Harvest of Secrets

by Ellen Crosby

  “Merde. Sorry.” She swiped the liquid with her sleeve.

  “That was thunder,” I said. “I didn’t know we were supposed to get a storm tonight.”

  Quinn stood up and walked over to the window. “The sky is lit up with devil’s pitchfork lightning. The wind is up, too. You can hear it.”

  As he spoke a noise like the rumbling of a jet plane passing overhead reverberated through the trees and a blood vessel behind my left eye started to throb. I pushed my fingers hard into my eyebrow, willing the pressure headache I always got when storms like these blew up to go away and leave me in peace for once.

  “Dammit, I left a window ajar in the studio. The place smelled of glue since I’d been building a model for the Couple from Hell,” Eli said. “I’ll be right back.”

  By the time he returned, the rain was coming down in sheets and Eli’s jeans and sweatshirt looked as if he’d gone swimming in them. He sneezed and shook himself like a wet dog. His hair was plastered to his head and water ran down his face in rivulets.

  Dominique found paper cocktail napkins in the drawer of a side table and handed some to him. “Here. Use these. You ought to get out of those wet clothes before you catch cold.”

  Eli nodded and mopped his face. “I will. The rain is coming down so hard it’s going to flood the gutters. That wind is wicked. I’ll bet you’ve got a headache, Luce.”

  “I do.”

  Another crash of thunder sounded directly overhead followed by a lightning bolt that illuminated the trees and gardens outside like a spooky amusement park house of horrors.

  “It’s just over top of us,” Eli said as the inside lights flickered.

  “I hope we don’t lose power,” Quinn said.

  “We ought to get the lanterns and flashlights from the pantry,” I said. “Just in case.”

  “I’ll get them,” Quinn said.

  “I’ll get the candles in the dining room,” I said.

  “I’ll change,” Eli said.

  “What can I do?” Dominique asked.

  “Sit there and drink your Scotch,” I said. “You’ve got enough on your plate.”

  As Eli predicted, the rain soon overran the gutters, cascading like a waterfall down the windows and rat-a-tatting like gunfire as it bounced off the sills. My eye wouldn’t stop pulsing. The lights went out for good while Eli was upstairs and Quinn and I were rummaging in the kitchen and dining room. A quiet explosion in the basement followed by absolute stillness meant the heating and air-conditioning system was out.

  By the time everyone got back to the parlor, Dominique was on her feet, looking around in the dark for her purse.

  “I don’t think I should stay here tonight after all,” she said. “Thank God we have a generator at the Inn, but I ought to check on everything just in case.”

  “You have good people working for you who can take care of all that,” I told her as Quinn lit two pillar candles and set them in the middle of the coffee table. “You shouldn’t be on your own, under the circumstances, and you don’t want to be driving in this storm. The low spots in the roads will be flooded and it’s too dark to see some of them, so it’s dangerous. You’re staying here, sleeping in your old room, and no arguing. Got that?”

  She gave me a weak smile. “Okay. You win.”

  “Anyone for another little drinkie?” Eli held up the bottle and waved it back and forth like a semaphore. He was already more than a bit drunk, but then so were we all.

  “I’ve had enough,” I said. The swaying bottle was making me dizzy. “I’ll pay for it tomorrow.”

  “Me, too,” Quinn said. “I’m beat. Anyone else ready for bed?”

  “I am,” I said. “First I need to make the guest room bed for Dominique. There are no sheets on it.”

  “I know where the sheets are and I know how to make a bed,” my cousin said, yawning. “This used to be my house, too, remember? Thanks, chérie, but I’ll take care of it. No arguing. Got that?”

  I grinned. “Okay. You win.”

  Quinn passed out the lanterns and flashlights so we could see where we were going in the dark as we made our way up the spiral staircase in the foyer like a slow-moving caravan. Since Highland House had a well, no electricity also meant the well pump wouldn’t function and there would be no water and no flushing the toilet once we used what was in the holding tank in the cellar. The telephone landline had a backup battery capable of lasting only a few hours and everyone’s mobiles would work as long as they held a charge. Unfortunately I’d let mine run down until it was nearly dead, but I’d trade no phone for running water any day. And a working toilet.

  Quinn and I undressed by lantern-light and opted not to brush our teeth or wash our faces to save water.

  “We have to fill the bathtubs and sinks before Lolita arrives,” he said, “so we don’t get caught off-guard like this again. This storm came out of nowhere.”

  “I hope the power comes back on tonight or tomorrow morning,” I said. “A tree probably fell on a power line or knocked out a generator. They ought to get it fixed in no time. It will be a different story with Lolita. We could lose power for days.”

  He slid into bed and held the covers for me. I got in next to him and said, “I’m beat. Today felt like it went on forever.”

  “I know. But I think you still owe me a bedtime story,” he said, adjusting his pillow so it was propped against the headboard. He leaned against it and watched me. “Don’t you?”

  He had turned the lantern down to the lowest setting. Though the bedroom was bathed in soft golden light, the marionette lines on his face looked deep-set and harsh and his silhouette was an angry-looking shadow on the wall. He was still upset with me for lying about having lunch with Kit when I had obviously been somewhere else.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I meant to tell you everything today at the house in the woods until Miguel showed up.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “I don’t want Eli to know about this. At least not just yet. And certainly not Mia.”

  He frowned, but he said, “Okay.”

  I took a deep breath and it came out raggedy. This wasn’t going to be easy. “Leland had an affair,” I said. “After Eli was born and when my mother was pregnant with me. Eli, Mia, and I have a half brother. I have no idea whether Leland realized he had a son or not. I just met him today at the Goose Creek Bridge when you thought I was having lunch with Kit. His biological mother is African-American and his name is David Phelps. His mother gave him up and Phelps is the name of the couple that adopted him.”

  After a long moment of silence he said, “That must have been a hell of a discovery. Are you okay?”

  I nodded and he pulled me into his arms. We lay there for a long time without speaking.

  Finally I said, “I want you to meet him. And he wants to meet you. But Eli … and Mia … I just don’t know how I can tell either of them. That’s why I didn’t say anything tonight at dinner.”

  “You can’t shield them, Lucie. They have a right to know they have a half brother.”

  I told him about the Genome Project and how I’d learned about David. “They didn’t ask for this, Quinn,” I said. “I did.”

  “What are you trying to do? Protect them?”

  My voice cracked. “I’m trying not to break their hearts.”

  “If you’re tough enough to take it, so are they,” he said, stroking my hair, his touch gentle as a feather. “Look, I’m the last one to give advice on relationships considering what a mess my own family is. But you can’t rewrite history. You can’t change Susanna Montgomery falling in love with someone she was told she wasn’t allowed to love. It seems to me she risked her life, risked everything, for love. And you can’t change Leland having an affair that produced a child who is now your adult half brother. You said yourself he’s an amazing person. You two have the same father. You share the same blood. So do Eli and Mia.”

  I leaned into the crook of his arm and blinked back tears. The blood of
your parents is not lost in you. It was a line from Homer’s Odyssey. I’d spent an entire semester reading it, one of the most famous epic poems in literature, in an Intro to Lit course in college. My dog-eared marked-up copy was on a bookshelf downstairs in the library. The professor had also gotten into the psychological debate of nature versus nurture: which mattered more in shaping each of us as children into the adults we became? Was it genetic inheritance or environment and experience? Who could say? There was no right or wrong answer, just lots of variables and individual situations that seemed to skew one way or the other.

  Except for one immutable fact: in the end blood mattered. No one could change who their parents were or where they came from. DNA was DNA. Family was family.

  “I suppose you’re right,” I said. “I’ll tell them, but not just now. There’s too much going on. Jean-Claude’s murder and Bobby apparently suspecting Dominique. The hurricane. The end of harvest. Let me figure out the right time and place.”

  “Don’t leave it too long. They’re both going to want to know when you found out,” he said. “And wonder why you waited to tell them. Put yourself in their shoes. How would you feel if either of them discovered bombshell news like this and decided to keep it a secret for a while?”

  “You’re not making this easy.”

  “Messy stuff usually isn’t easy. Especially when it involves families.”

  Quinn was right. I was kidding myself that I could spare Eli and Mia from the bewildered hurt and anger I’d felt the first time I learned what Leland had done. And of course there was David, who had charmed me today, and was eager to meet his two siblings. Find the family he hadn’t known existed until a couple of years ago, maybe build a future together even though there had never been a past. David was the silver lining that could make forgiving Leland possible.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “Soon. I promise.”

  “Good.” He leaned over and turned off the lantern. Outside the storm had ended, except for the hypnotic drumming of rain on the roof.

  “I hope we get the power back on and the rain stops before morning,” I said, stifling a yawn.

  “Me, too.” He rolled over onto his side so we were facing each other. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m worried about Dominique.”

  “I know. You’re all wound up. I can feel it.” He leaned in and kissed me. “There’s a remedy for that, you know.”

  I smiled. “Tell me, what would that be?”

  “I’m not going to tell you, I’m going to show you … for a little while, it would be good to forget … everything.”

  He pulled me into his arms and I felt, as I always did when we made love, as if I was losing myself in him, drowning. But this time was different. This time he was saving me. From the ghost of a dead girl and her lost lover, from the hurt of my father’s secret affair, and from a killer who probably had a trusted, familiar face. I surrendered to everything he wanted to do and for the next hour, I forgot all these things that had haunted me.

  We finally fell asleep, exhausted, wrapped in each other’s arms in a tangle of sheets. Briefly I heard him murmur something about the power coming back on and realized he’d left our bed. Eventually he returned, his body chilled from the night air and wherever he’d been, and I woke up.

  “What’s wrong?” I murmured. “Where were you? You’re cold.”

  “Shh. Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “I was just checking on everything, turning off lights we left on. Go back to sleep.”

  I closed my eyes. The next time I opened them, it was light outside. And it had stopped raining.

  * * *

  DOMINIQUE WAS GONE BY the time I came downstairs a few minutes later after washing my grimy face and brushing my teeth. The grandfather clock in the foyer had just chimed six. My cousin’s note was propped up against Susanna’s copy of The Journal of John Woolman on the demilune table in the foyer. She thanked us for taking care of her last night and said that her bedsheets were already in the washing machine in the basement and our drinks glasses had been washed and put away. If she could have vacuumed and dusted the entire house from top to bottom without waking anyone, she would have done that, too.

  I set her note down and picked up The Journal of John Woolman. In the commotion of Dominique’s arrival, too much Scotch, and a power outage, I’d forgotten all about it. Quinn had been right that the book had taken a beating when Miguel knocked it out of my hands and it landed open and facedown in the bushes.

  I brought it into the kitchen and put it on the table. Quinn had set up the coffeepot the night before to start brewing coffee at 6 A.M. as we usually did, but the power outage had reset the clock to midnight. I readjusted it and hit the brew button. Then I sat down at the table to see what damage had been done to the old book and whether I could do surgery on it myself or it needed professional help. The back flyleaf had started to come away from the cover and the binding was pulling away from the spine. I ran my thumb over the endpaper. It had already been separated from the book once before. The glue that held it to the cover was nothing more than a thin bead around the edge of the paper. Something stiff and rectangular had been inserted between the paper and the book. It felt like a card. Or maybe a photograph.

  I got a butter knife and finished separating the endpaper from the cover. When I was done, I knew I was looking at a black-and-white photograph of the man Susanna Montgomery had loved enough to defy her family and reject her fiancé. Noble-looking, light-skinned, dressed in a fine-looking jacket and a white dress shirt, he had large, expressive eyes, full lips, a broad nose, and bushy black hair that was combed back from his forehead like the mane of a lion. I turned the photograph over. The flowery script had to be Susanna’s handwriting. It didn’t look masculine.

  Henry Wells, June 30, 1862. Lincoln, Virginia.

  “Who is that?”

  I jumped. Quinn was standing behind me, leaning over my shoulder.

  “Oh, gosh, you scared me. I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Sorry.” He bent down and kissed my hair. “Want some coffee?”

  “Yes, please. According to what’s written on the back of the photograph, his name is Henry Wells. I bet he was Susanna’s lover, the man she was going to run away with and marry in New York. He lived in Lincoln, the Quaker village next to Purcellville.”

  Quinn picked up the photograph and examined it. “He looks very … I don’t know … aristocratic. I wonder who he was?”

  “Me, too.”

  “Well, now you’ve got something to go on. You ought to be able to find out more about him.”

  “I thought I’d start at the Thomas Balch Library in Leesburg. If any place has information or genealogical records about him, they will.”

  Quinn got two mugs from the cabinet and poured our coffees. “It would be interesting to know what happened to him. Did he make it to New York, even if Susanna didn’t, or did he end up like she did?”

  “You mean dead.”

  He nodded and handed me a mug. “It seems to me the punishment—or retribution—would have been worse for Henry than for Susanna if he got caught. Especially in Virginia, the heart of the Confederacy.” He paused. “I wonder if Charles…”

  “Murdered Henry, too?”

  His eyes met mine. “Either on his own or perhaps he had help. He must have been furious when he found out, don’t you think?”

  I did. Unbidden, an image of men carrying burning torches and pitchforks came into my head. And another of white-robed men in conical hoods on horseback. The Klan. I shuddered.

  Maybe Thelma knew whether Charles had exacted some kind of revenge on Henry and chose not to tell me about the man who would not only be my distant cousin but also her great-uncle. I still didn’t know for sure whether Charles had killed Susanna or merely buried her in that unmarked grave. Thelma and I hadn’t discussed that subject, either.

  “David told me yesterday he photographed an old church in Lincoln that was the first African-American church in Loudoun Co
unty. It has a cemetery, although apparently it hasn’t been maintained. Both slaves and free blacks were buried there. I think I’ll call him and ask if he can show me around.”

  “It would be ironic if Henry was buried there with a proper headstone while Susanna was dumped in a shallow unmarked grave next to your family’s cemetery.”

  “It would. In the meantime maybe Robyn can tell me something about the quilt Susanna was wrapped in. I’ve never seen one like it,” I said.

  “Plus I presume you’re going to ask her whether she was arguing in French with Jean-Claude right before he was murdered?”

  “I thought maybe I could work it into the conversation.”

  “It’s hard to be subtle about murder.”

  “No fooling.”

  “So how are you planning to bring it up?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I told him. “But I’ll figure out something.”

  * * *

  KIT CALLED AS I was in the car driving over to Robyn’s.

  “I ran into Eli yesterday,” she said. “We were getting lunch at The Upper Crust. He was supposed to tell you to call me.”

  “He did,” I said. “During dinner. After that, things got sort of crazy. I’m sorry, I just forgot.”

  “Is everything okay? How about lunch today? We can catch up.”

  “Sure, lunch would be fine,” I said. “Let’s meet at Lightfoot at eleven thirty. I need to pay a visit to the Balch Library afterward and look through their records and it’s right down the street.”

  “Would this have something to do with your skeleton?”

  “It would.”

  “Lightfoot sounds good. I love that restaurant,” she said. “Want some company at the library? The Trib uses their resources all the time. I know my way around.”

  “I’d love it,” I said. “See you soon.”

  I disconnected with Kit and pulled into Toby and Robyn’s driveway. After last night’s torrential rain, the driveway was still wet and slick under a gray, sullen sky that perfectly matched my mood. I got the quilt out of the back of the Jeep, still packed in the paper bag Yasmin had put it in, and rang the doorbell with my elbow.