Simon Said (20 page)

"She's not living in the present," Simon said. "She's somewhere in Eisenhower's second term. She kept talking about Sputnik and the Little Rock school crisis."

The two men were sitting in the faculty lounge of the history department, where Simon had gone to drink a Coke and unwind after his interview with Mrs. Blythe. There he had found Marcus grading blue books at the long table in the middle of the room.

"What would make her like that?" Simon asked. "Alzheimer's disease?"

"Without having talked to the woman," Marcus said, "I think there must be some other syndrome at work, rather than the common senile dementias of old age. I would guess that something psychologically traumatic happened to her, which caused her mind either to return to the 1950s or kept her from leaving them."

"So if she lives in a time before the event," Simon said, "she doesn't have to deal with it."

 

"That's right. Her mind protects itself. It's a coping mechanism. Not what most psychologists would consider a very healthy one, though."

 

"Whatever happened to her must have been terrible."

"Terrible for her. Not necessarily for someone else. She sounds like a person who is very rigid in her attitudes. Rigid people always have more trouble adapting to change than flexible ones."

"How do you think I'm doing?"

 

"Excellently. Your psychology is so normal that I could use you as a control when I'm training my rats."

 

"Be serious."

 

"I am serious. It's normal to be unhappy if something miserable happens to you. What's not normal is to get stuck permanently in 1957."

 

"Could anything be done for her?"

"I would never suggest it if she was my patient. Maybe thirty years ago, psychotherapy or medication would have served some purpose. Now it would just be cruel. If you were able to bring her out of the past, think how disoriented she would be. Leave her alone."

"But you do think her memory of 1926 is trustworthy?"
"As much as anyone's would be."

Simon bummed a yellow legal pad from Marcus and sat with him at the table, reconstructing his interviews with Mrs. Holland and Mrs. Blythe. Usually Simon took a tape recorder to interviews. He preferred to concentrate on reaching a rapport with his subjects rather than on taking notes. But Simon hadn't wanted to make these elderly ladies uncomfortable by arming himself with a tape recorder. Fortunately, he had an excellent memory, and he was able to reconstruct the conversations almost verbatim.

Simon taught a semester course in oral history every other year. He never got tired of watching his students' reactions when they participated in one of his favorite exercises. He would ask them to read several popular accounts of the Pearl Harbor crisis, then to interview eyewitnesses who lived in the community. One old gentleman, who was a retired civilian employee of the Navy Department, could be counted on to make such pungent and shocking observations about Franklin Roosevelt that his young interviewers were left stammering. Then Simon would ask them to write a paper about the differences between the printed sources and the oral testimony they had collected. This little experiment always separated the historians from the dilettantes. If they were historians, the students became addicted to diaries, letters, and old people, like chocoholics who had to have Ghirardelli every day. If they were dilettantes, they changed their major.

So it wasn't a surprise to Simon to find, after just two conversations with real people, that the newspaper accounts skimmed the surface of the story of Anne Bloodworth's disappearance. Now he wanted desperately to find Bessie. If she really had been Anne's maid, her knowledge could be crucial. There was still no answer to his newspaper ad, and Simon wished he'd offered a lot more than a hundred dollars for information about her.

When Simon finished his notes, he looked up at the clock and realized it was almost time for his class. Marcus had slipped away long ago, leaving him a brief note propped facing him on his empty Coke can. "No neurosis," it read, "is possible with a normal sex life (Freud)." Simon carefully folded the note in half and put it in his jacket pocket. Then he wrote a reply. "Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit (Seneca)."* Grinning, Simon stuck the note in Marcus's mailbox on his way to class. Let him work on that one for a while.

*'"There has not been any great talent without an element of madness."
Chapter Twenty-One

SIMON, JULIA MCGLOUGHLAN, AND OTIS GATES MET AT THE neighborhood bar for a conference on the Bloodworth murder case. Simon had made copies of his interviews for Otis and Julia. They read the pages carefully while sipping on their beers, and Simon drank his and stared at the old black-and-white pictures of various North Carolina State football teams that covered the walls.

The bar had been built in a blessed time before ferns, piped in classical music, and pastel prints. A jukebox blasted out rock 'n' roll from the golden sixties and seventies. The knotty pine walls were stained the color of mahogany from years of cigarette smoke. The old-fashioned pinball machines rang, crashed, and lit up. Pool was played night and day in a side room, at five dollars a rack, no one under eighteen allowed. Burgers, buffalo wings, steak, spaghetti, fries, and iceberg lettuce salads were the only items on the menu. There was nothing at all trendy about the place. It was packed all the time.

Sergeant Gates took up an entire side of the booth and still oozed a little over the edges of his bench, while Simon and Julia sat together on the other side of the booth. Simon was glad to see Julia was drinking beer. He wouldn't have been devastated if she'd ordered white wine, though. No one was perfect.

Gates looked over his reading glasses at Simon.

"This is interesting," Gates said. "It tells us a lot about Anne Bloodworth. She was intelligent, independent, and had no intention of marrying her cousin. She was in love with someone else. Just about everyone in her circle thought she had run off with him when she disappeared."

"That may be why the hue and cry over her disappearance died down so quickly" said Julia. "No one was very worried about her."

"Exactly" Simon said. "In fact, there was probably a lot of effort spent on covering up. Bloodworth wouldn't have wanted anything about a lover in the newspaper. There was that one reference about rumors that she had run off with a lover, but Adam Bloodworth denied it."

"So her father makes a big show about looking for her by hiring Pinkertons and putting ads in newspapers all over the world, but he doesn't really care about her being found—because of the scandal," Julia said.

"He's protecting her from embarrassment," Simon said, "not to mention his own and his cousin's."

"You can bet, though, that if all these girls knew about Mr. X, lots of other people in the community did, too," Julia said. "Especially after she vanished. One of those girls was bound to have told her parents. After that, there would have been no stopping the rumor."

"Rumor is different from scandal," Simon said. "One is speculation and the other is often true."

"Only after they didn't hear from Anne in a few years did her friends begin to worry about her safety. And her father was already dead," Julia said. "He would have been the obvious person to reopen an investigation. But since he couldn't, we're the first people to do anything about it in seventy years."

"Hold on, you two," Otis said. "You're letting your imaginations run off with you. The only new fact that surfaces in these interviews is confirmation of the secret beau. Everything else is just guesswork. We come back to the same problem. The girl might have intended to run away. The suitcase certainly adds some weight to that conclusion. But she didn't. She was shot in the head and buried on her own property. We still have no idea who did it."

"I don't think so," Simon said. "I think all the evidence points right at Adam Bloodworth."

 

"How do you figure that?" Gates said.

 

"It's clear that it was common knowledge that Anne Bloodworth was not going to marry Adam Bloodworth, and that she had another beau."

 

"Agreed," Gates said.

"Adam stood to lose everything if he and Anne didn't get married. He had been brought into the family and the business for that express purpose. If Anne jilted him, what would happen to him? If she died or disappeared, he would be the obvious person for Charles Bloodworth to turn to. And that in the end is what happened. Seven years after Anne Bloodworth vanished, three years after her father died, Adam had her declared dead. He inherited everything."

"I think we've discussed motive before," Julia said. "Motive is meaningless without opportunity. You can't single out an individual for suspicion just because he may have benefited from someone's death. You've got to prove it through physical evidence, and we haven't got any."

"And declaring her dead seven years after she vanished would be a very reasonable thing to do," Gates said.

"I guess what really makes me think he's guilty is that his alibi is so lousy," Simon said. "Adam was supposedly out of the house, having gone fishing, but apparently he wasn't the fishing type. Did he go alone? If he didn't have any fishing buddies along with him, what kind of alibi is that?"

"And," Julia said, "the servants were not in the house, so they wouldn't have known where he was."

"What about the elder Bloodworth?" asked Gates. "He was home."
"He would cover up for Adam," Simon said.
"His daughter's murderer?" Gates said.

"No, of course not. He wouldn't have known that she had been murdered. He thought she'd run away. And he'd want to protect Adam, who was the only relative he had left."

"So if Adam killed Anne, he did it right there on the property, while Charles Bloodworth was in the house? And the old man didn't hear or see anything suspicious? That doesn't make any sense," Gates said. "And there's Peebles. He seems like a pretty

good cop to me. His report is very matter-of-fact. He says Adam had an alibi. He repeats the fishing story. I don't think a cop would accept something like that without corroboration, even in 1926."

"Even if it came from two very rich and very influential men? I mean, if Charles Bloodworth said Adam was out of the house fishing, wouldn't Peebles automatically accept that?"

"Maybe," Gates said. "But I'm still inclined to think Adam's story was somehow verified, and we just don't know how yet. I don't think social status alone would save Bloodworth from suspicion in her disappearance, even at that time."

"And besides," Julia said, "the whole community knew about Mr. X. Even if the police ignored the love affair, the detective agency wouldn't."

 

"We'll never know what the agency uncovered," Simon said. "Those records are all lost. But speaking of Mr. X, any thoughts on him?"

 

"He must have been really unacceptable," Julia said, "if even Anne's girlfriends didn't know who he was. That implies that they wouldn't approve of him themselves."

"Yes, but in 1926 more men would be considered unacceptable for someone like Anne Bloodworth than would be today," Simon said. "The guy could have been completely respectable by our standards—like a doctor whose parents were farmers or immigrants, for instance."

"Mrs. Blythe said she met him through her college," Julia said, "but wasn't Kenan a school for women then?"

"They could have met at a lecture or a tea or who knows what all," Gates said. "Don't forget State College was right down the road. Unacceptable men were everywhere, I would think."

"So," Julia said, "Anne Bloodworth was running away with Mr. X; she was caught in the act by Adam Bloodworth, who shot her and buried her in the backyard. Then he fabricated an alibi, which was corroborated by Charles Bloodworth, who wanted to avoid a scandal. Then what did Mr. X do? Wander off and pine and write despondent poetry for the rest of his life? Why wouldn't he go to the police the next day and say Anne never made it to their rendezvous? Instead, he didn't say a word to anyone, just let the world think she was safe with him somewhere."

"Maybe Adam killed Mr. X, too," Simon said.

 

"Then where's his body? Or a missing person's report? Whoever he was, he wouldn't vanish without someone noticing," Julia said.

 

"Maybe she wasn't going to meet him; maybe she was just running away in general," Gates said.

 

"That's possible, I guess," Simon said. "But I think she was too smart to take off without a plan."

"The truth is," Gates said, "we don't have enough apples to make a pie. There are just too many missing pieces to this puzzle. The damn case is seventy years old. The principals are all dead, and the eyewitnesses who are still around think Elvis is alive."

"Seventy years is no time in historical terms, Otis," Simon said. "Your greatgrandparents were slaves. My mother's family experienced the Holocaust. Those two facts alone affect the two of us profoundly every single day. Who knows what impact Anne Bloodworth's death had. Or what the impact of her existence would have been if she'd lived."

"I think I'm getting a headache," Gates said. "All I know is, I've got a forty-seven-page psychologist's report on an arson suspect in my briefcase, grass in my yard a foot tall, and tonight my two boys are playing ball at the same time seven fields apart. That's about all I can handle in one evening." Gates got up from the table to leave. "I don't want the two of you to think I'm not interested," he said. "I am. Murder is murder. But I need facts to proceed officially. Keep in touch."

Gates left, without allowing Simon to pick up his check.

 

"Am I imagining things, or did I irritate him just a little bit?"

"Your speech about the significance of history was just a tad preachy," Julia said. "But don't worry about it. You've just bonded with the victim. Gates knows that. He's done it himself."

"What?"

"Homicide investigators get cases that they just can't let go of," Julia said. "The victim is unidentified, or there is no evidence, or it leads nowhere. Long past when a normal person would give up, the cop carries that file around with him—for years and years. He's bonded with the victim. The search for justice has become personal. You have an interest in the past that attracts you to Anne Bloodworth's case. Sergeant Gates has enough in the present to keep him busy. But don't worry—if we can still turn up facts, he'll be interested."