Ciji Ware (7 page)

A shaft of moonlight slanted through a window, illuminating one corner of the Empire-period sitting room. Sim’s breath caught when he saw that the harp’s strings were still vibrating as the haunting melody faded into silence. What surprised him even more, however, was that the stool next to the harp was vacant, and there was not another soul to be seen in the room.

***

The following morning, Daphne sat alone in the cluttered kitchen at Bluff House, sipping a steaming cup of chicory coffee laced with hot milk and trying her best not to think about the odd scene she’d witnessed in Cousin Maddy’s parlor at three in the morning.

Or
had
she?
she wondered. Maybe all the stress lately had suddenly caused her to sleepwalk? Perhaps she’d merely had one of those dreams that seem
so
real the next day?

Groucho, belying his name, was peacefully curled up on a nearby kitchen chair, snoozing in the morning sunshine that filtered through the dusty window above the sink. Earlier, in response to the cat’s plaintive meows, Daphne had fed him a few morsels of chicken she’d filched from a half-eaten sandwich found in Maddy’s nearly empty refrigerator. While she was musing about the previous night’s events, the kitchen door opened.

“Mornin’, darlin’ girl! I cannot tell you how
wonderful
it is to have y’all under my dilapidated roof.” Madeline Clayton Whitaker burst into the room, her arms full of groceries. “Just dashed out to the Piggly Wiggly, since all I had ’round here were those ol’ red beans and rice and half a chicken sandwich. Not exactly fancy fare to serve the bride and groom on the mornin’ of their weddin’, do you think?” She set the bulging grocery bags on the kitchen table and bent to engulf Daphne in an enormous hug. “Now stand up, and let me look at you!”

Daphne rose and embraced her cousin heartily in return. “Oh. Maddy! It’s great to see you too!” She nodded in Groucho’s direction, and said solemnly, “The chicken sandwich is history.”

Daphne gave her sixty-seven-year-old cousin an indulgent once-over, noting her faded denim skirt and flowered blouse. Untidy wisps of dark hair threaded with silver drifted alongside her lined cheeks. Maddy looked as if she’d set out for the Piggly Wiggly without once glancing into a mirror.

Despite Madeline Whitaker’s disheveled appearance, however, the tall, erect woman exuded a wonderful
presence
, Daphne thought, smiling into her cousin’s warm, amber-colored eyes. Maddy radiated an aura that said here was a person who had known better days, when life was not burdened with cares and tragedy. Yet, she carried all that had befallen her with remarkable dignity and grace.

“Look how absolutely gorgeous you are!” Daphne’s first harp teacher crowed, extending hands that sported fingertip calluses that were equally as thick as Daphne’s. “I’ll just bet people in New York mistake you for… you know! That fabulous actress with the halo of blond curls who looks and talks like an
angel
…” She shook her head in frustration. “
You
know the one I’m talkin’ about… Michelle somebody.”

“Michelle Pfeiffer?” Daphne offered obligingly, thinking to herself that it had been a long time since Maddy had been to the movies.

“
Yes!
Exactly. You’ve heard people say that to you before, haven’t you, darlin’? She’s an
angel
on screen—and so are
you
! Now, what can I get you for breakfast? Bacon? Eggs?
Pain
perdu?
” she offered, referring to a wonderful Southern version of French toast.

“No thanks, Maddy. I’ve had your delicious coffee and some toast. But let me help you put all this away before I head for First Pres. I have a ten o’clock rehearsal with the organist.”

“Don’t be silly,” Maddy said, with an airy wave of her arm. “I’ll do it later. Let’s get you a second cup of coffee and sit down a spell. How was your trip down from New York?”

Daphne thought briefly of the career disaster awaiting her return to Manhattan, as well as of the unwelcome sight of Jack Ebert at the New Orleans airport and the near mishap with her harp, but decided not to mention either disturbing event. Instead she said, “As you probably noticed when you got home last night, I was totally pooped after I got here and went straight up to bed.”

“Well,
good.
You deserve it, workin’ as hard as you do up there. Was your bed all right, sugar?” Maddy asked, suddenly anxious.

“I slept like a stone most of the night,” Daphne reassured her quickly, adding, “But you know… the oddest thing happened.” She hesitated, and then continued. “About three o’clock in the morning, I could have sworn I heard a harp playing. It wasn’t you, was it?”

Madeline, coffeepot in hand, paused midway to Daphne’s cup and gazed at her houseguest speculatively, but all she said was “Really?”

“At least that’s what I
thought
I heard. I came downstairs, but… well… no one was in the parlor.” She held out her coffee cup. “It must have been some wacky dream.”

“Maybe you heard the family ghost playin’ the harp,” Maddy said matter-of-factly, pouring a dark brown stream of coffee from the spout of the chipped, enamelware pot.

“Oh, c’mon.” Daphne laughed. “I’m not a tourist, remember, and you’re not on house tour duty this morning.”

“Tease ’bout it, if you want to, but surely I told you, when you were a little girl, ’bout my family’s harp-playin’ specter? You never heard the story when you were stayin’ here?”

“No, never. Who’s it supposed to be?” Daphne said, taking a sip from her cup.

“Well,” Maddy said with enthusiasm, seating herself across the kitchen table from her younger cousin, “according to family lore, your namesake—”

“
My
namesake! I thought you said this was a Clayton family deal.”

“Daphne Drake
Whitaker
Clayton. You’d have to look at the family genealogy chart to keep it all straight ’cause we’ve had cousins marryin’ cousins and I don’t rightly know
what
all. But way, way back in the mists of time, Daphne Drake Whitaker—later she married a Clayton, which is
my
maiden name—fell in love with a real
cad
.”

“Sounds kinda familiar,” Daphne joked ruefully.

Maddy smiled in sympathy and continued with her story. “He was a French aristocrat, or something, tagging along with the duc d’Orléans who’d been exiled, for a time, to America in the aftermath of the French Revolution.” She paused for breath and then waved at Daphne. “Well,
you
know all this history stuff, but, anyway—”

“Wait a minute,” Daphne interrupted. The hair on her arms was standing on end. “You were born a
Clayton.
How could this Daphne also be a Whitaker like Cousin Marcus and Grandmother Kingsbury?” And how strange, she mused, that she had just been telling Corlis yesterday about the young duc d’Orléans’s celebrated visit to Natchez.

“The ghost on my direct side of the family is also considered a Whitaker because, like I said, my husband Marcus and I were
cousins
several generations back—like half the folks in Natchez,” Maddy said with amused exasperation.

“Oh,” Daphne said in a small voice.

Warming to her tale, Maddy continued, “Your namesake, the other Daphne, met this Frenchman when she was an impressionable girl and was totally smitten by the scoundrel. He promised to return from New Orleans to marry her, and she reportedly pined away for the bounder till her dyin’ day, playin’ the harp and waitin’ for her faithless lover to return. Such a waste.”

“And did he ever come back to Natchez?” Daphne asked, unwilling to admit, even to herself, that her heart was pounding erratically and her pulse was racing.

“Well, I don’t rightly know,” Maddy said thoughtfully. “Clearly, she finally married someone else… but apparently she’s still playin’ her harp in the parlor in the middle of the night!” she pronounced triumphantly.

“Do you know who she married?”

“Oh, of course I do, ’cause it caused a lot of talk at the time. Daphne Drake Whitaker eventually married Aaron Clayton—a Yankee, my great-grandmother said he was—and musta had children by him, ’cause that’s where my daddy got his name, Drake Clayton the Fourth.”

“Now, tell me the truth,” Daphne demanded. “You
live
in Bluff House. Have you ever heard your harp playing by itself in the middle of the night?”

“I thought I heard it once,” Madeline said with a pensive, faraway look. “Right after Marcus and Clayton passed on… but, of course, I was not myself much durin’ that time…”

“Oh… sweetie.” Daphne was suddenly contrite that their bantering conversation had led to this subject. Maddy’s grief over the double tragedy of losing a husband and a son in the same year had thrown her into a serious bout of depression requiring medication and a brief period of hospitalization. “What person
wouldn’t
have thought she heard—”

“But a tour guide over at Rosalie
swears
she’s heard Daphne Whitaker playin’ her ghostly harp in the parlor there,” Maddy rushed on, obviously not upset by their discussion of ghostly matters. “And believe me, she’s a prominent member of the D.A.R. The tour guide, I mean… not the ghost!” Maddy laughed at her own joke, which completely assured Daphne that her adored cousin’s spirits were fully restored.

“Have other people seen this supposed ghost?” Daphne asked skeptically.

“Oh, lots. The cleaning woman at Monmouth says she heard a harp playin’ by itself a while back, and one of the gardeners at another plantation house upriver, that has a harp in the upstairs music room, vows on a stack of Bibles he hears it through the open windows every spring—”

Daphne stood abruptly, carried her coffee cup to the sink, and rinsed it out. “Well, this flesh-and-blood harpist better skedaddle out of here,” she announced firmly. She’d been overtired and overwrought from the accumulation of stress in her life these days. Proof? The brief but bizarre moment at Monmouth Plantation when Simon Hopkins seemed to morph into a high-booted horseman. She’d seriously begun to wonder if long-term anxiety and sleep deprivation weren’t playing very strange tricks on her. Smiling to Maddy in farewell, she silently vowed to get lots of rest and plenty of fresh air during her visit to Natchez.

“Well, I’m outta here,” Daphne declared with as much good cheer as she could muster.

“Don’t forget, angel girl, you and Corlis have beauty parlor appointments at Anruss Salon at one o’clock,” Maddy reminded her.

“
You’re
the angel,” Daphne pronounced, kissing her older cousin on the top of her untidy head.

Within minutes, she had pointed the Ford Explorer down Clifton Avenue and headed for Pearl Street in downtown Natchez and the magnificent, pillared First Presbyterian Church. A janitor kindly helped her extricate the bulky harp from the car, transport it upstairs to the balcony overlooking the sanctuary of the Federal-style church, and position it next to the organ.

It took Daphne some fifty minutes to tune the harp strings, by which time Avery Johns, the octogenarian organist, arrived. Then the two musicians swiftly ran through the wedding program before the floral designer arrived to decorate the church.

Later at the nearby Anruss Salon, Daphne and Corlis happily submitted to having their hair done, along with manicures and pedicures. At three fifteen in the back room, Daphne donned a sage-green silk dress with a flowing skirt and matching silk shoes. She swiftly touched up her makeup, and emerged to wish Corlis good luck.

“Same to you, sweetie pie,” Corlis said, swathed in a black cotton dressing gown. “You look drop-dead fabulous! Was everything okay with your harp? King told me about Ebert trying to hijack it at the airport yesterday.”

“The harp loves being back where it’s warm,” Daphne said, her banter belying the tension that gripped her stomach whenever she thought about Jack Ebert’s sudden appearance.

“Well, I love you for schlepping that mammoth thing all the way down here,” Corlis pronounced, kissing Daphne lightly on the cheek. “And I can’t tell you how much it means to me to become your sister-in-law today—not to mention King’s wife.”

“Me too, you,” Daphne murmured. She hugged Corlis and grazed her cheek against a gigantic hair roller. By this time, both women had tears welling at the rims of their eyes. “Now can I claim your Aunt Marge as kin?” Daphne asked with a watery smile. “She and Cousin Maddy are the greatest, aren’t they?”

“Since it would appear neither one of us did too well in the parental department,” Corlis said, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye with a freshly manicured forefinger, “I’ll share one Marge McCullough with you for one Madeline Whitaker—what do you say?”

“It’s a done deal!” Daphne replied, sniffing inelegantly as she reached for a tissue from a nearby dispenser. The women gazed quietly at each other for a long moment.