on the journals of New England women during the Civil War. It was very well received, uncovering new material about the way small communities worked together while the men were at war. The details were remarkable.” He frowned. “I wonder whom she stole that from?” His eyes widened. “She could have made it all up!”
“Is there a formal method to complain about what she’s done?”
“None that would make a difference, I’m afraid.”
“You have a motive for murder, Dr. Webber.” Certainly he knew this already.
“You’re right. I might have gleefully offed Twist, but I had nothing against Boswell.” He draped an arm over his chair back. “I told you Boswell came to me, begging for a job. Olive treated him like an indentured servant, which is pretty ironic since she’s trying to paint the Richmond and Falcon families as slaveholders who killed a relative because she supported freedom for the slaves.”
“Olive thinks the Lady in Red was murdered by her own family because she was an abolitionist? But I thought she was an assassin of the South’s number one enemy.”
“The problem of working with legends and folklore, Ms. Delaney, is that truth is distorted by family interest. The woman—Tilda Richmond, if Olive’s estimations are correct—was viewed as a traitor and a whore. Olive intends to prove the Richmond and Falcon families conspired to poison her and bury her in a grave where she’d never be found.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. She was lovingly interred. The coffin was handmade to fit her. If her relatives had murdered her, wouldn’t they have just dragged her into a cotton field and buried her?”
Webber leaned back and resumed in his most professorial tone. “Olive’s theory is that the families were forced into the murder. Remember, my dear, the war had destroyed the South. Brother fought against brother. Families were betrayed by loved ones. If Tilda Richmond was Lincoln’s lover, she would have been viewed as the ultimate whore and turncoat. If she came back to Mississippi, then she would have been considered a spy. The Richmonds and Falcons likely had to kill her, or else they would be suspect, too. And I hate to say it, but if Olive can verify this, she’s going to have a runaway bestseller on her hands. I don’t know where she found Secretary of War Stanton’s private letters, but if they can be authenticated, this will propel Twist into national prominence.”
I didn’t care about Twist’s future. “So you’re pretty much saying the entire county was in on the murder of a young woman—because she didn’t agree with their politics.”
“Well, if you put it that way, yes. Community pressure. Think of it, Ms. Delaney. The South had lost everything. Every family contributed a father, husband, or brother. Some lost multiple family members. The women and children were starving, their homes and crops burned to the ground. People have this idea that war is honorable, but don’t believe it for a minute. Women with infants were left to starve. It would have been kinder to put a bullet in their brains.” Webber waxed eloquent.
“Everyone suffered. No one disputes that. But to think people would be bullied into killing a family member because her politics were embarrassing, that’s just plain nuts.” Jeremiah popped into my mind and with him came a dawning awareness. It wasn’t such a stretch to consider Cece putting him in an unmarked grave. Luckily Webber couldn’t read my mind.
“By our standards today, perhaps. But put yourself in a country torn apart by a bloody war that was fought to preserve a way of life in the South. Whether the cause was right or wrong, the men who fought gave everything. To find a viper at their own breast … it would have been unthinkable. It’s possible everyone in the Richmond and Falcon families would have been hanged as traitors. I presume the families did the only thing they could do for survival.”
“How are both families involved? I mean, she was either a Richmond or a Falcon. Why does Olive want to involve both Sunflower County families?”
His smile was smug. “I’ve done a little research myself in the last few days. There’s a common factor between them. Tilda Richmond—and I am certain the Lady in Red was a Richmond—was betrothed to a Falcon. She ran away from home rather than marry him. He was humiliated, especially in light of the fact that she took Abe Lincoln as her lover. And just think how delicious—if she was an assassin, she couldn’t confess that and save herself. Either way, she was doomed.”
My head was already swimming in boys in gray and blue uniforms doing their best to kill each other. “This is too much.”
“In a very roundabout way, it makes perfect sense. Olive believes a member of both families was involved in Tilda Richmond’s murder and secret burial. A Falcon, because of the rejection of marriage, and a Richmond, to save the family’s honor, and possibly lives.”
“This gets worse and worse.”
“From your perspective, but not from that of a historian.”
“The past aside, my concern is the murder of a young man. One who had no dog in this fight. Boswell had nothing to gain, yet he’s dead.”
“Boswell wasn’t an innocent. I told you about the tapes he made of Olive.” Webber rolled his eyes. “He’s got her dead to rights, and those tapes, released at the right time, could have torpedoed a book deal. They cast doubt on her credibility and her sanity.”
“Did Boswell show you the tapes he mentioned? Do you have any evidence they existed?”
“Unfortunately, he was murdered before he could show them to me.”
I stood up. “Where were you the night before Boswell died?”
“You know very well I was at The Gardens B and B. Just as you were. And your partner, and Twist, and about twenty other people. I heard Olive’s room was firebombed. Find any fingerprints?”
“The investigation moves forward. That’s all I can say.” I didn’t want to admit that every lead had been a dead end so far.
“Which means you’ve got zilch. If I were truly a suspect, Sheriff Peters would have me behind bars.” His teeth sparkled white. “You’re here on a fishing expedition.” He leaned closer. “And you haven’t gotten so much as a bite.”
He might get a punch in the nose. He grated on my last nerve.
“Oh, this trip hasn’t been a total waste of my time.” I gave him my sly and superior expression. “You reveal a lot more than you realize, Dr. Webber.” I decided to give him the pretend-psychic treatment. “You’re attracted to Olive, yet she doesn’t reciprocate. That’s why you excoriate her conduct. You accuse her of stealing what you’ve put out for public consumption, which tells me you’re jealous of the fact she took this thread farther than you thought to do. You’re used to opening doors with your charm, and right now it isn’t working for you. You’ve been left without another play.”
Heat jumped into his cheeks, but he held on to his smile. I had to give him credit for that. “Always an interesting tactic, Ms. Delaney. Attack on a personal level when you have nothing else.”
“One you’re all too familiar with, I see.” I walked to the door. “My visit was unofficial. I wonder how the board of trustees of the university will react when Coleman comes a’calling.”
Before he could answer, I walked out the door and closed it behind me. I felt the secretary’s gaze drilling into my spine.
She looked down at her desk, pretending she hadn’t been staring. I knew better. “Mrs. Blackmon,” I said, reading the nameplate on her desk, “do you file travel vouchers for the professors?”
“I do.” Her fingers flew over the keyboard to show she was too busy to chat.
“May I see those for Dr. Webber?”
“I can’t release that data.” She stopped typing. “Even if I’d like to.”
“Thanks.” I hadn’t seen his expense sheets, but I’d discovered something else. The history department secretary was not a fan of the professor.
* * *
Tinkie was waiting for me on the porch at Dahlia House when I got home. She was sipping a bourbon, neat, when I climbed the steps. This was not the proper drink for a Daddy’s Girl on a hot September afternoon. It was a declaration of intent to tie one on.
“You’re violating Rule 3,394 of the Daddy’s Girl Handbook.” I hoped to squeeze a laugh out of her.
“I’m sure I’ll break a lot more rules before Olive Twist leaves town. Dead or alive.” She tossed back the bourbon and clapped the highball glass to the wood floor.
“What’s going on?” I asked as I settled down beside her. I gazed out over the fields we both loved. Tinkie was on the edge of either a temper tantrum or a crying jag. I hoped for the former because the latter made me feel helpless.
“Oscar is in a snit,” she said. “Coleman came and talked to him about the note Jimmy Boswell slipped in his pocket.”
“And?”
“They went in the library and closed the door so I couldn’t hear. After the sheriff left, Oscar wouldn’t talk about it.”
“Coleman doesn’t seriously think Oscar had anything to do with Boswell’s poisoning?”
Tinkie’s lower lip protruded slightly. It wasn’t a pout, which indicated the dreaded tears were a distinct possibility. “Oscar refuses to say anything. It must be bad.”
I’d warned the big nudnik about holding out on Tinkie. His wife wouldn’t judge him on events from two centuries ago. He was a fool not to confide his worries to her. “I talked with Webber. He believes members of the Richmond and Falcon families murdered the Lady in Red. Family honor and survival.”
“You paint them like the mafia.”
She wasn’t far off the mark. “According to Webber, Tilda Richmond, whether she is the Lady in Red or not, was betrothed to a Falcon.”
Tinkie’s eyes widened. “And she dumped him?”
“Yep. I guess she didn’t read the Daddy’s Girl Handbook.”
Smarty Bones: A Sarah Booth Delaney Mystery Page 15
