The Reservoir (14 page)

Willie takes the lid off and flips through the letters. There are several from girls whose names he barely knows, if at all. They’re filled with gushings about how sweet and adorable Tommie is and how thoughtful he was to write. One includes a lock of golden hair, bound with red thread. She writes that as soon as she turns eighteen she’s going to get on a train and come right out from Richmond to see him. Another warns him that if he’s writing to other girls he had “better count on losing me forever, for Tommie, I give my heart only to one boy at a time and when I do you’ll know it for sure!” Another, named Georgiana Lee, mentions that he’s a good kisser and she can hardly wait until she sees him again because she has some big news involving a family member. There are easily two dozen letters from five or six different girls. Only two are from Lillie.

They are down near the bottom of the tin, and Willie’s heart skips a beat when he sees them. Perhaps there had been more, and Tommie destroyed them. These two were left or forgotten, or maybe were the only ones she wrote him. The best thing, Willie thinks, would be to take them out and burn them—no one need ever know their contents. It occurs to him that Aunt Jane already knows; maybe she has been reading his mail for years. If so, there’s nothing damning in them.

One letter is postmarked from Manquin, April 6:

Dearest Tommie,

Now I know what it is to be loved now I have a purpose to my life. I have to confess, Tommie dear, that I lied about your brother—I was not with him like that but in a different way which I will explain the next time you come if you want to know. I have prayed almost all night and I have an answer this morning and that is we did not sin because we love each other and do you know as soon as I was sure of this I saw the sun coming up over my windowsill and the whole window lit up like a rainbow and I think it was a promise to me. And you won’t believe this but as I sit here writing in my room the sun through the crab apple tree out my window is making a shadow on my wall that looks like a T it really does … When will you come back?

Love your loving, Lillie

Willie stuffs the letter back into its envelope and crams it deep into his pocket. He can hardly bear opening the next, postmarked February 9 from Millboro’ Springs:

Dear Tommie,

Please forgive my last letter being so short with you its on account of how lonely I do get out here sometimes, though I have made some jolly friends. I don’t know why you would say I should marry that boy who I hardly even know I only mentioned him because we met at church and went walking on the mountain, not alone but with my friend Ella Kinney and another boy. I have to go now because little Mattie is calling for help with her ciphering. I will see you soon,

Love, your Lillie

Strange, Willie thinks, how there is no mention in the more recent letter of anything between them, just “Love, your Lillie.” He folds the letter back up and pockets it. He then takes the tin of letters and returns them to his brother’s trunk. For an hour he carries the letters around with him, wondering who his brother is and what he has done and not done. And when at the end of the hour he still doesn’t know any more than before he found the letters, he goes into the machine shop and strikes a match and lets them burn on the dirt floor. When they are nothing but ashes, he sweeps them out and lets the wind push them toward the pasture.

That night he asks Aunt Jane if she knows of any letters anybody has written to Tommie in the past year that might be important to him. She thinks a minute, then says, “He took to having his letters held at the post office so he could get them faster. He was traveling so much for Mr. Evans, you see. It was easier for him.”

Miss Hillyard, who is looking at her plate, shakes her head. “I don’t see how that made it easier for him,” she says, her tightly bunned hair stretching her skin so that to Willie she is a skull with eyes and a tongue.

“Rosa,” Jane admonishes, “he couldn’t always know when he’d be coming down here or when it would be easier to pick his mail up in King and Queen. So he told Mr. Garland to always hold it for him. What is your point?”

“Oh, I see,” Miss Hillyard says. “My brain’s turned to mush. I think it’s the blood pills Dr. Dixon gave me.” She helps herself to another of Jane’s cheese biscuits and says nothing more about the mail.

It’s the next day that Epps and Birney come out with a search warrant. Epps pushes his way through the house, his thick neck and beetling brow giving him a peremptory look, while Birney smiles and nods, apologetic at the intrusion. Willie gives them the key to Tommie’s trunk. After going through the letters in the little tin they ask if his brother had any other letters. “Not that I know of,” Willie says. “I believe he kept them all in that tin.” They take the letters, as well as Tommie’s two spare steel watch keys, some issues of
Ogelvie’s
and other magazines with dog-eared pages, photographs of Tommie and Lillie, papers with Tommie’s writing, and a penknife. “That’s mine,” Willie tells them. “He shaves his pencils with it.”

“That so?” Epps says curtly. Birney, hands in his pockets, whistles and tries to look unobtrusive. Epps wants to take Jane’s cork-handled fountain pen, but Willie convinces him it has just come from Philadelphia and nobody has used it but she. When they’re finished, Jane gives them a packed lunch and wishes them a safe journey home.

• CHAPTER FOURTEEN •

J
UDGE
H
ILL
, who at forty-three looks and acts sixty, opens the trial, telling the defense he’ll tolerate reasonable delays if they need to hunt down a witness. He pauses to rearrange wisps of hair over a mottled, bald patch, a remnant of his vainer, more ambitious days. The clerk then calls on Tommie to rise. Tommie stands, steadying himself with one hand on the bar. It takes five minutes for the clerk to get through the indictment, after which he says, “What say you? Are you guilty or not guilty of the felony whereof you stand indicted?”

“Not guilty,” says Tommie loudly. He lowers himself into his chair.

Tommie is asked to rise while the jury—half of whom are from out of town, so many locals were biased—is sworn and charged. Then the clerk intones, “Gentlemen of the jury, look upon the prisoner and hearken to his cause. If you find him guilty, you are then further to inquire whether it be murder in the first degree or in the second degree …”

Tommie listens to words that nothing in law school or private practice have prepared him for. Second-degree murder carries up to eighteen years; surely they would find a lesser degree. Voluntary manslaughter, no more than five years. Involuntary manslaughter, no more than twelve months and a fine not exceeding five hundred dollars.

“… If you find him not guilty, say so and no more. So hearken to the evidence.”

If they find him guilty of anything, Tommie decides, it will be voluntary manslaughter—no intention to kill. What keeps nagging him is whether he should break down and tell Crump everything he knows. But would anybody be sympathetic to it? The real problem, of course, is that now it would look as if he were trying to wriggle out—the public would feel justified in thinking him a depraved and despicable creature. If he gives them an opening, they’ll pounce. He cannot count how many times he has lain awake at night, confessing to God, then risen in the morning feeling almost—but not quite—free of his burden.

The first day of witness depositions begins where the story began for the public—at the reservoir. Prosecutor Meredith calls Lysander Meade and asks him to describe his job and what he found on Saturday morning, March 14, at seven o’clock. Very few people know Charles Meredith yet, nor his ambition to run for lieutenant governor in the fall. But a good showing here could make his reputation. In his early thirties, he is short, barrel-chested, and has a pugnacious thrust to his clean-shaven chin.

Even Meade, his own witness, seems intimidated by him at first, but Meredith smoothly recalibrates his demeanor and continues teasing out the facts. Meade, wearing a natty little checked bow tie his wife selected for him and his navy-blue superintendent’s jacket, all buttoned up and showing the double row of buttons, launches into meticulous detail on the dimensions of the reservoir. Meredith guides him toward a recital that shows off Meade’s extensive knowledge, letting Meade’s natural proclivity for numbers seem useful instead of eccentric. That Meade’s eyesight was so bad he was still a drummer boy at eighteen during the war need never arise. Yet when Meredith asks him if he could tell right away that something wasn’t right about the path, Meade blurts out, defensively, as he has done many times over the years, “Well sir, my eyesight isn’t so good, but once I was up close I saw where the walkway was rucked up right smart.” Meredith quickly moves on to what Meade actually saw.

Colonel Aylett for the prosecution has a few follow-up questions. “Mr. Meade, are the reservoir’s surroundings of the sort that would invite a young lady to venture there alone at night?”

“Is that not a leading question?” Crump complains.

“We withdraw it.”

“But you shouldn’t have asked it.”

“Your Honor, I’m bound to frame my questions by my own brains, not those of the defense.”

The crowd murmurs its approval. This is the kind of smart comeback they’re here for, cramming themselves into every available space, one spidery man even climbing atop the stove before being shouted down by a deputy. Colonel Aylett’s roots in King William County, Lillian’s home, are as formidable as his oratorical wizardry. His great-grandfather was Patrick Henry; he fought in twenty-two engagements during the war; he has served numerous terms as a commonwealth’s attorney. And if there is anyone who is a rhetorical match for Crump, it’s Aylett. He has sharp blue eyes that need no correction and silver hair slicked back over his collar. Every inch the country gentleman, he keeps a wide-brimmed hat on his table and he wears a double-breasted coat and an old-fashioned black stock cravat. His goatee comes to a point and his twisted white mustache frames a polished set of teeth that flash like a wild beast when he talks.

On the cross-examination, Evans says, “You say your vision is imperfect, Mr. Meade. How far can you see, exactly, with your glasses?”

Meade, who has been on the witness stand for forty-five minutes, thinks, then says, “Ninety-five million miles. They say that’s how far the sun is.” The court erupts in laughter, and Meade enjoys his brief celebrity.

Evans then asks Meade in which direction the reservoir flows. Meade has clearly not thought about the reservoir flowing at all. “I imagine what drift there is is toward the outflow pipe, to the east.”

“So something that entered that side of the reservoir wouldn’t go very far, would it?”

“No, sir,” Meade says, a little confused. Tommie smiles at how easily Evans has erased the picture the prosecution is trying to paint of a body being thrown over the fence on the side nearest the walkway. If the footprints indicate a struggle, and the bruises a mortal blow, then the murderer would naturally carry or drag her the shortest possible distance; carrying her all the way from the path down and around to the south side of the reservoir would make no sense.

Aylett whispers something to Meredith, then takes to his feet. “That gate in the picket fence,” he says on redirect, “was it there for the public to use?”

“No,” Meade says, “it was there so workers could get to a water pipe.”

“Would it be difficult to find that gate in the dark if you didn’t know where to look?”

“I imagine it would be. Besides which, I kept it locked.”

Tommie imperceptibly shakes his head at this.

“Are the palings sharp?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Now, Mr. Meade,” Aylett says, “Would a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy have a hard time climbing over a fence like that, nine inches shorter than she?”

“We object!” Mr. Crump shouts.

“Very well, we’ll withdraw the question.”

“But you put a question and then withdraw it,” Crump says. “I ask the court to rule on that type of question, so they won’t be asked again. It’s obviously an improper question.”

“I thought I could please the defense by withdrawing the question. I certainly want Your Honor’s views, but not in advance of any questions I might put.”

Judge Hill nods, lips drawn into a tight smile—he knows Crump and Aylett quite well, and all their tricks. But though they are legends with Confederate honors trailing their names like sacred robes, he is determined to manage this trial in the proper way. The publicity it is receiving all the way from Charleston to New York worries him, and he will not let the city his father died defending, the city of Chief Justice John Marshall, be dragged in the mud in the dawn of its return to life. “The court will not rule on questions before they’re put,” he says.

Mr. Lucas is on the stand for only about fifteen minutes. He wears an ill-fitting gray suit, thin at the cuffs, with pants that don’t reach his shoes. He is so worried about the key that he nearly forgets to take a look at the prisoner, yet today Meredith mainly wants to know about the footprints on the embankment walkway. “Yessir,” Lucas says, “I took the girl’s shoe up to Mr. Wren. It fit in some of the prints pretty well.”

“But not the others?”

“No, sir.”

“Would you say that the others were made by a man’s shoe?”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Crump thunders. “The witness isn’t a footprint expert, is he?”

“I’ll restate the question,” Meredith says. “Was the other set of prints larger?”

“Yessir, they were.”

Evans then proceeds to grill Lucas about the exact number and size of all the footprints. “So you think there were about ten small footprints in all?”

“Yessir, I’d guess so.”

“Did you count them at the time?”

“Nosir.”

“And the other ones you said were larger. How much larger were they?”

“I couldn’t say, exactly. There were only a few of them, and they weren’t real clear—really just the heels, because they were off more toward the grass.” Lucas looks into the distance, trying to recall the day, and thinking of a girl who has so often since then appeared in his dreams—not the girl from the almshouse, whose face he doubts he would know if she were sitting in the courtroom now. He steals a glance at the prisoner—a young man with a face like a schoolboy—and he briefly wonders where the real killer is, in his imagination a big brute with a sneering pug nose.

“So, you don’t know how many footprints there were, nor their size. Can you tell what kind of shoe made those larger prints?”

“What kind?”

“Well, was it a brogan, a work shoe, a dress shoe, an overshoe, or what?”

“I don’t know.”

“How many people were up on that walkway before you had a look at those footprints?”

“I don’t know exactly. You’d have to ask Dr. Taylor.”

“I intend to, but what would you say?”

“I’d say there was Detective Wren, Dr. Taylor, Mr. Meade, a newspaper man, and I don’t think anybody else.”

“So anybody could’ve made those footprints?”

“I don’t think so, not in that location.”

“But it’s possible?”

“I suppose, yessir, ’tis.”

Evans thanks him for his time and takes his seat between Tommie and Mr. Crump. To Crump he whispers, “Got ’em on the run,” then winks at Tommie.

Judge Hill says, “Witness, you’re dismissed,” but Lucas keeps his seat until the judge says, “Mr. Lucas, please step down.”

Next up is Dr. Taylor, who for more than an hour meticulously details the marks on the victim’s face and head and the results of the autopsy. Evans wants to know if it’s possible she could have come by the marks after entering the water. Dr. Taylor considers for a moment, then says simply, “Yes, it’s possible.”

“I see,” says Evans, “and do you remember whether the victim was face up the entire time she was being removed from the water?”

“I believe she was.” Dr. Taylor, dressed in black and clutching an umbrella, takes his time with each answer. He’s proud of his reputation and confident of his findings, without which none of them would be here, and he wants to show that he is the judicious man of science he is known as.

“But you’re not a hundred percent sure?”

“I’m ninety-five percent sure,” Taylor says, his knowing smile undercut by his walleyed gaze.

“Thank you, Dr. Taylor, and you told the police court that you first believed that Miss Madison had killed herself. Why did you believe that?”

“That was not a medical opinion, just an individual opinion. I’m not an expert in murder or suicide.”

Evans waits for the nervous laughter to die to absolute silence. “What inclined you to that opinion?”

“For one thing, as I said then, the articles scattered about looked like they could possibly have been farewell tokens. Others viewed it differently.”

“I see, and what else?”

“Her advanced stage of pregnancy led me to believe she might be emotionally inclined toward suicide.”

Meredith, without getting up, then asks Taylor if his opinion of two months ago has changed.

“Yes, it has,” Taylor answers.

A recess is called, and Tommie turns to his brother, sitting directly behind him. They shake hands for the third time that morning, Willie seeming reluctant to let go; Aunt Jane, sitting beside Willie, beams encouragement, but the morning appears to have been more than her constitution can handle. Willie helps fan her, trying to stir the close air. “Daddy’ll be up tomorrow or the day after,” he says. “But maybe it’ll be over by then and we’ll all be on the way home.”

“Can I have roast turkey and oyster pie for my homecoming?” Tommie asks, hoping to lighten everyone’s spirits, his own included. He tries not to notice the eyes flickering toward him and away, the people trying to size up his character and his history and his very soul in quick glances. He wants to act calm and natural, but it’s the most difficult performance of his life.

“You can have whatever you like,” Willie says.

On his next visit to Manquin, Tommie and Lillie went out walking instead of to the meadow. It was Tommie’s suggestion, and Lillie seemed accepting, if a little hurt. He wanted her, and now that they had crossed a threshold he thought of her in a way as his. Yet he knew he was not being fair to her—either propose or leave her alone, he told himself. But he could not make up his mind to do either. As though reading his mind, she said, “You haven’t broken with Nolie, have you?”

“We talked about it.”

“What did you say?”