Caroline clung tightly to the journal Cade found beneath the floorboard. She hadn't looked in it yet. She couldn't help but feel she was invading someone's privacy. However, Rachel had invaded her dreams, so it seemed only fair. The click of heels neared just outside the door. She quickly tucked the journal under the covers. April peeked around the door, and Caroline moaned in dread.
"Hello, daughter."
Caroline scoffed. "One would first have to be a mother to have a daughter."
April's indigo eyes narrowed, and for an instant she looked positively evil. "If you knew what was good for you, you'd watch how you spoke to me."
"What do you want, April?"
"Don't mind me, I was just checking to make sure you didn't have any other guys hidden in your bed again."
Eddie silently walked up behind April, but Caroline did not shift her focus from her stepmother. "Sorry to disappoint you. If I see any I'll be sure to send them to your room so you can accommodate them like you so willingly offered Trevor. Do you need to steal my phone again or do you have his number memorized?"
"It's too bad he didn't take me up on that offer. I could show him how a real woman treats her man."
"Really, April? Perhaps you could use those skills on your husband. I wouldn't mind experiencing that myself."
April winced and glared, knowing Caroline had provoked her nasty confession.
"Hey, Daddy," Caroline grinned wide. "Great to see you. Your timing is impeccable. April was just leaving."
April huffed, spun on her heel, and bumped into Eddie on her way out hardly fazing him.
"Hey, kiddo, how ya feelin'?"
"I'm okay."
"I'm glad to see you still have your wits about you." He nodded his head toward the direction April had retreated.
"What is her problem? Why does she hate me so much?"
"Don't let it bother you. She's upset with me because I added you as a beneficiary in my will. She'll get over it."
Caroline's eyebrows shot up. "Wow, you added me to your will? That's kind of a big deal, huh?"
"Sweetheart, you are kind of a big deal." His smile reached his bright eyes. "You are my daughter, my only biological child, my baby. I've missed out on the first quarter of your life, and that is something that will haunt me until the day I die. I love you. You deserve it as much as Claire and Remy. April's just mad because she signed a prenuptial agreement. If anything happens to me, then you, Claire, and Remy will get more of my inheritance than she will."
Caroline failed to hold back her amusement. She burst out in laughter and covered her mouth. Eddie laughed aloud and leaned down to kiss her cheek. "I did have a reason for coming to visit you. I thought you may be bored, so I brought you some of the old Fontenot photo albums to look through. I can go over them with you and point people out if you'd like. I don't know every bit of our family history, but I know most of it."
Caroline perked up. "You must have been reading my mind. That is exactly what I would love to do. I can't wait to see pictures."
"This is the oldest of the albums." He settled in the bed next to her and opened the ancient album. "I figured we would start with the oldest of the ancestors we have pictures of and work our way to the current ones. Is that okay?"
"That's perfect."
The first yellowed, sepia-toned photograph was of three people. "This is Jefferson and Madeline Fontenot with Jackson when he was about ten years old. Jefferson was my great, great, great grandfather."
"Cade would call him your G3 grandfather." Caroline said.
"Hmm. That's much easier to say. I'll keep that in mind." Eddie turned the page and her heart leapt into her throat with the next picture—a wedding portrait, and the woman in it looked just like Caroline, only a fuller, curvier model. "This is my G2 grandfather, Jackson, and his wife, Rachel." Eddie ran his finger along the edge of the photo, lost in thought, before he spoke again. "Rachel's story is a very interesting, very sad story. I never knew her personally, and I'm not sure why, but she holds a special place in my heart."
"I look just like her."
Eddie grinned. "Yes, you certainly do. I used to think I looked like her. . .until I saw you." On the opposite page was a single portrait of Rachel. "I think she may have been pregnant with my great grandfather, Joseph, in this picture. The story goes, she got pregnant on their honeymoon."
“She’s so young.” She knew the answer to the question she was about to ask, but wanted to hear what he had to say about it. "Why was her story sad?"
His eyes fell to the picture as he spoke. "All I know is what I was told, but she was a beautiful, vibrant and caring woman. She went out of her way to help anyone in need, and she was very smart. Apart from Rachel and my dad, longevity was prevalent in the Fontenot family. I was fortunate to know my great grandparents well into my adolescence. My great grandpa used to say his father would tell him she was a spitfire and anyone who crossed her had to deal with her wrath. Her story is sad because it's believed she developed severe depression after the birth of Joseph and couldn't deal with it."
"Postpartum depression is no joke, for sure."
Eddie pursed his lips together and focused on the picture. "Yeah, but they didn't even know what that was back then. They'd put people in the asylum for any random thing, so I guess she was lucky in a sense. She could've been locked away."
"What did she do instead?" Caroline knew the story from her dreams but wanted to hear what everyone else thought had happened to Rachel.
"Supposedly she closed herself up in her room and slowly began to go crazy. She became paranoid and harmful to herself. She eventually jumped out of the window of this very room and hit her head on a statue." He tilted his head thoughtfully. "Ironically, it's the same statue you hit your head on in the duck pond." Eddie lovingly caressed the side of her face and smoothed her hair. "Thank goodness it wasn't the same outcome."
Caroline's jaw dropped. "Wait, it was the same statue? Why was it in the duck pond?"
"After Rachel's death, Jackson couldn't stand the sight of it, but he also didn't feel comfortable throwing away a statue of the Virgin Mary, so he had it stored in one of the outbuildings. A few years ago when I had the duck pond remodeled, Beau had found the statue in the shed behind his cabin. He was doing the landscaping and asked if I wanted him to use it in the design. I didn't see any reason not to, so I told him to go ahead." He looked at the bandages wrapped around her head. "Now I wish I'd told him otherwise."
"Oh, Dad, you can't blame yourself for this. I tripped and fell backwards over a rock. It was my own clumsy fault, nobody else's." She studied his face, his worried scowl, and changed the focus.
"So do you believe Rachel killed herself?"
"I wouldn't know. I wish I could have known her. From the descriptions I heard growing up, she didn't sound like the type to do such a thing. I want to believe she didn't, but there's no way to be sure. Why else would she go flying out the window?" He chuckled, "You might have inherited your clumsiness from her. She could have accidentally leaned too far to look at something and fallen rather than jumped."
"Ha, ha. Very funny. I wasn't clumsy until I came down here." She turned the page and saw a group of men, two young and two old. "Who are these guys?"
"This is Jefferson and Jackson Fontenot with their business partners Peter and George Callahan."
"Huh! Callahan! That's Trevor's last name. What a strange coincidence." By now the crazy parallelism of everything no longer surprised her. It seemed to surround her family.
Eddie's brow furrowed. "Yeah. . .strange."
Something seemed familiar about the one he called George, but she couldn't figure it out. He looked like a decent, handsome man in the picture. It could have been the coincidence in the name, or the square jaw, but Caroline could swear George slightly resembled Trevor.
The next page bore a picture of a very pregnant Rachel. Beautiful with hair a lot like Caroline's. The picture was black and white, but her long, thick hair seemed lighter, more red than auburn,
and wavy. Caroline knew exactly what shade Rachel's hair was from seeing her in the dreams, which meant she must dream in color. That's pretty cool.
Rachel had the same features Caroline shared with her dad. She and Eddie both looked like her. Maybe that's why Rachel held a special place in his heart. Eddie turned the page to a portrait of Jackson, Rachel and baby Joseph. Though in those days nobody smiled for pictures, Rachel wore a smirk, and they really seemed happy. The next few pages were pictures of Jefferson and Madeline with their grandchild, the whole family, just Joseph and other random photographs. But there was one picture. . .chills flurried from her head to her toes.
The candid shot of three men in an office setting shouldn't have shocked her. Jefferson behind the desk, Jackson on one side and she guessed George stood on the other side. But George's left hand was heavily wrapped with gauze.
"Caroline, what's wrong? You've been staring at that picture forever. I think you may have even stopped breathing. Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine. I was just wondering what happened to this guy's hand. What was his name again?"
"George Callahan. I'm not sure exactly what happened. I never heard the story behind that."
"What's the story with George? He was a business partner?"
"Well, the way I heard it was, he and Jackson were supposed to take over the business Jefferson and Peter owned as partners. Peter died fairly young of pneumonia, leaving the entire company to Jefferson. He intended to let Jackson and George take over the company, but supposedly George was very jealous of Jackson's relationship with Rachel. When the two of them got married and had a baby, George couldn't handle seeing them together as a family, so he moved up north. The company stayed here in Louisiana and was kept within the Fontenot family."
Caroline knew better, but now wasn't the time to try and explain. "Do you own the company now? What's it called?"
"Gulf Coast Import and Trading Company. I own it, but I have other people that manage it for me. I mostly handle the paperwork and legal matters of the company. You know, the fun stuff."
"That's awesome. To still be successfully owning and operating a company that has been handed down for so many generations. Wow, that's just. . .awesome."
"I don't think I had much of a choice in the matter. My dad didn't ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. He just told me what I needed to do and taught me everything he knew about it. Luckily for me, I enjoyed it."
They looked through all the rest of the albums, and Caroline learned everything she could about each of her ancestors, including her grandparents who had passed away from a freak accident six years ago. He didn't disclose how they died and she didn't want to pry. Otherwise, Eddie was a wealth of information. Caroline felt more connected to him and this place than ever before. Now very tired, and her head aching from holding it up for so long, Eddie recognized her need for rest and closed up the family history lesson for the evening. He gave her some pain medicine, and she instantly drifted into a dizzy, exhausted stupor.
From the corner of the room, Caroline watched Rachel try on several different dresses. She had difficulty fastening each of them around her waist. Rachel cinched the latest dress and turned sideways to look at her belly in the dressing table mirror. She ran her hands down around the barely noticeable bump. Rachel's shoulders slumped and she began crying.
A baby's cries echoed from down the hall. Swiping her tears Rachel rushed to her closet and put on another dress. The dress resembling a nightgown fit loosely and hid her belly well. Caroline guessed that was the idea.
Just as she spun to the door, a small dark-haired woman with her hair high in a severe bun appeared with a baby cradled in her arms.
"He just woke up from a nap, and I believe he is hungry, Mrs. Fontenot."
"Thank you, Ms. Marianne. I'll take him now."
"Yes, ma'am. I'll be downstairs if you need assistance with anything."
Rachel held the baby up to look at him, and she smiled. "Well, hello there, Mr. Joseph. My beautiful boy. Momma's so happy you woke up from your nap. Are you hungry? Are you ready to nurse?" She sat in a rocking chair by the window and she fed baby Joseph, cooing with a content, satisfied grin. She genuinely seemed happy.
Caroline learned about postpartum depression in school, and this woman did not have the symptoms. She softly hummed a lullaby to Joseph while he nursed. Much like the baby, Rachel's soothing voice relaxed Caroline. "It was him, you know?" Rachel said.
Caroline had an eery feeling Rachel wasn't just talking to her infant, but to her.
"He violated me and caused me to be with this child growing in my womb. How could I possibly hate something so innocent and precious growing within me?" Tears flowed in streams down her cheeks. "I will love it as if it was Jackson's own blood and I will never tell anyone who the baby's father really is."
Her gaze brimmed with love over baby Joseph. "It will be your baby brother or sister, and we will love you both." She looked out the window. "Someday that horrible man will have to stand before judgment for the crimes he's committed. Someday he will pay for what he's done, but I'll be damned before I let an innocent child suffer the consequences of his jealous rage. I will love this baby with all my heart. I will. That evil mongrel will never know."
Joseph finished eating, and she cuddled him up on her shoulder to burp him. She hummed the same soothing lullaby as she rocked him to sleep.