Summer in the South (35 page)

He laughed. “The forest ranger thing is a possibility but there aren’t too many lighthouses here in the mountains.”

“True,” she said. She grinned, looking up at him.

He kissed her nose. “My mother’s looking for a stable hand. It’s part-time but I bet you could talk her into letting you stay in her old trailer. It’s about a mile from the house, and last time I was out there, it was in pretty good shape.”

“Wow, I’ve never really thought about living in a trailer.”

“Stick with me, kid. The sky’s the limit.”

“I may have to rethink the whole marriage to Will Fraser thing.”

“There’s a lot to be said for never having to worry about money.”

“I’ll say.”

“But then again, money doesn’t buy happiness.”

“Who says?”

He shrugged and looked at the sky. “Someone who obviously didn’t have any.”

“That’s assuming I ever
do
marry. She looked down at the dark oily water. “Which given my temperament and demanding career will probably never happen.”

“Probably not.”

“Still, you never know. The right man might come along.”

“If you’re lucky.”

“I haven’t been too lucky up to now.”

“That could change.”

“And then there’s your reputation.”

He took the vase from her gently and set it down on the bridge. “My reputation?” he said.

“Ladies’ man. Heartbreaker.”

He grinned and pulled her roughly against him. “You can’t believe everything you hear,” he said, and kissed her soundly.

W
hen she was ready, she took the lid off the vase and scattered the ashes in the river. A faint earthy smell of decay and roses filled the air.

She said, “Goodbye, mother.” She thought,
I am an orphan.

But that wasn’t true, really. She had parents out there in the world just waiting for her to find them. If she wanted to. If she decided later that it was necessary.

“From what you’ve told me about her, she would have loved this place,” Jake said.

“Yes,” she said. She climbed off the bridge and, filling the vase with wildflowers, nestled it among the rocks at the edge of the river. Moonlight flooded the clearing. “This is where I’ll come when I want to visit her.”

She climbed up the bank and walked out onto the bridge where Jake waited for her. Despite the sadness of the occasion, she was filled with an odd feeling of hope and optimism. She looked up at the moon floating over the water. She thought,
I am my mother’s daughter. I am my father’s daughter. I am neither.

I am.

She laughed. “I’ve always wondered, what is the meaning of life? But now it dawns on me that I’ve been asking the wrong question.”

“What’s the right question?”

“What is the meaning of
my
life?”

“Ah,” he said.

T
hat night, she slept the sleep of the dead. When she awoke the following morning, sunshine flooded the room and the sky was blue. Josephine and Fanny were gone but they had left a note on the kitchen counter, with instructions on where to find breakfast. Ava had the feeling they were avoiding her, which only strengthened her resolve to move out. She would get a hotel room, if she had to, until she talked to Jake’s mother about the trailer or made some other arrangements. She had no job, very little money left in her bank account, and she had, quite possibly, burned her bridges with the Woodburns but she wasn’t worried. She wasn’t fearful. All that was in the past.

It seemed to Ava that her whole life had been ruled by fear. Fear that her mother would leave her, that they would starve or be homeless, that no matter how hard she worked she could never escape the wolves at her door, their ravenous howling.

Her search for her father had been a distraction, she saw that now, a way of staving off the wolves. She had been looking for a protector, a savior, first with her mythical father, and later with her lovers. But there were no saviors, there was only herself. Maybe that was what Clotilde had been trying to teach her with her stories. To be unafraid and strong.

To do whatever was necessary.

She showered and went into her room to finish packing. Around ten-thirty there was a knock on the door and Ava, startled, said, “Yes?”

Will stood in the doorway holding two coffees in a takeaway tray. He looked tired and unkempt; there were dark crescents beneath his eyes. “I brought breakfast,” he said. “Or at least coffee.”

She stood at the desk, stacking the box that held her manuscript on top of her laptop. “How nice,” she said, making room for him.

He set the tray down carefully on the desk and passed her a cup. She took it, smiling.

“It looks like you’re packing.”

“Yes.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“But not back to Chicago?”

“No.”

They sipped their coffee companionably, gazing out the opened shutters at the wide blue sky. The house was quiet. Neither one wanted to begin.

“You read the manuscript?” Ava asked finally.

He sighed. “Yes.”

Outside the window, a fat bee tapped repeatedly against the glass. In the crowns of the tall trees, leaves fluttered on an errant breeze.

“You can’t think my family will be happy about this novel,” he said.

“It’s not really about your family.” He gazed at her forlornly until she looked away. She said, “It’s fiction, Will.”

“You’ve made Josephine and Clara murderers.”

“Not Josephine and Clara. Lillian and Rose.”

“You can’t just change the names! Everyone will see through that.”

“I’m not saying it’s the truth. I’m not saying it’s what really happened. It’s just the way my story evolved. It gave them the most motive to kill Charlie.”

“If you publish this my family will be a laughingstock in this town.”

“What is it you expect me to do, Will?”

They had reached an impasse and they both knew it.

He sipped his coffee, carefully avoiding her gaze. “I suppose I blame myself,” he said. “If I’d been more open about Charlie from the beginning, you wouldn’t have been so curious. But it’s hard, Ava. That’s not the way I am. I can’t just open myself up the way some people can. And down here, you’re raised a certain way. You’re taught to keep some things private, family matters especially. It’s just the way it’s done.”

“Everyone worships the past but no one really wants to talk about it.”

He sank down on the edge of the bed. “I wasn’t trying to close myself off from you. That was never my intention.”

“I know, Will.” She stood looking down at his bowed head.

“And you’re right. I haven’t been honest about a lot of things.”

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to explain.”

He looked up at her. “Humor me,” he said coldly. His eyes slid away from her, coming to rest on the box holding her manuscript. He sat quietly staring as if contemplating a plunge into deep, frigid water. “You asked me once about the Gray Lady. The ghost. You asked me if I’d ever seen her and I said no. That wasn’t true. I did see her. Or at least I thought I did. Several times when I was a child. A small, smoky figure standing on the landing beckoning to me.”

“What did you do?”

“I cried. I wouldn’t go upstairs without Josephine to hold my hand.”

“Did you tell her?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Don’t be afraid. She’s one of us.’ ”

Ava put a hand out and touched his face.

“I wanted it to work with us, Ava.”

“I know.” She sank down beside him. “And we’ll always be good friends. But I could never make you happy. You know that. I don’t want the same things you want. I’m nothing like Hadley.”

“Hadley?” He laughed harshly. “Thank God you’re nothing like her.”

She blinked, confused. “But I thought after the other day at Jake’s that you must still love her.”

“I didn’t love her, but Jake did.”

“Will,” she said gently, shaking her head. “You were engaged to her but you didn’t love her? You dated her for four years but you didn’t love her?”

He got up without a word and went out.

S
he was still sitting on the bed when he returned a few minutes later with a large cardboard box in his hands. He sat down on the edge of the bed with it on his lap, took out a framed photo, and gave it to Ava.

“Here’s a photo of Hadley when I first met her, when I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.” He reached into the box and took out a faded pressed carnation, frail and dry as old paper. “Here’s the boutonniere from our first dance, where I caught her in the cloak-room with someone else.” He laid it down on the bed and took out a small velvet box. “And here’s the promise ring I gave her that she returned to me the summer before she went to Europe. It was the most miserable summer of my life, lying up there in my room imagining her in the arms of English schoolboys.” His voice had become increasingly bitter as he spoke.

“And here’s a photo of her the following fall when she returned to school and we agreed to see other people, which meant that I moped around and watched while she went through a steady stream of boyfriends.”

He picked up a photo of himself, Hadley, and Jake standing in formal clothes in front of a stone chapel and passed it to Ava.

“Of course, my own cousin, a boy who had been almost a brother to me, who had attended the same school, the one person I trusted above all else. Even I didn’t imagine that she could be capable of that. But she was. They were.”

His expression was anguished, sullen. She gave him back the photo and he placed it, facedown, in the box. “I swore I’d never forgive them.”

Ava didn’t know what to say. She sat with her hands in her lap, staring at the bright patch of blue sky beyond the window.

“What you saw the other day wasn’t about me and Hadley. It was about me and Jake.” He was quiet, folding the flaps of the box down. When that was done he set it on the floor at his feet. He said hesitantly, “I may have been wrong about Jake. I realize that now. Maybe he left school and went to California to give Hadley and me a chance to be together. Maybe he thought he was doing the right thing. I know he loved her. He didn’t know her like I did.”

“She told him you two were broken up. She lied to him from the beginning.”

He stared at his hands. A moment later he lifted his head and gazed out the window. The light slanting through the glass accentuated his pallor, the deep shadow along his cheeks where he hadn’t shaved. Ava had a sudden desire to touch him, to comfort him, but she was afraid he would misunderstand her actions.

“The sad thing is, all that anger wasn’t necessary because I didn’t love her anymore. I realized that after I found out about her and Jake. I guess I saw her then for who she really was. It was an ideal I loved, not the real girl, but I was too young to know that.”

Ava slid her hand into his and he looked down at it gratefully.

“When she came to see me not long after I broke off our engagement, I told her how I felt, all the cruel, hurtful things I’d wanted to say to her for years. When she left, she was crying and I didn’t care.” He looked at Ava, his eyes wretched, bleak. “I’ve always wondered—was I responsible for her death? Was she crying so hard she couldn’t see the road? Or did she kill herself, knowing that I’d have to live with the guilt the rest of my life, knowing that Jake would have to live with the loss? Because she was capable of that. She was capable of throwing her life away in one final act of spite.”

Ava put her arms around him and he buried his face against her, holding her fiercely. She stroked his hair.

She said, “I’m sorry, Will. I’m so sorry.”

L
ater, she went out to take a call from Jake’s mother and when she came back in, Will was standing at her desk holding the photo of Charlie Woodburn.

“Is this who I think it is?” he said.

“Yes.”

“He looks like Jake.”

“A little.”

“Was it Jake who told you about Josephine and Clara?” His voice was cool and noncommittal. He seemed less agitated over Jake now, as if whatever had stood between them all these years had diminished. Or maybe it was simply the act of telling her the truth about Hadley, the act of confession that had changed everything.

“Jake didn’t want me asking questions about Charlie any more than you did. He knew it would upset you and the aunts, and he doesn’t seem to care what happened. It was something Alice said that got me thinking that it could have been Clara who killed Charlie. She said that Charlie used to torment Clara by threatening to horsewhip her father. It was a time when a white man could do whatever he wanted to a black man with little fear of retribution. So maybe Clara believed Charlie’s threats enough to poison him to protect her father. I knew she couldn’t have done it alone. She would have had to get his body to the river, and that’s when I started thinking about Josephine. I found her diary, and I knew how much she hated Charlie. How much she wanted to be rid of him for Fanny’s sake. And she loved Clara like a sister. She would have been willing to do anything to protect Fanny and Clara.”

He set the photo down carefully on the desk. She shrugged, smiling faintly. “It wasn’t too hard to imagine Josephine and Clara on one hot, fateful day finally taking matters into their own hands and getting rid of Charlie Woodburn.”

She waited for him to say something. He stood with his hands hanging down at his sides, facing her across the room.

“There’s something between you and Jake, isn’t there.” He said it as a statement, not a question.

Ava met his eyes. “Yes,” she said.

He nodded once, looked around the room. “You don’t have to be in a hurry to move out of here, you know. No one’s evicting you.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Will you move in with him?”

“No.” She told him about the trailer Jake’s mother had offered to let her use.

“I know the place well. Jake and I used to have wild parties out there.” He smiled. A look of sadness passed swiftly across his face. “It’s the perfect place for a writer. Quiet, secluded.” He gave her a brief, devilish grin. “I think it even has indoor plumbing.”