fourteen

“Ow! Ow! No! No! Stop! Don’t do that!”

Wren turned loose and Death rolled away from her and tried to pretend he hadn’t just been shrieking like a girl. He was dressed in loose gym shorts and a tee shirt and she was wearing a low-cut tank top and spandex tights.

“That’s not nice,” he scolded.

She grinned, crouched like she was getting ready to spring and flexed her hands like lobster claws.

“I’m only following advice,” she said.

“Whose advice?”

“Mother Weeks, remember? Pinch butts now, while you’re young, because no one will appreciate it when you’re old.”

“That wasn’t my butt.”

Her grin turned feral. “I know.”

He leaned in and kissed her, using it as cover to reach around and pinch her butt. She shrieked and he backed away quickly, laughing. “Actually, you know what? That’s a damn good move. Not to use on me!” he amended hastily, fending her off. “But if you ever get into a real fight with a guy, get hold of him like that and he’ll be at your mercy.”

There was a knock on the door and Chief Reynolds stuck his head through. “You two okay in here? Hope I’m not interrupting anything?”

They pulled themselves and one another up from the floor.

“Death’s teaching me hand-to-hand combat,” Wren explained.

The cop nodded. “Good idea, but you might want to go a little easier on her, son. I could hear her yelling clear down the street.”

Death blushed and Wren snickered, but neither one of them corrected his assumption.

“Come on in,” Wren invited. “Would you like some coffee?”

“Oh, I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble. It’s already made.” She went into the kitchen and returned with a cup of coffee for the chief. “I looked up ‘care and feeding of a Marine’ online and it said to always keep a steady supply of coffee handy.”

Death went to the kitchen to refill his own coffee and brought Wren a cold bottle of strawberry soda and they all settled around the coffee table to talk. “Got any word on Fairchild?” Death asked.

The chief shrugged and shook his head. “Not really. He stole the motorcycle outside a biker bar, which was either really ballsy or really stupid. In either case, I think he’d better hope we find him before the guy who owns it does.”

“What about Josiah Halftree?”

“We followed up with Ava Fairchild’s cousins—the ones we could get hold of. One of them is dead now and another’s in a care facility for Alzheimer’s patients. The ones we talked to all got phone calls from Halftree about the jewels he claimed he saw. These are all elderly people and I don’t see any of them being personally involved, but all of them say they mentioned the phone calls to other people, family and friends and whatnot. There are probably several dozen people who could have heard about it and any one of them could have connected the jewels Halftree saw to the robbery Declan was suspected of.”

Death hesitated, not wanting to step on the cop’s toes. “We kind of had an idea about that,” he offered.

“Death did,” Wren corrected. “Death’s the idea man. He’s the brains of the operation. I’m just the muscle.” She raised her arm and made a fist, her bicep tiny next to Death’s.

“Don’t laugh,” Death said, though he was smiling himself. “She looks harmless, but then so does that atlatl over there if you don’t know what it’s capable of.”

Chief Reynolds laughed but didn’t comment. Instead, he said, “so you had an idea, then?”

“Uh, yeah, if you don’t mind my suggesting it?”

“Fire away.”

“We found a secret entrance to the Campbell house. Well, Mercy Keystone found it. But we figure that’s how Fairchild got in to sneak up on us when we were … uh …”

“Reading papers?” the chief suggested slyly.

“Yeah, that. Anyway, it’s a lot easier way to get in than climbing through that tiny little window, so we wondered, if Whitaker was working with Fairchild, why didn’t Fairchild send him in that way? And then we thought maybe Whitaker wasn’t working with Fairchild after all. We thought, maybe he was working with whoever killed Josiah Halftree. If you have an idea of who Halftree talked to, and who they talked to, maybe you could check Whitaker’s phone records and see if he was in touch with any of them. I mean, I know it wouldn’t prove anything, but—”

“But it might give us somewhere to focus our investigation. That’s a good thought. That’s a real good thought.” He drained his coffee and stood up. “I’m going to go get right on that. Thanks for the coffee and good luck with the hand-to-hand combat training.” He started to leave, then turned back to lean over and speak to Wren in a stage whisper.

“Be careful not to damage anything you might want him to use later.”

_____

“There’s no mention of any jewels in the will,” Death said.

Wren, absorbed in the book she’d found, was still listening but distracted. “You didn’t really expect there to be.”

“No, I just thought it wouldn’t hurt to double check. There’s something about all this that bothers me. Something about the timing, or the sequence of events. Something I’ve seen or heard that doesn’t fit in, but I just can’t put my finger on it. She found the jewels in the middle of December. She found out they were the stolen jewels and not the Civil War jewels at the end of the month. She changed her will in mid-January. She died in March. What am I missing?”

“I don’t know. But I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” She turned the page and snuffled a bit and Death turned his full attention on her. She could feel the force of his concern.

“What are you reading?”

They were sitting in the research room at the Historical Society. Millie Weeks had provided Death with their copy of Ava Fairchild’s will and the table was stacked with historical documents and photographs relating to the Campbell house.

“Jenny Halifax wrote her memoirs.”

“Jenny who?”

“Halifax. Remember Jenny, the slave who sat with Carolina while she was dying? Her last name was Halifax. She got it because that was where she was born. She had a daughter who was sold to another family when she was seven and Jenny never found out what happened to her. She wrote down her life story in case her daughter ever found out who she was and wondered about her past. It got published in the 1890s and the local paper reprinted it in 1976.”

“Seven? God, I don’t understand people. How could anyone do that to someone? The Campbells did that?”

“No, it was before she came to them. She and her family belonged to an old man who’d never married or had kids. When he died, his relatives came and sold his house and all his property at auction, including his slaves. She and her husband and daughter were all sold to different people. After the war she managed to find where her husband had gone, but he was dead. He died during a scarlet fever epidemic in the 1850s.”

“Poor lady.”

“You know, it’s funny,” Wren said. “She said she didn’t learn to hate slavery until after she’d learned to be free. She was born and raised in it and she just thought that was the way things were. And she genuinely liked Carolina. Listen to this:” She took a few seconds to find her place in the book and started to read.

“When you’re a slave, you don’t own anything, not even yourself. Not even your child And yet, oddly enough, the one thing you can lay claim to is the person who owns you. My master. My mistress. That’s a possessive. My. Mine. Andrew never really belonged to anyone, I don’t think, but Carolina was definitely mine. She was a pretty, elegant little thing, with a sense of grace and a sharp wit and an unexpected dry humor. When all the grand ladies and gentlemen gathered, for their teas and dances and cotillions, I dressed her in bright clothes and brighter jewels. I fixed her hair so that every strand was in place, and when she went in and outshone them all, I was proud. When Andrew went to war and left her lonely and frightened, I ached for her, and when she died it broke my heart.”

“That’s really sad. Did she say anything more in her memoirs about what happened when Carolina died? About the jewels, I mean?”

“Well, she tells the story about Carolina waking up and claiming she hid the jewels, and how, after that, she just raved incoherently. She kept talking about ‘see all the pretty colors’ and ‘stars in the water’ and ‘the seventh stone’. She didn’t have any idea what any of it meant. I guess, when Andrew came home, he let on that he suspected the slaves of stealing the jewelry, and there was a lot of hard feelings about it.”

“Might they have taken it? I could argue that they were entitled.”

“Jenny was adamant that none of them had. She said there’s no way anyone could have taken the jewels before they were taken to Kansas by the abolitionists, and all the slaves who returned to the Campbells stayed in the area after the war, when they were free. Most of them worked menial jobs for very little pay and just scraped by. Certainly, none of them ever produced any fortune in jewels.”

“Yeah, that makes it highly unlikely. If one of them had the jewels, they would have left to try to find someone who’d be willing to fence them and share the profits.”

“Jenny was a seamstress and taught in the first black school. I gather she helped raise Andrew and Carolina’s son until he was a teenager, but she never really liked Andrew and she left when the boy was old enough that he didn’t need her anymore. I think she was hurt that Andrew suspected her of stealing from them, especially from Carolina. And I think she didn’t think he grieved enough, and I get the feeling she didn’t entirely approve of his second wife.”

“Did she ever find happiness?” Death asked.

“I don’t know, I haven’t finished the book yet.”

“Well, I hope you’ll find that she did. But whatever happened, try not to grieve for it, okay? You can remember the past and you can learn from the past, but you can never change it, and the things and people it took from you are gone and will never come back. There’s just no future in spending your life crying in the rear view mirror.”

Wren sniffled. “You’re so wise, and so reasonable and so mature,” she said. “I’m going to have to beat that out of you.”