The Girl On Legare Street

by Karen White

  How fortunate for young Alice, to have fallen so ill as to make her unsuitable for travel and thus to have been left behind in your tender care. She was spared the same watery fate as her parents and twin sister, and for this we must be grateful, even as our hearts grieve.

  Your cousin,

  William Crandall

  Mrs. McGowan folded the letter and replaced it in the envelope. “I’m a little bit of an amateur genealogist and have been working on the Crandall family tree with information gleaned from these letters. Nothing serious, mind you, but just something that sparked my interest.” She began rummaging through a stack of papers that had been placed inside a large three-ring binder.

  My mother and I shared a glance before I asked, “So who is the girl in the portrait?”

  Mrs. McGowan looked up at us, seeming confused for a moment. “Ah, yes. That’s Alice Crandall. Daughter of Josiah and Mary, and twin sister to Nora, the child who perished on the ship with her parents. She remained in Connecticut, raised by her aunt Suzanne, until she was thirteen and the family moved down here to South Carolina. Alice lived here until she died in the 1920s, mercifully before the family lost the house and property during the Depression. Her son, Bill, had to deal with that.”

  I’d been hoping that one of the names would have had an R or M, something that would fill in a piece of the puzzle instead of adding to it. I would have even been willing to suggest that the Crandalls and their tragic story had nothing to do with us, that the girls and their identical lockets were merely coincidence.

  My mother turned to me. Speaking softly, she said, “But then the girl’s spirit wouldn’t have followed us here.”

  I stared at her for a long moment, wondering if she’d even realized that I hadn’t spoken my thoughts out loud. Maybe all mothers and daughters were like that, but I’d never had the chance to learn.

  I turned back to Mrs. McGowan. “I’d like to see a Crandall family tree, if you have that handy.”

  Her forehead wrinkled. “That’s what I’ve been looking for. That’s odd. It was right here. I was showing it to Miss Edgerton, so it couldn’t have gone far.” She continued to flip through the binder. “I’m wondering if she accidentally picked it up with her things when she left.”

  Again, I shared a glance with my mother. “Probably. When I see her, I’ll ask and let you know.” I stood. “We can’t thank you enough, Mrs. McGowan, for your time.”

  “And your cookies,” added my mother as she stood, too. “You’ve been most helpful.”

  Mrs. McGowan escorted us to the door. “I’ve enjoyed it. Please come back anytime you want to discuss more of the family’s history. It really is quite interesting. And bring Jack.” She smiled and handed us our coats.

  “One more thing,” I said. “Do you have any idea of the name of the ship that sank with all on board?”

  She shook her head. “No. It was never mentioned in any of the letters. Only that it sank in 1870 somewhere along the coast between North and South Carolina.”

  I nodded. “Well, that’s a place to start. Thank you again,” I said before turning and leading my mother from the porch.

  We paused at the car, facing each other over the roof. My mother said, “Well, that wasn’t a complete bust. We know the girl in the portrait is Alice Crandall, and she had a twin named Nora who went down with a ship in a storm in 1870. And that whoever is haunting the house on Legare is connected to this house in some way and wasn’t very happy to see us today.” She looked up as a heavy cloud lumbered its way over the sun. “We also know that for some reason Rebecca is reluctant to let us see the Crandall family tree.”

  I groaned in frustration. “None of this makes sense. I’m beginning to believe that none of it is even related to anything else.”

  My mother opened her car door. “Let’s go eat dinner and we can discuss this more. I saw a nice seafood restaurant about five miles down the road on our way in.”

  I studied my mother, noticing the graying sky behind her head, and the way the fading light darkened her eyes, making them look more like mine. I sighed, realizing that regardless of the new yet tentative bonds that we’d begun to forge, there would always be parts of my life that my mother had opted out of; parts that would always be irretrievable. But along the way, those things had somehow begun to lose their significance. “I’m allergic to seafood, Mother. I had a severe reaction to shrimp when I was eight years old and I haven’t touched it since.” This wasn’t completely true, as on my doctor’s recommendation I’d tried it again as an adult and I’d had no reaction, but the small child in me wanted my mother to know that she hadn’t been there in a moment when I’d needed her.

  She was silent for a moment, her eyes sad as she contemplated me. “There’s something you need to know, Mellie. . . .”

  Her words were drowned out by the sound of an approaching car. We turned and I recognized Jack’s black Porsche, puffs of dirt and gravel thrown behind it like exclamation points.

  He pulled up next to us in the driveway, then climbed out quickly. Ignoring me, but with a quick greeting to my mother, he said, “Rebecca’s already gone, I assume.” He wore an unbuttoned and wrinkled oxford cloth shirt thrown over a white T-shirt, and he was still sporting a five o’clock shadow. I wanted to say that he looked disheveled, but the only thing that came to mind was how much he looked like he belonged on a magazine cover.

  I faced him. “She left about an hour before we got here. How did you know she was here?”

  “Yvonne called me, trying to reach you.Your cell phone must be out of range. She told me about the window and your grandmother, and how Rebecca has the folder with the information Yvonne had meant for you, and that the Crandall family tree is missing from the archives. I wanted to find Rebecca to set the record straight.”

  “Us, too. That’s why we came here. And guess what. Mrs. McGowan can’t find the Crandall family tree that she was working on, either. It went missing somewhere between the time Rebecca got here and the time she left. Go figure.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “I’m sure there’s an explanation. Sometimes Rebecca gets really caught up in a story and she does—irresponsible things.”

  “Like stealing the journal from my kitchen? That’s more than irresponsible, Jack. It’s a criminal offense. And she’s not returning any of my phone calls.”

  He rubbed his hand over his jaw and when he looked at me again, his eyes were hard. “I’ll get to the bottom of it.” He glanced at the house. “Did Mrs. McGowan have anything interesting to show you?”

  “Besides the missing family tree? Yes, actually.” I quickly filled him in on the identity of the girl in the portrait and the ship lost at sea.

  He was thoughtful for a moment. “You said the ship was lost in 1870, correct?”

  “Yes.Way too late for my ancestors—the supposed wreckers—to have been involved, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  He raised both eyebrows. “The ship was lost off the South Carolina coast, and the figurehead was found not far from your family’s plantation on Johns Island. It’s a bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

  My mother stepped forward. “But surely our family’s financial and social positions were secure enough by that time that such drastic actions weren’t necessary.”

  Jack shrugged. “All I’m saying is that the ship went down near Johns Island. If any salvaging was done by anybody, it would have been a crime of circumstance seeing that it was Mother Nature who sunk the boat. The Civil War devastated the finances of many of Charleston’s upstanding citizens, and the market for sea-island cotton, not to mention the difficulty in cultivating it without slave labor, would have made a huge cut in the Prioleau family fortunes. Who’s to say that they wouldn’t have seen an opportunity and taken advantage of it?”

  “It’s possible, I suppose,” I admitted reluctantly. I didn’t want to be related to anybody who could profit from another’s loss. “But it still doesn’t bring us any closer to the identity
of the girl on the sailboat that was sunk nearly sixteen years later.”

  “Maybe it was Alice on the sailboat,” Jack said.

  I shook my head. “No. Mrs. McGowan said that Alice moved from Connecticut with her aunt to Mimosa Hall when she was thirteen and lived there until she died sometime in the 1920s. But she wore an identical locket to the one worn by the unidentified girls in the portrait in my mother’s house. And if a girl named Meredith lived at Thirty-three Legare, then I have to assume it’s probably her in the portrait with the M locket on.”

  Jack approached the car. “Not to confuse things”—he began as he reached into his back pocket and brought something out, keeping his fist closed over it—“but aren’t you curious what Yvonne was so eager to tell you?”

  “Yes, of course.” I’d nearly forgotten the reason Jack was at Mimosa Hall in the first place.

  “She found a casualty list from the Charleston earthquake of 1886.” He paused for effect. “She found a listing for Meredith Prioleau. Missing, presumed dead. Her last known residence was Thirty-three Legare Street.”

  My mother stepped forward. “But why isn’t this Meredith anywhere on our family tree?”

  I rubbed my temple, feeling the beginning of a headache. “We found a calling card with Meredith’s name and address in the journal, and the casualty list also gives her address as Legare Street. If we can make a leap of faith and say that she was probably the journal writer, I think we can assume that she’s the girl in the portrait, too.”

  Jack nodded, his expression unreadable. “That’s what I was thinking, too, until I picked this up today after having it cleaned.”

  A cold gust of wind caught my hair as Jack placed the gold locket and chain in my hand. At first I didn’t recognize what it was because it now gleamed in the fading light.

  My gaze met his. “I don’t get it.”

  “Look closely.”

  Giving up on vanity completely, I squinted my eyes, staring at the single letter in the middle of the locket. Even in fading light and without glasses, it was clear to the naked eye that the last leg of the letter M had been added at a later time—and that the original letter on the locket had been an N.

  I held it up to my mother, who had already slipped on her reading glasses. Slowly she raised her gaze to both of us. “This is just a shot in the dark, but since it’s the only thing we have to go on right now, could the N have been for Nora?”

  I’d been thinking the same thing. “But how could the locket have ended up in the sailboat sixteen years after Nora died? And why was it altered?”

  After a final look, I slipped the locket into my purse as Jack scratched his head. “Look, why don’t we all grab a bite to eat so we can discuss everything, see if we can reach any conclusions?”

  Avoiding my gaze, my mother smiled brightly at Jack. “Thanks so much, but I need to get back home. But you and Mellie will certainly be able to figure things out without me.”

  “You can’t go alone, Mother. I’ll come with you.”

  “I’ll call your father. He’ll come.”

  I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or not.

  She continued. “I’ll be fine. You two go on.”

  It was clear she was trying to push me together with Jack, but I was equally sure that he wasn’t too thrilled with the arrangement either.

  As if the situation were settled, she returned to her car and opened the driver’s-side door. Before she got in, she said, “One more thing, Mellie.” She paused. “We made the ghost mad today. We showed her that together we’re stronger than she is. She’s going to try even harder now to separate us, to diminish our power. We need to find out who she is soon.”

  “Or what?”

  She shook her head, the wind loosening the French twist and blowing her hair around her face, making her look vulnerable. “I don’t want to find out.”

  She got in her car and with a brief wave, headed out of the drive.

  Without a word, Jack opened the passenger-side door and indicated for me to get in. As he slid behind the steering wheel, he sent a glance in my direction. “Glad to see you didn’t come back for more of a sampling of Mr. McGowan’s brandy.” His lips turned up at a memory he apparently didn’t see the need to share with me.

  About half an hour outside Ulmer, we pulled into a roadside restaurant advertising fried chicken, fried okra, and fried pie—my three favorite food groups—and settled into a booth in the corner. The restaurant smelled of stale smoke and grease, and an underlying aroma of beer and late nights that emanated from the bar and lit jukebox. I surreptitiously pulled out an antibacterial wipe from my purse and rubbed down the plastic red-and-white-checked tablecloth before pulling out a clean one to wipe my hands and vinyl booth cushion, seemingly held together by short strips of duct tape. I offered a wipe to Jack but he declined with a raised eyebrow and slow shake of his head.

  The waitress came and took our orders and then, unnerved by Jack’s pervading silent perusal of me, I pulled out a notepad from my purse. I drew two columns and as many rows as would fit on the page, then began filling in everything I’d learned since my mother first returned to Charleston and told me that I was in danger. Everything I still had questions about I put in the right column. Everything I had answers to I put in the left column. By the time I was finished, I’d run out of room in the right column and I had only two items in the left column: Meredith Prioleau wrote the journal and presumably the same Meredith Prioleau was listed as having lived at Thirty-three Legare Street and was reported as missing following the earthquake of 1886.

  I held my pen poised above the pad, then looked up at Jack, wondering why he hadn’t added anything or at least said something annoying. He was still shaking his head.

  “What’s the matter?”

  His eyes met mine. After a moment he said, “You.”

  “Me?”

  Again, he contemplated me in silence. “Yeah, I’m wondering what in the hell I’m doing here with you.”

  I hid my hurt with a frosty smile. “I assume because Rebecca isn’t returning your phone calls and you didn’t have anybody else to harass. Besides, I thought you were looking for research material for your next book. I know you’d never help me for purely altruistic reasons.” I stared pointedly at him, hoping to remind him of the first time we’d sat in a similar restaurant eating barbecue shrimp while he lied to me and told me he was interested in everything but the diamonds that were hidden in my house.

  Jack leaned forward, his eyes flashing, but he seemed to hold himself back from saying what he wanted to—something he might regret. Instead, he signaled for the waitress. “Make our order to go, please.”

  The waitress dropped the check on the table and as Jack reached for it, I placed my hand on his arm. “Are you still angry with me for the stupid things I said to you the night of the house tour? I already apologized for that, didn’t I? And I truly am sorry. I thought we were friends again, Jack. Have I done something else to make you mad?”

  The waitress reappeared with three grease-stained bags of food and a cardboard container with our two Cokes. Jack took one of the Cokes out and left it on the table before grabbing the bags. “The car only has one cup holder,” he said in explanation before standing and moving toward the door.

  I grabbed the remaining drink and followed him outside into a night that smelled of rain.

  We drove the entire way back to Charleston in silence, without even the radio. I didn’t dare open one of the bags despite the tantalizing aroma and my grumbling stomach, which I’m sure Jack heard over the roaring of the engine.

  The sky opened up with a torrential downpour somewhere between Ruffin and Osborn, precluding me from speaking. I was miserable, wanting him to talk to me but dreading what he might say. I was afraid of him not being in my life anymore, but terrified of what he’d need me to do to keep him there.

  My foot began to keep rhythm with the fast pounding of the windshield wipers until Jack put a hand on my leg to
get it to stop. His touch was electric, sending little fires through my bloodstream as it traveled up my leg and back—like mercury in a thermometer—before settling somewhere in the pit of my stomach.

  He must have felt it, too, because he let go quickly and returned to staring ahead in silence as he drove through the pelting rain.

  We pulled up to the curb on Legare Street in front of the house, relief flooding me when I saw that the outdoor lights were on along with the majority of lights inside. I wondered fleetingly if my mother had done that for me, or for herself.

  I turned to Jack. “Thanks for the ride. Do you by any chance have an umbrella?”

  He turned to me with a slight smile that barely resembled the ones I’d grown so used to that I now missed them. “No. Actually, I don’t. Never figured I’d melt.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” I said under my breath. I thought of my hair, my suede jacket, and my Kate Spade pumps and frowned. Eyeing the large paper bags with the now-cold fried food, I said, “I don’t suppose you’d let me take the food out and use the bags for cover.”

  He was looking at me with an odd light in his eyes. His voice was so soft that it was hard to hear over the splatting of rain against the car roof. “Go ahead and get wet, Mellie. Do something unscheduled and unexpected for a change.”

  “If you’d just let me use one of those bags . . .”

  He didn’t let me finish my sentence. Instead he took my head in his hands and crushed his lips to mine. I was so shocked at first that I didn’t move. And then I felt his hands in my hair, and the roughness of his chin, and the way his lips fit mine as if they were supposed to be together. I closed my eyes and I think I sighed as I pressed back and gave in to the fire that had begun to lick at the base of my spine.

  I jerked back, suddenly remembering whom I was with, and who I was, and that I had a reason for not kissing Jack but with only a fuzzy recollection as to exactly what that might be. Panicking, I grabbed the door handle and hurtled out into the pouring rain, slamming the door before running for the front gate. I managed to unlatch it and had reached the top step before Jack caught up to me.