Findings (20 page)

There was no more “Dearest love, Viola, my wife.” Just a bare “Dear Viola.” Even his closing words were chilly. Rather than “Your devoted husband,” or “Your loving husband,” he’d simply signed himself “Loyally yours.”

Surely their marriage wasn’t yet another casualty of the war. Faye, set off-balance by her own emotional state, thought her heart would break at the very thought of it. She knew what Jedediah could not, that his wife would not survive the year. It was unthinkable that she should have died believing he didn’t love her any more. Faye’s own heart was nearly broken by the fear that the man she loved wouldn’t love her back. If Jedediah and Viola Bachelder had lost each other, Faye didn’t think she could bear it.

Joe reached out a gloved hand to turn the page, and Faye reached out her own gloved hand to stop him. The letter’s date jangled like an out-of-tune guitar.

May 15, 1865.

Viola’s biographical sketch said that she died before Appomattox, in the final days of the war. And the Civil War ended with the surrender at the Appomattox courthouse on April 9, 1865. Viola had been dead more than a month when this letter was written.

Had Jedediah known she was dead? How long would it take for word to get to him in the midst of the anarchy left behind by the fall of the Confederacy?

She reached for the book and Joe handed it to her. Flipping forward through the months, she saw that he continued to write Viola throughout the rest of 1865. The salutation of every letter was a cool “Dear Viola,” and each closing was a crisp, “Loyally yours.”

Scanning random letters, she saw nothing more personal than the general housekeeping issues common to a marriage, or even a longstanding business partnership. Jedediah told his wife how to dispose of certain assets and advised her on managing their much-altered post-war finances. And throughout all the letters ran a much-repeated theme. Viola must retrieve the green and the gold before anyone else did, and she must let him know as soon as the task was done.

Every letter depressed Faye more. How long did it take Jedediah Bachelder to learn that his wife had died? And if their relationship had been strained when he lost her, how it must have grieved him for the rest of his life.

Chapter Twenty-three

Joe had finished reading Jedediah Bachelder’s last letter, and Faye wanted to scream, but she couldn’t because Ms. Slater’s disapproving presence pervaded the room, even when she was out of sight.

The book of letters trailed off into an inconclusive list of financial irrelevancies. Faye wanted more. This man had met her great-great-grandparents, Cally and Courtney Stanton, though she felt sure he never knew that Cally had been his friend’s wife. Common-law wife, actually, since a formal marriage between a white man and a freed slave would have been impossible due to the mores of the time. Illegal, too.

It was likely that he’d seen Cally’s child, also named Courtney, who would have been hardly bigger than Rachel at that time. The fact that young Courtney was a girl had been almost as closely held a secret as the fact that she wasn’t white, not by the standards of the day.

As a woman, young Courtney couldn’t inherit her father’s estate, so Cally had just kept her out on the island and remained vague about who the child’s mother was and even what its gender was. Eventually, people were too caught up in the disastrous aftermath of war to care who inherited a bunch of worthless land.

Until that time, though, too much snooping into the facts of Courtney, Sr.’s “heir,” would have brought Cally’s world down around her ears. She had clearly pulled the wool over Bachelder’s eyes, since no man of the Victorian era would have recognized a daughter’s right to inherit her father’s land and fortune. Viola might have, but not Jedediah. He was too much of his time to reflect on how well a woman like his wife could have managed several vast estates.

Faye smiled when she pictured her great-great-grandmother, barely out of her teens, dandling a baby on her knee and lying through her teeth to Jedediah Bachelder.

The man had called Cally “resourceful.” He had no idea.

***

After Joe finished recording the text of the letters, Faye suggested that he go downstairs to the library’s general collection and poke around in the section where Civil War history—particularly the history of the Confederate government—was stored. She needed time alone with Bachelder’s letters, and she needed Joe to be far away during that time. The simple fact of his presence scrambled her brain waves.

“I’ll meet you down there after the rare book room closes,” she said, trying not to watch his manly back as he walked to the door.

After he left, Faye sat at the work table, unproductive and unable to shake the unbalanced feeling she got from Bachelder’s later letters. And she still hadn’t figured out why he made that second wartime trip to Joyeuse Island. The last year of a war that his side was losing didn’t seem like a safe time to dig up the necklace. Besides, he spent the whole next year telling Viola to go to Joyeuse Island and dig it up. Why did he risk an overland journey, alone, through war-torn territory? And he’d done it while weighted down with enough travel trunks to make a team of strapping field hands grumble.

What drove him to make the trip?

No, that wasn’t the question to ask. The right question was this: What was in those trunks? Because whatever it was had stayed on Joyeuse Island when Bachelder left.

On his first trip, Jedediah Bachelder’s letters had said that he’d buried a fabulous emerald necklace. Cally had said that he left behind several heavy trunks on his second trip. After that, he wouldn’t shut up about “the green and the gold.”

What if he wasn’t talking about the necklace any more? And what if he knew he was no longer talking to Viola?

All those odd letters written in 1865 had been signed, “Loyally yours.” These were not the words of a husband. They were the words of a citizen.

Faye reached for Bachelder’s letters again. Perhaps all that financial advice to his wife was a code for something else—the disposition of a dying country’s financial resources. Disguising these governmental documents as letters to a wife who had received oh-so-many such letters would allow the instructions in those documents to easily slip past censors and spies who had seen Jedediah’s besotted love notes before. The letters would have raised no suspicions before they reached the Bachelders’ home, where someone would have been waiting to pass them on to the proper officials. If Faye had to say who that messenger was, she would have put her money on Isaiah.

Faye imagined that officials working for a government in its last days would be scrambling to hide things from an invading army—things like battle plans and the identities of their spies…and things like money.

There were a thousand stories about the final hiding place of the Confederacy’s hard currency, but none had ever proven true. Maybe Jedediah Bachelder was the man entrusted with the Confederate treasury. Or the “Confederate Gold,” as true believers referred to the legendary treasure. Looking back through Jedediah’s later letters, the ones signed “Loyally yours,” with that notion in mind, Faye thought she saw a clear pattern.

In these letters to a woman who he knew was dead, Jedediah Bachelder had directed the dismantling of a national government.

The letters instructing Viola how to dispose of their family assets in order to gain much-needed cash were veiled instructions to other Confederate officials, laying out in detail how to convert Confederate bills into assets less vulnerable to inflation.

The letters discussing their will and specifying the executor and the beneficiaries were coded messages telling those officials who was to be put in charge of the disbursement of the Treasury funds.

And the letters detailing the hiding place of the green-and-the-gold were describing the location of that Treasury—the fabled Confederate Gold itself.

Money is green and bullion is gold. And gold is very heavy…

***

Before long, a formidable pile of text was growing on the work table in front of Faye. She had searched the rare book library catalog for “Confederate treasury,” “Confederate Gold,” and any other variant she could imagine, gathering stacks of books from the reference shelves. Then she had signed out books shelved in the stacks controlled by the charming Ms. Slater.

Ms. Slater did not seem pleased by the number of volumes she would be reshelving at the end of the day, but she fetched book after book from the stacks, anyway. She had to, Faye reflected spitefully. It was her job.

Some of the books spread in front of Faye were written by reputable scholars with thoughtful opinions on the fate of the Confederate treasury. Some of them were written by conspiracy theorists and general nutcases, but Faye figured that, just because a person—or a whole group of people, for that matter—is crazy, that didn’t necessarily mean any of them were wrong.

She’d also found a book of regional folk tales, hoping that old wives had passed Jedediah Bachelder’s story down through the generations. The most important question plaguing her was this: Was there anybody out there looking for the Confederate Gold who knew that Jedediah Bachelder might have hidden it? Even worse, was it possible for anyone seeking the treasure to infer that the Confederate treasury had been buried on Joyeuse Island?

Because that person—or person—could be extremely dangerous.

***

The clock was ticking, but Faye was coming up dry. The people writing the books she was reading seemed to have never heard of Jedediah Bachelder. She wondered whether people who
didn’t
write books might know more than these prolific scholars. When she and Joe had been exploring the ruins of Bachelder’s home, they’d seen Nita glance around the property and say, “I heard tell…”, but the young woman had been interrupted.

What had Nita heard about Bachelder’s property, or about Bachelder himself? Wayland had made at least one trip to the rare book library. Had he and Nita been on the trail of a man rumored to have hidden a fortune somewhere in the backwoods South?

Herbie had said something that stuck in her mind, too. When she’d asked him why he didn’t let anybody dig on his property, he’d sneered at her, saying she wasn’t much of an archaeologist if she didn’t know the history that was right under her nose.

Amateur history buffs like Civil War re-enactors tended to gather their knowledge indiscriminately. Serious history texts, far-out Internet ravings, oral history, rumors, legends…they knew it all. Herbie and Wayland had both asked Captain Eubank about Jedediah Bachelder. Were either of them close to solving the mystery of where he hid all that gold? And would either of them have killed for it?

***

The hands of the library clock were pointing at closing time, and Faye had found exactly nothing. No evidence that anybody had ever associated Bachelder with the Confederate Gold. No rumors that the Confederate Gold had ever been buried anywhere near her island. No nothing.

She reached for a reference book that didn’t qualify as rare, and thus didn’t absolutely require her to wear cotton gloves while reading it. Those gloves had wicked every last gram of moisture out of her hands, and they were making her nuts. She peeled them off as furtively as if she were removing her bra in public.

It was a wonder Ms. Slater let them get away with no other protection than cotton gloves. She pictured herself wearing white paper booties over her shoes and a hair net and some kind of an apron to cover her clothes, which were nasty with the dust of the outside world.

An apron…

Faye’s ungloved hand fell on a rare text, leaving destructive skin oils behind, but her mind was too occupied to notice. She had remembered a disappearing apron.

Chip always wore an apron over his clothes while he was working, to protect them from people’s uneaten food. He’d been wearing one the night Wally died. Faye could still see him hauling dirty dishes into the kitchen and returning with a platter of raw hamburger patties. He had fixed a misshapen burger and wiped his hand on that apron. Faye was sure of it.

Where had that apron been just a few minutes later, when he was comforting his mother on the dock beside the boat where Faye sat, covered in Wally’s blood? She remembered Liz’s face, pressed against Chip’s polo shirt. The red cotton had been blotched with her tears, right where the bib of his apron should have been.

He could simply have taken it off because it needed washing. But what if he had taken it off because it needed to be washed clean of Wally’s blood?

Chip worked in a kitchen full of knives, and his work took him outdoors to the storage shed several times over the course of an evening. Could he have seen Wally and known that he couldn’t be allowed to talk to Faye? Could Chip have grabbed a knife and caught up with Wally in the parking lot, stabbing him twice? The sheriff had said there might not have been much blood, not at first. The little bit of blood Wally lost at the time of the stabbings could well have been intercepted by an apron.

It would have been so easy for Chip to take off that apron and throw it in the washer with all the dishcloths and towels that a busy restaurant generates every day. Even if someone saw him before he was able to hide the apron, they might not have noticed a red blotch…not when Chip was regularly stained with raw meat and ketchup and spaghetti sauce. And it would have been easy to put the knife in the commercial-powered dishwasher, along with dozens of others, and let the scalding water blast away Wally’s blood and its incriminating DNA.

Her suspicions of Herbie, Wayland, and Nita, fueled by the fact that she just flat didn’t like them, had blinded her to the fact that they weren’t the only history buffs in her neck of the woods. Chip had been a history major, and he’d lived for years right here on the campus where Bachelder’s letters had rested unnoticed on a library shelf. His name hadn’t been on the sign-in sheet with Wayland’s, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t already learned all Bachelder had to teach him.

Chip could have read the letters months ago. If he was as smart as his proud mother said, he might well have realized that the hiding place of the Confederate Gold was waiting for him, on an island somewhere within just a few miles of his mother’s bar.

No wonder he’d dropped out of school and moved back home. Liz had worried over the obvious reasons he might have done that—drugs, alcohol, gambling, a woman—but the real reason hadn’t been obvious at all. Chip was a drop-out busboy because he had his eye on a notorious treasure.

Why would Chip kill Wally? And had he killed Douglass, too?

Faye remembered Wally’s last words, spoken through pale blue lips.

He’d said he needed to tell her he was sorry for everything. Then he’d said, “Tried to stop…never meant to…”

Had he tried to stop Chip from beating Douglass to death? Chip and Wally were both big men, so they could have been the intruders Emma described. Maybe Wally was dead because Chip couldn’t trust him not to tell anyone he’d committed murder.

This was all unprovable speculation, but the sheriff needed to know. There was no way Faye was going to lay out her case against Chip when there was any chance someone might overhear. She didn’t trust the privacy of the ladies’ room or the stairwell, and certainly not the parking garage. She didn’t feel safe out in the open, now that she had accepted the fact that someone had cut her brake lines and tried to kill her. She needed to get to the nearest utterly private place she knew—Joe’s car.

She had just risen to go find Joe when he came into sight, asking, “What’s taking you so long? This place is supposed to be closed by now.”

“Joe,” she whispered in a library-friendly voice. “We need to go.”

He appeared at her elbow. “Like I said. It’s about that time. Past it, actually.”

She checked her watch. He was right. Ms. Slater was slipping. She had let Faye stay and work for fifteen extra minutes, and that quarter-hour had proven very enlightening indeed.

Ms. Slater was nowhere in sight when they left the rare book room, which was a relief. Faye had no patience for dealing with an unfriendly face, not when she was still chewing on the details of her theory.

The thought of Chip as a mastermind in the burglary of Douglass’ home didn’t mesh with her impression of him. The burglary had required significant planning and coordination. Somebody had to see the newspaper article, recognize Jedediah Bachelder’s name on the silver flask, and concoct a plan to steal from Douglass any information he possessed about where it was found.