Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (24 page)

“Those are wonderful,” Nick said, slurring, to his great mortification. “Who did them? Where are they?” He noticed the second bottle was already half empty.
This woman must have a wooden leg!

“A historic home near here. Tadbull Hall. Lots of old money, lots of land. They owned the lumber mill that just closed. The man who painted these took hundreds of photos, too, around the turn of the century. The one before this one, I mean. He was the current Mr. Tadbull’s grandfather. A Renaissance man, we’d call him today. You know, a dabbler, fascinated by knowledge itself.” She rubbed a hand down her face, remembering something. There was a problem. She wrinkled her nose. “But you may have to go there alone. I’m not sure they’ll let me in. Anymore. . . . Why don’t you lie down? You look totally trashed.”

“Yeah, I think I will,” Nick said, wearily slouching over to the couch, trying unsuccessfully to act in complete control of his faculties. “Why wouldn’t the Tadbull’s let you in? Did you slug someone there, too?”

The last words he remembered were, “Worse. I bet with his chips and lost.”

CHAPTER 16

T
he Friday morning that greeted Nick outside Holly’s room was gray, drizzly, and cool bordering on downright cold. Louisiana fall was a fickle creature, ever promising itself to winter as it dallied with summer.

Tommy had sounded his pickup’s horn a few times before Nick awoke on the couch that backed up to the window of “Annie Oakley.” His watch told him he was fifteen minutes late for his eight
A
.
M
. appointment. He stumbled outside.

His tongue dry and his head aching, he squinted at the dismal day that seemed to sneer maliciously at him.

“If you’re looking for your red-headed gal,” Tommy said, a grin of rakish solidarity on his face, “I saw her at Three Sisters Pantry. She looked a lot better than you. And she had a pretty good appetite. Had a big breakfast. No one answered at your room, so I put two and two together.”

“Hey, it’s not what you think,” Nick said in a bullfrog’s voice that would have made him an instant radio celebrity. “Really, nothing happened.”

“Come on, Nick, don’t give me that. You come to the door of her room, looking like yesterday’s dog shit? You didn’t by any chance spend
the night here, did you? And she’s all smiley and perky? . . . Can’t fool me. I got a wife, you know. I can tell a happy woman when I see one.”

Nick continued to protest. “No, believe me, absolutely nothing—ah, forget it. Give me ten minutes, will you?”

He trudged to Daniel Boone, wishing Tommy had solid reasons to envy him. The cold mist on his grizzled face felt like botched acupuncture. “I’m getting too old for this,” he muttered between chattering teeth.

His wet hair and the blood from his hasty shave had almost dried when they reached the Sangfleuve Parish Courthouse in Armageddon. Tommy had tribal business to attend to with lawyers and accountants. Wooty Tadbull, on behalf of his family, had made a generous offer of land for an initial reservation—minus mineral rights, which the family wanted to keep just in case there was oil or gas underground. With this promising development to work on, Tommy seemed in much better spirits than the last time Nick had seen him. He’d dressed up for the occasion in a summer coat that was too small and which must have dated from his high-school days. Within his open shirt collar he wore a silver necklace with a pendant cross that captured the overcast day’s stingy light, reflecting—in Nick’s symbol-hungry mind, at least—the man’s resilient faith and optimism.

This must have been what the sheriff returned to Tommy the night before, Brianne’s gift found at the murder scene. He probably would have preferred a new shotgun but would never have said so, Nick thought, succumbing to a twinge of bachelor’s snideness in the presence of connubial bliss.

In his own coat of the right season but the wrong decade (this one an academic tweed from a Salvation Army Thrift Store) Nick would
have a solid day alone to begin the basic on-site research he so much enjoyed.

The creamy limestone courthouse was a fine example of Louisiana’s version of Depression-era Art Deco architecture. Straining with foolish credence in populist lies, it was terrifically ugly and out of context, a cross between a Soviet bureaucratic pile and the state Capitol in Baton Rouge. But current or personal taste shouldn’t be the arbiter of historic value, Nick believed. How much had been lost already to such intellectual arrogance? He was constantly reminding Hawty never to throw anything out of his book- and document-crammed office. Nevertheless, he detested this building and all like it. He would gladly plunge down the handle for the controlled implosion.

He bought breakfast from a blind black man who ran the courthouse snack booth. Nick was surprised to find that the coffee was good, the muffins and biscuits outstanding. As a connoisseur of the amenities of public buildings, Nick never expected much from such places.

Luevenia Silsby, of Three Sisters Pantry, made the goodies every Friday, the snack man informed him, his eyes flitting uselessly about the dark-granite lobby. Miss Luevie had just dropped them off, in fact.

The wild gymnastics of the snack man’s eyes made Nick dizzy and edgy. Just what he needed, on top of a hangover, before spending hours studying crabbed script on faded documents and dim, blurry, scratched microfilm.

In Armageddon, the fire had been real; Sangfleuve Parish really was a “burned county.” Here, the tale of the conflagration that had destroyed all records—one of the stock excuses used by town-hall clerks to fend
off bothersome genealogists—was quite literally the defining moment in the town’s life.

The parish clerk of court, Roberta Gridley, was a diminutive woman in her forties, with thinning, frizzy brown hair and the plump, pink features of a cute piglet. In her eyes Nick saw a deep hatred of disorder; she attacked cataloging, indexing, and the collection of fees with zeal. Though their office habits differed considerably, both of them shared a passion for records, which even in their smallest increment added a brushstroke to the portrait of a life.

Nick always made a point to schmooze with courthouse personnel. On-site research was a major undertaking, and a cooperative clerk could make the difference between bridging the impossible gaps in a family history and coming home empty-handed. Sure, microfilm and digital files were available for research at a distance. For decades, the Mormons, with their well-known devotion to genealogy, had been clicking away with cameras at the essentials of local genealogical research, around the world—birth, death, and marriage certificates, probate files, tax lists, land records, and other mileposts of life. Digitization of records was broadening exponentially what genealogists could access online. But in truth, just a fraction of the holdings of most courthouses and other official repositories made it to microfilm and the Internet. Thousands of years of family history, like the fabled Dead Sea Scrolls, still slept in the metaphorical desert dust of countless Qumran caves.

Clerks’ offices were charged with keeping order in present-day affairs; budgets were too tight and staffs too small to cater to genealogists’ insatiable appetite for long-forgotten facts. There were, though, sterling exceptions who could open many hidden doors to the local past, and Nick was instantly convinced that he’d found one in Roberta Gridley. Such a helpful local clerk could guide the visiting genealogist to old records that had not been touched—and perhaps not even
catalogued—for a hundred years, material “lost” through idiosyncratic filing systems and laws. A cooperative clerk could also open doors to more-contemporary records often kept for no good reason out of the general public’s hands. Nick had written and called Roberta Gridley beforehand to explain who he was and what he would be doing for the Katogoula. He’d even obtained a comprehensive privacy release from Tommy on behalf of tribe members whose family histories he would be investigating.

Now he listened patiently and with genuine interest as Roberta explained what had happened in 1863.

One pre-dawn morning, eight companies of about seven hundred Union soldiers fleeing a rout south of Shreveport floated on makeshift log rafts between the fog-enshrouded banks of the Sangfleuve River. The Federals were hoping to reach the Mississippi and the main Union force fighting its way up the big river under General Butler and Admiral Porter. That fall morning, the water was low at Port Sangfleuve; the rafts snagged on limestone rapids within easy range of a regiment of over a thousand Confederates bivouacking along the town’s riverbank.

By the time the Rebels convinced themselves that these shapes in ragged blue were not phantoms, the odds were about even. The Union soldiers, equipped with the new Henry repeating rifles, had not hesitated to exercise their superior firepower. By late in the afternoon, the surviving combatants ceased fire from redoubts on opposite sides of the river and during the truce retrieved their wounded. On one of the stranded rafts, they exchanged food, tobacco, and whiskey, and regarded the smoldering town. Before going their separate ways, they agreed the town should thenceforth be called Armageddon, for the battle had been like Judgment Day. The name stuck.

“I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Herald. Hardly anything original before 1863.
The Red Book
and
The Handybook
are right,” Roberta said, enthroned at her rigorously ordered desk in her office. A large plate-glass window let her keep tabs on her office staff of three women, who worked in a high-ceilinged room at old oak desks among file cabinets of many sizes, copiers, ever-warbling phones, computers, and massive ledger books. “But we offer an up-to-the-minute computer index of what we do have from the earliest surviving records to today. We run across lost file packets all the time, families bring old documents in for recording, and we’ve been able to reconstruct some destroyed records based on later property transfers, probate proceedings, civil suits, notarial and attorney papers, and the like. . . . And since you’re interested in Indian genealogy, I ought to tell you—though I’m not supposed to—we have special access to the
Legajos de Luisiana
.”

Surely she’d made a mistake. Could this be true? “Excuse me, Roberta, did you say the
Legajos de Luisiana
?” He struggled to hide his elation.

The
Legajos de Luisiana
, those wonderful, voluminous records of Spain’s administration of the territory later known as Louisiana. Part of a larger group of archives known as the
Fondos de las Floridas
(which in turn were part of the famous
Papeles Procedentes de Cuba
), the
Legajos
remained in Cuba after Spain had relinquished its North American colonies. Microfilm of the
Legajos
—a complete set would run to nearly thirty reels—wasn’t publicly available as yet, to Nick’s knowledge. It had only recently been microfilmed in Cuba, after centuries of obscurity, by the Historic New Orleans Collection. Microfilm sets were expected to cost upwards of twenty thousand dollars. He was still trying to get at THNOC’s
Legajos
in New Orleans—not that he wasn’t fond of Veronique anyway.