Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters

by Emily Carpenter

  I hesitated. “Look, I’m sorry to do this now, at your party. I really am. But can you tell me what you know? If you’ve ever heard any information—any real information—about Steadfast’s death or the missing coin, I’d be really grateful if you’d share it.”

  “I haven’t.” He held my gaze. “I’m sorry. No one in my family knows what happened to Steadfast or where the coin went. It’s unfortunate, but the truth is just that simple . . . and boring, I’m afraid.”

  I didn’t know what I’d expected—for Jason to possess some long-forgotten tidbit of family lore that would have led me to the coin and some kind of exoneration of Dove? Or maybe, even more preposterously, for him to go full Superman, pull some backroom political levers and save the day for me? I just knew I certainly hadn’t expected the avalanche of disappointment that engulfed me.

  “Eve.” He stood. “A thought, if you’ll indulge me.”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t think this whole situation has to be a negative. Not necessarily.”

  I gave him a confused look. “What do you mean?”

  “The slickest agency in the world couldn’t come up with PR this good. Finding my long-lost ancestor? Blowing up an extortion scheme. It’s actually pretty brilliant, if you think about it.”

  I stiffened, reflexively. “Okay, hold on, though. I understand you’re trying to help, but we can’t—”

  “Just hear me out. You’ve got two days to find the coin, right?” His lips curled in a devilish grin, an impish gleam in his eye. “God, it’ll be so perfect.”

  “What will be perfect?”

  “Just keep an open mind.” He grabbed my elbow, the weak one, and hauled us both up. “Would you mind coming with me? We can talk more downstairs in my office. And I really want to loop in a couple of advisers, if you don’t have an objection.”

  I certainly did have an objection.

  But we were already moving toward the door. Before I could protest, he guided me through it, and the sounds of the party below—laughter and tinkling glasses—rose up to me. I broke out in a flash of sweat.

  “I can find Matt,” he was saying. “We’ll get Emmett and Eleanor on the phone, then we can get to work. Hash things out.”

  I pulled my arm from his grasp. “Mr. Faulk—”

  “Jason, please.”

  “Jason,” I repeated. “Stop.”

  He did, his hand still at my elbow.

  “All of this . . . everything I just told you is extremely confidential. You absolutely cannot tell anyone. You have to understand. I’m here to stop rumors, not start them.”

  And then I felt his brown eyes, beautiful and thickly lashed, fasten onto mine. He formed his perfect lips into a smile that highlighted just the right angle of cheekbones. All so mesmerizing. Oh, he really was the consummate candidate. “Look, Eve. You asked for my help and I’m going to help you. But you’ve got to trust me. I’m not going to let any—”

  His phone rang and he pulled it out of his pocket. After a few seconds he barked, “Okay, give me a minute.”

  A woman’s laughter spiraled up from below us. “He doesn’t care about your income inequality. He won’t even let me buy the house I live in from him!”

  Jason groaned, looking supremely annoyed. “Yep, right on time. Here to provide the entertainment.”

  I didn’t wait to find out what he was talking about. I started down the steps, nearly colliding with Althea, who was heading up. Jason clattered past us both, a blur, and at the foot of the staircase, intercepted a petite young woman. She was about my age with a crown of spiky black hair and black-winged eyeliner. She wore an old plaid shirt unbuttoned over a purple tank top, and had multiple piercings studding her nose, ears, and sharp arched eyebrows.

  She was just reaching for a champagne flute from a passing server, but when Jason took her elbow, he accidentally upset the tray. Champagne splashed and glass shattered.

  Jason jumped back, a warning in his voice. “Ember.”

  But the woman turned toward the crowd. “You all think he cares about you because he lets you into his home. But it’s easy to show off what isn’t yours. This house was handed to him on a silver platter. Given to him, not earned, like everything he has.”

  Jason reached for her and she grabbed him back, swinging him around and away from her in a kind of manic do-si-do. A few people laughed like this might be the entertainment they’d come for. Then she spoke again, her voice brighter, but distinctly slurred.

  “Steadfast Coe died and left the house and all his money to his two grandsons, nothing to his daughter or granddaughter. Of course.”

  I watched in horrified fascination. This lady wasn’t just fun-drunk. She was ready-for-a-fight hammered. The crowd hushed.

  “Ember,” Jason said quietly.

  An unsuspecting partygoer, edging his way from the uncomfortable scene, passed the woman, and she neatly relieved him of his beer. “But the granddaughter was a wonderful person. She could sing and dance. She was pretty and smart.” The young woman turned to Jason. “But she got nothing, did she? Because she was a female. Because she didn’t count!” The woman’s voice slid up an octave. “Her name was Bruna Faulk Holt and she was my Granny Bru! I loved her and she deserved this place!” She pointed at Jason and stared at the crowd. “If you elect this man governor, and he takes everything you have, do not come bitching on my doorstep!”

  “You mean my doorstep,” Jason said quietly. “My doorstep. I own the house you live in, remember? I bought it with my own money that I made from a job I hold down. Does that sound familiar?”

  Silence fell over the room. Somewhere, a door closed softly.

  She spotted me at that moment and did an almost cartoonish double take. I noticed then that her winged eyeliner was smudged and there were dark crescents of sweat under her arms. I also noticed Jason’s men, the ones in black T-shirts, easing their way through the crowd, closing in on her.

  “Hey, I know you,” she said, her voice loud enough to reach us on the stairs.

  I met her blue eyes and couldn’t move. Her stare created some kind of force field that held me. I felt a sudden pang of sympathy.

  “You’re—” she started to say, then stopped, her face crumpling, mouth contorting in a tragic slash. “Oh my God,” she wailed. “Oh fuck—”

  But then she yelped, a bloodcurdling shriek. One of the black T-shirt guys had snuck up and snagged her around the waist, swinging her toward the front door. Her legs flailed as she reached back toward me, as if touching me was going to change what was happening to her, and I got one last look of a desperate black-winged eye.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Florence, Alabama

  1934

  Because Arthur Holt’s father, the Methodist minister, knew about every tent revival, camp meeting, and sacred harp singing in the Shoals area, Arthur was able to arrange lots of appearances for the girls. The engagements were mostly on Sundays, Ruth’s day off. Occasionally, they fell on a Friday night or Saturday, and Bruna had to cajole Edith into watching Steadfast an extra day. This resulted in quite a bit of sniffing and pursing of lips as Bruna’s mother thought singing in tents smacked of vaudeville.

  Bruna took the position that without school or a job to pass the time, she’d most likely wind up running off and getting married. The unspoken message, Ruth gathered, being that the groom in question was Arthur Holt, far from Edith’s first choice for her well-born daughter.

  Truthfully, he wasn’t Ruth’s first choice for Bruna either. Arthur was always giving the girls suggestions to refine their stage presentation and polish up their hairdos and clothes. And before every meeting started, he’d pull Bruna away for a private pep talk. It was just as well Ruth wasn’t invited to their get-togethers. If that puppy tried to tell her how to sing, she’d bust him right in the nose.

  At any rate, presented with the choice of her only daughter marrying a Methodist preacher’s son or singing at a few revivals and remaining available for a more a
dvantageous match with one of Florence’s wealthy denizens, Edith relented, and the girls took their act on the road.

  As it turned out, the road generally consisted of a twenty-mile radius around Florence and included the towns of Sheffield, Muscle Shoals, and Tuscumbia across the river. All Bruna and Ruth needed was Steadfast’s old ice cave packed with chicken or potato salad or whatever Ruth had cooked that day, and they were on their way.

  Early on, Bruna suggested they call themselves the Hawthorn Sisters. “Because of the tree he chopped down,” she giggled. Ruth had to admit she didn’t mind the impudence of the name. And it made her think of Dell.

  It wasn’t long before they were doing much more than just singing at the meetings. Sometimes, when she had a particularly captive audience, Ruth would tell the story of Dr. Asloo’s lion. How—through the power of the Lord, she spoke to it and closed its mouth. Entranced by the story, the audience was then primed for Bruna. She’d sashay to the edge of the stage and call out whatever might be troubling the worshippers’ hearts. Loneliness, family strife, or envy—she named them all, and, convicted by the Spirit, people rushed forward with tears and confessions. The girls would lay their hands on them and pray, pronouncing them healed of their maladies just like they’d seen other evangelists do, and Arthur recorded it all on his small Cine Kodak Model K.

  It was during one of these meetings, up in St. Florian, that a man dressed in filthy overalls and a filthier cap brought his wife down front. She wore an apron stained with grease. It appeared the man had dragged her directly from her kitchen in the middle of cooking supper. She hung her head down, wisps of light-brown hair curtaining her face, but Ruth could still see the shadow of a bruise at the corner of her eye, purple and yellow.

  The man, his bewhiskered face mottled red, shoved his wife forward. “Lay yer hands on this un,” he spat at the girls. “See if the Almighty can fix a willful heart and a stiff neck.”

  The woman lifted her face. She wasn’t crying, nor was the fever of the Spirit high on her cheeks. Her face was blank; her eyes two holes of dead space, framed by that nasty bruise.

  “I can’t seem to get out of bed in the morning,” she said quietly.

  “Morning and afternoon and night,” her husband’s twangy voice rang out from behind her.

  Ruth took her other hand. “What’s your name?”

  “Maggie Kittle.”

  “You got kids, I reckon.”

  She nodded. “Nine.”

  Bruna pressed her lips together.

  After they prayed for the woman, the man marched her back down the aisle toward the back of the tent. Just before he reached the opening, Ruth lifted her chin and sang out in a pure, clear voice.

  “Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus . . .”

  The man stopped. The congregation sat frozen on the benches. The Hawthorn Sisters didn’t sing spirituals. Spirituals were field songs sung in the black churches, not at white revivals. Furthermore, a lot of people thought that particular song was about a slave who wished to escape to freedom.

  Bruna elbowed Ruth gently, but Ruth ignored her and sang the second line. “Steal away. Steal away home. I ain’t got long to stay here!” The metaphor seemed appropriate enough to Ruth. This lady needed to escape.

  The farmer turned slowly, deliberately, his face a study in fury.

  “My Lord, he calls me,” Ruth belted out across the crowd. “He calls me by the thunder. The trumpet sounds within my soul . . .”

  Even from where she stood, Ruth could see the man tremble with rage. His sneer turned to a snarl. But this just served to spur her on. Her voice boomed across the tent, stronger and surer than it had ever felt before. “I ain’t got long to stay here!”

  The piano joined in. Then Bruna too. At last, the crowd sang, clapping along tentatively. Ruth, watching it all, grinned. The feeling was intoxicating, like moonshine out of a walking cane. It was only when the man took his wife by the arm and pulled her the rest of the way out of the tent, that she realized she may have gone a step too far.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Florence, Alabama

  Present

  Jason Faulk followed the phalanx of black T-shirts who hauled his cousin to the front of the house. I gave Althea and Griff the high sign and we made our escape out the back. Back at the Hampton Inn, we changed and reconvened at the indoor pool—or rather, the small adjacent hot tub.

  We sat around the edge, dangling our legs in the frothy, suspect water. When Griff peeled off his T-shirt and jumped in, shorts and all, Althea and I both screamed in dismay.

  “Oh, please. Water’s great, girls. Come on in!”

  I shook my head. “Noooo . . .”

  “Absolutely not.” Althea made a face. “As I tell my kids, Griff, ‘we don’t play in garbage cans.’”

  He laughed and produced two more airplane mini bottles, pouring one into the bubbling white-foamed water before handing the other over to me. “Disinfectant. You’re safe now.”

  I took a sip and made another face. But I was furtively studying his bare torso. He was lean with just the right amount of build, his abdomen and back covered with tattoos. There were so many I couldn’t tell precisely what I was looking at. But I’d been looking long enough, so I averted my eyes.

  Althea held up her can of Diet Coke in a mock toast. “I’ll stick with this. But I notice you always seem to have a supply of those handy little bottles.”

  He arched an eyebrow at her. “I’ll admit I come prepared because I enjoy sharing a drink with friends after a long day of shooting. But it’s only because I happen to dislike bars.” He found my eyes. “I prefer a place where you can actually hear what the other person is saying.”

  “Point in your favor from the ladies’ team,” Althea said. “Right, Eve?”

  “I think so. I hate bars too.”

  “What a coincidence,” Althea said, in a coy tone. “You’re a gem, Griff, you know that?”

  “Ha. Tell my parents that.”

  “Oh, come on, they’ve got to be proud of you. Up-and-coming filmmaker.”

  “My mother is. One of the reasons I go by her last name.” His gaze was still trained on me, and it was getting hard not to gaze back. And this other thing, the way he was divulging bits of personal information to me, was really kind of sweet. Like he was interviewing for a different kind of job altogether. “What do you say, Eve. Do I lose my point?”

  “A less-than-spectacular parent’s nothing to be ashamed of. My dad wasn’t great and look at me. I turned out fine.”

  “Better than fine,” Althea said. “I’d say absolutely stellar.”

  Griff raised his tiny bottle of bourbon. “I would too.”

  “Griff,” Althea said. “Just curious. You’re single, right?”

  I slapped my knees, businesslike. “We should really get back to business, don’t you think?”

  Althea just grinned.

  “Well, I do. We don’t have much time.” That came out slightly sharper than I’d meant it to, but whatever. Time was running out.

  “Okay, fine. Thoughts on Jason Faulk?” Griff asked.

  “Possibly a jerk,” Althea said.

  “Definitely not on good terms with his cousin,” Griff agreed.

  “What’s your assessment of him, Eve?”

  “I’m not totally sure what his motives are, but I think he might be willing to help us out. Let us search his house even. I’m just a little worried about his inability to keep Dove and the foundation out of the news.” I let my feet drift through the warm water.

  “I think we should talk to Ember first.” Althea pulled her legs out of the water and reached for a clean towel. “Besides being Bruna Holt’s descendant, she may know something about the coin that Jason doesn’t. And maybe she’ll be more understanding of our need to be discreet.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We can find her in the morning. My guess is she’ll be sleeping off whatever she was on tonight.”

  “Speaking of discreet,�
� Griff said. “Do you think she’s got a problem? Like a problem, problem?”

  Althea shrugged. “It’s possible. And with that guy as her only family . . .” She rolled her eyes. “Forgive me, but politicians aren’t exactly my jam.”

  “I hear you,” I said. “We’ll tread carefully. I don’t want her getting hurt.”

  “Yeah, well, people get hurt in situations like these,” Althea said. “Family situations, I mean. Collateral damage is almost impossible to avoid.”

  We all got quiet, then Althea stood up.

  “Hope y’all don’t mind, but I’m off to bed. I feel hungover every morning just because I’m over thirty-five. Enjoy it while you can.” She sent us a wicked grin and made her way to the glass door. “I’m sure y’all won’t miss me one bit.”

  The door shut behind her, leaving Griff and me alone in the humid, chemical-infused enclosure.

  “You’re not turning in, are you?” He looked at me, forlorn. “Please don’t go to bed.” He dropped into the bubbling water. “Look at this elegant hot tub we have. We shouldn’t let it go to waste.”

  I inspected my toes. I really needed a pedicure. “I don’t know. I’ve got two more days until my life is metaphorically over.” I’d meant for it to sound lighthearted, but my voice had come out ponderous. Grave even. Oh, boy, I really sucked at this. Why the hell couldn’t I ever fake nonchalant?

  He pushed toward me through the water. “You’ve done all you can do for now. So you might as well enjoy yourself.” He rested his hands on either side of me, tattoos in full view. There was so much to take in—a snowcapped mountain, a tree with blossoms, a series of numbers—I almost didn’t notice the name. Anna.

  “Why do you think she came?” he said.

  My head popped up. “Who?”

  “Althea. Why do you think she left her kids and husband and took off with us?”

  I stared at him.