Not Quite Clear (A Lowcountry Mystery)

by Lyla Payne

  “I like your technique.”

  “Anyway, it should be fine, provided you know how to act normal. It’s a big wedding, almost four hundred guests, so nobody will know everyone there. The reception is on the back lawn, near where you want to sneak around. It’s perfect.”

  “That sounds great. Thanks.” I ignore her barb about acting normal, which only makes her grin.

  “Don’t thank me yet.” She eats the olives off the little plastic sword in her martini. “I helped you before and I’m going to help you again, but this time you have to tell me why. I’ll die otherwise”

  The hyperbole makes me grin back. If I were Jenna, the curiosity would be enough to kill me, and I’m starting to think that she and I aren’t all that different. The fact that I like her so much is my reason for holding back, but the bottom line is that I might need her help again.

  “Would you reconsider if I told you it’s dangerous to know what I’m doing out there and I don’t want you to get hurt?”

  “No,” she says, after the briefest pause ever. “The way I see it, if something that awful is lurking out by the river at the place where I spend about eighty hours a week, maybe it’s better to know about it.”

  Smart girl. We engage in another short standoff, which she wins. Again.

  “Fine. Do you remember when I asked you about the ghosts people see on the property?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, there’s one of them that’s helping me with…something.” I hold up a hand. “I’m not telling you what. That’s personal.”

  “Who?” Her dark almond eyes light up, dazzling in their curiosity.

  “Mama Lottie.”

  Nothing else so far has surprised her, but this does. Her head jerks, fingers tightening on the thin stem of her glass. The last olive slips out of her grasp and hits the table with a squishy thud. “Mama Lottie? You’ve seen her?”

  “Yes. Talked to her, too, and we’re about due for another discussion.”

  “That is crazy, Graciela. And so freaking cool! I’ve worked there for ages and hardly ever see anything weird. You’re there for a couple of weeks, tops, and start a friendship with a ghost!” She’s fidgeting in her seat, as though the excitement is too much to contain. “And Mama Lottie! She’s the Draytons’ most famous ghost.”

  “Yeah, she’s a real peach.” The sarcasm feels wrong, maybe because it’s like I’m waiting for Mama Lottie’s ghost to shove my face into another invisible barrier. “What do you know about her?”

  “Just what I’ve read in the various Drayton journals. She was a powerful herbal healer. Not Gullah, though. Her practices were different, from what I understand. The family loved her, depended on her, treated her better than the others, not that they were particularly harsh slave owners at all.”

  My own curiosity snags on her words. It pushes the fear to the sides, where it belongs, and I sit up straighter. “Is there anything in those diaries about where they got her? Or anything about her not being like the other slaves?”

  “Nothing about where she came from. The Draytons didn’t keep purchase records, or at least, not after they stopped farming.” The question puts a thoughtful look on her face. She retrieves the lost olive and eats it, chewing slowly. It’s as though her brain is a computer and she’s input a search term. We’re giving it time to return all the results and when it does, her face lights up. “They did often make note of all the skills she had, how differently she spoke. Mrs. Sarah Drayton remarked once that she suspected Mama Lottie, just a girl at the time, knew how to read and write after she caught her making notes in the margins of a book.”

  “Interesting.” And in line with Mama Lottie’s claims that she’d been sold illegally. “What do you think of that generation of Draytons? The ones who owned her.”

  “There were two, actually. The first ones, Charles the Second and Mary Middleton Schoolbred, weren’t around all that long after Carlotta—Mama Lottie—came to the plantation. He was a doctor, like his father, and served in the War of 1812. There are fewer details since Mary wasn’t really into that sort of personal accounting, plus they had six kids, so that kept her busy.”

  “When did Mama Lottie come to the plantation?”

  “Around 1842, just two years before Charles the Second died and his son, Charles the Third, took over the plantation. Business was declining and the father had urged the son to look into some other, more stable line of work, but family is family.”

  “Indeed it is,” I murmur, my heart and mind on a more recent crop of Draytons. I’d read most of this family history during my time going through documents on the property, but it’s more interesting to hear it from Jenna’s perspective. “And people didn’t give up a legacy or land like that without a fight.”

  “Right.” Jenna looks at me as though she suspects I’ve been referring to something else with my agreement about family, but moves on with her historical recounting. “Charles the Third married Sarah Parker, the woman who really raised and befriended Mama Lottie during her teen years into adulthood.”

  “They were the ones who allowed Mama Lottie’s healing or witchcraft or whatever to flourish on the plantation,” I verify, picking at the label on my bottle of beer.

  “Yes. And when Charles the Third died young—pneumonia—Sarah blamed Mama Lottie.”

  “She thought her maid had something to do with it?” I haven’t heard this rumor before and make another mental note, this one to find a way to get my hands on Sarah’s diary.

  “Not in so many words. It’s more like Sarah didn’t understand why Mama Lottie would let her master die after saving so many others. The two of them got into a nasty row, and Mama Lottie was banished from the house to work in the fields for the rest of her tenure.”

  “Sarah ran the plantation after that? Until the Civil War broke out?”

  “Unofficially. Her son, Charles Henry, inherited but he was only five years old. His uncle John, Charles the Third’s brother, was the legal steward.”

  “He’s the one who saved Drayton Hall.”

  It’s officially a mystery how the big house stood strong through the Civil War when the others around it were looted and burned by Union troops. The prevailing theory is that because John, like the other men in his family, was a doctor, he treated troops on the land. Or, alternately, may have marked the house as a smallpox hospital to scare away anyone not infected.

  “Supposedly. The slaves were freed afterward, of course. Charles Henry let many of them stay on, work as sharecroppers in the phosphate mines that became the family business after the war, but poor Mama Lottie didn’t make it that long.”

  My heart sinks. The woman scares the bejesus out of me, and she’s ruining one piece of my life while salvaging another, but if her story is true…it’s heartbreaking. “She died? How?”

  “No one knows, exactly. There’s no record, and even though we have one of the only designated African American cemeteries in the country, the majority of the graves aren’t marked. The ones that are have long since worn away.” Jenna shrugs, her own eyes slightly wet at the recounting. “She could be anywhere, really.”

  “Are you sure about when she died?”

  “No. But there was no record of her working at the Hall after the war, and Charles Henry did make a journal entry about losing the woman who had helped raise him before turning her back on their family in their time of need. It has to be her.”

  “Interesting. He cared about her.”

  “He and his wife named one of their daughters Charlotta. I always thought that was telling, even with the slight alteration in spelling. It wasn’t a family name.”

  The information swirls through my mind, sinking its tiny little teeth in and gnawing away. The edges tell their own stories, indecipherable on their own, like smaller pieces in the big puzzle that makes up the life of the spirit haunting Drayton Hall.

  One of them, anyway.

  “So, what do you think she wants?” Jenna asks, startling me out of my head befo
re ordering another drink. She puts her elbows on the table, chin in her hands, and stares at me like one of the kids at the library during story time when I pause too long before reading the last page.

  “Revenge,” is my honest answer.

  I expect the young preservationist to flinch, or her eyes to widen in surprise, but as with most everything else that’s come out of my mouth today, the revelation doesn’t seem to shock her.

  I suppose the news that an enslaved person, and one who fell from grace at her master’s house to boot, has held a grudge shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

  Instead, she purses her lips and nods. “And I suspect she’s going to get it, one way or another.”

  I swallow, my beer too warm and sour now. “I suspect you’re right.”

  We finish a second round of drinks, tossing around small talk and catching each other up on what’s been going on with school and writing thesis and journal articles, and relationships. It’s nice to feel as though it’s still possible to make new friends in an old place. It’s even nicer to find a person who not only shares so many of my interests but has a genuine passion for understanding the people and landscapes that have lived and died on this planet before us.

  I insist on paying the bill since she’s still in school, even though we both know she probably makes more money at Drayton than I make at the library—I’m still waiting on that check from the Journal of American History and for Mr. Freedman to find the time to talk to me about my request for a raise—and then I find the courage to ask the question sitting on the back of my tongue.

  “Do you think you could get me Sarah Parker Drayton’s journal? Or photocopies, at least?”

  She thinks for a minute. “It’s over at Magnolia, and Sean’s in charge of all that stuff. He’s got a couple of copies that he loans out to local archivists and college professors sometimes. You could make an official request?” She looks doubtful, and the statement turns into a question we both know would get answered with a big fat no.

  Sean Dennison is a good guy—he even loves his job—but he’s Cordelia Drayton’s lackey. No way will he give me access to so much as the results of my own urine sample.

  “Yeah, I’m guessing my grand exit speech pretty much got me blackballed from associating with Drayton or Magnolia in any sort of official capacity.”

  She nods, pursing her lips. “I could ask to borrow it. I’ve read it before but he wouldn’t question me, I don’t think. Unless you think we’re being followed.”

  Jenna looks far too delighted by the idea that we’re some sort of spies. Next thing I know she’s going to be suggesting we wear black leather and only use invisible ink and self-igniting paper to communicate.

  I give her a smile. “I doubt it.”

  Even as I say it, I’m not sure. I wouldn’t put it past Beau’s mother to maintain an interest in where I spend my time and with whom, but more concerning is Mama Lottie. She could be here, anywhere, undetected. An extra bit of white mist above the grill or swirling through the season’s first fallen leaves that litter the cobblestone pavement.

  “I’d appreciate anything you’d be willing to do to get me a look, though. If I’m going to be dealing with Mama Lottie and her requests, it would be nice to understand the person she was in life as well as I can. And it seems as though Sarah knew her best.”

  “Sure. No problem.” Jenna gets up, swinging a black leather jacket over her T-shirt and dropping a five-dollar bill on the table for the tip. “Oh! I meant to tell you, since you won’t be coming out to visit your favorite tree again anytime soon…”

  My blood goes cold at the mention of the big, ancient oak tree that presides over the front grounds at Drayton Hall. I’ve long loved it but doubt I’ll ever be able to look at it again without seeing the image of young Nan Robbins swinging back and forth, fingernails tugging desperately at the noose around her neck.

  The noose Brick Drayton helped her tie.

  “What’s that?” I ask, my own voice strangled.

  “It’s got a plaque now, real shiny and so big you can’t miss it. ‘In loving memory of Nanette Christina Robbins, Little Sister, Daughter, and Excellent Friend,’” Jenna quotes, unaware of the effect her words are having. She shakes her head. “I had to look up the name because I had no idea that someone killed themselves on the property. Crazy, right?”

  “Crazy,” I echo, my heart begging me to correct the assumption about how Nan died, but my better sense, for once, stops me. “Did her sister ask for permission to put it up?”

  Poor Reynolds. This, at least, is a way to ensure her sister will never be forgotten.

  But Jenna Lee shakes her head again, arms over her chest as a brisk, chilly wind sweeps down the street. “Nope. It was Brick Drayton. How weird is that?”

  My afternoon with Jenna proved so intriguing that I rush back to Heron Creek and go straight to the library, even though it’s closed for the day and Amelia’s gone home. I told her and Beau that I’d been inspired by my afternoon and wanted to start researching my next potential article.

  It wasn’t really a lie. Sarah Drayton and her relationship with Mama Lottie would be exactly the sort of obscure, relevant, fascinating topic that could score me a second publication credit, but one thing at a time.

  While I wait to get my hands on the original diary, the burning desire to verify everything else Jenna said today is eating me alive.

  So far, I’ve managed to track down most of the family details of Jenna’s recollection. They’re historically accurate, if conjecture in places, and that means it stands to reason that the tidbits here and there about Mama Lottie and what became of her are also correct.

  The sun slipped below the horizon about thirty minutes ago, and now the faintest streaks of rose and lilac paint the horizon. The moon hangs low in the sky, pregnant and nearly full, so bright it blots out the twinkle of the boldest stars. The lack of detail or verification of the time and place of her death negates my ability to sit still while I wait for Leo to meet me out front.

  I searched for info on Carlotta with several different terms, including the last name Drayton since slaves often kept their owners’ names even after they were freed, but it came up with nothing but a few hits for the real Charlotta Drayton, Charles Henry’s youngest daughter. Whatever really happened to Mama Lottie, wherever she ended up, I’m not going to find it out on the Internet.

  A lone, lanky figure turns the corner, striding up the block toward me. All my instincts go on alert, my muscles tensing and my finger wrapping around the trigger of the little container of Mace Beau insisted on hanging off my keys after my confrontation with Brian the Homicidal Tour Guide.

  All the preparation turns out to be for naught when Leo’s face bleeds out of the darkness. He’s wearing his jeans, a blue T-shirt that hugs his biceps, and boots that seem to suggest he might have been working at his job as a volunteer firefighter this afternoon.

  “Hey. Busy afternoon?” I ask.

  “Yes. Mrs. Walters had me running around changing the batteries in every single smoke and carbon monoxide detector in her house.” He rolls his eyes. “She has an excessive amount, in case you were wondering.”

  “Well, hallelujah. We sure wouldn’t want anything to happen to her, now would we?”

  “You’re terrible.” He gives me a sly grin. “And she has so many good things to say about you.”

  I don’t bother to bite back a groan. “Oh no. She talked to you about me?”

  “Hell yes. I’m now equipped with any number of reasons to reject your brazen advances, which I can only assume are coming because you’re too big of a floozy to stick with one guy for too long. That or the mayor is going to finally open his eyes to your hussy, hellfire-leaning ways and hightail it for the hills. Either way, I’m next in line for corruption.”

  “What? That’s…? How dare she,” I sputter, unsure where to start.

  Leo laughs, a rich one right from his belly. “Don’t worry. I thanked her for her concern but ass
ured her that, as a friend since childhood, I’d long ago developed Gracie-proof armor. Told her Will filed for a patent for the good of the town.”

  “You’re hilarious.” His good humor and matter-of-fact teasing calms me. There’s no reason to get upset over Mrs. Walters. She hates everyone, most of all probably herself, and everyone in town knows not to take her seriously.

  I hope.

  “Well, you ready to meet some real, live moonshiners?”

  “I grew up here, Gracie, and unlike you, stayed past the legal drinking age. I’ve met a few mountain men in my day.”

  “Fair enough. I won’t hold your hand, then.”

  I lead the way to my old Honda, which is waiting patiently where I left it in a parking spot down the street from the library. The town is quiet, only a few people milling around and small crowds inside the restaurants and bar. School has started, which means families calling it an early night, and with the sun setting earlier and earlier, most of the older folks get home while there’s still light to navigate the cracks in the sidewalks.

  I’m not especially pumped about going out to the mountains at night, but seeing as how Leo’s been busy with his many jobs and I can’t take any more days off work, this is the best way to get it done without explaining where I’ve been to half the town.

  Once we’re in the car, whizzing down the dark, two-lane road with fresh air howling past the windows, there’s no turning back. It feels good to be doing something, making moves, even with the threat of Clete hovering on the horizon.

  “What’s this guy going to want from you in return for his help, do you think?” Leo asks as we get closer. He squints into the blackness on the side of the road, but there’s nothing to see.

  I pull into a gas station parking lot and put the car into park, catching his curious glance. “We have to go on foot from here. It’s just a mile or so.”

  “Just a mile or so? Through the woods at night, woods that are probably teeming with men who think the Second Amendment is basically the Bible?”