Ciji Ware (18 page)

“How hard have you tried?” she asked bluntly. “Traveling constantly is a choice, too, it seems to me.”

Ouch. This woman was definitely not a ships-that-pass-in-the-night type, he thought regretfully. “You may be right about that,” he murmured. Then she surprised him a second time.

“I think I gave you a shot in the chops just now—instead of the guy who deserved it,” she said, grimacing faintly. “Sorry.”

“Black Jack?”

Daphne flushed. “No, the Travelin’ Man Sweepstakes goes to a musical conductor in New York who shall remain nameless, but easily falls into the ‘astonishingly unfaithful’ category.”

“Ah… one of those,” he said, nodding. He gazed directly into her brown eyes. “Not that you probably care, but infidelity wasn’t my sin. Francesca and I had plenty of
other
sources of strife to derail us.”

Her eyes widened in surprise, and then she said, “Well… anyway… thanks for apologizing. I felt sort of blindsided over dessert, you know what I mean?”

“I could see that.”

“And by the way,” she added, “I want you to know that I
do
realize it’s not easy to make your living photographing and writing about wildlife if you stay in one location.”

“In a word, no,” he replied. “And thanks for that.”

“You’re welcome. Have you noticed that things seem to get a lot more complicated as we get older?” she declared in a tone of voice that indicated they were becoming friends again.

“Believe me, I’ve noticed.”

They both stared contemplatively across the Mississippi at the bridge spanning its sluggish depths. Then Daphne abruptly placed her back against the guardrail and pointed up the street in the direction of a brick building with the sound of a hard-driving blues band pouring out of the door and windows. “Behold the Under-the-Hill Saloon!”

He took her arm again and they walked another fifty yards, entering a shadowy room where fewer than a dozen patrons sat at the bar and the few small tables scattered around the club. Daphne nodded in the direction of the band.

“Miss-Lou funky,” she pronounced with obvious pleasure. She cocked her head and listened for a few moments to a riveting backbeat. Then she grinned, and her broad smile infused Sim with a sense of impending fun and adventure. “Hey… let’s forget the last fifteen minutes—and the last ten years—and just have a good time, okay?” she said. By now, he could swear she was batting her sable eyelashes at him. “Wanna jitterbug, shutterbug?”

“Yeah, baby, yeah,” he deadpanned.

“There’s no dance floor here, so we’ll have to go to Biscuits and Blues for that,” she pronounced.

As a matter of fact, he couldn’t wait to get his arms around this woman, but first he wanted to talk to her about another thorny subject.

“Great, but how about we have a drink here,” he suggested over the din of the three-piece band, “and then head on up the hill?” He guided her to a table that another couple had just vacated and placed an order for two stingers. “Maybe this is my chance to ask you about harps that… uh… how shall I put it?”

“Why don’t you just tell me what happened at Monmouth the other night?” she asked, her eyes suddenly wary once more.

Just then, the music ended and the band took a break. Now that the joint had grown considerably quieter, Sim felt self-conscious and more than a little foolish. Despite this, he plunged ahead, relating the sequence of events that had brought him to the entrance of the ornate Victorian parlor at his hotel at three o’clock in the morning.

“The room was full of moonlight, but even so, the harp was sitting in the corner where there were mostly shadows. No one was in the room,” he said, shaking his head, “but I swear to God I heard harp music!”

“Do you remember what it sounded like? Classical?” She bit her lip. “Maybe you were just dreaming ’cause you’d heard me playing earlier that day?” she suggested.

But Sim was trying to recall exactly what he’d heard that night. “No… it wasn’t classical music I heard, and… it wasn’t blues, or anything.” He snapped his fingers excitedly. “It was a nursery tune… a lullaby, or something. French! You know…” He began to hum softly and then stopped. “I can’t remember the words that go with it, but—
you
know!” And he resumed humming the familiar tune.

“‘Frère Jacques.’”

She pronounced the name with no excitement whatsoever, but rather with an odd air of resignation.

“‘Frère Jacques’! That’s
it
!” He congratulated her. “I can’t sing worth a damn, but you figured it out. But, then, you’re a musician, aren’t you?” he said, laughing.

But Daphne wasn’t even smiling. She looked disconcerted, in fact. Just then, a waitress appeared with their drinks, and she took a long draft of her stinger.

“I think you’ve seen the town ghost.”

“The what?”

“You
really
are going to be a welcome addition as far as the Natchez Chamber of Commerce is concerned,” she teased, but her smile stopped short of her eyes. And then she proceeded to tell him about a forsaken young woman two centuries earlier who’d played the harp and had fallen in love with a French cavalier passing through Natchez. “Apparently, the poor girl has spent her afterlife waiting for the cad’s return and has been seen or heard playing harps in parlors all over town by everyone from a Grand Dame of the Daughters of the American Revolution to a local gardener. So, congratulations for having made a sighting!” she finished, her demeanor now thoroughly tongue-in-cheek.

Sim raised an eyebrow and shrugged at Daphne’s fanciful tale, sensing she wasn’t telling him what she truly thought about the bizarre incident. Well, he didn’t know what to make of it himself. He finished his drink, thinking that the entire evening had been a bit bizarre. He’d enjoyed Daphne Duvallon’s company. In fact, he’d enjoyed it very much, but he also felt as if he’d been navigating minefields—both his and hers. He glanced around the barroom. The band seemed on a permanent break.

Daphne stole a peek at her watch, and said, “It’s Sunday night. Maybe they just play one set.” It appeared she was about to call a halt to the evening—and that felt disappointing, somehow.

Hurriedly he asked, “Well… are you still up to seeing what’s going on at Biscuits and Blues on
top
of the bluff?” He signaled the waitress to bring their check.

She gave him a curious look, and then replied, “I can take it, if you can.” She almost seemed relieved to change not only the subject, but the scene as well.

***

The minute Daphne and Sim walked into the blues club, Daphne recognized the bandleader, Willis McGee, who’d played at her brother’s wedding. The bar was half full, and Willis and his group were doing their utmost to liven up the place with an up-tempo rendition of “Summertime.” He’d added a new member to his group, a young black woman who played bass guitar, freeing up Willis to wail on a tenor saxophone. Sim and Daphne sat down at a small table near the front, and as soon as the tune ended, she waved to the musicians.

“Hey, Willis! Y’all sound great!” she called.

Willis peered through the thick lenses of his black-rimmed spectacles and did a double take.

“Well, hey there yourself, Miz Daphne!” He turned to the members of his group. “Hey, guys… remember her? Did that down-home version of ‘Georgia On My Mind’ at the weddin’ over at Monmouth yesterday.” His fellow musicians nodded and smiled in greeting. He introduced the woman bass guitarist. “This here’s m’ daughter, Kendra. Kendra, meet Daphne Duvallon, and—” The gray-haired bandleader looked apologetically at Sim.

“Hi, Kendra… Willis. I’m Sim Hopkins. Please. Play some more.”

Willis and his daughter nodded amicably. “Anything you folks wanna hear tonight?” Willis asked, looking at Sim and Daphne expectantly.

Daphne, who couldn’t take her eyes off Kendra McGee, was virtually struck dumb and deferred to Sim, who swiftly suggested “‘I’ll Be Seeing You’?”

Kendra? Kendra McGee?

“The old Billie Holiday tune? Cool, man,” Willis was saying. “You got it!” He turned to the band, and called, “And a one… and two…” and the musicians swung into the familiar standard.

As for Daphne, she could only force a smile and nod. This Kendra looked nothing like the young house servant who had kindly told another Daphne in another life that she was welcome to spend the night in the safety of her family’s slave cabin behind the Devon Oaks Plantation house.

This
is
just
too
damn
weird!

Daphne stilled her pounding pulse with the thought that local families in a small town like Natchez—population eighteen thousand—went back for generations. Names, such as hers, and perhaps Willis and Kendra McGee’s, were handed down for so long, no one even remembered who the original ancestor might be. Meanwhile, she attempted to shake off her bewilderment that both a Willis
and
a Kendra were playing at Biscuit and Blues the night after she encountered their namesakes in some inexplicable “flashback.” Instead, she focused her attention on Sim.

“Have you heard Etta James do ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ on her
Mystery
Lady
CD?” she asked.

“Yeah, but I’m a loyalist,” Sim replied emphatically. “I think I own every Billie Holiday tune ever recorded. If I have a song by Miss Billie, I don’t buy it by anybody else.”

“Wow… you’re tough!” she teased. “I can’t remember if Billie Holiday ever recorded ‘Georgia on My Mind’—but I
hope
not!”

He reached across their table and tapped his forefinger on the end of her nose. “For
you
, I’d make an exception.”

It was a simple, playful gesture, but Daphne felt as if it were as intimate as a kiss. The Willis McGee quartet languidly swung into the second chorus of the old World War II tune, galvanizing Sim to rise from his chair and ask Daphne to dance. The rest of the bar’s patrons, it seemed, were bent on consuming more alcohol, and except for Daphne and Sim, the dance floor was deserted.

“Just us?” Daphne asked, suddenly feeling self-conscious. She was accustomed to playing music, not dancing to it.

“Just us,” Sim confirmed, and drew her into the circle of his arms.

He was the perfect height for her, and Daphne felt as if a key had fit effortlessly into a lock somewhere in the cosmos. The few moments that she’d slow danced with Simon Hopkins at her brother’s wedding had been an altogether different experience. After her mother’s flame-throwing episode, when she called her daughter a “dance hall floozy” in front of fifty guests, Daphne had simply gone numb, remembering the subsequent fox-trot only as a near out-of-body experience.

Now they were standing shoulder to waist to thigh, and Daphne wondered how a perfect stranger’s body could feel so right, his six-feet-two so exquisitely proportioned to her five-feet-four. The room’s walls and the bar’s patrons seemed to recede, and Daphne’s entire world became the curve of Sim’s navy-clad shoulder and the warmth of his left hand holding her right.

The words of the song drifted through her head.

I’ll be seeing you
…
in
all
the
old, familiar places
…

It
felt
so familiar, one part of her brain insisted, but a warning voice rang a clarion call: Sim Hopkins was a travelin’ man who was still deeply troubled by the end of a marriage that had been officially DOA for a decade.

Sim’s arm tightened around her waist, and she fought a desire to fit the top of her head under his chin. It felt wonderful. It felt dangerous. It felt—

Oh, shut up, and just
dance
!

And dance they did. To a moody rendition of “Skylark,” and then to a sultry, down-to-the-bone version of “Embraceable You,” another Billie Holiday tune that Willis called for with a mischievous wink in Sim’s direction.

Daphne gazed briefly at Sim from beneath her eyelashes and felt a bolt of electricity when their glances met. They moved across the dance floor as one, or as if they were Ginger and Fred, or Gene and Cyd, two dancing fools who magically knew
exactly
where to put a foot, make a turn, or change directions.

“Hey…” Sim whispered against her ear. “You’re some dancer, you know that? When do you practice? Three a.m.?”

“I hardly ever dance,” she said in a small voice. “I—”

Sim pulled her closer and exhaled softly against her ear. He appeared unabashed by his state of arousal that bloomed against her thigh. It was as if she’d been dancing with him her entire life. In
another
life.

Now, stop that! Thank your lucky stars no Sim Hopkins has appeared in any of these wacky visitations
…