Simon Said (5 page)

"How can you be sure of that?" she asked.
"The draftsman's drawings for the kitchen addition are in the Preservation Society's library," Simon said, "and they're dated. Plus, a watercolor of the house done shortly afterward shows what the house looked like after various improvements, including the kitchen addition. There's a date on the back of the watercolor, which is hanging in the house, by the way. And we know the building burned in 1933, because it was reported in the newspaper in a story that included the information that it was being used for storage. All this is in the monograph I wrote."

David jumped into the ditch. "And look—Simon, I haven't had a chance to show you this yet—it verifies the written record." With his finger, he traced a line of black not far beneath the surface of the sides of the ditch. "This is a layer of carbon, which proves that the building did burn at about the time we believe it did."

Simon and Julia climbed into the trench to inspect the evidence. Julia knelt in the dirt for a closer look.

 

"Look," Julia said, pointing to another layer of black about a foot farther down the trench. "Is that another fire?"

 

"In the early nineteenth century," David said, "but there's no written record of it." "Detached kitchens burned all the time," Simon said. "That's why they were built away from the house to begin with."

Julia contemplated the wall of the trench while the two men climbed out of it. Simon turned and reached out a hand to help her, and she scrambled up, oblivious to the mud collecting on her shoes and stockings. David handed her a towel, and she wiped her hands carelessly, staring off in the general direction of the house.

"This all seems very suspicious to me," Julia said.
"I think so, too," said Simon.

"What are you two talking about?" David asked. "It's not suspicious, it's clear as a bell. The woman was killed and her body was hidden to conceal the crime. What could be clearer than that?"

"There's more to it. I think that we can make some other assumptions from what we know so far," Julia said. "First of all, we can assume that Anne Bloodworth was murdered that day in 1926 when she supposedly disappeared. She was shot in the back of the head, which is odd if she just surprised somebody on the property who was doing something they shouldn't have been doing. Did she even see the guy? If she was running away, why shoot her?"

"I want to know where everyone else was," Simon said. "Where were her father and the servants? Someone should have seen something. It's unlikely she was on the property alone."

"And the person who killed her knew the area pretty well, because he buried the body right here, in a building that had been abandoned except for storage," Julia added. "Hidden so well, in fact, that it wasn't found for seventy years."

"It would be far-fetched to think the building was burned down a few years after her disappearance to further hide the crime," Simon said.

 

"Far-fetched is an understatement," David said. "There's no evidence of that at all."

"But it certainly is a coincidence," Julia said. "And I think there is one solid conclusion we can draw from all this: Anne Bloodworth's murderer was someone who knew her, which isn't really surprising. That's true in most murders."

"I think he definitely knew her fairly well," Simon said.
"Hold it—that's going too far even for you," David said.

"The body was laid out for burial," Simon said. "Anne Bloodworth was shrouded in a quilt and her hands were crossed across her chest, just as if she'd been buried formally. Her jewelry hadn't been stolen. Would an ordinary criminal, a stranger, do something like that? Especially if he was in a hurry? Hell, where did he get the quilt? Did he go into the house?"

"It's a mystery, that's for sure," said Julia, "and one I would like to solve." "No way," David said, "the trail's too cold."

"No trail's so cold that we can't at least try to make sense of it," Simon said. "Look at what we know already."

"And by next week, we should know a lot more," Julia said. "Simon's going to do his historical research thing, I'm going to search our files, and the ME, we hope, will be able to ID the corpse positively, and who knows what else he may find." Simon and Julia both looked at David expectantly, waiting for his contribution.

"I think you're both crazy," he said.

"Well, I've got to go back to the office and pretend to work on something a little more current," Julia said. "But what I'm really going to do is find out what happened to our own files from 1926, if we even had any." She declined Simon's offer to walk her to her car, then went off by herself toward the parking lot. Simon watched her walk away from him. She had a good figure.

"I would think you'd be cured of women," David said. It was the first reference David had made to Simon's troubles, and Simon chose to ignore it.

 

"What do you think of her?" he asked.

 

David shrugged. "She's okay. At least she doesn't mind getting a little dirty." Simon liked just about everything about Julia McGloughlan except that awful gray suit.

As Simon walked back to his office and his meeting, he noticed that the sky was becoming very dark with promised rain. Some of the cars on Hillsborough Street already had their lights on. Hillsborough Street was a broad thoroughfare even back in the twenties, when Anne Bloodworth had disappeared. The first mass-produced automobiles mixed with horse-drawn vehicles of every description. The trolley, its bell constantly sounding, ran under a tangle of wiring between downtown Raleigh and State College, now North Carolina State University. Anne Bloodworth would probably never have ridden the trolley, even though it had passed right in front of her home. Her set had its own carriages or automobiles to drive to one of the houses on fashionable Blount Street for chicken salad and pickled oysters, or perhaps to the Nine O'Clock Cotillion in the ballroom on the second floor of the Olivia Raney Library. Had Anne heard of the Scopes trial? Did she care that women got the vote in , although without the approval of North Carolina? What kind of young woman had she been? And who cared now, anyway?

Finally, whatever had been eating at Simon had worked its way into his consciousness. He realized that he cared. A lovely and intelligent woman had died violently long before her time. In the natural order of things, she should have lived, married, had children, enjoyed the good times and endured the bad, and died in bed. Someone took all that away from her. Simon wanted to know who and why.

Chapter Five

EVERYONE ELSE HAD GATHERED IN THE LOUNGE BY THE TIME Simon arrived for the faculty meeting. Nonetheless, it was a sparse assembly, with just Walker Jones, Vera Thayer, Alex Andrus, Marcus Clegg, and himself.

Marcus Clegg held a joint appointment in the departments of psychology and history. His research in both fields was brilliant, original, and meticulous. Despite his accomplishments, Marcus probably wouldn't be welcome at a major university. He just didn't fit into any standard academic niche. Kenan College was happy to have him move between his lab, where he studied the neuroanatomy of rats in the context of behavior, and his crowded office in the history department, where he was finishing a book on the recantation of Galileo.

Marcus's views on psychology and psychotherapy were unfashionable, too. He was a social liberal only because he believed that either the carrot or the stick would solve any problem known to man, but that the carrot was more humane. Buying off the masses was just plain more acceptable to him than locking them up. He was especially critical of talk therapy, which he believed encouraged self-pity and helplessness. "I hate to hear people whine," he once told Simon. "I don't want to spend years listening to the same people try to figure out why they can't get on an elevator without having an anxiety attack. I want to get them on that elevator—as soon as possible. And never see them again."

Simon was glad that Marcus was in town. He was the only one in the room with whom Simon had a personal relationship. Marcus was about ten years older than Simon, and he still cultivated a sixties' image. He wore Birkenstock sandals with socks practically all year, wire-rim glasses, and his brown hair curled over his collar. He professed to be a radical, but he had an essentially conservative nature. The man worked hard at his job, adored his wife of fifteen years, and was devoted to his four daughters. He spent most of his free time with his family at soccer games and Indian Princesses meetings and other such family events. Simon was jealous as hell of him.

As always, Walker Jones presided paternally at the head of the table. White-haired, dignified, and poised, he reminded Simon of Walter Cronkite. He had been department chair for twenty years and took it just as seriously today as he did his first week on the job. Vera Thayer sat rigidly next to him, poised like Athena determined to defend Troy from the Greeks. She wore her business suit like armor and her beehive hairdo like a helmet. All that was missing was a sword and a shield. Alex Andrus was pacing in front of the windows, carefully balancing a well-worn chip on his shoulder.

Andrus was on his second career and was sensitive about it. After being passed over for captain twice, the navy refused to renew his enlistment contract. He was a fanatic Civil War hobbyist, so he went to graduate school to get his doctorate. He worked hard and produced dozens of articles published in Civil War journals and magazines. Most of them were bibliographies and catalogs of artifacts. He was a popular teacher because he taught the Civil War anecdotally and adhered to the standard southern line that slavery had not been the cause of the Civil War. If Simon had not come to Kenan and won the Pulitzer Prize, Andrus would have been a sure bet for tenure.

Simon kept his mouth shut around Alex. He disliked the man, but he also despised his attitude toward southern history. Simon was a devoted southerner. He wouldn't live anywhere else in the world. But he hated the unquestioning idolatry of most of the South toward the Civil War experience. He believed that the decision to secede was indefensible from any standpoint, whether social, economic, or military. It was even more irresponsible to keep fighting once the odds against the South became clear. Many thousands of young Southerners died unnecessarily for "the cause" long after it was hopeless. In any other nation in the world, everyone from Jefferson Davis to General Lee would have been shot for treason after the surrender at Appomattox. Then what the outmoded economics of slavery didn't do to delay the development of the South, Reconstruction did. It was a hundred years before the South recovered. It gave Simon a headache to drive past the capital on Robert E. Lee's birthday and see the Confederate battle flag flying.

But Simon was smart enough to say very little on the subject. He did once suggest mildly to Andrus while he was holding forth on states' rights that he really ought to read the Constitution. But he didn't want to get ridden out of North Carolina on a rail. Just because he thought the Yankees' victory was inevitable, he didn't want to have to go live with them.

Simon sat down next to Marcus. Everyone looked at him. Although Simon knew he was the focus of this meeting, he was relaxed. He was right and Andrus was wrong. Walker Jones called the meeting to order.

"I really dislike holding a faculty meeting when we have so few of our people here," he began, "but I have come to feel that it is necessary to keep a certain situation from becoming out of control." He looked at Simon directly. "Vera tells me that she mentioned the purpose of this meeting to you earlier this morning."

"Yes," Simon answered. "Bobby Hinton's senior thesis grade is being appealed."

"That's correct," Jones said formally. "Let's summarize the situation briefly." He looked at his notes. "Mr. Hinton was a senior history major, one of our best students. Along with nine others, he was selected to participate in the senior honors seminar, which requires the writing of a long research paper over the course of the year. This paper is expected to be of graduate-school quality. Last year, the seminar was taught by Simon. In addition, every student has a faculty adviser who is a specialist in the period he or she has selected. As Mr. Hinton's topic was the Civil War, Alex Andrus was his adviser. At the end of the year, Hinton received a C from Simon. The other grades in the class were six As and three B-pluses."

"It was absolutely ridiculous—" began Andrus.

 

"Hold on, Alex. I'm not done yet," Jones said. "Please tell us, Simon, your rationale for that grade."

"A senior thesis of the quality we expect must be written to graduate-school standards," Simon said. "We tell the kids that when they sign up for the course. Most of them live, eat, and breathe this paper for the course of the year. It gives them a huge edge in graduate school. They all know that. All the senior faculty take turns teaching the seminar, and we emphasize critical reading and thinking, and the use of primary sources. I repeatedly warned Hinton after reading his drafts that his primary research was unacceptable. In fact, it was practically nonexistent. He ignored me. He writes very well, and he did an excellent survey of the literature on his topic. But he didn't add an iota of original knowledge or thought to the subject. So he got a C. It would have been unfair to the other students to give him anything else."

"I hope you realize that he will lose his spot in graduate school because of this," Andrus said.

"That's completely irrelevant," Vera Thayer said.
"Hold on, please," Jones said. He turned to Andrus.
"Now, Alex, did you know of Simon's comments on Hinton's drafts?" he asked. "Of course I did. And I referred him to a number of sources."
"And did he make any use of these?"
"Yes. But he said that they didn't add much to his discussion."
Jones turned to Simon. "Simon?"

"All the students are supposed to make sure there are sufficient sources for their topic before they formally select it and begin work. In fact, his bibliography referred to a number of primary sources. But there was no evidence at all in his paper that he actually used any," Simon said.

"Listen," Andrus said. "The boy was carrying a huge load. He was taking an extra course, and doing research for me at the same time."