Murder at Monticello (15 page)

Kimball sat back down. He spoke slowly. “That does make sense. It would force him into silence, too, concerning the paternity slanders.”

“John Wayles wasn't equipped to handle this kind of scrutiny. Jefferson was.” Mrs. Hogendobber hit the nail on the head. “And even though they hurt Jefferson, the slandermongers, they couldn't really abridge his power.”

“Why not?” Kimball was perplexed.

“And flush out all those white jackrabbits in the briar patch?” Mrs. Hogendobber laughed. “The question is not which southern gentlemen slept with slave women, the question is which ones did not.”

“Oh, I do see.” Kimball rubbed his chin. “The Yankees could fulminate properly, but the Southerners shut up and rolled right over, so to speak.”

“Hell, yes, they wouldn't have nailed Jefferson to the cross for their own sins.” Harry laughed. “The Northerners could do the nailing, but they never could quite catch him to do it. He was far too smart to talk and he always sheltered those weaker than himself.”

“He had broad, broad wings.” Mrs. Hogendobber smiled.

“And where does that leave Medley Orion?” Kimball stood up and paced again.

“She may or may not have been related to the Hemingses. Obviously, from the description of her as ‘bright,' she was one quarter white if not half white. And her lover was white. The lover is the key. He was being protected,” Harry said.

“I disagree. I think it's Medley who was being protected. I can't prove it, but my woman's intuition tells me the victim was Medley's white lover.”

“What?” Kimball stopped in his tracks.

“The Jeffersons extended their grace to many people: to Wayles if he was the amour of Betty Hemings or her daughter, Sally; to the Carrs if they were involved. The corpse in Cabin Four wasn't a family member. His absence or death would have been noted somewhere. Someone had to make an explanation for that. Don't you see, whoever that man is—or was, I should say—once the Jeffersons found out, they didn't like him.”

She paused for breath and Kimball butted in. “But to countenance murder?”

Mrs. Hogendobber dropped her head for a second and then looked up. “There may be worse sins than murder, Kimball Haynes.”

32

Warren Randolph buttoned his shirt as Larry Johnson leaned against the small sink in the examining room. Larry was tempted to tell Warren it had taken his father's death to force him into this check-up, but he didn't.

“The blood work will be back within the week.” Larry closed the file with the plastic color code on the outside. “You're in good health and I don't anticipate any problems, but”—he wagged his finger—“the last time you had blood drawn was when you left for college. You come in for a yearly check-up!”

Warren sheepishly said, “Lately I haven't felt well. I'm tired, but then I can't sleep. I drag around and forget things. I'd forget my head if it weren't pinned to my shoulders.”

Larry put his hand on Warren's shoulder. “You've suffered a major loss. Grief is exhausting and the things that pop into your mind—it'll surprise you.”

Warren could let down his guard around the doctor. If you couldn't trust your lifelong physician, whom could you trust? “I don't remember feeling this bad when Mother died.”

“You were twenty-four when Diana died. That's too young to understand what and whom you've lost, and don't be surprised if some of the grieving you've suppressed over your mother doesn't resurface now. Sooner or later, it comes out.”

“I got worried, you know, about the listlessness. Thought it might be the beginning of leukemia. Runs in the family. Runs? Hell, it gallops.”

“Like I said, the blood work will be back, but you don't have any other signs of the disease. You took a blow and it will take time to get back up.”

“But what if I do have leukemia like Poppa?” Warren's brow furrowed, his voice grew taut. “It can take you down fast. . . .”

“Or you can live with it for years.” Larry's voice soothed. “Don't yell ‘ouch' until you're hurt. You know, memory and history are age-related. What you call up out of your mind at twenty may not be what you call up at forty. Even if what you remember is a very specific event in time, say, Christmas 1968, how you remember it will shift and deepen with age. Events are weighted emotionally. It's not the events we need to understand, it's the emotions they arouse. In some cases it takes twenty or thirty years to understand Christmas of 1968. You are now able to see your father's life as a whole: beginning, middle, and end. That changes your perception of Wesley, and I guarantee you will think a lot about your mother too. Just let it go through you. Don't block it. You'll be better off.”

“You know everything about everybody, don't you, Doc?”

“No”—the old man smiled—“but I know people.”

Warren glanced up at the ceiling, pushing back his tears. “Know what I thought about driving over here today? The damnedest thing. I remembered Poppa throwing the newspaper across the room when Reagan and his administration managed that Tax Reform Act of 1986. What a disaster. Anyway, Poppa was fussing and cussing and he said, ‘The bedroom, Warren, the bedroom is the last place we're free until these sons of bitches figure out how to tax orgasms.' ”

Larry laughed. “They broke the mold when they made Wesley.”

33

The graceful three-sash windows, copied from Monticello, opened onto a formal garden in the manner of Inigo Jones. The library was paneled in a deep red mahogany and glowed as if with inner light. Kimball sat at a magnificent Louis XIV desk, black with polished ormolu, which Samson Coles's maternal great-great-great-grandmother was reputed to have had shipped over from France in 1700 when she lived in the Tidewater.

Handwritten diaries, the cursive script elegant and highly individualistic, strained the archaeologist's eyes. If he stepped away from the documents, the writing almost looked Arabic, another language of surpassing beauty in the written form.

Lucinda, the consummate hostess, placed a pot of hot tea, a true Brown Betty, on a silver tray along with scones and sinful jams and jellies. She pulled a chair alongside him and read too.

“The Coles family has a fascinating history. And the Randolphs, of course, Jefferson's mother's family. It's hard to remember how few people there were even at the beginning of the eighteenth century and how the families all knew one another. Married one another too.”

“You know that America enjoyed a higher rate of literacy during the American Revolution than it does today? That's a dismal statistic. These early settlers, I mean, even going back to the early seventeenth century, were as a rule quite well educated. That common culture, high culture if you will, at least in the literary sense and the sense of the living arts”—he rubbed the desk to make his point—“must have given people remarkable stability.”

“You could seize your quill and inkwell, scratch a letter to a friend in Charleston, South Carolina, and know that an entire subtext was understood.” Lulu buttered a scone.

“Lulu, what was your major?”

“English. Wellesley.”

“Ah.” Kimball appreciated the rigors of Wellesley College.

“What was a girl to study in my day? Art history or English.”

“Your day wasn't that long ago. Now, come on, you aren't even forty.”

She shrugged and grinned. She certainly wasn't going to correct him.

Kimball, at thirty, hadn't begun to think about forty. “We're youth-obsessed. The people who wrote these diaries and letters and records valued experience.”

“The people who wrote this stuff weren't assaulted on a daily basis with photographs and television shows parading beautiful young women, and men, for that matter. Your wife, hopefully the best woman you could find, did not necessarily have to be beautiful. Not that it hurt, mind you, Kimball, but I think our ancestors were much more concerned with sturdy health and strong character. The idea of a woman as ornament—that was off waiting to afflict us during Queen Victoria's reign.”

“You're right. Women and men worked as a team regardless of their level of society. They needed one another. I keep coming across that in my research, Lulu, the sheer need. A man without a woman was to be pitied and a woman without a man was on a dead-end street. Everyone pitched in. I mean, look at these accounts kept by Samson's great-grandmother—many greats, actually—Charlotte Graff. Nails, outrageously expensive, were counted, every one. Here, look at this account book from 1693.”

“Samson really should donate these to the Alderman's rare books collection. He won't part with them, and I guess in a way I can understand, but the public should have access to this information, or scholars at least, if not the public. Wesley Randolph was the same way. I ran into Warren coming out of Larry Johnson's office yesterday and asked him if he'd ever read the stuff. He said no, because his father kept a lot of it in the huge house safe in the basement. Wesley figured that if there were a fire, the papers would be protected in the safe.”

“Logical.”

Lulu read again. “Whenever I read letters to and from Jefferson women I get totally confused. There are so many Marthas, Janes, and Marys. It seems like every generation has those names in it.”

“Look at it this way. They didn't know they were going to be famous. Otherwise maybe they would have varied the first names to help us out later.”

Lulu laughed. “Think anyone will be reading about us one hundred years from now?”

“They won't even care about me twenty minutes after I'm gone—in an archival sense, I mean.”

“Who knows?” She gingerly picked up Charlotte Graff's account book and read. “Her accounts make sense. I picked up Samson's ledger the other day because he had laid it out on the desk and forgot to put it away. Couldn't make head or tails of it. I think the gene pool has degenerated, at least in the bookkeeping department.” She rose and pulled a massive black book with a red spine out of the lower shelf of a closed cabinet. “You tell me, who does the better job?”

Good-naturedly, Kimball opened the book, the bright white paper with the vertical blue lines such a contrast from the aged papers he'd been reading. He squinted. He read a bit, then he paled, closed the book, and handed it back to Lulu. Not an accounting genius, he knew enough about double-entry bookkeeping to know that Samson Coles was lifting money out of clients' escrow funds. No broker or real estate agent is ever, ever to transfer money out of an escrow account even if he or she pays it back within the hour. Discovery of this abuse results in instant loss of license, and no real estate board in any county would do otherwise, even if the borrower were the president of the United States.

“Kimball, what's wrong?”

He stuttered, “Uh, nothing.”

“You look pale as a ghost.”

“Too much scones and jam.” He smiled weakly and gathered the papers together just as Samson tooted down the driveway, his jolly red Wagoneer announcing his presence. “Lulu, put this book away before he gets here.”

“Kimball, what's wrong with you?”

“Put the book back!” He spoke more sharply than he had intended.

Lulu, not a woman given to taking orders, did the exact reverse, she opened the account book and slowly and deliberately read the entries. Not knowing too much about bookkeeping or the concept of escrow even though she was married to a realtor, she was a bit wide of the mark. No matter, because Samson strode into the library looking the picture of the country squire.

“Kimball, my wife has enticed you with scones.”

“Hello, dear.” He leaned over and perfunctorily kissed her on the cheek. His gaze froze on the account book.

“If you two will excuse me, I must be going. Thank you so much for access to these materials.” Kimball disappeared.

Samson, crimson-faced, tried to hide his shock. If he reacted, it would be far worse than if he didn't. Instead, he merely removed his ledger from Lulu's hands and replaced it on the lower shelf of the built-in cabinet. “Lulu, I was unaware that my ledger qualified as an archive.”

Blithely she remarked, “Well, it doesn't, but I was reading over your umpteenth great-grandmother's accounts from 1693, and they made sense. So I told Kimball to see how the accounting gene had degenerated over the centuries.”

“Amusing,” Samson uttered through gritted teeth. “Methods have changed.”

“I'll say.”

“Did Kimball say anything?”

Lucinda paused. “No, not exactly, but he was eager to go after that. Samson, is there a problem?”

“No, but I don't think my ledger is anybody's business but my own.”

Stung, Lulu realized he was right. “I'm sorry. I'd seen it when you left it out the other day, and I do say whatever pops into my head. The difference between the two ledgers just struck me. It isn't anybody else's business but it was—funny.”

Samson left her gathering up the scones and the tea. He repaired to the kitchen for a bracing kick of Dalwhinnie scotch. What to do?

34

Mrs. Murphy, with special determination, squeezed her hindquarters into Mim Sanburne's post office box. From the postmistress's point of view, the wall of boxes was divided in half horizontally, an eight-inch ledge of oak being the divider. This proved handy when Harry needed to set aside stacks of mail or continue her refined sorting, as she called it.

As a kitten, Mrs. Murphy used to sleep in a large brandy snifter. She never acquired a taste for brandy, but she did learn to like odd shapes. For instance, she couldn't resist a new box of tissues. When she was small she could claw out the Kleenex and secrete herself into the box. This never failed to elicit a howl and laughter from Harry. As she grew, Mrs. Murphy discovered that less and less of her managed to fit into the box. Finally, she was reduced to sticking her hind leg in there. Hell on the Kleenex.

Usually the cat contented herself with the canvas mail bin. If Harry, or on rare occasion, Mrs. Hogendobber, wheeled her around, that was kitty heaven. But today she felt like squishing herself into something small. The scudding, frowning putty-colored clouds might have had something to do with it. Or the fact that Market Shiflett had brought over Pewter and three T-bones for the animals. Pewter had caused an unwelcome sensation in Market's store when she jumped into Ellie Wood Baxter's shopping cart and sunk her considerable fangs into a scrumptious pork roast.

Harry adored Pewter, so keeping her for the day was fine. The two cats and Tucker gnawed at their bones until weary. Everyone was knocked out asleep. Even Harry and Mrs. H. wanted to go to sleep.

Harry stopped in the middle of another massive catalogue sort. “Would you look at that?”

“Looks like a silver curtain. George and I loved to walk in the rain. You wouldn't think it to look at him, but George Hogendobber was a romantic. He knew how to treat a lady.”

“He knew how to pick a good lady.”

“Aren't you sweet?” Mrs. Hogendobber noticed Mrs. Murphy, front end on the ledge, back end jammed into Mim's box. She pointed.

Harry smiled. “She's too much. Dreaming of white mice or pink elephants, I guess. I do love that cat. Where's the culprit?” She bent down to see Pewter asleep under the desk, her right paw draped over the remains of her T-bone. The flesh had been stripped clean. “Boy, I bet Ellie Wood pitched a holy fit.”

“Market wasn't too happy either. Maybe you ought to give him a vacation and take Pewter home tonight. She certainly could use a little outdoor exercise.”

“Good idea. I can't keep my eyes open. I'm as bad as these guys.”

“Low pressure system. The pollen ought to be a factor soon too. I dread those two weeks when my eyes are red, my nose runs, and my head pounds.”

“Get Larry Johnson to give you an allergy shot.”

“The only person an allergy shot does any good for is Larry Johnson.” She grumbled. “He'll come by soon to give us a lunch hour today. He's back working full-time again. Remember when he first retired and he'd come in so you could take time for lunch? That lasted about six months. Then he was back working at his practice Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. Soon it was every morning, and now he's back to a full schedule.”

“Do you think people should retire?”

“Absolutely not, I mean, unless they want to. I am convinced, convinced, Mary Minor, that retirement killed my George. His hobbies weren't the same as being responsible to people, being in the eye of the storm, as he used to say. He loved this job.”

“I'm trying to find a business I can do on the side. That way, when I retire, I can keep working. These government jobs are rigid. I'll have to retire.”

Miranda laughed. “You aren't even thirty-five.”

“But it goes by so fast.”

“That it does. That it does.”

“Besides, I need money. I had to replace the carburetor in my tractor last week. Try finding a 1958 John Deere carburetor. What I've got in there is a hybrid of times. And I don't know how much longer the truck will hold up, she's a 1978. I need four-wheel drive—the inside of the house needs to be painted. Where am I going to get the money?”

“Things were easier when you were married. Anyone who doesn't think a man's salary helps isn't very realistic. Divorce and poverty seem to be the same word for most women.”

“Well, I lived just fine on my own before I was married.”

“You were younger then. You weren't maintaining a house. As you go along in life, creature comforts get mighty important. If I didn't have my automatic coffee maker, my electric blanket, and my toaster oven, I'd be a crab and a half,” she joked. “And what about my organ that George bought me for my fiftieth birthday? I couldn't live without that.”

“I want a Toyota Land Cruiser. Never could afford it though.”

“Does Mim have one of those?”

“Along with one of everything else. But yes, she's got the Land Cruiser and Jim's got the Range Rover. Little Marilyn has a Range Rover too. Speak of the devil.”

Mim pulled up and sat in the car, trying to decide if the rain would let up. It didn't, so she made a dash for it. “Whoo,” she said as she closed the door behind her. Neither Harry nor Mrs. Hogendobber informed her of Mrs. Murphy's slumber. She opened her post box. “A cat's tail. I have always wanted a cat's tail. And a cat's behind. Mrs. Murphy, what are you doing?” she asked as she gently squeezed the feline's tail.

Mrs. Murphy, tail tweaked, complained bitterly.
“Leave me alone. I don't pull your tail.”

Harry and Miranda laughed. Harry walked over to the cat, eyes now half open. “Come on, sweet pea, out of there.”

“I'm comfortable.”

Sensing deep resistance, Harry placed her hands under the cat's arms and gently removed her amid a torrent of abuse from the tiger. “I know you're comfy in there, but Mrs. Sanburne needs to retrieve her mail. You can get back in there later.”

Tucker raised her head to observe the fuss, saw the situation, and put her head down on the floor again.

“You're a big goddamned help,”
the cat accused the dog.

Tucker closed her eyes. If she ignored Mrs. Murphy, the feline usually dropped it.

“Did she read my mail too?” Mim asked.

“Here it is.” Miranda handed it over to Mim, whose engagement diamond, a marquise cut, caught the light and splashed a tiny rainbow on the wall.

“Bills, bills, bills. Oh, just what I always wanted, a catalogue from Victoria's Secret.” She underhanded it into the trash, looked up, and beheld Harry and Miranda beholding her. “I love my cashmere robe. But this sexy stuff is for your age group, Harry.”

“I sleep in the nude.”

“True confessions.” Mim leaned against the counter. “Heard you all have been helping Kimball Haynes. I guess he told you about the pathology report, or whatever they call those things.”

“Yes, he did,” Miranda said.

“All we have to do is find a thirty-two-year-old white male who may have walked with a slight limp in his left leg—in 1803.”

“That, or find out more about Medley Orion.”

“It is a puzzle.” Mim crossed her arms over her chest. “I spoke to Lulu this morning and she said Kimball spent all of yesterday over there and Samson's mad at her.”

“Why?” asked Harry innocently.

“Oh, she said he got out of sorts. And she admitted that maybe she should have waited until Samson was home. I don't know. Those two.” She shook her head.

As if on cue, Samson stamped into the post office with customers from Los Angeles. “Hello there. What luck, finding you here, Mim. I'd like you to meet Jeremy and Tiffany Diamond. This is Marilyn Sanburne.”

Mim extended her hand. “How do you do?”

“Fine, thank you.” Jeremy's smile revealed a good cap job. His wife was on her second face-lift, and her smile no longer exactly corresponded to her lips.

“The Diamonds are looking at Midale.”

“Ah,” cooed Mim. “One of the most remarkable houses in central Virginia. The first to have a flying staircase, I believe.”

Samson introduced the Diamonds to Harry and Miranda.

“Isn't this quaint?” Tiffany's voice hit the phony register. “And look, you have pets here too. How cozy.”

“They sort the mail.” Harry didn't have the knee-jerk response to these kinds of people that Mim did, but she marveled at big city people's assumption of superiority. If you lived in a small town or the country, they thought, then you must be unambitious or stupid or both.

“How cute.”

Jeremy brushed a few raindrops off his pigskin blazer, teal yet. “Samson's been telling us about his ancestor, Thomas Jefferson's mother.”

I bet he has, Harry thought to herself. “Samson and Mrs. Sanburne—Mrs. Sanburne is the chair, actually—have raised money for the current restorations at Monticello.”

“Ah, and say, what about the body in the slave quarters? I know why you look familiar.” He stared at Mim. “You were the lady on
Wake-up Call
with Kyle Kottner. Do you really think the victim was a stalker?”

“Whoever he was, he posed some danger,” she replied.

“Wouldn't it be ironic, Samson, if he were one of your relatives.” Tiffany sank a small fishhook into Samson's ego. Her unfortunate obsession with looking young and cute, and her faint hint of superiority, hadn't dimmed her mind. She'd endured enough of Samson's genealogical bragging.

Harry stifled a giggle. Mim relished Samson's discomfort, especially since she hadn't fully forgiven him for his behavior at Wesley's funeral.

“Well,” he gulped, “who knows? Instead of living up to the past, I might have to live it down.”

“I'd rather live in the present,” Tiffany replied, although her penchant for attempting to keep her face in the twenty-year distant past stated otherwise.

After they vacated the premises, Mim walked back over and leaned against the counter. “Sharp lady.”

“She's got Samson's number, that's for sure.”

“Harry”—Mim turned to Miranda—“Miranda, have you found anything at all?”

“Just that Medley Orion lived with Martha Jefferson Randolph after 1826. She continued her trade. She had a daughter, but we don't know her name.”

“What about searching for the victim? Surely the possibility of a limp could give him away. Someone somewhere knew a lame man visited Medley Orion. And he wasn't a tradesman.”

“It's baffling.” Miranda leaned on the opposite side of the counter. “But I've turned this over and over in my mind and I believe this has something to do with us now. Someone knows this story.”

Mim tapped the counter with her mail. “And if we know, it will upset the applecart.” She grabbed a letter opener off the counter and opened her personal mail. Her eyes widened as a letter fell out of a plain envelope postmarked Charlottesville. Letters were pasted on the paper: “Let the dead bury the dead.” Mim blanched, then read it aloud.

“Already has,” Harry said. “Yeah, the applecart's upset.”

“I resent this cheap theatric!” Mim vehemently slapped the letter on the counter.

“Cheap or not, we'd better all be careful,” Miranda quietly commented.