Arsenic and Old Books (15 page)

How should I respond to the distasteful, gleeful malice I heard in Mrs. Long's voice? She was making the assumption, I supposed, that Singletary would lose votes if it were known that he was of mixed race. One never knew how voters would react to anything. In the twenty-first century I wondered whether this could be a factor in the race.

I had to admit, however, that I'd had some of the same thoughts the mayor expressed to me—only I hadn't been chortling over them.

Finally I said, “At the beginning you stated that these diaries should be available to the public. I have already discussed the contents of this volume with Chief Deputy Berry. Do you still want the contents publicly available?”

“By all means,” the mayor said. “The public has a right to know the background of the candidates running for office. Then it's up to them to decide what's important.”

That sounded smugly self-righteous—not to mention self-serving—to me, but I didn't care to get into an argument with the mayor over it.

“In that case I will give Mr. Singletary a file of the digitized pages,” I said. “In the event that this could affect his campaign, he should know as soon as possible. I think that's the only fair thing to do.”

“Agreed,” Mrs. Long said. “Now I really have to get going. I'll check in with you again tomorrow. I heard the other books will be back in your office sometime in the morning.”

The phone clicked in my ear, and I put the receiver back in its cradle. I didn't like to think so, but I believed that the issue of class had reared its nasty head. The Longs were among the elite in Athena, if not the entire state of Mississippi, whereas Jasper Singletary came from a poor family. The Singletarys had been in Athena for generations, but they didn't have money or political clout. Mrs. Long might add a third lack to those two: breeding. The Longs considered themselves patricians, and there came with that status a sense of entitlement, at least on their part. That bothered me, but there was nothing I could do to change it.

I went back to the laptop and searched for a phone number for Jasper Singletary's campaign headquarters. I didn't want to go through Kelly Grimes. Instead I thought I should share the file only with the man himself. Number located, I punched it in on the house phone and waited for someone to answer. A harried-sounding woman picked up after five rings.

I gave her my name and stressed the urgency of my call. “He is interested in this information, and I know he will want to know about it as soon as possible.”

She promised to pass the message along, but I put down the receiver wondering when Singletary might actually receive the news of my call.

I should not have doubted the poor woman, as it turned out. Singletary called me about fifteen minutes later, when I had my head stuck in the fridge trying to decide what I wanted for dinner.

“You have news for me, I hear,” Singletary said after a quick greeting.

“I do. I would like to send you a file with the scanned pages from the diary,” I said. “I think you'll find the contents interesting.”

“Did you find the evidence I need?”

“No, I didn't,” I replied. “I really think you need to read this for yourself, rather than have me try to tell it all to you over the phone.”

Singletary expelled a sharp breath. “All right, then.” He gave me an e-mail address, and I jotted it down.

“Does anyone else read the mail sent to this address?” I asked. I wanted to be sure that he, and he alone, read this. He might want to think about the contents before he acted upon them.

“Yes,” he said. “Has anyone else seen this?”

“No one else has seen it,” I said, “but I did share the contents during conversations with Mrs. Long and with Chief Deputy Berry. I don't see that there's any connection to the current murder investigation, but there is family history that you should know about, if you don't already.”

He did not respond for several seconds. “Go ahead and send me the file.” He ended the call.

I speculated that the abrupt hang-up meant he was angry I had talked to Mrs. Long and Kanesha. Well, so be it. I sat down and pulled the computer into my lap. It took less than half a minute to send the file on its way to Jasper Singletary. I powered down the laptop and set it aside. Time for dinner, I decided.

While I ate the chicken salad Azalea left for me and doled out cat treats to Diesel, I thought about the Singletary family and the source of their hatred for the Longs. I could understand that Franklin and Celeste did not want to tell their children about how father traded land for mother and instead might present the transaction as a nefarious deal arranged by Rachel's father-in-law. But how could the knowledge that Celeste was once a slave be lost to collective memory?

The townspeople would surely have known, and given the mind-set of the time, I couldn't imagine that there wasn't gossip about the couple. Gossip that would have persisted over the years, at least for a generation or two.

I hoped Miss An'gel would call soon. In the meantime I had to think of a discreet way to ask her about the Singletary family and what would be considered miscegenation in the family tree. I knew Miss An'gel would not press me for details that I couldn't share, but I still had to take care with what I said.

By the time she called the kitchen was clean and Diesel and I were upstairs. I was reading while he snoozed beside me on the bed.

“Good evening, Miss An'gel. How are you?”

“Doing fine, Charlie. How are you and that beautiful kitty of yours?”

“We're fine, too. Diesel is stretched out beside me napping, though he did perk up when he heard your name.”

Miss An'gel laughed. “Give him a few rubs on the head for me and Sister. You said you wanted to talk to me about a local family. What's going on?”

I gave her a quick précis of the situation with the diaries and the murder of Marie Steverton. “Mrs. Long thought there might be information about the family that could help her son in his election bid. In the one volume I've read so far, I haven't spotted anything.”

“That boy will probably skate through on the family name,” Miss An'gel said. “I don't think he'll do any harm in state government, but he certainly won't accomplish anything significant.” She sighed. “Young Singletary, on the other hand, is bright and capable, but he doesn't have the cachet of a distinguished family like Beck Long. That could hurt his chances.”

“About the Singletarys,” I said, thankful she had given me a segue to my question, “other than the fact that they have been poor farmers for several generations, is there anything you might know of in their family tree that voters might find, well, objectionable?”

“What a fascinating question,” Miss An'gel said. “I'm sure there is a story behind it, but I suppose you can't tell me why you're asking in such a delicate way.”

“No, ma'am, I can't, at least not yet,” I replied.

“Let me think for a moment.” The line went silent for about fifteen seconds. “No, nothing. Other than bitterness against the Long family over some land deal around the time of the Civil War, I can't think of anything.”

“What do you know about that land deal?” I asked.

“My mother told us the story when Sister and I were young,” Miss An'gel said. “I suppose Mother had it from our father, who had it from his father. Our grandfather was born in 1870, so he would have heard something about it from his father, who fought in the war.” She paused. “The story doesn't reflect well on the Long patriarch at the time, one of the many Andrews they've had in the family; I forget exactly which one. The way Sister and I heard it, Andrew Long had his eye on some land the Singletarys owned and had tried to buy it several times. Early on in the war, Singletary—I think he was a Jasper—fell ill and was desperate for money to feed his family. Long saw his chance, swooped in, and offered the lowest price he could and bought the land. Singletary died right afterwards, I think, and his son had lost some of his best farmland.”

“Was there anything else about the land deal that you might have heard?” I asked.

“No, not that I can remember,” Miss An'gel said. “One of the reasons Mother told us was because our father had apparently told her not to do business with the Longs because they're cheap and always looking to get the most they can for next to nothing.” She laughed. “Don't you dare tell anyone I told you that, now.”

I smiled. “Of course not. Thanks for sharing that story with me, Miss An'gel. I really appreciate it.”

“You're always welcome,” she replied. “And one of these days, I hope, you're going to tell me what this is all about.”

“It won't be long, probably,” I said. “Please give my best to Miss Dickce.”

“I sure will,” Miss An'gel replied. She said good-bye and ended the call.

I put the phone aside and regarded the yawning cat beside me. “Miss An'gel was helpful, but what she told me leaves me with questions I can't answer.”

The cat looked at me and warbled. Then he stretched for a moment before snuggling down and closing his eyes.

I had a habit of telling Diesel things as if I expected a helpful answer, but I realized I was mostly just verbalizing my thoughts. Thinking aloud helped sometimes.

I found it fascinating that the facts surrounding the transaction of swapping Celeste for the land had apparently never been known to anyone other than the Longs and Franklin and Celeste. How had they managed to keep it a secret?

The only thing I could come up with for an answer was that none of the townspeople knew that Celeste was a slave. That was possible, I supposed, but not likely. The Longs' other slaves would have known, and after the war, when they were all free, surely there would have been talk among them about Celeste.

The phone rang. I glanced at the screen.

“Good evening, Kanesha.”

She returned my greeting. “I have two items of interest to share with you.” Her tone sounded grim, and I braced myself for bad news. I hoped it wasn't another murder.

“First off,” she said, “I am looking at the forensic report on the diaries. According to this, at least ten pages were removed recently from one of the books.”

I barely had time to take that in before she continued.

“The other thing—and I have to wonder if these two are connected—I had a call from Chief Ford at the college. Someone broke into Dr. Steverton's office and ransacked it.”

I took a moment to mull over what Kanesha told me. I could see a connection between the removal of the diary pages and the searching of Marie Steverton's office.

“Here's what I think,” I said. “Marie removed those pages. Then the killer found out and decided to search the office looking for them.”

“That's what I'm thinking, too,” Kanesha said.

“When was Marie's office ransacked?” I asked.

“Chief Ford couldn't pinpoint a time,” Kanesha replied. “It obviously happened after we looked through the office the morning her body was found. That was around nine thirty. We sealed the office, and it stayed sealed—until the history department secretary happened to notice around five yesterday afternoon that the seal had been tampered with. She called Chief Ford, and he found the office turned over.”

“I wonder if the searcher found what he was looking for,” I said.

“We don't know,” Kanesha said. “Neither the secretary nor the head of the department could tell us whether anything was missing. The secretary said the office was messy to begin with, and the only valuables she knew of were the computer and a CD player. Both of them were still in the office.”

“Whatever is in those missing pages must be significant,” I said. “Marie had to have been the person who removed them. Otherwise it doesn't make much sense.”

“I agree,” Kanesha said. “I wish I could narrow down the time frame for the office search. It must have occurred during the night, because it's next door to the secretary's office. She would have heard someone moving around in there otherwise.”

“Marie obviously had an excellent hiding place, because you didn't turn up the diaries when you searched her house,” I said. “Maybe the missing pages are in the same spot, wherever it is.”

“I sent two deputies over to search the house again tonight,” Kanesha said. “They reported no signs of forced entry or of a search but they're still looking for the pages.”

“I hope they turn up,” I said. “The contents have to be pertinent to this crazy situation somehow.”

“I expect so,” Kanesha said. “If we find them, I'll be in touch.” She ended the call.

I wondered what Marie could have found in the torn-out pages. If the information in those pages could damage someone—either the Longs or Jasper Singletary—then obviously the killer would want to find and destroy them.

Perhaps Marie tried her hand at blackmail; but if she had, she paid the ultimate price. At least this train of thought produced a believable motive for her death—if I accepted that the missing pages contained seriously damaging information.

Jasper Singletary claimed that Rachel Long deliberately poisoned his ancestor's wife and children. Would Rachel have confessed something like that to her diary? That would have been a stupid move, and from what I'd read today, I didn't think Rachel was a stupid woman.

I went back to an old question—why was one volume of the diary hidden and not kept with the other four? Did the hidden one—that I had read today—contain information missing from the others? There had to be a reason it was separated and placed in the false bottom of the trunk.

There were too many questions. My mind buzzed from all the possibilities, none of which seemed to offer a solid answer.

I felt too restless, too mentally unsettled, to choose a new book to read. I checked the time. Eight thirty. At least ninety minutes or more before Helen Louise would call.

“I'll be back in a minute,” I told the drowsy cat beside me. He blinked at me and yawned.

I retrieved my laptop from the den and brought it back to the bedroom. I had some pages left to read of Rachel Long's diary, and I might as well finish them tonight. I recalled having read about the death of her father-in-law in the fall of 1863 and then searching for information about her husband's death. I hadn't gone back to the diary to find out what Rachel recorded about the loss of her husband.

I found mention of it in an entry dated October 15, 1863.

Two weeks ago we laid to rest my precious Andrew, only days after we mourned the passing of his father. Father Long lost heart, seeing his son in such grievous condition, and the news of the war compounded his sorrow. I must remain strong and pray that the Lord will guide me now. My boy is too young for the responsibility of caring for his inheritance, and I cannot fail him, though I cannot see how we will last through the winter
.

Poignant words, but I knew that Rachel had survived, along with her son. They made it through the war and somehow found the way to prosperity again. In her way, I thought, Rachel must have been a formidable woman. With the deaths of her father-in-law and her husband, she had a heavy burden. I recalled that her son, Andrew III, was only about five or six years old at the time.

I finished the pages about twenty minutes later. Rachel's record-keeping grew sparse. She had little time to think about writing in her diary. The final entry came on May 17, 1865.

Word reached Bellefontaine today that General Lee surrendered to General Grant in Virginia. The war is over, and I find myself numb and exhausted. All but a few of our most loyal workers have fled. May the Lord watch over us and give us the strength to face the future.

I felt as if I'd been left hanging by an ambiguous ending to a mystery novel. I wanted to know what happened next. I wouldn't have long to wait. The rest of Rachel's diaries would be back in the archive tomorrow, and I could read the rest of the story, as it were.

I shut down the laptop and got up to put it on the desk in the corner of my bedroom. Back in bed I lay there and stared at the ceiling. Diesel slept on beside me. I dozed off at some point, then was roused by the ringing of my cell phone.

I yawned as I picked up the phone. “Hello, love,” I said.

“You sound as tired as I feel,” Helen Louise replied. “Long day?”

“Yes, I'll tell you about it later. How was your day? Was business good?”

“Very good,” she said. “So good, in fact, I'm thinking about expanding into that empty storefront next door. What do you think about that?”

“That's great,” I said. “Congratulations to you for building up such a successful business. You have such a gift, not only for creating the most delicious food I've ever tasted, but also for creating a wonderful ambience at the bakery. It's no wonder everyone in Athena loves it.”

“Thanks, love.” I could hear the smile in her voice. “I have to sit down with my banker and figure out the finances, but I think it's doable. Going to be a lot more work, though, and of course I don't want to be shut down long for the construction. I need to talk to an architect about that and see what the options are.”

“Maybe all you'll need is a door between your space and the one next door. That should be simple enough.”

We talked about her plans for several minutes before we both began to yawn. Soon after that we bade each other good night. I promised to come by for lunch again tomorrow.

*   *   *

The next morning I was eager to get to the archive and hurried through breakfast. I didn't know when the diaries would arrive, or who would bring them. I doubted that the person bringing them would show up before nine, but Diesel and I made it there by eight thirty just in case.

Melba's door was closed, but she would arrive soon. Diesel and I headed upstairs. I planned to get a few things done before Melba popped up for her usual visit and before the diaries arrived.

I had neglected e-mail the past few days, and I needed to catch up. I spent half an hour responding to messages, some of which required answering questions about the archive's collections. I also needed to make new archival boxes for the four diary volumes. When I finished that task I decided to act upon a half-formed idea I had when I woke up this morning.

My knowledge of Civil War–era Athena was sketchy at best, and I intended to rectify that. I wanted to know more about what happened here during those dark days, and I figured there might be theses or dissertations that could satisfy my curiosity. I hadn't run across any books on the subject, but students earning degrees might have written about aspects of the town's history.

I also debated going through the Long collection to look for letters that Rachel might have written, but decided that she would hardly have confided plans to poison the Singletary children to a correspondent.

A search of the college library's online catalog yielded several works with the town of Athena as a subject. One of them,
Athena, Mississippi, During the Civil War: A Study of Social and Political Life Under Crisis
, was a dissertation by Catherine Louisa Brooke. The date of the degree was 1987, and according to the catalog the bound item was on the shelf in the library.

I considered my options and decided to ask Melba to watch Diesel while I went next door to the main library building in search of the dissertation. I knew she would be happy to have my cat to herself for a while. “Come on, boy,” I said to the napping feline on the windowsill. “Let's go see Melba.”

Diesel perked up the moment he heard Melba's name and slid down from the window. He scampered to the door ahead of me and was down the stairs by the time I reached the top of them. I hurried down, and as I neared the office, I could hear Melba already cooing over the cat.

“Morning, Charlie,” she said. “I was asking Diesel if he sneaked down to see me on his own.” She rubbed her hand along the cat's spine, and Diesel chirped happily in response.

“No, we came down because I wanted to ask you to watch him while I go next door. I want to get a book from the library.”

“Of course.” She beamed at me.

“One other thing,” I said. “Someone will be returning the Rachel Long diaries to the archive today. I'm not sure exactly when, but I was told it would be this morning. Give me a shout on my cell phone if they show up before I get back, okay?”

“Sure,” Melba said. “Take your time. Diesel and I'll be fine.”

The whole errand took me only ten minutes, and it was almost nine thirty when Diesel and I arrived back upstairs in the office. He got comfortable in his favorite spot, and I sat at my desk and opened the dissertation.

I noted that Professor Newkirk was the student's major advisor and also that Marie Steverton had been a member of her committee. I skimmed the acknowledgments and was not surprised to see that Marie received only a bare mention.

I settled back in my chair and started to read. I was happy to discover that Dr. Brooke had an engaging style and her prose didn't suffer from the usual academic dryness. The opening chapter related the beginnings of the town of Athena in the early 1820s, and I recognized several names as those of our most prominent families: Ducote, Long, and Pendergrast, among others. Then I had the pleasant shock of seeing the name of my own great-great-grandfather, Henry Harris. He had owned a large dry goods store in Athena and was considered one of the town's most prominent businessmen.

The narrative absorbed me, and I lost track of time while I read. A knock at the door roused me, and I looked up to see a man in the uniform of the sheriff's department standing there.

“Please, come in.” I stood and motioned for him to enter. He looked vaguely familiar but I couldn't remember his name.

“Morning, Mr. Harris,” the deputy said. “Where would you like me to put this?” He nodded to indicate the box he carried.

“Right here on the desk, Deputy Turnbull.” He had come close enough for me to read the name on his badge.

Turnbull set the box down and pulled some papers out of the top. “If you'll sign this for me, sir, to acknowledge you accepted return of the books, I'd appreciate it.” He put the papers on the desk in front of me.

“Certainly.” I sat and picked up a pen. I followed the direction of the deputy's pointing finger and signed as asked.

“Thank you, sir,” he said. He gave a sharp nod. “Have a good day.”

I thanked him in return and bade him good day as well. My hands trembled as I reached in a drawer and pulled out a pair of cotton gloves. I was thrilled to have the diaries back in the archive.

I stared down at the contents of the box as I pulled on the gloves. Would the diaries yield the information necessary to shed light on the bizarre events of the past few days? I took a deep breath and began to unload the box.