Summer in the South (15 page)

Darlene patted Ava’s hand. “I just know we’re going to be good, good friends. I knew it from the moment I first set eyes on you. I knew it right here,” Darlene said, thumping her chest like she was trying to dislodge something trapped in her trachea.

Ava smiled nervously. She looked around the restaurant. “Do you eat here every day?”

“Sure,” Darlene said. She crossed her arms on the table and leaned forward, examining Ava closely. “I wish my eyelashes were as long and thick as yours! Why, if I went without mascara like you do, my eyes would just disappear in my face.”

“Is it open for dinner, too?” Ava asked, smiling at the waitress who brought their iced teas.

“I could never get away with wearing my hair short. It looks good on you but if I went around not fixing my hair or my face nobody would give me the time of day!”

Ava coughed politely. The tea was good, very cold and very sweet, served in a frosty mason jar. Ava tried to think of something pleasant to say. “So do you like your job?”

“Oh, hell no,” Darlene said. “But it pays the bills and puts food on the table, two things my ex seems incapable of doing, bless his little heart.” And she launched into a long tirade about her deadbeat ex-husband and Ava listened, thankful to have Darlene’s attention off her for a while. A short time later the waitress brought their food. Darlene was still going on and on about Eddie Haney. “Listen to me,” she said finally, giving another bright fierce smile. “Going on and on about my loser ex-husband when you’re attached to just about the most perfect man in the whole wide world!”

Ava looked at her blankly. “Who?”

“Why, Will Fraser, silly.”

“Oh, right. Will’s a nice guy.”

Darlene leaned forward and lowered her voice. “So is it true you two are actually—dating?”

“Who told you that?”

Darlene chewed slowly, her eyes fixed steadily on Ava’s face. “It’s common knowledge,” she said.

“It’s true that Will and I are good friends. We went to school together.” Ava’s voice trailed off. She glanced around the restaurant, took a long drink of iced tea. “We’re just good friends.”

“Oh, really?” Darlene said, and it was clear that she wasn’t convinced.

Ava turned her attention to her plate. “The food is good,” she said and it was true, everything except the fried green tomatoes, which looked pretty and smelled good but tasted kind of bland.

“This is country-style cooking,” Darlene said, pointing at her plate with her fork. “You probably don’t get a lot of this at the Woodburn table.”

“Oh, no, they eat a lot of vegetables. And Maitland makes corn bread from time to time, although he puts jalapeño peppers in his.”

“Really?” Darlene said. “Jalapeño peppers? Huh.”

“Listen, there’s something I wanted to ask you,” Ava said.

Darlene put her fork down and leaned forward. “Go ahead. Shoot. Ask me anything.”

“Charlie Woodburn.” Ava stopped. Saying his name sent an odd tremor down her spine. A week ago she had never even heard of him and now she couldn’t stop thinking about who he was and how he had died.

Darlene stared at her curiously, a slight smile pulling down the corners of her mouth. “What about him?”

“What do you know about him? I know he was married to Fanny before Maitland. A long time before Maitland. I know he and Fanny eloped and then he died.”

Darlene pushed her plate away and crossed her arms on the table. “Well, of course that was long before my time,” she said, letting her eyes slide over the diners at the tables closest to them before shifting back to Ava. “But you know how these little towns are. Everybody’s known everybody else’s secrets for generations. And everyone loves to gossip about the high and mighty Woodburns.”

There was something secretive about Darlene, something damp and cloying that spilled out of her like an overfilled glass. Ava could sense it now. She remembered Fraser’s tale of Darlene’s glory days up at UT, how she’d dreamed of marrying a rich man and instead found herself saddled with three children, working long hours in a dress shop frequented by snotty adolescent girls. Ava supposed this was why Darlene seemed so eager to gossip about the Woodburns; it took the focus off her own dreary life.

“High and mighty?” she said.

“Oh, sure,” Darlene said, rolling her eyes mockingly. “The Woodburns have been gentry for generations, ever since old Randal Woodburn crossed the Cumberland Bluff back in 1799. On his way to Nashville, they say, to study law with his old friend Andrew Jackson. The Woodburns were an old Virginia family, gentry even back that far, before the Revolutionary War, and Randal was the younger son who had to seek his fortune on the frontier. They say he stopped at Piney Creek and saw the rich bottomland churned up each year by the floods and figured if he could find a way to divert the creek he’d have the makings of a fine plantation. Of course, there was nothing there in the way of civilization at the time, just the occasional fur trader making his way up from Natchez, and a Chickasaw town decimated by smallpox.

“Anyway, he drove off the few Chickasaws who still had the gumption to fight, enslaved the rest, and set about clearing the land and diverting the creek. His father sent a gaggle of black slaves to help, and when they were done he had a well-built stockade to keep the slaves and animals in, a cabin to sleep in, and two thousand acres of rich bottomland to grow cotton. He called the plantation Longford after their homeplace in Ireland or Scotland or wherever it is the Woodburns came from.”

“But how does Charlie Woodburn fit into all this?”

“Hang on, I’m getting to that. It seems Old Randal got lonely back there in the wilderness and took up with a Chickasaw woman who bore him a number of little brown-skinned, black-eyed children. That’s where the Black Woodburns come from.”

“The Black Woodburns?”

“That’s right. They all descend from Randal and this Indian woman, and they’re called that because of their dark eyes and black hair. To distinguish them from the True Woodburns, whose eyes are always blue-gray, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“And Charlie was a Black Woodburn?”

“Black as the devil. Now don’t look at me like that, I know it sounds crazy, but you can always tell a Woodburn just by looking at them. They all look like they were stamped out of a cookie cutter, kind of like the royal family of England, only half of them are dark-eyed and dark-haired and the other half are light-eyed and fair. And the ones who are dark are poor as a sawmill rat.”

“Will’s hair is dark.”

“Yes, but he’s a Fraser, too. His grandmother, Celia, was a Woodburn, but the male line of True Woodburns died out with Will’s great-grandfather, Miss Celia and Miss Josephine and Miss Fanny’s father. Maybe that’s why the Colonel took such an interest in Charlie Woodburn, offering to pay his way through Vanderbilt. Charlie looked just like Old Randal—you’ve seen that oil painting of him in the dining room of the house—only with the dark eyes and hair of the Black Woodburns.”

“So Miss Fanny’s father took Charlie in and raised him? He approved of Fanny marrying him even though they were distant cousins and Charlie had no money?”

“Oh, hell no,” Darlene said, shaking her head and looking at Ava like she couldn’t believe how naive she was. “Charlie was a Woodburn but he wasn’t highborn. He wasn’t a True Woodburn. He was born here but raised in New Orleans. The rumor is, his father was a gambler and Charlie took after him. Came riding into town in a big car and fancy clothes, making all the girls’ hearts flutter like that actor from the silent movies, the one who always dressed up in veils and turbans.”

“Rudolph Valentino?”

“Yeah, him. Fanny’s father was happy to send him to Vanderbilt, but he never intended for Charlie to marry one of his daughters.”

“So what happened?”

“The old man dropped dead and suddenly Celia and Josephine and Fanny were orphans. Rich orphans. Celia was still a child, but Josephine and Fanny were up at Vanderbilt with Charlie, and that’s where he got his hooks into her. He eloped with Fanny right under the Woodburn cousins’ noses, not to mention Maitland Sinclair’s, who was Miss Fanny’s childhood sweetheart. They say Charlie did it for the money.”

“So Charlie Woodburn eloped with Fanny, and the rest of the family got angry because they felt he was taking advantage of an orphaned girl?”

“That’s right, and that’s why they killed him.”

Ava stared blankly at Darlene.

Darlene’s eyes grew round. She clamped a small, plump hand to her face. “Oh, dear,” she said through her fingers. “I’ve said too much.”

“Don’t even think about stopping there,” Ava said, leaning to peel Darlene’s fingers off her mouth. “Continue.”

Darlene looked around the restaurant and dipped her head, dropping her voice. “That’s just a story,” she said. “No one knows if it’s really true. There are probably a half dozen stories about how Charlie Woodburn died. And who killed him.”

Ava was quiet for a moment, remembering Will’s hesitation in the cemetery. “Tell me,” she said finally.

“Well, some think it was Maitland Sinclair. He had the most to gain because he and Fanny had been sweethearts since childhood and they married after Charlie died.”

“But not right away.”

“Oh, hell no. Not until after Miss Fanny’s boy, Sumner, was grown. And then some. Sumner was born the same year Charlie died, and he must have been about forty when they finally married.”

“Fanny and Maitland waited
forty
years to marry?”

Darlene shrugged. “Yeah, but still, they married.”

Ava sat back with her hands in her lap, thinking about all this. She thought of the framed photographs of a youthful Fanny and Maitland hanging on the walls at Woodburn Hall. They may not have married right away but they had certainly traveled the world together, they had certainly acted like husband and wife. Or had they? Perhaps they had only been friends, not lovers. Fanny must have been crazy in love with Charlie Woodburn to mourn him for nearly forty years.

She thought of big jolly Maitland with his homemade mayonnaise and apron that read
Kitchen Bitch.
Poor man.

“Maitland is a sweetheart,” she said. “I can’t imagine him murdering anyone.”

Darlene gave her a dismal look. “You never know what people will do,” she said darkly, “if they’re pushed to it.” They were quiet for a moment, each lost in her own thoughts, and then Darlene roused herself and added, “Personally, I always thought it was the McGann woman.”

“Clara? What about her?”

“Who killed him. From what I’ve heard anyway.”

“Wait a minute,” Ava said, holding up one hand. “Start at the beginning. How exactly does Clara fit into the Woodburns?”

Darlene frowned and tapped one finger against the edge of her iced-tea jar. “I don’t know. Her people were slaves at one time, I guess, but no one around here ever talks about stuff like that.”

“Will says Clara’s people were freed before the Civil War.”

“Oh, well, he should know, then.” Darlene yawned, then hesitated as if something else had occurred to her. “One story I always heard is that Clara is related to the Woodburns somehow.”

“How?”

Darlene shrugged. She gave Ava a sly smile. “Maybe you should ask your good friend Will.”

Ava imagined that a question like that would go over about as well as her questions about the fiancée and Charlie Woodburn. “Why do you think Clara had something to do with Charlie Woodburn’s death?”

“Her mother was a healer. People used to come from far and wide to have their fortunes told, and she knew how to use herbs and wildflowers. I’m sure she taught her daughter. I’m sure Miss McGann knows how to use plants, which ones are poisonous and stuff like that. She could’ve poisoned him and no one would have known the difference.”

“But why would Clara McGann have poisoned Charlie Woodburn?”

Darlene shrugged and stifled another yawn. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe she didn’t like him.”

C
oming out of the Kudzu Grille, Ava’s attention was drawn by a man loading lumber into the back of a pickup truck. He was standing across the narrow brick street with his back to her, and for a moment Ava thought it was Will. But then he turned and she stood staring at him in amazement. He bore a striking resemblance to Will, tall and dark-haired, although he was sturdier, more heavily built. He stood staring intently at her, the sunlight glinting on his hair. Beside her, Darlene stiffened.

“Good morning,” he called and his voice was not like Will’s. “Who’ve you got there?” he said, talking to Darlene but still staring at Ava.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Darlene said. She took Ava’s arm. “Come on,” she said. “We’re risking our reputations just talking to him.”

He laughed as they walked off. Ava turned and glanced at him over her shoulder. He was leaning against the truck watching her, and she suddenly remembered that night outside the movie theater when she and Will had been silently observed by a dark-haired man. He was that man. She was sure of it.

“My God,” Ava said, letting Darlene pull her along the sidewalk.

“No. Jake Woodburn,” Darlene said.

“One of the Black Woodburns?”

“Black sheep more likely,” Darlene said. “He makes Charlie Woodburn look like a saint.”

“He and Will could be twins! Well, maybe not twins, but certainly brothers.” Ava could feel the heat beating down on the top of her head, seeping through her, settling in her bones.

Darlene stopped, letting her hand drop. “I wouldn’t mention to Will that you saw Jake if I was you.”

“Why?”

“They don’t speak. They’re estranged.”

“But why?”

Darlene let her face go blank. “Something about a girl,” she said.

“A girl?” Ava said stupidly.

Darlene clamped her hand over her mouth, her eyes blue and sharp as ice picks.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I’ve said too much.”

Burn Barrel

D
arlene Haney left the clueless Yankee girl Will Fraser was dating, told her boss she had to make a bank run, then drove over to the wrong side of town to visit her mother and brother. She was in a foul mood; being around Ava had done that. Darlene couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was about Ava that was so attractive. She was pretty enough in that careless, affected way some smart girls adopted, as if the way they looked was secondary to what went on inside their heads. But she certainly wasn’t pretty in the conventional sense of the word, not in the sense that Darlene, raised on beauty pageants and reruns of
Charlie’s Angels
, had been taught to appreciate. Her hair was too short, she wore very little makeup, she obviously didn’t care a thing about fashion, and yet there was something compelling about her.

Darlene guessed she was different enough from the Southern girls that Will Fraser had been raised with to seem like a novelty, although Darlene was just as certain that Will would eventually tire of all that naturalness and come looking for a woman who kept breath mints on the bedside table, who went to bed wearing full makeup, and never left the house without fixing her hair and wearing a pair of six-inch heels. It was only a matter of time before you came back to what you were raised with.

This thought took root in her mind, but instead of cheering her only served to deepen her depression as she pulled up in front of her mother’s peeling little shotgun house. A pair of kitchen chairs sat out on the sagging porch, and the overgrown yard was decorated with a couple of painted plywood cutouts, one showing a spotted hound dog lifting his leg on a daisy, and the other a little girl in a petticoat and a short dress leaning over to water the grass in a disturbingly provocative way. A rusty wind chime stirred listlessly in the slight breeze. This part of town sat down in a depression and was always foul smelling and airless, choked from the south by a dense swamp and from the north by the railroad stockyards. Darlene had spent her childhood and adolescence trying to figure out how to get as far away from here as possible.

And now here she was back again, although she wasn’t living with her mother; thank God, she hadn’t sunk that low. Yet.

Darlene’s seventy-seven-year-old mother, Snowda, was a chain-smoking diabetic who had already lost one leg and a lung to her vices, and spent most days hooked up to an oxygen machine. She kept her thermostat set on eighty-five, even during the hottest days. Darlene’s sixty-year-old brother, Richard, lived with Snowda. Richard had a heart condition and failing kidneys that left him puffed up like a blowfish. He was deaf in one ear but refused to wear a hearing aid, which may have been a blessing in disguise, as his ex-wife, Deb, had been a loudmouthed shrew. Deb had recently absconded with the proceeds from the sale of their trailer and most of Richard’s railroad pension, leaving Richard with nothing more than a molting, mean-tempered parrot named Fred who spent his days screeching, “Ri-chard! Ri-chard!” and “You want a piece of me?” in exact mimicry of Deb’s shrewish voice.

When Darlene opened the front door they were just sitting down to what Snowda liked to call “her programs.” The cable was out, and they were reduced to watching Spanish television soap operas even though neither one of them spoke the language. Through the dining room window of the tiny house Darlene could see her three sons in the backyard flicking lit matches into a burn barrel.

Neither Snowda nor Richard seemed to have noticed her arrival, their eyes glued to the flickering television set. “Guess what,” Darlene said to her mother. She sat down gingerly on the sofa, smoothing her skirt. “Guess who sold more cotillion gowns this month than any other salesgirl at the Debs and Brides Shoppe!”

At the other end of the sofa, Richard scratched listlessly at his crotch and said, “Mama, turn it up some. I can’t hear.”

“Don’t make no difference if I turn it up or not,” Snowda said. “You can’t understand none of that gobbledygook they’re saying.”

“Me! That’s who!” Darlene said brightly.

Snowda slid her eyes from the screen to Darlene, then back again. “What?” she said. “Were some of the regular salesgals out sick?”

The house was as sweltering as a jungle. Waves of heat rose off the TV and hung in the air like thunderclouds. In the background the parrot screeched, “Ri-chard! Ri-chard! Ri-chard!” in a crazed, endless loop.

“No, they were not out sick,” Darlene snapped, but she knew she was fighting a losing battle. She’d gone her whole life without her mother’s approval, and she wasn’t about to get it now. Snowda had been nearly fifty when she had Darlene, a surprise up until the very moment the birth pangs began, and as a child Darlene used to imagine that she’d been kidnapped from a large white-columned house on a hill and plopped down in the middle of these poverty-stricken circus freaks.

“Mama, you got any Pepsi?” Richard said.

Snowda pointed behind her with a large flat thumb. “Them boys of yours need a good whipping,” she said to Darlene. “They cut the blooms off all my Crimson Glory roses.”

Darlene stared through the window at her sons, who had managed to ignite the burn barrel and were dancing around it now like a tribe of savages. She left the boys with her mother because she couldn’t afford decent child care with the wages she made at the Debs and Brides Shoppe. She sighed. “I’ll buy you some new roses, Mama.”

“Them boys need a daddy.”

“I’m working on it,” Darlene said grimly, and, rising, she went into the kitchen to hunt for the fire extinguisher.

B
y the end of her third week in Woodburn, Ava was growing accustomed to the routines of the house. The sameness of their days, broken only by the one daily planned activity, the punctuality of meals, the afternoon nap, light gardening or reading followed at five by Toddy Time, all had a soothing effect on her. She found herself being lulled into a kind of stupor by the somnolent quality of the place: the steady ticking of the mantel clock, the low hum of the air-conditioning, the ceaseless whirring of the cicadas in the trees, so loud you could hear them through the window glass.

Some days she would wander out on the verandah after lunch while the others slept, stretching out on the old porch swing or along one of the settees with a book on her lap, a frosty glass of iced tea resting on the table beside her. They made it by the pitcher down here and loaded it with sugar and fresh mint.
Sweet tea
, they called it, and Ava had never tasted anything so good. She would sip her tea and gaze out at the garden and the lawn, hazy beneath the midday sun. Everything in the landscape seemed to move in slow motion, drowsy with the heat. She would look up into the tall trees shading the house and think,
This is heaven.

Lost in her reveries, it was not hard to imagine how it must have been when the house was first built, men on horseback passing out front, the muffled clop of hooves on the dusty road, the jangle of mule-drawn wagons on their way to town. In the old days this would have been fields and forest, all except for Woodburn Hall and a few other summer “cottages” scattered along the road. Half closing her eyes and squinting up into the tops of the tall trees, Ava could imagine herself in another time and place, with no sound but the clatter of cicadas, bird-song from the dense thickets, the occasional creak of wooden wheels or the rattling of bridle bits.

She had always been an imaginative person. Reared on Clotilde’s fantastic stories, Ava had turned naturally to literature. Whole worlds opened to her between the covers of a book. Whatever her other failings as a parent, Clotilde had always made sure Ava had a library card, and she had gone once a week to prowl the shelves of the public library in whatever city they found themselves marooned in. Ava never got over the sense of sanctuary she felt in a library, the fragrance of cloth and old paper, the reverence she felt when holding some dusty book in her hands. It was the same feeling she got now, shut up in the library of Woodburn Hall. The house, the whole town, was like living inside an old novel.

Yet despite the quiet peacefulness of the place, she had not written one word since she arrived. She had not entered one sentence onto the glowing computer screen.

Since college, she had written only in the evenings, being forced to support herself by a series of dismal day jobs. None of the produced work had been promising; few of the short stories were ever finished, and those that were were never accepted by the literary magazines she sent them to. But she had persisted with a stubborn tenacity, an overwhelming belief that she was meant to be a writer and that one day her luck would change. The sale of her mother’s old Subaru, as well as the extra income from her sublet apartment, had left her with enough to get by on for a few months this summer, and yet now that she had time and quiet and was free of the need to make a daily wage, she found herself unable to sit down at her computer and plink out more than a few halfhearted attempts at an outline.

Write what you know or what you’d like to know
, one of her professors in college had told her. What she had known, what she had experienced, was a nomadic childhood with a mysterious mother who collected odd characters the way some women collect spoons. And yet when it came time to write about such promising material, she felt stymied, blocked, unable for some reason to immerse herself in the story.

As if guessing that she was having trouble starting, Will asked her one day, “Do you want me to brainstorm with you?”

“No, that’s all right. Not now anyway.” It irritated her that he always seemed eager to fix her problems, as if he had little confidence that she could do it herself. This was on a Friday afternoon and she was putting on some makeup for Toddy Time, while he sat and watched.

“Really,” he said. “I don’t mind.”

“No. Thanks.”

She caught his expression in the looking glass. He looked amused and dubious, and it occurred to Ava that he was only being polite, that he really didn’t care if she ever wrote a novel or not. She had listened to his CD and had been surprised at the quality and sophistication of his music, something of a cross between Radiohead and Pete Yorn. But when she asked him why he didn’t try to land a recording contract, he said coolly, “It’s just a hobby. Just something I do for myself. Trying to make a living out of it would only spoil it.”

“Who’s coming today for cocktails?” she asked.

He told her. She fluffed her hair with her fingers, glad now that the short spikes had lengthened and were beginning to lie flat against her scalp. He stared at her in the glass, smiling. She hadn’t told him about seeing Jake Woodburn on the street, and yet now it seemed as if she should.

“You look nice,” he said.

“Do I?” The time for confession was past. She avoided his gaze, turning swiftly from the mirror.

Cocktail hour, she had learned in the weeks that she had been here, was as ritualistic as a Japanese tea ceremony; it began at five o’clock and ended promptly at six. Maitland was in charge of the silver cocktail shaker, and took his duties seriously. Everyone dressed for Toddy Time; Maitland always wore a prep school tie and a blazer over a pair of dress slacks and a shirt, while Fanny and Josephine invariably changed into light summer dresses. Will was partial to collared shirts and khaki shorts. Even Ava would change her shorts or jeans for a skirt. There was always a silver tray of sliced cheese and crackers and sometimes an assortment of olives sitting on the coffee table. It was impossible to tell how much anyone actually drank, as Maitland continued throughout the hour to discreetly refill glasses.

“You asked me that first day out at Longford about my broken engagement,” Will said suddenly, without warning, and she was so surprised she could think of nothing to say. He went on slowly, carefully choosing his words. “I was engaged,” he said. “To a girl I met in boarding school. Her name was Hadley.”

“Hadley? How very aristocratic.” She kept her tone light, teasing. She waited to see if she might feel even a twinge of jealousy but she felt nothing.

“We got engaged our second year of college, which I realize now was entirely too young. She was up at Sewanee, and we had been dating for nearly four years and, I don’t know, it just seemed like the right thing to do. At the time.”

“Look, Will, you don’t have to …”

“It seemed like the right thing at the time,” he said. “But it wasn’t and I realize that now. I just didn’t want you to think I was still grieving over that relationship.”

“No, of course not,” she said.

He seemed so sincere, so mannerly, and she felt bad that she had ever teased him about his engagement, and that he seemed so determined to explain something she really cared nothing about.

S
he couldn’t stop thinking about Jake Woodburn. She knew that it was wrong, that it would only wind up complicating her life when she was intent on simplifying it. The aunts had never mentioned him, and Ava felt certain there was a reason for that. And Will had made it clear that evening outside the movie theater that he disliked Jake. Ava didn’t want any trouble. She wanted a quiet summer where she could work undisturbed, and she was grateful to the Woodburn sisters, and to Will, for giving her this opportunity. She made up her mind to stop thinking about Jake Woodburn and start thinking about the novel she had so little time left to write.