Authors: Jonathon King
“Watch your head,” he said, and I had to keep myself bent to fit under the low angle of the roof trusses. I could now see a single lit bulb hanging in the rafters.
“Back in the far corner there, Mr. Freeman, is a crate from my grandfather’s river house,” he said, nodding toward the northeast wall. “It is one of the few things that my father salvaged from that place.”
I looked in his face, but he would not meet my eyes.
“You may take it with you, sir. And do with it what you must.”
He handed me the pry bar and this time looked in my face and must have seen the questions. In his own face was a look of calm benevolence—and maybe a sense of relief.
“It is a new and scientific world, Mr. Freeman. Experts have broken down the double helix of life and snipped at individual strands of genetic material and told us they have the blueprint all mapped out.”
He was using the voice of his pulpit now, and I looked over at the corner.
“But the sins of the father aren’t chemicals and chromosomes, sir. And in the end we are all, each one of us, much more than just DNA.”
With that he turned and climbed down the stairs and walked out into the sunlight.
I
had to work my way to the corner, pushing away cardboard boxes full of old electrical supplies, cartons of cracked, dusty pottery, a wooden keg of half-rusted nails. I brushed away cobwebs and was forced to bend farther over as the roof sloped. It was hot and I was stirring up motes of dust—I could feel the particles in the back of my throat when I tried to breathe through my mouth.
Finally the weak light caught the raw pine of a crate lying flat in the deepest part of the corner. I pulled up one edge and was able to stand the piece on one side. It was about as long as the distance from my shoulder to my fingertips and as wide and deep as a piano bench. It was more awkward than heavy. I wrestled it out of its hiding place and backed out, carrying it to a cleared spot on the floorboards.
The wood was dry and clean but almost brittle with age. I used the bar and pried off the entire top panel. The contents were packed in a dried moss of some kind, not much different from the paper confetti used today. I pulled it away and uncovered a long scabbard made of dark leather that was cracked and split. I untied the top flap but before reaching inside, I looked around and found a ripped but dry section of old towel and covered my hand. Then I carefully withdrew the stock half of a Winchester .405 Takedown. The rifle had to be nearly a hundred years old and was stunning. The plating on the fixed box magazine was tarnished, but the scrollwork along the lever action was gorgeous and as intricate as any I’d ever seen. I reached back into the scabbard and from a separate compartment slid out the barrel half. The base was threaded, and even with some spots of rust showing, I was able to twist it smoothly into the receiver. It was the same kind of gun that Teddy Roosevelt had used in his African hunting exploits.
I didn’t touch the surfaces of the gun but laid it down on the opened scabbard while I checked the rest of the crate. Buried in the moss at one corner was a small wooden box of ammunition. The cartridges were at least three inches tall and the tips big and heavy. Roosevelt had called the .405 cartridge “Big Medicine” for its power to drop a water buffalo, gator or man. At the other end of the crate I found a leather-bound book. The initials
JWJ
were stamped in gold relief into its nearly black cover. The pages inside were yellowed and felt like dried leaves between my fingers, but the faded markings and tooled letters were still legible. It appeared to be some kind of ledger. Rows of calculations were on some pages, along with entries for quantities bought or sold and the amounts. On other pages were diagrams and drawings of machines and plans for buildings. The light was poor, so I stood and cradled the book in one hand while carefully turning the pages. When I finally determined the dates, I skipped forward to 1924.
Among those pages I found a crude map. Its dominant feature was a straight hatched line, apparently depicting a rail line. I could make out the west terminus as Everglades City, while the opposite end was scratched “Miami.” Along the hatch marks, childlike drawings of tree palms were spaced at odd intervals, and at each of these was a cluster of faded X’s. Two at one spot, three at another, six farther to the right toward Miami. The spots also bore numbers above the tree drawings, which I recognized as longitude and latitude indices. And beneath the X’s were dollar amounts much like the prices marked in earlier pages. The left, and I assumed western group, where there were two X’s, was marked “II—$600.00.” The three X’s were marked “III—$900.00.” The eastern grouping was marked “IIII I—$1,800.00.” I began to feel nauseated as I stared at the figures and went down on one knee, with the book still balanced on the other. Sweat was now running in rivulets down my back, and I pulled at the front of my shirt to tighten the fabric and soak up the moisture between my shoulder blades. I wiped at my eyes and carefully turned the page to the subsequent rows of the ledger. There, listed under the name “Noren,” were the same figures, dated and grouped “ea./$300 + .15 ammunition.” Gator hides, I knew, were going for $1.50 a foot in those days. John William was not killing alligators for three hundred dollars apiece. Even the most luscious and illegal flamingo plumes did not bring those kinds of prices.
I placed the book back in the crate, rewrapped the Winchester and tamped the panel back into place on the crate. I used the pry bar to reset the nails, and with the crate held tight against my chest, climbed back down the staircase and snapped the light off. The reverend Jefferson did not show himself again. He may have been in the house, having lunch with his wife. He may have been out in the back rows of his garden. He may have been somewhere quiet and cool where he went to pray alone.
I carried the crate to my truck and slid it into the space behind the seats on top of my bag. I climbed in, started the engine and kicked on the AC. The reverend’s sedan and family van were still parked side by side, and I watched the front of the house as I backed away but saw no movement at the curtains or the door. As I drove away I kept my eyes on the rearview mirror until the dust billowed up and the house and the oaks disappeared.
When I got to Billy’s it was late and the overnight desk manager looked long and hard at the crate under my arm as he passed me through.
“Good evening, Mr. Freeman,” he said with his stiff British accent. “Mr. Manchester is still out for the evening.”
I nodded and continued to the elevator.
“Do you require the freight elevator, sir?” he said, still looking with disdain at the wooden box, judging perhaps its rough corners and the damage they might do to the paneled walls.
“No. I’m fine,” I said as the regular elevator doors slid open.
The apartment was lit, although the lamps and recessed spots were dimmed. Billy remembered well his days in a chopped-up tenement building in North Philly, where the lights would be shut down sometimes for days because of blown fuses or blown deadlines for making
the
payments. He never wanted to come home to a dark house again.
I laid the crate on the carpeted floor and went to the guest room and found a large bath towel in the bathroom linen closet. My own image in the mirror stopped me. The light blue oxford shirt I’d worn to church that morning was creased and rumpled, and so was the face above it. The skin was deeply tanned, left even darker by the unshaven stubble. The crow’s-feet were pronounced and pouches of skin hung beneath my
eyes,
the exhaustion of hours on the road. I leaned in closer. I didn’t have a mirror at the river shack and sometimes didn’t look at myself for weeks at a time, and even then, not closely or seriously. The reverend’s last words had followed me for the entire drive back, and I looked into the black irises of my eyes. Was my father in there? And if so, which one? The relentless cop who wouldn’t let a child-killer go unpunished? Or an alcoholic racist who beat his wife? Or both? Or neither? “We leave more than DNA behind,” the living William Jefferson had said. But how much more? The answers weren’t in the mirror.
I took the towel with me out to the living room and spread it out on Billy’s polished wood dining table, then carefully laid the crate on it. I used a screwdriver from the utility drawer to pry the top off and took out the ledger. Under better light I sat at the kitchen bar counter and studied the pages while sipping cold bottles of beer from the refrigerator. The man had been meticulous. If my interpretations were right, John William had recorded every dime he had paid out or taken in from the time he landed in Everglades City until 1962, when he’d blown his brains out in his barn one late summer night. The entries were filled with figures, dates, mileage, the running costs of supplies and their changes from year to year. But there was not a single sentence of opinion or emotion or aesthetic description in all the dry, yellowed pages.
It was past midnight when I gently closed the book and took a fresh beer out onto the patio. There was an uncharacteristic chill coming in on the northeast ocean wind. I could hear the surf chopping at the sand, and interrupted moonlight caught on the swells at sea far from the shore. Weather was kicking up. I took another long drink from the bottle and found it difficult to focus on the lights of a ship at sea. Then from behind me I heard my name being called.
“M-Max.”
Billy was looking down into the crate when I came in through the sliding doors. Diane was at his side, barely a step behind. Billy was in a tuxedo and black tie, and looked every bit like a version of the most recent Academy Award winner. Diane was in a long gown, an expensive-looking lace shawl still around her shoulders. Billy looked up at me.
“M-Max. What the h-hell is this doing in my home?”
I hesitated only a second. My mind might have been muddled at the moment, but it was made up.
“That, my friend, may be the murder weapon used to kill our Mr. Cyrus Mayes and his family.”
I drank coffee after that, standing next to the pot in the kitchen. Diane tasted a glass of chardonnay and Billy drank bottled water as they sat on stools on the other side of the counter going carefully over John William’s ledger. Billy had pulled on a pair of thin latex gloves before handling the book and Diane only looked over his shoulder, letting him touch the pages.
I narrated the story of John William Jefferson as it was told to me. They listened, interrupting only for clarification, which lawyers do, and even that happened less and less as the coffee sobered me. When he got to the pages showing the diagram of the trail, Billy spent several minutes staring at the markers.
“Jesus, M-Max,” he said.
Billy had come to the same assumption that I had: the possibility of grave markers. X’s where bodies where buried or simply left some eighty years ago.
“Yeah. But not enough to get a warrant for all of PalmCo’s records pertaining to their part in building the road, is it?”
The two attorneys did not look at each other but both were subtly shaking their heads.
“N-No names. No use of the word ‘bodies.’ No description of killing or the three hundred dollars b-being the rate for the d- disposal of a human being.”
“Any attorney is going to argue that those entries could represent anything from rattlesnakes to bobcats,” McIntyre said.
“We could use it as m-more ammunition to get PalmCo to consider a settlement, but that’s n-not what Mayes wants. Or anyone else,” Billy said, looking at me.
“We still need the bodies,” I said.
“Eighty years old?” McIntyre said, not bothering to hide her skepticism.
“Yeah. The bones, teeth, skeletal remains. Hell, even the bullets themselves could still be there. And now we may have the treasure map.”
I’d already written down the coordinates from the ledger. Billy could lay them out on a relief map of the Glades in the morning while I made a call to the Loop Road hotel and got a message to Nate Brown. If John William had borrowed the technology of the road surveyors and was meticulous with his markings, we had a chance.
“I also h-have to get this to our d-documents expert for a t-time analysis,” Billy said. “Is that going to b-be a problem with your reverend Jefferson?”
“I don’t think he even knows it exists,” I said. “I doubt he ever even opened the crate. Maybe his father had, but it was like a Pandora’s heirloom that they didn’t want to destroy but didn’t want to acknowledge, either. It was like they were waiting for someone to take it out of their hands.”
The statement left us all quiet. Billy had long ago shed his jacket and tie but somehow still looked as sharp as a razor crease. McIntyre was barefooted again and in her concentration had dragged her fingers through her thick dark hair enough times that it left her looking rumpled.
“Tomorrow,” Billy finally said, as his hand subtly went to McIntyre’s neck and they rose together. He started to turn but stopped. The Winchester Takedown was still on his dining table. No one had even looked at it after we’d started concentrating on the book. Billy’s aversion was not political or liberal; it was personal. His past was not without its own flashes of violence and what always comes with it.
“I’ll take it down and lock it in my truck,” I said quickly.
“OK, M-Max. T-Tomorrow we can put it in p-proper storage. And I’d l-like to get our f-friend Mr. Lott to take a l-look.
They retired to Billy’s room. I closed up the crate and went and closed the patio doors. I then snagged two bottles of beer, picked up the crate and carried it down to my truck. I draped a rain jacket over it in the back behind the seats and took out my emergency sleeping bag, then locked up and walked out to the beach.
The wind had died some but the surf was still kicked up. The lights from the shorefront buildings caught the white foam of the breakers and illuminated them as they rolled and tumbled and eventually died on the sand. I walked up into the breeze. I could feel the moisture of the salt air on my arms and hands. When I found a swatch of dark beach where the building light was blocked by a partial dune, I sat in the sand and wrapped the sleeping bag around my legs and opened the first beer. I took a sip and stared out at the eastern horizon, thought of what John William may have left behind, and waited for the glow of sunrise.
The next day I showered and shaved upstairs while Billy made one of his gourmet breakfasts. The weak nor’easter had blown itself out overnight. The ocean had begun to flatten out and the partial cloud cover had been replaced by a hot clear sky that was difficult to look up into for too long without hurting one’s eyes.
When I came back up well after seven, Billy and McIntyre were on the patio drinking coffee and absorbing sections of
The Wall Street Journal
. By the time I’d cleaned up, Diane had gone off to court.
“The girl’s a workaholic,” I said to Billy as I sat down with coffee in the patio chair she had abandoned. He was still in the kitchen, on the other side of the threshold.
“She’s seriously considering a run for a judgeship in next year’s elections. I think she’s testing her stamina,” he said, the physical barrier removing his stutter.