“Most cats don’t travel well,” Tony had said, and Beatrice seems determined to prove him right, her high-pitched cries starting the minute I put her in the car, becoming louder at each intersection—she doesn’t like moving, but she doesn’t like stopping, either—as I drive south on Highway 17 toward Edisto.
“Settle down, honey,” I say, and she glares at me through the holes in the carrier as if to say, Don’t call me ‘honey.’ But as we leave the heavy traffic behind and cross the Wallace River she’s calmer, her complaints less dramatic, and by the time we turn onto Toogoodoo Road, she’s quiet.
Does she know we’re headed toward Edisto Island? I remember reading about a lost cat who walked two hundred miles to find home. My sense of direction can’t compare: I frequently get lost when I leave the Charleston peninsula, despite instructions from the GPS lady (I finally had to disable the thing; she was driving me crazy). “The reason you get lost,” my ex, Joe, once said, “is that you always want to be somewhere else.” He was right: I was always imagining what it would be like to live somewhere else. Out West, I’d fantasize, or Alaska. “Or maybe you don’t really want to live someplace else,” he said, “you want to be someone else.” And he was right again. “Remember, even if you manage to get a change of venue, you’re still going to be the same old self!”
Edisto is the kind of place, only an hour from Charleston, where I can imagine being someone else. The state highway winds through the country: woodland and marsh, farms, a few houses. Sometimes the road seems about to disappear into the marsh and I’m sure I’m really lost this time, but then I recognize the intersection. Beatrice, on the seat beside me, is lying down but alert, her head erect. When I make the left onto Highway 174 she lets out a long satisfied “meow,” as if to say: Yes, I really am going home!
It’s been years since I’ve driven out here—the last time wasn’t long after my divorce from Joe, when Frank McGill took me to a New Year’s Day oyster roast. I’d accepted the invitation only because Frank, a fellow public defender, insisted he was just trying to cheer me up. I wasn’t ready to start dating again, and wondered if I’d ever be. But at just about this point in the drive—the bridge over the Edisto River—Frank confided that he’d had a crush on me since law school. Poor thing, his wooing skills were about on par with his courtroom skills, his argument pathetically sincere but hopeless. I did my best to state my case without crushing him: It has nothing to do with you, Frank, I’m just not ready.
By the time we arrived at the party I was desperate to disappear into the crowd. I found a place at one of the tables with people I didn’t know. We stood around in the cold, stamping our feet and poking around in the pile of picked-over oysters and waiting for the next load to be shoveled onto the table. When they came I busied myself prying a big one open, finding the slit between the halves of the sharp shell, twisting the knife until the thing revealed its glistening meat. Shucking oysters is dangerous business even with gloves, and since I was a determined vegetarian, I was violating my principles. I remember the pain as the knife slipped, jabbing my wrist just above the glove.
There was a lot of blood, and the hostess insisted I come inside the house to clean the wound, and then—I should have known he might be there—Joe was next to me, his arm touching my elbow. “Probably won’t need stitches,” he said, “but you ought to get some antibiotic on it.” There was a woman with him, one of those dainty creatures who manage to look petite even in multiple layers of heavy clothing. “Sally, you remember Susan Harmon?” I nodded dumbly, closed the bathroom door, and cried while I let the hot water run over the cut. I convinced Frank to take me home early. “I have a terrible headache,” I said.
I did have a headache, but it wasn’t from the pain of the wound. I’d been undone by seeing Joe with another woman. It was totally foreseeable, of course. He was young, good-looking, affable, an associate in his family’s venerable Charleston firm. He was still living in our apartment, but would soon, with his parents’ help, buy a place of his own a couple of blocks away from their house on Church Street. As far as they were concerned he’d made only one mistake in his life, and that was to marry me, that strange ungainly girl from upstate, who was definitely not, as they would say, “our kind of people.” She was smart, yes, but why on earth did she want to work at the public defender’s office? Thank God she’d done him the favor of leaving him—after only a year, can you imagine!—though everyone said she’d lost her mind. If she thought she’d ever find a husband better than their Joe, she had another think coming.
And now I look for the turnoff to Oak Bluff Plantation Road. (“It’s a dirt road, on your right, about half a mile after you pass the Presbyterian church,” said Gail Sims, the caretaker, who’s meeting me at the house. “The road’ll wind around and you’ll see a coupla trailers and then an old store and not much after that you’ll come to the gate. Just push it open—it’s not locked.” As we pass through the gate the cat lifts her chin, looks straight ahead. She can’t see what I see—the glimpse of gray-white behind the row of oaks, the red roof against the clear sky—but she knows where we’re going.
The house isn’t as large as I’d imagined, and badly needs painting. It seems very plain, boxlike, until I realize I’ve approached the back side of the house. I follow a brick walkway around to the front, and then I can see the glory of the place: the view from the bluff overlooking the river. There’s a wide piazza running the length of the house on the main floor, reachable by a long, wide flight of stairs.
I’m looking up the stairs at what must be the front door, dreading the thought of having to lug Beatrice in her carrier, when a young woman appears at ground level, right in front of me, as if she’s come from nowhere.
“Oh, precious!” she says to the cat. “I’ve been missing you!” And to me: “I’m Gail. Come on in.” She gestures toward what seems to be a basement door, under the stairs. “We can talk down here if that’s okay—save you the climb. It’s kind of a mess upstairs, anyway.” She leads me into a large, musty-smelling kitchen, one countertop completely covered with magazines and newspapers. “Watch your head. In the old days this part of the house was just used for storage,” she explains, “but Lila turned it into an apartment for herself, turned the storeroom into this kitchen, and she stayed down here most of the time. This room over here,” she says as we cross a narrow hallway, “is where she did her writing. Lila, she was always writing. I told her she should get a real desk—you know, with drawers to put stuff—but she just wouldn’t hear of moving her papers and things off that old table. I did my best to help her keep things straight, but she wouldn’t let me touch them.” Indeed, there are piles of papers on the long table behind the sofa. But despite its clutter, the room is inviting and warm, with a fire going strong in the fireplace. “Billy says this is the only part of the house that’s livable.”
“Billy?”
“My fiancé. We been together a while now.” She looks about thirty, boyish, her wheat-colored hair cut short, her jeans clean but showing some wear and tear. “He works on the shrimp boats.” She moves some magazines off the sofa, gives the cushion a swat. Dust rises, swirls in the light from the fire. “You can set right here. Sorry the place is such a mess. She wouldn’t let anybody touch it while she was alive, but I shoulda come down here and cleaned up after she passed. I guess I—I just couldn’t get it through my head that she wasn’t coming back.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, “this shouldn’t take long.”
“Time to let you out of jail,” Gail says to Beatrice, opening the door to the carrier. “Come here, you precious thing, come to Gail.” She sits on the wide hearth across from me and the cat settles in her lap. “There! You know where you belong, don’t you, precious?” The fire crackles behind her.
“So,” I take a notepad out of my purse, “you understand why I’m here?”
“I heard about the will.”
“Actually, it’s a trust.”
“Well, whatever it is, I heard it’s a lot of money. Don’t it beat all?” She strokes Beatrice under the chin, which the cat clearly enjoys. “Who’da thought she was so loaded?”
“Did Mrs. Mackay discuss the terms of the trust with you before she died?”
“She sure didn’t. Lila was real private about her money.”
“So, how did you learn about it?” I ask.
“Word kind of gets around. I was knocked right off my rocker when I heard. I mean, you just look around.” Her hand, dirt under the fingernails, sweeps through the air. “Does it look like she had a lotta money? Anyway, I don’t know much about them other two, you know, that she put in the will or the whatever, but you can best believe that me and Beatrice here, we’ve always been buddies. Just like Lila—Miz Mackay—and me, we was good buddies.”
“I can tell she likes you.” Beatrice’s purr is loud enough to hear over the whistle of the hot air going up the flue. “Would you be willing to care for the cat, then?”
“Oh, sure. I’d give her a good home. Billy and me got a three-bedroom mobile over there off Oyster Factory Road, which will be fine until we can build—”
“But you understand that under the terms of the trust, the caretaker must live here with the cat.”
“That just don’t seem necessary,” she says. “A cat don’t need a big ole place like this, with the ghost and all.”
“Ghost?”
“I never did see him, but Lila did. She always said she wasn’t afraid of him—said it was a friendly ghost, but a ghost is a ghost as far as I’m concerned.”
“So you wouldn’t want to live here?”
“Like I said, it don’t seem necessary, but then again, what am I saying?” She stops herself, biting her lip. “Billy and me, we’ll do anything we have to do to take care of this precious animal!”
“How old is the house?”
“Plenty old. Like, about 1800, I think.”
“You work on the island, is that right?”
“Part-time over there at the nursery.”
“You take care of children?”
She laughs. “Oh, no! It’s the plant kind of nursery. That’s how I got to know Lila. She’d come every now and then to buy stuff for her garden—it’s not much now, but you should see it in spring and summer—and one time we got to talking about cats, and I told her about my cats and she said she needed somebody to look after Beatrice when she’d go into Charleston overnight, and I said sure, be happy to. And then I started helping her out with the grass-mowing and the garden, and I got really close to her.”
“How did she die?”
“Cancer. Kept that a secret except for me and Billy. Wouldn’t do chemo, though from what she told me, it probably wouldn’t have done any good anyway. In the end it was a heart attack. A blessing, I guess. Right out there in the rose garden. She loved her roses. Her roses, her writing, and Beatrice here. That’s what kept her going.”
“How many cats do you have?”
“Two.”
“So when you’d take care of Beatrice, did you bring your cats here?”
“Billy stayed with them. Lila—Miz Mackay—wanted Beatrice to stay at home, so I’d come over here for a night or two when she went into Charleston. And Billy don’t like this house, anyway. I’m not, you know, suspicious … superstitious or whatever, but he was really freaked out when I told him about the ghost.”
“But I thought you said you hadn’t seen the ghost.” I look down at my notes so that she won’t see the smile that’s tugging at the corners of my mouth.
“No, but like I said, Lila told me about him. She always said he wouldn’t hurt a flea, but Billy—”
“So you’d prefer not to live here?”
“Not unless we have to. Like I said, Beatrice would be fine at our place, wouldn’t you, precious?” Gail strokes the cat’s back. Beatrice’s eyes are closed, her body relaxed. “She’d get along fine with SpongeBob and SquarePants. They behave themselves pretty good most of the time.… Anyway, I think I could do as good a job as anybody, with Beatrice, I mean. Does the will or whatever say we definitely got to live here?”
“The trust states … let me see, I have a copy … that ‘the chosen caregiver shall reside with Beatrice, during Beatrice’s lifetime, at my home … and shall endeavor to provide Beatrice with the same lifestyle, routine, and emotional environment as she has become accustomed to in my care.’ What do you think that means?”
“Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I thought ‘environment’ is about the outside, but Beatrice never did spend much time outside. I know the ‘routine’ thing is important, though, for a cat.”
“What’s her routine?” I’m taking notes: Beatrice comfortable with Gail. Gail’s affection for her seems genuine.
“She likes to sleep with Lila—I mean, before—but if I take care of her I guess she’ll sleep with me and Billy.”
“That wouldn’t upset your cats?”
“Oh, they’ll be okay after everybody gets adjusted. You want to see upstairs? Everybody always wants to see the upstairs, it being so historic and all.”
“Sure,” I say, though I don’t really care for a tour, “but let me finish up with my questions.”
“I guess that’s what lawyers do,” she says. “They ask a ton of questions!”
“We were talking about the cat’s routine.”
“Right. She wakes up pretty early, wants something to eat. She’ll walk around her empty bowl until you give her something, acts like she’s starving to death! Lila would always say, wait until supper-time, feed her once a day, but as fat as she is—the cat, I mean—looks like she broke her own rule, so when I had her—I gotta tell the truth—sometimes I spoiled her, gave her a little something in the morning. And then she’d pretty much sleep the rest of the day, unless it was story time.”
“Story time?”
“Yeah, I know it sounds crazy, but Lila would read her stories. There’s one of the books right there, beside you.” Atop a stack of newspapers there’s an old book, with a brown leather cover, faded gold letters on the binding: Aesop’s Fables. “It’s the darnedest thing, I could swear Beatrice understands it. The one about a cat and a fox—that’s her favorite.”
“Maybe she just liked the sound of Mrs. Mackay’s voice.… You said you work part-time. What about Billy?”
“When he’s not shrimping, he takes people out on fishing charters. Right now things are kinda slow.… Let me show you upstairs.” She’s insistent. “Kinda run-down, but interesting … all those antiques and all.”
“Okay, sure.”
“We’ll just let Beatrice stay right here where it’s warm. Don’t worry, she’ll be fine. Won’t you, precious?” The cat opens her yellow eyes briefly as she’s transferred from lap to hearth, then closes them again.
I follow Gail up the wooden staircase to the main floor. She moves with a self-assured, muscular grace. It’s hard to believe she’s afraid of anything, much less a ghost. “You see what I mean?” We’ve reached the landing, which is really a central hall. “In the old days they built the houses like this—two big rooms on each floor. The kitchen used to be in a separate building, but it burned down a long time ago. That there used to be the living room, I guess, but Lila only used it when she had company. Like I said, in the last few years she spent most of her time downstairs.”
The room is huge, with twelve-foot ceilings. Between the two long windows overlooking the river there’s a floor-to-ceiling mirror crowned with gold-painted cherubs; on the opposite wall, a fireplace with a marble mantelpiece. From the chandelier, cracks spread out across the ceiling; in one corner a large chunk of plaster has fallen away, revealing the lath skeleton underneath. Matching sofas—Victorian, I’m guessing—face each other around the fireplace. One’s covered with books and papers, the other draped with an old blanket. Along one wall, surrounding both north-facing windows, are glass-covered bookcases crammed with books.
Gail points to the missing piece of ceiling: “It’s kind of a maintenance nightmare, this place. Like I said, I can do a lot, but she wouldn’t let me touch the plaster, said it needed a specialist. I found a guy in Charleston who could do it but she said he was too high. You know old people—I guess even the ones that got plenty of money, they don’t want to part with it. So the house just kind of got away from her. I think that’s part of the reason she spent most of her time downstairs—that, and she didn’t have to deal with the stairs. She even got to where she slept down there, on the sofa, so she wouldn’t have to climb up to the bedroom. This over here,” she continues, leading me back across the hall, “is the dining room, but she quit using it a long time ago.” The table is probably twenty feet long, covered with papers and books. “You want to see the bedrooms?”
We go up another flight of stairs. The banister shakes a little as I steady myself. “Wow,” I say when we get to the top, the landing above the central hall below. The view from the huge window is spectacular: down the wide lawn, maybe a hundred yards, to a point where a dock stretches across the marsh to the river.
“You can catch pretty good crabs off that dock. She used to love to pick crabs. Used to eat them all the time. Weeks would go by and she’d eat nothing but crabs and cole slaw! I used to help her with the net, but then she got too wobbly to walk out there. I said, I’ll do it myself, but in the last coupla years she quit eating them anyway, said she couldn’t bear to see them go into the boiling water.… Anyway, if you look way, way out there you can see the ocean. Over here’s her bedroom, but like I said, when it got near the end she didn’t get up here much.” This room is the same size as the living room below, with a high four-poster bed. “She still kept most of her clothes in that chifforobe. There’s some fancy stuff in there, but kind of old-fashioned, like those long white gloves ladies used to wear, know what I mean? You want to see?”
“No, thanks.” I feel like an intruder already.
“And around here’s the bathroom.… There’s one in the basement, too, which is the one she mostly used.… And this”—we’re on the other side of the house now—“is the guest room. Kind of a wreck, so I guess it’d been a while since she had anybody spend the night.” Another tall bed, this one covered with more books and papers.
“Watch yourself going down these steps.… They built these a long time ago, when people’s feet were a lot smaller! You have any more questions, you just let me know. Like I say, Billy and me, we’d be tickled to take care of Beatrice. Speaking of which, where are you, precious?”
Beatrice isn’t on the hearth. She isn’t on the sofa or in the kitchen.
“Precious!” Gail yells, and when that fails to produce the cat, she begs: “Come here, kitty-kitty. Come to Gail.” Nothing.
“Maybe she snuck past us on the stairs,” I suggest.
But when Gail opens the door to the backyard, there’s Beatrice—and she’s not alone.