If Briley hadn’t noted the shudder that overtook my body and caught me as I stepped backwards, I’d’ve either fainted in the doorway or run screaming from the Flynn residence shrieking Fiona Belle’s name along with Teresa’s. How the heck did my aunt know who I was?
Briley’s arm steadied me. I suddenly remembered I’d been named after another Melody in the family, a first cousin to Teresa. My Dad used to tell me family stories. There’d been one about Melody, from the Alabama branch of Flynn’s. She’d left the South during World War One and just dropped out of sight and communication.
This was good. This meant Teresa assumed I was that Melody and would graciously allow her cousin and a strange man to enter the house without benefit of passport, driver’s license or a plausible reason for showing up on the doorstep.
I smiled tentatively. “Teresa? Yes? It’s, uh, been awhile?”
That wicked grin flashed again and I had this certainty that my aunt knew damn well I was not cousin Melody from Alabama, but her time-traveling great-great niece, Mel.
“Yes indeed. Well, don’t y’all just stand there bakin’ in the heat. Come inside and I’ll get Agnes to fix us all some lemonade.”
“Agnes?” I asked.
She nodded. “She came in with the new crop of Irish workin’ the lumber mill. She’s only thirteen, but her Mama and Daddy insisted she work for us and stay here while they’re travelin’ around Ireland. Can’t let their darling daughter stay alone.” She exhaled loudly. “I do so long for the time when women don’t have to have someone hoverin’ every damned day. I’m perfectly capable of livin’ on my own.”
I bit my lip to keep from laughing. Teresa Flynn was a card-carrying suffragette. She’d written in her diary (which I also inherited) stories of storming the courthouse in Memphis with a group of thirty other card-carrying suffragettes, then chaining themselves to the pillars and posts until the mayor himself came out to listen to their pleas and their demands for voting rights. Memphis, surprising for a Southern town struggling to get back on its feet after the Civil War and several epidemics, had produced more than one determined young woman anxious to become part of American history and the 21st Amendment.
Briley sighed. “Another one.”
Teresa growled at him. “You have a problem with women bein’ independent, Mr. Um?”
“McShan.” I answered. “I’m so sorry, Aun- uh - Teresa, I’ve completely neglected my manners. Teresa Flynn, this is Briley McShan.”
They nodded at each other. Briley smiled his most charming smile. “I apologize if my comment was offensive, Miss Flynn. It was more the amazing resemblance to your – cousin. In manner as well as looks.”
Teresa and I looked at each other for a long moment. At the exact same time we began to laugh. She graciously gestured to the chairs set up in the sunroom under a large ceiling fan.
“Mr. McShan. May I call you Briley?”
He nodded. “Please.”
“Yes, well, the Flynn women all have an independent spirit to go along with what some have called a stubborn streak. Perhaps it can make us a bit abrasive in our dealings with others.” She turned her head and yelled, “Agnes! Lemonade, please!” and Briley took the opportunity to wink at me. I whispered, “It’s the red hair. Not our fault.”
Within minutes a tiny dark-haired girl bearing a tray appeared and deposited our drinks on the table. Teresa told her to get one for herself and join us, but the girl giggled and said she had work to do if she was to meet her young gentleman friend this evening, but she was charmed to see another family member in the house. She ran off toward the kitchen.
Teresa rolled her eyes heavenward, then simply stated, “Gentleman friend is not how I would describe Agnes’s ardent admirer, a tough young scalawag from the Pinch slums who works the docks. At least he appears sober at all times. He seems to adore Agnes, so I’m letting her continue to keep company.”
I started to say even a true suffragette wouldn’t allow a thirteen-year-old girl to go traipsing about with a dockworker, but then, maybe in 1919 - they would? Before I had a chance to stick my foot in my mouth Teresa began the interrogation. Her questions, thankfully, and perhaps with shrewd intuition on her part, stayed focused on why we were in Memphis instead of what “cousin Melody” had been up to for the last ten years or so.
“Mel, happy though I am to see you, why the visit now?”
What the heck. I dove in.
“We’re lookin’ for some friends of ours who disappeared back in Manhattan.”
Teresa didn’t miss a beat. “Who are they? Why are they missin’?”
Briley took over. He told Teresa about Denise and Nevin, then explained about the other missing Follies girls, and that I’d decided to try Memphis to look for them. Then he stopped.
Teresa was no fool. “Why do you think they’re here?”
Briley looked at me. I looked at him. I could not tell my Great-great-aunt that I’d time-traveled, that sheet music that hadn’t been written yet kept cropping up, and that the only clues I thought we had were back-handedly supplied by a short witch. She probably already knew but just in case my instincts were wrong it was best not to let Teresa think her relative was one ivory short of a piano keyboard.
I smiled. “Um. My landlady back in New York” (I declined to elaborate on why I was in New York) “is rather shrewd at detecting things. She put some pieces of this puzzle together and determined that these missin’ girls were in Memphis - perhaps in some sort of white slavery prostitution kind of thing. Possibly being held in a hotel that fronts a brothel.”
It was a lousy explanation but Teresa simply nodded, took a sip of her lemonade, made a face, and then added four teaspoons of sugar from the bowl in front of her.
“Well, then. The pair of you have some work to do, don’t you? I’ll be happy to tell you anything I can about some of these infamous bordellos and perhaps Agnes’s young man Dougal can fill in the blanks. Not that I assume he has first hand knowledge, mind you, or at least I hope he doesn’t, but many of the ruffians who work the docks do indeed frequent some of these establishments. Dougal could point you in the right direction.”
She stood. “I have to attend a meetin’ in an hour.” She smiled. “I called it, so it wouldn’t do for me to be late. Let me show you your rooms so you can rest. You are both free to come and go as you please. I’ve always felt close to Mel,” she paused and the smile grew wider, “to Melody, so use this as you would your own home.”
Mel. She’d slipped and called me Mel. I’d read Teresa’s diary. She mentioned her young cousin Melody all the time. As Melody. Never Mel. Teresa had divined the truth about me. Was she another durned pyshic witch? Or perhaps Fiona Belle Donovan Winthorp herself in the guise of my relative? Nothing would surprise me at this stage of my journey through time.
Teresa led us through a parlor that housed the antique desk that would end up in my home office in about ninety years. The Baby Grand that now resided in New York sat proudly in the corner.
I gasped. “It’s my piano! I mean, it’s a Baby Grand.”
Teresa smiled. “It is indeed. Brand new. I love it even though I’m not the best musician in the world. I bought with my own earnin’s though, not Papa’s, so I’m very proud to say it’s mine. Someday I’ll will it to family.”
I glanced sharply at her but her face was as serene as a nun’s in prayer.
Briley nodded. “Where do you work, Miss Flynn?”
“Teresa, please. I work at A. Schwab, the department store.” She beamed at us. “I’m a window dresser. I love workin’ with the fashions that arrive at the store and love creatin’ tableaux for each season.”
I smiled broadly. “I design costumes. I guess artistic talent runs in the family.”
We hugged each other as she whispered, “Passed from generation to generation. Nice.”
Teresa led us upstairs to rooms separated by a bathroom in between. She turned to go, then whirled back around. “Those houses? The ones on Gayoso Avenue. It’s an odd thing, but here we have men and women engaged in, er, activities that should be the closest, most familiar, intimate experience in one’s life. All those men. All those women. Yet so separate from one another. I swear, that section of Gayoso should be renamed ‘Lonely Street’.”
She smiled, then strode down the hall to what I assumed was her bedroom. I stood still and wondered if I’d heard right. Briley was oblivious. He headed right into his room. He looked exhausted and it hit me again how deeply he cared for Denise and her son.
I sank down on the most comfortable mattress I’d ever felt, but sprang back up again when I heard Briley pacing next door. I yelled through the space in the bathroom,
“You’ll wear out the rug, Briley. Come on over and we’ll chat, hows about?”
He rapped politely on the entrance to my bedroom from the hall, not the bath.
“I can’t rest.”
“Neither can I.”
We stared at each other.
“All right, Mel. We’re here. We’re in Memphis; we’ve managed to find lodging with your doppelganger aunt. What’s next? Where is this Heartbroken Hotel? Do we need transportation?”
I ran to the window, threw open the sash, leaned out and stared at the streets of Memphis.
“It’s Heartbreak Hotel. And it’s not really a hotel. I’m pretty sure it becomes part of Graceland in like 1988 or so.”
“Then where in tarnation are we supposed to look for Denise? I thought you had this all figured out.”
I sighed. “Briley. The sheet music was a clue just to get us to Memphis. Now that we’re here, we have to start thinking metaphorically.”
“Metaphorically?”
“Yeah. Like metaphor? Used to describe something not literally. Figuratively.”
Briley stared at me with an expression steadily growing darker than the soul of the man who’d kidnapped Denise and Nevin. (Metaphorically speaking.) “I know damn well what a metaphor is. We have them in 1919. Your 21st century brains did not create them.”
I grinned. At least he was still willing to entertain the notion that time travel existed. He added, “I’m merely asking how this particular metaphor relates in our quest to find Denise and Nevin. Do you have any ideas?”
I nodded. “Yep. Check the bordellos. It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”
“Nothing makes sense in this entire endeavor.” He paused, then continued, “But I guess we’ve got to go on the theory that white slavers grabbed them up, that Francesca somehow died before she could be taken away from the city, and that it’s very possible the other two Follies girls who disappeared over six months ago did not go willingly.”
“My only problem is -where does Nevin fit into this scenario?” I shuddered. “Unless there’s some sleazy pedophile involved as well.”
Briley turned white and I hastened to add, “But I’m sure that’s way off the beam I mean, no one else who went missing was a child. I didn’t say that right, did I?”
He nodded. “I’m determined to believe Nevin just got taken along with Denise because he’s always with her. She’s a wonderful mother, and she’s careful about who babysits him even backstage when she’s working there. His being taken wasn’t intentional.”
I nodded.“Sounds logical. I pray you’re right. It’s horrible enough to imagine of these girls involved in - what they’re involved in - but a child?”
We both shuddered.
“Okay. I guess we need to get organized.”
Briley smiled. “I’d say so.”
“Well, I’ve got to admit I’m kind of stumped on how best to proceed. I mean I can’t see us just casually strolling up to the cathouses on Gayoso Avenue and yelling, ‘Yo! Denise, Nevin? Y’all in there? Wanna jump out a window and high-tail back to the train station with us?’”
Briley bit his lip. “Bold, yes. Sensible, no. Let me think for a second.”
I kept quiet, watching his face and praying by the end of this trip, if not this night, the worry lines would smooth out and the pain in his eyes would turn to joy or at least calm.
“Briley? I have a suggestion. Well, it’s more a request. Let’s eat.”
“I agree. Both of our brains are quietly disintegrating while we stand here.”
“Let’s raid the kitchen. I mean, Aunt Teresa - durn - I’ve got to skip the Aunt before I totally slip up - anyway, she said the house is ours. And if my great-grandparents were anything like my grandparents, the larder is full.”
It was. Briley and I found homemade bread and hunks of cheese and fruit and even leftover bar-b-que in the small box that had been replenished with ice earlier in the day.
It was cooler in the parlor so we took our meal there. I was sated, but nervous. I headed for the piano and began to play show tunes to calm me down.
Nothing helped. Briley kept pacing and I kept playing and both of us stayed on edge. I felt as if I was waiting for something to happen. I also felt the presence of whomever I’d felt had been following us. Someone who’d discoverd in Manhattan we were going to Memphis. And why.