He did a double take between me and the curving road. ‘Why would I want to do that?’
My sense of self-preservation kicked in before I blurted my first thought. If it got around that I saw ghosts, then I would be the girl who cried wolf if I ever tried to tell anyone that a bunch of high school students were influencing the success of the Maddox Point development. And that was without mentioning magic.
But if I said that aloud, I might as well go jump in the river myself. So I said, convincingly, ‘I have no idea.’
Pulling the truck into his usual spot at the side of the house, he set the parking brake and turned to me. We were out of sight of any of the windows, and the deepening twilight made the cab seem more close, more intimate. ‘Can I walk you in?’
The low rumble in his voice implied something more lingering than a handshake on the porch.
I counted cars, and seized on an excuse. ‘Paula’s here. And my leg really hurts, Shawn. It’s been a long day.’
‘All right.’ He picked up a strand of hair that had escaped from my ponytail, and twirled it around his finger. ‘I just don’t want to end our first date on an argument.’
‘It’s our second date,’ I said thoughtlessly. Stupidly. He grinned, and I realized my mistake.
‘In that case,’ he said, and leaned forward, with a slow, tempting smile – tempting in spite of everything – and brushed my lips with his.
Gigi stirred in my lap and sat up, putting a puppy barrier between us. Wilful, wonderful dog.
Shawn sat back with a disappointed laugh, and I opened the truck door, trying not to look like I was making a break for it, running from him, and from my own reaction to him.
‘I’ll call you about going out to the Point this week,’ Shawn said, when I’d extracted Gigi and myself from the truck. ‘And maybe we can talk about the TTC.’
That stopped the ‘don’t call me, I’ll call you’ on my lips. ‘What about it?’
‘Well, I know you’re not here for long.’ He propped a hand on the steering wheel, still turned to face me. ‘But I hope you’ll be back to visit. Maybe you’d like to have some say in how things go here.’
I was too stunned to say anything more committal than ‘Maybe.’
‘Great.’ Shawn flashed his smile, and released the parking brake. I closed the truck door, and wondered what the hell that invitation meant.
Everyone was in their usual spots around the table when I came in – Clara and Paula, Rhys and his dad. The kettle was steaming, the tea canisters were out and it was all very domestic and cosy. The adults watched me with a paternal sort of expectation that would have been amusing if I didn’t feel like someone had wrung out all my emotions and left me as limp as one of Clara’s dishrags.
Rhys looked me over critically, but before I could register more than that, Gigi ran in behind me and made a flying leap into Professor Griffith’s lap.
‘Sylvie!’ barked Paula, about to harp on me about the dog. But after another glance at me, she softened her tone. ‘Lord, honey. You look done in. I’ll bet today was just too much for your leg.’
Clara put her hands on the table to push herself up. ‘Come sit down. I’ll make you some tea.’
Crap. I must have looked as bad as I felt. It wasn’t my leg, though it did ache. I was completely spent, like I’d done three shows in a day. But in a way, I’d been onstage since the church bell rang that morning.
‘I’ll make it,’ I told her. ‘Then, if you don’t mind, I’ll take it upstairs and go to bed.’
‘That’s an excellent idea,’ said Paula. ‘A warm drink and an early turn-in.’
Her agreement was a little pointed, but she didn’t need to worry about nocturnal wanderings. No ghost chasing for me tonight. At least, not in the woods. I planned to read more of Hannah’s diary, and maybe the reverend’s. If I could keep my eyes open long enough.
Rhys followed me on the pretence of refilling his own cup, though from his father’s passing smile, he wasn’t fooling anyone. At least, not about the fact he wanted to talk to me. While I refilled the kettle, he stood close by, letting the running water cover his voice. ‘How was your date?’
As tired as I was, I managed to find the retort I wished I’d made that morning. ‘You know, it’s not as if you gave me a reason to turn Shawn down. Like, say, asking me yourself.’
He grimaced ruefully. ‘By the time I thought of that, it was too late.’
‘Nice.’ I was glad to know that asking me out wasn’t something that leaped quickly to his mind. The bruise to my ego made me cranky. ‘For someone so concerned about me, you were nowhere to be seen this afternoon.’
His gaze slid from mine, and he became very intent on opening the tin of cookies on the counter. ‘I had something to do.’ Then he looked at me again, gaze narrowing. ‘What happened to “I can swim, don’t worry about me”?’
How did I admit that I’d had no idea how deep the waters were without inviting an ‘I told you so’? Besides, it wasn’t just depths, it was riptides and maybe sharks. That was a lot to deal with.
‘Your kettle is overflowing,’ he said, interrupting my thoughts.
I said a word that made Paula chide me from the table. Setting the kettle on the flame to boil, I turned back to Rhys. ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where you were.’
‘Not rock hunting.’ He took a mug from the cabinet and handed it to me. I dropped in a tea bag, then handed him one for his own refill.
It was a small thing, but we moved as if completing each other’s motions. If Shawn and I were supposed to be some kind of Davis/Maddox superteam, why did this feel so natural?
Rhys was asking me a question. ‘Did you learn anything that was worth eating catfish for?’
‘Nothing is worth eating catfish for.’ A nice evasion, I thought. But from his expression, not an effective one. I glanced at the table to make sure the adults were caught up in their own conversation. ‘Why are you asking me, when you obviously know everything?’
‘If I knew everything,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t be such a huge variable.’
I found enough energy to be outraged at the unfairness of that. ‘That makes me this kettle and you a pot.’ The kettle wasn’t black, but he took my point.
It occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t asking the right questions. Given the incredible possibilities I was juggling, maybe I needed to be wondering not what he knew, but how.
At the table, Professor Griffith talked in his lilting accent about his theory that the settlers he was looking for had integrated into the tribes of Kansas and the Mississippi Valley. I listened absently until the simmering of the water on the stove drowned him out, then turned to Rhys, knowing the sound would hide our voices, too.
‘How do you know there’s something weird up with the TTC?’ I asked softly, reaching for one of the cookies in the tin as an excuse to stay close and keep my voice down.
His look said I wasn’t as subtle as I thought. ‘Because I have eyes, and ears. And a bit of horse sense. You knew there was something out of kilter, even before I said anything.’
Yes, but my mind didn’t leap to supernatural possibilities. It still wasn’t quite making the stretch. But was his?
Just to see what he would say, I swallowed a bite of cookie, then casually mentioned, ‘Shawn talked about my joining the TTC meetings while I’m here.’
Rhys’s gaze sharpened to a razor’s edge. ‘Don’t,’ he said, a clipped demand, all teasing gone. I froze, not just with shock, but with a tremor of something darker. The single word was harsh, and it seemed to come from the deeper part of himself that he was so careful to keep hidden.
Something in my immobile face made him twitch, as if cursing himself, and he continued, just as urgently, but without the iron edge of a command. ‘Sylvie, do not get involved any more than you already are. I know it must seem to you like kids just messing about with stuff, but it’s not.’
I stared at him, a piercing alarm going off in my ear and tw
isting the muscles of my shoulders into knots. His words confirmed everything and nothing, and raised new spectres to compete with my fear of the Colonel.
‘Sylvie!’ Paula’s voice cut through the sound, and I realized it was real. ‘For heaven’s sake, turn off the kettle!’
With a shaking hand that echoed my rattled emotions, I turned off the flame on the stove, and the whistle faded out. Placing my hands on the counter, I let out a trembling breath and the part of my tension caused by the scream of the kettle. My back to the adults at the table, I let their resumed conversation cover my whispered question.
‘Kid stuff. Like magic?’
I couldn’t believe I’d said that aloud. If he laughed or called me out for being nuts, I didn’t know what I would do. I didn’t look at him, but his stillness was its own answer in a way. Then he reached across me and filled my cup as he spoke in my ear. ‘Stay out of it, Sylvie. I don’t want anything to happen to you.’
His breath stirred my hair, and I shivered as he moved away. Dimly I heard him saying goodnight and excusing himself. I may have said something automatically, keeping up the act of normalcy until I could get to my room and finally let down my guard.
I believed he didn’t want me to be hurt, but there were a lot more people than me involved. I’d been assuming the council had been doing something bad, and Rhys knew about it. He and Shawn were obviously in opposition somehow, and I’d figured that meant one was ‘bad’ and one was ‘good’. But they could be good and less good. Or bad and less bad.
From the beginning, my connection to Rhys had been eerie and inexplicable – the familiarity, and dizzying attraction, and heightened swing of my emotions around him. I’d suspected Shawn’s charm of hiding his motives, but what about Rhys?
Maybe I really couldn’t trust anyone.
‘Sylvie, honey, are you going to stare at that tea until it’s cold?’ asked my cousin.
I was too numb with fatigue and confusion to be irritated at her for scolding me like a stern governess. ‘No, ma’am.’
‘Why don’t you go to bed if you’re so tired?’
That was a great idea. Saying goodnight, I picked up my mug and called for Gigi. She bounced off the professor’s lap; he and Clara said goodnight, sounding sympathetic for what I suppose must have looked like complicated romantic problems. I followed Gigi’s plumed tail up the stairs, where she checked the halls for me, the advance guard against ghosts.
There was no chill on the landing, and I thanked heaven for small favours, then went into my room and closed the door against the world.
Chapter 27
When Gigi woke me in the morning, my first thought wasn’t about magic, or about Rhys or Shawn, or how much my romantic troubles were tied up in the mysteries of Bluestone Hill, or what that had to do with the ghosts, if anything. It was about my garden.
Sunday had been the first day I’d spent no time at all there. I’d become used to the invigoration of digging in the dirt, re-creating the generations-old pattern. Not to mention the almost meditative calm it gave me. If I could figure things out at all it would be in the garden.
I dressed hurriedly, anxious to get downstairs and to work – almost as anxious as Gigi, who was impatient for her morning pee, especially since we’d gone to bed so early. I grabbed my copied drawings and notes – satisfyingly grubby by now – and cast a quick, guilty look at the desk, where I’d set Reverend Holzphaffel’s journal on top of the other books I’d accumulated. Hannah’s journal was still hidden in the drawer. I promised Hannah that a few hours of work in the garden would make me much better able to concentrate on her mystery, and headed downstairs.
However, I hadn’t counted on the rain.
The drizzle started as soon as Gigi had finished her business. The light coat of moisture didn’t seem to bother her, so we went to the knot garden, where she flopped at the base of the rock and rolled in the wet herbs.
The bluestone lived up to its name when it was wet, turning a dark slate colour. Did it live up to the rest of its hype? Electromagnetic potential, mystical energy, lines of spiritual force making a web on the earth – what did those things have to do with ghosts and magic?
Think, Sylvie. With the exception of the incident in Central Park, I only saw and sensed things here at the Hill and in Old Cahawba, and they were so close I might as well think of them together. So there was something about this place.
But there was something about me, too. That was why Shawn was so excited by my arrival, and why Rhys was so confused when I knew nothing about the Hill. He must have expected that I’d arrive and meddle with – whatever he was doing. I just wished I knew what it was I was supposed to be able to do.
Everything about Bluestone Hill went back generations. Maybe to figure out my story, I first needed to figure out Hannah’s.
‘Sylvie Davis!’ I jumped when Paula yelled at me from the porch. The startled slam of my pulse almost drowned out her annoyingly predictable admonition. ‘Don’t you even think about gardening in the rain. Do you want to catch your death?’
Definitely not. And I didn’t want her irritated with me, either. So I called back, ‘I’m coming, Cousin Paula,’ in an obedient voice.
It looked like I’d be spending the morning in my room with Hannah after all.
In a way, reading Hannah’s journal was as absorbing as working in the garden. When Gigi whined and scratched at the door, I had to blink myself back to the present, disoriented by the modern things in the room.
I’d started reading the entries where I’d left off, about a quarter of the way in, and just a few months before the end of the war. Hannah didn’t write every day, and the whole journal covered the last six years of her life. The older she got, the more interesting her entries, though they remained frustratingly vague about the things I wanted to know most.
Gigi became insistent. The rain had stopped, and I knew that walking the dog would force me to stretch my legs and work the kinks out of my back.
My knotted muscles were going to require more exercise than a stroll to the garden. I put on my sneakers and grabbed Gigi’s leash, a plan already half formed. Figuring Paula might have something to say about my heading out into the woods, even in the daytime, I avoided her on the way out. Following the forest’s edge made a longer walk to Old Cahawba, but it meant I didn’t have to pay such close attention to my feet. After some of the things I’d read, I had a lot to think about.
Hannah didn’t have one suitor, she had two. She referred to them rather unhelpfully as E___ M___ and J___ M___. Reading between the lines, I’d figured out that EM was probably Ethan Maddox, referred to in Reverend Holzphaffel’s journal. Hannah’s own entries told me that JM was his brother. I was almost to the end of her story, and I still didn’t know which of them was The One. Late in the tale, about nine months before her last entry, she merely wrote of seeing ‘him’ today, or of meeting ‘him’ on the street.
However, E and J had their own story. They fought side by side in the war, but now – Hannah’s now, which, even as I walked through the woods, following the plume of Gigi’s tail, seemed slightly more real than my own time – the brothers hated each other. It didn’t seem to be merely romantic competition, either. Hannah wrote how much it troubled her that whole families of men and boys were lost (her brothers, for instance) to the battlefield, and E and J couldn’t stop their fighting.
Gigi and I reached a dirt road with an open gate – the entrance to Old Cahawba. The rain hadn’t been hard enough to turn the road to mud, but it made the red earth sticky, turning Gigi’s white feet to a rusty tan that matched the rest of her.
The road led to the fenced ‘new’ cemetery. Dr Young had explained there was an ‘old’ graveyard on the other side of the ghost town, where, even in death, the residents were segregated. I glimpsed Dr Young with a couple of tourists, giving them his spiel. He waved when he saw me, but I didn’t interrupt. I knew what I was looking for.
When he was free, he joined me at the Maddox p
lot. I’d found Ethan Maddox. He died an old guy in 1895. But I saw no J. Maddox born near the same time. Which didn’t necessarily mean that J had been the one to run off on Hannah. He could have left, or Ethan could have returned, after the fact.
‘Hey, little lady,’ said Dr Young, then bent to pet Gigi, so I wasn’t sure which of us he meant. ‘You’re not limping today, I see.’
I realized that was true, despite the long walk. Of course, I had taken the more level path, which was much easier on my leg. And as I pointed out to him, ‘It’s worst when I’m tired or the weather is changing.’
He chuckled. ‘Well, you must be in a different climate than me. There’s a front blowing in a storm up north of us, and all my joints are aching today.’ He gave Gigi a last pat, then stood stiffly, proving his point. ‘But enough of that. Here for the rest of the tour?’
On a different day, I would have indulged him, and myself, with the full history lesson, but I was on a mission. ‘Actually, I have a question for you. Though I wouldn’t mind seeing more of the site while you answer.’
‘Excellent. I haven’t been to check on the dig today. We can ride over together if you like.’
‘Great.’ We started towards the cemetery gate. Though it was hard to forget the eerier aspects of our problems, the exercise of deciphering the puzzle of Hannah’s story had steadied my mind, and I was eager to fill the gaps in my knowledge.
‘So my question is this: What’s a scalawag?’ The Colonel had called J that, which hurt Hannah greatly. ‘I gather it’s not a nice thing.’
‘Oh, no. A scalawag was worse than a carpet bagger.’ At my blank look he explained, ‘A carpet bagger – Reconstructionist is the nice term – was an opportunistic Northerner who came down after the Civil War had yanked the foundations out from under folks here. Not only did the war tear up the land and decimate families, the entire economy had been destroyed.’
‘By emancipation of the slaves,’ I said pointedly, in case he was one of those Southerners.