Synopsis:
Shadows in the Moss: A Liberty Oak Mystery
Brittan Lee Hayworth has been waiting forty years to hear from her best friend, Beth Ann Hamilton. Missing since 1963, Beth Ann Hamilton was presumed dead in the same tragic accident that killed Brittan Lee’s father and the young black civil activist, Ebon Johnson. Johnson had been accused of kidnapping the two girls and Brittan Lee’s father died trying to save them. The town mourned the loss of the mayor and Beth Ann; and blamed Brittan Lee. If she had been a better child, Brittan Lee and Beth Ann wouldn’t have been in a position to be kidnapped, and then Dr Hayworth wouldn’t have been killed. Only Ebon Johnson’s family mourned for him.
Forty years later, the body of Beth Ann is discovered at the bottom of the Liberty River. Brittan Lee returns to Liberty and lands in the middle of an FBI investigation of potential civil rights violations that summer of 1963.
FBI Agent Andrew Zeller greets Brittan Lee at the airport; he hopes to use Brittan Lee’s memories to provide the timelines, attitudes and behaviors of the local citizens during that summer. Initial reports place her everywhere about town that summer. Zeller hides his own private agenda: the disappearance of his brother, a civil rights worker who also went missing in 1963.
From the moment Brittan Lee takes in her first breath of low-country marsh air, she becomes entangled in currents of suspicion. She rejoices being with her family: Mama, the brothers, Jack and Four, her nieces and nephews so much alike they could be interchangeable, and Trulee the beloved family housekeeper. With her look-alike niece, Leigh, Brittan Lee attends the painful but necessary ‘visitation’ with Beth Ann’s still grieving mother and blatantly evil grandmother. She takes Leigh and Agent Zeller on tours of tiny Liberty, showing them the places she has held in her heart. Memories in flashbacks rush through her, painful, joyous, endearing, sometimes devastating: making hospital and patient rounds with her father, sneaking out of Children’s Choir to explore Liberty with Beth Ann, the night she followed the sounds of music to the tiny AME church and met her first black friend, Tansey. Or the times she and Beth Ann walked down to the Dairy Queen for a Dilly-Bar with Mr. Hamilton or his assistant Buddy Hudson. Her fear the day she hid in an examining room cabinet as her father’s medical partners fought over Dr Hayworth’s plans to integrate the hospital and the schools. Her sense of helplessness the afternoon she saw Ebon Johnson bloody and tired, forced in an illegal chain-gang, clearing an old field. The power of her father standing up to the deputy to right that injustice. Her anguish when she saw Ebon beaten, when she had been beaten and the pair locked in the old tabby shed under the Liberty Oak. Memories which have the potential of triggering her nightmares, of stripping away her control. Brittan Lee is big on self-control.
Someone doesn’t want Brittan Lee sharing her stories. Within hours of arriving in Liberty, someone pushes her off the pier into the Liberty River. Rescued by two local scounge-divers, they provide her with the first clue to Beth Ann’s death- a cigarette lighter found at the bridge site. A lighter engraved with a company logo, initials and a date.
Leaving the even tinier Cooshea, Georgia after the visitation, Brittan Lee and Leigh meet Warren Hamilton, still tall and handsome and now married to the former Children’s Choir Director--a woman who had actively disliked Beth Ann and Brittan Lee. As Brittan Lee and Leigh return to Liberty, a high-speed pursuit occurs- when an unknown truck chases the women through the pelting rain and lightning. Brittan Lee evades his pursuit, hiding them in a ramshackle abandoned tobacco barn.
That evening, a barrage of memories assail Brittan Lee as friends and acquaintances join her family. Introducing Zeller to her Auntabelle, her father’s office manager, Brittan Lee suggests he meet with the older woman and follow the money.
A casual comment from Leigh triggers a significant memory to Brittan Lee. With Agent Zeller, she leaves the party to sort through storage bins in her brother’s garage; while there, they share more personal intimacies until someone makes another attempt on her life- shooting at her through the storeroom window.
Warren Hamilton hired investigators to search for Beth Ann and shares the unsuccessful results. Shown the lighter with his company logo and his initials, he grieves and fears that his current wife had harmed Beth Ann. Cheryl Darton Hamilton sneers and points out that the lighter was dated two years prior to Hamilton moving to the company. Search of old company personnel records from 1950 show employee William “Buddy” Hudson; Hudson hated Hamilton for supplanting him in the business, for selling insurance to blacks and for possibly warning them of physical violence by the white supremists . The records indicate Hudson died in an alcohol-related single-car accident two days after the first anonymous phone call to the FBI in 1985.
As Hurricane Daphne encroaches on the coast, most of Liberty evacuates. Brittan Lee responds to an emergency phone call from her niece, and returns to the courthouse. She finds Leigh beaten and dumped in the tabby shed- the same shed where Brittan Lee, beaten and alone, waited out Hurricane Dora. As she hunkers down to wait out this storm, Brittan Lee is attacked again. Her late father’s partner, Dr. Bruce Wensley assaulted Leigh mistaking her for her aunt and is now determined to kill Brittan Lee, as well. He believes that Brittan Lee knew he had killed Marshall Hayworth forty years earlier. Wensley had embezzled large sums of money from the medical practice as well as from his wife’s trust funds to support his affairs with other women. Panicked that Marshall Hayworth would report him to the Medical Board, Wensley killed him and blamed the attack on the black youth, Ebon Johnson.
Brittan Lee subdues the older man; then, holding her niece, they wait out the storm.
After their rescue, Brittan Lee meets the senior FBI agent for the first time.
“Welcome home, Ebon.”