The House on Tradd Street

by Karen White

  I tried to hide my relief. Jack had become such a large part of my life that I was having a hard time imagining it without him. Even if he was annoying and bigheaded most of the time. “Sure. I don’t mind.”

  He smiled. “Guess you wouldn’t be interested in finding another ghost or two who know a few secrets, hmm? I’m always thinking about my next book.”

  “Running naked through glass sounds more fun. I think I’ve had enough mystery solving and ghost talking to last me a lifetime. You’ll have to do your research the old-fashioned way in the future. It was a short-lived career, but I’m retiring.”

  Jack laughed. “Gee, Mellie, tell me how you really feel about it.” His face sobered. “But I understand. None of this could have been easy for you.” He looked past me, toward the men working in the garden. “I’m going to go outside now and see where they are in the excavation. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Thanks,” I said, his face hovering very close to mine. “And thanks for defending my honor today.”

  His eyes crinkled at the corners. “It was the least I could do, seeing as how my own behavior wasn’t exactly exemplary in the gentleman department.” He continued to stare into my eyes, not moving back.

  “No, it wasn’t,” I agreed, my eyes half closed as he began to close the distance between us.

  His lips hadn’t even made contact when my cell phone rang, and he drew back. I dug into the back pocket of my jeans and pulled out my phone, not recognizing the area code or the number.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hello, Mellie.”

  I froze. Only one person besides Jack ever called me that. “Hello, Mother.”

  “I realized that if I waited for you to call me back, I’d never talk to you. So I asked your father for your cell phone number.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “I learned that your grandmother’s house on Legare is for sale, and I want you to be my Realtor and help me purchase it.” There was a brief pause. “I’m coming home, Mellie. I’m moving back to Charleston.”

  I held the phone close to my ear, hearing the rushing of my blood thundering through my head. “Don’t, Mother. Please don’t. I’ve been fine for so long without you. Please don’t come back.”

  She spoke in a rush, as if she knew I wasn’t going to give her enough time to say everything she wanted to. “I don’t blame you for saying that. But there are things you need to know before it’s too late, Mellie—about your grandmother. About her house and why I had to let it go. There are secrets in our family you should know. . . .”

  I cut her off, having had enough family secrets in the last four months to last a lifetime. In light of my recent experiences, which included being nearly choked by a ghost, I was surprised at the fear and angst I felt at merely hearing my mother’s voice. But, I reasoned, ghosts couldn’t hurt me because I was stronger than they were. I’d proven that. But mothers always could.

  “No, Mother. I’m sorry. I just can’t.” Before she could answer, I closed my phone and turned it off.

  Jack raised his eyebrows. “Not good news?”

  I took my time sticking my cell phone back in my pocket. “She wants to move back to Charleston and buy my grandmother’s house. She claims there are family secrets I should know about. Something about my grandmother.”

  “And?” he prompted.

  “I told her I wasn’t interested.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Or maybe my next book is about to write itself for me again.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” I snorted, trying to hide how shaken I really was by my mother’s phone call.

  Jack picked up General Lee’s leash and led him outside, with me following close behind.

  Without turning to look at me, Jack said, “I believe that was near-kiss number three. If we keep this up, we might have a world record or something.”

  He headed down into the garden before I could think of something clever to say. I remained on the top step, surveying Louisa’s wounded garden and wondering again if it could ever be put right. I crossed my arms, recalling my conversation with my mother with the same uncertainty I considered the garden. Weeds could be pulled and new seeds planted, hardened soil tilled and watered to make a fertile bed. Water could be piped in to make an old fountain cascade for the first time. Perhaps my relationship with my mother could be tended in the same way, with care and patience used to rebuild the bedrock of a mother-child bond that had been broken nearly thirty-three years before.

  Or not, I thought as I watched a small bulldozer take a chunk out of the newly bricked path that encircled the fountain. The cherub seemed to wink at me, and I blinked, wondering if it had been a trick of the light.

  I turned around and crossed the piazza to the front door. I’m home. The thought struck me from nowhere, and when I considered it, I realized how very true it was. I turned the handle of the magnificent door with the Tiffany windows and pushed it open, noticing how nothing barred my way this time. I breathed in the smell of beeswax and polish, and smiled to myself as I gently closed the door behind me.

  Melanie Middleton and Jack Trenholm will be

  back for a new adventure—

  turn the page for an exciting preview of

  their book, coming from New American

  Library in November 2009.

  The milky glow of winter sun behind a sky rubbed the color of an old nickel failed in its feeble attempt to warm the December morning. I shuddered in my wool coat, my Charleston blood unaccustomed to the infrequent blasts of frigid air that descend on our city from time to time to send yet another reminder of why we chose to live in this beautiful city where its inhabitants, both living and dead, coexist like light and shadow.

  I yanked open the door to the City Lights coffee bar, the wind behind me threatening to close it again before I’d gone through it. Glancing around, I spotted Jack at a table by the front window, a latte with extra whipped cream and a large cinnamon roll already sitting on the table across from him. Immediately suspicious, I approached the table with caution.

  “What do you want?” I asked, indicating the latte and cinnamon roll.

  He looked up at me with a pair of killer blue eyes that I’d spent the last six months of my life trying not to notice. His look of innocence would have made me smile and roll my eyes if I didn’t still have the lingering aura of dread that had dogged me all the way from my house on Tradd Street to Market. It had been a strong enough feeling to make me linger outside the café for a moment longer than necessary, hoping to identify whatever it was. I wanted to think it was grogginess caused by a phone call at two o’clock in the morning, after which I’d been unable to fall asleep. That would have been an acceptable explanation, but in my world, where phone calls from people long dead weren’t as unusual an occurrence as most people would expect, I wasn’t satisfied.

  “Good morning, Melanie,” Jack said cheerfully. “Can’t a guy just want to buy breakfast for a beautiful woman without expecting anything in return?”

  I pretended to think for a moment. “No.” I unbuttoned my coat and folded it neatly on the back of my chair before sitting down, noticing that all of the women in the restaurant, including the gray-haired woman with a walker at a table by the ladies’ room, were staring at Jack and regarding me with narrowed eyes. Yes, Jack Trenholm was way too good-looking for a writer, especially a writer of historical true-crime mysteries. He should have been bald with a gray beard, wearing thick turtlenecks that protruded over his paunch, his teeth tobacco-stained from his ubiquitous pipe. Unfortunately, like so much about Jack, he didn’t even try to fit the stereotype.

  “So, what do you want?” I asked again as I took out the bottle of hand sanitizer from my purse and squirted a dollop on my palm. I offered the bottle to Jack, but he shook his head before taking a sip of his black coffee. Emptying two packets of sugar into my latte I looked up at him again, then wished I hadn’t. His eyes were certainly bluer than they should be, their intensity not
needing the help from the navy blue sweater he wore. But something flickered in his eyes as he regarded me, something that I thought looked a lot like concern, and it made me squirm in my seat.

  “How’s General Lee?” he asked, ignoring my question and glancing out the front window, then down at his watch.

  I swallowed a bite of my cinnamon roll. “He’s fine,” I said, referring to the small black-and-white dog I’d reluctantly inherited along with my historic home on Tradd Street.

  “Are you still keeping him in the kitchen at night?”

  I avoided his gaze. “Um, no. Not exactly.”

  A wide grin spread over Jack’s face. “He sleeps in your room now, doesn’t he?”

  I took a huge bite of my roll to avoid answering, annoyed again at how astute Jack could be where I was concerned. After having failed at foisting General Lee off on my best friend, Dr. Sophie Warren—who’d turned out to be allergic—I’d sworn to all who would listen that I wasn’t a dog person and had no intention of actually keeping the dog.

  “He’s sleeping at the foot of your bed now, isn’t he?” Jack couldn’t keep the glee from his voice.

  I took a long sip of my latte, studiously avoiding looking at him.

  Jack crossed his arms over his chest and slid back in his chair, a smug look on his face. “He’s on the pillow next to you, isn’t he?”

  “Fine,” I said, slamming down my coffee mug. “He wouldn’t sleep anywhere else, okay? He’d cry if I left him in the kitchen, and when I brought him up to my room, he’d sit next to the bed staring up at me all night until I brought him up there with me. Sleeping on my pillow was his idea.” I slid the mug away from me. “It’s not like I actually like him or anything. He just seemed . . . lonely.”

  Jack leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “Maybe I should pretend I’m lonely and look up at you with sad-puppy eyes and see what happens.”

  I stared at him for a moment, suppressing the unwanted trill of excitement that settled somewhere near my stomach. “You’d end up in a crate in the kitchen.” I pushed my empty plate away and signaled the waitress for another.

  Jack laughed, then shook his head. “You know, one day those calories are actually going to stick to you, and you’ll have to watch what you eat like the rest of us mortals.”

  I shrugged. “I can’t help it. It’s hereditary. My maternal grandmother was as slim as a reed until the day she died, and she ate like a linebacker.”

  “Is your mother the same way?”

  My eyes met Jack’s, and I saw he wasn’t smiling anymore. “I wouldn’t know, would I? I haven’t seen her in more than thirty years.” This wasn’t precisely the truth, as I’d accidentally spotted the famous soprano Ginette Prioleau several times while flipping channels on the television, the remote control in my hand unable to flip quickly enough from the PBS station broadcasting a production of the Metropolitan Opera. The exact truth was that my mother was still as slender and as beautiful as she’d been when she’d abandoned her seven-year-old daughter without a backward glance.

  The darkness that had been hovering over me all morning seemed to descend on our corner table, obscuring the light as if someone had hit a dimmer switch. I fought a wave of nausea as the hairs on the back of my neck rose, and I looked at Jack in panic to see if he’d noticed a change, too. But he was too busy staring past my shoulder to notice anything else.

  “You resemble her a lot, you know.” Jack’s eyes slid back to mine, and I saw the look of concern quickly switch to one of apology.

  “Oh, God, Jack, you didn’t!” I made a move to stand, but he placed a hand on my arm.

  “Melanie, she said it was a matter of life or death and that you wouldn’t see her or return her phone calls. I was her last resort.”

  I looked around blindly, searching for an exit other than the door through which I’d entered, and wondered if I could run through the kitchen before anybody noticed me. A small, gloved hand gripped my shoulder as a bright light seemed to pop in front of me like a curtain being pulled back from the window to reveal a sunny day. The darkness dispelled as she squeezed my shoulder and dropped her hand, but the light remained, leaving me to wonder if the sigh and whisper I’d heard as the darkness left had been only in my imagination.

  I looked up into the face of the woman who’d once been the world to me, when I was too small to understand the vagaries of human nature and that calling somebody “Mother” didn’t always mean what you wanted it to.

  “Hello, Mellie,” she said in a soft, melodious voice that had haunted my dreams for years until I’d grown old enough to believe that I didn’t need to hear my mother’s voice anymore.

  I winced at the sound of the nickname she’d given me—the nickname I’d never let anybody call me until I’d met Jack and he persisted in calling me Mellie regardless of whether I wanted him to.

  I faced Jack, my fury easily turned on him. “You set this up, didn’t you? You knew I didn’t want to see her or talk to her, but you set this up anyway. How dare you? How dare you involve yourself uninvited, I might add, in something that has nothing to do with you and something I explicitly made clear to you that I wanted nothing to do with?” I paused just for a second to catch my breath, ignoring my mother’s presence completely since that was the only way I could remain relatively calm. “I don’t want to see you again. Ever.”

  He raised his eyebrow, and I knew we were both remembering another time when I’d said the exact same words. I leaned forward and pressed my finger into his sweater-covered chest. “And I really mean it this time.”

  I stood, intending to make a graceful exit, but managed instead to bump the table and spill the remainder of my latte in addition to two tall glasses of water. I slid to the next chair to escape the deluge, and while a busboy and our waitress were cleaning up the mess, my mother used the opportunity to slide into my vacated chair, effectively holding me hostage between her and the window.

  She faced the side of my head because I refused to look at her. “Please don’t be angry with Jack. I’ll admit to using my friendship with his mother to coerce him into helping me. It’s hard to say no to Amelia Trenholm, especially if you’re her son.”

  I knew Amelia, and even liked her, but it didn’t stop the need I had to get out of that café and away from my mother as fast as I could. Staring down at the laminated tabletop, I said, “I haven’t had anything to say to you for over thirty years, Mother. And I don’t think anything has changed. So if you’ll excuse me, I need to go. I’m meeting clients at nine to show them houses in the Old Village and I don’t want to be late.”

  She didn’t move, and I was forced to continue staring at the bright yellow, green and blue specs of the linoleum tabletop, because I didn’t want to look across from me and see the reproach in Jack’s eyes.

  Still wearing her gloves, my mother folded her hands on top of the table, and I wondered if she did it out of habit now or out of necessity.

  “I need your help, Mellie. Your grandmother’s house on Legare is for sale again, and I need your professional help in purchasing it. Everyone says that you’re the best Realtor in Charleston.”

  Finally, I faced her for the first time, seeing the dark hair swept back in a low ponytail, her flawless skin and high cheekbones, the green eyes that I had always wanted instead of my father’s hazel ones, and only the hint of fine lines at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth to show that she had aged at all since the night she’d said good night to me when she really should have said goodbye.

  “There are hundreds of other Realtors in Charleston, Mother, all as qualified as I am—and a hell of a lot more willing—to help you purchase a home. In other words, no, thank you. I don’t need to make a buck that bad.”

  To my surprise, she smiled. “You haven’t really changed all that much.”

  “How would you know?” I asked, needing to wipe the smile from her face.

  I heard Jack suck in a breath. “Mellie, I know you’re hurt, and I wouldn’t
have had any part in this if I thought your mother was here just to make you feel worse. But there’s more, and I think you need to listen to her. She believes you might be in danger.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Right. Well, tell her that I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing it for more than thirty years, after all. And I’m not speaking to you, remember?”

  My mother spoke quietly beside me. “I’ve been having dreams. Every night. Dreams about a boat at the bottom of the ocean rising to the surface after many years. There’s something . . . evil about it.” Her eyes met mine and darkened. “And it’s looking for you.”

  My throat tightened as a lungful of air escaped through my mouth. I recalled the phone call I’d received the night before and the feeling of dread that had followed me all morning, and I had the odd sensation that I had just fallen through thin ice into freezing water. I swallowed, giving my voice time to find me.

  “It was a dream, Mother. Only a dream.” I slid on my coat and fumbled with the buttons with shaking fingers before giving up on them. “And I really must go. If you need a recommendation for a good Realtor, call our receptionist, Nancy Flaherty, and she’ll put you through to somebody.”

  To my surprise, my mother slid out of her chair and stood, a printed card held out to me between two gloved fingers. “Take my card. You’re going to need it. This isn’t the first time it’s sought you out, you know. But it is the first time you’re old enough to fight it.” She paused. “We are not as we seem, Mellie.”

  Again, I was consumed with the feeling of plunging into icy water, and I couldn’t speak. I stared at her without making a move to take the card. After a brief moment, she laid it on the table, and with a brief goodbye to Jack, she walked away, leaving behind the lingering scent of orchids and stale grief.

  I turned to Jack again, but he held up his hand. “I know, you don’t want to speak to me or see me again. I get it. But I think you need to listen to your mother. Her psychic abilities are well-known, and she knows what she’s talking about. Sure, she could be wrong—after all, you have the gift, too, right? And you’re not seeing anything. But what if she’s right? What if you’re in some kind of danger—don’t you think you should know?”