compound on Martha’s Vineyard; a winter home in Florida; and in South Carolina’s Low Country, a plantation known as Windrow.
“I was there several months ago working in the potting shed when I overheard two of the help talking. Mary Pell runs everything and she was talking to Willie Snow, our caretaker, and she said, ‘Do you think Mrs. Sampson will ever find peace?’ And Willie Snow said, ‘Not until there’s justice.’
“I don’t think they knew I was there until I asked her who Mrs. Sampson was. And she said, ‘Just some momma that lost her baby a long time ago. Nothing you need to fret about.’ I didn’t fret about it but I didn’t forget about it. A few days later, I asked her again. She didn’t want to discuss it. That got me even more interested.”
I sympathized. “I hate it when people tell me something’s not my business. I’ll be the judge of whether it’s my business.”
“Me, too. I guess I’ve always had a curious streak,” Bradford continued. “I studied botany at Harvard. I’ve made it a life goal to identify every plant species at Windrow. It drives me crazy when there’s a plant I don’t know. I wanted to know more about Mrs. Sampson, so I started poking around.”
“So why do you care about this?”
“It bothers me that it was never investigated. It bothers me that no one wants to talk about it. Plus, it’s an intellectual challenge. Solving the murder of Wallace Sampson is like trying to find the name of a plant I can’t identify. I really can’t stop until I do.”
Over the years, the building that houses the Times had settled and some of the floors had become uneven. The problem was particularly pronounced on the fifth floor, where the newsroom shared space with the library, and it was at its worst in the corner where the conference room was located. As a result, the walls shook and the Famous Front Pages rattled when someone approached. Certain staffers had very distinct walks and I could tell from the nature of the rattle who was coming before they got there.
Walker Burns was on his way. He knocked, opened the door part way, and stuck his head in.
“Can I borrow you for a moment, Matt?”
Bradford stood. “I’m sorry, I’ve really taken too much time.”
“Sit down,” I told him. “I’ll be right back.” I followed Walker out of the conference room.
“Are we comfy in there?” he whispered. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? A donut?”
“Sorry, Walker.”
“What’s this loco want anyway?”
“I’m finding that out.”
He opened his eyes wide in mock disbelief. “You don’t know yet? In the amount of time you’ve already spent with that guy I could have written War and Peace!”
I rolled my eyes.
“Wrap it up and get your hide out here! The publisher just came by with a tip about some fatcat downtown friend of his who died. He wants an obit for tomorrow morning.”
“Why can’t Ronnie Bullock do it? He’s the obit writer.”
“If you’ve got some journalism more worthwhile to do, then you ask him to do it.” Walker headed back to the city desk.
I returned to the conference room.
“I hope I didn’t get you in trouble,” said Bradford. He started to stand again. I motioned him back down.
“I’m going to have to wrap it up,” I said. “This investigation of yours is all very interesting, but what is it that you expect us to do?”
Bradford Hall sat so far forward on the edge of his chair that he was practically kneeling. “When it comes to finding out about plants, I know where to look. There are books and periodicals and drawings and texts. When it comes to a killing, I don’t know where to start. I was hoping you or someone here could help me. You could even stay at my place. I once saw a newspaper series about unsolved crimes. Maybe the Times could look into this. Maybe somebody wrote about it at the time. Maybe somebody remembers.”
My job is night general assignment reporter. I come in late in the afternoon. By the time I arrive, the creative stories, the ones where you can really write or really investigate, have already been given to the dayside reporters the big editors favor. Those of us on the nightside get the obits, the stories from the cop shop, and night general assignment. Whatever’s left. That’s generally not going to include any time spent writing about a years-old unsolved killing on the edge of our circulation area.
But before I told Hall that, I wanted to do a little checking. I thanked him for thinking of the Charlotte Times, told him I would get back to him, and ushered him out of the newsroom.
On my way back to my cubicle, I passed Bullock. “Ronnie,” I asked, “Any way you can handle this obit for me? I’ve got to get back to the library and pull some clips on this nut case.”
“Sure thing,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to have to burden the progeny of Lucas Harper with the unseemly task of writing obits.”
Bullock could be lazy, not to mention a jerk. I’ve never used being a Harper to get ahead. If I had, would I be a general assignment reporter working nights at a mid-sized daily in North Carolina? The truth of it is, in terms of journalism, neither my father nor grandfather taught me anything. Lucas Sr. was dead before I arrived and Lucas Jr. might as well have been.
“Forget it,” I told Bullock. “I’ll do it myself.”
It was the end of the shift before I could get to the newsroom library. Nancy Atkinson, the librarian, peered at me over her glasses. “Almost twenty years ago? You’re waaaay before newsroom computers, honey. In fact, you’re before microfiche. You’ll be looking for clippings.”
Assassinations, wars, scandals—Miss Nancy had catalogued it all. I couldn’t recall her ever getting excited about much of anything. But Miss Nancy actually hurried past the library’s computers and the film readers and deep into a maze of shoulder-high Army-green filing cabinets. I could sense her delight.
“It’s so nice to retrieve real stories from real newspapers,” she sighed. “Even microfiche is okay. But computers and these files make news stories seem so artificial. Anyway, there’s no proof anything was really ever printed. No proof at all.”
Miss Nancy bent down in front of one of the cabinets and pulled out a drawer, releasing the unmistakable musty smell of aging newsprint. She fingered through a row of brown envelopes and pulled one labeled Murders–South Carolina.
Inside were maybe a hundred clippings, most a paragraph or two long. They were arranged by date so it didn’t take me long to find the one I was looking for. It was yellowed but didn’t look like it had been touched since it had been put in the morgue. The four-paragraph clip had been stamped in red with the date it ran in the Times. It read in its entirety:
South Carolina Youth Shot, Dies
Hirtsboro, S.C. (AP) A 13-year-old boy was shot in the head shortly after midnight here Friday night.
Wallace Sampson was taken by Hirtsboro Ambulance to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston
