I felt like I should be taking notes, but I’d come unprepared. “That’s when you saw him again?”
“Tom first stayed at the boarding house with his mother, but so many people came to see him he couldn’t work. He went to a cabin in Oteen where he could write.”
Harry’s sequence of events matched what Ted Mitchell had told us. The old man’s memory was sharp.
“I’d missed seeing him in town. I worked for the Biltmore Dairy—had been since Daddy died—and I thought I’d take him some fresh milk and ice cream. I knew we’d have to eat it right then because the cabin had no way to keep it. Tom was glad to see me. We got talking about old times and our families and I told him the story about Elijah and the trip to Georgia. Tom had been at the university then.”
Harry paused, took a deep breath and another swallow of water. “Tom got so excited he couldn’t stop asking me questions. He wanted to know every detail. The ice cream melted in the tub and we talked past nightfall.”
“And you told him everything up through Elijah’s murder?” I asked.
“No. I went beyond that. I described the trip back to Georgia with Elijah’s son Amos so we could bury Elijah with his kinfolk. And how Bessie and her family had disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Nakayla scooted closer, evidently hearing this story about her relatives for the first time.
“Yep. It was less than a month since Daddy and I’d eaten lunch in their farmhouse. The place was abandoned. Peaches were rotting in the wagon. Somebody had moved it out by the road. Amos had no way to reach them. Nearest neighbor said they’d gone north.”
“When did your father die?” I asked.
“Two weeks after we buried Elijah. We found the cemetery where we’d helped him take his uncle Hannable. Amos and my daddy got a large rock from the stream and chiseled Elijah’s name on it. They did the same for Hannable since Elijah had left it unmarked.
“One night Daddy took some supplies over to a funeral director in Brevard. He never came back. Sheriff found his Model T at the bottom of a ravine. The car had burst into flames. I overheard Mr. Galloway telling the sheriff my daddy must have been drinking. He knew better. My daddy never took a drop of whiskey. I never liked Mr. Galloway after that. He got meaner and short-tempered. He changed after his son Jamie returned from the war.”
“The journal said his son had been killed,” I said.
“That’s what we all thought. Jamie had been shell-shocked and wandered off. At least that’s what Jamie said.”
“People thought otherwise?”
Harry shrugged. “You’ve seen combat. A man’s whole unit is wiped out by a direct hit but he’s unharmed? There were some in town said Jamie Galloway had been a deserter. He came back to Asheville and resurfaced as one of the returning heroes. He could have been hiding in the hills for months. People whispered and Mr. Galloway knew it.”
I thought about what Herman Duringer had said about his ancestor evading service in the Civil War. “What happened to you and your mother?”
“Mother sold the property and we moved onto the Biltmore Estate. She started sewing homespun clothes. Mrs. Vanderbilt wore them to encourage the fashionable ladies to support the local dressmakers. Edith Vanderbilt was a woman without pretense and I don’t regret one day of working for her. When she died in 1958, I stayed on at the dairy for Miss Cornelia. She’d married the British man Mr. Cecil whose family still owns the estate, but she’ll always be Miss Cornelia to me. I retired when she died in 1976. Over all these years, the family’s kept Edith Vanderbilt’s promise to take care of my leg. But my skin’s thin as tissue paper and I can’t wear a prosthesis anymore. I get by with a wheelchair and a walker for hobbling around the apartment.”
Harry’s reminiscences about the Vanderbilts were interesting, but they didn’t answer my main question. “If you told Thomas Wolfe more of the story, why’d he stop where he did?”
“Fred said his brother was unhappy with the way he had the boy writing.”
“Fred?” I asked.
“Tom’s older brother. Tom left the journal with him at the end of the summer. Fred gave it to me forty years later.”
Harry was jumping decades so fast I couldn’t keep up. “Why so long?”
“Because Fred and I didn’t cross paths for forty years. I didn’t know Tom had even written the thing.”
“And you never saw Tom again?”
“No. He’d left the journal with some questions he wanted me to answer. Fred told me Tom was having trouble creating the story. He loved the events, but he didn’t know where to take them. No one knew what happened to Elijah.”
“So Thomas Wolfe couldn’t solve the mystery,” I said. “Even with a fictional solution.”
“And he died the next year. He never came home again. Imagine, Tom dead before age thirty-eight and here I sit, a hundred years old.”
I shifted in the chair, moving my leg to a more comfortable position. “I understand the comment written at the end about the kid’s vocabulary, but what did he mean by ‘Ask Harry about the mule?’”
“Fred said that was important to him. Tom wanted me to read what he’d written and tell him about the mule. All I know Junebug was found the morning after Elijah died, grazing in a lower Biltmore pasture with the cows.”
“Wasn’t that the normal pasture?” I asked.
Harry looked at me like I’d failed to add two plus two. “Elijah kept Junebug at his place. Junebug was only in a Biltmore pasture when Elijah was there.”
Nakayla frowned. We kept coming back to the Biltmore Estate. But that was where Elijah worked, where he might have left Junebug during the day if he went off with someone.
“What about the mule’s pack?” Nakayla asked.
“What?” Henry and I asked in unison.
“In the journal, Junebug’s pack was missing. Did that happen?”
Harry pursed his thin pale lips. “I’d forgotten I’d told Tom. He must have set something by it.”
“Maybe that was his question for you,” Nakayla said. “About the mule.”
“I only remember it because I was so surprised to see Elijah outside my window the Sunday morning after the trip to Georgia.”
I understood how that would have been a vivid memory for a twelve-year-old boy, but Thomas Wolfe had seen the underlying significance. Someone had taken Junebug’s pack.
The glimmer of an idea began to emerge from the murky mire of distant events. “How’d you get the journal from Fred?”
“I went to see him in Spartanburg. Back in 1977. Miss Cornelia had died the year before and I’d retired from the dairy. They were going to turn the barn into a winery. Milk to wine was too much of a new trick for this old dog to learn.”
“Did Fred ask to see you?”
“No. One of his relatives was going down and offered to take me along. She knew we’d been friends and she could run errands while Fred and I talked. He was in his eighties and a real character.” Harry laughed. “Fred smoked like a chimney and stuttered like a Model T with bad sparkplugs. He stayed in his pajamas and bathrobe the whole day. He sat in his easy chair with cigarette burns on the upholstery and carpet around him. It’s a wonder he didn’t burn himself up.
“We got talking about Tom and I mentioned our last conversation at the Oteen cabin. Fred got the oddest look on his face. He stood and went back to his bedroom. I heard him pulling out dresser drawers and a few minutes later he returned with the journal. ‘Tom asked me to give you this.’ He said it like his brother had dropped it off the night before. Then Fred told me what I’ve already told you—how Tom got stuck in the story.”
“The journal must be worth something,” I said. “Why’d you hold onto it for thirty years instead of selling it?”
Harry took a deep breath and stared at a photograph on the wall across the room. The scene was Asheville’s Pack Square, probably in the 1920s and filled with antique cars and long dead people. For the first time I noticed the apartment was more of a museum
. A plaque beside the photo proclaimed Biltmore Dairy Farms the winner of the Grand Champion Bull and Grand Champion Cow of the National Jersey Breed Show—1952. For a dairy man, I figured that was like sweeping an Olympic event. Another picture over Nakayla showed a younger Harry standing in front of a barn with a Biltmore Dairy Farms truck beside him. Other photographs offered trips back in time for the old man. Thomas Wolfe, Edith Vanderbilt, and Cornelia Cecil were not paragraphs in an encyclopedia. They were flesh and blood, and his mind must have still heard echoes of their conversations and felt the clasps of their hands.
“Tom was my friend,” Harry said. “So was Fred. That journal wasn’t finished and I’d have been betraying them by letting people see it.”
“But Tikima was different,” Nakayla whispered.
“Tikima was different,” Harry repeated. “Elijah’s direct descendent, Harrison Robertson’s granddaughter.”
“My grandfather too,” Nakayla said. “Harrison. Was he named for you?”
“Yes. Elijah’s son Amos and I became good friends. He married and never went back to Chicago. We worked together at the dairy.”
“Did you marry?” Nakayla asked.
“No. Too busy. Dairy cows don’t leave much time for courting.”
I wondered how much of that had been an excuse and glanced down at my artificial foot. Easy to think of yourself as incomplete and unattractive when you’re missing a leg.
“I lost track of the family after Harrison died. Then six months ago, I met Tikima when she presented a program on security tips for seniors. Afterwards, I asked about her last name and made the connection. She came to my hundredth birthday party and I gave her the journal as a gift.” His voice quivered. “I wish I’d burned the damn thing years ago.”
“But you didn’t,” Nakayla said. “And Tikima found a link to Elijah’s murder. I don’t want my sister to have died in vain.”
“I owe my life to Elijah,” Harry said. “When I die, I’d like to know some justice had been served.”
I knew justice would only come with evidence. “Did Fred offer any clues as to what Tom thought might have happened?”
“No. His niece’s daughter returned and we had to leave.” A twinkle sparkled in his eyes at the memory. “She’d brought Fred a strawberry milkshake from Baskin-Robbins. That had been his only request. She called me out to the kitchen where I saw a freezer so packed with strawberry milkshakes that we couldn’t fit it in. Fred was like a squirrel hoarding what was most dear to him. He followed us out to the car and stood singing ‘Give My Regards to Broadway’ as we drove off.”
Nakayla laughed. I found the story amusing, but not nearly as funny as she did.
Harry winked at Nakayla. “He doesn’t get it.”
“Get what?” I asked.
“Fred wasn’t singing about New York,” Nakayla said. “Broadway is a major street in Asheville and ends at Pack Square where Wolfe’s Monuments used to be.”
“That was the last time I saw Fred,” Harry said. “Singing in his cigarette-burned pajamas on his front lawn. What a family.”
I decided to pry some more memories out of Harry. “Do you know if Elijah made jewelry?”
“Jewelry?”
“Yes. Or worked with gold?”
“No. But Elijah was a jack-of-all-trades. I suspect he knew his way around the smithy at the estate. Why?”
“Tikima was asking questions about gold and gems the week before she died. Nakayla says there’s a family bracelet Elijah is supposed to have made.”
Harry scratched the thin hair behind his ear. “Tikima asked me what I thought Elijah was doing at the creek. That’s where he brought me right after the bear attack.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“That I’d never thought about it. But since then I’ve tried to recreate the scene in my mind. Junebug was there. Elijah had to take a shovel and pick-ax off her before I could ride. There may have been some pans—not cooking pans—the round flat ones. He could have been prospecting that stream.”
“And then Junebug’s pack disappeared,” I said.
Nakayla leaned forward on the sofa. “With gold in it?”
“Maybe traces. Enough to spark someone’s interest.”
Harry whistled softly. “For all these years, I never made that connection.”
“No reason you should have,” I said. “You didn’t know about the handmade jewelry. But Tikima did.”
“So Elijah was murdered for gold?” Harry asked.
“As long as people have been mining for gold, they’ve been killing for gold. Maybe Mr. Galloway took the pack. Y’all were gone all that Saturday.”
“But why take it?” Nakayla asked. “It would have warned Elijah.”
“Maybe someone else then,” I said. “Someone who wouldn’t have been able to return it if Mr. Galloway was there.”
“And maybe that’s why Tikima wanted old employee records from the estate,” Nakayla said. “She was looking for a connection to Elijah and Galloway.”
Harry took a longer sip of water and cleared his throat. “And she found one. Only she didn’t know it until too late.”
“We need to research genealogy,” I said. “Nakayla, what kind of resources do you have at work?”
“We subscribe to a lot of services. Sometimes insurance fraud involves relatives so we access databases that hold birth and death records.”
“Tomorrow you need to work it from both ends—Galloway and anyone Harry can think of from the past, and then the people we know Tikima talked with. We’re looking for an intersection.”
I felt energized by having something to do. Even Harry seemed eager. He gave us names of people he remembered as friends of Mr. Galloway and then people he worked with at Biltmore whose descendants were still employed at the estate. Both Luther Rawlings and Jake Matthews fit that category. I knew we needed someone whose family had a positive change of fortune, unless Elijah died without revealing the location of his strike. But if that was true, what was somebody desperately trying to cover up? The case continued to defy a clear course of investigation, but at least we had a starting point—and we had Harrison Young, perhaps the world’s oldest witness.
We left him with a promise to stay in touch. Nakayla started the car.
“Wait,” I said.
“What’s wrong?”
“Whoever killed Peters has his files and his notes. I’m worried about Harry.”
“His name’s not in the file.”
“But we managed to find him.”
“Do we ask for police protection?”
“What do you think?”
Nakayla turned off the engine. “I don’t feel too good about giving the police Harry’s name.”
“Me either.” I opened the door. “Come on.”
Without explanation, I led Nakayla back to the lobby. As I’d hoped, Captain was still watching TV with his bevy of beauties. I motioned him over and he used his walker to join us in a corner out of earshot.
“Did you talk to the mayor?” he asked.
“Yes. He was very helpful. Listen, Captain, you know we’re trying to find out who killed Tikima.”
“And we’re praying for your success.” He cocked his head toward the women by the TV.
“We might have put Harry in danger by coming here tonight. We haven’t told anyone about him, but someone could come by asking questions.”
“And they might want to hurt Harry?”
“They could try to force him to tell things he doesn’t want them to know.”
“What about the police?”
I shook my head. “Someone on the force might be involved.”
Captain balled his right hand into a fist and waved it in the air. “Then we won’t let that happen. No one will mention Tikima knew Harry and no one will say you were here.”
“The lady at the front desk?”
Captain smiled. “She’s one of us. I’ll set her straight. And then I’ll draw up a list of patrols. Old folks are
always walking the halls. Teams of two should do it.”
The fire in his eyes gave me a glimpse of what Captain must have been like in World War Two. I saluted him and he beamed as he returned the honor.
***
Nakayla dropped me at the Kenilworth and planned to call me the next day as soon as she had something to report.
I went to the Bible on the nightstand and found the stiff old envelope taped inside the back cover. A string on the flap wound around a tab to keep it closed.
The bracelet was about an inch wide and hinged in three places. Tikima kept it unclasped and flat in the envelope, but when I fastened the clasp, the gold circle had four distinct sections separated by the hinges and clasp. Each had a green stone, polished smooth like Herman Duringer had described. On either side of the stones, ridges in the gold formed a design in relief. None of the patterns were alike, but they were similar in style in that they consisted of straight lines, curved lines, x’s and o’s.
The weight of the gold alone had to make the bracelet valuable. If Elijah had created it at the Biltmore smithy, he must have done so during hours when he was alone. I wondered if the Bible had been Elijah’s and passed down from generation to generation with the bracelet.
I flipped to the front where the pages provided space for genealogical information: births, marriages, and deaths. The first name under deaths was Malachi, Elijah’s grandfather and the first Robertson in the Georgia cemetery. The last was Harrison Robertson in 1983. Elijah’s name had been entered for July 1919—not a specific day. Above his was Hannable Robertson, the uncle Elijah had gone to such trouble to bury. I looked at the name a second time and a tingle ran down my spine. The date of death was July 2, 1917. The words East St. Louis were written beside it.
Hannable Robertson had died in one of this country’s most horrible race riots.
Two years later, his coffin arrived in Biltmore Village.
Now I knew one thing for sure. The body of Hannable Robertson didn’t lie in a grave in Georgia.
I marveled at the ingenuity of Elijah’s scheme.
Chapter Eighteen
Blackman's Coffin Page 19
