“I was busy.”
“You’re always busy.” He glanced around for the first time since he’d entered.
Charlotte could only imagine what was poking through that countrified sensibility of his. Champagne glasses and gussied up females and Beyoncé—a recent add to her playlist, thanks to Freesia—hardly constituted busy.
“I need you back at the farm now. I have to go to Lavery to get a part for the tractor and there’s hen carcasses everywhere.”
“I can’t just up and leave, Nash.”
“Isn’t that what you got help for. I’ve tried to be understanding, but I haven’t seen you in days. I agreed with Alex, to let this damned place go, sell it and get some cash to fix up that old barn we’d talked about, but I took your side because it was important to you. But this…this isn’t what I signed up for, Char.”
She always hated that nickname. Or maybe she didn’t and it simply triggered her now because it came at the tail end of his drawl, more whine these days.
“A wife who works outside the home?”
“A wife who never wants to come home.”
His tone backed away, wounded. He had removed his hat, the way a good southern gentleman always did, indoors. A sweat ring tamped down his dirty blond hair, making his face look more boyish than ever, the Nash she’d fallen for in high school. Nash was a good man, put his family above all, never met a stranger he wouldn’t help. She hated the part of her that insisted that was no longer enough.
She had been helping Freesia finish dresses for four nights straight. And most everything here was done. Charlotte could do this for Nash. Mama always said it was better to bend than to break.
“Alex is just going to have to come out.” Charlotte knocked on the office door. “Alex?”
“She ain’t here,” said Nash.
“What?”
“Stopped for feed, ran into Clyde. Said Alex had called him a few hours ago from the house to collect her dog.”
“Collect what for her dog?
“Not what. Collect her dog,” said Nash. “Guess she came home and found it dead.”
It. As if Bear wasn’t more than an it. To Nash, who lived and died by the life cycles on a farm, part of animal ownership. To Charlotte, who knew Alex’s sun rose and set on that dog—especially since returning to Devon—one more crumble to a cookie of a year.
Bear had suffered so much at the end. Still, her heart slipped loose.
Charlotte made eye contact with Freesia. Must have said a whole lot in that second because in the span of the next few, Freesia was beside her. “Everything okay?”
Nash took a step back.
Charlotte didn’t have time for his pettiness. He’d made it clear he didn’t like Freesia one bit. Said on more than one occasion she’d brought nothing but trouble and should head back to Georgia. Charlotte, on the other hand, was relieved she was there.
“We have to find out what was in that envelope.” Charlotte turned to Nash. “Gimme your pocketknife.”
“Don’t got it.”
Freesia reached into the half-apron she stuffed with sewing tools and tied around her waist during fittings. She uncapped a seam ripper and handed it to Charlotte. “Try this.”
Charlotte crouched eye-level to the lock, poked the opening to find the lever, and followed it with a bent bobby pin from her hair. She knew how to peel a kiwi with a spoon, make a straw holder out of a soda can tab, and make a popsicle dripless by poking the stick through a paper muffin liner but her coolest tricks came from her daddy and his time in the service. Picking locks was no exception.
The knob’s counter pressure against her grip eased and the door swung open. Inside, they found an open window, chair pushed in front as a step, and the shrapnel of legalese scattered on white paper.
Freesia scanned the pages, found the cover page, held it for Charlotte to read.
Charlotte uncrumpled a yellow note, held it for Freesia to read.
They shared a look.
Nash stood like an iron filigree atop a ranch gate. “What’s going on?”
Charlotte hadn’t broken eye contact with her half-sister. Still, she addressed her husband.
“Nash?”
“What?”
“You know I love you, right?” Charlotte reached for her purse in the cubby on the wall and secured it over her head, across her body. “But I have to go.”
“Me too,” said Freesia.
If Charlotte’s heart was tugged loose before, it was hitched to her runaway thoughts and sailing down the highway at top speed now. She pictured a bitchy A-lister, a sobbing bride, a write-up in the Clarion-Ledger’s business page on unprofessional business practices, an entire store looted. Everything awful she could think through as a consequence of crawling through that window—but nothing compared to the image of Alex distraught, alone, needing the only family she had left.
Match Made in Devon meant nothing if it didn’t have the March sisters. All the sisters.
“What about those women out there?” Nash’s protest was extra, like the Downer-Jacobson party was a den of ravenous copperheads. Charlotte was pleased with the analogy. At least one of them was a redhead.
“You’ll know what to do,” said Charlotte. “Your charm with the ladies knows no bounds.”
Two ways out of the shop that day: the front door, through a barrage of questions and requests for champagne refills and the window, same as Alex, stealth as all get-out. Her trapdoor, after all. Charlotte scaled the chair, sat on the ledge, and flipped one leg out before she had a chance to change her mind.
“You can’t just…” Nash had plumb run out of words.
The route down proved more challenging—unladylike, ungraceful, unbalanced—but Charlotte landed with the agility of a ninja-in-training. Daddy would have been proud. She helped Freesia down.
And when her half-sister held her hand a second longer than necessary, Charlotte squeezed Freesia’s hand and they exchanged smiles.
Not unlike the approaching storm, Nash’s voice boomed and rained from the open window, “But I have to go to Lavery for that tractor part.”
Nash might as well have said he needed to go to the moon for space junk. Charlotte had earned the right for her world to be here, now, at least for a little while. She couldn’t run like she used to, had a little more junk in her space suit than when she ran track in high school, but she kept up with her younger companion’s strides just fine when their sister’s heart was on the line.
Charlotte Evangeline March was running toward something, sure, but she got a taste of running away from something. And it was everything.
20
Freesia
Charlotte checked Alex’s bedroom first.
Freesia knew Alex wouldn’t be there. She spent most of her time at home battling sleep—sometimes succumbing on the sofa; increasingly as the nights warmed, wrapped in a blanket near the fire pit. The dawn when Freesia found her beside Bear on the dining room rug had proven more the rule than the exception. Freesia didn’t know how Alex could sustain on a steady diet of deprivation and disappointment.
As Freesia headed back inside, having checked the grounds and the trailer, Jonah pulled up in his truck. He told her the wheels in town had greased with news of Alex’s dog and that he’d come to check on her after repeated attempts to call her cell phone went unanswered.
Lightning strobed the late-afternoon bank of sooty clouds, chasing them both inside. The rumbling answer shook the land and rattled the shutters. By the time they reached the kitchen, its ample windows usually offering the brightest spot in the old house, the approaching storm cast the room into advanced dusk and emptied itself like a faucet.
Storms elicited abandonment in Freesia. During bad weather, her mother donned a rain slicker and headed up the beach to open the restaurant and feed radio operators who used the café’s backup generators as a command center. Invariably, loved ones whose boats had yet to return to shore gathered. This ritual of communal coffee and flapjack
s almost never ended happily. The ocean was a merciless assassin. Freesia found she preferred being alone to the haunting wails, like sirens without end.
While Charlotte and Jonah discussed what Alex likely had on her and what she had left behind, Freesia roamed the house. Living with Alex gave clues to her psyche. The haunting of aligned papers and reaffirming sticky notes covering her walls. Jewelry laid parallel on the dresser, shoes rarely kicked off at angles. The minimalism to which she had stripped her childhood bedroom. The alphabetical alignment of fragrances on the bathroom shelf so contrasting to the messy mathematical formulas scratched out on the medicine cabinet mirror in brow liner.
Freesia gravitated to the bathroom, the place where Alex took showers long enough to empty the tanks buried outside. A long pink and blue box in the trash can caught her eye, Alex always preferring to keep the can tidy, bagged, visually clean. Freesia picked up the can to get a closer look: New Beginnings Pregnancy Test.
The violation rested bitter on her tongue, but the compulsion overcame her. She shook the stick free of the box.
Two lines.
Pregnant.
Freesia recalled the spilled beads, the World’s Greatest Dad mug. Her mother came to mind, how she had found out about a baby girl that was coming outside of a marriage into love but little else. The desperation of signing away the child with papers, only to rip them to shreds before the swaddled infant reached the door in the arms of a better couple, a better life.
Lightning pulsed past the window’s half-curtains. She closed her eyes and braced herself through the rolling that followed, the end crescendo more like a lion pounding its paws on a drum inside her, a banishment of the sort she knew intimately. She put the trash can under the sink and raced to the kitchen.
“We have to find Alex.”
Jonah said, “I’m sure she’s safe from the storm somewhere.”
“Rain this hard is like quicksand when it mixes with that red clay—” said Charlotte.
“This can’t wait.” Freesia’s words punched through their complacency. She grabbed Charlotte’s elbows and leveled her with a stare, an ending punctuation that left no room for indecision. “Where would she go?”
Charlotte’s gaze tracked up and around the ceiling as if the answers hung from the rack like pots ready for stew. Her hands shook. “I don’t know.”
“Taffy’s?” suggested Freesia.
Jonah shot that down immediately. “No. Too many people mentioning the dog. She’d want to be alone.”
“Unless she was at your place,” said Charlotte.
“I left there ten minutes ago.”
They divided up calls: the sheriff, Stella Irene’s clan, a friend of Jonah’s who worked at the last gas station north because Freesia said the tank was nearly empty, the vet to see if Alex had mentioned finding a place to bury Bear. Nothing netted a clue until Charlotte spotted Alex’s laptop on the table in the darkened dining room.
Freesia followed, jiggled the mouse to awaken it from sleep. What was on the screen wasn’t the find. Beneath the laptop, Alex had left her journal.
“The envelope is gone,” said Freesia. “The letter from your—our—father. She kept it in here since the day she got it.”
Charlotte was inert, unsure.
For the second time that day, Freesia pushed past boundaries to read it.
Jours Parfaits.
Whatever that meant. For all of her travels, Freesia hadn’t picked up a lick of French. Black marks slashed through every entry, the thick lines so angry, unlike the precision in the rest of the journal.
July moon, swimming hole
Acceptance letter, Daddy’s tears
podium, stadium, audience after commencement speech
George Street Gate @ Brown, first snowfall, 9 pm
Something covered in correction tape.
Every line crossed out but one.
Jonah – ruins.
Freesia called Jonah into the room.
The next page was folded, a preview of what was to come, a pen-ink sketch, stiff and faded with time: architectural ruins, a grand staircase to nowhere against a forest of pines. It was familiar in a way Freesia couldn’t place. She flipped the fold and stretched the drawing’s span just as Jonah joined them.
Freesia knew immediately when the drawing landed in Jonah’s recollection. The seam of his lips parted. His breath stopped exchanging the humid pull of stormy air for what he had trapped in his lungs. His body stiffened, all but a shift of his Adam’s apple, a slow swallow. And his eyes roamed the page, far deeper than ink.
“Kingsley.”
His voice was even, assured, doubtless. Freesia barely knew the man at all, but he stepped inside the heavy raincoat of that place, that memory with Alex.
The name was familiar, but Freesia was an outsider, no help here but the impetus to push for them to leave, to find the ruins, to find Alex before she did something about those black lines.
“How far is it?”
Jonah gave a slight shrug. “Twenty miles.”
“We have to go.”
Her voice came out piqued, insistent. Always pushing.
“I’ll drive.” Charlotte was already at her purse, digging out her keys.
“Better let me,” said Jonah. “Might need four-wheel in this mud.”
On their way out, Charlotte passed them raincoats from the hooks in the foyer. The driving rain had its own ideas. Little time spent buttoning and fastening left them nearly soaked by the time they scrambled into Jonah’s cab. Water deluged the windshield like they had driven into a carwash and gotten off-track. But Freesia had never felt more on-track. For the first time since coming to Devon, maybe ever, she felt part of things, like she was making a real difference past empty answers on a map or a pretty sewn dress someone would wear once and put away for safekeeping. Alex needed Charlotte’s kindness and Jonah’s history, but Freesia was certain Alex needed something else: honesty.
Freesia hadn’t known why, until this moment—pushing, pushing, pushing until she reached her desired effect, a connection no longer repellent. She had spent a lifetime in her jungle—roaming, searching, orbiting an authentic connection to someone, something—when all she really needed was to realize she no longer wanted to hold the tree. This time, in Freesia’s new story, she was the lion.
“Go, go, go,” she urged from the backseat, the dogged rain drowning her words.
21
Alex
She selected the ruins because they were perfect. Elias March believed the greatest architecture was that of the mind. Said so on more than one occasion. Alex believed the mind could be a cold place, imperfect and unreliable. She far preferred the symmetry, the power, the absolute command of Greek revival—both of a time and timeless. And of course, she had been deflowered here. Daddy would have hated that about Kingsley. It’s why she’d chosen it to read her father’s final words. Leveraged the game a bit.
The storm was his chess move. An answer. Her fortune, to bring out the imperfections in everyone and everything. Michael and Jonah couldn’t run away fast enough. A long line of lovers who were what she desired for a time but who monstered out flaws in the light of day. One sister who filled her peg at home at the expense of dreams she never dared and another who had practically inflicted self-harm on her quest for answers Alex refused to give. And a faithful companion who couldn’t hold on for her, no matter how much she loved him.
Then there was her. Always making the wrong choices. Recycling shortcomings as if they wouldn’t repeat the next season. She ran the day she found out she carried Jonah’s child, no more than a child herself. And she ran on this day, the day she found out she carried Michael’s child. This time, she hadn’t fallen.
Not yet.
The sign was new: Danger. Unstable Ruins. Crude under-bricks showed through in some of the concrete’s bare spots. Still, she had climbed the stairs, what was left of them. That was before the rain. The columns stood guard as she sat, pressed her back to one ornate
pedestal, and opened the letter.
Daddy sat beside her. He wore a mechanic’s jumpsuit, smeared with grease, the name Elias in script embroidered on a front patch. A traveling circus mechanic. The first time he hadn’t appeared as a salesman in a blue button-down and tie.
“I like it here.” He surveyed the grounds from their high perch. “Never did bring your mother.”
“You didn’t love her enough. She watched the trailer after you left. You should have stayed.”
Alex didn’t normally speak to him that way, not even in death. But they were at the top ledge of the grand staircase to nowhere, the heavens starting their pour. Didn’t really seem the time for dancing around truths.
“I should have. For all the puzzles we solved, I never got that one right.”
She pulled her raincoat hood over her head, low across her brow to retreat into shadow. The rain drenched Daddy immensely yet not at all.
“Charlotte and I were on the balcony for nights on end, under that stupid carousel blanket you gave her because she thought the horses were magical, waiting for you to come back. She asked me to tell her Evangeline’s story at least a hundred times. I changed the ending. Didn’t have the heart to tell that after a lifetime apart, Gabriel died in Evangeline’s arms, and it was too late.”
“Our story ended differently. It wasn’t too late.”
He had stayed away for so long. Alex had so much to ask but the storm, the watershed moment, wouldn’t last.
“Why did you drive to Georgia?”
“Georgia was the answer in the newspaper crossword I held that day. Something about Stone Mountain…I don’t recall now. Seemed like a sign.”
“And the sea?”
“I drove until the roads ended.”
“And that restaurant?”
“Only light in a storm.”
Alex recalled Charlotte being afraid of the dark, insisting on flashlights those sixteen nights on the balcony. “No, Daddy. Not the only light.”
Her voice came out sharp, loud enough to be heard over the rain—yes—but fervent, piercing. Bolts found the trees. She didn’t care.
Our Bridal Shop: Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book One Page 19
