Sharyn Mccrumb_Elizabeth MacPherson_07 (26 page)

“They were very kind. Look, can I hold on to this for a little while?”

“Don't you think I need a lucky piece more than you do?” asked Bill.

“I promise to let you have the luck, partner. Right now I'd better go and talk to somebody about this little predicament of yours. We need to do something before you get indicted. I have our reputation to think of.”

“Who can you talk to?” asked Bill. “I was afraid to go to any of the old boys in town, because
if they find out how badly I've screwed up, we'll never get accepted by the legal eagles around here.”

“I don't care for the thought myself,” said Powell Hill. “But I can't see any way out of it. I'm going to see what I can do to clear up this mess. And then I suppose I'll have to talk to Cousin Stinky.”

“Great!” groaned Bill. “Your cousin Stinky. You think a country lawyer from southwest Virginia can help me out? Where does Stinky practice? Martinsville?”

“Richmond. Cousin Stinky is the state's attorney general.” A. P. Hill tossed the coin in the air and caught it. “Catch you later, partner.”

“L
ET ME TELL
her about it, Flora!” Lydia Bridgeford was saying. “After all,
I
discovered it!”

“But who put it there?” Dolly Hawks Smith demanded.

I was almost oblivious to their bickering, because the words
Confederate treasury
were still reverberating through my brain, louder than the cannons at Petersburg. “The Confederate treasury,” I said, for perhaps the fifth time. “Wasn't it recovered by the U.S. Army at the close of the war?”

“Some of it,” said Lydia Bridgeford. “One of the cabinet officers, a Mr. Micajah Clark, managed to account for about thirty thousand dollars, which he did turn over to the Union authorities. But remember that when Richmond fell, the government took the treasury with them to Danville. Gold bars.”

I shook my head. “There couldn't have been much money. The Confederacy was poor. Our
soldiers had no shoes, no ammunition, no meat—”

“I thought of that, too,” said Flora Dabney. “But the Union blockade cut off the Confederacy's trade with other countries, which meant that there were no supplies to be had. That's not the same as being without the money to buy them.”

“I have been tracing the Confederate treasury for some time now,” said Lydia Bridgeford. “My dear father was one of the men responsible for guarding it.”

“Your father stole the Confederate treasury?” I should have thought before I spoke, but, frankly, I was amazed to find that genteel larceny was hereditary.

Lydia Bridgeford was thoroughly indignant at such an improper suggestion. “Stole it from whom?” she demanded. “The government had fallen and the officials were trying to flee to Mexico. I am sure that he was keeping it in trust for a time when the South would rise again.”

“Oh, Lyddy, he was not,” said Dolly Smith. “You know perfectly well that your father spent his share and lost what he didn't spend in the crash of '29. What's buried here is
my
father's share.” Her eyes twinkled as she revealed these ancestral misdemeanors. “Our fathers were young sailors assigned to guard the treasury,” she explained. “And at some point after the retreat to Georgia, they took some of the gold bars
entrusted to them and left for home. Lydia's father managed to sell his gold and became a prosperous legislator. My father buried his on this island.”

“And you're only now coming back for it?” I was thinking that I wouldn't have waited until I was seventy to go in search of the family inheritance.

“I only learned of it recently,” said Dolly Hawks Smith. “When we were going through our belongings as we packed to leave, Lydia found an old letter from my father to her father. Father wrote it in 1901, long before I was born, when his first wife died, and he thought his life was coming to a close. I suppose he wanted his old friend to have the money.”

“Father hid the letter in a loose cover of the family Bible,” said Lydia. “I confess that I don't turn to it as often as I should, but really I do think it was Providence that led me to find that letter as I was leafing through it last month.”

I looked at their beaming faces and at the metal detector resting against the seat of the picnic table. “But how do you know that the gold is still here?” I asked. “Mr. Bridgeford might have come back and dug it up after he got the letter.”

“I think he planned to,” said Lydia. “After he lost all his money in '29, he told Mother that we were going to a Georgia island to vacation. I was only a little girl then, but I remember
Mother remarking on how strange it was that he'd want the expense of a seaside holiday when we were in such dire financial straits. Anyway, we never came here. Father had his stroke shortly after that. He was an invalid until he died.”

“It's still here,” said Flora Dabney. “And we intend to find it.”

“Good,” I said. “Then you won't be needing the million or so from the sale of the house, will you?”

They gazed at each other with somber expressions. Finally Mary Lee Pendleton said, “We don't want your brother to go to prison. If we find the gold, we'll return the house money.”

“In that case,” I said, “I would be happy to work this metal detector for you. An old boyfriend taught me how.”

   If Cousin Stinky was glad to see the Hill family's newest attorney, he concealed the emotion with remarkable skill. It might have had something to do with the fact that “little Amy” had appeared at his office without an appointment and with no apparent regard for his schedule and prior commitments. It might have been the grim look of determination she wore in lieu of the deferential simper he preferred on a young female face. But most likely, it was the fact that with newsmen thick on the ground in Richmond government buildings, little Amy
Powell Hill had the audacity to come to his office in the middle of the day wearing a Confederate officer's uniform, complete with sword and plumed hat. Stinky (who had scotched that nickname two hundred miles west of Richmond) barricaded himself behind his mahogany desk, and prepared to humor his eccentric young cousin for at least seven minutes—out of duty to the family.

“Well, Amy,” he said genially, “have you embarked on a movie career? Is there a Civil War epic being produced in the vicinity?”

Powell Hill winced at the use of her first name, but she let it pass, saving her ammunition for bigger skirmishes. “No, sir,” she replied. “I'm still practicing law.”

“So I heard. I believe your mother said you had a tiny little practice in Danville. A low-rent affair. Have you tired of being stubborn already?” He rifled the papers on his desk, as if to indicate all the job openings he might be able to find for qualified young attorneys.

“No, I'm not tired of the practice,” said A.P. “I'll stick it out, thanks. I came here to discuss two matters. One is my law partner, Bill MacPherson. Your state legal beagles are hassling him because he accidentally sold the Home for Confederate Women.”

“I've heard about that,” said Stinky with an ill-concealed grin. “Is that young fellow your law partner? Oh, my. There's more than a million
dollars unaccounted for, isn't there? And isn't he under some suspicion of having done away with the residents of the home?”

“I can clear that up.” A. P. Hill reached into her briefcase and pulled out a fax message. “Here is a copy of an affidavit signed by all of the former residents of the home, indicating that they are alive and well and they removed the paperwork regarding the lien from the courthouse before my partner did the title search. And here's an agreement signed by John Huff, the present owner of the house, agreeing to sell the property back to the state for his purchase price plus ten percent.” She paused and looked thoughtful. “I hope the restoration people were planning to do some remodeling. Mr. Huff seems to have done a lot of damage to the house. Holes dug in the yard, plaster removed from the walls …  I take it he didn't find what he was looking for.”

“Can we sue him?” asked the attorney general, momentarily distracted from the case at hand.

“You don't own the house, remember? I talked to a couple of my law professors about this. They agree with me that if no lien was present in the courthouse records, then the transaction was legal as it stood. Mr. Huff bought the house fair and square. Bill was within his rights as an attorney to handle the sale. He is not liable for the money. Which”—she tapped the fax
document from Jekyll Island—“the former residents admit to having in a numbered account in the Cayman Islands. They will not be returning to testify, by the way.”

“This won't look good for your lawyer friend when it hits the papers, Amy.”

“It won't hit the papers. That's where you come in. I want you to use all your influence to make this whole problem go away, because if you don't—”

Cousin Stinky frowned. The seven minutes were surely up by now. Why didn't his secretary buzz him? “If I don't—what?”

A. P. Hill stood up and straightened her plumed hat. “Why, Cousin Stinky, if we have any trouble at all about this matter, my entire regiment of Confederate reenactors will come and camp on the lawn of this building, and we'll give press conferences left and right telling people how the Commonwealth of Virginia evicted a bunch of senior citizens from their home because you were too cheap to pay their utilities! And I'll make sure the reporters know that
I'm
related to
you.”

“You wouldn't!”

“Sure I would,” grinned Powell. “And I'd be sure to mention how the old ladies outsmarted you by stealing the documents, so that you'll have to spend nearly two million dollars of the taxpayers' money to buy the house back.”

The attorney general's face had gone from
good-old-boy red to the delicate green of aged cheese. The buzzer on his intercom sounded insistently, but he made no move to communicate with the caller. Finally he said, “I suppose I could speak to a few people and see that this gets hushed up.” He had been considering running for a Senate seat in the next few months. A Confederate rally on his behalf would do nothing to help his chances at higher office.

“Good,” said A. P. Hill. “I'll tell the boys to reschedule the rally for the other location.”

“Reschedule it? But you said—”

“Oh, I'll leave you out of it,” his cousin promised. “No one will know we're kin. But I'm going to stage a photogenic demonstration at the headquarters of the Park Service. That will give them one chance to back down before I sue them.”

“You're suing the Park Service?”

A. P. Hill narrowed her eyes and set her jaw. “Damned straight. They told me that I couldn't participate in reenactments because I was a woman.”

“So you're going to give them a real war instead, eh, Amy?” He was smiling in spite of himself, possibly at the thought of the legal fees that such a battle would generate.

“Yes. I'll fight them all the way to the Supreme Court if I have to. And I hope I have to.”

The attorney general shook his head. “Legal battles like that can be both time-consuming
and costly. I think you'd better drop this idea and get back to that struggling little practice of yours before you and your partner go broke.”

“That brings me to the other thing I wanted to ask you about,” said A. P. Hill. She reached into the pocket of her trousers and fished out a copper coin. “Do you know what this is? A Confederate penny piece. I had it verified at a coin shop before I came over here. Do you know how many there are in existence?”

“Can't say I do.”

“Eight. They were made in Philadelphia as samples for the new government, but metal became scarce in the Confederacy, so pennies were never minted. This one must have belonged to one of the members of Jefferson Davis's cabinet. It's worth over half a million dollars.”

“Where did you get it?”

“One of the Confederate ladies gave it to Bill. Her father acquired it after the fall of Richmond.”

“Shouldn't you give it back, Amy?”

She shrugged. “Elizabeth MacPherson—that's Bill's sister—says that the women are leaving the country and they won't tell anybody where they're going. I guess they just don't trust your government, Stinky. Speaking of the government, I thought I'd ask you if the Commonwealth of Virginia would like to make us an offer for the coin before I put it up for auction.
It would be a wonderful addition to the museum.”

“I will consult with the appropriate officials,” said her cousin cautiously.

“Great! Well, I guess that's it, then. Bill is off the hook—and I'm going to take on the Park Service.” She patted her cousin on the shoulder. “Take it easy, Stink!”