Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters

by Emily Carpenter

“Amen,” said Arthur.

  “Amen,” Bruna echoed.

  Ruth turned and ran back to the tent.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Florence, Alabama

  Present

  I told Danny he was welcome to come along with me to dinner with Griff and his parents, but, with his typical deadpan humor, he insisted he desperately needed to catch up on whatever happened to be on the hotel TV in the next couple of hours. Jason dropped him at the hotel, then me at the Cajun restaurant outside town.

  “Call me,” Jason said, but I just sighed and shut the car door.

  Griff and his parents had gotten us a booth by the window, a red-leather and brass-trimmed setup. Helena Singley, an elegant hippie, wore her hair twisted into a loose bun, dangling stone earrings, and a worn denim shirt. Bobby, Griff’s father, was handsome, white-haired, and barrel-chested. Basically, an older version of Griff.

  Everyone stood when they saw me.

  “Don’t mind the bruise,” I said preemptively.

  “Shower door,” Griff said.

  “Tree branch,” I said at the exact same time.

  There was a brief moment of silence, then Helena darted forward to hug me. She smelled like coffee and organic shampoo. Bobby offered me a wide, bright white smile in a sun-weathered face. He wasn’t as big as Griff, rangier, but just as solid. He wore stiff jeans and a starched collared shirt. Bifocals hung on a lanyard that proclaimed War Eagle.

  “Bobby Singley.” He stuck out a large square hand and I shook it. “Glad y’all could make it so we could get a look at Griff’s girl.” He winked and my face reddened. “And whether it was the shower or a tree, she’s still sure enough a beauty.” Another wink in Griff’s direction. “Not unexpected. The men in this family have fine taste in women.”

  “Okay, Dad,” Griff said. “Dial it back about a hundred clicks.” But his hand didn’t move from where it rested lightly on my back.

  “Bobby, you’re embarrassing her,” Helena said.

  But Bobby wasn’t to be dissuaded. He smiled at me conspiratorially. “She’s tough. I bet she can take a compliment. Can’t you, Eve?”

  “I can,” I said. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Singley. Mrs. Singley.”

  “Call me Helena, please.”

  Bobby winked. “My apologies. I get carried away when I’m starstruck.”

  We slid into the booth, opposite the Singleys. Griff put his hand on my leg under the table and I did the same. His leg was warm beneath the jeans.

  “I thought we might be overstepping,” Helena said, “coming up here to see you. But we’re so proud of Griff, working on a movie about such an inspiring woman.”

  I nodded. “He’s doing a fantastic job. The film’s going to be great.”

  Bobby signaled the server. “Helena and I saw Charles and Dove back in ’78, I think it was?”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Helena said, “1978. It was May. The National Day of Prayer at the capitol building in Montgomery.”

  “Pat Dye was there,” Bobby said.

  “Football coach,” Griff said to me. “A god, basically. Little g.”

  Helena nodded. “And that Miss America, I think. Whatever her name was.”

  The server came and we ordered beer. Then Bobby turned to me, his eyes bright and laser- focused. I instantly recognized the look. It was the super-groupies look, the one they got when they were recounting an interaction with Dove. She laid her hands on me. I went right over—and poof! When I went to my doctor, he said I didn’t have diabetes anymore, praise the Lord!

  “I’ll never forget that Montgomery meeting.” Bobby sipped his water, thoughtful. “Dove was older—in her fifties, at least. But a clock-stopper, just like you. But it was more than the way she looked.” He grew serious. “She had a kind of air about her. Like she possessed some kind of secret wisdom. When she took my hand and looked into my eyes, I swear, she could see the blackness of my soul.” He held my gaze. “You know what she said to me?”

  I shook my head. Griff had found a toothpick from a dispenser and was gnawing on it ferociously. Helena was sitting very still.

  “She said God saw my suffering—and He wanted to relieve me of it.”

  I watched him. Bit my lip nervously.

  “How about that?” His face softened, even though his voice stayed gruff. “I’ve had my vices, there’s no doubt. I’ve had some anger management issues. Some financial things that have caused suffering for the people I love.” At this, he reached for Helena’s hand and squeezed it. “But she saw me. How at the bottom of it all, what I was doing was really hurting myself. Isn’t that something?”

  I swallowed. I felt Griff beside me, still like Helena. I wondered if he was embarrassed.

  “She was so kind, Dove,” Helena chimed in. “I remember, she stayed until almost midnight, until the very last person got prayer.”

  “Yes, that was definitely my grandmother,” I said. “She was tireless.”

  “Do you have any good Dove stories?” Helena asked. “From the old days?”

  I lifted one eyebrow. “Oh, too many to tell here.”

  “That reminds me.” Griff helped himself to a basket of biscuits. “Y’all ever hear any stories about Dove ministering with another young girl around this area? They were kind of a big deal back in the early thirties. Called themselves the Hawthorn Sisters.”

  Helena’s face grew thoughtful. “I don’t think so.”

  “No,” Bobby said. “Not that I recall. What kind of ministry did they have? Prophecies? Healing? Or just plain old preaching? Those folks, those traveling preachers, were a dime a dozen around here back in the Depression.”

  My phone rang. “Eve,” Margaret Luster drawled into my ear with her honey-sweet accent. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Sure.” I glanced at Griff. “I’m sorry. I need to take this.” I slipped out of the booth and fled the dark restaurant for the humid, still bright parking lot.

  Margaret apologized for interrupting, then launched into her spiel. “I’ve been listening to Charles’s old sermons again. And, like I said, all Dove usually does is sing a few songs here and there. Occasionally pray for people in the audience. But there’s this one tape. I’ve heard it before, but this time—knowing what I know about the missing coin—it sounds entirely different. May I play a segment for you? It’s from one of their earlier meetings. In Memphis, I believe, 1938.”

  I felt my stomach clench and flutter by turns. “Please.”

  She fumbled with her electronics, and then I heard the scratchy whir of the old magnetic recording mechanism. I was instantly transported to an old tent, musty and hot, on the grounds of some centuries-old church. Adjacent to a cemetery, probably. Surrounded by sawhorses loaded down with covered dishes.

  “My wife used to know a very rich man,” Charles Jarrod said on the tape. Even in the tinny recording his voice was deep and sonorous. “Isn’t that right, Mrs. Jarrod?”

  “That’s right, Mr. Jarrod,” came Dove’s chipper reply.

  “This wealthy man thought he could hide his treasure from the Lord, didn’t he?”

  “That he did, Mr. Jarrod.”

  A chorus of voices shouted out their disapproval.

  “Tell the people, Mrs. Jarrod, where did this man hide his treasure?”

  “Well, sir, he hid it under stairs, under floorboards, and behind drawers. Why, I do believe he even hid money inside the leg of the piano bench!”

  “Because God can’t see inside the leg of a piano bench?”

  Dove giggled. “Mr. Jarrod, the Lord can see everywhere at all times, you know that. He can see inside that piano bench just as well as He can see inside that man’s heart.”

  Someone started banging away at a piano, and Margaret Luster paused the tape. “I’ve heard this tape dozens of times. I can’t believe I never picked up on this part.”

  My God . . .

  “Is there one still in the house?” Margaret asked me. “A piano? Beca
use you may find what you’re looking for there.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Florence, Alabama

  1934

  Three days later, Ruth sat at the table in Steadfast’s dark dining room. The room, stripped of its china and silver, felt dismal and cold. The previous night, Arthur had announced to the girls that he’d persuaded Bruna’s father to let her skip the family vacation and attend the state fair. He’d claimed the governor was planning on attending the Hawthorn Sisters’ show and it was impossible for Bruna to bow out.

  Another lie, Ruth knew, without even asking.

  She stared at the dented silver pitcher, back in its place on the table and holding a single camellia branch, and weighed her options.

  She could go for broke and try telling Bruna everything: that she suspected Arthur had killed Steadfast in his bed, and that then he had cajoled Ruth into hiding him and agreeing to the whole sham about revealing a fake revelation from God at the fair.

  But would her friend believe her? There was no proof that Arthur had actually murdered Steadfast. She hadn’t actually seen him touch the old man. And Steadfast was old. Very old. Maybe he really had died in his sleep, the way Arthur had claimed.

  And Bruna would believe him. Because inexplicably, the lovely, upstanding young girl with the rich family and the prettiest singing voice Ruth had ever heard believed whatever Arthur Holt told her. Bruna would definitely think Ruth was lying, possibly even trying to turn her against Arthur. She would be furious. She might end their friendship forever.

  There was only one solution she saw.

  And that was Charles Jarrod.

  The renowned evangelist had appeared before all sorts of important people. He knew President Roosevelt and even a few kings and queens, Ruth had heard. He was rich, connected, and if the instincts she’d developed in the past four years were any indication, he was one of the smartest people she’d ever met.

  He didn’t have a choir or regular music director traveling with him, not like Billy Sunday. He might be willing to hear Ruth’s proposal. Because that’s what she’d decided to do, sitting there at Steadfast Coe’s long cherry table in the dark, staring at the silver pitcher.

  She’d gone down to the post office and asked Melva Caldwell to help her find an address in California. Then she went back to the house, rifled through Steadfast’s drawers, and found a letter that just might work. It was dated thirty-five years before, but Ruth liked the turn of phrase the fellow had used. And besides, it was written to Coe by someone seeking a job.

  Which was exactly what she planned to do.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Florence, Alabama

  Present

  After I hung up with Margaret Luster, I made a quick apology to the Singleys, then climbed into a waiting Uber. Griff leaned into the open door.

  “I’ll wrap up dinner, then check back in with you. Call me, no matter what you find. Good luck.” He shut the door.

  Jason Faulk’s house was locked tight, windows curtained and shuttered. In the softening light of the day, the grand antebellum facade showed its age in crumbling mortar and missing bricks in the front steps. I noticed for the first time that the whole house seemed to be listing to one side, shifted slightly off its foundation.

  I couldn’t believe I was doing this. That I thought for one second there could still be a chance . . .

  But you do, Eve.

  I did. As much as it pained me to admit it, I still had this feeling down in the deepest part of me that the coin was there—at my fingertips, close enough to touch, but just out of reach. I couldn’t just walk away. I couldn’t give up.

  And yes, maybe I wanted to give Dove’s gift one last chance to reveal itself, helping me find the coin. It might mean I’d lost my mind just a little bit.

  On the front porch, I retrieved the key from under the brick like I’d seen Ember do. Once inside, I eased the door shut behind me. I hoped the neighbors were too busy or far away to notice my low-key breaking and entering. Or maybe they’d assume I was one of Jason’s coterie of staff, just dropping by to polish the chandeliers or inventory his paper towels while he was on the road.

  Only one lamp was burning in the wide hallway, a small silk-shaded porcelain mermaid that threw just enough light to see vacuum marks on the rug. The doors were all sensibly shut, every drawer slid neatly back into place. No sign of Althea and Griff’s day of ransacking. I put the key on a long glass table.

  “I’m back,” I said aloud.

  The house seemed to swallow my voice. Strangely, also the sounds of my breathing and heartbeat. That was odd. The old houses I’d been in had always creaked and groaned and sighed. Dove’s house rattled in the night wind, like an old lady who’d forgotten her cardigan. But this place . . . this place was deathly quiet. It seemed to suck away sounds instead of making them. Maybe it was because this particular house was too full. Of the past, of other lives—their fears and foibles, loves and labors.

  In the parlor, I found the burled, baroque piano. I flipped the bench over and unscrewed one of the legs, but when I peered inside, the hollow space was empty. I pulled off the next leg. It was empty too. And the next. When I gripped the fourth and last one, it felt different, screwed in tighter.

  I braced the bench against the floor and twisted with all my strength. It finally loosened, and I shook it, but nothing came out. I upended the leg and peered into the cavity. There was something. A piece of paper maybe? It was hard to tell. I dipped two fingers in, but whatever it was had been pushed down too far to reach.

  I grabbed a poker from the hearth and, carefully maneuvering it into the cavity, managed to hook the tip on something. I drew it out. Two pieces of yellowed paper, which turned out to be brittle and water-spotted hundred-dollar bills. I stared at them, then broke into laughter. They may not have been what I was looking for, but I couldn’t fault Margaret Luster’s detective skills.

  I tossed the bench leg and the bills on the sofa and let my eyes shutter closed. What had we missed?

  Maybe we shouldn’t have assumed the coin was in the house. Maybe we should’ve thought bigger. In truth, it could be anywhere. It could be back at Dove’s house in Pasadena, tucked beneath a floorboard or hidden behind a false drawer. Dove could’ve taken it on her travels with Charles. Maybe she’d hidden it in a hotel in Tennessee or a boarding house in Iowa.

  Or maybe, like Jason had said, Dove had never had the coin in the first place. Maybe Steadfast, OCD raging, really had hidden it, just like the other error coins—but at some special place of his in town or down at the river.

  But as much as I wanted to believe it, I didn’t. I didn’t feel it, in my gut or my heart . . . or—and I couldn’t believe I was thinking this—my arm.

  The coin wasn’t in Pasadena or Tennessee or Iowa. It was here.

  Here in this house.

  I stayed there for a long time, eyes closed, wondering if the sound-swallowing rooms would speak to me. The idea was ridiculous; part of me—no, most of me—knew it, but maybe . . . maybe, if those old voices wanted to make themselves heard badly enough, they would speak. My arm had started to ache with a sort of dull, rhythmic throb. Like the beating of a heart. Maybe that meant something.

  And then I heard a sound. Or sounds. The faintest sounds, coming from the back of the house. Murmuring voices. Or singing. Yes, it was singing. That hymn, the one Ember had sung. There’s a land that is fairer than day . . .

  I closed my eyes. Stayed as still as I dared, listening, listening. But then instead of singing I just heard a whooshing sound. Like wind or water crashing over a fall. But that wasn’t real either, was it? Just like the singing, it was my imagination, my exhausted, overwrought mind playing tricks on me. But still, I stayed there, standing in the hall, letting the sounds of the house—real or imagined—surround me.

  This place . . . there was something so strange about it. Almost like it was a passageway to another time. To another person. A small, shadowy tunnel to the girl my grandm
other had been . . .

  The jangle of my phone made me yelp. “Mom. Hi.”

  “Eve? Eve? The reception’s bad.”

  “I can hear you.” I rubbed my forehead, trying to wake myself up from the strange trance I’d fallen into.

  “I’m on my way to Phoenix for the trafficking summit, but there’s some issue with the electrical system and we’re still sitting on the tarmac at LAX, if you can believe it.”

  I raked my fingers through my hair. “Oh, Mom. That’s the worst.”

  “I’ll admit, I did drink a mimosa.” She let out a little rueful tongue cluck. “What’s going on? Are you okay? Is something going on with the documentary? I haven’t heard from you in a few days and I was getting worried.”

  I pressed my fingers against my lips. “Let’s talk later, when you get to Phoenix.”

  Her voice was soft, hesitant. “I know you’re working hard on this film. And I can see how much you care about it. About getting it right. I’m just . . .” She trailed off.

  “It’s okay, Mo—”

  “No, Eve. I need to say this.” She hesitated. “I’ve known there was the chance that along the way you might uncover some . . . stories . . . about your grandmother that might not show her in the best light.”

  I made a noncommittal sound, but my heart had started thumping painfully.

  “I’ve heard rumors through the years. But they mostly came from unreliable sources so I never believed them. People are jealous. Obsessed with discrediting people who do good.”

  I stayed quiet.

  “I know it may be tempting to believe them because . . . well, because of what happened with your arm. How she couldn’t heal you.”

  “Mom. Don’t worry. It’s all good. I’m good. You know that.”

  “I just wanted to say that no matter what you may hear, Dove loved you. Loved us. And she tried her very best to follow the Lord and do what He wanted her to do. And now we have the chance to carry on her work. It’s an honor. A blessing. I hope you feel that way.”

  I could hear the squawk of the captain’s voice in the background. It was all I could do not to scream and throw the phone. She had no idea what Dove had done to us. How, in just hours, her mother’s precious legacy was going to turn to rubble unless I did something. Because I was the one who’d started all this. I was the one who’d agreed to keep the lie going to protect everyone, and instead, I’d signed them up for humiliation and heartbreak.