Daughter of Ashes

TWENTY-TWO

‘Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, can never willingly abandon it.’

Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791

Kim and I were sitting in her office, drinking coffee out of proper cups and saucers, discussing my findings in the library and what I’d learned from my visit with the Nightingales when there was a knock on the door behind me. Before Kim could rest her cup in its saucer, the door swung open and Clifton Ames eased into the room, his signature cigarillo clamped between his teeth.

The tip glowed red as he sucked air through the roll of noxious weed. When he removed it from between his lips long enough to say, ‘Good morning, ladies, I hope I’m not interrupting anything,’ gray smoke curled toward the ceiling.

Kim wrinkled her nose.

I made a production of fanning smoke away from my face.

‘You can’t smoke in here, Mr Ames,’ Kim told the Chicken à la King.

‘Oh, yeah. Sorry.’ He waved the cigarillo around a bit helplessly. ‘Ashtray?’

Kim snatched the saucer from under her cup and pushed it across the desk.

Ames snubbed the offending cigarillo out, then grabbed a straight-back chair from the corner, dragged it over next to mine and sat down in it. ‘Mrs Ives.’

I was impressed that he remembered my name. It had been several weeks since Kendall’s party.

‘What can I do for you, Mr Ames?’ Kim wanted to know.

‘I’ll get right to the point,’ he said. ‘I was talking to Fran Lawson at Kendall’s shindig a while back and she told me about the work the historical society is doing in the basement here. Now that Kendall’s gone, I’m wondering if you need someone to pick up the tab on the office space, the computers and such.’

I’d been wondering about that, too, and it was, in fact, one of the questions I had for Kim on my list, so I was relieved when she replied, ‘I think we’re in good shape there, Mr Ames. Fortunately, Kendall paid the rental on everything in advance, so we’re good for another three months at least. After that…’ She shrugged. ‘Perhaps after that I’ll give you a call. It’s thoughtful of you to volunteer.’

Ames rubbed his lower lip, seemingly uncomfortable without his familiar cigar. ‘What you got down there anyway?’

Kim smiled warily. ‘We’re not exactly sure. That’s where Fran Lawson and Hannah here come in. It’s our very good fortune that they live in Tilghman County and that they’re both trained records managers.’

‘We’re making a complete inventory, Mr Ames,’ I explained. ‘Once we know exactly what we have we’ll share the list with the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis. Some of the material will undoubtedly be transferred directly to them. The rest? Well, we’ll see.’

‘According to the records retention schedule established by Maryland law,’ Kim added, ‘most of what we found belonged to various county offices and could have been discarded in the 1960s and 70s.’

‘Why didn’t they? Destroy them, that is?’

Kim twirled a pencil between her fingers, as if considering how to answer his question. ‘In 1975, the courthouse was extensively renovated. The funds became available rather suddenly – end of year money, I suppose – so everyone had to hustle to clear out their offices before the painters arrived. They needed a convenient place to store their files temporarily, so they moved them into the basement. But after the painters left, the records never went back.’

‘Can’t you just give them back to the various offices now, let them deal with it? What are we talking about anyway? Traffic tickets?’

Kim smiled. ‘The historical society would hardly be interested in traffic court records, Mr Ames. No, there are some indexes going back to the nineteenth century that we think will prove invaluable to genealogists. Land records, marriage indexes, chattel mortgages… material like that.’

‘There are some real treasures in those boxes,’ I added. ‘We found a packet of letters written home by a local soldier during World War One.’

As I spoke, Clifton Ames’s eyes never left my face.

‘Some of the material is too water damaged to save, I’m afraid,’ I said, shifting uncomfortably in my chair.

He continued to stare. What was the man’s problem?

A light flashed in my brain. It flashed on so brightly and with such an audible click that I feared, for a second, that Ames might have heard it, too.

This is all about the early 1950s. Clifton J Ames the Second, the man presently giving me the hairy eyeball, had been young back then. Sixteen, seventeen tops? But what about his father, Clifton J Ames the First? It was he who had set up a shadow company, Liberty Land Development, specifically to buy up land from small, predominately black farmers like Cap Hazlett’s mother, Mary Hazlett, land on which the sprawling Clifton Farms processing plant now stood. What if there had been something fishy about those transactions? What if we were, quite literally, sitting over the evidence of his father’s shady deals? If they should come to light, it would reflect negatively on the family, and might even put the kibosh on Jack Ames’s promising political career.

I shot the Chicken à la King a toothy grin. ‘Thank you so much for your offer, Mr Ames. And if Fran and I run into any trouble, you will be the first person we call.’

After he left, another thought struck me like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. In the early 1950s, Clifton J Ames the Second had been too young to negotiate land deals, but I knew from the Tilghman Tigers yearbook that he had attended high school with Cap’s sister, Nancy. He’d starred in a musical with her. What if…

I plucked a tissue out of the box Kim kept on her desk and used it to retrieve Ames’s cigarillo from the saucer. ‘Kim, do you have a paper bag or a box or something I can put this into?’

‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘I’m in love with the man,’ I said, dangling the disgusting object between my thumb and forefinger over the saucer while Kim scrabbled around in her desk drawer. ‘I want to keep his cigar forever, in a locket around my neck, close to my heart.’

Kim laughed out loud. ‘You are a nut.’ She held up a Ziploc sandwich bag. ‘Will this do?’

‘No, it can’t be plastic.’

‘Because…?’

‘I can tell you don’t watch enough CSI,’ I said. ‘Because it might spoil the DNA results.’

Kim stared. ‘My God, you’re serious.’

‘Deadly,’ I said.

Kim opened a drawer, reached in, and upended a box over her desk blotter. Columns of staples tumbled out. ‘This should work, right?’ she asked, handing the empty box over.

‘Perfectly,’ I said, sliding Ames’s distinctive Bonnie and Clyde cigarillo into the box. ‘Now I just need to convince Andy Hubbard that I’m not a nutcase.’

The Elizabethtown Police Station sat on the edge of town near the railroad tracks, adjacent to the train station that had been restored and converted into a charming florist shop named the Watering Can.

Inside the single story brick building I found myself in a boxy waiting room, with a water cooler in one corner and a gumball machine sponsored by the local Lion’s Club in the other. A uniformed police officer sat at a desk behind a glass window on the right, talking on the telephone and taking notes. I waited until she finished the call, then tapped on the glass. ‘Excuse me?’

She looked up. ‘How can I help you, ma’am?’

‘I’m here to see Sheriff Hubbard,’ I said. ‘Is he in?’

‘He’s on the phone. Who should I tell him is here?’

‘It’s Hannah. Hannah Ives.’

A few minutes later, I sat on one side of Hubbard’s gray metal desk and he on the other. My makeshift paper evidence ‘bag’ lay like an exclamation point on the desktop between us.

It’s fair to say that Andy Hubbard was not impressed with my sleuthing skills. ‘And you want me to have this analyzed, why?’

‘I suspect that Clifton Ames was the father of Baby Ella. If you could have the lab compare the DNA on this cigar with the baby’s DNA…’ I shrugged. Even to my ears it sounded lame.

‘May I remind you that, according to the medical examiner, the baby died of natural causes.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘I realize that. It’s not the baby’s cause of death that I’m questioning, it’s her mother’s.’

The shadow of a smile played across Hubbard’s face. ‘The mother. You mean Nancy Hazlett?’

That caught me off guard, but if I could figure it out, it shouldn’t surprise me to learn that the police had, too. ‘Ah. You’re steps ahead of me, I see.’

‘Do you know Thomas Hazlett?’

‘Cap? Of course. He’s helping us clean up the mess with the records in the courthouse. Nancy was his sister.’

‘Exactly. After the baby’s body was found, Cap contacted us. He thought it likely that the child had belonged to his sister, so he volunteered to be tested. We performed avuncular DNA analysis and the results showed an unusually high kinship index. We can say with confidence that the child’s mother was a close relative of Cap Hazlett. The obvious conclusion is Nancy.’

I leaned forward. Using my index finger, I pushed the cardboard Swingline staple box a millimeter closer to his side of the blotter. ‘And I can say with some confidence that the guy who smoked this cigar is probably the baby’s father.’

Hubbard breathed in noisily through his nose then let it out slowly. ‘Did Cap put you up to this?’

‘Cap? Of course not. It’s just that I’ve been talking to an elderly minister and his wife who knew Nancy quite well. They remember that she was pretty sweet on Clifton Ames the Second,’ I said, embroidering just a bit. ‘Black girl, white boy, a baby. Seems like a recipe for disaster, especially back in those days.’

‘I think you and Cap Hazlett need to concentrate on getting the courthouse basement squared away and let me do my job.’

‘So you don’t think the identity of Baby Ella’s father is of any importance?’

‘Not particularly. Unless a crime was committed because of it.’

‘That’s my point exactly!’

Hubbard rolled his chair back a few inches and stretched his legs out to one side. ‘Did you have Ames’s permission to take this sample?’

‘Of course not.’

‘A court order?’

‘Now you’re making fun of me, Sheriff.’

‘What I’m trying to tell you, Mrs Ives, is that you are not, as far as I know, a trained specimen collector. And even if you were, the chain of custody on this evidence you’re bringing me is crap.’ He waved a hand over the staple box as if shooing away flies. ‘How will we know this cigar wasn’t planted or tampered with?’

‘Kim Marquis was sitting right there with me when Cliff…’

‘Save your breath, Mrs Ives. Courts of law require a strict paper trail. A police officer hands evidence off to the evidence clerk, the evidence clerk to the lab and so on. At each step, someone has to sign a form. The lab won’t even accept a sample if it isn’t accompanied by the appropriate paperwork.’

‘I guess it was naive of me to think that small town law enforcement would be more…’ I paused, choosing my words carefully. ‘More laid-back about crime investigation.’

Hubbard bristled. ‘May I remind you that there was no crime here? One day, a long time ago, a child died of polio. Shortly thereafter, her mother committed suicide. Why, we don’t know, but we can guess.’

‘But what if Nancy Hazlett didn’t commit suicide? What if she was murdered?’

This time Hubbard groaned. ‘Next thing I know you’ll be asking me to get a court order to dig up Nancy Hazlett’s body.’

‘You must be reading my mind.’

Hubbard stood. ‘Not gonna happen, Mrs Ives. Now if you or Cap think of anything else that might be helpful, please do not hesitate to let me know.’

I was being dismissed. ‘The cigar?’ I asked as I headed for the door.

‘You want it?’

‘Ick, no.’

‘I’ll take care of it, then,’ he said.

I passed through the doorway, then turned back to face him. ‘Baby or no baby, nobody I’ve talked to who knew Nancy thinks she drowned herself on purpose.’

‘Do you know how many times I’ve heard that?’ Hubbard asked as he escorted me through the waiting room to the front door. ‘In my experience, it’s the people who think they knew them best who find out they hardly knew them at all.’