by Karen White
I wasn’t sure what Rebecca was hoping to find, and I had given up guessing. Within the waves, hide all our guilt. That’s what Wilhelm had told me, and that behind the wall lay what I sought. I wanted to find at least one answer to all the questions, to find one thing that would move me forward to my goal of once again leading a quiet, productive life without the intrusion of family members, workmen, or ghosts.
I looked up when the hammering stopped. “Are you done already?” I was surprised. I’d figured that something that ugly would take a long time to remove, but it had been less than an hour.
The foreman approached and took off his hard hat before wiping his forehead with his sleeve. The air was thick with dust and sweat—and something else that I should have recognized. “Yes, ma’am. We’ve taken off all of the drywall and exposed the original brick fireplace.”
I stepped forward to see the fireplace, original to the house. It was deep, and the back bricks were blackened with use and age. I studied the darkened bricks, looking for whatever Wilhelm had wanted me to see.
“You need to break through the bricks.”
We all turned to Rebecca.
The foreman, with drywall dust forming a raccoon pattern on his face from his goggles, wrinkled his forehead. “Well, ma’am, there’s no need for that. The fireplace is completely functional, just needs a little cleaning . . .”
“Break through the bricks,” she repeated as if the man hadn’t spoken. She walked to the side of the fireplace, where a bank of polished cherry cabinets and granite countertops now stood. “There were shelves here, and a hidden door that led behind the fireplace.” Rebecca looked at me. “I would think it would be cheaper to break through the bricks than these custom cabinets.”
I nodded, not needing to question where she got her information from, but hoping she was right. “Go ahead,” I said to the foreman. “Just try to do a little bit first, maybe just a couple of bricks, to see if there’s anything behind there. And if there is, we can move on to plan B.”
With a little more argument, I finally persuaded him to break through the bricks. Rebecca and I stood back as he hoisted a hammer, aimed it at what appeared to be a brick surrounded by crumbling mortar, and let it go. As a testament to old workmanship, the brick didn’t give in, but the mortar shifted, giving the foreman room to use a screwdriver to dig out enough mortar to give him a fingerhold at the side of the brick. With a little more scraping, he removed two bricks, giving me a vantage point to whatever lay within.
I stepped forward. “Can I borrow a flashlight?”
One of the other workmen handed me one, and after flipping it on, I shone it through the opening and looked. The room behind the fireplace was windowless and bare, the air stale and stagnant, and the trace scent of gunpowder and salt water crept through the opening. The beam of the flashlight hit on brick walls and a dirt floor before finally coming to rest on a large nautical chest sitting in front of the far wall. Your illustrious ancestors started out as wreckers. I remembered Jack’s words as I stared at the chest, half wanting to close up the fireplace and forget what I’d seen.
Instead, I turned to the foreman. “Take as much brick away as you can. Enough for a person to fit through.” I worried my lip for a moment, trying to think of what Sophie was going to say when she saw the fireplace. “Maybe you can remove a brick at a time to contain the damage.”
“Oh, great, an old-house hugger,” one of the workmen muttered under his breath.
The foreman shot him a warning glance. “I understand, Miz Middleton. We’ll take it nice and slow and do it one brick at a time.” He scratched the back of his neck. “And just so you understand that the price I quoted you for the job didn’t include this type of work, so there’s gonna have to be some adjustments.”
I sighed inwardly, having already had way too much exposure to building contractors during the Tradd Street restoration. “I understand. Just do what you need to do to give us access to what’s behind without damaging too much of the original fireplace.”
Rebecca took my elbow and gently dragged me away. “It’s a room, isn’t it? With a sea captain’s chest.”
I looked at her and nodded. “Another dream?”
“Yes.” She glanced back at the fireplace. “It’s going to take a while. Let’s go in the other room so we can compare notes.”
With one last look at the workmen, I allowed Rebecca to lead me back to the foyer. Since the majority of the house was unfurnished until we could decide on paint colors and get the interior painted, we sat on the bottom step.
As Rebecca began to take things out of her satchel, I said, “I visited with Yvonne yesterday afternoon. She said that you and Jack were there earlier in the morning. But I could have sworn that you told me your appointment was next week.”
She continued to focus on her satchel, peering into the dark depths. “No, it was always scheduled for yesterday. You must have heard incorrectly.”
I didn’t point out to her that I’d put it on my BlackBerry so I wouldn’t forget to ask her what she’d discovered afterward. I thought about pointing out how it seemed she’d planned to get there first to find out what she could so that she might or might not pass the information on to me. But then I thought of the journal and how I hadn’t told her about it yet, and closed my mouth. A secret kept was sometimes as good as a secret shared.
She put the satchel down at our feet. “Not to worry, though. I actually didn’t end up finding a lot out with Yvonne, anyway. She made all of these photocopies but kept giving them to Jack instead of me. He said I could look at them afterward, but I like to have my own materials to go through on my own time. Besides, when Jack and I get together, he rarely wants to work.” She giggled without looking at me as she sorted her folders.
I pretended that her words hadn’t felt like a paper cut dipped in vinegar and instead eyed the stack of folders on her lap. “Looks like you made out all right, anyway.”
“These aren’t from the historical society.” She placed her hands over the stack, and I thought again how familiar they looked. “I got them through the archives at the paper. Remember when they first found the human remains on the boat and I told you I could help narrow down the list of possible candidates? Well, I borrowed the Prioleau family tree from Jack’s folder and wrote down all the names on a spreadsheet I made, then I spent a lot of time with the microfiche machines to see if I could find any newspaper articles or photographs of any of the family members. Since we know the gender, approximate age, and height of the person, I thought it might shed some light on who we were looking for.”
I looked at her closely. “I’m dying to see what you found, but I have to ask you how you think this might help with the article you’re writing about my mother.”
She seemed confused for a moment before managing to look insulted. “As any good journalist could tell you, I need to have a good grasp of my subject—her family’s history, her past, her present—before I can write the first word.Your mother, and her family, is fascinating to a lot of Charlestonians, myself included, and I want to make sure that I do her story justice. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I don’t skimp on details in any of the other citizen profiles I’ve already done in the series.”
I stared at her blankly. “I’m sorry, but I don’t read the paper. I take out the real estate listings and trash the rest. No time,” I said weakly.
“I see,” she said, although it was clear that she didn’t. “Speaking of which, though, I could use a face-to-face interview with your mother, and I was hoping you’d work as an intermediary to set something up.”
“She’s still not taking your calls?”
“Still.” Rebecca smiled, but it appeared as if she might be gritting her teeth. “I was hoping that if she saw us working together, she might be more willing to speak with me.”
“Why would you think that? Believe me. I have no influence over her at all.”
This time, Rebecca’s smile was genuine. “You have a lot more
influence than you think. I see the way she defers to your opinion, or waits until you speak. I think she means it to protect you.”
“To . . . ?” I couldn’t even finish the sentence.
“Really, Melanie, for somebody who sees so much, you see so little of the things right in front of your face.” She took a deep breath and before I could stop her from continuing, she said, “I used to think that your mother was trying to protect you from public opinion should news of your psychic gift be made public. But it’s something more. It’s—I don’t know—more personal than that. It’s beyond motherly love, even. It’s as if you share a bond that most people only dream about.”
I wanted to protest, to use my old excuses about how she couldn’t have cared very much because she left me, but the picture I had of the mother who’d abandoned me no longer fit the image of the woman who’d reentered my life almost four months before. She wasn’t who I thought she should be. She was warm, had a sense of humor, and wanted to throw me a birthday party, albeit thirty-three years too late. Fitting the old image into the new was like trying to fit into somebody else’s shoes—foreign, tight, and uncomfortable. But no matter how hard I tried to make the images fit, nothing could ever change the fact that she’d apparently not wanted to be my mother until now.
I focused on the folders again, eager to change the subject. “What did you find in the archives?”
“I’m not really sure. Definitely not anything conclusive. However, I did notice something in all the pictures.” She knelt on the marble floor and began to lay out photocopied photographs and portraits. “I’m going to put these down like a family tree to make them easier to identify.”
I got down on my hands and knees and began helping her by spreading them out and lining them up evenly—not that I really needed to; Rebecca was probably even more obsessed with order and structure than I was, lining up each generation with an almost laserlike precision. Even I was impressed.
When she’d finished laying them out, she sat back to admire her work. “What do you see?”
“Well, you’re missing a lot, but I might be able to help you.”
I opened Yvonne’s folder, remembering that she’d told me she’d included copies of any picture or portrait she found of anybody on my family tree. I pulled them out, then filled in some of the missing spots on Rebecca’s impromptu floor chart, stacking any duplicates.
When I was finished, Rebecca repeated, “So what do you see?”
I stared at the sea of faces, all of them vaguely familiar. Some of the slots didn’t have a picture attached to them, but it was easy to spot the family resemblance in the remaining pictures. I saw eyes that could have been hazel and some that appeared green, and I thought I recognized the shape of my nose on several women and a few of the men, going back as far as the 1780s. I noticed, too, that almost all of them wore glasses or some type of eyewear, except for the younger women, which made me aware that I was squinting again in an attempt to see better. I wondered vaguely if vanity might also be a genetic trait.
“I see a lot of people that look a lot like me. Is that what I’m supposed to see?”
Rebecca rolled her eyes. “Look again. It’s pretty obvious. Look at the people in the top half of the family tree, and compare them to the last four generations.”
I looked at the chart again, and frowned. Finally, I said, “I still don’t see it, but I did notice that you have a few pictures of Rose. But they’re all of her as an infant or small child so I can’t really compare her to the girl in the portrait.”
“I know. I searched for her name first, but these are the only pictures I could find of her, which is odd because her name appeared in the newspaper quite a bit as an adult. I found out that following the 1886 earthquake, she traveled through Europe with family friends who lived in England. When she returned, she married her fiancé—who’d been waiting for her since she left—and they traveled all over the world. They really only lived in the house when their daughter, Sarah, was born, and even then Rose tended to be a bit of a recluse. She was quite the phi lanthropist, though, and gave away an extraordinary amount of money to charity. But I cannot find a single picture of her past early childhood. It would seem she might have been a little camera shy.” She pointed to the pictures again. “Come on, Mellie. Look again and tell me what else you see.”
I leaned forward, scrutinizing the pictures more, until noses, eyes, and chins seemed to blur together. It wasn’t until I’d sat up and looked again that I saw what I thought Rebecca was talking about. My gaze traveled across the family tree, then down to the last four generations. I looked up at Rebecca and met her eyes.
Triumphantly, I said, “Nine out of ten of the people in the pictures we have in the top half of the tree have walking canes. Even the two younger women. And all of them are short, and a little on the plump side.” I traced my finger along the marble floor between the pictures, coming to a stop beside my great-grandmother Rose. “All we can tell about Rose is that she was a fat baby, but if you look here at my grandmother Sarah, and my mother, they’re all suddenly tall and slender.” Rebecca had placed my college graduation photo, a picture of me with permed hair and padded shoulders that I wanted to forget, at the bottom of the chart. But even behind the ridiculous eighties hair and clothing, there was no doubt that I was related to Ginnette and Sarah Prioleau.
“Do we have a picture of Charles, Rose’s husband?”
Rebecca shook her head. “Not that I could find. I was hoping that maybe you or your mother might find old photo albums or photographs as you go through the attic.”
“We haven’t made many inroads into that project, but I’ll let you know what we find.”
Rebecca studied the pictures again. “Charles must have been tall and slender to explain the rest of you.”
I sat back, too, thinking. “The remains found in the boat had a congenital hip defect. Maybe that would explain the walking aids.”
Rebecca looked at me with grudging respect. “Good one. I hadn’t put those two things together, but I think it makes sense.”
She began picking up the photocopies and I helped her, taking care to keep them in order. I felt guilty; she’d freely shared this information with me, yet for no real reason I could think of, I’d withheld the journal from her. Despite misgivings, I realized I needed to be forthcoming, too.
I cleared my throat. “I forgot to tell you. Sophie found a journal hidden in my grandmother’s old desk. The writer is unknown, but the book dates back to the late 1800s when my great-grandmother Rose would have been in her late teens or early twenties.”
I reached for my purse and pulled the journal out to show it to Rebecca—who was looking at it oddly—and I wondered if she was remembering asking me about it before and how I’d told her that I hadn’t found anything.
I continued. “The writer’s identity is a mystery, but she refers to another girl about her age whose first initial is R, which makes me believe that it can’t be Rose because she didn’t have any sisters, and the two girls in the journal are definitely living under the same roof. But I can’t help but think that the girls in the portrait with the M and R lockets are most likely the girls in the journal. But who they are, and how the M locket was found with the body on our boat, is a mystery.”
I looked up from the journal to see that most of the color had drained from Rebecca’s cheeks. Her eyes met mine and for the first time since I’d met her, I felt something besides dislike for her. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s her, isn’t it? The girl in the boat. And here in the house. She’s here now, watching you. Watching us.”
“What do you mean?” I grabbed her arm, feeling how cold it was.
“Your mother. Keep this book away from her. It’s—dangerous to her.”
“I know. She already touched it. But she’s fine now.”
She shook her head and closed her eyes. “No, no. I had a dream. She can’t touch it again.” She opened her eyes. “Promise me.”
&
nbsp; “I don’t think . . .”
“Keep it away from her.” Her voice was harsh, and she seemed to realize it, too. She put a hand on my arm. “When I was a girl, I used to have these premonitions all the time, and they were always right. But then I realized that other kids didn’t do the same thing, and they thought I was weird, or crazy, or whatever. I was ostracized because of it. I changed schools, and learned how to stop dreaming, much how I expect you learned not to see the things you could.” Her lips curled up in a small smile. “The things kids do to fit in.” She shook her head. “Anyway, since the first time I met you, outside on the sidewalk before your mother bought the house, I’ve been having dreams. I don’t remember all of them, but they all seem to center around you and your family. And I’ve been right one hundred percent of the time.”
She regarded me steadily, and I thought she wanted to say more. After a moment, I said, “So what do you think it means?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure you don’t always understand things you hear and see, either. It’s a gift, but not an easy one, is it?”
I studied her for a long moment, recalling how my mother had seen her when she’d held the journal and I wanted to tell that to Rebecca now. But I held back, remembering that Sophie didn’t trust her. And I still had my own misgivings, which I kept telling myself had nothing to do with Rebecca’s relationship with Jack. Despite our shared confidences, I was still convinced that her intrusion into my life wasn’t coincidental, and that even her explanation of writing a story about my mother seemed contrived.
Instead I said, “Let me read you an entry from the journal for a little more insight. Notice what it says about R.” I flipped through the pages until I found the entry I was looking for.
Father took us out sailing again this morning. He was in the Confederate Navy in his younger days, and I think he is a sailor at heart because he loves nothing more than to be out on the waves, filling his sails to make the boat move as fast as the wind will allow. He has always encouraged R to sail, and to love it as much as he does because, I suppose, she is the eldest. But she has no affinity for it at all, and it might be because of her physical affliction. She hides it well so no one, not even her suitor, knows about it, but I see her at the end of the day when her limp is pronounced from the physical exhaustion that is required to mask it when she walks without assistance. I know not to mention it, even in sympathy or in an effort to assist her, because she looks at me with such venom that I feel guilty at having two perfectly formed and healthy legs.
