Vendetta (Deadly Curiosities Book 2) (27 page)

The morning was pretty busy, but I still couldn’t get the vision from Josiah Winfield’s pistols out of my mind. Maggie went to meet a friend on her lunch hour, and Teag had packed a lunch, so I decided to clear my head and go for a walk.

“Why do I suspect that you’re going to end up at the Archive?” Teag said jokingly.

“Maybe because it makes sense to talk to Mrs. Morrissey and see if she knows anything about this Winfield character,” I replied, grabbing my purse. “I’ll be back before too long,” I headed outside, hoping the sunshine would improve my mood.

First, I grabbed a quick lunch at Honeysuckle Café and a couple of lattes to-go. Mrs. Morrissey, the woman who runs the Archive, has a weakness for lattes, and bringing one to her pretty much guaranteed we’d talk a while.

It wasn’t far from the café over to the Historical Archive. The Archive is situated in the old Drayton House, a beautiful home built by a family from Charleston’s elite. Time passed, things changed, and the Drayton House was bequeathed to the city.

“I’m here to see Mrs. Morrissey,” I told the receptionist. No matter how often I visited, I always appreciated how beautiful the place was. The Archive had kept most of the house looking like a grand old home, with period furnishings and paintings. I could almost imagine women in ball gowns and men in formal attire gathering in the parlor for a party.

“Cassidy! How wonderful to see you. And you’ve brought a latte for me, you darling girl!” Mrs. Benjamin Morrissey emerged from the former sitting room that was now her office with a big smile of welcome. I handed her one of the coffees, and she gave me a quick hug and air kiss, then motioned for me to follow her into her office.

“It’s been a little while. I was beginning to think you’d forgotten your way here!” she said, as I sat down in one of the comfortable chairs facing the desk. Mrs. Morrissey went around to take a seat in her own leather chair.

Mrs. Morrissey came from one of the Charleston blue-blood families, and had married well. When her husband died, he had left her well-off both in money and social connections. I guessed that Mrs. Morrissey was in her seventies, still pretty in an elegant way. She was slim enough for St. John suits, and her hair and make-up were always perfect. I loved that Mrs. Morrissey had no patience for Botox or facelifts, meaning that she looked her age in the most graceful way possible. She had been a friend of my Uncle Evan’s, and I suspected that she had more than an inkling of what we really did over at Trifles and Folly.

“Oh, I’d never forget,” I replied with a chuckle. “And I’ve got a question I’m hoping you can answer. What do you know about a man named Josiah Winfield?”

Mrs. Morrissey took a sip of her latte and leaned back in her chair, thinking. “Was he from Charleston? I can’t place that name.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. He was something of a wandering vigilante who might have passed through the city around the time of the last big Yellow Fever epidemic.”

Mrs. Morrissey set her latte aside and stood up. “There’s a book upstairs with sketches from that period,” she said. “Some are pretty grim, as you can imagine. Photographs were expensive, so a lot of the newspapers still relied on sketches. Come on. Let’s see what we can find.”

The Archive’s big front hallway was a display area for rotating exhibits, and so was the ballroom on the second floor. I’d had some bad experiences with items in a past display, but to my relief, the current special exhibit was on ‘Angels in Charleston’.

“Oh wow!” I said, looking at the display. “What’s up with all the angels?” The wall display cases had paintings, small sculptures and stained glass panels, Christmas ornaments and jewelry – all of them featuring angels in very Charleston-esque settings.

“Do you like it?” Mrs. Morrissey asked. “It’s for the Angel Oak Fundraiser.”

The Angel Oak is a huge old live oak out on Johns Island. Scientists say it’s at least four hundred years old, and some estimates go all the way up to fourteen hundred years. The tree is a celebrity in its own right, but hurricanes damaged it, and so local preservation societies were raising funds to keep the old tree healthy.

“I never realized there were so many depictions of angels in Charleston,” I said, peering into the cases.

“Well you know, they do call us the Holy City,” Mrs. Morrissey said with a laugh. That’s a nickname Charleston has earned for the large number of churches in the city. No matter where you turn, there’s always a spire in sight.

Some of the pieces on display looked very old, while others were modernistic. “There are more in the exhibition room upstairs,” Mrs. Morrissey said, warming to the subject. “Some of the pieces date back almost to Charleston’s founding. Usually, they were religious paintings of angels watching over the city, or guarding a particular person or family. Down through the years, a lot of artists have been drawn to the angel theme. I didn’t realize quite how many until we started to put the display together.”

Some of the paintings were ‘primitives’, done by artists with talent but no training. Others were clearly done by professionals. A few of the paintings even featured the Angel Oak, while others showed angelic creatures holding back threatening shadows and monsters with their glowing swords.

“You know, angels are a theme almost everyone can identify with. Pretty much every belief system has some kind of angels, and we tried to display pieces that show a broad range of viewpoints,” Mrs. Morrissey added as I followed her upstairs.

On the way up the broad staircase, I stole a glance at an oil painting of a ball from the late 1800s. It had been painted at the Drayton House during a big party, and tucked into the back, trying not to be noticed, I saw Sorren among the many guests whose faces and outfits had been captured by the painter.

Displaying small collections in the Drayton House is pretty new for the Archive, but the front hallway and the upstairs ballroom are perfect for showing off pieces in a more intimate setting, and donors love it. Upstairs, the old ballroom was decked out in white, silver, and gold. Angels of every size and style graced the room. Some were blown glass and others were punched tin. There were angels of stone and wood, stitched from fabric banners, even woven from sweetgrass. A series of photographs showed the angel monuments from Charleston’s fine old cemeteries, and a local baker had created some interesting variations on the idea of ‘angel food’ cake. Standing in the center was a replica of the Angel Oak itself, a floor-to-ceiling model that still didn’t come close to the size of the real thing.

“That’s pretty amazing,” I said, nodding toward the artist’s version of the old live oak. Even though it was a fraction of the size of the actual tree, it was still huge. Although I hadn’t touched any of the artwork, the display filled the ballroom with a peaceful vibe, strong and confident. I felt myself relax for the first time in days, enjoying a sense of safety. There in the midst of the angel art, it really did feel like someone was watching over me.

“Isn’t the model of the Angel Oak striking?” Mrs. Morrissey said. “The artist received permission from the tree’s caretakers to use some of the twigs and acorns from the real Angel Oak. He really captured the essence, don’t you think?”

I nodded, looking all around at the artwork. “Whenever there’s been a difficult time, we’ve had a rise in art with angels,” Mrs. Morrissey said, leading me around the exhibition. “Yellow Fever, cholera, earthquakes, bombardments, hurricanes, and the like – people turn to making or painting angels. I guess it gives them a sense of comfort.”

“So the display is part of the fundraiser?” I asked.

Mrs. Morrissey nodded. “Yes, and I think it will be fabulous. Almost everything here is part of the silent auction to raise money to preserve the Angel Oak. The exhibition premier will be during the donor gala. It’s just a few days away – I have a million and one things to do to get ready!”

A grouping of paintings in the far corner of the room caught my eye and I wandered over. I could feel the energy shift as I headed toward the edge of the room, and the feel-good vibe became edgy. The angels in the rest of the display ranged from cute to protective, chubby cherubs to hunky bare-chested guys in white robes with flaming swords. But the images in this painting were much darker and more sinister. The faces of these angels leered or threatened, and their eyes were cold. The artist had painted the background in the colors of storm clouds: black, gray, sickly green, and a shade of purple that was the color of a deep bruise or a wound gone bad. I found myself face-to-face with a painting of three Nephilim.

“Why is this part of a display on angels?” I asked, taking a step back.

Mrs. Morrissey chuckled. “Interesting, isn’t it? It’s one panel from a series of paintings called ‘Nephilim Rising’. I suspect they’ll raise a lot of eyebrows. I call them our ‘bad boys’. Haven’t you ever heard of fallen angels?”

“Of course I have. Those just look like they fell hard.”

One of the fallen angels was in its monster-form. A second was robed in black with a cowl that nearly covered his face. The third looked straight ahead with a frightening intensity, strikingly handsome, like a movie star hired to play a psychopath with the flat, dead eyes of a remorseless killer. I shivered, having seen that same look in Coffee Guy’s eyes. Whoever had painted these Nephilim had first-hand knowledge.

“I can’t imagine anyone getting a sense of comfort from these angels,” I said. There was a horrible beauty to them that made it difficult to look away, and a disquieting sense that it might be best to keep an eye on them. Near the painting, the resonance was disquieting and dangerous, as if the room itself was screaming a warning to stay back.

“Unfortunately, you’re right,” Mrs. Morrissey said. “They were painted by Gerard Astor, an artist from Charleston who gained national – and international – prominence. But Gerard battled some demons of his own, like depression and drugs. This was the last painting he finished before he vanished. Most art historians believe he committed suicide.”

I remembered what Father Anne had said, “
Poor, doomed Gerard Astor”…
If he had enough contact with the Nephilim to paint their portraits, it didn’t surprise me he killed himself. Especially if the Nephilim came with the same dose of overwhelming guilt that I felt around Coffee
Guy.

I let Mrs. Morrissey lead me around the rest of the exhibition, although I did not turn my back on the fallen angel painting. The other pieces were light-hearted, inspirational, and gorgeous, and I tried to push the darker images from my mind.

“I think your display is fabulous,” I said, surprised at how many different ways there were to fashion angels. I let my hand gently touch one of the carved and painted wooden angels, and felt a warm, protective power resonating from the sculpture. I was willing to bet the same would be true for most, if not all, of the figures. Whether the artists knew it or not, the angels they felt moved to carve carried their own flicker of magic, bound up in the emotional imprint of the artists that made the figures.

Reluctantly, I left the ballroom and followed Mrs. Morrissey to the Archive’s library. “Here we go,” she said, bringing a large, canvas-bound book down to one of the reading tables. Not everything had been scanned into computers yet, and while doing so was an ongoing project, such things take time and money. Hence the ‘stacks’, dozens of shelves filled with old volumes organized by the Dewey Decimal System with Mrs. Morrissey’s brain as the search engine.

“
The Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1854
,” I read, looking down at the embossed cover of the large book. Yellow Fever had scourged Charleston from its founding until the creation of modern medicine. A hot, wet climate, mosquitoes and the constant coming and going of strangers in a port city was a recipe for epidemics. But even by those standards, the outbreak in 1854 had been a doozie.

Gingerly, I touched the cover of the book, but no vision appeared to me. Just a persistent sadness, perhaps from others who had looked for clues to the fate of ancestors in these pages.

“I can’t imagine wandering around the city with a sketch book in the middle of an epidemic,” Mrs. Morrissey said as I flipped the pages in the oversized book. Black-and-white charcoal sketches caught images of funeral processions, corpses littering the streets, carts filled with dead bodies and mourners of every age and social class. A few old daguerreotype photographs were sprinkled among the sketches, faded with the years.

“They must have realized that the epidemic would go down in history,” I mused. The sketches looked like they had been drawn quickly, but with an eye for detail. I turned one more page, and drew in a sharp breath.

“Did you find what you needed?” Mrs. Morrissey asked as she busied herself with another book.

Oh yeah.
The next sketch looked like the cover for a fantasy novel. A man in a long duster coat was shooting at five dark, cloaked figures. Bodies lay heaped around the feet of the creatures, and one of the beings gnawed on a human leg bone. Streaks of lightning fell from the sky, and the gunslinger’s weapon shot fire.

Most people would have taken the sketch for allegory, mankind versus the plague. I was certain the sketch’s artist had witnessed a battle between Winfield and the Nephilim. I took a picture of the page with my phone, and decided to ask Sorren for details later.

“I found the man you asked about, here in the names of the dead,” Mrs. Morrissey said, calling me away from the sketchbook and over to where she pointed to a name in a big ledger of the plague dead. And right above Mrs. Morrissey’s sculpted fingernail, I saw the name ‘Winfield, Josiah. Death by unlawful duel’.