Death Brings a Shadow Page 10

  “They children got sold away more often than not. Mistress didn’t want no reminders around the place.”

  “Reminders?”

  Again Preacher Solomon looked at Geoffrey.

  “Women and girls couldn’t refuse their master, his male relatives, or his friends. Couldn’t refuse any white man, for that matter. Still can’t,” Geoffrey said steadily, forcing himself to speak the unpalatable truth without using words that would shock and horrify Prudence. He knew she understood what he meant when a wave of scarlet turned her cheeks bright red and she ducked her head. “I’m sorry you had to hear that,” he apologized.

  “Did it happen here?” she asked, her voice shaky but undaunted. “Did it happen at Wildacre?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Preacher Solomon replied. “Not Mister Teddy. He never would do nothin’ like that. Not even when other young gentlemen was visiting the quarters regular-like and dippin’ they wicks.”

  Prudence was relieved and appalled at the same time. Teddy might not have taken advantage of the ex-slave women who remained on the island, but if what Preacher Solomon said was true, other white men did so with utter impunity. It seemed that emancipation brought very little real change to their plight.

  “What about the other Bennett men? Before the war?” she asked.

  “All you gotta do is look around you, miss,” Preacher Solomon said. “They still a few of ’em left on the island. Can’t be sold off like in slavery days.”

  “Their own children?” Prudence’s face showed anger, disgust, and revulsion. “How could they do that? What were they thinking?”

  “Weren’t no thought to it. No feeling one way or the other, neither. Slave woman gots to have babies. Otherwise how’s master gonna make him any money off her? Women what don’t have children end up in the fields or sold.”

  To Preacher Solomon the past was as alive as the present. The only thing that had changed was the disappearance of public auction blocks. Reconstruction was over, and with it any hope for permanent change. One at a time, the bad old days were creeping back.

  “Tell us about Aunt Jessa,” Geoffrey said. “We’ve heard that she had no enemies, that there wasn’t anyone on the island who would wish her harm.”

  Preacher Solomon shook his head. “Ain’t so. Folks don’t like to speak ill of the dead, so they start forgettin’ what they don’t want to remember.” He shifted his Bible from right hand to left, then shoved it into a pocket. “Mostly she were a good woman, but she done some things the Lord wouldn’t countenance. Not hardly.”

  “Such as?” Prudence asked.

  “Stopping babies from being born. Telling women they don’t got to stay with they husbands after they been beat. Puttin’ dreams into heads that didn’t have no business hankering for ’em. Some of the men ’round here thought she needed to keep her nose out of they business.”

  “So it was mainly husbands who had grudges against her?” Geoffrey asked.

  “The Bible say a woman got to obey, no matter what. Aunt Jessa didn’t hold with that.”

  “Good for Aunt Jessa,” Prudence muttered.

  “Was there anyone in particular who might have wanted her dead?”

  “She a keeper of secrets. Nobody could say what or how many, but if you done something you needed to hide, she knew about it.”

  “So people were afraid of her?”

  “More like they was afraid of what she might do.”

  “If they crossed her?”

  “Or she thought you was gonna do something bad and she needed to stop you.”

  “Can you give us an example?” Prudence asked.

  “No, ma’am, not without rakin’ up old business better left where it lie. I think mebbe I say too much as it is.” Preacher Solomon clapped his hat on his head, took the Bible out of his pocket, and disappeared into the live oaks.

  “I’m not sure what good this is doing us,” Prudence complained when he was out of earshot. “Jonah and Preacher Solomon both stopped talking just when I thought we were on the verge of finding out something important.”

  “I want to take one more look inside,” Geoffrey said. No one else waited in the dirt yard to talk to them; he didn’t see any shadows among the trees.

  “Everything will have been cleaned up and put back in place,” Prudence protested.

  “Exactly. The women who scrubbed the blood off the floor and walls and picked up what had been tossed around knew Aunt Jessa well. They would have put her things back where they belonged. So what we’ll see is the cabin the way it was before she was attacked. Sometimes you have to step into a person’s everyday life to understand him. Or her.”

  * * *

  Geoffrey was right. As usual. Aunt Jessa’s one-room home was as clean and tidy as though she had just gone out to fetch some wood or a bucket of water from the spring.

  “I’m amazed,” Prudence said. “You’d never know how terrible it was just a couple of hours ago.”

  “Those women have spent their entire lives cleaning up after other people,” Geoffrey reminded her.

  She could feel the warmth of an embarrassed flush creep up her neck. Why did she always seem to say the wrong thing down here? “I meant it as a compliment,” she said, but even that hadn’t come out right.

  Geoffrey walked around the cabin corner to corner and wall to wall, studying everything on the shelves, lifting the lids off cauldrons suspended from hooks in the fireplace, picking up pots of replanted herbs and flowers. Whatever was ruined had been thrown away, but enough remained to give a sense of what Aunt Jessa would have seen as she lay on her bed or threaded a juju amulet.

  “Something’s missing,” Geoffrey said. “I can feel it.”

  Prudence was mystified. How could he tell something that should be there wasn’t? As far as she knew, he’d never been inside this cabin before today.

  “Everybody has a place to hide secrets,” he explained. “A letter or a photograph can be slipped between the pages of a Bible, something small and valuable dropped into a flour sack or bag of sugar, a box of mementos secreted beneath a loose floorboard. Look around you, Prudence. Do you see any place where you’d be comfortable hiding your most valuable possession?”

  She tried to imagine herself in Aunt Jessa’s place, searching her walls and floor and everything she owned for a safe hiding place for something that was worth killing over. Remembering the thoroughness with which someone had turned everything inside out and upside down. Geoffrey had said the searcher hadn’t found it, whatever it was. And so far, he’d been right about everything.

  “There’s no place in this cabin to hide anything,” Prudence admitted. “Unless . . . ?”

  “I asked Jonah to crawl underneath after they took the body out,” Geoffrey said. The cabin was set on stacks of stone cemented with tabby. “He didn’t find anything there either.”

  “Then I’m completely at a loss,” Prudence said. “Maybe she never had anything to hide, after all. The killer was looking for something that doesn’t exist, and so are we.”

  “It exists, all right. You heard Preacher Solomon. If anyone on this island had a secret, Aunt Jessa knew what it was.”

  “What good would it do her?”

  “Power,” Geoffrey said. “It gives you sway over people, but it also makes you vulnerable.”

  “Motive? Is that our motive?”

  “It’s the only one we have right now,” Geoffrey said ambiguously.

  * * *

  They waited another hour, sitting quietly on the cabin’s front porch. The day grew hotter and quieter as everything in the live oak forest succumbed to the afternoon doldrums.

  It was only May. Prudence wondered again how anyone could stand the heat of August.

  “Geoffrey?” She’d had a horrible thought that she couldn’t get out of her mind. “What’s going to happen to Eleanor? If Mr. Dickson doesn’t change his mind and allow Teddy to bury her in the Bennett family plot, I mean?”

  “There’s an arsenic-based compou
nd they used during the war to embalm the bodies of soldiers whose kin wanted them shipped home,” Geoffrey said, understanding what she was asking. “It doesn’t take a great deal of skill and I imagine every undertaker in every small town knows how to use it.”

  Prudence shuddered. “How awful.”

  “Don’t think about it too much.”

  She lapsed into silence, but as the mosquitos continued to find her and flies buzzed over the sand where bloodied water had been tossed, Prudence grew too restless and uncomfortable to sit still. She walked to where the horses had been tethered, fiddled unnecessarily with her saddle, then stood absentmindedly running her fingers through her mount’s mane. She’d had the barest tease of an idea that obstinately refused to surface where she could get a good look at it. Something someone had said today? Something she’d seen but not taken conscious note of?

  “We can leave now, Prudence, if you want,” Geoffrey said. “I don’t think anyone else is going to show.”

  When had he gotten up from the porch and closed the cabin door? Prudence had been so lost in her thoughts that she hadn’t noticed. “Did they not come because of me? Because I’m so obviously an outsider?”

  “Maybe.” He’d decided not to pretend otherwise despite knowing the truth would sting. “It could be they need more time.”

  “I don’t want to give up,” she said. “I want to find out who murdered Eleanor and why. And I think Aunt Jessa deserves the same degree of justice.”

  “She does. You’re right about that.”

  “But I’ve been wrong about so many other things. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “This is a world you can’t be expected to understand, Prudence.”

  “I wasn’t born and brought up thinking it’s all right to own other human beings,” she flared.

  He stepped back as though she’d slapped him.

  Then he untied his horse’s reins and led the animal out from under the trees. He swung into the saddle. And waited.

  They said not a word to each other all the long way back to Seapoint.

  CHAPTER 11

  The undertaker and his assistant recruited four of Seapoint’s youngest and strongest male staff to help them wrestle Eleanor’s lead-lined oak coffin off the flatbed ferry that had brought it from the mainland. The wheels of the cart that hauled it to the house sank deeply into the roadbed of crushed shells. The coffin itself weighed at least three or four times more than the young woman whose body would lie within.

  Philip Dickson watched from the open door of the small stone chapel where his daughter’s wedding was to have taken place. Sawhorses draped in black crepe stood before the altar. The coffin would remain there, behind locked doors, until he decreed otherwise. No one, including the grieving father himself, knew when that would be.

  * * *

  “It’s been four days,” Dickson said, cutting the end off one of the Cuban cigars he favored. Whether he was smoking or not, his Seapoint library had the familiar reek of tobacco and leather that permeated the air of his New York offices.

  “There’s been another killing,” Geoffrey began bluntly. He had reminded himself that men like Eleanor’s father only showed their true emotions when hit by stark truth delivered in unembellished language. Dickson might avow that his family was safe from his business competitors, but Geoffrey was less certain. Former Pinkerton colleagues working undercover to destroy the nascent labor union movement had told him too many accounts of cold-blooded viciousness that ignored niceties of age, gender, or direct involvement with labor organizers. Dickson’s response to this second death might give away an uncertainty he was anxious to hide.

  Philip’s hand holding the match flame to his cigar never wavered. “Tell me,” he said.

  “Do you remember the old woman I mentioned?” Prudence asked. She didn’t know what Geoffrey was up to, but she refused to be left on the sidelines. “Her name was Aunt Jessa.”

  “We’ve managed to find out a good deal about her,” Geoffrey interrupted. “She was beaten senseless.”

  “Savagely beaten,” Prudence added.

  “Who was she?” asked Philip. Prudence’s effort to humanize the murder of a woman he’d never met failed to touch Eleanor’s father. Except where his wife and daughter were concerned, and even then not always, he lived in a world of facts, not feelings.

  “An ex-slave who had once belonged to the Bennett family,” Geoffrey said in a businesslike tone, watching Dickson’s face for any change of expression.

  “As did every person of color on this island,” Philip said. “One way or the other. Born into slavery or children of slaves. The stigma remains.” He looked at Geoffrey for affirmation.

  It was on the tip of Geoffrey’s tongue to say that he didn’t believe the stain would ever be erased, that it was as real as the color of the skin that bore it, but one look at Prudence’s face and he bit back the comment.

  The silence between them on the ride back to Seapoint yesterday evening had been agonizing, yet neither of them had been able to break it. They hadn’t spoken to one another since.

  “She raised the Bennett children until it was time to turn them over to a tutor or governess.” Geoffrey was choosing his words carefully. “We were told that Teddy had always been her favorite and that he returned the affection.”

  Philip snorted in disbelief. He’d grown up in a family where displays of warmth or tenderness toward children were as rare as hen’s teeth. “Why was she killed?” It was the same, as yet unanswered, question he had asked about Eleanor.

  “We don’t know,” Prudence said.

  “It depends on who you talk to,” Geoffrey amended. “According to Jonah, the man who found the body, she was loved and respected by everyone on the island. Someone else told us that she interfered with nature and a husband’s rights.” He shrugged his shoulders. “One thing is very clear, though. She knew things about people, white and black alike.”

  “What was her connection to Eleanor? What was she doing in the cellar before you interrupted her?” Philip demanded of Prudence, who simply stared at him. “And what’s that thing you’re wearing on your wrist?”

  She held out her arm as if it didn’t belong to her and she’d only now noticed it. The amulet against the evil eye fit as snugly as ever. She’d meant to cut it off last night, but she’d been too troubled by the chill of Geoffrey’s reaction to the casual remark she had thrown at him to remember. “Someone gave it to me,” she said, trying to recall exactly what the skinny little girl had told her. “Aunt Jessa made it and said words over it.”

  “What words?” Philip demanded.

  “It’s white magic against the evil eye,” Geoffrey explained. He had seen the amulet on Prudence’s wrist the moment he’d found her in the live oak forest. Seen it and known immediately what it was, but hung back from questioning her. He seemed to be saying all the wrong things lately.

  Philip waved a dismissive hand. A thin trail of smoke spiraled off the end of his cigar. “So far you’ve only told me what you don’t know,” he complained.

  “The Bennett family, the men at least, weren’t always the best of masters.” Geoffrey hesitated, then said what he knew had infuriated Prudence almost more than anything else. “Especially not toward their women slaves. There were consequences.”

  “I’ve seen the pictures and read the accounts. Everyone has,” Philip said.

  Abolitionists had published the photographs in Northern newspapers and weekly magazines under outraged headlines proclaiming the existence of white slaves. Children and adults with no visible African features, sometimes photographed with darker-skinned half-siblings, bought or stolen from their masters, smuggled north. Some of them had appeared before abolitionist audiences to recount in person the uncertainties and horrors of a life that straddled the color line.

  “I fail to see what the sins of the past have to do with Eleanor’s death. Or with Teddy, for that matter,” Prudence said.

  She’d already argued o
nce with Geoffrey that her friend and the eldest Bennett son were forging something new by their marriage. She hated to give up what might have been an idealized notion of the life they planned together. It had been a blow to learn that Teddy intended them to settle in Savannah. And that Eleanor had apparently agreed. Out of love and genuine enthusiasm? Or just love and resignation?

  “More to the point, you still have no proof that Eleanor’s death was not accidental.” Philip Dickson ground out his cigar with a vicious twist of the wrist. “You’ve gotten nowhere.”

  “I don’t believe it was,” Prudence said quietly. “Even if the actual fall into the water was not deliberate, someone lured her out of the house and then into the swamp. Whatever happened next is on his head.”

  Geoffrey looked at her for a long moment, then nodded. “Prudence is right. Someone, certainly not Eleanor by herself, is responsible for her death. Our job is to find out who that person is. Anything else we learn is secondary. A distraction. We can’t afford to allow ourselves to become sidetracked.”

  It didn’t evaporate completely, but the nearly unbearable tension that had stretched tautly between Prudence and Geoffrey lessened. Softened. Lost some of its distrust and hostility. Became something else. An edginess, perhaps, that sharpened what was growing between them, imbued it with an air of urgency.

  The silence lengthened until Philip Dickson sighed and pulled something from his waistcoat pocket. Eleanor’s ruby and diamond engagement ring. “I will not bury my daughter with this on her finger,” he declared, the muscles of his jaw set like granite. “I was told it was a Bennett family heirloom. By rights I should fling it into the swamp that took her life. But that would not be the act of a gentleman.” He held the ring out across the desk. “Will you see that it’s returned?”

  Geoffrey stood up to take it, but Prudence was faster. “I’ll make sure it is,” she promised, careful not to mention Teddy by name.

  Philip Dickson turned back briefly before leaving them.

  “I’ve ordered that no more laudanum be given to my wife. She’s all I have left.”