Ella Maud Read online

  Wilcox was indeed not himself: he was disgusted by the stink of accusation in the room. Had he not known all of them for the three and a half years he had courted Nell? Was he not a fixture in their house on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays? How could they believe he would stand by and let anything happen to his girl?

  Cropsey, Henry and Dawson resumed scouring the riverbank, this time with electric torches. It did not escape notice that Jim didn’t move a muscle to help. It seemed to Ollie that he was trapped in some kind of terrible anticipation, as if he feared Nell had disappeared just to get him in trouble. He sat in the armchair beside the hearth, slouching and fidgeting exactly as he had hours before, when he had called on Nell and not exchanged a word with her. Nell had been cruel, pointedly ignoring him. Ollie had convinced Nell this was necessary: if she was ever to get rid of a man the likes of Jim Wilcox, she would need to be rude to him. And she was, in that perverse way of hers. Nell’s mood was light, verging on giddy, as she plunged blades of indifference into him. Ollie almost felt sorry for him…then.

  “Why didn’t you get up when Papa came the first time?” she asked.

  He started at the sound of her voice. Then he resumed fidgeting with the sleeve of the armchair.

  “I wasn’t awake. I barely remember what my mother asked me.”

  The Cropsey house was still in a furor at the first gleam of dawn. Every lamp in the house was lit. The younger children — William Jr., Fred, William Douglas and May —- had been roused, set to search the surrounding fields and outbuildings. Mary Cropsey passed from panic to a kind of inert shock; gently, with some trouble, Ollie managed to coax her up to her bedroom and under the bedclothes. Her mother stared into the ceiling, gibbering indistinctly, until simple exhaustion overtook her.

  Ollie met her father on the landing. His pant legs were wet from wading into the river, his arms flecked with dirt from beating the reeds. He held the parasol he had almost tripped over in the hall. From her figure, he could easily distinguish Ollie in the dark—she was half a head taller than Nell, and towered higher from the way she piled her hair on her head, Gibson Girl-style. Unlike with her sister, Cropsey had never felt much of an urgency to protect her.

  Father and daughter paused three feet apart, inspecting each other’s eyes.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Now.”

  Ollie’s gaze dropped to the floor.

  “Come, then.”

  She led him to the bedroom in the back of the house the sisters shared. She could hear him breathing behind her—shallow with alarm—as she removed the key from between her breasts, and unlocked the door.

  Being on the west side of the house, that room was still enveloped in pre-dawn gloom. Ollie led her father to the bed, to the human-sized mass under the blankets. She paused before pulling the covers aside, looking to him again, as if giving him a last chance to avoid the journey they were about to embark upon. His expression did not change.

  She pulled down the blanket to reveal Nell’s face. Cropsey’s breathing stopped as he looked down on his daughter, who was too still to be merely asleep. Though it was dark, he could make out a black substance flowing from her left ear, down the gentle inflection of her neck, to pool on the sheets.

  It was only then, for the first time that dismal night, that Ollie Cropsey bowed her head to weep.

  II.

  The same day Nell Cropsey disappeared, the Raleigh News and Observer reported the strange death of a sixty-five-year-old black man. Frank Jones was discovered lying face down in a small stream off West Street. As his fingers were curled into the muddy bottom, it was ventured that Jones “struggled when strangulation came on.” The authorities concluded that he must have stumbled into the branch and drowned. Oddly, he died in a section of the stream that was only four inches deep. No further investigation of the incident was thought warranted, and nothing more about it appeared in the Raleigh papers.

  The same day, the coroner’s report came in regarding the death of one John W. Scott. Scott, “a young club and society man”, had been discovered viciously beaten in a doorway in the west end of town, and died without regaining consciousness. The physicians concluded that he had been attacked “by a weapon in the hands of some person unknown”. Though the newspaper reported that the affair “is exciting the greatest interest”, nothing else was published about it, and the incident was quickly forgotten.

  More outlandish, the News and Observer recounted the miraculous resurrection of James Wynn of Oxford, Alabama. Wynn had been pronounced dead more than forty-eight hours before his funeral. As he was about to be lowered to his eternal rest, “unwonted sounds” were heard from inside his coffin. The lid was opened, and the assembled mourners bore witness as the dead man’s body “was seen to move.” The casket was “hurried back to the home of Wynn, where he revived and is now under treatment.” This incident—and hair’s-breadth by which a man had escaped being buried alive—astounded all who heard it. Yet no investigation of the competence of the attending physician, nor those who prepared his “corpse” for burial, was reported.

  By contrast, the vanishing of Nell Cropsey ignited a firestorm of interest that refused to die. Nell, after all, was reported to be a “beautiful girl”, “winsome”, “handsome”, “the pet of her home”, with “sweet, lively features” and—importantly—of “unsullied” character. Word of her disappearance flashed through the town. By noon on the 21st she was the first topic of conversation around work benches, across lunch counters, and over the bars of a dozen local saloons. “A right-looking girl, that Nell,” folks said, and not just the men. “Saw her outside the Methodist chapel the other week, and she was almost worth a Sunday morning in church. Almost!” (Wink, wink). “She was at the racetrack last month with her sisters, dressed real fine,” said someone else. “My brother the milliner waited on her,” said a third, “and there was not a hat in the shop that looked bad on her head!”

  At first, conversation settled on the beauty of Nell Cropsey, not her disappearance. She had, after all, been gone fewer than twelve hours. The mere fact that she was missing hardly proved the worst; it was not unheard of for young women to vanish from small towns in eastern Carolina. Some eloped. Some absconded with their boyfriends under less reputable circumstances. Some simply left abusive or unfulfilling lives with their families, seeking work in the big industrial cities. Everyone knew the story of Jenny Lattimer, a girl of eighteen who had disappeared from her parents’ home on Pool Street in ’99. The mother and father insisted on foul play; woods were swept, wells checked, properties in the Negro section of town ransacked—seldom with the occupants’ assent.

  Her fate stood as a mystery until a month later, when Chief of Police W.C. Dawson took a pleasure trip to Chicago. He went to Marshall Fields’ with his wife. There, to his astonishment, he found Jenny Lattimer. She was in the store’s uniform of white shirtwaist and black skirt, wrapping packages for customers. “Well hello there, Chief Dawson!” she chirped. “How is every one in Betsy Town?”

  The story could have served a cautionary purpose—and would have, if Nell Cropsey had not been so much prettier than Jenny Lattimer. As noon chimed from the churches, scuttlebutt took a darker turn.

  “Lucky bastard, that boyfriend!”

  “You mean Jim Wilcox? He reported for work this morning at Tom Hayman’s.”

  “Is that a fact? So where’d she go, if not with him?”

  “Somebody should ask Wilcox. He always seemed shifty to me.”

  William Cropsey agreed that ‘somebody should ask Wilcox’. Before Nell had been gone for half a day, he asked the judge to swear out a warrant for his arrest. Deputy Charles Reid fetched Wilcox right off the floor of his workplace at Hayman’s. Though removed from the premises in plain sight of his co-workers and his boss, Jim cooperated without complaint. At the Chief’s office, he recounted his story of the night before to Dawson, Mayor Tully Wilson, and (again) to the girl’s father. There were no inconsistencies: he sat with Nell, Ollie and Roy Craw
ford for most of the evening, and asked to speak with Nell on the porch around eleven. Sometime during their conversation she became emotional. Jim left around 11:15, to meet some friends in town. He met Len Owens at 11:30, near the Ives place up Riverside Avenue. He was home soon after, and heard nothing from or about Nell Cropsey until hours later, when her father and uncle pounded at his mother’s door.

  “Can you say for a fact that she didn’t follow you?” asked Reid.

  “I can say for a fact I left her on the porch. What she did after that I can’t speak to.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” growled Cropsey.

  “Nothing.”

  “My daughter did not harm herself. She would not.”

  “All right,” said Dawson. “I want you to tell it again, Jim. Start at the beginning.”

  With a pinched expression that, for the first time, betokened some annoyance, Wilcox told his story again. Again, there were no inconsistencies.

  “I’m asking you for the last time, Jim. Where’s Nell?” Cropsey demanded.

  “And I’m telling you again, sir—I don’t know.”

  Fifteen minutes later Wilcox was released on condition of not leaving the county. Since a crowd had gathered in front of the Mayor’s office, it was thought better to escort him out the back. William Cropsey, however, strode right through the throng, which was mostly composed of Elizabeth City’s male, well-lubricated citizenry.

  “Where’s the girl, Bill?” someone asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Cropsey, “but somebody does, and he’s not telling.”

  “Is it Jim Wilcox who did it, Bill?”

  “Somebody knows something,” he said, and climbed into his buggy.

  Though Nell had only been gone less than a day, Chief Dawson believed it was time for extraordinary measures. He sent a telegram to the town of Suffolk, Virginia, thirty miles away on the other side of the Great Dismal Swamp. There resided one “Hurricane” Branch. This was a man who had carved for himself a wide reputation as a detective and bounty hunter, and who made his prize bloodhounds available for manhunting purposes. His dogs, Sampson and Tiger, were not just good at following the scents of fugitives: in June of 1900, during a demonstration exercise, the 100-pound animals treed and almost killed their test subjects. As they were pulled away, the dogs turned on a bystander.

  They had, however, proven their worth in—among other cases—the search for the escaped killers Walter Cotton and John Sears. Dawson was pleased to receive an almost instant response from Branch, who offered to come down by train the next day. He sent a boy over to Riverside Avenue to inform William Cropsey of the good news. To this, Cropsey made no response.

  Branch and his bloodhounds showed up at the Cropsey home mid-day on the 22nd. It was one and a half days since Nell had disappeared. Branch came with Chief Dawson, Deputy Reid, and a straggling line of onlookers who had noticed the big animals being led down Riverside Avenue, and decided to have a look.

  Hurricane Branch himself was not nearly as prepossessing as his nickname. Dressed in checked shirt and wool pants with suspenders, under a slouch hat, he looked like every other backwoods hunter or trapper seen in the Great Dismal. Sampson and Tiger did not lead him, but trotted calmly at his side, giving only cursory sniffs toward the air and ground. When Cropsey came out on the porch to greet them, the dogs sat on the sides of their haunches and tried to yawn through their muzzles.

  It was a clear, sunny day, with the temperature warming into the fifties. William Cropsey came onto the porch in his shirt-sleeves, his napkin still in his collar from lunch. Only his son Douglas—held from school due to unfortunate events—came out with him. His eyes were glued to the lazy but fascinating beasts in his front yard. Ollie and his other sisters waited in the sitting room, expectant but also appalled that the search had so soon come to this. Their mother sat in the turret above, where she had lately installed herself, to keep vigil over the wide, indifferent river.

  “Sorry to have to ask, but I’ll need something that belonged to her,” said Branch, in the soft tones he adopted for bereaved relatives. “Socks or some article of clothing.”

  Douglas went inside to fulfill this request. Cropsey pulled the napkin from his shirt, wiped his mouth, and pointed with his chin.

  “Hope your dogs don’t get stage fright.”

  Branch looked to the swelling crowd that had gathered on the road. A line of men stretched down Riverside Avenue into town, hands in pockets, cigarettes in mouths. A few boats had also anchored in the river opposite. Nothing had happened yet, but the promise of something beat the usual lunchtime lull. If that included a glimpse of a lovely girl’s body, so much the better.

  Branch was provided with a pair of Nell’s stockings and her usual walking shoes—she had worn only slippers the night she disappeared. The dogs perked up the instant they saw these articles. As if in anticipation of his afternoon of work, Sampson lifted his leg and pissed on the porch steps. Cropsey looked afflicted by this, but said nothing.

  Branch removed the hounds’ muzzles. After burying their noses in the stockings and shoes, the animals’ excitement mounted. Branch shouted “Whereaway!”, and the dogs, thus released, whirled and sniffed their way down the front path, snouts sweeping, pendulous ears raking the ground. They barged forward as onlookers jumped aside, and Branch followed with a tight lead, giving them constant, inarticulate encouragement.

  The dogs went to the center of the road, then began to turn in circles as if needing to regain the scent. From there they struck west, across the kitchen garden, shouldering the bean-poles aside. After proceeding fifty yards in that direction, they made a hard right, straight toward the river. The crowd buzzed and Mrs. Cropsey, with dread, rose from her chair in the turret. The hounds crossed the road and mounted the first pier on the river northwest of the Cropsey home—the one owned by Fearing’s Marine Railway. Without the slightest deviation, they snorted their way down the pier, straight to the end. At the water, they sniffed the air, whined, and stared back at their master.

  Branch came back to Cropsey on the porch. The latter was in a chair, face set skeptically. “You know that she went out on that pier almost every day, right?” he said.

  “The dogs must follow the strongest scent,” ventured Dawson.

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  The exercise was repeated, with the same results. The crowd dissolved into knots of men having the same argument. Was she abducted by boat? Or could she really have thrown herself into the river? Over the likes of Jim Wilcox? And for the first time, the public mood shifted from titillation to suspicion. Not a few asked whether there was an article of Wilcox’s clothing available, to see if he had accompanied—or dragged—the girl to the end of that pier.

  “Suppose you expect to get paid,” Cropsey said.

  “I will be, but it’s not for you to worry about,” replied Branch. Then he added, “I am sorry for your loss.”

  When Cropsey went inside he found his daughters Lettie and May had gone upstairs to comfort their mother. Mrs. Cropsey had taken it badly when she saw the hounds sniff the end of the pier. Only Ollie was left in the sitting room, with a handkerchief in her hands, fidgeting with the folds. She met her father’s eyes as he looked in from the hall. Neither spoke, until Cropsey muttered “Tarnation waste of time”, and went upstairs.

  He found Mrs. Cropsey, Lettie and May standing at the foot of the stairs to the third floor turret. His wife—bleary-eyed from hours of staring into the distance— declared, “I don’t care where those dogs tracked her, William. She wouldn’t have drowned herself.”

  She used the formal “William” when she wanted to convey the gravity of her thoughts. He replied, “I saw her on that pier just the day before. There may be no fresh trail from the porch.”

  He turned away and shut the bedroom door behind him.

  III.

  The following day, a gathering was called of all citizens concerned about the disappearance of Nell Cropsey. Interest was
so high that none of the town’s churches was big enough to host the meeting. It was held instead at the Academy of Music, a theatrical venue that had been erected since the arrival of the railroad and the touring companies of performers the trains brought. The hall shared a stolid brick building that thrust its cornices over the intersection of Main & Poindexter streets. Downstairs was the Bee Hive department store, with its vitrines and floor displays and mannequins; upstairs, the Academy presented its slate of comedians and painted dancers and poetic declaimers. It was a grand space, the best in the region. The theatre’s owners proclaimed that any sort of entertainment either had already been featured at the Academy, or soon would be. But no program quite like that of November 23, 1901 had ever been seen there before.

  By the time the meeting was called to order, it was standing room only in the auditorium. The attendees—packed elbow to elbow— were almost exclusively male. The room’s capacity was seven hundred, which worked out to a third of the adult men of the entire town. But it felt like there were more than seven hundred crowded into the place. The fire marshal looked down from the proscenium stage, and frowned.

  When the town’s steeples chimed seven, the thick form of Mayor and Justice of the Peace Tully B. Wilson appeared. Gazing over the assembled, he recognized faces from all the major professions of the burgeoning town. In the front row, some of the leading citizens, including the transplanted northerners Greenleaf, Turner and Winder. To his right, seated together, the pastoral contingent of the town, including the Rev. Dr. Lewelyn of the Episcopal Church, Tuttle of the Methodist, Ferrebee and Dunke of the Baptists, and their entourages of deacons, choristers, and organists. Behind them, sawyers and lumbermen from the logging camps in the Great Dismal; boatmen and dredgers of the oyster beds of the Pasquotank; the shipwrights and pilots and fishermen and ferrymen and all the others who kept the commerce of the waves, and the railroad men who kept it on the line of steel that snaked down from Norfolk. And, of course, there were the working men from downtown—the grocers, fruiterers, dry-goodsmen, bankers, stationers, druggists, clothiers, butchers, florists, milliners, bakers, cigar salesmen, upholsterers. Wilson had made his business to know all of them in his various campaigns for office.