Hesitating, the large man took it. "I never figured you for this."
"Neither did I," she quietly replied.
Cora walked over to the hooks by the door and put on her coat.
"What are you doing?" Idabelle's eyes were as big as saucers.
"I'm going for my man."
"But what if he comes home?" Ida asked.
"He ain't coming home."
"How do you know?" The old woman's head was fogged from her terror and subsequent relief.
"They'd send men here to kill him." Cora looked at Celeste. "Will you take me up there?"
"Yes."
Ramelle, considering all possibilities, inquired, "Where are the girls?"
"Down at the theater."
"Perhaps you ought to leave them a note in case they come home early. The whole town's in an uproar. They might return soon."
"I can't write," Cora stated.
"I'll write a note for you." Ramelle found a scrap of paper in one of Juts' schoolbooks on the kitchen table.
"Let's go." Celeste herded everyone out the door. "Ramelle, I'm dropping you off home."
"No you're not. I'd rather be in danger with you than worried sick about you."
"There won't be room in the car if we find Aimes."
"That's a damn flimsy excuse, Celeste. No!"
Cora, her voice low, begged, "Miss Ramelle, do me the great favor of finding my children and taking them back to your place."
"I—of course, Cora. Don't worry."
Celeste dropped Ramelle off at the theater. The rain splashed against the windshield.
"Cora, we can't go right up to the plant. There will be a huge crowd by now."
Dennis spoke up. "Miss Chalfonte, you can get close if you use the old Littlestown road. We can circle around on the north side and get within a half mile of the plant. That road is hardly ever used. It'll ruin your car, though, in this weather."
"The hell with the car." Celeste hunched over the wheel. "Go up to Dead Man's Curve," Cora said softly. "What?" A cold hand seemed to smash Celeste's chest.
"Dead Man's Curve. Brutus is like a dog with another bone."
The curve hooked treacherously over a bluff. Celeste switched off the engine. Cora, unmindful of the downpour, ran to the sharpest point over the drop.
"Can you see anything?" Celeste was right behind her.
"No," Cora shouted above the rain.
"Cora, he got away. This place is like a grim magnet for you. Let me take you home."
"He's down there, Celeste. I can feel it."
Shivering and soaked, Celeste was more chilled by Cora's intuition than by the weather.
"You stay up here. I'll go down."
"Miss Chalfonte, I'll go with you." Dennis had already started his slow descent.
"I'm coming along."
"No, Cora. You'll hurt yourself. I don't want to be impolite, but you're too big. Please."
Cora stayed transfixed at the edge. A great sadness washed over her—and a terrible question. How can these things happen? How can murderers walk among us, untouched? She knew he was down there.
Slipping, sliding, Celeste lowered herself down the steep incline. The rain nearly blinded her. Dennis's form lurched before her. His foot gave out from under him. He grabbed a naked bush. She stretched for his hand.
"O.K." She grasped him. "Keep hold of my hand. You feel your way down. I'll try to balance you as best I can." The rain swilled in her mouth.
Not thinking she would be on a grim search, Celeste hadn't brought a lantern. Finally at the bottom, amid a tangle of bushes, neither she nor Dennis could see much.
"I'll go left. You go right."
"No, Miss Chalfonte. Can't hardly see your hand in front of your face. We'd better stick together even if it takes twice as long."
Sinking up to their ankles in mud, they hugged the bank. Neither one wanted to say it, but they were sweeping the area as far as a body could go, if a body did go over the curve.
"See something." Dennis's voice was clipped.
A dark mass lay about two yards off. Groping toward it, Celeste felt her heart rip at her rib cage. She fought back an almost uncontrollable urge to run. She wondered if Dennis felt the same way.
His voice cracked. "It's a man."
Celeste got down on her hands and knees to peer at the face. Revolted, she reeled back.
"It's him. What's left of him."
Even with the rain and darkness she saw they had bashed half his face in.
"Dennis, we have to bring him up."
"Oh, God, Miss Chalfonte, let's wait until the morning. Don't let her see this."
"I know Cora. If we don't bring him up she'll crawl down here herself and break her neck. If we forcibly take her home she'll walk back in the night."
They could hear her calling through the noise, but couldn't make out what she said.
"If you lift under his chest, I can get my shoulder under his legs. We might be able to climb up like that."
"Worth a try. We can't hurt him anymore." Dennis bent over and hoisted Aimes on his shoulders. Celeste stood behind him and wrapped her arm up around the dead man's hips. Slowly they made their way to the path down. It took them forty-five minutes to get to the top.
On seeing Aimes, Cora let out one piercing cry of impossible anguish, then lapsed into silence. Celeste and Dennis rested the body in the back seat, where Cora sat with his bloodied head in her lap. The whole torturous way back to Celeste's, Cora wiped his caved-in face with her apron. She ran her palm over his brow like a mother checking a sick child for a temperature. Rocking back and forth, touching her crushed lover's body, she never uttered a sound.
Celeste felt like a bathtub with the plug pulled. Shaking, empty, she sternly concentrated on bringing both the living and the dead safely home.
April 6, 1917
Celeste rested in a blue wing chair. Spotty's bold, clear handwriting made reading easy.
Dear Twinklie:
I hope everyone is mending. Forgive me for not writing you since the funeral, but as you may have already guessed, pandemonium reigns here. We expect a war declaration this week. I estimate, given the usual snarls, I will go to France sometime in June. At least that's what Colonel Raider tells us. You know Bunny Cadwalder was shot down behind German lines. How hard it was for me to sit here in Washington amid papers, people and patter while half the fellows I chummed with joined Lafayette Escadrille.
Colonel Raider also told me Brutus got his contract as well as covert funding to repair the damages. Given the situation, any hint of a strike will be met with federal troops. I am afraid Aimes Rankin died in vain. Brutus gathers more power daily. Steel, railroads and munitions are interlocked here like the Three Musketeers. As a soldier I am to be above politics—above politics and beside the point. I find myself wishing Father were alive. What was it like then? What internal petty army politics did he endure for the sake of the Confederacy? What alliances between Richmond and cannon-makers insulted his sense of honor? Worse, my dear sister, I am beginning to question honor. You and I were raised with a code, a duty, a sense of place, position, responsibility to others. We may bear as much relation to this society as a dinosaur does to our own.
Forgive me, darling. I am morbid today. I feel overpowered by events and out of step with my associates. I keep it to myself of course. You are the only soul to whom I can unburden myself, and forgive me for such indulgence. You are carrying your own heavy sadness. Remember last Harvest Moon Ball when I consumed too much champagne and conceived of myself as the planet Jupiter? I laugh to think of it and to think of Fannie Jump Creighton resorting to lewd palm readings. This hour my mind wanders to thoughts of the firmament, though less jolly. Perhaps, dear Celeste, pain is the experience of a marred universe.
Since I can't stop myself, I shall stop this letter and relieve you. I believe I'll be able to come home mid-May. I do so look forward to that.
Your loving brother, Spotty
Placing the l
etter on a cherrywood table, Celeste considered the past three weeks, Spotty's letter, the new doubts breaking into her well-ordered brain. She recalled her old clich6: "Revenge is a dish best eaten cold." Cold . . . How cruel the cold was that night up by Dead Man's Curve. Then she thought of something Cora said days afterward: "A snake that swallows too large a prey loses its swiftness." Celeste began to wonder about wealth, war, women. She was so taken with those swirling impressions, ideas, tremors, she didn't hear the uproar outside. Firecrackers and guns crackled. Cora stopped dressing the leg of lamb and hit the back screen door just as Ramelle pushed it on her way in from the garden. Julia Ellen slammed the front door. She was not to enter the house by the front door. This startled Celeste.
"Julia, why are you home from school?"
"War. We declared war on Germany!"
May 19, 1917
A gentle west wind played with Spottiswood's black hair. The extensive, well-clipped lawn provided a green counterpoint to the gold and maroon decorations Celeste had put up in his honor. Spotts had to laugh, because he knew full well those were also the colors of the suffragists. A large tent housing cold chicken, champagne, truffles, caviar and other delights stood next to the perfect garden. Hundreds of guests gloried in the gentle weather and Spotts was touched by the pains his sister had taken in his behalf and by the large turnout. He used to love going to France. He certainly never dreamed there would be a time he'd rather remain in Runnymede or Washington. Starched, shining, he looked the warrior in his captain's uniform. To his surprise and Celeste's, Curtis arrived from California, also in uniform. Spotty threatened to reveal Curtis's age, thirty-three, to the enlistment officer since he knew his younger brother had lied. Curtis simply replied, "I am a Chalfonte. It is my duty to go." Nothing more was said of the matter, except that Spotty turned to Celeste and remarked, "Good God, Twinklie, don't you try to go as well." The three of them had a good laugh over that.
Juts wore white for the occasion. Her high-button shoes drove her bats, but she did her best. Louise went whole hog. A large summer hat, replete with feathers from countless unfortunate birds, dwarfed her small head. After much begging, Celeste had allowed her to wear one of her pin-on watches. To complete her wardrobe Louise carried an embroidered handkerchief in her left hand. As she walked she cast it to and fro. She could barely wait for the dancing to begin, as she knew Captain Spotts would ask her at least once and then she could transfer the pink flag to her right hand and have it trail while she twirled. The height of romance, she thought.
Bullpucky, Juts thought. She'd seen her sister snitch a pinch of rouge from Celeste's vanity. Loose as ashes! I hope I never get that daffy, Julia grumbled to herself.
Carlotta, La Sermonetta, towered above everyone else. She was the tallest of the Chalfontes. Striding among the well-dressed guests, she paused here and there for a counseling word, a prayer, a magic moment.
"There goes Carlotta, despotically improving our lot," Celeste said gaily to Spotty.
"Apparently she hasn't heard of the Great War and the Twelfth Commandment," Spotts replied.
"And what might that be?" Curtis asked. Overhearing a dig at Carlotta, he had moved closer.
"Each against all," Spotts solemnly intoned.
"Oh, that's good, Spotty, that's very good." Curtis roared. "Perhaps the family could inscribe it on a tablet or even a giant domino and have it installed in the chapel at Immaculata Academy."
"You are wicked." Ramelle tiptoed up behind him, Curtis was hopelessly smitten with Ramelle.
Cora, though invited to the party as a guest, stuck close to the food tent. Celeste had hired people from Baltimore to come and create their gastronomic concoctions.
Seeing her headmistress, Louise assumed a saintly air. "Good afternoon, Mrs. Van Dusen."
"Why, Louise, don't you look very grown up. And who is this?"
"Permit me to introduce my little sister, Julia Ellen."
"I'm pleased to meet you, Julia Ellen."
"I'm not little." Juts forgot her manners, never her strong point anyway.
"Shut up, Julia."
"Louise, suffer the little children to come unto me."
"Suffer is right, Mrs. Van Dusen, Julia's a brat."
"Now, now, dear, she's younger than you and therefore must look to you for spiritual and social guidance."
This puffed up Louise like a blowfish.
Seeing her sister and two soldiering brothers, Carlotta moved over to them. Louise pulled along with her, caught in a religious undertow. Juts stomped at her heels.
"Darling Celeste, I want to thank you again for bringing Louise to my academy. She is our best musical pupil."
"Oh, hell," Julia muttered under her breath.
Spotty began to smirk, although he tried to hide it.
"Thank you, Mrs. Van Dusen."
"Apple polisher," Julia whispered in Wheezie's ear, which she had a hard time finding beneath the mounds of hair.
"I'm thinking of requesting Louise to give a performance for this year's graduating class."
Louise, beside herself with joy, blurted out, "I can do Bach's Tobacco and Fugue in D Minor."
Celeste exploded with laughter.
Carlotta corrected her charge. 'Toccata, dear, Toccata. Tobacco is one of those sins of the body, staining the temple the good Lord bequeathed us to inhabit. A sin you will notice both my brothers indulge in freely and my sister, too, when no one is looking."
"Spare us Salvation in Tremolo just this once, won't you, Carlotta? The war will be ever so much easier to face if I don't have to bear your blessing."
"Spottiswood, you and Celeste imagine yourselves terribly clever. God will forgive you your transgressions, although I confess I am not yet the Christian I would like to be. I find it hard to greet your snide comments with charity."
"Dear sister, you ooze charity as long as it isn't connected to your pocketbook," Celeste flared.
"Your sins are unmentionable, especially in the company of children, unstained yet by vice."
"Ha, Louise is full of vice," Julia butted in. "Once she had lice, too."
"I did not!" Louise's face burned red.
"Now, now, Julia Ellen, you and your sister are tied by bonds of blood. The Lord placed you two here in his wonderful, mysterious way so that you could offer sustenance and comfort to one another as you travel through life's perils."
"How come you know so much about God, La Sermonetta?" Julia unwittingly repeated the nickname she had heard Celeste use countless times in connection with her sister. Carlotta, however, had missed hearing her epithet until now.
"Such a sharp-tongued little girl," she gasped.
Celeste, Spotty, Curtis and Ramelle spilled their drinks from laughter. Louise was mortified.
"My sister resists the Lord," Louise dug.
"Little girl—" Carlotta began.
"I ain't little!"
"Julia, then, not a sparrow can fall to the earth but that the Lord in his infinite wisdom and kindness knows. Think then how he must attend to your life and the lives of other lit—I mean, young ladies."
"God can't be all that great—everything he makes dies." Juts spun on her heel and walked off.
Carlotta stood there, the milk of human kindness curdled on her face. The others had their mouths hanging open. Recovering, Carlotta said in a terribly understanding tone of voice, "Her recent loss, poor dear."
Juts wandered over to the cascading peonies, where she observed Fannie Jump Creighton, looped again, reading palms.
Caressing a gentleman's upturned hand, Fannie crooned, "Oh, you big naughty man."
Once Carlotta floated off to uplift more souls, Celeste and her gang noticed Fannie Jump, in her cups and hot to trot.
"Darlings, I have the most sensational idea."
"No, I am not offering myself up on the altar of Fannie's lust," Curtis warned her.
"Heartless man—but I will."
"Celeste, are you mad?" Ramelle wanted to know.
Spotty and Curtis shifted uneasily. After all, no one talked about these things.
"Curtis, would you say Spotts and I are close to the same height?" Celeste's eyebrow arched upward.
"Give or take an inch."
"There's meaning to my madness. Spotts, let me wear your uniform. I'm going to let Fannie read my palm."
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