Cancel the Wedding (21 page)

I moved the magnifying glass to the name written on the parcel to the other side of the Rutledge property. This parcel was roughly the same size and shape as Rutledge Ridge. This piece had the owner's name listed as: George Kipp Jones Jr.

So Janie Rutledge and George Jones were next-door neighbors; they had grown up together. I sat back in the chair realizing, maybe for the first time, that this man, George Jones, was my mother's first love. I was achingly sad for my father as I wondered what that meant he had been to her.

Bitsy came over. “Any luck?”

I pointed to the map. “The first husband, George, lived next door to my mom.”

Bitsy loved the romantic turn of events. “That's so sweet to have your first love be the boy next door.” She was obviously the kind of woman who loved a love story. She had that dreamy look on her face.

I asked, “Where did you meet your first love, Bitsy?”

As I expected, she was hoping I would ask. Why couldn't I be one of these girls who got giddy and gushy like that? As she told me her tale of dorm-crossed lovers I thought back to when I met Leo.

He and I met at a friend's wedding five years before. Leo showed up at the ceremony deeply tanned having just vacationed in Barbados. The second he walked into the ballroom he became the number one draft pick for every unattached girl in the wedding party. At one point the maid of honor, with a microtolerance for alcohol, was performing some kind of dance for him that would have satisfied a liberal definition of the term “sex act.”

As I was walking by the peep show, Leo grabbed my arm, deliberately spilling my champagne down the front of his suit. He made a show of needing to dry off and kept hold of my hand while the two of us made for the exit in a fit of laughter. He introduced himself to me in the cab that we shared back to the hotel and that was that.

He was smart, good-looking, and kind. We had all the same friends. We fell into dating, moved naturally into a relationship, and were suddenly a couple. I didn't question any part of it; it just happened. It was painless. I had been in my midtwenties and everyone around me was getting married; some were already having babies. It seemed like Leo and I met at the right time in our lives. We had never had much in the way of passion, but I always considered that a good thing because it meant we never fought. Leo and I were vanilla ice cream. Consistent but bland.

Bitsy asked, “What about you? Was your first love the boy next door?”

“Ha, no.” My stomach lurched as I thought of the art installation of fluttering white papers I had found in the kitchen that morning. I surprised myself with my answer. “I think I met him in a coffee shop.”

I could feel my face blush, realizing I had said that, and I pretended to be engrossed in the map book. Bitsy went back to her research. I opened to the map from the sixties showing the creation of the lake. I didn't stop long on that one. All I could see from this vantage point was the hand of God turning on some colossal spigot, giggling as he extinguished the whole town of Huntley.

The next map showed the area as I knew it now. It was drawn in the late seventies and included all of Tillman and all that remained above water from Huntley, which wasn't much.

There was a legend indicating that there were some larger-scaled maps of the parcel where my mother's land had been on pages thirty-four and thirty-five. I turned to the pages in the book, anxious to see what my mother's property had looked like in the seventies. Pages thirty-four and thirty-five were missing from the book. They had been surgically cut from the spine. I ran to find Bitsy.

It took Bitsy a long time to calm down enough to stop pacing, but she was still ranting about the missing pages from the map book. She said for the second time, “It is against the law to willfully and maliciously deface any property of the public library.” You would think someone had sneaked in at night and cut off her child's hair.

I asked, “Is there another copy of this? Is there somewhere else I could get these maps?”

She turned her mind away from the vandalism for a moment.

“Well, you could contact the county, of course, but the information they'll have readily available will be the most current maps, which are at most maybe five years old. They won't show any historical data, just the name of the person who owns it now or who had last filed a deed when the map was printed.”

I knew she was right about that. I started thinking aloud. “Maybe I can order the older records from them.” Now that the maps were missing I desperately wanted to look at them. It was the same way I felt about the missing journals from the reading room. What was in there that someone didn't want me to see?

Bitsy went back to writing up her report on the “wanton destruction of property” while she spoke.

“You should, Olivia. The county courthouse is just across the square. I know they do a lot of searches for title discrepancies and ownership disputes so they should know how to order the historical maps.” She finished the report with a sigh and put it aside.

When she said “discrepancies” it reminded me of something. “Bitsy, you know that old church steeple that used to float around in the lake? Logan found an article about it that said it was from a church on the disputed line between the Rutledge and Forrest properties. Do you think there would be any articles about the dispute between those two families?”

Bitsy smiled. “That's so funny that you asked about that church.”

“It is? Why?”

She put a printout from a newspaper article in front of me. “I found this when I went looking for your mother's wedding announcement. Guess where your mother and George Jones were married.”

“No way!” In some part of my imagination I could hear the distant chiming of church bells float out from the bottom of the lake, bloated and distorted.

“Yes, and guess where your grandmother's funeral services were held.”

Now the floating ghostly church steeple felt like it wasn't just quietly haunting me, but was literally trying to scream out at me from underneath the water. I shuddered involuntarily as I read the articles.

The first one was a story about the Rutledge family dedicating the small garden in front of the church to Martha Rutledge's memory. The fuzzy picture that went with the article showed my grandfather, the judge, standing stoic but clearly sad as he held the hand of his little girl. On the other side of ten-year-old Janie Rutledge was a little boy, slightly taller than her, holding her other hand. I stared at the picture for a long time and knew for certain that the little boy must be George.

The little girl in that picture looked so lost. She was staring through the camera with a haunting vacancy. The one detail that kept pulling my eyes down was her sock. One white knee sock had fallen and was sagging down around her ankle. It seemed like the kind of tiny detail that a mother would notice and rectify before letting the newspaper take her photograph. To me it was the personification of being raised without her mother. That sagging sock.

The article continued on another page with a second photo. It showed the judge ceremoniously holding a shovel next to a newly planted hydrangea bush. Janie was standing slightly behind him holding the hand of a black woman. I noticed that now Janie didn't look quite so lost or quite so frightened. And her sock had been pulled up, fixed for the camera. The name of the black woman was not given in the article but I knew it had to be Maudy. The woman who had worked for the judge and most likely raised Janie after her mother had died. I felt an unmistakable gratitude toward this woman I had never heard of, and would certainly never meet, for doing such a good job raising my mom.

The newspaper story focused mostly on the church. It was a tiny one-room building, wooden framed and whitewashed, built in 1893 by former slaves. The sparse little structure held eight pews and could seat about forty people. It was no longer being used by the First African Baptist Church when this photo was taken, but the community was in the process of trying to have it declared a historical site to protect it.

The second article Bitsy had found was an editorial debate about the little church. One side argued to preserve the structure by having it moved to higher ground. Apparently one of the tributaries leading into the newly formed lake had begun to flood in the springtime and was threatening to overtake the church. The other side argued that the structure was fully on Mr. Forrest's land and if Mr. Forrest wanted the building to be left alone to be swallowed by the lake, then that was his right.

The side in favor of saving the building had a photo of a very young and very angry-looking Janie Rutledge. As I examined the picture more closely I corrected myself, not Janie Rutledge. She was now Janie Jones and she was standing with George while he held up a clipboard, which he was waving at someone off-camera. Their body language was exactly the same. They were matched perfectly.

Underneath the photo was the caption: “Mr. and Mrs. George Jones, formerly of Huntley, petition to save the church where they were married.”

Because we had no photos of my mother at this age I was mesmerized by it. Her skin was so smooth and her hair was thick and dark. She wore it in a long flip and she was wearing lipstick. My mom never wore lipstick. Her arms were strong and lean and her tiny waist was pinched with a wide belt over her slim cropped pants.

George was at least a head taller than her. He wore khaki pants and a white shirt. He was tan and fit and perched on his head was a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses. It wasn't hard to see why she had fallen for him. Or him for her. They looked like a slice of Camelot, or a Ralph Lauren ad.

The picture accompanying the other side of the argument showed a man wearing blue jeans with a work shirt and no shoes sitting on a porch with a hunting dog by his side. I said, “Nathan Forrest Sr., I presume.” Then I looked closer at the picture. I recognized the face. When I met him he had aged considerably, and was armed with a shotgun. But this was definitely the same menace we had run into on the mountain.

I heard Bitsy, sitting at her computer say, “Oh dear.”

When I looked up she waved me over. She printed out one last piece and handed it to me. It was the front-page article covering the conflagration of my mother's house. There was a picture of the burned-out remains. Charred sticks of wood framing were bubbled up on their surface like burned marshmallows. Wisps of smoke were still billowing up, frozen gray and transparent in the still picture. One part of the roof remained intact and you could see into the maw of the attic where unidentifiable family heirlooms were melted together or burned into nothingness.

Bitsy pointed to the first paragraph. Someone had been badly burned in the fire: Nathan Forrest Jr. That must have been the mountain man's son.

The story emerged as I read the article. Nate, as he was called, was a twenty-five-year-old married mechanic working at the dam. He woke up his young wife in the middle of the night and told her that he smelled smoke. He urged her to call the sheriff while he went to investigate. Apparently, he was worried that someone could be trapped in the house, asleep when the fire broke out, and now passed out from the smoke. He ran from his house, pulling on his work boots. He managed to run into the inferno and get to the top of the stairs before they collapsed beneath him. He was pulled from the wreckage with burns over both of his legs.

It had been assumed by the first responders that Nate had gone rushing in to try to pull my mother out of the house, but Janie Jones was nowhere to be found.

A search for the missing Janie commenced using tracking dogs, volunteers on foot, and boaters. After twelve long hours, Janie Rutledge Jones was found alive. She was pulled out of a small rowboat, adrift in the lake, unconscious. The article stated that she was uninjured, but offered no explanation about the strange fact that she was floating out on the lake in the middle of the night while her home burned to the ground.

The investigation concluded that the fire started in the kitchen and was most likely due to the ancient wiring. Perhaps a spark had gone off inside the wall igniting the cotton batting insulation allowing the fire to take off from there.

I closed my eyes, the images of shifting map lines morphing with hydrangeas and wide summer porches bursting into flames in front of a black night sky. Why was she in the lake while her house burned? Was she trying to escape the fire?

How many things had burned for her that night that she lost her house? I needed to find someone who knew her back then, someone who may be able to answer some of these questions. So far the only person I had met in this town who may have known my mother was that crazy old man wielding a double-barreled shotgun. It wouldn't be pleasant, but I was going to see if I could talk to him again.

I retraced my drive up the switchback roads and climbed the gravel lanes that led to the top of the ridge. Before I left the safety of my get-away vehicle I checked around for a weapon of some kind. I was regretting not buying mace years ago when Georgia had told me to. My only weapon was my cell phone so I kept it in my hand as I hiked up to the abandoned house.

The path looked different this early in the day. It was steamy under the trees in the heat and the sunlight was sharp as it broke through the leaves. The house came into view and I approached it slowly, fully expecting Nathan Forrest to materialize at any minute.

I stood at the edge of the eroded path leading to the front door and called out. “Hello? Mr. Forrest?”

The house looked different in this light too. Instead of menacing it just looked sad. Lonely almost.
Thud!
I wheeled around at the direction of the bang I had just heard expecting—what? For someone to swing down from a tree with a knife in his mouth and an axe in his hand probably. “Mr. Forrest? Are you here?”
Thud!
This time the bang had come from the other side of the house. I was surrounded. I held my cell phone out in front of me, putting it between myself and the monster sound coming out of the trees.