“Who wrote them?”
Now I had to guard my expression. “There were no signatures, so I am operating on the assumption they were Eva’s love letters.” Vague was good.
He nodded. “Check with Isabelle about Kemp heirs. She’s far more embedded in the social scene and blueblood lineage than I am.” He called for the check. “Now, I must return to the law practice. I have a client facing serious charges, and I have to prepare for court in the morning, but it was a delight to spend some time with you.”
“I enjoyed lunch very much.” I didn’t have to pretend. “You’ll be out for the séance?”
“I’d hoped to get out before then, but my clients make even an evening off impossible. I wouldn’t dream of missing the séance, though. You can count on me.” He rose and assisted me from the table. We parted ways at Bienville Square as he strode down the sidewalk to work. After a moment’s hesitation, I hurried to the downtown post office and mailed my story off. I was so lightheaded afterward that I almost went home. Instead, I headed down Dauphin Street to the candy store and a quick gab with Pretta.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Pretta’s face was flushed with heat as she brought a pan of cheese straws out of the big commercial oven in the back of the candy store. Two pots of key-lime custard bubbled on burners.
“Can I help?” I asked. “I’m not much of a cook, but I can help if you tell me what to do . . .”
“Could you stir that custard? It has to thicken so that I can pour it into the chocolate shells.”
Stirring I could manage. I’d done plenty of that standing on a stool beside my mother. She wasn’t a bad cook, but she preferred reading over cooking.
“John Henry should be here any minute,” Pretta said.
“Is he a chef, too?”
“He’s helped me since he was nine. Best damn candy maker in the Southeast. That boy can tell when sugar has spun by looking at it.” She arranged the cheese straws on a fancy platter in an elegant pinwheel pattern. “These are for Mrs. Marcum’s bridge gathering this afternoon.”
Bridge gatherings were all the rage in Savannah, too, for women who had no job or career.
The back door opened, and the young man I’d met on my first visit to the shop—the one who’d knocked into me, spilling sticky soda all over me—stepped into the kitchen. He nodded a shy greeting, then washed his hands and donned an apron.
“I’ll start on the pecan clusters,” he said. “You’ve been out of those for two days, and Mr. Avery will be by this afternoon. He comes every week.”
“John Henry keeps up with customers far better than I can.”
I studied the young man, who was in his late teens or early twenties. He had an easy smile and a sure handle on the candy process. “I think this custard is cooked.” I removed it from the heat and helped set out the delicate dark-chocolate shells that Pretta had already made. She filled the shells, and I applied a decorative curl of chocolate and a teensy slice of lime wedge. The final creation was both elegant and delicious—of course I had to sample them.
“John Henry, when you finish with the clusters, would you deliver these to Mrs. Marcum?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t mind the delivery, but it’s a half-hour walk, and the sun is hot today. If the chocolate shells get too hot, it’ll be a mess.”
“I can drive him on my way home,” I volunteered. “He’s right. The cheese straws will be fine, but I wouldn’t put my money on the custard and chocolate not melting.”
“Thanks, Raissa. I may have to hire you. Need a part-time job?”
“I wouldn’t mind helping you at times, but I’ve started my own . . . venture.”
“And what might that be?”
“I submitted my first short story today.” My grin spread so wide it made my cheeks hurt.
Pretta clapped her hands and jumped lightly up and down. “A ghost story?”
“Yes. I’m almost sick with anticipation.” I’d held all the anxiety about submitting and probable rejection in check. With Pretta, though, I could confess my fears and misgivings.
“And how will you spend the check for the story?”
I hadn’t even dared to think of such a thing. “Why, I’ll take you to New Orleans for a night. We can stay at the Monteleone and go to a play or listen to music or . . . buy a painting!”
She grasped my hands. “The story will sell. I can feel it.”
I didn’t put a lot of stock in her feelings of success for me, but I certainly appreciated the sentiment.
We left John Henry to his chocolate making and went to the front of the store, where we began packaging the delicacies. The candy business was labor intensive. It was a relief to be out of the hot kitchen, and while I sat at the counter, Pretta made us both a Coca-Cola over crushed ice. The drink offset the humid day.
“Tell me about the story,” Pretta said.
“I’d much rather you tell me about Elise Whitehead.”
Discomfort flitted in her eyes before she covered it. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to tell you gossip about the place you live.”
“Who told you not to tell me?” It didn’t take a genius to see she’d been stampeded off this patch of grass.
“Mr. McKay. He didn’t tell me not to talk or anything like that. He said you had enough unpleasantness with what happened to your new beau and all.”
“Robert was hardly a beau.” I sounded a bit snappy, and I modified my tone. “I didn’t know him. Not really. I did like him.”
“And he died at Caoin House, which was exactly Mr. McKay’s point.”
“But Elise Whitehead died fifty years ago, and I never knew her. Don’t you think it’s a lot safer to talk about her than Robert?”
Pretta spread her manicured fingertips on the cool marble of the counter. “She fell from a third-floor window on the night of her wedding.” Her telling was matter-of-fact, without the pleasure of a good story.
Caoin House did have a knack for serving as the background of celebratory tragedies. “Details. How can I weave a ghost story around it if I don’t have a picture? What did she look like?”
“She was as beautiful as her mother, it was said.” Her features softened as she focused on the story. “Beauty doesn’t guarantee happiness, I suppose.”
“It’s strange that there are several paintings of Eva at Caoin House, but I don’t recall seeing any of Elise.”
“It was said that Eli had all images of her removed from the house after she died. It broke his heart.”
“So what happened? Who was she to marry? Was it a love match? Spill the beans.”
Pretta rolled her eyes. “Mr. McKay will be annoyed with me.”
“If he finds out.” I laughed at her consternation. “He isn’t my jailer or my protector. He’s my uncle’s lawyer.”
“And he’s sweet on you. Any fool can see that.”
“Tell me about Elise, and then we’ll discuss Carlton.” I dangled that bit of gossip with great effect.
“She was engaged to Charles DeMornay, a Mobile native, who traced his ancestry back to the French settlement of Mobile. From all accounts, he was a handsome man, and it was a love match. They were to be married at Caoin House in an elaborate ceremony in the third-floor ballroom.”
Pretta could pack a lot of info in when she chose. “Did she jump from the window, or did she fall, or was she—”
“She could have been pushed.”
The parallels of Robert’s death weren’t lost on me. “By whom?”
Pretta refilled our drinks, and I wrapped my hand around the sweating glass, glad for even that small touch of coolness. “She had an argument with her father before the wedding—now this is all local legend. There’s no way to document what’s true and what’s false.”
Because Pretta wouldn’t try to push me into helping, I got the candy boxes lined with waxed paper and set them on the counter. I picked up a tray of the freshly made confections and began to put them in the little
wax paper shells. “Don’t worry that I’ll use the details exact. I’m going to turn it all into fiction anyway. I’ll make up what I like, and it might be set in Mobile but not Caoin House.”
That seemed to satisfy Pretta, and she picked up the story with the pleasure I’d noticed before. Together, we filled boxes as we chatted.
“We have to go back to the tragic death of Eva Whitehead,” Pretta said. “No one ever really expected Eli and Elise to return from Europe. After the war, Eli left the plantation in the hands of a good friend, Able Ashford. Eli took Elise to Europe.”
“London?”
“They were nomadic, from the stories I heard, living in London until they tired of that, then on to Paris and Rome and Athens and even into Turkey, Arabia, and Persia. The years passed and they continued to travel. It was almost as if they fled farther and farther away to avoid the past, both of them haunted by death and violence.”
“Was the child okay?” I emptied the key-lime tray and picked up the cheese straws, which went into a different kind of box.
“She didn’t speak for several years. It was in Rome, at the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, that she spoke for the first time.”
“Why there? Did something prompt her to recover her ability to speak?”
Pretta grinned with satisfaction. “The perfect questions, Raissa. That’s the crazy part. That temple was built by Antoninus to honor his wife, Faustina, much as Caoin House was built to honor Eva Whitehead. Elise fell to her knees in front of the columns and cried out her mother’s name. It was the first word she’d spoken since the murder.”
“Too bad she didn’t cry out the names of the people who killed her mother.”
Pretta shook her head in disapproval. “She was just a baby, Raissa. You have the mind of a police detective. I pity the man you decide to track down.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Now finish the story. I hear John Henry washing the pots. He’ll be ready to go soon.”
“While Elise didn’t go to school, she received an education through her travels, and it was said she could speak five languages. Once she started to speak, she was quite good at it. When father and daughter returned to Mobile, they lived in town. Elise was frequently seen at the port translating for sea captains and her father’s business associates.”
I had an image of Elise now, and I felt the strings of a story tugging at me. “Why did they return to Mobile?”
“Some say Eli returned to Caoin House to sell it so that he and Elise would be free to travel for the rest of their lives. The house he’d spent so much time and money on held only sadness for him.”
Perhaps that was why his ghost remained constantly outside the house, as if he didn’t belong within the walls any longer. A wave of sadness swept across me, startling me with the intensity of emotion.
“Others said Eli had come home because he knew he couldn’t outrun the past. Whatever his reasons, Elise met Charles DeMornay at the Mobile docks, and once they met, she no longer wanted to travel with her father.”
Love had thrown a monkey wrench into their lives. “Surely her father would be happy for her?” When I married Alex, one of my biggest regrets was that my father wasn’t alive to walk me down the aisle. My father would have approved of Alex, though. I knew it in my heart.
“Elise was all Eli had left to live for. And I understand Elise intended to live at Caoin House, which displeased her father.”
“So was she pushed out the window?”
Pretta motioned me to take a seat on a stool beside her. She crossed her legs and leaned on one elbow on the counter. “No one knows. The story goes that there was a heated argument between Elise and Charles. The quarrel was loud, and some of the guests left the house and went for a walk on the grounds to give the young couple some privacy to sort through things.”
“Did anyone say what the argument was about?”
Pretta shrugged one shoulder. “The story goes that they were arguing about where they would live in the house. Eli had suddenly decided to live with them at Caoin House, and he’d sprung the announcement just moments before Elise was to walk down the aisle. Charles was unhappy about it.”
“That could put a damper on newlyweds.”
“Caoin House is plenty big to accommodate several generations without folks tripping over one another.” Pretta gave me a slanted look. “When you marry, surely Brett will live with you and your new spouse at Caoin House.”
“That’s really getting ahead of yourself. I don’t even have a prospect.”
“Carlton McKay fancies you,” she teased.
“Time will tell that tale,” I said. “Now back to the story.”
“Yes, anyway, the wedding was set to take place at seven in the evening, a candlelit affair. Elise and Charles had ended the disagreement, and she was on the third floor in a small room off the ballroom that had been set up for her dressing area. From what the guests said, she was alone. The seamstress had been tucking some last-minute pearls along the train of her wedding gown, but the woman went downstairs for thread. The next thing anyone knew, Elise was dead on the front lawn, blood pooling—” She looked stricken. “I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to stir painful memories.”
“I asked,” I reminded her. “Did she fall or was she pushed?”
“The question everyone asks. Some of the guests attending the wedding were still walking on the grounds, and a few reported that they saw a struggle in the window. Others said they watched in horror as she tumbled out the window, seemingly without provocation.”
“Was it ever investigated?” I thought about Robert Aultman’s coroner’s inquest and the secrets it had uncovered.
“I don’t know if there are records. Back then, what the rich gentry said was pretty much accepted as the facts. Still true today, too.” Pretta stood up when John Henry came to the doorway and signaled her. “I can see this has upset you, Raissa. You’re white as a sheet.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Well, you’ve heard the story. There isn’t much to add. Are you sure you don’t mind driving John Henry?”
“Not in the least. It’ll be good for me to learn my way around Mobile.”
“Congratulations on finishing your story, and I’m sure you’ll be published. Just don’t dwell too long in the dark hallways and crypts where ghosts reside.” Pretta put an arm around me. “That’s for your help today. And remember, you’re too pretty to become one of those women who court the darkness.”
I knew what she meant. “No worries. This is all professional curiosity.”
“I like the sound of that. Professional curiosity.” She nodded. “Now let me get John Henry ready to go.”
Within ten minutes we had the car loaded with goodies for Mrs. Marcum’s party. As we drove toward West Hamilton Street, John Henry fidgeted. The closer we got to the residence, the more he laced his fingers and tapped his toes. When I pulled up in front of the stately old two-story antebellum, he hopped out of the car and began stacking the boxes.
“Let me help carry some of those.” I picked up a box of the key-lime delights.
“No, ma’am, best you stay here, please.” He looked up at the house as if he thought it might develop a mouth and teeth with the sole purpose of eating him.
“Nonsense. We can get all of this up to the house in one trip.”
“Please.” He looked at me with anguish. “Don’t go up there with me. Mrs. Marcum says mean things, and you shouldn’t hear them.”
“Maybe she won’t if I’m there.”
He looked perfectly miserable. “Please, Miss Raissa. She’ll be worse if you’re with me.”
I handed him the box of sweets and stepped back. “Okay.”
He sprinted up the sidewalk and around the huge camellias that adorned the front lawn of the two-story Victorian, freshly painted a pristine white. When I heard John Henry’s knock on the front door, I slipped closer, yet remained out of sight. What things could a Southern lady say to a delivery boy that would
be so upsetting?
The door opened to a lovely woman dressed in a lavender silk organza that clung to her narrow waist. The swan corset was still alive and well in the Marcum house. She wore pearls at her throat and ears, and her beautiful chestnut hair was pulled up in a Gibson-girl style. Her thin lips were flattened in a line.
“Ms. Pretta sent me to deliver your order, ma’am.” John Henry kept his gaze on the boxes as he spoke.
“I hope your black hands didn’t touch the candies.”
He didn’t say a word or look up.
“Well, tell me, did you touch my confections? I won’t have them if you did. I don’t pay good money for a darkie to make my desserts.”
“I got the key limes and the chocolate cashews you wanted. Miss Pretta got the nuts fresh from Brazil this week. She said it was the best crop she’d tasted.”
“You still haven’t answered my question, but here’s another. What’s your last name, John Henry? I hear you’re going by the name Marcum.”
At last he looked up and met her gaze. “That’s my daddy’s name. And mine.”
“You’re no more a Marcum than you are a monkey. You’d do well not to use that name in Mobile, pretending to be a relation to my husband. He has no Negro blood in his line.” She snatched the boxes from his hand and slammed the front door.
For a long moment John Henry stood at the stoop, and then he turned slowly toward the car. I rushed out of my hiding place and climbed into the front seat. I didn’t look at him because I felt his shame.
“You heard her?”
I couldn’t lie. “Yes. She’s an evil old bitch.” Cursing wasn’t the norm for me, but there was no other word that served.
“She’s my aunt.”
“She’s still a bitch.”
“That day when I ran into you and spilled the Coca-Colas, it was her brother who came after me. They look for a reason, because I use my daddy’s name.”
The Book of Beloved (Pluto's Snitch 1) Page 16