Summer in the South (31 page)

And the Woodburns had given her an even greater gift. They had given her the story of Charlie and Fanny.

“Progress brings jobs,” Josephine said. “Without jobs all of our young people have to grow up and move away.”

Fanny turned a hopeful gaze on Ava. “Do you think you would ever want to settle in Woodburn?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Ava said vaguely. “I have my work in Chicago.”

“Can’t you write anywhere?” Alice asked sharply.

“Well, yes.”

Fanny smiled tenderly. “Maybe you could spend part of the year living down here?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Josephine said. “She’s young, and she lives in one of the most vibrant cities in the world. Why would she ever want to live in sleepy little Woodburn?”

This seemed to put an end to the discussion. Alice finished her coffee and stood up, stretching. “So are we finished warning Ava about Jake Woodburn? Because I’ve got things to do.”

“Is that what this is?” Ava asked, grinning. “An intervention?”

“You’ll only need an intervention if you take up with Jake,” Alice said “If he sets his sights on you, there could be trouble.”

Ava smiled, stacking her dishes. “Did you think to warn Hadley about him?”

No one said anything. Josephine stood and began to gather the dishes from the table.

“What was she like?” Ava asked, realizing she’d said the wrong thing but unwilling to change the subject.

“Hadley? She was beautiful,” Alice said. “There’s a photo of her and Will taken out at Longford. They used to go out there all the time while they were courting.”

Ava said, “Courting?”

“It was all Will ever wanted,” Josephine said. “Longford and a family. We used to go out there when he was a boy and he’d say, ‘Aunt Josie, I’m going to have ten kids, five boys and five girls.’ I guess it’s common for only children to want big families.”

Fanny shook her head sadly. “Poor Will,” she said.

“I suppose he always blamed himself,” Alice said. “For what happened to Hadley.”

“It’s in the past,” Josephine said, glancing severely at Alice. “None of it matters now.”

Outside the window a mockingbird sang sweetly. The sun slanted through the long windows, filling the room with light.

“Still, it was a tragic way to die. She was a beautiful girl. And so young.”

“Such a lovely face,” Fanny said dreamily. “So perfect on the outside.”

And it wasn’t until much later, alone in her room and waiting for her muse to find her, that Ava thought how curious that statement was.

O
ver the next two weeks, Ava worked with passionate and relentless determination. She had Charlie’s character right now, she was sure of it, and that was propelling him toward his tragic end. She was still uncertain exactly who had done the killing, but she knew it had been murder. The story was unfolding as it should. It was only a matter of time before the true killer revealed him- or herself.

Caught up in her work, she had little time to worry about her social life. Jake didn’t call. Will, eventually, did. She didn’t press him, as Fraser had suggested she do. She didn’t try to get him talking about what had happened between him and Jake. It seemed unimportant to her, and she was hesitant to break the uneasy peace that fell between them. It was easier to work when Will was appeased; it was easier to live undisturbed in the house with the aunts.

Will left her alone to work but when he did see her he seemed nervous, as if he realized that what was between them wasn’t working but he was unwilling to let it go.

And Jake? Perhaps what everyone said was true; perhaps he was only a womanizer intent on conquest, and she had made it too difficult for him. Perhaps he had simply lost interest. Or maybe it was as he had intimated, that his guilt over once again pursuing Will’s girl had proven too much for him.

Whatever his reasons, he didn’t call.

It was all right with her. She had no time for anything but her work. Writing was the thing that drove her, the thing that gave meaning to her life. She realized that now. What had once been important she had put away for months, years while she worked dull day jobs in order to pay her rent. Because that was what happened if you weren’t careful. You put away your treasure in order to live in the real world, and soon it became dusty, forgotten, something to be trotted out in blushing acknowledgment at cocktail parties. It became a hobby, like Will’s music had become. The thing that had once given meaning to your life became diminished, small, something you could barely remember.

She could never be happy with the life Will offered. She saw that now. She could never be happy subjugating her life to his, disappearing into the role of wife, mother, keeper of the hearth. It wouldn’t be enough for her. She was a writer. Her life turned on the rhythm of a sentence, a snatch of dialogue. Whole worlds opened at the thought of a young man, impoverished and alone in the world, returning to his ancestral home in search of love and redemption. Odysseus returning home to Penelope. Princess Sheelin returning home with the One True Pearl.

It was her mother’s legacy to Ava, these stories. Writing was Ava’s treasure, but the stories had been Clotilde’s.

Every evening while the house slept around her, Ava worked. And then in early August, perhaps because of the strain she was feeling in her relationship with Will or the long hours she was working on her novel, the night terrors returned. She awoke on two consecutive nights to the sound of someone whispering her name. She lay there with her eyes wide, a sensation of dread prickling her scalp. The feeling that she was being watched, the sense that there was someone in the room with her was so intense that even after the paralysis subsided, she was afraid to turn her head to look. When she did, that first night, there was no one there.

But on the second night the feeling of vague unease continued, and as the paralysis waned she turned her head and caught something out of the corner of her eye, a dark fleeting figure that flickered and disappeared through the wall like a column of smoke.

Hippie Girl

August 1st

Dear Ava—

I’m sorry to take so long with this. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I had to say and it seemed best to do it on the phone but I don’t have your number. So I’ll just have to write it. I’m not good at writing things down, so please forgive how messy this is. Also I can’t spell worth a damn but you already know that.

I laughed when I read the part in your last letter about how Meg told you her and me met out at Boblo Island. I always called your mother Meg because that was her real name, Margaret Anne Govan. I never called her by any of those hippie names she liked to use. She was from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and I’ll get into all that in a minute. I have to write it down straight, just the way I’m thinking it. Otherwise I’ll start to ramble and this will be twenty pages long.

The only time we were ever out at Boblo was when you were a baby and we went out there to hear Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. I met your mother at a Kmart parking lot. She was there with the Sunshine People. They were a bunch of hippies who traveled around the country in an old school bus painted with peace signs and flowers. They had parked their bus in the Kmart lot and they were selling love beads. I walked by and saw your mother and it was love at first sight. I can tell you that. My heart just flopped around in my chest. She had long red-gold hair and she was wearing a white dress that fell to her ankles but it was kind of thin so I could see her shape right through it. She was the loveliest thing I’d ever seen.

I was working at a machine shop in those days and I never looked back. I told my friends, you go on without me. I’m staying here. The Sunshine People took me in because that’s how it was in those days. Flower Power and free love and all that shit. Excuse my French. It was, “Hi, how’s it going, man? Want to go to California?” There were ten of us on that bus, six women and four men, and we were all a little in love with Meg. Dharma. That’s the name she went by then, although I never called her anything but Meg.

She was a couple of years older than me. She’d been to college at Ann Arbor, although she’d dropped out without telling her parents when she hooked up with the Sunshine People. She was a rich girl, she was from Grosse Pointe, and her dad was a bigwig out at Ford. I don’t know what her mother did. Spend money, Meg said. She was an only child. Raised in the lap of luxury with every privilege. There was bad blood between Meg and her dad; she never told me why, but she wouldn’t talk about him, and maybe that’s why she never saw her parents. I got a call years after we parted from some private investigator her dad had hired to track her down. He didn’t get shit out of me. Bastard.

The six months I spent traveling around the country with your mother and the Sunshine People were the happiest days of my life. I won’t lie to you. I still think of those carefree times now that I’ve got a mortgage and a wife and three kids to feed. Did I tell you I had three kids? Tom, he’s sixteen, Ralphie, he’s twelve, and little Lorie, she’s ten.

Your mother was a storyteller. I guess you know that. We’d sit around the fire at night and she’d tell stories that made you shiver with fear or cry with sadness. She had a good heart. She was always looking out for others, always looking out for the underdog. She couldn’t stand to see anyone picked on. Once outside a convenience store in Topeka she saw a man beating a tethered dog. She hit this guy in the back with a camp stove and knocked him down, and then she stood over him, flailing away with a bag of hot dog buns and shouting, “How do you like it, huh? How do you like it?
”

It was the funniest thing I ever saw. She was small but she was crazy. I loved her. You have to know that. It wasn’t my idea that we part.

Still, she was a difficult woman to live with. She had her own way of looking at things, and she didn’t like anyone telling her what to do. She had her dark days, too, just like the rest of us. She used to cry out in her sleep, and she would wake up whimpering and wouldn’t let anyone comfort her. Would just sit there with her knees drawn up against her chest rocking back and forth and whimpering, and if you tried to touch her she’d bare her teeth and hiss and claw like a scalded cat. I still don’t know what that was all about.

When you came along, she changed. A lot of the wildness seemed to go out of her. You asked me if I knew who your real father was, and I have to say, honestly, I don’t. Meg never told me. Still, I had my suspicions. I’m happy to talk about what I know, but I don’t feel right writing it down in a letter.

Call me if you want to talk about this. My number’s 313-886-5105.

Frank

p.s. Thanks for sending along a photo. Funny, how you look like her.

Coming as it did during a period of intense work on her novel, the letter only added to Ava’s fairy-tale view of reality. Shut up in the old house, Ava found herself working feverishly every night, long into the early hours of the morning, the words
“Help me”
echoing in her head. Time seemed to move now in swoops and snatches; it had lost its linear arrangement. Perhaps it was the thick drowsy heat of August that made her feel as if she was moving through an underwater world.

“A rich girl,” the letter had said. Clotilde had been “raised in the lap of luxury with every privilege.” It was almost laughable. Certainly ironic. Ava thought of all the times she had done battle with irate landlords and debt collectors, the nights she had lain awake wondering if they would be homeless, if there would be money for school lunches and electricity bills. She thought of her ruined childhood, the stubbornly responsible character she had become so that her mother could remain carefree and childish. (“Oh Ava, don’t fret. Everything will turn out fine—you’ll see!”) All those years of worry and want and desperation, when all Clotilde ever had to do was pick up the phone and call her rich father.

Ava walked over to the mantel and picked up Clotilde’s vase. She held it above her head as if she might dash it against the floor. She said fiercely, “Why?” She said, “It wasn’t fair.”

She sprawled facedown on the bed, weeping for her lost childhood, her lost mother. Outside the windows, the clatter of the cicadas soothed her. The summer heat flowed through her drowsy limbs. After a while she fell into a fitful sleep.

She dreamed she was running through a dark forest. The trees were so thick she couldn’t see the sky, and she was lost. There was something pursuing her—she could hear it crashing through the brush behind her—and as she looked down in terror she saw a red serpent underfoot. She couldn’t help but step on it, and as she did, it swung around and sank its teeth into her flesh. There was a moment of excruciating pain, then she opened her eyes and noticed a light streaming through the trees, which were opening before her like a golden path.

She awoke with a start. The sky outside the window was a violet gray. She thought of the story Clotilde had told her all those years ago, the story of the Princess Sheelin who goes to the bottom of the sea searching for the One True Pearl. The girl who falls into a deep, mindless sleep until a messenger from her father wakens her and reminds her of her destiny. Reminds her who she truly is.

Somewhere out in the world there were Govan grandparents. Somewhere out in the world there was a flesh-and-blood father waiting for her to find him.

T
wo days later, she got a call from Rachel Rowe. Ava was on the verandah with Maitland and Fanny but Rachel sounded so excited that she excused herself and went into the house, closing her bedroom door behind her.

“Okay,” Ava said. “Shoot.”

“Well, you know how I’ve been going through the Woodburn family papers given to Vanderbilt? And let me tell you, that has been some chore. There are literally enough boxes to fill a semitruck, and most of them have been rearranged and pilfered by researchers and grad students.”

“Rachel? What did you find?”

“I’m getting to that. There’s a senior researcher there, Alice Atkinson, who I’ve known for years. She’s very knowledgeable about the Woodburn collection, and she’s the one who’s been combing through documents with me looking for a deed from Colonel Woodburn to Charlie Woodburn. We literally went through every document and couldn’t find anything. No deed, no letters mentioning Charlie other than the ones the Colonel wrote to the president of Vanderbilt recommending Charlie for admission. Nothing else.

“Just when I was ready to give up, Alice mentioned a couple of boxes in storage that contained odds and ends, family memorabilia, receipts, stuff they didn’t know where to catalogue. I started going through the first box yesterday and within a couple of hours I had found it.”

“A deed,” Ava said, breathing slowly. “You found a deed giving Charlie Longford.”

“No. Not a deed. A letter. From Colonel Woodburn’s attorney.” She hesitated and Ava could hear the shuffling of paper. “A Mr. Atwood. That was the attorney’s name. Anyway, the letter was from him to Josephine. It was dated a few weeks after the Colonel’s death. And there’s a part that says, hang on, I’ll find it.” She was quiet for a moment and then continued, “ ‘Per our conversation in my office prior to the reading of the will and your later instructions, I have destroyed the document. The document,’ ” Rachel repeated, her voice trembling. “Get it? It must have been the deed they’re talking about. The deed the Colonel had mentioned in his journal. The Colonel had Atwood draw up a deed prior to his death, but it was never properly recorded. Or maybe never even signed. Maybe the Colonel was on his way to his attorney’s office the day he dropped dead in the street. And later, when Atwood discussed the deed with Josephine, she instructed him to destroy it. Which would make sense because, from what you’ve said, she didn’t like Charlie. She wouldn’t have wanted him to inherit anything that belonged to her or her sisters.”

“What was the date on the letter?”

“November 14. It was addressed to Josephine via a Mrs. Stillwell’s boardinghouse.”

“So it was after Fanny eloped with Charlie.”

“Yes, a week or so after.” They were both quiet a moment, then Rachel said, “Do you think Charlie knew about the deed? Do you think the Colonel told him about it before he died?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Then that would mean that Charlie knew he’d been cheated out of something promised to him. And it might explain why he eloped with Fanny.”

“Yes,” Ava said quietly.

Rachel sighed. “There’s a lot we don’t know for sure, a lot we’ll probably never know. You don’t think we’re reaching?”

“It makes a good story,” Ava said. It made perfect sense, the pieces falling easily into place. Josephine’s smoldering hatred of Charlie exploded into open warfare between the two of them. Charlie would have known he’d been cheated at the reading of the Colonel’s will, although he may not have known who it was who cheated him, the Colonel or Josephine. It would not have mattered to him.

She remembered that Will had told her the Colonel was the last to use the plantation ledgers. He was wrong about that. In the final journal she had found a page at the end with a cryptic message written in a modern hand.

Goddamn them all to hell. Every last lying, cheating one of them. They’ll rue the day they crossed me.

S
he felt Charlie Woodburn’s presence everywhere in the house. She felt a connection to him, and that connection was evidenced by the words that flowed from her fingertips onto the screen.

And then one evening a curious thing happened.

She had fallen asleep with her head slumped on the desk, and she awoke suddenly and sat rigidly upright, listening. The room was frigid. Condensation fogged the windows. She had fallen into a deep sleep with no warning or recollection. The computer screen had gone black; the room was lit only by the dull glow of the lamp at the corner of the desk. She had been dreaming of something unpleasant, something that left an odd sensation of a tingling scalp and raised hair at the nape of her neck.

She rose like a sleepwalker and extended her arm to turn off the lamp, and it was then, at the precise moment when the room was plunged into absolute darkness, that she felt, quite clearly and distinctly, someone take her hand.