MacPherson's Lament

CHAPTER 7

“DO YOU HAVE anything to declare?” the customs man asked me as I shuffled past him with my one old suitcase.

“Yes,” I said, stifling a yawn. “It’s past midnight.”

He consulted his watch. “Seven-fifteen, ma’am.”

“Not according to my body,” I told him wearily. Easy for him to proclaim this the shank of the evening. He hadn’t climbed aboard a plane in Scotland at two in the afternoon and winged his way across the Atlantic in a seat the size of a panty-hose egg to arrive hot and thirsty ten hours later, in what my body damn well knows is the middle of the night, only to have twenty minutes to hustle through customs to make my flight connection: an airborne Dixie Cup bound for sleepy little Danville. Things had been pretty peaceful in rural Virginia since the Late Unpleasantness in 1865, but my family seemed determined to make up for more than a century of uneventfulness.

I ignored the whole situation for as long as I could. When Mother wrote me a cheery little letter bomb announcing that she and my father were thinking of “going their separate ways” (after nearly thirty years!), I hoped for the best, but decided that I should stay out of it, assuming that they could resolve their differences on their own. Surely, I thought, with a decades-old relationship at stake, they won’t do anything hasty. When I heard from my brother that Dad had a girlfriend (who is probably named Bambi, and whose IQ probably equals her bust size), I will admit that I became somewhat more concerned about the situation, but I coped. (No matter what my husband says, I feel that throwing chairs is an excellent way of channeling stress into physical exertion; the incident had nothing whatever to do with feelings of rage or frustration.) Which reminds me that while I am over here, I must see if the Thomasville Gallery is having anything in the way of a sale on new dining room chairs. Perhaps in oak, which has a reputation for being a very sturdy wood. Cameron can say what he likes, but throwing things is a better reaction to stress than eating, which is temporarily comforting, but only creates more stress in the long run, when one begins to break chairs simply by sitting in them.

Despite the strain I remained firm in my resolve to stay out of the family crisis. Even Bambi or whatever her name is could not induce me to cross the Atlantic, leaving home and husband, though. Least said, soonest mended, they say. But I did check to make sure that my passport was up-to-date and that my luggage tags had the correct address in Edinburgh. Just as well that I did, because yesterday my brother contacted me with the news that he is suspected of mass murder and accused of stealing a fortune. That was too much.

I decided that I’d better fly home before my demented relatives decided to take over an air force base and start the War all over again. Even Cameron had to admit that things seemed out of hand with the stateside branch of the family; so he didn’t try to talk me out of going. But he couldn’t take time off to come with me. I suppose it’s just as well that I haven’t yet found a job in Scotland; there was no telling how long I was going to have to stay in Virginia. With a funeral, you just attend, settle matters concerning the estate if you must, and then return to your regular life, but no one in my family had the decorum to die. I suppose I’ll feel very guilty for making that wisecrack, but I’m angry now-and my family is being particularly exasperating. They’re probably doing this just to drive me crazy and get the inheritance.

I took the new scandalous royal biography with me on the plane for reading matter. It was comforting to be reminded that no family is immune from turmoil, but even the tale of a princess’s drinking problem couldn’t hold my attention. I kept thinking of Aunt Amanda’s reaction to my parents’ breakup, assuming that anybody had been fool enough to tell her. “I knew it wouldn’t last,” she’d sniff. “They eloped.”

And then I’d think about poor old Bill, who seemed to have drifted into law school because a college degree wasn’t enough anymore for ambitious middle-class parents. It wasn’t enough for the modern job market, either. Fast-food restaurant managers had college degrees these days; everybody else needed an extra piece of paper to move upward.

I remember my brother, Bill, as a towheaded kid captivated by magic acts on television. He’d use his allowance to buy simple tricks, and then he’d inflict them on the family and the Scout troop at the slightest lull in conversation. Our enthusiasm hadn’t been exactly unbounded, and after a few years of saying, “Pick a card, any card,” to the backs of a stampeding audience, he gave it up and retreated into his schoolwork. He’d graduated Phi Beta Kappa from William and Mary, and had been accepted into law school without much difficulty. But I never saw him talk about law school with anything like the glow he used to have for his hokey magic tricks. Sometimes I wondered if his interminable stay in law school had been a postponement of his inevitable humdrum fate. That made me sad. For all the teasing I go through for my career (grave-robbing, as my cousin Geoffrey puts it), I genuinely enjoyed forensic anthropology, solving death’s little puzzles based on the clues left behind in the human body. I wished that I could be sure that Bill was as happy in his expensively acquired profession.

One thing I was sure of, though: Bill MacPherson was not a crook. And there was absolutely no way that he could be a murderer. Even as a kid, he’d been a halfhearted squabbler, generally losing the last piece of cake or the new toy to me not because he was unselfish, but because he didn’t really care enough to make a fuss about things. I couldn’t imagine him beset with any of the aggressive sins, like avarice or larceny. I could, however, envision his being careless in detail or overly trusting of other people (when we were kids, he used to let me divide up the ice cream), but there is no way that my brother could have done what he stands accused of. No way.

“Give me something with an air bag,” I told the car-rental people at the Danville airport. I’d been driving in Scotland for so long that I didn’t trust myself to make an uneventful transition back to the right side of the road, especially when I had so many other things to worry about.

Bill would have picked me up at the airport, but I didn’t want to be dependent on him for transportation. I didn’t know Danville very well, but a city map came with the car, and Danville isn’t large enough to get lost in. It’s the kind of place where people read the newspaper to see who has been caught. I knew that my brother’s office and his apartment were in the same downtown building, so the chances of finding him at this hour seemed excellent. I wasn’t ready to go to my parents’ house yet. The thought gave me chills.

I crossed the Dan River on the old bridge that led downtown and found a parking place just outside the law office building. The street was deserted and the sky had a haze of reflected light from the city, hiding the stars. I wondered if I should have picked up a pizza on my way in. When he’s worried, Bill forgets to eat. I never have that problem.

I hurried up the stairs, knowing that if I stopped to think about what to say, I might turn around and run. The door to the office was closed, but the light was on. I looked at the frosted glass, emblazoned with the names MacPherson and Hill, wishing I’d come to visit in time to be proud of his achievement.

He was sitting in his office, head in his hands, oblivious to the sound of the door opening and my footsteps in the outer office. I slipped in quietly and sat down in the chair beside his desk. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” I said softly. “Thought I’d stop in.”

Bill looked up and tried to muster a smile, but he looked like a tired old horse. “Hello, Elizabeth. If you’ve come to take me home with you, don’t bother. I think we have an extradition agreement with Scotland.”

“How about Beirut?” I said, smiling back. “It would seem peaceful after your experiences here. Anyhow, I didn’t come to help you escape, but I could buy you dinner. Then we could talk about getting you a lawyer.”

Bill shrugged. “I am a lawyer. And I don’t think much of my case. As for dinner, I don’t seem to be hungry these days, either.”

“Is it as serious as you made it sound in your telegram? I mean, has anything changed?”

“No. The old ladies are gone, the money is still missing, and the Commonwealth of Virginia is still insisting that they had issued an order of eminent domain, claiming the property for the state. That about covers it, I think. Suspicion of murder, embezzlement, fraud. At least it hasn’t hit the papers yet. They’ve given me a couple of days to try to straighten things out-probably because I’m a lawyer. Even a lowly one apparently has some rank. But when the case goes to the grand jury, they’ll go public, and then I’m finished.”

I glanced around his Goodwill-furnished office and saw what looked to be a stuffed groundhog in a black robe standing on a small table. “Have you thought about pleading insanity?” I asked.

Bill made a face at me. “Since when do you object to having dead things around the office?”

“I draw the line at dressing them up,” I told him. “He is kind of cute, though.” I was thinking how much fun it would be to hide him in Cousin Geoffrey’s bed.

“His name is Flea Bailey,” said Bill. “You can take care of him when I go to the slammer.”

“That won’t happen. Thanks to our late great-aunt Augusta, I have money, remember? We’ll hire you the best lawyer in the state.”

Bill shook his head. “That’s just what I don’t want. Don’t you see? If any of the real lawyers around here find out how badly I’ve screwed up, I’ll never get into a decent firm! My only hope is to get out of this on my own before anybody finds out.”

I had never seen him this depressed. Not even when he was failing calculus. “What does your law partner say about all this?” I asked.

“I didn’t tell her,” he sighed. “She’s out of town, defending her first client in a murder trial. She doesn’t need to be worrying about me. I keep hoping I’ll get it straightened out before it’s necessary to tell her.”

“I was hoping to meet her,” I said. Intelligent women in the vicinity of my brother are a novelty. “Well, maybe later. I plan to be around for a while. I want to hear exactly what happened with this real estate transaction that went sour. But could you tell me on the way to a restaurant?”

By the time he finished the story of the Confederate women in all its intricate and puzzling detail, I was pouring Sweet’n Low into my fourth glass of iced tea. I missed iced tea in Scotland. I missed ice. Now, though, I was barely tasting the tea, so engrossed had I been in my brother’s account of the house sale. He had eaten most of a cheeseburger, and now he was pushing French fries around on his plate while he described the visit from John Huff and the assistant state director of art and antiquities.

“I thought I was doing those old dears a favor,” he mumbled.

“You would,” I told him. “It’s all that vestigial Southern chivalry in your veins. You think that old ladies are sweet and helpless, and that you are doing them a kindness by offering them the assistance of your competent little old self.”

“But why would they want to get me in trouble?” moaned Bill. “They were so nice. Look, one of them even gave me a Confederate penny as a souvenir of my first case.” He pulled the shiny copper coin out of his pocket and held it up so that I could see.

“Maybe that’s what they thought your services were worth,” I said, and instantly regretted it, because Bill got that hurt look that always used to make me give him back the last cookie. “I’m sorry I said that,” I mumbled.

“I tried to do it right,” he said sadly. “And I didn’t do anything to make them mad at me. I’m too insignificant to have enemies.”

“I expect you are, Bill. I don’t think you were the target at all. I think they just needed a lawyer. If you’ll pardon my saying so, they probably wanted the dumbest lawyer they could find.”

Bill groaned. “They chose well. Fresh out of law school, wet behind the ears. I was the perfect fool all right. I suppose the real scam was selling the house before the state could evict them?”

“That seems likely.” I yawned again. Three A.M. Edinburgh time.

Bill glanced at his watch. “You must be comatose by now, kid. Where are you staying? With Mom?”

“Not if I can help it,” I said quickly. “How are things going with them, anyway?”

“If I had time to worry about them, I would. They won’t talk to each other, and neither of them seems anxious to confide in me, either. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

“Do they know about the trouble you’re in?”

He shook his head. “They’re not too much fun to have around right now, so I thought I’d try to get out of it on my own. Otherwise there might be a reverse custody battle of sorts: both of them fighting to see who has to claim me.”

“But you told me about it.”

“Oh, you,” said my brother. “What do you care? Trouble is your middle name. I thought you might actually enjoy it.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, finishing off the last of my tea. “But I don’t intend to sit by and watch it happen. I think I’ll find the old ladies and see what they have to say.”

“I’ve tried,” said Bill. “They aren’t in the retirement community they said they were going to. I can’t find them anywhere.”

“How long have we got?”

“Before the grand jury? About ten days.”

“I’ll find them,” I told him. I should have commended Bill on his customary competence and said I’d just search for the old ladies because I had so much free time and because I might get lucky; but I was too jet-lagged for conversational acrobatics. Southern women spend a lifetime playing down their abilities as a form of politeness. I’ve done it all my life, but I didn’t have time for charades at that moment. I had only ten days to find eight old ladies who were also Southern and-Bill’s opinion notwithstanding-probably smarter than I was.

A. P. Hill took another sip of cold coffee, and looked appraisingly at her client. He was paler now, after a few weeks in prison, but his white T-shirt still bulged with pasty fat. Apparently, he hadn’t found jail food inedible, but the fare wasn’t doing much for his health. His shaggy hair was now greasy and in need of cutting, and his chin was blue with beard stubble. Powell wished he looked more appealing; juries had qualms about convicting good-looking people. They’d put Tug Mosier away without batting an eye. He looked like the villain on a TV movie of the week.

“Are you sure you want to do this, Tug?”

He blinked at her as though it were a trick question. She was the first authority figure who had ever been on his side, and he couldn’t quite separate her from the bullying schoolteachers and pitiless bureaucrats who peopled his past. Sometimes he thought he might trust her, but even if she meant well, she might be too innocent and powerless to do him any good against the System. “Well, I reckon I ought to find out for sure one way or the other.” He hesitated. “But if it’s bad-what we find out-can we just keep it to ourselves?”

“If it’s bad, neither you nor Dr. Timmons will be called upon to testify,” Powell promised him. “But in case it isn’t, we’re going to make a tape of the session. Okay?”

“I guess y’all know best,” he said, shifting his manacled hands and giving them a wary smile. Tug Mosier didn’t trust anybody who’d admit to having gone to college. In the fat cats’ world he was a barn rat, and it was always open season.

Dr. Timmons ushered the uniformed guard to the door of the treatment room. “You’ll have to wait outside,” he said. “The room isn’t soundproof. You won’t be able to hear the session, but if there’s any disturbance, it will come through the walls, and you may interrupt. Don’t expect any trouble, though. I’m going to sedate him right away.”

The guard looked suspiciously at Tug Mosier’s hulking form. “I’m right outside,” he said.

They had borrowed a room at the county hospital, and set up an evening session so as not to interfere with the normal routine of the clinic. It was a small windowless room, containing only a bare metal desk and three straight-backed metal chairs. On the desk, they had placed Powell Hill’s tape recorder, a yellow legal pad, and Timmons’s medical supplies. Dr. Timmons made his preparations, talking in a low reassuring voice to the manacled patient. “This won’t hurt, Mr. Mosier. It may not even work. But if it does, you’ll remember the night in question as if it were a movie that you were watching on television. Do you understand?”

Tug Mosier shrugged. “I know how to watch televsion, if that’s what you mean, doc.”

“That’s about all there is to it. When I put you under, you watch that movie screen in your head, and when I ask you to, you describe for us the things that you see taking place. It’s easy. Can you do that?”

“I reckon.” People had been telling Tug Mosier how easy things were all his life. Making passing grades, holding down a job, staying sober. But nothing came easy to him.

Timmons filled the hypodermic needle and held it up for his inspection. “Seven and a half grains of sodium amytal,” he said. “This ought to help you to remember. You’ll feel the pinprick of the needle, but that’s all. Are you ready?”

Tug Mosier glanced at his attorney, who nodded almost imperceptibly. He held out his arm. “Go on and stick me, then.”

While they waited for the drug to take effect, Powell Hill thought about the forthcoming trial. She wondered if she had insisted on this psychological evaluation for Tug Mosier’s sake, or for her own peace of mind. She was just beginning her career in law. She still wanted to know if things were true or false. Later, she’d heard, it all turned into a complex chess game. And only the skill of the moves mattered any longer.

“He’s ready,” said Timmons softly.

Tug Mosier seemed awake, but more subdued than before. He sat slack-jawed in his steel-frame chair, staring at the lime-green wall with a furrowed expression of concentration.

“Can you hear me, Tug?”

“Yeah.” The reply was a voiceless whisper.

“We’re going back to the last time you saw Misti. I want you to watch yourself on that wall there. That’s where the movie’s showing. Do you see yourself out drinking with the boys?”

“Yeah.”

“You see it happening, Tug, but you won’t feel it this time. You’re not going to get high just from watching, understand?”

Tug’s head jerked in what might have been a yes. He was still staring at the lime-colored wall, almost oblivious to their presence.

“Tell me when you see yourself leaving the party, Tug. Can you fast-forward to that part now?”

“Okay. Getting my jacket on. Heading for the door.”

“You’re drunk, though, in the movie, aren’t you? Not walking very well?”

“S’right.”

“Does the gang say goodbye to you?”

“Naw. Too busy partying. Nobody gives a-”

“Does anybody go with you? Maybe you needed some help getting home.”

“Yeah. Somebody’s holding on to me.”

Timmons and Powell Hill looked at each other. After a moment of silence, the doctor went on in a carefully offhand tone. “Can you see who it is, Tug?”

“Yeah. Red. Red Dowdy?”

Powell Hill scribbled the name on the note pad and waited with pencil poised for her client to continue. “Get a description,” she mouthed silently to Timmons.

“What does Red Dowdy look like, Tug?” asked Timmons with casual interest.

“Tall drink of water. Stringy red hair. Gap-toothed. Boots.”

“And have you reached your car yet, Tug?”

“Yeah. Sitting in it. Head’s spinning too much to drive.”

“Did Dowdy get in the car, too?”

“He’s pushing me over. Thinks he can drive better.”

“Do you let him?”

“Yeah. Too dizzy to argue.”

“What happens next, Tug?”

“He’s shaking me. We’re in the driveway of the house.”

“Your house? The place where Misti Lynn is waiting?”

“Yeah. He’s pushing me out of the car. I feel like I’m gonna be sick.”

“But you go inside. Does Red go in with you?”

Tug Mosier’s eyes widened as he stared at the pale green wall, watching Misti Lynn Hale die again.

John Huff knew that soon he would have to return to his business up north, but before he left, he intended to have matters well under way for a prosecution in the case of his house purchase. He didn’t suppose that MacPherson would get anything really satisfying, like the death penalty, even in a blood-and-guts state like Virginia. Even so, Huff was determined to see that the local authorities prosecuted the matter to the fullest possible extent. No one made a fool of John Huff and escaped unscathed.

He was in the back parlor of the Home for Confederate Women, still fully clothed although it was well past midnight. A full moon shone through the uncurtained window, giving the room an air of romance, but Huff cared nothing for such sentimental twaddle. His attention was centered on the built-in oak bookshelf that stretched from floor to ceiling on either side of the marble fireplace. As he had stipulated, the old ladies had left behind the books-and a sorry lot they generally were, too. He didn’t suppose he could get a quarter apiece for most of them at a yard sale. They were a saccharine collection of book-club novels and cheap editions of second-rate poets and historians. Still, he had to examine all of them carefully. He didn’t have much time. Soon the state might succeed in getting its house back and he would be forced to leave. But the process would take a little time.

Meanwhile, he had bullied Custis Byrd and his bureaucracy into letting him stay on in the mansion until matters were resolved. Another title search had been initiated immediately after the MacPherson fiasco came to light, and sure enough, there had been no paperwork filed with the deed indicating that the state intended to claim the house. Of course, that didn’t let MacPherson off the hook. In fact it got him in deeper, because Byrd was swearing up and down that the kid lawyer had destroyed the evidence of the state’s claim. But Huff was quick to point out that he had purchased the house in good faith, and that until the state could prove otherwise, the transaction looked legal. If they wanted the house, they would have to pay him purchase price plus ten percent. Moreover, he said, he intended to stay in his newly purchased house until somebody gave him his money back. He didn’t care who, or how long it took. That sent Byrd flitting away, mumbling to himself about consulting the attorney general, but John Huff didn’t care. He would let Fremont, Shields & Banks take care of that. Not, incidentally, Nathan Kimball, who was a reasonably competent errand boy, but not the legal chain saw Huff required for this sort of contretemps.

For now Huff was marginally content. He had possession of the house, and he intended to take full advantage of the situation, even if it meant getting by on very little sleep. It was nearly two A.M. now and he was still stirring. He had searched most of the house by now, but not as thoroughly as he intended to in the days to come. He even planned to rip out the plaster walls if necessary. Failing that, he’d go over the grounds with a metal detector. If he thought he stood a reasonable chance of getting to keep the house, he would have been considerably more careful about the property, but since the state seemed likely to step in and confiscate it at any moment, he decided that he had nothing to lose by taking drastic measures.

After all, the house had a very interesting and complex history. When the word Danville caught his eye in the newspaper ad, he began to investigate a hunch. Since then he had studied the house’s past in detail. He would have liked an opportunity to take a crowbar to the Summerlin House as well, but that was now a well-guarded local museum, so he had to pin his hopes on the Phillips house and pray that the temporary occupancy of Micajah Clark in April 1865 meant what he thought it did: several million dollars in Confederate gold concealed somewhere on the premises. If he could spirit that out of the state, he didn’t care who ended up with the house itself. If he still wanted to become a Virginia gentleman, he could build a dozen such houses with that kind of booty. John Huff’s hobby was treasure-hunting.