The Guests on South Battery

by Karen White

  “I have no idea. Maybe it’s the pictures and the saltshaker—maybe I just needed visuals. Which is why I’m now convinced that I need to go to Alabama for a few days. See if I can talk to anybody who remembers Lake Jasper and who might know if May thirtieth, 1984, is significant. I’m probably grasping at straws, but there are so many different loose ends and I’m convinced that there’s a real story here somewhere.”

  I threaded my fingers through his hair. “I’ll miss you. I’d go with you if my schedule weren’t jam-packed at work—which is a really good thing. We could use the money.” I hadn’t yet mentioned the wood-boring beetles Sophie had discovered in the dining room floor, and thought I’d save that for later, too.

  “It’s just for a few nights. And then hopefully I’ll get some new material to inspire me and that might actually make a book.”

  My gaze fell to the hall table. “What’s this doing here?” I asked, walking over to pick up the frame that had been on Button’s nightstand, the one of her and Sumter at a party. I stared at their smiling faces, barely noticing the anonymous woman neatly clipped from the photo.

  Jack came over and took it from me. “I have no idea. It was on my desk last time I looked. Nola must have moved it. Remind me to ask her in the morning.”

  I looked closely at the photo, noticing for the first time the date in tiny, faded ink on the bottom right of the photo. “March seventeenth, 1984. Must have been a St. Patrick’s Day party—that’s why her dress is green and he’s wearing a green-striped tie.”

  “Probably,” Jack agreed, taking the frame from me.

  We kissed good night and then he retired to his study, bringing the frame with him. I slowly climbed the stairs, thinking about my conversation with Michael, and the photo of Sumter and Button on my hallway table. I was halfway up before the grandfather clock struck the hour, four long chimes that echoed in the sleeping house.

  CHAPTER 25

  Istared out at the spidery cables holding up the Ravenel Bridge from my spot at the beginning of the footpath that ran parallel to the traffic bridge as it crossed the Cooper River. A large semi thundered by, making me take a step back, and then look again at Sophie.

  “You want to do what?” I asked, the sun already baking the back of my neck with no hint of shade in sight. She’d driven me to what she referred to as simply “a new place for us to exercise.” I hadn’t suspected that she was actually trying to kill me.

  “I thought we could do the bridge run. It’s only ten K—six-point-two miles for those of you who didn’t learn metric—and you only have to go one way. It’s on April second, so we’re too late for this year, but if we start conditioning now we can run it next year.”

  I stared at her for a few moments, then began walking away. “I’ll wait for you in the car. I’ve got some calls I need to make.”

  Sophie ran after me and grabbed my elbow. “I’m not suggesting that we run six miles today. I’m saying we do a little bit every week, and build up slowly. It’s like restoring a house—you can’t do it in just a day.”

  She smiled brightly, and I wanted to shake her. With my hands on my hips, I stared up at the bridge again. “I don’t know, Sophie. . . .”

  “Jayne said that she’s already registered to run it this year.”

  That captured my attention. “Is she?” I looked at the various groups of walkers and runners moving on and off the bridge. They appeared to be of all ages and genders, some with well-muscled calves and toned hips in their running gear, and a whole lot of others that, well, looked more like me.

  “The great thing about running,” Sophie said as almost an afterthought, “is that it burns enough calories that you can splurge on a doughnut once in a while and it won’t make the scale tip.”

  I frowned at her, but when I didn’t start running for the car, she went in for the kill. “We can start by walking. I’ll set my phone for fifteen minutes and when it beeps we’ll head back. No fuss, no muss.”

  I wasn’t sure whether it was the thought of Jayne’s running 6.2 miles or my eating a doughnut without censure, but I dropped my arms and walked past Sophie. “Come on, then, let’s get this over with. But we’re only walking today. I don’t think I could handle running up this incline right now.”

  “Deal,” she said, catching up to me and beginning to pump her arms.

  Half an hour later we’d returned to our starting spot. Sophie had barely broken a sweat, whereas I was panting like a dog that had just finished the Iditarod and was soaked with enough sweat that an unsuspecting passerby might assume that I’d just swum across the river. Once I was back in Sophie’s Prius and had the air-conditioning blasting on me, I felt a modicum of pride that I had managed something.

  Sophie turned the key in the ignition. “Before I take you home, do you have a few minutes to drop by the Pinckney house? I found a stack of photo albums in Button’s room. I thought we could box them up and you can bring them to Jayne to go through and figure out what she wants to do with them. I’m afraid they’ll get damaged if we leave them in the house during the renovation.”

  I checked my phone and then my watch before checking the clock in the car just to make sure. “I’ve got a closing at eleven, but I think I can spare about an hour before I have to get ready. Do you think we could get it done by then?”

  Sophie stuck out her lower lip as she looked in her rearview mirror and flipped on her signal before pulling out onto East Bay. “Oh, absolutely. I seriously doubt it will take long at all.”

  I sent her a dubious look but refrained from mentioning that my house was a never-ending construction zone despite her earlier assurances that the renovation would last less than six months. I’d reconciled with both parents, gotten married, had two babies, and added a stepdaughter since we began work and the house still wasn’t completely renovated. I simply didn’t have enough breath in my lungs, so I kept silent and stuck my face in front of the air-conditioning vent.

  I was relieved to see that Rich Kobylt and several workers were at the house when we pulled up. Not that I was convinced the spirits would leave us alone if we outnumbered them, but it bolstered my nerves before I walked up the steps to the front door. I stood in the foyer, listening to the now-familiar sounds of construction in various places in the house—sawing, hammering, the metallic clank and squeak of ladders and scaffolding. It took me a moment to realize that I was listening for something else, too. And then I heard it. Or maybe I felt it. I was semirelieved that the curtain had been pulled back so there were no barriers between me and the spirit world, and I knew it would be only a matter of time before it showed itself to me, too.

  “Anna?” I whispered, preferring not to be surprised by an appearance. “Hasell?” I said a little louder. The soft tread of bare feet on the floor above us let me know that I’d been heard. Hasell, I thought. But she didn’t want to be seen, not yet. I could sense the presence of the other spirit, the one I was convinced was poor Anna, and I wondered if she was the one holding Hasell back. And I wondered why.

  I followed Sophie up to the second floor, feeling someone watching us as we proceeded down the hallway to Button’s bedroom. I held my breath as I walked in and focused my gaze on the thankfully empty chair where the Edison doll had been found.

  “Any word on the value of the doll yet?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Not yet. John took it to an antique doll show in Cleveland, which is probably why we haven’t heard from her recently. Isn’t there some rule about spirits not being able to cross water?”

  “I really don’t think there are any ‘rules.’ And if there were, I’m sure there would be one against old dolls dematerializing and then appearing where they’re not supposed to be.”

  “Good point,” she said, walking to the tall mirrored armoire and opening it up. “If you’ll pull out the albums, I’ll go find a box we can load them in.”

  I almost beg
ged her not to leave me alone and to suggest we stick together, but she’d already left the room. Making sure the bedroom door was wide-open, I knelt on the floor in front of the armoire and peered inside. Stacked neatly together were three columns of dark brown leather albums with gold-embossed years on the spines spanning from 1960 through 1985—the year the lake was flooded. I pulled them out one by one, careful not to tear the bindings, then stacked them in three piles, loosely organized by decade but not by year. I knew Sophie would be expecting me to sort them by year, and it killed me not to, but it would be worse to prove her right.

  Sophie returned, lugging two medium-size boxes with the name of a grout compound stamped on the outside. “I made a bet with myself that you’d have them organized by date by the time I came back.” She dumped them in the middle of the room. “I win.”

  “Ha! They’re only sorted by decade, not by year. But we probably should before we give them to Jayne so it’s easier for her to go through them.” I neglected to add that I wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing they’d been tossed haphazardly in a box.

  Sophie knelt next to me and grabbed the first album. “Did you look inside any of them yet?”

  “No,” I said sheepishly. “I was too busy organizing them.”

  She opened the cover of the one from 1960. “It looks like these were all photos taken at the lake house. If they were once kept at the lake, I’m guessing Button decided these albums would be worth saving. It’s kind of sad, though, seeing as how there’s nobody left who might find these photographs meaningful.”

  I took the album into my lap and studied the large photograph in the middle of the first page. It was one of the old magnetic albums, not the archival-quality scrapbooks that Sophie made me use for all my own family photographs, and the colors had started to leach from the photos, the faces exiting like souls leaving this world. The photograph showed a Craftsman-style cottage with lots of porches and rocking chairs, and a long dock sticking out into the dark waters of the lake. It was so different from the mansion on South Battery, as if a conscious effort had been made to create a cozy family home without all the frills and ornamentation of their house in the city. A family of four—mother, father, older son, younger sister—stood on the dock with the house in the background, smiling at the photographer. I leaned forward to study the girl, vaguely recognizing her.

  “That’s Button,” Sophie said. “I carefully peeled off the photo to see if anybody had written anything on the back. From my random checking, I figure that most if not all of the photos have been labeled. Sadly, they’re all written in blue ink and some of the writing has already started bleeding into the photos.” She pointed to a spot on the photograph, a thin blue vein hovering over the mother’s head. “This was taken during the Pinckney’s first summer at the lake, and it’s a picture of the whole family—Rosalind, Sumter Senior and Junior, and Button. She’s about eight or nine.”

  “They look so happy,” I said, slowly turning the pages, looking at the sunburned faces and tanned legs of the family and friends having fun on the water and in and around the house in various seasons. I quickly thumbed through all the pages before handing it back to Sophie to place in the box. I rubbed my palms against my pants legs, feeling as if I’d just been caught spying.

  Sophie added a few more of the albums to one of the boxes before handing another album to me. “Check this one out.”

  I flipped it to the spine to read the year—1967. I began turning the pages, seeing more images of faded photos of the same family, older in these photos, as well as a rotating group of visitors. There were picnics on the dock and yard, and lots of photos of various people on a boat and water-skiing, swimming in the lake, lying on the dock.

  I stopped suddenly, recognizing my mother. She was in her midteens, looking like a swimsuit model with her long limbs and rounded bust. She and Button and another girl all wore bathing caps and relatively modest one-piece bathing suits, and were lying on towels on the dock, sunbathing. “It’s a good thing she wasn’t around when I was a teenager to tell me to use sunscreen, because I could have used this photo for blackmail.” I’d meant it as a joke, but my throat caught. As a teenager I would have given anything to have a mother to make me wear sunscreen, or tell me how to put on makeup, or buy me a well-fitting bra. All those things that I’d had to figure out for myself.

  “That’s Anna,” Sophie said, pointing to the third girl.

  The girl was squinting into the camera, her cap hiding her hair and making it difficult to see what she looked like. I tried to see the tragic woman she’d become, the mother of a lost child, in this girl’s upturned face, but she was a blank canvas to me. Unreadable.

  I thumbed through the rest of the album, seeing more photos of the family, the three girls, and Sumter. He was a dead ringer for a young Robert Wagner, and I imagined it would have been hard for Button’s friends to ignore him. Somewhere, though, there’d been a falling-out between Anna and my mother, and despite Ginette’s protests, I’d have to guess it was over Sumter Pinckney. As I quickly flipped through all the albums, I noticed there were fewer and fewer photos of my mother, and more of just Anna and Button, and Anna and Sumter. My parents had been married in 1972, so maybe that was what had happened. And then I was born, and my mother left for New York to further her singing career, leaving all of us behind.

  “It’s sad to think all this is gone,” I said. “Not just the house, but most of the people; the memories. It’s almost like none of it ever existed.”

  “It is sad,” Sophie said, stacking more albums in one of the boxes. “It’s how I feel when I find an abandoned or dilapidated old house. How can a structure that was a family’s home for more than a century suddenly become obsolete? Especially when so much is left behind—personal items, even. As if they’ve simply been erased.”

  I handed her the last album, catching sight of the year embossed on the spine—1985. “Hang on. I think we skipped one. The last one I gave you was 1983. Where’s 1984?”

  Sophie began shifting the albums, reading aloud all the years from the spines. “Nineteen eighty-two, eighty-three, eighty-five.” She turned to the other box and did the same thing, reading out consecutive years from 1960 through 1979. “It’s not here. Hang on.” She moved to the armoire and knelt in front just as I had, and stuck her hands in the dark corners to make sure I hadn’t missed any. “Empty,” she said, frowning. “I wonder what happened to it.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t with the rest when Button brought all of them from the lake house. Which is sad because if it was left behind it’s gone forever. Just like that beautiful house.”

  “Not necessarily,” Sophie said as she folded up the box flaps. “The architectural plans still exist, so it’s possible it could be rebuilt somewhere else if anybody is so inclined. I was at the Historic Foundation archives with my students working on another project, and decided to see what I could find out about Hasell Architecture and Construction. That hidden staircase and door were not designed by amateurs. I’m curious as to their provenance. Jayne’s allowing me to use the restoration as a project for my grad students, and it’s an important detail.”

  She straightened and handed me a box before picking up the other. She led me down the stairs while she spoke. “Most, if not all, of the company’s records are there—including blueprints for many of the buildings they designed and restored.”

  “And?” I said, my muscles straining as I reached the landing, aware again of being watched. There was definitely more than one presence; I could sense the tug-of-war going on along the periphery of my vision. I rested the box on the banister, trying to get an impression of whether it was safe to continue. I took a step and paused, suddenly awash in the awareness that I was being kept safe. From what and by whom, I wasn’t sure. I reached the foyer and dropped my box on top of Sophie’s, trying to pretend I wasn’t out of breath.

  “Anyway,” Sophie continued, without even
a hint that she’d just carried a heavy box down a flight of stairs, “Anna’s name was prominent on many of the designs. Meaning it was truly a family business, and her father wasn’t pandering to her by putting her name on the letterhead. I mean, she did have an architecture degree, so it makes sense. But that was the early seventies—and design and construction was definitely still very much a man’s world.”

  I worried my lip for a moment, thinking. “So Anna would have had the knowledge needed to design the hidden door in the attic once the staircase was discovered.”

  Sophie nodded in agreement. “Not to mention the door into the butler’s pantry—it’s pretty sophisticated the way it opens and closes so that it’s seamless. The old steps continue past the cement wall, which makes me believe that they were definitely used to get to the outside once upon a time and the entrance into the butler’s pantry was added later.”

  “Was there an earlier door leading from the attic to the old set of steps?”

  “Definitely. It’s apparent from looking at the studs that a larger opening once existed and then must have been closed off when the lower level was filled in and the steps didn’t lead anywhere anymore. It would make sense that both the new hidden attic door and the butler’s pantry access were put in at the same time, and since Anna was in the business, she probably knew a painter who could replicate the mural Sumter had painted so no one was the wiser about the hidden stairway.”

  “But why go to all that trouble? It’s the same number of steps if you take the hidden stairs or the attic stairs.”

  Her eyes met mine. “Exactly what I was wondering. And the only answer I can come up with is that whoever put them in—and I’m assuming it was Anna or at least on her instructions—did so to keep their comings and goings a secret.”