Summer in the South

by Cathy Holton

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know that.”

  “Then why are you implying that it’s something more sinister?”

  “I’m not implying anything. I’m just curious as to who carved it. And if it was Charlie, why did he carve it?”

  “Someone’s been filling your head with rubbish.”

  They were coming dangerously close to something. They stared at each other. Ava sat against the headboard, her feet curled under her. He stood, leaning his shoulder against the bedpost.

  She said, “I had lunch with Jake Woodburn.”

  “So I heard.”

  “Is that what this is about?”

  He pushed himself off the bed and went over to the window, staring out at the garden.

  She said in a reasonable voice, “Jake didn’t tell me anything. In fact, he didn’t want to talk about Charlie at all. He has a rather misplaced sense of loyalty when it comes to your family.”

  “I don’t want to talk about Jake,” he said.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  A hummingbird hung suspended outside the window. From the library came the muffled sounds of conversation and laughter.

  She had always been attracted to men who held a certain command over her, a stern masculine authority that made her willingly abdicate her own power. Anyone who knew her, besides Michael and Jacob, would have been surprised by this. People invariably described her as “strong-willed” and “self-sufficient,” but it was an act on her part. A certain masculine tone of voice, a flicker of disdain, and she would go as limp and docile as a child. Michael and Jacob had had this manner of indifferent authority, and Will, she realized now, watching him turn and walk to the door, had it, too.

  “They’re waiting for us,” he said.

  “I was just curious about the carving,” she said, trying to make him see her point. “I just wondered who might have done it.”

  He mumbled something she couldn’t understand and went out, and it wasn’t until later, as she drifted off to sleep, that she realized he had said, “For all I know, it could have been you.”

  Golden Girl

  Ava continued to work on her novel every evening, although, in light of her argument with Will over Charlie Woodburn, the work took on a more sinister, secretive air. She knew now that she could never show him the novel. She could never openly betray his trust or that of Josephine, Fanny, and Maitland. And yet she couldn’t stop writing.

  She had begun to work in earnest now, sitting down at her computer every evening when the house was quiet. If the other members of the house knew of her nocturnal endeavors, they said nothing, other than to tease her about her new habit of sleeping late. She didn’t care. Nothing mattered but the work, flowing between her fingers and the computer screen like an electric current. At night the house was hushed but for the periodic hum of the air-conditioning and the creaking of the ancient timbers settling around her. Caught up in the tragic story of Charlie Woodburn, she was unaware of time. Hours seemed to pass in a twinkling, and she was often stunned to look up and see that the bedside clock read four a.m. Often as she wrote, she became gradually aware of noises in the house—doors closing, footsteps in the hallway—but when she stopped writing and listened, the noises stopped.

  She felt a connection to Charlie, and that connection was evidenced by the words that flowed from her fingertips onto the screen. And yet as the summer passed into the long hot days of late July, the work began to slow. She had entered the mid-book doldrums, the place where doubt and insecurity raised their ugly twin heads. It always felt to Ava a little like rolling a boulder up a mountain. Just before reaching the summit there was a moment of uncertainty, of breathless wondering: would the boulder roll back down and crush her, or would she be able to launch it over the precipice, where it would make its speedy, inescapable descent? With the story of Charlie Woodburn, she felt that she was being slowly, relentlessly crushed.

  She felt stifled, confounded, unable to write anything she didn’t delete the following day. It was frustrating to have come so far and now find herself blocked.

  She had rewritten Charlie’s character based on her conversation with Clara and Alice. She had made him more charming, more handsome, more popular and at ease with women. But something had happened. Some shift had occurred in the rewrite that made the story feel forced and false. Josephine was proving troublesome, too. She kept her secrets well. Despite appearing in several new chapters, Josephine had yet to divulge her lover. It was almost as if she was being coy, patronizing. Perhaps Ava had only imagined a secret lover after all.

  Perhaps the story of Charlie Woodburn was beyond Ava’s capability to tell.

  That’s what it all came down to, that same old fear and lack of faith she had struggled with for years. Did she have what it took to be a writer? Or was it just some girlish dream she had yet to outgrow? She had beat her head against this wall until it was bloody, and to come up against it now, when everything seemed to be going so well, seemed especially fatalistic. For the first time in her life she wondered if it was really all that important that she become a novelist. Surely a career as a copywriter would do just as well? Or perhaps she should just marry Will and settle down here in this quiet place where everything was simple and unhurried. Surely that life would do just as well?

  No. She wouldn’t think like that. She wouldn’t give up, not yet anyway.

  There was something with Josephine; she knew it. She had seen it in the scene she wrote yesterday, where Josephine, Charlie, and Clara stood in the garden and Josephine betrayed herself with a glance, an awkward movement, an affirmation that caused the other two to look away from her with swift, furtive expressions of pity.

  Despite her frustration over the progression of her novel, Ava was thankful that another sleep episode had not occurred. The incident of the dark man by the window had left her shaken for days. A hallucination appearing after the initial paralysis had passed was something new, something she had not experienced before. She was afraid she might be entering a new stage of the disease.

  But in the days following the strange appearance of the dark man, no other episodes occurred. As the days wore on, she found it easier to believe that she might have imagined the whole thing, the dark fleeting image brought on by her fright, a trick of the eyes, a subtle shifting of shadows and nothing more.

  She spent her afternoons, while the others were napping, roaming the town looking for evidence of Charlie. She spent a great deal of time at the downtown library talking to the local historian, a retired schoolteacher by the name of Rachel Rowe. Rachel had not known Charlie—he had died before she was born—but she remembered her mother and grandmother talking about the scandalous elopement, and she was able to tell Ava about the boardinghouse where Charlie had lived before marrying, a rambling Victorian house that still stood not far from where Jake Woodburn currently had his furniture shop.

  “Do you have any photos of him?” Ava asked her. They were sitting at one of the long tables near the research stacks, a large picture book on the history of Woodburn open in front of them.

  “Of Charlie Woodburn?” Rachel frowned, her eyes narrowing. “No. I suppose I could check the microfiche. There may be a photo with an article in one of the old newspapers.”

  The next time Ava came in, Rachel beckoned to her and led her over to the large reader machine used to view the microfilms.

  “I’ve found something you might like to see,” she said.

  Ava felt a quiver of excitement. She was suddenly afraid that the man she had pictured, the Charlie she had created in her imagination, might not match the real thing. She hoped she wouldn’t be disappointed. She leaned forward, peering over Rachel’s shoulder. “Were you able to find any of the Woodburn papers that mention Charlie?”

  “No, unfortunately, all the Woodburn family documents were given to Vanderbilt years ago.”

  “Well, not all,” Ava said, remembering that Will had checked the attic
when looking for the original blueprints of Longford. “There may be some papers stored up in the attic at Woodburn Hall.”

  “Really?” Rachel looked at her with interest. “Do you have access to them?”

  “Yes. I mean, I suppose I do. I don’t know exactly what’s up there, but I could check.”

  “You might want to look. Sometimes old photos fall to the bottom of a trunk and get lost. You might find some family letters that mention Charlie. People had a tendency to keep them in those days. I had a friend who did some renovations on a two-hundred-year-old house and found a box hidden in the wall containing a cache of letters. And they were pretty racy, too,” she said chuckling. “For love letters of that day, anyway. Compared to now they seem pretty tame. Although I guess no one writes letters anymore, do they? It’s all emails and instant messaging. How sad.” She scrolled absently through the screen as she talked. “I did find one photo, and that’s what I want to show you.”

  Ava laced her fingers together to keep them from trembling and dropped her hands into her lap. She sat quietly while Rachel wound and rewound the film until she reached the image she was looking for. It zoomed suddenly into view, dark and grainy, a photo of a group of men sitting around a long table in evening clothes. They were smoking cigars and wore what looked like laurel wreaths on their heads, facing the camera with the proud disdainful air that gentlemen of that period used when being photographed. There were no women present, but several black men dressed in dark suits and white gloves stood against the far wall.

  The caption read “Gentlemen of the Commerce Club Gather for Annual Banquet.” Underneath that was a list of names. Ava read through until she came to Colonel James Woodburn. And beside him, Mr. Charles Woodburn. An aristocratic old man with white hair and a long white mustache stared into the camera, and behind him, half hidden by the older gentleman, a younger man leaned into view. His face was bathed in shadow, and his features were indistinguishable. One elbow was propped carelessly on the table in front of him, and in that hand he held a thick cigar.

  “Can you blow it up?” Ava asked.

  “I can, but it doesn’t make it any easier to see.” The old man’s face came suddenly into view, and Ava was shocked at his resemblance to Josephine. They shared the same proud, wary expression, the same high forehead and long blade-like nose. His head was tilted slightly up toward the camera, and his mouth was open as if he had been speaking or perhaps exhaling.

  The young man behind him was still indistinguishable. His face was dark and blurry, but other details jumped suddenly into focus: the gold cuff link of his upraised arm, the smooth, slicked-back hair, a certain carelessness in the buttoning of his pintucked shirt, as if he found such formality absurd but necessary. But it was the dark blurry face with its inscrutable expression that most drew Ava’s attention.

  Staring at him, she shivered.

  On the walk home from downtown, she couldn’t stop thinking about that shadowy face. It was Charlie who had scratched Help me into the headboard of her bed. She was sure of it. He must have had some premonition of his death, some warning.

  But how had he died? Was it really an accidental drowning, as the Woodburns seemed to imply? And if so, why would Josephine, Fanny, and Maitland refuse to speak his name more than sixty years later? Why were there no photos of him in the house? Grief was one thing, but a complete annihilation, a removal of any evidence that a person had ever existed, was something else entirely. It indicated—what? Revenge? Denial? Guilt?

  She walked along the shady sidewalk in a stupor. The day was hot and humid, and she was glad of the overhanging trees. Their thick roots pushed up through the old brick sidewalk, twining around her feet like serpents.

  Had Charlie set out to drink himself to death, and in an accident of tragic proportions, simply hastened the process, as Will had suggested? Or had he been murdered and, if so, by whom? There were several possible suspects with conceivable motives: the menacing cousins intent on avenging Fanny’s honor; stoic Josephine, the defender of family secrets; or perhaps it had been Clara, as Darlene Haney had suggested, a woman familiar with all the poisonous plants of the garden, although Ava could not imagine what motive Clara could possibly have had.

  The one with the most motive, of course, was Maitland Sinclair, the jilted lover. On the surface, jolly Maitland seemed an unlikely suspect, yet Ava had seen the youthful photos of him in his big-game hunting gear. She had glimpsed his face that night when she had asked him why it had taken so long for him and Fanny to marry.

  And then there was his curious answer. Penance.

  His adoration of Fanny was all-consuming. Some people would do anything for love.

  Even murder.

  She could see the imposing roofline of Woodburn Hall rising above the tall hedges. She was almost to the garden fence when her phone rang, startling her out of her reverie.

  “Don’t hang up,” Jake said. “It’s me.”

  The tall hedge surrounding the garden gave way now to the wide, sweeping lawn. Ava glanced at the house to see if anyone was out on the verandah but it was empty. She slowed her steps. A pair of rocking chairs faced the street, half-hidden by a row of glossy-green shrubs.

  “Hello,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. She walked slowly, looking down at her feet, watching so she wouldn’t trip.

  “I’ve been thinking about you.”

  She’d been thinking about him, too. Because she hadn’t been writing, she’d had a lot of time to think about how she might have been too hard on him the last time they spoke.

  “Can you talk?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He made a sound that might have been a sigh. Or maybe it was just a bad connection. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said the last time we talked.”

  “Look,” she said. “I was pretty irrational that day. Don’t pay too much attention to what I said.”

  “No, I think you had a valid point. I should have opened up more about Hadley.”

  She didn’t want to talk about Hadley. Not today anyway. “I took your advice,” she said quickly.

  “What advice was that?”

  “I wrote a letter to Frank Dabrowski. You know, my father. Asking him why he hadn’t ever sent me a birthday card or a Christmas present the whole time I was growing up. And do you know what he said?” Dear God, what was she doing? Why did she feel compelled to tell him the most intimate, depressing details of her life?

  He was quiet, waiting for her to finish.

  “He said he wasn’t my dad after all! I had it all wrong! Even though his name was on my birth certificate, he wasn’t my biological dad, and my mother told him it would be best if he just stayed out of my life. So he did.”

  “Damn, Ava. I’m sorry.”

  His voice was warm and sincere. She stood at the tall fence separating the sidewalk from the lawn of Woodburn Hall, clutching an iron paling with one hand. She was dismayed to find that she was crying.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  She held her phone against one shoulder and rummaged around in her purse for a Kleenex. “I’m fine!” she said, then blew her nose.

  “Do you want to go somewhere for a drink?”

  “I can’t. It’s Toddy Time and I’m heading back to the house.”

  “All right. How about tomorrow?”

  She wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. “Why don’t you come over to Woodburn Hall? You can join us for a Singapore Sling.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “No.”

  She blew her nose again.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Allergies,” she said. “I’m walking back from the library. I’ve been down to see Rachel Rowe. Do you know Rachel? The town historian? Anyway, she had a photo she thought I might like to see of your grandfather Charlie. I have a copy. Would you like to see it?”

  He was quiet for a moment, then he said, “Sure.” />
  “Did you know that your grandfather used to board at a house just down the street from where your shop is?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I’ve got the address. I may go by there on Thursday.”

  “Ava,” he said.

  “What?”

  She could hear movement in the background, as if he was placing his hand over the receiver. “Nothing.”

  “Maybe I’ll stop by your shop while I’m in the neighborhood.”

  “I’d like that. What time?”

  “Well, I don’t get up much before ten.”

  “Sounds like a pretty sweet life.”

  “How about if I come by between 11:30 and 12:00?”

  “That’d be great.”

  “Okay then. See you later,” she said and hung up.

  She was still snuffling into her Kleenex. Odd, how these crying spells seemed to come over her with no warning. She hoped her eyes wouldn’t be red when she showed up for Toddy Time. Will was sure to notice. He noticed everything about her these days. His eyes seemed to follow her wherever she went, as if he suspected her of something and was trying to see validation of her guilt in her face. No doubt she confirmed his worst fears (whatever they might be) every time she felt the weight of those eyes and blushed.

  She clung to the iron fence and blew her nose for the last time. At the edge of the lawn, under a glossy shrub, a white cat watched her warily, its tail twitching. She could hear distant voices. It sounded as if they were already gathered in the library for Toddy Time.

  “Great,” she said, checking her purse for eyedrops. She wished she hadn’t teased Jake about coming for Toddy Time. She’d been trying to throw him offtrack, to hide the fact that she was crying, but she saw now that she might have seemed insensitive. She would apologize Thursday when she saw him.

  He really was a nice guy. There was no reason they couldn’t be friends.

  Will was sitting on one of the long sofas when she came in, and he raised his glass in greeting. He seemed to trail her with curious eyes the whole evening. After dinner, he followed her into her room and shut the door.