Even with the chance that the doily meant nothing, Grant had taken the map with him. The other men who had a glazed look of greed in their eyes when they discovered the doily map. Grant relied more on Julia’s good sense than the likes of his father‘s get rich quick schemes. Jesse Grant would find a way to take the map to market and sell it to the highest bidder.
Grant didn’t like the map though. He was distrustful of things that seemed too easy and leaving a map out in a house for anyone to find seemed just that simple. Woerner had a twisted mind, one that liked to make people think one thing while he did another. Marking the gold on a surveyor’s map seemed too simple for his tastes.
Still no one else would be satisfied with his conclusions. With so much money at stake, they would insist on trying every tack possible. That would mean digging in one or more of the sites on the map before they would concede that Grant was right. He was willing to bide his time, provided that the killer was as well. If the murderer struck again, he’d have to find another path to solve this matter. Or he could just settle on the last man standing.
Grant finally chose the site at Main and Circus for the group’s first dig. The name seemed telling, since the search had taken on some of those characteristics. Plus the spot had the distinction of being the farthest from the center of town. Though Grant held few illusions that everyone in the hamlet wouldn’t know exactly what was happening before the group could wash the mud from their shoes.
Jess had already pulled digging instruments from Newman’s root cellar before the rest of the group had made it downstairs again. The boy had no end of energy when it came to something exciting. When it came to tasks he wanted to do. Chores and errands seemed to induce his lethargy. Still Grant didn’t mind. Jess was the last Grant child at home, and he wanted to enjoy every minute of the boy.
Julia had insisted on going along. She carried the map and walked along beside Grant, commenting on the changes in the town since she’d been there for Buck’s birth, some thirteen years before. It seemed like a lifetime since Grant had been on the west coast and his bride had come to stay in Bethel, but it hadn’t been all that many years since he’d been an unhappy captain in the army. Now he was the general for the Federal army, leading a wild goose chase across the streets of an Ohio town.
He certainly had taken a step down from leading the Union army to organizing a treasure hunt in a country village. He wasn’t sure what Stanton or Seward would say if they were to see this fool’s parade. They held their Cabinet positions in high regard. Of course, they might be more forgiving if they knew this spectacle could help pay down the war debt.
The small troop arrived at the designated spot on the map. For a few minutes, Grant thought that perhaps the others had a good idea. The corner was an empty lot, a bare patch of dying hogweeds and grass. A grove of locust trees made it a shady quarter acre. The lot wasn’t fenced in. The others quickly set upon the spot. Jess let out a whoop when he found a small marker. A stone obelisk, no more than eighteen inches high and shaped liked the unfinished Washington monument in the capital, sat towards one edge of the lot. Grant inspected the marker and found that it wasn’t very old. It was conceivable that Woerner had had put in there recently to mark the gold’s location, but Grant had his doubts. It looked more like a touch point, an arrow to something bigger and more important. Yet the stone block gave up no secrets.
Grant still couldn’t believe the plan’s simplicity. The map seemed too easy, too fortuitous. No one would hide thousands of dollars in gold coins under a visible marker, even if it was in a small town. The temptation was too great.
Jess laid into the ground with a pickaxe. He took a few good swings before his grandfather joined him. Newman pulled up the marker and carefully rested it on the side of Circus Street. The tufts of grass that had survived the first killing frosts were the only thing distinguishing property from street. The namesake Grants were already a foot into the ground and still swinging. Jess had managed to get most of the fill from the hole on his clothes. He already had streaks of mud on his cheeks and brow. Grant was amazed at how dirt seemed to attract children like a magnet.
Jesse Grant fared a bit better. He’d rested his coat on a locust tree branch stretching over the lot and rolled up his sleeves. His father was definitely not afraid of hard work if it was profitable. He’d spent his early years in little more than indentured labor until he could become a tanner. Grant recalled his own childhood with the days of tanning leather, where the house and yard stunk of entrails and rotting carcasses. Digging a few feet into the ground wasn’t much for a man who could do that without flinching.
Grant hated to tell the pair that he suspected nothing was buried there. He thought back to the funeral he had attended two days ago for Christopher Halley. The ground on top of the gravesite was freshly turned and damp. He didn’t see any signs of disturbed earth here. The ground was packed hard, and grass grew in fits and starts all over the lot. No signs that Woerner dug up a treasure here any time recently.
Newman stood next to Julia who seemed to view this outing as a working picnic. She’d brought odds and ends to eat and a blanket that she rested about twenty yards from the digging. She carefully spread out the blanket and set down a basket of snacks for the group. She felt much the same way about Jess that Grant did. Allow him some freedom to be a child, and treasure hunts were the centerpiece to any boy’s vivid imagination. Maybe that excitement as well as greed lured men with its Circe song. It was no different from the romantic notions that men held about warfare. Many a man in the North had signed up for war thinking of the grandeur and the exhilaration of traveling and battling the enemy. Now they’d come home, starved to skeletons and missing limbs. Was combat still so exciting to those young men?
Jesse and their son had now dug down about two feet. The boy had climbed down in the hole to get a better shot at hitting something, but so far the thick Ohio clay was the only paydirt they’d found so far. Jesse threw another clump of clay behind him, and stopped to wipe his brow. He looked at the picnickers with disgust. “Why aren’t you over here helping, Ulysses? Those men were your friends.”
Grant frowned. Finding the gold wasn’t the same as finding who was responsible for his friends’ deaths. The material profit that Jesse had in mind was unrelated to the murders at hand. If they found the Confederate gold, Jesse would be just as happy to move on to Cincinnati and forget the men who had died on its altar.
By this point, the pair had dug down almost three feet and had found nothing more interesting than a few old Indian arrowheads. Jess wasn’t in the mood to look at them now, but Grant pulled them from the clumps of dirt and scraped them clean. The boy would probably want to see them when his fancy turned from pirates to the far west again.
Grant wanted to stop, but he didn’t know of a good way to demand that they abandon this quest. Other than mussing up someone’s unused property, they weren’t causing any harm. No one in town would question him. Grant commanded too much respect for saving the Union for someone to demand to know why his family was intent on digging a hole in the empty lot.
Grant tipped his hat to a woman as she strolled past with her toddler. The little one looked fascinated by the scene and wanted to play in the dirt. Just like a child. The woman looked slightly shocked as if she’d never seen men working.
Jesse had finally gotten the hint and started digging in a different location. Newman stood by watching the pair dig and offered suggestions. With only one leg, he couldn’t be of much help to them in the way of labor, but he pointed to spots where any treasure might be.
Jesse dug down a few feet at the new location and stopped to mop his brow. Despite the cooler temperatures of late September, the group had worked up a sweat in trying to find the gold. Little Jess ran over to the blanket, threatening his mother with filthy hands. Julia wiped him off as best she could and handed him some apple cider. Fall meant the harvest of the best apples in town and the Fagleys of Bethel still had the most delicious o
rchards in Ohio. Grant loved the taste of the red ripe apples that came from their land.
The group seemed quieter now than when they had begun. Grant was glad that he’d let them dig. He’d never have heard of the end of it if he hadn’t, but he knew that Woerner wouldn’t make it so easy for anyone to find the gold. The boy had been cunning in school, and Grant didn’t believe for a minute that Andersonville had changed him that drastically. He would never have left the treasure out in an open lot to be found by anyone. Besides the empty parcel of land didn’t explain the key that Newman had found. It meant something. People didn’t lock up very much in a town like Bethel. You knew your neighbors and your friends. You trusted them. Maybe that’s why it was so easy for someone to kill three men. Who would suspect the men you’d grown up with and fought alongside of? You’d had a common enemy then, and now the killer was one of you. All for gold.
The procession marched back to Newman’s house. Jesse dragged the shovel behind him and handed it to Grant as he headed back towards his temporary lodgings. The group entered Newman’s house. Patsy announced that she had heated water for baths after the dirty outing. Ulysses looked at her with gratitude. She obviously knew her way around children. Grant wondered where Newman had found help like this. She escorted Jess off to the tub as Julia went upstairs to rest.
Chapter 12
The scene in the bedroom could have been from a Currier and Ives lithograph had the topic of conversation not been stolen goods and murder. Julia sat on the edge of the cornhusk mattress, splitting her gaze between her husband and the map of Bethel. Grant took his time spreading out the map on the home-stitched quilt and puzzled over where a treasure could be in Southern Ohio. The couple had their heads close to one another, and Grant had his arm around her waist.
Julia took a long look at the map on the bed and then turned to the Bible that she’d placed on the dresser. “Ulys, maybe we’ve been looking at this the wrong way.”
Grant looked up from the map and smiled. “Obviously, we have or we’d have found the gold this afternoon, and Jess wouldn’t be quite so muddy.”
Julia tittered and reached out for the map. She started folding it into sections as she spoke. “No, I meant that we should be concentrating on the murders and not on the money. People matter most. If we find out who is killing the veterans, then we should be able to locate the gold.”
Grant stared off into space as he pondered her words. Julia knew what she was talking about. She understood people and had an uncanny knack for knowing things without being told. “You may be right. The two have to be related somehow.”
Julia finished folding the map back up and smiled at Grant as she handed it back to him. “There are so many things we could look into. And we don’t have to get filthy.”
Grant laughed, knowing that keeping her petticoats pristine was behind her sudden compassion. Just like Julia to worry about making a proper presentation of herself. “I’ve been meaning to talk to the doctor about Halley. See if he thinks it could have been poison that killed him.”
Julia smiled. “Well, of course, that would have to be Dr. Peck, the man who helped deliver Buck. We could call on him together.”
Grant smiled. He took pleasure in the way that Julia insinuated herself into these situations. Much as he enjoyed her companionship, he worried that she might be in danger. His work often put her in harm’s way. He’d worried about her during the war, being too close to the front line. Yet she had never seemed to mind. “Well, it’s a mite late now to be paying social calls.”
Julia slid her arm through his and pulled him a bit closer. “Then, General, we shall do it tomorrow.”
True to her word, Julia dressed for a social visit the next morning. She didn’t neglect to bring several pictures of Buck, their second son, along with her as the couple walked down Main Street. Grant was glad to have her along. Julia could coerce any conversation around to the subject she desired. Usually it had to do with her social standing or her husband’s military rank, but it came in handy with country gossip as well.
The doctor had his office in his house. Unlike the homes Grant had seen so far in Bethel, this homestead would be considered modest. The clapboard home was one level, with no porch or dramatic entryway. Dr. Peck answered his own door and greeted Julia warmly. Grant had been in the Washington Territory at Fort Vancouver when Buck was born and hadn’t been introduced to his son for over two years. He’d dearly missed those irreplaceable memories with the baby. So Dr. Peck was a relatively unknown entity, just a man whom Grant had read about from Julia’s infrequent correspondence. He couldn’t glean much from one letter every six months. He’d only met the man socially during the past few visits.
Peck greeted Julia with a deep bow and smiled as she showed him the photographs of their son. The boy was thirteen now and more like his father all the time, or so people told Grant. The boy had been named Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., even though that wasn’t Grant birth name. The boy had not lived long with the moniker though. Since he’d been birthed in Ohio, people called him Buck, for the Buckeye boy. The name stuck despite Julia’s best efforts to remedy the situation.
Peck shook Grant’s hand and invited the couple inside. The town must be suffering from an outbreak of health, Grant thought. The waiting area of the dispensary was empty and the only sound was the ticking clock. He led them into a large airy room that held a different style of loveseat along each wall. Along with two filing cabinets, a desk and chair staked out the middle of the room. The files caught Grant’s interest. Halley’s records would most likely be stored there with details about the rest of the soldiers who had passed. Sadly, no medical records could tell if Woerner had died of a simple fall or of murder. Science would never be that precise.
Peck went to check on tea, the only offered libation, and left the couple in the waiting area. Grant debated about rummaging through the medical records while the sawbones was gone, but thought better of it. If this visit was supposed to be under the guise of a social call, snooping would be out of the question.
The doctor returned with tea after a few minutes and served both of them in silence. After the advantage of a servant for the past few months, Grant was humbled to remember that he was more accustomed to these circumstances than serving help. He took his tea and swallowed a mouthful. He wished that the doctor would have offered him something stronger, but with a lady present, that was unlikely. Grant looked around for an ashcan or spittoon, but those were not present. Apparently, the doctor practiced the life he preached.
Presently, after Julia had spent a good twenty minutes talking about Buck to the doctor, she mentioned the Halleys. Grant’s ears perked up as he heard the name, and he set the teacup down on the end table next to the loveseat on which they sat. The doctor certainly couldn’t suspect the real purpose of their visit after talking about seemingly everyone else in town.
“We were supposed to stay with the Halleys. The General knew Mr. Halley from childhood. The General used to visit during summers at West Point.” Julia made it a point of calling Grant by his title in front of company. As if anyone could have missed the events of the past four years and the role Grant played in shaping national history.
“Ahh, yes. The Halleys.” The doctor scratched his long whiskers and looked at the pair. Grant knew that something was wrong. The man’s gazed bounced back from one to the other, as if he was trying to size up the couple. Grant’s quiet countenance exuded reliability and sturdiness. If he couldn’t get the doctor to talk, no one could.
Julia turned her eyes down in an uncharacteristically demure pose. “Did I say something wrong, Doctor?”
The doctor turned chivalrous and harrumphed a few times for good show. “Not at all my dear lady. Not at all. I just wasn’t sure what to say about the situation at the Halley home.”
Julia looked to Grant and gave a smile that spoke volumes. They had been married long enough for Grant to know exactly what each of Julia’s expressions meant. She had conquered this man t
horoughly and knew that it was merely a matter of time before she got the desired information.
“You can count on us to keep quiet. We’re not staying with Mrs. Halley. We really didn’t know the widow all that well.”
Grant knew what Julia was saying. We don’t know her, so tell us everything you can.
The doctor made a noise in his throat that Grant thought should be checked out with a tongue depressor. “I’m glad to hear that. She might be having some difficult times coming up.”
Julia arched her well-plucked eyebrows. Grant loved to watch his wife operate on small town men in the same way that she handled Washington diplomats and ambassadors. “Difficult?” Julia’s genteel upbringing allowed her to wield her honed etiquette like a bayonet. She knew the appropriate mix of iron and velvet to use.
The doctor looked at her and almost seemed to forget that Grant was in the room. “Well, it’s not pleasant, but Mr. Halley’s mother has made some rather unpleasant statements. I’m not sure how to handle them. I certainly don’t know that anything can be proved, but I hate to see someone mired in accusations.”
Julia put a small hand to her throat, brushing the cameo around her neck. “I’m not sure I understand you. Is Mrs. Halley ill?”
The doctor smiled and patted her free hand. Grant knew that he had years of bedside manner in treating the biddies in town. He wondered if the doctor had ever met anyone of Julia’s natural guile. “It’s nothing like that, dear lady. But some people are saying that Clarissa Halley expedited her husband’s departure from this earth. I’m not sure what means they are suggesting she used.”
US Grant Mysteries Boxed Set Page 26
