Secrets of the Last Castle

by A. Rose Mathieu

  She seriously contemplated calling Grace. In fact, she spent most of the night debating with herself. By morning, she decided that she wouldn’t tell her because she knew Grace would never approve and would probably go so far as showing up at the plantation to stop her. This seemed to be her only shot at understanding not only the document, but unraveling what the hell happened that caused a woman to be killed twice.

  “There’s a car coming up the drive,” Jack said in her ear.

  Elizabeth turned her attention to the driveway and took a deep, stabilizing breath. “Showtime.”

  A white, newer model, midsize sedan approached and stopped several yards from her car. It seemed he was assessing the situation before he came any closer. Elizabeth never took her eyes off the car, and after several moments, it came closer and parked. Several more moments passed before Beadle opened the car door and exited, and he stood close to his car and turned in a circle surveying the property.

  She remained quiet, not wanting to spook him, and let him advance toward her at his own pace. When he finally approached he asked, “You alone?”

  Hearing his voice made her shiver. Memories of their encounter on the street near the clinic flooded back, and she swallowed hard before she spoke. “Yes. I have nothing to gain by bringing anyone else into this. All I ever wanted is to know what these documents mean. My client’s life depends on it.”

  “All right, show me the documents.”

  She turned and walked toward the entrance of the home, and she waited for him to follow. He continually scanned the area while he walked. She pushed open the door and led him to the front room and sat on the couch. She had no idea where Danny was hiding but hoped he was close by.

  Beadle stood in the middle of the room, taking it all in. “My God, look at this place. You could almost feel its history.”

  The awe of the home had worn off for her, and she continued to stare at him, watching his every move. His twitch was absent, which she took as a good sign.

  “Where are the documents?” he asked.

  “Nope, you first. I want to know what this document is and why it’s so important to you.” She pulled out copies of the pages and set them on the table in front of her.

  He watched her carefully, as though he was weighing his options. “Why would I tell you that now?”

  “Because if you don’t, you will never see the original documents, and I will never show you what else this home hides.”

  He continued to stare at her as he chewed the inside of his mouth. “All right, fine.” He approached her, and she tried not flinch when he came around the table and sat next to her. He lifted the pages and held them up for a better view. “These are pages from a diary. It’s written in code.”

  “I gathered that much. Whose diary is this?”

  He looked at her for a moment before answering, as though he was still undecided. “John Wilkes Booth.”

  “The John Wilkes Booth? As in the man who shot President Lincoln?”

  “Yes. He was killed twelve days after the assassination of Lincoln at a farm in Virginia where he was hiding. A red appointment book that Booth used as a diary was recovered. It was alleged that his last entry was on April 14, 1865, the day he assassinated Lincoln, but there had always been speculation that there was more. In the book, there were pages that had been torn out. The consensus was that Booth tore them out, possibly to use for other purposes like jotting down notes, but there were others that believed the pages were deliberately removed by someone else after his death.”

  “Is that what you believe?” Elizabeth asked.

  “This is what I know. These pages prove it.” He pointed to the handwritten dates on top of the entries. “There are five separate entries written between April fifteenth and April twenty-fifth, the day before he died.”

  Elizabeth took the pages from his hand and held them up close to see for herself. “What is he saying? Why is he writing in code?”

  “He knew his fate. He was a hunted animal with nowhere to run. It was only a matter of time before he was caught and killed. I believe he feared his diary would fall into the wrong hands.”

  “So he wrote in code?”

  “Exactly.”

  “How do you know what it says?” she asked, turning the pages sideways, trying to make some sense of the letters.

  “I have seen it before. It’s a common coding practice of the time. Each letter stands for a different letter of the alphabet.”

  “So what does it say?”

  “No, first you show me the original pages and the other things you say are here.”

  “No.”

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “I’m not giving any of it to you until you tell me everything I want to know. Once I get the information I need, you can have it all and do as you like with it. You can claim full discovery.”

  “Why should I trust you?”

  “I don’t think you have a choice.”

  He shook his head. “Not good enough.”

  “Then I guess we’re at a standoff. You’ll never find the documents on your own.” She started for the door, hoping to call his bluff.

  “All right, all right. I’ll tell you what I know.”

  She turned and sat back on the couch.

  “The Knights of the Golden Circle. They are one of the best secret organizations that ever existed in US history and one of the least known.”

  “Booth was a member?” she asked.

  “That’s what this proves. It had long been debated whether the KGC was involved in the assassination.”

  “What do you know about the KGC?”

  “The KGC grew out of several Southern organizations that believed in nullification, the concept put forward by South Carolina Senator and Vice President John C. Calhoun.”

  “Nullification, the concept that the state should have the right to nullify a federal law if the state believed it was unconstitutional. But that theory was struck down by all federal courts, including the Supreme Court.”

  “Exactly, but that didn’t mean the idea died. It only fueled the subversive groups. Nullification became an important ideal as the battle for the preservation of slavery heated. When it became clear that the South could no longer expand its slave territory, it began to look outside the United States. Two Southern senators formed the Order of the Lone Star to sponsor a filibuster expedition to free Cuba from Spain’s rule and make it a new slave state. From this idea, the KGC was born, founded in 1854 by George Washington Lafayette Bickley. Some say the KGC spawned from the Order of the Lone Star, and others believe it grew up alongside it and expanded upon its ideas. Either way, it was formed to create a slave empire. Bickley had this grand idea of invading Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean Islands. Along with the Southern states, this newly conquered territory would create a golden circle of a slave empire in the Western Hemisphere.”

  “How come this isn’t in the history books?” Elizabeth asked with skepticism.

  “Needless to say, Bickley’s plan failed. He began to assemble a military in Texas, but there was insufficient funding for the weapons, militia, and supplies to invade Mexico. At that point in 1860, the Southern states began to secede from the Union, and Bickley shifted the efforts of the KGC to stand behind the newly formed Confederate government. As he saw it, slavery as a whole was at stake. There are varying accounts of the KGC’s involvement in the war, from surreptitiously infiltrating the North and obtaining valuable intel to providing battle troops that helped capture Union forts in the South. There has also been speculation that the KGC was behind the first assassination attempt against Lincoln in 1861.”

  “So what became of the KGC?”

  “That depends on who you talk to.”

  “What do you think?” Elizabeth asked, trying to cut through the long history lesson.

  “In 1863, Bickley was captured by Union troops when he entered Northern territory. He was held as an enemy spy for the remainder of the war. This weakened the
KGC and their efforts.”

  Elizabeth sighed. She had enough of the backstory and wanted to fast-forward to something more relevant to current events and gestured her hand, urging him to move along.

  “When the South lost the war, several of the KGC fled to Mexico, refusing to live under Union control. The rest went underground. The castles began to disintegrate or merge with other groups.”

  “Castles?” Elizabeth perked up. First knights and now castles. Webb’s daughter was not ranting about a fairytale.

  “Oh, right, I skipped that bit. The KGC was organized as a hierarchal structure with three branches, called degrees, which consisted of rank-and-file military, commercial, and governing—the governing degree being the most secretive. The organization, particularly the top degree, was full of rituals and secret codes. Often these codes were left behind for others as a means of communication and could be left as written notes or even carved on signposts or trees. This was particularly useful during the war where covert intel could be passed along right under the noses of the Union army.”

  Elizabeth was beyond frustrated. It was clear that if asked the time, Beadle could only answer the question after first explaining how to build the watch, but she knew she had to rein in her impatience because only he could give her the information she needed, and she could not afford to cross him at this point. Instead, she tried to tactfully steer him along. “And the castles?”

  “The KGC existed in several Southern states, and each KGC territory had a castle or headquarters. There was usually a person who oversaw the castle who was referred to as a captain.”

  “What became of the KGC?”

  “It’s generally believed that the organization eventually collapsed or became absorbed into other groups. It’s likely that its structure became the basis for other white supremacist societies, including the KKK.”

  “What if it isn’t gone? What if it was just dormant?”

  “Why?” he asked with suspicion.

  “Just speculating.” She was not about to reveal the woman’s warning to Jackson to beware of the knights. And what was it Jackson said…the purse was the key to the castle.

  “Some would like to believe that the KGC planned for a second revival. There were millions of dollars of gold that went missing near the end of the war. Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered the gold to be loaded on a train and moved from the Confederate capital in Richmond to the deeper south to ensure the Union didn’t get it. Somewhere along the line, the gold went missing. Legend has it that the KGC was behind this. They took the gold and hid it with the belief that when the time was right, they’d have sufficient funds to rise again.”

  Elizabeth had grown up hearing about the legend of the Confederate gold and the gold hunters that spent a lifetime tracking clues that were purportedly left behind. She gave little stock to it. She figured if it existed, it would have been found by now. However, there was something that Webb’s daughter wanted others to know.

  “So what do Booth’s pages say?” She had almost forgotten that was why she met with Beadle in the first place.

  He took the pages from her hand and began reading. “His code work is identical to that of the KGC. I’ve studied any known samples of it since grad school. Although the KGC had many different coding systems, some very intricate using symbols, pictures, and letters, with only some relevant and others merely decoys, this is a basic code, which leads me to believe Booth was merely rank-and-file military. It’s just a matter of rearranging the alphabet.”

  “That’s great and all, but maybe if you could just skip to the end and tell me what it says.”

  “Booth confirmed that the assassination was a KGC act, which not only proves that they were still in operation after the war, but were still operating at a high enough level that they could pull off such a feat. As the days went on after the assassination, he became disillusioned by the group, believing they abandoned him. He gave names of some of the higher members, something a KGC member is sworn to never do. Booth believed that his death would not be at the hands of the military, but the KGC.”

  “These names that he gave, was one of them Frederick Lawton?”

  Beadle looked at the papers again and flipped to the last page. “Yes,” he said with surprise in his voice. “How did you know?”

  “Frederick Lawton built this plantation.”

  “You think he was responsible for Booth’s death…to shut him up? It would explain how these missing pages ended up here.” He clearly wasn’t expecting her to answer because he continued. “The orders from Washington, DC, were to take Booth alive, and it seemed feasible considering Booth was trapped inside a barn surrounded by the Union army. Instead, a lone soldier, Boston Corbett, fired a shot through the boards of the barn, fatally wounding Booth.” Beadle was so excited that his body vibrated. “Corbett claimed that it was a sudden sense of rage at the sight of the man that caused him to fire, but what if that wasn’t it…” His voice trailed off, and he seemed to forget she was there.

  When he mentally returned, he looked at her. “You must show me the rest.”

  Although Elizabeth had obtained all the information she needed regarding the papers, there was one thing more. “You knew what these pages were when Rich sent them to you.”

  “Of course I did. Do you have any idea what an historic find this is? With these missing pages from Booth’s diary, I’ll be the most celebrated historian in modern history.”

  “I didn’t understand the importance of the documents before, but now I get it,” she said, placating him. “Breaking into my legal clinic and attacking me on the street, it was for the greater good. You needed these pages.”

  “Exactly!” He nearly jumped from his seat. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I just needed these pages.”

  She hadn’t expected that it would be so easy to elicit a confession from him, all of which was being recorded.

  “Dr. Beadle, I want to show you something. I think you will find it quite exciting.” She rose and led him around the first floor, weaving in and out of rooms. At first he seemed taken by the antebellum mansion, but he began to grow annoyed when she didn’t seem to be leading him anywhere.

  “Do you know where you are going?”

  “Sorry, it’s just that this place is so big. I just need to get my bearings.” The problem was she hadn’t planned it out very well with Danny, and she had no idea where he was hiding. She continued circling around the first floor, until he roughly grabbed her arm and pulled a gun from his coat pocket.

  “Enough with the games.” His twitch was back.

  “I think it’s just through here.” She pointed to a doorway, and he pushed her toward it. She went into the kitchen and walked the circumference of the room with him right behind her, prodding her in the back with the gun a few times. She was running out of options. As she passed the pantry, the door flung open hitting Beadle, and the gun skittered across the floor. She dove for the gun as Danny pounced on Beadle. It seemed Beadle was no match for a teenager, and Danny had him easily pinned.

  “Where are the handcuffs?” she asked.

  “In my coat pocket,” Danny replied.

  She reached in his pocket and retrieved the cuffs, which were another one of Jack’s mementos from his police days, and she snapped one side around Beadle’s wrist and inserted the other through a loop in a metal fireplace door. It seemed that she was getting good with these things. Once he was securely held, she turned to Danny. “The pantry? You hid in the pantry?”

  “I figured he wouldn’t find me there.”

  “Well, neither would I!”

  Before she could continue her rant, Jack came huffing and puffing into the room at a pace that she was sure he was unaccustomed to. “Are you all right?”

  “We’re fine,” she answered for the two of them.

  “What are you doing in the kitchen? Why not subdue him in the front room where you were sitting?” Jack asked.

  “Where’s the fun in that?” she
said as she handed Jack the gun and headed to her car to call Detective Martinez.

  * * *

  Elizabeth sat staring at Detective Martinez’s well organized desk, with every piece of paper neatly stacked and the pens and pencils perfectly aligned in order of height. She resisted the urge to move one of the pencils out of place to see how long it would take for him to notice. She had been waiting for the detective’s return for nearly an hour. Danny sat at her side, but he was distracted by his phone. Jack stood in the corner conversing with other detectives, reminiscing about the good old days. He was in his element.

  To say that Detective Martinez was annoyed that Elizabeth took matters regarding Beadle into her own hands would be an understatement. He was downright livid, but he had to begrudgingly agree that the recording was damning evidence and perfectly legal in the state, which only required one party in the conversation to give consent. After taking statements from Elizabeth, Jack, and Danny, he disappeared to oversee the processing and questioning of Beadle, and they were instructed to wait for his return.

  She could see Grace’s desk on the opposite side of the room and wanted to walk to it and explore, but the other detectives in the room spoiled that idea. Instead, she sat and waited. To hell with it. She began flicking the pencils on the desk, scattering them.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Elizabeth heard from the doorway and looked up, surprised by the reprimand for her pencil rebellion, before she realized it was Grace. She approached and stood towering above Elizabeth, with her hands on her hips. “Will you come with me please.” It wasn’t a question.

  Elizabeth followed her out into the hallway, trying to formulate an explanation. When they reached a relatively isolated corner, Grace turned and leveled an angry stare. “How do you think I felt when I learned that you lured Beadle to a secluded area, unprotected, so you could what…get a confession?”

  “Jack and Danny were with me.”

  “Oh well, then that makes it much better. You had an old man who can’t walk a block without getting winded and a teenager who finds himself handcuffed in a woman’s bathroom. Why do you keep doing these things?”