35
EVERLY
Present day
The corner house stood three stories high, made of tawny-colored stone and gray Savannah brick. Its tall, wooden, double front door faced Bull Street. Green shutters flanked each window and the transoms above peeled brown paint. Planted behind an iron fence that surrounded the property, climbing rosebushes wound their stems through the rusted filigree. Dumpsters sat on a once-green lawn now parched and filled with lumber and loose bricks. Two men in hard hats carrying construction debris trudged in and out of the front door.
Oliver and I watched. “I’ve always loved this house,” I said, “but I never knew the family who lived here.”
“I thought you knew everyone.”
“Not even close. Savannah has changed so much . . . I can tell you more about the past than I can the present. Not sure that’s a good thing.”
He pointed at the open gate. “I think we can just go in.”
“I don’t think so. It’s under construction and . . .” My voice trailed off as Oliver headed up the front stairs onto the portico. A man as round as he was tall, in a painter’s white coveralls and a mask, stopped him.
They spoke and I heard a laugh, and then Oliver motioned for me to join him. That man could smooth-talk his way into anything. I took the steps two at a time, half afraid the painter would change his mind, and followed Oliver inside.
Dust clogged the air. Every surface was being stripped of wallpaper and paint to reveal the pearly plaster and fine wood beneath. Years of updates had hidden the true beauty of the house. A formal parlor spread the length of the house on the left with a dining room to the right. All the rooms were bare except for light fixtures covered in white cloth. The wide hall led back to a dark wood banister with a pineapple spindle. “There’s nothing here,” I said. “We’re going to have to call the daughter or ask the new owner if she removed boxes belonging to the family.”
“Where would you keep family papers?” Oliver asked, heading toward the stairwell. “If you didn’t care about them, but you didn’t want to throw them away, where would you put them?”
“The attic.”
“Right.” Light from the crystal chandelier caught the excitement in his eyes. It was contagious. I ran past and bumped him before climbing the stairs to the second floor.
His laughter followed me as we reached the landing. I glanced around at four closed doors. “Looks like four bedrooms and the stairwell to the attic would be at the far end.”
We walked on a brown paper runner taped to the herringbone-patterned hardwood floor and reached a stairwell that ran along a back wall. I clicked on the flashlight of my cell phone and we crept up the stairs until we reached a dusty attic full of boxes, discarded furniture and moth-eaten curtains that looked straight out of a 1986 hunter green/burgundy color palette.
I ran the flashlight beam over the jumble. “Looks like they haven’t made it up here yet. Look at this furniture. I bet it’s worth a fortune.” I ran my hand over a Windsor chair with a crocheted flower seat. “I hope they know what they’ve got.”
“I’m sure they do. Stay focused.” He laughed and picked up an alligator skull. “Don’t get lost in all these beautiful heirlooms.”
I recoiled in mock horror and ran my hand over a burlwood dresser. “You keep the skulls. I’ll take the furniture.”
“No,” he said with a laugh. “You look in those boxes.” He pointed at a pile of mildewed cardboard boxes. “I’ll check these.” He set his hand on top of a gray metal filing cabinet, rusted at the edges. “It’s a long shot but we can try, right?”
“Right.” I shuffled to the far end of the attic, pushing aside cobwebs and dead palmetto bugs that cracked under my shoes. I felt a bit like the Everly of old who would take the dare and dig through dirt to find a clue to the past. The Everly who might burst into laughter at any minute.
The boxes looked as if they would disintegrate under my hands and I lifted a lid to see folders containing yellowed papers, a book with a fabric cover splotched with green mildew, and a pile of letters tied with a faded pink ribbon. I lifted a folder and opened it. Dust flew out and a dead spider fell to the floor. The papers were legal documents I didn’t quite understand except for the name at the top: Longstreet.
“Here!” I hollered out to Oliver. “Longstreet papers. There are piles of letter-books.” I pulled out another of the ancient leather books that had once been used to hold the dealings of families and businesses. This one held certificates of birth, baptism and confirmation; deeds for burial plots and marriage licenses. “Someone was meticulous with their filing. I don’t even have all my things in one place like this.”
“Josephine said her sister-in-law was obsessed.” Oliver drew near. “That filing cabinet is empty.” He stood behind me and read over my shoulder. “But it looks like this box is a full-on bingo.”
“Bingo?” I looked over my shoulder at him. “Been hanging out in the old folks’ home lately?”
“You’re funny,” he said.
I kicked two boxes below the one I had opened. “How are we going to go through all these and find what we’re looking for? We can’t stay up here.” The heat was pressing down now, the dusty air filling our nostrils. Sweat ran down my spine and into the band of my linen pants already ruined from the cemetery’s mud.
“Then we take them.” Oliver lifted a box and motioned for me to get another. “Let’s go.”
“We can’t just take them.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re not ours.”
“We won’t keep them, just look through them and put them back. Listen, the woman who left them doesn’t want them. They’re trash to her. She sold the house without bothering to remove them. We’re just helping her.”
“This is totally and completely illegal.” I patted the top of the box he carried. “This is—”
“Something Mora would do,” he said with a closed-lipped smile. “That’s what you were going to say.”
He was right. “Then let’s go.” I tried to smile but my lips shook.
We carried six boxes down the stairs and set them in the front foyer where the round man in the white coveralls approached us with his hands on his hips. “You can’t be taking things from the house.” His southern accent was lazy and rich, and the dip in his cheek poked out like a golf ball.
“Oh, no.” Oliver held up his hands. “We aren’t taking them. They’re for the museum. These family papers will be filed with the Georgia Historical Society. We can’t allow them to be damaged any more than they already have been in the heat and dust.”
The man spit into a Coke can and wiped his face with a white cloth. “Why y’all want to save such musty things I will never understand.” He waved us off.
I widened my eyes at Oliver and mouthed, “You are so bad.”
“So bad,” he mouthed back.
We carted the boxes to the sidewalk where Oliver’s car was parked. As we paused in the late-afternoon sun, Oliver brushed dirt from his forearms. “Thanks for taking me along on your adventure. I’d forgotten how fun it is.”
I lifted the hair off my sticky neck. “What are you talking about?”
“You. Always finding something wild.”
“You’re mixing me up with Mora.”
“I don’t think I could do that.”
“She was the one full of adventure. She was the wild one. I was just along for the ride.”
“I never saw it that way. Neither did she.” His voice trailed off as we loaded the boxes in his trunk and settled in the front seat without saying a word.
The six decaying boxes sat on ragged towels I’d brought in from the laundry room. The tops were off the containers and papers were spread around the room on every surface. I sneezed, and Oliver laughed.
“I need to eat,” I said. “I just realized I haven’t had food since before I met Maddox this morning.”
“Maddox is in town?” Oliver set a pile of newspaper articles on the dining room table.
“Yes. I nearly forgot.” I cringed. “I ran off and left him at the Owens-Thomas House where we went to ask about the silver flatware his guys found. We took the teapot and the pocket watch, along with the silver. I was hoping for some . . . clarification. But so far—none. I have a book about family crests to leaf through. But . . . he implied I was a bit too obsessed with finding out about Lilly, and well, I left him there.”
Oliver spread his hands to encompass the mass of papers and boxes and said dryly, “Gee, I wonder why he thinks you’re obsessed.”
I gave a light punch to his shoulder. “I know. I know. But it’s all connected. One thing always leads to another and even though I might not find out who that particular silver belonged to or what crest is on it or anything in these papers, we always find something . . . and you just never know . . .”
“What’s going to happen next,” he finished for me.
“Exactly.” I plopped down on the couch. “My God, I haven’t said that in over a year.”
“You say it all the time. All. The. Time.”
“I haven’t, though. That’s the point. Not since . . . Mora died. I haven’t really cared what happened next because what happens next might be just as horrible as that.”
Oliver sat next to me and twisted to face me although I stared straight ahead, toward the kitchen with my coffee press, herbs and teas in glass jars, out the window to the oak tree that shaded the back brick patio. I felt his gaze rest on me and I turned back to him.
“Have you thought about diving to the salvage site?” he asked. “You used to love that.”
“I have. Why? Have you?”
“Yes. I’m going to visit the site next week and I thought I might go down.”
“You’re going to the site? With Maddox?”
“Yes. You sound annoyed.”
“Not at all. I just didn’t realize you two were . . . friends.”
“We have lots to talk about.”
A shiver of something like envy ran through me. They were talking, hanging out, living a life while I sifted through papers and photos and made charts and graphs and . . . I shook off the stupid thought while Oliver lifted a photo from the side table. It was a group shot of friends taken at an arts festival two years earlier. “Do you still think about that guy? That ass who broke your heart?”
He meant Grant, my old boyfriend. I’d forgotten he was in the photo. “Oh . . . My heart’s not broken anymore. Maybe I miss the idea of him. I shudder with the realization that I gave so much of my life to him. That I wept for someone who wasn’t worthy. I was over him long ago. In fact, he changed me for the better.” I took the photo from Oliver and noticed he was in it, too. I’d forgotten . . .
“How did he change you for the better?” Oliver asked.
“I will never again—I hope—confuse love with need or obsession.”
“Ah.” Oliver settled back and ran his hands over a box. “I think this is what qualifies as near-obsession.”
“Most likely.”
What I didn’t tell Oliver was what I did miss about not having Grant around—touch: gentle touch, wild touch, tangled-sheets touch. That was not something to talk about with Oliver.
And yet, why had I avoided him all these months? Who else would understand how I felt? Without saying a word, he sat quietly as if he were holding open a door for me to walk through whenever I was ready. I suddenly felt completely emptied out. I slumped against the back of the couch and picked up my cell. “I’m ordering pizza before we start.”
“This isn’t a one-night job. What you have here is weeks of work.”
“I know. No time to waste.” I returned my attention to ordering a pizza while Oliver picked up a few papers. His voice wafted past me as he read. “‘When I last had the pleasure of seeing you in England your demeanor was one of melancholy.’” He laughed. “Between their language and their tight script, these letters could take years to decipher.”
“I know. I can’t wait.”
“The things they wrote about; the things they cared about.” Oliver flipped through a few more pages. “Seems so archaic. And look how many words they fit on one piece of paper. If I copied this one page in my handwriting, it would take up six.”
“At first glance, I don’t see anything here that has to do with Lilly or is personal about the family,” I said. “This is all about business. Shipping cotton; selling the enslaved; arguing politics; spreading rumors of war. These are letters about a family trying to run a business, keep a legacy alive.”
“Here’s another letter-book,” Oliver said, picking up a leather binder with another lot of papers. “These books were the hard drives of their day. Look at this—they copied every letter they sent into this letter-book. They wrote two copies and filed one here for safekeeping,” he said, leafing through it quickly.
I peered over his shoulder. “It was their way of keeping everything on one subject in one place . . .” I paused. “I’m going to run up and change. I’ll be right back.”
“You just want me to pay for the pizza,” he said, his voice light although he kept his gaze on the papers.
I hustled upstairs, showered and slipped into clean clothes even as I heard the doorbell ring, Oliver talking and the door shutting. I came back down in jeans and a T-shirt, my hair wet. What I looked like to him was inconsequential to finding what we were looking for in this pile. The hunt was on.
We chomped on greasy pizza until it disappeared and we were clean enough to touch the documents.
Oliver asked, “Where is that family list?”
I rummaged through a pile of papers on the side desk until I found one listing the Longstreet family. “Here are their names. The father, Lamar, is of French descent. His grandfather settled in Maryland and they ended up here in Savannah in the early 1800s. Lamar was a cotton merchant, banker and as you know, a pioneer in bringing steamboats to the South.” I pointed at another name. “His wife, Melody, was also from Savannah but of Irish descent.”
“And those circles around Charles and Lamar?”
“I know for sure that they lived. But I don’t know about the others. His wife definitely passed because Lamar remarried only a year later.”
“A year?”
“Men seem to get over things fairly quickly, non?”
Oliver rolled his eyes. “Low blow, Everly.”
“Sorry.” I cringed. “I didn’t mean—”
“Adam Forsyth has a red circle also.”
“He is in newspaper articles building a statue for his wife, so . . .”
“Got it. Well, keep reading.” Oliver lifted another letter, purely business-related, and filed it back into the letter-book. “I don’t see his name anywhere yet . . .”
Oliver’s phone dinged and he smiled at the text. “Maddox is worried about you.”
“Tell him I am totally fine.”
He exhaled and nodded. “Okay. Listen, it’s getting late. If I leave you with this, do you promise to get some sleep and we’ll keep digging later this week?”
“You have plans tonight?” The question came unbidden.
He didn’t answer but instead gathered his backpack and headed to the door. “You need anything else?”
“No. You go on home and I’ll spend the evening with the dust of the Longstreet files. Go on. I’ve got this. If there’s anything here that matters, I’ll find it.”
“I know you will.” He dropped his hands on my shoulders and then angled his head forward, kissed me on the forehead in the same gentle way Papa used to. That was who we were now—friendly and warm—and it was good. My heart slowed. “See you in a bit.”
When the door clicked shut, I fell back against the cushions. After all my excitement at finding the papers, and the day’s insanity that had started with Maddox at the museum, I had nothing left to do but close my eyes.
I vaguely wondered if Oliver was headed to the river for another date. I brushed the image away and thought of the exhaustion and hunger of those who had washed ashore on the North Carolina beach more than a century and a half ago.
I shivered with the knowledge, and a growing desire to dive to the bottom of the sea, to the place where all their ghosts rested with their belongings.
Memories of diving with Mora, of the freedom of breathing in water, of the primal sensation of being part of something so much bigger than myself, flooded me. The multicolored fish that nudged by, the smooth kick of my fin that propelled me forward, the soft hush of my own breath in and out, in and out.
I’d seen aquatic grass that danced its own rhythm. I’d brushed against a parrot fish and watched a barracuda take another fish in one bite. I’d passed through the sunlit area of water to the twilight and swam until my tank was low on oxygen. I wanted to go there again.
The world below was alive; it was teeming with life and mystery. When I dove with Mora, I was able to see a place so foreign that we could almost believe we were the only ones who knew about it. Our ancestors, who couldn’t dive this way, had fashioned tales of gods and goddesses of the sea—it was too majestic not to contain divinity. Science believed they’d debunked the gods, but diving always restored my belief.
It had been two years since I last dove with Mora and Oliver, two years since I’d had my gear certified, two years since I’d gone over the safety rules. I’d been taught that diving without a refresher was dangerous, but only slightly dangerous and I’d been enough times. Maybe I’d go again, to the place where Mora and I went together—below.