“Elder Jeremiah,” Shepherd Isaiah said quietly, “Elder Mason forgets his place. I am the one to ask questions.”
Elder Jeremiah backed out of the shed. There was a thud and a muffled groan. Elder Jeremiah returned.
“Now, my child, speak to me.” Shepherd Isaiah’s voice caressed Retha.
“I told you. My baby boy is dead. The Lord’s will. You said no doctors because we would abide by the Lord’s will. And now Billy Lee’s dead. That was the Lord’s will. I was too afraid to tell you, so I put a doll in his bed.”
“Then where did you bury him? I have to give that boy a Christian funeral or hellfire will lick at his soul forever.”
“Can’t say where I buried him. I don’t remember where I was, I was grieving so bad.”
“Elder Jeremiah, it is with sadness that I ask for your help.”
Elder Jeremiah loomed over her. He raised the belt in his right hand.
“Can’t say? Or won’t?” Shepherd Isaiah said. “This is disturbing me greatly, this here disobedience. I’m giving you one last chance to purge Satan from your body and speak truth. Where’d you bury the boy?”
“Can’t say.” It revolted Retha, thinking she’d once looked up to this man.
“Satan begone!” Shepherd Isaiah commanded. “Leave this child of God.” He nodded to Elder Jeremiah.
The belt came down once.
“This pains me, my child. Please cleanse yourself with obedience to me and God’s holy Word.”
Retha clenched her jaw.
Shepherd Isaiah sighed and nodded to Elder Jeremiah.
Free, Retha told herself as she waited for the belt to descend again. Finally free.
**
“Evelyn,” Samuel said to the shriveled woman in room 309 of the Bethany House extended care facility of Mount Pleasant, “this is my friend Nicholas Barrett. I hope you don’t mind that he joins us for this visit?”
“Any visit is just fine with me. Especially by a man that looks so fine,” Evelyn answered. “He looks real fine. Don’t bother me none to have you two good-looking men nearby. Sit by my bed all morning if you want.”
I was surprised at the robust voice coming from such a withered body. The woman wore a shiny dark wig, slightly askew. One eye was patched with a white bandage. Her other eye gleamed as she looked from Pastor Samuel to me.
“Now, Pastor,” she said, “you bring some grape juice and cheese and crackers like I asked last week? Seems we could have ourselves a real party.”
“Evelyn,” Samuel said with theatrical despair, “you should know I searched high and low but couldn’t find any wine of a quality deserving of you.”
Evelyn laughed. Her dentures slipped and she gagged slightly. With a quick pop of the heel of her hand, she
knocked her teeth back in place. “You do beat all, Pastor Samuel.”
“All this talk about parties aside, how are you?” Samuel asked quietly. “You know I’m serious about that question. Especially after the operation on your eye.”
“Mostly lonely,” she said. “Nobody from my family comes to visit, and the lady in the other bed, she sleeps most of the time. Won’t wake up no matter what I say to her. I can’t read magazines because my other eye went so bad on close-up stuff all of a sudden. Seems like when one part goes bad, the others are sure to follow.”
The dividing curtain of the room had been pulled back. I glanced at the other bed. This woman was older than Evelyn and asleep, her head barely peeking over the sheets.
“Other eye gone bad for reading,” Samuel repeated. “What does your doctor say about it?”
“He says sometimes that might happen when it tries to compensate for the eye that had the operation. He says I shouldn’t worry; it will come around. I say, let him try seeing out of only one eye and have it go bad, and maybe he’ll know about worrying. Yesterday, my eye was fine. Today it’s not.”
To confirm her complaint, Evelyn reached for her eyeglasses from her bedside table. She put them on and stared at Samuel. The frame was plain brown plastic, the lenses thick and square. She blinked her good eye, and to me, it seemed she was peering at us through a magnifying glass.
“Just like now,” Evelyn said, holding up her hand in front of her eyes. “It’s like seeing my hand underwater. Can’t hardly make out my fingernails. It’s almost as bad as being blind. Sure I can see people and their faces without my glasses, but reading, that’s impossible.”
Evelyn turned her head, looking around the room. “I puts these on, and things gets bad. I takes ’em off, and my eye works the way it always did without ’em.”
“You want I should talk to the doctor about this?” Samuel asked. “Sometimes they get busy and don’t listen. If he hears it from the two of us, it might make him pay attention.”
“That’d be good. Real good. And while you’re talking to him, there’s a few other things he ain’t listening to real close. I been trying to tell him about my intestinal problems. Like I said, one thing goes bad, and the rest is sure to follow.”
Evelyn began to go into great detail about her gastronomical difficulties. With her single large eye looming from behind the eyeglasses, the askew wig, and the animation on Evelyn’s face as she spoke about her last four days of intestinal activities with a fondness normally reserved to the departure of close friends, I found it difficult to listen with the seriousness that Samuel was able to maintain.
I bit my lip to keep a straight face and looked elsewhere, nodding sympathetically in rhythm to the cadence of Evelyn’s voice. In the other bed, the woman’s face twitched occasionally.
I began to wonder if she was really sleeping or keeping up the pretense to avoid conversation with Evelyn.
When Evelyn finished, Samuel cautiously cleared his throat. “It sounds serious,” he said. “I’ll certainly let your doctor know what I can. Now, before we go, can Nick ask you a few questions?”
“But there’s more,” Evelyn said. “I’ve got a bunion that hurts even when I’m laying in bed. I swear, it’s the size of a pumpkin. Pull up the sheet and take a look. Or if you want, you can run your fingers acrost it. I swear, you’ll never feel another that’s bigger. Then you’ll know why it causes me such suffering.”
“Well . . .” Samuel said. He sighed. “Why don’t you tell me about it instead?”
“Glad to, Pastor. See, the problem is I can’t reach down like I used to when I was younger. Was fun, then, peeling some of the dead skin off it myself. Like layers off an onion. You think that’s where they got the name bunion? ’Cause it’s like an onion? Fact is, that bunion makes my eyes water when I step on it wrong. . . .”
As Evelyn launched herself into further description of her foot ailments, I caught the woman in the other bed with one eye half open. She snapped it shut when she noticed me looking at her. I also noticed a pair of eyeglasses on the other bedside table. Plain brown plastic frames. Lenses thick and square. I slid my chair to the other bed. I leaned close to the other woman’s head.
“Ma’am,” I said in a low voice, “you have blurry vision, too, but afraid to talk about it?”
In the background, Evelyn’s voice rose and fell.
The other woman nodded, still refusing to open her eyes.
“Maybe I can help.” I stood from the chair. I took the other woman’s eyeglasses in my hand. “Evelyn,” I said, cutting her off in the middle of the description of a particularly difficult ingrown nail. “Try these.”
Evelyn took the first pair off her head and replaced them with the eyeglasses I extended. She blinked once or twice with her good eye, then clapped her hands with glee.
“That’s it!” she said. “That’s it! The Lord done give me back my eye and we didn’t even pray for it.”
She clapped her hands again. “And that ain’t been the only miracle in my life. There’s been plenty others. While I was birthing my first child, it seemed like the bleeding would never stop . . .”
I set the other eyeglasses on the bedside table of th
e other woman. “These are yours,” I whispered. “My guess is someone switched them by accident when they were cleaning the room.”
“Bless you,” she whispered. “Now maybe you can ask her your questions so she’ll talk about anything but her ailments.”
“I’ll do my best, ma’am.”
Chapter 12
When I finally did ask, Evelyn’s face lost all animation. She stared at me as if I were the ghost of Agnes Larrabee.
“Agnes Larrabee,” Evelyn repeated in a whisper. “Agnes Larrabee.”
She lost herself in memory, and when she spoke again, her voice seemed to come from a deep quiet place inside her. “Believe me, there was plenty about that family that no one on the outside knew.”
As Evelyn spoke, she stared straight ahead. She had folded her hands on her lap. Stillness fell upon her body as her memories sent her backward into time.
She described the Larrabee mansion on East Bay where it overlooked the harbor. It was square, a pastel yellow with two-story columns and a long, narrow front porch, with vines climbing its railings. The wicker porch furniture never held anyone on hot summer evenings.
I knew the exterior well. I remembered it because of how my mother had once described the history of the house to me.
A century and a half earlier, a shipbuilder had designed it for his fiancée in England. He sent for her after its completion, but she died during the journey across the Atlantic, and he’d sold it without spending a single night in any one of its ten magnificent bedrooms.
As a child, after my mother was gone, I had made a habit of finding a quiet place at the base of one of the massive pillars of the suspension bridge over the Cooper River. The shortest walk to my place of retreat took me up East Bay, so I passed it almost daily, each time remembering how my mother described the different generations that had occupied the house since the shipbuilder lost his true love at sea, each time feeling renewed sorrow at my mother’s absence.
But I knew nothing of the Larrabee mansion’s interior.
This, too, Evelyn described in a quiet voice that contrasted so strangely to the coarse manner she’d exhibited during the first part of our meeting. Perhaps the first voice she needed to prove she wasn’t afraid of old age and death.
If so, perhaps she spoke in her new quiet voice so as not to disturb the dust that had settled on her memories, recollections that would only remind her of how far past youth she’d traveled, and how little time remained until her own once vigorous body would become dust, with all those memories winking into the darkness of eternity at her passing.
Evelyn described the furniture permanently draped in cloths to protect the fabrics against the sun, and she spoke of the furnishings and paintings slowly disappearing from each room as Agnes Larrabee desperately leveraged them against bill collectors. First, the upper rooms farthest away from center of the house. And slowly, like cancer, the ravaging of more and more
of the interior rooms.
Evelyn told me about the great expanses of hardwood floor in empty rooms. Of dull walls broken only by brightly colored squares where the artwork had protected the paint beneath from the grime of dust and the bleaching of the sun.
She spoke of the massive table in the kitchen where servants prepared the meals. For though the furniture departed from the mansion, Agnes could not bear the prospect of altering a royal lifestyle that had always included the service of maids and cooks and gardeners.
Evelyn lingered in her description of the kitchen itself and of the dining room and the exquisite cutlery and dishes and plates, for Evelyn had been a kitchenmaid.
And finally, Evelyn described the night that she stood frozen in the dining room, hearing every word clearly as Agnes Larrabee directed a stream of hatred at Celia Harrison in the kitchen, only hours before Agnes Larrabee drank the death potion given to her on that tea tray by her grandson Timothy. . . .
**
Celia Harrison was pudgy and short, her black face shiny because she had a habit of wiping her greasy palms against her forehead. She stood in front of Agnes Larrabee, her head bowed.
“It has come to my attention that your daughter has actually consorted publicly with my grandson.” Agnes Larrabee spoke in a harsh whisper. She was an angular woman, with nothing graceful about any of her gestures. She stooped as she spoke, like a stick insect reaching for its prey. “I will not tolerate this. Especially in light of your daughter’s actions at the hardware store earlier today.”
Evelyn had been about to step into the kitchen from the dining room. Agnes had her back to the door, and Celia her eyes to the floor. Neither saw her, so Evelyn moved slowly back into the dining room, where earlier she had been stretching across a mahogany table with wax and a polishing cloth. Evelyn wished she could shut the French doors that connected the kitchen to the dining room, but she was too afraid of being seen. There was nothing predictable or logical about the anger of Agnes Larrabee. At the best of times, working in the mansion was a tightrope act of remaining just visible enough not to be accused of laziness but out of sight enough not to draw the old lady’s attention.
“It has been reported to me that your daughter actually led my grandson into the black neighborhood north of Calhoun. On several different occasions in the last month. Do you have any idea their destination?”
“No ma’am. Uh ken ax ’e navuh.”
“None of that Gullah nonsense with me. Get those marbles out of your mouth and speak clearly.”
“I ken ask de neighbors.”
“You ask no neighbors. I want no more attention brought to this. Your daughter is not permitted to chase my Timothy anymore. Furthermore, you will take your daughter tomorrow and apologize to Mr. Aimslick at the hardware store. He tells me that without quick action, the fire in the pile of newspapers would have spread to the rest of his store. And he swears he saw your daughter apply the match.”
“Ma’am?”
“You heard me correctly. Your daughter tried burning down the hardware store today. And she dragged my precious Timothy along with her. Into the shop and away from it. They will not see each other again. Am I understood?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I want you to call Samson to the kitchen. After that, you are dismissed. Permanently. You are no longer in my employ.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Evelyn remained in the dining room, afraid to come out where she might be noticed. Because of it, when Samson Elias arrived in the kitchen a few minutes later, she overheard that one-sided conversation too.
Samson was an ancient giant. Black as dull coal. Dressed immaculately in a dark tailored suit that did not conceal the bulge of his arms and shoulders.
“Samson, prepare the upstairs room. I will be there shortly with Master Timothy.”
“Yes ma’am.”
**
“The Jesus room?” I said to Evelyn.
“Mizz Larrabee just called it the upstairs room. What we servants called it was the Jesus room. ’Cause when Mizz Larrabee took the young master in the room—maybe once every few months—all what we heard was screaming and Mizz Larrabee calling on the name of Jesus. Then the young master, well, he’d never sleep in his own room. ’Cause the next morning, I’d go in to make up his bed, but there’d be nothing to make up. The sheets would be in place, perfect from when I’d made up the bed the day before.”
“You think they locked him up in the Jesus room all night?”
“Don’t know.” Evelyn anticipated my next question. “And I don’t know what the screaming was for. The door to the Jesus room was always locked. The only other person ever allowed in there was Samson. With him killed on the ’lectric chair for poisoning Mizz Larrabee, the only other person what knows about the inside of the Jesus room is the young master, and I ain’t heard much about his whereabouts ’cept the fact he got into bad ways and found himself in jail someplace. As for what was inside the Jesus room, fact is that night after the police left, Samson went in the Jesus room with a canvas s
ack and locked it behind him. When he come out, the sack was full and the room was empty. He didn’t bother locking it then.”
I thought about that for a few moments. “Do you remember the painting of Charles I?”
“The one that was stole and the newspapers went on and on about it and how Samson was the one that stole it?”
“Yes. You think Samson stole it that night?”
“No sir. I knew for sure he did not. I told the police that the young master Timothy took it a month before, but no one wanted to listen to me, ’specially since they was most concerned about the fact the boy accidentally poisoned Mizz Larrabee.” Evelyn nodded firmly, as if it were forty years earlier and she was trying to convince a detective at the scene of the crime. “Yes sir. It was Timothy Larrabee that took it. Gave it to Celia Harrison’s daughter. I know because I saw him take it from the mansion one day. I followed him outside and watched, ’cause I couldn’t figure out why he had need of it. And in the courtyard in the back, he gave it to that girl.”
“Celia Harrison’s daughter. Who started the fire in the hardware store.”
“Just like I said.”
“Any idea where Celia Harrison might be?”
“Heaven, I hope. She was a good woman.”
“Her daughter?” I asked.
Evelyn shook her head. “Got married. Don’t know what name she took along with her husband.”
“Crown of thorns,” I said. “Does that mean anything to you?”
Evelyn blinked a few times. “I’m trying to remember, but nothing comes to me. If all this is important enough, you might want to ask Richard Freedman. He’s still alive. He was just a puppy when he helped the gardener what worked for Mizz Larrabee. Now he’s some fancy millionaire, or so I heard. When Mizz Larrabee died, we all went our separate ways.”
I reached beneath my chair for my wrapped package. I stood and handed it to Evelyn.
“Thank you very much for your time,” I said.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Chocolates,” I answered. I’d picked them up on the way over.
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