CHAPTER 15

SUNDAY, JULY 7

Vik awakened early Sunday morning. Still tired, he made sure Mildred was sleeping and tried to get back to sleep himself. Mildred had been doing much better since their two-day trip. She was smiling more, and using her cane again instead of her walker. She had even helped Helen cook yesterday. He was going to take her to nine-o’clock Mass this morning, then, before he went to work, to a restaurant for breakfast and then a drive to the lake. Beside him, she stirred, then snuggled closer.

“Matthew, you’re still here.” She stroked his thigh. “Guess what,” she said. “I’m not sleepy.” She rose up on one elbow and kissed his mouth.

*   *   *

Marti looked up when Vik came in, pleased that there still were no circles under his eyes. There was a quickness in his step and a slight upturn of his mouth that wasn’t quite a smile but said that everything with Mildred was okay.

“Blueberry muffins,” he said, putting a bag on her desk. “Helen baked them while Mildred and I were at Mass. Slim and Cowboy come in yet?”

“You missed them by about twenty minutes.”

He poured a cup of coffee. “Nothing like having a case that’s going nowhere fast.”

“We are making slow progress,” she corrected.

“Too slow.”

Marti told him what she thought the root cellar might have been used for. To hide slaves, then said, “And I might have found something on the Internet last night. I don’t know what it could have to do with any of this, though.”

Vik came over to her desk. “What?”

“Lead mines.”

“In Galena?”

“Right.” Was she the only one who didn’t know that? “Guess who owned stock certificates in a lead mine?”

“Idbash Smith?”

She nodded. “And during the 1820’s, a lot of the galena and smelted lead were smuggled out of the state to avoid federal regulations and federal taxes.”

“The family is loaded and that’s probably part of the reason why.”

“I know. I don’t think it means anything important,” Marti admitted.

“What the hell is galena? Besides the name of a city.”

“It is sulfate of lead, and don’t even go there.”

“The early 1820’s? I thought Idbash settled here in 1829.”

“That’s what it said in the other research I did on settlers in Little Fort and Lake County, but if we go by the dates on these stock certificates, he was here by 1822.”

“Couldn’t he have bought the stock while he was back east or wherever he came from?”

“I don’t know that much about buying stock at all, let alone in 1822, and I have no intentions of trying to find out. I did find out that Idbash owned one of the mines that significantly underreported its production for at least eight years.”

“I bet Idbash wasn’t just involved in that smuggling. I bet it was his idea. He’s beginning to sound like that kind of guy.”

Marti opened the bag of muffins. The aroma of warm blueberries wafted out. “Delicious,” she said after she bit into one. “Point is that in the early 1820’s, mining was backbreaking work. Everything was done by hand, with chisel and sledge-hammer. And they had to use explosives, which was dangerous.”

“Not to mention lead poisoning, which was fatal. Those Indians who were slaughtered could have been involved too.”

“Those Indians were mining lead before the French and English came here. And if slaves were kept hidden in that root cellar, what if it was dug that deep so they couldn’t escape? They could have been used as another source of cheap labor.”

Vik drummed his fingers on his desk. “But what would make that important enough to kill for now? Proving that Idbash killed some Potawatomi might make them decide against naming a park or a school for him, but it wouldn’t impact the sale of his property or reduce its value. Hell, who knows, the way things are today, it might make that land worth more.”

That, Marti agreed, was still the question they could not answer. And unless they did, she didn’t see how they would have a case. “Harry Buckner dug at the Potawatomi site. And we’ve found something there. Maybe he found something, too. It might be easier to make that connection.”

Vik leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “Killing children,” he said. “That won’t make much of an impact. Happens all the time. But Buckner, maybe you’ve got something. He was old, alone, friendless. Who knows. With the way we still treat Indians and other minorities, not enough people will care about that.”

Marti looked into her coffee cup. Empty, just like this case. Relevance was definitely lacking. “How likely is it that one of the Smiths would actually kill someone?”

“Maybe that’s our answer,” Vik said. “If they hired someone…”

“It wouldn’t be anyone local, too risky. It would have to be a professional hit. Let me call a few contacts in Chicago.”

She thought about the two small skulls again and shuddered. Had Idbash been capable of that kind of violence against children?

*   *   *

Omari sat down at the dining room table and looked out the window. This part of Chicago, the south side, they called it, was an interesting place. He had expected a ghetto, with ramshackle housing, or, worse, projects; the homeless, drunks sleeping in hallways, gangs and drive-by shootings. Instead this was a quiet neighborhood with small brick bungalows lined up behind chain-link fences, with trees and grass and flowers. The street was quiet except for an occasional siren nearby. There were birds in the trees. It wasn’t much different from being at home.

Mrs. Jackson lived here with her son, Carlton, who had stayed up with Omari half the night going through all of the papers Grandpa had sent. Carlton had sorted them into neat piles that covered the table, then read through each stack. He didn’t say much but he seemed impressed, excited, even.

“Well, Omari, you’re up early.” Carlton spoke from the doorway. He was about fifty, and light-skinned, with hair the color of sand. “I’ve always been an early riser myself.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mom sleeps in a bit these days. She’s slowing down. We both are. I’m going to make breakfast.”

“Let me help.”

“Sure. Do you know how to scramble eggs?”

They had to clear a space on the table for their plates. After they ate, Omari loaded the dishwasher while Carlton cooked oatmeal and scrambled more eggs and took both upstairs to his mother. When he returned he brought some manila folders.

“Now we can get down to business. Let me see that list of things your grandfather told you to do.” He scanned it, then checked the labels on his folders, said, “Forgot something,” and went back upstairs. When he returned, Mrs. Jackson was with him.

Omari watched as Carlton pulled back a chair for his mother, then brought her some coffee. Mrs. Jackson was eighty-two. As Grandpa would say, she was “sassy.” Shiny gray hair framed her face. Her smooth light skin was almost unlined. She sat very straight, her back just touching the chair, and looked at them through wire-rimmed glasses.

“Good morning, Omari. I would so like to meet your grandfather.” She looked at him and smiled as she made a sweeping gesture over the table. Her fingernails were polished a deep red. “He must be quite a man to have worked at this for so long with so little help. And you are quite a fine young man to be helping him.”

Omari liked the way she talked. Her voice made him think of a Sarah Vaughn album his Uncle Floyd played a lot. She was elegant, a real lady. He had never met anyone quite like her. She began going through Grandpa’s papers. After a while, she looked at Carlton and said, “Our friend, Mr. Smith.”

“I think so,” Carlton answered.

Omari wanted to know what they were talking about, but they were so intent on studying Grandpa’s research that he didn’t want to interrupt. Without saying anything, Carlton and Mrs. Jackson passed papers back and forth. After what seemed like a long time, Carlton looked up at him.

“The name ‘Thatcher’ is what got our attention,” he explained. “That, and the fact that this plantation was in Missouri when it was still part of the Louisiana Territory. Missouri didn’t have many big plantations like they had in the south. Thatcher, though, he had about a hundred and fifty slaves at any given time. He raised cotton and tobacco.”

“His place wasn’t too far from the Missouri River and almost across from Alton, Illinois,” Mrs. Jackson said. “Alton was a river town where some people were sympathetic to slaves, and Illinois was supposed to be a free state.”

“With some exceptions,” Carlton added.

“A lot of those who came along the river did not want to risk crossing Lake Michigan, so they would take the Illinois River up to the Des Plaines River and go on to Wisconsin.”

Omari nodded. He had already figured that out.

“We began researching our family years ago,” Carlton explained. “A few years ago we began branching out.”

“Whenever we saw a trend,” Mrs. Jackson continued, “we tried to investigate, find out what it might be about.”

“We noticed this Thatcher because it seemed like we were always finding a handbill offering a reward for one of his runaway slaves. So we tried to find out what happened to some of those slaves. That’s when this Smith name came up.”

“Some of Thatcher’s slaves who we tracked to Wisconsin were helped by an Idbash Smith,” Mrs. Jackson said. “We found this in records kept by some of the people who helped them escape. Then we noticed that there were also entries that indicated that some of the slaves the conductors were expecting never arrived. When we went back, we found records of slaves making it to Illinois, some as far as Chicago, some further north, then disappearing.”

“What makes you suspect this Idbash Smith?” Omari asked.

“Coincidence,” Mrs. Jackson admitted. “And lack of information rather than additional information. We just can’t find any other records of a significant number of slaves being expected in Wisconsin and never showing up who were on their way to any conductor other than him.”

“So how does knowing that help Grandpa find Samuel?”

“We don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t,” Mrs. Jackson said. “We’ll have a better idea after the three of us go through the county records tomorrow. We are going to get there as soon as they open, and we’ll probably be there all day. We have a few friends there who don’t mind helping us with our research, and we’ve already called to let them know what we need.”

“Now,” Carlton said, “this is what we need to do today.”

Omari smiled. Wait until Grandpa heard about this. When Uncle Floyd called last night, he said Grandpa was really feeling good about him being here, that it was going to help Grandpa get well. When he called again later today, Grandpa would really be glad he was here.