The Ming and I (6 page)

I
bought a new phone for the shop and three new phones for the house. I subscribed to caller ID, but I still panicked every time I got a call.

You can bet I watched my back when crossing the street. My front and sides, too. I nearly gave myself whiplash just crossing Selwyn Avenue. Just the sight of a blue van was enough to strike terror in my heart, which accounts for why I swerved up onto the bank in front of the Black-Eyed Pea on Tyvola Road in Charlotte.

Given my state of mind, it would have made sense to forgo my meeting with Miss Lilah and spend the evening at home, my doors barricaded, watching “Seinfield.” But Mama didn’t raise me to make sense. I would like to think she aimed for “plucky.” Even as a girl, I never lay trembling in bed, waiting for the bogeyman to come out of my closet or reach up from under the bed and grab my feet. Not little Abby Wiggins. Mama thought I kept a broom in my room because I was a clean freak. Little did she know that as soon as she turned out the light and closed my door, I turned my light back on again and ferociously jabbed every remaining shadow with my wooden lance.

If Greg and his staff weren’t going to poke under the bed for me, I would have to do it myself. This
time I was better armed, with a can of pepper spray, a fistful of keys, Buford’s old fish scaler (how I ended up with it, Lord only knows), and a long-handled shovel. The bogeyman wasn’t going to get me without a struggle.

Lilah was true to her word. At precisely seven-thirty, just as the sun was starting to set, she pulled up to the gate and lowered the window of her mint green Cadillac.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. I hope it wasn’t too long.”

“I just arrived myself,” I said. It was a white lie. I’d been lying in wait for the bogeyman for at least twenty minutes. But except for a skunk family crossing the road, there had been no traffic.

“We’ll park in back,” Lilah said. “The back door is easier to open.”

She raised her window and drove ahead of me between the massive brick pillars of the open gate. I watched her silver chignon grow smaller for a moment while I entertained some rather silly thoughts. If Lilah was the bogeyman then she was a stupid one, because Mama knew exactly where I was, and with whom. But Lilah, the Rock Hill legend, was anything but stupid. Her degree from Winthrop aside, the woman was brilliant—so smart, in fact, that several U.S. presidents have picked her brain while ensconced as houseguests at her vacation home on Kiawah Island.

I shifted into drive and followed the shrinking chignon down a long, narrow dirt lane. Old live oaks arched overhead, shutting out the last of the fading light. It was like driving through a tunnel, and I immediately put my lights on. The chignon and Cadillac disappeared around a bend, and I had to brake hard to avoid smashing into an oak. Miss Lilah, it seemed, had a heavy foot. It took some fancy driving to keep up with her and still stay intact.

Even at that rate it took us several minutes to reach the clearing where the mansion stood. It was, of course, lighter in the clearing. I hadn’t seen the main house since I was a child. It took my breath away then; it took it away now. The set designers for Tara should have done their homework in Rock Hill.

The first thing one notices are the Ionic columns. They are two feet in diameter at the base and twenty-two feet tall—twenty-four of them in all. There are three aboveground floors to the mansion, although from the outside the top floor appears to be merely a jumble of gables, chimneys, and eaves. The two lower floors are separated by a wide veranda, which in turn is guarded by a black wrought iron fence. Scores of tall windows, each with its pair of black wooden shutters, punctuate the white walls.

But the most important feature, in my book at any rate, is the pair of stone staircases that curve away from the massive front door and sweep around to meet each other on the front lawn. They give the impression of embracing arms, that Roselawn in its heyday welcomed visitors.

I reluctantly followed Miss Lilah around the back of the house. There I saw a cluster of buildings—a small village, really—that I had forgotten about. Summer kitchen, washhouse, storage sheds, slave quarters, barns; Roselawn had required a large supporting cast, most of whom were there without their consent and received no pay. And if half the stories told around the fire at local Scout meetings were true, Old Man Rose, the Civil War plantation owner, had been an exceptionally evil taskmaster. Virtually every building on the premises was said to be haunted by the souls of his anguished victims. It was a wonder the freed slaves didn’t burn the place down after the Yankees missed it.

“Are any of those buildings open to the public?”
I asked. “I mean, just imagine the stories they could tell if walls could talk.”

“I’m afraid we haven’t had time to get around to them yet. Maybe next year.”

I wondered aloud if the teenagers of Rock Hill knew about all those empty buildings. It looked like make-out heaven to me.

Miss Lilah was clearly shocked. “They are all locked,” she said firmly, “and I am the only one who has a key. I would never tolerate a situation like that.”

My face was still stinging from her aristocratic rebuke when she—ever the lady—softened.

“For some reason, this back stretch of lawn gets unusually dark at night,” she said, producing a flashlight. “We’ve seen to the indoor wiring satisfactorily, but the paving lights we installed are always shorting out. We’ve had four electricians out here, and not one of them can find the problem.”

“Ghosts?” I suggested lightheartedly.

Miss Lilah had a laugh like porch chimes in a gentle breeze. “That would be Samson’s fault, then.”

“Samson?”

She pointed into the gathering gloam at the nearest outbuilding.

“Samson was a house slave who jumped the broom with Rebecca, a kitchen girl.” By that she meant the pair had gotten married, slave-style. “According to the story, Rebecca was beaten for some minor infraction, and she foolishly tried to avenge herself by poisoning the dinner guests one night when the Roses were entertaining. Rebecca had no lethal poisons in her possession, and it’s doubtful she meant to kill anyone. However, she was able to lay her hands on some noxious herbs and give everyone a proper bellyache.

“Unfortunately Rebecca confided her misdeed to another kitchen slave named Uma. It turned out that
Uma was a stoolie. Rebecca was sold to a rice planter in the low country, and Samson never saw her again. One night when it was much darker than this, and the Roses were away, Samson killed Uma. Slashed her throat with one of the kitchen knives. Right here where we’re standing. Supposedly it’s Uma’s blood that shorts out the wiring, even with the proper grounding.”

I glanced down at the ground that Uma’s blood had cursed. It seemed inordinately dark, considering we were still in red clay country.

“Do you mind if we go inside?” I asked. “It’s getting rather cool.”

My heart sank when Miss Lilah flipped on the lights in the dining room, the first room we entered. Anne Holliday was right. At least to a precursory glance, Roselawn was no treasure trove of priceless antiques. No English Chippendale appeared to have survived the treacherous Atlantic voyage, no hand-carved rice beds and sideboards had been hauled up from Charleston, no family heirlooms brought south from Virginia.

Oh, it was furnished, and amply so, but everything was Victorian. Late Victorian. True, the pieces were authentic and in good, if not excellent condition, but it was not the kind of collection that normally produced a fifteenth-century Ming vase of exceptional value. Granted, one cannot judge an entire mansion by just one room, but those first pieces I saw would, if sold individually, bring in only hundreds of dollars at an auction, not thousands. Certainly not millions.

Miss Lilah read my mind as clearly as if it contained the headlines on a supermarket tabloid. “The good stuff is upstairs, dear. So far only the ground floor is open to the public. We’re using the upstairs rooms for storage.”

“I see. Then Miss Holliday—”

Miss Lilah waved a manicured hand. She was too much of a lady to interrupt vocally.

“Miss Holliday is not an expert on antiques. But you are. That’s why I took you up on your kind offer.”

Flattery will get you anywhere you want to go with me—well, almost. It worked for Buford. But I would like to think I have matured at least a little since the water slide. At least I didn’t throw myself into Miss Lilah’s arms and nibble her ear.

“Thank you, Miss Lilah. You don’t know how good that makes me feel, especially coming from you. You’re a legend around Rock Hill, you know that? I’ve been a great admirer of yours my entire life!”

She smiled graciously. “That’s very kind of you, dear.”

We walked from the dining room into the drawing room, and came to a stop in front of an enormous fireplace. I caught my breath. The carved oak mantel was worth all the furniture that I had seen so far put together.

“Irish?” I managed to ask.

She nodded. “Dublin, 1758. Old Man Rose’s great-great-great-great-grandfather brought it over from the family seat. It should be worth a pretty penny, I imagine.”

“A drop-dead-gorgeous penny.”

“That’s what I thought. Miss Timberlake?”

“Yes.”

“Would you mind terribly keeping two lists when you do the inventory?”

“
Two
lists?”

She smiled awkwardly. It was the first imperfect thing about her.

“Yes. You see, we need a very detailed list with replacement values. That would be for insurance
purposes. I think Polaroid shots of the more important pieces would be in order, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. I’ll see that you are supplied with a camera.”

“And the second list, ma’am?”

She laughed, and this time the chimes rang a little off-key. “Yes, that. Well, we think it would be helpful to have a list of liquidation value prices—in case we find ourselves in the position of having to sell off a few of the redundant pieces.”

“I see.”

I didn’t. If Miss Lilah and the board wanted to sell a few of the pieces, liquidation was not the route they wanted to go. Ten to twenty-five cents on the dollar was all they could expect to get. I was screwing up my nerve to tell her so when I was distracted by a thump upstairs. This was not imagined; the crystal chandelier above our heads was swinging back and forth like the pendulum of a giant clock.

It’s possible I took a step closer to Miss Lilah. “Is there someone else here?”

“That would be Maynard.”

“A resident caretaker?”

The chimes rang clear again. “In a manner of speaking, I guess. Although Maynard doesn’t have a social security number, and never gets a paycheck.”

“Another ghost?”

“A very active ghost, I’m afraid. One who dates to the Late Great Unpleasantness. You see, although officially the Yankees never made it to Roselawn, unofficially a young soldier named Maynard stumbled onto Roselawn during a reconnaissance mission. He was discovered in the house, and never left. Old Man Rose supposedly had him sealed up somewhere inside a wall. Sort of like ‘The Cask of Amon
tillado,’ by Edgar Allan Poe. Have you read that story?”

“Yes, in high school. You don’t think the story about Maynard is true, do you?”

Even her shrugs were elegant. “Of course there are no documents to support it. But there are plenty of unexplained noises, as you will soon find out.”

I could hardly wait.

That night I woke twice during nightmares. In the first my bed was floating on a river of blood, bobbing along like a huge piece of driftwood. In the second there was a Yankee soldier—a quite live specimen—living between my bedroom walls. Every day I had to remove the wall plate around an electrical socket and stuff bread and small vials of water into the hole.

I rarely have such bad dreams, but those times when I do, I would settle for any warm human body—even Buford’s—lying next to me. Abigail the Fearless, the tyke who poked a broomstick under her bed, can be rendered into a bowl of jelly by her subconscious. I must have lain awake for an hour or more after each dream. After all, I couldn’t very well poke a broomstick into my walls, although I came mighty close to removing the screws on my wall plate and peering inside.

Suffice it to say I arrived at work tired and out of sorts. “Yes?” I snapped at the man waiting for me at the front door of my shop.

It was Frank McBride, an antique dealer whose shop, Estates of Mine, is just down the street. Frank is about my age and of medium height. I have the feeling he was once fairly muscular, but it has long since turned to flab. Even his face looks, to put it kindly, like that of a shar-pei. What little hair he has is bleached, pale blond, while his skin is the color of walnuts. Frank is originally from North Myrtle
Beach, and still spends a lot of time there, so he probably owes at least some of his bizarre appearance to the sun.

“I heard about your break-in,” Frank said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Thanks but no thanks,” I said, not even having the decency to regret my waspishness. “Only a phone was stolen, and it’s been replaced. I’ve got caller ID now.”

He blinked several times. His faded gray eyes were undoubtedly solar damaged as well.

“Everyone should have caller ID these days. And a good security system.”

“That’s next on my list.”

“I could recommend a good company. In fact, I have a cousin here in Charlotte who has his own security systems company. He could get you a really good deal.”

“That would be very nice, but I prefer to just browse through the yellow pages.” Let him think me strange, but I didn’t want to be beholden to him in the slightest. I was just plain too stressed to worry about returning favors.

“Well, let me know if you change your mind.”

“Thanks. I will.” I turned away to unlock my door.

“Abigail?”

I swallowed my sigh. “Yes, Frank?”

“Some friends of mine refurbished an old Tudor-style mansion in Myers Park and are having an open house on Saturday evening. I hear they have the entire place done in authentic fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English antiques. Even the textiles. It’s supposed to be really something.
Architectural Digest
and
Southern Accents
are both hot to do stories on it.”