The Twelfth Card

What was it?”
    “Had to do some thinking about that. I thought at first maybe Geneva had seen some tenants being evicted illegally when she was scrubbing graffiti off old buildings for a developer. But I looked into where that’d happened and found that Sanford Bank wasn’t involved in those buildings. So, where didthat leave us? I could only come back to what we’d originally thought . . . . ”
    He explained about the old Coloreds’ Weekly Illustrated that Boyd had stolen. “I’d forgotten that somebody had been tracking down the magazine before Geneva supposedly saw the van and terrorist. I think what happened was that Ashberry stumbled on that article when the Sanford Foundation renovated its archives last month. And he did some more research and found something real troubling, something that could ruin his life. He got rid of the foundation’s copy and decided he had to destroy all the copies of the magazine. Over the past few weeks he found most of them—but there was one left in the area: The librarian at the African-American museum in Midtown was getting their copy from storage and must’ve told Ashberry that, coincidentally, there was a girl who was interested in the same issue. Ashberry knew he had to destroy the article and kill Geneva, along with the librarian, because he could connect them.”
    “But I still don’t understand why, ” Cole, the lawyer, said. His sourness had blossomed into full-fledged irritation.
    Rhyme explained the final piece of the puzzle: He related the story of Charles Singleton, the farm he’d been given by his master and the Freedmen’s Trust robbery—and the fact that the former slave had a secret. “ That was the answer to why Charles was set up in 1868. And it’s the answer to why Ashberry had to kill Geneva.”
    “Secret?” Stella, the assistant, asked.
    “Oh, yes. I finally figured out what it was. I remembered something that Geneva’s father had told me. He said that Charles taught at an African free school near his home and that he sold cider to workersbuilding boats up the road.” Rhyme shook his head. “I made a careless assumption. We heard that his farm was in New York state . . . which it was. Except that it wasn’t upstate, like we were thinking.”
    “No? Where was it?” Hanson asked.
    “Easy to figure out,” he continued, “if you keep in mind there were working farms here in the city until the late eighteen hundreds.”
    “You mean his farm was in Manhattan?” Stella asked.
    “Not only,” Rhyme said, allowing himself the colloquialism. “It was right underneath this building.”

Chapter Forty-Two
    “We found a drawing of Gallows Heights in the 1800s that shows three or four big, tree-filled estates. One of them covered this and the surrounding blocks. Across the road from it was an African free school. Could that’ve been his school? And on the Hudson River”—Rhyme glanced out the window—“right about there, at Eighty-first Street, was a dry dock and shipyard. Could the workers there have been the ones Charles sold cider to?
    “But was the estate his? There was one simple way to find out. Thom checked the Manhattan recorder’s office and found the record of a deed from Charles’s master to Charles. Yep, it was his. Then everything else fell into place. All the references we found to meetings in Gallows Heights—with politicians and civil rights leaders? It was Charles’ s house they were meeting in. That was his secret—that he owned fifteen acres of prime land in Manhattan.”
    “But why was it a secret?” Hanson asked.
    “Oh, he didn’t dare tell anyone he was the owner. He wanted to, of course. That’s what he was so tormented about: He was proud that he owned a big farm in the city. He believed he could be a model for other former slaves. Show them that they could be treated as whole men, respected. That they could own land and work it, be members of the community. But he’d seen draft riots, the lynchings of blacks, the arson. So he and his wife pretended to becaretakers. He was afraid that somebody would find out that a former slave owned a large plot of choice property and destroy it. Or, more likely, steal it from him.”
    “Which,” Geneva said, “is exactly what happened.”
    Rhyme continued, “When Charles was convicted all his property was confiscated—including the farm—and sold . . . . Now, that’s a nice theory: setting up someone with false charges to steal his property.