“I don’t think you got off on the right foot with Lawrence,” Geoffrey teased.
“Don’t be annoying. The man’s a cad and a bounder,” she declared.
“I’d say he’s a true son of the Old South.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“For one thing, he likes women to know their place.”
“Which means they shouldn’t have any opinions contrary to his own?”
“Or at least have the sense not to voice them.”
“You’ve changed, Geoffrey,” Prudence seethed. “And you’re getting worse by the day.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. Ever since we got here you’ve been melting into the landscape.” She fumbled for exactly the right words. “You’re not the same person you were in New York. You’ve got an accent that’s getting thicker by the day, you don’t seem able to look critically at anything around you, and I’d swear you feel a kinship with that disgusting Lawrence Bennett. What did you say to him?”
“I told him I’d see to it you didn’t stick your pretty little Yankee nose in where it didn’t belong.”
For once, Geoffrey had left her speechless. There was absolutely nothing more Prudence wanted to say to him.
Ever again.
CHAPTER 8
Aunt Jessa wasn’t surprised and she wasn’t afraid.
She was too old to run and she wasn’t strong enough to fight.
That made what he’d come to do quicker and easier.
It was all over before he’d gotten much of a chance to enjoy it.
* * *
Alone in her Seapoint bedroom, looking out at the vast emptiness of the Atlantic Ocean, Prudence fought against the temptation to give in. To surrender to whatever it was that had already affected Geoffrey and was gradually transforming him into someone she hardly recognized.
She tried to analyze what the difference was, but it was hard to quantify. Most of the time he appeared to be the same supportive partner upon whom she had come to rely, and yet some acutely logical and observant part of him was slipping away. No, that wasn’t quite right. The sharp edges of the intelligence that made him so formidable an investigator seemed to have softened. It was as though a part of his brain had decided not to take note of certain things, to pass over others without judging or assessing them.
She realized then how often she thought of Geoffrey in terms of his Pinkerton past. Although she knew almost no details of any of the cases on which he had worked or the assignments he had undertaken, that was the side of him she knew best—the epitome of detective. Of his private life, and especially his family, she knew next to nothing. He was born in North Carolina, had been sent North to boarding school where he met and befriended her late fiancé shortly after the war ended, was independently wealthy, and at some point, had a short but successful career with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
That was it. The sum total of the man.
Whatever else she did or did not accomplish before they returned to New York, she decided that resolving the enigma of Geoffrey Hunter would be of crucial, pivotal importance in the life she was carving out for herself.
Or the one they might create together.
Eleanor’s fate seemed to mingle with the dark shadows of Geoffrey’s past.
If she could understand one, would she unravel the mystery of the other?
* * *
A soft knock roused Prudence from the reverie into which she had drifted, lulled into woolgathering by the soft sea air, the warmth of the day, and a fatigue that was as much emotional as it was physical.
Before she could call out an invitation to enter, Eleanor’s mother pushed open the door and stepped inside. She looked terrible. Ravaged, desolate of eye and heart, drained of the lifeblood that was her daughter. In her hands she held the jewelry box containing the pearls worn on their wedding days by three generations of her family’s women. She held the case out to Prudence, who took it from Abigail’s trembling fingers and laid it on the table where they had shared early morning coffee two days ago.
“When I next see her, Prudence,” her friend’s mother whispered, “I’d like her to be wearing the pearls. Her father won’t want her to be buried in them. He’s a practical man; he’ll say they’re too valuable to be thrown away like that.” She laid a hand on the velvet box, but didn’t raise the lid. “No one but another woman would understand. Eleanor was my only child, my only daughter. I couldn’t bear it if Philip were to sell them and some stranger draped them around her neck. I couldn’t bear it.”
“I dressed her in her veil and wedding gown this morning, Mrs. Dickson,” Prudence said. “I promise I’ll place the pearls on her myself. She’ll be a truly beautiful bride.”
“Yes, she will be. A beautiful bride.” Abigail touched Prudence gently on one cheek, then drifted out of the room like a meandering ghost, one hand lightly touching a table, a chair, the doorframe as she groped her way back to her room and her empty life.
* * *
“Aunt Jessa come back while you was at Wildacre with Mr. Teddy yestidday,” a skinny little girl sitting on a three-legged stool by the cellar door told Prudence. “She say give you this.” On the palm of her hand lay a bracelet made of nine small shells strung evenly on a braid of seagrass. Knotted between each shell was a round white pebble painted with an elongated black oval.
“You got to wear it, miss,” the skinny little girl said, slipping the bracelet on Prudence’s wrist before she could protest. “It protect you ’gainst the evil eye. Aunt Jessa make it her own self and say the words. I only ever saw one other like it,” she finished enviously. “You got the good juju now.” Then she picked up her stool and ran off in the direction of the servants’ dining room.
Prudence heard the slam of an outer door and knew she’d lost any chance of questioning her. When she tried to pull the amulet over her hand to remove it, the seagrass seemed to have shrunk. It wouldn’t budge. Never mind, she thought, I’ll take a pair of scissors to it later.
Carrying the jewelry box containing the precious pearls, Prudence made her way into the cellar, following the lantern light shining up the staircase. This time there was no white-turbaned woman waiting for her.
Like the effigy of a knight’s lady, Eleanor lay atop the decanting table, waiting for the elaborate coffin ordered from the mainland undertaker whose card Lawrence Bennett had given Geoffrey. Prudence looped the rope of pearls around the dead woman’s neck and fastened the diamond clasp.
As her mother had predicted, Eleanor was a beautiful bride.
* * *
Twilight came early that late afternoon, brought on by banks of heavy clouds rolling in across the ocean to cover the island in a soft gray pall that smelled of salt and seaweed. The air cooled, but without thunder or the threat of rain. The canopy of the live oaks wore a translucent sheen that turned the narrow dark green leaves silver.
Standing on the balcony outside her bedroom, Prudence tried to imagine Eleanor’s flight across Seapoint’s lawns into the shadows of the forest. She opened the French door into her friend’s room, picked up a scarf left lying on a chaise longue, and pressed it to her face. Eleanor’s familiar cologne enveloped her in a wave of memory and grief.
Moments later Prudence herself disappeared into the gloom beneath the twisted branches of the live oaks.
* * *
The walking was easy at first. There were no marked or raked-shell paths, but deer and wild pigs had etched out trails that wound toward springs of fresh water and dense thickets of saw palmetto and wax myrtle in which to hide and birth their young.
Prudence hadn’t stopped to put on a shawl against the chill of the deep shade; now she wished she had as drops of early dew trickled onto her hair and arms. Her house shoes were delicate slippers made of thin, soft leather through which she could feel the sand and hard-as-rock acorns beneath her feet.
She had no purpose in mind other
than to re-create Eleanor’s odyssey, no rationale other than the conviction that if she trod in her footsteps she might somehow enter her friend’s mind.
Maybe it’s the cat’s-eye stones in the shell bracelet working their white magic, she thought, running a tentative finger along their polished surfaces. They were as smooth as the satiny pearls that would go into the ground with Eleanor.
Prudence walked in a halo of silence as she penetrated deeper into the woods. Ahead and behind her she could hear the scuffling of squirrels and small rodents, the warbling and squawks of sea and land birds, the swish of wind through trees and grasses. She stopped frequently to look around, to listen, to wait for Eleanor’s voice in her head.
But nothing happened. The small, scampering animals reminded her of the ones she saw and heard in Central Park, but the forest itself remained a collection of unfamiliar trees and plants. There were no voices in her head, nothing but frustration and a growing sense of unease to keep her company.
What had she been thinking to come out here alone? Geoffrey would be furious if he found out how impulsively she’d acted. And then, a split second later: What right does he have to think he can tell me what to do? She marched along to the rhythm of a mental dialogue that would probably never find voice but was immensely satisfying. The arguments she made to her silent partner were as well reasoned as any she could hope to present to a jury. And, unlike what had seemed to occur so often since they’d come to the island, her imaginary Geoffrey listened and forebore from criticizing her. It was a wonderful conversation. She won every point she attempted to make. Hands down.
It was time to turn around. She had no idea how deeply she’d penetrated the forest or how long she had been gone from the house. The only other occasion on which she’d come this way was with the search party that had hoped to find Eleanor alive. She’d been on horseback then, surrounded by islanders who knew their way through foliage that looked exactly alike in all directions. She didn’t think she had anything to fear from a doe, but she certainly didn’t want to encounter a wild pig on one of these narrow paths.
Her shoes were ruined, the leather sopping wet and muddy. The hem of her dress had been snagged so many times by jagged saw palmetto that it looked as though a mischievous child had taken a pair of scissors to it. She tried to twist her hair back on top of her head where it belonged, but the pins had fallen out long ago without her noticing it. Somehow, she’d have to find her way back to Seapoint, sneak into the house without anyone seeing her, then appear in the dining room for dinner as though she’d done nothing more exciting this afternoon than nap in her bedroom.
She could do it, she decided. Prudence MacKenzie had been in far worse predicaments before and come out of them unscathed. Relatively speaking.
All she had to do was retrace her steps. Keep her eyes out for her footprints in the damp, leaf-strewn sand, follow the trail she’d left behind, and hurry! No dawdling, no pretend conversations with Geoffrey, no wistful imaginings that the ghost of Eleanor would whisper in her ear. Hurry!
The eyes began to track her as soon as she took the first wrong turn toward the swamp instead of the house. By the time she realized that the scuffed footprints she could barely make out were too big to be hers, it was too late. She was well and truly lost.
Don’t panic, she told herself. The rapid thumping of her heart nearly deafened her. Find the sun. It should be sinking in the west, and the rear balconies of Seapoint face west. But the sun was hidden behind the clouds, not a single streak of red or gold penetrating the dense gray. How much longer before true darkness descended? Prudence shuddered and then began to shake—cold, wet, and suddenly afraid of what the next few hours would bring.
* * *
The skinny little girl saw the pretty lady Aunt Jessa was protecting walk into the live oaks and knew right away she was headed toward trouble. Her kind of folk didn’t have no business messing around where the swamp could reach out and pull them down. No, sir. They was things in the trees and the mud that didn’t bear thinking on.
But what was she gonna do about it? You didn’t go to Aunt Jessa’s cabin without no invitation, and the skinny little girl had been told in no uncertain terms to stay away. Deliver the juju amulet, make sure it got on the pretty lady’s wrist, then take herself out of the picture. Two out of three weren’t bad. She’d just hung around the kitchen in case someone had food that needed getting rid of. The skinny little girl was always hungry.
While she was cogitating, the handsome Yankee who wasn’t really what everybody thought he was came out onto the lawn and sauntered down to the beach. When he returned a few minutes later, he was walking faster and looking all around, like he’d gone out after someone and had come up short.
It didn’t take but a rabbit-tail minute to make up her mind.
The skinny little girl told him what she’d seen. “She wearing the juju bracelet,” she added when he dropped a coin into her outstretched hand. “Cain’t nothing too bad happen to her.”
But Geoffrey Hunter knew there wasn’t enough white magic in the world to matter much if the black gris-gris was too strong.
* * *
He saw the shimmer of her dress through the trees and stepped off the deer path.
She was walking slowly, head down, stopping every now and then to study the trail so she wouldn’t accidentally double back on herself.
Geoffrey grinned and flattened his back against a tree trunk. It might take her a while, but it looked like she was going to find her way home without him. Probably best to let her do it on her own. Keep an eye on her, but don’t interfere. She was in a prickly enough temper as it was.
The first thing he thought when he saw the shadow looming behind her was bear! But there hadn’t been any black bears on the barrier islands since the plantation owners cleared and planted the land, driving the creatures inland toward the mountains. Panthers liked to stretch out along a thick live oak limb and wait for dinner to pass by below, and wild pigs didn’t rear back on their hind legs to look like a man with outstretched arms. Then again, veils of Spanish moss hung nearly to the ground from some of the trees, twisting and turning like tattered phantom apparitions.
“Prudence,” he called, loud enough to frighten away anything on four feet.
Palmetto leaves rattled noisily as something large pushed its way through them. Whatever it had been was gone before he could get a good look at it.
Prudence’s head snapped up, and for a moment he saw a look of pure relief cross her face. Then her features arranged themselves into a ferocious scowl and she stamped one muddy foot. “Did you follow me?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. It was the only sensible answer to give.
“Then what are you doing out here?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
Stalemate. But the shadow, whatever it was, had disappeared. If something, or someone, had been stalking Prudence, Geoffrey’s arrival and his shout had scared it away.
“We might as well walk back together,” he said, ignoring Prudence’s flyaway hair and ruined skirts. “If you don’t mind the company.”
“On one condition. I don’t want to hear a word about how many times you told me to be careful out here.” There was a determined ring to her voice that told him she wasn’t going to back down.
“I promise,” he said, taking off his jacket to wrap it around her cold, damp shoulders. He thought she sagged against him for a moment in sheer gratitude at having been found. But Prudence being Prudence, the moment of weakness was brief and unacknowledged.
When they resumed walking, arm in arm, she looked straight ahead and never slowed down or faltered.
* * *
Aunt Jessa lay still and broken in the cabin where she’d strung the amulet against the evil eye. Her blood spattered the floor and dotted the walls. Beads and shells and juju dolls lay scattered around her, crushed and ground into the wood planking. The sheets and blankets had been torn from her bed, the corn shuck mattress
hacked to pieces.
Somebody had looked hard and long for something.
And hadn’t found it.
CHAPTER 9
Teddy came for them early the next morning.
“I got the news right after sunup,” he said, gulping a cup of coffee in the Seapoint dining room. “We’ll have to hurry before everything gets cleaned up. I told Jonah not to let anyone touch her or the cabin, but that may not stop them from trying to wash the body.”
“Prudence?” Geoffrey was already on his feet.
“I’m coming,” she said. “Give me ten minutes to get my boots and riding skirt on.”
“Ten minutes. No more.”
* * *
“All Jonah would say was that it was bad, real bad.” Teddy kept his voice low as he and Geoffrey waited for two Seapoint horses to be saddled and brought from the stables.
“Has someone gone after the sheriff?” Prudence was slightly out of breath. She’d changed into riding clothes and run as quickly down the stairs as she could, afraid they would start off without her.
“The sheriff won’t be coming,” Teddy answered.
“Why not?”
“That’s not the way things are done down here, Prudence,” Geoffrey said quietly. He expected her to explode, and she did.
“That’s the most appalling thing I’ve ever heard! A harmless old woman is murdered and no white person cares?”
“I care,” Teddy said. “She mothered me from the time I was born until I went away to school. She was always there when I came home on vacation. We shared a life. I don’t expect you to understand how that could be, but it’s true.”
Prudence sputtered at the effrontery and downright gall of Teddy’s assertion, but she had no words to refute it.
Geoffrey watched the play of indignant emotions across her face and turned away, unwilling for her to read what he was thinking. He understood exactly what Teddy had felt for the former slave he couldn’t save from a brutal death. It was the dichotomy of the South, one of the mysteries that both repelled and attracted him.
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