I confirmed. “I am to meet someone at the northeast corner of the St. Michael’s cemetery at 10 A.M.?”

  It was 8:30 now; that still gave me time to stop at the bank before going to the cemetery.

  “Yes, indeed.” Nothing in her voice betrayed any curiosity. “As I mentioned in my message, the note was signed by Isabelle Saffron.”

  “Thank you.” I hesitated. “And did someone else call and ask for my cell number?”

  “Only ten minutes ago. I hope you don’t mind. This person said it was extremely urgent and extremely personal. That’s why I gave it. Ordinarily . . .”

  “I’m glad you did, Ingrid. It helped a lot.”

  “Thank you. Is that all?”

  “Yes.”

  She hung up.

  That at least solved the small mystery of how the second caller to my voice mail had known how to reach me. But it didn’t tell me who it was. It didn’t tell me why this person wanted to meet at noon today. Or why this person had whispered during the entire message, making it impossible to guess the identity or gender of the caller.

  Most of all, it didn’t explain why the caller had said the meeting would help me find Victoria Sebastian.

  **

  The small, ancient stone building of South Carolina First and its quiet, marble-floored teller area with only three teller cages hid the immensity of the assets the bank guarded for many of Charleston’s fifth- and sixth-generation families. An unbroken succession of male Billsworths had been at the helm from the day it was founded late in the eighteenth century; here, behind a massive oak desk in a walnut-paneled office, Nigel Billsworth followed in the family tradition.

  He was in his midforties, sleek like a well-fed seal. The pin-striped suit was Wall Street, the precise, bleached-blond haircut and pedicured nails were California, and the accent and understated but warm welcome were Charleston.

  “Mr. Nicholas Barrett,” he said, getting up from behind the desk, “it is indeed a pleasure. Shame about Pendleton, of course, but in the end, justice must be done.”

  He was referring to my half brother, who until recently had occupied the Barrett mansion near the waterfront. Now it belonged to me.

  “There was a lot more to it than what made the papers,” I said. Pendleton and I had come to an amiable agreement. A postcard I’d received a week ago showed he was enjoying his decision to give up all that he’d once believed important, so important he’d almost sold his soul trying to keep it. Those too were events that had resulted from my return to Charleston. “I’m sure he believes it was the right thing for him to do.”

  Nigel Billsworth nodded, as if he knew everything that had transpired since my return to Charleston. It was a distinct possibility. News travels among the old families as if the city were still a village.

  “Please, sit.” He pointed to a burnished chair that could have been in the same spot for two centuries, polished by different generations of slaves, then employees. “Coffee? Tea?”

  I shook my head. “I appreciate the appointment on short notice. I know you must be very busy.”

  “No problem at all. Any business I could do for or with you would be wonderful. Although I’m sure you are being treated fairly at Southern Independent.”

  No surprise that he knew my bank. Or that he made his statement sound like a polite question. Or that perhaps the only reason he’d made my appointment a priority was the hope that I wasn’t being treated fairly.

  “I’m here on a different matter,” I said. “Matthew Pederson and Anson Hanoway Saffron.”

  Billsworth’s face lost all warmth.

  “I see you remember those names.”

  “Certainly. Both are linked with tragedies that happened in my final year at the Citadel. You’ll find I have very little interest in discussing either event. With you or anyone else.”

  The disadvantage of wearing khakis and a sweatshirt is the lack of storage space. I did not have a suit jacket like his that I could reach into for papers or a pen. Instead I had to squirm to reach into my back pocket and pull out folded sheets.

  I began to read directly from the top sheet. “ ‘Matt and Ethan and Nigel once caught Anson on his way to class. They made him take everything out of his briefcase and explain what each item was. Anson had a fifteen-page term paper on the Citadel’s role in the first stages of the Civil War. It was due that day as soon as he arrived in class. They made Anson eat the first two pages, then threw the other pages on the ground and set them on fire. They all found it funny, except Anson, who couldn’t say a word of protest.’ ”

  I lifted my eyes to meet Billsworth’s horrified gaze.

  “I can understand why you would remember Anson Saffron’s name,” I said. “Being a part of hazing and then a tragedy will do that for a person.”

  I held up the sheets, flipped through them so that Billsworth would see that each was filled with more to read. “The transcript of a recorded conversation with Cheryl Harper. You might remember her, too, since you were such close friends with Matt Pederson. Her maiden name was Cheryl Gibbon. She was Matt’s fiancée. Seems Matt told her a lot of stories.”

  I flipped through the pages again. Only the top page held anything of relevance to Nigel Billsworth, but if he wanted to conclude I had reams of stories about him, that was fine with me. I filled the silence by borrowing from what Jack Mardell had told me earlier. I’d had time to think about this during my drive back from Mardell’s cabin, knowing that Nigel Billsworth would otherwise have little incentive to talk to me.

  “Four cadets in balaclavas took Saffron out of his dorm room the night he died,” I said. “Four cadets who have never been identified. While there are witnesses to the fact that you and Matthew Pederson and Ethan Osgoode and James Edward Ball hazed Saffron on other occasions, I’m certain you never went as far as to put Saffron on a cross with a rope around his neck and taunt him to commit suicide. And because it was not you in one of those balaclavas that night, I see no need to take this written transcript any further than this office once you answer some questions for me. Because I’d hate to have the media here to ask the same questions after all these years. After all, once they’ve read this transcript, they might jump to the conclusion that you actually were part of torturing that poor young freshman. And if they were unscrupulous enough to actually run some of those stories, it’d be a shame what kind of impression that might have on some of the respectable people who are your clients.”

  I got up, hating the game I felt forced to play. But the stakes were high, especially since I’d found out that Saffron had not committed suicide. So a murderer—or perhaps an entire organization of murderers—might still be on the loose. I walked to his office door and shut it.

  “Perhaps,” I said, smiling as I returned to the expensive chair and sat again, “you would prefer that you and I have a private conversation instead.”

  As I watched Nigel Billsworth squirm, I thought of the chair with two screws removed. Which of the four had been the murderer?

  “Ready to tell me more about the night Saffron died?” I asked.

  Nigel fumbled with a desk drawer. Came up with a tall green bottle of Glenfiddich Scotch. He dropped the bottle cap on the floor as he reached for a tumbler. Didn’t bother to pick up the cap. Poured and gulped half the tumbler in one shot. “I can’t tell you much,” he said.

  “Because of the pact?”

  “You know about that too?”

  “Look,” I said, “all I want is the truth. I’m not interested in punishing anyone for what happened a quarter century ago. With one caveat. I will not hide any kind of criminal action. If you didn’t do anything criminal, tell me exactly what you did. Otherwise, I’ll assume you did and go to the media and police accordingly.”

  “It wasn’t criminal,” he said. “It was—” he stopped himself, then started again—“it was immoral, cowardly, and something the people involved should always regret. But not criminal.”

  “Then,” I said, “it stays between us.”

  “I will never admit I was involved,” Billsworth said. “But I can tell you about that night.”

  He surprised me by beginning to weep halfway through the story.

  **

  From Saffron’s diary and Nigel Billsworth’s story, I was finally able to piece together what had happened the last night of Anson Hanoway Saffron’s life. An hour and a half before lights-out, Anson Hanoway walked down the barracks hallway to his room. Conversations slowed and stopped at his approach, then picked up again after he passed by. He told himself that it was his imagination, hearing his name occasionally spit out by his fellow cadets.

  It bothered him less than it would have other freshmen. He was accustomed to a sense of apartness. Fountain pen, blue ink, spiral-bound notebook—these were the instruments of his refuge, and they awaited him in his dorm room. And so did God, his one solace besides his writing in the pressure-filled world of the Citadel. When the door was shut and he was immersed in poetry and prayer, his solitude became a blessing, not a curse.

  Fifteen minutes before lights-out, Anson reread all that he had written in the previous hour. The syllables of the words and the cadence of the sentences played like music in his thoughts. Satisfied, he slowly shut the notebook and placed it in the top drawer of his desk.

  Next was his diary, which he kept in a hole he’d cut into his mattress. To get it, he removed the lower corner of his bedsheet and reached far inside the mattress.

  He returned to his desk and spent ten more minutes recording the events of the day and his emotional impressions of those events.

  Anson wrote quickly, without measuring each word as he did with poetry. He did this in part because he liked to give his diary the feel of stream of consciousness, as if he’d actually been recording the day’s events as they happened. And he wrote with speed because he knew that his roommate would arrive in the final minute before lights-out. Soon he finished writing the day’s events and moved to the bed to hide the diary again. At that moment—earlier than Anson had expected—the door to his dorm room swung open.

  It was not his roommate but four cadets. Wearing black hoods.

  Anson shoved the diary under the mattress, hoping they had not noticed.

  The four moved toward him.

  **

  “The cross was Ethan’s idea,” Nigel said. He caught himself. “At least, that’s what I heard. Because outside of this room, I will deny to my dying breath that I was one of those four. And you would have no way of proving it.”

  “Of course,” I said. If these were the ground rules, I was happy with them. For now.

  “Saffron was standing up to all the other hazing,” he said, speaking slowly. He dabbed at his face with a handkerchief. “It was getting to the point where Matthew and I and some of the other senior cadets were actually beginning to admire Saffron. His faith and all he stood for. Not Ethan. He hated Saffron. It was almost unnatural.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “None. I think it was in the diary.”

  “How did you know about the diary?”

  “Matthew picked it up.” Nigel grimaced, realizing he’d made another mistake. “So I heard.”

  “So you heard.”

  “As Anson fought, we—those four who were there, I mean—threw him on his bed to tie him down. The mattress moved. The diary hit the ground. Ethan tried to grab it, and Matthew beat him to it. But Matthew never gave anybody a chance to read it. I think that’s why he and Ethan got into a fistfight a few days later. Ethan wanted it as badly as I’d seen anyone want something, as badly as he wanted Saffron to quit the Citadel.”

  “Nothing worked until the cross?”

  Nigel nodded. “Anson surprised everyone with how tough he was. Looking back, I think Ethan thought Saffron would be an easy target among the entire freshman class. When Saffron didn’t fold in September—the way he suffered in silence and took all our hazing—it just made Ethan angrier and angrier. And from October on, it got worse and worse for Saffron. Until . . .”

  “He was up on the cross and decided to kick the chair over,” I said.

  I watched Billsworth closely. Did he know that two of the screws had been taken out of the legs of the chair? That it hadn’t been a suicide?

  “That shocked me,” Billsworth said. “Really. What I heard . . .”

  “Because, of course, you weren’t there. . . .”

  “Exactly. What I heard was that Matthew said that this would be the last time anything was done to Saffron. If Saffron didn’t quit, he would put word out to the seniors to leave him alone. None of us expected that Saffron would actually kill himself. He was just so calm about all the other times we hazed him. Dignified. Like he was almost sad for us. In a way, it didn’t make sense with what Ethan had told us about him.”

  “Told you what?”

  “That I can’t answer.”

  “The pact.”

  “That I can’t answer.”

  Which was answer enough.

  I was beginning to feel sympathetic toward Billsworth. My guess was that he’d gotten caught up in the hazing of Anson Saffron, without realizing as a teenager what it was like to be on the wrong side of that kind of persecution.

  “Weird thing is,” Billsworth said, “the next week, I heard that Matthew had decided to become one himself.”

  “One what?” I asked.

  “A believer. Like Anson Saffron.”

  I thought about that and compared it to what I already knew about Pederson. “But Pederson didn’t mind going to bars with a married woman,” I said.

  Billsworth held the bottle over his tumbler, then set it down without pouring.

  “What don’t you know about all of that?”

  Billsworth just stared at me.

  I stared back.

  Billsworth hesitated, then finally said, “She wasn’t married. Or at least Matt didn’t know if she was. He said she was his soul mate. Could pour out all his troubles to her. We asked about his fiancée, and he said it was over. We said we wanted to meet this mystery woman, and he said when the time was right.”

  “You think he ran away with her?”

  Billsworth began to pour himself more scotch. “I try not to think about it. Really. I’m very ashamed of what happened. You can punish me by spreading the story you just read to me, but trust me, I’ve already punished myself. A lot of sleepless nights.”

  “I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights of my own,” I said, standing. “You want to talk? Call me anytime.” I handed him my card.

  “Yeah,” he said. He studied the glass. “That’s it? We’re done?”

  “One last favor,” I said. “Any idea where I can find Ethan Osgoode?”

  “That you don’t know, huh?”

  I waited.

  “Killed in a car accident. About a month after Saffron committed suicide. Was in his car at a stop sign, and a semi rear-ended him. Spun him out into traffic and about three other cars broadsided him. He didn’t have a chance.”

  Chapter 17

  I walked among the dead of St. Michael’s.

  St. Michael’s Church was at the corner of Broad and Meeting Streets. As the first Episcopalian church in North America, it had a venerable history. Some of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were buried here, and many of the parishioners took their glory from the esteemed dead.

  I was familiar with the grounds. I visited it every week. My own son, stillborn, was buried here. I would visit his grave and mourn the loss and reflect on the circumstances that had led me away from him, then back to Charleston years after my marriage had been annulled.

  I could never leave the church grounds without a sense of sadness and peace and gratitude for the awareness of the power of God’s presence. Here, in front of my son’s headstone, I could not breathe without being reminded of how fleeting each breath was, and in turn, how fleeting this life. Without God, life was dust that had no meaning. With God, hope transformed life and its sorrows. I had discovered that hope, and the love and forgiveness of God too, after a long struggle. And I had learned that these ancient truths of the soul are undiminished by the passage of countless generations.

  I had been on the grounds in fog, in rain, in sunshine. Today, low clouds covered the sky, and a breeze with a hint of bitterness plucked at the early leaves that had fallen.

  It was ten o’clock. I’d just left the bank for here.

  I found the sender of the note where she had promised.

  At the time she had promised in the note.

  In the northeast corner, near the headstone that marked where Anson Hanoway Saffron was buried.

  At the far corner, near the iron fence that separated the grounds from the street behind, stood a large man in an overcoat. As he watched us carefully, I guessed he was Isabelle Hanoway Saffron’s caretaker.

  She sat hunched in a wheelchair in front of the headstone. She’d wrapped herself in a dark shawl, with only unadorned fingers showing where they gripped the edges. Age had thinned her face and speckled it with moles. The feathers of her hat fluttered in the breeze.

  “You are Nicholas Barrett,” she said in greeting.

  “I am.” Conscious of my height while she was seated, I knelt beside her.

  “I understand you have been asking questions about my son.” She remained as she had been on my approach, staring at the headstone.

  ANSON HANOWAY SAFFRON. May 12, 1961–March 3, 1978. In the arms of his Savior for all time.

  “I have,” I answered. Remarkable that she knew already. It had only been the day before that I had visited James Edward Ball.

  “And have you considered whether my family’s tragedy is truly any business of yours?”

  “I have,” I answered.

  “And still you persist?”

  “Mrs. Saffron, another woman lost her son too. A son who knew your son. She wants to know how and why her own son died.”

  “After all these years?”

  “I have a son buried here too,” I said. “Time only softens the grief. It doesn’t change the sense of loss. Only God can do that.”

  “I am asking you to stop with your questions.” Finally she turned her head to look directly into my eyes. The skin of her face sagged, and her eyes were a pale, bleary blue. “Surely we can leave the past in the past. Anson did not deserve what happened to him then. He doesn’t deserve to be brought into whatever you are bringing to light now.”

 

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