The Reservoir (7 page)

“My, oh my,” she said. “We can go again, but it’s three dollars extra.”

This hardly seemed fair, seeing as how he had not technically gone even once. But since he was not sure how such things were counted, all he could do was lament, “I don’t have but five.”

“How am I ever gonna get to New Orleans if I give out special favors?” she asked, as though it were a problem they had discussed for years.

“I could pay you later.”

But she was already putting on her underclothes, and he didn’t want to beg. “You ask for me next time, hear?” she said. He said he would. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Tommie,” he said. “Tommie Merton.” It was the first name that came into his head, from church history—Walter Merton, thirteenth-century bishop.

“Well, Tommie Merton, it was a pleasure to meet you.” She gave him a sassy little smile. “Now it’s time for you and me to get dressed.”

• CHAPTER SIX •

O
N
T
UESDAY
Richardson receives word from Millboro’ that Lillian Madison got on the train on Thursday bound for Richmond. It was six hours late and didn’t arrive until three o’clock Friday morning. Richardson then learns from the conductor that the young woman was traveling alone and that she was staying at the American Hotel and expected to meet a friend in the city.

The American Hotel sits on the southwest corner of Twelfth and Main in a row of iron-fronted buildings that arose after the war. It’s a white four-story with arched windows and green shutters and decorative cornices—one of the nicer hotels in town, with its own barbershop and restaurant. The entrance is down around on Twelfth, with a ladies’ entrance to the left. Richardson steps briskly in and asks for the manager on duty. There were several young women here that night, he is told. While waiting for the clerk who was on duty last Thursday night, he is shown the register; running his finger down the list of late-arriving guests, he comes across one of the last—F. L. Merton of Roanoke City. He taps it. “This Miss Merton,” he asks. “What was she like?”

The day desk clerk doesn’t know, but tries to make helpful suggestions while they wait for Mr. Dodson, the night clerk, who has to be woken up at his house six blocks away. “She probably was one of the finer young ladies from Roanoke, visiting a sick relative or something. Though I don’t know her personally.”

Richardson nods but is not really listening. He’s trying to imagine why Miss Madison would travel to Richmond and register under a false name, if indeed she did. The train conductor supplied him with a fairly good description that matched the reservoir woman—short, stout, brown hair, wearing a grayish dress, he thought, and a black hat with feathers; carrying an oblong clothes bag and a hand satchel. He’d also mentioned a red shawl. The Dunstans’ shawl could very well be hers. But best not leap too far ahead, he tells himself. He decides to make inquiries of the bellboys and night watchmen.

The night clerk arrives shortly, nattily dressed for someone who has been rudely awakened. A dandy boy. Baby-faced, late twenties. As soon as he opens his mouth, Richardson knows he’ll give a good description but will be nervous and unsure of himself. “Ah, yes,” he says. “I do remember her. She arrived on that late train. She was wearing a charcoal-colored alpaca dress and a black hat with ostrich tips and a veil and bugle-gimp beads, I believe. Let’s see, a blue jersey jacket and there was a red crochet shawl around her shoulders. There may have been brown gloves. Possibly cotton, but I can’t be one hundred percent sure. We see so many people every day.”

“You have a very good memory, Mr. Dodson,” Richardson tells him. “Now, tell me what else you remember about her.” Dodson says that she seemed like a well-bred young lady with good connections. She didn’t seem at all out of place. He did not see her again, but she sent a note by a newsboy, a short mulatto of about fourteen or fifteen years. One of the bellboys, Slim Lane, apparently took the note out to the newsboy, but the newsboy could not find the person for whom the note was intended and so Slim returned the note to the desk.

“I went off duty at ten,” Dodson says. “The note was there when I came back and stayed there all day Saturday. But the young lady had already left—without paying her bill. So I tore the note up and threw it away.” Dodson then asks if this has anything to do with the reservoir girl, though he knows it does. Richardson only says that it might.

Now he has Dodson digging through the trash, which the clerk is fairly certain has not been emptied in the past three days. They take two trash bins back to the clerks’ office and sort through handfuls of notes, orange peels, candy wrappers, pencil shavings, and other detritus, Dodson explaining that all manner of refuse gets left on the front desk even though the clientele is generally of the finest quality. Richardson pulls out a crumpled note and three torn ones, or rather pieces, and begins assembling them. Two of the torn notes have names that are not ones he’s looking for; the third one is inside three pieces of a ripped cream-colored envelope. The note is unsigned and appears to be torn from a larger piece of ruled paper. It reads, “I will be there. So do wait for me.” The envelope, pieced together, is more interesting. There is a name in cursive on the outside.

Dodson says he glanced at the note before reinserting it into the envelope and tearing it up. He is almost certain it is the same note that Slim brought back undelivered. Richardson puts the three pieces of the envelope together on a table and asks Dodson to read the name. Dodson squints and says, “T. J.… Clements?”

Richardson nods. He can see plainly what it says, but it’s not a name familiar to many people. He strokes his jaw, lost in thought. He and Dodson keep sifting through the trash looking for anything else that might have belonged in the envelope. Dodson cannot remember. The note looks complete in itself, but it’s odd that it was torn from a larger paper. Likely she was frugal, Richardson thinks. Probably she had grown up that way—large family in the country, scraping by after the war; she goes across the state to teach when she’s barely of age, if that. Even with much on her mind, the habit of not wasting paper was natural. He cannot yet form a picture of Cluverius, her cousin and possible seducer. But why “T.J.” when Cary Madison had clearly said “Willie”? Perhaps it was a nickname.

Richardson meets with Slim Lane in the clerks’ office. Detective Wren has been waiting outside, but Richardson tells him he’ll have to wait a little longer—Wren can be useful, but he has an unfortunate way of bullying people into believing he’s in charge of an investigation he may never be paid a cent for. Making him wait is the best medicine.

Slim is skinny and brown, in his mid-twenties, his nose as angular as a white man’s. He carries his head back, as though his neck were too weak to hold it upright, and he constantly shifts his eyes right and left in what Richardson at first thinks is nervousness, then realizes is simply a personal tic. Richardson asks him about the woman who was staying in Room 21 on Friday.

“A yellow boy give me a note to take to her,” Slim says, darting his eyes right. His voice is nasal, his accent almost as Caucasian as his nose, as though the whiteness in him is concentrated in the middle of his face.

“Who was this boy?”

“Don’t know his name. I’d recognize him though.” His eyes shift to the left, making Richardson look to that corner of the room, as if for the ghost that Slim sees.

“And what did the boy ask you to do?”

“He said a man give him a note to take to the lady in Room 21.”

“So the man knew she was in Room 21?”

Slim’s eyes shift back and forth, pausing for the first time directly on Richardson. His Adam’s apple bulges. “How do you mean?”

“I mean, did he ask for the note to be delivered to a room or a person?”

Slim shakes his head. “I disremember exactly. The yellow boy might know.”

“Do you remember the name of the woman?”

Slim says no.

“Was it Merton?”

“Yessir, I believe it was Murder, Murdon, yessir.”

“And what was on the note?”

“I didn’t look at it. It was on a little card. I took it to the lady in Room 21, and she said wait, and she handed me an envelope to take back out to the man. I give it to the boy, and a nickel. She give me one too.”

“Then what?”

“Then I went back to work.”

“Did you see the lady again, or the man that sent the note?”

“Nosir, I never saw that man. The lady went out later in the morning and came back in at dinnertime.”

“Did you see her after that?”

“She went out again in the evening. Came back after dark and went out again. I didn’t see her after that.”

Richardson tries to fix times to her coming and going, but gets different answers each time. Slim describes the woman as short and wearing a dark dress and coat and a red shawl. The last time she went out he believed she was carrying her clothes bag. He remembered that because most folks don’t carry their bags out at night.

The night watchman, a black man in his forties named Hunter Hunt, remembers her comings and goings a bit differently. Hunt claims she went out after dark, as did Slim, but says she did not return after that. He agrees that it’s possible Slim saw her and he didn’t, but that it’s also possible Slim mistook her for another woman staying in the hotel. He remembers a short woman with a red shawl leaving Room 21 with her clothes bag. Not long before this, along about nine o’clock, a gentleman called for her by mistake. He said he was waiting for a lady his sister went to school with, and the lady in 21 only looked something like her. So Hunt had him wait in the parlor, but when he looked in a few minutes later the gentleman was gone.

“What did the gentleman look like?” Richardson asks.

Hunt thinks a minute. “He was tall and thin. Had a mustache, a light-colored coat.”

“As tall as me?”

Hunt takes his time in answering, trying to judge Richardson’s height rather than the importance of the question, as Slim appeared to be doing. “I’d mostly say so, yessuh. But without him here, I don’t know.”

“So the gentleman left the hotel without the lady?”

“Yessuh.”

“And did you see her go out?”

“Nosuh. Round midnight I noticed her door open a crack and the light squeezin’ out. I knocked and went in. Looked like she was clean gone. Bed made, no bags, no lady. I turned off the light and closed the door.”

“And you didn’t see either of them again?”

“Nosuh.”

Richardson turns back to Slim. “Anything else you remember about her or any visitors she might have had?”

“Nosir,” Slim says, eyes wide right. “I don’t remember another thing.”

• CHAPTER SEVEN •

T
UESDAY EVENING
Tommie and Mr. Evans are back in the sitting room at the Tappahannock Inn. The Sunday paper is there and Tommie helps himself to it. The article is on the front page. He had hoped there would be nothing, but it’s right there, staring at him, “Woman’s Watery Grave.” He gulps it in. It doesn’t say much, only that an unidentified young woman was found dead in the old city reservoir. The pregnancy is mentioned, the coroner, an autopsy to be performed, a lonely place to commit suicide, a detective. Why bring in a detective for a suicide? He reads it over again and then scans the rest of the paper. Something more troubling appears in a short paragraph at the bottom of the fourth page. A woman’s clothes bag was found at the coal docks; a pair of underwear was labeled F. or T. Madison. The paragraph concludes, “Perhaps the bag may furnish a clue to the mystery of the girl found in the reservoir.” How can they leap to such a conclusion, Tommie wonders. It’s irresponsible.

He glances up at Mr. Evans, enjoying his cigar, apparently lost in thought. He smiles at Tommie. “Anything interesting?” he asks.

Tommie’s blood races. “Just the usual,” he says. “Robbery in Manchester, Catholics celebrating St. Patrick’s.” He peruses the other headlines and passes the paper on to Mr. Evans, who is eager to check on the baseball scores and his railroad stocks. “We should raise a glass to St. Patrick ourselves,” Tommie says, brightening. The thing to do is forget about it, to relax, he tells himself.

“Indeed we should, Tommie, indeed we should. Go order us a couple of bottles of lager.” As Tommie gets up, Mr. Evans shakes his head. “You see this about the girl found at the reservoir?”

“The suicide?”

“Yes, it’s a sad business.”

Evans reads from the paper. “Coroner suspects suicide … but evidence to the contrary … articles of clothing belonging to the woman were found elsewhere on the grounds.”

Tommie sits back down. “How do they know they belonged to the woman?”

“Good for you, Tommie.” Mr. Evans taps the side of his head, obscured in a haze of cigar smoke. “Where’s the hole in their argument? You always have to be alert to these things.”

“There’s no proof of any connection.”

“True,” Evans says, one hand going to his paunch. “You know how they write these things up to sell papers. People like a mystery—takes them out of the humdrum. They get credit if they’re right. If not, oh well, everybody forgets about it. The language is cagey—they don’t come right out and say this bag belonged to her. They just suggest it. That’s good courtroom technique.” He pokes his side and winces, “Dern bowel flare-up. Forgot to take my powder.”

When Tommie returns with the lagers Evans goes on. “Richmond’s gotten so big I don’t hardly recognize it. Why, you can walk down Main Street and not see a soul you know.” He then tells about a cousin of his who killed himself by jumping off a cliff to make it look like an accident. “Said he was just going out for a walk. What he didn’t know was that his own brother saw the whole thing.”

Tommie nods, smiling, not paying much attention, even though Mr. Evans is a good storyteller. What he’s thinking is that since no paper comes out on Monday, he’ll have to wait two more days for further news. Unless Tuesday’s happens to come on Wednesday. It sometimes only takes a day. Meanwhile, the lagers and forget about it.

Two pints later Mr. Evans is deep into a story about a midget who was the sergeant at arms when Evans served in the state legislature; he stood on a chair and used a megaphone. Then he moves on to telling about when he was an engineer in Cary’s Brigade, retreating with Lee to Appomattox Court House. Tommie is amazed at the fund of entertaining stories Mr. Evans has at his command and how they can make one feel that the best years to have lived were the ones he knew. The hum of other conversations fills the room, and a sense of well-being suffuses Tommie’s veins.

Slim Lane shakes himself like a dog as he steps out of the clerks’ office. Richardson’s interrogation has left him harried and suspicious. His eyes shoot left and right, then grow large as he nearly walks into an enormous man wearing a long black coat and holding a notepad that looks about the size of a cracker in his meaty hand. “William Lane?” the man says. Slim nods. “Detective Wren. Mind if I ask you a few questions?” Slim shakes his head. Wren puts a paw on his shoulder and guides him out to the hallway, then just outside into the alley off Eleventh. The clopping sound of carriages from Main is muffled back here, the air sour with the stench of garbage.

“Hunt tells me you carried a note to a girl in Room 21 from a gentleman. Is that right?”

Slim glances down to Wren’s shoes. They are as large as boats, and there’s mud on the soles. The man wearing them is asking him a question in a quiet, friendly way that doesn’t really seem friendly. “Yessir, that’s right.”

“And she sent one back?”

“Yessir.”

“Who was the gentleman?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see him. A yellow boy took the note.”

Wren widens his stance so that he’s eye to eye with Slim. “What yellow boy?” he demands.

“I don’t know his name. I’ve seen him around.”

Wren corners Slim’s eyes into looking straight at him. “You can find him for me, though, can’t you?”

The big man’s face is right in front of Slim’s; his breath is heavy with onions and some foul kind of fish that white people eat for breakfast. He’s nothing like a wren—more like a bear without all the fur, and a skritchy voice like a fox. Slim adds two random numbers in his head to calm himself: 3,586 + 4,567 = 8,153. “I don’t know if I can,” Slim says. “I’ll be working most all the time.”

“I’ll see about your job,” Wren tells him. “Don’t worry about that.”

Don’t get mixed up in white folkses’ business, Slim Lane. Don’t you do it. Your mama would slap you across the room. He tries to say something, but his mouth won’t work.

“If you can get me his name in a day, there’ll be something extra in it for you.”

Slim sees an opening and dodges his eyes left. “I don’t know.”

Wren places a hand against the wall right beside Slim’s face. His nostrils open up like caves, and Slim imagines running up into one and hiding. He begins to burst into laughter, and pretends to have a coughing fit. Wren waits for him to finish. “Let me put it to you this way, son. You like your job at the hotel, don’t you?”

“Yessir.”

“Good, I thought so. The manager’s a good friend of mine. So’s the owner. I do favors for them. You do this favor for me and they’d be mighty pleased. I’m going to speak to both of them about it directly. You take the afternoon off and start hunting for that boy, and when you find him you come running to my office and don’t stop for anything until you talk to me. You understand?”

Slim nods, glancing briefly into Wren’s sharp eyes. Don’t get messed up in no business, he tells himself. But suddenly Wren is gone, and Slim
is
messed up in the very business he wanted not to get messed up in. And not a thing he can do about it.

Tommie and Mr. Evans leave on Wednesday morning, hoping to get home in time for dinner. They make a stop at the Trace crossroads store; the eastbound stagecoach has just arrived, carrying, among other things, mail, freight, and Richmond newspapers. But nothing from Tuesday yet. They head out in the carriage again.

It’s warmer out today than it has been. The rank, fecund odors of skunk cabbage and newly plowed earth mingle in the air, and the faint buds of dogwoods are wedding lace along the roadside. The grinding carriage wheels suggest a rhythm. Tommie opens his mouth and begins singing: “Ching-a-ring-a-ring ching ching, ho-a-ding-a-ding kum larkee …” He whistles awhile.

Mr. Evans looks up from his paper, inhales the scents of spring, and absently takes up the verse: “Brothers gather ’round, listen to this story ’bout the promised land.”

Then together they go. “You don’t need to fear if you have no money, you don’t need none there to buy you milk and honey.” Lustier now, “There you’ll ride in style, coach with four white horses, there the evenin’ meal has one two three four courses.”

Mr. Evans compliments Tommie on his singing and tells him a story about minstrels traveling through King and Queen when he was a boy. “The best music I ever heard. The grown-ups were a little less appreciative—I didn’t understand it at the time. They were free coloreds—in the company of a white manager—but folks were afraid it would give the slaves ideas. Of course, we had free negroes in King and Queen, so I don’t know why they were worried.” Tommie is reminded of his first trip to Richmond. His father took him on the train and showed him the burned-out Spottswood Hotel where he’d seen Jefferson Davis, and when they walked across Capitol Square two old negroes were singing and strumming a banjo. A policeman told them not to disturb the governor, and they moved on, singing more softly, “Why do I weep, when my heart should feel no pain?”

They arrive in King and Queen Courthouse before noon. Tommie bids Mr. Evans good-bye and continues on to Little Plymouth, where Aunt Jane hugs him and fusses over him again as if he has been gone two weeks instead of two nights. An hour later he’s sitting down to dinner with her and Willie. She tells him a letter arrived from Lillie. He had forgotten the letter, and for a moment he says nothing.

Jane continues, “She says in it that she’s going down to Point Comfort to take care of a friend’s sick aunt. Can you imagine? Here I am, with you boys away all the time, and she can’t come here and spend some time with me. After all I’ve done for her. My health hasn’t been anything to brag about this winter, as I’ve told her.”

“She’ll probably stop by, if she can,” Tommie says.

“It would be out of her way,” Jane says, shaking her head. “I don’t want to be a bother to her, but you’d think if she took the trouble to write she could spare me a day or two. What I don’t understand, though, is why she didn’t ask me for anything. Not even a dollar. It’s strange.”

“She probably just wanted to keep you up with her doings,” Tommie suggests. Willie glances at him, but doesn’t say anything.

“Well, you read it for yourself and see what you can make of it.” She looks at him over the top of her eyeglasses, which are secured around her neck with a gold chain. Tommie knows the look as one of worry, but he cannot help reading accusation in it.

He peruses the letter and nods, as though he doesn’t already know its contents. Then he mentions the nice weather and asks Willie about the crops, and he repeats a story Mr. Evans told him about a farmer who worked for his father. Animals kept eating the front row of beans, so Mr. Evans’s father told him, “Looks like you should quit planting that front row.” The farmer nodded and turned, and about halfway back to the field he suddenly got it. He chuckled so hard his shoulders went to his ears.

“You’re in a fine humor today,” Willie tells his brother. “Lawyering suits you, I believe.” He smiles and takes in his brother’s entire countenance in a glance, and Tommie knows he is being scrutinized. Did something ring false in his speech or his manner? After dinner he talks to Aunt Jane for a while, then goes out to the machine shop where he finds Willie sharpening mower blades. He likes watching his brother work. Though manual labor never had appeal for Tommie, he takes comfort in the skill and care with which his brother goes about the job.

“Let me take over for you,” Tommie says.

Willie looks surprised but yields his stool. Right away, Tommie cuts his thumb on the blade. “I’m out of practice,” he says, sucking the crescent of blood. He lights a cigarette to steady his hands, leans back, and mentions the cottage in Little Plymouth he’s interested in. If he could just get to that point, he thinks—say, a month from now—then maybe the storm will have passed.

And he’s there, smoking a cigarette and talking about the house he wants to buy, when he hears the back porch bell ringing and Jane hollering, “Boys, oh, Lord, boys come quickly.”

Justice Richardson heads over to the cheap boardinghouse where Mr. Madison and his brother-in-law have spent the night. He goes in and finds the brother-in-law, Lillian’s uncle, finished with breakfast and ready to go. The father seems in no hurry to get out to the almshouse and identify his dead daughter. Nor does he seem particularly distressed. He’s a stout man, with a thick sinewy neck, white hair, and a grizzled beard, his hands strong and worn as leather. His wrinkled necktie bunches his collar so that when he swallows, his Adam’s apple bobs up as if for air. Walker is thin, clean-shaven, and at least a decade younger than Madison. Both of them wear old, cracked boots.

When they get there, the almshouse superintendent pulls back the sheet. Mr. Madison nods and says it’s his girl. The uncle stands back and peeks, while gripping tight to his slouch hat. A kind of strangulated noise issues from his throat like a rusty hinge, and he smears the corner of his eye with a thumb knuckle. Richardson regards them both—you never know how people are going to react to the sight of a dead loved one.

He asks them if they know anything about a scar above the girl’s left breast.

Madison nods. “A fever blister when she was little,” he says. “Didn’t heal properly.” He’s not inclined to say much more, but Richardson accepts the identification now as complete. He takes the two men into an office, gives them coffee, which only Madison takes, and asks about Lillian. Mr. Madison tells him that she was not yet twenty-one years old. She lived with her aunt Jane in Little Plymouth for about five years starting when she was fourteen. She moved there because she had become “difficult to handle.” She went to Bruington Academy for a while, but Mr. Madison and his wife thought it was not good for her, that she was putting on airs, and so they wouldn’t let Jane send her back. Then, not quite two years ago, she moved in with her grandfather and uncle, who lived only a few miles from her parents.