Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies (15 page)

“How did you find out where he was planning to live?”

“I called every major moving company with the story that I was with Child Protection in that state, hunting a deadbeat dad. The dispatchers were only too glad to help. Ninety-nine percent were gals who’d been divorced at least once from some low-life with a beer gut and a birddog he loved better than her.”

Typical thoroughness of a great genealogist, Nick thought. “How did you get in?”

“Oh, come on, Nick, don’t tell me you’ve never picked locks in attics, cellars, crypts, cemetery gates, or boarded-up houses to get at some genealogical mother lode.” She grabbed a tool lying atop a box; it resembled a small metal flashlight, except that a metal prong with a sharp, wavy tip protruded from the end where the lens should have been. “I had excellent teachers—Woodrow among them, I have to give him that.” She handed him the lock pick and showed him how to retract the prong for safe carrying. “Keep it. I have a drawer full of’em. You’ll get the hang of it.”

Nick didn’t admit that his cat-burglar skills were inferior to hers. Bluemantle had slighted him in that department.

“And have you found the memoirs?” he asked.

Had they ever been here? he wondered. Maybe the killer had taken them from Bluemantle’s hotel room? Or was she hiding them in her leather rucksack?

“No. Actually”—she seemed to be debating inwardly making yet another revelation—“I don’t think any publisher would touch Woodrow’s memoirs with a twenty-foot pole. They’d probably never see the light of day, and if so it would be a vindictive old man’s word against everybody he named in them. The whole genealogical community knows he became … aberrational. Somebody’s already been through this stuff, anyway. If anybody took them, they don’t have much. So I’m not all that worried about the memoirs—if they exist at all. It’s some letters I’m really looking for. Some stupid, immature, raunchy letters I wrote when I was in my twenties. Lord, what a bitch in heat I was!”

She explained that Woodrow was aging ungracefully, doing rash things, drinking himself into the grave. What was going to happen when he died? Would the letters surface? How could she deny letters in her own hand?

“That wouldn’t go over big in Utah,” Nick said.

“No, it wouldn’t.”

“Is your husband the jealous type?”

“Jonas? Do you mean, could he have killed … oh, that’s absurd! ridiculous! He doesn’t know anything about it. Besides, he’s Mormon. They—
we
don’t do things like that.” After a moment’s pause, she added, “Do we?”

“Nah, of course not.” Nick stood up, taking her arm and urging her to stand also, and then ripped open the box they’d been sitting on. “What do you say we find those damn letters, eh, Carolyn?”

“He kept them,” she said, when they’d completed their search. She remembered each letter, and they’d found them all.

“I can’t believe it. Son of a gun must’ve still cared.”

Holding the stack of letters, she sniffled a bit at first, and then broke down in an earnest, open-floodgate jag of relief. Nick led her to the dusty couch. Carolyn Bullenger was a strong woman; crying didn’t come easily to her.

“You’re a good guy, Nick Herald. Where were you ten years ago? … Oh, I remember.” She sat up straight and wiped her face quickly with the heel of her hand. “You were a teacher—a
college English professor, I believe. At Freret U, just down the avenue a bit. Well, I guess you know about silly young women and unwise crushes.”

Nick, amazed anew at her hard-drive mind, confirmed it and told her of the scandal that forced him from academia. He also spoke of his friendship with Bluemantle, of his visits to Samford University in Birmingham to sit in on his mentor’s courses there. The Baptist-affiliated college, tired of turning a blind eye to the eminent scholar’s moral lapses, finally, reluctantly booted him out. It was the start of Bluemantle’s humiliating decline; yet, conversely, the beginning of Nick’s rehabilitation. The parallels and divergences in their lives traced a cautionary tale Nick would never forget. And like the good genealogist Bluemantle had helped him become, he could not accept an impossible gap as final. He had to follow the downward sweep of Bluemantle’s life to the reasons for his murder.

Nick felt he’d probably told Carolyn too much, but there was something about her that invited confidence. And hadn’t she been thoroughly forthcoming?

“What do you know about the Society of the
Allégorie
?” he asked her.

“Not much, really. I call it a ‘society of last resort,’ for people who can’t get into the biggies: DAR, Colonial Dames, Signers of the Declaration, one of the good Civil War groups, not to mention Founders and Patriots.”

“Toughest of all, I’ve heard,” said Nick.

Carolyn nodded and continued. “In general, the Society does okay work, even if they’re a little too pushy with the self-promotion.
I’ve never heard their
serious
research impugned, if that’s what you mean. I doubt they knew how far Woodrow had sunk when they hired him.”

“Could Woodrow have found out something damaging?”

“About the Society? Maybe. He had an uncanny knack for unmasking fraud and imprecision. He was fearless, and he thrived on controversy. If there was anything happening like that he would have lapped it up. You’re familiar with his ‘The Five Franklin Farnhams of Fuller County, Tennessee’?”

Bluemantle’s classic article, required reading for every professional genealogist, untangled the knot of five men apparently with the same name living in the same county at the same time. None of them, Bluemantle had discovered, was even remotely related, as descendents of all five had asserted for a hundred-and-fifty years.

“Oh, absolutely,” Nick said. “Many times.”

“Poor Woodrow. Did you notice the absence of any family photos in his stuff ? I heard it wasn’t easy to find relatives who gave a flip about his death. Finally a cousin in Massachusetts stepped forward.”

“Yeah, I know,” Nick said. “I was afraid I’d have to take it on myself. All I could’ve afforded was a pine box. Fortunately, the Society paid for cremation and shipping the remains, and I suppose it would’ve given him a decent burial here, if it came down to that.”

“Just goes to show that genealogists sometimes get along better with the dead than with the living.”

“Carolyn, I want you do me a favor.”

“Well, if I can. Shoot.”

“Call a New Orleans Police detective named Dave Bartly tomorrow.”

“Go to the police!? Are you kidding? After I’ve tried my darndest to keep my name
out
of the papers!”

“You have a fairly bullet-proof alibi, right?”

“‘Fairly’?” she said, still not happy with the suggestion. “Well, yes.”

“Then, hey, what’s the problem? Tell Bartly you went to see Bluemantle, an old friend from way back. No one answered your knocks, so you left. And tell him about the voices from inside the room. You didn’t come forward before because you hadn’t heard that it was murder; you’ve been too busy with your research, whatever. Simple as that.”

“Why is my visit so important? Did someone see me?” Her eyes narrowed in recollection. “The room-service kid.”

“Very good.”

“The little prick stared at my boobs so much, I didn’t think he saw the rest of me. What about the letters?”

“They’re between you and me.”

“And Woodrow, wherever he is.” She rose, covering a yawn. “I’m beat.” She hugged him. “Thanks, Nick.”

Her hand on the doorknob, she looked back. “If you’re ever in Salt Lake, you be sure to look me up, you hear. I’ll buy you a drink.” She shook her head. “Let’s make it a cup of coffee. Nobody’s god can make me give that up.”

CHAPTER 12

R
esearch always produces results for a genealogist: results he expected, and those he didn’t. It was time for Nick to do some of his own.

Friday morning he heard the alarm go off at six forty-five but turned it off and slept until nine. Eventually, he managed to arrive at his Uptown destination without any no-left-turn tickets.

In the cool, quiet dimness of the microfilm reading room at the Plutarch Foundation, Nick found the English ship
True Faith.

Nelson Plumlaw had been right on the money. The ship had indeed sailed from Bristol. Nick discovered it listed on the microfilm Hawty had tracked down electronically for him. Apparently no one had ever mentioned the ship in a published article, so it did not appear in the passenger-ship indexes genealogists usually consult. Thousands and thousands of ships and their passengers share that fate; and then one day, when an amateur genealogist stumbles upon an immigrant ancestor who took passage on a hitherto unknown vessel, one more ship is raised from the obscurity of the past.

The
True Faith
had
made thirteen uneventful round-trip voyages across the Atlantic in the years preceding 1731, ferrying products mostly at first, slaves twice, and then passengers to the colonies. A later notation on the embarkation listing for the 1731 voyage indicated that the ship was lost at sea; and a still later note in a different hand, referring to legal proceedings, prompted Nick to investigate English judicial and governmental records. The Plutarch had extensive holdings of these.

With a few more hours of studying microfilmed pages of Admiralty, Chancery, and Treasury papers, among others, Nick was able to reconstruct the tragedy of the
True Faith
, and the scandal that followed.

The most interesting information came from “Gaol Delivery rolls” and “Crown Minute Books” for the Oxford Assize Circuit, Gloucestershire County, England. Nick learned that the
True Faith
was a small, swift merchantman of ninety-five ton capacity, which had begun life as a French-built ship of unknown name in 1710. She had been captured by the English and refitted as an armed transport and store ship during the War of the Spanish Succession, and in 1714 the
True Faith
had returned to private trade. On its last known voyage in 1731, the ship was manned by fifteen crewmen, armed with six small cannon, and loaded with a relatively light cargo of fifty-one felons for transportation—thirty-six men, fifteen women—and manufactured goods. These convicts had already endured considerable hardship. Most of them from London and its environs, they had been sentenced originally there and had languished for months in Newgate prison.

Then, according to the records, in the summer of 1730, they were transferred to rotting old ships, called “prison hulks,” in the Thames, where they sat for an indeterminate number of fetid months, their transportation delayed because of one of the periodic flair-ups of resentment in the colonies at the stream of convicts being dumped there. Finally, after various further transfers and bureaucratic infighting, those unfortunates left from the original group of eighty-four prisoners were placed aboard the
True Faith
at Bristol in May of 1731. The ship finally sailed for Barbados at the end of that month.

The
True Faith
never made it. The destination hadn’t been Barbados, anyway: it had been Maryland. Certain governmental functionaries had “gone rogue,” connived in a new commercial scheme designed to restore the earlier smooth flow of criminals out of Britain. The idea was to change the name of the
True Faith
to the
Wyvern
sometime during the passage; the convicts were to be described as honest, hard-working indentured servants. This deception was revealed by an embarrassed government junior minister in 1732, when the scandal was aired in a Bristol courtroom and subsequently in the newspapers. Those pesky colonials were to be brazenly hoodwinked, their reluctance to accept any more of Britain’s riffraff circumvented, and the mother country’s transportation backlog was to be thus eased. The captain and ownership syndicate had been promised secretly an ample reward from the government for the risk; the captain was also to receive payment in colonial land, known as a headright grant, depending on how many of the felons he delivered alive.

The scheme failed. The ship was presumed lost, probably in a strong July Atlantic hurricane that had wreaked havoc along
the eastern seaboard of America. No one could say for sure what had happened to the ship. The grief of the relatives in England led to an investigation. The saga was played out in Bristol and not London, to keep the scandal as quiet as possible. A vain hope on the government’s part. There was a loud popular outcry on both sides of the Atlantic against the duplicity of the government.

Nick rubbed his eyes; even in the pleasant darkness, he could see furniture and walls moving. He felt as if he’d just stepped off a boat, himself. That’s what happens to you when you spend hours under the hood of a microfilm reader.

The fly ball of speculation he’d hit to Nelson Plumlaw was coming down fast: it appeared that the
True Faith
never made it to Maryland, much less New Orleans. No, he just couldn’t see what this ship of convicts had to with the passengers and crew of the
Allégorie
. Hundreds of miles of water separated them. After all this frantic research, he knew a lot more about the
True Faith
, but he was no closer to cracking Mr. Montenay’s mysterious equation or to discovering why Bluemantle and Therman had been killed.