The Girl On Legare Street (21 page)

“She is.” He looked down at his feet. “But I’m thinking that this whole ‘incompatible signs’ thing is just a cover. She’s so independent, you know? And I think it’s just an excuse to keep her independence and keep me at a distance. But together . . .” He smiled and looked away for a moment. “It’s like she’s the sun and I’m the moon and it takes both of us to make a whole day.”

I stared at him, not sure if he was being eloquent or just speaking in tongues. I decided to cut to the chase. “Do you love her, Chad?”

He nodded, and I was relieved that he hadn’t tried to put his feelings into words again.

“Good. Because even a blind man could see that the two of you were made for each other.” I pushed him toward the door. “So go do whatever you have to do to show her how much you care for her and want to be with her. And I won’t tell a soul about the sander. Promise.”

He looked at me gratefully as I propelled him out of the room. “Ciao, Miss Ginnette, catch you later.”

My mother stuck her head out from the closet. “Good-bye, Chad.”

After Chad left, my mother turned to me. “Was there something you needed, Mellie?”

I looked around for where I’d placed the journal, having forgotten why I’d come in there in the first place. I held the book in my hands, suddenly shy and unsure how to approach her.

“I’ve been reading the journal we found in Grandmother’s desk. I don’t know who the writer is, yet, but I know she lived in this house with another girl whose name begins with an
R
. I get the feeling that they’re sisters, but the writer doesn’t come right out and say it.” I glanced up at my mother to gauge her reaction to my next words. “She mentions a protector who she can see and talk to, but R can’t see him.”

I knew what I needed her to do, but still I hesitated.

“I’ve been thinking about what’s been going on in the house. We’ve both seen the soldier, but he’s not—foggy anymore. And a couple of times he didn’t disappear when I looked him in the face.”

She nodded, her brows furrowed. “And the other spirit, the girl, she likes to appear when you’re alone. Like you’re on an even playing field when it’s just the two of you.” My mother sat down on the bed and a skirt slipped to the floor, but she didn’t move to pick it up. “Except for that time in the kitchen when I touched the locket, she hasn’t appeared when the two of us are together. Like she knows that together we’re too powerful. If we find out her name, if we know who she is and why she’s here to harm you, we can exorcise her. She will work very hard to make sure we don’t figure that out.”

She pointed to the journal. “You want me to hold it, don’t you?”

I hesitated a moment before nodding. “I was hoping you might be able to tell me more than what’s written within the covers.”

She eyed the journal, then looked back at me. “It kills me a little each time.”

“I know. That’s why I haven’t asked you.”

For a moment, I thought she was going to refuse, and I felt the old anger resurface. Instead, she held her hands out. “But I would gladly do this a hundred times if I thought it might spare you even a moment of danger.” Slowly, she opened her palm so that it was facing me, and there—in faded pink where the burn was healing—was the imprint of the locket.

I sucked in a breath of air. “You didn’t tell me.” It was a stupid thing to say, and I shook my head.

She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Give me the journal, Mellie. I want to help if I can.”

I hesitated, and she reached for it. “Give me the journal.”

I swallowed, then placed the book in her hands and she took it, gripping it tightly. The response was almost immediate. Her eyes closed as her hand began to shake. I put my hand over hers only because I didn’t know what else to do, and her skin felt cold and wet like snow. Her mouth moved, but nothing came out, a drowning woman searching for air.

I felt real fear then—fear of whatever force was causing this, and fear for my mother. Clothes slipped off the bed in a small avalanche as she continued to grip the book, her head shaking back and forth.

“Mother!” I shouted, wanting to make her stop. She continued to shake uncontrollably. “Mother!” I called out again and this time she responded by jerking her arm back and hurling the book across the room. It hit the freshly painted wall, denting the plaster, before it landed on the hardwood floor.

My mother stared at me, her chest rising and falling rapidly and her eyes blinking slowly.

“What is it?” I asked, almost afraid to know. “What did you see?”

Shakily, she stood and put her hands on my shoulders, whether to steady me or her I wasn’t sure.

“What did you see?” I asked again.

Her eyes were clear as she answered and it took me a moment to recognize the single word that came out of her mouth.

She dropped her hands and said it again, just to make sure I’d heard, and I watched her lips move as if in slow motion as she formed the one word. “Rebecca.”

I paused on the outdoor steps, hearing the staccato snipping of manual hedge cutters. Until about a year ago, I’d had no idea what hedge cutters were or what they sounded like, and I still wasn’t sure if my newfound knowledge was a good thing or not.

My hands shook as I turned the key to lock the front door, having not yet completely recovered from watching what happened when my mother touched the journal. She seemed disoriented, but insisted it was only because she needed to take a nap and nothing more. I wanted to reschedule my appointment with Yvonne so I could stay with her, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

I followed the sound to the side of the house where my grandmother’s garden had once been the pride of Legare Street. Most of the former residents’ cement blobs and hulking metal monoliths had been removed. I’d instructed for them to be tossed in a Dumpster but instead listened to Amelia Trenholm when she convinced me to get them appraised first.

Shocked as I was by their apparent value, I happily took the money from an independent art dealer and purchased a Queen Anne console table and bookcase for the upstairs sitting room, and still had money left over to convert my bathroom from a bordello to something that more resembled a spa.

My father stood with his back to me, pruning back two large crepe myrtles that had once been no taller than my six-year-old self. He stepped back when he saw me, and lowered the clippers. “Who knows the last time somebody did any cleaning up in this garden? Seems to me those people just let everything go wild.”

“Maybe they did it as a distraction so people wouldn’t mind the inside so much.”

He smiled at me, his eyes bright, and it occurred to me how new it was to see him smile, and how hard he had to have worked to have something to smile about.

“Come here,” he said, motioning for me to follow before leading me to the edge of the house. “Look what I found.” He moved aside tall grass that hadn’t yet fallen to the hedge clippers and revealed my grandmother’s prized Miss Charleston camellias. Despite being neglected and overgrown, large deep red semidouble blooms resembling the puffed-out cheeks of cherubs clung stubbornly to their stems. These camellias had been Grandmother’s favorites, but not just for their beauty and scent. She loved them because of how brave they were to bloom brightly in the winter months when everything else slept.

“I can’t wait to clean this grass out and let those flowers go to town. I’ve got some pretty amazing plans for this garden, a sort of mix between old and new design. I’m even going to resurrect your grandmother’s famous knot garden.” He grinned broadly and I couldn’t help but grin back, his enthusiasm contagious.

“Daddy . . .” I began, and he tilted his head toward me, waiting for me to continue. Speaking of my feelings came unnaturally to me. I’d spent a lifetime pretending I didn’t hurt, and making believe that I didn’t require affection or the give-and-take of any close relationship. And somehow along the way, I’d forgotten how to show him how much he meant to me.

“Daddy,” I started again. “You’ve done a great job.”

He met my gaze, and I wondered if he was noticing that my eyes were just like his. He nodded tightly, both of us knowing that I wasn’t talking about the garden, yet each aware of how much I needed to pretend that we were. “Thanks, Peanut.”

I grimaced and rolled my eyes, warmed by the use of my old nickname. I studied him for a moment. “You know, Daddy, I’d be happy to help you find a house. It’s silly in this market to rent when you could get something pretty decent right now.” I thought of the cramped one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment in North Charleston where he’d lived ever since he retired. Initially, he’d told me it was only until he got settled, but that had been more than five years ago.

He squinted at me in the sunlight. “Yeah, I’ve thought about it. I think I’m going to wait on it a bit, though. Try to limit any more life changes for the time being.”

I nodded, understanding. “Just let me know. I’ll do it without a fee, of course.”

“I would hope so,” he said, pretending to be offended. Then it was his turn to study me. He seemed to be struggling with words, as if unsure how to string them together in a way that wouldn’t make me run. Finally, he said, “I wish you could find a way to forgive your mother. She tried to reach you all those years, and I wouldn’t let her.You’ve forgiven me. Why can’t you do the same for her?”

Sadness welled up from inside of me, surprising me only because of the absence of anger. I shook my head, wondering when the anger had gone. Maybe it had been when my mother had touched the journal, knowing it would hurt her but doing it anyway because she thought it might help me. I swallowed. “She left, Daddy. You didn’t.”

He didn’t look away and I had trouble holding his gaze. I turned to leave, then stopped. “Can you do me a favor?” I asked.

“Anything. What?”

I smiled to myself, noticing how he’d agreed to help me without knowing what I was going to ask. “I need to go see Yvonne, but Mother isn’t feeling well and is lying down. I didn’t want to leave her, but she insisted that she was okay. I’d feel better knowing that you’re keeping an eye on her while I’m gone.”

He put down the clippers and began peeling off his gardening gloves. “What happened?”

“You don’t want to know.”

His lips tightened over his teeth. “Some of that hocus-pocus upset her?”

I pressed the collar of my coat up to my neck, feeling chilled in the cool air. “Don’t go there, Dad.”

“But . . .”

“Please, Daddy. And if you’re going to go up there to upset her more, then just stay out here. I would have thought after forty years, you might have opened your mind a tad. Stepped out of your box a little. It’s not like Mother and I have been making this stuff up all this time just to annoy you. Maybe if you’d stop to think for a moment, you might discover that life isn’t all just black-and-white.”

We stared at each other for a long moment, both of us surprised that I’d spoken at all, much less defended my mother and admitted to being psychic all in the same breath.

“Fine,” he said. “I won’t say or do anything to upset her.”

I nodded, recognizing his don’t ask, don’t tell policy as the truce it was. “Thank you,” I said. “And don’t . . .” I paused, trying to find a better way to say it, then gave up. “Don’t leave her by herself.”

He looked at me from beneath lowered brows and I saw him struggling not to argue with me. “I’ll stay with her.”

“Great. I’ll be back around five.”

As I watched my father enter the house, I felt a little like I was leaving a lion to watch over a lamb. But I knew he’d take care of her, and protect her if she needed it. Whoever had been haunting me had yet to include my mother, but if I’d learned anything about dead people it was that they were a lot like the living, breathing kind; they didn’t always behave like you expected them to.

I walked out of the garden to the sidewalk, then turned around as I realized that the sun was in the right spot. Facing the stained-glass window again, I squinted in the bright reflected light. As I studied it closely, I saw how it was really an optical illusion, like one of those pictures of two completely different images. One image was visible right away, but the second one only became obvious after you stared at it for a long time. At first glance it appeared to be random splotches of color and sticklike markings, but as I squinted at it in the sunlight, the image of the map that I’d seen in the photo appeared: the large house, the body of water with the odd angel’s head, the figures standing in the lawn. But what I noticed now were all the fine lines that became visible when the sun hit the window, embellishments to the original image that couldn’t be seen without the sun’s help.

Squinting, and wishing I had my glasses with me, I tried to make out why the border of odd lines and marks had been added, what function they served, and couldn’t determine anything. I needed to talk with Rebecca, to see if she’d had any luck turning up any of the paperwork on the window, but I was hesitant to call her. My mother’s vision of her while holding the journal had shocked us both, prompting more questions and even fewer answers. Besides, I remembered Rebecca telling me that she had other work deadlines and wouldn’t be able to see Yvonne until the following week.

I unsnapped my phone from its place inside my purse and used the telephoto button to take a close-up picture of the window before carefully placing the phone back where it belonged. Then I pushed open the gate and walked out to the sidewalk, going over my mental notes of all the things I needed to discuss with Yvonne. I paused for a moment, tilting my head to hear better, sure I’d heard the sound of a crying baby. It had been soft at first, so soft that I thought I hadn’t really heard it. But there it was again, coming from inside the house, and it was louder now. I faced the front door, expecting to see a baby there, but the steps were empty.

The crying softened to a quiet mewling, and I wanted to believe it was just the noise of a lost kitten in the grass. But I recognized the sound from the time following my mother’s stay in the hospital when I was a little girl, and how it had awakened me at night until I’d told my mother. The sound went away, at least for that night, and I remembered sleeping well for the first time in a long while. Then the next day my mother was gone and my father took me from the house for what I thought would be forever, and for a long time wished that it had been.

I forced myself to walk away and not look back, sensing that somebody or something was watching me. I reached for my phone as I’d done dozens of times before to call Jack and tell him what had happened, but my hand stopped halfway to my purse. When I reached my car, it rang as if conjured, and I ended up emptying my purse on the hood to find it before I realized it was neatly clipped to the inside pocket where it always was.

I took it out and flipped it open, my anticipation clouded when I saw the name Marc Longo on the screen. We’d been playing phone tag for weeks, trying to set up lunch, but he’d been out of town, and I’d been less than enthusiastic about promptly returning his calls. But now my thoughts turned to Jack, and how he didn’t appear to want to have anything to do with me anymore—not that I really blamed him after what I’d said to him—and I realized how desperately lonely I was. And, as Jack had pointed out, a relationship with a ghost didn’t count as a relationship.

After a deep breath, I flipped open the phone on the fifth ring and spoke, wishing as I did that it wasn’t Jack’s face I saw.

I drove the short blocks to the Fireproof Building on Meeting Street where the South Carolina Historical Society library is located. Lacking the Jack Trenholm touch for finding curb parking directly in front of wherever he was heading, I found parking three blocks away, then walked back with five minutes to spare before my appointment with Yvonne.

I ascended the circular stone stairwell, remembering coming here before with Jack while trying to find out more about the Confederate diamonds hidden in my Tradd Street house. Yvonne was an octogenarian with a sharp mind and even sharper wit who knew just about every source in the archives at the historical society. And if she didn’t know it personally, then she could tell you where to find it.

Yvonne sat at a table in the reading room, a box of folders and a stack of books on a corner of the table. She smiled when she saw me and stood, never one to let her arthritis get the best of her. She wore a pink cashmere sweater set over a pink tweed skirt and she smelled of roses as I leaned down to kiss her cheek.

“Jack’s not with me,” I said, not really understanding my need to explain.

“I know. He took me to dinner last night at S.N.O.B. and we had a nice heart-to-heart.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to sound disinterested but wanting her to feel obliged to tell me everything.

“He’s been working very hard on his book,” she continued. “He was actually here this morning with that blond reporter from the
Post & Courier
. Rebecca somebody. I was surprised that you weren’t with them since they were looking for information on the Prioleau house on Legare.”

“They were here today? I thought her appointment with you was for next Monday.” I remembered Rebecca telling me that she was busy doing research for another “famous Charlestonian” article and wouldn’t be able to see Yvonne until the following week. “Did she have to change it?”

Yvonne shook her head. “No. Her appointment was for today, at ten o’clock sharp.”

She sat down and indicated the chair next to hers. I’d already unloaded my coat and scarf in the locker room so I had nothing to fiddle with while I tried to figure out a way to tactfully ask her what she’d found for them.

“I kept the records out just in case you wanted to see them, too.”

I looked at her, grateful. “Thank you.” I waited for her to pull three pieces of paper from one of the folders. One appeared to be a handwritten order from a John Nolan & Sons on Market Street, and another was a receipt from the same business. But it was the third piece of paper that caught my attention. It was larger than the other two, and it appeared to be a vellum-type paper. On it was a miniature replica of the stained-glass window at my mother’s house.