[The Old Port Chronicles 01] • Judith Greene

Without question, the most beloved and respected lady in Old Port in the decades following the Civil War was Mrs. Judith Ward Greene, the wife of surgeon Dr. Phillip Greene. Well-educated, abundantly talented, quick witted, and naturally athletic, Judith does not let her abilities go to waste. All of her time is given over to civic and charitable activities for her local community. She teaches the classics at the school as a volunteer; she organizes and acts in the Ladies Theatre Association, an organization whose mission is to raise money for widows and orphans; and she is an active member in her church. Her home life is the picture of contentment, and her love for her husband has never wavered. Time has been kind to the statuesque graying blond. At fifty years old, she seems to have retained her youthful beauty and energy. Things could not be better for the former chief tomboy of the town and her league of gentlemen admirers. Until a unique child’s coffin is uncovered near the railroad depot. Shortly thereafter, the most prominent men of Old Port, the closest friends from her childhood, are murdered one by one in the most horrific fashion. Their deaths stem from their activities as Confederate spies, and Judith was the boldest member of their ring. Her husband, who was a field surgeon during the war, knows nothing about her secret adventures. But Judith has an even darker secret. She took an infant from his mother after the poor woman had tragically passed during the war, and claimed him as her own. First raised in the home of a postmaster of a small town, the boy was sent to boarding schools; and in 1882, he is in college studying law. While misleading the young man into thinking she is a war widow, Judith has also deceived her husband into thinking the son she supposedly gave birth to while he was away with the army had died. Through celebrate trickery and collusion from her childhood friends, there is a grave in the Old Port Cemetery that bears the name of the young man in college. It is not an empty grave. Inside the coffin is a cache of valuable and damning evidence of the shameless exploitation of a wartime economy by powerful and wealthy men, for which the spectacular murders are being committing. For her participation in wartime intrigue, Judith is called by the Union officer that hounded her relentlessly during the war “the most dangerous woman of the Earth” and is at the top of the death list.