Edgar Fripp, not a religious man, smoked three cigarettes in succession and stared at the broken wall as if trying to memorize it. A squirrel ran down the trunk of the nearest pine, saw the men, and scrambled back up without a sound.
The sheriff, whose name was Oscar Hayward, arrived at Ravenel Bluff just after 2:00 in the afternoon, accompanied by the county coroner, a physician named Dr. Rutherford Stewart, who had officially retired from the coroner's office two years before, but still served on the most serious cases because no one else in the county had his experience. Dr. Stewart was 68, a thin, white-haired man with a clipped manner of speaking and pale eyes that missed little. He had been a surgeon in the Confederate Army at Fredericksburg and Chickamauga.
Through the long, terrible winter of the siege of Petersburg, he had seen more death than most men could imagine. He approached the broken wall with a handkerchief pressed to his nose and mouth, went inside with a kerosene lantern, and came out 11 minutes later with an expression the sheriff would describe in his report as the look of a man who had just been shown something he hoped never to see.
He walked a short distance, leaned against a live oak, and stood there for two full minutes without speaking. When he turned back, his voice was steady, but his hands were not.
What Dr. Stewart found inside that cabin, and what he would document in the county coroner's report of October 30, 1908, was this: the cabin was a single room approximately 12 by 14 feet with a packed earth floor, a small hearth at one end, and a narrow loft accessed by a wooden ladder. The interior had been stripped of all furniture except a single iron bed frame against the far wall.
On the bed frame were the remains of two human beings, arranged with a care that Dr. Stewart found the most disturbing element of the entire scene. One was an adult female. The other was a child male between 7 and 9 years old.
The remains had been almost entirely mummified by the sealed dry conditions of the cabin, which had kept out moisture and scavengers for 45 years. The skin had become the color and texture of old parchment. The hair was still attached. The clothing—a simple cotton dress on the woman, a linen shirt and wool trousers on the boy—was intact, though faded and brittle. The woman's arms were positioned around the child whose head rested against her shoulder.
They had been placed that way after death. Dr. Stewart was certain because the arrangement was too composed to have occurred during any struggle. Someone, he noted in his report, had taken the time to lay them together in a posture approximating rest, and then had built a wall around them, and then had gone home. The woman's skull showed a fracture at the left temple consistent with a single heavy blow, and the child’s skull showed a similar injury at the back of the head. The remains otherwise showed little evidence of a prolonged struggle.
Whatever had been done to them appeared to have been done quickly, “a mercy of a kind,” Dr. Stewart wrote, though he used the word with obvious discomfort. On a small wooden table beside the bed, there was a folded piece of paper, brittle with age, but still legible, a notarized bill of manumission dated January 15, 1863, signed by Augustine Ravenel, granting freedom to Dileia and her son Isaac, eight years of age. The document bore the seal of a Charleston notary, Francis Gadston, who had died in 1879, but whose records, preserved in the Charleston County archives, matched the signature exactly. Beside the paper lay a small leather pouch containing 37 silver coins, mostly Mexican and Spanish pieces dated between 1821 and 1859. It was roughly a year's wages for a free laborer in 1863, enough to begin a life if one was willing to work and be careful.
Beside the pouch, a single object wrapped in muslin. A child's wooden horse carved from what looked like live oak, smoothed by years of a small palm closing around it. The mane was carved in fine detail, the tail notched with care. Stuck to the underside, scratched into the wood with something sharp, were two initials: I.R.