Savannah Scarlett

by Becky Lee Weyrich

  “She couldn’t believe that.”

  “I think she does. A couple of nights this week, she scared me out of my wits, woke up screaming from a nightmare. The thing is, the bad dreams don’t go away after she wakes up. She’s carrying a lot of baggage at the moment and Raul’s ghost is only a part of that.”

  “You mean she actually believes that his spirit’s come back to haunt her?”

  Bolt chewed at his bottom lip before answering. “That’s hard to say. The first time it happened, she told me he wasn’t really dead that he’d faked his death and followed her back to the States. When she calmed down a little, she admitted that he had to be dead. But she seems totally convinced that his ghost is stalking her.” Bolt stopped there, not wanting to admit to Kathleen that he and Mary Scarlett would have made love that first night had it not been for the menacing presence of Raul Miguel.

  “Shouldn’t she see a good psychiatrist, Bolt?”

  “There’s no way she’ll do that. You know how Miss Lucy was—scared senseless of battery acid and shrinks to name only two of her phobias. Mary Scarlett’s had it drummed into her all her life that anyone who needs a psychiatrist is crazy. And that’s another thing that has her worried. Everyone always thought Granny Boo was insane because she wanted them to think that. Mary Scarlett’s afraid madness is in the blood, that she’ll go right off the deep end one of these days and there’s not a thing she can do about it.”

  “Good grief! She sounds like a mental case already.”

  “She very nearly is, thanks to Raul, Big Dick, and Miss Lucy. It’s got nothing to do with Granny Boo, though. She was the one strong influence in Mary Scarlett’s life.” He raised an eyebrow. “And by the way, she’s also been conversing with her granny’s ghost.”

  “Bolt, she needs help.”

  “Right now, more than anything, she needs someone she can depend on. I don’t think Allen Overman quite fits the bill. Do you?”

  “But you do?” There was hopelessness in her voice; she knew the answer.

  “I think I’m the only one who can help her right now. And I feel like it’s my duty to do what I can.”

  Kathleen sat up straighter and brushed her hair back off her face with both hands. “Come off it, Bolton Conrad! Who do you think you’re talking to? I wasn’t born yesterday. Don’t talk to me about duty. You want to be back in her life.” She paused and swallowed the rest of her drink, then raised her empty glass to him in mock salute. “This wasn’t just a nightcap. It was a farewell toast. Admit it.”

  He stared down in his beer. “Not farewell. I just thought you deserved an explanation. I’m sorry, Katie.”

  “Save your apologies.” She picked up her evening bag and stood. “I’d like to go home now and it’s too far to walk in heels.”

  “Sure, Katie,” he said miserably. “Whatever you want.”

  She didn’t reply to that. She wanted Bolt Conrad. But it was clear she wouldn’t get what she wanted. At least not right now.

  The party got wild after Bolt and Kathleen left. Allen brought out tapes of their high school and college “oldies but goodies” and turned the volume of the tape deck up full blast. The liquor flowed like the eternal tides at Tybee Beach. Before long his fashionable guests got down, kicking off their shoes and doing the dirty bop, a dance that brought back memories of youth, hope, and eagerness for all the golden years yet to be lived. More memories than any yearbook could supply.

  Mary Scarlett felt the years rolling back as she was passed from one guy to the next, each wanting his turn with the best dancer of them all. Bolt’s hasty departure with Kathleen had left her crushed and depressed but no one would have guessed. More champagne and all that old music had her flying high.

  “Just like old times, eh?” Allen shouted above the music as he gyrated rhythmically, sending pelvic thrusts toward Mary Scarlett’s thighs.

  “Right on, man!” she answered in that deep smoky voice—low, sexy, and inviting.

  She reached the very peak of her euphoric intoxication around one in the morning. From there the drop was straight down, with the dark jaws of hell waiting at the bottom. She looked up suddenly and saw him leering at her from the stairs.

  “Raul!” she gasped.

  “Say what?” Lawton Winthrop shouted over the music and laugher. “Couldn’t hear you, honey.”

  But Mary Scarlett didn’t stay to repeat anything. She broke away from her gyrating partner and ran for the front door. Allen was in the kitchen at the time, but even if he had been in the room, she wouldn’t have bothered with the formalities of saying good night or thanks for a great party. She shed his diamonds and tossed them on a table by the door. Then she vanished into the night before anyone could stop her.

  The others shrugged and bopped on. Mary Scarlett had long been known for her abrupt departures.

  Without even knowing where she was going, Mary Scarlett turned toward Bull Street. Shoes in hand, she hurried barefoot, leaving Lafayette Square and heading west along Charlton Street. She was conscious of the cool, misty air of night on her face and the day’s trapped warmth in the pavement beneath her feet. She quickened her pace until she was almost running, glancing over her shoulders now and again, checking to see if Raul was following.

  By the time she reached the wrought-iron fence around her childhood home, she was out of breath, exhausted, and shaking with fear. With a final burst of energy, she flung the gate open and ran up the weed-choked brick path to the veranda. She had taken the key back to Bolt’s apartment earlier in the day, but she knew where an emergency key lay hidden. Surely, it would still be there. Only her family had known of its existence.

  It took all her strength to raise the molded concrete planter by the stairs. Her effort was rewarded when her hand closed around the heavy key to the front door. Fumbling at the lock, she seethed, “Ollie, ollie, oxen free. You can’t touch me once I’m home, Raul.”

  She burst inside, slamming the door behind her and leaned against it, breathing heavily. After a moment, she felt for the switch beside her on the wall. With a click, the foyer was bathed in soft yellow light.

  “I’m home!” she called out to the empty house, the same words she had always used when she entered unless she was sneaking in after curfew from a date.

  There was one difference. No one answered her call this time. With a jolt she remembered that they were all gone … all dead.

  She stayed where she was for several minutes, listening to the silence, trying to figure out what disturbed her about it. What sound did she expect that was missing?

  “The clocks,” she said. “They aren’t ticking.”

  She tiptoed slowly down the hallway to the spot where the grandfather clock had stood for well over a century. The pendulum hung motionless, the hands positioned at five minutes after twelve. For some reason that hour seemed significant. She knew that it was five minutes after midnight, not noon. But how did she know? What did it mean?

  She reached inside the back parlor door and switched on the lights to check the delicate French clock on the mantel. Again, five past midnight. But now she remembered the significance of that time. Her clue came from the long mirror above the fireplace. It was draped in black bunting.

  Suddenly, she heard a voice, her mother’s voice, ringing soulfully through the house. “Stop the clocks, Delsey. Cover the mirrors. She’s breathed her last.”

  “Granny Boo,” Mary Scarlett whispered chill bumps covering her arms. “She died at five minutes after midnight.”

  She remembered something else, too. She turned and ran her hand over the satiny wood of the wide parlor door—the cooling board door. Unlike the others in the house, this one was smooth on one side, with two boards nailed across the other side so that it could be placed on sawhorses without danger of slipping. Its other oddity was the ease with which it could be slipped off its hinges whenever it was needed.

  Mary Scarlett heard her mother’s voice again. “Take down the
door, Delsey. We’ll be laying her out as soon as she’s bathed and dressed.”

  Another voice from the past boomed through the silent house, making Mary Scarlett cringe. “What the pluperfect hell do you think you’re doing, Lucy?”

  “You know she wanted it this way. Besides, it’s time Mary Scarlett learned about preparing the dead for burial. Now you just go back to bed and leave us be, Richard. Your bellowing will wake up the dead.”

  “Damned if I will! I’m going to call the funeral home,” he yelled. “I won’t have this voodoo going on under my own roof.”

  “It’s not voodoo, Richard, and you know it. It’s tradition. She wanted to be laid out the same way as all her ancestors. That door’s coming down!”

  “The hell you say!”

  “Calm yourself, Richard. You’ll wake Mary Scarlett. Here, have a drink.”

  Mary Scarlett smiled, remembering. She had been awake already, listening and watching all the while. She knew that the drink her mother had made for Big Dick was liberally laced with Lucy’s own sleeping powders. Give it ten minutes and the cooling board door would be in the front parlor while Big Dick slept like a drunken baby. Richard Lamar might be more than a match for his tiny wife when it came to a physical struggle, but she could outmaneuver him mentally without breaking a sweat.

  A short time later, Mary Scarlett heard his telltale snoring from the library.

  “Mary Scarlett? Is that you up there on the stairs?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “She’s gone to her reward.”

  “I know, Mama.” The child was suddenly sobbing.

  “It’s all right to cry for her,” Lucy Lamar said, climbing up to the landing. “But you’re really crying for yourself, you know. She lived a good, long life. Granny Boo’s happy now, released from this earthly plane to fly with the angels. Why, she’s probably already up there, planting her Confederate flag at the gates of heaven.”

  That image brought a smile to Mary Scarlett’s lips. She could just see her great-grandmother, storming the Pearly Gates, dressed in her father’s old Confederate uniform and flying his tattered flag of battle.

  “I know what she told you, Mary Scarlett, but I won’t have it. It wouldn’t be proper to put her in her grave wearing that moth-eaten uniform. We’ll pick out one of her nice Sunday dresses. Come along now. We have a lot to do before dawn.”

  Reliving the past, Mary Scarlett climbed the stairs all the way to the attic, to the room Granny Boo had claimed as her own. The door squealed from lack of use when she opened it, but inside everything looked the same. Dominating the room was the bed where Mary Beulah Robillard had been born and where she had died over a century later. The bedstead was intricately fashioned of wrought iron, painted white. Since the piece predated the use of electricity, each bedpost formed a candleholder to light the chamber at bedtime.

  Mary Scarlett smiled, remembering the stormy nights when she would sneak up the stairs to climb into bed with Granny Boo. When lightning flashed all around the house, the old woman turned off her electric lights and lit her candles. The two of them would huddle close on the soft feather mattress and whisper tall tales by the flicker of bayberry candles. It was here on such nights that Granny Boo had begun telling Mary Scarlett about the family, about the good times and the bad.

  She lit the candles and the room filled with the familiar scent of waxy bay. She touched the iron rosettes and curlicues of the headboard, remembering that she used to imagine fairies and elves perched there, eavesdropping on their conversations. Now only dust lay thick and dormant in the metal curls.

  “Are you here, Granny Boo?” she called softly, almost afraid she might hear an answer. She listened closely, but the only sound was the whisper of the rising wind outside the house.

  She moved to the cottage-style vanity. Here, too, the mirror was covered with black cloth as it had been since the night of Granny Boo’s death. Her great-grandmother’s most personal belongings remained in place on the dresser top. A box of Pond’s face powder. A small blue vial of Evening In Paris eau de toilette. Long silver-gray hairpins in a Nippon china dish. A comb and brush, their sterling silver backs gone black from time and want of polish. Then Mary Scarlett spied something she had neither seen nor thought about in years. In fact, she herself had brought it up here the night her great-grandmother passed away. Granny Boo had always thought the silver dollar-sized piece of polished mahogany was a lucky token.

  Holding the relic in her palm, Mary Scarlett climbed onto the bed. She stretched out and closed her eyes, smoothing her fingers over the circle of wood that felt as smooth as satin to the touch.

  “A mere bit of trash from the steamship Pulaski, but the plank it was cut from saved a life, you know.” In her drowsy state, Mary Scarlett could hear the faint echo of the old woman’s chuckle as she began her tale. “Yes, it served Captain C.A.L. Lamar well, that broken beam. He held on to this shred of flotsam after the boiler blew until he was dashed through the breakers and onto the white sands of a North Carolina beach. Nearly drowned like so many others, he was. Makes a body wonder—why was he saved to do such deeds? He was a roundabout, all right. A thinker, a dreamer, a scoundrel, truth be told. ’Twas the War that took him finally. He’s always been known by folks as ‘the last man to fall.’”

  “Oh, tell me about him, Granny Boo!” Mary Scarlett heard a child’s excited voice—her own from years gone by. She looked down, not at all surprised to find herself dressed in a soft white flannel nightie instead of her black silk gown.

  The old woman began in a faraway voice that called back the years. “Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar, his name was, born on the pretty first day of April back in 1824 to Jane Meek Cresswell and Gazaway Bugg Lamar. His mama was a sweet, pretty thing, so I’ve heard tell, and his daddy was rich as a lord, a banker by profession, well respected. So much so, in fact, that the Marquis de Lafayette, that hero of our Revolution, came to little Charley’s baptism at Christ Episcopal Church and even stood as his godfather. You can’t get much more distinguished than that, honey.”

  Mary Scarlett had heard the tale a dozen times, but she remained silent, eager as always to hear it again.

  “When Charley was in his early teens, his whole family took a pleasure trip on the steamship Pulaski, under Captain Dubois, bound from Savannah to Baltimore, with a stop in Charleston to take on more passengers that first afternoon. They sailed at six the next morning with one hundred and eighty-two souls aboard, passengers and crew. They never made Baltimore, though. And that’s when Charley’s whole life changed. You know the story, I vow.”

  “It sank, Granny Boo.”

  “That’s God’s own truth, honey. It sank out deep in the ocean on the fourteenth of June in 1838, only a day out from Savannah and Charleston. There were forty-five women on that ship and many children much younger than Charley. Some babes in arms. A great tragedy! Jane Lamar and all five of her other children died. Only Charley, his daddy, and his Aunt Rebecca McLeod survived in their party.”

  Granny Boo paused to utter a deep, mournful sigh. Then she looked down at the little dark-haired girl sitting beside her and shook her head sadly. They shared a silent moment to honor the dead.

  “Having no mama and losing all his brothers and sisters probably accounted for some of Charley’s wildness in his later years,” the old woman continued. “But who’s to say?”

  “How would a child get by without a mama, Granny Boo?” The idea struck terror in Mary Scarlett’s young heart.

  “Well, back then, just as now, it was real hard. So his daddy married again only eleven months later. Harriet Cazenove, Charley’s new mama’s name was. She wasn’t a Savannahian, but from a fine old Virginia family. I reckon she looked down her nose at Savannah because a few years after their marriage, they moved off to New York City.”

  Granny Boo was usually good at recalling dates, but she squinted a minute thinking about it before she went on. “Let’s see, that would have been
back in 1846 that they moved up North, the same year Charley married Caroline Agnes Nicoll of this city. They stayed here and set up housekeeping. It looked like Charley was finally going to settle down and make something of himself as a cotton and rice factor. Especially once Caroline started having children. People were big on having younguns back then, Mary Scarlett. Not like today when one or two will do. Charley and his wife had five daughters. Caroline tried her best, but I reckon that was a disappointment to Charley, too. No son to carry on the family name.”

  “The same as our family,” Mary Scarlett said with a sigh of remorse at her own girlhood.

  Granny Boo patted her hand. “Don’t you fret, honey. Girls are better, smarter, and a whole lot prettier than old hairy-legged, foul-mouthed boys.”

  Mary Scarlett was frowning. Granny Boo had taught her a lot about genealogy. “If all Charley Lamar’s brothers drowned and if Charley himself had no sons, then what line did I spring from?”

  Granny Boo winked at her. “You’re a smart one, missy. Ask your daddy, and he’ll tell you he came down from one of Charley’s cousins. But I’ve always figured that our Charley had a roving eye. It’s my belief he had a son right here in Savannah that his wife never knew of.”

  Mary Scarlett giggled. “What happened next?”

  “From the day Charley’s daddy and stepmother moved back to Savannah, Charley and old Gazaway never saw eye-to-eye on another thing. ‘Cal,’ as some of his friends called Charley on account of he always signed his name ‘C.A.L. Lamar,’ was a real firebrand. He fought to bring duelling back. Why, he shot and nearly killed his best friend, Henry du Bignon, of Jekyll Island, after they got into an argument at Ten Broeck racecourse. He was all for Georgia’s secession from the Union, and he had a scheme about setting up a fleet of blockade runners with the state footing the bill. But the biggest thorn under his saddle was slavery. He was all for it, of course, being a cotton factor as he was. No slaves, no cotton, no money to line Charley’s pockets. He wanted the law against importing more slaves repealed. Since that wasn’t going to happen, Charley decided to take matters into his own hands and that’s when he hit on his wildest scheme ever. He went up to New York City with some of his buddies and they joined the New York Yacht Club and partied with their new Yankee friends for a time. Then they bought the Wanderer from one of the other members. She was a beauty—the sleekest, fastest yacht you ever laid eyes on.”