Return to Me

by Rosemary Rogers

  Jackson grabbed the doorknob, steadied himself with one foot against the wall and jerked on the door. It flew open and he nearly fell back. “Stay here,” he ordered, scrambling up the narrow staircase.

  Cameron ran after him. Holding her skirts in one hand, placing the other hand on one rough-hewn stair tread at a time, she climbed into the attic where she’d not been for years.

  The moment she reached the top of the stairs, she knew the child had been here for some time. Weeks at least, perhaps months. A small table that had come from the parlor was set with Cameron’s mother’s silver tea service. There were two chairs at the table, as if the little thief was expecting a guest for tea. An area had been set up under the tiny eaves window as a bed with a mattress from one of the bedrooms below and a curtain for a bedcovering.

  “Where is she?” Jackson panted, standing in the center of the attic where his head nearly brushed the beams beneath the peaked roof.

  It took a moment for Cameron’s eyes to adjust to the dim light that came from the small window. The attic was cluttered with three generations of the Campbell family’s discarded chairs, trunks and crates. She saw an old spinning wheel, a freestanding dress rack, a dressmaker’s mannequin used for fittings.

  “I know you’re here,” Jackson growled. “We’ve got you trapped, so you might as well come out.”

  Cameron’s gaze drifted carefully from one shadowed object to the next. She spotted another chair, a table of some sort, a pile of hatboxes. Then something caught her eye. She looked back at the table and smiled.

  “Damn it, Cameron, I told you to stay downstairs. You shouldn’t be running or climbing steps yet!”

  As Jackson protested loudly, she slid one foot in front of the other, easing toward the table. When she reached its edge, she slowly bent at the knees to squat, balancing herself with one hand on the dusty table’s edge.

  Cameron’s gaze met another’s.

  The young girl blinked.

  “It’s all right,” Cameron said softly. “We won’t hurt you.” She offered her hand. “Why not come out where I can see you.”

  After a moment, she hesitantly took Cameron’s hand. It was obvious to Cameron that she did so not because she wanted to, but because she knew she was trapped.

  “That’s right. Just come out where we can see you better,” Cameron urged gently, as if the girl were a startled colt. “Just here in the light where I can get a look at you.”

  The child allowed herself to be led out from under the table and into the wide beam of sunlight in the middle of the room. Her face was smudged with days of dirt, as was the hacked-off blue gown that looked like some New Orleans tart’s dress. Her bare knees were skinned and grass stained.

  “Goodness, how old are you? Ten, twelve?” Cameron questioned, holding fast to the dirty hand. Between the dirt and the dim light, it was difficult to guess her age.

  The girl smelled as if she had not bathed in weeks, and she was desperately thin. Even in the feeble light, her protruding collarbones and sunken cheeks were evident.

  The girl pulled away slowly, her gaze locked with Cameron’s.

  “Can you tell me your name?” Cameron asked, making no quick movements for fear of startling her.

  “Lacy,” the child answered, still seeming undecided as to whether she would bolt again or not. But she pushed a hank of matted hair out of her face and boldly remained where she stood. “My name is Lacy Campbell.”

  20

  Cameron stared in shock at the girl’s filthy, waiflike face. Lacy Campbell? Of course, it was a coincidence, their having the same family name. But a cold stab of intuition in the pit of her stomach suggested it was not. There was something about this girl—the way she spoke, the way she held herself—that put Cameron on edge. “What did you say?”

  “Ya deaf?” the girl challenged, dropping her hands to her narrow hips to reveal in one hand a wooden slingshot made from a Y-shaped tree branch. Suddenly her timidity had been transformed into a bravado Cameron knew wasn’t quite genuine.

  “Hey,” Jackson growled at Lacy. “You’ll be respectful.”

  The child never acknowledged Jackson, never blinked.

  “I said I’m Lacy Campbell!” she repeated, meeting Cameron’s gaze with childlike defiance. “And this here is my house, too.”

  “I want you to pack whatever is yours and go now,” Jackson told Lacy. “Go now and don’t come back, and I won’t call the authorities and have you arrested.”

  Lacy’s wide, intelligent eyes were the color of green grass flecked with shades of honey. Those wary eyes—somehow hauntingly familiar—watched Cameron.

  “I said, I won’t bring the authorities if you go now.” Jackson reached for her arm, and Lacy jumped back as if she’d been stung.

  “Jackson, no.” Cameron stepped between them, separating them. Still studying Lacy carefully, she turned her back to her husband, speaking softly, as she might approach an unbroken colt. “You’re mistaken,” she told the girl. “This is my house. My sister’s and mine. My father left it to us when he passed away.”

  Lacy shook her head, setting her jaw, glaring back with eyes too old for her face. “Might be yore’n, but it be mine, too,” she said stubbornly.

  Cameron offered her hand again. “My name is Cameron Campbell.” She twisted to glance at Jackson and then turned back to the girl again. “It was Campbell before I was married. Now I’m Cameron Logan, of course.”

  “I know who ya are.” Lacy whipped her tangled mass of red-gold hair and made no move to accept Cameron’s hand of introduction.

  “You do?”

  Lacy nodded. “Seen ya in town, a’fore the war. Ya and the mulatto. Y’all always wore pretty dresses and pretty bonnets. Ya were the one with them fancy horses.”

  Cameron’s brow knitted. She was certain she had never seen this girl before, but then four years ago the child could have been only eight or so. She might have looked quite different. “Do I know you?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t reckon ya do.”

  “And you say you have a claim on Elmwood Plantation? That’s impossible, of course. The fact that we share a family name is simply coincidence. My half sister Taye and I are the last of the Campbells in Mississippi. In all of the United States. We have no relatives here. You would have to take a ship across the ocean to a place called Scotland before you met another of my father’s blood relations.”

  Lacy folded her arms over her chest and the folds of her gown gaped at the bodice to reveal bare, freckled skin, nearly hidden by more dirt than Cameron would have thought possible for one child to possess. Lacy Campbell was wearing no undergarments; it was plain to see that whatever her age, she had not yet begun to grow breasts. “I knows what I know.”

  Cameron thought for a moment. She realized the girl’s claim was untrue, naturally. If Lacy had seen her and Taye in Jackson before the war, it was probably wishful thinking. But there was something about those flecked hazel eyes that told her there was more to the girl’s tale, a story Cameron feared she didn’t want to know.

  “Are you hungry?” Cameron asked, veering off the subject of Lacy’s claim.

  “’Course I’m hungry. Nothin’ in the garden ’hind the kitchen. A few stray beans and onions in the old slave garden. Once in a while I get me a rat or a bird.”

  Cameron winced. “Well, let’s go downstairs and I’ll get you something to eat. I brought food with me and I’ll share.”

  “Cameron.” Jackson’s fingers closed over her forearm and he turned her, forcing her to look at him. He lowered his voice. “You shouldn’t do this. I understand you feel sorry for her, but girls like this are all over the South. You can’t save them all. We should give her some money and send her on her way. She can mean nothing but trouble, and more trouble is something we don’t need right now.”

  Cameron glared at Jackson, wondering exactly what he meant by that, but she didn’t ask. This wasn’t about her or him, or the trouble between them. It was about this
half-starved, homeless urchin who was barely more than a child. Where was his heart?

  Cameron pulled her arm from Jackson’s firm grasp. “Let’s go downstairs,” she told Lacy, mopping her perspiring brow. “It will be cooler outside.”

  Lacy followed Cameron down the attic stairs, with Jackson bringing up the rear. At the bottom of the grand staircase, Cameron told Jackson, “There’s a dinner basket in the back of the carriage. Would you bring it to the veranda?”

  “Cam, it’s barely eleven—”

  “We can eat there. We’ll drag a table and some chairs out. Papa and I used to eat on the veranda all the time.”

  He stood on the marred Italian tile staring at her. “I’m not leaving you alone with that urchin. She could harm you.”

  “With her slingshot?” Cameron snatched the weapon from Lacy’s hand.

  “Hey!” Lacy protested.

  “Just for safekeeping. I’ll give it back to you,” Cameron promised, slipping the slingshot into the waistband of her navy riding skirt. She glanced at Jackson. “Please?”

  He grunted and walked out the front door, leaving it open.

  By the time the scowling Jackson had returned with the dinner basket Naomi had packed, Cameron and Lacy had carried a wooden table and three unmatched chairs they had found overturned in the ballroom onto the veranda. It was nothing like it had once been, not the veranda or the house or the once neatly manicured garden before them, but it was still home and that thought warmed Cameron’s heart.

  “I’m not hungry,” Jackson grumbled, dropping the basket in front of Cameron. “I need to get back to town.”

  “If you have to go,” Cameron said to Jackson. “Go.” She waved her hand. “Take the carriage. Send it back for me later.”

  “I’m not leaving you here with her!”

  Cameron arched an eyebrow. “So you’ll wait until after we have our dinner?”

  Jackson walked away to stand by the open door to the house and glare at them.

  Cameron ignored him. “Let’s see, what do we have here?” She pulled several pieces of fried chicken wrapped in brown paper from the basket. “Chicken. Cheese. Pears. Oh, and Naomi’s lemonade. You’re going to love this, so sweet and yet so tart at the same time.”

  Lacy sat on a chair and stared with wide-eyed wonder at the food Cameron spread out on the table.

  “Please, eat,” Cameron said. She watched as both of the girl’s small hands darted out.

  Lacy somehow managed to grab two pieces of chicken and a pear, all at the same time.

  “Unless you’ll like to wash up first,” Cameron suggested, watching as Lacy gnawed ravenously on one piece of chicken, while clutching the other tightly in her filthy hand.

  “Don’t need no washin’,” Lacy said between mouthfuls.

  Cameron picked up a pear and, tossing it in the air, caught it and took a bite. “So you say Elmwood is yours. How so?”

  Lacy chewed on the gristle from a drumstick. Taking one last look at the bone, she deemed she was done with it and threw it over her shoulder. “Ya don’t look stupid. I tole ya. ’Cause I’m a Campbell, too.”

  Jackson made a derisive sound behind them.

  Cameron watched in amazement as the discarded bone flew into the garden and landed on the weedy path. She didn’t know where the poor girl had been raised, but the young woman’s manners had obviously not been addressed.

  Cameron had to drag her attention to Lacy again. “So you are a Campbell, are you? Long-lost cousin of mine, I suppose?”

  Cameron’s mouth twitched with amusement when Lacy didn’t answer. The child had probably heard that the Campbell heiress was home and that she was planning to restore Elmwood to its former glory. She was here to see what she could get from the Campbell family. “So you’re not a cousin?”

  “Nope.” Lacy munched on the pear, then took a bite from the second piece of chicken. “Yer my aunt.”

  Cameron nearly choked on her pear. She didn’t know what she had expected the girl to say, but that wasn’t it. She swallowed the mouthful of fruit. “You can’t expect me to believe that you are my niece?”

  Lacy nodded. Pear juice ran down her chin and her lips were shiny with grease. “Ya gonna eat that other chicken?” She stared at the piece left on the paper. “It’s real good.”

  What appetite Cameron had was gone. She set down her half-eaten pear. “Help yourself.” She leaned forward, elbows on the table, studying Lacy. “How could you be my niece?”

  “Grant Campbell’s daughter.”

  Cameron sat back suddenly in her chair, as if her brother’s ghost had just floated onto the veranda. She took a deep breath, brushing off the strange feeling that had come over her at the mention of her brother’s name.

  Lacy was lying, of course. Grant had had no children. “My brother died without issue,” Cameron said coolly. “He had no children, legitimate or otherwise.”

  “None ya knew ’bout, I guess.” Lacy threw the other bone over her shoulder. “’Course, the other Mr. Campbell, he knew.”

  Cameron shot out of her chair. “Mr. Campbell? Which Mr. Campbell do you speak of?”

  “The father.” Lacy licked her fingers noisily. “Yer father.”

  “I think we’ve heard enough here,” Jackson said. “She needs to go, now, Cameron.”

  Cameron held up a finger to Jackson. “No. That’s impossible,” she insisted, turning back to Lacy. “My father knew nothing of a grandchild. You’re lying.”

  Lacy shook her head. She was finishing off the pear, smacking her lips, eating it core and all. “Mama said ya’d say I was a big fat liar. But I ain’t.” Her hazel-eyed gaze, which suddenly looked startlingly like Grant’s, met Cameron’s. “But ya dig down in yer belly, ya know I ain’t.”

  Cameron pressed her hand to her mouth. “Who was your mother?” she demanded. “How old are you?”

  “Be fourteen come the turn of the year, and my mama’s name was Morrie. Maureen Matthews. She worked at The Dog-Ear Saloon.”

  Cameron remembered The Dog-Ear vaguely, though it had closed down years ago when the proprietor was shot and killed in a barroom brawl. It had been a seedy place where men played cards, drank…and apparently amused themselves in other ways. “So, your mother was a—”

  “Cleanin’ woman,” Lacy said, meeting Cameron’s gaze, daring the older woman to say otherwise.

  The girl had a lot of guts for someone her age.

  Lacy spotted a scrap of crumb from the chicken batter and licked her finger to pick it up with. “My mama cleaned for old man Carter, but he didn’t pay much. Mama said Mr. Campbell was nice to her, least at first. Bought her pretty baubles.”

  “You mean Grant? My brother.”

  Lacy nodded. “Mama said he was young then, had a draggin’ leg and wanted to make up for it. Thought he was a big stud.”

  Cameron blanched. Grant had had a limp. He’d fallen from one her horses when he was twelve and broken his leg so badly that it had healed shorter than the other. After the injury her brother’s personality had changed for the worse. He spent the rest of his life trying to make up for his physical weakness by bullying others.

  Lacy wiped her greasy mouth with the back of her hand, then dragged it down the front of her stained blue gown. “’Course, he lost interest once her belly got swolled up, Mama said. He stopped comin’ ’round. Tole her she looked like an ole sow.”

  Cameron couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How could Grant have fathered a child and then simply ignored her? But inside, she knew what kind of man her brother had been. She knew the kinds of things he had done.

  “If this is true, though I’m not saying I believe you,” Cameron warned, raising one finger, “why didn’t your mother ever come to us? How did I not know about you?”

  “She did come. She come to this house when I was still a babe on the tit. Mr. Carter had put her out on account of my cryin’. Mama couldn’t get no work done. Grant Campbell turned her away,” she said, making no attempt to h
ide her hatred. “But then old Mr. Campbell, Senator, Mama called him—” Her face lightened. “He come to the Dog-Ear and give us money. Put us in a nice place over the apothecary’s. He brought money every month, for years till—”

  Cameron gripped the back of the chair, lost for a moment in that terrible night here at Elmwood. “Until he died,” she murmured.

  Lacy nodded. “At first, Mama thought he just forgot about us, there bein’ a war and all, and him being such an important man, but then we heard.” She lowered her gaze to the table. “And we was sorry ’cause he was a good man.”

  Tears gathered in the corners of Cameron’s eyes. David Campbell had been a good man, and this young girl was living proof. “What happened to your mama?” Cameron asked.

  “Jesus,” Jackson barked. “You believe this horseshit?”

  Cameron sat down in the chair again and waited for Lacy to speak.

  “She couldn’t find no work. Not when the fightin’ started. We couldn’t stay above the apothecary’s no more, so we started sleepin’ here and there. When soldiers come to town, blue or gray, they give her food for washing their clothes, sewin’.” The girl’s gaze flickered to Cameron’s, her pain obvious. “Sometimes they wanted other tendin’. Men things.”

  Cameron trembled. Lacy’s mother had sold her body to soldiers to feed her child. To feed Senator David Campbell’s granddaughter. It was an appalling story, so appalling that Cameron knew in her heart of hearts that it was true. It had to be. It all made perfect sense. Grant had fathered a baby when he was fifteen. To protect the Campbell name, the senator had quietly taken care of the child and her mother. If he was alive today, he would still be fulfilling that obligation he felt.

  “Where’s your mama now?” Cameron asked.

  Lacy stared at her dirty hands in her lap. “She got sick. Bowels wouldn’t stop runnin’. Big ole sores on her paps and arms. I tried to help her best I could. Tried to get us food. I even stole some tea and a fancy teapot, but she died anyway,” the girl finished softly.