Death Brings a Shadow

by Rosemary Simpson

  “I’ll be on my way, then.”

  “One more thing to ask of you, Doctor,” Elijah said as they left Lawrence’s room.

  “What’s that, Mr. Bennett?”

  “My daughters are going to spend some time with family in Savannah. Their trunks are packed, and they’re waiting in the parlor. I wonder if you would undertake the task of chaperoning them on the journey?”

  “I shall consider it an honor, sir.” From what he’d observed of the Misses Bennett, they were two swiftly withering candidates for the marriage market. Unfortunately, though the doctor chose not to share the information, there were more spinsters in Savannah than men willing and able to marry them. He himself was supremely uninterested.

  * * *

  Teddy had himself driven to Seapoint the morning the Dickson yacht left the island. He was pale and obviously in pain, but the wound had closed and the skin around it showed no deadly streaks of red. The whiskey Philip poured into it on the field of honor had staved off infection.

  Eleanor’s coffin was the last item to be carried aboard the sailing craft. Six men shouldered it from the chapel onto the cart that rumbled over the narrow sand track to the dock. She had traveled the same road two weeks earlier, chattering happily with the fiancé who had won her heart and with whom she confidently expected to exchange vows of lifelong love and devotion.

  They had all been so happy that day, Prudence recalled, spirits buoyed by the sea voyage down from New York City and the anticipation of the quiet, private ceremony Eleanor and Teddy had insisted on. The couple was going to carve out a new life for themselves, choosing to retain the best of both of the worlds from which they came, trusting implicitly in each other to keep promises already made and those yet to be vowed.

  Of them all, perhaps only Geoffrey had seen through the joy to the darkness beyond, but even he had not envisioned how impenetrable it would be. He and Prudence had talked well past moonrise last night, walking the beach in the clear white light that illuminated everything in shades of black, white, and gray. It had become the custom at Hunter and MacKenzie, Investigative Law, to dissect every case before it was consigned to the office’s meticulously kept files. The too-short life and cruel death of Eleanor Dickson was no exception.

  “When did you know?” Prudence asked him. She’d taken off her shoes to wade barefoot in the warm shallows. Physically tired and emotionally drained, she grieved more for the heartache of the man who walked beside her than for herself. They had both suffered painful losses, but the passage of time did not seem to have healed Geoffrey’s sorrow. It wasn’t a single person he mourned, but the entire culture in which he’d grown up, the way of life that remained a part of him no matter how much he struggled against it.

  “I’m not sure,” he answered. “I think it was seeing Eleanor against the background of the island that first disturbed me. Her place in New York society was so well established by her family connections that when you introduced me to her there I don’t think she registered as anyone but another pretty and accomplished debutante about to embark on marriage. But here, where there were no distractions, she took on an exotic quality I recognized but was reluctant to name.

  “Aunt Jessa’s murder told me there were secrets on this island that Eleanor’s death was an attempt to conceal. That was the beginning. From that point on it was a matter of unraveling the past and tying it to the present.” He reached for her arm when she stumbled in the shifting sand. And didn’t relinquish it as they continued walking. “Do you remember the portrait of Ethan Bennett hanging in the Wildacre library?”

  “How could I forget it? They looked so much alike, he and Elijah. Two sides of a coin, but one side badly damaged.”

  “There was a single, significant difference,” Geoffrey said.

  Prudence frowned, trying to picture the faces of the two young men, searching for whatever it was Geoffrey had seen but she had missed.

  “Ethan had a slight cleft,” he said, touching a finger lightly to Prudence’s chin. “So did Eleanor. It’s a trait that runs in families, though no one knows why. Not every child inherits it, but when one does, it’s recognizable.”

  “Maggie Jane has it,” Prudence said. “It was the first thing I noticed about her because she so often hides her mouth with her fingers. She doesn’t realize that it draws attention to the cleft.” She stopped abruptly, sand and seawater pooling around her toes. “Minda has it also.”

  “I suspect she’s Elijah’s child.”

  “Oh, Geoffrey.”

  “Never to be acknowledged in any way, but everyone on the island will know.”

  “Do you think Teddy suspects?”

  “He turned a blind eye to that type of thing long ago. He sees but his mind refuses to accept the evidence. Most Southern men prefer it that way. It might seem cruel, Prudence, but it’s been going on for so long that no one questions it. There may be moments of bitterness when the child realizes who he or she is, but they pass. If there is no possibility of entry into the white world, there is comfort and acceptance to be found in the other.”

  “It breaks my heart,” Prudence said.

  “You can’t fix all of society’s ills in one lifetime.”

  “Teddy won’t go to Savannah, will he?”

  “No. He’ll stay here on the island. Elijah won’t last much longer, and when he dies, Wildacre passes to Teddy. He’ll run it with the same dedication and efficiency he would have demonstrated on the Cotton Exchange, and he’ll gradually bring the plantation back to some semblance of what it once was. But he won’t leave it. And every evening he’ll have his brother wheeled out onto the veranda where they’ll drink whiskey together over crushed mint and sugar lumps. He won’t say a word to Lawrence about what happened, but the silence will do its work, and eventually Teddy will be alone with his memories.”

  “How will Lawrence do it?” Prudence asked.

  “It’s surprisingly easy to kill oneself,” Geoffrey said. “A razor across the wrists or throat, laudanum saved until the dose is large enough to be fatal, a bullet to the brain. Lawrence will never regret what he did, only the consequences of it.”

  “He meant to kill Teddy, didn’t he?”

  “He aimed for the belly,” Geoffrey said, “but his hand was shaky. He had sat in the library into the early hours, drinking himself into oblivion.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Sometime in the middle of the night I went downstairs in search of whiskey myself. Teddy was snoring and the valet’s couch was so hard and uncomfortable I couldn’t sleep. I saw Lawrence slumped in a chair before the fireplace, empty glass still in his hand.” He hesitated, then clamped his lips so tightly together that a thin white line appeared above them.

  “Before I went back upstairs I glanced at the cabinet where Elijah and I had locked the dueling pistols. One of the cases was crooked, and I knew that we had left them precisely aligned. So I unlocked the cabinet door and checked them. The firing pins in both of Teddy’s guns had been tampered with. I replaced them, relocked the cabinet, and said nothing. When Lawrence turned his back on his brother after he had fired his shot, he believed Teddy’s pistol would misfire.”

  “Have you told him?”

  “Teddy? No. And I won’t. The code duello only requires that both gentlemen face each other with equal odds. They did, insofar as those odds could be determined by their seconds. The other elements that influence a duel’s outcome—a man’s previous experience with the weapon of choice, the amount of whiskey he drinks to shore up his courage, the calculating coldness it takes to kill when the passion of the moment has cooled—those things are individual traits over which only the duelist has any control. I don’t know why Lawrence drank himself insensible the night before he faced Teddy across a dueling ground, but it proved to be his undoing.”

  “Lawrence’s weaknesses were overweening pride and arrogance,” Prudence said. “He truly believed he had the right to kill Eleanor and that he would escape any retribution
for the taking of her life.”

  “It’s as good an explanation as any.” Geoffrey shrugged. “His punishment will be to spend whatever miserable years remain to him trapped in a body he can no longer control, tormented by a mind that won’t let him forget he brought it on himself. A creature to be scorned and perhaps pitied, then forgotten.”

  “You’re a hard man sometimes, Geoffrey.”

  “I believe in justice, Prudence.”

  And that’s where they had left it.

  CHAPTER 31

  The small cabin where Eleanor’s casket would lie during the northward voyage had been stripped of its furnishings except for a single chair in which Abigail sat, one hand resting on the polished oak as though it touched the living child who had been so cruelly taken from her. She would spend every waking moment with her daughter’s remains until the wrought iron doors of the Dickson family mausoleum locked them away from her.

  Philip had had a final, bitterly candid conversation with Teddy Bennett, who had implored him, one last time, to allow Eleanor to rest in the Wildacre burying grounds. Philip hadn’t hesitated for a moment. Eleanor might have thought she loved him, her father informed the wounded man, but she would have come to her senses eventually. She could never have lived in the world Teddy represented; the affection he claimed they shared would have turned into rancorous resentment. Sullen anger. Harsh words and ill treatment. Philip would not surrender any part of his daughter to the place that had destroyed her.

  When Eleanor’s father turned his back on the man who had hoped to marry her, he erased him from his mind as though Teddy Bennett had never existed. To deny him even the half-life of memory was the only vengeance he could exact. It would have to be enough. At least until he determined how to dispose of Bradford Island in the new will he would write.

  Perhaps, he thought, feeling the swell of the Atlantic beneath his braced legs as the yacht moved away from the dock, perhaps I needn’t wait that long. There was a growing movement in the country to preserve huge tracts of land in some of the western states, to afford them by legislative act the same protection Ulysses S. Grant had approved for the Yellowstone area some seventeen years ago. He smiled to himself at the thought of ordinary citizens taking picnic baskets into the Bennett family’s live oaks and digging for crabs along the shores of what had once been their private beaches.

  Philip Dickson would not return to the island that had taken his daughter’s life, but he could ensure that never again would it be the isolated kingdom of the family that had both spawned and killed her.

  * * *

  “You said you wouldn’t be sorry to leave Bradford Island, Geoffrey,” Prudence remarked. They stood together at the yacht’s port railing, watching the broad, sandy beach and the twisted branches of the live oak forest recede into the distance. What she was really asking was whether his ties to the South of his youth had strengthened or been further weakened by their experience on one of Georgia’s most beautiful sea islands.

  “I’m not,” he replied, covering the hand gripping the railing with his own. “I don’t regret one moment of its beauty, but I won’t dwell on any of the rest of it. I shall always deplore Eleanor’s death, as much for why Lawrence killed her as for the deed itself, but I number her as one of the late casualties of the war. There are countless victims of its cruelty throughout the country. You and I, Prudence, have seen a face of blind hatred up close, and we’ll never forget it. This crime was unlike the others we’ve investigated, and I hope to God we never have another one to match it.”

  He lapsed into silence, eyes turning to the Atlantic horizon that lay ahead of them. Telling her that the subject was closed. He would no longer welcome her questions. When Geoffrey put something behind him, he wanted it to stay there.

  So Prudence did what she had so often done before. She tackled the mystery of who he was with the lawyerly concentration in which her father had trained her. They would have five days together in close quarters before the yacht sailed into New York Harbor. More than enough time to unpeel another layer of the protective defenses in which he’d wrapped himself. Just when she thought she had grasped the essence of Geoffrey, he changed. Again.

  The duel seemed to have toughened him in some new way she had not seen before. He hadn’t questioned its rightness nor any of the arcane dictates of the code duello. It was as though all of the loose threads of his boyhood and what came after had suddenly resolved themselves into a knot he didn’t care to untie.

  Neat and deadly. It was as close a description of Geoffrey himself as any that had ever crossed her mind.

  Five days, she thought. With nothing to do but sleep long and dreamlessly at night and drink in the beauty of sun and sea by day.

  And turn her formidable intellect to the mystery standing beside her.