The Tidewater Sisters: Postlude to The Prayer Box (2 page)

“Well, it looks like there was a contract to sell your land, earnest money and a down payment were exchanged, and then problems arose regarding a tax lien, some easements, and most importantly breach of the covenant to convey. The seller—that would be you—then promised to remedy these things and provide clear title within thirty days. The seller—you again—has failed to do so. The buyers don’t just want their money back; they’re filing a complaint for breach of contract, promissory estoppel, and specific performance, meaning they intend to force you to comply with your end of the deal, clear your title, and sell them the land,” Vince says, sipping a tall frappe from the Sandy’s Seashell Shop coffee bar. Kicked back with an ankle cocked over his knee and a flip-flop dangling, he looks as sure of himself here as he does in his ambulance-chasing legal commercials. Since moving to the Outer Banks, he’s become one of Sandy’s best customers, and I honestly can’t think of anyone else to call. I definitely can’t afford to hire a lawyer.

“Vince, I don’t
own
any property,” I insist again. “And I
didn’t
steal anyone’s earnest money. I have no idea what this is about.”

Sandy frowns, her short blonde hair standing on end as she leans over the document. The fan of crow’s feet around her eyes deepens ominously in the shadowy after-hours shop light. “This is obviously a case of mistaken identity. How do we get these people off our backs? How do we straighten it out?”

Suddenly
I
has become
we
. Seashell Sandy is ready for a fight, and apparently, so is her little shop dog, Chum. His tiny paws brace on the table, and he shows Vince some Boston bulldog teeth.

Vince lifts both hands, the evening breeze pressing through the screen doors and fluffing his comb-over. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger.”

“So . . . what’s the next step here?” As usual, Paul is the voice of reason. Steady, smart, confident. Completely certain that I haven’t done anything wrong, and I
haven’t
. Even so, I feel like there must be something I’m overlooking. I think of the man I was running from when I came to Hatteras, Trammel Clarke. Shady deals were his specialty. Could this have something to do with him?

“You have any enemies?” Vince seems to be reading my mind.

“It’s a
case
of mistaken
identity
,” Sandy insists again. “You tell us what we need to do, Vince, and I’ll keep you in frappes for the next twenty years. You and Natalie.”

Vince’s smile turns a bit more tender. He appreciates the Seashell Shop girls for taking his much-younger wife under wing rather than giving her the reception a twentysomething woman with a middle-aged husband often gets.

“Washington County . . .” Vince reaches for his iPad. “Not much out that way, as far as I can remember. Sued a gas company there once when their pipeline blew up next to some lady’s house. Good lawsuit. Brought the hammer down on ’em.” The last part is a direct quote from one of his commercials. “Let’s see if we can find out where this place is.” He turns the pages and reads the property description again. “Sure you don’t know anyone in Washington County?”

“I’m sure.” But my mind is turning now.
Washington County
. . .
Washington County
. . .
It rings a bell, but I can’t quite figure out why. “Where is that?”

Vince homes in with his iPad. “Hang on a minute. I’ll have it for you. Let me get the coordinates for this land entered.”

Washington County Fair.
That’s what my mind was reaching for.

“Here we go. It’s coming,” Vince says.

I remember an old black-and-white picture . . . a shot of a prize-winning show steer posed in the victory circle.

“Wait for it . . .”

Vince’s voice fades as the image in my mind clears and expands. There’s a ribbon hanging beside the steer’s photo. Once blue, it’s now faded to pale lilac.
Beaufort-Washington Livestock Show, 1968,
the ribbon reads.
Grand Champion Steer.

“Man, the Internet is slow tonight,” I hear Vince complaining. “Okay, there it is. Let’s zoom in on the Google satellite view and see what’s down there. So . . . looks like a house . . . and some other buildings . . .”

I turn to the iPad, but in some way I already know what I’ll find. Vince’s short, stubby fingers glide across the screen, stretching the sky view of an old house and barn. My mind tumbles down and down and down, into the tiny world on the screen.

I feel the old shingles of the barn roof, know their scratchy surface and the network of pinpoint and scalloped imprints they’ll leave on my skin when I rise . . . when Luke Townley takes my hand to pull me to my feet and we climb down the silo ladder, then hide in its thick moon shadow, where we’re invisible, even to each other.

Someone yells my name from the house, and Luke just chuckles, tugs my hand, and whispers,
Come on. I’ve got an idea.

I hesitate, he pulls harder, and the invisible roots holding my feet in place fall away, and we fly through the night dew into the cornfield, where no one can find us. I realize it’s my sister yelling after me, not Mama or Daddy, and all fear leaves me. Gina can’t hurt me.

Gina
. . .

A gasp rushes from my lips, and Sandy, Vince, and Paul all look my way in unison.

My stomach clenches in a full-fisted grasp. I do, I realize, have an enemy.

“Gina,” I whisper, rubbing my temples and squeezing hard, as if I can work her out like a charley horse. If only it were that simple. Anytime my life is stable, the cataclysmic downfall will in some way involve my sister. It’s like she’s radar-equipped for this sort of thing. Capable of knowing, from wherever she hangs out in the meantime, when to show up and do the most damage. Somehow or other, she’s probably heard about the wedding. And given the way Gina and I left things the last time we saw each other, she’s undoubtedly out for blood. “This has something to do with Gina.”

Paul’s eyes widen and Sandy’s narrow. Vince just looks confused. My sister ended her short stay on the Outer Banks and disappeared before Vince and Natalie moved to Hatteras Village. Vince has no idea what we’re dealing with here.

“If that witch gets within a hundred yards of this place, I’m gonna grab her by that blonde ponytail and sling her around until her eyes bug out.” Sandy’s lips tighten into a scowl.

In some weird way, her opinion of my sister stings. I wonder, will these bizarre family ties ever fall free? Gina is my last blood relative, true, but what does she have to do before I finally don’t think of her as my sister anymore? Before I stop feeling like I owe her something?

“Gina? How so?” Paul asks cautiously.

“That’s my grandparents’ farm.” I point at the screen. “It’s in the Tidewater near Wenona. Washington County.”

“That explains a few things.” Vince nods as if this news is somehow satisfying.

“But my grandparents have been gone for years, and so has the farm.” I stare at the image, trying to make sense of it. “My grandmother sold it to pay for Pap-pap’s nursing care after his stroke.” I struggle to remember how I know that. It seems like I found out sometime while I was in foster care as a teenager. Maybe Gina told me during a sibling visit.

“You can’t sell property you don’t own,” Vince points out.

“My sister probably could.”

“She probably
would
,” Sandy agrees.

Vince returns to the legal documents. “Can’t get any more details until Monday when offices open, but
there’s no secondary name on this complaint. Just yours. Could be they’ve gone after your sister in a separate suit.”

“I really can’t believe Gina would . . . use my name in some . . . some scheme. She doesn’t even know anything about real estate.” But the truth about Gina is, when she’s either mad or desperate, she’s resourceful.

“We’ll just have to fight this thing. That’s all there is to it.” Sandy has her game face on. “Any of us can testify that Tandi hasn’t been anywhere near Washington County this past year. She’s been with us on Hatteras, working.”

“What’s the procedure here?” Paul chimes in. “How long is this likely to take?”

I catch the look in his eye, and I know what he’s thinking. Instantly, I think of it too.

The wedding. The honeymoon. Two weeks from now we’re supposed to be standing before a preacher at sunset on the beach. We should be talking about flowers and finger sandwiches and the cute little starfish-and-sea-glass napkin rings Sandy wants to put on the reception tables. Instead, we’re discussing real estate fraud.

I should be walking on air, but instead I’m tiptoeing on razor blades. The realization is sudden and stark. Even through all the planning and the talking and the napkin-ring making, I’ve never really believed that this wedding would happen. Deep down inside, I’ve known all along that things like this—dream weddings, friends who are closer than family, men like Paul Chastain—don’t happen to people like me.

Who do you think you are, Miss High and Mighty?
The voices are old, but they’re still here, and still powerful. My mother, my father, my sister, my aunt Marney.
You think you’re somebody special? That stuff’s not for people like us.

Guilt strikes my core, and I pinch my temples harder. I’ve dragged Paul and the shop girls into this mess, just by letting them care about me. By letting Paul fall in love with me. By falling in love with him. He’s a normal guy from a normal family. He doesn’t know anything about this kind of dysfunction.

“I’ll take care of it.” I grab my purse from the table and start toward the door, the weak-kneed emotions of shock and disbelief quickly being forged into an armored suit of pure, white-hot anger.

How dare she!

How dare Gina use my name. How dare she involve the one place we were always loved and cared for and protected. That farm in the Tidewater is sacred ground.

“Hang on a minute.” Paul’s chair rattles over the uneven plank floor as he stands up.

“Where are you going?” Sandy calls after me.

“I don’t know yet.” But the truth is, I do. I know exactly where I’m headed.

And I know it’s no accident that, just a few hours ago, I awoke from a dream of Mulberry Run Road and Luke Townley.

Mulberry Run Road hasn’t changed. The pavement is still sticky black tar that swishes like water beneath the tires. Quiet farmhouses, old barns, and hired-hand trailer homes look like they’ve seen better days. The fields, always ripe with tobacco, muscadine and scuppernong vines, and corn tassles towering head high, paint a patchwork of summer growth clothed in morning dew—short, tall, leaves, fringe, blooms, myriad shades of green.

Mailboxes still cling to leaning posts. Electric lines sag lazily. The canals, kept clean and in good repair by farmers, are still crisscrossed by occasional trails worn into the surfaces by livestock and kids on bicycles. Crossing a bridge that has been in place since long before my mother was born here, I slow, look down the trench, and remember pedaling hard toward it, then at the last minute throwing my feet out straight, waiting for the old Columbia 3-Star to fly for an instant before toppling off the edge, then careening down the slope and popping up the other side.

Now, bicycles like the ones we found in Pap-pap’s barn are a hot item on
American Pickers
and
Antiques Roadshow
. I wonder what became of them. Was there an estate sale when my grandmother signed the farm over to a new owner, or was the farm purchased with the contents in place? Who lives there now?

For a moment, I fantasize that the bicycles are still in the barn where we left them during our hasty departure that final summer. I picture them propped against the wall in what was once a stall for plow horses.

I’m overcome with a sense of not wanting to go back and see that they’re gone, that the house has a new family in it and there’s nothing left but the ghosts of the past, still clinging to all the hidden spaces. But I know I have to return—to the farm, to what was, to the ghosts.

Sooner or later, the future always circles back to the past.

I’ve come full circle. All by myself. Against Paul’s wishes and Sandy’s protests and Vince’s warnings that I shouldn’t set foot on the land that’s in dispute or talk to anyone about the lawsuit until he can make some more calls tomorrow when offices are open. In the meantime, he has promised to figure out what he can. I’ve convinced Paul that I need him to stay with the kids, and Sandy that I need her to look after the ongoing wedding plans, and Vince that I’d never dream of asking him to come over to the Tidewater with me pro bono.

The truth is, I have to make this trip alone. If it’s possible to prevent the past from spilling any further into the present, I have to accomplish that. I’ll do whatever it takes—even confront the ghosts . . . and my sister. If I can find her. This fraudulent real estate sale could be something she’s cooked up from hundreds of miles away. She could be back in Texas by now, but I doubt it. I have a feeling this is something she stirred up in person.

I clear a grove of Carolina pines grown up around what used to be a neighbor’s double silo, and I see it ahead—the old white house with its three steep gables. Behind it stands the hip-roof barn that was always red. It’s the color of weathered wood now. As I come closer, I notice that there are boards missing. In places, I can see all the way through to the sky on the other side. Along the side of the house, the roof of the wraparound porch leans, a post missing. The driveway is still in use, apparently. There’s a layer of gravel atop the blackland muck and two clear tracks with a hump of grass between.

The orchard out back has grown into a forest, but I can see fruit trees here and there—pears, persimmons, figs, the little green apples Meemaw always used for apple butter in the fall.

Turning in the driveway, I wonder if the mulberry grove still lies beyond the old orchard. A few mulberry trees have sprouted in the fencerow at the edge of the yard, the seeds dropped by birds as they sat atop the wire. Pap-pap would have rooted out the saplings, back in the day. This place was always as carefully kept as an accountant’s balance sheet. Everything in its proper place. Everything in working order. Nothing thrown away. The equipment and the furniture repaired, repainted, reupholstered, and used as long as it would hold out.

Now the farm is almost unrecognizable as its former self, a sad stranger as I climb from the car, shade my eyes, and squint up at the gables. It’s like looking at a homeless person along the sidewalk and thinking for a
moment that you recognize the face. Could this be an old friend you lost track of long ago? A part of you wants to pass on by without knowing.

Behind the wavy plate-glass windows, I imagine Meemaw in the pink room upstairs.
Gonna be a fine ’un today, mighty fine. Rustle up, child. The rooster’s done sung and chickens been layin’ for hours a’ready. . . .
Her Blue Ridge Mountain twang wraps me like music as I stretch bony arms against my pillow, hearing the creak of Pap-pap’s old chair downstairs. He’s shifted to one side, relinquished the newspaper, prepared the little warm space I’ll snuggle into when I run to the day room. Together, we’ll read the funnies while the scents of frying bacon, farm-fresh eggs, and biscuits waft from the kitchen.

We’ll revel in this golden hour of the morning while my sister stubbornly sleeps in. I’ll curl against Pap-pap’s big barrel chest, wishing this time could last forever . . . and knowing it won’t. Sooner or later, my mama and daddy will straighten out whatever issue has caused them to leave us here again. They’ll come back for us, and we’ll have that talk about making a new start somewhere. We’ll all pile in the truck, and that’ll be that for a while. Life will wobble around and around off-kilter until it crashes again.

The memory of those mornings tastes both bitter and sweet as I reach the front steps. They’re intact, but the decking has been removed from the porch floor, only the joists remaining. Those have been exposed long enough to weather and gather debris of dead grass and leaves. Either someone began repairs here at one time and then abandoned the effort, or the house is under some slow form of demolition, perhaps being stripped for parts.

The second possibility makes me flinch. Maybe I really am better off not knowing. . . .

“Hello?” I call, though it’s silly. Who would be living in a house with a five-foot drop outside the front door? “Is anyone here?”

I climb two more steps, crane to see through the dirty window glass. I’d swear I can see Pap-pap’s brown recliner silhouetted beyond the entry hall, still resting in the day room, where it always was. It can’t be there, of course. Undoubtedly, the house has been occupied since then, even if not in recent years.

“Hello?” An eerie feeling creeps over my shoulders. I pause on the top step, check the yard, the driveway, the farm field that appears almost ready for harvest. The land is still in use.

Something creaks rhythmically, and overhead, the weather vane groans as it turns. I remember the sound.

I cross a joist like a gymnast on a balance beam, my arms stretched the way they would’ve been when we traversed the sagging top rails of county-road bridges nearby. The higher the bridge, the better the dare.

This feels like a dare. My heart pounds. A pulse thrums in my throat.
Leave,
common sense pleads.
Don’t do this. You don’t need more trouble. There’s nothing to be gained here.

But I can’t help feeling that the answers to my questions are hidden inside this house.

Maybe I just don’t know where else to start looking.

I knock on the door, listen, knock louder. No one answers, of course.

The iron doorknob resists as I try to turn it. Locked. I feel along the top of the porch light almost without thinking. The key is right where it has always been.

An icy sensation walks up my spine as I unlock the door and let it fall slowly open. This is breaking and entering. I have no right to be here. But I can’t stop myself. I need to know what’s left. I won’t stay long.

I step across the threshold, glad the floors inside are intact, but the olive-green linoleum sags beneath my feet as if it might give way too. I look down at it momentarily, test its strength, then survey the entry hall, gaze up the stairs, take in the pictures still hanging there.

Ancestors watch me from ornate frames—a farmer posing with his hay wagon, my grandfather in his military uniform, my mother at two or three years old, my grandfather’s family on their shrimp boat on the Outer Banks. My grandmother’s people posed in front of a mountain cabin at a long-ago family wedding. How many times did I beg her to take down that frame and tell me one more time who those stern-looking faces
belonged to? In the photo, my grandmother is the little dark-haired, blue-eyed girl posed with her hand on her grandfather’s chair.

My baby picture is there on the wall too, and Gina’s.

I blink, sweep over all of them, blink again, expecting them to disappear. How could this be after so many years?

It’s all I can do not to run wildly through the place to see what else is left. Instead, I walk quickly from room to room, disturbing dust motes, sneezing at the mildewed smell, taking in with bewilderment the smattering of belongings that remain. Most of the antiques are gone. The old mantel clock, the iron bedstead in my grandparents’ room, the beautiful hall tree Gina and I used as a princess throne—all have vanished. My grandmother’s wedding china and Fostoria crystal are missing from the dining room cabinet. Her silver chest is gone. Her jewelry box is nowhere to be found.

The place has been scavenged.

Maybe Meemaw needed money after she had Pap-pap in the nursing home for a while? Maybe she sent someone here to remove estate goods and sell them?

It’s hard to imagine, and the idea propels a wash of sadness and guilt that follows me up the stairs. I was just a teenager then, but I could’ve been some help to her. I could’ve helped both of them, if my mother hadn’t concocted the terrible lies that prevented my grandparents from getting legal custody of us.

Meemaw’s sewing room at the top of the stairs is practically untouched. It smells of musty fabric, and the air is warm and thick, but the cloud-muted light through the window is soft and inviting. Shelves bow beneath the weight of fabric and notions. The prints on the yard goods, now faded along the creases, read like a timeline of fashion from 1930 to the 1980s, when she retired from taking in alterations and creating custom prom dresses and bridesmaids’ gowns for neighbors. I watched her fit garments to many a young woman in this room. She always kept the scraps. There were new outfits for Gina and me every time we came here.

I move around the shelves, testing the sags in the dusty floor, fingering a bridal veil left hanging from the edge of her bulletin board. The notes and pictures there make me smile—babies for whom she crafted intricate christening gowns, girls for whom she sewed first communion and party outfits, brides clothed in her beautiful wedding dresses.

There are books and boxes and stacks of patterns on the shelves all around the room. I want to open every one, look inside for connections to my grandmother, yet logic tells me this is all a long, strange dream. The house couldn’t still be here after so many years—a perfect time capsule in some places, pillaged in others.

An old J. G. Dill’s tobacco tin atop the bookshelves catches my eye. It’s roughly the size of a shoe box, almost invisible among the clutter, but I remember it now. I remember finding it buried in a drawer during one of my visits here and slipping my fingers under the lid, trying to pry it open.

I was fascinated by the image of a beautiful woman on the front. Etched in lines of black and red, hands thrown behind her head, she smiles in wild abandon, even now. Next to her the words
Cut Plug Tobacco
destroy the romance a bit, but I remember wanting the tin and wondering what might be inside. Meemaw found me with it and took it away.
Oh, pea pod, that’s not for playin’,
she said gently.
Someday, when you get big, it’ll be for you.
She set it high on the shelf. On that
exact
shelf, where it must have remained all these years, half hidden between a stack of patterns and a cardboard box.

I stretch toward it, but something shadow-moves in the corner of my vision. I gasp, slap a hand to my chest, wheel around so quickly that I’d swear the floor ripples beneath my feet like a paddleboard on a wake. There’s a little boy standing in the driveway. Just standing there, staring up at the house with his arms hanging at his sides, the sun glinting off his honey-brown skin. His oversize jeans are bunched around bare feet, and his blue button-up shirt hangs askew, so he looks like something from
The Grapes of Wrath
. There was a hired-hand family that lived in a shanty house down the road, years ago. The grandfather still worked his little garden patch
with a mule. We were never allowed to play with the kids. Could it be that the family still lives there?

Or maybe I’m only imagining the boy, remembering the past.

He seems to be looking at me through the window.

A toppled-over bike rests in the ditch nearby. It’s modern enough to snap my mind from the haze. I’ve just been caught where I have no business being.

I hurry downstairs, wondering if he will still be there when I get to the door, and he is. He watches with consternation as I navigate the balance-beam porch and hurry down the steps.

“Y’ain’t supposed to go up’n there,” he says, and his directness surprises me. He’s only nine or ten, around the age of my J.T., but he looks me in the eye, and his bottom lip squeezes upward into the top one.

“My grandparents used to live here,” I offer, trying to appear calm, but inside the voice of reason scolds,
Good gravy, Tandi, what were you thinking? You could get arrested for this.

Yet I want that tobacco tin, and other things that have been left inside the house. . . .

The boy looks doubtful. I don’t blame him.

“Do you know who owns the place now?” It doesn’t hurt to ask, I figure, since I’m already in trouble anyway. I do have a little money saved up—assuming I don’t need to use it for a legal defense fund. Maybe I can buy the things I want.

“My daddy does the farmin’ on it. Till they run him off, anyhow. You one a them people?”