The Secrets She Carried (24 page)

Leslie stole a glance at her watch. “I, um…I’ve got a few ideas about that. Speaking of which, I need to get going. I’ve got a couple of appointments, but if you want to cook me dinner, I’ll fill you in on the details later.”

If Jay was surprised, he didn’t show it. “Any requests?”

“My dinners all cook in five and a half minutes on full power. I’m in no position to be picky. Should I bring anything?”

“A bottle of wine is customary, I believe. I don’t suppose you know where to get your hands on a really good Chardonnay?”

Leslie laughed, a soft, breezy sound that felt like flirting. “I’ll see what I can do about the wine. See you around seven.” The invitation—could you still call it an invitation if you invited yourself?—had popped out without a second thought, and now that it had she was glad.

Downtown was just beginning to stir as Leslie pulled into
Meeting Street and parked along the curb in front of Randolph Estate Sales. She was glad to find the shop empty as she struggled through the door with the sheet-wrapped Rebecca.

A jangling brass bell brought a thickset man in a lumpy gray cardigan bustling from the back room. His smile was bland, his faded blue eyes comically magnified by the optical visor he wore. “Austin Randolph,” he said, pumping her hand warmly, his voice thick with Carolina drawl. “You must be Miss Nichols. I believe you called about some jewelry?”

Leslie held out her wrist. “I’d like to know how much you’ll give me for this.”

Mr. Randolph was clearly startled by her abruptness, but after adjusting his visor, he turned his attention to her watch. “A lady’s all-gold Rolex, and a fairly new one at that.”

Leslie opened the clasp and slid the watch off, laying it on the glass counter. “It’s two years old. I’ve got the original box and paperwork in the car.”

Randolph picked up the watch, looking it over with a practiced eye. “Plain bezel, diamond dial…It’s a beautiful timepiece, in excellent condition, but I’ll be honest; I can’t give you anywhere near what you paid. Are you quite certain you want to part with it?”

In response to Leslie’s nod, he produced a jeweler’s loupe from his trouser pocket and proceeded to make a more thorough inspection. When he was finally satisfied, he reached for a calculator, tapped a few buttons with the eraser of a pencil, then held it up for her to see. Leslie felt her shoulders sag but reluctantly nodded her agreement. He hadn’t been kidding when he said the figure would be nowhere near what she paid, but if she was frugal, it might be enough to finance her plans for the Splash.

With the necessary papers complete and the cash counted out, Leslie inquired if there might be time to take a look at the Rebecca.
Mr. Randolph seemed only too happy to oblige. Hoisting the painting up onto the counter, he peeled back the faded floral bedsheet, adjusted his visor, and turned his attention to the canvas.

After several minutes, he tugged the visor up onto his forehead. “Are you looking to sell this piece as well?”

“I haven’t decided,” Leslie lied, feeling a twinge of guilt. “But I would like to know more about it. There are another four at home, all apparently painted by the same artist.”

Randolph’s downy gray brows lifted in surprise. “Four more, you say?” He glanced once more at the signature in the lower right-hand corner, then pulled off his visor and hung it on a nearby peg. “Art of this caliber really isn’t my specialty, Miss Nichols, but if you’d allow me to, I’d like to hold on to the piece and consult with a friend of mine in the art department at UNC. I can’t be certain, but I suspect it may be a rather special piece.”

Leslie was disappointed at the prospect of having to wait but was intrigued by his use of the word
special
. “How long will that take, do you think?”

“It shouldn’t be more than a week or two. If it’s the painting you’re worried about, I assure you it will be in good hands.”

Leslie swallowed her disappointment; she’d been hoping for answers today. Scribbling down her number, she handed it to Mr. Randolph, thanked him for his time, and left the shop, her thoughts already shifting to her next appointment.

The
Gavin Gazette
was the last stop on her to-do list, and the most critical. She had pulled together a hasty press packet, media of the house and grounds, along with a shamelessly schmaltzy timeline of Peak’s evolution from tobacco farm to winery. It was presumptuous, she knew, to suggest content to a newspaper editor, but as Jay had pointed out, harvest was around the corner and they were coming down to the wire. With advertising dollars scarce, it was starting to look
like exposure was going to come down to whatever she could wrangle from the paper.

As it turned out, she had no trouble convincing Steve Whitney, the
Gazette
’s new, and somewhat wet-behind-the-ears, editor to agree to a series of local-interest pieces, culminating in a full-color spread in the
Weekender
, which would run three days before the Splash. It was more than she’d hoped for, even if she did have to flutter her lashes a bit to get it done.

Thanking him profusely, she reiterated the hope that she would see him at the Splash, then asked to be directed to the archives department. If she couldn’t get instant answers about the Rebecca, maybe she could dig up something on how Adele Laveau might have died.

The archives department turned out to be a cramped and musty room at the end of the hall. A stout woman with iron gray hair and penciled-on brows informed Leslie in clipped tones that there was no research staff to assist her, but if she was willing to search on her own, she was welcome to stay until they locked up.

Leslie was glad when the woman finished her brief tutorial and left. Nothing was digitally archived, and the microfiche trays were confusing, but eventually she grasped how the information was stored. Unfortunately, with no concrete dates, there was no easy way to attack the data. All she could do was scan back editions, one at a time, in hopes that something caught her eye.

After three hours, Leslie was ready to throw in the towel. She had combed through a dozen years of minuscule print and grainy photos and had yet to run across anything remotely helpful. No surprises, no loose ends, nothing pertaining to the woman buried on the ridge or the child she had borne out of wedlock. So now what? There were hospital records she could check, and the courthouse, though in those days rural births often went unrecorded. She could visit local
churches, search for a record of baptism for the boy, but it seemed unlikely that Adele would have flaunted Henry’s illegitimate son in church.

Groaning, she pressed her knuckles to her lids. Perhaps it was time to admit she’d already invested more energy in this wild-goose chase than she could afford. Adele Laveau was dead and gone and had been for eighty years; nothing she learned now was going to change that. Weary and resigned, she reached to shut down the reader, then went stock-still.

MYSTERIOUS FIRE AT PEAK PLANTATION

The photo was poor, degraded after so many years, but appeared to show the foundation of a small shed heaped in ash and rubble.

Leslie couldn’t say why she had bothered to print the article. A shed fire might have been news in 1940, but it wasn’t what she’d been looking for. As gruesome as it seemed, she’d been hoping to find some clue about the accident that had killed Adele. Instead, her big
discovery had turned out to be a case of vandalism in which the only casualty was an old woodshed. Sighing, she stuffed the article into her purse and flicked off the light.

On the way home she fiddled with the radio, searching for a station that wasn’t playing LeAnn Rimes or Billy Ray Cyrus and wondering why so many country singers happened to have three names. As she turned onto Gavin Boulevard she caught sight of First Presbyterian’s soaring steeple, white and piercing against the bright blue sky. Without thinking, she pulled into the deserted lot, cut the engine, and got out.

Something wobbled in her chest as she stepped onto the cracked slate path. For a moment she stood staring at the church’s neat white double doors, its redbrick walls and stained glass windows. Generations of Gavins had attended service in its sanctuary, sung in its pews, wed at its altar, been buried on its grounds. Suddenly, the gravity of tradition, of years and loss, was stifling. What was she doing here?

In the yard behind the church, headstones stood like rows of well-tended teeth. Leslie forced her feet off the path, navigating them like land mines as she crossed to where the dead Gavins slept. Henry’s lofty granite obelisk made the family plot easy to locate, a shaft of sullen gray marble adorned with a heavy bronze plaque. Beside him, Susanne rested more modestly, her epitaph as inconspicuous as her plain granite headstone. She had gone first, six years before Henry, at only forty-seven.

Leslie’s breath caught when she saw the small stone in the grass to Susanne’s right, nameless and etched with a solitary date—a child lost too soon to even be named. Miscarriages and stillbirths were a fact of life in those days, but the sight of it, so tiny and final, was sobering. A few feet away, Maggie’s headstone basked in the last rays of afternoon sun. It was hard to believe she’d been gone a whole year, harder still to realize thirty years had passed since she had decorated
gingerbread men or carved a pumpkin with her grandmother. How could thirty years feel like yesterday?

The marker beside Maggie’s was a perfect match, slate gray granite etched with crosses at the corners, belonging to the grandfather who lived in Leslie’s memory not as flesh and blood, but as a blend of remembered scents—peppermint, tobacco, the faint limey tang of hair tonic.

And then there was her mother’s stone, a heart-shaped slab of pink-veined marble standing alone in the shade of a nearby oak. Until that moment she had never laid eyes on it. Maggie hadn’t thought it a good idea to let her attend the funeral. And then, three days later, Jimmy had taken her away. Stepping into the shade, she read the epitaph.

Amanda Lynne Nichols
April 4, 1953–October 27, 1984
Beloved daughter, devoted mother,
Cruelly stolen from those who loved her.

Stolen.

The word rocked her.

Maggie had chosen it, of course, a glaring indictment of the son-in-law she blamed for the death of her little girl. And she’d been far from alone in her suspicions. There had been an inquest, and the not-so-subtle whispers when Jimmy had failed to appear at his wife’s funeral. No one knew it was because he couldn’t stand up long enough to dress himself. The memory of her father—drunk and sobbing on the bathroom floor—still made Leslie shudder. But the memory came with a rush of understanding too, about what she was doing here.

She had never said good-bye.

She had carried her mother’s death quietly, locking it away, burying
it deep. But now, like the ridge with its abandoned stone and rusted iron gate, time had found its way in. Suddenly, she was weeping, quiet sobs that rushed up from nowhere to fill her throat, for all the lost years and all the unsaid good-byes. Until now, she hadn’t understood how irrevocably linked it all was, and how inevitable. Peak was Maggie’s legacy, enduring and unshakable, tying the past with the future, and somehow, she had unwittingly followed it home.

Leslie had no idea how long she lingered before finally heading back to the car. She only knew that the sun had begun to dip and she was finally cried out, emptied, and strangely at peace. She had come to say good-bye and she had, to her mother, and to Maggie, and perhaps to some part of her past.

L
eslie arrived for dinner fifteen minutes early, wearing black slacks and a matching turtleneck, a chilled bottle of Chardonnay in hand. The cottage door stood open. She walked through to find Jay in the kitchen, contemplating a pair of bronze-skinned fish.

The smile he flashed when he glanced up was slightly distracted, almost boyish. “I hope you like sea bass.”

“Sure, I guess. As long as you promise there won’t be a face on mine. Faces on my food make me queasy.”

“No face, I promise,” he said over the
shing-shing
of his knife against the sharpening steel. “I’m going to fillet them, then roast them with a sweet-corn and black-eye succotash.”

Leslie lifted a brow in approval. “Sounds wonderful, and very southern. I’m guessing you didn’t learn to cook like that in Connecticut.”

“And you’d be right. Maggie and I had a standing date every Friday night. We would trade off cooking for one another. I taught her how to fry oysters and make Yankee pot roast. She taught me to make corn bread and fry okra.” His hands went still over the fish, the ghost of a smile on his lips. “I never tasted okra until I met your grandmother.”