Not Quite Right (A Lowcountry Mystery) (Lowcountry Mysteries Book 6)

by Lyla Payne

  If I’m being honest, I don’t care too much if people know any such thing, but I do want his son to know every word of this is true, and for him to know he comes from not only great strength and abilities, but from a love so powerful it saved both of our lives.

  I swear on my own life that this is the truth of what happened the night James died, the night my son was born, no matter how it sounds.

  By the time the witching hour came and went, the whole family was wretchedly ill. The servants couldn’t keep up emptying the chamber pots and both Bessie and I had given up, crawling out onto the balcony and vomiting over onto the grass. It had been hours and we’d barely stopped. Mama was even worse, and Father sent Charles for the doctor even though his little legs were shaking from his own bouts of sickness. Yet he still went.

  Part of me wondered if he would get back in time or if we would all die, even though I didn’t think a person could die from bad chicken. Not so fast.

  I was scared as we stared at the lane, waiting for help to come. Not only for the fact that our escape attempt was slipping away but for the baby living inside me. What would become of him if this didn’t stop soon? Would my distress become his? Would he die without nutrients, without water?

  Desperate tears wet my face. Bessie paid me little attention, as she was struggling to breathe between cramps and the servants were running between the four of us wringing their hands and cleaning up—there was nothing else anyone could do.

  Finally, lights appeared at the end of the drive, promising relief. At least, that’s what we hoped. I didn’t see how we could go on like this another hour, and Bessie had taken to moaning to God to take her away from the pain. That sounds dramatic but I half wanted to join her. At that point, anything felt preferable to the suffering that felt as though it tore holes in my gut.

  The doctor saw Mama first, at my father’s insistence, and his frown only deepened as he examined the rest of us. He hung his tools around his neck after he’d gathered us all on the balcony. We were wrapped in blankets, sweating and shivering at the same time, and if all of us had made it through his diagnosis without crawling to the ledge in an attempt to expel our own organs, it would have been a miracle.

  “You say you all took ill after dinner, correct?”

  “That’s right. Chicken prepared by the servants.”

  “I don’t want to alarm you, but given that you are all ill and it came on at around the same time, I have to assume it was the food.” He cleared his throat, looking like he’d like to be anywhere but looking at the five of us. I wanted to tell him join the party but held my tongue. “How well to do you trust your servants?”

  Mama coughed. Daddy’s bushy eyebrows went up. “What are you saying, Phil?”

  “I’m saying that the meat could have been simply bad, or it could have been poisoned. I’m saying either way a competent cook would be responsible.”

  The truth slammed into me, curling my body protectively around the baby. “Did Mama Lottie prepare dinner tonight?”

  My mother looked surprised by the question. “No, of course not. She’s not in charge of cooking any longer.”

  Mama Lottie was mostly retired. My father had such affection for her that he kept her on the payroll but didn’t require anything from her. I think he thought of her as a sister of sorts, to be honest. A frown finds my lips at the memory of her words the other night, when she’d found us. If nothing else, it might be true that the story my parents told me was not the true one. Or, at the very least, not the only one.

  “Ma’am, Lottie did prepare dinner tonight.” One of the servants confesses in a soft voice, fear written across her pretty, young features. “She said she had a special recipe she wanted to try.”

  “Oh my god,” I moaned. “She’s poisoned us.”

  “How do you know?”

  I held my tongue, even then. It would be too horrible to be so close and throw it away. “I just know. We’re poisoned, Doctor. What can you do?”

  “There are a few things we could try, but in truth, we have to let it run its course.” The look on his face told me everything I needed to know. We were going to die.

  Mama Lottie wouldn’t do anything halfway. She said she would put an end to our affair, and she hated my whole family. She’d decided to kill all of her little troublesome birds in one fell swoop.

  Tears filled my eyes as I looked at my parents one last time, knowing they would never see me the same after this night. But if they were alive to see anything, it might be a miracle.

  “Please, Doctor. I’m pregnant. Almost seven months, I think. Is there anything you can do?”

  My mother gasped and my father’s mouth fell open, shock making its way through the pain and wooziness. Bessie’s eyes glittered with triumphant glee—she’d been right all along. Only Charles didn’t react, his head hanging over the balcony as his little body convulsed bile onto the grass.

  “Who? How? When?” my mother demanded.

  I ignored her questions, trying not to moan and writhe as another attack overtook me. “Doctor?”

  His eyes were sad. “I know of nothing, little one. I’m sorry. The best I can hope for is to keep you all comfortable. If the worst happens, we may be able to save the child. Or try to.”

  My mother fainted. It took the servants and the doctor to get her inside to bed, and my father went along, as well. He never glanced my direction, the grief and disappointment on his face like a dagger though my chest. It hit nothing, however, because my heart was shattered. I was going to die. I was failing my baby.

  “James,” I whispered into the night, wishing more than anything he could be here to hold us both. That I could say good-bye.

  I closed my eyes, then, and when I opened them he was there. Like an angel, like a miracle, I thought, until I realized that day had broken and we were meant to have left the plantation an hour ago. The train would be leaving soon, and we would miss it.

  Tears blurred my vision as he gathered me against his chest, ignoring my sobbed apologies. My stomach hurt, cramping in a different way, and fear nearly tore me in half.

  “I think the baby is coming,” I choked out, wishing there were some way to stop it. “He’s not ready, James. He can’t face the world, not without me. I’m his mother.”

  I’m ashamed to say I was near hysterics, weak and dying and about to give birth. James shook his head, pressing a kiss to my mouth and laying me back on the tile.

  “No, wait, where are you going? I’m sorry, James, I’m so sorry.” I sucked in a deep breath. “I’m dying, James. Your mother, she poisoned us all and there’s nothing the doctor can do…”

  His eyes went wide with horror, and he leaned in close, again, pressing his cheek to mine and inhaling a deep breath. When he pulled away, my pain doubled.

  “Come back, don’t leave me,” I begged.

  “Shh, Charlie. Shh.” He tucked the blanket tight around me and stood. “You’re not going to die. I’ll be back as soon as I can, okay? You hold on to that baby a little longer.”

  I remember thinking, “I don’t think he understands how babies work” as another cramp rippled through my abdomen like a tidal wave. Charles was gone, and Bessie had managed to doze, even my muffled grunts not waking her up. I was afraid she’d died.

  Then James returned. My vision blurred again, but this time not because of tears. It was pain, and brain fog, and maybe the salty sweat running down my face from trying to bear it all. He looked like a dream, and when he didn’t come to me I thought perhaps he was just that.

  Now, I know that he was no such thing.

  My James went to Charles, who had returned from wherever he’d gone and was curled around one of the stone spindles holding up the railing of the porch, crying silent tears. James knelt beside him, putting his hands on either side of Charles’s face. His fingers were so long and Charles so small that his palms covered my brother’s cheeks.

  He brought their foreheads and noses together, until their lips were so close
it was as if they might kiss. Charles went completely still, his eyes huge as they stared up, wondering what was happening.

  James breathed in deep. Something green and brown—brackish, but more like mist than water—spilled from my baby brother’s nose and mouth as James sucked it into himself. He shuddered, closed his eyes, and laid Charles down on the tiles.

  When he hovered over Bessie’s lifeless form and repeated the process, understanding began to dawn. I didn’t know then what Mama Lottie was or the extent of her capabilities. I didn’t know James could do some of the same things, or about good and evil. Not truly.

  But after James finished sucking the poison out of my sister he came and scooped me into him, cradling me as he shuddered again and his eyes rolled back in his head. He had gone green about the gills, and his eyes were shot though with red. Crimson blood dripped from his nose, and I couldn’t stop crying.

  “No. No, you can’t do this. You can’t.”

  “You’re going to be okay, Charlie. Little James is going to be fine, I know it.” He put one big hand on my belly as another contraction took hold, sending me into a moaning fit. “I love you, Charlie. No one else.”

  I was almost bent double with the pain, half-delirious as he lifted my face to his. The motion was smooth, familiar, but instead of kissing me as though I was everything he needed to survive, James stopped when our lips barely touched. His soft hands held my face still as he breathed me in the way he had so many times before.

  This time was different. I could feel the goodness of his soul next to mine and the sweet relief of the poison leaving my body. It was everywhere—in my blood, under my skin, threaded into the prickly hairs at the back of my neck. Worst of all, I felt the shock of it hitting James, of it soaking in deep. I sobbed as though my own soul turned black in that moment, which in a way, half of it did.

  He held me tight until he couldn’t any longer, his muscles losing tension as he laid me down and curled beside me. Bessie and Charles sat, dazed but already looking better, and stared at the two of us. James’s eyes closed, but I didn’t know then I would never see them open again. I had more imminent worries, as the agony of childbirth gripped me harder and the pressure between my legs told even an inexperienced girl that there would be no talking the baby into waiting even another five minutes.

  “Charles, run and get the doctor,” I panted. “Is he still here?”

  “I heard him say he was going for some coffee in the kitchen,” Bessie said, crawling to my side and picking up my hand. She was still my big sister, after all, and if I was having a baby she would see me through it.

  And she did. Charles came back with the doctor, and Bessie squeezed my hand. Mama came out on shaking legs toward the end and watched, murmuring encouragement here and there. I realized then that James must have gone to them first, and I couldn’t help but wonder what he’d said. If he’d talked about me or our love, told them about the baby, or if they had been too out of sorts to understand what was happening, as Charles and Bessie had been.

  When James Jr. was born, the sun broke through the clouds as if its whole purpose was to warm the squalling babe with its rays. The doctor handled everything smoothly, but when he set the baby on my chest, he told us that he probably wouldn’t live. He was too small.

  I knew better.

  “James,” I whispered, awed by the stunned, blinking newborn in the crook of my arm. “James.”

  I wanted him to see our son, to say how beautiful he was and how lucky I’d been right about his being a boy, but James never did any of those things.

  He was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  After I pull myself together I head straight for Beau’s. I know how James’s story ends, now, and I want to go tell Mama Lottie what she did—her, not the Draytons. I want her to know that her grandson lived, but I need to ask Beau two things first: what happened after James died, and if he could help me get back to Drayton Hall. I have more questions, like how the baby was raised, what her parents thought and how they treated him, and most of all what became of Mama Lottie, but the first two are the more important.

  The story doesn’t line up at all with the one Mr. Raven had told me in Savannah—he’d said the child had been a girl, and that James had left the plantation and taken her with him. There’s no question in my mind that Charlotta’s story is the true one. His could have been handed down wrong for generations while the Draytons hid the truth, safe in these journals, from the people who most deserved to hear it.

  Tears gather in my throat every time the scene Charlotta described in her final entry plays in my mind. What happened to them is so sad, and it’s made even worse after reading her carefree, excited, hopeful entries from just months before everything imploded for the two of them.

  As the Honda turns a corner and Beau’s house comes into view, my lips draw into a deep frown. Mama Lottie clearly blames the Drayton family for far more than they’re culpable for. I mean, I’m not one to apologize for people who owned slaves—and surely Mama Lottie and anyone else they owned has plenty of reason to be angry at the family—and they must have known she was different when they bought her.

  Young slave girls who used proper English and knew how to read and write didn’t exist, not even so late into slavery in the United States. Mama Lottie might be assigning more blame to Charles III and Sarah Martha than they deserved, but at the very least they had willfully ignored what they must have known to be true: Lottie didn’t belong on their plantation. They kept her anyway, for whatever reason, and whether or not Charles Henry and the later Draytons treated her like family, the damage had been done.

  The journals are in a couple of giant plastic baggies on the seat next to me now, the air squished out as best as I could manage. It’s not perfect, but they’ll survive another day or two before we can get them back to Mrs. Drayton’s controlled environment. Now that Mama Lottie knows I have them, I would hate for her to take them. That would be unfortunate. If Mrs. Drayton hates me now, losing any of her precious family artifacts will cement my place on her shit list probably into the afterlife. A development that would present a particular problem for me.

  I pull into the driveway and sit there for a few minutes, staring at Birdie’s car in front of me. I’m feeling like a chickenshit because I’d rather not face her. What I did isn’t even that bad, in the grand scheme of things, and Beau says they’ve talked it out already. But the woman intimidates me even more than her mother does.

  Probably because I wouldn’t mind if Birdie liked me, whereas with Mrs. Drayton, I couldn’t care less. Not to mention the chances of catching a fart in a skillet would be better than that happening, no matter what I do.

  I nudge the car door open with my elbow and drag the bags of journals into my lap. Leaving them out here isn’t an option, even if once upon a time I would have thought nothing would get stolen from a car in Heron Creek. Too many weird things have happened since my return to take a chance with what amounts to my only hope of convincing Mama Lottie that there’s nothing left to fight for around the living.

  On the front porch, my knuckles pause an inch from knocking on the wooden door, frozen by the sound of raised voices. Eavesdropping is wrong, obviously, but it’s also a great way to find out things people would rather not say to your face.

  “How can he not have been able to track down any of them?” Beau bellows, his familiar voice haggard, the tone sharper than the one he typically uses with me. “Is this guy some kind of hack?”

  “A hack? Yes, that’s exactly what I’m known for, Beauregard. Hiring hacks when people’s lives are on the line. When Lucy’s life is on the line.” Birdie laughs, but it’s forced and there’s nothing funny about it. “He’s got some leads, okay. It’s been five years since the last payoff we know of. Trails get cold. This isn’t going to happen overnight.”

  Beau mumbles something I can’t hear, and I resist the urge to press my ear against the door. My chest is tight at the mention of Lucy and the idea tha
t their independent investigation isn’t going so well. I’m surprised to hear Birdie involved but I don’t know why—I should have realized that her loyalty to Beau’s ex would trump any duty as the Middletons’ lawyer. Should have but didn’t…

  “I know,” Birdie says from inside. “I want to make them pay if they did this, too. I even want to hug Gracie and her snoopy little nose for digging up another shot at this.”

  I knock then, because it’s getting creepy and it sounds as though they’re almost finished with the discussion, anyway. Footsteps, heavy and measured and belonging to Beau, come my way, and the sound of the locks disengaging comes a moment after he must have peered through the peephole.

  “Hi,” I greet him, aware that it’s late for a visit, and since we’re starting over or whatever, maybe I’m not allowed to pop over unannounced at all.

  Then again, he’s the mayor of a small town. It’s not like he has any real expectation of privacy.

  Happiness floods his face, lightening the bags under his eyes, and my stomach stops cramping. “Gracie Anne. What are you doing here?”

  “I found something out, and I wanted to talk to you…” Birdie peers around her brother, golden gaze wary but not pissed anymore. That’s something. “Both of you, actually, if you have a minute.”

  “Sure.” He looks toward his sister. “You okay with sticking around?”

  Birdie nods, pursing her lips. “How could I resist when Gracie wants to talk? No doubt whatever pops out is going to be interesting.”

  I don’t know if she means that as a compliment, but she probably doesn’t. Beau beckons me inside, then slips my coat from my shoulders and hangs it in the closet. Despite the fact that his sister still stands in the foyer, he wastes no more time and pulls me into a giant bear hug. We hold on for longer than makes Birdie comfortable, I guess, because when Beau releases me, she’s wandered off.

  “I’m glad to see you,” he murmurs, one thumb stroking my cheekbone.

  Every muscle in my body has been wound tighter than a tick for hours, but his arms leak some sort of magical elixir into my skin that lets me relax for the first time in days. I lean back into him, resting my cheek on his chest and breathing the scent of him deep into my lungs.