No Nest for the Wicket(69)

She had turned slightly away from me and her shoulders were shaking. Was she upset? Perhaps someone in her family had died in the battle, but that was a hundred and fifty years ago. Even in Virginia, people these days didn’t react quite that personally to the Late Unpleasantness, as many preferred to call the Civil War.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

She turned back and looked at me over her glasses.

“Is there somewhere private we can talk?”

“My office,” I suggested, pointing to it.

She nodded, then strode off. I could barely keep up with her, which was slightly embarrassing—she was a good six inches shorter than I was and had to be around seventy-five, unless she’d gotten her master’s in library science at an age when most people were still in kindergarten.

All the while, I kept wondering what I’d done to upset Ms. Ellie. Not only upset her but cause her to give me the librarian look—the one that quashed unruly patrons in an instant, and informed you without a single word that she knew perfectly well it wasn’t your brother who had spilled chocolate syrup on The Black Stallion’s Return. The look still worked on me, even though I liked Ms. Ellie and considered her a friend, damn it.

I followed her into the tack room and shut the door.

“The Battle of Pruitt’s Ridge,” she said. I could see that her face was twitching slightly; obviously, the very idea of the battle aroused some strong emotion. “What got you interested in that?”

“I think it might have something to do with the murder,” I said. “Or with Mr. Briggs’s outlet-mall project. Or both. Look, if this is a touchy subject …”

She burst out laughing. Not a few giggles, but a long, hearty belly laugh. After a few seconds, she plopped down in my desk chair and leaned back, the better to enjoy it.

“Oh, dear,” she said finally, wiping her eyes. “I know you’re serious; it’s just that—”

She relapsed into chuckles. I sat down in Michael’s chair to wait until she could talk again.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “No, there aren’t any other references. As for the original source documents—do you want to know the true story of the Battle of Pruitt’s Ridge?”

I nodded.

“There wasn’t a battle.”

“It’s a local legend?”

“It’s a complete and utter fake, that’s what it is.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I made it up.”





Chapter Thirty-five

She sat back and waited for my reaction.

“You made it up,” I repeated. I probably sounded skeptical. After all, I’d seen the documents.

“Me and a couple of my friends—all gone now, bless them; it was more than fifty years ago. We were at the annual town Fourth of July celebration—July 4, 1953—waiting through all the speechifying till the fireworks began, and Mayor Pruitt—that would be Henrietta’s husband’s grandfather, not the Civil War-era one—was carrying on about the town’s long and distinguished history, and the Pruitt’s long and distinguished service to the town, and I just got fed up. I cooked up a plot to get back at all those stuffy old town fathers, and when I told my friends about it, they all jumped at the chance to help.”

“So you made up the story of a fictitious battle.”

“We didn’t just make up a story,” she said, shaking her head and smiling. “We documented it. My friend Grant immersed himself in Civil War history for weeks, finding a way to weave our fake battle plausibly into the real fabric of events. My brother Blair took the photographs—we wanted some authentic-looking photos to document the event, because everyone knows the camera doesn’t lie, right?”

“Of course not,” I said. I wasn’t sure whether to feel embarrassed or angry as I remembered the emotion I’d felt while handling the fake photos.

“He did a superb job,” Ms. Ellie said, almost as if reading my mind. “He studied Civil War-era photographic techniques, learned to re-create them—you can’t imagine how many hours of research and experimentation went into making those two dozen photos. Edwina did the costumes—we needed clothes that looked as if people had gone to war in them. Normal wear and tear, gunpowder stains, things like that. And the makeup—we didn’t want anyone to recognize the people in the photos. I did the documents. Writing all the letters in different period handwritings, creating the phony newspaper accounts and the official documents—and artificially aging them and the photos, so they really looked old. If we’d done it as a living-history project, we’d have gotten straight A’s—you can’t imagine how much we learned. Then we had Grant write up a paper about the battle for one of his classes—he was a history major at the college. Had a class with a professor who was one of Mayor Pruitt’s buddies. We knew if we could fool him, he’d show it to the mayor.”