Ghost Moon (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

GHOSTS. THEY WERE EVERYWHERE ON THAT steamy summer’s night. Their white misty shapes hovered over the old graveyard that stood sentinel on the bluff beside the lake, played hide-and-seek behind the Spanish moss that dripped from the twisted branches of the bald cypresses, stretched heavenward above the inky surface of the water. They whispered together, their words falling like drops of water through the mist, almost drowned out by the other, more corporeal sounds of the night.
Run away. Go. Run away
was what they said. Whether the ghosts were real or the product of atmosphere and imagination, though, who knew? And what difference, really, did it make?

It was hot, still, although it was some ten minutes past one A.M. on August 19, 1999, which was a Friday night, or, rather, a Saturday morning. Hot with the thick, damp kind of heat that always lay like a blanket over Point Coupee Parish in August. The kind of heat that curled your hair or made it go limp, depending on what kind of hair you had. The kind of heat that made women ‘‘dewy’’ and men sweat, that exacerbated tempers and passions and bred clouds of mosquitoes and carpets of the slimy green floating plants known as duckweed.

LaAngelle Plantation heat. Courtesy of the swampy Louisiana low country to the south, the Atchafalaya River to the west, and the mighty Mississippi to the east. It came with its own feel, its own smell, its own taste.

She was come home at last, Olivia Morrison thought, inhaling the indefinable aroma of decay, swamp water, and vegetation run amok that she remembered from her earliest childhood. The knowledge both exhilarated and frightened her. Because the truth was that this was, and was not, her home.

‘‘Are we almost there, Mom?’’ The tired little voice at her elbow was barely audible over the night sounds around them.

‘‘Almost.’’ Olivia glanced down at her eight-year-old daughter with mixed tenderness and concern. Sara looked dead on her feet, her sturdy little body drooping like a wilted flower. Her thick-lashed brown eyes were dark-shadowed and huge with fatigue. Her upturned face was pale. Tendrils of jaw-length coffee-brown hair, having been pushed back by an impatient hand once too often, curled and clung to the moist skin of her neck and forehead. The yellow and white gingham sundress that had been so pretty and crisp that morning in Houston was now as limp-looking as the child herself. Her dusty black ballerina flats—thriftily bought big to allow for growth—slipped off her heels with every step to slap against the spongy ground. The lace-trimmed white anklets she wore with them were grimy with dirt. They’d walked from the bus stop at New Roads, a distance of perhaps five miles, because nobody had answered the telephone at the Big House when Olivia called, and she didn’t have the money for a taxi.

Not that she would have had much chance of rousting out Ponce Lennig and his beat-up Mercury anyway, Olivia thought, lifting strands of shoulder-length coffee-brown hair away from her own moist neck. LaAngelle’s only taxi service had always been erratic at best, and Ponce had always turned off his phone promptly at six P.M. He didn’t believe in working nights, he said.

Maybe Ponce didn’t have the taxi service anymore. Maybe there was a new, modern taxi service—or none at all. Not that it mattered, since she was down to her last five dollars and change.

Ponce, if apprised of their circumstances, would have gladly given them a free ride out to the house, but Olivia would have had a hard time confessing to him or anyone else just how broke she was. Only to save Sara a five-mile hike could she have made herself do so. Once upon a time, as Olivia Chenier, spoiled and wild and the youngest of the golden Archer clan, she had been as glamorous and above their touch as a movie star to the people of the town.

Once upon a time. A long time ago. Now she was a dental office manager, barely scraping by from paycheck to paycheck. How the mighty are fallen.

No one but Aunt Callie knew she and Sara were coming, and Aunt Callie didn’t know precisely when. Olivia couldn’t blame any of the family for not being on hand when she called to fetch her and Sara home.

She hadn’t seen them, any of them, for nine years.

With a twinge of anxiety, she wondered how they would react to her return. With something short of the proverbial killing of the fatted calf, she guessed. Her hand tightened around Sara’s.

‘‘I think I’m getting a blister on my heel,’’ Sara complained. ‘‘I told you these shoes were too big.’’

Olivia focused on Sara again. ‘‘I have a Band-Aid in my purse.’’

‘‘I hate Band-Aids.’’

‘‘I know.’’ It was all Olivia could do to suppress a sigh. Sara was not usually whiny, or grumpy, but she was rapidly becoming both. And who could blame her? The child had been traveling since seven that morning, first by car and then by bus and then on foot. ‘‘Listen, baby, if we keep walking up this path, just a little bit farther, we’ll come to some stepping stones, and when we reach the end of them we’ll go up some steps to the top of a bluff, and you’ll be able to see the house from there.’’

Sara’s gaze swept their surroundings.

‘‘It’s spooky here.’’ She shivered despite the heat.

‘‘That’s just because it’s night.’’ Olivia’s words and tone were comforting, but she, too, glanced around, almost unwillingly.
Run away, Olivia. Run. Run away.
She could swear that’s what she heard, murmured over and over again through the shifting pockets of steam, but she told herself that it was her imagination, nothing more. What with the insects out in full force, the water lapping at the shores of the lake, and all the other sounds of the night, the calling voices could be anything, and certainly did not belong to ghosts. It was just that the dirt path through the woods was so
dark
. They should have kept to the road until they reached the long driveway; taking the shortcut had been a mistake.

‘‘Aren’t you scared?’’ Sara asked, darting a glance up at her mother.

‘‘No,’’ Olivia said stoutly, as her daughter sidled closer against her side, but wasn’t quite sure that she was telling the truth. Whether she was or wasn’t, though, there was no turning back at this point. The road was farther behind them than the house was ahead. They had to keep on walking.

Overhead, a pale crescent moon slipped in and out of view behind a lacey overlay of lavender-tinged clouds, providing just enough silvered light to see by. Glittering stars peeked at them through the dense canopy of leaves. To their left, moonlight painted a shimmering white stripe across the polished surface of the lake, while a nodding ring of water hyacinths, black in this light, performed an eerie ballet close to shore. To their right, the darkness of the cypress grove grew impenetrable just a few feet beyond where they walked. All around them, leaves rustled, branches swayed, and twigs snapped as who-knew-what nocturnal creatures moved about. Insects whirred in never-ending chorus. The soprano piping of dozens of tree frogs was underscored by a bullfrog duet from the direction of the water. Not far ahead, where the ragged-edged lakeshore curved back toward itself, monuments to long-dead Archer family members tilted this way and that atop a kudzu-covered bluff. A long-ago patriarch’s marble crypt gleamed faintly through the darkness. Surrounding it, the aged stone markers looked like ghosts themselves. Fingers of diaphanous white mist rose above all.

Spooky? Oh, yes. Although she would never admit as much to Sara.

‘‘Is that the lake where your mom drowned?’’

Trust her sensitive, imaginative child to hit upon the one topic that Olivia really did not want to talk about just at that moment. The death of her mother had been the defining event of her childhood. It had changed her in a moment, like a catastrophic earthquake instantly reshapes the topography of the land. And yet, although the memory of the pain was sharp and strong even so many years later, she could conjure up no memory of how she had learned that her mother was dead, or of who had told her. No memories of her mother’s funeral, or her stepfather, or the Archer family in mourning. It was as if her memory banks, where the events surrounding her mother’s death were concerned, had been wiped clean. All she knew were the bare facts: Her mother had drowned at age twenty-eight in that lake.

The same lake from which voices now seemed to be calling to her.

‘‘Yes.’’ Olivia set her teeth against the sudden stab of loss remembered, and ignored the icy tingle of dread that snaked down her spine. She would not give in to the morbid fear of the lake that had been the bane of her growing-up years. She had always imagined that it was waiting to get her, to suck her down beneath its shiny surface as it had her mother. Her cousins, once realizing that she was afraid of the lake, had tormented her with it unmercifully, even going so far as to throw her in on one memorable occasion. Now, after so many years in hiatus that she had nearly forgotten about it, the fear threatened to rear its head again. Threatened, bull, she admitted to herself with chagrin. Just setting eyes on the lake once more had brought it back in full, ridiculous force.

Run away. Run away.

Firmly she told herself that she was too old to be afraid of a body of water, even if it was dark and even if voices did seem to be coming from its vicinity. After all, she was twenty-six now, a divorced mother who had been the sole support of herself and her daughter for nearly seven years. A grown-up. Definitely a grown-up.

‘‘After your mom died, your stepfather kept you here with him until he died, and then his family took care of you until you married my father, right?’’

Sara knew the tale well; a somewhat edited and greatly glamorized version of her mother’s history was her favorite bedtime story. During the last few lean years in Houston, both Sara and, if Olivia was honest, Sara’s mother, had needed the dream of better times and better places to cling to.

‘‘Yes,’’ Olivia agreed, groping about among the bits and pieces of information currently capable of being accessed by her tired mind for some means of changing the subject. Tonight, walking through the cypress groves that ringed aptly named Ghost Lake, drawing ever nearer to the Big House and the reunion with the Archers that she had both longed for and dreaded for years, her past was no longer a fairy tale with which to beguile a little girl into sleep. It had suddenly become all too real.

‘‘What’s that?’’ Sara’s voice went high-pitched with surprise.

Mother and daughter stopped and exchanged startled glances. For a moment they stood there, hand in hand in the darkness, every sense alert, as a new and incongruous sound joined the chorus of the night.

CHAPTER 3

‘‘I THINK IT’S ‘TWIST AND SHOUT,’ ’’ OLIVIA said incredulously after a moment, as some of the tension begin to seep from her fear-tightened muscles. It was impossible to remain sensitive to ghostly atmosphere with that sixties hit reverberating through the air, she thought with relief. After a couple of seconds, a reminiscent smile curved her lips. The family must be having a party. Of course, that was why no one had answered the phone when she had called from the bus station. The Archers did things like that. In the summer, particularly in August, they had huge outdoor barbecues/dances to which the whole town was invited, and came.

The Archers had always been bigger-than-life, more colorful and exciting than anyone else she had ever known. Since leaving them, Olivia realized, her life had turned as drably brown as an acre of parched land. Now, just as soon as she had set foot on Archer land again, peacock colors began seeping in.

How she had missed their brightness!

‘‘It’s a party. Come on, we’re missing the fun.’’ She tried to infuse a note of gaiety into her voice, and was heartened to see Sara smile in response. Hand in hand, they walked forward with renewed energy, buoyed by the infectious beat of the music that grew louder with every step.

‘‘Wow!’’ Sara’s reverent exclamation echoed Olivia’s thought as they puffed their way up the last step cut into the twenty-foot-high limestone bluff. Standing side by side on level ground, they stopped by mutual, unspoken consent to absorb the scene before them.

Flaming six-foot-tall citronella torches formed a picturesque and, as Olivia remembered it, highly effective mosquito barrier around the perimeter of the five-acre lawn. Will-o’-the-wisps of mist danced with the guests. The grass itself seemed to stretch out endlessly, looking as soft and lush as a jade-colored velvet carpet in the uncertain light. The torches ended just a few yards in front of where Olivia and Sara stood, so Olivia had the sensation of being on the outside looking in at the festivities through a haze of pungent smoke. Beyond the torches, tiny white Christmas tree lights glittered everywhere. They were wrapped around the trunks and branches of the flowering dogwoods and redbuds that dotted the lawn so that each tree was entirely illuminated. They were strung through the neatly trimmed boxwood hedges that lined the stone path leading to the gazebo and, farther on, to the various outbuildings and the Big House. They adorned the ancient magnolias that stood near the house, ringed the rose garden with its centerpiece bronze crane fountain, and dripped from the eaves of the gazebo and the Big House itself. In addition, the Big House, a twenty-four-room Greek Revival mansion of white-painted brick with a pedimented portico and more than two dozen soaring fluted pillars supporting twin galleries, was lit up like a jack-o’-lantern from within. Its long, rectangular windows glowed softly against the midnight-blue backdrop of the night. Although dozens of guests still mingled and danced on the lawn, it was obvious from the stream of headlights moving slowly down the long driveway toward the road that the party was beginning to break up.

Once upon a time, Olivia thought, on a night like this, at a party like this, she had worn a short red dress, and danced and laughed and eaten
boudin
and jambalaya until she thought she would pop, and fallen in love. . . .

The spicy scent of the rice and pork sausage that was
boudin
was in the air tonight, awakening her taste buds along with her memories.

If she could only go back and have it all to do over again, she would do things very differently, Olivia told herself.

A sharp slap on her left forearm brought her startled gaze around and down.

‘‘Mosquito,’’ Sara said matter-of-factly.

‘‘Oh.’’ Olivia was thus recalled to the present, and realized in that instant that if she could live her life differently she would not, because living her life differently would mean that there would be no Sara, and Sara was worth far more than the sum of all the things that Olivia had given up to get her.

‘‘Thanks.’’ She smiled at the daughter who looked enough like her to be her own miniature, and twined her fingers more tightly with Sara’s small ones. ‘‘Ready to go join the party?’’

‘‘Are you sure it’s okay?’’

Typically, when faced with a new situation, Sara’s instinct was to hang back. Shy was not quite the right way to describe her, Olivia thought. Cautious was more like it, and reserved.

‘‘I’m sure,’’ Olivia said, with more confidence than she felt, and drew Sara with her through the ring of torches. The band stopped playing with a flourish as she and Sara walked along the stone path toward the gazebo. A glance around at the people they passed told Olivia that the tie-strapped sundresses she and Sara wore, even though they were cheap to begin with, slightly soiled from traveling, and limp from the heat, would attract no notice in this eclectic gathering. Guests were dressed in everything from party clothes to a Hawaiian shirt and shorts. Not that what they were wearing mattered a jot, Olivia told herself. They hadn’t come to attend a party. That she should entertain so much as a niggle of unease about the suitability of her own watermelon-pink puckered cotton Kmart special surprised her. Apparently the style-conscious girl she had once been still lurked somewhere inside. For years now, she had been far more concerned about how much an article of clothing cost than about how fashionable it was. Their budget had not been able to stretch to include new clothes very often, and what little money she’d been able to scrape together for that kind of thing had been spent on Sara.

Sweet Sara, her baby and her rock, who deserved far more than her shortsighted mother had been able to give her.

Olivia breathed an inward sigh of relief as they drew one or two curious glances from the party-goers around them, but no real notice. She realized that she probably knew many of the guests, but from some combination of elapsed time and uncertain light and nervousness, she was not able to put a name to any of the faces she passed, and no one seemed to recognize her.

More guests were headed in the direction of the Big House now—there was a parking area immediately beyond it—and the traffic on the driveway streaming toward the road grew increasingly heavier. Looking away from the blinding stream of headlights toward the gazebo, Olivia was both pleased and frightened to recognize a familiar figure at last: her grandfather, or step-grandfather, to be precise. Her feet faltered for a moment as she drank in the sight of him. Even at eighty-seven, as he must be now, he was still taller than the man he was talking to, although he was slightly stooped and thinner than she remembered and his age was obvious even at a distance.

She had been gone too long, Olivia thought, with a sharp pang in the region of her heart. Whether he had loved her or not, and Olivia was not sure that he ever had, she realized in that moment that she had always loved him. She was lucky that he was still here for her return.

Olivia was suddenly, fiercely glad to have this chance to put things right with him, with all of them. Despite everything, the Archers were the only real family she had ever known.

‘‘There’s my grandfather,’’ she said softly to Sara, indicating with a nod of her head the old man who had cast a shadow as big as a mountain over her youth. Big John was what nearly everyone called him, including his grandchildren, not Papaw or Granddaddy but Big John. He’d once stood six feet five and weighed two hundred fifty pounds, which was how he’d earned the name. As head of the family, Big John Archer owned all this, the LaAngelle Plantation estate on which they now stood and the whole town of LaAngelle, practically, where Archer Boatworks was the main employer and the Archers had provided money for everything from a new fire truck to a library from time without end.

‘‘Do you think he’ll be glad to see us?’’ Sara’s steps flagged, and her voice held the same doubtful note as before.

‘‘Of course he will,’’ Olivia said, a shade too heartily. She was not entirely certain herself about what kind of reception to expect from the old man, but it would never do for Sara to suspect that. Her daughter didn’t need to be burdened with old family business that had nothing to do with her.

It didn’t help her determined optimism to remember that Big John, like most of the rest of the Archers, had tended to be unforgiving at best.

‘‘Mom, maybe we should come back tomorrow.’’ Sara tugged urgently at Olivia’s hand to slow her down.

‘‘Pumpkin, don’t be silly. This is my home. We’re welcome here.’’ Olivia’s voice was firm, although she wasn’t nearly as certain as she sounded.

‘‘Then why haven’t we ever come here before?’’ Sara sounded skeptical.

‘‘Because—because . . . We’re here now.’’ Olivia answered the unanswerable with as much conviction as though her response made perfect sense. To her relief, Sara didn’t question her further. Mother-speak had its uses.

They were nearing the gazebo, and the man Big John was talking to glanced toward them. Dressed in a tan sport coat with an open-necked dark polo shirt beneath and dark slacks, he was over six feet tall, which still made him several inches shorter than Big John. He had thinning gray hair, a square-jawed, big-nosed face, and a noticeable belly. His gaze drifted over them without much interest, and then returned in a classic double take to fix on Olivia’s face. She recognized him then, although he was some thirty pounds heavier than she remembered, and much balder, too: Charles Vernon, Big John’s son-in-law and the town physician. He would be around sixty now. Although he was, of course, no kin of hers whatsoever, she had always known him as Uncle Charlie.

His arrested expression attracted the notice of the two women in the group, and they looked at Olivia. She was still puzzling over their identities when Big John himself turned her way, seeming to peer at her through the darkness as if he, too, was curious to discover what had attracted his son-in-law’s fascinated attention.

She and Sara were hand in hand, walking through pockets of guests and mist toward the gazebo, and Big John was no more than a dozen yards away, standing on the third from the bottom of the wooden steps. He was wearing a white linen sport coat and dark trousers, and his hair, which had been a thick crop of iron gray when she had seen him last, was as thinly white as the moon overhead. But his face, with its high forehead and long, hawkish nose, was unchanged as far as she could tell, except for, perhaps, the addition of a few more wrinkles. Olivia would have known him anywhere, and was surprised that he did not immediately seem to recognize her.

Then she realized that she and Sara must be silhouetted against the blazing torchlight behind them. Although she could see him perfectly well, it was possible that her features were shadowed and he could not quite make them out.

And, too, he was now a very old man, with a very old man’s vision. Allowances must be made for that.

She and Sara stepped into the circle of brighter light cast by the hundreds of twinkly white bulbs adorning the gazebo, and immediately their shadows were behind them, long and dark against the velvety grass. If darkness had been the problem, it should be no longer. She could feel the light on her face.

Still, Big John stared fixedly at her without making any attempt to greet her. Trying to ignore her growing discomfort—was she really so changed that he didn’t recognize her, or was she really that unwelcome?— Olivia attempted a smile as she and Sara drew closer. Big John’s lips parted slightly in response, and his eyes widened. He almost looked . . . horrified to see her, Olivia thought with dismay. Then he blinked rapidly, shook his head, took a deep breath, and stared again. One thin hand lifted toward her. But the gesture was not one of welcome. Rather, it was as if he would ward her off.

Olivia thought sickly that she should at least have had the sense to come alone so that Sara would not be subjected to this.

‘‘My God,’’ Big John said in a hoarse voice. ‘‘Selena!’’

Then Olivia knew, knew the cause of the horror on his face, of his failure to greet her. Instantly she opened her mouth to correct him, to ease his mind of the terrible misapprehension that apparently gripped him, but it was too late. He made a harsh sound. His hand curled into a claw and he clutched at his chest. Before anyone could react he pitched forward, tumbling down the steps to land face-first in the yielding cushion of carefully manicured grass.