MacPherson's Lament

CHAPTER 6

JOHN HUFF STOOD in the front hall of his newly purchased home, savoring the emptiness and the echoes of his own footsteps. The old ladies were gone, taking with them all their furniture and knickknacks, but leaving a tantalizing collection of trunks and boxes in the basement. He’d already checked. It was the first place he went. Well, not the first place; it had been a long drive out from the airport and he’d had two whiskey sodas on the plane; but after that, it was his first concern. He could examine the papers themselves later. The electricity was still on and the house’s water supply came from a well, so there was no billing problem to interrupt service there either. It was only three o’clock; the moving van should be arriving any minute with his furniture. With any luck and a little hustle on the part of the movers (which he would see to personally) he would be able to spend the night in his new residence. He had got a good deal on the house, he thought for the hundredth time. These Southern yokels were no match for a businessman of his caliber.

Apart from his other interests in Danville, he thought that the house might make a very nice vacation home; perhaps even a place to retire to. He was bored with the usual vacation spots frequented by his acquaintances. He was getting a little old for skiing, and thoughts of skin cancer dimmed his enjoyment of the beach. He had been divorced for years, and there were no children to consider in his vacation preferences. He could please himself. Perhaps a graceful Victorian mansion was the perfect retreat for a gentleman of his age and income. He might even take up fox hunting. After the completion of his current project, that is.

He looked appraisingly at the silent rooms, with sunlight filtering through the curtainless windows making dust motes dance above the oak plank floors. There was no sensation of the lingering dead haunting the empty halls. Too bad, thought Huff with a wry smile; he would have welcomed a couple of ghosts. He would have had questions to pose to them.

After a last look around, while he mentally arranged his furniture in these graceful rooms, John Huff sat down on the stairs to wait for the moving van.

For perhaps the fiftieth time since he began his law practice, Bill MacPherson considered the idea of raising sheep. Sheep were so restful. So pleasantly bland. They just stood around all day not arguing with anybody, not asking silly questions, and not minding that a dozen ewes all had to share the same ram. You never heard of a sheep filing for divorce; no sirree bob. They just stood around in their fields, placidly content with whatever mate was provided for them. Sheep never went off to find themselves. Bill pictured himself out on a green hillside with a clever collie (sort of a canine A. P. Hill), communing with nature, soaking up sunshine, and counting his lamb chops.

He was jerked back to fluorescent reality by the sound of his mother’s voice, containing all the warmth of an injured timber wolf. “He’s driving me crazy!” she wailed.

Bill closed his eyes and ran his hands through his hair, wondering whether he was supposed to respond as a son or as a lawyer. He opted for the second choice, thinking that the emotional distance of the attorney-client relationship might make for a calmer discussion. “All right, Mother,” he said gently. “Take it easy. What has Dad done now?”

“He keeps coming back to the house, saying he forgot something. Last week he took the road atlas, the flashlight, and the sea-shell ashtray you made at 4-H camp.”

“What did he want that for? I thought he quit smoking.”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s too cheap to buy cereal bowls. What does it matter? I don’t want him wandering in and out of the house. And that’s not the worst of it! He’s killing the fish.”

“The fish?”

“The goldfish. Doug used to always accuse me of forgetting to feed the goldfish, and now he is convinced that they’ll starve unless he dumps food into the tank. But since I feed them every morning, the food he adds is more than they need. I can always tell when he’s been in the house-even before I look to see what’s missing-because there’s a little bloated body floating on top of the water.”

“Okay,” sighed Bill. “So you want him to stay away from the house. Have you told him?”

“Yes. He always says it’s the last time. He says he just forgot one little thing. And then three days later he’s back. Sometimes he comes when I’m out, and I panic and think a burglar has broken in, but the dead fish give him away.”

“What does he say about killing the fish?”

“Natural causes. He suggests an autopsy.”

“Do you want me to talk to him?”

Margaret MacPherson hesitated. “Can I have him arrested for trespassing?”

“No, Mother, you cannot have him arrested. Why don’t you just change the locks?”

“Because I can’t remember who all has keys! Elizabeth does, and you do, and I think Robert and Amanda have one set. Oh, it would be too much trouble to change all the locks and redistribute keys. Besides, why should I have to go to all that trouble and expense? Can’t I just have your father arrested?”

Bill closed his eyes and thought about fields of cloudlike sheep. “Okay,” he said at last, “if you insist on indulging in legal carpet bombing, I will handle it. We will file a restraining order against Dad, specifying that he cannot come into the house to retrieve anything without your express permission, and that he cannot enter the premises unless you are present.” Bill was scribbling notes to himself on the yellow legal pad.

“Don’t forget the fish!”

“Right. The fish. The restraining order will absolutely prohibit Douglas W. MacPherson from feeding any and all fish at his former residence at 816 Mead Lane. I’ll get it typed up and formally present it to Dad’s lawyer. Will that do?”

Bill’s mother gave him a reproachful look. “You don’t have to take that tone with me, Bill. I’ll have you know that it’s very stressful to have an estranged husband popping in and out of your house like Banquo’s ghost, and besides, I happen to be very fond of those goldfish. We’d had the fantail moor for almost three years.”

“I’ll put that in the restraining order. Maybe it will mute the hilarity.”

“Will your father and I have to go to court over this?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Bill, who hadn’t filed a restraining order before. “His lawyer will have to appear, though. And I’ll be there.”

“But if he ignores the restraining order and barges in anyway, then we can have him arrested?”

“Well, theoretically. I think if it’s just a case of fish murder, the judge might let him go with a scolding. He might order Dad to replace the fish.”

“Impossible!” snapped Margaret MacPherson. “Doug can’t swim.”

They looked at each other and burst out laughing. It was the first symptom of sanity Bill had seen in any of his family members in weeks.

John Huff stood on the front porch supervising the unloading of the moving van. “Be careful with that sofa!” he called out. “Don’t scrape the upholstery against the door frame.”

The movers swept past him without even pretending to heed his warning. “That goes in the room to the right!” he called after them. He got up and peered into the trunk to see how much furniture they had left to unload. The truck was still at least half full. They wouldn’t finish until after five o’clock. He was glad he wasn’t paying them by the hour.

The movers had just unloaded an antique walnut desk and were stumbling precariously up the steps with it when Huff’s attention was deflected by the arrival of a white sedan pulling into the winding driveway. Huff did not recognize the dark-haired young man behind the wheel; for a moment he had thought that it was the sellers’ attorney Bill MacPherson, coming to welcome him to town, and perhaps to hustle a little future legal business. But while this young man looked like a lawyer, in his Southern prep’s uniform of spotted tie and khaki slacks, he certainly didn’t look like a welcoming committee. He was staring open-mouthed at the moving van and flipping through a sheaf of papers on a clipboard as he approached the house. Local tax assessor, thought John Huff, bracing himself for the confrontation. These yokels would soon learn that they couldn’t push him around. Huff sat where he was and waited for Mr. Power Tie’s opening salvo.

He didn’t have long to wait. The young man looked at the moving van, jotted down its license plate, and said, “Well, my goodness, we’re busy this afternoon.” He waved his hand at the truck, the house, and John Huff. “And just what are we up to here?”

“Well, I’m moving into my new house, and you’re trespassing,” said Huff. He believed in asserting himself at the earliest possible moment.

The reply was an unconvincing imitation of a smile. “I beg your pardon? I am trespassing? Do you know who I am?”

“No, I can’t help you there. Are you lost?”

The young man drew himself up to his full height-about five seven-and announced, “Sir, I am Randolph Custis Byrd, and I have the honor to be the assistant director of art and antiquities for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Now please tell me what is transpiring here. I thought the elderly ladies were going to wait for us to assist them in vacating the premises.”

“They didn’t wait. I guess with a million dollars they didn’t need any help with moving expenses from the state.”

R. Custis Byrd stared in disbelief. “A million dollars? Are you serious? But where would they…” He peered into the back of the moving van. “They didn’t sell you the furniture, did they?”

“No,” said Huff. “I didn’t want it. I’d rather furnish the house to my own taste.”

“Furnish the house?” echoed Byrd. “What are you talking about?” Two movers in gray coveralls clumped past them up the ramp and into the truck, and emerged balancing a recliner between them. Byrd watched them go with an expression of horror that the recliner’s upholstery did not quite merit. “Why are you moving a lounge chair into the state art museum?”

Now it was John Huff’s turn to look stricken. “Art museum? You must have come to the wrong house. Why, I paid a fortune for this house not two weeks ago!”

“I hope not. This was the Home for Confederate Women. The state has decided to claim it for the people of Virginia because of its historic value. I have the paperwork right here if you’d like to see it. In return for the house, we were planning to move the eight current residents to a nursing home outside Danville, and to pay for their care for the rest of their lives. The poor old dears ought to be on their way to Bingo Heaven right now. Where are they, by the way?”

John Huff set his jaw. “I tell you I bought this house.”

“Well, you’ve been taken in by a fraud, sir,” said Custis Byrd in tones bordering on sympathy. “Who sold it to you?”

“A Danville attorney named Bill MacPherson.”

A. P. Hill had returned to the twentieth century, exchanging her gray infantry uniform for the navy-blue coat and skirt that was her legal uniform. Reenacting was an enjoyable hobby, and a way for her to feel closer to her great-great-grandfather the general, but the present-day A. P. Hill had no desire to live permanently in the past. The Springfield rifle, the brogans, and the rimless spectacles had all been put away until next weekend’s reenactment, a scripted skirmish to take place at a battlefield that was now a national park. Now she had to return to a more crucial battle: the trial of Tug Mosier.

Because of the local sentiment about the case and the fact that the victim came from a prominent family, Powell had succeeded in getting a change of venue. Now the trial was scheduled for the end of the month in Stuart, a small town in Patrick County, some fifty miles west of Danville. She hoped that the new location would filter some of the emotion out of the case. At least she would have jurors who weren’t former classmates of Misti Hale or friends of the victim’s parents.

Now she had to decide how best to proceed with the defense. She was consulting a possible expert witness, Dr. Arthur Timmons, a Richmond psychiatrist who had some experience in criminal cases. As Powell Hill sat in his waiting room, leafing through old copies of Smithsonian, she wondered which would prove the more difficult task: coming up with a way to help her client or persuading a prominent physician to consult for nothing.

He had been cordial enough, though. Ushering her into his oak and green leather consulting room, he had listened carefully to her description of the Mosier case and the quandary over whether or not Tug was guilty of murder.

“And what do you want me to do, Miss Hill?” he asked when Powell’s explanation finally wound down.

“Well, I was wondering if you could examine my client and try to determine whether or not he did it. Give him some tests, perhaps.”

Arthur Timmons considered the matter for a few moments. “Tests,” he mused. “There are some measures that we could take to try to restore his memory of the night in question. Hypnosis. Using a drug to put him into a semiconscious state so that he can discuss that night without inhibitions. But are you sure you want to do that?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” asked A. P. Hill.

“Because he might remember. Right now you can plead your client innocent with perfect sincerity, since you have no conclusive evidence that he did it. But what are you going to do if I regress him, and he promptly confesses to the murder?”

A. P. Hill looked thoughtful. “I suppose I would have to concentrate on mitigating circumstances,” she said. “Diminished capacity. Accident. I’d have to know the circumstances before I could make any decision about how to proceed. I think, though, that Tug Mosier would like to go through with the tests, if possible. He’s grief-stricken over Misti Hale’s death, and he genuinely seems to want to know if he did it.”

Dr. Timmons scribbled a few notes and then looked up with a sad smile. “I think you’re taking a great risk by doing this,” he said. “It has been my experience that most trial lawyers aren’t interested in the truth. They’re interested in a game plan. But talk to your client, Miss Hill. If he truly wants to resolve the question of his guilt, I will do what I can to assist you.”

“There’s one other thing,” said Powell. “I’m court-appointed, you see, and we don’t have any money to spend on medical experts.”

“I assumed that,” said Timmons, still smiling. “Poor and honest seem to go together, don’t they?”

Edith came into the office, closed the door behind her, and stood with her back against it. Her expression brought to mind the expendable blonde in reel one of a horror movie.

“What is it?” chuckled Bill. “Mr. Trowbridge in person?”

Edith shook her head. “It’s that ornery man who bought the Home for Confederate Women, and if you thought he was bad before, you ought to see him now. He’s about ready to spit nails.”

“Oh, boy! I hope it isn’t termites. Did he say what he wanted?”

“No, but judging from his expression, I’d say he wants to use your scalp for pom-poms.”

“Hmm,” said Bill. “That doesn’t sound good. Is Powell here? No, of course not. She’s in Richmond, isn’t she? Well, let them in, and I’ll try to straighten this out.”

“Okay,” said Edith. “I just thought I’d warn you.” She mustered a wan smile and went out to face the visitors. Seconds later, Bill’s door burst open again, and John Huff stormed in, followed by an officious-looking young man with a clipboard.

“Hello, Mr. Huff,” said Bill, coming out from behind his desk with an outstretched hand. “What can I do for you?”

Huff ignored the friendly greeting and turned to his companion. “That’s him.”

Randolph Custis Byrd bustled forward and introduced himself in condescending tones. “Am I to understand that you sold the Home for Confederate Women to this gentleman last month for more than one million dollars?”

“I represented the sellers,” said Bill. “Why? What’s the matter?”

“You represented the sellers,” echoed Byrd with a tight little smile. “And who were the sellers, may one ask?”

“Well… the Confederate widows. Daughters, actually, I think. There were eight of them. Miss Dabney, Miss Pendleton… I could look up the names.”

“I never saw them,” said John Huff. “You ran the ad in the newspaper.”

“Well, yes,” Bill admitted. “They instructed me to. They’re very elderly, and they didn’t want to be bothered with telephone calls.”

“And when I flew down to Danville, you drove me out to the house and showed me around, but there was no one else there.”

“They went out to tea,” stammered Bill. “They were a little upset about… uh… selling their home.”

“But you didn’t see them at all, Mr. Huff?” asked Byrd.

“I did not.”

“And then you decided to purchase the house,” Byrd continued, staring at Bill as he spoke. “You signed the papers here, I believe?”

“That’s right,” said Huff grimly. “And he signed on behalf of the sellers. Said he had their power of attorney. We transferred the money from my bank to an account in his name.”

Bill’s head was reeling, and for a moment he thought he was back in one of his bar exam nightmares. “I can explain all that,” he stammered. “The old ladies didn’t want to come down to the office because one of them had a doctor’s appointment. It was short notice, you remember.”

“What doctor?” said Byrd quickly.

“How should I know?” snapped Bill. “I can’t even remember which old lady. We could ask them, I suppose. Now, will one of you tell me what this is all about?”

Huff ignored the question. “What did you do with the money, MacPherson?”

Bill blushed. “It’s going to sound crazy,” he said with a little laugh. “But the old ladies claimed they didn’t trust American banks. They asked me to deposit the money in a numbered account in the Cayman Islands. Can you imagine?”

Nobody laughed with him.

John Huff looked like a thundercloud. “A numbered account in the Cayman Islands! I’m surprised you had enough savvy to come up with that.”

“I didn’t do it,” said Bill. “The old ladies did. I don’t know how they came up with the notion.”

“Banks in the Cayman Islands won’t give out any information about their accounts,” said Huff. “They won’t say how much money the account holds, and they won’t tell you whose account it is, either. Of course you knew that.”

Bill looked from Huff to Byrd and back again in disbelief. “You don’t think I did it?” he gasped. “You think I opened that account and kept the money?”

“It seems obvious to me,” said Huff, stone-faced.

“But the fraud goes well beyond that,” Byrd pointed out. “That house is state property. We had filed a writ of eminent domain, claiming the property for use as an art museum for southwest Virginia. No one had any authority to sell it.”

“We did a title search,” Bill protested. “We got a clear title! Mr. Huff’s lawyer must have double-checked that.”

“I intend to find out,” said Huff grimly. “And if he didn’t, I’ll have his job at Fremont, Shields & Banks!”

“If the acquisition notice is not on file in the courthouse, that adds to the seriousness of the fraud,” said Byrd. “Tampering with legal documents for the purpose of fraud.”

“But I didn’t!” wailed Bill. “At least I didn’t do the title search. But Edith wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

“Get her in here,” said Huff.

Edith Creech appeared in the doorway. Huff, his eyes glittering like a snake’s, waved the title in front of her, and said, “MacPherson claims that you did this title search. Is that correct?”

“I went to the courthouse and found it,” said Edith warily. “Why?”

“Did you leave out anything? A document with a state seal on it, for example?” asked Custis Byrd.

“I don’t think so.”

“And you witnessed this power of attorney, signed by the eight residents of the Home for Confederate Women.”

Edith looked at the paper. Then she looked at Bill. And back at the paper. “Uh… well…”

“Did you or did you not witness these signatures?”

“What did he say?” Edith hedged.

“It’s all right, Edith,” sighed Bill. “I’ll tell them. I forgot to take Edith with me when I went out to have the paper signed. We had only about twelve hours’ notice about the closing, and she was very busy typing up all the documents we needed. By the time I realized that it wasn’t notarized, one of the women had gone for the evening, and we had a ton of work to do, so she took my word for it.”

“Of course we will be reporting this to the state bar association, as well as to the proper legal authorities,” said Byrd in a self-righteous pout.

“Wait,” said Bill. “Flora Dabney can clear this up. Just call her and ask her about the bank account and the newspaper ad-and all the rest of it.” He reached for the telephone book. “They said they were going to be moving to the Oakmont Nursing Home. They even invited me to come and have tea with them. Ah, here’s the number. We’ll soon straighten this out.”

Bill looked at the ceiling while he listened to the phone ring. What incredible bad luck, he was thinking. Everything going wrong, all on the same case. He’d catch hell for that notary business, and A. P. Hill would be thoroughly pissed about this snafu in the new firm, no matter how brief a mixup it proved to be. The ringing stopped.

“Hello,” said Bill eagerly. “Oakmont Nursing Home? May I speak to Miss Flora Dabney, please? She’s a new resident. She and the other former residents of the Home for Confederate Women just moved to your facility-oh, about a week ago… What? Are you sure? Could you check? Maybe somebody else?… Oh, you do.” Bill’s voice became progressively muted as the conversation continued. Finally he muttered a lifeless thank-you and hung up.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “They’re not there. The director of Oakmont says that she’s never heard of them. Oakmont-I’m sure that’s what Flora Dabney said.”

“Maybe they changed their minds,” Edith suggested. “You know how old ladies are. Try the other retirement communities.”

“Did you ever actually see any of these women?” Custis Byrd wanted to know.

“Well… no,” said Edith after a moment’s thought. “But I’ve heard so much about them. Miss Dabney came by the office on my day off.” She turned to Bill. “Was Powell here? Did she meet them?”

Bill shook his head. “I don’t know where she was. A meeting, I think. But Miss Dabney sent me a photograph of herself.” He reached in the desk drawer and pulled out the sepia portrait of the Edwardian girl.

Huff and Byrd were not impressed. “You can buy a hundred photos like that in any antique shop,” said Custis Byrd. “Instant ancestors for a dollar apiece. I’d hardly call that picture evidence.”

“Try the other nursing homes,” Edith said again. “Miss Dabney can clear all this up in two minutes.”

“If there is a Miss Dabney,” Byrd snickered.

Ten minutes later, Bill had completed four more phone calls, each following the pattern of the first. There were no more retirement communities to try. Then he called directory assistance in search of a telephone listing for Flora Dabney and for each of the other ladies. Nothing.

“But it just doesn’t make sense,” Bill kept saying. “Where could they be? They couldn’t just vanish into thin air!”

John Huff and Custis Byrd looked at each other. Huff stood up. “Well, I think that’s all,” he said, motioning for Byrd to follow him. “We’ll be going now.”

“Going?” echoed Bill, standing up as if he wanted to run after them.

“Yes,” said Huff. “We’ll let the authorities take it from here. You can explain this to the police. And I’m sure they’ll want to know what you did with the bodies of the eight defenseless old ladies who lived in the Home. You didn’t bury them in the basement, did you?”

Jimmy Stewart stood up and embraced the young boy with the crutch. The congregation burst into song as the credits rolled.

The Confederate soldier switched off the video. On the tiny rug that constituted A. P. Hill’s living room, two other uniformed men scribbled furiously in spiral notebooks, while on the two sofas more contemporarily dressed gentlemen and A. P. Hill herself were similarly engaged in composition. Aside from sporadic muttering over an answer, no one spoke. Only the whir of the rewinding cassette recorder broke the silence.

Even in a less prosaic setting, no knowledgeable observer would have mistaken the uniformed men for Confederate ghosts. Their gray wool coats were clean and undamaged, and they all wore leather boots. Besides, they were at least ten years too old and forty pounds too heavy to have been the boys who really fought that distant war. These were the sunshine soldiers who fought the war summers and weekends, without grapeshot, dysentery, gangrene, malnutrition, or conspicuous personal inconvenience. They were the reenactors.

Tonight, though, they were not on duty, even in their mythic Confederacy. They were in uniform just for the fun of it, attending a meeting of the local Civil War Roundtable Discussion Group, which was assembled at the home of A. P. Hill, descendant and namesake of the general. The evening’s entertainment had been a showing of Shenandoah, a Civil War-set film of the 1960s starring James Stewart. It was a sad and stirring saga of the war in Virginia, but in this audience wet handkerchiefs were conspicuously absent.

A. P. Hill went to the kitchen and brought back coffee and plates of cake and cookies. When the rations had been distributed to the troops, she said, “All right, is everybody ready? Put your pens on the table now, so no one can be accused of modifying his comments. Who wants to go first?”

An elderly man in a black suit raised his hand. “I got eight,” he announced. “Shall I read them out?”

“Go on, Dr. Howe. The rest of us will check off any of our responses that duplicate yours.”

“First, the scenery was wrong. Does that count? It certainly was not Virginia.”

“They filmed it in Oregon,” said Powell Hill. “I don’t think we can fault them for that, though. Movies almost never get produced in a logical setting. Go on to the next one.”

“According to the film, the year was 1864, and Jimmy Stewart still had six grown sons living at home on his farm in the middle of a war zone. No way. The Confederacy introduced conscription in 1861. Those boys would all have been drafted. So would their dad, more than likely.”

Everyone in the room nodded. Most retrieved their pens and made check marks on their note pads.

“It might have worked if you’d changed the location,” Ken Filban suggested. He was a bank executive from East Tennessee. “According to the movie, they were on a five-hundred-acre farm near Harrisonburg.”

“Which should have been crawling with hired help,” said Confederate corporal Scott Chambers, otherwise a driver for UPS. “In the days before mechanized farming, you couldn’t cultivate five hundred acres with five men and two young women to run the house. They weren’t ranchers; they were farmers.”

“Like I said, change the location and it might have been plausible,” Ken Filban said. “Make the Anderson farm a fifty-acre place tucked into a hollow in the North Carolina or Tennessee mountains, and chances are they could have got away with ignoring the war. Family legend had it that all my great-great-uncles spent the war dodging both armies-and never served a day.”

Dr. Howe cleared his throat. “It’s still my turn. Number two: the rifles were wrong.” Unanimous check marks.

“They even got the rifles wrong in Glory,” said A. P. Hill. “They had the soldiers checking serial numbers. It was more accurate than this movie, though.”

“Number three: they had a black Union soldier serving in a white regiment. That didn’t happen.”

“How about when Jimmy Stewart’s family stopped the Union train and the Federals didn’t shoot them? Six guys stopping a train! And what did the Federals have, five guys guarding a couple of hundred prisoners on that train?” Ken Filban was laughing at the naïveté of moviemakers.

Powell Hill shrugged. “That’s Hollywood. Still, the film had some good qualities. The main characters were Southerners who weren’t made to sound like idiots. And the rural people weren’t portrayed as hicks.”

“It seemed like a Western to me. Didn’t it look like a Western to you?”

“The director’s next job was the television series Bonanza,” said Dr. Howe.

“Yeah, but maybe that wasn’t inaccurate,” said Scott Chambers thoughtfully. “Only thirty years earlier, some of Virginia was Indian country. I think we were the West in those days.”

“Costumes!” said Dr. Howe, still trying to finish his list. “It was 1864 and we were seeing Confederate soldiers who weren’t in rags. And they had shoes.”

“Everybody was too well dressed,” Powell agreed. “After four years of war, even the civilians should have been thin and shabby, wearing mended old clothes.”

“Well, that covers my list!” said the history professor, crossing off the last objection on his pad. “That was fun. What shall we do next? Gone With the Wind?”

A. P. Hill shook her head. “None of us can write that fast,” she said.

“Those Hollywood people should try reenacting,” said Ken Filban. “You learn a lot about war from tramping around in the heat in a wool outfit loaded down with heavy equipment.”

Scott Chambers nodded. “It’s a funny feeling, walking in a straight line toward a bunch of guys holding bayonets. Even when you know they’re acting.”

“Same time next week?” asked Dr. Howe. “My place.”

“I won’t be able to come,” said A. P. Hill. “I have a trial coming up out of town, starting Monday.”

“Will you be-” Ken Filban glanced apprehensively at the elderly Dr. Howe. “Will you be coming out this weekend?”

Confederate corporal A. P. Hill gave him a trace of a smile. They were careful not to talk about her reenactment activities in front of any possible Silverbacks. “See you there,” she said.