Ella Maud Read online

  Audience secured, Madame put down her teacup and began the show. She sat with her eyes closed, breathing quietly at first, but then with more vigor. A low moan emanated from her throat, a sound that made the girls’ blood caper. Then she stood up and left the sitting room. When she did so, she no longer heaved about like a shoal of flounces, but with the bird-like quickness of a certain nineteen-year-old.

  “Sorrow! Such sorrow!” she cried as she regarded the dining room—the last space inside the house Nell was known to have been. “For I am in a dark place, and wet, and there is no one to mourn me!”

  She drifted around the room, looking with mournful gravity at the settings placed for lunch. When she reached the corner closest to the kitchen, she stretched a quivering hand to smooth the tablecloth that had bunched up there. The act made Louise Cropsey seize Ollie’s forearm—for this was exactly the kind of gesture the ever-tidy Nell would make.

  “She has become Nell,” Ollie breathed.

  William Cropsey was less impressed. That public money had been spent to find his daughter bespoke the decency of the citizens of the town. But to waste a train ticket on the likes of Madame Newman struck him as vaguely back-handed. Who would they summon next? he wondered. A feathered shaman from the forests of Borneo? As the woman evolved around the room, Cropsey stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms crossed over his chest, giving her performance no reaction at all.

  Nell, can I speak to you a minute?” Madame Newman said in a voice they all recognized as Jim’s. She went out on the porch, to the right-hand section outside the dining room windows. There she leaned with her right cheek against the pillar, tears standing in her eyes—just as Jim had described Nell doing that fateful night.

  Below the porch, the family and neighbors and reporters from all the nearby towns had gathered. To this throng she pronounced, “Nell is not in that river. She is in a much smaller place. A wet place…”

  Cropsey suddenly went pale, and uncrossed his arms. But he was relieved when she went on: “After Jim Wilcox subdued her, he dealt her the fateful blow, and disposed of her in an old well. Oh perfidy! Oh horror!”

  She gazed into the distance as she waited for them to absorb this news.

  “If you wish, I will take you there.”

  The rest of the afternoon was spent in a tour of abandoned wells. The Cropsey family buggy, with Madame Newman beside William Cropsey in the driver’s seat, led a procession of vehicles. Cropsey went along with the charade for the pleasure of watching the clairvoyant made to look foolish. But as each well proved not to hold Nell’s body, she gave no hint of becoming discouraged. “Esoteric knowledge is not ordinary knowledge,” she explained to her increasingly impatient audience. “It admits not of small notions, such as ‘proof’.”

  Having toured ten wells, the party had no interest in an eleventh. Madame Newman was taken to the train station, and put on the 4 o’clock to Norfolk. As the train pulled out she opened the window and gave the crowd a triumphant wave; the crowd, made of decent people, waved back. But when she was gone, they dispersed under a cloud of disgust.

  IV.

  December unfolded dry and warm, with temperatures in the fifties and sixties. Nell was missed, but there came a time when they became accustomed to her absence. When she went up to visit Carrie in Brooklyn, she had been away for weeks at a time. It was just possible, with a little effort, to pretend she was still up north, sitting in on courses in design and homemaking at Pratt with her cousin.

  In time, Ollie stopped expecting to see her in the mornings, seated at the dining table with her sewing, or on the porch with one of her books, kicking stockinged legs under the rocker. In these accustomed places she had become a memory--a fact that pained Ollie, and gave her fresh pangs of guilt.

  Yet the fleeting shade of Nell would surprise her at odd moments. She would think she saw Nell out of the corner of her eye in the sitting room, at the window. Or just miss her as she came up the stairs and a slender figure disappeared into a bedroom. These were never really her--never really anyone, in fact--but the way the illusion struck her off-guard, when her thoughts were on something else, unnerved her. Once, when she was in the privy, she thought she heard her sister call her name. She heard the word so clearly she would have answered--but restrained herself.

  After Nell had been gone two weeks, William Cropsey allowed himself to be questioned by a Norfolk reporter. To the surprise of those in the community who still hoped for the best, he said, "I am now convinced that my daughter is dead. That she would fail to communicate with us for so long leaves us no hope she may yet come home to us. I am positive that there are certain persons in this town who can throw light on her fate. Jim Wilcox can clear it up in about fifteen minutes. For lack of that, we yet hope justice is served, and those responsible will answer for their acts.”

  The rest of the Cropsey family was surprised by this declaration. Lettie and cousin Carrie loosed fresh tears. Uncle Hen frowned and took sudden interest in the buttons of his shirt. Ollie fixed her father with inquiring eyes. But when the reporter asked for her comment, she repeated what he said: "The time has come to face our loss."

  Later, when they were alone, Ollie asked him, "Why did you say that?"

  "I'm tired of the stories. If I have to hear another rumor that she's run off with some swell, I'll kill someone. Better dead than talked about that way.”

  He sent an open letter to the Committee of Five, which was reprinted in all the papers. In part, it read:

  I shall always believe Jim Wilcox was instrumental in my daughter’s disappearance and if she is dead I believe his hand or the hand of his hireling is responsible for her death. Sometime when this life shall cease and we shall stand before the presence of the great Judge I believe we shall learn how and when he murdered my daughter and that the justice he may escape will be dealt with then.

  The reporters tracked Jim Wilcox down at his job and asked for his comment. His outward reaction, it was said, was minimal, as if such dire accusations were daily occurrences. Pressed, he finally remarked “It is unjust. I’ve known the Cropseys for more than three years. I have nothing but the warmest feelings toward them. I am at a loss to understand why Mr. Cropsey would say such things.”

  It was the holiday season. Cousin Carrie--who also took dressmaking classes at Pratt--employed her skills with the scissor to make paper dolls in the shapes of angels and cherubs. The smaller children colored them, and hung them over the fireplaces. Ollie and Lett baked the components of a gingerbread house, and assembled them with molasses. The smells of their baking filled the house with a sweet perfume. It wafted up into the turret, to where Mary Cropsey kept her vigil. It made her smile a little, but no one was with her at that moment to see it. Since the public acknowledgment of Nell's death, no one had the heart to share it with her, and the family left her alone.

  On Christmas Day, the family had its traditional meal of lamb, mint dressing and potatoes from their own fields. To everyone’s relief, Mary Cropsey joined them. After, they all gathered in the sitting room to exchange presents they’d made for each other, or had purchased through catalogs. Uncle Hen got a fine 47 cents ‘Easy Opener’ knife from the girls; their mother, a shower bath yoke. Ollie brought out the presents Nell had meant to give but never would. When Uncle Hen got a silk handkerchief, embroidered with flowers by Nell’s own hands, he was so overcome he left the room.

  Later, he played the harmonica and Carrie accompanied him on the mandolin. It was strange to hear music in the house again. Nell was fair with the harmonica, but more enthusiastic to hear her uncle play. Sometimes, when he really got going, she would grab Ollie and they would do a jig together. Ollie was four inches taller than her sister, but Nell’s vigor and enthusiasm made her the larger presence. Alas, that Christmas, there was not much taste for dancing.

  There was a full moon that evening. William Cropsey quietly rose in the small hours, pulling on his boots and overcoat against the near-freezing night. Navigating without a
lamp through the moonlit house, he went out the back door to the little shed in the yard. Moments later he came out with a large object over his shoulder: one of the heavy canvas sacks used to collect potatoes for harvest. This sack was filled not with potatoes, but a single object, and Cropsey struggled with its weight as he tottered out of the yard and toward the river.

  After the holiday, the people of Elizabeth City were asleep in their beds, and the water was devoid of traffic. There were no witnesses as Cropsey went out on the Fearing dock and, with as little splash as possible, slipped the sack’s contents in the river. He stood watching it for a while as, silvery in the moonbeams, it drifted on the current, toward the middle of the stream. Then Cropsey turned and, after a brief stop at the privy, went back to bed.

  The next day was Friday, an ordinary work day. Ollie was having her morning tea in the dining room when her father came in with coffee in hand. Instead of sitting with her, he went to the front windows and stared out at the water. The purposefulness to his vigil made her wonder.

  “Expecting someone?” she asked.

  He let the curtains drop.

  “Don’t play the fool,” he replied. “You above all.”

  She understood. And with that understanding, she shivered.

  “So you say.”

  They looked at each other as the mantel clock ticked and the muffled thuds of the children roughhousing upstairs shook the ceiling. In that moment, under his frosty gaze, Ollie disliked her father. She looked at the stubborn cut of his jaw, and the bristling hardness of his cheeks, and hated what this ordeal had made him. She resented him with the passionate fullness of an ally who had become a betrayer, with the hatred that is love transfigured.

  These feelings shocked and shamed her, and they passed quickly. Her father would not show it outwardly, but he was suffering as profoundly as his wife, with both the burden of his loss and of the truth. He was never an easy man to love. In many ways, he was a stranger to her.

  Until now their shared secret had been theirs alone, and could be undone with a simple call to Bill Dawson. There would be an inquiry, of course, and probably an indictment. The public would resent them for their deception, and pour sympathy on Jim Wilcox for the calumnies he had endured. The Cropseys would be drummed out of Elizabeth City. But at least the lies would come to an end.

  What her father was looking for out the window, she knew, was the point of no return.

  That moment arrived on Saturday, the 27th. Just after sun-up, two men were on the river just across from the Cropsey place. The air had warmed up a bit, and a light rain peppered the water. The man at the bow hunched on his seat, collar of his oilskin coat turned up over his ears. He was keeping a close watch for good spots to fish, until he sighted an odd, dark shape floating midstream.

  “Wait a minute, there. Come over that way.”

  Closer, and the shape resolved into a body. It was a woman, floating on her stomach, with clothes billowing and brown hair spread wide just below the surface. She wore a red shirtwaist, a belt of black leather, and black skirt. There was a slipper—the kind a woman might wear around the house, not outdoors—on her right foot. The other foot was clad only in a black cloth stocking, with one toe protruding through a tear.

  At this sight, the man in the bow sucked in his breath, and looked to his companion. The other stared back in horror and wonderment. Both knew exactly whom they had found.

  Neither would touch her. Instead, they sunk a spare oar blade down in the river bottom, which was shallow at that point. With a length of fishing-line, they tied the oar to one of the ankles, so the body would not float away. Then they rowed straight for the Cropsey residence.

  As they approached the shore they saw a older woman come out to receive them. Unkempt, tear-stained, pale from weeks of isolation, Mary Cropsey had run down from her turret the second she saw the boat come in.

  “You’ve found her! You’ve found my girl!” she cried, and seemed intent on charging straight onto the boat. Unnerved, the man on the oars, C.A. Long, pulled up just short of the waterline.

  “We’ve found…someone,” replied John Stillman.

  “Bring her to me! Bring my sweet girl back!”

  The men were relieved when William Cropsey came down, pulling a coat on over his open union-suit.

  “Better take me,” he said.

  The rest of the Cropseys gathered as they rowed him out. Carrie and Ollie clung to each other as Cropsey leaned over the gunnels and pulled the body toward him. They saw him fumble with the weight of it, from the waterlogged clothes and the mass of matted hair. Neither breathed as he turned it over and looked at the face. They could see their father’s shoulders droop, and even from fifty yards away they could discern his expression.

  Ollie recognized the red shirtwaist she wore the night she had disappeared. That red shirt that made her seem so mannish, so modern and formidable in her burgeoning independence. Ollie had tried to talk her out of buying it. She never favored that look for herself, preferring the wasp-waisted profile of a decade earlier.

  “That suits you, with your frame,” Nell had told her. “It’s not so good for me. I intend to be a twentieth century woman!”

  She remembered those words as her father tied Nell’s body to the oarlock. She heard them in her head as what remained of her beloved sister inanimately plowed the water. She heard that voice, and like that time she thought she heard Nell call to her, she wanted to plug her ears. But that would not silence a voice that lived only in her head.

  “She is home!” said Mary Cropsey, beaming. “Nell is home at last.”

  A crowd gathered to watch the body come ashore. The people were silent, and not a few eyes were wet, as the drowned beauty trimmed in blood red was lifted into a hay wagon. Prayers were spoken as the impromptu cortege began its trip back to the Cropsey house, with the bereaved family behind, and the disconsolate, weeping mother—utterly exhausted—held up by her daughters.

  With that, several young men broke away from the crowd, heading back up Riverside Avenue toward Hayman’s.

  “Where’s everyone going?” someone asked.

  “We’re going to hang that sonovabitch Jim Wilcox!” came the reply.

  The Hall

  I.

  Elizabeth City’s development was delayed by the local geography, which begrudged settlement. To the east were the treacherous shoals of Eastern Carolina, notorious as a graveyard of ships. To the north, the Great Dismal Swamp— that “vast body of dirt and nastiness”— divided the lower Pasquotank region from populated areas around Chesapeake Bay. The Revolutionary War passed the area by, leaving its sparse population to fend for itself among a maze of small waterways. The few visitors from outside included ocean-going ships that dared the Outer Banks. The fresh water flowing out of the Great Dismal, peat-black and naturally full of tannins, was valued for resisting contamination over long voyages, if not for its acrid taste.

  The obstacles of the banks and the swamp were finally overcome with the opening of the Great Dismal Canal. Dug entirely by slaves, the canal took a dozen years to complete. By the time it was opened, the area’s resources of timber, fish and oysters exerted their pull on settlers from the north, many of whom settled near the point where the canal met the Pasquotank, and the river opened up to what became Albemarle Sound. The town was first called Redding. Then it became Elizabethtown, after the wife of the saloonkeeper who sold the land on which the town was chartered— or maybe Queen Elizabeth. Nobody was quite sure. In 1801, to avoid confusion with another Elizabethtown in Bladen County, the port became Elizabeth City.

  The canal put the little settlement firmly on the map. Half the state’s total import-export trade passed through Elizabeth City by 1829, rivaling the commerce of larger cities to the north. But its rise to greatness was seriously stalled by the Civil War. When the U.S. Navy confronted the local Confederate ‘Mosquito Fleet’ in 1862, the rebels were swept aside in less than a half hour, and the streets of Elizabeth City were occu
pied by U.S. Marines.

  The occupation divided the population in a way that threw its entire future into doubt. Local secessionists swore the town would be better off burned to the ground than left in Yankee hands. Unionists, naturally, objected. When Col. Frederick Henningsen of the 59th Virginia Infantry set a fire that destroyed the courthouse and the residential district around it, half of Elizabeth City applauded. The other half joined U.S. sailors to put out the fire. A Union garrison patrolled the town for the rest of the war. But that didn’t stop the low-level insurgency from simmering, or heal the political divide.

  Elizabeth City continued to decline after the surrender. Neither the former Secessionists nor Unionist residents spoke of the rift. Yet the knowledge that one’s neighbor had wished—and even helped—to burn one’s house down did little for civic pride. By 1870 the city had dwindled to fewer than one thousand souls. Whatever vitality was left was contributed by new arrivals, so-called “carpetbaggers”, from the North. Many of the families prominent in the town during the lifetime of Nell Cropsey— the Kramers, the Greenleafs, the Robinsons—arrived at this time, where for obvious reasons they co-existed uneasily with the divided locals.

  The town was born again with the arrival of the Norfolk & Elizabeth City Railroad. In the scheme of things, this was rather late. The Rocky Mountains proved a lesser barrier to the railroads than the Great Dismal, as Sacramento, California was joined to the national rail network twelve years sooner than Elizabeth City. Transportation was liberated at last from the ponderous canal-boats and steamers, and the town tripled in population by 1900. Lumbering boomed, with camps and mills appearing even in the remotest backwaters. Oysters from the beds of Albemarle Sound were harvested in the morning and served by afternoon on plates in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore. The overheated commercial atmosphere, and large proportion of newcomers, made Elizabeth City more like a booming frontier settlement than other coastal towns—the westernmost town in eastern Carolina.