Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies (25 page)

“Suit yourself. See you.”

Nick started the car and began to drive away.

“Johnny Doe,” he said to the figure in his rearview mirror, “you’re a wise man.”

CHAPTER 23

“G
ot it, boss!”

Hawty proudly held the diskette for Nick to see. She rolled manually over to the powerful computer she had persuaded Nick to buy; here at the office, she usually preferred the exercise of maneuvering her chair by muscle.

Nick sat at his desk, hard at work on another genealogical mystery—this one not having violent death at its center. He was puzzling out the complicated skein of heirship that had led him to a bank trust department in rural Indiana, where some important family records were held—wills, deeds, promissory notes. The bank was not being very forthcoming. Nick’s experience had taught him that just about everybody had something to hide when money was passed across generations. For small-town banks like this one, the issue was often some fraud perpetrated by an unscrupulous officer, possibly in cahoots with a family member, half a century or more ago.

It was Thursday, the day after the Montenay funeral.

“Professor Plumlaw’s barn was wide open,” Hawty said. “Kedric and I rounded up all the cows and took them for a little walk.”

“Good girl. Print that for me, will you?”

Hawty shot a squint-eyed look of censure at him. “Do you have any idea how many trees would have to die for that? You just get your lazy butt over here and read it from the screen with me.”

“Hey, they’re already cut, the paper’s already manufactured,” Nick said. “No one’s going to order whole forests decimated just because I partake of the old-fashioned pleasure of holding pages in my hands. I’d like to be an idealist, but does it have to be so much trouble?”

Hawty’s scowl of disapproval deepened. He surrendered.

Together, sitting before the monitor, they scrolled through the reports and testimony of the saga of the
True Faith.
After more than two hundred and fifty years, the ship sailed once again, on the sea of their imaginations.

Nelson Plumlaw’s friend in the bookbindery in London was well versed on the latest developments relating to British government archives. A batch of eighteenth-century documents thought lost since the early nineteenth century had been rediscovered, declassified, and released. Few scholars had delved into the material; none of it had been microfilmed. The woman in London was unaware of the local significance of what she was forwarding to Nelson, but mentioned in her cover e-mail that she would be pleased to handle his project if Nelson decided to do a book on the subject.

“I can’t even get my book proposals
read
, much less accepted sight unseen!” Nick exclaimed.

Thirty minutes later, he clenched his fists in exultation. “This is it, kid, the missing link, the equal sign in the equation!” He gave Hawty a kiss on the cheek.

“Therman the heckler and Mr. Montenay were right,” Hawty said.

Nick pushed his chair back, limbered up his neck and shoulders, and twisted side to side in a modified jogging warm-up. “The
Allégorie
was actually the
True Faith
. Through a brazen deception, the two English spies—”

“Juslin and Windner?”

“Yeah. The two spies aboard convinced their Spanish rescuers and then the French authorities in New Orleans that the ship was full of industrious French colonists, not transported English felons who’d taken over the vessel. New Orleans was a small, struggling frontier town, with big Indian and slave troubles. Able-bodied colonists were desperately needed. A few bribes”—Nick snapped his fingers—“and doors opened for the initially awkward newcomers.”

“Corruption is still a New Orleans specialty,” Hawty observed. “Someone at the Society has known about this funny business for a long time, right?”

“Since the Society’s founding in 1823—well, really, since 1731. How else are we to explain all of the Society’s vaunted genealogy that so conveniently detours around this story of mutiny and transformation? We’re talking about either very bad scholarship—which I seriously doubt—or a colossal, deliberate lie.”

“Think of the money involved,” Hawty said, now fully understanding the magnitude of their discovery. “The Society has more promotions than a Target store! What about the hundreds of families who are going to find out they aren’t who they
think they are? Captain-Director Nowell is going to have some very perturbed folks on his hands.”

“And one very curious police detective, if I can arrange it the way I want to. About the money, you don’t know the half of it.”

“I’m not sure I
want
to know. But tell me this: did the mutinous convicts know that Juslin and Windner were spies? I must have missed that part. You scrolled the thing so fast.”

“Apparently not,” Nick said. “Juslin and Windner acted like disaffected crewmembers, siding with the convicts. I can see those two calculating that their best chance was to go along with the take-over, betraying the doomed captain and the rest of the crew, who went to their deaths not knowing the truth about them, either. The convicts were probably glad to have the two capable men aboard, to help run the ship.”

“Especially during that hurricane,” Hawty said.

“It probably didn’t take long for them to become the leaders. Tricking the Spanish and then the French must have solidified their position within the group. And they lived out their lives in New Orleans, cloaked in deception: English spies masquerading as mutinous English crewmen posing as French crewmen/colonists. According to these records, they let only the doctor in on their true identity, and one of them continued to report to England well into the Spanish period, forty years later. Long after anyone had ceased to care, the British government stuck with the official story that the
True Faith
had sunk in the hurricane. Eventually, the records of the case fell into the bureaucratic swamp and were lost for two and three-quarters centuries.”

“Why didn’t any of the convicts try to go back to England?” Hawty asked.

“Some may have, I don’t know. But getting caught back in the mother country after transportation meant certain death. If any did make it back, they wouldn’t have bragged about it.”

“Wonder why the doctor went along with the big fiction,” Hawty mused aloud, “if that’s what happened.”

“Maybe the two spies threatened him, maybe they’d become friends. My guess is he was a young man with nothing back in England to call him home. It was an exciting time, an exotic place, and this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for an adventurous soul.”

Hawty nodded pensively. “Now we’ve got a pretty good motive for Detective Bartly.”

“Indeed we do, Watson.” Nick smiled as Hawty rolled her eyes. “To keep the phony tradition alive, would Nowell be willing to commit murder?”

“Four people have died, and for what?” Hawty said. “A fiction, a fabrication. I wouldn’t have believed it without this evidence.”

“I’m with you there. This is genealogy turned on its head. Here’s an organization supposedly devoted to exploring and celebrating the past, instead obscuring and falsifying it. There could be more unexplained deaths from the roster of Society members through the years.”

“Others who couldn’t stomach the lies,” Hawty added.

“I haven’t told you about Jillian’s brother; he died in a mysterious accident, too—that’s number five. Bluemantle and all of
the others must have stumbled across some part of the story, and each victim obviously refused to toe the Society line when warned off.”

“How long do you think it will take for this information to get out, officially? How can they stop it now?”

Nick shrugged. “Who knows. The information isn’t where it should be. Initially, the historians who run across this
True Faith
material won’t know there’s an American lineage society based on the voyage of the
Allégorie
; they won’t give a damn about genealogy or necessarily see any linkage.”

“Genealogy’s the batty old aunt in the attic for some of these academics,” Hawty said. “We don’t get the respect we should.”

Nick suppressed a grin at her growing allegiance to their discipline. “Unfortunately, that’s how it is. And anybody—historian or genealogist—researching the
Allégorie
, a French ship, would have no obvious reason to go to British naval records, right at the start, would they?”

“We’d all be a lot better off,” Hawty said, “if the two disciplines cross-pollinated more often.”

Nick told her about a similar case of misplaced records. The British ship
Pelham
was on its way back to England from colonial Virginia, when it was taken by the French privateer
Machant
. The next day, though, the
Pelham
was taken back by the British ship
Blakeny
. But in England, the
Pelham
’s mail and other papers ended up in the archives of the High Court of the Admiralty. It wasn’t until 1985 that scholars uncovered the correspondence. The intended recipients of the letters never
knew the good or bad news in them, but modern genealogical researchers who looked in this unusual place could plug many an impossible gap.

“Someone had to be first to connect the dots,” Hawty said. “I hope all that gets us is a book contract.”

Nick shook his head. “Bluemantle was first.”

“Uh-huh. And look what it got
him
.”

“We’ll just have to be more circumspect.” Nick crossed his arms in speculation. “A book contract … that has me thinking about our odd little friend and publisher Coldbread. There’s a guy who would cheat his own brother for such a discovery. But he’s not a murderer—and I speak from first-hand knowledge. Even with motive, means, and opportunity, he couldn’t pull the trigger.”

“Don’t tempt him—he’s crazy
enough
trying to solve the mystery of that mythical treasure.”

“What stops Coldbread or you or me but doesn’t stop a Preston Nowell from stepping over the boundary, from committing the primeval sin of murder?—if we’re right about the shady past of the Society. Is it arrogance taken to the ultimate degree? Or is it something infinitely larger that we all resist, some more effectively than others: the active embrace of evil that exists side by side with good, the violation of the commandment ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before Me’? religion, philosophy, science, and art have all wrestled with the same question for millennia. I guess that’s why the police worry about the who and the how of a murder, and we lucky genealogists get to work on the why.”

“If your sermon on murder is over, Rabbi Herald, can we get down to brass tacks?”

Nick stood up, stretched, and walked to the windowsill. He poured a cup of coffee. “On this find, Bluemantle and Nelson Plumlaw did the digging, and we, my brilliant and beautiful friend, get to pry open the treasure chest and run our hands through the loot. Want a cup?”

With a few strokes of her arms, Hawty deftly moved her chair next to Nick and pivoted to face him. “No thanks. Must be awful. I made it this morning… . What I want to know is, what’s in the safe Jillian told you about? In Nowell’s office.”

“It must be something that can’t be challenged, that ties the Bristol-English half with the New Orleans-French half. I suspect it’s some kind of contemporary record of what happened. Something incontrovertibly authentic. Something that holds the full, damaging truth.” Nick pointed to the computer monitor, still displaying the information that reached Nelson Plumlaw shortly before he died. “even this could be a trumped-up story, for reasons of state. Some kind of disinformation planted by the government of that day or this. Let’s judge it according to the genealogical standard of proof, Hawty. None of this is original or even primary evidence; we’re looking at summaries of reports from individuals who weren’t on the scene when the events occurred. Provocative, yes, but not quite clear and convincing. We need more.” He tasted the coffee. “Ycchhhhh!”

“Told you,” Hawty said, as he headed to the bathroom to pour out the cup. “Why would the Society keep something so incriminating?”

Nick walked restlessly around the office. “I had a great-uncle who took a bullet at Belleau Wood in World War I. Kept it on a chain with his pocket watch his whole life, made sure he was buried with it. We human beings do crazy things like that. We have this urge to hold on to the past, to love it, even if it almost killed us.”

Hawty said, “Maybe it’s the same urge that gets people interested in genealogy. If we don’t know what we were, we can’t know what we’ve become?”

“Good point. I’m going to find out what’s in that safe,” Nick declared. He threw himself into his unstable desk chair, tilted back abruptly, and propped his feet on his littered desk. “Tonight.”

“Nosirree!
We’re
going to find out. I’ve graduated from being the gofer of this place. I want more of the action! Besides, any fool who sits in a wobbly old chair that way might just trip over his own shoelaces and break his neck!”

CHAPTER 24

A
fter midnight, Jillian’s Toyota station wagon—significantly dented at the right front—rolled to a stop, across the street and three houses down from the Society library. Old, muscular live oaks blocked most of the white glare from the streetlights. Big houses set back in well-kept lawns were vague darker silhouettes against the indigo stillness. The air was dense and sluggish, with just a memory of coolness; above, slightly luminescent clouds, heavy with trapped dirty-gray moisture, lumbered across the night sky.

“Jillian, you’re with me,” Nick said authoritatively. “You know the place better than I do. Hawty, stay on this side of the street, so you can keep the building in sight. If you spot anything I should know about, use your chariot phone to call me on this.” He held up a tiny cell phone, which he’d borrowed from his neighbors, the gay shopkeepers; the purple-green-and-gold Mardi Gras motif of the phone flaunted attitude even in the dimness.

“Those colors are definitely you, boss,” Hawty said.

“And the glitter, too,” Jillian chimed in.

Their teasing cut the tension a bit.