Ciji Ware (6 page)

“You’ve just decided all that and you’re getting married
tomorrow
? I’m impressed. The lead-up to
my
wedding felt like the Bataan Death March.”

Daphne felt a jolt of disappointment at this last revelation.

I
should
know
by
now
that
every
man
I’m even remotely attracted to is either nuptialized
—
or
certifiable!

Corlis laughed, and said, “With Lani’s help, fast as the speed of sound is the only way to go with an event like this.” She put her arm around Daphne’s shoulders. “And now, on to Cousin Maddy’s. Ready for that, my almost-sis?”

“If you can organize Madeline Whitaker as you have your wedding, you
are
Wonder Woman,” Daphne said, unable to resist a sidelong glance at Sim’s left ring finger. It was a large hand, as he was a large man—but it was bereft of jewelry.

Probably
just
another
guy
who
refuses
to
wear
his
wedding
band!

She could just hear him tell people that wearing a ring interfered with squeezing off camera shots, or something. Even so, there was no denying the currents of electricity that had hummed between them when she was playing the harp. However, in the world of professional performers, Daphne had met scores of traveling Lotharios in the mold of the dashing Mr. Hopkins. These were men vaguely dissatisfied with their marriages, but who always opted for the homecoming at the end of a tour. They easily found willing females on the road who provided them with just enough emotional intimacy to ensure that these seductive characters retained permanent membership in the “Have-Their-Cake-and-Eat-It-Too Club,” as one cynic in Daphne’s circle of New York musician-friends put it. Maybe they were great lovers, but rotten prospects for committed relationships. And even if Sim Hopkins was now single, Daphne thought, she’d sworn off traveling men for good.

“Well, are we off?” she asked Corlis brightly. She offered a stiff smile to the photographer, shook hands with Lani Riches, and led the way to their car parked out back.

“I’ll drive,” she announced.

“Great.” Once in the car, Corlis asked slyly, “You think that guy’s still married? With looks like his, he should be in
front
of the camera.”

“He lives in San Francisco and travels for a living, so it’s a nonstarter as far as I’m concerned,” Daphne replied tersely.

“Got it,” Corlis said, with a regretful shrug.

As dusk appeared, Daphne steered the car down the hotel drive, cruised back through the heart of Natchez and out along the bluff, heading upriver. She was doing her best to put the arresting Simon Hopkins and the strange, sudden appearance of his tail-coated mirror image out of her thoughts.

“Where’s Cousin Maddy’s place?” Corlis asked.

“Surely King has warned you about her… ah… shall we say… slightly bizarre abode?”

“He told me that there’s a race as to whether her house or the cliff will collapse into the river first.”

Up ahead, at a bend in the Mississippi, half a bright orange sun hung on the horizon, poised to plunge into the river. “Some years back, the Army Corps of Engineers decided to take out a loop… right over there”—Daphne gestured through the windshield—“to speed up river traffic, they said, claiming the river was rerouting itself anyway. The result of the government’s fooling with Mother Nature is that megatons of water slam against the bluff each year and eat away at the earth on the bottom. Not a cool thing, since ninety-five percent of the city
rests
on the top.”

Corlis peered through the gloom of early evening. “Oh, my God! You weren’t exaggerating. Tell me
that’s
not her house.”

A hundred yards distant, a great, hulking mansion with patches of missing wooden siding and roof shingles perched at the very edge of the bluff. Daphne parked and locked the car next to King’s Jaguar in the Whitaker driveway to the rear. The two women strode toward the large, once-graceful structure whose front porch tilted alarmingly.

“This place may be crumbling around her ears, but Cousin Maddy always leaves a light on the veranda,” Daphne said happily as they walked up the front steps in the lengthening darkness.

Propping up the second story—barely—were towering Grecian-style columns whose peeling white paint curled like the skin from a banana. Not five feet from the outer edge of the ground-floor veranda that encircled most of the house, the front lawn halted abruptly and a sheer precipice plunged toward the riverbed five hundred yards below.

“Is it safe for anyone to
occupy
this place?” Corlis gasped, paling at the sight in front of them. “Half the cliff must have eroded,” she marveled, peering apprehensively over the edge into the void.

“It’s safe enough,” Daphne allowed. “At the moment, at least—while we taxpayers foot the bill to shore up the base of the promontory and keep historic houses like Maddy’s from careening down the slope. No one will buy her place, of course. She can’t get a bank to loan on it, and she can’t afford to sink money into maintaining it anymore—since it may well tumble down the bluff in the end.”

“What happens now?” the television reporter queried, concern creasing her forehead. “How does the poor woman make ends meet? King told me that there’s no Mr. Whitaker, right?”

“Sadly, not anymore. Maddy was my first music teacher and has taught harp to half the females in Natchez. As you will soon see, Madeline Clayton Whitaker’s a remarkable woman.”

However, Corlis and Daphne were forced to postpone their first encounter with their hostess. Cousin Maddy, King explained upon greeting them at the sagging front door, had gone off on an important errand having to do with last-minute floral arrangements for the church. Upon his arrival he had found a hastily scribbled note directing them to eat heartily of the red beans and rice she’d left warming on the stove. Three cats swirled around three pairs of ankles as the trio made its way through a darkened front foyer toward the lighted kitchen.

“Meet Harpo, Chico, and Groucho,” King announced for Corlis’s benefit. “Don’t let ’em fool you, though. I just fed the beasts, so ignore their pathetic mewing.” He pointed to a black cat with a white tuxedo front. “Watch out for that one… Groucho. He does this little bitey thing when he gets annoyed.”

Daphne set her suitcase on the floor’s wide cypress planking and gazed into a kitchen whose sink was piled high with unwashed dishes. In the hallway, she glanced at a sideboard littered with a hodgepodge of two months’ worth of half-opened mail, a cut-crystal ashtray heaped with paper clips, and a priceless Fabergé egg on a gold stand. A brief survey of the front parlor revealed Maddy’s antique harp cheek by jowl with a larger modern one, and both surrounded by a jumble of exquisite old furniture and piles of musical scores. Newspapers and magazines were scattered everywhere. The mere sight of such chaos exhausted her.

“Would y’all be insulted if I just fell into bed?” Daphne asked, feeling suddenly depleted. “I’m still stuffed from lunch and I can hardly keep my eyes open.”

“Must be too much fresh air, Ms. New Yorker,” King teased. “Sure, honey. Hit the sack. I’ve assigned you the bedroom next to the sleeping porch. You remember, turn right at the top of the stairs.”

Suitcase in hand, Daphne headed straight up the staircase, passing family portraits that stared down on her from high on the walls. A sketch of a sinister-looking hawk—
Falco
Peregrinus
—purportedly by John James Audubon, hung crookedly at the top of the stairs. The drawing had been given to some member of the family when Audubon briefly lived in Natchez, and its presence suddenly made Daphne think of the handsome photographer again.

Heading down the shadowy hall, she studiously avoided peeking through open doors at bedrooms she knew to be chockablock with upholstery sorely in need of refurbishment, rain-stained wall coverings, and threadbare draperies. She quickly got ready for bed, doing her level best to avoid any mental review of Cousin Maddy’s disordered lifestyle.

What was there to say? The woman tolerated clutter. Feng shui and simplicity were definitely not part of her lexicon. Who could be critical when they knew about the life-and-death issues this wise and wonderful woman contended with the last four years? End of story.

Madeline Whitaker was one of the dearest, kindest people in the entire world, and that was all that mattered, Daphne considered sleepily, sinking between clean but wrinkled sheets. Her thoughts drifted as she closed her eyes and heaved a grateful sigh that she and her harp had arrived safely. Good thing she could store it in the locked Explorer, for there didn’t seem an inch of space left in Maddy’s front parlor. For some reason, a French nursery song sprang to mind. It was one that Maddy used to sing to her when she was a child visiting during the summer and first learning to play the harp. She softly sang the words to the familiar melody as she snuggled into a comfortable position beneath the ancient satin coverlet.

Frè-re Jac-ques… Frè-re Jac-ques…

Dormez vous? Dormez vous?

Sonnez les mat-in-es… sonnez les mat-in-es

Ding, dang, dong… ding, dang, dong…

And despite the French rhyme’s message to wake up, she slept.

***

A grandfather clock downstairs tolled three chimes, its lingering tones echoed by two French timepieces sounding the hour—one of which had apparently decided it was four o’clock. Daphne swam to the surface of consciousness but somehow couldn’t force herself to open her eyes. Disoriented by the unfamiliar night sounds, she tried to remember where she was.

Her apartment in New York? Juilliard? Her parents’ house in the Lower Garden District?

Somewhere, she could hear a harp being played faintly, as if someone was practicing in a far-off rehearsal room in Lincoln Center. No, she thought groggily, she was in Natchez. At Bluff House. Was Cousin Maddy having a sleepless night?

The delicate staccato roused her to a more conscious state and she sat bolt upright. The harp was playing the same French nursery song that she’d been remembering right before she fell asleep. She could hear the strings being plucked with precision, just as if accompanying a chorus of little children in ages past… just as
she
had heard it played and sung by Madeline Whitaker some twenty-five years earlier, in an antebellum mansion on the edge of a bluff overlooking the mighty river.

Frè-re Jac-ques
…
Frè-re Jac-ques
…

Daphne grabbed her robe, crept toward the stair landing, and looked down. Cousin Maddy’s antique instrument was usually woefully out of tune, she remembered suddenly. But not
this
night.

Slowly, she advanced down several stairs until she had a clearer view through the front foyer and into the sitting room. Moonlight streamed through the windows that faced the river, illuminating with remarkable clarity the parlor and its peeling wallpaper. Daphne caught sight of the first harp she had ever touched. The antique instrument had fewer strings than its neighboring modern version, and had never produced a very robust sound. In fact, when it was properly in tune, as it obviously was this night, Daphne would have recognized its tinkling, music-box quality blindfolded.

Arriving at the foot of the stairs, the classically trained harpist grabbed the newel post and simply stared, awestruck, at a harp whose strings were vibrating—all by themselves.

***

In the Lovell Room at Monmouth Plantation, Sim Hopkins awoke slowly, realizing in some distant sector of his brain that it was far too early even to stalk Audubon’s blasted birds. After a few moments, he realized what had caused him to stir. He could distinctly hear the sound of harp music tinkling through the planks of the thick cypress door to his elegant rented bedroom. He glanced at the coral-colored silk canopy engulfing his massive four-poster plantation bed and listened intently. These were not the earthy, bluesy chords that that angelic-looking young woman had played in Monmouth’s double parlor the previous afternoon, but rather, a child’s lullaby plucked on an instrument known for making listeners think they’d died and gone to heaven. Surely, the harpist with a set of legs that just didn’t quit couldn’t possibly be rehearsing for her brother’s wedding at the ungodly hour of—

Sim glanced at his watch, the only item he wore to bed. Its luminous dial told him it was ten minutes past three. He reached for the velour robe draped over the bottom of the mattress and swiftly padded to the door. Oddly, the music didn’t grow louder when he crossed the threshold and moved toward the hotel stairwell. He descended the carpeted steps to the front hall and stood at the wide entrance to the parlor where he had leaned against the door frame and listened to Daphne Duvallon’s sensuous rendition of “Georgia on My Mind.”