MY DEAR HUSBAND, THE FIRST LETTER BEGAN. I hope this finds you safe.
Joline’s grandmother’s handwriting was the same as on the envelope, each word carefully constructed. I pictured her hunched over the kitchen table, the pen clutched tightly in her fingers as she struggled to swallow her anxiety and speak of the everyday, mundane goings-on of the Mitchell family. A lot of the ink in the body of the letters had been smeared, too, so there were gaps in the narrative. But as I paged through the sparse information that had escaped the water damage, a picture of life in wartime South Carolina began to emerge. Mrs. Mitchell spoke of shortages and rationing, of her garden and how she shared its bounty with those less fortunate folks on Edisto Island. And of the blessings of being close to the sea where fishing and shrimping provided food they might otherwise not have been able to obtain.
Reading between the lines, I could tell that their store was in trouble. I checked the signature on the letter. Joline’s paternal grandmother had been named Esther, and she obviously struggled daily to obtain goods with which to stock the almost barren shelves, although she made light of it when corresponding with her husband. She spoke rather of their friends and neighbors, of humorous incidents around the tiny island, the day-to-day minutia of small-town life in the forties. No mention of other husbands and sons off fighting, of wounds or injuries or of the dreaded telegrams from the War Office that devastated tens of thousands of families during World War II. Even if she’d been inclined to burden her husband with such sadness, it probably wouldn’t have made it past the censors.
As I perused the next letter, and the next, more information began to emerge. I pulled the genealogical chart over in front of me and traced the lines back to Chauncey and Esther’s generation. Joline’s grandfather had five siblings, represented by four empty boxes and the one I had filled in from the information in Patience Brawley’s Bible. Patience’s father Joseph and Joline’s grandfather had been brothers.
I turned back to the letters, scanning them for proper names and any clues to their relationship to the family. In a matter of a few minutes, I’d managed to extract the names of what I was pretty certain were the rest of Chauncey Mitchell’s siblings: Ezra, Zachariah, Ruth, and Mary. Someone had been a student of the Bible. Mention of birthdays gave me a couple of their dates of birth as well. I penciled the information in on my copy of the chart.
I studied the many interconnected boxes and lines, trying to fix in my mind the relationships and how any of it might help us find a donor for Kimmie Eastman. I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my eyes behind the reading glasses perched on the end of my nose.
“Hey, Erik?” I called, and a moment later he stood in the doorway.
“Yes?”
“Take a look at this with me, will you? I think I’ve stared at it so long I’m losing perspective. Do you see anything there that we can use? I’m beginning to think this whole family tree thing will turn out to be a waste of time.”
He sat in the client chair, and I swung the genealogy around so we could both look at it.
“The letters didn’t help?” he asked while his fingers traced from the bottom to the top of the page.
“Too early. Joline’s father wasn’t born until after the war—1946—so most of his generation wasn’t even alive when these were written. I managed to fill in a few empty boxes, but I can’t see anything worth pursuing.”
He continued to follow the convoluted connections from level to level. “This is interesting,” he finally said, tapping a box on the far right of the paper.
“What?”
“Right here. See? Did you make this entry? For Patience’s sister, Charity?”
“Yes. She was listed in the Bible. Why?”
“She has the line indicating a child, but no marriage. And there’s no name in the box.”
I pawed through the papers strewn across my desk and finally pulled out the list Ellis Brawley had e-mailed us.
“Here it is. Charity. It just says, ‘child.’ ” I slid the chart back in front of me. “Okay, so Charity, Shadrack, and Patience are of the same generation. That means her child would be a contemporary of the Mitchell girls.” I paused. “And that would make him or her Joline’s second cousin or something like that, right?”
“Right,” Erik said. “And if it was a boy, it could be the mysterious Deshawn.”
I tried to suppress the rising excitement. “Can you check the notes you entered from my conversation with Keisha Spencer, the older Mitchell girls’ high school friend out in Bluffton?”
He stepped out into the reception area and typed standing in front of his desk. “Got it. What do you want to know?”
“Didn’t she say Deshawn was some sort of cousin?”
He scrolled. “Yes. Here it is. She used those exact words, according to your notes. ‘Some sort of cousin.’ And that he might have lived with them one summer.”
“And Kimmie was born when?”
“September twentieth. I just entered it in the time line.”
I did some quick math. “So Kimmie’s conception had to occur around December the year before. That sure isn’t summer.”
“But Keisha also said he used to hang around the house. Even if he didn’t live there doesn’t mean he didn’t have . . . access.”
“True. So now what? Anything you can do with the information? If his mother wasn’t married, he probably went by Deshawn Mitchell, don’t you think? Can you work with that?”
“I can sure as hell try,” he said, dropping down into his chair. “Let me take a run at it.”
I thought back to my conversation with Joline on Saturday morning, and something clicked. “You know, when Joline said that he couldn’t help, I assumed she meant Kimmie’s father was dead. What if it’s something else?”
Erik looked up. “Like what?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe he’s in the military and deployed overseas. Or maybe he’s a respectable married man with a family of his own now. Or he could be in prison. I guess there are lots of other possibilities that she might consider insurmountable reasons.” I paused. “Or maybe she has no idea what became of him after the attack or whatever it was that happened.”
“I’ll get started,” Erik said.
“Good.”
I sat for a moment staring out across the reception area at the framed print of sunset over the marshes that hung on the far wall. Maybe we were completely off base with this Deshawn thing. Red was right—I did have a bad habit of latching on to an idea and trying to manipulate the known facts to fit my preconceived notion. We could be wasting Kimmie’s dwindling time—
The phone jerked me back to reality.
“I’ve got it,” I called and picked up the handset. “Simpson and Tanner.”
“Hey, boss, it’s me.” Red’s voice held a hint of laughter along with an exuberance that I suddenly realized had been missing for some time. His decision to leave the sheriff’s office might have been long overdue.
“Yes and no. We came up dry on the sisters. No record either of them was ever arrested for anything, at least not in South Carolina. Of course, if it was in some small jurisdiction and didn’t result in jail time, it wouldn’t be in the database. Or if they’ve remarried, and it happened under different names.”
“So what’s the ‘yes’ part?”
He sobered. “I ran across something completely by accident while I was checking out the names, and I think it might be relevant. In fact, more than relevant. But it isn’t actually good news.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Okay,” he said. “There’s an unsolved homicide, right here in Beaufort County, about fifteen years ago. Body, male, probably African-American, approximately midtwenties to early thirties, found by some kids playing in a swampy area out past Pritchardville near Rose Dhu Creek. Nothing much left but the skeleton, and even some of that was missing.” He swallowed hard. “Gators must have been at it.”
The buzzing in the back of my head almost drowned out his next words.
“But the skull was intact. Single gunshot wound. They also recovered a couple of ribs with nicks on them that could have been caused by bullets. The body was never positively identified, and it’s been a cold case almost from day one.”
I could feel the pieces tumbling around in my brain, trying to fall neatly into place. I forced myself not to jump to conclusions, but the temptation was almost overwhelming.
“Why do you think this is connected to Joline and Kimmie?”
“Because the only missing person’s report that even came close at the time to matching the dead man was filed by a woman named Patience Brawley.” He paused for effect. “On her nephew—Deshawn Mitchell.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I whispered, and Red added, “Amen.”