Die Job (3 page)

“Maybe,” I agreed. Not. At the University of Georgia, I’d taken more business and music classes than history or sociology.

Bending, Lucy dragged a cardboard box a little larger than a case of wine from under the table. She hefted it with a grunt and handed it to me. “Don’t eat or drink anything while
reading these,” she cautioned, “and wear gloves so the oils on your hands don’t damage anything, and—”

“I’ll take good care of them,” I promised, heading for the door before she could change her mind.

The carton cut into the flesh of my upper arms as I lugged it to the car, and I wondered what there was in this small box of history to make it so heavy.

[Saturday]

“WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THAT?” I ASKED MOM AND Althea as we prepped the salon for opening early Saturday morning. I looked at them over the letter, the first one I’d pulled from the box Lucy had loaned me the previous night. I couldn’t get the VCR tape to play—my machine was on the fritz—so I’d started on the box of documents. I slipped it back into the manila envelope I’d used to protect it. Although the paper was thicker than I thought it would be, it had yellowed and the brownish ink had faded.

“It’s fascinating, isn’t it?” Mom said. “Getting a glimpse into history like that. I feel sorry for poor Clarissa and she’s been dead for more than a hundred years most likely. How terrible to lose her father so suddenly.”

I nodded, a lump rising in my throat. I’d felt an immediate bond of fatherlessness with Clarissa. My own father had died of pancreatic cancer when I was under five, and I had few memories of him. At least Clarissa had her papa until adulthood. “I meant to read more letters last night,” I said, “but I fell asleep.”

“I’ll bet that Matilda she mentions was my great-great-something-granny,” Althea put in, coming over for a look at the letter.

“Your great-grandmother was a slave at Rothmere?” I asked. “How come I didn’t know that?”

Althea shrugged. “I didn’t know it myself until Kwasi and I did some genealogical research a couple months back.” Wooden
bangles clacked on her wrist as she pulled the letter gently from the envelope, read it, and handed it back.

Kwasi Yarrow was a professor of multicultural studies at Georgia Coastal College and Althea’s boyfriend. She’d experimented with finding her African heritage at his urging, and although she ended up explaining to him that her roots were in south Georgia and she returned to First Baptist after attending his African Methodist Episcopal church for a month, she retained some of her traditional African fashions and accessories, saying they “suited her.”

“You’re not surprised that I come from slave stock, are you?” she said, jutting her chin out.

“Of course I’m surprised,” Mom said, running a dust cloth over the wooden blinds. “Any slave that gave her master the kind of lip you give everyone from clients to friends would probably have been sold to some unsuspecting owner out of state.”

“Hah!” Althea laughed. She tapped on the lid of the Mr. Coffee to encourage it to brew quicker. “You’re probably right about that. We Jenkinses are known for speaking our minds. Kwasi and I couldn’t find out a lot about Matilda, but it seems she got her freedom and lived to be a hundred and two.”

“Good for her,” I said, putting the letter in my purse and accepting a mug of coffee from Althea.

“If you come across any more references to Matilda, I’d be interested in seeing them, Grace,” Althea said.

“I’ll let you know,” I promised.

The day passed quickly in a blur of cutting and coloring and highlighting. Once again, conversation revolved around Horatio, which was still on course to hit the
Georgia coast by Wednesday night. People who weren’t fussing about the hurricane were talking about their Halloween costumes for trick-or-treating Sunday night. Mom and Walter left for Jacksonville, Althea cleared out an hour early to meet Kwasi, and after I closed up the salon, I walked the six blocks from my apartment to the high school to catch the bus as dusk was falling. A bat flapped past just overhead and I wished her luck with catching a mosquito dinner. The sky was still relatively clear, but it felt like the pressure had dropped a bit and a headache niggled at the back of my skull. It grew more forceful as I took in the students milling about the yellow bus in the parking lot, several of the boys tossing a football around and other students chatting in clumps of three or four. Rachel broke away from one of the groups when she caught sight of me.

She grabbed my forearm. “Grace! We’ve just had the most, like, splendiferous idea. The student council”—she nodded toward the group she’d been talking to—“has been trying to come up with a fund-raiser idea for the Winter Ball. Ari suggested we do one of those head-shaving things; you know, where people contribute money to get certain teachers or popular kids to shave their heads. And then I said we could, like, contribute the hair to Locks of Love, and everyone was, like, ‘Yeah!’ ” She looked at me expectantly.

“Sounds like a good cause,” I said, looking around for the science teacher who was supposed to be in charge of tonight’s outing.

“Great! Then you’ll do it?”

I looked at her eager face. “Do what?”

“Come to the school and shave the heads of the kids who ‘win’ and cut girls’ hair for Locks of Love. Ari looked it
up on her iPhone and you have to have at least ten inches of hair, so I s’pose it’ll mostly be girls doing the Locks of Love thing.”

It
was
a good cause—Locks of Love makes wigs for children who lose their hair to cancer treatments or other causes—and I didn’t mind helping out. “Sure,” I said. “I could leave the salon a little early and come to the school. And I can mail the hair to Locks of Love; I’ve cut hair for them before.”

“Great! We’ll set it up so we can do it every day this week—maybe over lunch or during last period. I don’t know how we’ll do the voting, yet . . .” She bounced back to her student council buddies and they began to argue about how to talk kids into participating.

“You must be Rachel’s friend,” a voice said from behind me.

I turned to see a soap opera–handsome man holding out his hand. Soot-colored lashes and brows made a striking contrast to ice blue eyes that glinted in a way that would have gotten him cast as the guy with just enough bad boy in him to be interesting. He had the kind of full, shapely lips that combined sensitivity with sexy, and smallish ears set close to his head. Strands of silver in his collar-grazing dark hair and crow’s feet put him in his late thirties, I guessed. “Grace Terhune,” I said, liking his firm grip as we shook hands.

“Glen Spaatz. Science teacher and amateur ghostbuster.” He had a dazzling smile that produced a sexy dimple on his right cheek. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

He gestured me toward the bus with a courtly gesture and I climbed the steps with their ridged rubber matting, feeling like I was stepping into a time machine. Letting my hand
slap against each seat as I passed, I settled in by a window three-quarters of the way back, just like in high school. The teens filed on, laughing and joking, slinging their backpacks onto the bench seats. Rachel waved to me from her seat near the front, then scooted over as Braden McCullers, her former main squeeze, slid onto the seat. They immediately fell into conversation, her dark head close to his blond one.

“Is this seat taken?” Before I could answer, a short woman with dark hair pulled into a low ponytail so it emphasized her widow’s peak sat down, jeans stretching over stocky thighs. “I’m Tasha Solomon.” She offered her hand across her body and we shook awkwardly. She smiled, revealing straight teeth with the yellowy gray of tetracycline staining near the roots. “That’s my daughter, Ari.” She pointed with her chin to a plump, auburn-haired girl seated three rows ahead and studiously avoiding her mother’s eyes. “It’s really Ruth-Ellen, but she’s been going by RE—Ari, get it?—since she started high school. Heaven forbid that I sit with her!” She rolled her eyes as if amused, but I caught a hint of hurt in the way she studied her daughter’s back.

“No teenager would be caught dead with a parent at a school function,” I said, remembering my own feelings the time my mother had volunteered to chaperone a Sadie Hawkins dance my sophomore year. I’d told her she might as well stab me through the heart since my social life was over. At least she’d had the decency not to actually
dance
like one of the chaperone moms had.

“Oh, I know,” Tasha said, waving a would-be casual hand. “Which one is yours?”

“Pardon?”

“Which kid?”

Ye
gods. Did she actually think I looked old enough to have a high schooler? “None of them,” I said through gritted teeth. “Rachel Whitley is a friend.”

“Oh, nice girl,” she said. Her gaze followed a pair of youths in letter jackets as they made loud, fist-bumping progress toward the back row. “Those boys look like trouble with a capital T,” she said in a low voice. “That Lonnie Farber asked Ari out once, but her father and I put a quick end to that. He’s headed to no good end. His brother’s actually in
prison
.”

The kid she indicated was a six-foot-four African American teen, lithe and muscular, with a cocky air and short dreadlocks draping across his forehead. The bus lurched forward, but he swayed with the motion, settling his backpack between his feet as he sat. The bus trundled out of the lot and picked up speed.

Lonnie Farber didn’t look like an immediate threat, and I turned back around as Tasha said, “My husband was against this field trip from the moment Ari mentioned it, but I’m trying to be open-minded. I am a scientist, after all.” She paused a brief moment so I could ask about her career but continued when I stayed silent. “The ghost-hunting shtick might be a bit unorthodox, I told Aaron, but I’m sure there’s no harm in it.”

“How could there be?” I agreed.

The students stampeded out of the bus when we reached the plantation. I followed more slowly with Tasha Solomon and Wally Peet, the high school football coach who’d also been a PE teacher when I was in high school. I couldn’t figure out if he was there because he was doing Spaatz a favor or because he wanted to keep an eye on
some of his players. Several of the boys wore football letter jackets, including the three from the bus’s back row, plus Braden McCullers and a couple of others.

The Satilla River flowed past the plantation down beyond the cemetery, and although I couldn’t see it, I could smell the wetness in the air. Spanish moss dripped from many of the trees, swaying with the breeze. I had to admit it was an atmospheric setting; if I were a ghost, I’d have hung out here. Five jack-o’-lanterns glowed from the wide Rothmere veranda; with a start, I realized Sunday was Halloween. Why had Spaatz planned the ghost-hunting trip for the night before Halloween? Surely he knew the teens would find it impossible to resist a Halloween prank or two.

“Isn’t this fun?” Rachel skipped up beside me, accompanied by Braden McCullers.

A good-looking blond kid, he smiled at me and said, “Hi, Miss Terhune. Thanks for coming.” They seemed easy in each other’s company as Rachel linked her arm through his and drew him up to the front of the group.

“About as much fun as a root canal,” Coach Peet muttered from my left, having overheard Rachel’s question. A fiftyish man no taller than five-ten, he looked more like a long-distance runner than a football player. He had a tonsure of gray-tinged brown hair growing around a shiny bald spot and a beak of a nose; combined, the hair and nose made him look a bit like a condor.

“You got drafted, too?” I laughed, holding out my hand. “Grace Terhune. I let Rachel Whitley talk me into this.”

“Hunh,” he said, ignoring my hand. Hunching his shoulders, he quickened his pace until he was three or four strides in front of me and I was staring at his back.

I let my hand drop, stunned by his boorishness. Not exactly Mr. Friendly.

“Don’t mind him,” a voice said from behind me.

I looked over my shoulder and Glen Spaatz fell into step beside me, his long stride making me pick up my pace.

“He’s like this every year during the season. Two of his star players got ruled ineligible last year after a DUI and a vandalism charge—separate incidents, both Halloween weekend—and he’s trying to keep it from happening again. He’s a really friendly guy after the playoffs.”