Arsenic And Old Books

This volume did cover the same time period. Actually it was a bit more extensive, I realized after a moment’s thought. The volume I had read started in March of 1861 and ended in mid-May 1865, a week or two after the end of the war.

Why had Rachel kept two diaries for roughly the same period? The one I read did not use all the pages of the book like this one did. Was the one I read the original diary of the period, and the one on my desk perhaps a fuller version Rachel wrote later? I knew Mary Boykin Chesnut edited and rewrote parts of her diary before the book, A Diary from Dixie, was published in 1905. The diary was not published in Mary’s lifetime. From what I could remember she died in the mid-1880s and asked a friend to see about getting it published.

Rachel couldn’t have known, of course, about Mary Chesnut’s diary, but perhaps she had a similar ambition, to see her diary published as a record of her experiences growing up in the South through a tragic era.

Miss Eulalie might be able to shed light on the subject, although I now felt diffident about asking her. There might also, I realized, be information in the correspondence and other papers in the Long collection.

All that could wait. Right now I wanted to delve into this volume of the diary to see what information it might contain that would be in any way relevant to present-day events.

I went back to the gap in the pages. The last sentence before the missing pages read, “Words cannot express the horror and sickness I feel over . . .”

Over what? I wanted to scream. How frustrating. This lead-in told me that there must be something sensational in the missing pages.

I suppressed my irritation and read the first words on the page after the gap. They were just as intriguing as the words preceding the gap: “behind us, never to be mentioned or recalled as long as I draw breath.”

I glanced down the page to see the date of the next entry: September 30, 1863.

What had happened between August 10 and September 30, 1863, besides the deaths of Rachel’s husband and father-in-law? The Union Army didn’t come to Athena until the winter of 1863, in November, I thought.

I would have to do some digging to see what I could find about the summer of 1863 in Athena. Dr. Brooke’s dissertation might cast light on it. I closed the diary and set it aside.

A knock at the door caught my attention before I could resume reading the dissertation. I looked up to see Jasper Singletary approaching me.

“I apologize for dropping by unannounced like this, Mr. Harris.” He extended his hand, and I shook it. “I took the chance you’d be here and would have time to talk with me about the diary.”

“I’m glad to see you.” I indicated a chair. “Please sit. I have to tell you I’ve been curious about your reaction to the information related to your ancestors.”

Singletary regarded me in silence for a moment. I couldn’t read his expression.

“My first reaction is that Rachel Long was a liar,” he said. “She came across to me as a bit self-righteous about her charitable behavior. Just because she didn’t admit to anything in that diary doesn’t mean she didn’t poison the children and their mother deliberately.”

He surprised me. I thought the first thing he’d address would the news about Celeste. Instead he focused on his grievance against the Longs.

“I can’t deny that,” I said. For now, I decided quickly, I wasn’t going to tell him about the diary he read being a partial duplicate of another one. I wanted to figure out the reason for its existence before I talked with him or any of the Longs about it. “Rachel could very well have omitted anything that would make her look guilty. You’ll have to look elsewhere for your proof that she was a murderess.”

“I’m not giving up,” he said firmly. He crossed his arms over his chest and regarded me with that enigmatic expression again. “Rachel was also lying about my great-great-grandmother Celeste. Don’t you think we would have known before now if she had been a slave before she married my great-great-grandfather Franklin?” He snorted.

“What kind of family documents do you have?” I asked.

The question obviously surprised him. “What do you mean? Are you talking about birth certificates?”

“No, because I don’t think they gave them out in the 1860s. I’ll have to look that up,” I said. “I’m talking about a marriage license, or some proof that Franklin and Celeste married. It was illegal for a black woman—and Celeste would have been considered black even though she was allegedly of mixed race—to marry a white man, and vice versa.”