by Karen White
He snorted. “Me, too,” he said, and I laughed as he headed down the road back to Queen Street.
CHAPTER 23
Have you tried ‘Holy City’?” I asked Jack as we sat in a Delta jet on a runway at Charleston International. Before and after our artery-clogging meal at Jestine’s the night before—which included a basket of fried chicken and corn bread covered with honey butter—we had worked on the clock’s cipher, once again plugging in every word or phrase we could think of. For a break, we’d played with the Roman numerals on the fountain and had reached the same result: nothing.
“Yep. And Saint Michael’s, Saint Philip’s, and the Battery. Next I’m going to try Jihad, Hussein, and Iraq.”
I looked at him, completely perplexed. “Whatever for?”
“Because I think those are the only words in the dictionary that we haven’t tried yet.” He sent a sidelong glance at me. “I’m kidding, you know.”
“I knew that,” I said, returning my focus to the notepad in front of me as I plugged “White Point Gardens” into the cipher.
We spent the next five and a half hours of our trip—with the exclusion of our connection in Atlanta—alternating between working on the cipher and sleeping. We arrived in Burlington, Vermont, around nine o’clock in the evening, rented a car, and booked two rooms in a nearby motel, figuring we could drive the short distance to Colchester in the morning before catching our return flight to Charleston.
I slept fitfully, kept awake by working codes in my head and wondering if Jack was also thinking about tomorrow’s meeting with Susannah Barnsley. Jack had spoken to her briefly on the phone, explaining who we were and asking if we could come see her. She seemed reluctant at first until he explained that I was Augustus Middleton’s granddaughter. She’d agreed to the meeting but hadn’t said anything more, and I was filled with doubts that she had anything to add and that our trip had been a waste of time.
I felt grumpy and rumpled the next morning as we grabbed a fast-food breakfast and coffee before heading north to Colchester. Jack was chipper and looked well-rested, which made me offer him nothing more than a grunt when he wished me good morning.
We plugged Susannah’s address into the rental car’s GPS and followed its directions through the chilly Vermont countryside. I was pretty confident that the scenery was lovely and colorful but I was unable to appreciate any of it through my puffy and irritated eyes. Jack had the good sense to keep quiet.
The house we pulled up to wasn’t at all what I had expected. I had supposed Susannah would have wanted a traditional Southern home like the one in which she’d lived in Charleston, and not the neat and brilliant white Cape Code Colonial with the white picket fence and black shutters that I now stood in front of. I knew, however, that we were in the right place when I saw the walled garden in the back. Being Vermont in late autumn, the bushes and beds were stripped bare of color, but the sheer extensiveness of it made me think that a Charlestonian must live there.
We stood on the neatly swept brick step, and Jack rang the doorbell. Quick footsteps sounded from inside before a neatly dressed woman in her midfifties answered the door.
“Hello,” she greeted us. “I’m Mrs. Marston. I look after Miss Barnsley.” She opened the door wider. “Come on in. We’ve been expecting you.”
The house was furnished with antiques—but not the sparse utilitarian Ethan Allen style one would expect of a Vermont country house. Instead, these were elegant pieces that would have been completely at home in the house on Tradd Street.
A roaring fire greeted us as we entered the front drawing room, and I nearly missed seeing the diminutive woman propped up with pillows in a huge winged-back chair near the fire. Despite her age, which I had calculated as being ninety, I recognized her immediately from her photograph. She had few wrinkles in her light brown skin, as if she’d spent a lifetime taking care of it, and her green eyes were wide and vibrant, belying her years.
“You look just like your grandfather, you know,” she said, her voice strong and still carrying with it the soft consonants and gentle cadence of Charleston. It made me feel at home.
“Do I?” I asked, as I moved forward to take her offered hand. Her grip was strong as I shook it before introducing her to Jack. I could see by the brightening of her eyes that Jack’s charms weren’t lost on her. Remembering Yvonne’s similar reaction to Jack, I made a note to myself to tell him that if his writing career didn’t pick up, he could always be the social director at a nursing home. Or a gigolo.
Mrs. Marston took our jackets before Jack and I sat down on a love seat facing Susannah, the warmth of the fire permeating my chilled body. Because I’m a native South Carolinian, anything under sixty degrees Fahrenheit is too cold for me. Mrs. Marston left to get a tea tray, leaving us to talk in private.
Jack spoke first. “Thank you, Miss Barnsley, for allowing us to come visit. It must have seemed odd to you to get a call from Charleston from out of the blue.”
“Not so odd, actually. Yours was the third in as many days.”
“Really?” I asked. “Anybody you knew?”
“Well, the first two Mrs. Marston told me were just hang-ups, so I don’t know for sure. She recognized the Charleston area code, though, which is how we knew. When you called, I figured the first two times had been you as well.”
I remembered Yvonne telling us that she had called to see if Susannah was still living and I assumed that she had called twice and just forgot to mention it to us.
Jack leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Well, I’m glad you had some warning beforehand, since I’m sure seeing Melanie brings back some memories for you.”
“Yes, indeed. It sure does. Mostly good, though.” She smiled, but her eyes seemed turned inward toward another time and place. I felt dizzy for a moment, as if I traveled with her, and we were both back in Charleston and all that was there in her heart was my grandfather. She loved him very much, I thought. She faced me again and her eyes sparkled, and I had a fleeting thought that she had sensed me inside her head. “So what is it you would like to know?”
I opened my purse and pulled out the photograph of her that I’d kept between two pieces of cardboard. “Is this you?” I asked.
She held it in her hands, the nails neatly trimmed with clear polish. Her hand shook a little as she examined it. “Yes,” she said quietly. “That’s me. Or it was me, I should say. Gus had that taken. I only saw it once—he said he liked to keep it with him.”
“So, as far as you knew, it was always in Gus’s possession,” Jack interjected.
Susannah nodded. “As far as I know, it was.”
I watched Jack as he nodded, presumably ascertaining that Robert and Augustus must have collaborated on the contents of the box.
Jack continued. “How well did you know Robert Vanderhorst?”
“Not very well at all. Of course, times were different back then. Now folks of all colors are free to walk in any social circles. But back then, my place was not where the Vanderhorsts and Middletons were.”
“But you were Gus Middleton’s mistress, correct?”
She didn’t appear taken aback or disturbed by Jack’s bluntness. Instead, she smiled at him. “Yes, I was. He even wanted to marry me but I knew that was foolishness, and not just because I was eighteen years younger than he. I knew how he felt about me, and I didn’t need a ring to prove it. He would have had to give up everything—his friends, his law career, his social standing—to marry me. And that would have been our undoing. One day he would have realized that he missed all those other things, and there would be no way to get them back.” She shook her head. “No, no. We were content with the way things were. For a time, anyway.”
“So why did you leave?” I asked, wondering how my grandmother Middleton had felt about all this. But she had been much younger than my grandfather, and it occurred to me now that they hadn’t been married until nineteen forty or forty-one—about ten years after Susannah had left Charleston forever.
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Susannah looked down at her small hands, neatly folded on top of the knitted blanket on her lap. “Because Gus asked me to.”
Her words lingered in the still room for a moment. “Do you mind if I ask you why?” I felt a tinge of excitement. Her departure coincided closely with Louisa’s disappearance, and I thought for the first time since I’d been trying to solve the mystery of what happened to Nevin’s mother that I was the closest I had ever been to finding out the truth.
Mrs. Marston entered the room with the tray filled with small sandwiches, pastries, and tea. Susannah poured for us, her hands remarkably steady, considering how thin and frail her wrists were. After ensuring that we had everything we needed, Mrs. Marston again left the room, closing the door behind her.
I placed several pastries and a sandwich on my plate and began eating, stopping myself in midchew when I noticed Susannah watching me with a half smile. “Your grandfather loved his sweets, too. Yessirree. He sure did love his sweets. It’s good to see a young girl these days with a healthy appetite.”
I heard Jack snicker but I wasn’t sure if it was the comment about my appetite or me being called a “young girl” that he found amusing.
Susannah dabbed daintily at her mouth. “Before I answer your question, I hope you don’t mind if I ask a few of my own first.”
I noticed that Jack was staring at my leg, and I watched in horror as it bounced up and down in uncontrolled impatience. I pressed my folded hands against my calf to make it stop, then smiled at Susannah. “Absolutely. We’ll answer any questions you have.”
The old woman took a slow sip of her tea, and I pressed my hands harder against my agitated leg. “How did you find me?”
Jack motioned for me to answer. “My father, James Middleton—Gus’s son—found your picture in a humidor, along with a letter for Robert’s son, Nevin, and a roll of film.” I grimaced. “It’s all a bit of a mystery, I’m afraid. We’re hoping all of these clues will lead us to Robert’s wife, Louisa. And . . .” I looked at Jack for confirmation, and he gave me a quick nod. “And maybe even a clue as to what happened to six flawless diamonds rumored to have been in the possession of the Vanderhorst family.”
“Ah, so that’s what this is all about.” She sounded disappointed.
“Actually, no. It isn’t.” I thought for a moment, trying to remember when my last few months had stopped being about restoring an old house to make money from its sale and had instead become all about finding a young boy’s missing mother to tell the world that she hadn’t abandoned him. I realized with a small start that that was really what it had been about for me from the very beginning, when I’d read Nevin’s letter to me. It was almost as if I had challenged myself to prove to the world that not every mother who abandoned her child did so willingly. I thought of the words of his letter that I had long since memorized: Maybe fate put you in my life to bring the truth to the surface so that she might finally find peace after all these years. I cleared my throat and met Susannah’s eyes. “Mr. Vanderhorst—Nevin—died without ever knowing the truth about what happened to his mother. I aim to find out and clear her name so that they can both rest in peace. Because I know with all certainty that Louisa loved her husband and her son. She wouldn’t have left them willingly.”
Susannah’s face drooped a little. “So Nevin is gone. It seems wrong, somehow, that he would be gone before me.” She shook her head. “As far as Louisa ever deserting her son, though, never. He was her life.”
I looked at her hopefully. “So you knew her?”
“Not socially, no. But I knew of her from the society pages and from Gus. She was what we called ‘real quality’ in the old days. A true lady. And I didn’t for one minute believe what the papers were saying about her running off with that no-good Joseph Longo.”
“So . . . you don’t know what happened to her?” I felt my shoulders slumping. The coincidence of the date of Susannah’s departure with Louisa’s disappearance had me hoping they had both gone north together.
Susannah shook her head. “I’m sorry, dear, but I don’t know. Gus knew, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said that the fewer people who knew the better off we’d all be. He said it was the kind of knowledge that could get a person killed.” Her bright eyes lighted on me and then Jack. “I guess that means it’s my turn to answer your questions.”
She sat back and rang a small bell sitting on a low chest by the side of her chair. Mrs. Marston appeared immediately, almost as if she’d been waiting outside the door. Susannah gave her a small nod and Mrs. Marston abruptly left the room. I put another pastry in my mouth and listened.
Susannah continued. “I don’t know all the details—just what I heard from Gus—but I think it will be enough to answer your questions.” Jack and I waited while she took another sip of her tea. My foot gave a little kick of impatience, but I reined it in with my clasped hands.
“The night Louisa disappeared, Gus came to see me. He told me that something bad had happened—he wouldn’t tell me what but that I needed to leave town right away. I didn’t want to go, of course. I didn’t want to leave him. I loved him more than my own heart, you see.” She glanced away for a moment. I watched as the pearls on her sweater rose and fell like the vagaries of time, and waited until she was ready to speak again.
“Gus told me that he needed to give me something to take with me, and that nobody must ever find it. Not ever. He knew that whoever wanted it wouldn’t think of me at first, and if they did, I would be long gone. Gus told me that if this . . . thing that he was to give me was discovered, it would mean certain death for him and for Robert. And even little Nevin.”
She gave us a shaky smile, and Jack stood to get a clean napkin from the tea tray for her. She touched the corners of her eyes and took a shaky breath. “He promised me that he would take care of me, that he would make sure I had a beautiful house to live in for as long as I liked and unlimited funds in a local bank. I would never want for anything if I agreed.” Her face crumpled like a drying rose. “But he was wrong, you see, because all I ever wanted was him.”
“But you said yes,” Jack promptly softly.
She nodded. “Yes. I knew Gus wouldn’t ask me if it wasn’t a life-and-death situation. For ten years he had given me everything, and I’d had nothing but my love to give him in return. I thought that I could at least do this one thing for him.”
There was a brief tap on the door, and Mrs. Marston entered the room again, but this time she held something in her hand. I stood when I recognized my grandfather’s humidor. Jack stood, too, then motioned for me to sit down again. “It’s not the same one, Melly. Look, the lock is still there.”
Jack held out his hand for the box, and when Susannah nodded, Mrs. Marston gave it to him. We both sat down again and waited for Susannah to speak. “Gus helped me pack my things, then took me to the train station. He bought my ticket and waited with me until the train arrived. And then . . . he kissed me goodbye and gave me that box. Gus told me that he had a business associate who would meet me at the train station in Atlanta and purchase my next ticket and send me up north. Gus didn’t want to know my final destination in case . . . well, in case whoever it was he was afraid of would want to come after me. He said this associate—I never learned his name—would take care of my finances and travel with me to help me procure a house. Gus gave me a small package to give to him, explaining to me that his payment for assisting me was inside. I assumed it was money, but I can’t be sure.”
I felt a lump in my throat. “Did you ever see him again?”
Her eyes were cloudy as she regarded me. “No, dear. I never did.” The room was silent except for the gentle crackling of the fire. “He loved me—I knew that. But he loved his friend and his godson, too. He did the only thing he could think of that would keep us all safe, and I understood that.” She shrugged. “And I knew, too, that our time together was coming to an end. You see, family was so important to him. One day soon he’d be wanting a wife and some children
, and I couldn’t help him with either one of those things. And he was such a man of principles that he never would have considered continuing his relationship with me while marrying another woman. Other men would, but not Augustus Middleton.”
Her chest rose, as if filled with pride. “No, I never saw him again. So that was my parting gift to him: not only to help him save the lives of those he loved, but also in helping him say goodbye to me.”
Jack’s fingers were white against the box. “And you have no idea who Gus was afraid of.”
Susannah shook her head. “No. And he made me promise to never show this box to anybody except for Nevin. Not anybody. He said that when Nevin was older, he would be told the truth, or at least be led to the truth, and he would find me here. I suppose what you found in Gus’s box was supposed to lead Nevin to me.”
Jack nodded. “Yes. We’re guessing that Augustus held the box for safekeeping for Nevin, in case something happened to his father before Robert decided it was safe to tell Nevin the truth. But Robert and Gus died only a few days apart without Nevin ever knowing anything. And then the first box sat in Gus’s effects until one day last month when Mellie’s father found it.”
The old woman’s head drooped so that her chin nearly rested on her chest. “I didn’t find out about Robert dying until later, but I knew about Gus. I received a newspaper clipping of his obituary that was in the Charleston paper. The envelope had an Atlanta postmark, so I assumed it was from his business associate. I remembered that I cried all day but it wasn’t all from sadness. Oh, no—there’s lots more people like me that have a great deal more to cry about. And I had ten good years with him.” She glanced up and our eyes met. “I think I was crying because of all the years I’d missed him and how I’d always pretended he was dead. And then he was, and I had to miss him all over again.”
“How difficult for you,” said Jack.
Susannah surprised us by smiling. “Not really. You see, I feel him here, in this house. With me. When I go to sleep, I see him. It’s like he’s waiting for me.”