by Karen White
We stared at each other for a long moment, both of us surprised that I’d spoken at all, much less defended my mother and admitted to being psychic all in the same breath.
“Fine,” he said. “I won’t say or do anything to upset her.”
I nodded, recognizing his don’t ask, don’t tell policy as the truce it was. “Thank you,” I said. “And don’t . . .” I paused, trying to find a better way to say it, then gave up. “Don’t leave her by herself.”
He looked at me from beneath lowered brows and I saw him struggling not to argue with me. “I’ll stay with her.”
“Great. I’ll be back around five.”
As I watched my father enter the house, I felt a little like I was leaving a lion to watch over a lamb. But I knew he’d take care of her, and protect her if she needed it. Whoever had been haunting me had yet to include my mother, but if I’d learned anything about dead people it was that they were a lot like the living, breathing kind; they didn’t always behave like you expected them to.
I walked out of the garden to the sidewalk, then turned around as I realized that the sun was in the right spot. Facing the stained-glass window again, I squinted in the bright reflected light. As I studied it closely, I saw how it was really an optical illusion, like one of those pictures of two completely different images. One image was visible right away, but the second one only became obvious after you stared at it for a long time. At first glance it appeared to be random splotches of color and sticklike markings, but as I squinted at it in the sunlight, the image of the map that I’d seen in the photo appeared: the large house, the body of water with the odd angel’s head, the figures standing in the lawn. But what I noticed now were all the fine lines that became visible when the sun hit the window, embellishments to the original image that couldn’t be seen without the sun’s help.
Squinting, and wishing I had my glasses with me, I tried to make out why the border of odd lines and marks had been added, what function they served, and couldn’t determine anything. I needed to talk with Rebecca, to see if she’d had any luck turning up any of the paperwork on the window, but I was hesitant to call her. My mother’s vision of her while holding the journal had shocked us both, prompting more questions and even fewer answers. Besides, I remembered Rebecca telling me that she had other work deadlines and wouldn’t be able to see Yvonne until the following week.
I unsnapped my phone from its place inside my purse and used the telephoto button to take a close-up picture of the window before carefully placing the phone back where it belonged. Then I pushed open the gate and walked out to the sidewalk, going over my mental notes of all the things I needed to discuss with Yvonne. I paused for a moment, tilting my head to hear better, sure I’d heard the sound of a crying baby. It had been soft at first, so soft that I thought I hadn’t really heard it. But there it was again, coming from inside the house, and it was louder now. I faced the front door, expecting to see a baby there, but the steps were empty.
The crying softened to a quiet mewling, and I wanted to believe it was just the noise of a lost kitten in the grass. But I recognized the sound from the time following my mother’s stay in the hospital when I was a little girl, and how it had awakened me at night until I’d told my mother. The sound went away, at least for that night, and I remembered sleeping well for the first time in a long while. Then the next day my mother was gone and my father took me from the house for what I thought would be forever, and for a long time wished that it had been.
I forced myself to walk away and not look back, sensing that somebody or something was watching me. I reached for my phone as I’d done dozens of times before to call Jack and tell him what had happened, but my hand stopped halfway to my purse. When I reached my car, it rang as if conjured, and I ended up emptying my purse on the hood to find it before I realized it was neatly clipped to the inside pocket where it always was.
I took it out and flipped it open, my anticipation clouded when I saw the name Marc Longo on the screen. We’d been playing phone tag for weeks, trying to set up lunch, but he’d been out of town, and I’d been less than enthusiastic about promptly returning his calls. But now my thoughts turned to Jack, and how he didn’t appear to want to have anything to do with me anymore—not that I really blamed him after what I’d said to him—and I realized how desperately lonely I was. And, as Jack had pointed out, a relationship with a ghost didn’t count as a relationship.
After a deep breath, I flipped open the phone on the fifth ring and spoke, wishing as I did that it wasn’t Jack’s face I saw.
I drove the short blocks to the Fireproof Building on Meeting Street where the South Carolina Historical Society library is located. Lacking the Jack Trenholm touch for finding curb parking directly in front of wherever he was heading, I found parking three blocks away, then walked back with five minutes to spare before my appointment with Yvonne.
I ascended the circular stone stairwell, remembering coming here before with Jack while trying to find out more about the Confederate diamonds hidden in my Tradd Street house. Yvonne was an octogenarian with a sharp mind and even sharper wit who knew just about every source in the archives at the historical society. And if she didn’t know it personally, then she could tell you where to find it.
Yvonne sat at a table in the reading room, a box of folders and a stack of books on a corner of the table. She smiled when she saw me and stood, never one to let her arthritis get the best of her. She wore a pink cashmere sweater set over a pink tweed skirt and she smelled of roses as I leaned down to kiss her cheek.
“Jack’s not with me,” I said, not really understanding my need to explain.
“I know. He took me to dinner last night at S.N.O.B. and we had a nice heart-to-heart.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to sound disinterested but wanting her to feel obliged to tell me everything.
“He’s been working very hard on his book,” she continued. “He was actually here this morning with that blond reporter from the Post & Courier . Rebecca somebody. I was surprised that you weren’t with them since they were looking for information on the Prioleau house on Legare.”
“They were here today? I thought her appointment with you was for next Monday.” I remembered Rebecca telling me that she was busy doing research for another “famous Charlestonian” article and wouldn’t be able to see Yvonne until the following week. “Did she have to change it?”
Yvonne shook her head. “No. Her appointment was for today, at ten o’clock sharp.”
She sat down and indicated the chair next to hers. I’d already unloaded my coat and scarf in the locker room so I had nothing to fiddle with while I tried to figure out a way to tactfully ask her what she’d found for them.
“I kept the records out just in case you wanted to see them, too.”
I looked at her, grateful. “Thank you.” I waited for her to pull three pieces of paper from one of the folders. One appeared to be a handwritten order from a John Nolan & Sons on Market Street, and another was a receipt from the same business. But it was the third piece of paper that caught my attention. It was larger than the other two, and it appeared to be a vellum-type paper. On it was a miniature replica of the stained-glass window at my mother’s house.
I pulled my phone out of my purse and flipped it open to the picture I’d taken earlier of the window. “Look,” I said, showing Yvonne. “I took this picture right before I came here.”
She looked at it closely before I held it up to the drawing next to it. “It’s almost identical, isn’t it?”
We sat in silence for several minutes, comparing the two pictures, our heads turning back and forth like spectators at a tennis match.
“The differences are pretty subtle, aren’t they? At first glance you don’t notice the changes, but after you become familiar with one or the other, you start to notice the differences. It’s like one of those games in puzzle books my grandmother used to give me to play with while she watched her soaps. What looks like the same pictu
re appears on opposite pages and you circle the differences.” I looked at Yvonne. “If any other family besides my own was behind this, I’d say it was coincidence. But the Prioleaus are known for their love of puzzles.”
“Which makes you believe that this was done on purpose.”
“Absolutely.”
“And I think you’re right. I’m only surprised that Jack hasn’t noticed it, too. It’s really out of character for him to miss something like this. He must be distracted.” She gave me a pointed look.
“Can I make a copy of all these?”
Yvonne smiled. “I already did. Jack asked for copies, too, so I made extra just in case you wanted your own set.”
“Thanks,Yvonne. I owe you dinner,” I said, recalling how Jack always took Yvonne to the nicest eateries in town as repayment for going above and beyond her duties as a research librarian. It didn’t escape my notice that I was probably receiving the same level of treatment due to my association with Jack. It was disconcerting, but I was going to take advantage of it while I could.
I looked at the picture on my phone again, then back at the drawing. Tapping my fingers on the wooden tabletop, I thought back to what my grandmother had taught me about applying logic to puzzles and problems. She’d shown me how to unravel a puzzle like a thread, creating an alternate beginning and end, examining the new strands in unexpected ways, like starting at the end instead of the beginning.
My fingers stopped in midair, then came to rest on the table in front of me. I slid the receipt over to look at it again. “Do you know, or do you have any kind of records that would show, what happened to the shop after John Nolan died or moved away? Like deeds or that kind of thing?”
Her eyes sparkled. “You’re beginning to sound like Jack. Plucking random ideas from out of nowhere and convincing others to help him hunt unicorns.”
She was smiling but I wasn’t sure that was a compliment. “Is that a good thing?”
She almost looked offended. “Of course. Our Jack is very successful at what he does. He’ll question the color of the sky if he thinks there’s a possibility that everybody might be wrong about an accepted knowledge. Well, except for that Alamo fiasco, but there are still some experts who say he was right,” she said, referring to his canceled book contract because of its public debunking on national television. “So, what unicorns are you hunting?”
I had to think for a moment to figure out what she meant. “Oh, right. Well, see, the changes were made to the window after the original order was placed.” I turned the description page toward her. “There isn’t an angel head on the original order, and this odd line design that goes around the entire window was added, too. And no people, see?” I pointed to the people standing beneath the oak tree near the house in the picture on my cell phone. I squinted, trying to see the details more clearly.
“You need glasses, dear. Squinting will give you wrinkles.”
“I have glasses. I just always forget to bring them with me.”
She blinked slowly behind her own wide-framed glasses. “Despite evidence to the contrary, Jack is much more attracted to what’s in here”—she pointed to her forehead—“than anything else. In other words, he wouldn’t find glasses a turnoff at all.”
It was my turn to blink slowly at her. “I’m not trying to impress Jack Trenholm, if that’s what you’re getting at, Yvonne. He’s just not my type.”
She was silent for a moment. “I didn’t know such a woman existed.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” She cleared her throat. “Now show me what else you found.” She looked down at the map and I could have sworn I saw her roll her eyes.
Trying not to squint, I held the drawing closer to my face, then looked at the picture on my phone. “The window was installed in 1871, meaning the changes could have been made anytime after that.”
“Or maybe the changes were made during the design process and simply not recorded.”
I nodded, happy to have her play devil’s advocate. It reminded me of my childhood, working on mind teasers with my grandmother where I’d question and she’d answer with another question until I’d figured it out for myself. I had a flash of my mother, in what my grandmother called the puzzle room in her house, laughing and hugging me because I’d figured out a difficult one. It saddened me to think of it, too easily reminded of how very few memories of my mother I had.
Yvonne was watching me closely as I answered. “True, which is why I want to make sure that we’ve looked through all the existing records from the window maker, just in case there was some written record of any changes.”
“But what if the requested changes were made verbally?”
I smiled, enjoying the way our minds worked together. “Then there won’t be any records to find. But that can’t be helped. Which brings me to my request about searching for deeds on the window maker’s business.”
“Assuming that a son didn’t inherit, and an ongoing concern was valuable enough that an astute businessman would consider purchasing the business, and attaching his own name to the storefront.”
“Bingo.”
She folded her hands primly in front of her. “It’s a long shot, of course, but I like your creative thinking.”
“I guess that’s better than calling it a crapshoot, but I’ll take it. So, do you have access to that sort of information?”
“I do. I’ve got some other projects that I’m working on at the moment, but I see no reason why I can’t squeeze it in between. Give me a couple of days and I’ll give you a call whether or not I find something. I’ll admit I’m intrigued, although I must say it’s a bit more far-fetched than most of my requests.”
“Welcome to my world,” I muttered. Smiling, I said, “That’s great. Thank you.” I glanced over to the stack of large books on the corner. “Any luck with the family tree?”
Yvonne stood and took a book off of the top of the stack. “You, Miss Middleton, have been blessed with an old Charleston name. There is certainly no shortage of family histories and genealogies; the hardest part was narrowing down your branch of the Prioleau family tree.”
She slid a piece of paper out of the middle of the book and flipped it open to the marked page. “This book is a personal history of the Manigault-Prioleau branch, done in the early 1940s by a distant relation, most likely trying to prove his own bloodline, but a great source, anyway.”
I leaned close to the page she indicated, mindful of summoning wrinkles and trying not to involve my forehead or brows while I squinted. I followed her pink-tinted and neatly clipped nail as she indicated names on the hand-drawn tree.
“I’m not sure how far you want to go back, but this one goes back to the early 1700s, when the earliest members of your family were farmers on Johns Island.”
“Johns Island? I just always assumed they’d lived in the Legare Street house.”
“No.” She pulled the second book from the stack and opened it to another marked page. “According to this history, written by another relative in 1898, they didn’t purchase the house on Legare until 1783.”
I glanced over at the book. “So they weren’t the original owners?”
She shook her head. “No. Apparently, your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather came into his fortune around the time of the Revolutionary War and made enough to purchase the house. They still owned the property on Johns Island, and had apparently acquired enough wealth and land to become one of the largest sea-island cotton plantations on Johns Island. It’s around that time that they decided they were important enough to name their farm and called it Belle Meade.”
“I recall the name of the plantation. My grandmother took me there. It’s part of a golf community now. But for the rest, I had no idea. I really know very little about my family history.”
Yvonne pursed her lips. “Don’t say that too loud.You might be asked to leave the city and relinquish your last name.” She winked.
Laughing, I asked, “Could I get pho
tocopies of that part of the book? I might as well educate myself while I have the chance.”
Yvonne slid a new manila folder from the side of the desk. “I already did, thinking you might want to read more. It’s in here with the rest of the photocopies.”
I looked at her in surprise. “You’re amazing, Yvonne. Really.”
She grinned broadly, her perfect dentures gleaming. “I’ve heard that more than once. I guess that’s why they pay me the big bucks.”
I laughed again. “I’ll let you get dessert and something to go when I take you out, all right?”
“I’d hoped you were going to say that.” She moved away the second book so that I was staring at the family tree again.
I glanced briefly at the generations preceding the Civil War, and focused on my great-great-grandfather’s generation. I looked at birth, marriage, and death dates, seeing nothing new or surprising. Leonard Prioleau had married Cecilia Allston in 1855, and their only daughter, Rose, was born in 1866. Rose Allston Prioleau married Charles Manigault in 1890 and died in 1946. She gave birth to my grandmother, Sarah Allston Manigault, in 1900. The only interesting item of information was that Sarah apparently married a distant relation whose last name was Prioleau, bringing the family name back to the Legare Street house until Sarah’s daughter, my mother Ginnette, married James Middleton.
“I was hoping I’d find a mention of Rose having a sister, but there’s nothing on the family tree.” I looked back at Rose’s name. “Having just one child, a daughter, seems to be a family trait.” I recalled the sound of a baby’s crying, and what Rebecca had told me about my mother’s miscarriage, and wondered if my life would have been different if I’d had a younger brother or sister. If that would have been enough to get my mother to stay.
“That it does. And since your mother wasn’t born until 1945, it would seem that she was a bit of an afterthought. I suppose you’re lucky that the house is still in your family, considering there were no males to inherit for at least three generations.”