by Karen White
He nodded but I wouldn’t drop his gaze.
I crossed my arms across my chest, my anger a welcome cover to the crushing bruise around my heart. “Did you know?”
He shook his head. “I probably figured it out at about the same time you did. And I’m telling the truth that I didn’t believe Rebecca knew anything before that, too.”
“Is that why you brought the locket, then? To prove to me that you weren’t lying?”
“Partly.”
“Only part?” I wanted to slap down the part of me that felt a rising hope.
A corner of his mouth twitched and I was happier than I’d admit to see something of the old Jack. “You know I can’t leave a good mystery alone. And we do work well together.”
I curbed my disappointment. “Just don’t ask me to work with Rebecca.”
He didn’t answer right away. “Fine. I don’t know what she’s up to, and she’s probably already figured some of this out, but I’m sure it’s not as bad as you’re thinking. Regardless, I won’t make you work with her if that’s what you want.”
I stared at him for a long moment. “Why Rebecca?” I said the name with the same distasteful inflection most people reserved for names like Hitler or bin Laden.
“Why Marc Longo?” he mimicked in the same tone of voice.
Despite myself, I smiled.
“Truce then?” he asked.
I could think of a million reasons to say no, including his ability to lure me into doing things I really didn’t want to, but I could see in Jack’s eyes that I’d already been shot, bagged, and my head mounted over his fireplace. “No” simply wasn’t an option. “Fine,” I said, sighing heavily. “At least until we can figure out all of this.”
“And then what?” He sounded almost hopeful.
“Then I can move back into my Tradd Street house, and you can get back to writing your historical true crimes. We’ll send Christmas cards for a while, and I’ll wave to you from a distance when we see each other at the annual Oyster Festival at Boone Hall Plantation that Sophie will make us buy tickets for each year until we’re too old to walk without assistance.”
He smiled, but his eyes didn’t. “Great. Then we have a truce.” He drew a deep breath. “So let’s get busy.” He reached into another pants pocket and pulled out a stack of photographs and began laying them out on the foyer floor. I recognized them as the pictures I’d seen on his dining room table. The last thing he pulled from his pocket was a folded-up piece of paper that he straightened and placed on the floor above the photographs. I knelt to see better and realized that it was a handwritten version of the verse on my grandmother’s tombstone, and that each line had been numbered, and each letter had been numbered from left to right starting at the number one at the beginning of each line. Someone had highlighted what seemed like random letters with a yellow highlighter.
When bricks crumble, the fireplace falls;
When children cry, the mothers call.
When lies are told, the sins are built,
Within the waves, hide all our guilt.
“What is this?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. I think I’ve figured most of it out, but I need you to help me with the rest.”
I tried not to grin like an idiot and kept my gaze focused on the verse. “Show me how far you’ve gotten.”
He set up the photographs of the lasso-like outline that encircled the verse on the grave marker and the stained-glass window in the same order as they appeared with the top, two sides, and the bottom forming a circle. He pointed to a gap between the top of the left side and the upper line. “See how there’s a separation here? That makes me think that they’re in order from number one to number four, starting at the top and moving clockwise around the circle.” He slid the paper with the gravestone rhyme next to the photographs. “Notice how there are four lines on the marker. Since the border appears on both the marker and the window, I assumed it wasn’t a coincidence.”
“Since there’s no such thing as coincidence according to the Jack Trenholm school of thought.”
He didn’t smile, and I hoped it was because he was remembering when I’d last said that to him, when he was defending Rebecca as I confronted him with the evidence of her connection to the Crandall family.
“Exactly,” he said through narrowed lips.
“There’s something in the journal, too,” I said. “How the soldier—Wilhelm—would tap on the glass four times, always by the quadrant where the depiction of the angel’s head is.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
Clearing his throat, he pointed to the photographs again. “Remember how I noticed that some of the weird marks in the border were larger and bolder than the rest? Like here.” He indicated the top border where the second and fifth black marks stood out from the others. “I played with it a bit until I figured out that they corresponded to a word in the rhyme. For instance, the second and fifth words in the first line are ‘bricks’ and ‘fireplace.’ ”
My eyes met his and I felt a surge of adrenaline. It had been this way between us before, when we’d worked together to solve an old cipher. “That’s really good,” I admitted.
“I know.”
Our eyes met again and I couldn’t help but roll my eyes to disguise my smile.
“Going around the border, these are the words that I picked out.”
He flipped the paper over and I read the words out loud. “Bricks, fireplace, the, sins, within, hide, our.”
He glanced up at me and I found myself staring at his lips and remembering our kiss. I looked back at the words, struggling to speak past the lump in my throat. “Obviously, they’re scrambled. Have you been able to make any sense out of them?”
“Not yet. That’s why I came here.You’re really good at creating order from chaos.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Without waiting for him to respond, I stood and went to the kitchen to pull out two notepads and pencils. When I returned, I handed him one of each. “There’re only seven words. Create as many sentences as you can using those words—making sure nouns, verbs, pronouns, etcetera are all in the right place so that they’re forming coherent sentences.”
“You don’t need to tell me that, Mellie.”
I shrugged. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know that. You seem to have an appalling lack of judgment.”
He didn’t say anything as he sat down on the floor beside me. Then he leaned over and whispered, “Marc Longo.”
I pretended I hadn’t heard him as I began to write.
Our bricks hide within the fireplace sins.
Sins within our bricks hide the fireplace.
The fireplace sins hide within our bricks.
I glanced over at Jack, who’d made equally nonsensical sentences.With a sigh, I returned to my word bank and studied them again, the words seeming to twist and warp on the page, teasing me. I closed my eyes, seeing the words like metallic glints against my eyelids, on what seemed like a scrolling marquee. I focused on the words behind my lids, then popped my eyes open to stare at the paper again. I squinted, trying to get them to lie flat, focusing on the nouns and verbs in a final attempt to wrestle them into some kind of a coherent sentence. I blinked, then sat up, eyeing the words again and seeing how obvious they were, and wondering why they hadn’t been as obvious to me the first time I’d seen them.
With a firm grip on the pencil, I wrote, Within the fireplace bricks our sins hide. Putting the pencil down, I said, “I think I’ve got it.”
Jack stood and I handed him my notepad. He read the words out loud. “Within the fireplace bricks our sins hide.” His eyebrows knit together. “I think you’re right.” His gaze met mine. “But which fireplace?”
I thought for a moment. “All of the fireplaces in this house are brick, including the one in the kitchen. But we’ve already examined every inch of it. If there’s anything else hidden there, we woul
d have found it by now.”
“And what sins can you hide?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. But since the words appear on a window my grandmother installed, as well as on her grave marker, I’d say it’s fairly safe to assume that the sins directly relate to her and her family.”
“The Prioleaus.”
“Or not. Meredith Prioleau was born Nora Crandall.”
Jack raised his eyebrow. “Something else you forgot to tell me.”
“Not exactly. You were—busy, if you recall. That’s why I went to your condo, to tell you what I’d learned.”
He didn’t say anything in his defense, so I continued. “My mother and I believe that the infant Nora Crandall wasn’t lost at sea, but was rescued by a member of the Prioleau family, perhaps by my great-great-grandfather, and raised here as a distant cousin to Rose. They changed her name to Meredith, and treated her as Rose’s sister.”
“Which would explain the change in the locket initial. And why Alice Crandall would have an identical locket.”
“And,” I continued, “Rose’s father had one made for Rose, which is how she ended up with hers. Apparently Rose felt quite a bit of jealousy for Meredith, always wanted what Meredith had.”
Jack was frowning at something I’d said.
“What is it?”
“Rose’s locket. We’ve found the other two, but where is the one with the R on it?”
“Hold that thought,” I said, and went back to the kitchen to retrieve the photograph my father had found of my great-grandparents on their honeymoon.
Jack flipped it over to read the names, then studied the sepia-toned faces. “I don’t get it. What does this have to do with Rose’s locket?”
“It says it’s Rose, but it’s not. The woman in the photograph is tall and slender. Look how tall she is in comparison with her husband and the horse behind them. And she doesn’t have a cane. The remains discovered in the sailboat were of a person who was no more than five feet two inches, and who would have walked with a limp.”
“So who do you think it is in the photograph?”
“Meredith. I’m sure of it.”
“But if Rose is the one on the sailboat, why was she wearing Meredith’s locket?”
Quietly, I said, “Within the waves, hide all our guilt.”
My legs were getting cramped as I knelt on the floor and I moved to stand. Jack extended a hand to me and I paused for a moment before taking it.
He didn’t let go of my hand right away, but stood close to me, a look of hard concentration on his face. “If you’re right, then somehow during the earthquake of 1886, Meredith and Rose swapped identities. But how? And why?”
I shook my head, gently untangling my hand from his. “I don’t want to speculate. I don’t want to think that my great-grandmother was a murderer.”
“A locket could be hidden within a fireplace brick.” Thoughtfully, he added, “Within the fireplace bricks our sins hide.”
We stared at each other as a strong gust of wind pushed at the house, making the front door shudder. The chandelier above our heads swayed, the mirrored glass tinkling gently like a muted conversation.
“A bad storm’s coming in this evening,” Jack said. “A nor’easter. It’s going to get pretty nasty on the coast.”
A breath of cold air descended on me and I shivered, but Jack didn’t seem to feel it.
He looked at me oddly. “You do realize that all this means that you and Rebecca are cousins.”
The thought had crossed my mind, but I’d avoided thinking about it, much as a person avoids muddy puddles on a city sidewalk. “I suppose you’re right. I guess that explains her ability to see things in dreams. But the rest of her,” I shook my head, “comes from a completely different gene pool.”
I thought for a moment he would laugh, but instead he focused on something behind me. Clutching his arm in apprehension, I turned.
My mother appeared at the bottom of the stairs, her hand trembling on the newel post. “Rebecca’s in danger. We need to find her—quickly.” A streak of lightning illuminated the graying sky outside, shooting white light across her face, making her seem transparent.
“How do you know?” I asked, but I could see the journal tucked under her arm, and I knew.
“Meredith,” she whispered as her knees gave way and she ended up sitting on the bottom step.
I moved to sit next to her, and put my arm around her narrow shoulders. “You’re not going anywhere, Mother. You don’t look well.”
Despite her diminished appearance she trembled with anger as she faced me. “Don’t tell me what to do. You need to listen to me, and do what I say. And we must find Rebecca. Rose is with her, and Rebecca doesn’t know how to fight back.”
I wanted to argue with her until I realized that her fury was directed against someone or something that meant me harm, too. Relenting, I asked, “Where is she?”
My mother’s eyes were blank and we both turned to Jack.
“She left shortly after Melanie did, and I haven’t heard from her since. I’ve called her cell phone a couple of times, but it keeps switching to voice mail.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and dialed before raising it to his ear. He waited for a long minute before snapping it shut. “Still no answer.”
“Where would she have gone?” I asked out loud as my eyes settled on the journal still tucked under my mother’s arm. “Can I see it?”
My mother relinquished it with what seemed like relief. I opened it to the back cover that showed the illustration of the angel head. “Maybe this might tell us.”
Jack approached as I opened my cell phone to the picture of the stained-glass window that illuminated the hidden picture. I pointed to the angel. “This was the other thing I came over to show you today. It’s a picture of the figurehead from the Ida Belle, the ship carrying Nora and her parents from Connecticut to Charleston. The figurehead was the only part of the ship that was ever recovered—and they found it on Edisto Island.”
Jack’s gaze met mine. “Which is very close to Johns Island.”
I nodded. “I think that the way the figurehead is situated in the picture, with it half turned, could mean that it’s pointing to something. See?”
With my fingernail, I indicated the bottom of the triangle made by the angel’s hair and wings. “The tip is missing, as if it’s buried under sand, which I think indicates land. My father told me that he saw Rebecca taking pictures of the window, as if she might have figured this out, too. The picture of the figurehead from the boat is on the Internet, so it’s more than possible that she discovered it. And what it might mean.”
Jack pointed at the depiction of the house in the picture. “Do you know the location of the old Prioleau plantation on Johns Island?”
I frowned, thinking. As a Realtor, I’d sold a lot of houses on the island, and I was familiar with all the golf communities and the names of the neighborhoods named after the former plantations upon which they were built.
“Belle Meade,” I said. “It’s a golf club community now. I know where it is, but I haven’t been to the house since I was a little girl. My grandmother Sarah took me.”
My mother’s voice was strained. “I can find it. If you can get me into the neighborhood, I’ll know where to go.”
The house shook as a large roll of thunder launched itself at the earth, making me shudder. Heading out to an old ruin in a thunderstorm on pure speculation didn’t sound like a good idea. “It’s practically gone. Hurricane Hugo took off the roof and toppled chimneys, but local preservationists wouldn’t let them bulldoze the rest. It’s taped off to prevent trespassers because it’s not safe.”
“Chimneys?” Jack asked, and I jerked my head toward him.
I nodded. “There were at least three fireplaces that I can remember. But the largest was in the main room of the house, what used to be part of the original farmhouse.”
“She could have figured out what we have, and decided to search for whatever
is hidden in the fireplace,” Jack said.
My eyes widened. “Like Rose’s locket.”
Rain pelted the house as bright forks of lightning illuminated the gray world outside the windows. I wanted to suggest that Rebecca and Rose might be evenly matched, but from looking at my mother’s drawn face I realized that the situation was much more serious than I wanted to think.
“We need to go. Now.” We both faced my mother, who was gripping the newel post and trying to stand. I wanted to tell her that she obviously wasn’t well, but her obstinacy and determination reminded me too much of myself.
I walked toward my mother and helped her up. “Let’s go, then. But I’m driving. Jack’s car is too small, and you can barely stand.” I grabbed my purse from the hall table and carefully led her outside while Jack closed the door firmly behind us just as another flash of lightning illuminated the sky like an omen.
CHAPTER 27
We headed toward US Highway Seventeen South and the Ashley River Bridge to the road that would lead us onto the island. Bohicket Road was a narrow two-way thoroughfare canopied by old oaks and sweeping Spanish moss. It was ethereal and magical in the sunlight, but in the height of a thunderstorm it brought to mind the presence of things that went bump in the night.
Against my better judgment, I let Jack drive my car so I could sit in the backseat with my mother, who appeared too weak to sit up on her own. She rested her head on my shoulder, and I recognized the scent of her shampoo as the one I used. I remembered recognizing the same scent on Rebecca. I recalled, too, Rebecca’s ability to see things in dreams, and the way her hands had seemed so familiar to me, and I shook my head, castigating myself for being so oblivious. But as I sat in the back of the speeding car, listening to the storm whipping at the windows and feeling the weight of my mother’s head on my shoulder as if it were the most natural thing in the world, I realized that being oblivious was sometimes just another form of denial.
I navigated from the backseat, directing Jack to turn onto an unmarked road. The community was so exclusive that the residents believed that if you didn’t know it was there, you had no business being there. When we reached the security gate, I showed my Realtor credentials to the guard and with a few odd glances at my mother and me in the backseat, he opened the gate and we drove through.
