Marcia Talley - Daughter of Ashes

‘Can’t you just give them back to the various offices now, let them deal with it? What are we talking about anyway? Traffic tickets?’

Kim smiled. ‘The historical society would hardly be interested in traffic court records, Mr Ames. No, there are some indexes going back to the nineteenth century that we think will prove invaluable to genealogists. Land records, marriage indexes, chattel mortgages… material like that.’

‘There are some real treasures in those boxes,’ I added. ‘We found a packet of letters written home by a local soldier during World War One.’

As I spoke, Clifton Ames’s eyes never left my face.

‘Some of the material is too water damaged to save, I’m afraid,’ I said, shifting uncomfortably in my chair.

He continued to stare. What was the man’s problem?

A light flashed in my brain. It flashed on so brightly and with such an audible click that I feared, for a second, that Ames might have heard it, too.

This is all about the early 1950s. Clifton J Ames the Second, the man presently giving me the hairy eyeball, had been young back then. Sixteen, seventeen tops? But what about his father, Clifton J Ames the First? It was he who had set up a shadow company, Liberty Land Development, specifically to buy up land from small, predominately black farmers like Cap Hazlett’s mother, Mary Hazlett, land on which the sprawling Clifton Farms processing plant now stood. What if there had been something fishy about those transactions? What if we were, quite literally, sitting over the evidence of his father’s shady deals? If they should come to light, it would reflect negatively on the family, and might even put the kibosh on Jack Ames’s promising political career.

I shot the Chicken à la King a toothy grin. ‘Thank you so much for your offer, Mr Ames. And if Fran and I run into any trouble, you will be the first person we call.’

After he left, another thought struck me like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. In the early 1950s, Clifton J Ames the Second had been too young to negotiate land deals, but I knew from the Tilghman Tigers yearbook that he had attended high school with Cap’s sister, Nancy. He’d starred in a musical with her. What if…

I plucked a tissue out of the box Kim kept on her desk and used it to retrieve Ames’s cigarillo from the saucer. ‘Kim, do you have a paper bag or a box or something I can put this into?’

‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘I’m in love with the man,’ I said, dangling the disgusting object between my thumb and forefinger over the saucer while Kim scrabbled around in her desk drawer. ‘I want to keep his cigar forever, in a locket around my neck, close to my heart.’

Kim laughed out loud. ‘You are a nut.’ She held up a Ziploc sandwich bag. ‘Will this do?’

‘No, it can’t be plastic.’

‘Because…?’

‘I can tell you don’t watch enough CSI ,’ I said. ‘Because it might spoil the DNA results.’

Kim stared. ‘My God, you’re serious.’

‘Deadly,’ I said.

Kim opened a drawer, reached in, and upended a box over her desk blotter. Columns of staples tumbled out. ‘This should work, right?’ she asked, handing the empty box over.

‘Perfectly,’ I said, sliding Ames’s distinctive Bonnie and Clyde cigarillo into the box. ‘Now I just need to convince Andy Hubbard that I’m not a nutcase.’

The Elizabethtown Police Station sat on the edge of town near the railroad tracks, adjacent to the train station that had been restored and converted into a charming florist shop named the Watering Can.

Inside the single story brick building I found myself in a boxy waiting room, with a water cooler in one corner and a gumball machine sponsored by the local Lion’s Club in the other. A uniformed police officer sat at a desk behind a glass window on the right, talking on the telephone and taking notes. I waited until she finished the call, then tapped on the glass. ‘Excuse me?’

She looked up. ‘How can I help you, ma’am?’

‘I’m here to see Sheriff Hubbard,’ I said. ‘Is he in?’

‘He’s on the phone. Who should I tell him is here?’

‘It’s Hannah. Hannah Ives.’

A few minutes later, I sat on one side of Hubbard’s gray metal desk and he on the other. My makeshift paper evidence ‘bag’ lay like an exclamation point on the desktop between us.

It’s fair to say that Andy Hubbard was not impressed with my sleuthing skills. ‘And you want me to have this analyzed, why?’

‘I suspect that Clifton Ames was the father of Baby Ella. If you could have the lab compare the DNA on this cigar with the baby’s DNA…’ I shrugged. Even to my ears it sounded lame.

‘May I remind you that, according to the medical examiner, the baby died of natural causes.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘I realize that. It’s not the baby’s cause of death that I’m questioning, it’s her mother’s.’

The shadow of a smile played across Hubbard’s face. ‘The mother. You mean Nancy Hazlett?’

That caught me off guard, but if I could figure it out, it shouldn’t surprise me to learn that the police had, too. ‘Ah. You’re steps ahead of me, I see.’

‘Do you know Thomas Hazlett?’

‘Cap? Of course. He’s helping us clean up the mess with the records in the courthouse. Nancy was his sister.’

‘Exactly. After the baby’s body was found, Cap contacted us. He thought it likely that the child had belonged to his sister, so he volunteered to be tested. We performed avuncular DNA analysis and the results showed an unusually high kinship index. We can say with confidence that the child’s mother was a close relative of Cap Hazlett. The obvious conclusion is Nancy.’

I leaned forward. Using my index finger, I pushed the cardboard Swingline staple box a millimeter closer to his side of the blotter. ‘And I can say with some confidence that the guy who smoked this cigar is probably the baby’s father.’

Hubbard breathed in noisily through his nose then let it out slowly. ‘Did Cap put you up to this?’

‘Cap? Of course not. It’s just that I’ve been talking to an elderly minister and his wife who knew Nancy quite well. They remember that she was pretty sweet on Clifton Ames the Second,’ I said, embroidering just a bit. ‘Black girl, white boy, a baby. Seems like a recipe for disaster, especially back in those days.’

‘I think you and Cap Hazlett need to concentrate on getting the courthouse basement squared away and let me do my job.’

‘So you don’t think the identity of Baby Ella’s father is of any importance?’

‘Not particularly. Unless a crime was committed because of it.’

‘That’s my point exactly!’

Hubbard rolled his chair back a few inches and stretched his legs out to one side. ‘Did you have Ames’s permission to take this sample?’

‘Of course not.’

‘A court order?’

‘Now you’re making fun of me, Sheriff.’

‘What I’m trying to tell you, Mrs Ives, is that you are not, as far as I know, a trained specimen collector. And even if you were, the chain of custody on this evidence you’re bringing me is crap.’ He waved a hand over the staple box as if shooing away flies. ‘How will we know this cigar wasn’t planted or tampered with?’

‘Kim Marquis was sitting right there with me when Cliff…’

‘Save your breath, Mrs Ives. Courts of law require a strict paper trail. A police officer hands evidence off to the evidence clerk, the evidence clerk to the lab and so on. At each step, someone has to sign a form. The lab won’t even accept a sample if it isn’t accompanied by the appropriate paperwork.’

‘I guess it was naive of me to think that small town law enforcement would be more…’ I paused, choosing my words carefully. ‘More laid-back about crime investigation.’