Gravy called in the morning while Big Boy and I were out strolling, dodging packs of runners. We stood under an awning waiting for a summer downpour to subside when I took his call.
“No more stalling. The state attorney has served me with a subpoena concerning you first thing this morning. Spencer followed up with a phone call. He wants you in his office by one this afternoon or, and I quote, ‘they will issue a warrant for your ass,’” said Gravy. “Attorney General Gore wants to see you no later than three o’clock. No subpoena yet, but it’s coming.
“That’s a little quick,” I replied.
“Yes, but you have been putting them off,” said Gravy. “And they want you to know they’re serious. Spencer told me he has got a judge ready to sign a warrant. No more delays, Walker.”
He added, “What kind of idiot has the attorney general and state attorney on their ass at the same time? At least, Sheriff Frost stopped calling.”
Big Boy lifted his leg on a Pensacola Herald newspaper box, then flopped down by my feet satisfied.
“Thank you for running interference for me, Gravy. Tell them I promise to see both before the day is over.”
“Promise?”
“Scout’s honor,” I said, trying to sound sincere. “Tell Spencer I will stop by his office at 3:30 p.m. Gore, I will see at 4:45. He can work overtime.”
“Don’t screw with them. They are serious about sending law enforcement to bring you in if you don’t show. If you are arrested, you’ll sit in Frost’s jail all weekend.”
Not a pleasant option. “I’ll make it, Gravy.”
Gravy asked, “Do you want me there?”
“No, I’ve got it. Stop worrying.”
At the morning meeting, I let the staff vent.
“What the hell is going on?” said Jeremy, holding his triple shot, peppermint latte in his left hand and waving his right. “Protesters, smashed windows, you getting beaten every other night. Are our lives at risk?”
Mal said, “Shut up, Jeremy. The only people wanting to kick your ass are the karaoke singers at The Red Garter that you trashed last week in your column.”
“Well, how many times can anyone listen to ‘Sweet Caroline,’ ‘It’s Raining Men,’ or ‘Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover’ before they pull out a gun and shoot up the place?” he replied.
Jeremy had a point. I told the staff about how he might have helped us locate Pandora Childs to soften the blow of Mal’s jab.
Roxie ignored the Mal-Jeremy exchange. She wanted to restart the Best of the Coast sales. Summer had completed the database of the contact information of all the winners.
“Summer and I plotted out who I will contact first,” she said. “We will exceed last year’s numbers by twenty grand.”
Roxie had made a few sales calls yesterday from home and hadn’t gotten much push back. She said, “The flak over Hines and Frost surprisingly hasn’t hurt as much as I feared. People like our approach to reporting. We’re winning fans.”
Finally.
Yoste was missing, which made Mal furious. “He wrote his big cover story and has gone fishing.”
I said, “I promised him he could take today off, but he needed to do a follow-up piece on Operation Cherry Bomb. He emailed me he has some interviews set up for later today.”
Mal said, “You baby him. It’s got to stop.”
Jeremy grunted in agreement.
I outlined my cover story for them. Admittedly it had plenty of holes, but I promised them I would have it pulled together by Monday. As always, I sounded more self-assured than I felt.
At a little before noon, I grabbed my laptop and headed to visit the North Hill home of Jacob Solomon and learn more about Celeste Daniels.
When I had called to set up the interview, Mr. Solomon was more than happy to meet with me and talk about Celeste. After all, he was the one who gave Dare the yearbooks.
Jacob Solomon lived in a little gingerbread house on a narrow side street in North Hill. In front of his house, a historic marker declared this was the site of the Queen’s Redoubt, a British fortification that the Spanish artillery blew up during the Battle of Pensacola in 1781. The Spanish rebuilt it and changed the name to Fort San Bernardo. When the United States government took over Pensacola in 1821, the British residents convinced Governor Andrew Jackson to allow the fort to deteriorate, out of pure spite. Nothing now remained of it, except the marker.
Jacob and Ruth Solomon raised two sons and a daughter in the three-bedroom, one-bath cottage. Ruth had passed away two years ago in her sleep. The two sons, both doctors, lived in Atlanta and Miami. The daughter, Sarah, lived in Pensacola and worked as an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.
I parked in the driveway under an enormous hundred-year-old oak. Before I began to follow the stepping-stones to the front door, Solomon opened a side door to wave me in.
“Mr. Holmes, it is such a privilege to have you in our home,” said Mr. Solomon. “I told my older brother Caleb you were coming for lunch, and he was so jealous. We’re big fans of yours. What is it about Mississippi that it produces such great writers? William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Willie Morris, John Grisham, and you.”
I wondered where the best place was to sit. Mr. Solomon motioned to a leather lounge chair by a bay window.
“Mr. Solomon, please call me Walker. I only know five hundred words, and my goal is to put them in a different order every week and somehow tell a story.”
He laughed and excused himself to get the sandwiches and iced tea with fresh mint he had prepared. The room where I sat must have been his study. Books filled the room, not only in the bookcase that covered an entire wall but also on the tables and stacked on the floor. On top of the table beside the chair was a book of crossword puzzles written in German. Under it, I spied a well-worn copy of Caesar’s Commentaries, written in Latin, of course.
I shut my eyes for a few minutes as I heard Mr. Solomon whistling in the kitchen. I felt the love in this place. I pictured Ruth and Jacob sitting here with classical music on the stereo, reading and sharing tales of their days. I liked this house. The books had actually been read. Glancing up at the collected works of Dickens and Balzac above me, I thought if I picked up one of them the book would fall open to his and Ruth’s favorite sections. Generations had read these books and discussed them at dinner.
I could hear a beautiful woman in a simple floral print dress saying, “Father, I am going to go grab that book, because I just know you remember it wrong!”
The thought warmed me. A real library was haunted by the ghosts of everyone who cared for a book in it.
“I’m a writer, too,” said Mr. Solomon as he returned, balancing a tray of tuna fish sandwiches and tea. Barrel-chested with shoulders even broader than mine, the past ninety years had stooped him over and shrunken him to less than five feet. But his walk still showed vitality, and his eyes sparkled. His voice, slow and richly deliberate, made every word seem important. It was not difficult imagining him as a teacher.
“Ruth and I traveled all over the South visiting the childhood homes of great Southern authors. We went to the homes of O’Connor, Williams, Welty, Faulkner, and even the Sayre house in Montgomery and wrote about them, and we were fortunate to have our book published.”
“I would love to read it,” I said, meaning it.
We took our time eating, as people of his generation used to do. He asked questions about some of my past articles: deaths in the county jail, relocation of the downtown sewage plant, and the maritime park. I asked about his children, who were close to my age. He brought me a photo album of his grandchildren. He sighed when he saw a picture of his Ruth holding one of his daughter’s babies.
After we rinsed the dishes, we talked about Celeste Daniels.
“A gifted student, Celeste Daniels was in my first-year Latin class,” he said. “Smart and unafraid to show it. She reminded me of Katherine Hepburn—very athletic, sort of a tomboy, but still the boys were attracted to her. She bedeviled them on a regular basis though quite unintentionally.”
Solomon had taught both at Catholic and Booker T. Washington. Later he became the dean of students at Washington, before becoming the principal of the school. But in the early 1970s he worked part-time at both schools. When Dare called him about Bo Hines, Mr. Solomon remembered a link between Hines and Wittman that predated Bo marrying Sue.
“Celeste liked both boys. I think she was drawn to athletes like herself,” he said. “I taught both Bo and Jace. Neither of them was as good a student as Celeste. Bo worked hard but didn’t have the brain power. Jace had the brains but was too spoiled and lazy.”
“Did she date both at the same time?”
“Yes, sort of.” He paused for a second, trying to remember something. With his eyes still shut, he said, “Ruth and I chaperoned the proms for both schools. Usually freshmen didn’t go to those dances, at least not back then. Ruth felt Celeste did it to show off to her older brother and classmates. It was like winning a trophy for Celeste, or so my wife believed.”
“How did Stan Daniels react to his baby sister dancing with his rival, Jace Wittman?”
“Stan Daniels had no rivals. He operated on a different level than everyone else, but he watched Hines and Wittman like a hawk, never letting Celeste out of his sight at either dance. Pretty and popular, she would have gone to both dances, even if Bo and Jace hadn’t asked her. And, yes, Stan was so popular he had invitations to both dances, too.”
I leaned over in the stiff chair, and it creaked. “Tell me about the day Celeste Daniels disappeared.”
Mr. Solomon got up and walked over to the big bay window that overlooked his rose garden. I didn’t want to rush him. Like the years and ghosts in his library, he would speak when he was ready. He touched a framed picture of Ruth in her wedding dress; she was smiling and radiant.
When he turned to face me, he said, “Ruth and I talked about that day often. Celeste had been distressed all week, asked to leave class several times. When she came back to the classroom, she had been crying. Something was wrong.”
He paused and shut his eyes. “When she first disappeared, I thought she might have run off to get away from her overly protective mother. Ruth and I believed she would show back up in a few days with tales of a road trip to Panama City, Mobile, or Biloxi. There was even a report that she had been seen hitchhiking, but that later proved to not be true.”
“How did Bo and Jace react?” I asked Mr. Solomon, who looked even smaller than when I first walked into his house.
He said, “Bo and his friends helped Stan and the Catholic High boys search for her. Jace walked around in a daze for a few days.”
“Did you ever find out what was bothering her the week before she disappeared?”
He shook his head. “No, we talked about it some in the teachers’ lounge, but we had no clue. The kids were pretty tight-lipped and didn’t seem to know either.”
“Did you talk with Mr. or Mrs. Daniels about Celeste?”
“I went to the principal, Sister Mary Thaddeus,” he recalled. “She thought it best if we left the family alone and let the authorities deal with the matter. I think she worried it might reflect badly on Catholic High and hurt enrollment.”
He walked around the library, glancing at the books, then stopped at the window. Outside, the day was bright and young and a tabby cat chased butterflies along the stone walk. His eyes filled with tears.
“The Daniels family fell apart when Celeste disappeared,” he said. “Stan went to college and became a successful lawyer, but his parents were never the same. I left Catholic the following year. The tragedy had taken away from me the joy of teaching there. I dreaded walking the halls.”
“But you remained a teacher,” I said.
“I took a break and enrolled in the Masters in Educational Leadership program at the University of West Florida,” he said. “Ruth’s parents helped us make ends meet, and I worked part-time at the campus library.”
He pointed to his framed diploma on a stand in the bookcase. “When I graduated, the Escambia County School District hired me as a dean at Booker T. Washington, which put me on the track to be the school’s principal. I never taught in the classroom again.”
Celeste Daniels’s disappearance clearly ate at him, like it did her brother, Stan. Did it bother Hines and Wittman? The tabby cat pounced on the butterfly, crushing it. Mr. Solomon winced.
Thanking him for the lunch and the interview, I headed for the door.
“Would you ever be available to come speak to our book club?” asked Mr. Solomon as he shook my hand. “Caleb would be so happy to meet you. You can talk about whatever you like.”
“Sure, it would be an honor,” I replied, thinking, if I’m not in jail.