The Guests on South Battery (Tradd Street #5)(68)
“Why are you smiling?” Jack said as he put his arm around me.
I looked up at him. “Oh, I don’t know. Just a feeling I have that we’re being watched over.”
Nola was already tucked into the limo with the other two girls and their dates, leaving Cooper by the back door to turn around and wave good-bye. I watched in horror as Jack made a V with his two fingers, pointed at his eyes with them, and then turned them toward Cooper.
I knocked his hand down and waved back at Cooper, whose smile had vanished. “Don’t mind him,” I called out. “Have fun!”
The limo pulled away and the parents left shortly afterward, leaving a tense Jack and me alone. “Nola asked me to help you chill out. We do have four empty hours to fill.” I stood on my toes and kissed him.
“Hold that thought,” he said, taking my hand and leading me to his study. “I’ve been dying to share this with you all day. After several postponements, I finally went into the family archives today at the Charleston Museum, and I think I might have found something interesting.”
He flipped on the banker’s lamp on the corner of his desk and began to riffle through sheets of photocopied papers strewn over its surface. I closed my eyes, wishing I had a baby to sniff to help with the rising blood pressure. “Apparently, Rosalind—Button’s mother—left all her correspondence to the museum, including her son Sumter’s. I don’t know if there’s anything significant in that collection, but I figured I’d go through it just in case, so I made copies. The donation was made after Anna’s death, probably a posthumous request made by Rosalind so as not to offend the living. Anyway, I’ve just had a chance to thumb through it so far, but I did find this. I’m assuming Button cut this from the Post and Courier when Anna died, and put it with her brother’s papers.”
I squinted to read the small, typed print, amazed as I usually was how newspapers could condense stories of giant proportions into a small square of text. I read it twice, just to make sure I was reading it correctly. I met Jack’s gaze. “Anna killed herself. How horrible.”
“She hanged herself in her daughter’s attic bedroom,” Jack added.
My eyes widened as I remembered the horrible presence in the house, the push and pull of two warring entities, and I couldn’t help wondering if I’d just discovered the identity of at least one of them.
“She must have been so distraught over Hasell’s death,” I said. “But if she’s the very unhappy ghost we’ve sensed in the house, we need to find out why, and why she’s still here.” I frowned. “Unfortunately, when only a dead person knows the answer, there’s only one way to find out what that is.”
CHAPTER 19
Ihuffed next to Sophie as we walked along one of the paths at Cannon Park, its asphalt edge bordered by an outrageously colorful flower bed full of plantings my dad would lust over but I couldn’t name. I pushed the jogging stroller with the twins, and Sophie carried Blue Skye in a carrier not unlike the one Rebecca used for her dog, Pucci.
Cannon Park was near Ashley Hall on Rutledge, so I’d suggested meeting Sophie after carpool drop-off to catch up. I missed seeing her as often as I had when we were both single and before children and spouses had taken up most of our lives. Not that I wanted her to read my tarot cards or tell me again why old windows were far superior to what was being made today, but I missed her company. There was something to be said for a friend who told you the truth about everything, even when you didn’t want to hear it. Even if that friend dressed like a Sesame Street character, and had suggested underwater birthing as a viable alternative to a normal hospital birth.
“Why are you walking so fast?” I panted, struggling to keep up.
“Why are you struggling? I thought you’d been walking with your mother, and you have a jogging stroller. I assumed that you could keep up.” She began pumping her arms and walking even faster.
“No fair—I’ve got two and you’ve only got the one. And besides, Jayne uses the jogging stroller just about every day, so I pretty much consider it hers now.”
She sent me an odd look but kept up her grueling pace without comment.
We had reached the tall, stately columns and front steps of the former museum building that had burned in 1981, leaving only the columns, all in a perfect semicircle, as a reminder of what had once stood there.
“Do you smell fire?” I asked, putting my hand over my nose because of the choking fumes.
“No,” Sophie said matter-of-factly. “You say that every time we’re here. You’re just smelling a fire that’s more than thirty years old.”
I brightened. “But I can smell it! That’s good to know. My psychic abilities seem to be fading in and out on me these days, for no apparent reason. There are times, like right now, when they’re as strong as ever, and then other times when I’m completely blocked out.”
“That is weird. I’d say it was hormones, but when you were pregnant it went away completely and didn’t come and go.”
“Maybe it’s postpartum hormones.”
Sophie finally slowed down so she could look at me. “Seriously? It’s been almost a year. They should have settled down by now and your mind and body gone back to the way they were.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “Some people take longer than others to bounce back.” I took a quick bite of my slightly squished doughnut from Ruth’s Bakery that I’d smuggled into the house. I’d bought a dozen when Ruth was visiting her sister for a couple of days and I’d taken advantage of her substitute. I’d kept them hidden in the back of the freezer, constantly checking to make sure Mrs. Houlihan hadn’t rearranged anything and discovered my stash, smuggling one in the waistband of my yoga pants whenever I left the house to exercise. I didn’t want to pass out because I didn’t have the sustaining fuel I needed.