Pendleton rose, a graceful movement that I would never be able to achieve with my plastic limb. He moved to a shelf, took a framed photograph, and handed it to me.
I glanced at it. A wedding photo. Pendleton and Claire.
I had not known.
I handed the photo back to him. I hoped he didn’t notice the tremble in my hand. A tremble which, if I truly did hold a saber, would have loosened my grip and let it clatter on the floor.
“Go ahead and tell the world,” Pendleton said. “You
may think you can destroy everything I have with your announcement, but you are wrong.”
He went back to his desk and sat on the edge of it. “Since the day you left town, Edgar Layton has bled me by using that same information. Sure, he had photos of you behind the steering wheel. He also had photos that showed blood on the passenger side, where I had no injuries that would have caused blood. Photos that showed the driver’s side wasn’t damaged enough to do what the accident did to your leg. He’s a smart man. He pieced it together and reeled me in slowly, never demanding enough to really hurt me. But through the years, he’s probably taken a million or two. From me. And, indirectly, from my wife’s family. That and a couple of disastrous investments left me in a position where I tried something stupid and desperate and cut some corners on my taxes. Even now, with that bloodsucking leech on his deathbed and his blackmail about to end, it’s too late for me. That accident has hurt me as much as it hurt you.”
“I doubt it,” I said.
A rueful smile crossed his face. “Every cloud has a silver lining,” he said. “Until today, I never thought that my troubles with the IRS would provide me with any kind of joy. But you, my long-lost cousin, have just proved the merit of that saying.”
The only thing I’d really heard him say was one phrase. My wife’s family. Claire’s family. I desperately wanted a place to sit now. I doubted I would be able to stand motionless for much longer.
“You might be happy to know that all my assets have been frozen,” he continued. “By the IRS. Until the final court judgment is rendered. I doubt it will be resolved in my favor.”
Another of his shrugs. “Fortunately, I am able to live off proceeds from my wife’s trust fund. You did recognize her from that photo?”
I didn’t trust my voice to answer. He studied my face with a cruel smile and came to his own conclusion.
“Ah yes,” he said, “you did recognize her. It has been greatly convenient, you know, the income from her protected trust fund. And while we are separated, my finances are so poor she doesn’t dare divorce me, afraid that I’ll try to take too much of it as a settlement.”
He allowed his smile to widen. “Tell the whole world about that car accident,” Pendleton said. “You can’t hurt me financially. I’m already at rock bottom. But you can hurt her. A scandal like this will play well, don’t you think? Especially given the mayor’s race she intends to enter next month. She’s spent ten years building her base for this and has a good chance, really. Or had, until you arrived with this monumental news.”
There my dream was. Not the red-hot coals of revenge. But ashes.
Pendleton chuckled. “I take it, then, you will not destroy her by going public?”
I had no answer.
“How about telling it to her privately?” he asked. “Have you done that?”
No answer. He knew I had not, or he would have heard it already from her.
Pendleton smoothed back his hair. “Let’s turn this around, shall we? You see, I really must remain married. I need her family money to live the Charleston life. If she and Helen discover that I killed Philip, my marriage will be over. No more family money. No more comfortable living. At that point, I won’t care if the entire world knows the truth about that accident, for I will have nothing left to lose. A man with nothing to lose is a dangerous man, wouldn’t you agree?”
He smiled, a carnivore. “Which means I believe I shall threaten you with the truth behind the car accident. If you tell her about it or tell anyone in private about the accident so that it reaches her, I’ll do the rest of the damage myself. I’ll be the one to take it to the media. It’ll end her run for mayor before it gets started. In other words, by telling anyone this nasty little secret, you’ll hurt her far more than you will me.”
In defeat, I struggled for the illusion of disdain, as if with a shaking hand, I reached for that imaginary sword from the floor at my feet.
“I remember,” I said, “how often you reminded me that you represent nothing but the finest in Charlestonian aristocracy. This civil resolution only proves it.”
“It’s an instinct,” he said, thrusting aside my feeble parry. “I can understand your admiration of it. Your family’s from the plantation side of the river. Civility is not expected of you or bred into you.”
My smile and sense of control had long faded, but I managed to keep my voice even. “Bad form, Pendleton, insulting parentage. Have a half hour? I’ll start on yours.”
“At least I know my parentage.”
There was silence as Pendleton let that hang. It took both of us back to the time on the beach when we were boys. He’d won then, and he’d won now.
I should have surrendered in this conversation long before. He knew it and I knew it.
“Good-bye,” I said. It was a poor defense.
Pendleton waited until my back was turned and my hand was on the doorknob. “By the way,” he asked, “how did it feel to find out that she and I had married?”
He assumed I’d long known. I had not. I fought the urge to turn around and make a stumbling, awkward tackle into his midsection. But if I turned, Pendleton would see on my face how it had felt.
“Good-bye, Pendleton,” I repeated.
“Stay away from her, Nick,” Pendleton called to my back. “She’s mine. Always will be.”
Chapter 6
I was in no mood to blithely walk among the tourists, not with defeat filling my belly like sour milk.
From Pendleton’s office, I wandered to the bustle of the market area. I simply wanted to be among noise and people, with nothing to remind me of my past and of my failures and of my failures to deal with my past.
In that, too, I failed.
For in walking the few blocks to the market, like the night before, I could not avoid seeing church steeples rise above the centuries-old stone buildings gathered at their bases like chicks around a comforting hen.
And I remembered my mother once pointing at a particular steeple for me.
It was a day like this one, when the sun had brought out songbirds and tourists in droves.
**
“See how it reaches for the sky,” she’d said. “Beautiful. White against a cloudless blue sky. Hard to miss, isn’t it?”
I had obliged, craning my head upward. “I guess.”
To me, at that age, pirate stories and war stories and escaped slave stories were exciting. Not church steeples.
“Now picture a full moon,” Mama said on that beautiful day of my memories. She dropped her voice to a dramatic hush. “With the city below dark and still. Silver light shining down on that great white steeple above all the shadowed buildings. Picture the silver moonlight on that steeple. Picture the steeple rising into the sky like a white angel, wings folded at its side.”
She whispered, “And then listen for a loud whistle, like ghosts screaming in the night.”
Screams were good in stories.
“Ghosts in the night?” I whispered back.
Mama squatted so that she was speaking into my ear. She spoke slowly, getting into the rhythm of another story. “Hear the long, high whistle. And fear for your life. You are living in this city more than a hundred years ago. That screaming whistle is the sound of Yankee cannonballs coming in through the night, fired from ships so far away that the thunder of cannon fire reaches you long after those deadly balls of iron have ripped away the roof of your house, smashed into your bedroom, scattered the flames of you
r fireplace. Around you, houses erupt into flame, the wails of frightened babies fill the night. Again and again comes that screaming whistle of the next cannonball as you lie there, eyes wide, wondering if this is the cannonball that will snuff out your own life when it lands. And all because that great white steeple rising into the darkness gives the Yankees
a target directly in the center of the sleeping city.”
“Here?” I asked. “Cannons?”
Cannons were good too. Very good.
“Here,” she said. “Cannons. Great guns of war. Pounding the city day after day after day.”
“Tell me why.” I was in the spell of Charleston’s tragic enchantment.
“Because of the war between the North and the South. Because Charleston was a proud city and believed it had nothing to fear. Because politicians on both sides of the war had put themselves into a situation where the only way out was to allow hundreds of thousands of soldiers to die first.”
She paused to search her memory.
“ ‘A city of ruins, of desolation,’ ” she quoted quietly, “ ‘of vacant houses, of widowed women, of rotting wharves, of deserted warehouses, of weed wild gardens, of miles of grass-grown streets, of acres of pitiful and voiceful barrenness—that is Charleston, wherein rebellion loftily reared its head five years ago.’ ”
She opened her eyes and gave me a crooked smile. “So wrote a journalist named Sidney Andrews in the year 1865.”
She gestured at the buildings around them. “Another woman wrote to a friend outside the city at the end of the war. She didn’t see what you see now. Instead . . .”
She closed her eyes again, drawing out another quote. “ ‘The houses were indescribable; the gable was out of one, the chimneys fallen from the next. Here a roof was shattered, there a piazza half gone, not a window remained. The streets looked as if piled with diamonds; the glass lay shivered so thick on the ground.’ ”
My mama had succeeded, as always, in taking me out of the present. I gazed around as if seeing the smoldering city, the crouched women in long dresses lifting the rubble to search for survivors.
We began walking again. She pointed at a block on the curb. “Carriage step. Where a horse-drawn carriage would stop so that women could step on that block to make it easier to get into the carriage. Later, I can show you a boot scrape, where people would scrape horse droppings from their shoes before entering a house because the streets were so dirty, they could not avoid stepping into manure. How the cobblestone streets were made with stones hauled across the ocean in ships that needed them for weight to keep them steady in storms. I could tell you about abandoned wine cellars beneath the sidewalks, now filled with rats. About earthquake bolts that hold a house together. About love stories and sword fights and pirates. This is your city, Nick. You can learn the stories and they will become yours, like they became mine.”
I took my mama’s hand and walked with her in silence until we were far enough away from St. Michael’s Church that when we stopped, we had the same view of the steeple again, but from the opposite direction.
I asked the question that had been bothering me. “If the steeple was white and it gave soldiers something to aim at with their cannons at night, why didn’t people do something about it?”
She had been waiting for that question, and she bent down and kissed me with a teacher’s thrill of accomplishment.
“They painted it black for the rest of the war,” she said. “They painted it black because it was better to get rid of its glory than face the harm that came with drawing attention to it.”
“I get it,” I said in my innocence. “Like running away.”
**
Now, all these years later, St. Michael’s steeple was still bright against the sky to remind me that it had survived because it had been better to be rid of its glory than draw attention to it.
I thought about Claire.
Once I had hoped that all that had been beautiful and glorious about our love for each other would survive if I ran away. If I rid myself of its glory.
But I’d been wrong.
Again, Pendleton had defeated me.
Chapter 7
Twenty-five hours earlier, I’d last stood
on the piazza of the deMarionne mansion, angry and confident.
Now, robbed by Pendleton of my chance for vindication, I had returned this evening only out of stubbornness and curiosity.
The stubbornness came from the determination not to give Helen deMarionne the satisfaction of thinking I had run from her again, for if I failed to arrive at my appointed time she would most surely think I had lost my nerve.
The curiosity came from that one phrase in the letter that had drawn me to Charleston.
Ask Helen deMarionne the truth. She knew your mother best.
Even so, I did not expect to add much to my knowledge. The old quarter of Charleston is a quirky, reclusive cloister, with rules of living among the high society far closer to the aristocratic inbred circles of ancient European royalty than to the crass openness of the rest of the Americas. Helen deMarionne had probably agreed to see me out of her own curiosity, and I expected she would indulge in her customary arrogance, take satisfaction in divulging little, then send me on my way.
Which I would not take personally.
I had long since learned I would never be part of Charleston. It was half the reason I had guided tourists during my fourteenth summer. The money I made was money I did not have to accept like crumbs from the Barrett table.
By my fifteenth summer, however, the independence granted by that money mattered little compared to time I could spend with Helen’s stepdaughter, Claire Eveleigh deMarionne. Against the alternative of money from slow walks with elderly nodding tourists, I gladly chose poverty and endless summer days on the beach with Claire.
I was always conscious that my presence in the household of the Charleston Barretts was an affair of charity because of my mother’s departure, so I had learned disdain for the Charleston heritage and money of which I would always remain an outsider.
It was not the deMarionne name, then, which drew me to Claire Eveleigh, but first and foremost, her soul. We each confided in the other, hiding nothing of fears and hopes and questions about the mysteries of life and adulthood, shy only about our increasing awareness of the other as more than a friend. Claire was truly beautiful—tall, lithe, athletic, having the form of a goddess in her sleek swimsuit—with short blonde hair that turned white against tanned skin as the summer progressed. There was no danger, however, that we might stray beyond the occasional kiss stolen in the ocean as high waves hid us from the beach. Our extreme chasteness was ensured by the excessive chaperoning of Helen deMarionne, who had no intention of seeing her stepdaughter stray into an unsuitable marriage.
Despite the barriers put in place by this chaperoning—
or by the separation of each successive winter while Claire attended a private school in Boston—despite the growing disapproval of Helen deMarionne, and despite obvious shortcomings of my financial future, four summers later—when I was nineteen and Claire was eighteen—we managed to escape long enough for a successful elopement and a brief honeymoon before returning to face the collective wrath of the deMarionnes and the Barretts.
It was a marriage that lasted only four days. Until the automobile accident. My exile from Charleston began upon leaving the hospital; I had not seen Claire nor spoken to her since.
**
The first love—discovered then lost—is an incredible potion of youth and unfulfilled desire and noble idealism never given the chance to tarnish or decay. For every person, the heart absorbs so thoroughly the perfume of this love that no matter how many layers of new memories are added, at times wisps of this perfume, as subtle and unpredictable as a dancing breeze, will escape the fabric around the heart to renew the old longings for something forever gone.
While time and events and exile from Charleston had blunted my loss, I had never fully escaped that perf
ume. Each slow measured step tonight to the deMarionne mansion had filled me again with the perfume of this lost love as surely as if I were sixteen or seventeen again, sneaking home late at night with Claire’s scent on my clothes adding giddiness to my steps.
Now, waiting on the piazza of the mansion as the echoes of my knocking against the door faded, I fought the bewildered pangs of sorrow that had taken me years to set aside.
Helen deMarionne had shown me no mercy decades earlier. I had no reason to expect it from her tonight.
**
Ella opened the door for me. With a curt nod, she invited me inside to the entrance hall.
She remained sullenly silent as she led me farther inside, where the entrance hall opened to fifteen-foot ceilings and to lights set hardly above a glow, lights that cast pinprick stars onto the dark glass of the tall, arched windows on all sides. In contrast to the heavy, warm air outside, the house carried the chill of air-conditioning, something I had always associated with the chill of Helen deMarionne.
The hall opened to the great central room of the house, with a suspended spiral staircase leading upward to the ballroom on the second floor and bedrooms on the third floor, the top of the spiral lost to sight in the depths of the shadows of a domed skylight.
The house was filled with the antique trappings of stolen nobility—marble Fu lions, one on top of each side of the fireplace mantel, taken from the Imperial Palace during the Boxer Rebellion; a coat of arms of a Russian czar; a jade Fabergé box on a Chippendale end table; mirrors framed with gilded gold; the dozens of other items accumulated and hoarded by the family over the generations.
As I followed Ella to the rear of the house, I had a glimpse of the dining room on the far side of the central room. It had not changed from my memory of it; the huge mahogany table was set for twenty with the porcelain dishes from Queen Victoria, matching silverware, and needlework linen napkins carefully arranged as if guests were expected any moment.
Out of the Shadows (Nick Barrett Charleston series) Page 5
