Arsenic and Old Books (16 page)

“Well, boy, I have my work cut out for me now,” I said as I placed the last volume on my desk and set the box on the floor beside it. I figured the cat would want to investigate the box, and better that it should be on the floor than on my desk.

I turned to the windowsill. Diesel wasn't there.

I had a brief moment of panic, then forced myself to calm down. “Diesel? Where are you, boy? Come here please.”

I waited for at least fifteen seconds before I repeated my summons.

No cat appeared. He was probably downstairs with Melba. I stripped off one glove, picked up the office phone, and punched in her extension. She answered right away.

“I was about to call you,” she said. “I have a furry visitor, and I'll bet you didn't know he'd sneaked out of the office and come down here.”

I felt a huge sensation of relief. “No, I didn't know he'd left the office. I was pretty engrossed in reading, and he got out without my knowledge. Thank goodness he's safe with you, the little demon.”

“I thought he might follow Art Turnbull, the deputy who was here a few minutes ago. He stopped in to say a quick hello to me before he came upstairs.”

“One of your many admirers, no doubt,” I teased her gently. I figured Turnbull for mid-forties, but that was close enough for Melba.

“No, he's married,” she said. “But I know his sister Madge real well. You probably don't remember her. She was a few grades behind us in school.”

“No, can't say that I remember her. Look, are you okay with Diesel down there? Or do you want me to come get him?”

“He can stay with me for a while,” Melba said. “When I get ready to take a break, we'll come upstairs.”

“Thanks.” I felt relieved but also a bit aggravated with myself. I shouldn't have been so wrapped up in my reading that I missed seeing my large cat slink out of the office. I needed to be more alert.

My heart rate returned to normal, I picked up the discarded glove and put it back on. I figured I might as well take a look at the volume with the missing pages. Each of the volumes lay on its side on my desk, with the bottom pages of the book toward me. I bent closer to them and examined each one.

The volume with the missing pages wasn't hard to spot. There was a slight gap in the pages about two-thirds of the way toward the back of it. I pulled that one forward and opened it with care.

I turned to the place in the book where the pages had been taken out. I examined the area, and it looked to me like Marie had used a razor blade to cut the pages loose. There was no point in feeling anger over Marie's act of vandalism. She had already paid a higher price than I could have exacted.

The date of the entry preceding the gap was August 10, 1863. I turned to the beginning of the diary and found the initial date there: November 1, 1860.

That was odd. This volume covered at least part of the same period as the volume Mrs. Long found hidden in the false bottom of the trunk.

I checked the final entry for a date: June 3, 1866.

This volume
did
cover the same time period. Actually it was a bit more extensive, I realized after a moment's thought. The volume I had read started in March of 1861 and ended in mid-May 1865, a week or two after the end of the war.

Why had Rachel kept two diaries for roughly the same period? The one I read did not use all the pages of the book like this one did. Was the one I read the original diary of the period, and the one on my desk perhaps a fuller version Rachel wrote later? I knew Mary Boykin Chesnut edited and rewrote parts of her diary before the book,
A Diary from Dixie
, was published in 1905. The diary was not published in Mary's lifetime. From what I could remember she died in the mid-1880s and asked a friend to see about getting it published.

Rachel couldn't have known, of course, about Mary Chesnut's diary, but perhaps she had a similar ambition, to see her diary published as a record of her experiences growing up in the South through a tragic era.

Miss Eulalie might be able to shed light on the subject, although I now felt diffident about asking her. There might also, I realized, be information in the correspondence and other papers in the Long collection.

All that could wait. Right now I wanted to delve into this volume of the diary to see what information it might contain that would be in any way relevant to present-day events.

I went back to the gap in the pages. The last sentence before the missing pages read, “Words cannot express the horror and sickness I feel over . . .”

Over what?
I wanted to scream. How frustrating. This lead-in told me that there must be something sensational in the missing pages.

I suppressed my irritation and read the first words on the page after the gap. They were just as intriguing as the words preceding the gap: “behind us, never to be mentioned or recalled as long as I draw breath.”

I glanced down the page to see the date of the next entry: September 30, 1863.

What had happened between August 10 and September 30, 1863, besides the deaths of Rachel's husband and father-in-law? The Union Army didn't come to Athena until the winter of 1863, in November, I thought.

I would have to do some digging to see what I could find about the summer of 1863 in Athena. Dr. Brooke's dissertation might cast light on it. I closed the diary and set it aside.

A knock at the door caught my attention before I could resume reading the dissertation. I looked up to see Jasper Singletary approaching me.

“I apologize for dropping by unannounced like this, Mr. Harris.” He extended his hand, and I shook it. “I took the chance you'd be here and would have time to talk with me about the diary.”

“I'm glad to see you.” I indicated a chair. “Please sit. I have to tell you I've been curious about your reaction to the information related to your ancestors.”

Singletary regarded me in silence for a moment. I couldn't read his expression.

“My first reaction is that Rachel Long was a liar,” he said. “She came across to me as a bit self-righteous about her charitable behavior. Just because she didn't admit to anything in that diary doesn't mean she didn't poison the children and their mother deliberately.”

He surprised me. I thought the first thing he'd address would the news about Celeste. Instead he focused on his grievance against the Longs.

“I can't deny that,” I said. For now, I decided quickly, I wasn't going to tell him about the diary he read being a partial duplicate of another one. I wanted to figure out the reason for its existence before I talked with him or any of the Longs about it. “Rachel could very well have omitted anything that would make her look guilty. You'll have to look elsewhere for your proof that she was a murderess.”

“I'm not giving up,” he said firmly. He crossed his arms over his chest and regarded me with that enigmatic expression again. “Rachel was also lying about my great-great-grandmother Celeste. Don't you think we would have known before now if she had been a slave before she married my great-great-grandfather Franklin?” He snorted.

“What kind of family documents do you have?” I asked.

The question obviously surprised him. “What do you mean? Are you talking about birth certificates?”

“No, because I don't think they gave them out in the 1860s. I'll have to look that up,” I said. “I'm talking about a marriage license, or some proof that Franklin and Celeste married. It was illegal for a black woman—and Celeste would have been considered black even though she was allegedly of mixed race—to marry a white man, and vice versa.”

“You think if I have a copy of a license showing they were legally married, that would prove she was white?” Jasper shrugged. “Look, it doesn't matter to me whether she was or she wasn't a slave in the long run. By all accounts she and Franklin had a happy marriage even though they were dirt poor all their life together. I'm not ashamed of my background, but I am curious why nobody in my family, including my great-aunt who's ninety-eight and still sharp, knows anything about this. I asked Aunt Addie this morning, and she laughed. Celeste died when Aunt Addie was fifteen.”

“The fact that your great-aunt knew Celeste doesn't rule out the possibility. If Celeste had been a slave, she and her husband would have taken great pains to keep it from the rest of the family.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Jasper said. “But how come no one ever came up to Aunt Addie or my grandfather and said anything about their grandmother being a slave once upon a time? If Celeste had been a slave, people in town would have known. You couldn't hide something like that.”

I couldn't argue with his logic, and I told him so. “That's been troubling me, too. For the moment, let's assume that it's true that she was a slave. If that became public knowledge now, would it have a bad effect on your campaign?”

“I might lose some votes from narrow-minded people.” He sounded tired all of a sudden. “Look, people come up with all kind of nutty reasons not to vote for a candidate. They think he has a squint and looks like a crook, or the other candidate is more attractive. If it does turn out to be true, who knows? I could actually pick up support from black voters in this district.”

I couldn't tell whether he really believed what he had told me, about not being all that concerned over Celeste's racial heritage, or whether, in typical politician fashion, he was saying what he thought was most expedient in the situation. I hoped it was the former.

Singletary stood. “I've taken up enough of your time, and I've got to get on the road. More campaign stops. I'd also better do what I can to find out if Beck Long and his handlers plan to make this stuff public.”

We shook hands again, and out he went. I sat again and stared at the diaries on my desk. On a sudden whim, I got up and went to the storage room next door. I found the fifth volume and brought it back to my desk. I opened it to a random page beside one of the other volumes and began to compare them.

After fifteen minutes I gave up. The handwriting looked pretty much the same to me. The fifth volume had the same binding, the same paper, from everything I could see. Still . . .

I hesitated for a moment, then picked up the phone. I punched in Stewart Delacorte's number on campus and hoped he would answer.

Stewart answered after several rings, and I identified myself.

“Hi, Charlie, how are you?” Stewart asked.

“Doing fine. I'm working on a new project,” I said. “I was wondering if you could help me with something.”

“Sure,” Stewart said. “What do you need?”

“It might be better if I explained in person,” I said. “Can I come over to your office sometime today?”

Stewart chuckled. “I'm not in the office at the moment. I have my office phone forwarded to my cell phone. I'm home, actually. How about I come to your office in about twenty minutes?”

“That's fine,” I said, “if you're sure you have time.”

“I do,” Stewart replied. “See you in twenty.”

I hoped Stewart might be able to answer the questions I now had about the authenticity of the fifth volume of Rachel's diary. I suspected that it was a fake, and if Stewart could give me some kind of basic evidence of that possibility, I would turn the book over to Kanesha and tell her it needed to be thoroughly tested.

If the diary proved to be a fake, then the question was, who did it?

The most obvious answer was the mayor herself, Lucinda Beckwith Long.

Her motive? To embarrass Jasper Singletary and cost him votes by spreading the news that he was a descendant of a slave who once was the property of the Long family.

The arrogance that lay behind such a plan stunned me. Was the Long family so desperate to put Beck in office that they would stoop to something so preposterous? I suspected they were. I also found repugnant the notion that Jasper Singletary was less
worthy
—I had to struggle for a word—because of the alleged connection to a slave woman. Did Mrs. Long really believe that was such a terrible thing, enough to turn voters away from Jasper?

The man himself didn't seem that bothered by it, and I had to credit him for that attitude if it was, indeed, genuine.

How did the murder of Marie Steverton connect to this? I wondered whether she had known about the faked diary.
Allegedly
faked diary, I reminded myself. Had the mayor run Marie down in cold blood to keep her from giving away the scheme? That was possible, I supposed, but it didn't seem likely somehow.

I kept running these and other questions through my brain while I waited for Stewart to arrive. The frustration from not being able to find answers was building, and I knew before long I would have a headache from the tension.

Stewart's arrival came as a welcome interruption. “Hi, Charlie,” he said from the doorway. “Here I am, and I have a companion with me.”

Diesel trotted into the room ahead of Stewart and came around the desk to sit by me. He looked up at me and meowed.

“Your companion has been naughty,” I said. “He sneaked out of here while I was busy and went down to see Melba.”

“Oh, Diesel, you are a bad boy.” Stewart chuckled as he made himself comfortable in the chair across from me.

I looked down at the cat and frowned. “You shouldn't do things like that.”

Diesel meowed and placed a large paw on my leg. For him, this probably constituted an apology. I patted his head. Reassured, he climbed into the window behind me and stretched out.

I turned to Stewart, who looked as neatly groomed and fresh as always. I wished I knew how he managed to stay that way, even in the heat of a Mississippi summer.

“Thanks for coming by,” I said. I waved a hand to indicate the volumes of Rachel Long's diary on my desk. “I need your help with these.”

Stewart quirked one eyebrow. “Are they old chemistry books? Otherwise, I'm not sure I'd be of much help.”

“They're not,” I said, “but it's your expertise in chemistry that I need.” I tapped the suspect volume lightly. “I think this one is a fake, and I'm hoping you can tell me if I'm right.”

“What are they?” Stewart asked.

“I'm getting ahead of myself,” I said. “These are diaries written by Rachel Afton Long around the time of the Civil War.”

“Long?” Stewart said. “As in our esteemed mayor's husband's family?”

I nodded. “Yes. Mrs. Long brought four of the diaries to me on Monday. She found them in a trunk in the attic and wanted them added to the Long collection here in the archive. Later she brought me a fifth one.” I held it up. “She said she found it in the same trunk, but hidden in a false bottom.”

“What makes you think it's a fake?” Stewart asked.

“The contents,” I said. “From what I can see, the paper, the ink, and the handwriting are similar. But the time period covered in this volume is also covered in one of the original four Mrs. Long brought.”

“Tell me the whole story,” Stewart said. “I've got time, and before I get involved with this, I want to know what's really going on.”

That was a fair request. I gave him the salient facts as I saw them. When I finished, he shook his head. “The Longs have always been snobs, but this really takes the
gâteau
.” He shifted in his chair. “Do you think the mayor ran Marie down, then?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I'm really not sure how the murder fits into this mud-slinging scheme. Unless Marie managed to figure it out and threatened to expose it.”

“I'll leave that up to you and your buddy Kanesha.” Stewart grinned. “Have you told her yet that you think you've got a fake on your hands?”

“No, I haven't. I wanted to have some kind of evidence before I tell her and suggest she send it for a more thorough investigation.”

“And that's where I come in.” Stewart looked thoughtful. “I'm sure you don't want me to do anything to harm the integrity of these books. Probably the easiest thing would be for me to examine the paper and ink with the microscope.”

“What would that tell you?” I asked.

“I can compare the fibers in the paper, to start with,” Stewart replied. “Then I can look at the ink, see how it has bonded with the paper, for example. If one was written back during the Civil War and the other one only recently, there will be noticeable differences.”

I forestalled him before he launched into a more technical explanation. “If you do find these differences, then I'll feel more confident about calling Kanesha and telling her what I suspect. When will you be able to do it?”

Stewart smiled. “I don't have class this afternoon, so I can work on it now. I'll take the suspected fake and one of the others and compare them.”

“Thanks. I really appreciate this,” I said. “I've got a box here you can take them in.” I put the suspected fake and the final volume of the four original ones into the box for him.

“I'll bring them back when I've finished,” Stewart said. “Shouldn't take too long if I can get into one of the labs and find the appropriate tools available. This time of the semester the labs are pretty full.”

Diesel warbled and trilled a good-bye as Stewart left. He called a farewell to the cat before he disappeared into the hallway.

I turned in my chair to regard the cat. Diesel gazed sleepily at me. He meowed, and I rubbed his head.

“I can't stay mad at you for long,” I told him. He purred and pushed his head against my hand. “I'm going to have to pay more attention, though.”

Diesel settled down after a bit more love, and I tried to focus on what I needed to do next. I had to keep busy or else I'd be staring at the phone every other minute, silently urging Stewart to call.

My glance fell on the diary volume with the missing pages, and my thoughts homed in on the time period of those pages. What had happened in the summer of 1863 in Athena?

I picked up the dissertation. Too bad it didn't have an index, I thought. Instead of looking up pages where any of the Long family was mentioned, I'd have to read or skim through the text.

After the chapter on the early history of Athena, the author of the dissertation focused more tightly on the years of the war and its aftermath. I started skimming, looking for mentions of the Long and Singletary families. After fifty pages or so, I found what I was looking for.

Tragedy befell the Long family twice in rapid succession in the summer of 1863 with the deaths of both Andrew Long Senior and his son, Major Andrew Long Junior. The major, badly wounded during the Battle of Gettysburg in early July, and no longer able to serve, somehow managed to make it home to Bellefontaine by mid-August. He remained secluded there with his wife, son, and father until his death. Several of the town's prominent citizens called upon the family to welcome Major Long home, but were turned away by his wife, Rachel. The major's wounds were so disfiguring, she told them, the major refused to see anyone
.

The footnote to this paragraph cited the letters of one Josiah Rhodes, who was evidently the Longs' banker. The author of the dissertation went on to say that word reached the town in late September of 1863 that the major had succumbed to a fever, and shortly after, his father died as well. Mrs. Long was left with her young son and a few servants at Bellefontaine.

I had seen photographs of the carnage wrought by the Civil War and the grievous wounds borne by the soldiers who survived. I could understand that a proud man might not care to be seen and pitied by anyone other than his family. The Battle of Gettysburg had the highest casualties of any battle during the war, with more than twenty thousand of them from Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Meade's Army of the Potomac sustained a similar number.

I put the book aside, my question about the death of Major Andrew Long answered. Time now to focus again on Rachel's diaries. Ordinarily I would have started at the beginning, but because of the questions I had regarding the diary I thought was fake, I started with the volume with the missing pages. There might be clues in other parts of the diary that could be helpful.

For the next forty-five minutes I read steadily, and I paused every few minutes to make sure Diesel remained on the windowsill. I also cast a few glances at the phone, wishing Stewart would call, but I had no idea how long it would take him to examine the paper and ink. I hoped he had been able to find the equipment he needed and hadn't had to wait for it to become free.

The office phone rang while I was standing and stretching in front of the desk. I snatched up the receiver.

“Charlie, I've got an answer for you,” Stewart said without preamble. “Based on my analysis, I'd say this one volume is definitely a fake. The inks don't match, though the paper does.”