When the captain reached shore he hurried to his goodwife and gave her a fierce hug. My nose wrinkled over the wretched odor that clung to him. He smelled of human waste and despair. When he saw me raise my handkerchief to my nose, he grinned and replied the stench of money was not always sweet.
When I arrived home, Penny was silent and hovered in the corner. Dr. Goodwin arrived home for lunch, grinning. The cargo, he said, would fetch handsomely on his investment. Penny turned to the fire and prepared him a hot cup of broth, and when she turned again and handed the mug to him, she was her old smiling self.
Chapter Ten
Carrie woke at midnight and then again at three in the morning. Though her cries startled me awake each time, my heart didn’t race as fast or as hard as last night. My body was trying to adjust to this new, temporary routine.
On the vineyard, there were plenty of times we rose as early as four. Harvest season was a three-week stretch of days that began long before the sun rose and ended hours after sunset. The grapes were planted and designed to ripen in one section of the vineyard after the other, and it was important to be ready for the grapes because, if left too long in the sun, they withered, and if left too long in damp soil, they rotted. Grapes required a delicate balance that the grower carefully maintained.
The alarm on my nightstand went off at five-thirty A.M. and I quickly silenced it. I needed to be downstairs, ready to go with Grace and Carrie at six-thirty.
Carrie slept in her dresser drawer bed, her little lips slightly parted as her chest rose and fell steadily. “As tempted as I am to wake your little ass up, I won’t. I’m the bigger person in this relationship.” I also reveled at the idea of taking a quick shower, dressing, and guzzling coffee before the kid awoke.
I found Grace in the kitchen setting up a pot of coffee. “I’ve made sandwiches,” she said. “And I’ve packed the last pre-mixed bottles.”
“That’s great.” I didn’t expect the gesture.
“Get your shower. I’ll scramble a few eggs.”
Whoever whisked the real Grace away and brought this Replacement Grace was my new best friend. “Will do. Thanks.”
I hustled into the shower and turned on the hot water. Aching and tired muscles all but groaned their pleasure as I stepped under the hot spray and soaked up the warmth for a minute or two before I was out of the shower. I was half dressed when Carrie started to wail. Pulling a quick comb through my hair, I hauled on a T-shirt and moved toward the kid. I found Grace standing over the child, frozen.
“You can pick her up,” I said.
“No. You’re better with her than me.”
“She’s pretty tough.” I leaned over, my damp hair falling forward, and lifted Carrie. “I think she’s gaining weight. Or her diaper is a real mess.”
Grace backed out of the room. “I’ll let you figure that out.”
I cleaned up the baby, who squawked and cried as I wiped her off and fitted her with fresh diapers. I dug out another outfit from Grace’s clearance-rack run and found a long-sleeved jumpsuit covered with a commando print and sporting a duck in the center of the chest. As I wrestled her into the outfit, I said, “Sorry, kid, but you don’t look so hot.”
Carrie cried.
I hefted her on my shoulder. “Yeah, I’d cry, too, if I were wearing a camouflage outfit with a duck on it.”
Grace handed me the bottle as we entered the kitchen and grimaced when she saw the baby. “It was only a dollar.”
I sat and tucked the kid in the hollow of my arm. Within seconds, she was suckling hard. “It doesn’t really matter. Soon, we’ll have her with real parents who’ll know what the hell they’re doing. She can spend her days in a crib staring at mobiles instead of a bare ceiling.”
Grace poured me a cup of coffee, her expression grim. “A kid does deserve a real home.”
“We’re the temporary harbor and not the final destination.” The idea of sailing to a new port buoyed my spirits. As hard as this seemed, it wasn’t forever.
Carrie finished up her bottle as I gulped coffee and ate a piece of toast. I rested her on my shoulder and eight pats on the back later she burped like a field hand. “Good girl.”
As I was about to load her in the front pack, she did a number in her diaper, which required a revolting change of diaper and apparel. I tossed the damp and very smelly commando duck outfit in a paper bag for dirty clothes and dug out another jumper. This one was navy blue with sailor stripes on the collar. The red clearance tag read fifty cents. “Your aunt knows how to squeeze a dollar.”
We found Margaret McCrae on the first floor studying an old marble fireplace. She wore faded jeans rolled up to her calves, Chucks, and a loose green shirt. Her red hair was fastened in a knot with a black scrunchie. In the last twenty years Margaret and I had crossed paths a couple of times, but she hadn’t really changed much. Still the same free-spirited geek.
“Margaret,” I said.
She turned with a grin that vanished as her gaze swept over the baby. “You dropped a kid?”
Away from the vineyard, it was easy to discuss my well-known family. “She’s Janet’s baby.”
“Where’s Janet?”
“In the hospital.”
“Complications?”
“Not the medical hospital.”
Her eyes narrowed and then her head nodded with understanding. “She’s sick again.”
“Yeah.”
“How bad?”
“She made a baby, nearly gave birth on the street corner, and now can barely communicate.”
“Sucks.”
“Yep.”
She glanced at the baby, but didn’t ooh or ah like some women might. “You already enlisted the kid in the Navy.”
“Yeah, meet Ensign Carrie Morgan.”
“Morgan? So Zeb wasn’t a part of this?”
“No.”
Margaret rested her hands on her hips. “And you’re keeping it together?”
“For a few days.”
“And then?”
“I’d rather talk about my stones and all the great history behind them.”
Margaret’s grin was swift and genuine. She rubbed her palms together, her ringed fingers catching the light. “I can’t say for sure if I know who the property once belonged to, but I have an idea.”
“Let’s load up the truck, and you can tell me as we go.” I glanced toward the stairs. “Grace!”
Footsteps sounded on the stairs and her head poked around the corner. She carried the baby seat and the cooler stocked with lunches and bottles. “Addie, I’ve gotten a call.”
“I didn’t hear the phone ring.”
“It’s important.” She glanced toward Margaret. “Good, you’re here to help.”
“At your service. How you doing, Grace?”
Grace arched a brow, her expression saying, You’ve got to be kidding. “Great. Did you get those men we used the last time?”
“More or less. Two men. Very strong. And hard workers.”
“Then you don’t need me.”
“You said you were going to help with the baby,” I said.
Grace shook her head. “I can’t. Not today. Besides, Addie, the baby likes you better than me.”
Annoyance snapped and stirred old feelings of resentment. What was the deal with this family? Did anyone ever go the distance? “Grace, I think you can pull it together enough today to help.”
Grace’s frown deepened. “I’m not coming and I’m fairly sure Margaret doesn’t want to hear our argument.”
Margaret shrugged. “Grace, I never mind a good family argument. It’s much like being at home. You two have at it.”
Arguing in front of others might not have bothered Margaret, but it bothered me a lot. As much as I wanted to yell and scream, with Margaret standing feet away, I swallowed all my frus
tration. “We’ll see you when we see you.”
Pissed, I picked up the car seat and loaded it in the backseat of the truck. My familiarity with the belts and hooks was growing at an alarming rate. I installed the kid in her seat and then turned on the truck engine and the air-conditioning. Margaret slid into the passenger seat beside me. As I backed out of the parking lot, I caught sight of Grace standing in the door of the salvage company, staring at me with a stony face.
I pulled into traffic and wound my way up King Street. A turn on Patrick Street and I was headed south toward Richmond Highway.
“So you want to hear what I found out?” Margaret asked.
Shoving out a breath, I loosened my grip on the steering wheel. “I sure do.”
“If I have my property correctly identified, then you’re going to love this.” She dangled the historical tidbit much like a mother used candy with a child.
“Spill.”
“Do you have a basic history of Alexandria?”
“For the most part. Most of my knowledge centers around architecture because it helps to know a little when you’re demolishing a place.”
She winced. “Taking a place apart. Makes me want to cry.”
“The way I look at it, I am saving history.”
Margaret swiped away a loose curl. “In the sixteen hundreds . . .”
The truck frame shuddered a little as I slowed. “We’re going back that far?”
“I pulled up your job site on Google Maps. And yes, we’re going back that far.”
I downshifted at a stoplight. “Give it to me.”
“You know about Jamestown?”
“Sixteen oh two.”
“Sixteen oh seven. Basic American history, Addie.”
“Understood. But can you give me the CliffsNotes version?”
She sighed. “I’m dealing with peasants.”
“Work with me.”
She turned sideways in the seat so that she faced me. “In 1607 the English created the first settlement in America. As you may or may not know, it didn’t go so well.”
“Right. Pocahontas.”
“Right, Ms. I-Get-My-History-from-a-Disney-Cartoon. Anyway, the first settlements didn’t go well, but settlers kept coming and, after a decade or so, discovered that tobacco was a major cash crop. Thank you, John Rolfe, Pocahontas’s husband. Long story short, the Virginia settlement spread west toward Williamsburg and into the Chesapeake Basin and around the banks of the Potomac. In 1732, the plantation owners along the Potomac River were doing a bang-up business of growing tobacco, but trading it with the English was cumbersome. And the English were finding that sometimes the tobacco reaching their shores had rotted. The Crown decreed the establishment of tobacco inspection warehouses. Long story short, Mr. Hugh West’s Hunting Creek warehouse thrived.”
“On the corner of Union and Oronoco Streets.” The site was five blocks north of our warehouse.
“Give or take. Yes.” She settled back in her seat, as comfortable as a history professor at the lectern. “I could get into the land grant, the surveying of what would become Alexandria, but that lesson’s for another day.”
“So who did my stone hearth belong to?”
“I know there were a few families that lived in the area south of town. Technically, they would have leased their land from the Berkeley family, who really owned all of Northern Virginia and as far west as the Shenandoah River Valley.”
“Margaret, you’re getting too deep in the weeds for me. What about these stones would help me sell them?”
She fiddled with a red beaded bracelet on her wrist. “There’s a mention of a woman named Faith who lived in that area. She was brought to Alexandria in the mid-1740s and, from what I can tell, she was accused of witchcraft in Scotland and her punishment was indentured servitude in Virginia. This is the first time Faith has popped up on my radar, so I’ve definitely got to do more digging on her.”
“Witchcraft.” I sensed Margaret would connect the witch to the stones.
“Fears of it were alive and well, even then.”
“I thought all the witch stuff was limited to Salem in the sixteen hundreds.”
“Nope, fear of witches thrived in Scotland around that time. And Virginia can claim a lapse in judgment when it comes to witches. There was a case in the Tidewater area around seventeen hundred. That woman was convicted and sentenced to seven years in jail.”
“Seven years? What did that woman do?”
“Basically, she was an independent woman. She grew herbs, wore trousers, and refused to remarry after her husband died.”
“But she is not connected to our stones.”
“No.” Margaret rubbed her hands together, the rings on her fingers clicking against each other. “But stories about witches will sell those rocks.”
“For the right buyer, they sure could.”
“To be fair, a lot of people believed in witches in Faith’s time. England or Virginia weren’t easy places to call home in those days. Disease, hunger, and the Indians all made life tough. Death was always close and when the sun set, there was only a handful of candles and hearths to chase the dark away. It was easy to assume the unnatural lurked in the woods.”
“So you think Faith is attached to this property?”
“I do. On microfilm I found her indentured servant contract. It was first owned by the ship’s captain, then it was sold to a man named McDonald.”
“The current owner of the land is a McDonald.”
Margaret ran her hands along her arms, chilled by a sudden breeze. “No shit?”
“Yeah. It’s a woman. Rae McDonald.”
Bracelets rattled as she fist pumped her hand in the air. “I love it when the past connects to the present.”
“So we have a connection to a witch. Then our stones will be enchanted?”
Laughter rumbled in her chest. “Hey, you wanted a story that would sell them.”
We drove down Richmond Highway past the older subdivisions filled with mid-century modern homes and fully thick mature trees. I reached for my phone in my purse and pulled up the job site address. One mile to go.
“So Zeb Talbot is working this job, too?”
“He is.”
Margaret jabbed her thumb over the back of the seat toward the baby. “So that’s got to be weird.”
“You’ve no idea.”
“And Janet’s okay with you having the baby? As I remember, you two didn’t get along so well.”
“She needs me, and whether she likes me or not really doesn’t factor into the equation.”
“How long do you have the baby?”
“A few days.”
“Damn. I can do an hour with my nephew and then I need a drink. He’s a great kid, and God knows Daisy adores that boy, but wow, a real live kid to raise? Too scary.”
“I try not to think about it.”
A soft laugh rumbled in her throat. “That’s why we’re on for this excursion. You need something to do so you don’t go crazy taking care of the kid.”
“I’m getting a little claustrophobic. But this should be an easy job, and the stones are going to be worth good money to the right buyer. I hate to see opportunity lost.”
The GPS on my phone warned me a quarter mile remained before I needed to take a right-hand turn. As I slowed, not wanting to miss the turn, I spotted the twin white brick pillars, surrounded by a riot of purple and yellow pansies, marking the entrance to a newer neighborhood. Gold letters that read Belle Haven sprawled across the white brick.
“Belhaven used to be the name of Alexandria,” Margaret said almost to herself. “George Washington surveyed this area when he was a young man and referred to the city as Belhaven.”
GPS silenced my questions and told me to turn left and then to take another quick left past newer homes and then fi
nally into a cul-de-sac that faced Richmond Highway but was buffered by a thick stand of trees. Centered on the cul-de-sac sat a large brick colonial house surrounded by a thick stand of boxwoods. In the center of the yard stood a tall oak tree with a full and thick canopy of leaves. Hanging from the lowest limb was a thick rope that dangled above the grass, its end frayed and broken. Somewhere along the way, it had been a rope swing.
Margaret sat forward in her seat. “Nice house. This the McDonald house?”
I reached in my back pocket and pulled out the rumpled note with the name and address of the owner. “Yes. The owner of the home is Rae McDonald. She’s putting on an addition or building a garage.”
No sooner were the words uttered than a large, rumbling red truck moved down the center of the street and parked behind me. I didn’t need to see the driver clearly to realize it was Zeb behind the wheel.
I glanced at the baby in the backseat, figuring in five minutes she’d realize the car wasn’t running. With the air-conditioning blowing cool air, I slid out of the car and came around to Margaret. “You have men coming, correct?”
“Should be here any minute. Grad students. Not day laborers, but they love this kind of stuff and they’re very cheap.”
“That works for me.”
I moved toward Zeb’s truck, not sure if he were here to help or check up on me. The Morgan sisters were not known for their staying power, and we did break our word from time to time.
He got out, pulled off his glasses. “Glad to see you made it.”
Hearing the challenge, I silenced a petulant quip begging to be voiced. With all the trouble in my life, I did not need a war with Zeb Talbot. “Let me introduce you to Margaret McCrae. She works at the Archaeology Center and helps Grace from time to time.”
Margaret thrust a calloused hand forward and took his in hers. “Been a long, long time. I was at your wedding.”
A muscle tensed in his jaw. “Right. Good to see you again.”
“This should be an interesting job,” Margaret said.
“Stone removal is interesting?”
“It’s history, dude. And history makes me weak in the knees.”
At the Corner of King Street Page 13