by Lyla Payne
“That’s what I’m thinking. But we can’t wait on Gracie.”
“Agreed.” He looks like he wants to say something more, but it takes him a second to get up the nerve. “Is there any way Will could talk to Clete Raynard? I know Gracie said he didn’t find anything on the Senator we could use in court, but now that we have specific leads, he might be able to call in more favors.”
“He would do it.” Committing Will to helping in that way leaves a layer of glue and sawdust on my tongue. There’s nothing I want less than to send my husband back into those mountains.
Well, other than to go to prison.
“He would do it,” I try again. “But I don’t think his kind of contacts are going to be any good. We found a nanny who knows about the abuse, but honestly, I’m guessing most people in Washington aren’t going to be surprised by that. The story that could really bring him down is some big business, pharmaceutical testing nightmare.”
“I’ve met Clete.” Leo pales, his eyes shifting as though the moonshiner might have sneaked into the room. “You’re probably right about that being out of his league. How are we going to verify anything more than hearsay and rumors? Those are a dime a dozen.”
“I don’t know.” I chew on my bottom lip, thinking. A prickle between my shoulder blades promises Lindsay is listening just outside the kitchen, and it annoys me that she’s not in here, too. Why on earth would I care if she listens to a conversation about how to get her brother and me out of this mess?
Her attitude about Gracie baffles all of us, but whatever. She’s entitled to her opinion, and as charming as my friend is, Lindsay Boone isn’t the first person to be immune.
“We need to talk to the guy again,” I continue. “The ex-‐employee who told us the story. He might have some ideas, or maybe know where to look for a paper trail.”
“Do you seriously think Randall Middleton is stupid enough to leave a paper trail after committing an actual crime against humanity?” Leo’s eyebrows are up, skepticism etched into his rugged features. He’s handsome, always has been—and has always known how to use it to his advantage, too.
“I don’t know, but it’s somewhere to start. Do you have any better ideas?”
“For starters, I know someone who’s good with computers. Like, scary good with computers. I’m going to talk to him.”
My chest squeezes. “That information would have been helpful before my amateur ass went snooping around my boss’s office.”
He grimaces. “Sorry. You know Gracie. She doesn’t tell one minion what the other is up to.”
His description of us as Gracie’s minions is all wrong, and leaves me bristling in her defense. “I did what I did to help Gracie on my own, not because she asked me to. In fact, she told me not to get involved. I love her. I don’t serve her.”
The shock on his face as it goes white, the horror in his blue eyes, reaches out and grabs me. “No! I didn’t mean it like that, it was just a joke. I don’t think of our friendship that way. Gracie’s the most caring, loyal person I’ve ever met, and that’s why…that’s why I help her, too.”
The outpouring of words, the passion soaking them, batter my senses.
Desperation clings to Leo. He needs me to believe him, and all of the emotion in the room distracts me from what he actually said for several seconds.
Then it sinks in.
Did he just say he loves Gracie?
Not in so many words, but it sort of sounded that way.
I shake it off. Of course he loves Gracie—we all do. It’s hard not to after she gives her heart and soul to you the way she does, and Leo’s always had a special bond with her. He doesn’t mean he’s in love with her. Jesus H. I’ve been indulging in the dangerous combination of pregnancy hormones and sappy movies too often.
“Now that we’re clear on that…” I give him a small smile, letting him know we’re good. I get it. We’re all under a lot of stress. “I think contacting your friend is a great start.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow.”
I finish my tea and Leo opens a second beer. We chat for a while about our separate arrest experiences, what the police asked, and what our joint attorney had to say when she visited him earlier tonight. I don’t tell him that Travis came over earlier and that Gracie’s got to be losing her mind over that, too—hopefully she’s smart enough to figure out that something doesn’t jive at least as quickly as I did.
Probably faster, since a baby isn’t eating half of her brain cells.
For his part, Leo seems keyed up and ready to go. Determined and hopeful in a way my husband and Lindsay aren’t, and I wonder what it says that we’re the calmest two of the bunch. Maybe we have too much faith in Gracie and her magic, or maybe it’s that we’re in shock. Either way, it’s nice to be with him right now. I can see why Gracie enjoys hanging out with him.
I can also see that he’s got a card he’s playing close to the vest, one he’s not willing to lay on the table just yet.
At least not for me.
Chapter Ten
Amelia
Jenna sticks around a long time after I expect her to bail out. We haven’t heard from Grace, which would make me nervous even if the storm hadn’t increased to a demon’s howl over the past thirty minutes. She should have made it there by now, and I mean really, how long does it take to discuss curses with a ghost?
The answer is anyone’s guess, and the only thing the two of us can do is keep reading.
“Tell me again what we’re looking for?” Jenna asks, draining the rest of her cup of coffee. It’s her third or fourth mug, and the pot is empty.
I get up and start another pot, rubbing my eyes. It’s not that late, not even midnight, but it seems later to me. My bedtime has gotten earlier and earlier, and seeing the ten o’clock news these days is a major feat.
“I don’t know. Anything about this kid James, the one who fathered her child.”
“I was thinking,” Jenna starts, eyeing the fresh coffee as it drips. It reminds me of college, and easier times. “We started with her adult journals, and those are the only ones I’ve skimmed before, too. But by then, she would have realized her relationship was taboo, and probably would have avoided talking about it.”
“Even in her journals,” I agree, realizing where she’s going. “And if they grew up together, the way the guy Grace talked to seemed to think, she would have been more likely to write about him when they were small.”
She nods. I swap her empty mug out for a full one, shove a bottle of creamer across the table, and dig through the pile until I find the books labeled with the earliest dates. In my head, I say a quick prayer that whoever painstakingly copied these journals didn’t redact them to make Charlotta or anyone else less of a rebel. Or change history.
“Should we be worried about Gracie?” Jenna asks, giving voice to the thoughts rattling around in my head.
To be honest, her being gone for so long, with no word, is making concentrating on the words on these pages more difficult than it should be. The printing is legible and large enough, the pages are crisp, and the story of her days—at least as an adult—are well-‐described, if not terribly fascinating..
“I don’t know,” I reply, refusing to look up from the journal I’m reading. There’s too big a chance that Jenna will see the fear grabbing my heart. That would lead to more questions, and even though I spilled the beans about Mama Lottie being the ghost at Drayton Hall, there’s plenty more the young preservationist doesn’t know.
“But Grace can take care of herself.”
“Sometimes I think Gracie just wants us all to believe she can take care of herself.”
“Fair enough.”
We lapse into silence again, reading. Young Charlotta Drayton’s days were more interesting than the ones she spent as an adult. The way she describes Drayton Hall with such wonder makes me feel like a child again myself. We wandered the grounds of all the local plantations for hours, Grace, Mel, Will, and me. But we didn’t kno
w the place the way Charlotta did, and she must have spent hours exploring every nook and cranny. Her entries describe funny bugs she found, the taste of the pecans when they were fresh and falling to the earthy grounds, the way moss grew like little forests across the boulders near the river.
Her brothers were patient, indulgent even, but didn’t spend much time goofing around with her. Her older sister Bessie took on the role of tiny mistress and second mother, so Charlotta instead made playmates of the worker’s children. The Civil War had ended, slavery abolished, before little Charlotta was born. I knew from my own history classes that a large majority of slaves had stayed on with their former masters, even on the same property, working for pitiful wages because they had no education and nowhere else to go.
From the way Grace talked about this James, it’s not hard to assume that’s the reason he’d remained at Drayton Hall during Charlotta’s life—that his parents must have been slaves.
An hour passes, and about six months of Charlotta’s young life, before she first mentions a boy named James.
19 June 1925
Mother wasn’t feeling well again today, so I’m free to run about the grounds. Bessie thinks she’s the boss of me and told me to go check on the chickens. Everyone knows that’s not for us to do, but she doesn’t know they’ve just had chicks so I didn’t mind going to see them.
I especially didn’t mind when I met a boy there checking the temperature of their hay. He’s older than me but not by much—perhaps a year or two. His skin is dark like a chestnut roasting on Christmas Eve, his eyes like the silky coat of our darkest brown mare, but his eyes and teeth are pure white. My presence startled him and he scurried away from the teeny chicks, ready to take flight.
They’re all scared of me, at first, on account of my last name. They think because my mama and brother are in charge of their mamas and daddies that means we can’t be friends, but mostly they come around once I smile and show them my best games.
Anyway, this boy was harder to convince. Finally, after ten minutes of talking about chickens and babies and how warm the hay should be for them to feel safe, he told me his name was James. That’s it, though. He won’t tell me who he belongs to or how old he is or why I’ve never seen him until today. It’s as though someone dropped him right there in the chicken house for me to find, and I have to say, I’m happy to have a mystery to solve.
That’s what I told James, too.
He said I should forget I ever saw him, and he got angry when I laughed. You don’t know me too well, James with no mama, I told him. But you will. We’re going to be best friends.
That’s when he took off. I tried to follow him, because of course he has a mama and that’s where he went running, but that James is fast.
Not to worry. Tomorrow’s a brand new day. My candle is about burned out and Bessie will tan my hide if she finds me awake. Mama’s still coughing in her room, and even though the deep, rattling sound of it makes even my bones scared, it means no one will bother with me.
And that means James better look out. Because we’re gonna be friends whether he likes it or not. I can feel that in my bones, too. But that makes them sing.
For some reason, reading the diary entry brings tears to my eyes. I might have just read about the moment a great love was set in motion—or, if you ask the family, the moment Charlotta stepped onto a path that would alter her life forever. And not for the better.
If this is even the same James. My gut, along with all of the extra hormones skipping through my blood, thinks it is.
“Did you find something?” Jenna’s watching me, a wicked smile on her lips that pushes excitement through me.
“Maybe. I found an early entry—she’s maybe, I don’t know, ten?” I search my memory for all of the information that poured into my head about the sixth generation of Draytons to live on the property and struggle to match it up with tiny details from what I read. I give up quickly, shaking my head. “This is Grace’s area.”
Jenna thinks for a minute. “Was the entry dated?”
“Yeah.” I double-‐check it, just to be sure. “Nineteen twenty-‐five.”
“Did she say anything about her parents?”
“She said her mother was sick, and that the workers belonged to her mother and her brother.” I pause. “Her father died?”
“Yes, Charles Henry. Pretty young.” Jenna taps her fingers against the pages in front of her. “I’m not a hundred percent on when Eliza died, but it wasn’t long after that. Charlotta would have been about ten.”
“Well, this is when they met. Let’s focus on the ones that take place after this.”
I go back to the book under my hands and Jenna digs through the pile until she finds one she wants to read. The storm gets worse outside, rattling the windows with each clap of thunder. Every time lightning flashes across the roiling sky our lights flicker and I hold my breath. The electricity holds, though, and my eyes skim pages looking for his name.
Jenna tells me more than once that she’s found another passage that mentions the boy, but that it’s more of the same—childish games, talks of friendship, and the boy being evasive about how he came to live at Drayton Hall.
I see his name a few times as well, but find nothing new. My back aches worse than it did hunched over the laptop earlier and Jenna almost falls asleep a half a dozen times, her face falling toward the table only to be caught at the last moment.
And she’s the one who’s had an entire pot of coffee. The girl must be keeping some seriously late hours for her thesis. Or maybe a boyfriend.
I yawn, shaking my head to try to force it back on track, but the sentences blur on the page. “Jenna.”
She doesn’t answer, her chin pressed into her palm.
“Jenna!” I say louder, startling her awake and unable to suppress a giggle at her confused expression. “Go home.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Seriously, go home. It’s late. The storm is over, and I’m crashing, too.” The truth is that there’s no way I’m going to be able to go to bed without Grace home, but falling asleep on the couch is an inevitability. I don’t know how Grams always stayed awake until we were safe and the door was locked behind us.
“Okay, okay. I’ll go because you’re tired.” She winks, her face considerably more pale and tired than when she arrived. “I can come back tomorrow, or whenever. Tell Gracie I want to help.”
“I will.” We both know Grace won’t put Jenna in a position to lose her job, which is exactly what will happen if Mrs. Drayton finds out she helped us with this whole curse thing.
Not that Mrs. Drayton would believe in the curse. Probably not even if Grace went and introduced her to Mama Lottie and her snakes in person.
Jenna leaves, with me watching from the porch until she pulls out of the driveway and onto the street. It’s late enough that Mrs. Walters probably gave up on spying, but she’s no doubt wondering whose car showed up in the middle of the storm, and why she hung around so long. No doubt she’d been clocking the hours since Grace has been gone.
It’s too many, that’s the answer. She’s been gone too many hours.
I go back into the kitchen, getting a bit of a second wind from my renewed worry as I clean up the mugs and coffee pot, then scarf half a package of cookies over the sink. Instead of lying down in front of the television to give my brain a break like I’d planned, I grab another of the journals from the relevant date range and thumb through it.
The name James catches my eye and I stop, sure it’s nothing.
But it’s something.
My heart jams in my throat as my adrenaline pumps so hard my fingers shake, causing me to drop my cell phone twice and misdial three times before getting a call through to Grace.
Come on, pick up. Oh, pick up, Grace.
If she’s still there, this could mean the difference between ruining the Draytons and saving them. It could mean she can go back to Beau with good news, maybe patch things up, instead of starting th
e uphill climb of getting over their breakup.
Voicemail.
“Grace, it’s me. Please call me back—it’s important. Don’t leave Drayton Hall until you do.”
I don’t even know if she’s still at Drayton Hall. My stomach clenches painfully at the idea that something could have happened to her. Maybe she slid off the road on the way there. Maybe she pissed off Mama Lottie with her smart mouth and got herself snake-‐bitten. Maybe the voodoo curse sucked her straight into the bowels of hell, if we’re not already there.
Who knows, really? There are tons of bad things that can happen to a person who doesn’t see evil spirits and has trouble biting her tongue when she should.
There’s a knock on the door for a second time tonight and I race for it, sure it can’t be Grace. Equally sure it can’t be good news.
This time it is Travis, and it only takes one look at him to tell me something is very wrong.
Chapter Eleven
Frank Fournier
I sit straight up in bed in the middle of the night, startled awake in the way only a ghost in my bedroom can accomplish. My reaction shifts the nightstand beside the motel bed, jostling it hard enough to send a half-‐full glass of water tumbling onto the thin carpet.
Luckily, ever since I was about fifteen and figured out my gift—or curse, depending—differed from the others in my family, the chances of the visitor being an unwelcome spirit isn’t likely. This one is even expected, but he needs to work on his less-‐than-‐charming penchant for scaring me.
Henry Woodward has a bit of a scamp in him.
I’m not surprised my daughter has gotten snippy with him on more than one occasion, despite the fact that he does a mean impression of a dead person whose feelings are easily hurt. On the other hand, he’s easy to manipulate, so the day when she finally figures out how to get rid of him is going to be an inconvenience for me.
“Why do you insist on arriving at such ungodly hours with news?” I grouse, squinting at the clock beside the bed, surprised to find it’s only half-‐past midnight.