by J. L. Salter
“Looks like an old military buckle.”
“Check real close. I cleaned off the dirt, but didn’t use anything abrasive. See all these scratches?” Diane pointed to deep scrapes into the metal, probably brass. The first of three large letters was almost completely obliterated.
“You think it’s a C?”
“That’s my guess. Joe thought so, too. C-S-A.”
“Well, Belva’s diary mentioned one of her sisters kept a buckle from the dead Confederate. And Mary’s letter said something about ‘ruining the medals’… which I didn’t completely understand. If this is the result, they apparently defaced the metal items so they wouldn’t be recognizable as part of a Rebel uniform.” Kelly picked up the buckle and turned it at angles to the sunlight.
“Didn’t you say the nursing home lady mentioned losing a buckle?”
Kelly thought a moment. “Yeah, Mrs. James indicated she’d had one at some point, but it sounded recent. Surely, this can’t be the same buckle. My guess is Belva’s sister tossed this one at some point during those next two years of the war. With her father dead and the Yankee garrison still hereabouts, she probably felt safer not having it in the household. Or maybe Mary told her to get rid of it.”
“Well, anyway, I figured you might want it. Or if not, maybe you’d give it to Mrs. James, since her buckle was lost or stolen.”
“No, it rightly belongs to Pop.” Kelly examined the back of the buckle. “Wonder if there’s any initials or anything. I’ll check with Don about how to clean artifacts, so we can find out.” She squinted at a spot, but the entire brass buckle was soiled, stained, and tarnished. “I figure Pop will donate it to the museum at Nancy. Anyway, tell Joe thanks for finding it.”
Diane nodded and Kelly got up to leave.
Chapter Forty-Two
Saturday, June 2
Kelly had not left yet for the library, even though it was nearly mid-morning. Temperature was already low eighties, with absolutely no clouds in the seamless, deep blue sky.
Mitch called, a little breathless. “I met the most interesting lady while I was back on the lake collecting low water stories.”
“So, spill.”
“Not on the phone. It’s too, um, awesome.”
“Okay, come over here then. I’ve got a hankering for sausage and eggs, and your name’s in the pan. But your story better be good — this is the last of my eggs.”
Since Perra was still recovering at the veterinarian’s, Kelly didn’t have to worry about tripping over her in the small kitchen space.
Before Mitch arrived, Gato made loud gagging noises and his stomach convulsed. Instead of hair balls, however, the huge feline typically produced a long wad of slimy hair which greatly resembled a freshly dead mouse.
Kelly watched as Gato inspected the hair wad. He sniffed it a few times, then stepped over the pile and tried to cover it by dragging his front paw on the tile. Seemingly unaware nothing was loose on the floor to cover the disgusting clump, Gato moved to three different vantage points and tried to rake something up on top of his regurgitated mess. He’d stop to sniff it, then start raking again.
Kelly wondered if Gato believed it was covered up, which it clearly was not, or if the big cat just satisfied his instinct to try to conceal it. In that speculation, Kelly realized a flash of insight. People with secrets had an instinct to cover them up, just as her cat did with its disgusting mass disgorged from deep inside. Just like Gato raked invisible grass or leaves on top of it, people went through the motions of covering up their exposed secrets.
In Gato’s case, the wadded hair was regurgitated out of necessity — kept inside, it would possibly block his digestive system and slowly kill him. Sometimes people disgorged secrets out of necessity, because containing them any longer would eat up their insides. But often people vomited up secrets on their own, like sticking a finger down one’s throat. Why would a person do that, then go through the motions of covering it up? Did people really think the secret was hidden? Or did instinct make them go through the motions regardless?
What were Belva and Mary doing with the secret diary and hidden letter? If they covered them by instinct, why did they preserve them? The analogy fell apart — Belva and Mary weren’t dealing with a hairball. It was more like pieces of their hearts. For Belva, an embryo was miscarried and her betrothed lover never returned. For Mary, her first grandchild would never be born and her husband died shortly after causing the miscarriage, even if he had not known about the pregnancy. If Belva and Mary instinctively clawed the ground to cover their heart chunks with figurative leaves and grass, it probably didn’t do much to ease their pain.
However, both Mary and Belva had done an admirable job of protecting their secrets. Even if they somehow apparently wanted someone, at some point, to know what had happened.
Mitch drove up, entered, and tossed his notebook on the recliner.
Kelly touched his cheek with the back of her sausage-greasy hand and resumed the cooking. “So what’s this hot news about your mystery lady? Anybody I know?”
“It’ll keep ‘til after we eat. How can I help?” Not waiting for her answer, Mitch began fiddling with the toast, then peered into her fridge. “All you have is elderberry jelly?”
“Out of grape, but it’s on my list.”
“Every time I eat elderberry I think of the old Cary Grant movie.”
“Two old ladies murdering strangers with arsenic, strychnine, and a pinch of cyanide in their elderberry wine? You think I’m going to poison you, Mitch?”
“Not likely.” He grinned. “You’re hot for my brains. But I do wonder about those two old ladies — Arsenic and Old Lace. They’d already killed about a dozen old guys, and kept their secret all that time, but they were just itching to tell somebody. You remember their excitement and relief when they finally had someone to tell it to?”
“Their nephew, I think.”
“Right. Do you suppose Belva — or her mother, for that matter — ever felt like blurting out their secrets to anybody?”
“Actually I was just wondering that very thing.”
****
After breakfast, in which nobody was poisoned, Mitch picked up his notebook and plopped down on the loveseat. “Well, I interviewed Miss Dottie Daniels, who must be mid-to-late eighties and lives in an old house in Burnside overlooking what’s now dry land.”
Kelly nodded. “That was Burnside’s business district until the late 1940s when the government impounded the area and relocated the town in order to flood the lower portion.”
“Well, Miss Dottie was answering my questions about the water level, how it’s affected tourism, recreation, and local economy. She had clear memories of Burnside when its main street had shops, houses, banks, et cetera. Of course, there’s nothing down there now but leftover road surface and remnants of building foundations.”
Kelly acted impatient.
“Well, Miss Dottie said she always seems to make connections with people, wherever she is.”
Kelly sat next to him. “So how about connecting me to this story?”
He smiled broadly. “When I called her back earlier this morning to check on a quote about old Burnside, she took the opportunity to tell me something else she remembered.”
Kelly moved her hand in a forward motion, an obvious sign to stop dragging out his story.
“If you’ll bear with me, I think you’ll like the ending.”
“Why not skip to the end?”
“I’ve sometimes suffered through your long stories.” Mitch grinned. “Your turn to suffer.”
Kelly shrugged.
“Well, Miss Dottie’s great-grandmother, who must’ve been born in the 1840s, lived through the Civil War and later was a nurse down in Memphis in 1878. This was when the big Yellow Fever epidemic spread all over the Mississippi Valley, including Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, of course.”
“Of course.” Kelly was clearly impatient.
“Well, Yellow Fever
killed about 20,000 people in those four states, including supposedly some 5,000 in Memphis alone.” He checked his notes. “So, anyway, her great-grandmother Philomena was a nurse who spent over seventy days in one of the Memphis hospitals helping the Fever victims. About one in six died in the epidemic.”
Kelly’s body language indicated the history lesson was lagging.
“Patience — you’ll like the payoff.” In the somber context, Mitch’s smile likely seemed inappropriate. “So this nurse had patients from all over, Memphis being a big port. One of the folks she cared for, through nearly five full days, was a guy from our own Pulaski County.”
Kelly perked up.
“Miss Dottie didn’t recall his name, but she knew the story well. Her great-grandmother told it to her grandmother, who told it to her mother, who told it to Miss Dottie.”
“What? For heaven’s sake, Mitch!”
Mitch smiled. “Okay, okay. While Nurse Philomena was keeping this Pulaski man as comfortable as possible and plying him with the various treatments, he began talking. Evidently knew he was dying — just a look around the hospital ward would’ve tipped him off. Plus, like many others, he’d probably already suffered from neglect and exposure before he even reached the hospital. Anyway, he seemed to be getting things off his chest which he’d carried as a heavy burden for the past half of his life. He was late twenties at that point, according to the story. So he was giving this nurse his deathbed confession, if you will.”
“What did he confess?”
“You’re going to like this part. It gives me some of the best clues yet on my mystery. This young guy, dying of Yellow Fever in Memphis in 1878, told his nurse he’d contributed to the death of an innocent man near a church somewhere in Pulaski County, a couple of years after the Civil War.”
Kelly’s mouth hung open.
“Evidently the nurse wasn’t asking any questions… it was just this guy wanting to clear his conscience or something. Philomena was confused by the details. When a man has fever for anywhere from twenty to ninety hours straight, you don’t pay too much attention to what he says. But when his fever broke shortly before he died, this man asked her to write down what he’d said and to get it back to his family in Pulaski. He wanted them to know and made her promise.”
“Did she promise?”
“She did, and probably intended to keep her pledge. But there were an estimated thirty thousand yellow fever cases in Memphis alone. When you’re in the middle of an epidemic, helping as many as you can, you don’t really have the luxury to sit down and write out a dead man’s confession. Anyway, Philomena did remember it, however — evidently this young patient’s story had quite an impact on her. Later on, as things settled down, possibly many years later — Miss Dottie wasn’t certain — the nurse made an effort to contact that family in Pulaski, to tell them what she’d been asked to pass along. But by that time, she couldn’t track them down.”
“What was the family’s name?”
“Miss Dottie didn’t remember, but the point was her great-grandmother did remember and tried to find them. Of course they couldn’t just search the Internet for a name in the 1880s or 90s, whenever Philomena finally got around to fulfilling her promise.”
“So she dropped it?”
“Not completely. She’d check into it now and then, every time Philomena ran across anyone with that surname. But she never located any of that name who’d been in Pulaski County right after the Civil War. So she figured the next best thing was to tell her own children, over and over, and encourage them to hunt for the folks of that surname. Maybe one day they’d make contact.”
“So her daughter possibly did try to find that family, and she certainly indoctrinated her own children, including Miss Dottie’s mother, hoping the quest would stay alive.” Kelly smiled slightly.
“Right. So the story passed down to Miss Dottie. She’s approaching ninety now and she’s told it to plenty of people. Only problem is, she’s lost track of the name of the family involved. Therefore, to the people Miss Dottie tells, it’s just an interesting story.”
“But not to you.”
“Correct. To me, it’s a solid lead to a cold case murder of 140 years ago. We’ve got the deathbed confession in 1878 of the person who contributed to the murder of a stranger near a church in Pulaski County a few years after the Civil War. How many matches could there be to those specifications?”
“Got to be your unsolved church murder.”
“The way I figure it.”
“But she said this guy contributed to the murder. How, if he didn’t kill the traveler himself?”
“This is the tricky part. The dying patient told Philomena he’d recognized the victim — possibly, or probably, the only person who did recognize him. So this fevered man, who would’ve been a young teen at the time of the original crime, evidently pointed out the stranger to the person or persons who shot him dead just a few minutes later.”
“So we still don’t know the killer, but you have the killer’s accomplice, so to speak.”
“Uh-huh. But I’ve just given you the Kentucky treatment.” Mitch smiled slyly. “I withheld the most significant part.”
“Tell.” Kelly clutched at his forearm.
“The dying patient explained why he recognized the stranger.” There was a long pause. “It was a wounded soldier who stayed with his family after a local battle… whose companion had died there!”
“That’s my mystery, Mitch! The Butler case! So the man who died of Yellow Fever in 1878 was Belva’s younger brother?”
“Got to be. So you know who the stranger was.”
“Belva’s wounded Reb was killed at the church house! Her true love, Corporal H.H., had finally come back for her after the war. He came to marry her and take her back down to Tennessee.” Kelly’s expression stiffened. “They would’ve finally filled in their marriage license, if he hadn’t been murdered.”
Mitch scratched the back of his head. “Do you figure she was expecting the corporal that evening, or not?”
“Probably not. If so, he wouldn’t have been at the church asking questions. He would’ve gone straight to the Butler cabin. In fact maybe that’s why he went to the church. Maybe he tried the cabin first and didn’t find anybody home, so the gathering outside the church represented the first folks he encountered.”
“Then you’re figuring the corporal’s appearance at the church was a total surprise to Belva, even if she was still hopeful he’d come back someday.”
Kelly nodded. “It’d been about four years by then.”
“But surprise or not, Belva still would have recognized her lover. It wouldn’t have been only her younger brother who spotted the soldier.”
“If Belva was there, and spotted H.H., she could not have let on — she would’ve been afraid her family would prevent it somehow.” Kelly reached for his notes.
Mitch gave her the papers. “But we still don’t know who shot the corporal after little brother identified him.”
“We need to go back over Mary’s unfinished, un-mailed letter to her sister, and the surviving pages of Belva’s diary. Maybe there’s a useful content clue somewhere.” Carrying Mitch’s notes, Kelly went to the table to retrieve her own material.
“Were there any likely suspects among the Butler branch that went to Missouri — the children of William’s first wife, or the kin of Mary’s sister?” Mitch closed his eyes while trying to remember the sister’s name.
“Don’t think so. There’s no indication any of them ever returned to Kentucky at all, much less in 1867 when the traveler — I mean Corporal H.H. — was killed.”
“I don’t recall anybody else being mentioned.”
Kelly again scanned her photocopy of Belva’s diary pages. “Nothing here about anyone else. She mentions father, brother, mom, and sister, who kept the dead man’s buckle.” Kelly quickly scanned her transcript of Mary’s letter. “Oh, wait, here’s somebody we haven’t studied much, the young Yankee from the
Somerset garrison.”
“I forgot what it says.”
“Well, Mary’s note to her sister refers to a Yankee who wanted to court Belva, but she spurned him. Hmm, there’s a motive.”
“Motive to be upset, but is it sufficient motive to kill?” Mitch reclaimed his own papers again. “Some of the suitors in these parts were pelted with rocks by younger siblings of girls being courted. If you were from across the town, or across the county — or for any number of reasons the family didn’t like you — you might be run off with considerable violence.”
“No reference to that by Mary. You think there’s any motive by the fact he was a Yankee during the war, and here comes a Rebel corporal to take away the girl he wanted to court?”
Mitch shook his head. “You’d think, four years after being spurned, the garrison Yankee would’ve caught on and basically accepted the situation. That’s if he was even still around these parts.” He yawned suddenly. “He could have been in a New York regiment and gone back home right after the war.”
“True, and even if he was a Pulaski native, what’s to say he was still hanging around Somerset two years after the war, and just happened to attend Sunday evening services at the Possum Knoll Church?” Kelly pointed at her notes. “We might have means and possibly motive, but it’s a big stretch for his opportunity. Besides, if the garrison Yankee was at the church that night, why would he care — two years after the war — whether Belva’s current suitor had been a Confederate?”
Mitch put down his papers. “Well, feelings ran pretty deep about the outcome of the war, especially in the states with repressive Reconstruction governments in place. You found that in your own research, remember?”
“Yeah.” Kelly paused to think. “But maybe this has less to do with the situation after the war than it does with what happened in 1863, when the wounded corporal was in the Butler cabin, their barn, and Tater Cave.”
“Huh?”
“What if little brother not only told the Yankee, ‘He’s the wounded Rebel who stayed with us after the fight at Dutton’s Hill’? Suppose the meddlesome sibling also said, ‘I caught them making love in the barn’, or in the cave, wherever.”
