WE STARED AT EACH OTHER FOR A LONG TIME BEFORE I could bring myself to speak.
“That’s ridiculous. Unless you mean—” I stumbled over the words. “Did she . . . did she commit suicide?”
“Of course not! She would never take the coward’s way out. Even after . . . everything, she simply found the courage to deal with it. Alone, except for me. I would never have abandoned her.” The woman’s eyes blazed with fury. “Of course she didn’t kill herself.”
“Then tell me exactly what you mean.” I leaned forward in the chair and forced her to look at me. “Quit dancing around. Give me facts. Names. Dates. Who lives upstairs, and why does she scream and run whenever she sees me?” I took a breath and pounded on. “When did you meet my mother? And what has she got to do with any of this?”
My voice had risen on the tide of questions, and Elizabeth Shelly’s haughty expression began to crumble. The pistol wavered in her hand, perhaps from the strain of holding its weight, perhaps from a failing conviction that she could still control the situation with a gun. I watched the tears pool in her eyes and finally spill over onto the creases the sun and age had carved into her face.
I eased myself slowly out of the chair. In a few steps I stood in front of the silently weeping woman. When I reached down and slid the gun from her limp fingers, she offered no resistance. My heart rate gradually returned to normal as I turned and dropped the pistol into my bag and resumed my seat. I waited while Elizabeth fumbled in her pocket for a handkerchief, blew her nose, and finally raised her eyes again to mine.
“I’ve waited so long,” she said, and her voice was husky from crying. “And now, I can’t . . . Somehow it doesn’t matter. It isn’t your fault. None of it is your fault.” She rose on unsteady legs. “Please forgive me. You should go.”
“I’d like to understand, Elizabeth. We can still talk, if you like.” I offered a smile.
She didn’t smile back. She stood for a long time staring at my face without really seeing me. Eventually she shook herself. “You’re really nothing like her at all, are you? She came to Edisto, you know. Asking questions. I saw her a few times in her fancy car, and they told me who she was. I should have done something then. If only I had.” Her hands were clasped so tightly together I thought she might crush her own fingers. “Later on, after . . . I went there. To your house. I watched her over time, waiting for her to do something, to admit . . . But she never did.” Again that shuddering sigh. “It doesn’t matter now. I’ll make some tea. It will only take a moment.” At the doorway, she paused. “I really am sorry,” she mumbled before moving out into the hallway.
I drew a long, deep breath and reached for my phone.
“Bay! Thank God!” Red sounded just this side of frantic. “What the hell is going on? I’m almost there, and—”
“I’m fine. Calm down. It was just a . . . misunderstanding. Where are you?”
“I’m just passing Gardens Corner. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. I would have called the local sheriff, but I didn’t know what kind of trouble you were in.”
“You figured it out!”
There was a brief silence. “Well, not exactly. I got that you wanted me to call the Judge, and when I told him all your crazy talk about pacts and halls, he told me to hang on. In a couple of minutes, he came back and said you were at Covenant Hall. I think it was the Bible reference that did it. How do you remember all that quotation stuff?”
It felt good to be having a semi-normal conversation without the muzzle of a gun pointing at my chest. “A misspent youth. Listen, I am with Miss Lizzie, but everything’s fine now.”
“She waving that damn pistol around again?”
“Yes, but it’s in my bag now. We’re going to talk.” I made a snap decision. “She knows about my half sister, and I don’t want to spook her. Can you go home and wait for me? I shouldn’t be long.”
“You sure? What about Joline’s sister?”
It had gone right out of my head. I glanced at my watch. “It’s too late to start out now. We won’t get anywhere banging on her door in the middle of the night. We can get on the road first thing tomorrow morning.”
“If that’s what you want. Are you positive you don’t want me to come ahead? I said right from the jump that that old woman was nuts. I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could throw her.”
“I’ll be fine. She has a lot of anger she’s stored up over the years, but she needs to tell someone her story—tell me, I guess. Don’t worry.”
Red sighed. “Okay. I’ll meet you at home.” He paused. “You scared the hell out of me, you know that?”
I smiled. “I know. Sorry. I was already calling you when Miss Lizzie shanghaied me, and I had to improvise in a hurry. My clues were pretty lame.”
“You be damned careful around that crazy old lady. And be alert driving home.”
I knew both of us were remembering Joline Eastman’s last words before her car slammed into the trees, the same trees that would be standing sentinel over my drive back down Route 17.
“See you later,” I said and snapped the phone closed as Elizabeth carried the tea tray into the parlor.
I jumped up and cleared space on one of the low tables. She arranged the tray and seated herself again.
“Thank you. Shall I pour?” I nodded. “Lemon?”
Except for the lingering British accent, her voice could have been my mother’s at one of her endless afternoon gatherings in support of historical preservation or some other worthy cause that always drew the cream of Beaufort society to Presqu’isle. I accepted the cup, part of a delicate set of Meissen if I wasn’t mistaken, the saucer chipped on one edge. As I raised the cup to my lips, another loud thud shook the ceiling.
“My ward is restless tonight,” Elizabeth said. “Your presence earlier upset her. It took me nearly an hour to find her and get her calmed down.”
“Is it all strangers, or does she have a particular aversion to me?” I asked, recalling how the woman—or girl?—had bounded off down the lane last Saturday afternoon.
“We’re very isolated here, not many visitors. Still, I think . . .” She placed her saucer on the table and leaned back. “Perhaps I should start at the beginning.”
“Please,” I said and settled into the hard chair.
Elizabeth Shelly drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “Your father and Beegie fell in love that summer he opened his law practice here, but I always knew he wouldn’t stay. Talbot Simpson was destined for bigger things than a one-room office on an isolated island. I tried to tell her that, and I think she understood, in her mind.” She smiled. “Her heart was another matter. But when he left, she seemed to recover. She dated, some nice young men from Charleston she met when she had to go to court or file papers, but none of them lasted.”
“She was an attorney?”
“Yes. It was one of the things they had in common. There was even talk of combining their practices, but nothing ever came of it.”
Her eyes roamed around the room, and I tried to envision the two friends growing into middle age, sharing this house, perhaps? But no, that couldn’t be right, I told myself. They lived on Edisto, didn’t they?
I let the silence play out a little, but Elizabeth broke it first.
“Over the years, she carved out a good, quiet life for herself. We were content.”
“But he came back.” I had a lot of the pieces now, and a pretty good idea of what might have happened, but I wanted to allow Miss Lizzie to reveal things in her own way.
“Yes. And he was married. He never lied about that, I’ll have to say. Beegie didn’t care. They stole evenings and weekends, and she always came back glowing. ‘I’ll take whatever part of him I can have,’ she’d say. I knew it would end badly again, but I learned to hold my peace.” I watched her face harden. “Until she told me she was pregnant. And that she would keep the baby.”
I suddenly realized that there was a measured tread of feet going on over my head, as if someone agitated or angry paced the floor, back and forth, back and forth.
“Is it your friend who’s upstairs? Did Beegie become—?”
“Insane? Is that what you think?” Her anger lasted only a moment before the same, crushing sadness settled back over her face. “No. Beegie’s dead and has been these thirty years or more.”
“Then who—?” I stopped myself, the answer so obvious I should have seen it the first time I saw the woman dashing down the driveway toward the house. Too young to be Elizabeth’s contemporary, her long dark hair only marginally streaked with gray.
“Beegie wanted her. We both wanted her, even after—”
The loud clomping sounded like a gaggle of children in heavy boots racing down the steps. Almost simultaneously we jumped to our feet.
She burst into the room in a rush, her wild hair tangled around her shoulders. For a moment we all stood frozen. What a bizarre tableau we must have made, three women so different and yet so connected.
Elizabeth was the first to move. “Julia,” she said, “darling. You shouldn’t have—”
I had only a moment to register the shock of having my deductions confirmed before my half sister flew across the room, the blade of the kitchen knife she brandished catching the last rays of the sinking sun. I threw up my hands.
“You hurt my mama!” she screamed a second before I felt the searing pain slice through my left arm.