I spoke with Jim about the situation several times and suggested we help Joanie find a place in Baton Rouge or send her home to San Jose. However, each time I brought it up, Jim was adamant that we keep her on. I was surprised, especially because she continually pitched fits of rage in front of our guests and embarrassed me by cussing me out in public. Something had to change. But the situation just got worse and worse. Why was Jim fighting me on this?
During a particularly nasty confrontation, yelling and swearing, Joanie picked up a full can of Coke and threw it at me. It grazed my nose as it whizzed past me and exploded on the sidewalk. I could have been badly hurt. She picked up another full can of Coke, raising her arm to hurl it at me. I ran over to her and grabbed her by her curly, unkempt hair, struggling to get the can out of her clutches before she injured me with it. Suddenly I stopped, horrified, as a large chunk of her hair came out in a clump. We both stared at the tangled mess of hair in my hand.
“Look what you’ve done!” she screamed, as she ran into the house, shouting obscenities at me. I felt ashamed that I had lost control with her. I didn’t know what had gotten into me. Maybe it wasn’t just Jim and Joanie who were acting oddly. Maybe whatever it was, was getting to me, too.
Later that day Jim and I went to look for Joanie to talk to her about the situation. Jim found her in the old nursery, crouched in the closet, hiding. He tried to coax her out, but she wouldn’t leave the confines of the dark cranny.
“Don’t let her send me away,” Joanie sobbed. “She’s going to send me away.”
“Joanie, I won’t let her do that,” Jim assured her. I couldn’t believe he was telling her that, but I thought maybe he was just trying to get her to come out.
Hours had passed, and Joanie was still hiding in the closet. “We’ve got to do something,” I told Jim. “We have guests checking into that room tonight. We can’t involve them in this debacle.”
There was only one sensible option left. Since she wouldn’t leave the closet, I called the police and asked them to come and physically remove her.
Joanie eventually came out of hiding in the old nursery after she learned that the police were on their way. I never did see the police officer. Later I learned that Chief Larry Peters had responded to the call. He drove up to the Myrtles and knocked on the front door. A lady in a long, antebellum gown opened the door and invited him in. She led him up the main staircase and into the suite, where she vanished right before his eyes.
Chief Peters didn’t bother to complete his police business. He fled the house, vowing never to set foot upon the property ever again.
I had to deal with Joanie alone. Jim was no help at all. For some very strange reason that I couldn’t understand, he absolutely refused to get rid of her. I couldn’t take her abuse anymore.
“Joanie, you have a choice,” I offered her. “Either you go get psychiatric help and learn how to stop these violent outbursts, or you leave the Myrtles.”
“No, I won’t leave the Myrtles! Tell her, Jim!” she cried.
I turned and faced Jim head-on. “Yes, tell her, Jim,” I retorted.
Jim was obviously uncomfortable at being put on the spot, but he was my husband, and he needed to be with me on this. My toes twitched involuntarily as we waited for his reply.
“Joanie, if you go see a doctor, you don’t have to leave,” he offered.
“You mean a shrink?” she sneered.
“Yes. They can help with your anger. It’s that or leave. You heard Frances,” Jim answered.
Jim had put it all on me, but I could handle that. At least he backed me up, sort of.
“Okay, okay. I will go see a doctor,” she relented, finally calm.
“I’m going to call the hospital in Jackson to have them evaluate your condition and get you some help,” I explained. “Since you don’t have insurance, it’s the only way.” (In Louisiana, anyone can have a person committed for seventy-two hours, with or without that person’s permission. It’s a pretty scary law, when you think about it.)
“Shall we drive you there, or should I get the police to come and take you?”
“You can take me,” was her barely audible reply. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
CHAPTER 57
No one spoke during the twenty-minute drive to the state mental hospital at Jackson. I spoke to the doctor who would be evaluating Joanie, and hugged her goodbye.
That night, Jim and I found ourselves alone in the house, something that seldom happened anymore.
“Let’s go sleep in the old nursery,” I suggested. I wanted to see if the judge would appear; if I could find any clue about whatever it was that had hold of Joanie. Whatever it was, I felt it had something to do with that room. Besides, sleeping in the different guestrooms made it seem as if we were getting away, as if we were on vacation. We desperately needed that right now.
Jim crawled into my twin bed, and we snuggled for a while, like old times. Finally he got up to get into the other bed.
“Could you turn out the lights?” I asked.
“Um,” Jim hesitated, looking around the room. “Maybe we should leave them on.”
“Why? We’ve never left the lights on before.”
“I don’t know why, I just think that we should.” Jim almost looked afraid.
“But there’s no dimmer switch in this room. If we leave the lights on, I don’t know if I can sleep,” I replied.
“Please, let’s just leave them on this one time.”
I was barely drifting off to sleep when the footsteps began, slowly at first as if they were afraid to ascend, tiptoeing up the back steps. They softly continued right up to the nursery door where Jim and I were.
“What’s that?” Jim shrieked as he bounded out of bed. He bravely opened the door just a crack and peered into the hall. “There’s no one there,” he exclaimed. He went out into the hall, then down the old staircase to examine the lock.
“It’s all locked up, and there was no one there,” he announced.
“Do you want to go downstairs to our room?” I asked.
“No, that would be silly. I’m fine,” Jim replied.
We had barely fallen asleep when the footsteps began again. “Do you hear that?” Jim asked.
“Yeah, I do,” I replied.
Jim got up again and threw the door wide open, hoping to catch whomever, or whatever, it was who was scaring us. As before, no one was there.
“Okay, this is getting old real fast,” he said, climbing back into bed.
I was just dozing off again when I could hear the footsteps coming up the back steps once again.
“There they are again,” Jim whispered.
“What do you want to do?” I asked. Although I was getting tired of the interruption to my sleep, I got a great deal of satisfaction out of the fact that Jim was disturbed by, and actually admitting to, and responding to, the ghosts.
“I hate to let them scare me out of here, but I won’t be able to sleep in this room,” he admitted. “Let’s go downstairs to our own room.”
Without uttering another word, I followed Jim through the blue bedroom and into the south wing to the main staircase so we wouldn’t have to walk down the back staircase.
Our experience that night in the old nursery brought up lots of questions in my mind. That was supposedly the room where the Judge took his young black mistresses while the children were outside playing. I wanted to know why Jim felt so fearful in that room, but he claimed he was merely uncomfortable in a twin bed. Could there be more to it?
As kismet as our relationship was, I didn’t believe that it was possible that Jim could have been Clarke Woodruff in a previous life. The house had reached out to me as if it were my destiny, and from the start I felt a communion with Sarah Mathilda, but it never grabbed him in the same way. It seemed that Jim was at the Myrtles because I was, not because of any past life calling. Joanie, too, was probably not called to be at the Myrtles. They were just acting out their assigned roles.
> And what about the dainty footsteps we heard outside the door? Sarah Mathilda had suspected that her husband was cheating. Supposedly she would tiptoe up the original staircase and hover in the hall outside the door to the nursery, listening, wondering. Had the dainty footsteps been those of Sarah Mathilda? If so, then if I had been Sarah Mathilda in a past life, and I was incarnate now, how could the footsteps be hers, unless they were an echo from the past. To my knowledge, Sarah Mathilda was one ghost from the Myrtles’ past that no one had ever seen at the plantation. Could the vibrations of tiny footsteps, magnified by intense passion, play back over time? Were some of the ghosts we experienced—the footsteps, the string quartet, or the ball sounds—just vibrations from the past?
CHAPTER 58
It was a beautiful June day, a perfect day for a garden party at Indian Fields Plantation in nearby Woodville, Mississippi. “Are you sure you don’t want to come with me?” I asked Jim.
“No, you go ahead,” Jim insisted. “It’s going to be mostly gay men anyway. You go, and have a good time.”
In happier days, Charles would have loved to have joined me, and I missed him, but he had walked out of the Myrtles the previous week claiming he couldn’t take it anymore, and moved to Baton Rouge. I wouldn’t even consider taking Joanie. They released her from the mental institution just three days after she arrived there, saying she wasn’t crazy enough to hold. She had spent all of her time since she got back locked in the old nursery. I had been in contact with her parents, trying to get her out of there for her own sake.
Jim was sitting in the tavern sipping his second Bloody Mary when I left. It was barely 10:00 a.m. and his eyes were already glazed. I didn’t mind going alone. If he didn’t want to be there with me, he would only complain and make me miserable.
“What time will you be home?” he called out, as an afterthought.
“Five o’clock,” I answered.
“How do you know you will be back at five o’clock?” he quizzed.
“Because the two men who own the place are going to stop serving liquor at exactly 4:00 p.m., so that the people driving up from Baton Rouge won’t get too drunk, and can get home before dark,” I explained.
It felt good to get away from the Myrtles. Things had just gotten so crazy, so out of control. Jim was drinking so much more, and I was trying my hardest to get Joanie out of there.
The party was grand, with touches only a gay man could pull off. Some of the men were stunning in their antebellum ball gowns, their hair and makeup flawless. It was rumored that a well-known actor would arrive by helicopter, but he never did show up.
When I returned home to the Myrtles I couldn’t wait to find Jim and tell him about the party and everything he missed. I checked the bar first, naturally, but not finding him there, I looked for him in our room. He wasn’t there either, nor was he anywhere downstairs. Fear gripped my stomach. Where was he?
An image from the past played out in my mind like watching a movie, and suddenly I knew exactly where he was. I walked through the parlors and into the gaming room. I drew a deep breath. The man in the painting not only frowned when I walked in; he seemed to be mocking me. The mercury doorknob to the old staircase seemed to be glowing, the same doorknob that Betty Jo had not been able to open the first time we visited the house. Pulling my arms around my chest I resolutely walked over to the door and turned the knob. An icy blast of air chilled me.
As I stood at the bottom of the stairs looking up, I felt such terror. I wanted to run, but something compelled me to walk up those stairs. Step by step, I determinedly tiptoed up the stairs to the landing, then as if I were in a trance, I inched my way toward the door—the door to the old nursery. I stopped, transfixed on the doorknob. In slow motion, my life played out before me. I watched as my hand reached out for the doorknob, and quietly turned it, flinging it open with one quick jerk.
CHAPTER 59
Jim was on top of Joanie, his naked ass thrusting between her legs. He barely missed a beat as he turned his head to face me. When it finally registered on him that I was watching, he quickly jumped up from the bed, pulling the sheet over him to hide his nakedness. Shaking, I turned and ran down the stairs without saying a word. What happened next remains a blur in my mind. I think I went downstairs to our bedroom. It was after 5:00 p.m., so all the hostesses had gone home. I felt as if my world was crashing in on me.
Within the hour, Betty Jo showed up. She told me Jim had called her and asked her to come over to be with me. I had no idea what was going on, or where anyone was.
“Where is Jim?” I asked Betty Jo.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I think he is around here somewhere. Do you want me to find him?”
“No. No. I’ve got to get out of here. Now!” I whispered, my eyes darting around the room. I didn’t know why I felt I had to get out of there. I just feared that if I stayed, something horrible would happen to me.
“You can come stay at my house,” Betty Jo offered. “Bring Grinch if you want.”
I would never leave Grinch alone in that house, so I brought him. I was too dazed to drive, so I let Betty Jo take me in her car. She showed me to her guestroom, which I had become all too familiar with. She offered to sit with me for a while, but I just wanted to be left alone. I crawled into bed, but I couldn’t sleep. Every time I started drifting off, horrible images invaded my mind, images of the original staircase, of tiptoeing up the stairs, of the shocking scene I discovered when I opened the door.
But was it my own visions, or Sarah Mathilda’s? It seemed to switch between the two: the present and the past, convoluted in my mind. Sarah had discovered Clarke in that very room. The same discovery had cost Sarah her life.
Part of me wanted to go back to my home, to find out what was going on, to confront Jim and Joanie, but I became absolutely terrified at the thought of returning to the Myrtles that night. Would Joanie try to hurt me, or worse yet, would she try to kill me? Would she retaliate in desperation after being caught with my husband?
Fear prevented my sleep: As irrational as it may have been, I lay awake listening for any sign of Joanie coming to find me. I tossed and turned until the first rays of light signaled the safety of daylight.
A strong pot of rich, ebony Louisiana coffee was waiting for me when I got up, but I was in no mood for chitchat. I sat at Betty Jo’s table, tears streaming down my cheek. I was devastated. My marriage was over. I had lost everything. What was I going to do? I knew I didn’t want to go back to that place—ever. I just couldn’t take it.
“Betty Jo, I want to put the house back on the market. Today,” I stated, defeated.
I didn’t know what Jim had told her, if anything, about the night before. I filled her in, offering as few details as possible, not emotionally able to rehash the entire grisly scenario. I tried to figure out how it all happened, what led to these events, but I didn’t have a clue. Jim and Joanie must have started their affair several months before, which could explain why Joanie’s attitude toward me suddenly became openly hostile. Maybe she was jealous because she wanted Jim all to herself, or maybe she realized that once the affair started, there really was only one outcome—that once discovered, she would be forced to leave the Myrtles forever.
“But why the old nursery, of all the rooms?” Betty Jo asked. “Doesn’t that room have twin beds? Why didn’t they go to a room with a bigger bed?”
“That was Joanie’s favorite room, for some strange reason,” I replied, not daring to go into what I really thought: I believed it was very possible that Jim was unconsciously compelled, for some reason bigger than any of us, to repeat the tragic events of so many years ago, and had used the very room where Clarke had been discovered by Sarah Mathilda.
I had absolutely no warning, no clues that the two of them were having an affair. I would have bet my life that Jim and Joanie together would never betray me in this manner. Since moving to the Myrtles I had lost many of the people that I loved. Now I had lost Jim and Joanie, too.
Were we all just pawns in some kind of sick scenario, a cycle that had to be played out over and over at the Myrtles, caused by a tormented spirit, or a voodoo curse? If that was true, the most important thing was that I had broken the horrific chain of events. I had survived that fateful night. Sarah Mathilda had not been so fortunate.
CHAPTER 60
My thoughts were interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. “It’s Lillie May,” Betty Jo apologized. “She says there is no one there to give the tour to the guests.”
Fear gripped me in the pit of my stomach. As much as I dreaded returning to that place, I couldn’t let down the guests. “Tell her I’ll be right there.” My heart pounding, I silently walked out to Betty Jo’s car for the dreadful ride back to the Myrtles.
“I’ll be okay,” I told myself. And then, reaching down and stroking my puppy dog as he sat there so lovingly looking up at me, I added, “As long as I have Grinch, I will be okay.”
At the Myrtles, I quickly glanced around to see if there was any sign of Jim or Joanie, but Lillie May told me that they were nowhere to be found. I gave the guests a quick tour and started calling my list of part-time tour guides, trying to get someone in to give tours. Tom agreed to come in, and he showed up a short while later. A recent high-school graduate, he was planning to pursue a degree in hotel management at LSU that fall. Now that it was summer, he was available to work full-time. Maybe he was the solution to my dilemma.
“Tom, how would you like to become the new resident manager of the Myrtles?” I asked him when he arrived. “It would give you a head start with your degree, and you could live here this summer until college begins.”
“Really, Miss Frances? That would be great. When do you want me to start?” he asked.
“Right away. What’s the soonest you can move in?”
“Tomorrow?”
The Myrtles Plantation Page 23