The Book of Lost Friends(28)

Though both show the unmistakable signs of neglect, the house and yard are magnificent, even from the back. Epic oaks and pecans line the drive and shield it overhead. At least a dozen magnolias stretch upward, their branches capped with thick green leaves. Crape myrtles with intertwined trunks as big around as my leg, antique roses, oleander, althea, milk-and-wine lilies, and spindly four-o’clocks scribble riotous patches of color alongside the old Grand House, pressing free from the artificial confines of flower beds and spilling onto the grass. The sweet scent of nectar wars with the salty air of the oncoming storm.

Presiding silently over its dominion, the stately house stands perched one story off the ground on a raised brick basement. A narrow wooden staircase up the back provides the closest entry to a wide, breezy wraparound gallery framed by thick white columns that lean inward and outward like crooked teeth. The decking groans underfoot as I traverse it, the sound mingling with a mystical, uneven melody of clinking metal and glass.

I find the music’s source out front. Near a pair of grand staircases that circle from the ground in ram’s horn fashion, a wind chime of forks and spoons clatters softly, testing the worn bit of twine that suspends it. Beside the porch, a barren tree strung with multicolored bottles adds a smattering of indiscriminate high notes.

I knock on the door, peek through the sidelight window, say “Hello?” a few times, even though it’s clear that, while the yard has been mowed and the flower beds around the house kept up, no one lives here and no one has for a while. The circular patterns of rain-spattered dust cover the porch floor, disturbed only by the tracks I’ve made.

I know it instantly when I reach the window to the room LaJuna told me of. I don’t even lean close to the thick, wavy glass or shield the slight glare from the going sun. I just stand before the double glass doors, stare through the grid of cobweb-laced wood and glass, and take in rows upon rows upon rows of books.

A literary treasure trove, waiting to be mined.





CHAPTER 7


HANNIE GOSSETT—AUGUSTINE, LOUISIANA, 1875

It’s dark when I come awake, not even a moon splinter or a gas lamp or a lit pine knot to see by. Can’t think where I am, or how I come to be here, only that my neck’s sore, and there’s a numb spot on my head where it’s rested on rough wood. I reach up to rub it, and half figure I’ll find a bald place. Back in our refugee years on the Texas plantation, when work was hard and help had got thin after the swamp fever and the black tongue killed some and others run off, even us from the house worked the cotton patch right alongside the field hands. The job for the children was toting water. Buckets on our heads, back and to, back and to, and back again. So many buckets, the wood rubbed us bald on top long before the harvest.

But there’s hair on my head when my fingers test it. Hair sheared short so I don’t have to trouble with it, but I’ve got on a hat instead of a headscarf. John’s field hat. My mind trips a step or two, then breaks to a run, comes back to where I am now. In a alley, dead asleep in a hogshead barrel that’s still got the boiled sweet smell of cane syrup.

Ain’t supposed to be dark, and you ain’t supposed to be still here, Hannie—that’s what hits me first.

Where’s Missy?

Where’s Juneau Jane?

A noise comes close by, and I know it’s what woke me. Somebody’s unbuckling the traces and tugs, unhooking Old Ginger from the calèche. “You want us to roll the wagon off in the river, Lieutenant? She’s heavy enough, she’ll sink mighty good. Nobody know any different, come mornin’.”

A man clears his throat. When he talks, I try to decide if he’s the same one who took Missy and Juneau Jane in the building hours ago. “Leave it. I’ll have it disposed of before morning. Load the horses onto the Genesee Star. We’ll wait until we’re past the mouth of the Red and over the state line into Texas to sell them. The gray is the sort too easily recognized nearby. An ounce of care saves a kettle of trouble, Moses. Remember that, or it’ll be your hide.”

“Yas’ir, Lieutenant. I remember that.”

“You’re a good boy, Moses. I reward loyalty as verily as I punish the lack of it.”

“Yas’ir.”

Somebody’s light-fingering Old Ginger and the gray! My body comes full alive so quick I can barely keep from jumping out, hollering. We need the horses to get us back home, and beside that, I was left to watch out for the stock and the carriage. If Missy Lavinia don’t do me in, Old Missus will when she finds out. I might as soon be sunk in the river right alongside of that calèche, and take John and Jason and Tati with me. Dead from drowning’s better than starving to death. Old Missus will make sure we can’t get work nor a meal anyplace. Some way, this mess with Missy Lavinia will be all my doing, before it’s over.

“You find her driver boy yet?” the man asks.

“Nah, sir. Reckon he run off.”

“You find the boy, Moses. Get rid of him.”

“Yas’ir. I do that directly, boss.”

“See that you don’t stop until it’s done.”

The door opens and closes and the Lieutenant goes into the building, but Moses stays. The alley’s so quiet, I don’t dare even get my legs bunched under me to run.

Can he hear me breathing?

These men ain’t just some horse thieves. There’s doings here that’s worse by far. Something tied to that man Missy and Juneau Jane went to see, Mr. Washburn.