July 11

MAYHEW, always up early, saw the article in the paper and took it into the bedroom. “Charily, Charily, wake up. This is something.” She swam up from a dream of driving a race car, skirting the edge of an abyss, woke to see Mayhew leaning over her. Irrationally, she thought he looked like a boiled pig, then she focused, saw dear Mayhew, and reached for her glasses.

SPECIAL FROM THE SWAN FLYOVER

BY RAINEY GROVER

TWIST OF EVENTS IN SWAN CEMETERY CASE

SWAN, GEORGIA—GBI investigator Gray Hinckle and J. E. B. Stuart County Sheriff Ralph Hunnicutt, investigating the recent exhumation of a body buried for nineteen years in Swan, Georgia, have come to the extraordinary conclusion that the original cause of death, previously presumed to be suicide, was murder. The alert officer and Swan sheriff concluded that because of the entrance angle of the bullet wound near the woman’s heart, she could not have pulled the trigger of the .22-caliber automatic rifle found next to her body. Other advanced forensic techniques have supported their theory. The body is that of Catherine Phillips Mason, wife of Dr. Wills Mason, long a resident of Swan. Her disheveled body was discovered beside her grave in the family plot by her sister-in-law, Lillian Mason, and Mrs. Eleanor Whitefield, neither of whom were available for comment. Sheriff Ralph Hunnicutt says his office is pursuing all leads and he expects to capture the culprits. When asked about the unexpected turn of events, he said it is too soon to comment.

Charlotte leapt out of bed. “God Almighty, Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, this is hideous. But, Mayhew, I’ve waited nineteen years to read that! I knew Catherine would not commit suicide. Remember, I knew. She just would not.”

“Well, it’s pretty strange that someone would kill her, then years later someone else would dig her up. Would you say the two might be related?”

“But how, who, who? I never thought that anyone who knew her was involved in her death. Who knows? It’s absurd. Someone broke in, broke in both times; that’s the only answer.”

“If it’s two random crimes, I say she had shit for luck.” Mayhew smoothed back her hair hard, as if he were petting a dog. “Try to keep your head screwed on.” He knew she’d be spinning way out over this news.

 

CHARLOTTE DIALED 0. “Operator, may I have information in Swan, the number for Lillian Mason?” But what would she say to Lily after all these years? Those Masons squelched the investigation because they were ashamed. Charlotte never liked Lily, wanted, in fact, to kick her in the pants. So proprietary. So controlling. A saint, though, to raise those children.

“Well, I can give you that number, honey, but I can tell you Lily is not home ’cause I just saw her drive off from the drugstore with Eleanor Whitefield.”

“Thank you, I’ll try calling later.” Charlotte shrieked, “Gawd that town!” If Catherine hadn’t married into that poky fiefdom. If she had chosen Austin. Charlotte pulled out the Macon phone book. Austin. Austin Larkin. His thin blue letters had arrived at the dorm daily. She could still see a stack on Catherine’s dresser in their dorm room, held down with an ivory-backed mirror. Catherine lying back in bed with a textbook on her chest, kicking her legs in the air. “He says I should float down the Nile on a flower-covered barge.” Catherine lined the window ledge with conch shells and amethyst geodes and ambrotypes of nineteenth-century children—all gifts he pulled from his pockets on the weekends. When she came back from that Thanksgiving wearing Wills’s square emerald ring, Austin had backed down the dorm steps shaking his head. Never said a word. As far as Charlotte knew, Catherine never heard from him again, except for the event of the roses. One winter afternoon, he flew his tiny plane low over the campus, scattering roses for Catherine, thousands of roses.

Charlotte wondered if he still lived somewhere near. Despite whatever had happened in his life, he’d want to know that Catherine had not killed herself. Charlotte was sure of that. He’d been brought up forty-five minutes away, in Stonefield. She called the operator; no Larkin was listed. She would go there and try to find him. Austin, what a hunk. “Hubba hubba,” Catherine used to say. Could she paint roses falling out of the sky? She had not seen them fall, only the quad after he flew over, strewn with petals, buds, full-blown blooms. To each stem was tied a thread with a small white flag attached. In black calligraphy, CRP was written on each. Rose—Catherine’s middle name. Catherine had picked up only one. It was as if she picked up a bolt of lightning, Charlotte thought. She could see the bloodred rose against Catherine’s pink angora sweater. In memory, the moments form so oddly, she thought, like a swan sculpted in ice floating in my bloodstream.

AILEEN WAS OUT EARLY. She had to drive over to Tipton to the Singer store because her last needle had snapped off. She needed more tiny pearl buttons and some ready-made tatting for edging the baby blankets of her less particular customers.

A sign on the door said Back in fifteen minutes. Since she didn’t know when the fifteen minutes had started, she walked across the street to the Main Street Café to have coffee and wait. Someone had left the Macon paper on the table. As she slid into the booth, the story on Catherine Mason jumped off the page at her.

Not a suicide.

She read the article twice, ignoring the waitress who poured her coffee. When she tried to pick up the cup, it rattled against the saucer. She put both shaking hands on her lap and pretended to blow the hot coffee. Across the street, a woman was unlocking the Singer store. But what could now raise her from her seat and send her among the buttons and zippers?

The information in the paper, she feared, was the truth, even though she’d told herself a different version ever since Catherine Mason died. That day, when news of the death had flown through the mill village, she had been completely relieved to hear that Catherine was dead by suicide, not by murder. She’d been desperately afraid at first that Sonny had tried to rape her and then killed her. He’d often railed on about Big Jim deserving for his family women to get fucked, tortured. He said he’d stick knives up them and see how horny Big Jim felt then. Sonny was always blowing up, but Aileen was scared of him. He’d gone into details that made her fear he’d do those things to her. But Catherine’s death had been simply suicide. No evidence to the contrary. No torn-up house. The sheriff knew how Catherine died, she’d thought. The sheriff could tell by how she was found, what gun was fired. They said she was holding the gun. Who knew what she was going through? Maybe her own husband screwed around. The sheriff knew those things. Sonny, she’d quickly concluded, didn’t do it; he simply left, the way he said he was going to.

Aileen always felt that she walked with Sonny’s shadow covering her. The preacher might explain that as her knowledge of her own sins, but Aileen never had told the preacher—or anyone, not even her sister. At work, when she’d looked at the office door, she was afraid Sonny’s pointed face and fish eyes would appear in the glass. His violence would sometimes scare her during sex with Big Jim at the motel. Even when she could take her time for the luxury of a shower afterward, she feared he might burst in and rip back the curtain. Sonny could find them. Alone at home, she had dreamed over and over that he was breathing outside the door.

After Big Jim up and died, even a branch scratching against the window made Aileen gasp. Then one morning, Sonny had appeared at her door, opened the screen, and walked in. All her fears during his four-year absence suddenly took the form of his real shape. It was as if his raid on the office were continuing. She was terrified by his bushy white run-together eyebrows, the distant look in his eyes. By then Big Jim was dead a year, the wife was dead, too. But Sonny, just out of the army, had come home still ranting about revenge. He yanked her hair back and spit in her face. “You pussy bitch. You stinking whore. He’s dead but he deserves to be drawn and quartered. His father fucked my grandmother. Who do they think they are? You’re not worth killing. But I’m going to get that family, all of them, those sorry motherfuckers. That puffed-up doctor, I’ll see how he likes somebody doing his woman.”

Out of fear, she lied. “It was never how you thought. Big Jim wanted me but I didn’t. Those things you found were because he was trying to get me. You never trusted me, ever. Now he’s dead. And we’re divorced, for God’s sake. You were dead wrong. Leave me alone. Forget it.” She wanted to kick and spit at him but remained still and controlled.

Sonny sat down. To hear the name Big Jim still enraged him. He banged his fist on the kitchen table. He looked at her, wide-eyed, grinding his teeth. He slung his arm across the table, sweeping the jelly and salt and pepper onto the floor.

“Please. Go. Please leave, go. Leave those people alone—they never did anything to you. It’s over, he’s dead.” She put her head on the table and cried.

He laughed. His eyes darted and he blinked over and over. His top lip raised like a dog about to snarl. Suddenly he slammed out of the house “Okay. Okay. You win, you slut. I’m going out West to Arizona, and you’re not ever going to see me again.” He said it like a threat, emphasizing each word. He jabbed the air with his middle finger.

Aileen breathed out. To placate him, she said, “Well, I hope your life goes better now. I never meant you no harm.” She rubbed her head where he’d pulled her braid. She closed the door and slid the bolt. She wished he were dead. She imagined slashing him with the turkey knife.

A month later, the night when she’d heard of Catherine Mason’s suicide, she got in the car and drove forty miles to her sister’s. Sometimes in the years after that, she’d imagined Catherine Mason wondering what had brought Sonny, a millworker who was sometimes sent there for repairs, to her door. Aileen imagined his attack, Catherine grabbing a gun, and Sonny turning it on her and firing, pausing only to arrange the gun in her hand while her life dripped out on the floor. But Catherine was a suicide. Sonny was long gone. Over time, her memory of Sonny receded. She began to leave her doors unlocked, like everyone else in Swan. She had not seen him since that day—nineteen years. After that long, can something still fester? Had he done this trick at the cemetery? Her mind would not stop whirling. Remembering his vacant eyes, she would not put it past him.

Aileen glanced at her face in the window’s reflection. “I’m plain gaunt,” she said to herself. When her face and lips had been kissed and kissed by Big Jim, she looked full and rosy in the motel mirror. Twenty years had sculpted her so that now her high cheekbones stuck out, concaving her face. Her lips looked pinched. I look like I suck lemons, she thought. Her hair remained thick and lustrous. She managed to sip the coffee, managed to light a cigarette and blow out smoke toward her own face in the glass. She looked at herself again. Her eyes looked wild. She saw a fox face, something on the edge of the woods with shining eyes—she could be Sonny’s twin.

She decided she would just drive on over to her sister’s in Tyler. She would have to figure out how she could go to the sheriff, Hunnicutt’s grandson. She knew she should, but should, would, could, blended together in her mind. Could she think of how not to tell the whole story? She did not want her carefully hidden life to be more shamefully exposed than Catherine Mason’s rotten body. And Big Jim, the bank president, mayor, owner of the mill. She would just wait and see what came to light.

Her sister, a widow now, would be glad for her company. They could make blue plum jelly, and Jeannie could help her sew. She could buy the few things she needed. If Sonny paid a visit to the mill village, there’d be no one for him to hit. Then she thought of the other Mason women—if Sonny was that crazy. But she didn’t really believe he had come back after all these years. Maybe she would talk to someone. She liked the preacher in her sister’s Primitive Baptist church. He spoke the gospel while looking at the sky, then would lower his head and bear down on the congregation with burning eyes. Aileen liked his unruly brown curls and the ropy cords in his neck. She imagined sweeping her hair over his sinless body. Last time she heard him, she’d gone to the verge of feeling saved.

I’ll go, she thought. I’ll get up from this booth and go. She left the newspaper on the table, Catherine Mason’s photo faceup for the next reader. She walked across the street and bought the lace and pearl buttons she needed.

RALPH’S PHONE AT HOME and at the office would not stop ringing. With the news hitting the morning papers, reporters from all over the state and as far away as Tallahassee and Mobile kept calling for information. Gray, with backup from the GBI staff, was conducting his own investigation. He’d walked out of the Columns after interviewing Wills convinced he had nothing to do with the exhumation. “Old fart could barely brush his teeth. Now, whether he pulled the trigger years ago, we’re just not going to find out unless something breaks open from an unexpected quarter,” Gray said. Ralph had combed the cemetery and had found no letter. Nothing. Gray had asked him to check up on J. J. Embarrassed that he would have to phone and ask J. J. where he was last week, he stopped in Scott’s store to verify their fishing trip to St. Clare’s.

Scott was wiping down the sweating sides of the ice cream freezer. He was hoping J. J. would stop in to go over some orders he wanted to make. “Yes,” he told Ralph, “we chartered a boat down there, fishing for marlin.” Scott gave him names and numbers, without mentioning that he’d slept on deck both nights because J. J. picked up a twenty-year-old girl named Gay Nix at the tackle shop, and they were rocking the cabin. That was nobody’s bidness. A big girl, who’d brought on board a sack of fried catfish and hushpuppies from her mama’s fish fry stand next to her daddy’s tackle and bait place. She’d kept up a shrieking laugh, and Scott had concentrated on the slap of waves against the bow. Usually, J. J. didn’t spin off like that on their trips. Had to be mighty hard up to go after that big-kneed gal. Far as he knew, she never asked them their names. J. J. kept calling her Sunshine. No need to tell the sheriff any of that.

Somebody down in St. Clare’s was mounting two fish they’d caught. Scott showed Ralph the receipt. Plenty of contacts. A relief. Ralph had no reason not to believe him, but for God’s sake somebody had to have dug up that body and maybe it was J. J. and this loyal buck. He didn’t want to be like his grandfather, who let the Masons slide by. He had to admit, however, that no motive presented itself, aside from pure craziness. Whatever he was, J. J. was not one drop crazy.

Mindy up at the register cut her eyes at Ralph. He is cute, plenty cute, she thought. That slash of scar all down his arm is from Vietnam. Who was it said he’d been left for dead and had to walk at night through war zones to get back to his troop?

Ralph picked up a bottle of Dr Pepper and some peanuts. “Well, Miss Mindy, how’s everything?” She wore a scoop-necked lavender T-shirt and he gazed down the great divide between her pushed-up breasts. She saw his look and reached to pin her hair, the gesture of raising her arms lifting her breasts. Ralph pulled on his earlobe and looked down at the change on the counter.

“I’m just fine and dandy, Ralph.”

“You sure are. Hey, you want to go out to the Shack tomorrow night? They’ve got a band.” He hadn’t danced in years. This Mason mess made him want to hit balls, run, dance, fuck, drive fast. Anything to remind him that the world was not going crazy again. He looked into her pert face. She wouldn’t have any idea about war or the horror of corpses. Ever since the war he’d been amazed by people’s innocence. He looked over at the rows of dish soap and detergent to block the sudden vision of Tommy Melton crawling beside him one moment, his head blown to bits the next, blood spurting from what had been his neck, his face like a run-over cantaloupe in the mud. Mindy’s old husband, Holy Roller now, with one leg two inches shorter than the other, never got drafted, like so many others—like J. J., come to think of it. Some said Mason contacts had fixed that, but Ralph didn’t see how he could, with the military offices way over in Dannon.

“Let me see if my sister will keep my little girl. I think she will. You know where I live—the sea-foam-colored house in the mill village.” She kept looking right into his eyes. He imagined rolling that T-shirt right off, the explosion of her flesh into his hands.

“Mindy,” he said. “What’s that short for?”

“Just Mindy. Mindy Marie.” She would wear her low-cut white eyelet that buttoned up the front. With her Saturday paycheck, she’d buy those fuchsia sandals with wedge heels in the window of Buster’s Shoes. She liked his square teeth and his golden chest hair in the V of his shirt. She hoped he didn’t have furry hair on his back like her ex-husband. Who would wait around for J. J. Mason to turn up? Not her. “Mama named me after her mama, Sugar Marie, and her granny, Mindy Lou.”

“That’s right nice. And much better than ‘Sugar Lou.’ Although, come to think of it, that’s a good name, too. Around eight tomorrow?”

He is damn cute, Mindy thought. Sugar Lou, who would have thought of that?

RAINEY GROVER PUSHED BACK HER CHAIR from her desk at The Swan Flyover. The famous doctor’s diet promised that she wouldn’t feel hungry between meals, but her stomach was roaring, as if it were trying to digest itself. After two weeks of starvation, she hadn’t lost but one pound. She’d expected five by now, hoped for eight. She opened a drawer and took out a package of cheese crackers with peanut butter, 125 calories apiece. She closed her eyes and ate one of the little sandwiches slowly, throwing the rest in the wastebasket. She had forty pounds to lose. At the conservative estimate according to the diet book, she would be down to her slinky best by February. Immediately, she wished she had not eaten the poisonous-looking orange crackers spread with evil peanut butter. At lunch she would skip the allowed piece of fruit.

She’d spent the morning calling people she met last March at the newspaper conference in Atlanta. She was bone-sure that no Mason had disrupted a grave. When, since the fabled Big Jim, had they ever shown enough energy for such an exploit? Her husband, Johnny, agreed. She wanted to be the investigative force for the case. That Lily or Wills could engineer a grave-opening was ludicrous. J. J.? But why? And besides, he was off fishing, playing the nature boy as usual, with that muscle-bound black stud who worked for him. J. J.—Swan’s answer to Tarzan. Only Ginger was on the move, and she went from pillar to post, without ever settling on anything. The news that their mother didn’t shoot herself must have rocked them all the way back to the cradle. When her own mother simply died of sugar diabetes, Rainey had been outraged. For years she half expected her mother to call or write.

Her colleagues scattered around Georgia were wildly curious about the case in Swan but had nothing to add, no similar activities in their towns. “Must be Martians,” the editor of The Cleveland Ledger said. “I wish something exciting would happen here,” others lamented. Rainey walked over to the long windows looking out onto the sidewalk and Main Street. Passing clouds reflected on the glass. Cliff Bryant, walking his two spaniels, Stevie and Clarkie, made her smile. His own doggish muzzle made him look as though he, too, might yap instead of speak. Agnes Burkhart, who with her cropped hair and laced, square-heeled shoes looked as though she’d been picked up by the wind from a street in old Europe and set down in Swan, came out of the drugstore with a little bag, probably medication for her sister’s fits. Francie Lachlan slammed on brakes and got out of her new yellow convertible with three boys. Pied Piper of, where? Hamlin? Watch out, Francie, she thought. Rainey had been the honeypot of her day, though she’d never had the pleasure of a daddy who bribed good behavior with fancy wheels.

Such a normal day. Cusetta Fletcher, new-rich in town, swaggered into the furniture store. She waved to Bunky, her neighbor, who caught her eye as she drove by. The slow flow of cars seemed to move through a dream. Rainey loved Swan. All her life it had seemed the best place on earth to live. Even as a girl, she’d felt she never could leave. She liked working downtown with Johnny, her desk looking out at the Oasis, the noon walk over to the Three Sisters, where she picked up most of her news. She even liked the tentacular gossip, rampant in any place where no news is no news.

She looked at her watch. Another hour until her carrot, chicken soup, and small salad. The sisters would commiserate as they plunked their coconut pies onto the sideboard. She pushed in the basketball bulge of her stomach, despising herself for fantasizing a slice of that tall, creamy pie sliding onto a plate. Now she and Johnny never made love with her on top. Too tactful to say so, he felt squished, she knew, when not many years ago, Johnny could span her waist with his fingers.

J. J. SLEPT IN, for once. It was almost nine by the time he lowered himself into the river. Four turtles, one a pretty substantial snapping turtle, sunned on a log the current had wedged against the dock. They regarded him without interest. He would let Ginger sleep as late as she could. She’d polished off the fudge at five in the morning. When she got up, they would call Charlotte Crowder in Macon. He’d already called Scott and found out that green pulpwood trucks belonged to Tall Pine Company thirty miles down the road in Flanders. That was the company to whom J. J. had sold cutting rights. He’d called Andy Foster to let him know he’d never get another tree from J. E. B. Stuart County unless they dealt with the bastard who almost ran down his sister yesterday. “Squirrelly little guy, we just hired him last week. I’ll sure see about it,” Andy Foster told him.

J. J. swam out to the sandbar and back, then lay flat back on the dock, his feet in the water, and looked at the sundogs and rainbows between his wet eyelashes until he fell asleep again under a clean sky.

STONEFIELD’S ONE AND ONLY MAIN DRAG, thought Charlotte, looked like one of those dreary WPA pictures from the Depression. Leaning, tin-roofed stores with throwback names like Bunny’s Dry Goods. As opposed to wet? The wide street accommodated a sleeping hound in the middle, which the few passing cars swerved around. Now that she was here, she wasn’t sure what to do. She went inside a small dime store on the corner. It smelled of stale popcorn and parakeet cages. Charlotte thought purgatory, if it existed, would be something like a dime store in a small town. Her eye was caught by the wall of embroidery threads, the skeins in figure eights silky and bright. She picked out damson, scarlet, spring green, rust. As she paid, she asked the clerk, “Do you know of a Larkin here in Stonefield?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m not from around here. I’m from Lux.” Lux was all of eight miles away.

Charlotte walked down one side of the street, crossed, and started back up the other. Three codgers sat outside the barbershop, chairs tilted back, their cheeks puffed with snuff. She glimpsed a soda fountain in the drugstore. She ordered a milk shake and the boy who made it whistled, to her joy, the Academic Festival Overture. “Do you know of any Larkins in town?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. Mr. Austin Larkin still owns a place off the highway out east of town, but he doesn’t live here. Hasn’t for a hundred years. Comes back now and then. He lives out West somewheres. Place is falling apart.”

“Where’s his house? Is it far? I want to leave something for him.” What a lie. What could she leave, skeins of thread?

“You go out to the red light”—he pointed—”then go about a mile and you’ll come to two big pines. Turn in there, and the road, nothing more than a pig track now, leads up to the house.”

Charlotte found the pines, with a leaning mailbox underneath. She opened it from the car window and saw only a clutch of leaves and a thick spiderweb.

Branches and palmettos slashed the sides of the car. She crept forward, the car bottom scraping, and stopped under a pecan tree. Austin’s house was a sprawling two-story farmhouse with wraparound porch and a round turret. Flaking white paint revealed a yellow coat underneath, probably from a happier time. Charlotte thought those who painted their houses yellow were optimists. From an open door on the right side’s lower wing, a tall black woman looked out. “Hello,” Charlotte called. “I’m an old friend of Austin Larkin. Is he here?” She walked up to the woman, who held strips of willow in her hand.

“Nome. He ain’t here. He done been gone a long time.” She gestured Charlotte in out of the heat. The table was covered with stripped willow branches. Charlotte introduced herself and the woman responded, “I’m Edwina, living here to take care of Mr. Austin’s home while he be gone out West.”

“You’re weaving?” Charlotte looked on the benches around the table and saw a fine egg basket and several small round ones, perfect for bread—no, for her collection of old marbles. You could dip in your hand and let them run through your fingers. “How beautiful.”

“Yes’m. I pass the time. It’s lonesome out here. My husband’s gone all day.”

“I’m sorry. At least it’s peaceful.” Charlotte waved her hand at the window, a neglected garden with some half-dead geraniums around a birdbath, weed trees, an overgrown field swaying with grasses and black-eyed Susans. “Do you sell them?” She lifted a basket.

“Oh, no, just give them to my chirrun. They use them for this and that. Nobody would pay good money for a little ol’ basket like this.” She waved a taut oval basket woven from osier. “It’s just a old habit I got from my granddaddy.” Her long fingers looked as supple as the willow wands she wove.

“I’d like to call Mr. Larkin. We were in college at the same time, then we lost touch. Do you have his number out West?”

“Nome, I sure don’t. We don’t have no phone. He just turns up here now and then. I don’t think he plans on coming back home to live.”

“When was he here last? Did I just miss him?”

“I reckon it was last November. He came back for some bird huntin’. Would you like a glass of tea? I made some fresh this morning.”

“Why, thank you.” Charlotte examined the egg basket. Her church craft fair could sell these like hotcakes at Christmas. Austin or not, she’d be back to talk to Edwina later about making three dozen of these. Would she be interested? Edwina walked like a queen, stately in her big shoes. Slowly, she poured and, as though she were transporting communion wine, set down the glass in front of Charlotte. Her two bare rooms were immaculate. Through a door she saw her bed made up without a wrinkle, the white curtains (from old flour sacks?) crisp at the window. Charlotte felt a stab of admiration for her reclusive life far in the country, the practice of an art that sprang so naturally from the ground. Weaving baskets seemed a felicitous life. She imagined Edwina gathering her materials along the wet spots where willows grew. One could rest here, she thought. Her own life crowded her head—too many people, exhibits, the children, dinners, Mayhew’s business, clubs, commitments. Sometimes she felt like a monkey swinging from tree to tree. And her painting squeezed in around the edges. This egg basket with its ridge up the middle to keep the eggs from knocking against each other—what a piece of necessity and beauty. If Catherine were here, she would want to stay all afternoon and learn how Edwina worked. Sometimes she thought Catherine knew everything. But how? She sprang from a tight Protestant family, just as intent on saying no as Charlotte’s family had been. The paintings, don’t they tie you to them so you never want to get away? They had looked furiously at the Matisse book, dazzled. So divine, they rush all the way through you. No wonder Austin had worshiped her. Or do we project on the dead a knowledge of life unchallenged by their silence? Charlotte always wondered what she would have said, what she would have been, how they would have gone forward . . . Dead, Catherine became a never-opened safe-deposit box for the imagination.

Charlotte thanked Edwina and said she must be going. She was dying to look in the windows of the main house but waved and headed for her car. Edwina again stood in the doorway. “Wait a minute.” She turned back into the dark house and emerged holding the egg basket. “Take this. I’m glad you like it. Everybody’s got some eggs.”

 

AS CHARLOTTE PASSED THE POST OFFICE SIGN, she had an inspiration. Austin would have left a forwarding address. Obtaining it turned out to be easy. She simply said she was an old friend, had been to his house looking for him, and now wanted to write. The postmistress looked in her pigeonholes, took out an envelope, and copied his address. “He doesn’t get any mail anymore. He’s been gone too long. I think even the tax office forgot him.”

“How long has he been gone?” Charlotte glanced down: 1518 Whitman St., Palo Alto, California.

“Ah, he left during the war. He warn’t a plain soldier like everybody else. He flew some big planes. Then I heard he went out near San Francisco, something else to do with airplanes. So I heard. Comes back here every so often. He’s still a good-looking man.”

“Thank you so much.” So he’d left the South long before Catherine’s death. “Oh, what did he do when he lived here? I lost touch with him after college.”

“I believe he used to travel in sales, equipment for cotton mills. Then all the mills went bust ’cause of the Japanese, so I guess he made other plans.”

“Thanks again.” Amazing what you can find out, Charlotte thought, quite pleased with her detective work. What she would do with the information she had no idea. Regardless of the span of time, she just knew that Austin should know the news about Catherine. Maybe she would call him. No, too awkward. She would write, say she remembered him well, and since they both had loved Catherine, she wanted him to know.

Seeing Edwina made Charlotte want to get back to her studio over the garage, to sit under the skylight in front of the A-shaped window looking out at expanses of trees and a big sky. She would paint not the cunning basket filled with eggs, but Edwina herself, long and big-boned, outlined by the sun in the doorway, her eyes black as asbestos, something in her hand, something to give.

IN THE LONG SUMMER TWILIGHTS Marco walked in the fields around his archaeological site. Although the current excavation surely had more to reveal at the most conservative estimate, his guess was that the site was potentially on a vast scale. He hoped to extend funding so that he could start preliminary surveys of surrounding terrain even while his team’s work continued. He wanted to begin with one group carefully walking the transects along the contours, bag whatever turned up, then pinpoint a few places for trial digs. Already Marco had picked up a few scattered sherds, probably Roman. With endless land spreading around them, it was always fascinating that the ancients built right on top of what was there before. Many local Christian churches rested on Etruscan stone foundations; below that, probably something from the earlier Umbrians. The artesian springs in this area guaranteed long habitation.

The farmer would not be pleased. A neighboring farmer last year turned up a bronze cup incised with Etruscan writing. For months he had hidden it in his hay barn but had not been able to keep quiet about it in the piazza. The police eventually made a visit and he handed it over. If Marco found funding, and the Italian ministry granted him permission, the farmer would lose his tobacco crop. Even though he would be compensated, such invasion didn’t sit right with local farmers who feared for their land becoming tourist attractions.

This particular gently terraced hillside would have been appealing in any era. Wide swaths of olive trees interspersed by rangy old grapevines stepped down to flat cultivation. Marco skirted the tobacco plants, keeping to the field’s edge, where the plow had left a ridge. He walked to unkink after a day at the site and to pass time until he could meet friends for dinner. Ginger had just called him at his mother’s. Midday there and she was just getting up. She told him about finding the film and her mother’s drawings and notebook. She and J. J. had made candy and drunk some icy vodka, then gone in the river late at night. “Don’t worry, we’ve done it all our lives,” she had said.

He missed her. During the day he was too busy, but he missed seeing her concentrating on her work, her startled look when he called to her, her hair falling around her face until she reached back, swirled it around, and pinned it up. He’d moved two interns to the area she’d been working and half hoped they would not find anything. When she returned, she would unearth a gold bee or a pot handle with datable glaze. Mostly, he found that he wanted to reach for her. Her physical absence felt solid, almost like a presence. Her life over there in the South was another world for him. The brother sounded dangerous, a man cut off like that. He unbuttoned his shirt to catch some of the breeze. That Ginger had knocked around in San Francisco, New York, had been married, all this seemed more inert as facts than the old chronology of sequential settlements on this land. He sensed her damage. He’d known her five months before she’d made love with him. Other American girls were stepping out of their clothes after coffee in a bar. Sometimes her eyes fixed somewhere beyond him—she travelled, he thought, over there, or she would turn silent in a group. But he felt her slowly changing, loving her work, quick to retreat but trusting him. Over time, he thought, she would simply walk away from the past, close the book on the dark story of her parents. His love would be a light to flood her bones.

“Should I go there to Georgia?” he’d asked. She insisted that she was fine. Her voice sounded remote. She would be back soon, maybe next week. The site would be closed for August, a reprieve for him to catch up on paperwork and for the team to go off on holiday. He and Ginger could go to Elba for a few days and lie in the healing sun. This made sense, but something was gnawing at him. She was the only woman he’d ever wanted to dance with in the kitchen, the pasta water coming to a boil, steaming the windows, his old albums, Johnny Mathis, Dominico Modugno, the Platters, the big crooners, a green-checked tablecloth, a bowl of sliced tomatoes, his uncle’s wine in a yellow pitcher. Laughing, speculating about the dig, Ginger licking sauce on her thumb. I haven’t loved her enough, he thought. What is life but this? Choices made early in a relationship determine the course. To wait for her, as she asked, is that the right choice?

WHEN GINGER WOKE UP, J. J. remembered to show her the bone fish spear. “I found this the day before I came home and saw Scott sitting on the dock looking hangdog, the bearer of bad tidings, which he sure as hell was.” Ginger sipped the scalding-hot coffee that had sat too long while she slept an exhausted sleep. He held the tiny spear. “Isn’t this something?”

Ginger jumped up. Immediately, he saw the joy in her face. “Oh, beautiful!” She held it in the palm of her hand. “It’s so precise, so gorgeous. Where did you find it?”

“Near the dock. This is the best thing I’ve found since that shark’s tooth on the sandbar.” J. J. even showed her his drawings of the spear.

Ginger knew that since sharks regrow their teeth many times, they are the fossil most frequently found from the ancient Eocene sea, though this far south, not many turned up. The pointed shark tooth sat on the mantel, almost as big as the palm of a hand. She picked it up, held it beside her jaw. “As old as it gets. Imagine him trolling that warm sea eons ago. Chomping on something finny. I find that incomprehensible, like black holes in space, and other galaxies.”

“Incomprehensible that we can pick it up on a sandbar.” Ginger is the only person who can travel with me, he thought, travel around an object, travel back and forth in time. “Gin, I think we should take a ride.”

“Where? I know—to Charlotte Crowder. Let’s call her.”

 

CHARLOTTE’S NEIGHBORHOOD LOOKED FAMILIAR, though they barely remembered going there. J. J. recalled a Thanksgiving, when the turkey was burned outside and raw inside. Ginger remembered the Crowder children’s huge white dog.

When they got out of the car, Charlotte ran to them, hugging and exclaiming. She was breathless and immediately began telling them that her cat had been caught in a mulberry tree all morning while she’d been gone, and she came home and had to climb a ladder which slipped and sent her, one hand on the cat, sliding sideways. “I am so glad to see you. We have a lot to talk about—years to talk about.” She put her hand to her throat, hoping they did not hear the catch in her voice. They had not come to see her cry. She led them into her sunroom piled with books and newspapers. The cat slept soundly on the flowered cushion of a wicker rocker. “That’s Jasmine, the culprit.” She brought in a tray with tea and cookies. “Ginger, when you were little, you used to drink only ice water with a spoon of cane syrup in it.”

“I did? I don’t remember that.”

“And J. J., I still have a letter you wrote me when you were seven. You asked for two books for Christmas. You said, ‘Please, may I have two this year?’ I remember so many things.” Again her eyes smarted as she bent over the tea glasses. Parents remember the ten thousand things a child says and does. Ginger and J. J. had no one to restore the fragments of their early days to them. “How proud your mother—and your father, I must say—would be to see you! You’re both fabulously beautiful and I can still see your tiny faces—both so bright—in your faces right now. Some people lose their youngest faces . . .” She realized she was starting to chatter.

J. J. told her about seeing her name in the sheriff’s report. “You were the only one who doubted the suicide. We read that you insisted that he investigate. Of course, we never knew that. What did you think at the time?”

“You know I never thought Wills would have done something like that in a million years, but I thought someone had stepped into the house, picked up the gun. Maybe a robber, a gypsy, some crazed goon or half-wit. Your mother, I knew then, never would have destroyed herself and, I imagine, a hunk of your lives.”

“Understatement,” J. J. said.

“Your mother, if you’d like to hear, was an extraordinary person. In all my life, I never met anyone like her. I feel I’ve been looking for her in my friends ever since and they all come up short.”

“We would like to hear,” Ginger said. “We found one of her notebooks and two sketch books yesterday and read them last night. We are just getting to know her again. It’s so strange, how suicide cut her off from our memories.” Ginger loved looking at Charlotte. Mother’s age, this is how she would be. Welcoming us in a sunny room, telling us some anecdotes about ourselves, pouring tea.

Charlotte told them about college days at GSCW, their passions for art nouveau, modern dance, clothes, and clay soul jugs. Catherine, they learned, had collected folk pottery. She told them about Catherine’s toast-colored coat with a lynx collar, which made her face look wild and fresh. “Sophomore year,” she told them, “Catherine was elected the Kappa Alpha Rose at Emory. She wore a sleek white evening dress and was serenaded by the entire fraternity dressed to kill in Confederate uniforms. Your daddy, a glamorous med student, was her date. She snowed him.” The cat woke up and climbed onto Charlotte’s lap. “Oh, and Catherine was a daddy’s girl. That man doted on her, spoiled her, your grandmother thought.” She wondered how she could convey what it was like to spend a simple hour in Catherine’s company.

J. J. picked up the egg basket from the coffee table. He held it up for Ginger to see. “Look, this is real fine.” Ginger leaned to him and together they looked intently as J. J. slowly turned the basket. Charlotte saw the look of familiar connection that passed between them. That rare, wordless bond that spoke more clearly than words. As she saw this, she felt less sad. They had lost so much of their mother, lost so much of their own childhoods. And Wills’s downfall, what an H-bomb that must have been. But irrefutably Ginger and J. J. had each other. Who knows, the choice relationship of their lives. And maybe it would not have been so if their parents had been able to raise them. She wondered if they ever had realized that. Something taken, but something given.

Charlotte heard Mayhew come into the kitchen. He peered in the sunroom. “I’ll be damned. I am so glad to see you children—of course you’re not children.” He embraced them and clapped his hands. “You’re staying for dinner. I insist. I’ve got steaks to throw on the grill and Charlotte is a master of the baked potato.” He disappeared into the pantry.

Charlotte heard herself launch into the awkward subject. “There was someone else—Austin Larkin, who went to Tech—mad for her. This may seem like a myth or a dream, but once he flew over the campus and scattered thousands of roses for Catherine. This was right after her engagement to Wills our sophomore year. I always wondered if Austin overwhelmed her, while Wills seemed more like someone to build a life around.”

“Austin,” Ginger faltered. “What a fabulous, fabulous gesture. I’d run away with anyone who scattered roses from an airplane for me.” Marco, she thought, he’s that tender, too. Ginger rubbed her lapis ring over her lips. A flash of insight hit her. Marco was her inheritance from her mother, maybe she now could let herself have a big love. She smiled at Charlotte.

How lovely she is, Charlotte thought. That silky hair and natural, sort of bony elegance. Ginger saw the admiration in Charlotte’s eyes and felt expansive. “This Austin comes up in her notebook, which was written during the war. I wish you would read it and tell us what you think.” She didn’t speculate. She took the sketch books and notebook out of her bag, along with the film reel. “And this was in the box, too. Do you have a projector?”

“We do, and miles of film of the children. Let’s look when it gets dark.”

“We should call Lily.”

“Sugar, you go up to my room and call her, and, J. J., if you would give Mayhew a hand, then I’ll sit here and finish my tea and read.”

From the first page of the sketch books, Charlotte was mesmerized by the prolific drawings. She grasped with firsthand knowledge Catherine’s hard, joyful work. By the time she started the notebook, she was so jittery she wanted to jump out of her skin from the shock of seeing her own name, reading the chronicle of that elusive time, plunging into Catherine’s delicate, reserved emotional terrain, and more, imagining J. J. and Ginger discovering the notebook lying on top of all the years of silence.

 

OVER DINNER, Ginger, swamped with fatigue, leaned her elbows on the table. Mayhew’s steak, doused with his own Ol’ Hoss sauce, was delicious, and she didn’t know how much she’d missed big baked potatoes piled with sour cream, butter, and chives. She would have to make them for Marco someday, she thought distractedly, if she ever could find sour cream in Italy. Tired, she ate slowly but with her usual relish. Charlotte seemed to forget about the plate in front of her as she described trips she and Catherine made up to Tech for dances, her plans for her garden, and the antics of her three grandchildren. Gently, she asked about Wills, not knowing whether the children had conceived of him as a possible murderer, an idea hardly to be avoided now.

J. J. said, “He’s like a big, bad baby in a high chair, banging his cup. It’s hard to explain. Who was he back then? What was he capable of? Maybe you’d know more than we do.”

Charlotte nodded. “He never . . . He saved people. I remember many times when he got up from the table to rush out to someone passing a kidney stone or someone who’d fallen off a ladder. He ignored Big Jim’s business—not many men would—in order to help people.” She didn’t say that in her experience she’d often found that someone’s strongest characteristic has an equal and opposite component. She simply did not know how far Wills could be driven. Under the wrong circumstances, couldn’t almost anyone turn murderous or cruel?

Mayhew set up the projector on the end of the table, and Charlotte pulled the draperies, closing out the night gathering on the garden. Ah, there was Austin as she remembered him, against the pink oleanders at Carrie’s Island, where she and Mayhew had spent many weekends with their three children. The World’s Fair footage passed, then the film abruptly shifted. When the yellow house appeared on her dining room wall, she recalled immediately the peeling paint on Austin’s farmhouse. “Austin’s porch,” she said. Mayhew looked at her, frowning. She remembered that she had not had a chance to tell him about going to Stonefield. “I’ll explain in a minute.” She fell silent, they all did, when Catherine loomed on the wall, filling the space between the windows, her face incandescent in slashes of sunlight.

Charlotte brought in for dessert a plate of barely thawed lemon squares, and Mayhew put on a pot of coffee. “I went to Stonefield—only this morning, seems like a week ago. She described the house and Edwina, then her inspiration to stop at the post office. “Austin lives in California, has for umpteen years, the same town as Stanford.”

“You know what they say.” Mayhew pushed back his chair. “God tilted America at the Rockies and everything loose rolled west.”

Ginger wondered if, twenty years from now, she would have the confidence in her instinct to pick up an action on someone’s behalf the way Charlotte had this morning, when she acted on her understanding of a friend from way back in college.

J. J. was admiring Charlotte, too. No logic, he thought. Plain blood knowledge.

Reading the notebook had confirmed everything Charlotte had not fully suspected. Catherine had met no mysterious stranger; she was seeing Austin during the war. But why? Charlotte knew she was devoted to Wills. Now this new, gaping question was opening before all their eyes. Mayhew and probably 99 percent of the people she knew would disagree, but Charlotte thought Austin as a father might be not so bad a discovery, considering the fate of Wills. If a family secret were brought into the light, which is surely a strong congenital abhorrence of all southerners, no matter how old or insignificant the secret, there might be an unexpected way forward.

Privately, in college she had longed for Austin herself, but since he already loved Catherine the possibility was totally unrealistic. She had hardly articulated her infatuation to herself. Senior year, she’d met Mayhew. They were instant friends, a friendship that strengthened on her part. On his, he’d been drawn to Charlotte with a migratory pull, the way sea turtles guide themselves back across the ocean toward their island of origin.

Charlotte opened her handbag and found the address the postmistress had written on a forwarding slip. She handed it to J. J., insisting that they spend the night, but Ginger said they must get back to Lily. When Ginger called from upstairs earlier, Lily was having dinner with Eleanor. Then she let it slip that Tessie had spent last night at the House. Ginger and J. J., so caught up with their own emotions, hardly had considered Lily beyond her initial shock and injured hand, nor had they thought that she might be frightened to stay alone. “I feel so guilty,” Ginger said as they got in the car. “She said she and Tessie sat up in their bathrobes last night watching Wuthering Heights. Is there something we can take her?”

“At this time of night? A fifth of Southern Comfort? Let’s think about it tomorrow, Scarlett, my dear.”

“J. J., the idea of Lily and Tessie drinking cocoa in the den and watching a movie. I never thought of them like that.”

“Best of friends. They just don’t know it.”