Sharyn Mccrumb_Elizabeth MacPherson_07 (24 page)

He pressed his face close to a sheet of writing paper and began to spell out the words:
Dear Tom Bridgeford—I take pen in hand to write you this missive
…

T
HE FASTEST WAY
to Georgia is Interstate 95, which is an extremely boring road—a more or less straight line of asphalt running down the coastal plain, hemmed in by an endless stretch of pine barrens and sandy soil. There is nothing in the way of scenery to keep you alert unless your reading taste runs to garish billboards or lists of fast-food joints at forthcoming exit ramps. I figured that the drive from southeast Virginia to southeast Georgia would be six hours of unbroken monotony, but much as I dreaded it, I will admit that there are routes I am even more reluctant to travel, roads that are anything but boring. These roads are mostly north of Danville.

I have an old school friend who lives in western Maryland, and the drive up I-81 to her house is always an anxious journey for me. To get to Frederick, I must pass through the heartland of the War. First comes Lexington, where Stonewall Jackson taught artillery at Virginia Military
Institute before he went forth in 1861 to practice it. An hour or so north is New Market, where the young boys of VMI still in their school uniforms went up against the Union Army and were butchered. Just seeing the road sign
NEW MARKET
makes me uneasy, and I picture schoolboys dying in the long grass of the valley. Farther up are exits for Charles Town, West Virginia, which means horse racing to most people nowadays, but to me, it conjures up an image of John Brown, waiting for the rope to be placed around his neck and predicting the coming war with his dying words. I-81 is a modern four-lane highway, but it follows the old route along the valley, where the armies traveled under Sheridan and Jackson, and I feel their presence, even over the roar of the eighteen-wheelers whizzing past me.

Near the Maryland border I cross Antietam Creek, and the chills start.
Antietam
…  I know that there are streets in Maryland named that now, probably grade schools and dry cleaners even. But to me Antietam is bodies piled in a roadway, one on top of the other, making a mound twelve feet high, stretching on and on through the dust of that winding road. It is the stench of powder and blood and death that can't still linger after a hundred years and more, but still I smell it.

They are just words on road signs, that's all, I tell myself. And between Norfolk and Richmond,
on I-64, is an exit sign for Cold Harbor.
Cold Harbor
…  The swampy terrain made it almost impossible to attack the well-entrenched Confederate Army. To charge in such a marsh against the enemy's guns was suicide, and the Union soldiers knew it. Cold Harbor. On the shirts of their uniforms, they pinned pieces of paper bearing their names and their hometowns. That way when their bodies were pulled out of the swamp, they could be sent home for burial. One soldier wrote:
June 3, 1864. I was killed.

I go out of my way not to drive past Cold Harbor.

In the South we haven't really forgotten the War. Many of us knew people who knew people who fought in it. It hasn't quite passed into history yet. It's still more feelings than facts, and likely to remain so for a good while. I know this because I've been with my Scottish husband to an older battlefield—Culloden Moor, west of Inverness—and watched his face grow pale and solemn as he looked at the field where
his
kinsmen died. On that field, the Scots met death, defeat, and the end of their country as an independent nation. That was 1746, and it still stirs them, so I figure we have a ways to go before the emotion fades away, before words like
Antietam
and
Cold Harbor
pass without raising chills and dark memories.

I hadn't thought about the War in a long time.
It was Bill and his damned Confederate ladies who brought it all back. Even on I-95, where the most ominous sign is an ad for Gatorland, the gray ghosts rode along, making me remember them. In Virginia, the Civil War isn't something you learn in school; it's a Presence. Always there. I can remember an ancient great-aunt telling Bill and me about our great-great-grandfather David MacPherson, a sixteen-year-old private in the 68th Infantry under General Bragg. In 1865 the 68th had marched from Virginia to Fort Fisher in the snow, he'd told her. They had no shoes by that time, just shreds of leather or rags wrapped around cracked and callused feet. It was winter and they followed the railroad tracks south. They left bloody footprints in the snow.

That's the war to me: a starving sixteen-year-old leaving footprints in the snow in his own blood. And the women I was tracking were the daughters of those young soldiers—the last link with them. So what was I supposed to do? Coax those old ladies into a nursing home so the state could take their house?

I wished there was something to look at on I-95 besides a million damned pine trees. I didn't want to have to think anymore.

   A month in a county jail had not improved Tug Mosier in any way. The lack of sunlight and starchy jail food had made him even paler and
more flabby. His hair shone with grease, and a stubble of beard completed a look that would have made a jury convict him on general principles. He looked guilty of
something.
A. P. Hill managed to smile at her scruffy client, hoping that she looked more confident than she felt. At least she had a shred of a defense now.

“How's it going?” she asked.

“I hate being cooped up,” said Tug. “Specially in summertime. And I sure as hell could use a drink.”

“I can't help you there, but I do have some news about your case. First of all, I just had a meeting with the district attorney. He has offered you a deal, which is really beside the point because I have a new lead that may win this case for us.”

“The D.A. is talking a deal?” The scowl left Tug's face and he leaned forward with the first sign of genuine interest he had shown since she arrived.

“Yes. He wants you to plead guilty to second-degree murder. He says he'll ask for a ten-year sentence.”

“Yeah, but you don't serve all the time they give you.”

“Well, you could, of course, if you tried to escape or didn't behave. But usually a prison term is about a quarter of the sentence. Say two and a half years. That's a long time to be behind bars, I'm sure. But listen: I have great news. I
had a forensic expert study the autopsy report on Misti and she came up with a wonderful piece of evidence to help our case.”

Powell's voice bubbled with enthusiasm as she explained Elizabeth's theory about the absence of petechial hemorrhaging in Misti Hale. She had to repeat the part about low blood pressure—and still Tug looked unimpressed. “You see,” she said triumphantly, “if she died of shock, you didn't kill her intentionally!”

Tug Mosier frowned and rubbed his stubble of beard. “You think a Patrick County jury is going to follow that?” he asked.

“I'll call in a medical expert,” A.P. assured him. “We'll go over the whole process. Maybe even have a chart to help the jurors focus on the technical part.”

“But if we do that, the district attorney won't be going for second degree, will he? He'll try to convict me of first-degree homicide. Maybe capital murder. They fry people in this state, you know.”

“We'd argue that Misti's death was accidental.”

“That's just it,” said Tug sadly. “We'd argue. But you can lose an argument. You can't lose a negotiated deal. I don't want to bet my life that this jury will understand a word you're saying. I didn't, much.”

A.P. looked down at her briefcase full of notes, the result of hours of work researching
the case. Then she looked at Tug Mosier, stone-faced and flabby, with the stirrings of fear in his eyes. “You want to plead guilty, then?” she asked. “Accept the D.A.'s offer?”

“I reckon so,” said Tug. “It seems the best way. I can do two and a half years, no sweat. I got friends inside. And—no offense, ma'am—but this is pretty damn near your first case. I'm not anxious to risk my life on the skills of a baby lawyer. Really: no offense.”

“None taken,” murmured A. P. Hill. “I'll go back and tell Mr. Hazelit that we'll accept his offer.”

Her client settled back in his straight wooden chair with a happy smile. “I sure am glad you're taking this so well, ma'am. I do hate a woman that argues and nags at a fellow. Misti was always a one for that. She used to bitch and moan till I'd itch to slam her through a wall. Anything to shut up that mouth of hers.”

A. P. Hill studied Tug Mosier's close-set blue eyes and his expressionless face as he reminisced about his dead lover without a trace of sorrow or regret. “You did it, didn't you?” she whispered.

“Yeah. Reckon I can own up now.”

“But why did you agree to the regression technique?”

“Well, I don't really believe in hypnosis and all,” said Tug. “Figured if you're strong enough, you can fight it. I thought I'd say I didn't do it
and then the doc would testify that I was innocent. Didn't work like that. It scared hell out of me when I came to and you said I'd been talking about Red Dowdy.”

“Why? He was there, wasn't he?”

“Yeah. He saw the whole thing. The next day he told me what I did—but I didn't believe him. I had sorta forgot about her being in the trunk.”

“But maybe he's lying!” said A.P. eagerly. “Red would hardly admit to you that
he
had committed murder.”

“Why not? He's always been straight with me before, about owning up to things. When we robbed that hiker at Hanging Rock, he—” Tug saw her eyes widen. He smiled a little and looked away. “Don't reckon you want to hear about that, ma'am.”

She shivered, pondering how the case might have gone in court. She saw herself grandstanding in her best baby-lawyer tradition. Then she envisioned the slow-talking old D.A. getting up in his shiny blue suit and blowing her away without so much as raising his voice. “So there was a witness who could have testified that you were guilty. Do
you
remember what happened?”

He frowned with the effort of concentration. “I sort of remember her yelling and me trying to make her quit. But it was no more than second degree, honest. I just felt like shutting her up, and I was too drunk to care about the consequences.
So if I can cut a deal for second degree, I'll take it.”

“I'll go tell the district attorney,” whispered A. P. Hill, fighting an impulse to run from the room.

“Yeah, tell him it's a deal,” said Tug Mosier. “I can do two and a half, Miz Hill. Misti was worth that.”

   Jekyll Island is now attached to the mainland of Georgia by an umbilical cord of highway, a manmade isthmus constructed of dirt dredged from the adjoining sound. I didn't think the old ladies would be too hard to find. The island is only a couple of miles long and less than a mile wide. A tollbooth at the end of the ribbon of road charges a small fee for every car coming onto Jekyll.

I got there about ten in the morning after spending a restless night in Savannah. I called Bill to make sure he hadn't been taken into custody—or jumped off a bridge. He sounded despondent (which showed a good grasp of reality, I thought), but at least things weren't any worse than when I left. I told Bill to give me a couple of days to straighten things out. I also asked him to invite our parents to dinner at his apartment on Saturday night. I didn't know whether we would be able to straighten
them
out, but I intended to try. I needed Bill for moral support—and
to pitch in with whatever persuasive skills he had managed to glean from law school.

The matter at hand depended on luck—after all, the old ladies might not be on this island at all—but beyond that I didn't foresee too many difficulties. Southern charm and grad student persistence ought to get me through this on my own. At the tollbooth I asked the attendant if he remembered a car full of elderly ladies coming on to the island. He said that he'd be hard-pressed to remember anything
else.
Apparently the temperate south Georgia islands are a great favorite of the over-sixty set.

Trying not to envision a house-to-house inquiry, I drove on, taking the road that encircles the island and getting the general lay of the land. The business district—one row of shops and a post office—was easy enough to find. I decided to complete the circuit of the island and then to center my search on this hundred yards of island. A postmaster could tell me if a new post office box had been rented; the Realtor would know if a gaggle of old ladies had been house hunting; and sooner or later they would have to turn up at the little grocery store or the restaurant across the road. I had one advantage, that of surprise. They didn't know that anyone had come looking for them, although I was certain that they were shrewd enough to be cautious anyway. I would be, if I were absconding with more than a million dollars.