Not Quite Gone (A Lowcountry Mystery)

by Lyla Payne

  “I know. I want that, too.”

  “This is not me endorsing my mother’s tactics, but you should know that I have little to no influence with her. She won’t care if I rail all night telling her to back off—she’s going to do what she wants.”

  “Yeah, I got that,” I reply dryly, reaching up to push his hair away from his forehead. “Nan says she didn’t kill herself, and it seemed really important to her that her half sister know that. I told the sister the truth, so hopefully that’ll be good enough.”

  “You’re almost done with your work out there, though, right? Since Nan doesn’t follow you home, that’ll be that, regardless of if she’s happy with the outcome.”

  “True.” As long as she doesn’t start following me home.

  We spend a few minutes talking about his work and what I’m thinking the new exhibits will be like and where they should be displayed before our time is up and we both scurry off to our daily duties. As he closes the front door behind us and kisses me by the driver’s-side door of my car, it’s not hard to imagine the rest of my life being exactly like this morning.

  Maybe not the sex up against the front door part, though I don’t think I’d complain.

  I can’t make the devils shut up, though, when they start asking where exactly his family fits into that ideal portrait of the future. Or when they wonder whether I can live with abandoning Nan and whether or not it’s the right thing to do.

  Beau’s working late, prepping for the next city council meeting, so I took advantage and went to bed early. Amelia fell asleep on the couch again, and this time I took her phone so her stupid mother couldn’t call and wake her up with a hundred more things for her to worry about.

  My attempt at relaxing screeches to a halt when I wake up in the middle of the night with a gloved hand over my mouth. My eyes pop open wide, my body frozen while I try to determine whether this is another one of my nightmares.

  Not a nightmare.

  “Graciela, I’m sorry to wake you this way. It’s me. It’s Frank. Your father.” He starts to lift his hand. “Don’t scream.”

  The slick press of the glove moves off my mouth and I fly to a sitting position, scooting backward until I run into the headboard. I yank my shaking knees against my chest. “What the Sam Hill? Could you not use the door in the middle of the day? I should call the cops!”

  His eyes harden. “You’re not calling the cops.”

  It’s only now, with the slight undercurrent of a threat in his voice, that my conversation with Travis resurfaces. That must be why he came here this way…through the window? I glance over at my sheer curtains flapping in a strong breeze and frown at a muddy footprint left on the chair.

  “I won’t call the cops.” I cross my arms. “Yet.”

  Not that I don’t fully support the FBI and their pursuit of a crime-free nation but there are plenty of questions in my own arsenal that need answers.

  “I’m sorry I scared you.” He follows the direction of my gaze. “And I’m sorry about your chair.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You get the test? The DNA one?”

  I nod. “Yes. You’re my father. Are you ready to tell me how you knew that? Or are you a liar as well as a thief?”

  Frank doesn’t flinch. The silver hair at his temples shines in the room’s dim light, and he takes several moments before answering. “I see you’ve been doing your research. Impressive. Frank Fournier is pretty hard to find these days.”

  “It wasn’t me. The Creek’s detective is on to you, I’m afraid. He wants me to call if I see you again.” I glance at my cell phone, charging on the bedside table.

  “Thank you for not doing that.”

  “You’re my father. Maybe I want to hear what you came here to say before getting you locked up for life.”

  He goes silent again, glancing over toward the closed door with a look of concentration drawing lines on his aging face. Then he nods. “You aren’t going to do that. Your friend Henry Woodward told me he’s got your phone.”

  My gaze jerks to the bedside table again to find it empty. My mouth goes dry, a stab of fear jabbing me in the gut. “How did you do that?”

  Frank rubs the bridge of his nose with a sigh. “You never answered me the other day about whether or not you see ghosts, but obviously you do. You’re a Fournier. We’ve always seen ghosts. We’ve died for seeing ghosts, and we’ve been, I don’t know…like advocates. Generations of us, though everyone’s gift is a little different and it’s grown weaker over the centuries. What can you do?”

  “I can’t really do anything.” My voice sounds small, shocked. I’d like to change that but it’s impossible when that’s exactly how I feel. “I see them. They come to me. Ask for help, and I figure out what it is they need.”

  He nods. “Very common. And let me guess, you feel compelled to help them.”

  “Sure. But that’s just because I’m a human being, right?”

  “It’s your genetics, sweet pea, plain and simple. No point fighting it.”

  “What can you do?” This whole conversation feels unreal. As though I’m having a nightmare after all, one that’s impossible to wake up from and even more impossible to believe.

  “I’m a little different. I can control them.”

  “What do you mean, control them?”

  “They do things for me, instead of the other way around, I guess.”

  He waits while the information, along with everything else I know about him, clicks into place. A lightbulb goes off over my head. “It must be pretty easy to rob banks and art museums when you’ve got invisible henchmen.”

  And then my heart stops.

  The hospital robbery. A ghost stealing medicine.

  I know the blood drains from my face because I’m so dizzy the room spins as if I downed half a dozen margaritas before bed. “You stole that medicine. From the hospital. Why?”

  The straight-up confusion twisting his features doesn’t look fake. “What medicine? I got into town the first day I came to see you and I’m keeping a low profile, remember?”

  It takes me a second to decide whether to believe him, but really, there’s not much of a choice. I’ll have to talk to Travis or maybe even Clete, if he’s involved, to ferret out the truth, but for tonight it’s trust him or call the cops.

  Once Henry gives up my phone. Traitor.

  “So, you came all this way to brag about how you get your spirit army to steal you millions of dollars and all I got in the genetics lottery was a lifetime of people thinking I’m crazy?”

  “Not at all. I came here after I learned about you from your mother’s ghost. I think she was as surprised to see me as I was her.” He smiles a little at the memory. “She felt guilty, I think, leaving you alone.”

  “I wasn’t alone.”

  He ignores me, glancing around the room. “She never liked it here. Why?”

  “You tell me. You seem to know everything about her.”

  He shakes his head. “Not about this. Our romance was a bit of a whirlwind, I’m afraid, and she refused to talk about her past. Only the fantasy of the future.”

  I close my eyes, blocking out the pain and confusion that comes with my conflicted feelings about my mother. “Okay, so you found out about me. You came here. Now what?”

  “I wanted to know whether you had the gift. Since you do, it’s important for you to understand the heritage of our family. That you’re not alone, you’ve never been alone, and we’ve shouldered this burden for a long time.” He stops, watching me as though concerned about my understanding his message. “We have a legacy, some people say. I’ve never really believed in that, but maybe it’s because of my gifts being different. My grandmother sure believed.”

  He’s not making much sense now but he keeps going before I can interrupt. “Then again, I’m here babbling about family legacy to you, so some of it must be as inbred as this damn curse.”

  My heart stops. “Did you say curse?”


  I so cannot handle a curse on both sides of my family.

  “Curse, gift. Two sides of the same coin, wouldn’t you say?” He pauses again, glancing toward the corner this time with that shuttered look of concentration. The same look he had when he told me Henry stole my phone. “I have to go, Graciela. I hope you believe me when I say it was nice to meet you, but your cousin is waking up and Henry says she’s not likely to be so open-minded about my track record. I’d like to stay and explain more but I’m not going to prison. Not even for family.”

  “Wait, what? You can’t leave. I don’t have a clue what you’ve been blathering on about!”

  “You’re a historian of sorts, right? Start with a woman named Carlotta Fournier. She’s local, and she’s important. You won’t be able to trace her family back, but her father was a man named John Fournier. A missionary in Africa back in the eighteen hundreds.” He glances toward the corner again, then scrambles toward the window. “If you need me, send Henry or whoever else is hanging around.”

  “They don’t take orders from me, remember?” Something like panic grabs at my heart even though the man leaving me is a perfect stranger. He knows things I don’t. He’s experienced things I haven’t. And it’s not even all about the ghosts. He knew my mom before I existed and he’s seen her after she died. “What if I never see you again?”

  Frank straddles the windowsill and gives me a sad smile. “Then you can consider yourself one of the lucky ones, kid. And you should check on your cousin.”

  Then he’s gone, as though he was never here at all. In some ways, it would be easier if he hadn’t been, but it’s not until after I get Millie back into bed—she’s trying to sleepwalk out of the house again—and settle into the purple-and-white bed beside her to ride out the night that the name he told me to research registers.

  Carlotta.

  It has to be a coincidence.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It’s three in the morning before I give up on sleep altogether. Amelia hasn’t stirred since just after midnight but my eyes refuse to close, my brain insisting on playing with questions there aren’t answers to.

  Not here, anyway.

  A quick browse on my laptop through regular search engines doesn’t come up with much. I’ll have to use the interlibrary search at work or renew my login for the academic databases I had during grad school. If Frank thought I’d be able to find plenty of resources using only those two names, though, it must not be impossible.

  Right now, I can only think of one place to start.

  I pick up my phone, my desire to passive-aggressively call Cordelia and inform her that I’m going in to work a few hours early nearly overwhelming. I manage to tamp it down because it’s three in the morning and being ridiculous isn’t going to get me back into her good graces. If she even has those.

  The files of slave archives are tucked away to be returned to the family since it seems they don’t want any “embarrassing” history displayed. I can assume reminding them that the Boone Hall slave cabins are one of their biggest draws, or that the Middletons have lists of all their former slaves displayed on their property, won’t do much to convince them.

  Not all the slaves have last names listed. Most of them don’t, in fact, but there are a few that do. I don’t remember whether there’s a last name behind Mama Lottie’s first, but they also have records on how most of them were bought. It might be a starting place, a way to find out if Mama Lottie used to be known as Carlotta Fournier.

  The drive passes peacefully. I spend most of it practicing how I’m going to tell Henry Woodward off the next time he shows himself to me. Imagine, him doing my father’s bidding at the drop of a hat when I’ve let him haunt my room for the better part of the summer, even though he’s not been a lick of help to me at all.

  It’s quiet at Drayton Hall, as I expect it to be, but I find very little of use in the files. Mama Lottie, as Sean referred to her, is listed only as Carlotta and it claims she was born on the property. If my father’s history is correct and her father was a missionary in Africa, that can’t be true—or they can’t be the same person. I sit among the files and blow my hair out of my face, frustration mounting. Nothing about this investigation is going right.

  The lawn staff will show up with the new day, which means I doubt anyone’s getting arrested for trespassing. I decide to take a walk out to the reflection pond, hoping it will live up to its name. Even if it doesn’t, it’ll be a nice place to watch the sunrise. And nurse my regret over never bringing a little coffee machine out to the office here.

  There’s dew on the grass and a chill in the air that promises summer may be gone for good. My thoughts turn again to Sean Dennison. He seems to have a wealth of knowledge about the family, and why shouldn’t he? If the diary he’s read says all that stuff about Mama Lottie and what she did in the area, then it could say more. Like where she came from if she wasn’t born here.

  I trip over a giant root, stumbling nearly onto my face before catching myself with my hands. The offending tree is the huge one, the one where Nan died, and with my palms pressed into the soft earth, something happens.

  The door in my mind, the one attached to a Charleston theatre in real life but is the passageway between the spirit world and me, is yanked wide-open without my permission. It’s like when I saw Dr. Ladd die in that alley—a scene begins to play in front of my eyes and there’s no way to stop it, since I didn’t say it could start in the first place.

  And like in the alley, I can hear it all.

  It’s Nan, so alive that it hurts. She’s sitting on one of the lowest branches that’s thick enough to support her weight, that damn length of rope in a coil on her lap. Her shoulders are slumped and the despondency in her face breaks my heart. I hold my breath, waiting for the inevitable, and am so focused on her that I don’t hear him coming.

  “Hey, Nana.” It’s a boy, one whose face hasn’t changed so much in the past fifteen years that he’s hard to recognize—Brick Drayton. His hair is longer, flopping into his eyes, and he’s wearing black from head to toe, but it’s definitely him.

  She makes a face. “Don’t call me that.”

  “Sorry.” He’s not sorry and all three of us know it.

  Oddly, Nan smiles. Brick climbs up into the tree to her side, and it’s not until he goes to sit that I notice he’s got a gun tucked into the back of his pants. My heart thuds against my rib cage as he pulls it out and sets it in his lap but Nan doesn’t seem scared. Or surprised.

  “You ready?” he asks.

  “In a minute.” Nan reaches over and picks up his hand. It’s not romantic at all, just a gesture of friendship. Or something. “What do you think it will be like after? Like, do you believe in heaven?”

  Oh dear God. I’m watching two fourteen-year-old kids talk about suicide with a rope and a gun in their laps. I have no idea what I was expecting to see if I ever saw what happened to Nan, but it wasn’t this. This is impossible to prepare for, impossible to watch. But that damned sense of duty to her grabs my chin and forces me to do just that.

  “I don’t know. There has to be something better than here, right?” The raw edge of pain in Brick’s voice kicks me in the gut.

  “Nothingness is better than here.”

  They’re not faking anything. Not being emo, not crying out for help—they’re depressed and they want a way out. I know this the same way I know Dr. Ladd’s friend regretted shooting him the moment he fired those bullets and that the pain from the shot to the knee surprised the good doctor more than anything—deep in my soul.

  “Agreed.”

  They sit in silence for a few minutes, swinging their feet, until Nan’s fingers start to work on her noose. “I don’t know how to tie it, really.”

  “I do.” Brick takes it from her and works deftly, tying the knot—with his dominant left hand—with the expertise of a kid who grew up around sailboats. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure the Draytons own at least one.

  He h
ands it back to her, and she slips it over her head. Brick goes to work securing the other end of the rope to the branch they’re sitting on, and when he’s done they stare at each other.

  “You promised you’d go first,” he reminds her, fear etched on his face and into every syllable. “We shook on it. With blood.”

  A suicide pact.

  It’s all starting to make sense, except the part where Nan insists she didn’t kill herself.

  “I know. I will.”

  Another couple of minutes pass. All the color drains from Nan’s face as she stares toward the ground. She’s wondering what it’s going to feel like, if it will hurt. How long it will take, whether she’ll be sorry that her toes will never touch the ground again.

  And that’s when she changes her mind.

  I feel the shift in her. It’s not that she gets happy or realizes she has so much to live for or anything like that. But one minute her heart is empty, and then there’s a spark.

  It’s her sister. A promise, maybe? I’m getting impressions from her now but nothing solid because she’s panicking so hard that emotions are zinging too fast to pin down. She turns, looks at Brick. Terror writes stories in the stricken expression on her face—of what he’ll think, of how she’ll manage to go on—and she’ll never know.

  Brick sees the terror on her face and takes it for run-of-the-mill fear—of jumping. A look of determination and love hangs in his eyes as he reaches out with both hands and shoves her so hard she flies backward off the branch.

  Nan hangs there, a surprised look on her face, fingernails scrabbling at the tight noose around her neck. Brick doesn’t see any of it, because he raises the gun to his temple and squeezes the trigger. At the last minute, he jerks. It could be an accident. It could be reflex, some kind of innate will to live. Either way, the sudden movement tips him off-center. It’s almost comical, the way his arms windmill trying to regain his balance.

  Bile sloshes in my stomach at the entire picture. Two kids dying, with Brick falling backward off the branch and crashing into the ground below Nan with a sickening crunch-thud. Her eyes bug out and her body goes still as she stares at him, her mouth open as though surprised.