CHAPTER 30
THE NEXT MONTH WAS SO BUSY THAT OLIVIA barely had time to catch her breath. She settled into her job at the Boatworks, Sara and Chloe started school— they were in the same class, and Olivia didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad one—and Callie endured another cycle of chemotherapy. Big John remained hospitalized. Olivia was finally permitted to see him—Seth drove her in one day a week during lunch—but since he had not regained consciousness it wasn’t the catharsis she had hoped for. The frail old man in the hospital bed with tubes sprouting from every part of his body bore almost no resemblance to the grandfather she remembered. Each time, she held his hand, murmured a few words, and then it was time for her and Seth to go.
As it became apparent that Big John was going to be in the hospital on a long-term basis, David and Keith had begun dividing the week between their home and LaAngelle Plantation. Weekends, which were the busiest time in the restaurant business, were spent in California. Monday through Thursday mornings they spent in LaAngelle, or, more properly, at the hospital. David and Belinda divided up the days, so that one or the other of them was pretty much always at the hospital. The rest of the family took turns as their schedules and responsibilities permitted. Even Keith went to the hospital, although he stayed away from Big John’s bedside. But, as he said, he wanted to be nearby for David.
Seth obviously felt that he should be at the hospital more, but his first responsibility was to run the Boatworks. As Olivia, with her access to the books, had quickly learned, the business that had provided the family with its comfortable lifestyle for so long had started to deteriorate badly over the last decade or so. With Seth’s insistence on taking commercial work, which many in the family still thought was beneath them, the company was slowly climbing back to financially sound footing, but every business transaction mattered. Seth oversaw every detail of the operation, from sales to production schedules to quality control. Without him, Olivia realized, Archer Boatworks would have gone the way of many longtime family businesses: sold to outsiders, or bankrupt.
Archer Boatworks had been in the business of turning out gentlemen’s yachts for almost a hundred years, and the office systems seemed to be almost that old. Ilsa Bartlett, whom Olivia would be temporarily replacing, was a tall, thin (except for her midsection, which bulged ominously as she entered her eighth month of pregnancy) thirty-year-old of moderate attractiveness but a great deal of humor. She handled all the routine business of the office, and, as she candidly told Olivia, the job was a killer. Papers dating back to the company’s inception were stored in a room in the main building that Ilsa referred to as the catacombs. It contained dozens of file cabinets squeezed into every available inch of space. In those file cabinets were what seemed like every scrap of paper ever generated by the business. In between answering the phone, keeping track of Mr. Archer’s (Seth’s) appointments, boat specifications, delivery dates and status, ordering and inventorying supplies, taking visitors on tours, and performing general secretarial tasks, Olivia was expected to transfer data from those long-stored documents onto the company’s newly acquired computer system. It was a daunting task, complicated by the fact that no one, including Ilsa, seemed to be able to keep the computers up and running on a consistent basis. From her first hour on the job, Olivia perceived that she was going to be earning every penny of her generous salary. That relieved her mind of one worry: that Seth had offered her a ‘‘gimme’’ position either out of the kindness of his heart or just to get her to move back to LaAngelle.
Carl and Phillip both worked for the Boatworks, Phillip as assistant general manager and Carl as sales manager. As Seth’s right-hand man, Phillip was always around, but Carl also seemed to have frequent business that brought him to the central office. Olivia never questioned the legitimacy of his visits until Ilsa remarked, dryly, that she had seen more of Carl since Olivia started work there than she had in the previous three years of her employment.
The Boatworks itself was located five miles to the west of town. It was a sprawling complex, consisting of a yacht storage facility, a repair shop, a retail sales center complete with four huge showrooms, a central office, the yacht design and building complex, and another construction facility devoted to barges. A twelve-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire surrounded the operation, making it look, to the uninitiated, rather like a prison. Approached from town, visitors were greeted by two large rectangular slabs of polished granite marking the entrance, both bearing the legend ARCHER BOATWORKS. A paved driveway then led across the flat, grassy lawn to the sales center, a two-story brick and glass building half as wide as a city block. Behind the sales center, directly atop the great earthen barrier of the levee that held back the mighty Mississippi, were two dozen warehouse-style buildings lined up one after the other that housed the rest of the operation. The location of these buildings on top of the levee was necessary because of the requirements of launching the completed or repaired vessels. When a yacht, or, increasingly, a barge, was ready, a crane would position it at the apex of a ramp composed of huge metal rollers that formed a path from the top of the levee to the river. With gravity to propel it and heavy-duty steel cables directing its slide, the vessel would be released and simply roll down the ramp into the water. The resulting splash made a giant wave capable of swamping anything in its path. Whenever a launch was planned, the Coast Guard was notified to stop traffic on the river for the required amount of time. It was a system that had worked beautifully, with some minor variations, for nearly a century.
As general manager, Seth put in long hours. He arrived at the Boatworks before seven most mornings, and basically worked until there was no work left to be done that day. Since their trip to Houston, he’d made an effort to get home no later than seven so he could spend a little time with Chloe before she went to bed. Some nights, when problems arose or there were prospective customers to be wined and dined, or he had a date with Mallory, he wasn’t able to make his self-imposed deadline, but he was obviously trying to focus more on Chloe.
At Olivia’s suggestion, he went with Chloe to her classroom on the first day of school—Olivia was surprised to learn that he had never done that before—and attended a midday library awards program a week later to watch Chloe (along with nearly all of her classmates except Sara, the newcomer) receive a medal for reading a certain number of books over the summer. Seeing Sara’s downcast face after the program, Seth, all on his own, hit on the perfect way to both cheer her up and make her feel included: That evening, when he came home, he was carrying two small, exquisitely wrapped presents, one for Sara and one for Chloe. When the girls opened them, searching frantically through layers of tissue paper when it appeared that there was nothing inside, what they each found was his business card. Olivia watched, as perplexed as her daughter as Sara stared blankly at the card she held in her hand. Then Olivia saw, scrawled in Seth’s handwriting on the back, the words Look in my car.
‘‘Turn it over,’’ she suggested softly. When they did, both girls squealed with excitement and tore out the back door and down the steps to where Seth had left his car parked on the pavement, instead of garaging it as he usually did.
Olivia, Seth, Martha, and Callie followed the children only as far as the veranda. From that vantage point, they watched as Sara and Chloe, chattering animatedly, peered through the windows, squealed again, and jerked open the right rear door. Seconds later, both girls emerged, clutching something close to their chests.
‘‘Mom, come look!’’ Sara called, her voice tremulous with awe.
Olivia went down the steps with the other adults behind her to find that Sara cuddled a tiny, fluffy smoke-gray Persian kitten. It had a pink ribbon tied around its neck with Sara’s name on it. Chloe was holding an identical kitten, with her name on it.
‘‘Oh, Sara!’’ Olivia exclaimed, giving her daughter a hug.
‘‘A kitten’s what I wanted more than anything else in the whole world,’’ Sara said, the words solemn
as if she couldn’t believe her good fortune. She looked up at Seth, who had come up behind Olivia, shyly. ‘‘Thank you, Seth.’’
‘‘You’re welcome, Sara,’’ Seth said, and Sara smiled at him, her eyes luminous with joy. He put a hand on her head, and then Chloe thrust her kitten under his nose and he exclaimed over it, too.
Later, when Olivia had a chance, she thanked him for his kindness.
‘‘You notice I got two,’’ he said, settled on the couch in front of the TV, his arms crossed over his chest as he watched the girls playing with their kittens on the floor of the den. ‘‘Absolutely identical, so they wouldn’t have anything to fight over. You think I did good, huh?’’
‘‘You did good,’’ Olivia confirmed. She was sitting on the couch, too, at the opposite end. Their gazes met, and she smiled at him, a warm and affectionate smile. He looked at her for a moment, smiled rather wryly in turn, and after a few moments got up and left the room.
Although Seth was still not quite comfortable with the more hands-on aspects of parenthood, like tucking his daughter in at night or giving her the occasional hug, he was making great progress, Olivia felt, by simply trying. Chloe responded to his increased attention by being—at least, for the most part—better behaved.
Time remained the problem. There was simply not enough of it for all Seth had to do, Olivia realized. Besides work, and Chloe, and Big John, there was Callie. Chemotherapy rendered her weak and ill, and she needed him, too, although she would have poohpoohed the notion. But Seth was her only child, and they were devoted to each other. He spent as much time with her as he could, taking off from work a couple of mornings a week to sit with her while the cancer-killing chemicals dripped into her veins, and being there with her in the evenings after Chloe went to bed. In addition to everything else, the plans for his wedding were proceeding apace, and Mallory stopped by the Boatworks nearly every day to get his opinion on, or approval of, something concerning the ceremony or reception. With so many competing demands on his time, Olivia sometimes wondered how he could function at all, much less as efficiently as he always did.
By the end of September, Olivia’s routine was firmly established. She rose at six thirty, got herself and the girls up, dressed, and fed, had Sara and Chloe at school by eight, herself at work by eight fifteen, worked until two forty-five, then picked up the girls at three. After that, she had her afternoons free for Sara—and Chloe. She supervised homework, arranged play dates, chauffeured the girls to soccer games, attended PTA meetings, and volunteered to assist with the Brownie troop, among countless other mommy-type activities. For the first time since Sara’s birth, she had plenty of time to spend with her daughter. Except for her ever-present concern for Callie and Big John, and the bad dreams that increasingly plagued her, she was more content than she had been in years.
The dreams did not come every night. Olivia almost thought it would be easier if they did, because then she would expect them. As it was, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it: Some nights the dreams came, and some nights they did not.
In them, it was always night, she was always standing on the shore of the lake, and her mother, in some kind of flimsy white top with wide lace straps, was always in the water. Her mother cried out to her: Run, Olivia! Run away! Go! Run away! Then Selena would disappear beneath the surface of the water, pulled down by something Olivia could not see.
But what made the dreams especially terrible was that each time some new detail emerged: In one she saw that her mother’s eyes were huge with terror, and her screaming mouth was bare of lipstick; in another she caught the ripples of something swimming in the water behind Selena as her frightened face turned toward shore; in a third she was a helpless observer as Selena sank, only to have one hand break the surface, fingers stretching frantically toward the sky, before it, too, was gone.
One thing never changed: Each time it happened, Olivia awoke terrified. She would lie in her bed, bathed in sweat, her eyes wide in the darkness as she reminded herself, over and over, that it was only a dream.
Or was it? She had never had dreams like this before returning to LaAngelle Plantation. Now they were so persistent, and so disturbing, that she was beginning to wonder if they were more than just products of her subconscious.
More than once, when the dream jarred her from sleep, she could almost swear that she caught a whiff, the merest whiff, of White Shoulders perfume.
It was her imagination, of course. Just like the dreams were almost certainly a manifestation of her fear of the lake. And she was afraid of the lake because her mother had drowned in it. When she thought it through rationally—which meant, in the daylight hours—the whole thing was perfectly logical.
Still, she made up her mind to ask Callie, or Seth, or someone, to tell her, in detail, about the night her mother died.
Just the thought gave Olivia cold chills. So she put it off, enduring the dreams, telling herself that knowing the details would make no difference. Besides, everyone was so busy. Surely, sooner or later, the dreams would just go away.
The big event in LaAngelle at the end of September was the Fall Festival. Held on a Friday night on the combined grounds of both the elementary and high schools, it was a combination carnival, picnic supper, and dance, designed to raise money for PTA projects. Seth, as general manager of the Boatworks and one of LaAngelle’s leading citizens, had been asked to serve a turn in the dunking booth. He was unenthusiastic but knew his duty, and left home around six thirty wearing swimming trunks and a T-shirt and taking dry clothes with him to change into later when his stint as target ended. Mallory and Chloe went with him in the Jaguar. Olivia had agreed to help out at the Cook’s Corner booth, where homemade baked goods were for sale. She and every other elementary school mother had contributed cookies, cakes, brownies, and fancy breads in massive quantities so the booth wouldn’t run out during the four-hour course of the event. Olivia had been assigned the first shift, from seven to eight, which would leave plenty of time for her to enjoy the other activities when she was finished. It was just getting dark when she and Sara drove into town with Callie and Ira and a trunk full of late-arriving baked goods in Ira’s big Lincoln. Dressed in a black short-sleeved sweater and a short white denim skirt, lugging an armful of miscellaneous goodies loaded into brown paper bags—Ira and Sara were similarly laden down—Olivia reached her booth just as the first customer arrived. Setting out the best of what she had brought with her on the U-shaped trio of tables that was the sales area, she got down to work. She was glad to see that her shift partner was LeeAnn James, who had a kindergartner in the school. Looking adorable in jeans and a pink sweater set, Sara went off with her teacher, Jane Foushee, and a trio of third-grade girls who had agreed to take the early shift with their grade’s fund-raising project, a cakewalk.
‘‘Gosh, we’re going to sell out in an hour,’’ LeeAnn said after fifteen minutes of brisk business had depleted their stock by about a quarter. It was the first chance they’d had to talk since Olivia had sat down.
‘‘Oh, no, everybody rushes over here first to get the really good stuff, like Mrs. Ramey’s caramel cake and Louise Albright’s chocolate chunk cookies. Once they’re gone, the other things usually last awhile.’’ It was amazing how fast she had gotten back into the swing of life in LaAngelle, Olivia reflected, answering LeeAnn with knowledge gleaned from years of attending the Fall Festival. Except for Sara, it would be easy to imagine that her nine years away had never been.
‘‘I keep forgetting you grew up here,’’ LeeAnn said with a laugh. ‘‘Since we went to high school together, I can’t seem to get it out of my head that you’re from Baton Rouge like me.’’
‘‘Olivia, do you have any of Lurleen Sprewell’s brownies left? My boys like ’em something fierce, but I’m late getting here tonight.’’
Olivia looked up at the speaker, Augusta Blair, with a smile. She was a contemporary as well as a friend of Callie’s, and Olivia had known her, as she had the greater portion
of the town, for most of her life. The boys she referred to were her three sons, grown now and all employed in various capacities at the Boatworks.
‘‘Let me look.’’ A glance around the table and then at the inventory underneath revealed two red paper plates piled with brownies, covered with plastic wrap and tied with Lurleen Sprewell’s signature big red bows. Olivia produced them. ‘‘Sure do.’’
Mrs. Blair paid with a pleased smile, and carried her purchases away. The next customer in line was Father Randolph. He wanted a chocolate cake, but wasn’t particular as to the cook. Knowing that, of the ones left, Ellen Gibbs’s was probably the best, Olivia sold it to him. After that, she was so busy that she barely had time to exchange more than a word or two with her customers, almost all of whom she knew. When the second shift arrived, she surrendered her seat to them with relief.
‘‘What are you going to do now?’’ LeeAnn asked, as they emerged together from the back of the booth. Olivia flexed her neck, which was stiff from looking up at customers for an hour, took a deep breath of the warm night air, and smiled.
‘‘Check on Sara. She’s helping out with the cakewalk.’’
‘‘I’m going to go find Tom’’—her husband—‘‘and Michael.’’ Michael was LeeAnn’s five-year-old son. ‘‘See you later.’’
Olivia echoed her farewell, then headed toward the elementary school where the cakewalk was taking place in one of the classrooms. Light shone through every one of the two-story building’s uncurtained windows, and Olivia could see people milling around inside. Besides the third grade’s cakewalk, each grade had its own fund-raiser. Olivia knew that inside the school were a doll-walk, a dart throw, a silent auction, a coin toss, and a pet beauty contest, and there were many other activities as well. A constant stream of people moved in and out of the main entrance.
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