The Twelfth Card (Lincoln Rhyme 6)

"Really?" the rookie asked. "Uhm, who's that exactly?"

"Why don't you look it up, Patrolman."

"Yes, sir. I will."

Rhyme disconnected and looked over the main evidence board, on the top of which was taped the twelfth card in the tarot deck, The Hanged Man.

He was gazing at the card when the doorbell rang.

Lon Sellitto, probably. He was due soon from a therapy session. He'd stopped rubbing the phantom bloodstain and practicing his Billy the Kid quick draw--which nobody'd yet explained to Rhyme. He'd tried to ask Sachs about it but she couldn't, or wouldn't, say much. Which was fine. Sometimes, Lincoln Rhyme firmly believed, you just didn't need to know all the details.

But his visitor at the moment, it turned out, wasn't the rumpled detective.

Rhyme glanced into the doorway and saw Geneva Settle standing there, listing against her book bag. "Welcome," he said.

Sachs too said hello, pulling off the safety glasses she

'd been wearing as she filled out chain-of-custody cards for blood samples she'd collected at a homicide crime scene that morning.

Wesley Goades had all the paperwork ready to file in the lawsuit against Sanford Bank and reported to Geneva that she could expect a realistic offer from Hanson by Monday. If not, the legal cruise missile had warned his opponents that he would file suit the next day. A press conference would accompany the event (Goades's opinion was that the bad publicity would last considerably longer than an "ugly ten minutes").

Rhyme looked the girl over. Unseasonably warm weather made gangsta sweats and stocking caps impractical so she was in blue jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt with Guess! in glittery letters across the chest. She'd gained a little weight, her hair was longer. She even had some makeup on (Rhyme had wondered what was in the bag that Thom had mysteriously slipped her the other day). The girl looked good.

Geneva's life had achieved a certain stability. Jax Jackson had been released from the hospital and was undergoing physical therapy. Thanks to some prodding by Sellitto, the man had been officially transferred to the care and feeding of the New York City parole authorities. Geneva was living in his minuscule apartment in Harlem, an arrangement that was not as dire as she'd anticipated (the girl had confessed this not to Rhyme or Roland Bell but to Thom--who'd become a mother hen to the girl and invited her to the town house regularly, to give her cooking lessons, watch TV and argue books and politics, none of which Rhyme had any interest in). As soon as they could afford a bigger place, she and her father were going to have Aunt Lilly move in with them.

The girl had given up her job slinging McHash and was now employed after school by Wesley Goades as a legal researcher and gofer. She was also helping him set up the Charles Singleton Trust, which would disburse the settlement money to the freedman's heirs. Geneva's interest in fleeing the city at the earliest opportunity for a life in London or Rome hadn't flagged, but the cases that Rhyme overheard her passionately talking about all seemed to involve Harlem residents who'd been discriminated against because they were black, Latino, Islamic, women or poor.

Geneva was also engaged in some project she referred to as "saving her girlfriend," which she didn't go into with him either; her advisor for this particular endeavor seemed to be Amelia Sachs.

"I wanted to show you something." The girl held up a piece of yellowing paper containing several paragraphs of handwriting that Rhyme immediately recognized as Charles Singleton's.

"Another letter?" Sachs asked.

Geneva nodded. She was handling the paper very carefully.

"Aunt Lilly heard from that relative of ours in Madison. He sent us a few things he found in his basement. A bookmark of Charles's, a pair of his glasses. And a dozen letters. This is the one I wanted to show you." With beaming eyes, Geneva added, "It was written in 1875, after he got out of prison."

"Let's see it," Rhyme said.

Sachs mounted it on the scanner and a moment later the image appeared on several computer monitors around the lab. Sachs stepped next to Rhyme, put her arm around his shoulder. They looked at the screen.

My most darling Violet:

I trust you have been enjoying your sister's company, and that Joshua and Elizabeth are pleased to spend time with their cousins. That Frederick--who was only nine when I saw him last,--is as tall as his father is a fact I find hard to grasp.

All is well at our cottage, I am pleased to report. James and I cut ice on the shore of the river all morning and stocked the ice-house, then covered the blocks in saw-dust. We then traveled some two miles north through substantial snow to view the orchard that is offered for sale. The price is dear but I believe the seller will respond favorably to my counter-offer. He was clearly in doubt about selling to a Negro but when I revealed that I could pay him in greenbacks and would not need to offer a note, his concerns appeared to vanish.

Hard cash is a great equalizer.

Were you not as moved as I to read that yesterday our country enacted a Civil Rights Act? Did you see the particulars? The law guarantees to everyone of any color equal enjoyment of all inns, public conveyances, theaters and the like. What a momentous day for our Cause! This is the very legislation about which I corresponded with Charles Sumner and Benjamin Butler at length last year, and I believe that some of my ideas made their way into this important document.

As you can well imagine, this news gave me cause for reflection, thinking back to those terrible events of seven years past, being robbed of our orchard in Gallows Heights and jailed in pitiful conditions.

And yet now, reflecting upon this news from Washington, D.C., as I sit before the fire in our cottage, I feel that those terrible events are from a different world entirely. In much the same way as those hours of bloody combat in the War or the hard years of forced servitude in Virginia are forever present but--somehow,--as removed as the muddled images from an ill-remembered nightmare.

Perhaps within our hearts is a single repository for both despair and hope, and filling that space with one drives out all but the most shadowy memory of the other. And tonight I am filled only with hope.

You will recall that, for years I vowed that I would do whatever I might to cast off the stigma of being regarded as a three-fifths man. When I consider the looks I still receive, because of my color, and the actions of others toward me and our people, I think I am not yet regarded as completely whole. But I would venture to say that we have progressed to the point where I am viewed as a nine-tenths man (James laughed heartily when I told him this over supper tonight), and I continue to have faith that we will come to be seen as whole within our lifetimes, or in Joshua's and Elizabeth's, at least.