Blackman's Coffin (12 page)
Stanley spun around and walked off. I watched him go, my anger turning to fear, not that I’d lost a brother or that I now had no place to go. I was afraid that Stanley had spoken the truth.
As Nakayla walked through the cafeteria toward me, several patients turned their heads from their hospital trays, stopped chewing, and eyed her appreciatively. She wore a light green pantsuit with a cream silk scarf loosely knotted around her neck. She moved gracefully, and I felt a tingle of desire that warned me more than my leg was healing.
I got up from the small corner table I’d commandeered and offered my hand.
Nakayla slid her slender fingers around mine and squeezed. “Are you all right?” Her eyes studied my face while her grip tightened.
“No. Not really. Let’s get something to eat and I’ll tell you.”
I’d called her at work after Stanley left because she was the only person I could confide in. I’d asked if she would meet me for dinner, the hospital cafeteria being the one and only choice.
We each took a pre-packaged tossed salad and a cup of coffee. My food sat untouched as I told her about my parents, my argument with Stanley, and that I wouldn’t be going to Birmingham. She didn’t interrupt, but a few minutes into my story, she set down her fork and gave me her undivided attention.
I finished saying, “So, I guess I’ll go back to Winston-Salem to be close to the case. At least I’ll have my honorable discharge and my disability income, and I’ve saved some money over the years. There wasn’t much to buy in Iraq. I’ll probably stay here for a few days till I can arrange transportation. I know this is the height of tourist season, but can you recommend a motel?”
For a few seconds, Nakayla said nothing. She looked away, and then locked her piercing eyes on mine. “The first thing you’re going to do is make peace with your brother.”
“What? I’m not going to beg him to take me in?”
“I’m not asking you to. I think going to Birmingham would be a mistake.” Her eyes moistened. “But I thank God Tikima and I were close. We’d had our share of arguments—some real catfights—because we were both strong-headed and I was the rebellious little sister. But I couldn’t bear it if my last words with her had been spoken in anger.”
“I’m not apologizing for what I did.”
“Then why are you upset? I could see it in your face halfway across the cafeteria.”
“He tried to trick me.”
“And you stopped him. If this were a business deal, you’d be happy.”
I slapped the table, sloshing coffee out of both cups. “It’s not a business deal, it’s my parents’ deaths we’re talking about.”
“Right. Your family. Like your brother. I’m not saying you didn’t do the right thing, but did you say the right thing? If Stanley were killed in a car wreck driving home tonight, would you have any regrets about the words you spoke?”
Nakayla’s question cut to the heart of the matter. I thought about how I’d called Stanley spineless and painted his wife Ashley as a selfish socialite wannabe. What did I know about their life together, a life that now included twin girls and no income? And although Nakayla was projecting onto me her own fears, the woman had just lost her sister, and that raw wound, as real as the one that cost me my leg, must have hurt so much that she didn’t want anyone else to go through it.
“I did say some things I regret,” I confessed. “They had nothing to do with the legal case.”
“Then I think you need to make peace over that. I’m not suggesting you back down on what you think is the right course of action for your lawsuit.”
“Some time will have to pass.”
“No. Time will only complicate matters. If you say where you were wrong you’re also clarifying where you think you’re right.”
I shook my head. “I don’t trust myself.”
“Then write a letter. Do it tonight. We’ll mail it in the morning. You can call in a few days.”
“And if he won’t talk to me?”
Nakayla smiled. “Then he’ll have to live with the consequences, not you.”
“And in the meantime?”
She licked her lips, suddenly nervous. “I have a proposition for you. You can stay at Tikima’s.”
For a second, my mind flashed on the apartment as a potential crime scene—the disguised journal and files on the table and the break-in while mourners attended Tikima’s funeral. To be living there, sleeping in the bed of a murdered woman, hadn’t been in my realm of possibilities.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you comfortable with all of her personal belongings in it?”
“You’re welcome to anything that fits you.” Nakayla’s bittersweet smile wasn’t without warmth. “We Robertsons are very practical. The rent’s paid through the end of the month, you’re helping to find Tikima’s killer, and you need a place to stay.”
The only objection I could raise would be my discomfort at being in the home of a homicide victim, but I sensed that response would be hurtful to Nakayla, depersonalizing her sister into some kind of macabre specter.
I shrugged. “Okay. If you’re sure.”
Nakayla seemed relieved. “Good. I’ll straighten up tonight. What time can you leave in the morning?”
“As soon as the administration office opens. Probably no later than eight-thirty.”
“I’ll be here.” She stood.
I got up and steadied myself against the table. “I’d like to run by Wal-Mart and pick up something other than a Hawaiian shirt.”
“We’ll do that second.”
“What’s first?”
“We mail your letter to your brother.”
***
The Thomas Wolfe Memorial Visitor Center was a light blue building on Market Street between Woodfin and Walnut. The shop in the lobby offered all of Wolfe’s novels, a variety of Wolfe biographies including Ted Mitchell’s, and a collection of pictorial books of historic Asheville, most of them concentrating on the late 1800s and early 1900s. A reception desk with a cash register was on the left wall. The woman behind it greeted us pleasantly. Her nameplate read Susan.
I let Nakayla do the talking while I stood beside her, confident in my new golf shirt and beltless slacks only thirty minutes off the Wal-Mart rack.
“We’re here to see Mr. Mitchell,” Nakayla said.
Susan looked confused. “You have an appointment with Ted Mitchell?”
“No. But I was told he’d be here this morning so we took a chance.”
Ted Mitchell hadn’t returned Nakayla’s voicemail, and we suspected he’d been out of town and might be driving straight to work.
“Ted’s leading the first tour. He won’t be free till after eleven.”
“Has the tour started?” Nakayla asked.
“No. I’ll be calling everyone to the rear doors in about ten minutes.”
Everyone at the moment seemed to be a retired couple browsing the books and two young men listening to recordings of Wolfe family members on old-fashioned telephones across the lobby.
Nakayla set her handbag on the counter. “We’ll take two tickets.”
I reached for my wallet. “Let me get them.”
Susan looked from me to Nakayla.
“Okay, big-spender,” Nakayla said.
I pinched one of the crisp twenties fresh from the ATM.
“That’ll be two dollars, sir.”
“Two dollars?”
Susan winked at Nakayla. “They’re a dollar each.”
“I can’t buy a cup of coffee for a dollar.”
“That’s why we don’t sell coffee.”
I felt guilty with my eighteen dollars in change and dropped a five in a donation box. During the wait, Nakayla and I looked through several books of old photographs. Was I peering into the world of Henderson Youngblood or the world created by Thomas Wolfe?
The announcement came that the tour was beginning.
“What are we touring?” I asked.
Nakayla pointed through the lobby’s rear windows to a two-story yellow house next door. “Wolfe’s mother ran a boarding house. You’ll see what it was like when Wolfe lived there.”
Ted Mitchell proved to be a middle-aged man with dark-rimmed glasses and salt and pepper hair. He introduced himself and encouraged us to ask questions. The older woman warned she was a retired English teacher and would be giving us a test at the end of the tour. Her husband laughed and assured us she wasn’t kidding.
With the group at ease, Ted passed out cards to each of us. “I want you to imagine you’ve just arrived at the train station and a young boy handed you this card. The year is in the early 1900s and the boy is Thomas Wolfe, whose mother often sent him to find boarders.”
The card read “Old Kentucky Home Just Off The Car Line No Sick People Rates Reasonable Mrs. Julia E. Wolfe, Proprietress.” The phone number had only three digits.
“Now ladies and gentlemen,” Ted Mitchell said, “follow me as we walk back through the years and enter Thomas Wolfe’s childhood.”
I held back, letting the faster walkers go first. Nakayla strolled beside me, her handbag containing the journal tucked under her arm.
Our group sat for a few minutes in rockers on the wide porch, breathing the mountain air and listening to Mitchell explain the history of the house. The name Old Kentucky Home came from an owner who pre-dated the Wolfes and had moved from Kentucky. Even though we were in Asheville, somehow the name fit.
The interior was a maze of halls and rooms. White-washed walls, dark trim and wide plank floors conveyed the feel of a bygone era. I had trouble navigating some of the stairs and Ted Mitchell would patiently wait for me to catch up before sharing his stories, often pointing to a portrait, piano, or fireplace to illustrate his point.
In one of the bedrooms, Mitchell mentioned Wolfe had stayed there when he returned for a few months in 1937, eight years after the publication of
Look Homeward, Angel
, which had so scandalized Asheville. By then Wolfe’s novels had made him a celebrity and the town was anxious to wrap itself in his fame. Mitchell pointed to a table where he said Wolfe had written the story “Return”
during his visit. A little over a year later, Wolfe would be dead.
The tour moved on but I lingered by the table, studying the piece of paper with Wolfe’s handwriting left there as an example of the author’s presence.
Nakayla stepped beside me. “What do you think?”
I was tempted to pick the small sheet up, but I didn’t want to violate Mitchell’s request that we not touch anything. “I don’t see the telltale ‘of’ in these few sentences, but the large, bold style of the letters is the same.”
“You’re still comfortable showing him the journal?”
I took her arm and led her after the others. “Yes. Otherwise everything comes to a dead end.”
The tour ended back in the adjacent building. Mitchell encouraged us to see a short film on Thomas Wolfe that would be starting soon in the auditorium. After the others had thanked him and moved through the double doors to find seats, Nakayla spoke up.
“Mr. Mitchell, do you have a few minutes?”
He looked past us to the auditorium. “You’ll miss part of the movie.”
“My name is Nakayla Robertson. I left you a voicemail on your home machine asking to speak with you.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been out of town and returned last night to find lightning had fried the answering machine and my TV.” He glanced at me, not sure why the two of us would be tracking him down at home.
“This is my friend Sam Blackman. Mr. Mitchell, my sister was Tikima Robertson.”
Mitchell stepped back. Our names had meant nothing but Tikima’s clearly jolted him. “She was your sister?”
Nakayla nodded.
“I read about her in the paper.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“Yes. On the phone. We were supposed to meet, but she never showed up.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“A couple weeks ago. I think a Monday when the Memorial was closed.”
I retraced the dates from Tikima’s Saturday visit. “June 4th?”
“That sounds about right. I can check my calendar to be sure.”
“What did she want to talk about?” I asked.
“She said she might have a Wolfe manuscript. Of course, I was interested.” He looked at Nakayla and shook his head. “But then she never came.”
“I have what she wanted to show you,” Nakayla said.
Mitchell’s eyes brightened. “You do?” He looked around the lobby. Several people browsed the books, waiting for the next tour. “Let’s go to the staff break room. I have about twenty minutes.”
We followed him through a door marked Staff Only. The room was more like a hall with a refrigerator at the end and a stainless-steel double sink on the left. Mitchell motioned us to take seats around a small table.
I was hoping Nakayla would just hand him the journal and not prompt him with any clues as to why we thought Thomas Wolfe wrote it. She must have read my mind. She opened her bag and pulled out the journal. She had wrapped it in tan chamois. Without saying a word, she slid the bundle across the table.
Mitchell eyed it for a few seconds and then unwrapped it so the volume rested in the center of the soft leather. “May I?” he asked.
Nakayla nodded.
He opened the cover. As he read down the first page, his eyes widened. “The penmanship bears a strong resemblance and it’s written with a pencil like Wolfe used, but there’s an artificiality to the language that’s not Wolfe.”
“What if he were trying to write like a twelve-year-old boy trying to write like Robinson Crusoe?” I asked.
“The voice,” Mitchell said. “Yes, that would affect the vocabulary and sentence structure. You’re sure this isn’t authentic, that a Henderson Youngblood didn’t write it?”
“We’re not sure,” Nakayla said. “We found the journal alongside your biography of Wolfe in Tikima’s apartment. Then the entries break off with a few strange sentences.”
Mitchell flipped through the pages carefully till he came to the end of the writing. He read aloud, “Vocabulary and style getting away from him. Ask Harry about the mule.”
“We don’t know who Harry is,” I said.
Mitchell turned back a few pages and read for a couple minutes. He mouthed a word or two as they made an impression.
“We don’t know why Tikima thought Wolfe might have written it,” I said. “But we saw the handwriting similarity between the journal and examples of Wolfe’s manuscripts in your book.” I mentioned the unique style of the word “of” and our feeling that the language grew more adult as the story progressed.
Mitchell pursed his lips. “If it is Wolfe, I could see him getting immersed in the narrative and losing the boy’s perspective, especially in a first draft. Can I keep this awhile?”