Summer in the South (29 page)

She had lied to Darlene. The truth was, she and Hadley would never have been friends. She had seen this in Hadley’s photo, in her casual, arrogant expression. The popular girl and the shy, secretive class clown. A truce perhaps, a grudging appreciation of each other’s gifts, but never a friendship.

She stared at the lush green landscape and thought of Hadley Marsh. A beautiful girl. A beautiful dead girl.

Ava could not put her finger on why this bothered her.

F
or supper Maitland had made a shrimp salad served in avocado halves and garnished with fresh tomato and cucumber slices. They were just finishing when Will came in.

“Let me get you a plate,” Josephine said when she saw him, getting up from the table.

“No. I’ve eaten.”

He was standing just inside the kitchen door. Ava could see from his face that Darlene had told him about her visit to Jake’s shop.

Fanny looked at him wide-eyed. “Is something wrong?” she asked in a timid voice.

“I need to talk to Ava.”

Ava stood up without a word and followed him through the house into her bedroom. She closed the door quietly behind them and sat on the edge of the bed while he paced up and down the room. He shoved his hands deep in his pockets and went to the window, standing with his back to her, looking out.

She said, “I went to Jake Woodburn’s shop today.”

He turned around and faced her, his eyes an icy blue. “I thought I made it clear that you were to stay away from him.”

“You made it clear that you didn’t like him. Who I hang out with, Will, is my own business.”

He stared at her. A muscle moved in his cheek.

“Look.” She put her hands out in a placating manner, palms up. “I don’t want to fight with you over this. I went down to see Jake because I had something to give him. A photo of his grandfather that Rachel Rowe found in the library archives.”

“A photo of his
grandfather
?” He looked at her incredulously, pulling his hands out of his pockets. “Is that what this is about? Are you pumping him for information about Charlie Woodburn? Because I can tell you right now, he doesn’t know anything about Charlie. When we were boys he knew even less about him than I did.”

“That may be true, but at least Jake’s willing to talk about him.”

“Of course he is! He’d talk about anyone if it would get your attention.”

She looked down, dropping her hands in her lap. “I don’t want to fight with you,” she said.

“Then you shouldn’t have gone to see Jake,” he said coldly.

“Who I see is my own business. I don’t owe you any explanations.”

He looked at her a long time and when he spoke his voice was filled with bitter accusation. “You’ve made that very clear,” he said.

“Jake doesn’t try to hide anything.”

“Oh, come on, Ava, you don’t even know him!”

“Do I know you?” Ava said, looking up. “Do I know anything about you? How about Hadley?”

“I told you about Hadley!”

“You didn’t tell me she was dead.”

Outside the windows dusk fell, bathing the room in a purple light. He turned around and leaned his forehead against the glass. Crickets chanted in the shadows. When he faced her again, the anger seemed to have gone out of him. “What difference does it make?” he said. “It was a long time ago.”

“Yeah. I hear that a lot down here.” She pulled her legs up under her, leaning back against the headboard. “It obviously made a difference to your relationship with Jake.”

His expression hardened. He shook his head stubbornly. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

“There’s a lot you don’t want to talk about.”

“Don’t keep bringing Charlie into this.”

“I’m not talking about Charlie.”

“Do you know he beat her?” he said softly. His eyes narrowed and he gave her a coolly appraising look. “Your hero, this dead man you spend so much time mooning over. He beat Fanny. Black and blue.”

She stared at him, watching a range of emotions flicker across his face. Of all the possibilities in the story of Fanny and Charlie, this was one she’d never considered. “Don’t change the subject,” she said softly. “You always do that. You always try to throw me off the trail. As if you don’t trust me with the truth.”

“What truth have I not told you?” he said. “Besides the fact that Hadley is dead, although I still don’t see why that should affect you. What else have I not been truthful about?”

“You told me you’d never seen a ghost.”

He groaned and shook his head. He chuckled, a dull, mirthless sound.

“Fraser told me that as a child you were terrified of the staircase because you used to see the ghost of Delphine Woodburn standing there.”

He dropped his chin and stared at her. “Oh, well,” he said. “If you’re going to bring the fantasies of childhood into it!”

“So, you did see her.”

He regarded her coolly, soberly. “Not that I recall. No.”

He had a clever way of remembering only what he wanted to remember. Ava supposed it was a useful trick.

“I don’t know what’s so hard about honesty,” she said.

He stood very still, staring at her. Then, without another word, he turned and walked out.

She lay back against the pillows and turned her face to the window, watching bats flit across the darkening sky. She could feel Clotilde observing her from the mantel. The atmosphere inside the house felt heavy, depressive.

After a while Ava got up and called Fraser Barron to see if he wanted to go for a drink.

T
hey met at a small English pub on the square called Churchill’s. It was a restaurant, too, and the interior was crowded with families sitting at pub tables and in booths along the walls. Fraser sat at the bar. He was in one of his Poe moods, dressed in a dark gray sacque suit with a burgundy cape thrown over his shoulders. Ava indicated a booth in the far corner, and Fraser stood up and followed her, picking his way through the tables and flourishing his cape like a magician.

“I can’t believe you don’t have heatstroke in that outfit,” Ava said, sitting down. Fraser stood for a moment, allowing everyone in the pub to get a good look at him.

“One must suffer for beauty,” he said, sliding into the booth opposite her. “Look at you women and your high heels.”

Ava stuck one sandaled foot out for his appraisal. “Note that I am not wearing high heels.”

“No. But then you’re different. We’ve established that.”

A flustered-looking waitress brought them a couple of vodka tonics. Ava told Fraser about the argument with Will. She told him about meeting Jake at his shop.

“All alone?” Fraser asked casually. “Oh, dear.”

“I mean, Will was furious. I’ve never seen him so angry.”

“Someone probably told him about it before you had a chance to. He just got his male pride a little ruffled.”

Ava crossed her arms and leaned against the table, ducking her head and leaning in close so she could be heard over the noise of the restaurant. “I want you to tell me what’s going on between those two. Why does Will hate Jake so much?”

Fraser raised one eyebrow and sipped his drink, then set it down again. “You already know why,” he said.

“They can’t still be fighting over a girl who died years ago. There has to be something more to it than that.”

“You mean Will hasn’t told you?”

“There’s a lot Will doesn’t tell me.”

“Well, that’s a Southern
thang.
” He ran one finger absentmindedly around the rim of his glass. “I think it has less to do with Hadley and more to do with the fact that Will thinks Jake betrayed him. He’ll never trust him again. And now you come along and it’s obvious Will has feelings for you. Don’t blush and look away, you know he does.” He grinned at her discomfort.

“Will and I are just friends,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” Fraser said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I think having feelings for you and watching Jake move in on you brings up a lot of baggage from Will’s past. Stuff he’d rather not deal with right now.”

“Oh, good Lord,” Ava said. “I’m not dating either one.”

“Look,” he said, settling back and pulling his cape around him. “You’ve been in therapy, right?”

Ava looked around the pub. “Well,” she said.

“Yes, yes,” he said, snapping his fingers impatiently. “Of course you have. Anyone with any sense has been in therapy. I was in therapy even before I came out.” He stopped and gave her a curious look. “You knew I was gay, right?”

Ava laughed.

Fraser laughed, too. “I know. I was never any good at hiding it, even back when I still tried. When I was fifteen, I’d come home from prep school and go shopping with Mother and she’d tell all her friends, ‘Fraser has the best taste! Why, he’s just like a woman!’ We’d go to public high school football games and critique the cheerleaders, and it never occurred to her that I was gay; she just thought I was a little
odd.
Odd runs in our family. Look at the Captain. Mother was raised in a different time. Men lived by a different code then. They could drink, gamble, whore around, abuse the help and their own wives and children, and as long as they had the right pedigree, still be considered gentlemen. Hell, they could kill somebody and, as long as they did it for the right reasons, still be considered gentlemen. But homosexuality! That was a horse of a different color. That was impropriety on a grand scale. Hell, that was sin!”

In the booth behind them, a child stood on her seat and said shyly to Fraser, “I like your dress.”

“Thanks,” Fraser said. “I like yours, too.”

“Mary Ann, sit down,” her mother said sharply. “Don’t you be bothering those people with your foolishness.”

Fraser pushed his glass around, making little wet spots on the tablecloth. “When Mother caught me looking at the cheerleaders in the yearbook she said, ‘Fraser, there’s nothing wrong with you looking at pretty girls. You’ll have a pretty cheerleader one day to call your very own.’ I said, ‘Hell, Mother, I don’t want to
have
a pretty cheerleader. I want to
be
one.’

“She sent me to Father Nichols, of course, and he sent me to a therapist in Nashville, and that turned out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Because he got me talking about my past and about myself, and the more I talked the more I knew who I was and the more I knew how I wanted to live my life.”

Ava raised her hand to tell the waitress to bring them another round.

“Here’s the thing about being Southern,” Fraser said. “You’re raised to be polite. Yes, sir. No, sir. On the surface it’s all moonlight and magnolias, but underneath it’s miscegenation and tragedy and poverty and ignorance. Sure we pay lip service to history, we pretend to admire it, but the truth is, no one really wants to talk about it, not the dirty part anyway. We don’t want to acknowledge all the bad things that happened. That gets swept under the carpet because it’s fucking unpleasant, and no one wants to talk about unpleasantness.”

His voice had risen as he talked. Ava glanced apologetically at the neighboring table. She dipped her head and said in a low voice, “Could we keep it down a little? There are children present.”

He smirked, raising his glass. He took a long drink, then set it down again with a loud
thock.
“Coward,” he said.

“Maybe. But I’m not hearing impaired.”

“I thought you wanted to talk about the past.”

“I do. But I want to talk about it quietly.”

“We’re tied to our history,” Fraser said. “We carry it around like rusty chains. No one does suffering better than us, unless it’s the Jews. Or maybe the Irish.”

The waitress brought their drinks. Trying to prompt him, Ava asked, “How did Hadley die?”

“I’m getting to that. I’m going to give you the broad outline but I’m not going to give you details, because you need to go home and talk to Will about that. You need to get him talking to Jake. You need to get those two talking. Somehow.”

“Have you ever been in love, Fraser?” That shut him up. He was quiet for a moment, tilting his glass and staring down into his drink like he was looking into a crystal ball.

“Of course I have. Many times. After college I lived in Atlanta with my significant other, Michael. Yes, I had a significant other. He was an architect and he was a lovely person. He was a cheating, lying bastard but he was lovely.” He set his glass down and waved his hand in front of his face, as if clearing away smoke. “But we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you. You and Will and Jake Woodburn.”

“No. We’re talking about
Hadley
and Will and Jake Woodburn.”

“Okay, so you already know that Jake and Will went off to boarding school together thanks to Fanny and Josephine. It was at boarding school that Will met Hadley. I guess it was love at first sight, at least on Will’s part. They dated all through high school. Jake took a year off after prep school and then went up to Sewanee. Hadley followed him while Will went to Bard. Will and Hadley got engaged sometime around their junior year. It was Christmas and there was a big engagement party out at Longford and everyone was there, even Jake. I guess Jake and Hadley had been carrying on for some time at Sewanee, so the engagement must have come as a surprise to him. Because not long after they announced it at the Christmas party, Jake dropped out of Sewanee and went to California. All that money Josephine and Fanny had invested in his education, and he just threw it back in their faces. It wasn’t that long after Jake left that Will found out about him and Hadley and broke off the engagement.

“It almost killed Will when he found out. They had to bring him home in the middle of the semester because they thought he was having a nervous breakdown.”

Ava could imagine Will’s suffering and she was sorry for it. She hadn’t really known him then. It was during the time at school when they hadn’t seen much of each other.

“Hadley,” she said, carefully folding the edges of her cocktail napkin. “Do you think Jake really loved her?”

“Jake?” He frowned and looked at her with surprise, as if trying to figure out why that mattered.

Ava wasn’t sure why it mattered, but it did. Perhaps it would show Jake in a better light. Perhaps it would help explain his actions. Ava imagined the three of them standing arm in arm beneath the portico. There was no doubt that Hadley had been a beautiful woman. That she had captured the hearts, or at least the desires, of two near-brothers spoke volumes of her power over men. And yet, how to draw a true picture of this fateful love triangle? Had she wanted it to happen? Had she instigated it? Ava didn’t know how to see Hadley as she truly was.