Not Quite Right (A Lowcountry Mystery) (Lowcountry Mysteries Book 6) (9 page)

Mechanisms won’t keep out ghosts, and I have my doubts about voodoo or its practitioners, but being alone, the locks make me feel the slightest bit better anyway.

I try not to focus on the fact that no one, except maybe Henry’s ghost, is in the house, and I trudge back to the kitchen, pour myself some coffee, and sit back down at the table with Charlotta’s journals. I pull a random one out of the pile, check the date on the first page, and decide to see what’s going on in her teenage life—she and James had gotten romantic around the ages of fourteen, but in a bumbling, childlike way. The history lover in me is fascinated by the ways in which fourteen-year-old children are both more and less worldly than kids today. Not that I have a ton of experience with kids today.

Teenage Charlotta had been dreamy-eyed but cautious, all too aware that her father would never approve of her feelings for James. They delighted in spending time together, she and James, and touching hands and cheeks. No kissing, and certainly no talk of intimacy beyond that without marriage.

Of course, we know they did engage in nonmarital intimacy, and the leap beyond what was acceptable makes me want to know her all the more. She was a brave girl, Charlotta Drayton, following her heart instead of custom, and it had cost her—in the terms of the time—a future.
 

Frustration that the journals stop before we know what happens to James runs hot in my veins. Had she ever regretted her choices? Had they ever seen each other again? Did she know what had become of him? Had he known about the baby?

They are questions that will probably always elude me, and nothing pisses me off more.

Sighing, I flip forward a few pages to the days after her fifteenth birthday and stop on an entry that takes place in the late summer:

16 August, 1899

The heat is so suffocating that there’s no benefit to being indoors. The entire family has taken to sleeping out on the piazza on pallets, which means little chance of my sneaking away to see James, but the slightest breeze through the pecan and oak trees brings immeasurable relief. It’s afternoon now, when the heat becomes visible in waves hovering above the packed dirt on the lane and the grasses in the field.

James and I meet across the river, some distance from my family home, toward the place that once belonged to the Middleton family. They still own the land, I suppose, but the Union army burned most of the house. When I think about the marvelous library the Middletons had amassed, volumes brought from all over the world, my heart feels its loss. Why would men burn books? Why ruin valuable antiques and put a beautiful home to the torch, instead of using those things to their advantage?

So much about the war makes little sense to my girlish head. At least, that’s why Charles Jr. says I don’t understand—because men do things when their blood boils that their heads can’t make sense of, either. He doesn’t know much about women, I don’t think, because sometimes the unfairness of this world makes me so hot I’d like to strip naked and swim in the river like a wild child, just to show people the angels won’t rain down hellfire because of it.

I don’t see why God would put people on this earth and make them different colors just to keep us apart. We’re all his children, that’s what the Good Book says. We’re to love one another—who’s to say what kind of love he means? My daddy? My mama? The preacher? Surely not.

All I know is that the pure, undiluted joy that pummels me at the sight of James rowing across our little branch of the Cooper River cannot be wrong. It cannot be a sin to love another person so much that you’d do anything for them, that you’d die to keep them from hurting.
 

“I’d rather live alone on this plantation my whole life than pretend to love someone other than you,” I told James this afternoon, my eyes so starry he blurred around the edges.

He’s so beautiful. I don’t think he believes how he appears to me, no matter how many times I tell him. It vexes me how no one else can see it—not Bessie and certainly not Charles Jr., though he loves James almost as much as I do. As if such a thing were possible.

“I don’t want to think about you alone, Charlie.” He always calls me Charlie. It’s his particular name for me, regardless of the fact that Papa and Bessie often shorten my name to Lottie in affection.

I think it’s because of his mama, though he doesn’t much like to talk about her.
 

His mouth turned down at the edges as he contemplated the future drawing nearer to both of us by the day. I longed to turn his lips up into a smile. I long to do other things with his lips, things Mama would flog me for thinking, but there’s no way to stop. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t.

“You’d rather think of me loving someone else? Even if it’s pretend?”

“No. I don’t want to think about tomorrow at all.”

I know James wants to go to school up north. He doesn’t want to be a worker, or a sharecropper, or anything else that colored people are allowed to do around here now that the North won the war. He’s smart. He has ambition, and I love him for it. But I know it will take him away.

He knows it, too.

What he doesn’t know is that I’m going to run away with him. No one does. It’s a secret, warm in my heart like the flicker of a new candle growing stronger with each breath of oxygen I provide. I want to hold it there for a while longer, nurture it into a fire so strong and so bright that no amount of blustering or tears can snuff it out.

“Let’s not think about tomorrow, then. Let’s talk about right now,” I told this boy in the tattered clothes, this boy with a smile that could light up the whole lowcountry if people only took the time to see it. I scooted closer, turning my face up to his with a smile that came from a new part of me—a womanly part, one that wanted things I didn’t understand and couldn’t name, but James saw it.

He sucked in a quick breath, his cheeks flushing. His silky, dark eyes clung to my face, hungry, and one hand lifted to cup my cheek, the pad of his thumb running along my lower lip.
 

A thrill ran through me over and over, like a strike of lightning or that moment you get away with filching a hot bit of bread and honey without Lillie noticing. I struggled to breathe. We shouldn’t have been touching. We shouldn’t have been sitting that close. We shouldn’t have become friends at all, and it was unnatural, according to most folks, for our feelings to have stretched beyond that.

But they had, long ago. My feelings for James have always been huge, too big to even think about holding on to or tying down—they fly where they wish, but they’re always wrapped tight around the two of us.

But today—oh, today! I can still feel the press of his lips against mine, the glorious meeting of our mouths in a way my body and his seemed to agree upon and understand. They still feel swollen and hot with the wonder of it all. I can’t wait to do it again and again and again. He is my future, he must be. A life without him would be too awful to bear, and I think—I hope—that Mama and Papa wish for me to be happy.

At any rate, they have Charles Jr. and Bessie to take over the Hall. If they won’t give me their blessing, at least it will not break their hearts when I leave.

I have to blow out the candle before Bessie comes in to bed. She’s been out in the parlor reading for hours, but I hear her shuffling around now. She mustn’t find out about James or about my plans. No one can, not before it is too late for them to stop me from leaving. It is already too late to put a halt to my loving him. I exalt in the fact that nothing can do that, not in this world or the next.

I put down the journal with tears in my eyes, touched by Charlotta’s youth and passion, and devastated by the benefit of my hindsight. Even without knowing what parted them in the end—whether it was the pregnancy, the baby, her father, his mother, or a combination of the whole mess—I know her statement about nothing in the world being able to put a stop to her love will not turn out to be true. Still, it’s terribly romantic.

And as all truly romantic stories are, horribly sad at the same time.

I need to know what happened to the two of them. If Charlotta’s journals end in 1905, Mama Lottie had likely still been living. Her ghost, at least the one that appeared as a grown woman, seemed to be well into her sixties. If Charlotta couldn’t tell me what had become of James, perhaps Mama Lottie could.

If I ever see her again. And if she’s willing to divulge painful family secrets to a strange woman she doesn’t seem to like all that much.

It’s hard to say which is the bigger “if.”

A knock on the front door startles me out of the past and dumps me in the present, which feels dreary and monotonous after Charlotta’s lush descriptions. I wipe my cheeks on a dishtowel before letting Leo, who’s laden with a couple of paper bags and a pizza box, back into the house, but he gives me a look anyway.

“Good Lord, Graciela. You know those people are already dead, right? Isn’t your grams the one who used to get on people for cryin’ at funerals?” He thinks for a moment, going ahead of me into the kitchen to set down his burdens. “Only reason to bawl over the dead is if ya think they’re dancin’ with the devil. And even then, at least they’re still dancin’. Was that it?”

The memory of Grams and her way with words makes me crack a smile. I nod, lifting up the pizza box lid to find half-pepperoni and half-sausage. Half my favorite, half Leo’s. My smile grows. We might only have pizza from a gas station in Heron Creek, but that doesn’t mean it’s not damn good pizza. The only thing that would make it taste better is if they started delivering.

Leo snatches two giant pieces of sausage, and I put a slice of pepperoni on a plate, then hand one to him, even though his first slice is already gone. “Coke?”

“Sure.”

“Kind?” I ask, following the ridiculous custom of having to verify what sort of ‘coke’ a person wants in the South. In Iowa, it’s all pop.

“Dr. Pepper?” Leo requests, not missing a beat.

“Of course. Only diet, though, because pregnant women.”
 

He makes a face but takes the can from me anyway. “So what were you reading that has you so verklempt?”

“Oh, nothing. Just silly girl stuff.”

“Feelings.” He gives an exaggerated shudder and ducks away from my swat. “I’m going to go seal up your windows and change the filter on the furnace.” Leo wipes his mouth and dumps his plate in the sink, then grabs another slice for the road.

“Okay.”

I down a second slice and clean the plates, then put out some hamburger meat for dinner. Maybe we can make spaghetti when Amelia gets home.

The journals wait for me on the table, and I’ve lost myself for about three minutes into a different, more recent one when the sound of voices in the front hall distracts me.

A glance at my watch tells me time has slipped away. Saturdays are short at the library, and Mr. Freedman often takes pity on Amelia and lets her off early when she’s alone.

She’s not by herself now, though, and by the sound of it, I’m not going to enjoy the company she’s brought along with her.

B
rick Drayton, for all his faults, has been good to my cousin. I repeat these words a couple of times to myself and manage to plaster on a smile by the time the two of them pop into the kitchen, laughing. They stop when they see me but can’t wipe the smiles off their faces, and underneath the happiness flows a river of relief. It’s as though there’s something they get out of being together that can’t be found elsewhere in their lives. Jealousy spikes in my blood. It’s unfair to want to be the one who’s there for Millie, and I don’t even mean it.

Like Charlotta and her description of her first kiss with James, it’s as though my body reacts without asking permission from my good sense. I don’t begrudge either of them happiness, honestly. It’s just awfully hard to sit and watch it when my own happiness, with a different Drayton, perches on a precarious ledge.

“Oh, hi, Grace.” Amelia’s eyes trail to the table, then narrow with interest. “Have you been reading? Did you find out anything?”

“Nothing we can use, I don’t think.” I do my best to keep the sadness off my face. It’s the last thing either of them needs. “Hi, Brick.”

“Graciela.”

“I ran into Brick at the library. He says he has some stuff to tell us about the Middletons so I figured we might as well hear it at the same time.” Her gaze lands on the pizza. “Oooh, pizza!”

She flips up the lid and then frowns. “Who’s the sausage for?”

“Leo brought it. He’s fixing some of the windows that are leaking.”

“That is so sweet. I’ve been half-frozen the last three mornings.”

“You could have said something to me,” Brick offers, sounding slightly offended. The look he shoots my direction leaves me blushing, as though he’s wondering if I’m finding a way to get over his brother so soon.

Amelia laughs, reaching out to put a hand on his forearm as though they’ve been friends for years. “Brick, honey, please. You’re good at so many things, but I have a hard time imagining you’re very handy.”