Deeper Than the Grave (8 page)

Chapter Sixteen

I moved quietly through the exhibit, Evie at my side. She stopped me at the first display, where a pretend fireplace burned with orange licks of faux flame. A dark-haired female mannequin dressed in black mourning sat in a rocking chair, a notebook in her lap. Another female figure—also in black, her blond hair in an elaborate plait—gazed at the mantel, one slender plastic hand resting there, the other on top of her pregnant belly. Between them stood a matronly figure in a dark slate housedress, hands on hips, gray hair in a netted bun, eyes like blue bullets.

Evie gestured with an upturned palm. “Meet the Amberdecker women. That's my great-great-great-great-aunt Violet, Braxton's younger sister, in the rocker. We used her sketches, including her self-portraits, to create the models you'll see today.”

I examined the three figures. “They're incredibly lifelike.”

“Part of that is technology—the hyperrealism of silicone skin—but the rest is Violet's talent. She had a way of capturing not only each person's distinct features, but also each unique personality. Unfortunately, all we have of her are her sketches. Her diaries and journals were lost in a kitchen fire just after the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain.”

I stepped closer. Violet seemed poised on the verge of springing from the rocker, her blue eyes bright in her pale pixie face. Childlike, but not innocent, an unsettling combination.

“She look a little manic,” I said.

Evie's expression remained smooth. “Violet eventually went mad and was committed to a mental institution, where she died at the age of twenty. Suicide from an overdose of laudanum.”

Her words hung heavy in the air. “That's awful,” I said.

“It was. I have a special fondness for Violet, who was the black sheep of my family in many ways. But more about that later. Let me introduce my great-great-great-grandmother now.”

We moved to the left of the tableau, stopping before the pregnant blonde. This figure seemed prissily bored, the slight curl in her tiny rosebud mouth rippling with genteel contempt.

Evie folded her arms. “And this is Evangeline Davenport Amberdecker, Braxton's wife.”

“She looks annoyed.”

“She was. The daughter of wealthy Northerners, Evangeline was betrothed to Braxton in a marriage that was more business arrangement than love match and which was bitterly unhappy on both sides.”

I pointed at the swollen belly. “They managed to get along for a little while.”

Evie laughed. “Well, that was their duty, of course. She was carrying their first and only child when he went missing in action at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. Her parents had moved her back to Maryland by then, however, so that child—my great-great-grandfather—was born in Chesapeake Bay. He didn't return to Georgia until 1895, when he reclaimed the land that is now the Amberdecker plantation and rebuilt it.”

I stepped to the edge of the display, looked the stern central figure in the eye. “And this is?”

“Augusta Rose Amberdecker, my great-great-great-great-grandmother and the matriarch of the clan. You'll notice she's not in mourning. That's because she refused to acknowledge Braxton's death. This put her at odds with her other two children, and with her daughter-in-law, who seemed quite eager to be a widow and put her unfortunate marriage, and Georgia, behind her.”

“Augusta Rose. Is she your mother's namesake?”

Evie nodded. “And not just the name got passed down. Mama also inherited her stubborn streak.”

“Richard told me your mother wasn't too happy about parting with the family heirlooms for this exhibit.”

“My mother would keep everything in the closet if she had her way. Sometimes I think she expects the Yankees to make another run at us.” She started walking. “There's only one section of our land that has ever been excavated, and that was back when the greenhouse was built over the ruins of the old slave quarters.”

I stopped abruptly when I reached the next tableau. This shadowy corner explored a darker aspect of plantation life—the labors of the enslaved—and as such contained the artifacts of an everyday, ordinary evil. The ten-pound bucket of nails that was a slave's required daily output at the forge. The slave ship manifests listing human beings as cargo. Every mundane thing, from the soup ladles to the pottery, felt touched by a sadness so pervasive it would never rub off.

Evie's voice was calm, however. “These artifacts tell the Amberdecker story as much as the rest. They speak of their participation in an inhuman institution. But they also demonstrate that by all surviving accounts, my ancestors were not brutal people. They provided religious services and health care for the enslaved workers, and Violet often taught the children how to read and draw—”

“But not write,” I said. “Because that was illegal.”

Evie's eyes widened in mild surprise—she hadn't expected me to know that—but she recovered smoothly. “Correct. Violet flouted the law, however. She was reprimanded multiple times for bringing free persons of color onto the plantation under the guise of religious instruction, when in reality, they were probably underground educators. It's one of the reasons I have such a fondness for her.”

Evie started walking again, and I followed, relieved to put that display behind me. I was on a fact-finding mission, I reminded myself, not a soapbox. But I couldn't help the dull seethe of anger. Or the guilt. Both were part of my Southern baggage, inextricable.

We stopped next at a three-dimensional replica of the Kennesaw Mountain battlefield and surrounding land, including the Amberdecker property. I recognized the area I'd trekked the day before, now rendered in miniature, bordered by the ridge of Kennesaw Mountain. I poked one of the push buttons lining the perimeter, and the terrain lit up where Braxton's bones had been found. Another button illuminated the chapel and the cemetery, pristine and intact, unlike their real-life counterparts.

I resisted the urge to touch the tiny gravestones. “I've heard rumors this land is haunted.”

“You've been listening to Joe Ben, haven't you?”

“He does talk.” I pressed another button and watched the front line of the Confederate defense light up across the mountain, where sharpshooters had hidden in the red clay earthworks, as gray and silent as ghosts themselves. “I used to be a tour guide in Savannah. The supernatural was my specialty. And the War Between the States.”

Evie kept her eyes on the display. “This is a story of a haunting, yes, but not how Joe Ben thinks. Violet had a premonition that her brother would never return from battle. She had a dream, she said, her brother dying in the forest, undiscovered. That was a pervasive fear then, even more than dying, so much so that some soldiers pinned their names to their backs, or etched them into their daggers and bayonets, as Braxton did. Indeed, his personalized bayonet was instrumental in identifying the remains as his.”

“You didn't run DNA?”

She shook her head. “My mother wouldn't allow it. And really, it wasn't necessary. We had anecdotal evidence that established his identity—a fracture of the left ulna, documented in his medical papers—plus the bayonet.”

“Richard said the evidence indicated he was trying to get home from the battlefield.”

“All we know is that he was buried prone, arms splayed, the Minié ball that killed him still in his skull.” Evie rubbed the bridge of her nose. “A single shot, right between the eyes.”

I winced. Minié balls were notorious for the damage they inflicted—tearing, lacerating, splintering. Over sixty thousand amputations were performed in the Civil War, most of them due to this deceptively small piece of lead.

“The in situ presentation demonstrated that he wasn't given a proper Christian burial—that's usually face up, supine. It suggested that he died where he fell and was covered with dirt, his body eventually becoming entangled in the roots of a tree growing nearly. That's how he was found, you know. When the tree fell.”

“Richard told me. He said the bones were red.”

“They were, as you can see from the photographs in the program. They were buried in stratified red clay, which created a staining pattern quite unlike anything I've ever seen. Beautiful, actually.” Evie stepped forward, pulling open a set of drapes. “Braxton left us his bones, Violet her art. Augusta Rose's stubbornness left us these.”

She pressed a button, and a previously dark alcove flooded with light like morning sunshine. The stained-glass windows flared to life. Unlike the ones in the chapel, these weren't blandly perfect. They thrummed with vitality, broken and authentic, as if the hundreds of eyes that had gazed through them over the centuries had burnished them brighter, as if the figures were poised to step out of the leaded panes, lungs pumping, blood surging.

I spun around to face her. “I knew the ones in the chapel weren't real!”

“I used the renovation as an excuse to switch them out with replicas. As the whole world will know on Saturday, including my mother. And then there will be hell to pay. But I decided it would be easier to ask forgiveness than permission.”

“You fooled Richard.”

She shot me a pointed look. “I did not. Richard knows, but he doesn't want to admit it because then he'd have to tell my mother, and he doesn't want to do that. And neither do I.”

I remembered Rose's eyes above the twelve-gauge. I wasn't about to mention it either.

Evie gazed at the triptych, her skin burnished by the reflected glow. “The Amberdeckers commissioned the windows the day they received word that Braxton was missing in action at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. They are extremely valuable, even without the historical provenance, an exquisite example of Henry Sharp's pre-1870 work. Today, it would cost approximately $143,000 to reproduce them. The images should look familiar to you—that's Braxton as the wayward prodigal, his brother Nate as the older son, and their dearly departed father as the patriarch.”

“Nate?”

“Braxton's older brother. Look around the corner.”

I did. And there he stood, a strapping, black-haired specimen of Confederate manhood in full officer's dress, his cadet gray jacket sleeves accented with the gold Austrian braid indicating his rank. Nate had the same angled jawline as his brother, but there was no tenderness in his lean cheeks and narrow eyes.

“Nate was the oldest of the Amberdecker siblings,” Evie explained, “and a proud son of the South. He'd barely graduated from the Citadel when the call to arms went out, and he voluntarily joined the Army of Northern Virginia as an officer. He was home on leave when the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain began and his brother went missing, effectively leaving him as head of the household during the Siege.”

The windows were mesmerizing, as tantalizingly mysterious as the story behind them. “But if this is the prodigal story, why is the inscription panel from the Psalms?”

Evie smiled. “Therein hangs the tale. The inscription panel was a memorial gift from the Davenports, Braxton's Northern in-laws. It was supposed to be Luke 15:32—‘For this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found'—but instead the Davenports sent the last line of the Twenty-third Psalm. ‘And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.'”

“They decided Braxton was dead.”

“They decided it was in their best interest to sever their ties with the Southern aristocracy, especially the Amberdeckers, who were left in, shall we say, reduced circumstances as the war progressed. Evangeline's status as a Confederate wife-in-waiting kept her from moving into respectable widowhood.”

“And further marriageability.”

Evie inclined her head. “Yes. Which is why they brought Evangeline back to Chesapeake Bay and got her engaged as soon as possible, this time happily, to a Unionist. Augusta Rose resisted, of course—it was in her best interest to have a wealthy daughter-in-law and an heir in her pocket—but in the end, the Davenports won that skirmish.”

I was dazzled by the brilliant rubies and golds, the textured opalescence of the skin tones. The yearning in the father's face, the despair in the son's, the stern flat judgment in the brother's.

I pointed. “Why isn't Nate in the second panel?”

“He used to be. Look closer.”

I saw it then, barely perceptible, a person-shaped collage of sky the tiniest bit lighter than the surrounding glass, thicker and duller too, without the same quality and workmanship.

I traced the outline in the air with my finger. “There.”

“Yes. The day after it was installed, Violet smashed a rock through the window, cutting herself so badly that she had to be hospitalized. It was this incident that forced her family to commit her to the asylum. Augusta had it repaired, but funds were too limited for a full restoration.” Evie shook her head. “Poor Augusta Rose. It helps me understand why she denied Braxton's death for so long, why she tried to keep Evangeline in Georgia. Her daughter-in-law carried the only grandchild Rose would ever have.”

“Nate never had a family?”

“He never married. After the war, he did his duty to his mother and father and what was left of the plantation, but his heart remained on the battlefield and the Glorious Cause. He died bitter and alone in the house I grew up in. So yes, I would say ‘haunted' is a fine word to use for our land. And our history.”

I stared at the window, a story woven in leaded lines and shimmery glass. Betrayal, insanity, misplaced blind faith. The template for every Southern tragedy ever written. I suddenly didn't blame Rose one bit for wanting to keep this tale buried.

Evie checked her watch and winced. “I'm sorry, but I have to get ready for the reporters now.” She handed me a program for the exhibit, scribbled her number on the back. “That's my cell. If you hear anything about the other bones, please let me know.” She paused, as if preparing to tread delicately. “Richard said the man who came with you yesterday works at Phoenix?”