risk Les bringing them up while Mom and I were in the same room. I had no idea if she knew Ashley had those boxes or what was in them, but I had no desire to find out at the moment.
Of course, that meant Mom invited me to stay for dinner. Since it was just her, Warren, and the kids, I really didn’t have any good excuse to decline. At least, not an excuse I could give her without lying. Plus, she had texted me about Clancy even though she’d known Dad and Ashley would both be pissed about it. And Warren wasn’t really a bad guy, just a weak one.
If I could ease some of the tension by staying for a meal, it was a small sacrifice to make. Besides the fact that it’d ruin this tentative truce I had going on with Mom at the moment, I would’ve had to be a real dick to act like what I was doing was more important than my nephew.
All of this meant that it was nearly seven-thirty before I was able to get away, and that was after at least a half-hour of practically biting my tongue to stop myself from telling them that I had work to do.
Once I was home, I kicked off my shoes, got a beer from my fridge, and sat down at my table to start going through what I’d taken from the house. I’d pretty much emptied the entire box, then split the contents of the other two boxes so they were all full about the same amount. If Ashley knew what had been in the boxes, my ruse would only last until she actually looked at what was there, but I doubted her attention would be anywhere near those boxes while Clancy was in the hospital.
My sister had a lot of negative character qualities, but the one thing I’d always admired about her was how much she loved her children. Even if she spoiled Betsy or tried to control the direction Les’s life went, it was because she wanted what she thought was best for them.
I had a bad feeling that would bite me in the ass in the near future because I had no doubt Ashley would see my film as being a danger to the well-being of her children.
“She’ll have nothing to worry about if I don’t find anything,” I reminded myself out loud.
I had my suspicions about my family, but no real evidence of any specific skeletons in the closet. Once I started digging in here, though, that could change. And I couldn’t brush it off as something I stumbled on. If I took this step, I would be actively searching for lies…or worse.
Maybe it was stupid, but I needed that moment. I needed to know that I could, when my film was done, point to a specific time and place where I’d made a conscious decision to put my own family’s reputation on the line. To put my money where my mouth was, so to speak.
The first thing I looked at more closely was the post about the sale of a man named Joshua. The fact that it’d been in with my family’s things in the first place was suspicious. The Traylors always claimed that they’d only had free, paid servants and workers, even before the war. They said they’d kept up appearances for fear of reprisal, but that they’d never actually owned a single slave who hadn’t been immediately freed after purchase. What I found on this page might very well prove that to be a lie.
The way the page was laid out made me think that it’d been something written by Joshua’s owner and given to a newspaper to have the ad run. Whoever its intended recipient had been, they must’ve had amazing eyesight because I doubted it would’ve been much clearer back then.
Still, I managed to puzzle out a little information.
As of 1853, Joshua had been a house slave, approximately twenty-eight years of age, and was described as ‘good-mannered and light-skinned.’ The paper also said that he was missing a finger from his left hand but was in otherwise good health.
It was impossible for me to tell if this ad had been placed by my family to sell Joshua, or if it’d been something my family had received after purchasing the man, perhaps with the intent to free him.
1853. Ten years after the wedding picture Les had showed me. Joshua would’ve been close in age to