The commuter aircraft slid downward through the crosswind like a wounded duck. Carrie glanced nervously out the window. A few thousand feet below her, the long, sausage-shaped bodies of dark water pointed like a gigantic splayed handprint toward the more distant blue of Lake Ontario. No wonder they call them the Finger Lakes, she thought. Rain was beginning to spatter against the oval window. The weather outside didn’t look good.
Beside her Max Slattery was gripping the edges of his seat, white-knuckled. The Jetstream turboprop was designed to transport nineteen passengers in relative comfort, but they hadn’t figured on carrying large, terrified New York police detectives like Max. Much more turbulence and Carrie was sure he’d rip the seat rests out with his bare hands.
“So,” he said, sounding as casual as a man could through tightly clenched teeth. “Tell me again about how the Russian symphony conductor from Detroit with the unpronounceable name and his drug addict daughter fit into all of this.” They hit an air pocket. The engines screamed for a second and the small airplane dropped like a brick. Max squeezed his eyes shut and a long bead of sweat emerged from his receding hairline and headed south. Carrie started talking as quickly as she could, hoping to distract Max from either a heart attack or a screaming anxiety surge.
“The drug addict’s name was Nina Gabrilowitsch. She overdosed on barbiturates in LA in 1966. It was probably intentional. She was the daughter of Ossip Gabrilowitsch.”
“The Detroit Symphony conductor.”
“Right. Anyway, her mother was Clara Clemens.”
“Mark Twain’s daughter,” Max ground out.
“One of several, but the only one to live long enough to marry and have children. Her mother, Olivia Clemens, was a Langdon from Elmira, and the Langdons’ neighbor was Thomas Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the woman who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” muttered Max. They were dropping down noisily and the rain was steady now, coming in gray sheets.
“Please don’t,” said Carrie. “Anyway, Jervis Langdon, Olivia’s father, was a firm abolitionist and supporter of the Underground Railroad—literally, since he was part owner of the actual railroad that ran through Elmira. That’s the connection with Barnabus Coffin, our murdered bog man. He was a runaway slave who was helped to escape by a friend of Jervis Langdon’s named John W. Jones. Jones, as well as being part of the Underground Railroad, was an ex-slave who made his living by burying the dead Confederate soldiers from the Elmira prisoner-of-war camp. He was paid two dollars a corpse and apparently got quite wealthy by the standards of the day. They ran almost thirteen thousand prisoners through the camp, and close to three thousand died. Jones buried all of them. Whole lot of digging going on.”
“Ha-ha. Get to the point.” Max’s eyes remained resolutely shut.
“I’m getting there. Like I said, Jones and our bog body knew each other, and they also knew the Arnots, who were vaguely related to both the Langdons and the Beechers. The Arnots were also involved in the smuggling of runaways both before and during the war.”
“And all of this concerns us how?”
“It turns out that Katherine Arnot, Olivia Langdon Clemens’s cousin, was the maiden name of Kate Warne, the famous Pinkerton agent and Civil War spy who once saved Lincoln’s life by uncovering an assassination conspiracy.”
“I’m getting dizzy.”
“Almost done. When Will Croaker phoned me from the Museum of Natural History, it was to tell me that he’d recovered a letter folded twice and hidden in Barnabus Coffin’s shoe. The same lack of oxidization that preserved the body preserved the letter almost intact. The letter was from John Jones, the grave-digging ex-slave, acknowledging receipt of Kate Warne’s journal and promising to pass it on to Olivia, Kate’s cousin. This was before she’d married Mark Twain.
“Diddy did some research on the New York Public Library computers and found a vague reference to the journal in a collection of uncataloged documents and Mark Twain ephemera from the Samuel Clemens estate via the drug-addict granddaughter, Nina Gabrilowitsch. Apparently she left a trunk full of stuff behind that wound up in the hands of a retired researcher from the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, a woman named Betsy Jones Arnot, who now lives in a little village called Erin a few miles out of town.”
There was a heavy thumping sound from directly beneath them and Max froze. “Aw, jeez, we’re all going to die,” he moaned.
“No, we’re not,” said Carrie. “We just landed.”
Max finally opened his eyes again.
The Elmira Corning Airport was a mediumsized two-runway regional facility with a low-ceilinged generically modern interior that was trying very hard to look sophisticated. They stopped for a late breakfast in the airport’s DC2 restaurant, a bleakly trendy space with an old radial engine complete with wooden propeller bolted to the wall and a wood and aluminum bar that was meant to look like the trailing edge of a wing. The airplane-parts motif inspired twenty minutes of grumbling from Max, and after picking at his food and getting a couple of giant-sized coffees to go, he led the way to the Alamo counter, where they rented a full-size Pontiac Grand Prix that the grizzled cop insisted on driving even though he was clearly still in a state of semishock after the flight from New Jersey.
“We should have driven here in the first place,” he said, climbing behind the wheel. He started the engine, flipped on the wipers against the steady drizzle and buckled up.
“In this weather it would have taken us five or six hours,” said Carrie, settling in beside him.
“It was a two-hour drive to Trenton and a ninety-minute flight, so what’s the difference?” grumbled the cop as he wheeled the car out of the parking lot. “Why couldn’t you have picked an airline that flew out of Teterboro or Newark or somewhere halfway civilized? New Haven, even.”
“It was short notice.” Carrie laughed.
“Tell that to my cardiologist,” said Max. “You can fly back if you want to; I’m driving.”
They left the airport complex and headed out onto the Southern Tier Expressway, following Interstate 86 into the rolling hills of northeastern New York’s Finger Lakes District. Bypassing the city of Elmira entirely, they took the 223 exit and continued east, following Newton Creek and the signs according to the instructions Betsy Jones Arnot had given Carrie on the telephone.
“There’s the Old Scotchtown Cemetery,” said Carrie, pointing to a scattering of stones among the trees behind a low iron fence on their right. “If we go past the trailer park we’ve gone too far.” She spotted another sign. “Fairview Road, that’s it. Turn right.”
Max did as he was told. On their left a pine-and cedar-shrouded hill rose steeply, while on their right was the sloping bottomland of a little valley that led down to the town of Erin itself, no more than a church steeple and a huddle of buildings at a crossroads a mile or so away, barely visible through the gloomy drizzle.
“Sleepy Hollow time,” said Max irritably as he guided the big car down the narrow strip of road. There was another small creek running beside them, the banks of the little stream fringed with cattails.
“Sleepy Hollow’s on the Hudson,” said Carrie. “This is more like Deliverance or The Village.”
“That piece of crap,” said Max. “Blind people running around through the woods, and monsters with bunches of twigs strapped to their backs running after them. Stupid.”
“That was Scary Movie 4.”
“Equally dumb.”
“Agreed.” She saw the sign for Wheaton Road and Langdon Hill. “Turn right here. Last house at the top, just before another crossroads. The mailbox says Harvest Home.”
“Funny name,” commented Max.
“It’s a pagan fertility rite,” said Carrie. “Human sacrifices for good crops, that kind of thing.”
“Right,” said Max. “You’re on a roll, Trixie. Mummies in the basement, lips sewn shut, slit throats, serial killers past and present, and now we’re doing a Stephen King story. What’s next?”
The house, when they found it, was refreshingly ordinary: a straightforward, simple Cape Cod in a pasturelike meadow at the end of a short driveway, looking lonely in the steady rain. There were window boxes planted with pansies. A burgundy Ford Focus hatchback with a mismatched hood was parked in front of a carport along with a boat covered in a blue plastic tarp. A set of yellow wooden ducks with most of the paint peeled off marched across the front lawn.
“Very sinister,” said Carrie. Max pulled up behind the Focus. They climbed out of the rental and ran toward the front door. It opened before they reached the house, and a small black woman in jeans, a woolly cardigan and sneakers ushered them inside and out of the rain. She had permed, iron gray hair, intelligent brown eyes behind a pair of round steel-framed glasses and a smile that revealed one old-fashioned gold-capped incisor. The entire house smelled like fresh coffee and Toll House cookies. Max took a deep breath and smiled broadly.
“You must be Hansel and Gretel,” said the old woman. “Come on inside.”
The house was small and simply laid out. A small entrance hall led to a back kitchen and a bathroom. There was a single bedroom on the right and a living room and dining room on the left, separated by a fieldstone fireplace built against the side wall. A banked fire burned warmly in the big open hearth. Coffee things and a plate piled high with cookies sat on a small table in front of the fire. It reminded Carrie of the fireside set from an old bass-fishing show she remembered watching as a child. Except for the dining room, the walls were lined with handmade pine shelves crammed with books. A plain desk in front of the window in the living room held a flat screen computer monitor. Unless it was lurking in the bedroom, there was no television visible anywhere in the house.
The elderly woman sat them down in comfortable upholstered chairs in front of the fire, poured coffee and offered cookies. Carrie took the coffee and declined the cookies for the moment. Max took both.
“It’s an awful story when you think about it,” said Betsy Arnot, sipping her coffee. “Especially when you consider that it’s a fairy tale for children. Impoverished father is convinced to abandon his children by their heartless mother. The children run into a cannibal witch who fattens up the boy and enslaves the girl. The girl burns the witch alive in her own oven and the children return home to find that their mother has died in the meantime. No moral, no lesson learned; just a thoroughly unpleasant story that would scare the hell out of most kids.” She shook her head. “They ban Harry Potter and Huck Finn, but you never hear people raise a peep about Hansel and Gretel.” She glanced at Max. “You like the cookies?”
“Wonderful.” He nodded, reaching for another one.
“I thought I’d bake a batch to catch you off guard,” she grinned. “Make me look a little less like the wicked witch.”
“I thought you were retired,” said Carrie with a smile.
“Six of one, half a dozen of the other,” said the old woman. “Like most things, it’s all a matter of perception.” She paused for a moment. “Like the letter you found,” she added. “Did you bring a copy?”
Carrie reached into her bag and took out the digitized scan Will Croaker had made for her at the museum. It was twice the size of the small, folded original, and the museum technicians had enhanced the image to make it more readable. She handed it across to Betsy Arnot. The old woman took it and tipped her glasses up onto her forehead. She examined the scan carefully, then nodded.
“That’s Johnny Jones’s handwriting,” she said. “Neat and precise, just like everything else he did. He could dig a grave by eye perfectly, you know, six by three by six, every time, each one spaced exactly the same distance from the one next to it. The records he kept were so precise that the U.S. government declared Woodlawn in Elmira a national cemetery, just like the one in Arlington. Not bad for a cotton-chopper slave from Leesburg, Virginia.”
“I’m still not exactly sure what the relationship was between Jones and Kate Warne and why she’d entrust her secret journal to his care,” said Carrie.
“They were neighbors. My great-great-grandfather worked for the Arnots when he first came up from the plantation in Leesburg in 1844. He sharecropped a piece of land owned by them, which he eventually bought. He and Kate were both in their mid-twenties then, Kate a little younger than he was. They became good friends and stayed in touch even when Kate left for Chicago with her new husband. Then her husband died and she went off to work for Allan Pinkerton.” The old woman paused. “How much do you know about Kate?”
Carrie shrugged. “Not a lot. She was a widow. She was the first female private detective. She was instrumental in saving Lincoln’s life. As far as I can tell, there isn’t much more than that on the record.”
“She wanted it that way,” said Betsy Arnot. “Kate was a very private woman. That’s part of the reason she kept her journal secret. There was a rumor for years that she was a lesbian, since she preferred to wear men’s clothes and she was quite plain, but the truth is she was Allan Pinkerton’s mistress right up until the day she died. She’s buried next to him in the Pinkerton family graveyard.”
“I still can’t see what any of this has to do with our bog body,” said Max.
“My ancestor didn’t just record the names of Confederates he buried,” said Betsy Arnot. “He also recorded the names of slaves he helped on the Underground Railroad. One of them was Barnabus Coffin. Coffin had worked the Mississippi paddle wheelers as a slave; my great-great-grandfather suggested that he join the Union navy, which he did. That’s how he wound up on the USS Monitor.”
Max frowned. “I’m more interested in how he wound up in a sewer on Minetta Lane in Manhattan with his throat slit and a gold coin stuffed down his gullet.”
“And how Kate Warne got involved with him,” added Carrie.
The old woman stood up and went to her desk under the front window. Outside it was still raining, the downpour drumming comfortably on the roof of the little hilltop bungalow. Betsy Arnot took a key out of the pocket of her jeans and opened one of the desk drawers. She carefully removed a bound volume in an archival plastic sleeve and brought it back to the table. She eased the book out of the sleeve. It appeared to be covered in some sort of soft leather binding.
“Deerskin,” said Betsy. “Fancy bookbinding was a hobby of my great-great-grandfather’s. The diary was a Christmas gift from him to Kate.” She eased the thick volume open. Carrie bent forward, examining it without touching the pages. It was written in faded sepia-colored ink. Block-printed neatly, an unreadable chaos of letters and numbers.
“Code,” said Carrie.
“Pinkerton railroad cipher,” said Betsy. “The agents used it for security when they sent telegrams to each other.”
“Can you read it?” Carrie asked.
“Yes,” said the old woman. “I translated it years ago.”
“Well?” said Max. He bit into another Toll House cookie.
Betsy Arnot smiled, her gold tooth gleaming in the dancing firelight.
“What do you know about vampires?”