“There’s one other thing,” Libby said. “I’ve seen the picture.”
This was a stunning announcement, which she had saved for the last, but she gave it to us with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Poor Barney Stuyvessant had a miserable jerk for a brother-in-law and then had his life cut short to boot. He might have been an important early photographer, but he went into the Confederate Army in 1861 and was killed at Bull Run in July that year. His sister apparently had possession of his records, papers, letters, and books as well as his original glass plates. She had believed in him all her life, but she died in childbirth in 1862, and Kelleher got rid of all that stuff.
“I don’t know what happened to it in the years after the war. Sometime in the 1960s it surfaced in a North Charleston junkshop. Rulon heard about it and went to see it. The man only wanted five hundred for everything: my God, those glass plates alone were a steal at that price, but Rulon was one of those maddening people who never paid the asking price for anything. He certainly could afford it, but he just had to dicker and the fellow got offended. What happened next depends on what you want to believe. Rulon either walked or was thrown out and had second thoughts almost at once. But he had a huge ego, he hated to admit he’d been wrong, and by the time he got back there two weeks later, the junkman had sold it to someone else. And was just delighted to tell him about it.”
“Who bought it?”
“A fellow named Orrin Wilcox, who was traveling through town. He was a…” She looked at Luke. “What was it he called himself? A booksmith, a booksomething, I can’t remember.”
“A bookscout,” I said.
“That’s it. A junkman by another name: someone who deals primarily in books but knows about letters and photographs as well. An eccentric man.”
“Many of them are.”
“By then I was determined to follow it to the end. I tracked him to Charlotte, where he has the most incredibly cluttered bookstore I have ever seen. It wasn’t even a bookstore in the normal sense of the word: it was like a cave of books that went back and back through I don’t know how many rooms, all so crowded with stuff that you could barely move. You got the feeling if you pulled one book out the whole building would tumble down. No place for a claustrophobic. But I went up there and saw this stuff. I had some notion that I was on the verge of a major discovery. Maybe I was, but we’ll never know that now, will we?”
“What happened?”
“I scraped together some money and I left Luke here to mind the store, then I caught a bus for North Carolina. I found Mr. Wilcox with no trouble at all. He was a gnarled little man, very old, very crotchety, so cantankerous I didn’t know what might set him off. But he let me in and for a while we got on reasonably well. I thought I was playing it so cool, but when we got down to brass tacks I got a bit spooked. I asked if he still had the Barney Stuyvessant archive and he said, ‘Whaddaya think I did with it, dearie, threw it out with the blinkin’ trash?‘ I told him I was looking for a picture I had heard might be in there, just a street scene with two men in it, and right away he said, ’Charlie ‘n’ Dick.‘
“I couldn’t believe it. I felt my heart turn over. I said, ‘Oh yes!’ and he got this evil grin on his face and said I should follow him. Back we went into the cave, all the way into a far back room. It was just like the rest of the place—oh, Janeway, you have no idea.”
“Actually, I do.”
“Well, there the stuff was—boxes and boxes of glass plates. I guess he’d long ago sold off the books but the plates were all there, piled in wooden boxes, one on top of another. He found the one I wanted right away. The original label was still on it—Barney had marked each one with a piece of adhesive or some kind of old tape and it was identified in his own hand. The writing said, Charlie and Dick on East Bay. He had taken down only their first names and that’s the title he had given it. The date on it was still legible, May something, 1860. Old Wilcox held it up to the lightbulb and said, ‘That look like what you want?’ And I came a hell of a lot closer than I wanted to come, we stood side by side with our arms almost touching, and I looked up at the image and there they were, in negative, Charlie and Dick, and even on the negative I could make out those shadows on Burton’s cheeks, and behind them was the Exchange Building. I’d know that anywhere, in positive, negative, or CinemaScope. And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ and I tried to keep my heartbeat from knocking us both down, but when I looked in his face he had a grin that was almost cadaverous. I could see his skull right through the skin, and he grinned and said, ‘Bet you’d like a picture of that, wouldn’t you, honey?’ I said, ‘I’d be happy to pay you for one,’ and he said, ‘Only a thousand dollars to you, sweetie.’”
She looked a little sick now, recalling it. “I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it was out of the question. There’s just no way we could have done that.”
She shrugged. “Maybe you can.”
CHAPTER 36
We talked some more and retired just before eleven o’clock. By then we all had a good sense of each other and they made a serious pledge to visit us in Colorado. “Maybe we’ll even get lucky and be assigned there,” Luke said. “I always wanted to work in the mountains, at Mesa Verde or Rocky Mountain National Park.” I told them my house would always be their house, and I promised Libby I would keep her informed as the Burton story developed. We called it a night and walked the few feet to the museum, where the three of us would bed down on the floor. Outside, the night was oppressively murky: inky, bleak, black-hole dark, with a stout wind that came at us in gusts off the sea. The sky was cloudy: only a small streak of stars could be seen through a seam across the top of the world, but that did nothing to relieve the blackness of the harbor. Charleston was nowhere to be seen, lost in some distant fog.
I stood at the door and heard Erin say my name.
“Hey, you coming?”
“Yeah, I’ll be along. You two go ahead.”
They went inside and I got out my flashlight and climbed along the edge of the battery toward the gorge wall. I thought I’d heard the sound of a boat again, and I wanted to give things a last look before turning in. I had no real reason to be uneasy or suspicious: Dante would have to be crazy to mount an assault on Fort Sumter with rangers on duty, and guys like Dante don’t stay alive by being fools. But that’s what old Judge Petigru said about the secessionists of olden days, that South Carolina was too small for a republic and too large for a lunatic asylum, and look what happened anyway. My uneasiness persisted and grew as I moved around the battery above the black ruins.
Whatever I had heard, it was gone now: nothing but the wind assaulted my ears, that and the sea washing against this ghostly black shoal. I still wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to stand at the edge of the fort and behold the nothingness, and that meant I had to go down through the old parade ground and pick my way back up to the right flank where the high ground was. From there I had a sweeping view: more pitch-blackness than I could ever remember in my life. I circled the old wall, keeping my light pointed down in front of me, and at last I came to the point where I turned off the light and just stood there. Nothing…
Nothing.
Except for the wind, this must be what death is like.
I walked along the gorge and down the left flank. From there I could see into the tiny room where Libby and Luke were talking, washing dishes, putting things away. It floated in space and a few minutes later she drew a curtain across the front window. Almost at once their light went out.
I turned back toward the channel, feeling rather than seeing it. Morris Island, I thought: Fort Wagner. In that void it was hard to imagine what had happened over there: one of the great epics of warfare, overshadowed by Vicksburg only because that involved greater numbers and grander strategy and bigger names, and because it was coming to its climax at the same time. I stared at the nothing and closed my eyes, which made no difference at all, and when I opened them I seemed to see the flash of a very old rocket against the eastern sky. Just for a moment I imagined that battle and all those black warriors charging up the beach to certain death. I thought of death…Thought of Denise…