The Guests on South Battery (Tradd Street #5)(19)
The Pinckney house was just brick, wood, and mortar, the longtime residence of a family I’d barely known and had no connection to. I found myself torn on how to advise my client, knowing the mental, physical, and bank-account-draining aspects of restoring a historic home.
I couldn’t look at Sophie, who was studying her surroundings as if she’d just found the Holy Grail, King Tut’s Tomb, and the Garden of Eden all rolled into one. Telling Jayne to sell it as is would break Sophie’s heart. And leave me vulnerable to her unique form of vengeance. The last time I’d advised a client to sell a house outside the protected historic district in dire need of repair and guaranteed to be demolished, Sophie retaliated by distributing flyers with a Photoshopped picture of me in a turban and one of my cell numbers printed on it, advertising free psychic readings. I’d had to change my number.
“Did you hear that?” Jayne asked when we finally made it to the second floor.
It had been a tinny, hollow sound. I would have thought I’d imagined it if Jayne hadn’t said anything. “Yes,” I said. “I think it’s coming from the room at the end of the hallway.”
“What noise?” Sophie asked from halfway up the stairs. She was busy studying the cypress wainscoting that had been stained to look like mahogany and ran up the wall on the side of the staircase. There were nicks and chips in the wood, little placeholders in time left by people long gone. Or so we’d like to think.
“It sounded mechanical,” Jayne said. “Like one of those old wind-up toys.”
I was already walking toward the end of the hall, feeling the odd sensation of being pursued from behind, and a separate, more gentle presence in front guiding me down the dark hall. I still couldn’t see, but I could feel both of them, sense them the way a plant follows the light. Whatever it was behind that door at the end of the hall, I needed to get there before Jayne.
I reached toward the round brass knob, but it was already turning, the door pushed open without any assistance from me. Jayne caught up to me in the doorway, apparently unaware that the door had opened on its own. We stared inside, taking in the large mahogany dresser covered in perfume bottles and tarnished silver frames filled with old photographs. A small end table was covered with an assortment of pill bottles and an empty water glass sitting on a lace doily. An enormous rice-poster bed held court next to it, the silk bedspread and pillows neatly placed on top. I thought of the housekeeper who’d taken care of the deceased owner, thinking she’d made the bed as her last duty to the old woman.
A cold breeze greeted us and I watched as Jayne shivered, wondering if she’d noticed the temperature drop in the already chilly room. I wanted to stamp my foot in frustration at my inability to see whoever it was. It wasn’t that I wanted to see them. But if I knew they were there, I’d rather see them than just feel them. It made it harder for them to sneak up on me and surprise me when I least expected it.
“This must have been Miss Pinckney’s room,” Jayne whispered, as if the old woman were still there, sleeping in the giant bed.
“You’re probably right,” Sophie said from behind us. “It’s the only room where the furniture isn’t covered. And there’s an air conditioner in one of the windows.” She crossed the room to a rocking chair in the corner near the window unit, an elegant piece of furniture with slender spindles and delicate rockers on the bottom. A small chest sat beside it, a stack of books teetering on its wooden surface. Sophie picked up the book from the top of the pile. “Apparently, either she or her nurse really liked Harlen Coben and Stephen King.”
“Too scary for me,” I said, not overlooking the irony. I began walking around the room and pulling open the heavy curtains to let in light, feeling oddly compelled to do so. Almost as if somebody were telling me to do it. Yet each time I grabbed a drapery panel to open it, I felt an opposing force trying to stop me. Jayne watched me with a furrowed brow as I wrestled with each window covering. “They seem to be stuck on something,” I explained, yanking one across the rod. “Don’t feel obligated to keep these.”
Sophie frowned at me. “I disagree. Those are Scalamandre, if I’m not mistaken. An exquisite reproduction of the originals, I would bet. Made to last, unlike so many things these days.”
“Was this Miss Pinckney?” Jayne asked. She stood by the dressing table, a large oval frame in her hands.
Peering over her shoulder, I saw a photograph of a beautiful young woman with a bouffant hairdo and thick black eyeliner, placing her in the late sixties or early seventies. She wore a white gown and gloves, and stood next to a young man only slighter older than she was. He resembled a young Robert Wagner—one of my mother’s old flames—and looked even more dashing in his white tie and tails.
“Yes, that’s her. And I’m thinking this was taken at her debut. She, my mother, and my mother-in-law, Amelia, made their debuts at the same time. She said that Button’s brother escorted her, since their father had died when they were little.”
“I’m pretty sure I never met her.” Jayne paused for a moment before carefully replacing it and picking up another, this one of three girls in Ashley Hall uniforms. Jayne pointed to the tall, thin girl in the middle, her bright blond hair held back by a headband, the edges of her shoulder-length hair flipped up. “I think this is her, too.”
I took the frame from her, noticing how faded the photograph was, the years leaching color from the paper and the images. I smiled. “And that’s my mother and mother-in-law on each side.”