THE DEVILS DIME (30 page)

. . .

Bundles of gray-green occupied most of the top of the small writing desk in Ford Magee’s living room by the time Addie had emptied the tin box. Startled, she checked her method a second time, certain that she must have miscounted.

Twice she flipped through each bundle to make sure there weren’t different denominations of bills mixed into any one stack. But they were all the same. A hundred dollars in each bundle. And fifty bundles total. Each tied with a piece of brown yarn.

How had her father managed to save five thousand dollars on a night watchman’s salary? She could understand the pile of silver dollars. She hadn’t counted them, but since working at the bank, her eye for estimating silver was fine tuned. The pile that occupied the center of the tin box probably amounted to a little over four hundred dollars.

Addie tapped her pencil on the desk. Could he have had bonds? It didn’t seem likely, just knowing her father’s cautious nature. He hadn’t even put his funds in a bank, so it didn’t seem likely that he would otherwise do business with a financial institution.

Maybe he owned land.

Addie brightened at the thought. Perhaps he owned land and sold it when the city grew out close to it and made himself rich.

Or maybe he’d taken bribes.

Stop it, Addie.

After all, he was a night watchman.

Ungrateful daughter.

Addie pulled her hands away from the stacks of worn currency. He’d told her he sent money to Aunt Lucille. How could he live here himself, save a small fortune, and still send money on his pitiful wage?

Addie looked past the currency to the cubbyholes in the back of the drop-leaf desk. Odds and ends of string and postage and old receipts filled most of the slots, but a small bound book was slid into the slot at the far end.

It felt very much like cheating, but Addie pulled the book out and began to flip through it. As she’d expected, it was a ledger. On the first page there were a half dozen entries marked ‘JLCMA-C’.

She ran the letters through her head, but didn’t come up with the answer until she spoke the initials out loud. Then it all made perfect sense.

Julia Lillabeth Carnello Magee Adelaide – Chicago.

This was his code for recording funds sent to Addie and her mother in Chicago.

Then, some lines below, a second entry began to appear.
‘JLC-W’.

If she was correct about the first set of initials, then this had to be Jeremiah Leviticus Carnello – Williamsbridge.

Addie stared at the entry. Her father had paid for his wife’s twin brother’s care at the institution. And handsomely, from the looks of it.

Next to each entry was a dollar figure. Modest at first, and then increasing for Addie and her mother. Enough to make Addie squirm. But the entry for JLC-W was always the same.

Addie paged on through the book, but each month the same two entries appeared. Until June of 1879, when the JLC-W entries stopped.

Perhaps her father had grown tired of paying for his brother-in-law. Or his brother-in-law was able to come out of the institution. Or...his brother-in-law, the uncle she’d never known she had, Jeremiah Leviticus Carnello, had died.

Addie dropped her head into her hands and propped her elbows on the desk. There had to be an honest answer for where this money had come from.

She refused to doubt her father.

But once the word ‘bribe’ had crept into her mind, it seemed the most obvious way for her father to have acquired such ample funds over the years.

Addie leaned back and covered her face with her hands. This was all Jess’s fault. He was the one who suspected everyone of wrongdoing, and now he had her doing it.

“Dammit, Jess!” Her fists came down hard on the little dropped-leaf. The top-heavy desk wobbled toward her, about to fall over.

She slammed a hand on each side to stop it from tipping, but the tin box that had been perilously perched on top tumbled to the floor. Silver dollars scattered everywhere, rolling along the floor and under furniture and even out onto the balcony.

“No-no-no-no-no!”

Addie ran after them and caught with the toe of her shoes the ones that were in greatest danger of disappearing. When the clattering stopped, she began sweeping them back toward the desk into one pile.

The ones that had rolled under furniture would have to wait until morning. But these she could get back into the box without too much effort.

Addie knelt and began sweeping the pile of silver dollars back into the box with her forearm. It was the perfect opportunity to count them, but she was simply too tired.

First the biscuits, now this. She hadn’t been this clumsy since she was—

On the third sweep, the corner of an envelope snagged her arm. Addie hadn’t noticed an envelope on the desk, but perhaps it had fallen off with the box.

She pulled the envelope from the pile of silver and read the address.

Daniel Scoburn, Ventura, California. The postmark was barely readable, but Addie made out what she thought to be 1888.

The fragile sheet of onionskin took some gentle poking to remove it from the envelope. But once it was free, Addie spread it on the floor and began to read.

My dear Ford,

You have probably wondered these long years since we two ghosts limped away from Andersonville what has become of me. I could write a volume of my experiences, but I shall forego that for another time.

My purpose in writing you today is to direct you to a package that awaits you at the New York City post office. When you forced me to take your discharge stipend before I began my trek westward, I swore to you that one day you would see it returned to you ten-fold.

Little did I know that I would not only keep that promise, but that I would instead return to you two hundred-fold the ten five-dollar gold pieces you laid in my palm that day.

There were a thousand ways you could have used that fifty dollars, Ford, and I knew it. Why you made me take it, I have not yet reckoned.

God has been good to me, though, and I pray he has been so to you. My oil venture near the western coast of California has amassed a veritable fortune for me and my dear Elizabeth. And we can think of nothing that makes us happier than to share with you a tiny portion of our prosperity.

It was your faith in me that sent me West, my friend. May God reward you richly for it.

With every kind regard,

Jacob Sanborn

Andersonville! Her father had been a prisoner in that horrid Confederate prison camp. Where so many had died. Addie looked to the small portrait on the mantel. No wonder he looked so thin, so sober, so haunted.

Tears dropped on the backs of her hands as Addie refolded the letter. It had been hidden under the pile of coins the whole time she’d been doubting her father. But she would never doubt him again. And tomorrow she’d let him know just how very much she treasured – and trusted – the father she was just coming to know.

She didn’t deserve him. Tonight had proven that. But from this moment forward she would do everything in her power to change that.

Addie arranged the desk as tidily as it had been before she started. But the box was not going back in, she decided. The desk was too obvious.

Within minutes she’d spotted the perfect hiding place. The foot-warming bricks her father used through the winter months stood ignored on the floor by the bed during the summer. Addie slipped the bricks out of their flannel covering and slid the box inside.

It fit perfectly.

She separated the bricks and placed them in random spots about the room that wouldn’t call attention. One as a door stop, one holding down a pile of old newspapers, one beneath the little kitchen stove. And one to occupy the empty cubbyhole in the desk.

Now you’re thinkin’ like a criminal, Addie girl.

The words loomed out of nowhere, and Addie tried to close her mind to the voice of the man who’d angered her so. A huge yawn marked her satisfaction with her solution. And at last, emotionally exhausted from the ordeals and revelations of the day, Addie fell into bed.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Patches of morning light from high barred windows brightened the upper regions of the jailhouse walls, but did little to dispel the gloom in the quiet cell block. A uniformed guard stood resolute in front of Ford’s door and refused to open it for Addie.

“Now really, officer, I fail to see why Mr. Pepper was allowed to visit freely with Mr. Magee and I am not.” Her fingernail tapped angrily on the bottom of the plate of cookies, but she kept her voice sweet and matter-of-fact.

“Well, ma’am, that freak in there tried to kill a couple hundred little gals just like yerself. It jus’ wouldn’t be safe.”

A couple hundred!— Addie took a slow breath to temper her seething anger. “That freak, as you call him, is my father. Now I’d like to speak with him, if you don’t mind.” She fixed him with the determined look every mother’s son knows all too well, and he began to shift from foot to foot. It seemed to Addie that he might just be on the verge of changing his mind.

“I’ll tell you what. You take this plate of cookies and sit right over there on that stool and let me chat with my father. I assure you I’ll be perfectly fine.”

The guard eyed the cookies and Addie knew she had him when he began to reach for the plate.

“Oh, here. I’ll just hold the plate while you unlock the door.” She gave him her most winning smile and he reluctantly turned and unlocked the door and swung it open.

Addie thrust the plate toward him as she moved through the cell door, but before the officer could grab it, she let go of the plate and gasped. Shards of breaking china and cookie were still scattering and rebounding off the floor as she darted back through the door and grabbed the startled officer by the front of his shirt.

“Where is he? Where’s my father!”

. . .

Williamsbridge was just waking up when Jess hopped off the back of a farm wagon as it rolled past the gates of a massive property. He touched the brim of the battered slouch hat he’d traded the farmer’s son for, and the two waved back as the wagon rolled on down the road.

If anyone had noticed him, they would have seen just another local farmer.

Jess stepped through the gate and walked up the carriage path to the front door. He’d assumed a slumped posture the minute he’d left the wagon. Just in case anyone was already watching.

Through second floor windows he saw women in white nursing hats move from window to window throwing up the shades. But no one seemed to take any great interest in him.

The veranda was empty. There were not even any empty chairs arranged about, as if no one ever sat outside. But just off to the left, beyond the veranda, an old woman who was busy clipping roses looked up and waved.

“Mornin’,” Jess called, taking care not to sound too bright.

Jess moved with his hangdog gait across the planked porch to the large main entrance and read the sign tacked beside the door in huge block letters.

Private institution. Ring bell.

Jess reached a hand out and knocked on the door. He waited for a minute, but no one came. He knocked again, louder and longer this time.

“Ring the bell,” the old lady called from the yard.

“Pardon?” Jess gave her his classic confused look.

“Ring the bell,” she called again, and nodded her head toward the door.

Jess cocked his head as if he didn’t understand, then looked up and shuffled in a circle as if he were looking for the bell.

“Here, just a minute, young man. I’ll show you.”

The old lady carefully laid her basket of roses on the low wall of the veranda and came around to the steps. She scuffled to the door in her floppy gardening shoes, smiling sweetly at Jess.

“Ring the bell, boy. Like this.”

She reached out a wrinkled hand and grasped the figure eight knob that stuck out a bit from the center of the large door. As Jess knew she would, she turned it once to demonstrate and then put her hand to her ear and raised her eyebrows to indicate she heard the bell ringing in the interior.