The House on Tradd Street (46 page)

“You just need to know where to look, sweet boy.” She glanced up at him and actually fluttered her eyelashes. “I think this means you owe me dinner.”

“Blossom again or would you like to try something new?”

“Blossom, it is. I’ll call you with my schedule.” She winked at me. “And Miss Middleton is more than welcome to join us.”

“I’d like that,” I said, taking her hand in both of mine and squeezing. My cell phone began ringing in my purse, and I excused myself so Jack and Yvonne could say goodbye, and left the building to answer it.

By the time I got outside, the call had switched to voice mail. I hit the button to replay and listened to Marc’s voice as he asked for a rain check for our date later that night because of a last-minute out-of-town trip that had come up. His smooth voice was so different from Jack’s. Much more controlled and sexy, but almost deliberately so. I snapped the phone shut, wondering why in the world I was comparing their voices.

As I was putting my phone back into my purse, Jack emerged from the building. “Marc just called,” I said. “He has to go out of town and had to cancel our plans for tonight.”

“What a shame,” said Jack, his voice and expression saying anything but. “I guess that gives us more time to work on the cipher. And to make plans for our trip to Vermont.”

“We’re going to Vermont?”

“Well, I guess you could stay here, but you might find it more interesting meeting Susannah in person than hearing me telling you all about it later.”

“True, but can’t we just call her on the phone?”

“We could, but my years of research have taught me that you learn a whole lot more visiting your source. It’s up to you if you want to come with me, but I’m definitely going.”

I thought for a moment, recalling that I didn’t have any pressing business and that Marc would be out of town, too. “Sure,” I said as I followed him down the steps toward the street, realizing that the thought of solving the cipher and meeting somebody who might have known Louisa and Robert, and who had definitely known my grandfather, was a whole lot more exciting to me than having dinner and watching fireworks with Marc. “I hear the foliage is lovely this time of year in New England.”

Jack winked at me. “That’s my girl. Now let’s go back to my condo and get busy.”

I raised my eyebrow as he opened the passenger-side door for me.

He shook his head in mock indignation. “To work on the cipher, of course. Get your mind out of the gutter, Mellie.”

“I think I’m going to have to ask for dinner at Jestine’s in return for my help, though.”

“Have you been talking to Yvonne behind my back?”

“Not at all,” I said, concentrating on the street in front of us. “I’ve just developed a sudden craving for coconut cream pie.”

He snorted. “Me, too,” he said, and I laughed as he headed down the road back to Queen Street.

H
ave you tried ‘Holy City’?” I asked Jack as we sat in a Delta jet on a runway at Charleston International. Before and after our artery-clogging meal at Jestine’s the night before—which included a basket of fried chicken and corn bread covered with honey butter—we had worked on the clock’s cipher, once again plugging in every word or phrase we could think of. For a break, we’d played with the Roman numerals on the fountain and had reached the same result: nothing.

“Yep. And Saint Michael’s, Saint Philip’s, and the Battery. Next I’m going to try Jihad, Hussein, and Iraq.”

I looked at him, completely perplexed. “Whatever for?”

“Because I think those are the only words in the dictionary that we haven’t tried yet.” He sent a sidelong glance at me. “I’m kidding, you know.”

“I knew that,” I said, returning my focus to the notepad in front of me as I plugged “White Point Gardens” into the cipher.

We spent the next five and a half hours of our trip—with the exclusion of our connection in Atlanta—alternating between working on the cipher and sleeping. We arrived in Burlington, Vermont, around nine o’clock in the evening, rented a car, and booked two rooms in a nearby motel, figuring we could drive the short distance to Colchester in the morning before catching our return flight to Charleston.

I slept fitfully, kept awake by working codes in my head and wondering if Jack was also thinking about tomorrow’s meeting with Susannah Barnsley. Jack had spoken to her briefly on the phone, explaining who we were and asking if we could come see her. She seemed reluctant at first until he explained that I was Augustus Middleton’s granddaughter. She’d agreed to the meeting but hadn’t said anything more, and I was filled with doubts that she had anything to add and that our trip had been a waste of time.

I felt grumpy and rumpled the next morning as we grabbed a fast-food breakfast and coffee before heading north to Colchester. Jack was chipper and looked well-rested, which made me offer him nothing more than a grunt when he wished me good morning.

We plugged Susannah’s address into the rental car’s GPS and followed its directions through the chilly Vermont countryside. I was pretty confident that the scenery was lovely and colorful but I was unable to appreciate any of it through my puffy and irritated eyes. Jack had the good sense to keep quiet.

The house we pulled up to wasn’t at all what I had expected. I had supposed Susannah would have wanted a traditional Southern home like the one in which she’d lived in Charleston, and not the neat and brilliant white Cape Code Colonial with the white picket fence and black shutters that I now stood in front of. I knew, however, that we were in the right place when I saw the walled garden in the back. Being Vermont in late autumn, the bushes and beds were stripped bare of color, but the sheer extensiveness of it made me think that a Charlestonian must live there.

We stood on the neatly swept brick step, and Jack rang the doorbell. Quick footsteps sounded from inside before a neatly dressed woman in her midfifties answered the door.

“Hello,” she greeted us. “I’m Mrs. Marston. I look after Miss Barnsley.” She opened the door wider. “Come on in. We’ve been expecting you.”

The house was furnished with antiques—but not the sparse utilitarian Ethan Allen style one would expect of a Vermont country house. Instead, these were elegant pieces that would have been completely at home in the house on Tradd Street.

A roaring fire greeted us as we entered the front drawing room, and I nearly missed seeing the diminutive woman propped up with pillows in a huge winged-back chair near the fire. Despite her age, which I had calculated as being ninety, I recognized her immediately from her photograph. She had few wrinkles in her light brown skin, as if she’d spent a lifetime taking care of it, and her green eyes were wide and vibrant, belying her years.

“You look just like your grandfather, you know,” she said, her voice strong and still carrying with it the soft consonants and gentle cadence of Charleston. It made me feel at home.

“Do I?” I asked, as I moved forward to take her offered hand. Her grip was strong as I shook it before introducing her to Jack. I could see by the brightening of her eyes that Jack’s charms weren’t lost on her. Remembering Yvonne’s similar reaction to Jack, I made a note to myself to tell him that if his writing career didn’t pick up, he could always be the social director at a nursing home. Or a gigolo.

Mrs. Marston took our jackets before Jack and I sat down on a love seat facing Susannah, the warmth of the fire permeating my chilled body. Because I’m a native South Carolinian, anything under sixty degrees Fahrenheit is too cold for me. Mrs. Marston left to get a tea tray, leaving us to talk in private.

Jack spoke first. “Thank you, Miss Barnsley, for allowing us to come visit. It must have seemed odd to you to get a call from Charleston from out of the blue.”

“Not so odd, actually. Yours was the third in as many days.”

“Really?” I asked. “Anybody you knew?”

“Well, the first two Mrs. Marston told me were just hang-ups, so I don’t know for sure. She recognized the Charleston area code, though, which is how we knew. When you called, I figured the first two times had been you as well.”

I remembered Yvonne telling us that she had called to see if Susannah was still living and I assumed that she had called twice and just forgot to mention it to us.

Jack leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Well, I’m glad you had some warning beforehand, since I’m sure seeing Melanie brings back some memories for you.”

“Yes, indeed. It sure does. Mostly good, though.” She smiled, but her eyes seemed turned inward toward another time and place. I felt dizzy for a moment, as if I traveled with her, and we were both back in Charleston and all that was there in her heart was my grandfather.
She loved him very much,
I thought. She faced me again and her eyes sparkled, and I had a fleeting thought that she had sensed me inside her head. “So what is it you would like to know?”

I opened my purse and pulled out the photograph of her that I’d kept between two pieces of cardboard. “Is this you?” I asked.

She held it in her hands, the nails neatly trimmed with clear polish. Her hand shook a little as she examined it. “Yes,” she said quietly. “That’s me. Or it was me, I should say. Gus had that taken. I only saw it once—he said he liked to keep it with him.”

“So, as far as you knew, it was always in Gus’s possession,” Jack interjected.

Susannah nodded. “As far as I know, it was.”

I watched Jack as he nodded, presumably ascertaining that Robert and Augustus must have collaborated on the contents of the box.

Jack continued. “How well did you know Robert Vanderhorst?”

“Not very well at all. Of course, times were different back then. Now folks of all colors are free to walk in any social circles. But back then, my place was not where the Vanderhorsts and Middletons were.”

“But you were Gus Middleton’s mistress, correct?”

She didn’t appear taken aback or disturbed by Jack’s bluntness. Instead, she smiled at him. “Yes, I was. He even wanted to marry me but I knew that was foolishness, and not just because I was eighteen years younger than he. I knew how he felt about me, and I didn’t need a ring to prove it. He would have had to give up everything—his friends, his law career, his social standing—to marry me. And that would have been our undoing. One day he would have realized that he missed all those other things, and there would be no way to get them back.” She shook her head. “No, no. We were content with the way things were. For a time, anyway.”

“So why did you leave?” I asked, wondering how my grandmother Middleton had felt about all this. But she had been much younger than my grandfather, and it occurred to me now that they hadn’t been married until nineteen forty or forty-one—about ten years after Susannah had left Charleston forever.

Susannah looked down at her small hands, neatly folded on top of the knitted blanket on her lap. “Because Gus asked me to.”

Her words lingered in the still room for a moment. “Do you mind if I ask you why?” I felt a tinge of excitement. Her departure coincided closely with Louisa’s disappearance, and I thought for the first time since I’d been trying to solve the mystery of what happened to Nevin’s mother that I was the closest I had ever been to finding out the truth.

Mrs. Marston entered the room with the tray filled with small sandwiches, pastries, and tea. Susannah poured for us, her hands remarkably steady, considering how thin and frail her wrists were. After ensuring that we had everything we needed, Mrs. Marston again left the room, closing the door behind her.

I placed several pastries and a sandwich on my plate and began eating, stopping myself in midchew when I noticed Susannah watching me with a half smile. “Your grandfather loved his sweets, too. Yessirree. He sure did love his sweets. It’s good to see a young girl these days with a healthy appetite.”

I heard Jack snicker but I wasn’t sure if it was the comment about my appetite or me being called a “young girl” that he found amusing.

Susannah dabbed daintily at her mouth. “Before I answer your question, I hope you don’t mind if I ask a few of my own first.”

I noticed that Jack was staring at my leg, and I watched in horror as it bounced up and down in uncontrolled impatience. I pressed my folded hands against my calf to make it stop, then smiled at Susannah. “Absolutely. We’ll answer any questions you have.”

The old woman took a slow sip of her tea, and I pressed my hands harder against my agitated leg. “How did you find me?”

Jack motioned for me to answer. “My father, James Middleton—Gus’s son—found your picture in a humidor, along with a letter for Robert’s son, Nevin, and a roll of film.” I grimaced. “It’s all a bit of a mystery, I’m afraid. We’re hoping all of these clues will lead us to Robert’s wife, Louisa. And . . .” I looked at Jack for confirmation, and he gave me a quick nod. “And maybe even a clue as to what happened to six flawless diamonds rumored to have been in the possession of the Vanderhorst family.”