“Miss?” Lilah held out a wrinkled piece of paper. “This fell out on the floor when I was wrappin’ up Miss Eleanor’s shoes.”
“What does it say?” Prudence asked.
The maid shook her head. “Cain’t read, miss.”
Chiding herself for not stopping to think before she asked the question, Prudence smoothed out the paper and glanced at what was written there.
“What is it?” Aurora Lee demanded.
Maggie Jane wiped her eyes and dabbed delicately at her nose.
“I’m not sure,” Prudence said. She felt a hollow, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. She started to read the message aloud, then stopped abruptly. “It’s nothing.” She slipped the note into the cuff of her left sleeve. “We do need to move more quickly if we want to finish all of this today.”
“I insist you tell me what’s written on that piece of paper,” Aurora Lee demanded. Her sharp eyes focused intently on Prudence’s wrist as if they could pierce through the sleeve of her gown.
“Please, Prudence,” Maggie Jane begged. “If it has anything to do with what made Eleanor leave the house that night, we deserve to know.” Her fingers came up to her mouth again. “Even if it’s not what we want it to be,” she whispered.
Aurora Lee’s threatening tone of voice hadn’t moved her, but Maggie Jane’s plaintive pleading did. Prudence laid the note facedown on the table that stood near the French doors to the veranda. She smoothed out the wrinkles as best she could, Aurora Lee and Maggie Jane peering over her shoulders. When she could delay no longer, she turned it over.
“ ‘Meet me in the live oaks,’ ” Aurora Jane read aloud. “ ‘You won’t be sorry.’ There’s no signature.”
“That’s Teddy’s handwriting,” Maggie Jane blurted out.
“No, it’s not.”
“It is, sister. I’d know it anywhere.”
Aurora Lee’s palm cracked against Maggie Jane’s cheek. A large red welt stained the younger girl’s skin. She shrank back and seemed to curl into herself like a whipped dog.
Prudence stared at the two sisters. Aurora Lee neither apologized nor made any move to comfort the weeping Maggie Jane.
“I don’t know what’s got into you, saying something like that,” Aurora Lee snapped. “You know good and well that’s not Teddy’s handwriting.”
“That’s easy enough to prove or disprove,” Prudence said, handing Maggie Jane another one of Eleanor’s handkerchiefs. “I’m sure we’ll find letters from Teddy in Eleanor’s correspondence.”
When she moved toward the leather portfolio Eleanor had carried with her from New York, Aurora Lee snatched up the note, ripped it into tiny pieces before Prudence could stop her, and threw the fragments from the balcony into the Atlantic wind.
Maggie Jane darted out as if to snatch the whirling bits of paper from the air, but it was too late. Nothing remained of the note someone had written to lure Eleanor into the live oaks.
“We’ll see to the rest of the packing, and my sister and I will make sure that Eleanor’s things go where they will do the most good,” Aurora Lee spat. “But as soon as we’re finished with the trunks, we’re leaving. I no longer feel welcome in this house.”
Dumbfounded, Prudence watched as the two Bennett sisters grabbed up armfuls of Eleanor’s clothing and accessories, dumping them unceremoniously into whichever trunk was closest. The maids, prodded relentlessly by Aurora Lee, worked even more quickly. In less than an hour the hastily packed trunks had been carried down to the wagon that would follow them back to Wildacre. Eleanor’s bedroom was forlorn and empty, the coverlet on her bed rumpled, rugs askew, a pair of overlooked shoes kicked beneath a chair.
Grabbing Maggie Jane’s hand, Aurora Lee dragged her down the mansion’s central staircase to where their pony cart waited outside the front door.
* * *
“Maggie Jane said it was Teddy’s handwriting,” Prudence told Geoffrey and Philip Dickson. She had watched Aurora Jane furiously whip the pony cart along the oyster shell drive and out Seapoint’s massive front gates, then knocked on the library door where Eleanor’s father had waited out the packing of the trousseau. Not surprisingly, Geoffrey had chosen to join him there. Both men held half-drunk glasses of whiskey.
“I don’t suppose there’s any point asking if she’s sure?” Philip asked.
“She insisted that Teddy wrote the note,” Prudence explained. “Aurora Lee was so angry she slapped her across the face. You could see the mark of her hand on her sister’s skin.”
“Did that make Maggie Jane change her mind?” In Geoffrey’s ex-Pinkerton world, unreliable witnesses were to be expected.
“She didn’t have time to say anything else. Aurora Lee ripped up the note and tossed the pieces off the balcony before I realized what was happening.”
“What’s your feeling about it, Prudence?” Geoffrey had learned to value and trust his partner’s instincts.
She showed him a letter from Teddy that she’d retrieved from the portfolio where Eleanor had kept recent correspondence. “The handwriting looks similar if not the same. But I only had a few moments to look at the note, and I was more interested in what it said than in the shape of the letters.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Philip said. “I’ll leave you two to argue it out, but my mind’s made up. I don’t need to hear any more. I said from the beginning that Teddy had a hand in what happened to Eleanor. I don’t know what made her walk deeper into the live oaks when he left her, and I’ll never forgive him for not making sure she was safely back inside the house before he went on his way. I doubt you’ll find out, Geoffrey, no matter how good an investigator you are. He may not be guilty of murder, but he’s damned sure to blame for carelessness.” He drank off the rest of his whiskey with the grim look of a juror who’s decided on a defendant’s guilt and won’t be persuaded otherwise. “I’m going upstairs to see to my wife. Thank you for helping persuade her to stay in her room, Prudence. It must have been difficult enough for her to know what was going on without being forced to participate.”
He closed the library door softly behind him.
They waited until they heard his footsteps recede into the carpeted hall of the upper floor.
“I think we can presume that Eleanor believed the note came from someone she could trust,” Geoffrey began. His habit was to examine and then pick apart both sides of whatever evidence was presented to prove or disprove a client’s case. Prudence often called him his own best devil’s advocate. “Teddy would fit that description, though he’s not the only one.”
“Who else?” Prudence had followed this style of reasoning with him many times.
“Almost anyone with whom she’d had a conversation since her father started bringing the family to the island. You told me that Eleanor didn’t make or see enemies.”
“But she was afraid, Geoffrey. She thought eyes were watching her from the live oaks.”
“I remember. But think about it for a moment. How afraid could she have been if she left the house late at night entirely on her own? And presumably on the strength of an unsigned note. Repeat it to me again.”
“As best I can recall, it was brief and to the point,” Prudence said, closing her eyes as she concentrated. “ ‘Meet me in the live oaks. You won’t be sorry.’ ”
“Someone is promising to give her something she wants,” Geoffrey said.
“Information?” questioned Prudence, her mind immediately summoning up Minda’s face. Maggie Jane had whispered that she wasn’t white. Aurora Lee had vehemently refused to acknowledge that the girl even looked white.
“It doesn’t sound like a lover’s plea to join him in the moonlight,” Geoffrey agreed. “Too brusque and businesslike. But that doesn’t automatically rule out Teddy. It just makes him a little less likely candidate.”
After an hour’s discussion, they were no closer to determining who had written the note that had lured Eleanor to her death.
If it wasn’t Teddy,
Prudence wondered what hive of hornets her friend could have stirred up.
Geoffrey kept his opinion to himself.
* * *
“It wasn’t Teddy’s handwriting, was it?” Maggie Jane asked. She’d cried most of the way from Seapoint to Wildacre. “I was wrong, wasn’t I?” She glanced at Aurora Lee’s hard face and somehow found the courage to continue. “The boys always shared the same tutor growing up. They were made to practice a gentleman’s penmanship until every letter was perfectly formed. I remember teasing them about it.”
“Father warned them that if they tried to fool the tutor into thinking Teddy’s essays were written by Lawrence, he’d have both their hides.”
“So it wasn’t Teddy who wrote that note to Eleanor.” Maggie Jane’s eyes ached, she could hardly breathe, and her head throbbed.
“That’s just it, you little fool. It might have been Teddy. But it could just as easily have been Lawrence. The only way we’ll know is if we ask them.”
“I don’t want to do that,” Maggie Jane said.
“Do you want to live the rest of your life not knowing?”
“There are a lot of things I don’t know. They don’t hurt me unless I think too hard about them. The best thing to do is not ask questions.” Maggie Jane had chewed on her fingers until the skin around the cuticles bled.
“You wouldn’t mind asking Teddy,” Aurora Lee said as the white brick façade of Wildacre appeared through the green of its towering oaks. “It’s Lawrence you’re afraid of.”
“Aren’t you? Aren’t you afraid of him, too?”
Aurora Lee never admitted to being frightened of anything. But after a moment, she nodded her head.
She knew her brother. And his temper.
CHAPTER 24
Teddy asked Geoffrey to join the Bennett men and the sheriff’s posse on their sweep of the island. Instead of objecting, Lawrence instructed his brother to add his voice to the invitation. Teddy obligingly passed along the information.
“I distrust what Elijah Bennett says is the reason for the sweep,” Geoffrey told Prudence. “He says it’s to clear out the nests of fugitives hiding in the swamp and the live oaks. But there’s no proof anyone is actually there. A posse like this can degenerate very quickly into a dangerous mob, especially if most of its members are Ku Kluxers gone underground. If that’s who the sheriff has recruited, there won’t be any moderate voices in the group.”
“What was Teddy’s rationale for wanting you to come along?”
“He didn’t say it in so many words, because he doesn’t want to appear disloyal to his father and brother. But he implied that he didn’t want to be the only voice of reason if the posse doesn’t find what it’s looking for and decides to take it out on the people who’ve been living on the island all their lives.”
“Suppose they do find the fugitives they say they’re looking for?” Prudence asked. “What will they do to them?”
“That may be what Teddy is most worried about. With the sheriff along, fugitives should be arrested and transported back to the mainland, theoretically to the jail or prison they escaped from.”
“But—” Prudence looked confused.
“But this sheriff is partial to summary justice,” Geoffrey said. “Lynching.”
“Queen Lula was—” Prudence couldn’t bring herself to use the word lynched.
“Apparently the sheriff maintains that the fugitives he’ll be looking for killed both Aunt Jessa and Queen Lula in the course of raiding their cabins for food and whatever they could sell. Then they burned the cross in Aunt Jessa’s yard and strung up Queen Lula to give the impression that white men were responsible because the law doesn’t usually bother investigating that kind of murder.”
“Does he have a theory about who shot Jonah? And why?”
“He says Jonah was known to help harbor fugitives, but that this time he was going to turn them in because of what had been done to Aunt Jessa. So they followed and shot him when he set out to row across the sound.”
“What proof does he have for this?”
“He doesn’t need any.”
“I think Teddy’s right, Geoffrey. You do need to be a part of this posse.” Prudence laid a land gently on his sleeve. “But please be careful.”
* * *
They set off as soon as the sheriff and the twenty men he’d brought with him had unloaded from the flat-bottomed barges that ferried them and their horses from the mainland. All were armed with rifles scabbarded on their saddles and pistols holstered on their hips. Perhaps a quarter of them were grizzled veterans of the war, toughened survivors of hand-to-hand combat, near-starvation, forced marches in brutal heat, and the misery of humiliating defeat. Some of them were barely in their twenties at the surrender, but the experience had shaped every day of their lives thereafter.
Alongside them rode equally grim-faced younger men, whose fathers and uncles had never come back. Just as scarred as the veterans, they cherished grudges born in the aftermath of war and advocated quick, brutal justice. Coils of rope hung from their saddles.
“We’ll push from this side of the live oaks,” Elijah Bennett directed. It was his island, his land. Sheriff Budridge would command the men, but it was Elijah who knew every feature of the dangerous terrain through which they would be moving. “Drive them toward the swamp. Into it if they’re stupid enough to chance quicksand, moccasins, and gators. If they get through, which I doubt they will, there’s only ocean on the other side. Either way, we’ll have them.”
“Some of our people may be caught up,” Teddy said. “We’ll identify them for you.”
“Won’t matter whose people they are if they’ve been givin’ ’em food and helping ’em hide out,” a voice called.
There were plenty of men on the mainland whose families had never owned a slave. Planters considered sharecroppers and anyone but the successful merchant and professional classes poor white trash. Indigent they might be, but their skin color guaranteed them immunity from any viciousness they chose to visit on people of color. Nothing made them madder than a rich white man coddling his negroes.
“We know all our people. We’ll tell you who to let go,” Teddy repeated.
This time there were smirks and shoulder shrugs, but no outright defiance.
Geoffrey guided his horse toward Teddy’s. He wouldn’t be obvious about it, but he’d have Teddy’s back.
The posse fanned out into a straight line, the same maneuver that had been used in the search for Eleanor. Over the years the trees along the fringes of the forest had thinned out, buffeted by storms and salty winds, chopped down for firewood, cleared for roads. Where once there had been rice and sea island cotton fields, now there were open expanses of sawgrass, seedling pines, and straggling young oaks twisted into fantastic shapes.
Not until the hunters reached the section of the forest that had never been cleared because the land was too poor to be worth the trouble did they come upon individuals and small family groups trying to eke out a living running fishing nets and crab traps, planting gardens of okra, squash, Indian corn, and runner beans. Children in ragged shirts huddled in doorways or clung to their mommas’ skirts, wide-eyed and frightened. Women hid their daughters and hoped they were dark and ugly enough to escape notice. Very few men showed themselves. Most were out on the water. The few who weren’t faded into the forest to wait until the posse had passed. The very old remembered slavery days, dropped their eyes, and said nothing.
Every time the sheriff and his men rode into a clearing, Teddy dismounted. He made a point of walking up to the cabin, where he propped one foot on the porch and started talking. He asked how things were going, commented on the weather, complimented the gardens, commiserated at meager catches. These were his people, his actions said, and don’t let anybody forget it. And because Geoffrey nudged his horse up to the front of the posse and loosened his rifle in its scabbard, men who might have been ripe for trouble-making in the miserably bug-ridden heat and humidity of the
island’s interior did nothing. Sat their mounts, wreathed their faces in cigar smoke to foil the mosquitoes, and hoped the sheriff would eventually lead them to where they could have some fun.
“They’re taking cover in the swamp,” Lawrence said. “Sneaking out at night to do their mischief, and crawling back before sunup.” It was the only explanation that fit the case he and Elijah had built to bring Sheriff Calvin Budridge across the water. There was bound to be somebody laying low out there. Hiding from his wife or an angry husband or from the man he’d cheated at cards or cracked over the head with a whiskey bottle. Always someone. Innocent scapegoat wasn’t in Lawrence’s vocabulary. Everybody was guilty of something if you looked at him long and hard enough. Eleanor’s death had to be an accident because the possibility of interference was something no one would tolerate. A white woman’s reputation had to be protected.
A lynching would make everybody feel better.
* * *
Deep in the swamp they found an abandoned lean-to and signs of recent habitation.
“Looks like one man on his own,” Sheriff Budridge said, sweeping aside gnawed squirrel bones and the ashes of a small firepit. A ragged blanket lay beneath the sheet of tin that had been clumsily fastened to a tree trunk, shelter from the rain but not much else. “Looks to me like he took off in a hurry.”
“Probably swam the sound back to the mainland,” Elijah contributed.
“None of our people said anything about a missing boat,” Teddy confirmed.
“Could be your man,” the sheriff continued. “Like you said, starving and desperate enough to kill those women and ransack their cabins, but crafty enough to try to make it look like they were guilty of something that caught up with them. He counted on you all thinking some rough justice had been dispensed. Figgered on it buying him some time, and he was right. He’s gone now.”
The horses danced as a burst of wind and rain hammered on the tin lean-to, then swirled away.
Clouds had been building all day, the air growing heavier and harder to breathe. Sometimes it had been so still you could hear the man next to you panting in the heat. Storms were a fact of life along the Georgia coast. After they passed, everything sparkled for a day or so. But they could turn dangerous. Only a foolish man ignored the warning signs.
Death Brings a Shadow Page 22
