Last in a Long Line of Rebels by Lisa Lewis Tyre

circumstances.”
    â€œUnder what circumstances?” Benzer asked. “Was Lou’s family against the war?”
    â€œNo, I believe her daddy’s great-great-grandfather was actually a captain,” she said. “I was thinking of the gold, of course.”
    â€œGold!” blurted Benzer. “What gold?”
    Mrs. Hall smiled. “Bless your heart, Benzer, your people aren’t from here, are they? It’s probably just a rumor, anyway, right, Louise?”
    I smiled weakly. I had no idea what she was talking about, but if my family hadn’t mentioned it before now, it probably wasn’t good.
    â€œI’m speaking of the gold that was stolen,” Mrs. Hall continued. “It was why General Dibrell was in town, you know, to replenish the coffers before engaging the enemy. He couldn’t very well go stay at the Mayhew house after the incident.”
    Patty shook her head. “What incident, Mrs. Hall? What does gold have to do with Lou’s house?”
    â€œWell, dear, the story goes that the gold General Dibrell came to get was stolen. I’m sorry to say that the chief suspect was Walter Mayhew, Lou’s great-great-great-grandfather.”

    I sulked most of the ride home. Bertie had driven into the parking lot, yelled at us to fix her a plate, then sat, radio blaring out the windows, until Benzer and I settled into the backseat. We hadn’t had time to ask Mrs. Hall any more questions, not that I’d even have known where to start.
    â€œThe letter I found was signed WLM,” I had whispered to Benzer as we walked to the car. “Walter Mayhew. The
L
must stand for
loser
.”
    â€œMaybe the gold was what he was saying to be cautious about,” he whispered back.
    If Bertie noticed I was quiet after dropping off Benzer, she didn’t comment. Of all the things I’d expected to hear about my family, having a gold-stealing ancestor wasn’t one of them. For twelve years,
twelve years
, my family had hidden this from me. They hardly told me anything—not about the past, not about the house, and certainly not about the future. It was so frustrating!
    I stared out the window. What else weren’t they telling me? Mr. Norman, our social studies teacher, had a phrase written on the board that he made us memorize: TRUST BUT VERIFY. He said that we should examine everything we heard, or else we’d be at the mercy of those who wrote the books. But what about what you didn’t hear? You couldn’t verify what you didn’t know.
    A small spiral notebook lay on the floorboard of the backseat. I picked it up and flipped through it; the pages were blank. “Hey, Bertie, can I have this?”
    She looked up in the rearview mirror. “Sure, they were giving them away for free at the bank. There’s probably a pen down there somewhere.”
    I dug around under the seat until I found it. In big, broad strokes, I wrote across the top, THE VERIFIED TRUTH ABOUT THE MAY HEWS . Mrs. Hall had said I had ancestors of steel, so I wrote that down. I chewed on the end of the pen. But ancestors of steel and gold thieves didn’t go together. There had to be more to the story, and I was going to do everything I could to find out.

From the diary of Louise Duncan Mayhew
July 1861
    I received a letter from Walter that concerns me greatly.—“Dear Louise, I trust that you have heard of the battle at Manassas. Recalling it in detail is more than I care to bare, but I hardly see how it will ever be forgotten. I will not burden you with it, exsept to say that to call it a victory for the Rebels seems blasphemous. Jeb Bilbrey was killed and Tom Brian wounded. There were many more deaths, and while their names would mean nothing to you, they have made a lasting impression on me. This battle has affected me deeply, and I fear that if this conflict is not resolved soon, the man you agreed to marry will no longer exist.”
    B ertie had