The scorched bricks we’d found came into my mind. The scorched bones I had seen behind the Cadence house materialized behind my eyes.
The leather-bound journal was on my lap. Once again, I attempted to open the next few pages. Used my fingernails, then a fingernail file from my purse. As I knew from experience, this had to be done gently, couldn’t be forced, so I had to govern my eagerness to confirm what I knew in my heart: Ben Summerlin and friends were the unknown raiders who had killed three Union soldiers near Labelle. Weeks later, they had laid a trap of cannon and flames on an unnamed river-this river. Lift my eyes, I could see the tree canopy that shaded water flowing a quarter mile away. My great-uncle had been among the gerillas set loose, a band of cow hunters turned man hunters. They had orchestrated the killings of an enemy who had perished under fire and in flames. Then he and his friends had allowed the dead to burn while digging shallow graves. What else explained scorched bones?
It was a time of war. Loathsome crimes had been committed. But I also had to wonder if greed had played a role. Belton had told me of the Union paymaster who, in 1864, had been sent to purchase cattle and pay troops at Fort Myers, but his boat had been ambushed by four-inch cannon. Rather than let the Confederates take the gold, he had jettisoned the money. No… Belton had clarified that point-the Cow Cavalry had ambushed the paymaster, not Confederate soldiers.
It was impossible to believe all these elements were coincidental.
Greed-it sullied whatever justice had been done. But who was I to say? I hadn’t suffered that poor woman’s pain and I was looking back from the distant, distant land of almost two centuries. Any attempt at moral judgment only proved my own callowness. My family disloyalty, too. Yet the shallow graves I had viewed that morning still nagged at my conscience. The graves were haphazard… indifferent… chaotic-but there was something else that troubled me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The answer, I hoped, was hidden between these damn stubborn pages that I continued to pry into and cajole.
Finally… finally the paper began to separate from the glob to which it had been adjoined for decades. I put an eye to the open space and was disappointed to see the first lines of the next page had been scribbled black. When I attempted to see more, the snap of flaking paper forced me to stop.
I took a break to calm my fingers. It was six-fifteen. The sun would set in an hour. Still time for photos, but the harsh late-afternoon light was draining westward. I checked phone messages, took another look at the house. Windows above the balcony had dimmed to black domino eyes; the music room and cupola were isolated chambers joined by a pitched roof. The house bore the weight of wood and years in silence, indifferent as a rock, but the structure was animated by wind-churning trees and cawing crows and… something else.
I used a tissue on the windshield to confirm what might have been imagined. Smoke… Smoke leaked from the chimney as indiscernible as mist. Last night’s fire would have gone cold by dawn. Why was there smoke?
I lowered the windows and sniffed-woodsmoke. But that proved nothing. Ranchers in central Florida do controlled burns off and on all winter long. Somewhere someone-Joey Egret, possibly-had set a fire to clear brush that might fuel a major forest fire come spring. No doubt, however, the fire inside the house still smoldered. The chimney proved it.
I had the keys to the padlock, planned to enter the house anyway. I wanted wood samples from the floors and walls-especially wood from near the fireplace. Eighty years earlier, a teacher had written of blistered skin and the aberrant behavior of good children. Last night, in a flashlight’s beam, the joists had glittered with sap. Pine sap, I had assumed. Now, however, after researching manchineel and mimosa trees, I suspected it wasn’t true.
My reasons for seeking a rational solution were selfish, but in a yearning, hopeful sense. I am a believer in good and evil. I choose to believe that a divine purpose cushions whatever tragedy befalls us and that order is of the highest design. There is no room in my faith for haunted houses or supernatural devilry. If there was a solid explanation, I wanted to know it. My faith is shaken often enough by reality.
That’s why I wanted those wood samples. First, though, I went back to work on the journal, hoping to read at least one more page. The result was disappointing: days or weeks after fighting had occurred here in 1864, Ben Summerlin had used ink to obliterate what he had written-two full pages. Then he had sealed those pages with daubs of tar.
His last entry about the incident was penned two months later and among the first I had read as a teenager, sitting in the attic of my mother’s house. Frustrated, I now skipped ahead and read the passage one more time:
December, 1864 (Punta Rassa Cattle Dock): Gossip tween Tampa & Key West says I kilt Sodbuster & God knows who else in the switchbacks of some damnt river when drunk. This aint true. It werent cause I was drunk I left behind a box of silver Liberties & the purtiest little dory this coast ever seen. What happened is Union Blues took me by ambuscade at night & I out run them. Figured they was bandits. A cable length from the Crossing I opened the seacocks & did not wait to watch Sodbuster sink. 100 silver dollars gawn & the purtiest little dory. I have never been so drunk as to abuse a vessel purty as Sodbuster. Better she is on the bottom than with bandits is what I thot. Same with them silver Liberties. So to hell with them that gossips of murder & drunkenness & thievery. I got a ranch in Cuba what needs tending. Florida is a might warm for me now…
When I was a girl, Capt. Summerlin’s language and allusions to danger and treasure had struck me as romantic in a Pirates of the Caribbean way. But they also left unanswered questions that were never addressed in later entries-an oversight, I had believed.
Not now. The man had been in fear for his freedom. Trivializing the matter, then dismissing the subject, had been his way of closing a door. By referencing Havana, he was also addressing the subject of murder. A hard-nosed sea captain cared nothing about rumors. But he knew the law. That’s why he had blotted out the facts and sealed them with tar before sailing south.
Tar… I closed the journal, pleased I had guessed right about exposing it to the heat of a fireplace-until I remembered that Theo had seen some of these entries. But after reflecting for a moment, I felt better about that, too. Captain Summerlin had been so vague about his dory’s location-a cable length from the Crossing-that Theo’s chances of finding it were less than my own. Besides, he was after the paymaster’s gold or John Ashley’s fortune, not a measly one hundred silver dollars.
I did feel a frustrating sense of loss, however, about the blotted passages. An expert might know how to retrieve my great-uncle’s lost history, but it would have to wait. Daylight and the photographs I wanted could not.
I stepped out of my SUV, opened the trunk, and got the camera ready.
WHY WAS a woman dressed like me, with hair as black as mine, inside the music room off the balcony?