“What if they’d killed him? Nobody’d ever know where it was.”
“At that point, what did he care?”
We looked at each other in the hot noonday sun, two bookmen from different worlds, pulled together briefly by the same quest. Dean lit a smoke and I found a clumsy way of apologizing for the razzing I had given him back in town. “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
“I said a lot. Sometimes I say too much.”
“I’ve been thinking about one particular thing.”
I didn’t have to tell him, he knew what it was. “Hal Archer’s never told me a lie of any kind, not that I’m aware of. How many friends have you had that you can say that about?”
Not many, I thought. Maybe none.
He shuffled uneasily. “If that’s all, let’s get out of here.”
Fifteen minutes later we were across the Cooper River, heading for North Charleston. None of us said a word the whole way across.
My rental was still where I’d parked it. Dean didn’t offer to shake hands and neither did I. He drove out of the lot and turned back toward Charleston and a moment later we went the other way, north to Florence.
CHAPTER 39
There were towns along every road now. There was sprawl that had never been part of any town at all. There were long fingers of commerce and drugstores and housing developments where only forests and swamps and farmlands had been in that earlier time. Then there had been occasional outposts to comfort a traveler in the wilderness; now there were motels and gas stations, Dairy Queens and Burger Kings, Piggly Wiggly and Winn-Dixie supermarkets and antiques malls. There were X-rated magazine stands and gunsmiths and temples of any god a man wanted to pray to. There were places to stop and get quietly drunk or get a car fixed after a sudden breakdown. No one would ever go hungry or thirsty, get horny or spiritually deprived for more than a few minutes in any direction. What had then been a two-day trek in 1860 was two hours now in air-conditioned ease. But there were still stretches of wilderness where the pines grew thick and the way resembled nothing more than a tunnel with sky. Imagine this on a dirt road at night, I thought: imagine 120 miles of it. As we traveled upcountry I followed the odyssey of Richard Francis Burton and Charles Edward Warren in my head. As I slumped in the backseat reading Burton’s words, I could almost see them coming down from the north, and I could still get some faint, faraway sense of what it had been.
We reached Florence in the early afternoon. From then on our journey was charmed. If anything, it was too easy.
A librarian knew right away what we were looking for. That junction where the roads had intersected was still called Wheeler’s Crossing. It was out of town a stretch and there was nothing there now. A roadside sign would show us where it had been.
The library had a number of Wheeler papers: letters, some of the old man’s ledgers, even a few menus in Marion’s hand. The Wheelers had all been buried in an old graveyard near the crossroad. Marion Wheeler’s mother had been put there before her; her father, who had outlived them both, died in 1881. “Look at this,” Koko said. “She died in childbirth, just like her mother…exactly nine months after Burton and Charlie would’ve been there. Her father made no attempt to cover it up.”
Her son had lived. Her father had honored her deathbed wish, named him Richard, and raised him as his own.
Richard Wheeler. One sketchy account existed of his youth: no more than a few lines in a letter written near the end of the old man’s life. His schooling, three years in a classroom, was probably average for the time. He was fair with numbers but brilliant with language. He had learned Latin on his own, becoming fluent in six months, and had been studying Spanish. He was a good and energetic dancer and girls loved him. In that passage he was described as tall and dark with a keen sense of honor.
A lady killer.
He went to sea at sixteen and that was all that was known of him.
We arrived at the site of Wheeler’s inn late that afternoon. It was a bend in the road now, marked by a simple state highway sign that said wheeler’s crossing. The graveyard was on a dirt road not far away. It was dusk when we found the Wheeler plots: the father and mother side by side, Marion a few feet away. The simple stone said, here lies marion wheeler, beloved daughter, who departed this earth january 30, l86l, aged twenty-four years, eleven months, fourteen days. Koko took notes and in the waning light tried desperately to take pictures.
I had to pry her away.
Now for the first time she asked my opinion of Burton’s journal. It looked real, I said. By then I didn’t need to add the line about my own lack of expertise. Most impressive were the scores of Negro spirituals and slave songs that Burton had written down, word for word, in dialect, as he and Charlie had traveled through the South. He had rilled page after page with them, adding extensive notes on where he had heard them and what he suspected their African roots might be.
There was a full account of Burton’s first meeting with Charlie. It jibed with what we knew and added color to Charlie’s tale. There was a detailed description of the day they went walking in Charleston. Burton had made a sketch of Fort Sumter from the Battery, and had written with fond amusement of Charlie’s outrage at the slave auction. Best of all, he told of having their picture taken outside a dentist’s office on East Bay Street.
We headed west into the night.
At Camden we turned north, picking up Interstate 77. From there it was a straight shot into Charlotte, but we stopped in Rock Hill, taking two rooms in a motel overlooking a river. Erin called Lee in Denver and told him the news. She called my room and suggested that we meet downstairs for a drink.
“Lee is ecstatic,” she said.
“That’s good,” I said flatly.
“What’s wrong with you? In case you hadn’t noticed, we won.”
I made the obvious excuse: I was tired after last night. But there was something else and she sensed it.
“It’s Denise, isn’t it? She’s been forgotten in all this fuss.”
“Not by me.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know yet. Something.”
“You had your chance at Dante and let him go. Is that what’s bothering you?”
“No. I told you, I’m just tired.”
But it was more than that.
We turned in but I still couldn’t sleep. At midnight I thought of Dean Treadwell, and for the hundredth time about his strange friendship with Archer. Again I thought the unthinkable, pushing it away at once, but it was there now and it kept me awake. I must’ve slept at least a few hours because I opened my eyes suddenly and knew I had been dreaming. I had dreamed of Archer and his mother Betts, and it took me a while to remember that Betts hadn’t been Archer’s mother at all.
In the morning we had a quiet breakfast in the cafe. Lee had already called Erin and they had discussed air passage. “We can get a flight to Atlanta at seven o’clock tonight. It’ll be tight, but we should just make the connecting flight to Denver. Lee wants me to put all three fares on my credit card and he’ll reimburse me.”
“No,” I said. “You cover your own, I’ll take care of Koko and me.”
She insisted. “Cliff, he wants to do this.”
“Well, he can’t.”
We went into Charlotte and found Orrin Wilcox. Libby had been painfully accurate in her description of the ghoulish old bookscout and the incredible clutter of his store. He gave the impression of a guy who didn’t give much of a damn about anything, but he responded eagerly enough to the sight of my money.
“I believe you quoted Mrs. Robinson a thousand dollars,” I said.