Nakayla stood. “Yes, if it’s not too much trouble. Can I get it for you?”
Ellie pushed herself up from the couch. “You’d never find it. I’ll be right back.” She disappeared down a hallway.
Nakayla leaned closer to me. “What do you think?” she whispered.
“Well, if Paul Weaver was seen off campus a lot with Ellie, he could have set himself up as a target. The Klan was pretty active in North Carolina at the time.”
“Maybe,” Nakayla mused. “Or maybe he simply fell. Violet Baker was a kid who idolized her older brother and still can’t accept he made a careless mistake.”
“Yes, and then there’s Harlan Beale, both then and now. And there’s the missing documents—the official coroner’s report and Paul Weaver’s death certificate.”
“How much more should we press her?”
“Look through the pictures during the years she was at the college and get more names. I’ll set up the laptop and enter them.”
Ellie returned carrying a slim volume with a frayed dust jacket. “Here it is. She wrote other books, but this is my favorite.” She handed it to Nakayla.
Nakayla looked at the cover and passed it to me. The title was written in cursive script, blue ink on a sheet of translucent notepaper cocked at an angle. letters from camp all lowercase. At first glance I thought the underlying picture was some industrial city. Then I saw the wire fence and the smokestacks, and the wagons loaded with corpses—“letters from camp,” a Nazi death camp.
“Ms. Ellie,” I said, lapsing into my childhood manners. “Do you think the people outside the college would have thought you and Paul Weaver were more than friends?”
“They had no reason to. We were never in town as a couple, if that’s what you mean.”
“And Paul and Leah?”
She hesitated, choosing her words carefully. “I’ll just say they had a special bond. You’ll have to ask Leah for any more than that.”
“Where is she?” Nakayla asked.
“At a retirement community near Chapel Hill. I got a letter from her two weeks ago, but at our age, you’d better not assume anything. I can give you the address, but then you’re on your own. Talking about Paul might be painful, and I don’t want to cause her more pain. That woman has endured enough.”
I looked down at Leah Rosen’s book. The smoke from the ovens formed the texture of the notepaper.
What were a few punks yelling epithets to someone who had come face-to-face with such evil?
Chapter Fourteen
We spent another twenty minutes going through the photographs in the book with Ellie. She identified ten other students, but I had no luck in finding any of them on the Internet. Odds were, most, if not all, were deceased. We thanked Ellie for her help and listened outside the door as she threw the deadbolt.
Our return flight got us back to Asheville a little after eight. Nakayla and I entered my apartment to find Shirley stretched out on the floor of the living area sound asleep. Blue lay perpendicular to her with his head on her abdomen. He rose, gave a short bark, and loped over to us. Shirley blinked awake and her face turned red underneath her white makeup.
“Sorry. Just a catnap.” She stood.
“Cat and dog nap,” I said. “Did Blue wear you out?”
“We had a long walk on the Biltmore Estate. I have an annual pass so we hiked along the French Broad as far as the trail ran. I didn’t think about having to walk back. How was your trip?”
“We saw the person we needed to,” Nakayla said. “She was interesting.”
“Interesting? That’s what Hewitt usually says after interviewing a client who’s guilty as sin.”
“I doubt she’ll ever need the services of your illustrious boss.” I set my backpack on the kitchen counter and noticed a coiled leather strap and a brown paper bag. “What’s this?”
I unwound the strap to discover it was a dog leash with silver studs running the length of the fine grain leather. The workmanship was better than the belts hanging in my closet.
“We also walked uptown and stopped at Three Dog Bakery,” Shirley said. “I didn’t want Blue led on a rope like some farm animal.”
“And the bag?”
“Cookies. You just don’t go into a bakery with Blue and not buy something. That would be cruel.”
“Yes. I imagine the ASPCA would press charges.”
Shirley scowled at me. “I’m just saying he has feelings. You’re the one who told me he was upset.”
I flashed back to Blue whimpering over the spot where Harlan Beale’s body had lain. “You’re right. Thanks for taking such good care of him.”
Shirley brightened. “Any time.” She picked up her handbag from a corner of the sofa and fished out my spare apartment key. “Just call.”
I looked at Nakayla. We’d spoken on the plane about next steps and the logistics of moving forward.
“Would it be too much trouble if we left Blue with you tomorrow?” Nakayla asked. “Sam and I might need to drive to Chapel Hill.”
Shirley dropped the key back in her handbag. “What time should I be here?”
“First, we’ve got to confirm that the person can see us,” Nakayla said. “If you wait a minute, I’ll try to find out now.” Nakayla headed for the bedroom where she could make the call in private.
Shirley knelt beside Blue. “What do you think will happen to him?”
I shrugged. “That’s more a question for your legal-eagle boss. Maybe there’s a will.”
“The only way Hewitt would touch a will was if one beneficiary murdered another.”
Her statement gave me pause. At this point, for all I knew, Beale could have been killed for some personal family matter. I needed to speak with his cousin, Nadine Oates. Leah Rosen could wait. Paul Weaver had been dead for nearly seventy years; Harlan Beale, less than forty-eight hours.
“Nakayla,” I yelled down the hall to the bedroom. “Hold off.”
She came out with her cell phone against her ear.
“We need to see Nadine tomorrow,” I said.
Nakayla held her forefinger to her lips, signaling she had reached someone. Then she turned her back to us. “Yes,” she said. “A mutual friend asked us to visit her when we were in the area. Tell her we’re bringing greetings from Ellie Johnson in Brooklyn.” Nakayla pivoted and cupped her hand around the bottom of the phone to cover the microphone. “Leah’s gone to bed already,” she whispered. “They want us to check back in the morning.”
“Fine. Let’s not go till Monday.”
Nakayla nodded that she understood. She removed her hand. “Yes, that will be fine. I’ll call around ten. We won’t be coming till Monday at the earliest. Thank you for your help.”
She disconnected. “Since we don’t have Leah’s direct number, they won’t put us through. The woman took our information and the morning shift will check with Leah at breakfast.”
“Good. You can confirm that tomorrow while I see Nadine Oates.”
Shirley ran her hand down Blue’s back. “Then you won’t need me to dog sit?”
“No,” I said. “We won’t go to Chapel Hill till Monday. We’ll find a kennel.”
Shirley’s black eyes narrowed. “Ridiculous. I can watch him Monday. He can come to the office. Hewitt probably won’t notice and Cory’s a dog person.”
Cory DeMille was Hewitt Donaldson’s paralegal. She and Shirley kept Hewitt in line as much as anyone could. If they both wanted Blue in the office, I doubted Hewitt would object.
“All right,” I said. “If we go Monday, we’ll drop him off on our way out of town.”
Shirley gave Blue a parting hug and admonished us to take good care of him.
Nakayla left a few minutes later, deciding clean clothes and a check of her mail outweighed spending the night with me. Blue and I padded back to the b
edroom. I didn’t know if he dreamed, but I spent a restless night trying to keep Harlan Beale from climbing a gigantic geodesic dome—shouting “you’ll be killed”—to no avail. I tried to follow but my prosthesis kept tangling in the Venetian blind strips that bent beneath my weight but didn’t collapse under Beale. At the top of the dome stood Violet Baker, scanning the horizon for her brother. I looked down at the base where the metal strips touched the ground. A body lay in the same position as Beale’s had been in the museum. But this wasn’t Beale. Even though I couldn’t see the face, I knew it was Paul Weaver, trapped in Buckminster Fuller’s failed dome of 1948, and I didn’t know if he was dead or alive.
I tossed and turned till eight when I decided sleep was going to be futile. I realized there was a good chance Nadine Oates would attend her church Sunday morning and that at her age, someone might take her there and back. I wanted to speak to her alone so there was no sense rushing. Early afternoon would be my target time.
I took a cold shower, drank two cups of black coffee, and walked Blue around my apartment building in an effort to clear the fog from my sleep-deprived brain. While Blue ate breakfast, I downed scrambled eggs and toast. At twelve-thirty, I called Newly and got the address for Nadine Oates in Fairview. Then I swung by Nakayla’s to hand off Blue, new leash attached, before circling back to take Old Highway 74 out of town.
The valley around Fairview was a farming community that appeared to be transitioning into a series of housing developments. The new neighborhoods were marketed to second-home buyers and retirees, homes that few locals could afford. I drove through acreage that might have once belonged to the Weavers—the farm that Violet’s parents sold so soon after Paul’s death. And now Nadine Oates, Harlan Beale’s closest relative, brought me to the same area. I couldn’t help wonder what connection might link the two families.
I left the main highway for a side road, narrow but paved, that ran along a bold stream. A quarter mile farther, I spotted a rusty mailbox with the faded name Oates written on its side. The gravel driveway curved through a thicket of rhododendron to end in a small turnaround in front of a white, single-story clapboard house. A maroon Ford Taurus sat under a metal carport that looked more like a funeral tent than a sturdy protective structure.
A sad and sagging three-cushion brown sofa was pushed up against the outside front wall of the porch to get as much shelter from the overhanging tin roof as possible. On the opposite side of the house from the carport were two outbuildings constructed from the same materials as Harlan Beale’s sheds. I suspected her cousin had made them for her from materials left over from Black Mountain College.
Newly had told me Nadine Oates lived alone so it was a logical deduction that the Taurus was hers. On a sunny spring day, why would a guest use the carport?
I parked, grabbed my notepad and pencil from the passenger’s seat and made a quick check of my face in the rearview mirror. No errant hair strands; no food stuck between my teeth.
As I stepped up on the porch, a voice called out from the other side of the front door. “Whatcha want?”
“My name’s Sam Blackman. I’m here to see Nadine Oates. It’s about her cousin Harlan.”
“Harlan’s dead.”
“I know. He tried to reach me the night he died. I’m hoping to learn why.”
“You the law?”
“No,” I said.
“Then why you sticking your nose in my family’s business?”
The woman behind the door wasn’t being unreasonable. I was a strange man who showed up on her doorstep. After a death, all sorts of hucksters descended upon the survivors. I needed to make a personal connection.
“Miss Oates, I’m actually helping Violet Baker.”
“Don’t know her.”
“She used to be Violet Weaver.”
Silence. I waited for a response and heard only a squirrel chattering in a tree somewhere behind me. Then, a click as the latch sprung and the door swung inward.
A tall, lean white woman with a gaunt face that looked more like cracked leather than skin stood in the gap. She wore a long, faded brown cotton dress and a misbuttoned blue sweater. A single-barrel shotgun rested in the crook of her left arm. Her steel gray hair was pulled into a bun the size of a pin cushion, a yellow pencil pierced through it like a stiletto. Behind her lay only darkness as if every window had been shuttered tight.
She eyed me up and down. I held my arms out to my side, the Black Mountain College book the only object in my hand.
“How do you know what happened to little Violet?”
“She’s returned to Asheville. I’m a private detective and she’s hired me to look into her brother’s death.”
Nadine Oates lowered the shotgun to her side. “I don’t know how I can help, but you might as well come in for a spell.” She stepped back and opened the door farther. “Take the wicker rocker.”
I walked past her, and then waited until my eyes adjusted to the dim light. The wicker rocker she indicated was near the far corner with an empty TV tray set up on one side and a floorlamp on the other. On the wall behind stood a breakfront with glassed-in shelves containing knickknacks and framed photographs. In addition to the wicker rocker, two armchairs that once matched the sofa on the front porch were angled so that all three chairs were like points of a triangle. I didn’t see a television, although one could have been in a back room.
Nadine Oates stood the shotgun by the door in a wicker basket with an assortment of walking canes. “You can turn on that lamp as soon as I take Ricky to the back.” She reached in the pocket of her sweater and brought out a small pellet. She held it up and made kissing sounds.
I heard the click of small claws as a rotund raccoon lumbered from beneath one of the armchairs. The masked bandit eyed me as he followed Nadine Oates down the hall. Sunlight from the open door sparkled on rhinestones decorating a leather collar like Ricky the Raccoon was a poodle going for Best in Show.
I didn’t know if and how Nadine Oates could help me, but it was clear Blue wouldn’t be coming to this house.
I switched on the floorlamp and used my moment alone to examine the photographs in the breakfront. Most had to be at least seventy years old. The vintage automobiles and wardrobes depicted an era in which Nadine would have been a young girl. I studied one group photo of some family celebration. I recognized Nadine as a laughing teenager with long black hair. Behind her stood young Harlan Beale, eyes closed as the camera shutter caught him in mid-blink. To the right of that picture stood an oval pewter frame encompassing a soldier and a woman standing in front of a black car I guessed to be from the late nineteen-thirties. I leaned close to the breakfront glass for a better look. The woman was Nadine Oates. The soldier was Paul Weaver. In one hand, he held a duffel bag. In the other, he clasped Nadine’s fingers.
“Ricky doesn’t like the light.” Nadine spoke as she entered the front room.
I stepped away from the picture, hoping to mask my surprise at what I’d seen. “Have you had Ricky since he was a…?” The question died as I couldn’t remember what you called a baby raccoon.
“Cub. Yes. A pack of dogs killed the mother and her other cubs. Ricky was the only survivor. By the time I nursed him back to health, he was too old to follow instincts of the wild.” She sat in a chair and I took the rocker. “But he’s still nocturnal. We go on night walks together.”
“You were good to take him in,” I said. “Does he get along with other people? Like when Harlan came to visit?”
She frowned. “Harlan wouldn’t go anywhere without that damn coonhound.” She sighed. “Blue had to wait in the truck, and he’d howl ’cause he knew Ricky was in the house. Still, Harlan was good to help me if my well needed priming or there was handyman work too tough for me to handle. Don’t know what I’ll do now.”
“Harlan was helpful to Violet and me.” I raised the book from my lap. “He identified so
me people at the college, people who might have known her brother.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“Did you know Paul Weaver?”
She shrugged. “The Weavers were the next farm over. We knew each other as kids.”
“How about when you were older?”
“Just to say hi. Then he went to war and I heard from someone, maybe Harlan, that Paul was up at the college after that.”
“Did you ever go there? To see Harlan? To see Paul?”
Her bony jaw clenched and she spoke through gritted teeth. “I didn’t know none of them. They weren’t my kind of people.”
“What kind of people were they?”
“Germans. Yankees. Jews. Communists. Take your pick.”
“How about African-Americans?” I asked. “Did you ever hear about Paul being especially friendly with them?”
“No. You think they killed him?”
“I don’t know that anyone killed him, Miss Oates. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Well, if you ask me, look no further than the Communists.” She leaned forward in her chair. “But my advice is not to look at all. You’re stirring up a mess of trouble. No telling what’s been let loose.”
“I don’t understand. What could possibly be let loose after seventy years?”
“Things that should be forgotten. Harlan knew and they killed him, too. That’s all I’m saying, Mr. Blackman.” She got to her feet. “I don’t know nobody in that book. Now I’m a busy woman with things to do and little time left to do them.” She walked to the front door and opened it. But not before picking up her shotgun.
Chapter Fifteen
I left Nadine Oates and her nocturnal friend, Ricky, to return to Nakayla’s. Her car wasn’t in the driveway and there was no note explaining where she and Blue might have gone.
The world was quiet on a late Sunday afternoon. I lay down on Nakayla’s sofa to think about what we’d learned over the past few days. Harlan Beale had known Paul Weaver back in 1948. He had agreed to review the photographs in the library book and had tried to reach me Thursday evening. From his shout to someone else during his voice message, I assumed he was still at the movie location, but that would need to be verified from the cell tower records that Newly was requesting.
Hidden Scars Page 13
