Chapter eight
Wilmington, North CarolinaThe Silver Sally slipped through the new inlet shoals without incident on her return run, and steamed the twenty-five miles north to port under the cover of darkness and a constant light rain.
It was still raining at eleven o’clock the next morning when Captain Denning left his ship following his best rest since leaving Nassau. He hailed a carriage driver who took him to the Prince Hotel. The rain was beginning to let up. Outside the lobby, Denning bought a freshly printed Wilmington Daily News and buried himself in the reading of it, leaning against one of the hotel’s great stone pillars. The front-page headlines exploded at him. A lot had transpired in his absence. The murder of a Wilmington widow, the second widow in three weeks. Wilmington was
