Summer in the South (26 page)

He was quiet for a moment, then he said, “Sure.”

“Did you know that your grandfather used to board at a house just down the street from where your shop is?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I’ve got the address. I may go by there on Thursday.”

“Ava,” he said.

“What?”

She could hear movement in the background, as if he was placing his hand over the receiver. “Nothing.”

“Maybe I’ll stop by your shop while I’m in the neighborhood.”

“I’d like that. What time?”

“Well, I don’t get up much before ten.”

“Sounds like a pretty sweet life.”

“How about if I come by between 11:30 and 12:00?”

“That’d be great.”

“Okay then. See you later,” she said and hung up.

She was still snuffling into her Kleenex. Odd, how these crying spells seemed to come over her with no warning. She hoped her eyes wouldn’t be red when she showed up for Toddy Time. Will was sure to notice. He noticed everything about her these days. His eyes seemed to follow her wherever she went, as if he suspected her of something and was trying to see validation of her guilt in her face. No doubt she confirmed his worst fears (whatever they might be) every time she felt the weight of those eyes and blushed.

She clung to the iron fence and blew her nose for the last time. At the edge of the lawn, under a glossy shrub, a white cat watched her warily, its tail twitching. She could hear distant voices. It sounded as if they were already gathered in the library for Toddy Time.

“Great,” she said, checking her purse for eyedrops. She wished she hadn’t teased Jake about coming for Toddy Time. She’d been trying to throw him offtrack, to hide the fact that she was crying, but she saw now that she might have seemed insensitive. She would apologize Thursday when she saw him.

He really was a nice guy. There was no reason they couldn’t be friends.

W
ill was sitting on one of the long sofas when she came in, and he raised his glass in greeting. He seemed to trail her with curious eyes the whole evening. After dinner, he followed her into her room and shut the door.

“I’m sorry about the way things have been lately,” he said, sitting in the chair by the window. His movements were stiff and awkward, and Ava saw how difficult this was for him. At Bard he had been open and friendly, but here in Woodburn he seemed, at times, clannish and cold. Not proud, but every bit a Woodburn. Able to switch off his feelings at the least provocation.

“You don’t owe me an apology,” she said quickly.

He put one hand up as if to stop her. “I don’t want things to be difficult between us,” he said evenly.

“I don’t want that either.”

He sat back, crossing his legs, resting an ankle on top of one knee. “It’s hard to understand if you aren’t from around here,” he said. “People speak a hidden language. You don’t always hear what’s being said if you haven’t learned to listen for it.”

“Yeah, I figured that out,” she said.

He played with the frayed hem of his jeans, taking his time before he began again. He had broken with tradition and dressed casually tonight. Ava had the feeling he had rehearsed this. “We’re courteous, polite people, and we don’t give ourselves away to strangers. There’s so much history here, not all of it good, a lot of it terrible. And all our stories are mixed up together from having been in the same place for so long. They all overlap. And everyone has a different version of the truth. Their truth.” He gave her a swift, earnest look. “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

She sat down on the edge of the bed, folding one leg under her. She said slowly, “When I asked you about Charlie Woodburn, I wasn’t trying to be rude or hurtful. I was just curious. It’s my job to ask questions, to try to figure out why people act the way they do.”

He continued to play with the hem, wrapping his fingers tightly in the threads. “I know that, Ava,” he said.

“I saw
Help me
carved on the headboard, and I wondered who could have done it. And it occurred to me that it might have been Charlie, that he might have had some kind of premonition about his death. Or maybe he suspected—someone.”

He looked at her and Ava could see that he was angry, but he was fighting his anger. She had the sudden impression that he felt as if he was belittling himself, as if it should have been her apologizing, not him.

“I’ve been hearing these stories all my life,” he said. “People in this town have always talked about my family. They say things that are untrue and hurtful. The thing with Charlie happened a long time ago, and none of it matters anymore, so let it go. I’m asking you. Please, just let it go.”

She couldn’t let it go. He had no idea how tied to this story she was, how dependent on it she had become. And she couldn’t tell him why. She might never be able to tell him.

He sat watching her and she stared back helplessly.

Distantly, from somewhere deep in the house, she could hear the slow, somber music of Ravel.

S
he was having trouble sleeping, and when she did eventually fall into a restless sleep, her dreams were wild and nightmarish. She had begun to keep the lamp on all night, although she knew from experience that this did little to banish her dark fantasies. It was an old trick she had learned in childhood soon after the episodes of sleep paralysis had first begun.

She had suffered nightmarish dreams, but she had not had another experience of sleep paralysis, and for that she was grateful.

The night after Will came to apologize, she sat in front of her glowing computer screen, willing the words to come. They wouldn’t, and after a while she stood, threw open the shutters, and raised the window. It was a beautiful night. Moonlight flooded the garden, and a chorus of crickets throbbed like a beating heart. Ava leaned her elbows on the sill and pressed her face against the screen. The air was hot and sultry, but occasionally a mild breeze stirred.

It was on a night like this, a moonlit summer evening, that she’d had her first attack of sleep paralysis. She was twelve, sleeping with the window open on a hot, muggy evening. She had lain awake long after she heard Clotilde go to bed, listening to the increasingly sporadic sound of traffic in the street. Far off in the distance she could hear the mournful wail of a passing train.

She fell asleep with her face turned toward the window but awoke suddenly in the middle of the night. She was lying on her back, taking short, shallow breaths. The room was a velvet blackness but, oddly, she could sense a light coming through the window. It was then that she realized that she couldn’t turn her head to look, she couldn’t move at all, lying stiff and wooden on the bed. There was a sense of something heavy resting on her chest; she couldn’t quite catch her breath. But this was nothing compared to the gradual horror, the dawning awareness that
there was something in the room with her.
She could hear whispering. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the movement of several small, shadowy figures. They didn’t move like humans; they skittered like crabs, and they were touching her cold skin with long, probing fingers and chattering among themselves, some strange language she couldn’t understand. Her terror was so extreme she thought she might faint. She tried to scream but couldn’t.

And then she could, screaming long after Clotilde had burst through the door and gathered her up in her soft arms.

Remembering this episode now, Ava shivered. She rose and began to walk around the room, stopping to stare at Clotilde’s vase. She had not spoken to her mother since the letter from Frank Dabrowski had arrived but now, remembering Clotilde’s comforting presence all those years ago, she said bitterly, “Don’t think I forgive you. Because I don’t.”

Clotilde maintained a knowing silence.

Ava sat down on the edge of her bed. She could hear a soft tapping in the wall behind her, and it was then, while listening halfheartedly to whatever was making the sound, that a thought occurred to her.

She rose, went into the small office, and took down one of the ledgers from the glass-cased secretary. On the spine was written
1919–1920.
She opened it and began to read. The handwriting was more modern, more easily decipherable than the earlier journals she had studied. Colonel James Woodburn, the aunts’ father, had continued his ancestors’ habit of keeping farm journals, except that his entries had less to do with farming and more to do with the weather, business, and family events. She closed the journal and put it back, running her fingers over the spines of the books until she found the one reading
1927–1928.
Nineteen twenty-seven. The year Charlie Woodburn first came to town.

Ava opened the journal and began to read. The Colonel wrote in short, choppy sentences, in a rather somber, self-conscious manner.

April 22nd—fair day. Wind from the west. Met with Attorney Atwood in the a.m. Lunched at the hotel with Jennings and Cates, who are trying to sell me a lumberyard. Josephine has spurned another beau, Harry Monroe, who she says has big feet and a cowlick, and is therefore unsuitable. I fear she has inherited the Woodburn pride. No man will ever be good enough for her.

It was here then, hidden among trivial notations about weather and business, that Ava would find the clues to her story. She read on.

April 28th—Dinner party at the Randolphs. Returned home to find the house in an uproar. Sweet Fanny observed a man beating a mule in the street and went forth in a rage to put a stop to it. He replied impertinently that it was his mule to do with as he pleased, at which point Josephine intervened and offered to buy the animal. He asked how he was to get home with a wagon and no mule, and Josephine made an offer on the wagon, too. Thus I returned home to find myself the proud owner of a mule Fanny and Celia have named Tulip, as well as a broken-down produce wagon! I despair sometimes of ever finding these girls suitable husbands. The fault is mine; they were raised without the gentle, nurturing presence of a mother. Celia is sober and steady. She will do fine. But Fanny is tenderhearted and silly, and Sister is proud and unforgiving. She especially seems destined for spinsterhood.

And farther on, Ava found this:

May 7th—Saw C.W. in the street today. His resemblance to Old Randal is uncanny. They say he’s only recently come from New Orleans, where he spent his childhood.

May 9th—Rain began around 7 a.m. A steady downpour all day. Called John to bring the car around twelve in the afternoon. Had lunch with C.W. at the hotel. Sister sick with a fever but will not allow Dr. Atkinson to attend her. Stubborn girl.

Ava looked up, studying the dark square of window at the end of the room. Only two days after meeting Charlie in the street, the Colonel had had lunch with him. Which meant, surely, that Charlie must have made a favorable impression on his old kinsman.

She took the journal to bed with her. It was two a.m. when she finished the last entry and, rising, went into the office and pulled the last slim volume off the shelf.
1929.
The year the Colonel had died. The year Charlie Woodburn had eloped with Fanny. She padded back to bed with the book cradled in her arms. The entries here were less frequent, the handwriting less legible, as if in the last year of his life, the Colonel’s eyesight had begun to fail. A short time later she came across this rather odd entry:

August 24th—I saw my beloved today. It was dusk, and she was standing at the edge of the garden in a long white gown, her hair undone. The dead are with us always. Their world touches ours, shimmering through. I am an old man, and I am weary of this life and ready for the next.

Had a stormy meeting with Atwood yesterday and told him to draw up the deed. Tomorrow I will tell C.W. I hope to right the wrongs of the past by giving back to C.W. what is rightfully his.

May our sins be washed away in the Blood of Our Redeemer.

There were only six more entries after that one, the last in October, a week before his death. None of them mentioned Charlie.

T
he following morning Ava awoke early but lay in bed waiting for the others to leave the house. Fanny had a dental appointment, and Josephine and Maitland were scheduled to take her in at ten o’clock. They planned to make a day of it, having lunch downtown and then buying groceries, so Ava figured she had at least an hour to roam around in the attic looking for photos of Charlie Woodburn before the cleaning people arrived. She could have asked Josephine; she felt certain Josephine would have politely agreed to her exploring the house, but she didn’t want to have to explain what she was searching for. She didn’t know how to broach the subject, so in the end she said nothing, waiting until she heard the car pull out of the drive before rising and going to the window.

To make sure she was alone, she went to the hallway and called out, but no one answered. The mantel clock chimed ten o’clock. She stood for a moment, listening, then slowly climbed the staircase, letting one hand trail along the banister.

There was a peculiar stillness to the house, a heaviness, as if somewhere in the darkest corners a storm might be brewing. She thought of Fraser’s comment that Will had been afraid of the staircase as a boy, that he had often seen the ghost of the Gray Lady standing there, and it was not too hard to imagine how this might be so. The staircase curved sharply to the left at the landing, and ascended for many wide shallow steps to an open central hall on the top floor. The sharp curve of the staircase, as well as the placement of a tall stained-glass window on the landing, caused the lower portion of the staircase to be bathed in shifting shadows.

Ava noted this now as she climbed, watching the way the swaying trees outside the colored window caused murky shadows on the stairs. It was not hard to imagine a child mistaking those shadows for a ghost.

She stopped and turned around, staring at the bottom of the stairwell. A slight breeze puckered the back of her neck. She remembered the entry in Colonel Woodburn’s journal, the image of his dead wife standing at the edge of the garden in a long white gown. What was it he had written?
The dead are with us always.
Even now, if she stared long enough, she could see, out of the corner of her eye, a small dark-haired woman in a gray gown standing at the foot of the stairway.