Summer in the South (25 page)

“I can’t believe you would ask her! My husband would never ask me. He would just go.”

“Young women don’t know how lucky they are nowadays. Young men are so—
accommodating.
Why, I don’t think Edgar has ever so much as made his own sandwich!”

Will continued to stare at Ava, a playful expression on his face. It was obvious that he was enjoying putting her on the spot. “So,” he said. “Do you mind?”

“Hell, no. Not as long as you win. Not as long as you bring home a big pot of money.”

He laughed, although the other women in the room seemed less certain of her answer. “It’ll be late when I finish. Sometimes we play until the wee hours.” Ava was afraid he would cross the room to kiss her but instead he winked and said, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Ava said. “You do that.”

Fanny walked with him to the kitchen. A moment later she returned, rubbing her hands together briskly, and resumed her seat. The conversation in the room, which had fallen to a dull hum, rose now to a low roar.

The blush wine was having its effect. Looking around the room, Ava noted several red noses and glowing complexions. Some of the women who had seemed staid and conservative when she first met them were now giggling like schoolgirls.

Ava remembered how, when she first came to Woodburn, she’d been intimidated by these women. And now, oddly, she felt at ease among them. Maybe it was the cozy, lamp-lit room or the Singapore Slings. Whatever the reason, Ava felt a sense of fellowship here that she would not have imagined possible. It was pleasant to envision herself years from now, sitting in a room like this, drinking blush wine and gossiping about husbands and investments, a confident, mature woman with a settled life and a large group of female friends. Maybe even children. And a handsome, accommodating husband who saw to it that she was not disturbed by the unpleasantness of life but instead kept cloistered like a princess in an ivory tower.

Ava had a sudden dazzling vision of this other self, the Ava she might become.

And then it was gone.

T
he investment club members were growing raucous. They had moved on, embarrassingly, from talk of accommodating younger men to talk of sex.

“That’s right,” Weesie Hartman shouted. “I know when I hear Edgar doing his impression of Maurice Chevalier singing ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls,’ I’m in for it whether I want it or not.”

The others hooted and covered their mouths with their hands.

“Look at Ava. She’s blushing,” Fanny said.

“More wine, anybody?” Ava said.

“Young folks don’t like to think about old folks getting frisky, but we do!”

“Some of us are widows,” Alice said. “Some of us have been widows so long we don’t remember what frisky means.”

“You’re never too old for frisky!”

“What’s your definition of frisky?”

“What’s your definition of old?”

“Born ten years before Moses,” Alice said.

“Getting long in the tooth,” Josephine said.

“I don’t know why y’all are talking about being old,” Fanny said, giving her head a little shake. “I don’t feel any different now than I did when I was sixteen years old.” Josephine snorted and Fanny exclaimed, “Well, I don’t.”

“Do you want to know what old feels like?” Clara said, looking around the room. “Old is going to get your annual mammogram and discovering that the X-ray tech is someone you taught in school—
fifty
years ago.”

“Don’t you just love those annual mammograms?” Cheryl said.

“My husband said, ‘What does it feel like?’ and I said, ‘It feels like laying your boob on a cold garage floor and having someone back over it with the car.’ ”

“I’m just standing there with my arm over my head,” Clara continued. “Squashed between two plates, and the lady looks at me and says, ‘Miss McGann, is that you?’ And I said, ‘Mary Montgomery, is that you?’ And she said, ‘Yes’m, you taught me world history back in high school.’ And I’m trying to remember if I’d given her an A or an F because suddenly it seemed real important.”

The room exploded in laughter and Ava rose and took a stack of plates into the kitchen. Maitland was standing at the counter mixing up a batch of his homemade mayonnaise. He was wearing his
Kitchen Bitch
apron.

“What’s going on?” he said. “Do y’all need me to make up some more of those little sandwiches?” Above the bib of his apron, his red face shone happily.

“I don’t think so. I think the meeting is winding down.” Ava put her hands behind her and pulled herself up on the counter, her feet dangling, looking around the cheery room. There was something soothing and intimate about a kitchen, the heart of the house, the place where families gather around a table to break bread and forget their differences, if only for a short while.

The last time she’d seen Jake Woodburn he’d been standing in his mother’s kitchen. She had not run into him since that day, and it seemed odd to the point where she had begun to wonder if he was avoiding her. And then she decided that he
was
avoiding her, and although she mentally shrugged her shoulders and washed her hands of him, she could not help but feel a vague sense of disappointment, too.

Maitland held the bowl of mayonnaise up for her to taste.

“Now that is good,” Ava said. “You could bottle it.”

He seemed pleased. “Do you think so?” he said.

“I do.”

“I put a little stone-ground mustard in this batch, and I think it kicks up the taste a notch.”

“Definitely.”

He spooned the mayonnaise into a mason jar and carefully labeled it. Watching his meticulous preparations, Ava said, “Uncle Mait, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“You can ask me anything, Sugar. I’m pretty much an open book.”

Ava looked at her dangling feet. She traced the outline of the tiles in the air with her toes. “Why did it take you and Fanny so long to marry?”

He continued to smile, but his hands, she noted, shook with a delicate agitation as he put the mason jar down. Something dark, an expression of fear or remorse, passed quickly across his face, and was gone. He chuckled and shook his head, his florid face shining.

“Penance,” he said.

S
he couldn’t stop thinking of the words. Sometimes late at night when the work was slow, when she reached an impasse and the story felt heavy and cumbersome, she lay down on the bed and traced her fingers over the delicate carving.
Help me.

Who had carved those words?

She felt certain it was Charlie Woodburn.

When she showed Will, he remarked scornfully, “That bed was built at Longford around the time of Napoleon. Do you know how many people have slept there? How many could have scrawled that?” His late-afternoon good cheer had evaporated the minute she mentioned Charlie. He strode angrily around the room, picking up items on the tables and setting them down abruptly. It was so unusual, this outburst, that at first Ava could do nothing but watch in astonishment.

“Why are you so angry?” she said.

“Because you make something out of nothing. You imagine things.” He put his hands on the foot of the bed, leaning over so she couldn’t see his face. Distantly they could hear the tinkling of barware as Toddy Time began. When he looked up again his face was calm, impassive. “Even if it was Charlie,” he said evenly. “How do you know it wasn’t the ravings of a man sunk in alcohol and depression?”

“I
don’t
know,” she said. “I don’t know that.”

“Then why are you implying that it’s something more sinister?”

“I’m not implying anything. I’m just curious as to who carved it. And if it was Charlie, why did he carve it?”

“Someone’s been filling your head with rubbish.”

They were coming dangerously close to something. They stared at each other. Ava sat against the headboard, her feet curled under her. He stood, leaning his shoulder against the bedpost.

She said, “I had lunch with Jake Woodburn.”

“So I heard.”

“Is that what this is about?”

He pushed himself off the bed and went over to the window, staring out at the garden.

She said in a reasonable voice, “Jake didn’t tell me anything. In fact, he didn’t want to talk about Charlie at all. He has a rather misplaced sense of loyalty when it comes to your family.”

“I don’t want to talk about Jake,” he said.

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

A hummingbird hung suspended outside the window. From the library came the muffled sounds of conversation and laughter.

She had always been attracted to men who held a certain command over her, a stern masculine authority that made her willingly abdicate her own power. Anyone who knew her, besides Michael and Jacob, would have been surprised by this. People invariably described her as “strong-willed” and “self-sufficient,” but it was an act on her part. A certain masculine tone of voice, a flicker of disdain, and she would go as limp and docile as a child. Michael and Jacob had had this manner of indifferent authority, and Will, she realized now, watching him turn and walk to the door, had it, too.

“They’re waiting for us,” he said.

“I was just curious about the carving,” she said, trying to make him see her point. “I just wondered who might have done it.”

He mumbled something she couldn’t understand and went out, and it wasn’t until later, as she drifted off to sleep, that she realized he had said, “For all I know, it could have been you.”

Golden Girl

A
va continued to work on her novel every evening, although, in light of her argument with Will over Charlie Woodburn, the work took on a more sinister, secretive air. She knew now that she could never show him the novel. She could never openly betray his trust or that of Josephine, Fanny, and Maitland. And yet she couldn’t stop writing.

She had begun to work in earnest now, sitting down at her computer every evening when the house was quiet. If the other members of the house knew of her nocturnal endeavors, they said nothing, other than to tease her about her new habit of sleeping late. She didn’t care. Nothing mattered but the work, flowing between her fingers and the computer screen like an electric current. At night the house was hushed but for the periodic hum of the air-conditioning and the creaking of the ancient timbers settling around her. Caught up in the tragic story of Charlie Woodburn, she was unaware of time. Hours seemed to pass in a twinkling, and she was often stunned to look up and see that the bedside clock read four a.m. Often as she wrote, she became gradually aware of noises in the house—doors closing, footsteps in the hallway—but when she stopped writing and listened, the noises stopped.

She felt a connection to Charlie, and that connection was evidenced by the words that flowed from her fingertips onto the screen. And yet as the summer passed into the long hot days of late July, the work began to slow. She had entered the mid-book doldrums, the place where doubt and insecurity raised their ugly twin heads. It always felt to Ava a little like rolling a boulder up a mountain. Just before reaching the summit there was a moment of uncertainty, of breathless wondering: would the boulder roll back down and crush her, or would she be able to launch it over the precipice, where it would make its speedy, inescapable descent? With the story of Charlie Woodburn, she felt that she was being slowly, relentlessly crushed.

She felt stifled, confounded, unable to write anything she didn’t delete the following day. It was frustrating to have come so far and now find herself blocked.

She had rewritten Charlie’s character based on her conversation with Clara and Alice. She had made him more charming, more handsome, more popular and at ease with women. But something had happened. Some shift had occurred in the rewrite that made the story feel forced and false. Josephine was proving troublesome, too. She kept her secrets well. Despite appearing in several new chapters, Josephine had yet to divulge her lover. It was almost as if she was being coy, patronizing. Perhaps Ava had only imagined a secret lover after all.

Perhaps the story of Charlie Woodburn was beyond Ava’s capability to tell.

That’s what it all came down to, that same old fear and lack of faith she had struggled with for years. Did she have what it took to be a writer? Or was it just some girlish dream she had yet to outgrow? She had beat her head against this wall until it was bloody, and to come up against it now, when everything seemed to be going so well, seemed especially fatalistic. For the first time in her life she wondered if it was really all that important that she become a novelist. Surely a career as a copywriter would do just as well? Or perhaps she should just marry Will and settle down here in this quiet place where everything was simple and unhurried. Surely that life would do just as well?

No.
She wouldn’t think like that. She wouldn’t give up, not yet anyway.

There was something with Josephine; she knew it. She had seen it in the scene she wrote yesterday, where Josephine, Charlie, and Clara stood in the garden and Josephine betrayed herself with a glance, an awkward movement, an affirmation that caused the other two to look away from her with swift, furtive expressions of pity.

D
espite her frustration over the progression of her novel, Ava was thankful that another sleep episode had not occurred. The incident of the dark man by the window had left her shaken for days. A hallucination appearing after the initial paralysis had passed was something new, something she had not experienced before. She was afraid she might be entering a new stage of the disease.

But in the days following the strange appearance of the dark man, no other episodes occurred. As the days wore on, she found it easier to believe that she might have imagined the whole thing, the dark fleeting image brought on by her fright, a trick of the eyes, a subtle shifting of shadows and nothing more.

S
he spent her afternoons, while the others were napping, roaming the town looking for evidence of Charlie. She spent a great deal of time at the downtown library talking to the local historian, a retired schoolteacher by the name of Rachel Rowe. Rachel had not known Charlie—he had died before she was born—but she remembered her mother and grandmother talking about the scandalous elopement, and she was able to tell Ava about the boardinghouse where Charlie had lived before marrying, a rambling Victorian house that still stood not far from where Jake Woodburn currently had his furniture shop.

“Do you have any photos of him?” Ava asked her. They were sitting at one of the long tables near the research stacks, a large picture book on the history of Woodburn open in front of them.

“Of Charlie Woodburn?” Rachel frowned, her eyes narrowing. “No. I suppose I could check the microfiche. There may be a photo with an article in one of the old newspapers.”

The next time Ava came in, Rachel beckoned to her and led her over to the large reader machine used to view the microfilms.

“I’ve found something you might like to see,” she said.

Ava felt a quiver of excitement. She was suddenly afraid that the man she had pictured, the Charlie she had created in her imagination, might not match the real thing. She hoped she wouldn’t be disappointed. She leaned forward, peering over Rachel’s shoulder. “Were you able to find any of the Woodburn papers that mention Charlie?”

“No, unfortunately, all the Woodburn family documents were given to Vanderbilt years ago.”

“Well, not all,” Ava said, remembering that Will had checked the attic when looking for the original blueprints of Longford. “There may be some papers stored up in the attic at Woodburn Hall.”

“Really?” Rachel looked at her with interest. “Do you have access to them?”

“Yes. I mean, I suppose I do. I don’t know exactly what’s up there, but I could check.”

“You might want to look. Sometimes old photos fall to the bottom of a trunk and get lost. You might find some family letters that mention Charlie. People had a tendency to keep them in those days. I had a friend who did some renovations on a two-hundred-year-old house and found a box hidden in the wall containing a cache of letters. And they were pretty racy, too,” she said chuckling. “For love letters of that day, anyway. Compared to now they seem pretty tame. Although I guess no one writes letters anymore, do they? It’s all emails and instant messaging. How sad.” She scrolled absently through the screen as she talked. “I did find one photo, and that’s what I want to show you.”

Ava laced her fingers together to keep them from trembling and dropped her hands into her lap. She sat quietly while Rachel wound and rewound the film until she reached the image she was looking for. It zoomed suddenly into view, dark and grainy, a photo of a group of men sitting around a long table in evening clothes. They were smoking cigars and wore what looked like laurel wreaths on their heads, facing the camera with the proud disdainful air that gentlemen of that period used when being photographed. There were no women present, but several black men dressed in dark suits and white gloves stood against the far wall.

The caption read “Gentlemen of the Commerce Club Gather for Annual Banquet.” Underneath that was a list of names. Ava read through until she came to Colonel James Woodburn. And beside him, Mr. Charles Woodburn. An aristocratic old man with white hair and a long white mustache stared into the camera, and behind him, half hidden by the older gentleman, a younger man leaned into view. His face was bathed in shadow, and his features were indistinguishable. One elbow was propped carelessly on the table in front of him, and in that hand he held a thick cigar.

“Can you blow it up?” Ava asked.

“I can, but it doesn’t make it any easier to see.” The old man’s face came suddenly into view, and Ava was shocked at his resemblance to Josephine. They shared the same proud, wary expression, the same high forehead and long blade-like nose. His head was tilted slightly up toward the camera, and his mouth was open as if he had been speaking or perhaps exhaling.

The young man behind him was still indistinguishable. His face was dark and blurry, but other details jumped suddenly into focus: the gold cuff link of his upraised arm, the smooth, slicked-back hair, a certain carelessness in the buttoning of his pintucked shirt, as if he found such formality absurd but necessary. But it was the dark blurry face with its inscrutable expression that most drew Ava’s attention.

Staring at him, she shivered.

O
n the walk home from downtown, she couldn’t stop thinking about that shadowy face. It was Charlie who had scratched
Help me
into the headboard of her bed. She was sure of it. He must have had some premonition of his death, some warning.

But
how
had he died? Was it really an accidental drowning, as the Woodburns seemed to imply? And if so, why would Josephine, Fanny, and Maitland refuse to speak his name more than sixty years later? Why were there no photos of him in the house? Grief was one thing, but a complete annihilation, a removal of any evidence that a person had ever existed, was something else entirely. It indicated—
what?
Revenge? Denial? Guilt?

She walked along the shady sidewalk in a stupor. The day was hot and humid, and she was glad of the overhanging trees. Their thick roots pushed up through the old brick sidewalk, twining around her feet like serpents.

Had Charlie set out to drink himself to death, and in an accident of tragic proportions, simply hastened the process, as Will had suggested? Or had he been murdered and, if so, by whom? There were several possible suspects with conceivable motives: the menacing cousins intent on avenging Fanny’s honor; stoic Josephine, the defender of family secrets; or perhaps it had been Clara, as Darlene Haney had suggested, a woman familiar with all the poisonous plants of the garden, although Ava could not imagine what motive Clara could possibly have had.

The one with the most motive, of course, was Maitland Sinclair, the jilted lover. On the surface, jolly Maitland seemed an unlikely suspect, yet Ava had seen the youthful photos of him in his big-game hunting gear. She had glimpsed his face that night when she had asked him why it had taken so long for him and Fanny to marry.

And then there was his curious answer.
Penance.

His adoration of Fanny was all-consuming. Some people would do anything for love.

Even murder.

S
he could see the imposing roofline of Woodburn Hall rising above the tall hedges. She was almost to the garden fence when her phone rang, startling her out of her reverie.

“Don’t hang up,” Jake said. “It’s me.”

The tall hedge surrounding the garden gave way now to the wide, sweeping lawn. Ava glanced at the house to see if anyone was out on the verandah but it was empty. She slowed her steps. A pair of rocking chairs faced the street, half-hidden by a row of glossy-green shrubs.

“Hello,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. She walked slowly, looking down at her feet, watching so she wouldn’t trip.

“I’ve been thinking about you.”

She’d been thinking about him, too. Because she hadn’t been writing, she’d had a lot of time to think about how she might have been too hard on him the last time they spoke.

“Can you talk?” he said.

“Yes.”

He made a sound that might have been a sigh. Or maybe it was just a bad connection. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said the last time we talked.”

“Look,” she said. “I was pretty irrational that day. Don’t pay too much attention to what I said.”

“No, I think you had a valid point. I should have opened up more about Hadley.”

She didn’t want to talk about Hadley. Not today anyway. “I took your advice,” she said quickly.

“What advice was that?”

“I wrote a letter to Frank Dabrowski. You know, my father. Asking him why he hadn’t ever sent me a birthday card or a Christmas present the whole time I was growing up. And do you know what he said?”
Dear God, what was she doing? Why did she feel compelled to tell him the most intimate, depressing details of her life?

He was quiet, waiting for her to finish.

“He said he wasn’t my dad after all! I had it all wrong! Even though his name was on my birth certificate, he wasn’t my biological dad, and my mother told him it would be best if he just stayed out of my life. So he did.”

“Damn, Ava. I’m sorry.”

His voice was warm and sincere. She stood at the tall fence separating the sidewalk from the lawn of Woodburn Hall, clutching an iron paling with one hand. She was dismayed to find that she was crying.

“Are you all right?” he said.

She held her phone against one shoulder and rummaged around in her purse for a Kleenex. “I’m fine!” she said, then blew her nose.

“Do you want to go somewhere for a drink?”

“I can’t. It’s Toddy Time and I’m heading back to the house.”

“All right. How about tomorrow?”

She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. “Why don’t you come over to Woodburn Hall? You can join us for a Singapore Sling.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No.”

She blew her nose again.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Allergies,” she said. “I’m walking back from the library. I’ve been down to see Rachel Rowe. Do you know Rachel? The town historian? Anyway, she had a photo she thought I might like to see of your grandfather Charlie. I have a copy. Would you like to see it?”