by Carolyn Hart
After a moment’s silence, Cissy said hesitantly, “I may have been the last person to talk to her.” She frowned in recollection. “We had a glass of wine in the library. I tried to talk her into staying until Aunt Carrie came back.”
“What did she say?” Carrie asked sharply.
Cissy looked uncomfortable.
“Go ahead,” Carrie insisted.
Reluctantly, Cissy continued. “You have to remember that Mary Ellen was furious. As much at her husband as at you.”
“What did she say?”
Cissy looked down at the diamonds sparkling on her finger. “She said you were stubborn as a goat, but not any more stubborn than she was. I knew about the scene she and Tom had on the pier. So I asked her, and maybe I shouldn’t have, but I asked her what she was going to do. She said she was going to show Tom that no one could order her to do anything. Besides, she said it was too dangerous to leave with the storm coming. The last I saw of her, she was heading back down to the boat to tell him they were going to lie to.” Cissy shrugged. “Actually, I thought she would prevail. You know what a strong personality she had. I also thought Tom would have better sense than to set sail in that kind of weather. It never occurred to me that they’d leave. When we found the boat gone the next morning, I couldn’t believe it.”
Carrie Devereaux looked incredibly old and weary. She looked around the room at each of them. “But don’t you see, this leaves us where we’ve always been—with the boat sailing and never being seen again. We always thought it had gone down and that everyone was lost at sea. Yet now we know Leah and Louisa survived. What happened to Tom and Mary Ellen, and to The New Star? And why did Louisa run away to Texas, taking Leah with her? In her letter, she said she must have been wrong about what happened the night of the storm. For God’s sake, what did happen?”
Her plea hung in the air. No one moved or spoke, but to Leah, the atmosphere of strain in the library was plainly evident. She saw it in the chalky white of Cissy’s face, in the studied emptiness of John Edward’s eyes, in the tautness of Merrick’s hunched shoulders. They’d all been here that night. Did one of them know more than he was willing to admit?
John Edward spoke finally. “The next morning . . .” He paused and swallowed. “I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but the next morning when I came down to the library, I noticed something funny.” He glanced at the east wall, and everyone else did, too. “Do you remember the silver dueling pistols that hung there among the other guns?”
Carrie Devereaux nodded slowly.
“They were gone.”
Chapter Seven
Leah lay sleepless in the four-poster, staring with unseeing eyes at the pattern of moonlight against the wall. Images whirled in her mind. She saw a slate-gray sky and trees bending beneath the wind; a slender, angry young woman storming up a hill toward a house that had once been her home—and a set of dueling pistols hanging against the library wall.
She moved restlessly. What did it all mean? She didn’t know, but she remembered that years ago she’d opened a sealed cistern behind their house in Rockport. Dead, sour air had choked her. There were things better kept closed.
Did she really want to find out what had happened that storm-ridden night?
Dreadful visions moved in her mind. She thought of Marthe, who’d killed her lover. She remembered her mother’s face in the portrait in the dining room. Mary Ellen’s face, now smiling, now angry, came together and apart, like broken pieces of a puzzle.
Only one tiny fact stood between Leah and her visions. Louisa Shaw had said in her letter that an evil existed at Devereaux Plantation. Leah felt that that evil was near, threatening her, threatening her grandmother. She slept finally, but in her dreams the wind moaned and thunder crashed, trees split and cracked, and horror lurked just out of sight.
NEAR MIDNIGHT, SATURDAY, MAY 9,1863
The door creaked, ever so slowly. Marthe lay rigid, yet she forced herself to breathe evenly. Oh, God, it must be Randolph! Did he suspect? The door began to open. Her fingernails jabbed into her palms. If he came in, if he pulled back the covers and found her lying in bed, fully dressed . . . Through barely slitted eyes she saw his large form, a darkness against the open doorway. Could he see the rise and fall of the bedcovers as she breathed? Finally, very slowly, the door closed. Marthe still lay rigid. He might come back. And what if he waited out in the hall by her door? She licked her lips in fear. She would leave by the door to the veranda.Randolph was so hateful, his breath thick with whiskey, his eyes red-rimmed and angry. Last night he had found her in the garden and twisted her arm until it ached, warning her that he would see her in hell before he would ever let her be with Timothy again. Oh, Timothy, she thought. She loved him so. Was he coming? Was he even now crossing the river? Abruptly, she threw back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed. The tiny chimes of her Dresden clock sounded . . . ten . . . eleven . . . twelve. It wouldn’t be long now!
Leah awoke with a start, heart thudding erratically. She raised herself up and listened. Then she heard a dog’s shrill, frenzied yelping and knew that was what had awakened her. The yelp sounded again. The dog must be in trouble. She got out of bed and hurried toward the open back windows that overlooked the garden. All she saw were the dark contours of the garden and the glint of moonlight on the pond.
The yelp came again, then was abruptly cut off in mid-cry. Leah frowned. Something was hurting the dog. She picked up her dressing gown and slipped it on. After stepping into her slippers, she hurried out the screen door and ran to the porch railing.
From above, the palmetto palms looked oddly stunted, but the pine trees that rimmed the garden were huge, dark triangles against the night sky. The stars shone brilliantly. The octagonal tower loomed to her left, appearing almost sinister. The oyster-shell paths were clearly visible in the moonlight.
She thought the dog must be somewhere in the garden or beyond. But now it was absolutely quiet.
Leah ran lightly down the veranda to the central steps, her slippers slapping against the wooden treads. At the base of the stairs, she paused again to listen. The night air was chilly, damp from the river. She shivered and drew her dressing gown closer. Something moved on the far side of the pond, and she clearly heard a crackling of twigs.
Then, to her horror, she saw a luminous whiteness out there, perhaps the size of a person. It seemed to be coming nearer to the edge of the pond. It made several jerky movements, almost as if in a curtsy, before it began to back slowly away. As it went deeper into the shadows of the weeping willows, it disappeared.
Leah stood frozen at the top of the garden. The silence around her was as unmoving and leaden as a funeral pall. She had seen . . . what had she seen? Something frightful, something touched with doom, and it held her rigid with fear.
Go and see, she told herself.
Her hands and legs trembled.
She didn’t believe in ghosts. But something had moved, something luminous and flowing, in a jerky, inhuman way. Leah’s mouth tightened. Something had moved, and she would bet her last cent that somebody had moved it. Anger pumped through her. Abruptly, she started down the path to the pond. She would go and see what was there.
Then her steps slowed. Louisa had written that if a ghost walked again in the garden, it meant there was evil at Devereaux Plantation. But evil implied human will and decision, a human agency.
Leah continued to walk forward, but now every one of her senses was alert and wary. She stopped when she reached the narrow, low-railed bridge that arched over the pond. It was very dark on the other side, the willow trees thick as hummocky grass. And somewhere beneath their hanging tendrils, that luminous whiteness had disappeared.
Leah stepped out onto the bridge. Her feet slipped a little on the dew-wet wooden boards. Midway across, she stopped again. She didn’t know what had made her stop. Maybe she’d heard a rustle in the undergrowth. Or was it more atavistic than that?
Nevertheless, she knew
with absolute certainty that she shouldn’t cross the bridge and step into the black shadows beyond. She stared at the silent clump of willows, their long, slender fronds hanging like witches’ hair, dark and impenetrable. Like wildfire racing up a tinder-dry tree, panic consumed her.
She whirled and ran, slipping on the slick wood. The oyster shell tore her flimsy slippers, but her pace didn’t slacken—not for pain or thought, not for anything. Fear rode her shoulder, whipping her to run faster still.
She reached the house and thudded up the wide, shallow steps to the first veranda, breathless now, her lungs straining for air. Stumbling, scarcely able to see, she made it up the second flight and crumpled at the top. She couldn’t run another step. She huddled there, her breath coming in tortured gasps, and twisted around to look down into the garden.
Nothing moved. No sound broke the stillness. No one followed her. Yet when she looked at the moonlit pond and the dark willows beyond, she couldn’t stop herself from shuddering.
Gradually, her lungs ceased to ache. She continued to stare through the balusters, but the garden remained quiet and empty.
She wasn’t fooled, though. She had come close to death, had felt it with an unshakable certainty. Death had waited for her across the pond, lurking in the shadows of the willow trees.
Louisa had been right. Evil underlay Devereaux Plantation, hidden like dry rot beneath a smooth and shining surface. If Leah had gone forward, she would have known the human agency that moved behind its luminous whiteness. Did she want to know who it had been?
Another ugly question forced itself into her mind: Did she want to know what had really happened to her mother and father?
Leah shivered. Her damp gown clung to her. Stiffly, she pulled herself to her feet and walked to her room. Once she was safely inside, she latched the screen door, closed and locked the inner door, then put a straight chair beneath the door to the hall.
She didn’t fear that a ghost might follow her inside. The danger she sensed was too concrete for that.
Leah woke up early to a bar of sunlight slanting across her bed and to the sound of cardinals chattering outside a window. She glanced at the bedside clock. Not quite six o’clock. No one else would be up.
She rose and dressed, putting on dark blue slacks, a yellow cotton pullover and sneakers. As she had thought, the house was still asleep when she stepped out onto the veranda. She walked to the end and looked out across the garden. In the moonlight, the shrubs had been clumps of darkness. Now they were bright sweeps of greenery, following the slope of the garden and serving as a counterpoint to the multicolored rose beds.
An occasional stone bench, its underside coated with moss, sat alongside the oyster-shell paths. The willows fringing the pond looked delicate in the softness of the early sun. A gentle breeze rippled the pond water.
All was lovely, peaceful, serene. Standing there, Leah found it hard to believe she’d run for fear of her life the night before.
Her sneakers made scarcely any sound on the shell path. This time she didn’t hesitate at the bridge but crossed it decisively. She moved deep into the willows, pushing aside the dangling branches. The luminous white shape must have hovered just about where she was now. She turned and looked back at the house, then realized with a chill that she had been clearly visible from her position at the top of the garden.
She looked down and began to study the ground. Broken strands of willow, shreds of palmetto and scattered live oak leaves carpeted the sandy, uneven ground. She had no idea what she was looking for, but, being stubborn she continued to look. There were no footprints here, yet closer to the bridge there had been a smudged footprint. Leah knew that meant nothing.
She was almost ready to give it up. She could have sworn that what she’d seen had been right about here. Not far from a rustic bench . . . She was just turning away when she saw a tiny tangle of white silk clinging to the side of the bench.
Leah felt a quick thrill of triumph. There it was—proof that the ghost of Devereaux Plantation, the famous Whispering Lady, was no more ghostly than she. Ghosts didn’t leave threads behind. When that inhuman shape had bowed toward her—displaying a nice touch of arrogance—the covering must have snagged against the bench.
Leah bent down and carefully pulled the little fluff of white free. This shred of silk was going to lead her to the human agency behind the ghostly appearances.
Suddenly her surge of confidence fell away. She had proof that satisfied her there was no ghost, but she didn’t have anything that could link the ghost to anyone. But in her heart she felt certain that when she’d paused on the bridge last night, she hadn’t been routed by a spirit of another world. Someone—someone alive—had waited in the shadows of the willows.
And she still felt certain that death had waited there, too. For her.
Then she frowned in perplexity. No, that couldn’t be right. If death had waited for her, willed her to come and see, it hadn’t been planned ahead of time. The danger to her would have come if the person in the willows had seized the moment to kill her. The appearance of the ghost couldn’t have been planned for her benefit. No one could have known or guessed that she would hear a dog yelping in the night and go look for it.
The dog! Where was it? What—or who—had hurt it?
The ghost had been on other business last night. Frightening her was incidental. What had been the primary objective?
Presumably the ghost walked when death was near. Would death stalk someone at Devereaux Plantation today?
Leah slipped the piece of silk into her pocket and looked back the way she had come. Last night there had been no trace of the dog in the garden, and there was nothing to indicate a dog had been in this swath of greenery. She looked beyond the willows. The land began to rise past the pond. Cedars, live oaks and pine covered the hill. A faint dirt path plunged into the wooded area.
She started gingerly up the path. The pale sunlight filtered through the thick-leaved trees and twisting vines to speckle the ground beneath her feet. Once she stopped when the brush crackled to her left. A squirrel scampered up a red cedar, and she started forward again. Soon she could no longer see the willows or the pond when she looked back. There was only silent, dim wood, the trees towering nearly eighty feet above her.
The path curved sharply to the right. Just ahead, a green snake darted into the undergrowth. Leah almost turned back. She felt terribly isolated, far from any habitation. She wasn’t exactly frightened, but the silence and the gloom daunted her. Then, as refreshing as a bobwhite’s call, she heard the sound of someone whistling.
She came around a bend in the path and saw a man, his hands on his hips, whistling and calling for a dog. He wore Levi’s, a work shirt and tan, crepe-soled boots. She liked him immediately. His dark brown hair clung to his head in soft, tight curls, and he had an equally tightly curled beard.
“Good morning,” he called out, regarding her with frank and open interest. “I’m Kent Ellis, resident archaeologist, rara avis to the locals, court jester to your grandmother.”
He laughed at her surprise. “Sure, I know who you are. Everybody in the county does. There hasn’t been this much excitement since the organist’s wife ran away with the deacon. Nobody in Mefford is talking about anything but your reappearance.”
“How do they know?”
“Mrs. LeClerc’s girl, Julie, told the second maid at Haverhill, who told her boyfriend, who told—”
Leah held up her hands to stem the flow of his words.
“The town’s already divided on whether you’re the real McCoy or an impostor. But don’t worry about it. Mrs. LeClerc says you’re a Devereaux, and that’s better than a baptismal record.”
He said it all so easily, so good-naturedly, that Leah couldn’t take offense.
“I know who you are, too,” she rejoined cheerfully. “It wouldn’t surprise me to hear you reel off more than anyone would care to know about the Huguenots or the typical pottery found on an eighteenth-century pla
ntation, but how in the world do you know what everybody in Mefford is saying?”
“I’m an ingratiating fellow. Besides, I’m interested in everybody. Now. Last year. Last century. Fifty thousand years ago. An academic busybody, if you want to know. And I love to show off my dig. Are you coming my way?” He gestured back up the path.
She nodded, so they walked together companionably. Twice more he interrupted a running monologue on plantation life to whistle. He was as comfortable and disarming as a front-porch rocker, which was quite a change from Devereaux Plantation. Leah hadn’t realized how tense she had become until she started talking to Kent Ellis.
“Why are you so interested in Devereaux Plantation?”
“The house on the hill, honey. Always has been of interest, and I guess it always will be.” He shot her a quick look. “You’ll find out what it’s like to be a Devereaux. Everything that happens on the plantation is of consuming interest to Mefford. Or, to be accurate, to a big part of Mefford, if not to everybody.”
They broke out of the trees. Ahead of them stood a long line of slave cabins, mostly roofless, partial walls and chimneys still in place. An olive-drab tent sat near the ruins. To the left, past a grove of pines, Leah saw Jason’s cabin.
“I heard you gave the old boy a shock yesterday, but the word is he’s sitting up and enjoying his stay in the hospital like a maharaja, which in a way he is around here.”
“Your grapevine is fast, if you’ve already heard about that.”
Kent laughed. “Anything you want to know, just ask me.”
Leah bit her lip. “I didn’t mean to scare him.”
“Don’t worry. He’s enjoying the attention. And he told the nurse, who told my girlfriend’s aunt, that he wanted to see you as soon as he could. He has lots to tell you about your ma.
“Oh, I’m so glad to hear that!”
