Cold Glory

by B. Kent Anderson

  Tolman handed him the paper. Under the Glory Warriors’ seal, in flowing handwriting—not that of Samuel Williams—was written, Enclosed fifty (50) G.W. jewelry pieces, per specifications. The page was dated January 2, 1865, and signed Layton P. Detheridge.

  “The jeweler,” Journey said. “He was one of them, one of the original Glory Warriors. It makes perfect sense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When Williams was recruiting people to his cause, he made sure he found someone who could make the pieces of jewelry. The company’s still in business, and the Detheridge family is still making G.W. pins. You know what else this proves? It proves Samuel Williams was still around after October of 1864, if this wound up in his papers.”

  “So this was one of the things he put in the bank vault.”

  Journey pointed at the box. “We’re on the right track. Keep looking.” He added the jewelry receipt to his growing pile of items to keep.

  “Um, do you want something to eat?” Lovell said from behind his desk. “I can go get something, if you want.”

  “That’s not necessary, Evan,” Journey said. “You’ve really done enough for us.”

  “I can get you some great barbecue,” Lovell went on as if he hadn’t heard. “There’s a place a few blocks away. You like ribs? They have wonderful ribs.”

  Lovell eased out of the office without waiting for a reply. When the door closed behind him, Tolman said, “So you’re a sports celebrity.”

  “Hardly. Not too many people would remember my playing career. Then again, there are those hard-core minor league fans. It was a long time ago.”

  “You miss it?”

  “No. It’s not who I am anymore.”

  “I see. So tell me about this Sandra,” Tolman said.

  “Is this professional interest?”

  “Maybe.”

  Journey put down the clipping in his hand. “She teaches in the same department I do. She’s younger, a fairly new faculty member. She’s … she’s been a sort of friend.”

  “You’ve mentioned her twice.”

  “She’s the only other person who knows about this. Other than the Glory Warriors and the U.S. government, that is. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have told her. It was wrong of me to get her involved.”

  Tolman shrugged. “Better than you carrying it around all by yourself.”

  “No, it’s not like that. She actually found what The Poet’s Penn was. I would never have found it.…”

  “But you told her about it, trusted her with it.”

  Journey thought of what he’d shouted at Sandra: “You know nothing about my life!”

  “And whose choice is that?” she’d shouted back.

  “I don’t want to talk about this with you,” Journey said.

  Tolman looked at him. “You’re an interesting man, Dr. Journey. When you’re talking about history-related things, your whole body language changes. Your eyes even open wider. But when it comes to anything personal, you close yourself up like one of those little antique fans.”

  Journey said nothing.

  “And you force yourself to rein in what you say,” Tolman said. “You hold yourself back a lot.”

  “I think of Sandra Kelly as a colleague and, recently, as a friend,” Journey said. “That should answer your question.”

  “Does she know about your son?”

  Journey settled his gaze on Tolman’s blue eyes. “Of course. I keep a lot of things to myself, but I don’t hide. I don’t walk around with ‘Poor me, I have a child with autism’ tattooed on my forehead, but I don’t hide him, either.”

  “But I bet his mother does, doesn’t she?”

  Journey was silent.

  “I’ve made a book on you, and it’s over a hundred pages by now,” Tolman said. “Not to pry, not to get some vicarious thrill, but to try to understand you as I was researching your case, trying to figure out what happened to you when those guys attacked you on the college campus.”

  “His mother—,” Journey said, then stopped and looked out the dusty window. “His mother thinks we should put him in a residential care program. She’s never come out and said it in so many words, but that’s what she wants. She as much as offered to pay for it.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “I don’t—I can’t. He’s my son. It’s my job to raise him. It’s not that there aren’t excellent residential programs around. With the autism explosion the last ten years or so, there are a lot more treatments out there. And I know Amelia wants what’s best for him, even if she can’t handle doing it herself, hands-on. But what would it mean if I put him away somewhere at twelve years old?”

  “I don’t know. It might mean that was your best option at the time. People do what they have to do.”

  “Yes, and I have to raise Andrew. I may not be great at it, but I try to do the right things for him.”

  Tolman was quiet a moment. “I know about the car accident that killed your family.”

  “So? I suppose that’s public record.”

  “I understand a little bit about you. I think it even partially explains why you’re so committed to your son.”

  “You knowing what happened when I was seven doesn’t mean anything.” Journey’s voice was even.

  Tolman hesitated for a long time. “Dr. Journey, when I was fifteen, my mother drove her car off the Rock Creek Parkway and into the Potomac. I was in the backseat. She didn’t survive. She was screaming at me, and that’s why she lost control of the car.”

  Journey’s tone changed. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Tolman thought of Hudson’s words: “If you dig deeply enough, you always come up with a fistful of tragedy.” “I’m not sure. I don’t tell many people. But I think I understand some things about you, and maybe it’s partly because of my own experience.”

  “I don’t think about them anymore,” Journey said. “They’re gone. It’s almost like…” He let the sentence fade, shuffling papers.

  “Like they never existed,” Tolman said.

  Journey looked up at her but said nothing.

  “I can do the math,” Tolman said. “It happened when you were seven. You’re forty-two now. You were with them for seven years; they’ve been gone for thirty-five. I get it.”

  “Yes,” Journey said. He looked as if he were about to say more, but stopped himself and gave a slight half nod.

  “I still think about my mother a lot,” Tolman said. “I ask myself a lot of ‘what if’ questions. You can’t tell me you haven’t done the same. Maybe not in a long time, but I’ll bet you have.”

  Journey locked eyes with her, then looked away, back to the pages in his lap. “We need to get through these papers.”

  Tolman went back to her own pile. A few minutes later, Lovell was back with armloads of plastic containers. They ate ribs and coleslaw and potato salad and drank Pepsi.

  After eating, Lovell joined them. “I want to help. I can stop working for a while. I want to find what you’re looking for. Maybe I owe it to my old man.” He took the lid off a box and went to work.

  At five twenty, Lovell thumbed a page and said, “What about this one?”

  He’d said the same thing every ten minutes or so since he started, but Journey took the clear plastic bag containing a sheet of paper. Journey saw immediately that it was not a photocopy.

  He began to read, then looked up. “You found it,” he said in a whisper.

  Journey looked around at the fourteen file boxes and the hundreds of scraps of paper they’d already seen; then he began to read. Tolman angled her body so she could see the page as well.

  “I found it,” Lovell said. “Cool.”

  This clause concerns the group of dedicated men of integrity, men of both North and South, who shall henceforth be known as the Glory Warriors. These officers and soldiers, both within the armies and without, shall assume exclusive executive control of the American Federal Government, in the event of the circumstances preceding. />
  With firmness of governance and efficacy of operation the primary objectives, other branches of the American Federal Government shall suspend their operation until reorganized by the controlling executive. Said executive shall be the leader of the Glory Warriors, chosen from within its ranks. He shall possess executive power and shall function as Commander-in-Chief, with the other members of the Glory Warriors to be organized into a new governing body to assure effective governance.

  Members of the Glory Warriors are to assume control of posts throughout the American continent, in areas both Union and Confederate, with direction and governance under the authority of a regional commander, to be chosen from within the ranks.

  Pursuant to the presence of conditions (outlined preceding) that warrant such transfer of governmental operation to ensure stability and tranquillity for all, we enact these provisions into law by virtue of affixing our signatures.

  Written in the same hand, but with a different pen and slightly darker ink, was At Appomattox Court House, VA.

  “Jesus,” Tolman whispered.

  “Is it what you thought?” Lovell asked.

  Journey looked at him. He felt hot. He didn’t speak.

  “And this just sat in the bank vault for over a century,” Tolman said.

  “Just like the other page was buried in the ground for all that time,” Journey said. “Waiting for them to find it.” He looked at Lovell. “Evan, I think your father had something very explosive in his possession and he didn’t even know what it was.” He glanced back to Tolman. “See, it doesn’t make sense without the first page. Without the first page laying out the conditions, it’s just gibberish. I mean, there were all kinds of so-called plots to overthrow the government during that time. John Wilkes Booth couldn’t pull it off, though he tried. Right at the end and immediately after the war, there were radical groups everywhere, in practically every state, all with their own ideas about how to run things.”

  “But this one actually laid out the conditions that had to be present, then stated what they were going to do if those conditions arose.” Tolman shook her head. “Jesus. This is—”

  “But they never did it,” Lovell said.

  The other two looked at him.

  “I mean, obviously they didn’t. I guess you’re saying Sam Williams was behind this thing and he hid this in his bank vault for all those years and no one figured out what it meant, and then my dad had it … but no one overthrew the government. So it doesn’t matter, right?”

  “Evan,” Tolman said, “we need to take this with us.”

  Lovell’s sly look crept back onto his face. “But maybe it’s worth some money now.”

  “Evan, I’m telling you that we are taking these papers. I am confiscating them for the U.S. government. Your contribution will be noted.”

  “But the signatures,” Journey said. “Both pages specifically state that all the pages have to be present, including the signatures, for the clause to take effect. Grant and Lee had to sign it.” He looked at Lovell again. “Did your father ever say anything about having a page with Grant and Lee’s signatures?”

  Lovell held up both hands. “Whoa. I don’t know anything about history, but I know who they were. I think if the old man had something like that, he would have said something. You think Sam Williams got them to sign this thing and he hid it in the bank, too?”

  “Maybe,” Journey said. “I don’t know. We need to keep looking.”

  “Hell,” Lovell said, “if I had a page with those guys’ signatures on it, I’d put it up on eBay. I bet you could get a lot of money for it.”

  * * *

  They had combed through almost all the boxes already, and it took only another half hour to empty them.

  “No signatures,” Tolman said, rubbing her eyes from fatigue and dust.

  “No signatures,” Journey said.

  “They have to be here,” Tolman said. The fingers of her right hand were moving, as if touching unseen piano keys.

  Journey watched her hand, and he thought of Andrew’s hands, the beautiful long, tapering fingers that would never play piano. He thought of the rhythms Andrew made with his straw and his pencil. Perhaps, he thought, there was music—beautiful, expressive music—in Andrew’s mind, all from a straw and pencil. In Journey’s world—and Andrew’s—things were not always what they seemed to be on the surface.

  Journey gazed around at the piles of papers, at the forty years’ work Thomas Lovell had put into the disappearance of Samuel Williams, never to find out what happened to the banker. All the time, the creation of the Glory Warriors was here, on a page that at first glance could have been construed as the mindless ramblings of a Civil War–era conspiracy nut.

  Things are not always what they seem.

  “We need to get the signatures,” Tolman was saying. “Before they do. We have to take this in.”

  Journey looked at her.

  The straw and the pencil. Rhythms.

  Things were not what they seemed.

  “The signatures were never here,” he said.

  “What?” Tolman said.

  “No. Williams was too smart for that. We don’t know if all of this was his idea, or if one of the generals came up with it and he became the go-between. But we do know he wrote this for the generals to sign. Then he split it up. Maybe they told him to; maybe he just didn’t want it to be too easy for all this to fall into place. So he came home to Louisville, left this page in the vault, then went to Indian Territory. He left the first page there, and that’s where the cache of weapons had been gathered. He wrote the note about The Poet’s Penn on the front page so that whoever found it would eventually find page two.”

  “But if he’d split up the first two pages, then he’d keep the signature page as far away from both of them as he could.”

  Journey shook the pages. “The generals didn’t trust him. Or he didn’t trust them. Either way, the signatures have to be somewhere else.”

  “Where?” Lovell said. “And you still don’t know what happened to him. I mean, to Sam Williams himself. Say he did all this stuff … but where did he go then?”

  “I think when we find that,” Journey said, “we’ll find Grant and Lee’s signatures.”

  * * *

  Gold had sat in the peaceful garden of the Center for Interfaith Relations for hours, standing up to stretch at intervals. He kept a map of downtown Louisville at his side, and he had read most of a book on Norse mythology through the course of the afternoon.

  He walked to the corner. Through the dusty window, he saw all three of them standing. The man with the mustache and ponytail was stuffing some papers into a manila envelope. He handed them to the woman. Gold watched their body language—they were tense, tight, excited. The woman handed the envelope to Journey.

  The two of them emerged from the office at a fast walk and turned toward Gold.

  * * *

  “We have to get you in,” Tolman said, pulling out her cell phone.

  Journey didn’t protest this time. “My car. My rental car is still at Falls of the Ohio.”

  “We’ll go get it, turn it in, and then you’re with me. They have to believe you now.” She was punching buttons on the phone. “Don’t look up. The guy over there in front of the courtyard, the Asian guy in the jeans and the gray shirt. He’s been around here all afternoon. How long can one tourist hang around a courtyard?”

  Journey made himself keep his eyes forward as they crossed the street. They fast-walked halfway down the block to Tolman’s car. Tolman kept the phone pressed to her ear, and in a moment heard a familiar voice. “Hudson.”

  “Rusty, where’s my fucking backup?”

  “Meg?”

  “Goddammit, yes, it’s me! Where is my backup?”

  “Listen to me,” Hudson said, his voice even. “They will not authorize people without some kind of evidence. I couldn’t—”

  “Rusty, if they want evidence, all they need is what’s left of Nan Darlington. He was
right, Rusty. Journey was right. We have another page of the document.”

  “Things are very difficult here right now,” Hudson said. “They think that there may have been someone inside the chief justice’s protective detail. Brent Graves is calling in everyone in the division. The media are all around. They haven’t descended on RIO yet, but they may.”

  “Shit. Shit! Someone inside … these people could do that. I think they have pretty long arms, and I have one on me right now.” She unlocked the car doors and slid in, motioning to Journey to do the same.

  “You have someone following you?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Meg … I am on a secure phone line. You’re on a cell.”

  Tolman nodded. “I know. Just believe me when I tell you that Journey called it. There’s one more piece we have to get—”

  “Stop right there, Meg.”

  Tolman slapped one hand against the steering wheel. “Rusty, listen to me. I think … I think you may need to talk to the Service.”

  Hudson was silent.

  “Rusty? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Damn,” Hudson said, and his voice was very soft. It was the first time Tolman had ever heard him curse. “Can you put it together?”

  “Jesus, I hope so,” Tolman said.

  “I’ll do what I can here. Don’t come back until you have it all and can show it to Díaz and anyone else who needs to see it. Do you have somewhere you can go to ground?”

  Tolman thought for a moment. “I think so. It’s a stretch, but I think I can make it work.”

  “Talk to no one but me, Meg,” Hudson said, “and only on secure lines. If what Graves says is true, this burrows very deep. If what you’re saying is true, then it is significantly bigger than RIO. Don’t trust anyone you don’t know well. If there is someone inside…”

  “There could be lots of people inside.”

  “Exactly. Call me when you can talk. I’m sorry I did not believe you before, Meg. Bring me evidence. And take care.”

  Tolman started to hang up, then said, “Hold on a minute, Rusty.” Tolman turned to Journey. “Did you say you gave the original of the first page to the agents who came to your house?”