Free Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies by Jimmy Fox Page B

prodigal undergraduate years. He’d missed the counterculture revolution of the sixties by a decade; but he compensated by developing a certain sympathy for vagabonds and jongleurs, wise fools and mad geniuses, in art and real life. Wasn’t it natural, then, for the Romantic era of Byron, Shelley, and Keats to have been his specialty as a teacher of literature?
    Una Kern had snatched him from that rootless fate by suggesting genealogical research as therapy for his wounded psyche. It was one of those life-changing lucky moments. He had fallen in love with the many-faceted discipline, even though, as Una had hoped, he had not fallen back in love with her.
    Yes, he could have been one of these wanderers he saw lounging under the old spreading oaks. One day they would be statistical shadows, frustrating enigmas for the researcher. Impossible gaps, in genealogical parlance—dead ends, where the tangible trail of a life in the written record stops cold. Nick had a brotherly urge to tell them that each was unique, each important, in ways they couldn’t imagine. Though they believed no one missed them now, in the future someone would need them, care about them again, as characters in an unfolding genealogical mystery … like the one that he had come today to ponder: the death of Woodrow Bluemantle, and now, of this kook named Wayne Therman.
    In genealogy, apparent coincidences usually aren’t. Nick had schooled his mind to see patterns in family history: given names that appear frequently in records might honor parents, siblings, in-laws, or friends; a deed given or received by one branch of a family might suggest a look at nearby land for another branch; birth dates, death dates, marriages, migrations, and disappearances … each small fact adds a clump of clay to the sculpture that is the saga of a family. People do things for reasons. They plan, adapt, act, or fail to act, all for reasons that the genealogist with determination and, especially, imagination can discover.
    Bluemantle, Therman? Bluemantle, Therman? Bluemantle, Therman?
    His running shoes hitting the pavement drummed this central question into his brain, and the question drew him on to further speculation.
    Both men had some relationship with the Society of the
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. Both were at the seminar. Both were now dead, murdered. Coincidence?Nick didn’t believe so. Was Jillian somehow “involved,” to use Bartly’s loaded participle? She too had been at the seminar; more ominously, she had discovered Bluemantle. Nick was, he admitted to himself, biased in her favor. His memory of her graceful body sent him into a dream for a mile and more.
    The running was doing its job, allowing his mind to be fluid as his senses dulled and his flesh moved through the humid air.
    The newspaper hadn’t made much of Bluemantle’s murder; the television stations even less. Therman’s murder had also been lightly covered, written off as just another victim of the city’s rising tidal wave of random violence. Maybe Hawty was right. A fresh outbreak of corruption in NOPD was the lead story; the Public Integrity Division was working overtime. New Orleans residents were jaded when it came to murder; to elicit any reaction greater than a yawn, it needed to be spectacular, involving famous locals whose high-profile misfortunes offer catharsis for the lucky survivors who’ve made it through another day, dodged another bullet. Bluemantle and his missing finger, Therman and his enigmatic note, didn’t cut the Creole mustard.
    Detective Bartly had dozens of other murders to solve. There were more than enough conscienceless killers in New Orleans for these two incidents to be wholly unrelated. He had admitted to Nick that the only common threads he saw were the obvious ones: that both of these men had obsessive interest in genealogy—for different reasons—and that this interest had prompted contact or conflict with the Society of the
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. A good starting point, possibly,