Lincoln's Dreams

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” the ranger asked eagerly. “There’s a guided tour at eleven.”

“No, thanks.” I folded up the map. “How many unknown soldiers were there altogether?”

“Here, you mean? There are twelve thousand seven hundred and seventy buried in Fredericksburg National Cemetery,” he said as if it were a point of pride. “They’re all Union soldiers, of course.”

“How many altogether? In the whole war?”

“The whole war? Oh, I have no idea. I’m not even sure there’s any way. He took a pencil out of his pocket and began writing oh the battlefield brochure. “All right. We have twelve thousand seven hundred seventy here, and there are eleven hundred and seventy Confederate unknowns in the Confederate Cemetery, and then Spotsylvania.” He wrote down a figure and then reached under the counter again and brought up a stack of brochures. “The Unknowns of the Civil War Memorial at Arlington has two thousand one hundred and eleven ….” He shuffled through the brochures, turned one over. “There are four thousand, a hundred and ten at Petersburg. Gettysburg has nine hundred and seventy-nine unknowns in the cemetery proper, but of course there are more graves on the battlefield. Most of the Confederate dead were moved to Richmond and Savannah and Charleston after the war and buried in mass graves there.”

He riffled through the brochures again. “It all depended on who won the battles, of course. For the loser, over eighty percent would be unknown at any one battle.” He started adding up the figures. “I’d say between a hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand unknown dead altogether, but if you want a more accurate number …”

“Never mind,” I said, and got in the car and went to get Annie.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Traveller only let Lee down once. It was on the march into Maryland, right before Antietam. Lee had been sitting on a log, holding Traveller’s reins loosely in his hands. It was raining, and Lee was wearing a poncho and rubber overalls. Someone shouted, “Yankee cavalry!” and Traveller started. Lee stood up to grab his bridle and tripped over the poncho. He caught himself on his hands. One of his wrists was broken and the other was severely sprained. At Antietam his hands were still in splints.

Annie wasn’t at the inn or the coffee shop. The redheaded waitress, still disapproving, said she had told her to tell me she was at the library, and I thanked her with such obvious relief that she was probably convinced we had had some kind of lovers’ quarrel.

Annie was in the reference section, the L encyclopedias spread out around her in a half-circle, most of them open to a picture of Lincoln’s careworn face, but she wasn’t looking at them. She was staring at the orange-painted bookcases across from her and not seeing them, thinking hard about something. I hoped the something wasn’t Gettysburg.

“Good morning,” I said, sounding like the inanely cheerful park ranger. “I didn’t think you’d be up this early.”

She made a reflexively protective gesture toward the book in front of her, and then shut it before I could see the page it was open to.

“I want to go out and see the vet,” I said. “Maybe he’s heard from his sister.”

“All right.” She closed the other books and stacked them on top of the book in front of her. “Let me just put these away.”

“I’ll help you,” I said, and grabbed for the bottom three books before she could pile the others on top of them. The top two were encyclopedias. The bottom one was the drug compendium I had used to find out about Thorazine. “What are you looking up in here?” I asked. “Are you all right? You’re not having any side effects from the Thorazine, are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said, turning away to put the other encyclopedias back on the shelves. “I wanted to know it the Thorazine was causing the headaches I’ve been having, but it isn’t. Did you go out to the battlefield this morning?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to keep my voice as casual as hers. “They’ve got a reference library out there. That’s why this library’s so skimpy on Civil War-iana. Ready? Maybe we can catch the vet before he makes his rounds.”

We drove out and saw the vet. He was in the stable again, feeding some horses he was boarding. “I’m afraid I don’t have any information for you,” he said, forking a bundle of hay into one of the stalls. “I haven’t been able to get in touch with my sister yet, but I’m going to a conference on horse diseases in Richmond tomorrow, and I should be able to run down and see her then.”

I had been counting on his having already talked to her, so that I could say to Annie, “Well, we’ve done what we came to do. There’s no point in sticking around here.”

“When will you be back?” I asked.

He stopped and leaned on the pitchfork. “It lasts through the weekend. I’ll probably come back Monday. Will you still be here?”

“If I’m not, I’ll call you on Monday.” Annie was looking at me. “We’ll still be at the inn. You’ve got the number, don’t you?”