Isolation (7 page)

Chapter Ten

Joe looked more than a little like his father. Emma knew that Joe wished this were not so, but it was, and there was nothing he could do about it. She wished there were a tactful way to ask Joe to describe his mother, or even to ask him to show her a picture of the woman she now knew as Patricia, because Sly had mentioned her by name.

She knew Sly had mentioned Patricia by accident. Emma sensed that he rarely spoke of his dead wife. She rested in a vault inside him that he rarely opened, and he'd kept her name locked in his mouth all these years. When he'd heard himself say, “Patricia,” the man's flirtatious patter had sputtered, just for a second, then resumed. Emma wondered why he had opened his mouth for her. What had she done to make him look into that vault?

They'd been talking about Joe and she'd said one of those things a father likes to hear. Something like, “You raised a good son. You'd think he believed there wasn't a grocery store in all of Micco County, if you looked at all the fish and venison he brings me. I keep telling him that I am well able to buy groceries, but the man behaves like he can't hear me. He keeps on filling my freezer.”

When Sly had heard himself say, “It was Patricia what taught—” he'd flinched and lost the thread of his thought. His hank of glossy hair had swung in reaction to the reflexive headbob that filled a silence so brief that she'd almost missed it. Then Sly had picked the thread back up and finished his thought.

“Joe's mama taught him to fish. Can't take credit for that. I like to fish, too, but I was doing long hauls back then, and they don't leave a lotta time for fishing. I was on a real long one when she decided Joe had got big enough not to stab his own thumb with a hook. By the time I got home, he knew near as much as she did, which was a lot. But I did teach him how to handle a bow.”

It was a quick conversational skip from this moment of paternal pride to Emma's admission that she hadn't gone fishing since Douglass died. An even quicker shift led to Sly's offer to remedy that situation. Now she was looking forward to being on the Gulf late that afternoon, bundled up against the weak chill of Florida in November. She'd packed some snacks—venison jerky, dried plums, shelled pecans. Come to think of it, Joe had stocked her pantry with all those things, just in case there was an apocalypse that took all the world's groceries but miraculously left Emma whole and able to defend herself.

She wanted to ask Sly whether he'd taught his son to make jerky, but she didn't. She wasn't willing to watch the man swallow hard if the answer forced him to say, “Patricia taught him to do that,” or, more likely, “Joe's mama taught him how.”

During that momentary silence when Sly hid his grief behind a bobbing head, Emma had time to wonder what Patricia had looked like. Joe's eyes were green and Sly's were black, or nearly so. Sly's hair was black, too, and Emma had seen the sun bring out hidden rusty tones in Joe's hair. Joe's skin tone, which she ordinarily saw as a strong and deep bronze, looked several shades lighter when he stood next to his father. It was possible that Sly was a hundred percent Creek, but Joe obviously was not.

In her mind, Emma folded Joe and Sly into a vision of the absent Patricia. She had been a real live woman—Emma could almost feel her presence—but her image was mutable. Patricia's hair had been blonde or maybe red. Her eyes were green, but perhaps they were blue. Her skin could have been as fair as Snow White's. Joe's limbs were longer and leaner than his father's, so perhaps his mother had been a willowy thing.

Unless she could get one of the Mantooth men to talk about Patricia, there was no way to know anything about her. Why did Emma care, anyway? Maybe for the same reason that she was happy whenever a conversation turned to Douglass. It seemed ungrateful to forget the dead, never looking back.

Joe sat waiting for her to speak. He looked about as stern as it was possible for a tenderhearted man to look, and he wanted her to tell him about Oscar. She would have preferred to divert the conversation to his mother, but that would have been cruel. So…Oscar. What could she say about Oscar without betraying Faye's trust?

Joe repeated himself. “Who is Oscar? And why don't I know about him?”

Emma began with a truthful, but careful, response. “Faye is my friend.”

Joe rolled those green eyes that didn't look like Sly's. “I know that.”

“I don't rat out my friends.”

Oh, crap. Now he looked like she'd slapped him. If she let the conversation die immediately after refusing to betray Faye's trust, then Joe would be free to imagine what Emma might be helping his wife hide.

Infidelity? Gambling debts? A drug habit?

All the obvious things people hid from their spouses sounded ludicrous when applied to Faye, but Joe's imagination was going to use them for a jumping point into madness. By the time he got home, he would have decided that Faye was hip-deep in international espionage, which actually seemed to fit her personality better than run-of-the-mill vices.

Emma was no rat, but she had to do something.

“Don't you need to stop by the museum?”

Joe was already imagining infidelity and gambling debts. There was no room in his head to think about her not-shocking Museum of American Slavery.

She touched him on the arm. “You know I spend my afternoons at the museum. Why don't you stop by today?” She did her best to add weight to her voice, hoping that he would understand that there were things to be learned at the museum that she couldn't say out loud. She repeated herself. “You should come today. This afternoon.”

Joe never stopped by the museum, except to see Emma, and he was seeing her now. His eyes said that he was wondering why she wanted him to come to this place he'd seen so many times before. Ever polite, he couldn't turn down her invitation, but he clearly didn't understand why she'd made it. Faye was lucky to have married a man who was so without guile.

“Go find yourself some lunch, Joe. Kill a little time. Then come see me at the museum about two.”

“And you'll answer my question then?”

“No. Because Faye will still be my friend at two o'clock this afternoon.”

Seriously. How dense could a man be?

“But if you come to my museum at two, you may get your question answered anyway.”

Emma wondered if Joe would be able to get the answer to his question quickly enough to get himself and his john boat home by four. If he didn't, there was no way that Sly was going to be able to pilot that boat back to shore in time to take her fishing. And she didn't want to miss that fishing trip. It had been a long time since she'd been alone in close quarters with a good-looking man.

Chapter Eleven

On the surface, the Museum of American Slavery looked almost exactly like it had when it was a rich man's hobby, but Joe knew that things had changed. After Douglass passed on, Emma'd had no place else to focus her loving attention, so she'd lavished it on his museum. Faye had helped her add interactive displays for children. Together, they'd trained volunteers to help kids learn to use scrub boards and hand-cranked cotton gins, and the museum patrons loved the hands-on activities. Joe wasn't sure that these historical games fully illustrated the concept of “It wasn't fun to be a slave,” but he was glad Emma's museum was busy.

She opened her office door when he knocked. When he saw that she had visitors, an older man and a woman about his age, he tried to excuse himself, but Emma looked at him with an expression that he used to see on his wife's face, before Faye got so sad. It said, “Would you stop being so clueless?”

Her mouth just said, “It's good to see you, Joe. Come in and sit down.” So he did as he was told.

Emma turned to her guests and said, “Joe Wolf Mantooth, I'd like you to meet Delia Scarsdale and Oscar Croft. They're visiting from Ohio.” She leaned a little bit on the word “Oscar,” and gave Joe a look that said, “Still feeling clueless?”

Joe shook both their hands. Emma clearly wanted him to say something, so he went with the first thing that came to mind. “What brings you folks to Florida?”

While waiting for their answer, he checked their hands, hoping to see wedding rings. No luck.

He trusted Faye. Besides, if he ever lost her, he hoped it wouldn't be to a creaky old dude like this one. But could it be that Faye and her friends were upset with Oscar because he'd been hitting on her?

“Oscar's interested in history—a real scholar, actually—and I'm helping him out. I'm his personal tour guide while he researches his family history.” Delia said this with a sparkly smile, like a TV newscaster.

“Don't be silly. You're the scholar.” Oscar's veined hand cupped her elbow, just for a second. “Delia here has a PhD in American history and she's a certified genealogist. ‘Tour guide' doesn't even begin to describe what she does for clients like me. She interviewed me, learned about my family and my interests, and planned this research trip for me. There's no better way to see this country than to hire Delia as a tour guide, not if you're interested in history.”

Joe was still trying to read Delia and Oscar. Emma clearly thought he was going to be able to figure out why Faye was bothered about Oscar. She also clearly didn't intend to help him. He couldn't think of any brilliant questions to ask, so he responded to Oscar's statement about what a brilliant tour guide Delia was.

“I have my own historian to show me the countryside. Well, my wife's an archaeologist, not a historian, but there isn't a spot of ground around here that she can't spend an hour talking about. She knows all the families that lived here and all the battles that happened here. Faye's as smart as they come.”

“Your wife's an archaeologist?” Oscar said. “I'm an idiot. I heard Emma say your last name was Mantooth, but I didn't put two and two together. Is your wife Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth?”

“Yes. You know her?”

“We met her once, briefly,” Delia offered.

“Emma introduced us,” Oscar said. “I had more questions for her than she could have answered in one conversation. Faye took some notes and said that she'd get back with me about the answers, but it's been weeks. I suppose she's been busy with a dig?”

Joe thought of the hodge-podge of pointless holes that Faye had been digging for weeks and said only, “Yes,” because it was true. Technically, a pointless hole was a “dig.” He also thought that Oscar must have a lot of money if he was paying this historian to spend weeks touring him around Florida.

“Delia is the genealogist, not me. She's helped me trace my family back for generations. But there's a question neither of us could ever answer. We both thought that coming here might get me that answer.”

Joe gave Emma an uncertain glance, but he couldn't read her face. He asked Delia the only obvious question. “What's the answer you're looking for? Is there an old family mystery?”

“Yes!” Oscar's eyes lit up under his bushy gray eyebrows. “One of my ancestors went missing right here in Micco County, just after the Civil War.”

“Are you thinking Faye can find him?” Joe pictured the holes all over Joyeuse Island. Surely Faye wasn't looking for a man who'd been dead for more than a century.

“Not
him
. Not his body. I'm sure it's gone to dust, although that doesn't mean we won't check every old cemetery in the county while we're here. But I'd give anything for some clue of what happened to my great-great-grandfather. His name was Elias Croft. We know he was sent to Louisiana early on, spending most of the war there. We know for certain that he survived the war, because he sent his medals home for safekeeping and Delia dug up the dates the government gave them to him. That was a pretty bit of detective work she did. She also found his name in a newspaper article about the soldiers occupying Micco County after the war, which was a nice confirmation of stories that came down through the family. We'd always thought he was in Florida at the end of the war, and that he stayed here during Reconstruction. Thanks to Delia, we know for sure.”

Delia ducked her head and smiled, peeking up at him through thick lashes. “All you need to know is where to look.”

“Well, you did. But that's all we know. There's no record of his death or of his discharge from the Army. When I was a kid, my grandfather had some letters he sent home from Florida, but they went missing after Grandpa went into a nursing home, years ago. I never actually read them, but Grandpa said that he seemed to be doing fine until his letters stopped coming.”

“
Stopped
,” Delia added, snapping her fingers with their candy-pink nails.

“Grandpa also said that one last letter came, years later, not written by his hand, but by the woman who tended him in his last sickness. She said that Great-great-grandfather Elias had died and that he had asked her to send his sword to his wife in Ohio. As the story goes, his wife burned the letter as soon as she had read it, laid the sword across her husband's pillow, then crawled in bed beside it. Before long, the tuberculosis she'd had for years finally took her, although some say she died of heartbreak. I have the sword, so I know this part was true.”

No,
Joe thought,
all you know is that you've got a sword.
He said, “So what do you think happened to him?”

“Grandpa told me about some other letters that came during the years after my great-great-grandfather went silent, but before his sword came home. The other letters came from a woman who lived near here in Panacea, who was very upset because Great-great-grandfather Elias was living in sin. She said that he was trying to hide his sin, but she'd seen it. He was living with a woman in an unholy state and he couldn't have done anything about their unholiness, even if he'd wanted to and even if he'd been free to marry, because the woman wasn't white. She said his wife needed to come down here and fetch him home. I never saw those letters, because my grandmother would have never let a little boy read about something sinful.”

Joe thought this sounded like a Civil War soap opera. “Did she come? Did she try to fetch him home?”

“By that time, the tuberculosis had her housebound. My grandmother said everybody always said that Elias' wife hung on for all the years after his letters stopped coming, hoping for another one that said what had happened to him. The letters from the busybody in Panacea tortured her, because she was hoping for news when she opened them and she got slander instead. But still she hung on, because those letters told her he was alive.”

“Until the sword?” Joe imagined getting a letter from a stranger, telling him Faye was dead and giving him one last thing to remember her by. “She hung on until she got the letter and the sword? Did they come from the busybody in Panacea?”

“No,” Oscar said, “though the busybody did do a lot of mailing, all letters telling horrible tales. Or maybe there was more than one busybody writing letters, because they changed in tone over the years. Later letters said that Elias wasn't living in sin. He was being held captive. There were a lot of stories floating around in those days about Union soldiers and the women the Confederate soldiers left behind. I know you've heard some of them.”

“There's a house in Mississippi that's supposed to be haunted by the daughter of its owner,” Emma said. “They say a Yankee soldier seduced her and she jumped off the balcony when he went away and never came back.”

“The legends went both ways. Sometimes it was the Northern soldier who was mistreated,” Delia said. “
Gone with the Wind
is our most famous Civil War story, and what does Scarlett do about halfway through the movie? She shoots a Yankee soldier dead. Yes, he's stealing her mother's treasures and he is probably planning to rape her, but that just highlights the conflict. Bad things happen in war, and sometimes civilians are involved. We want to know if Elias Croft was held against his will, perhaps even murdered.”

Joe thought the whole thing sounded far-fetched. “So you don't know who the Panacea busybody was? And I bet you don't know anything about the woman who sent home the sword, either.”

“Oh, but we do!” Delia looked like someone so delighted by a piece of nasty gossip that she couldn't contain herself.

Delia put her hands on her knees and leaned forward as if she were telling ghost stories around a campfire. She held her silence until she was sure the other three were all listening. Only then did she speak.

“Oscar's grandfather said her name too many times for him to ever forget it, but that's all we have at the moment. I can't seem to track her down, and I've tried. I've found no birth or death records. I've tried all the possible ways to spell her name. I've found a few people in surrounding counties with her surname, or one like it, and some of them were women, but none of them were born at the right time. None of them could possibly be the woman who sent Elias' great-great-grandfather's sword home.”

‘Then all you got is a story,” Joe said.

“I have more than that,” Delia said in a voice that reminded him of Faye's in its determination. “I did my doctoral work in a library, sifting through old papers, and I know what you can find when you don't give up. I have more than a story. I have a real woman's name. I know she lived in Micco County, just after the Civil War. That's enough to find her.”

“It better be an unusual name,” Joe said, “if you're hoping to find one lone woman after all these years.”

“It's unusual enough. Somebody around here knows something about Cally Stanton and I'm going to find out what it is.”