The Tidewater Sisters: Postlude to The Prayer Box

by Lisa Wingate

  I was sliding my fingers over the forbidden treasure before I rounded the corner into my office and shut the door. The glue on the bottom flap clung for a moment, seeming determined to keep whatever secrets lay hidden inside, then the tension released, and the contents, perhaps fifty sheets in total, came loose in my hand, the blue-green piece on top. A pen-and-ink drawing inched into view —a sketch of what looked like a thick cord holding six oval-shaped beads and a rectangular pendant of some sort, all ornately carved.

  The artwork was nicely done.

  Below the drawing, three words had been hand-inscribed in graceful, curving script that seemed fit for an ancient scroll in some long-hidden chest.

  The Story Keeper.

  CHAPTER 1

  WHEN TROUBLE BLOWS IN, my mind always reaches for a single, perfect day in Rodanthe. The memory falls over me like a blanket, a worn quilt of sand and sky, the fibers washed soft with time. I wrap it around myself, picture the house along the shore, its bones bare to the wind and the sun, the wooden shingles clinging loosely, sliding to the ground now and then, like scales from some mythical sea creature washed ashore. Overhead, a hurricane shutter dangles by one nail, rocking back and forth in the breeze, protecting an intact window on the third story. Gulls swoop in and out, landing on the salt-sprayed rafters —scavengers come to pick at the carcass left behind by the storm.

  Years later, after the place was repaired, a production company filmed a movie there. A love story.

  But to me, the story of that house, of Rodanthe, will always be the story of a day with my grandfather. A safe day.

  When I squint long into the sun off the water, I can see him yet. He is a shadow, stooped and crooked in his overalls and the old plaid shirt with the pearl snaps. The heels of his worn work boots hang in the air as he balances on the third-floor joists, assessing the damage. Calculating everything it will take to fix the house for its owners.

  He’s searching for something on his belt. In a minute, he’ll call down to me and ask for whatever he can’t find. Tandi, bring me that blue tape measure, or Tandi Jo, I need the green level, out in the truck. . . . I’ll fish objects from the toolbox and scamper upstairs, a little brown-haired girl anxious to please, hoping that while I’m up there, he’ll tell me some bit of a story. Here in this place where he was raised, he is filled with them. He wants me to know these islands of the Outer Banks, and I yearn to know them. Every inch. Every story. Every piece of the family my mother has both depended on and waged war with.

  Despite the wreckage left behind by the storm, this place is heaven. Here, my father talks, my mother sings, and everything is, for once, calm. Day after day, for weeks. Here, we are all together in a decaying sixties-vintage trailer court while my father works construction jobs that my grandfather has sent his way. No one is slamming doors or walking out them. This place is magic —I know it.

  We walked in Rodanthe after assessing the house on the shore that day, Pap-pap’s hand rough-hewn against mine, his knobby driftwood fingers promising that everything broken can be fixed. We passed homes under repair, piles of soggy furniture and debris, the old Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station, where the Salvation Army was handing out hot lunches in the parking lot.

  Outside a boarded-up shop in the village, a shirtless guitar player with long blond dreadlocks winked and smiled at me. At twelve years old, I fluttered my gaze away and blushed, then braved another glance, a peculiar new electricity shivering through my body. Strumming his guitar, he tapped one ragged tennis shoe against a surfboard, reciting words more than singing them.

  Ring the bells bold and strong

  Let all the broken add their song

  Inside the perfect shells is dim

  It’s through the cracks, the light comes in. . . .

  I’d forgotten those lines from the guitar player, until now.

  The memory of them, of my grandfather’s strong hand holding mine, circled me as I stood on Iola Anne Poole’s porch. It was my first indication of a knowing, an undeniable sense that something inside the house had gone very wrong.

  I pushed the door inward cautiously, admitting a slice of early sun and a whiff of breeze off Pamlico Sound. The entryway was old, tall, the walls white with heavy gold-leafed trim around rectangular panels. A fresh breeze skirted the shadows on mouse feet, too slight to displace the stale, musty smell of the house. The scent of a forgotten place. Instinct told me what I would find inside. You don’t forget the feeling of stepping through a door and understanding in some unexplainable way that death has walked in before you.

  I hesitated on the threshold, options running through my mind and then giving way to a racing kind of craziness. Close the door. Call the police or . . . somebody. Let someone else take care of it.

  You shouldn’t have touched the doorknob —now your fingerprints will be on it. What if the police think you did something to her? Innocent people are accused all the time, especially strangers in town. Strangers like you, who show up out of the blue and try to blend in . . .

  What if people thought I was after the old woman’s money, trying to steal her valuables or find a hidden stash of cash? What if someone really had broken in to rob the place? It happened, even in idyllic locations like Hatteras Island. Massive vacation homes sat empty, and local boys with bad habits were looking for easy income. What if a thief had broken into the house thinking it was unoccupied, then realized too late that it wasn’t? Right now I could be contaminating the evidence.

  Tandi Jo, sometimes I swear you haven’t got half a brain. The voice in my head sounded like my aunt Marney’s —harsh, irritated, thick with the Texas accent of my father’s family, impatient with flights of fancy, especially mine.

  “Mrs. Poole?” I leaned close to the opening, trying to get a better view without touching anything else. “Iola Anne Poole? Are you in there? This is Tandi Reese. From the little rental cottage out front. . . . Can you hear me?”

  Again, silence.

  A whirlwind spun along the porch, sweeping up last year’s pine straw and dried live oak leaves. Loose strands of hair swirled over my eyes, and my thoughts tangled with it, my reflection melting against the waves of leaded glass —flyaway brown hair, nervous blue eyes, lips hanging slightly parted, uncertain.

  What now? How in the world would I explain to people that it’d taken me days to notice there were no lights turning on and off in Iola Poole’s big Victorian house, no window heat-and-air units running at night when the spring chill gathered? I was living less than forty yards away. How could I not have noticed?

  Maybe she was sleeping —having a midday nap —and by going inside, I’d scare her half to death. From what I could tell, my new landlady kept to herself. Other than groceries being delivered and the UPS and FedEx trucks coming with packages, the only signs of Iola Poole were the lights and the window units going off and on as she moved through the rooms at different times of day. I’d only caught sight of her a time or two since the kids and I had rolled into town with no more gas and no place else to go. We’d reached the last strip of land before you’d drive off into the Atlantic Ocean, which was just about as far as we could get from Dallas, Texas, and Trammel Clarke. I hadn’t even realized, until we’d crossed the North Carolina border, where I was headed or why. I was looking for a hiding place.

  By our fourth day on Hatteras, I knew we wouldn’t get by with sleeping in the SUV at a campground much longer. People on an island notice things. When a real estate lady offered an off-season rental, cheap, I figured it was meant to be. We needed a good place more than anything.

  Considering that we were into April now, and six weeks had passed since we’d moved into the cottage, and the rent was two weeks overdue, the last person I wanted to contact about Iola was the real estate agent who’d brought us here, Alice Faye Tucker.

  Touching the door, I called into the entry hall again. “Iola Poole? Mrs. Poole? Are you in there?” Another gust of wind danced across the porch, scratching crape myrtle branches agains
t gingerbread trim that seemed to be clinging by Confederate jasmine vines and dried paint rather than nails. The opening in the doorway widened on its own. Fear shimmied over my shoulders, tickling like the trace of a fingernail.

  “I’m coming in, okay?” Maybe the feeling of death was nothing more than my imagination. Maybe the poor woman had fallen and trapped herself in some tight spot she couldn’t get out of. I could help her up and bring her some water or food or whatever, and there wouldn’t be any need to call 911. First responders would take a while, anyway. There was no police presence here. Fairhope wasn’t much more than a fish market, a small marina, a village store, a few dozen houses, and a church. Tucked in the live oaks along Mosey Creek, it was the sort of place that seemed to make no apologies for itself, a scabby little burg where fishermen docked storm-weary boats and raised families in salt-weathered houses. First responders would have to come from someplace larger, maybe Buxton or Hatteras Village.

  The best thing I could do for Iola Anne Poole, and for myself, was to go into the house, find out what had happened, and see if there was any way I could keep it quiet.

  The door was ajar just enough for me to slip through. I slid past, not touching anything, and left it open behind me. If I had to run out of the place in a hurry, I didn’t want any obstacles between me and the front porch.

  Something shifted in the corner of my eye as I moved deeper into the entry hall. I jumped, then realized I was passing by an arrangement of fading photographs, my reflection melting ghostlike over the cloudy glass. In sepia tones, the images stared back at me —a soldier in uniform with the inscription Avery 1917 engraved on a brass plate. A little girl with pipe curls on a white pony. A group of people posed under an oak tree, the women wearing big sun hats like the one Kate Winslet donned in Titanic. A wedding photo from the thirties or forties, the happy couple in the center, surrounded by several dozen adults and two rows of cross-legged children. Was Iola the bride in the picture? Had a big family lived in this house at one time? What had happened to them? As far as I could tell, Iola Poole didn’t have any family now, at least none who visited.

  “Hello . . . hello? Anyone up there?” I peered toward the graceful curve of the long stairway. Shadows melted rich and thick over the dark wood, giving the stairs a foreboding look that made me turn to the right instead and cross through a wide archway into a large, open room. It would have been sunny but for the heavy brocade curtains. The grand piano and a grouping of antique chairs and settees looked like they’d been plucked from a tourist brochure or a history book. Above the fireplace, an oil portrait of a young woman in a peach-colored satin gown hung in an ornate oval frame. She was sitting at the piano, posed in a position that appeared uncomfortable. Perhaps this was the girl on the pony from the hallway photo, but I wasn’t sure.

  The shadows seemed to follow me as I hurried out of the room. The deeper I traveled into the house, the less the place resembled the open area by the stairway. The inner sections were cluttered with what seemed to be several lifetimes of belongings, most looking as if they’d been piled in the same place for years, as if someone had started spring-cleaning multiple times, then abruptly stopped. In the kitchen, dishes had been washed and stacked neatly in a draining rack, but the edges of the room were heaped with stored food, much of it contained in big plastic bins. I stood in awe, taking in a multicolored waterfall of canned vegetables that tumbled haphazardly from an open pantry door.

  Bristle tips of apprehension tickled my arms as I checked the rest of the lower floor. Maybe Iola wasn’t here, after all. The downstairs bedroom with the window air unit was empty, the single bed fully made. Maybe she’d gone away somewhere days ago or been checked into a nursing home, and right now I was actually breaking into a vacant house. Alice Faye Tucker had mentioned that Iola was ninety-one years old. She probably couldn’t even climb the stairs to the second story.

  I didn’t want to go up there, but I moved toward the second floor one reluctant step at a time, stopping on the landing to call her name once, twice, again. The old balusters and treads creaked and groaned, making enough noise to wake the dead, but no one stirred.

  Upstairs, the hallway smelled of drying wallpaper, mold, old fabric, water damage, and the kind of stillness that said the rooms hadn’t been lived in for years. The tables and lamps in the wood-paneled hallway were gray with dust, as was the furniture in five bedrooms, two bathrooms, a sewing room with a quilt frame in the middle, and a nursery with white furniture and an iron cradle. Odd-shaped water stains dotted the ceilings, the damage recent enough that the plaster had bowed and cracked but only begun to fall through. An assortment of buckets sat here and there on the nursery floor, the remnants of dirty water and plaster slowly drying to a paste inside. No doubt shingles had been ripped from the roof during last fall’s hurricane. It was a shame to let a beautiful old house go to rot like this. My grandfather would have hated it. When he inspected historic houses for the insurance company, he was always bent on saving them.

  A thin watermark traced a line down the hallway ceiling to a small sitting area surrounded by bookshelves. The door on the opposite side, the last one at the end of the hall, was closed, a small stream of light reflecting off the wooden floor beneath it. Someone had passed through recently, clearing a trail in the silty layer of dust on the floor.

  “Mrs. Poole? Iola? I didn’t mean to scare —”

  A rustle in the faded velvet curtains by the bookshelves made me jump, breath hitching in my chest as I drew closer.

  A black streak bolted from behind the curtain and raced away. A cat. Mrs. Poole had a cat. Probably the wild, one-eared tom that J.T. had been trying to lure to our porch with bowls of milk. I’d told him to quit —we couldn’t afford the milk —but a nine-year-old boy can’t resist a stray. Ross had offered to bring over a live trap and catch the cat. Good thing I’d told him not to worry about it. Letting your new boyfriend haul off your landlady’s pet is a good way to get kicked out of your happy little home, especially when the rent’s overdue.

  The glass doorknob felt cool against my fingers when I touched it, the facets surprisingly sharp. “I’m coming in . . . okay?” Every muscle in my body tightened, preparing for fight or flight. “It’s just Tandi Reese . . . from the cottage. I hope I’m not scaring you, but I was wor —” The rest of worried never passed my lips. I turned the handle. The lock assembly clicked, and the heavy wooden door fell open with such force that it felt like someone had pulled it from the other side. The doorknob struck the wall, vibrating the floor beneath my feet. Behind me, the cat hissed, then scrambled off down the stairs.

  Picture frames inside the room shivered on the pale-blue walls, reflecting orbs of light over the furniture. Beyond the jog created by the hallway nook, the footboard of an ornate bed pulled at me as the shuddering frames settled into place and the light stopped dancing. By the bedpost, a neatly cornered blue quilt grazed the floor, and a pair of shoes —the sensible, rubber-soled kind that Zoey, with her fourteen-year-old fashion sense, referred to as grandma shoes —were tucked along the edge of a faded Persian rug, the heels and toes exactly even.

  The feet that belonged in the shoes had not traveled far away. Covered in thin black stockings, they rested atop the bed near the footboard, the folded, crooked toes pointing outward slightly, in a position that seemed natural enough for someone taking a midday nap.

  But the feet didn’t move, despite the explosion of the door hitting the wall. I tasted the bile of my last meal. No one could sleep through that.

  The bedroom lay in perfect silence as I stepped inside, my footfalls seeming loud, out of place. I didn’t speak again or call out or say her name to warn her that I was coming. Without even seeing her face, I knew there was no need.

  Gruesome scenes from Zoey’s favorite horror movies flashed through my mind, but when I crept past the corner, forced myself to turn her way, Iola Anne Poole looked peaceful, like she’d just stopped for a quick nap and forgotten to get up again. She was
flat on her back atop the bed, a pressed cotton dress —white with tiny blue flower baskets —falling over her long, thin legs and seeming to disappear into a wedding ring quilt sewn in all the colors of sky and sea. Her leathery, wrinkled arms lay folded neatly across her stomach, the gnarled fingers intertwined in a posture that looked both contented and confident. Prepared. The chalky-gray hue of her skin told me it would be cold if I touched it.

  I didn’t. I turned away instead, pressed a hand over my mouth and nose. As much as the body looked like someone had carefully laid it out to give a peaceful appearance, there were no signs that anyone else had been in the room. The only trails on the dusty floor led from the door to the bed, from the bed to what appeared to be a closet tucked behind the hallway nook, and past the foot of the bed to a small writing desk by the window. Whatever she was doing up here, she didn’t come often. What was the lure of this turret room at the end of the upstairs hall, with its gold-trimmed walls painted in faded shades of cream and milky blue? Did she know she was approaching her last hours? Was this where she wanted to die? Where she wanted to be found?

  Could I have helped if I’d checked on her sooner?

  The questions drove me from the room, sent me into the hall, gasping for air. I didn’t want to think about how long she’d been there or whether she’d known death was coming for her, whether she’d been afraid when it happened or completely at peace.

  Truthfully, I didn’t want anything more to do with the situation.

  But an hour later, I was back in the house, watching two sheriff’s deputies walk into the blue room. The deputy in back was more interested in getting a look inside the house than in the fact that a woman had died. For some reason, it seemed wrong to leave them alone with her body. I felt responsible for making sure they gave what was left of her some respect.