I leafed slowly through the rest of the photos. Several were of bearded men in uniform, staring grimly at the camera, holding guns and swords. One was of two soldiers; the man on the left was holding, incongruously, an accordion, the other something that looked like a cross between a guitar and a ukelele. Most of them looked like any other Civil War-era photograph—the poses stiff and formal, the picture randomly splotched or faded. I couldn’t help lingering over one postbattle shot that showed several forlorn bodies lying beneath a tree. I couldn’t tell whether they were union or Confederate, but evidently the colonel’s victory hadn’t been completely bloodless. Another, less graphic but equally heartrending, showed a tattered scrap of fabric—part of a sleeve, to judge from the remnants of a chevron—hanging from a rusting barbed-wire fence. I couldn’t be sure, since the photo was in black and white, but the dark stain on the fabric scrap looked like blood.
And a map.
“Yes!” I hissed. Jessica glowered at me for breaking silence, but she had a long way to go before she could replace Ms. Ellie.
I studied the map. I located the small road to town, which hadn’t changed its course in the intervening fifty years—it had been almost that long since the county last paved it. Mr. Early’s and Mr. Shiffley’s farms. Between them, the Sprocket house—which locals would still call the Sprocket house even if Michael and I lived there fifty years. The Battle of Pruitt’s Ridge had taken place along a rocky ridge between Mr. Shiffley’s farmhouse and the Sprocket house.
On our croquet field.
Chapter Twenty
I used up most of my change making copies of the relevant pages of Mrs. Pruitt’s book on the library’s ancient copy machine.
I tried not to gloat prematurely. After all, it was a very small battle. Virginia was pocked with battlefields. This wouldn’t automatically kill Briggs’s outlet mall.
But it was promising. With a little more research and documentation …
At least Mrs. Pruitt had been reasonably conscientious about citing her sources. The source, in the case of the chapter on the battle—it had all come from a 1954 issue of the Caerphilly Clarion.
Wonder of wonders, the library had back issues of the Clarion on microfiche. I had to surrender my library card to use the microfiche reader, but after that, Jessica was happy to hunt down the proper roll for me. I found the original article—a center spread with lots of pictures.
Mrs. Pruitt had left out half the information in the article—the more interesting half, if you asked me. The colonel received his Distinguished Medal of Valor not from the Confederacy but from the Caerphilly town council, which had invented the decoration on the spot, just for him. The paper showed a nice photo of his brother, Mayor Virgil Pruitt, pinning it on his chest. Nothing succeeds like nepotism.
Mrs. Pruitt had also omitted any mention of the three-day bash the colonel had thrown to celebrate his victory, complete with several pit-roasted hogs. Sometime during the evening of the second day, a group of marauders had looted and burned the Shiffley Brothers Distillery. Excerpts from the 1862 Clarion (not, alas, available on microfiche) left it up in the air whether the marauders were the defeated Yankees taking their revenge or the colonel’s own troops, reprovisioning the victory celebration. As a final footnote to the affair, on returning to his command, the colonel himself was court-martialed and reduced in rank for going AWOL and missing the whole of the Seven Days’ Battle. Another thing Mrs. Pruitt had glossed over in her version.
I used up the rest of my change making copies of the article. Then I tortured my eyes looking through fifty more years’ worth of microfiche for follow-up stories. There weren’t any. Which was odd, since, according to the article, the town had contacted the Park Service about the possibility of funding an archaeological dig at the battle site, and several prominent Civil War historians were coming to study the cache of old documents that had been found in a trunk in someone’s attic—presumably moved there from the ruins of a family farmhouse.
I did find one useful bit of information—proof that Lindsay Tyler hadn’t been a total stranger to the Caerphilly Historical Society. I found four different articles in the social columns that listed her as an attendee at the society’s meetings. Better yet, a photo, showing her, Mrs. Pruitt, Mrs. Wentworth, and half a dozen other ladies, all smiling at the camera as the newly elected officers of the society. Lindsay had been vice president and historian. I made copies of those, too.
No follow-up on the battle, though, and no clue where the old documents had ended up—not in the Caerphilly Town Library, though. I made sure of that, to the great discomfort of the poor library aide. To my dismay, she broke down in tears.