Chapter Twenty-One

I CATCH A MURDERER

“HOW DO YOU know that? Show me.” Mrs. Jefferson looked down at the file in front of Maggie. Maggie pointed, and Mrs. Jefferson and Daniel huddled around her and began to read.

“Sheriff Beale perjured himself.” Maggie’s expression was grim. “We have to take this to the police.”

“No!” I practically shouted the word at her. “Sheriff Hicks was in on it.” I told her what I had figured out. “It says in there that the body was secured by a rope and that the rope broke. But that’s not true.” I told her about the pictures that had been slipped under her kitchen door.

“That must have been Alma,” Mrs. Jefferson said. “She cleans the municipal offices, including the sheriff’s office. But where did she get them?”

It was a good question, one to which I didn’t yet have the answer.

“They show that Mr. LaSalle was anchored to that pulley by a cable. Either someone cut that cable just before Hicks drove by—which doesn’t seem likely, ’cause how would anyone else know he was coming?—or Hicks cut it himself.”

“So he knew where the body was?” Daniel asked.

I nodded.

“Then he and Sheriff Beale lied about it and said the body had been secured with rope and that the rope had broken in the storm.”

“Why would they do that?” Daniel asked.

That’s the question that had been plaguing me.

“They wanted to get Thomas.” Mrs. Jefferson looked at me, fire in her eyes. “They framed my son for murder.”

“But why?” Maggie asks. “I’m not saying that’s not what happened, but what did Hicks have against Thomas?”

“The same thing they all did. They hated him because he was a hero. And because he wanted to be treated like a man—like any man, not like a colored man.”

Maggie glanced at me. Her voice was soft when she said, “Then—and I mean no offense, Mrs. Jefferson, I’m just saying—if their target was your son, why was LaSalle’s body the one found in the river?”

“Because they couldn’t stand that a white man was friends with him.”

“Sheriff Beale was in on it too,” I reminded them.

“Why would Beale lie to cover for Hicks?” Maggie frowned. “Hicks was a rookie back then. He wouldn’t have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two.”

“Maybe he did it as a favor,” I said quietly.

“A favor to whom?”

I had thought long and hard about this. “To Mr. Chisholm.”

“John Chisholm?” Maggie was thunderstruck. “What does he have to do with it?”

“I think his daughter was seeing Patrice LaSalle.” There, I had said it out loud. “And Mr. Chisholm found out. I think he didn’t approve because LaSalle was good friends with Mr. Jefferson.” I paused. “And then there’s this.”

I slipped out the picture that I had already showed Mr. Standish. Maggie, Mrs. Jefferson and Daniel all stared at it.

“My God!” Maggie murmured. Then: “Excuse my language. Who is it? Do you know?”

“It’s my first husband,” Mrs. Jefferson said softly. “That’s Thomas’s father.”

Maggie stared at her. Then she turned to me. “Where did you get this?”

“The same place I found this file.”

“Beale had it?”

“There was always a rumor that someone had a picture,” Mrs. Jefferson said. “But it never came to light.”

“No wonder.” Maggie couldn’t take her eyes off it. She turned it over and looked at the scrawl on the back.

“I think that’s why Sheriff Beale is in that fancy nursing home. He made sure no one went to jail for the lynching. I also think it’s why his daughter broke with him,” I said. “When I talked to her, she was angry because she thought I wanted to ask her about this photo.”

“You spoke to Beale’s daughter?” Maggie asked. “She must have told somebody about that. That might explain the trouble you had in the woods.”

“Or Mr. Selig could have said something.” I told them what had happened at Mr. Standish’s. And pointed out that Mr. Selig was in the picture too.

“It hasn’t been publicly announced yet, but John Chisholm is planning a run for governor,” Maggie said softly. “If this picture comes out, that’ll put an end to his political career before it evens starts.”

“If there’s any justice in the world, it should put him in prison,” Mrs. Jefferson said.

“There’s no statute of limitations on murder,” Maggie said. “And if a lynching isn’t murder, I don’t know what is. You should talk to a lawyer, Mrs. Jefferson. You should get some advice on how to light the fire you need to get your husband’s and your son’s murderers brought to account.” She stood up. “I have to go back to town. I have to make a phone call.”

“Who are you going to call?”

“Not the sheriff’s office, that’s for sure. Cady, you stay here.”

I stayed until late afternoon, when Maggie came back with two men in dark suits. They were from the Justice Department.

“I didn’t know who else to call,” Maggie said. “I didn’t know who to trust.”

The men sat me down at Mrs. Jefferson’s kitchen table and made me go through everything again. Twice. And then once more for good measure. I told them everything I knew. I showed them the place in the report where someone—Sheriff Beale, it seemed—had written that the body was secured by rope. I showed them the pictures that the cleaning lady, Alma, had given me; Maggie had brought them from the house after I told her where they were hidden. I pointed out that in court, Sheriff Beale and Deputy Hicks had testified that Jefferson said LaSalle had left town. Then I showed them Sheriff Beale’s initial notes, which he made after asking Jefferson when he’d last seen LaSalle. In the notes, Jefferson was recorded as saying he had no idea where his friend was and that he’d been asking all over town. Sheriff Beale even verified this by talking to the owner of the hardware store and to Mr. Selig. But when the report was typed up, after Jefferson was arrested, Sheriff Beale wrote that Jefferson had been telling everyone that LaSalle had left suddenly and gone home.

“That was a lie,” I said.

The two Justice Department agents spent a long time on the older picture, the one of the lynching. They wanted to talk to Mrs. Jefferson too. Daniel and I sat together in the front room and waited. By the time they had finished, the sun was going down again. They told Maggie and me that they were going to arrest Sheriff Hicks on a charge of attempted kidnapping. They said that should keep me safe until they had a chance to go through everything thoroughly.