Beautiful Creatures (29 page)

“You’re crazy. You two are just looking at some crumbling old papers.”

“‘If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.’”

“Khalil Gibran.” He fired back.

“‘Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’”

“Benjamin Franklin.”

Eventually even my father had given up trying to get into their archive. We’d gone home and eaten rocky road ice cream, and
after that, I had always thought of my mother and Marian as an unstoppable force of nature. Two mad scientists, as Marian
had said, chained to each other in the lab. They had churned out book after book, even once making the short-list for the
Voice of the South Award, the Southern equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize. My dad was fiercely proud of my mom, of both of them,
even if we were just along for the ride. “Lively of the mind.” That’s how he used to describe my mom, especially when she
was in the middle of a project. That was when she was the most absent, and yet somehow, when he seemed to love her best.

And now here I was, in the private archive, without my dad or my mom, or even a bowl of rocky road ice cream, in sight. Things
were changing pretty quickly around here, for a town that never changed at all.

The room was paneled and dark, the most secluded, airless, windowless room of the third-oldest building in Gatlin. Four long
oak tables stood in parallel lines down the center of the room. Every inch of every wall was crammed with books.
Civil War Artillery and Munitions. King Cotton: White Gold of the South.
Flat metal shelving drawers held manuscripts, and overflowing file cabinets lined a smaller room attached to the back of
the archive.

Marian busied herself with her teapot and hotplate. Lena walked up to a wall of framed maps of Gatlin County, crumbling behind
glass, old as the Sisters themselves.

“Look—Ravenwood.” Lena moved her finger across the glass. “And there’s Greenbrier. You can see the property line a lot better
on this map.”

I walked to the far corner of the room, where a lone table stood, covered with a fine layer of dust and the occasional cobweb.
An old Historical Society charter lay open, with circled names, a pencil still stuck in the spine. A map made out of tracing
paper, tacked to a map of modern-day Gatlin, seemed like someone was trying to mentally excavate the old town from beneath
the new. And lying on top of all of it was a photo of the painting in Macon Ravenwood’s entry.

The woman with the locket.

Genevieve. It has to be Genevieve. We have to tell her, L. We have to ask.

We can’t. We can’t trust anyone. We don’t even know why we’re seeing the visions.

Lena. Trust me.

“What’s all this stuff over here, Aunt Marian?”

She looked at me, her face briefly clouding over. “That’s our last project. Your mom’s and mine.”

Why did my mom have a picture of the painting at Ravenwood?

I don’t know.

Lena walked over to the table, and picked up the photo of the painting. “Marian, what were you guys doing with this painting?”

Marian handed each of us a proper cup of tea, with a saucer. That was another thing about Gatlin. You used a saucer, at all
times, no matter what.

“You should recognize that painting, Lena. It belongs to your Uncle Macon. In fact, he sent me that photo himself.”

“But who’s the woman?”

“Genevieve Duchannes, but I expect you know that.”

“I didn’t, actually.”

“Hasn’t your uncle taught you anything about your genealogy?”

“We don’t talk much about my dead relatives. No one wants to bring up my parents.”

Marian walked over to one of the flat archival drawers, searching for something. “Genevieve Duchannes was your great-great-great-great-grandmother.
She was an interesting character, really. Lila and I were tracing the entire Duchannes family tree, for a project your Uncle
Macon had been helping us with, right up until—” she looked down. “Last year.”

My mom had known Macon Ravenwood? I thought he had said he only knew her through her work.

“You really should know your genealogy.” Marian turned a few yellowed pages of parchment. Lena’s family tree stared back at
us, right next to Macon’s.

I pointed to Lena’s family tree. “That’s weird. All the girls in your family have the last name Duchannes, even the ones who
were married.”

“It’s just a thing in my family. The women keep the family name even after they’re married. It’s always been that way.”

Marian turned the page, and looked at Lena. “It’s often the case in bloodlines where the women are considered particularly
powerful.”

I wanted to change the subject. I didn’t want to dig too deep into the powerful women in Lena’s family with Marian, especially
considering Lena was definitely one of them. “Why were you and Mom tracing the Duchannes tree? What was the project?”

Marian stirred her tea. “Sugar?”

She looked away as I spooned it into my cup. “We were actually mostly interested in this locket.” She pointed to another photograph
of Genevieve. In this one, she was wearing the locket.

“One story in particular. It was a simple story, really, a love story.” She smiled sadly. “Your mother was a great romantic,
Ethan.”

I locked eyes with Lena. We both knew what Marian was about to say.

“Interestingly enough for you two, this love story involves both a Wate and a Duchannes. A Confederate soldier, and a beautiful
mistress of Greenbrier.”

The locket visions. The burning of Greenbrier. My mom’s last book was about everything we had seen happen between Genevieve
and Ethan, Lena’s great-great-great-great-grandmother and my great-great-great-great-uncle.

My mom was working on that book when she died. My head was reeling. Gatlin was like that. Nothing here ever happened only
once.

Lena looked pale. She leaned over and touched my hand, where it rested on the dusty table. Instantly, I felt the familiar
prick of electricity.

“Here. This is the letter that got us started on the whole project.” Marian lay out two parchment sheets on the next oak table.
Secretly, I was glad she didn’t disturb my mom’s worktable. I thought of it as a fitting memorial, more like her than the
carnations everyone had laid on her casket. Even the DAR, they were there for the funeral, laying those carnations down like
crazy, though my mom would have hated it. The whole town, the Baptists, the Methodists, even the Pentecostals, turned out
for a death, a birth, or a wedding.

“You can read it, just don’t touch it. It’s one of the oldest things in Gatlin.”

Lena bent over the letter, holding her hair back to keep it from brushing the old parchment. “They’re desperately in love,
but they’re too different.” She scanned the letter. “‘A Species Apart,’ he calls them. Her family is trying to keep them apart,
and he’s gone to enlist, even though he doesn’t believe in the war, in the hope that fighting for the South will win him the
approval of her family.”

Marian closed her eyes, reciting:

“I might as well be a monkey as a man, for all the good it does me at Greenbrier. Though merely Mortal, my heart breaks with
such pain at the thought of spending the rest of my life without you, Genevieve.”

It was like poetry, like something I imagined Lena would write.

Marian opened her eyes again. “As if he were Atlas carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.”

“It’s all so sad,” said Lena, looking at me.

“They were in love. There was a war. I hate to tell you, but it ends badly, or so it seems.” Marian finished her tea.

“What about this locket?” I pointed at the photo, almost afraid to ask.

“Supposedly, Ethan gave it to Genevieve, as a troth of secret engagement. We’ll never know what happened to it. Nobody ever
saw it again, after the night Ethan died. Genevieve’s father forced her to marry someone else, but legend has it, she kept
the locket and it was buried with her. It was said to be a powerful talisman, the broken bond of a broken heart.”

I shivered. The powerful talisman wasn’t buried with Genevieve; it was in my pocket, and a Dark talisman according to Macon
and Amma. I could feel it throbbing, as if it had been baking in hot coals.

Ethan, don’t.

We have to. She can help us. My mom would have helped us.

I shoved one hand in my pocket, pushing past the handkerchief to touch the battered cameo, and took Marian’s hand, hoping
this was one of those times the locket would work. Her cup of tea crashed to the floor. The room started to swirl.

“Ethan!” Marian shouted.

Lena took Marian’s hand. The light in the room was dissolving into night. “Don’t worry. We’ll be with you the whole time.”
Lena’s voice sounded far away, and I heard the sound of distant gunfire.

In moments, the library filled with rain—

The rain battered down upon them. The winds kicked up, beginning to quell the flames, even though it was too late.

Genevieve stared at what was left of the great house. She had lost everything today. Mamma. Evangeline. She couldn’t lose
Ethan, too.

Ivy ran through the mud toward her, using her skirt to carry the things Genevieve had asked for.

“I’m too late, Lord in Heaven, I’m too late,” Ivy cried. She looked around nervously. “Come, Miss Genevieve, there’s nothin’
more we can do here.”

But Ivy was wrong. There was one thing.

“It’s not too late. It’s not too late.” Genevieve kept repeating the words.

“You’re talkin’ crazy, child.”

She looked at Ivy, desperate. “I need the book.”

Ivy backed away, shaking her head. “No. You can’t mess with that book. You don’t know what you doin’.”

Genevieve grabbed the old woman by the shoulders. “Ivy, it’s the only way. You have to give it to me.”

“You don’t know what you askin’. You don’t know nothin’ about that book—”

“Give it to me or I’ll find it myself.”

Black smoke was billowing up behind them, the fire still spitting as it swallowed up what was left of the house.

Ivy relented, picking up her tattered skirts and leading Genevieve out past what used to be her mother’s lemon grove. Genevieve
had never been past that point. There was nothing out there but cotton fields, or at least that’s what she had always been
told. And she had never had a reason to be in those fields, except on the rare occasions when she and Evangeline played a
game of hide-and-seek.

But Ivy’s path was purposeful. She knew exactly where she was going. In the distance, Genevieve could still hear the sound
of gunshots and the piercing cries of her neighbors, as they watched their own homes burn.

Ivy stopped near a bramble of wild vines, rose-mary, and jasmine, snaking their way up the side of an old stone wall. There
was a small archway, hidden beneath the overgrowth. Ivy ducked down and walked under the arch. Genevieve followed. The arch
must have been attached to a wall because the area was enclosed. A perfect circle—its walls obscured by years of wild vines.

“What is this place?”

“A place your mamma didn’t want you to know nothin’ about, or you’d know what it was.”

In the distance, Genevieve could see tiny stones jutting from the tall grass. Of course. The family cemetery. Genevieve remembered
being out there, once, when she was very young, when her great-grandmother had died. She remembered the funeral was at night,
and her mother had stood in the tall grass, in the moonlight, whispering words in a language Genevieve and her sister hadn’t
recognized. “What are we doin’ out here?”

“You said you wanted that book. Didn’t ya?”

“It’s out here?”

Ivy stopped and looked at Genevieve, confused. “Where else would it be?”

Farther back, there was another structure being strangled by wild vines. A crypt. Ivy stopped at the door. “You sure ya want
to
—
”

“We don’t have time for this!” Genevieve reached for the handle, but there wasn’t one. “How does it open?”