Blackman's Coffin (19 page)

“Did you see her shortly before she died?” I asked.

“Yep. Sure did. Not to speak to, other than hello. She’d come up to see the mayor.”

“The mayor of Arden lives here?” Nakayla asked.

Captain chuckled. “No, the mayor of Golden Oaks. Harry. He’s been here the longest. I’m the Captain. He’s the Mayor. He’s not a vet but Tikima took to him. She came to his hundredth birthday party last April. Maybe we should promote Harry to President.”

“Is Harry here?” I asked.

“Sure. Where else would he go? I saw him at Sunday brunch. Only meal they fix on Sundays. He’s probably in his apartment. D-133.” Captain pointed across the lobby to a hallway.

“Thank you,” I said.

“No trouble.” The old man lifted his right hand off his walker and touched Nakayla’s shoulder. “So sorry about your sister.” Then he stood straight and saluted.

As we walked down the D-wing hall, Nakayla fought back tears. Captain had been a bittersweet reminder of her loss.

The door of number 133 had a brass name plaque: Harry Young—His Honor the Mayor. I gave two sharp raps with the knocker.

“Come in,” called a raspy voice. “It’s unlocked.”

I opened the door and let Nakayla go first. A small kitchen lay on our left as we continued into the living room. A door on the right led to the bedroom. The apartment was tidy, and the elderly man sitting on the sofa wore a neatly pressed pink shirt and navy blue slacks. A wheelchair was turned facing him. He held a section of the Sunday paper and looked up, not at all surprised to see us.

Nakayla and I both stopped, speechless. Harry Young had only one leg.

“Thank God,” he said. “I was afraid I’d have to come after you.”

Chapter Seventeen

“Henderson Youngblood?” I blurted the name so loudly that Nakayla jumped.

“No. But I reckon I’m as close to being that boy as anybody could be.” He waved us to sit in the armchairs facing him. “As close as Fred Wolfe was to being Luke in
Look Homeward, Angel
.”

Nakayla and I sat. She hadn’t said a word and the way she kept looking from the old man to me betrayed her anxiety. I knew what she was thinking, but Harry Young said it.

“I got your sister killed.” The wrinkles in his thin face deepened. He choked back a sob.

Nakayla sprang from the chair and joined him on the sofa. She took one of his liver-spotted hands and pressed it between her own. “You gave her the journal?”

“When I realized she was Elijah’s kin.” He pulled his hand away and brushed the tears from his eyes. “I saw the news tonight. About that police officer. Leaving a wife and two boys.”

“Do you know who’s responsible?” I asked.

“No. I told Tikima to be careful.” He eyed the way my left leg stretched in front of me. “You’re the vet she went to see. The one that took on the brass up in Washington.”

“Yes. But we only met once. She was still sizing me up and didn’t tell me what she wanted.” I glanced at Nakayla. “Someone broke into her apartment during the funeral, but they didn’t take anything. Nakayla found the journal disguised as another book with my name on it.”

“Then how did you find me?”

“My sister had the Golden Oaks file at her apartment,” Nakayla said. “We came to talk to Sandra Pollock and learned Tikima had been visiting you.”

Harry cleared his throat. “Would one of you get me a glass of water? I dry out when I’m talking and I expect y’all have more than a few questions.”

I signaled for Nakayla to keep her seat. The sink was built into an island dividing the kitchen from the living room. I could see Harry and Nakayla as I checked the hanging cabinets for a glass. “Do you want ice?”

“Just plain water. I have a little problem swallowing if it’s too cold. Right from the tap is fine.”

I doubted a hundred-year-old man had much use for bottled water.

“Y’all eat?” he asked. “Make yourself a sandwich.”

Nakayla and I declined and I brought him the water and a paper towel for a napkin.

He took a small sip and let it linger in his mouth. After he swallowed, he spoke a little stronger. “Where do you want me to begin?”

“Tell us what’s true in the journal,” I said. “Did Thomas Wolfe write it?”

Harry nodded. “That he did. But aside from my name and some dramatic exaggerations, Tom got most of it right.”

“You told him the story?”

“Yep. Summer of 1937. I’d known Tom since we were boys. He was nearly seven years older, but Daddy did business with Mr. Wolfe and sometimes Tom would be at the monument shop. Tom had an eye and an ear. If he saw or heard something, he never forgot it. Like one of those VCRs they’ve got nowadays.”

“But the events in the story happened in 1919,” Nakayla said.

“That’s right. So what’s at fault is my memory, not Tom’s. Why, they say the angel in
Look Homeward, Angel
is on a grave over in Hendersonville. Tom’s daddy sold it in 1906. Tom was still five, but when he wrote about it, twenty years had gone by since he’d seen it. The description is remarkable.”

“Nearly twenty years had gone by when you told him your story,” Nakayla said.

Harry smiled. “That’s true. But I wouldn’t have been a good writer. Tom made that up about me. Math was my best subject.”

“And he changed you to Henderson Youngblood,” I said.

“My given name was Harrison Young. So close I don’t know why he bothered. Except for my family, every other name he left the same. That’s what got him in trouble with
Look Homeward, Angel
. People were too recognizable. Tom didn’t come back to Asheville for eight years after that book was published.”

I felt like I should be taking notes, but I’d come unprepared. “That’s when you saw him again?”

“Tom first stayed at the boarding house with his mother, but so many people came to see him he couldn’t work. He went to a cabin in Oteen where he could write.”

Harry’s sequence of events matched what Ted Mitchell had told us. The old man’s memory was sharp.

“I’d missed seeing him in town. I worked for the Biltmore Dairy—had been since Daddy died—and I thought I’d take him some fresh milk and ice cream. I knew we’d have to eat it right then because the cabin had no way to keep it. Tom was glad to see me. We got talking about old times and our families and I told him the story about Elijah and the trip to Georgia. Tom had been at the university then.”

Harry paused, took a deep breath and another swallow of water. “Tom got so excited he couldn’t stop asking me questions. He wanted to know every detail. The ice cream melted in the tub and we talked past nightfall.”

“And you told him everything up through Elijah’s murder?” I asked.

“No. I went beyond that. I described the trip back to Georgia with Elijah’s son Amos so we could bury Elijah with his kinfolk. And how Bessie and her family had disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Nakayla scooted closer, evidently hearing this story about her relatives for the first time.

“Yep. It was less than a month since Daddy and I’d eaten lunch in their farmhouse. The place was abandoned. Peaches were rotting in the wagon. Somebody had moved it out by the road. Amos had no way to reach them. Nearest neighbor said they’d gone north.”

“When did your father die?” I asked.

“Two weeks after we buried Elijah. We found the cemetery where we’d helped him take his uncle Hannable. Amos and my daddy got a large rock from the stream and chiseled Elijah’s name on it. They did the same for Hannable since Elijah had left it unmarked.

“One night Daddy took some supplies over to a funeral director in Brevard. He never came back. Sheriff found his Model T at the bottom of a ravine. The car had burst into flames. I overheard Mr. Galloway telling the sheriff my daddy must have been drinking. He knew better. My daddy never took a drop of whiskey. I never liked Mr. Galloway after that. He got meaner and short-tempered. He changed after his son Jamie returned from the war.”

“The journal said his son had been killed,” I said.

“That’s what we all thought. Jamie had been shell-shocked and wandered off. At least that’s what Jamie said.”

“People thought otherwise?”

Harry shrugged. “You’ve seen combat. A man’s whole unit is wiped out by a direct hit but he’s unharmed? There were some in town said Jamie Galloway had been a deserter. He came back to Asheville and resurfaced as one of the returning heroes. He could have been hiding in the hills for months. People whispered and Mr. Galloway knew it.”

I thought about what Herman Duringer had said about his ancestor evading service in the Civil War. “What happened to you and your mother?”

“Mother sold the property and we moved onto the Biltmore Estate. She started sewing homespun clothes. Mrs. Vanderbilt wore them to encourage the fashionable ladies to support the local dressmakers. Edith Vanderbilt was a woman without pretense and I don’t regret one day of working for her. When she died in 1958, I stayed on at the dairy for Miss Cornelia. She’d married the British man Mr. Cecil whose family still owns the estate, but she’ll always be Miss Cornelia to me. I retired when she died in 1976. Over all these years, the family’s kept Edith Vanderbilt’s promise to take care of my leg. But my skin’s thin as tissue paper and I can’t wear a prosthesis anymore. I get by with a wheelchair and a walker for hobbling around the apartment.”

Harry’s reminiscences about the Vanderbilts were interesting, but they didn’t answer my main question. “If you told Thomas Wolfe more of the story, why’d he stop where he did?”

“Fred said his brother was unhappy with the way he had the boy writing.”

“Fred?” I asked.

“Tom’s older brother. Tom left the journal with him at the end of the summer. Fred gave it to me forty years later.”

Harry was jumping decades so fast I couldn’t keep up. “Why so long?”

“Because Fred and I didn’t cross paths for forty years. I didn’t know Tom had even written the thing.”

“And you never saw Tom again?”

“No. He’d left the journal with some questions he wanted me to answer. Fred told me Tom was having trouble creating the story. He loved the events, but he didn’t know where to take them. No one knew what happened to Elijah.”

“So Thomas Wolfe couldn’t solve the mystery,” I said. “Even with a fictional solution.”

“And he died the next year. He never came home again. Imagine, Tom dead before age thirty-eight and here I sit, a hundred years old.”

I shifted in the chair, moving my leg to a more comfortable position. “I understand the comment written at the end about the kid’s vocabulary, but what did he mean by ‘Ask Harry about the mule?’”

“Fred said that was important to him. Tom wanted me to read what he’d written and tell him about the mule. All I know Junebug was found the morning after Elijah died, grazing in a lower Biltmore pasture with the cows.”

“Wasn’t that the normal pasture?” I asked.

Harry looked at me like I’d failed to add two plus two. “Elijah kept Junebug at his place. Junebug was only in a Biltmore pasture when Elijah was there.”

Nakayla frowned. We kept coming back to the Biltmore Estate. But that was where Elijah worked, where he might have left Junebug during the day if he went off with someone.

“What about the mule’s pack?” Nakayla asked.

“What?” Henry and I asked in unison.

“In the journal, Junebug’s pack was missing. Did that happen?”

Harry pursed his thin pale lips. “I’d forgotten I’d told Tom. He must have set something by it.”

“Maybe that was his question for you,” Nakayla said. “About the mule.”

“I only remember it because I was so surprised to see Elijah outside my window the Sunday morning after the trip to Georgia.”

I understood how that would have been a vivid memory for a twelve-year-old boy, but Thomas Wolfe had seen the underlying significance. Someone had taken Junebug’s pack.

The glimmer of an idea began to emerge from the murky mire of distant events. “How’d you get the journal from Fred?”

“I went to see him in Spartanburg. Back in 1977. Miss Cornelia had died the year before and I’d retired from the dairy. They were going to turn the barn into a winery. Milk to wine was too much of a new trick for this old dog to learn.”

“Did Fred ask to see you?”

“No. One of his relatives was going down and offered to take me along. She knew we’d been friends and she could run errands while Fred and I talked. He was in his eighties and a real character.” Harry laughed. “Fred smoked like a chimney and stuttered like a Model T with bad sparkplugs. He stayed in his pajamas and bathrobe the whole day. He sat in his easy chair with cigarette burns on the upholstery and carpet around him. It’s a wonder he didn’t burn himself up.

“We got talking about Tom and I mentioned our last conversation at the Oteen cabin. Fred got the oddest look on his face. He stood and went back to his bedroom. I heard him pulling out dresser drawers and a few minutes later he returned with the journal. ‘Tom asked me to give you this.’ He said it like his brother had dropped it off the night before. Then Fred told me what I’ve already told you—how Tom got stuck in the story.”

“The journal must be worth something,” I said. “Why’d you hold onto it for thirty years instead of selling it?”

Harry took a deep breath and stared at a photograph on the wall across the room. The scene was Asheville’s Pack Square, probably in the 1920s and filled with antique cars and long dead people. For the first time I noticed the apartment was more of a museum. A plaque beside the photo proclaimed Biltmore Dairy Farms the winner of the Grand Champion Bull and Grand Champion Cow of the National Jersey Breed Show—1952. For a dairy man, I figured that was like sweeping an Olympic event. Another picture over Nakayla showed a younger Harry standing in front of a barn with a Biltmore Dairy Farms truck beside him. Other photographs offered trips back in time for the old man. Thomas Wolfe, Edith Vanderbilt, and Cornelia Cecil were not paragraphs in an encyclopedia. They were flesh and blood, and his mind must have still heard echoes of their conversations and felt the clasps of their hands.

“Tom was my friend,” Harry said. “So was Fred. That journal wasn’t finished and I’d have been betraying them by letting people see it.”

“But Tikima was different,” Nakayla whispered.

“Tikima was different,” Harry repeated. “Elijah’s direct descendent, Harrison Robertson’s granddaughter.”

“My grandfather too,” Nakayla said. “Harrison. Was he named for you?”

“Yes. Elijah’s son Amos and I became good friends. He married and never went back to Chicago. We worked together at the dairy.”

“Did you marry?” Nakayla asked.

“No. Too busy. Dairy cows don’t leave much time for courting.”

I wondered how much of that had been an excuse and glanced down at my artificial foot. Easy to think of yourself as incomplete and unattractive when you’re missing a leg.

“I lost track of the family after Harrison died. Then six months ago, I met Tikima when she presented a program on security tips for seniors. Afterwards, I asked about her last name and made the connection. She came to my hundredth birthday party and I gave her the journal as a gift.” His voice quivered. “I wish I’d burned the damn thing years ago.”

“But you didn’t,” Nakayla said. “And Tikima found a link to Elijah’s murder. I don’t want my sister to have died in vain.”

“I owe my life to Elijah,” Harry said. “When I die, I’d like to know some justice had been served.”

I knew justice would only come with evidence. “Did Fred offer any clues as to what Tom thought might have happened?”

“No. His niece’s daughter returned and we had to leave.” A twinkle sparkled in his eyes at the memory. “She’d brought Fred a strawberry milkshake from Baskin-Robbins. That had been his only request. She called me out to the kitchen where I saw a freezer so packed with strawberry milkshakes that we couldn’t fit it in. Fred was like a squirrel hoarding what was most dear to him. He followed us out to the car and stood singing ‘Give My Regards to Broadway’ as we drove off.”