Kate swallowed. “People said things about her? About her relationships with men?”
Rose stood suddenly, as if in protest. “People are imbeciles, generally speaking. And repeat whatever comes to them, unexamined. Sarah Grace,” she added hotly, “was never unfaithful to your father. And Heyward behaved, as was his wont, like a damned fool.”
Kate sat slack-jawed at this vehement defense of her mother that seemed to imply there’d been plenty said in opposition. “Rose, I talked with someone at the College of Charleston who insisted that he, for one, didn’t believe my mother capable of the atrocity—which implied some people did. Do you have any idea what he could have been talking about?”
“No. Decidedly not,” Rose said in a tone far less decided.
Rose brushed invisible crumbs from her linen skirts with gusto. “That, my dear, is all I have to say on the subject—and it was doubtless already more than I ought. Do let’s switch topics, shall we?”
Kate took a moment to recover. Briskly, Rose marched about the piazza, stacking teacups and saucers onto a wicker side table. Her ramrod-straight posture and her back toward Kate said she was done with that portion of their conversation and there was no going back.
Reaching for her wallet inside her backpack, Kate fished between dollar bills. “I haven’t shown you this yet, I don’t think. This tiny key. And this scrap of a name, Palmetto 8, left in my mother’s things. I don’t suppose you have any idea what it could be.”
Rose examined the key in her wrinkled hand. “I wish I did, Katherine. I do wish that I did.” She lifted the watch at her wrist. “Oh my. My contractor, Mr. Lambeth, is coming to begin sanding the floors in the room adjacent. Which I assured him would be convenient, since I will be running an errand.”
Disappointed, Kate glanced up from the journal. “That’s right. You said you had another commitment. I don’t suppose . . .”
“It’s Thursday,” Rose said—as if that were sufficient.
With a wistful glance down at the journals and letters splayed there, Kate packed up her notes and moved reluctantly toward the stairs.
“On Thursday, one banks. Fridays being the day weekly wage earners come hording in.” From her rolltop desk, Rose drew several papers, including what appeared to be bank statements and a letter with an embossed letterhead. In one corner of the stationery was a gold palm tree.
Or, given the state tree here, Kate reminded herself, it was more likely a palmetto.
Plucking the Palmetto 8 scrap attached to the tiny key from her wallet, Kate squinted at the number eight, nearly flat on one side. Unless . . . Could the eight be an uppercase B instead?
Palmetto B.
As in Palmetto Bank?
Kate spun back toward the letter gripped in Rose’s hand. “Actually, Rose, I wonder if I might walk with you.” She held up the key with its scrap. “What if this was part of the words Palmetto Bank? And what if the key went to—”
“A safe-deposit box.” Rose snapped her fingers. “Lord, I feel like a complete, sugarcoated fool. Come on now, Katherine. Let’s see if your pretty little twenty-five-year-old legs can walk as fast as mine do.”
Rose ignored the crosswalks and glided diagonally across the street. She paused as a middle-aged tourist wobbled ahead of them on the sidewalk, the effort of running making her short denim skirt ride too high on her doughy, undercooked legs.
Rose’s lids dropped to half-mast. “Has the use of a mirror gone out of fashion entirely?”
Kate hurried to catch up as they reached Broad Street, and Rose, purse clutched tightly, marched toward the towering doors on the corner.
Just before the bank’s entrance, Kate nodded to the sign etched in gold overhead. “Palmetto Bank,” she read aloud. Then pulled the key with its Palmetto B scrap from her wallet again. She hauled on the heavy door. “Shall we give it a try?”
A soft ripple of whispers followed them in, like the far reach of a wave shifting shells on the shore.
“Does everyone here know you?” Kate whispered.
“That would be likely, yes. And there will be the usual nonsensical fawning remarks on my age: That hair! Still thick in her eighties! How handsome she must have been in her day . . . as if the days one could claim as one’s own ended with the first varicose vein.”
Across the full length of the bank, Rose carried herself, shoulders back, to the manager’s desk, where a man in a glossy gray suit stood, his wide-set eyes lifting to the two women.
“Yes? I’m a bit busy at the moment.”
“I am Mrs. Lila Rose Manigault Pinckney.”
A pause.
Then the manager bolted up from his seat. “Well, now. My mistake. I’m still a bit new. And not enough coffee this morning.” He nudged her. “Or too much Captain Morgan last night.”
Rose skewered him with a look.
But he tittered on: “Mrs. Pinckney, let me just say it’s an honor. And how can Palmetto Bank assist you two beautiful ladies today?”
“As I’ve no immediate plans to consolidate my accounts from other institutions into this bank, you needn’t overplay the toady. So you are new in this position, Mr. . . .” Rose glanced at the gold tag pinned to the too-glossy suit. “Vonnit.” One silver eyebrow arched. “Mr. Grich Vonnit.”
He pitched toward her like they were intimate friends. “An old nickname.” He nudged her again.
“An ill-advised one.” Rose half lowered her eyelids. “Actually, I remember you now, vaguely, as one of the young Turks who went to prep school with my second cousin’s son.”
The manager puffed out his chest. “How can I help you, Mrs. Pinckney?”
“May I. How may you help. I’ve come with a question about the ownership of one of your safe-deposit boxes.”
“Oh, now, Mrs. Pinckney, ma’am, all that information would be confidential—after all, they’re safe-deposit boxes, right?” He grinned.
She did not.
“I should have added, Mr. Vonnit, that during the time I served on the board of your school, it seems there was a certain C-minus student giving some trouble, a pimple-faced prankster who wore mirrors on his sneakers and stood up close to the girls when they wore skirts.”
Grich Vonnit’s eyes rounded, and his unfortunate skin blushed.
“I recommended against expulsion at the time, though I did wonder if the student’s poor judgment might not come back to haunt him in later life. It is such a shame, don’t you think, when the mistakes of our youth follow us into the present?”
He cleared his throat. “I appreciate your not mentioning that. To anyone here.”
“And I appreciate your cooperation with my request.” She surveyed him coolly. “If you would be so good as to tell us whether or not you have a safe-deposit box here in the name of Sarah Grace Drayton, we would be most obliged.”
Clacking away at his keyboard, Grich Vonnit scanned his computer screen. “I’m afraid there’s nothing, ladies.” The manager started to rise.
But Rose placed a frail hand on his shoulder—which sat him back down.
“Try Sarah Grace Ravenel,” Kate suggested. And then it hit her. “Try that together with the name Katherine Drayton.”
A sulk seeping into his professional smile, the manager settled back over the keyboard and clacked away. “Aha!” Vonnit threw both arms of the shiny gray suit up over his head.
Rose’s eyelids dropped back to half-mast. “Have we made a touchdown, Mr. Vonnit?”
Kate’s hand shook as she rubbed the key between two fingers. “A safe-deposit box.”
“Your wish, ladies, is my command.” Then he stopped, turning to Kate. “But unless you’re Sarah Grace Ravenel in the flesh, I can’t let you back to the box. Palmetto Bank policy.”
Rose pulled herself to full height. “I can see, naturally, the need for policy—for the general public. In this case, however, my young friend here, who holds, as you see, the key to the box, is the daughter of the recently deceased Sarah Grace Ravenel.”
He chewed on a bottom lip. “You got a death certificate on you?”
Rose patted his arm. “No doubt, young man, you can imagine the impracticality of that.”
“Palmetto Bank policy says I can only let the owner back to the box.”
“Given that my young friend here is holding the key, and given that her mother is recently deceased and she is the only living heir, and given that I do so hope to be able to keep to myself the unfortunate circumstances from the past by which I remember your name, Mr. Vonnit, I would imagine you might want to escort us now to the box.” Lila Rose Pinckney smiled at the young man.
Head down, he thrust his hands into his pockets. Sighing, he motioned for them to follow.
Kate tipped her head close to Rose’s as they walked. “You know what people whisper about you, Rose, don’t you?”
“Enlighten me, sugar.”
“How Mrs. Lila Rose Manigault Pinckney always gets her way.”
Rose smoothed the pleats of her peach linen skirt. “And why would it be otherwise?”
Kate’s legs and arms had gone numb as she followed Grich Vonnit back to the locked room with the boxes.
“This particular box,” he pronounced, “was paid for in advance for the entire calendar year. Paid up again last week.”
Kate shook her head. “A payment was made last week?”
“That’s what our records say. And our records are never wrong.”
“That can’t be. My mother died several weeks ago.”
Kate and Rose exchanged glances.
Vonnit shrugged. “Somebody paid for it. And has been paying for it the past twenty-five years. Our largest size.”
“This whole thing makes no sense,” Kate whispered to Rose. “She wasn’t a jewels or bank bonds kind of person.”
Rose patted her arm. “That is God’s honest truth. Yes. I remember that well.”
“You do?”
“In those months she was engaged to your father, she arrived at the St. Cecilia Ball with nothing around her neck—not one strand of diamonds or pearls. Despite, I understood, all Heyward’s offers to provide them.” She smiled with fondness. “For all Sarah Grace’s diminutive sweetness, I always suspected a streak of the renegade. Bless her.”
What was it that Dr. Sutpen had said about Sarah Grace? She cared little for how people talked?
Vonnit tapped his shoe on the floor with barely restrained impatience, but both women ignored him.
“She died with nothing in assets. With,” Kate added under her breath, “one notable exception. Which was missing from her things I gathered up from our house after she died.”
Rose placed a forefinger on her chin. “Yes, that great block of a diamond—the engagement ring Heyward gave her. My Lord, I recall how it looked on her tiny finger: like a kind of glittering membership card she was supposed to flash to be let in the door. Maybe that was Heyward’s hope in giving it to her.” Rose stopped, her eyes cutting to Kate’s. “Once again, I have said more than I’d set out to do. I appear to be slipping in my post-younger years.”
Kate squeezed her hand. “I suspect you had it just about right. Thank you.”
The safe-deposit box was up ahead, and Grich Vonnit gave an obsequious sweep of an arm, indicating that Kate should try the key.
“I typically take my leave at this point,” Vonnit was saying, “and allow the customer time to review a drawer’s contents in privacy.”
“Rose, would you stay with me? It sounds crazy, but I’m kind of nervous.” As an aside, she added, “Mr. Vonnit, you’re welcome to stay.”
A little too eagerly, Vonnit gushed, “It would be my pleasure.”
Rose slipped her arm around Kate’s waist. “Whatever you need. And listen to me, Katie.”
Kate blinked at the name—that only her mother had used.
She gripped Kate’s hand in hers tightly. “Whatever’s in there or not, that’s not going to change what you know of your momma. The kind of sweetness she had. You hear?”
Weakly, Kate nodded.
Atrocity, Sutpen had said. I never believed her capable of an atrocity.
Vonnit’s thumbs smoothed the insides of his lapels. The bank manager helped Kate slide the long, deep box to the table nearby. Inserting the key, Kate inhaled, then turned it clockwise.
The three of them stood there unspeaking. Gaping.
At seashells.
A long, deep drawer full of seashells. All shapes and sizes. And Kate knew all their names.
What’s this one called, Mommy? she’d demanded, landing with a splat in the surf and scooping up a handful of shells.
Kneeling beside her, Sarah Grace had dumped the pink plastic pail they’d been using to hoard that morning’s haul of shells. One by one, she’d held up each treasure: a Scotch bonnet and a banded tulip, a gray lightning whelk and a pink channeled whelk, a silver moon snail’s shell and a keyhole sand dollar, a white angel wing and a black striated ponderous ark shell, red sunset clams, a brown horse conch shell, a mushroom coral, and iridescent oyster shells.
Her chest tight, Kate scooped up two handfuls now. “Sarah Grace’s idea of riches. Not money. Not things you can buy. But this. Things you have to find for yourself. Things of beauty.” Eyes filling, she ran a finger over a large conch.
Rose’s arm had not left her waist, and it pulled her in now. Kate leaned into her and closed her eyes against the tears welling again.
“Rose, this is so like my momma. A treasure in shells. And more unanswered questions.”
Grich Vonnit cleared his throat. “Perhaps you two ladies would like to confirm that the entire contents would be to Ms. Drayton’s satisfaction? And sign here?”
Ignoring him, Kate turned the box on its side. Let the shells spill to the table.
Beneath was a small blue velvet box, identical to the one Kate had found in her mother’s possessions—the one that contained the earrings instead of the rings. Lifting the box, her eyes went to Rose. Her voice shook: “The one thing, maybe, she had of value.”
“Lands.” Rose brushed the velvet with one finger.
Kate held it a moment unopened.
Slowly, she lifted the velvet lid.
The slot for the rings was empty.
Kate stared at where they should have been.
And fluttering to the table from inside the box was a slip of yellowed notebook paper torn from a larger piece. Numbly, Kate reached for it.
Sarah Grace had penned a note—her handwriting shakier than usual.
My precious Kate,
If you’re looking here for my rings, then you know at least part of my story. I am so deeply sorry for the pain this empty box and what you may be learning of me have surely caused you. Remember that everything I had in life was yours, paltry as that was.
If only for the peace of your own heart, I hope you can come to terms as best you are able with all my unforgivable failures to act: the done—and all I left undone.
But how I have loved you, my daughter.
Tears spilling onto her cheeks, Kate stared at the note. And the empty box.
What you may be learning of me.
All my unforgivable failures to act.
Gripped by a spasm of sorrow for Sarah Grace—so shut off, even from her own daughter—and missing her mother so much it nearly doubled her over, Kate troweled her hands into the shells and let them sift through her fingers. She closed her eyes against what she saw there on the bank table before her.
Saw. But could not understand.
Chapter 25
1822
Tom ducked out the side door of his forge and let the wind off the harbor clear his head for a moment. He’d worked all through the early morning in a frenzy, a set of farm tools propped at the forge as his cover for the order he was supposedly filling—but he jumped each time the front door flew open. Now the coffin that sat along the far wall near the alley was filled, its lid concealing just-crafted pikes and hatchets and spears.
Sweating, although the day was
n’t yet hot, Tom stood behind his oak counter and faced the front door. Eyes on the door and hands shaking, feeling their way, Tom fumbled under the counter as he lifted bullets one by one out of the mold and dropped them in a barrel filled with rice.
A clamor just outside his shop door. A man’s shout.
Tom crammed the rest of the bullets still in their mold into the barrel of rice.
Now a child’s cry of pain.
Tom stepped to the paned windows of his shop. Three top hats towered just outside. A vicious thump sounded on his door.
He gave a quick backward glance to be sure the coffin was covered—and across it he tossed several of the cloths he used when painting wrought iron black so that it appeared to be a kind of workbench piled with stained rags. The barrel of rice with its buried bullets sat where he’d left it. Of course that’s where it is—like bullets would somehow move themselves out of hiding at the mere presence of a white man. Still, Tom’s hand shook as he opened the door.
But the thump must not have been a demand for him to open. The three white men stood there glaring at something a few feet away, James Hamilton’s walking stick apparently having fallen against the door. Colonel Drayton was tapping the end loop of his riding crop against his chin, as if contemplating the scene. But Jackson Pinckney’s mouth twisted into contempt.
Ned Bennett stood, bending over a child. “What’d you call the buckruh, child?”
Tapping the brim of his top hat lower over his eyes, Pinckney stepped closer. “What vile thing was it he said?”
The flat of Ned Bennett’s hand landed on the mulatto boy’s cheek. “Don’t you ever call a white man that again!”
The boy cowered, his eyes bright circles of fear. “Didn’t say nothing but what I heard.”
“What was it he said, boy?” Hamilton demanded.
Ned shook his head, doleful, and his tone took on the extra measure of calm and servility he reserved for crises—which could only mean, Tom realized, that Ned was worried. “It don’t bear repeating—I swear it don’t. Could hardly say it out loud. He won’t never say it again, though. You can be sure of that.” Ned cocked back his hand again.
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