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“What is it you want me to do?”
“Conduct a thorough investigation. Help Rick find some answers and, above all, find Martin Thomas’ killer.”
“You do realize that other people are more qualified than me to handle this. Cotton being one.”
“I do,” Weston said. “And we’ll involve him, once he returns from Arkansas. For now, could you get things started?”
“Any suggestions?” she asked, since both men had been thinking about this a lot longer than she had.
“Begin with a search of Martin Thomas’ apartment,” the chief justice said. “Things are missing from our archives that are not in his office. We need them returned.”
“And how will I know what these things are?”
“I’ll go with you,” Rick said.
She should have known. “How do we get into his apartment?”
“I’m assuming you can pick a lock,” Weston said.
“I have some talent in that area.”
Rick smiled. “Once everything had finished here tonight, you and I were going to go over there with Martin and have a look anyway.”
“So you did suspect he was not being straight with you.”
“Not until I saw him with the guy in the Cullman Library, which is another reason I called you.”
“All right. Let’s see if there’s anything there.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Cotton checked his watch. Tuesday was about to become Wednesday. What a day. It had started early this morning in a lovely room at a mountaintop lodge. Now it was ending in the heat and humidity of an Arkansas spring night, after he’d been twice assaulted, shot at, then chased by bees.
“What’s the vault?” he asked Terry Morse.
“It’s where they took all the gold and silver.”
He and Cassiopeia listened as Morse told them what happened starting in the latter part of the 19th century. Hundreds of caches were dug from the ground, their sentinels told to stand down. The Knights of the Golden Circle was fading into oblivion. A loyal core still existed, but their number was too small to be effective. The idea of a second secessionist movement seemed no more than a dream. So the decision was made to consolidate the Order’s wealth, where it could be more easily managed and retrieved, if the time ever came.
“Those were the days of the Klan,” Morse said. “Everybody focused on them and their cross burnin’s and lynchin’s. They were bad people. That wasn’t the knights. The KKK was somethin’ else entirely.”
His own grandfather had issued a similar disclaimer.
“My pa helped transport a lot of the gold from here to Kansas City, where it was given to other knights,” Morse said. “He told me they dug it slow and quiet. Took thirty years to get most of it, so nobody would notice.”
“I thought you said your father couldn’t read the signs in the woods,” Cassiopeia said.
“He couldn’t. But knights came who could.”
“Were there hoards buried all over the country?” Cotton asked.
“Best I know they’re scattered everywhere, but heavy in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The farther away from the carpetbaggers, the easier to hide.”
Which made sense. The fewer Federal troops around after the war, enforcing Reconstruction, the more freedom of movement an organization like the Knights of the Golden Circle could enjoy.
“You still haven’t told me about the vault,” Cotton said.
“’Cause I don’t know much. Only that it exists and that the stone out there with the bees helps lead the way to it. It’s called the Witch’s Stone because of the figure on the front and the hat.”
Cassiopeia produced her phone and Cotton saw again the image of the carved face.
“Where did the stone come from?” he asked Morse.
“That’s a tale my pa did tell me, as his grandpa told him.”
The wagon stopped on the dirt track, just beyond the split-rail fence. Trees lined the rutted route that led six miles east, back to town. A few days ago a tornado had cut a path across the road, dropping limbs, which had obviously been cleared, allowing the three-horse hitch to make its way into the Arkansas woods.
“That’s a fine-lookin’ council tree you got there,” the young driver called out.
The towering oak sitting off to one side of the front yard had been there when Morses first came nearly seventy years ago. Its trunk measured a good six feet in diameter, the height and breadth of its massive limbs signaling age and strength.
“It is that,” Grady Morse called out. “The Cherokees themselves sat beneath that tree with the governor of this territory, back in 1818, and bargained. That’s how we got all the woods north of the river.”
Council trees were common in Arkansas, shaded places where men gathered. Grady Morse was particularly proud of his. He studied his two visitors. The driver was a young, tough, healthy buck, the other man more like himself. Older, with pallid features, scarred and cratered, thin as a corpse, a white beard sprouting from a narrow jaw.
“I need to speak with you,” the older man said, the voice hard and sharp, resonant with authority.
Grady held his rifle, which was the prudent thing to do when strangers appeared. “About what?”
“Your duties, sir, as a sentinel.”
The older man climbed down from the wagon and stepped through the opening in the rail fence. As he approached, Grady n
oticed the watery eyes, red-rimmed, with dark crescents that cast a haunted look. One seemed sharp and watchful. The other not so much, more clouded with pain. Wrinkles on the neck and liver spots on the back of the hands betrayed an advanced age. The thinning gray hair was nearly a perfect match for the wool suit he wore.
“May I shake your hand?” his visitor asked.
They did, the grip tight, the palm moist, and he felt the familiar grasp of the third and little fingers with his own.
“Are you on it?” the man said.
“I’m on it.”
“They sat under the council tree for an hour and the old man told my great-grandpa about the Witch’s Stone,” Morse said. “He’d brought it with him in the wagon.”
“You never told me any of this,” Lea said to her grandfather.
“Wasn’t the time. You had to accept the duty, which I kinda figured you weren’t goin’ to. So I kept quiet.”
“Why are you telling these people?”
“’Cause I don’t want either of us to go to jail.”
“What happened?” Cotton asked. “With the stone.”
“The driver and the older man headed off into the woods. They came back two days later and told my great-grandpa that they hid it in the woods and left markers, like always.”
“You’re special,” the older man said to Grady. “You were chosen for this duty because of your family’s dedication to the cause.”
“I fought in the war and killed my share of Federals.”
“That’s what I was told. So we want you to guard the stone, as you’ve done our gold.”
Then the older man climbed atop the wagon beside the young driver.
“I do have one question,” Grady said.
