by Beth White
The curl in the pit of her stomach created by the feel of Levi’s powerful forearm beneath her palm had nothing to do with manners or personal ability. It was, she was aware, simple attraction. Nothing else. Therefore she refused to entertain it.
She walked over to the wooden swing Papa had had built a couple of years before the onset of the war. After brushing it off with her hand, she sat down. The morning breeze was stiff enough that she was glad of her shawl, but she could close her eyes and remember a late spring when she’d sat here with a boy from the Hankins plantation, pretending to be grown enough to need a chaperone. He’d tried to hold her hand, but she’d given him a glass of lemonade instead, chilled with ice from the ice house. He’d promptly spilled it all over his trousers—
“What are you smiling about?” Levi asked.
Her eyes popped open, and she found him leaning against a peeling, splintered post, legs crossed at the ankles. He looked scruffy and masculine and interested in what she had to say. She lifted her shoulders. “Just a silly incident from a long time ago.” She looked around. The two wrought-iron benches across the way, on either side of a small round iron table, were a bit rusty, but she supposed they could be painted. The wooden columns, floor, and railing would all need paint as well. “I haven’t sat out here in a long time, but we used to have lovely garden parties in the summer when it was too hot to stay in the house. Mama always took such good care of her flowers.” She glanced at the ice house looming over Levi’s shoulder. “If you want to go in and look around, go ahead.”
“Don’t you want to come with me?”
She avoided his eyes. “It’s just an ice house, no different than a hundred others in the South—except the bricks were made in our kiln right here on the property. I’ll wait for you here. I’ll trust your assessment.” It had been years since she’d been down into the ice house. It had been the milieu of the servants, she and her sisters having been discouraged as children from risking injury on the narrow stairs, not to mention the danger of getting accidentally locked in. After Papa left, they hadn’t been able to afford ice, even if it could have been smuggled down from the North on the black market. Now you couldn’t pay her a hundred dollars to walk down those stairs.
There was a short silence. “You’d best tell me about it.” Levi’s voice was gentle.
“I can’t.”
“Selah, you can tell me anything.”
“Not that. You’re—Union, you wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand more than you think.”
“I’ve learned to deal with it,” she said between her teeth, “but I can’t say it out loud. Pulling it up, talking about it, makes it real.”
He moved, in one step reaching the swing. It jarred as he sat beside her, but he seemed to know better than to touch her. “Yes, it will make it real—not some monster that can stalk you in the night. Look at me.” She did, reluctantly, and saw that his eyes blazed with pain. “Don’t you think I saw and did things during that cursed war that still make me sick to my stomach? There was a pastor at home, in Illinois, who had been in my unit. We listened to each other. And it got easier to bear. Though sometimes I just—” He swept a hand over his face, looked away, then fixed his eyes on hers again. “I could tell you about it sometime. If you want.”
She fought an insane urge to crawl up into his lap, to hold him and be held. “You’re going to think me the veriest coward, but small, enclosed spaces . . .” She shuddered. “Worse than heights.”
“Why? What happened?”
The words burst as if from a sprung dam. “It was April of 1863. Joelle and I were on the front porch—she was reading and I was sewing. Mama had been tending the flowers out by the gate. She came running up the front lane to the house, said horses were coming, a lot of them, men she didn’t recognize, and we were to hide. Under the porch, there’s a . . . crawl space, covered with latticework. We used to hide there as children sometimes.”
Levi’s hand went to his chest as if he were looking for something in a pocket, then remembered he wasn’t wearing a coat. It was an odd gesture, quickly covered when he clenched his hand and dropped it on his thigh. “Go on,” he said. “I’m listening.”
She swallowed. “We heard Mama run back in the house and shoo the servants out the back door. Then the horsemen, about five of them, dismounted right in front of us. We heard them clatter up the porch, saw their boots and breeches. They were in butternut, so I didn’t know if they were Union or Confederate, but Mama made us promise to stay put until she came for us. We sat there listening to them tear the house apart, breaking windows, and we could hear Mama trying to reason with them at first, then she started to cry and then scream.”
Selah doubled over, remembering, feeling the suffocating closeness of the hiding place, the fear that they would be found, the shame that she couldn’t go to her mother’s aid, the rage at her helplessness.
Levi shifted beside her, and she knew if he touched her, she would break into a million shards. He murmured something that sounded like “I’m so sorry.” But he didn’t touch her.
She sat up with a deep breath. “Someone came to stop them, apparently an officer—I knew he was Union because of the blue pants. There were a couple of gunshots, and we wondered who’d been hit.”
“Probably just fired in the air to get everybody’s attention.”
Selah looked at Levi.
He shrugged. “That’s what I would have done.”
She nodded. “So we stayed where we were, a long, long time, until late in the afternoon when they all rode away. Finally we decided it was safe to come out. The house was empty, so much damage . . . We went upstairs, calling for Mama. She didn’t answer, but we found her lying on her bed, and it was—” She gulped. “It was too late.”
“You and Joelle—you were both safe? No one molested you?” Tears stood in his eyes, and nothing had ever comforted her like his genuine concern.
“No, I told you, we were under the porch the whole time. Two girls who were in the house with Mama were raped but survived—” Selah’s voice broke. “They told me later that the officer who came and stopped the ransacking—they said he sent for a Union surgeon and waited while he tended to everybody. That’s why they were in the house so long. He was very kind, they said, and didn’t want to leave Mama there alone, but she insisted.”
“You never saw the faces of the men who were there?”
She shook her head. “All we saw were boots and spurs and pant legs and swords.”
“I’m sure the looters were prosecuted.”
“I doubt it.” She heard the bitterness in her own voice. “Both Union and Confederate troops pillaged plantations until the end of the war, and it got steadily worse. Of course, Jo and I didn’t have to worry about it, because Grandpapa came to get us as soon as he heard. And Grandmama never let us forget that we had a chance to come to Memphis when Aurora did, but Mama insisted on staying at Ithaca. But of course we wouldn’t leave her alone here.”
Now Levi took her hand. He threaded his fingers through hers, held it on his thigh, and looked her in the eye. “Selah, I promise you nothing like that is ever going to happen to you again.”
Twenty-One
IT WAS AN EXTRAORDINARILY PERSONAL THING to say, Levi knew it, and he didn’t care. She had just trusted him with the most private, heart-wrenching event of her life. She must know that he would guard it, guard her, until one of them died.
One thing that he could never tell her was that he had been partially to blame for that terrible scar on both their souls.
When she didn’t answer, just squeezed his hand a little, he sighed and let her go. The place was crawling with people, and he wouldn’t expose her to comment or ridicule.
“Well,” he said, “I’ll go take a quick look, just to satisfy my curiosity, maybe make a few notes—” He stopped in the act of reaching for the notebook in his pocket, reminded again that he’d left his coat on the back porch. “Mental notes,” he amended. �
��I’ll be right back.”
The ice house was a tall, narrow but sturdy little two-story brick building. The warped, rotten wood of the outside door would have to be replaced but at least made it easy to get in. Leaving the door open, he stood there for a minute, letting his eyes adjust to the comparative dimness of the interior. Stairs ran along the wall to the upper story, presumably a storage loft. “Should have brought a lamp,” he muttered, noting the empty hook by the door.
His gaze fell on a three-foot hinged square in the floor—access to the underground ice storage. Its rusty hasp having long since broken apart, Levi threw it aside and laid the door back on the floor. Peering into the opening, he found more narrow steps spiraling downward into the dank darkness. He’d have to come back with a light. Just as well, since Selah was waiting.
He started to rise, but a flicker of light from below stopped him. “Who’s down there?”
The light doused. All right, a scavenger. Since the incident in the cupola, though he could hardly carry around a rifle, Levi had kept his old Army Colt revolver tucked into the back of his pants. He drew it and pulled back the hammer.
“I’m armed,” he said quietly, “and I’m not going away. Come up with your hands in the air.”
He heard a distinct gasp. Holding the gun steady, he waited. Slow footsteps ascended the stairs, getting louder until the top of a curly brown head appeared out of the darkness.
Levi slowly lowered the hammer. “Wyatt, what are you up to?” Putting the gun away, he reached down to haul a very chastened Wyatt Priester into the light of day.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Riggins,” Wyatt said as soon as his feet hit the floorboards. “I wasn’t bothering all that stuff, I promise.”
“What stuff?”
The boy glanced down into the trap opening, then back at Levi, wide-eyed. “You didn’t know it was there?”
“Clearly I didn’t. What are you talking about?”
“Somebody’s got an explosives lab down there.”
Levi stared at Wyatt. “Give me that lamp.” When Wyatt started to follow him, he snapped, “Stay here.”
Five minutes later he came back chilled to the bone, though not from stored ice. In one hand he grasped the necks of three small canvas bags.
“Come with me.” Levi stalked out of the ice house and up the steps of the pagoda, where he dropped the bags onto the iron table, then yanked Wyatt by the sleeve to stand before Selah. “Look who I found snooping around in your ice house.”
Selah rose, all sorts of questions in her eyes. “Wyatt? You’re supposed to be helping ThomasAnne clean the kitchen.”
“She told me I was underfoot.” He clamped his lips together.
Selah studied his face. “You’ve been down there before, haven’t you?”
Wyatt hunched his shoulders. How had she known that? What an interrogator she would make.
She looked at Levi and sighed. “He could have gotten hurt, I suppose. But it’s just an old empty ice house.”
“Full of explosives.”
“Full of what?”
Levi studied her. “You didn’t know there’s an explosives lab in your ice house?”
She gaped at him. “Of course not! Are you sure?”
“Some of the materials look similar to what our troops used to mine Confederate earthworks during the war.” And identical to the shell pieces he’d found under the bridge outside Oxford.
Selah branded Wyatt with a piercing glare. “Wyatt, it’s not like you to go poking around where you haven’t been given permission to go. What were you thinking?”
Looking down, lips pressed together, Wyatt shuffled his feet. “I don’t know.”
Selah looked at Levi. “When you say ‘explosives lab,’ what do you mean? How dangerous is it? Are the elements assembled into actual bombs? What exactly are we talking about?”
She knew enough to ask good questions—something for him to think about later. He wished he had his notebook.
“Unassembled.” Levi gestured toward the bags on the table. “I brought some of what I found up here. But other things I’d never seen before in this context. Lime and other odd chemicals, for example, and wax.” He was fairly confident the boy hadn’t been buying and stockpiling explosive ordnance. Nor was he capable of manufacturing torpedo casings and fuses on his own. But that was not to say that the boy had no information about the real culprit.
Wyatt shivered in his thin jacket. A little physical misery would do him good, Levi thought.
Selah apparently agreed. She stood in front of Wyatt, hands fisted at her hips in remarkable resemblance to Horatia at her sternest. She glanced over her shoulder at the sample items from the ice house. “What do you know about those?”
“N-nothing!” Wyatt stammered. “I don’t even know what that is!”
Levi took his flint from his pocket. “Then you won’t mind if I strike a spark and test it out—”
“No!” Wyatt yelped. “You’ll blow us all to—” Wildly he shook his head and swallowed. “I mean, I don’t think that’s a good idea if you don’t know what it is.”
“I know what it is, you young knucklehead. And so do you.”
Wyatt folded his arms and slumped. “Yes, sir. It’s everything you need to make a torpedo. Powder—saltpeter, charcoal, and sulfur—fuses, shell casings, safety caps. I’ve seen it done up in Tennessee when the Yankees came riding over our land. Neighbors used to plant them under the bridges, and us kids had to know how to recognize them.”
Selah sucked in a breath, and Levi shot her a warning glance. Let me handle this.
She bit her lip, but lifted her chin. Be careful with this child.
He turned back to Wyatt. “All right, we’re going to Selah’s office, and you’re going to explain to me how and when you first discovered this stuff, along with anything else you might have noticed or moved or removed while you were down there.”
They marched Wyatt over to the office in the cottage, where Selah had left a fire burning low in the grate. No one thought of asking for refreshments. Wyatt hunched into himself, bony shoulders pulled up to his ears, freckled face pale and pinched. Selah sat ramrod straight on the edge of her chair, hands folded and expression sober. She watched Wyatt with maternal compassion in her brown eyes.
Levi sat with elbows on his knees and fingers steepled. At this point, he figured he’d get more out of the boy with a soft interrogation. There was something odd going on here. If Wyatt were innocent, there would be no need for this excessive reluctance.
“We’re listening,” Levi told him quietly. “No one’s accusing you of anything. We just want to know how long that lab has been in the ice house.”
Wyatt shrugged. “I don’t know. The other day I came across that trap door. It had been broken into, so I took a light and poked around. Nothing in the upper level, but when I went on down into the second one . . . well, there it all was, just like you saw it. I swear, Mr. Levi, I didn’t mess with it. Well, I picked up the charcoal and sniffed at the sulfur to make sure that’s what it was. None of it’s dangerous on its own, and I left the lantern on the nail by the doorway—I’m not stupid.”
“Wyatt, nobody thinks you’re stupid,” Selah said with a note of humor in her voice.
Levi exchanged glances with Selah. Wyatt was indeed no one’s fool. And Levi still couldn’t think of any motivation the boy might have for making homemade torpedoes. “Very well,” he said, frowning. “So who do you think left the materials there? No dust or mice droppings on them, so we know they haven’t been there long.”
Wyatt’s gaze slid to the side, and Levi knew a whopper was about to emerge. “I have no idea, sir,” Wyatt said. “I haven’t seen anybody go in or out of that door, not even any of the Negroes. And I’ve been watching to make sure.”
Negroes? Levi blinked. Who said anything about Negroes? “That’s good that you were watching.” He gave Wyatt an encouraging nod. “What day did you say you first found the ice house?”
“Saturda
y.”
Today was Thursday, which left several days unaccounted for. “How do you know nobody went down there while you were at school or church?”
The boy squirmed. Perhaps he was too close to the fire, but Levi didn’t think so. “Well, I guess I don’t know for sure, but yesterday I walked over to the blacksmith shop and watched Nathan work for a while, and he showed me how to make a fox trap, so when Miss ThomasAnne ran me out of the kitchen I decided to take the trap out to the woods and try it. But then I remembered the ice house and thought I’d better make sure nobody had been in it since yesterday. That’s when you found me down there.” Wyatt paused in his ramble. “How did you know about it, sir?”
“You might just say I had a feeling. So Nathan has been in the forge all morning?”
“Yes, sir! He was really busy.” Wyatt dramatically grabbed his stomach. “Miss Selah, I’m hungry. Do you think I could go to the kitchen and ask Horatia if she’s got some cheese or a biscuit or something?”
Selah had been frowning as she listened to Levi question Wyatt. “That would be fine. Would you mind telling her we’re about finished up here, and we’ll all need lunch in about an hour?”
“Yes, ma’am!” Wyatt bolted from the room.
Levi and Selah looked at each other. “What do you think?” he asked. He knew what he thought.
“You should question Nathan.”
He smiled at her. “Somebody taught you to spot a liar.”
She nodded. “Wyatt’s not a bad boy. He’s covering for someone.”
“I agree. May be Nathan, may not be. But explosive devices don’t magically appear in underground ice houses that haven’t been in use in a decade. Something funny’s going on here.”
“Levi, I’ve got a nasty feeling in the pit of my stomach. Combine this with the shots at you in the cupola, and we’ve got a dangerous situation here.”
He nodded. “How well do you know the workers who are making the repairs?”
“Most of them came off our plantation, so I know them all at least by sight.” She spread her hands. “It’s possible someone could hold a grudge against us.”