“I’m just saying Miss Eleanor wasn’t never meant for this world, not the way it is. You best hold on to your memories and go on back where you belong.” Aunt Jessa picked up her basket. “It won’t do you no good to stay here looking for trouble. They don’t want you any more than they wanted her.”
* * *
“Then she disappeared,” Prudence told Geoffrey, when she found him leafing through a book and lingering over his brandy and coffee in the parlor. She wrinkled her forehead in concentration as she tried to remember every moment of the odd encounter. “She must have brushed past me when she climbed the stairs, but I can’t recall the precise moment when she left. It was like I stepped into a dream. When I woke up I was still standing beside Eleanor, but I was alone and the lantern was sputtering.”
He poured her a glass of sherry and insisted that she sit down and drink it, buying time to decide how much of what Prudence had seen and heard he would choose to explain to her. How much she would be prepared to accept and believe. The Yankee hardheadedness and skepticism that made it impossible for her to walk away from a puzzle without solving it would work against her in the South where so much wasn’t as it seemed and far too many things defied rational explanation.
He refilled his coffee cup and topped off his brandy.
“I don’t think that woman belonged here, Geoffrey. At Seapoint, I mean. She was too old to be a maid.”
“From your description, I’d say she’d been some family’s mammy at one time. Probably the Bennetts. You call them nannies up north. They run the nursery and look after the children until it’s time to turn them over to tutors and governesses.”
“She said people called her Aunt Jessa.”
He nodded his head in agreement. “In slavery days, the oldest household servants who’d worked for the family all their lives were often called aunt or uncle in their final years. I had an Aunt Calla. She was the most demanding woman I ever knew, fierce as an attack dog if she caught you in some mischief, but gentle as an angel when she tucked you into bed at night. The aunties were always big women. When you sat on their laps it was like sinking into a stack of soft pillows.”
Prudence stared at him. Geoffrey had grown up on a plantation in North Carolina where more than a hundred slaves toiled in the fields that had made his family wealthy for generations before the war changed everything. Prudence had never known a servant who wasn’t white and often Irish. In fact, now that she thought about it, she didn’t think she had ever spoken to a dark-skinned person until she’d come to Bradford Island. How odd that was. Two separate worlds in the same country, as stubbornly different and distinct as their inhabitants could make them.
“What was she doing here, Geoffrey? Eleanor couldn’t have meant anything to her.”
And this was where Geoffrey had to decide whether Prudence would be shocked or touched by what he believed Aunt Jessa had come to Seapoint to do. She’d gotten angry with him before when he’d tried to shield her from an unpleasant truth. With the working relationship between them warming into something deeper, he didn’t dare risk jeopardizing the trust he’d worked so hard to earn.
“This is only a guess, Prudence,” he began hesitantly. “But I think Aunt Jessa probably belonged to the Bennetts before the war. She might even have been Teddy Bennett’s mammy. No matter how old she is now, she would have claimed the privilege of caring for any children he and Eleanor had. And Teddy would have set her up in the nursery with at least two young nursemaids to do the work.”
“That still doesn’t explain what she was doing putting oil on Eleanor’s body and chanting something I couldn’t make out no matter how hard I tried.”
“Have you ever heard of voodoo? Or juju?”
Prudence shook her head.
“If you want a man to fall in love with you, you go to a voodoo queen or conjure woman and pay her to cast a spell that will get you what you want. Or if you have an enemy, you can buy a potion or a doll that will sicken or kill him. It would take me hours to explain it all to you, and there’s a lot I don’t know, but that’s the gist of it.”
“It sounds like the superstitions the Irish have about holy relics and banshees,” Prudence said. “Nobody halfway intelligent believes that kind of nonsense.”
“What about spiritualism? Holding séances to contact the dead? It seems to me that at one time not so very long ago half the country believed it was possible to call up the shade of a deceased loved one.”
“My point exactly.” Prudence’s father hadn’t had a very high opinion of the reasoning capacity of the plaintiffs who appeared before his bench, and he’d passed that prejudice on to the daughter he’d trained in the law. Even though, as they both knew, there was little or no chance that a woman admitted to the bar would ever be accepted on the same footing as her male colleagues.
“I think Aunt Jessa was making sure that the woman who was supposed to marry the man she’d cared for as a child was given every chance to sit with the angels. She would have done the same thing for any child of Teddy’s who didn’t survive his first few years or was born dead. The oil and the anointing are from the Catholic tradition, the chanting probably calls on spirits and gods whose names we don’t know.”
“I thought at the time that she touched Eleanor as gently as a mother. With love. And how strange and beautiful that was.”
“The county sheriff is coming over in the morning,” Geoffrey said, leading Prudence away from spells and back to cold reality. “From the mainland. He’ll bring the coroner.”
“We have to tell them what we suspect, Geoffrey.”
“Don’t volunteer any information until we see which way the wind is blowing.”
“You’re being enigmatic.”
“Cautious and realistic,” he said. “I know these people the way you don’t, Prudence.”
He was maddening when he got patriarchal with her. Then he smiled.
And a dimple she’d never noticed before appeared in his cheek.
CHAPTER 5
The party of horsemen rode up Seapoint’s crushed shell driveway in late afternoon of the day following the discovery of Eleanor’s body. Prudence and Geoffrey watched them approach from the second-story parlor where Prudence had been impatiently pacing since breakfast.
“They’ve taken their time,” she snapped.
“Everything takes longer when you’re on an island,” Geoffrey soothed, knowing she’d eventually figure out for herself that rushing headlong into a situation wasn’t the Southern way. He’d rather not have to try to explain it to her.
She mumbled something he couldn’t make out, then whirled from the window and started toward the curved staircase to the main floor.
“Don’t,” he said, blocking her way so that she almost collided with him. “Let Eleanor’s father handle this.”
Philip Dickson had greeted them in the dining room that morning as immaculately dressed and groomed as though he had not spent most of the inconsolable night locked in the lonely privacy of his library. The man who had inherited one fortune and made another through cold-blooded risk taking and ruthless competitiveness had risen from the ashes of his grief and once more grabbed the world by its throat. Eleanor’s father got on with things; that was who he was and what he did. He looked years older than he had the day before and his eyes had the bleak emptiness of someone who has suffered overwhelming anguish and loss, but there was purpose to the set of his jaw.
It was on the tip of Prudence’s tongue to demand if Geoffrey meant there was no place for a woman in the discussion that would take place once the sheriff and coroner had viewed Eleanor’s remains. She bit back the sharp retort, physically exhausted and desperately miserable after a sleepless night during which she’d wrestled repeatedly with questions to which she had no answers. Worst of all was a stubborn, niggling doubt about the conclusion she’d reached and Geoffrey seemed to support. Eleanor’s shoulder had appeared to be dislocated and there had been at least the suggestion of bruising, but the
more she recalled what she had seen, the more she doubted the evidence of her own eyes. The uncertainty was unnerving.
Philip Dickson glanced toward the second-floor landing as he greeted his visitors, then ushered them toward the cellar where his daughter’s body lay. They were out of sight before Prudence could push past Geoffrey and insist on joining them. But she wasn’t a member of the family, she reminded herself. To be absolutely truthful, she and Eleanor had drifted apart, especially after Philip began to take his wife and daughter on annual trips to Europe.
For the past two years, the Dicksons had wintered at Seapoint. And there had been Teddy, of course, the determined suitor who followed her back to New York and courted her and her parents until he’d won his case. Time passed so swiftly that Prudence hadn’t realized how much of it had slipped away until Eleanor asked that she be her maid of honor. She’d been surprised and immensely flattered. And for a few of the busy weeks before they left New York to sail to Bradford Island, it was as though Eleanor had once more become the older sister Prudence never had. To find her friend again and then to lose her so cruelly was unbearable.
Maybe Geoffrey was right to advise her to pull back. Her grief was too sharp, too raw. It could make her say and do things she might regret. And for Eleanor’s parents, her very presence must be a painful reminder of the girl who was no longer there.
“They’re coming up from the cellars,” Geoffrey said quietly. He steered her toward the staircase, her arm firmly supported by his. “Now.”
She really didn’t understand him at times.
* * *
Eleanor’s father introduced them to County Sheriff Calvin Budridge and Justice of the Peace and Coroner Thaddeus Norton.
Teddy Bennett had the look of a man who had seen his own death; his brother Lawrence was a blank slate.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt about it,” Norton said once they had settled themselves in the library and suitable condolences had been expressed. “Miss Dickson was an unfortunate and tragic victim whose passing we must clearly blame on her unfamiliarity with the natural dangers of the island.” He sighed deeply. “I’ll enter a finding of accidental death by drowning.” Pen poised over the death certificate, he waited for only a moment before recording his decision and certifying it with an elaborately scrolled signature. “And, of course, I release the deceased to her family. I see no need for additional formalities or procedures.” By which he meant the deeply disturbing prospect of an autopsy.
Sheriff Budridge nodded in agreement. A burly, sun-browned man with deeply set brown eyes that gave away nothing, he wore his office with a casual authority that brooked no argument or challenge. He’d reduced Eleanor’s shoulder dislocation with the ease born of long jailhouse practice dealing with the injuries of drunken brawlers and short-tempered hotheads. Then he’d smiled at her father, standing sentinel over his daughter’s unclothed body. There, he’d seemed to say, she’s all fixed now. Nothing more to fret over.
Teddy, fists clenched and eyes burning, determined to ensure that nothing untoward was done to his Eleanor, shuddered when the man’s hands twisted her shoulder, but he did not protest. The sheriff and the coroner spent less than ten minutes beside the dead woman and did not roll down the sheet covering her farther than the injured shoulder. Lawrence Bennett had told them all they needed to know during the ride over from the Wildacre dock—where women of quality and good family were concerned, the less invasive the examination the better. Modesty was as much their armor in death as it had been in life.
* * *
Prudence had had enough. She found the disingenuous, impersonal sympathy expressed by the sheriff and coroner acutely offensive. Then a discomfiting emotion she couldn’t identify flitted across Lawrence’s handsome features before assuming the appearance of conventional grief. It seemed to her that three of the five men in the room could barely contain their impatience to be away and shut of Eleanor Dickson’s inconvenient death.
Before Geoffrey could move to stop her, she blurted out what no one else had said. “Eleanor didn’t dislocate her shoulder by falling to the ground. She couldn’t have caused that kind of injury to herself.”
Sheriff Budridge smiled condescendingly. “We see that same problem more times than I can count on boys we have to keep overnight in jail for their own good. They get liquored up, start picking fights, and the next thing you know they’re tripping over their own feet. Worst thing a person can do is try to break a fall by sticking out his arms.” Heads nodded on either side of him. “It’s treacherous footing out there in the swamp. Just ask any tracker. He’ll tell you.”
Furious, Prudence glared at Geoffrey, demanding that he say something. He didn’t.
“There were bruises on her shoulders,” she continued defiantly.
“And I’m sure Miss Dickson had injuries in other places as well,” the coroner said. He folded the signed death certificate and slid it into his jacket pocket. As soon as he could get around to it, he’d file the pesky thing in the courthouse. “I’ve seen bodies that were black and blue all over from their encounters with floating logs.” It was clear he meant to imply that the pretty little Yankee girl did not know what she was talking about. Somebody should have taught her not to stick her nose into men’s business.
“You were a Pinkerton at one time, Geoffrey,” Philip Dickson said. “What do you think about all this?” He hadn’t gotten where he had without consulting experts when he wanted an informed opinion. He’d been shocked by the knobby protuberance on Eleanor’s shoulder, relieved when the sheriff had caused it to disappear. He knew about the damage drunks and brawlers did to one another; any man who hired unskilled workers was familiar with payday mayhem. It had been easy to accept that Eleanor had tripped, then fallen heavily and awkwardly enough to pass out from the pain.
Three heads swiveled in Geoffrey’s direction.
“You were a Pinkerton?” the sheriff asked.
No point denying it. “I was,” Geoffrey said. He knew what was coming next. The Pinkertons had foiled a plot to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln and spied for the Union during the war. Southerners had long memories.
“And where exactly did you pink?” Lawrence used the word that in certain circles had colloquially come to mean spy.
Geoffrey hadn’t tried to hide the remnants of his North Carolina way of speaking. To the sheriff, the coroner, and probably the Bennetts, despite the fact that he’d been a child during the war and the Reconstruction period, just having been a part of the Pinkerton organization at any time in his life condemned him. Traitor to the Cause was not a badge of honor.
He didn’t answer. The details of his Pinkerton career were his own business. He shared them with no one.
Prudence broke the uncomfortable silence. “Mr. Hunter was with me when I tended to Eleanor,” she said, trying not to notice Mr. Dickson’s involuntary wince as his mind supplied the image of his daughter’s body being readied for burial. “We both saw the dislocation and the bruising. Mr. Hunter spread his two hands over the discolorations on her shoulders.” She stretched out her fingers to illustrate what he had done. “They disappeared. Someone held her down under the water until she drowned.”
“Do you read novels, Miss MacKenzie?” asked Judge Norton.
“Whether or not I read novels has nothing to do with the circumstances of Miss Dickson’s death.” Prudence’s voice trembled with suppressed rage at the implied insult to her intelligence.
“It’s just that some of you ladies let your imaginations run wild. I’ve confined my wife’s reading to the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress. The same for my daughters,” the coroner informed her smugly.
“Miss MacKenzie is not indulging in a flight of fancy,” Geoffrey said. “The dislocation is a fact. As are the bruises on Miss Dickson’s shoulders.”
He looked at Teddy, who so far had said nothing. Eleanor’s bereft fiancé sat as if turned to stone, his mind and heart clearly somewhere else. Geoffrey wasn’t sure he’d
even heard any of the conversation surging around him.
“That’s enough, gentlemen,” Philip Dickson said, rising to his feet. “I thank you for your time and your condolences.” He hadn’t rung a bell, but the Seapoint butler stood in the open library doorway. “Henry will see you out. Our business here together is concluded.” There was a sting to his words that told everyone he considered the near contretemps a slight to his daughter’s memory. He wasn’t obliged to suffer their company any longer than he had to.
“Teddy?” Lawrence laid a hand on his brother’s shoulder.
“You go on back to Wildacre without me, Lawrence.” Teddy had a request best made in private. He wasn’t sure what Philip Dickson’s reaction would be.
“Stay,” Eleanor’s father said when his visitors had departed and the butler closed the library door. “We need to talk.”
* * *
“Why did she do it? What drew her into the live oaks at night and alone when she knew the forest could be dangerous? Why? Was it to meet you, Teddy? Are you responsible and too much of a coward to admit it?”
Hearing the knife-sharp edge in Philip Dickson’s voice, Prudence finally understood why he hadn’t pressed too hard against the sheriff and the coroner when they pronounced Eleanor’s death accidental. He had his own suspicions but too much of a care for his daughter’s reputation to bring them out into the light. Eleanor had done mischievous things when she was younger; even as an adult she had loved to flout rules and take chances. Her father knew this about her, and because her high spirits and love of life were the essence of who she was, he had never come down too hard on her. Prudence suspected that Eleanor had been the spark of light in his mirthless world of commerce.
“No, sir,” Teddy said, standing up straight and tall, beginning to come alive again. “I would never have suggested such a thing. Never allowed her to do it had I any suspicion what she was planning. It wasn’t me, Mr. Dickson. I swear that to you.” No one, not even her father, could be allowed to believe that his beloved Eleanor would compromise her virtue two days before their wedding.
Death Brings a Shadow Page 5
