I asked Special Agent Booker to come into the back of my shop and sit down, and I put the kettle on the hot plate. My hands were steady, I noticed, though my heart was not. I said, “Agent Booker, I was her best friend for nineteen years. I was the last person but one to see her alive, and nobody ever asked me a single question.” She took out a small recorder and set it on my desk. I told her everything from the beginning, in the order it happened, as if I were writing it out on cream paper in copperplate.
Caroline Duval was thirty four years old in the spring of 1994. We had met in the choir of Saint John the Baptist, where she sang alto and I sang nothing at all, because I cannot carry a tune. She was funny, and clear eyed, and kind to everyone, and she talked in a low voice as if every conversation were a secret. In March she came to my house on Gaston Street at night, in the rain, and sat at the kitchen table with her hands wrapped around a mug. She said, “Eleanor, I am afraid of Reid.”
She told me he had been watching her. That he had started locking the door from the outside. That she had found a deed for the house on Jones Street with her name crossed out. She did not want to leave him without proof, because her family was gone and she had no money. She gave me a sealed envelope that night, and she said, “If anything happens to me, give this to the police.” She kissed my cheek and walked out into the rain. Thirteen days later she was gone, and I was so frightened that I put the envelope in a drawer.
A careful hand can carry more than words. Sometimes it carries the one message a whole family has been afraid to read.
I stopped talking. Agent Booker waited. I said, “I have been ashamed of that for thirty one years.” She put her hand over mine, which surprised me. “Mrs. Prescott,” she said, “do you still have the envelope?” I stood up, crossed the room, and unlocked the old walnut cabinet where I keep my best inks. Under a tray of nibs, in a Christmas tin that had once held shortbread, was a cream colored envelope, soft with age. The seal was unbroken. On the front, in the round hand of Caroline, it said, To the police.
I handed it over. Agent Booker slit it open with a letter knife. Inside were four pages of handwriting, a photograph, and a small brass key. She read in silence for a very long time. When she looked up her face was a different color. She said, “She wrote down everything. The dates, the threats, the name of the lawyer who drew up the deed. And she wrote, if I am gone, look at the garden by the back wall. I put something there that he does not know about.” She took a deep breath. “Mrs. Prescott, you may have just solved this case.”
They dug up the garden at 14 Jones Street the following Monday. The house had changed hands twice, and the new owners were kind enough to give permission. There were eleven people in white jumpsuits with tiny trowels and sieves. I stood across the street with a thermos of coffee and a blanket, and Jackson came and stood beside me with his arm around my shoulders. He did not say much. Neither did I. About four in the afternoon, a woman in a hard hat raised her hand, and the whole crew went quiet. Agent Booker walked back across the street to me and said, “We found her.”
Reid Duval was eighty two years old and living in a lake house in Beaufort. They arrested him on a Wednesday. He did not say a word, but his second wife did. Her name was Marion, and she was the one who had mailed back the invitation. She told the agents she had seen her husband dig in the garden on the night in 1994, though she had not been his wife then, only the woman next door. She had carried that knowledge for thirty one years, too afraid to speak, until she saw the beautiful invitation to the wedding of his granddaughter and recognized my name.
“She wrote the note in a motel in Savannah,” Agent Booker told me. “She sent it in your invitation because she thought, whoever made this made it with love. She wanted a person with a steady hand to carry the message.” I had to sit down. Two hundred invitations. Nine weeks. A hand cramp so bad I wore a brace at night. Somewhere in all those cards, a little ink had done what a thousand questions could not do. I put my head in my hands and laughed, until I was weeping, and could not tell which it was.
Sloane came to my shop the day after the funeral of Caroline. She stood on the other side of my counter with her hands twisted together and her eyes swollen. She said, “Mrs. Prescott, I owe you more than I can say. I called you Invitation Lady on a sticky note. I made you eat dinner by the umbrellas.” She held out a small box. Inside was a pen, a vintage dip pen with a gold nib, the kind they do not make anymore. “It belonged to my great grandmother,” she said. “I would like you to have it. And I would like to learn how to use it.”
I opened the apartment fund the very same afternoon. I told Jackson and Sloane I wanted them to have the money, five thousand dollars, with my love and a promise: that every Saturday morning for one year, Sloane would come to the shop and learn copperplate from me. She cried. She came the next Saturday, and the one after that, and by spring she could write her own name in a script that made me proud. The new sign over the door has an extra line now, painted in her hand. It says, And Granddaughter.
