The House on Tradd Street (35 page)

I remembered the Brownie camera that Jack had found in the attic and how Louisa had written that it had been a gift to her from her husband. Even if I hadn’t known that, I would have assumed from the look on little Nevin’s face that it was his mother behind the camera.

I closed my eyes, not wanting to see the face of the boy I had failed. Regardless of whether the diamonds existed—and even if they did, I was pretty positive that if they were in the house, we would have found them by now—I was no further along in my search for finding out what happened to Louisa than I had been when I’d first sat in the drawing room with Mr. Vanderhorst and ate pralines from the rose china. Without Jack I wasn’t sure I’d be able to dig up anything else; I simply didn’t know where to look. I felt numb, as if my nerve endings had been scattered into the wind like a dandelion, leaving a bare stem of simple weariness.

Opening my eyes, I stared again at the pictures, at the happy boy who had grown up to be a lonely man wondering why his mother had abandoned him. And who had entrusted me with his house and his dream of finding the truth.

I curled my legs up to my chest and rested my forehead on my knees. There was one thing I could do that I hadn’t done yet—something I hadn’t done since my grandmother had died and I’d realized that my imaginary friends weren’t real but something else entirely.

I took a deep breath through my nose and held it, then slowly exhaled from my mouth, trying to exorcise Jack with the outgoing air. With another deep breath, I looked at the pictures again of the smiling little boy and then around the empty room. “Louisa? Are you here?”

The clock chimed downstairs and then all was silent again. I remained where I was, listening.

“Louisa?” I asked again. I rubbed the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Please let me help you.” I kept my hands pressed into my eyes, so all I saw were red spots against my eyelids. “Why would you leave your son when you loved him so much?”

I shivered, and when I opened my eyes, I could see my breath. The dry rustle of paper brought my attention to the album, where the pages were flipping slowly as if blown by an invisible wind. They settled on a double layout of pictures of Louisa’s garden, focusing on her roses and a pergola that had since been replaced by the fountain. I sniffed, smelling the roses as if I were sitting in the middle of them on a hot summer day. The pages rustled again, fluttering like moths around a lamp, and a yellowed newspaper clipping caught the current of moving air, twirling twice before landing on the floor at my feet.

The article was dated December 30, 1930, and the small headline read,
Two Prominent Gentlemen End Their Longtime Association.
My eyes scanned down to read the entire article.

 
I stared at the article for a long time before sticking it back into the album. I slowly shut the cover and slid the album to the floor before dropping my head in my hands. Very quietly, I spoke to a woman who had long ago left this house but now seemed reluctant to leave it again. “I know all of this, Louisa. I know about your roses, and how my grandfather and your husband were friends and partners and had a falling-out.” I grabbed two fistfuls of my hair in frustration and tugged. “What I don’t know is why you left and where you went and why you’ve come back.”

Slowly, I struggled to my feet and stood, smelling now the tangy scent of old roses left too long in a vase. Wrinkling my nose, I reached under my bed and pulled out my suitcase and began packing up as many of my belongings as I could. I wouldn’t stay another night in this house, where everywhere I looked I saw my failures. I wasn’t used to failing: I’d been the top seller at my agency for the last five years, and a person didn’t get to that level by failing. My success was the one thing that kept me from looking backward and seeing a gawky girl whose own mother couldn’t find enough in her to love.

I wasn’t sure how my desertion would affect the codicils of the will, but I figured I had a little time before I’d have to contact the lawyers. Before that, they wouldn’t have to know. My father, who had the most dealings with the lawyers, wouldn’t tell them without asking me first. Regardless of all of his other failings, disloyalty had never been one of them.

As I was zipping up my bulging suitcase, I spotted the yellow rubber gloves on the dresser. I hadn’t left them there, and wondered who had. My cheek creased in an unwanted smile as I remembered the first time Jack had seen me wearing them.

My eyes then settled on the photo albums holding all the pictures of an amateur photographer who had once taken pictures of her beloved family, her garden, and her house, and then gone away one day and didn’t come back. I felt a rush of anger at someone who would go away and never once contact the little boy she left behind—the little boy who never stopped waiting for her to come back. What sort of mother did such a thing to a child?

My anger was irrational, and I’m sure on some level I realized it. But the dark feelings seemed to be leeching from the walls of the old house, feeding my anger like rain on parched soil. The anger made it easier to pack my suitcase, easier to leave this house with its warped floors, hand-carved mantels, and hidden secrets, which looked as if they would remain hidden. With more force than was necessary, I threw the yellow gloves into my suitcase, slammed the lid down, then jerked on the zipper until it was closed.

I’d already heard Jack’s departure and then my dad speaking with Chad and Sophie before watching my dad’s car leave, so I knew that when I opened my bedroom door I would be greeted only by silence and the incessant ticking of the grandfather clock.

Struggling with the heavy suitcase, I made it down the stairs and out the front door. I closed the door behind me for the last time, making sure the dead bolts were secure before dropping my keys into the bottom of my purse. Letting myself out the front gate, I crossed the street to where my car was parked at the curb and threw my suitcase in the trunk. As I fumbled with my car keys, gooseflesh erupted on the back of my neck. I turned back to the house, staring at the upstairs window of the bedroom I had just left, bringing back the feeling of anger that had dissipated when I left the house. There, outlined in the warped handblown window glass, was the dark shadow of a man.

My keys dug into my palm as I clenched my hand into a fist, my skin raw with fear. I backed up against my car, my hands fumbling for the door latch, because I didn’t have the courage to turn my back on the dark entity in the window. I had an odd feeling that to do so might prove fatal.

I slid into the driver’s seat, managing to stick my key into the ignition after the third try. My tires squealed as I peeled away, my hands still shaking as they gripped the steering wheel. I paused in the middle of the street, realizing that I’d forgotten to write a note for Mrs. Houlihan. And that the sweet aroma of roses had not appeared to dispel my fear. It was almost as if by abandoning her house, Louisa had abandoned me.

A thickness grew in my throat as I moved slowly down the street, glancing back in my rearview mirror as the house on Tradd Street grew smaller and smaller until I couldn’t see it at all.

F
or the first time in my life, I called in sick to work. I thought I’d called early enough so that I wouldn’t have to speak with anybody and could just leave a message on the machine, so when Nancy picked up on the second ring with a bright and cheerful greeting, I was speechless for a moment.

“Hello?” she repeated. “Is anybody there?”

“Sorry, Nancy. It’s me—Melanie.”

“Oh. Are you here? I didn’t see your car, and Ruth said she hadn’t seen you this morning when I stopped in for coffee.”

“Um, no. I’m still at home. In bed, actually.” I wondered for a moment if I should fake a cough and then decided against it. “I’m sick, so I won’t be coming in today. I was hoping you could cancel all of my appointments.”

There was a long pause. “Hang on. I’ve got to take these golf ball earrings off because it’s too hard to hold the receiver to my ear, and I can’t find my headset.” The phone clattered on her desk, and I waited for a moment before her voice came back. “I’m sorry. I thought you just said that you were calling in sick.”

“Yes, that’s right. And I was hoping you could cancel all of my appointments.”

“Are you with a man?” She was whispering now.

“No, of course not. I just . . . don’t feel good.”

“It’s Jack, isn’t it?”

“No, Nancy. It’s not a man. I’m a little under the weather, that’s all.”

“Well, you’ve never called in sick before, and as far as I can recall, you’ve never had a date, either, so I thought that somehow they might be related.”

“Nancy?”

“Yes, Melanie?”

“Would you mind keeping those thoughts to yourself?”

“Sorry. You know I’m only here to help you. Besides, I knew it wasn’t Jack.”

“You did? How?”

“Because he already called here this morning to speak with me.”

I frowned into my phone. “With you? What about?”

“You. He wanted to know if you were okay, and when I told him I hadn’t seen you yet this morning, he said that I might not. He told me that you’d received some bad news and would need a little TLC today. That’s why I went by Ruth’s—your bag of favorite doughnuts is sitting on your desk.”

My cheek reluctantly creased into a half smile at Jack’s thoughtfulness until I recalled that he was responsible for the crappy way I was feeling. “Thanks, Nancy. I appreciate it. But you can go ahead and eat them. I won’t be coming in today.”

“Hang on. That’s my other line. But don’t go away.”

Music piped in while I waited, my eyes skirting the once comforting walls of my condo—the white, empty walls without cornices or wide baseboards, the large main room devoid of a fireplace or anything that might be even loosely called ornamental. The focal point of the room was the flat-screen television I had bought myself for Christmas the previous year. I watched little on it except for old black-and-white romantic movies on AMC and the Weather Channel. The hardwood floors were prefabricated without any signs of wear and tear, their pristine condition evidence that feet from nearly two hundred years of people hadn’t walked across them, leaving heel marks and scratches as a sign of history’s passing.

The recessed lights on the ceiling left no room for elaborate chandeliers and spotlighted only stark white walls instead of oil paintings of Charleston Harbor and of people who’d once had breakfast at a mahogany dining room table and slept in the same bed as I had.

The chrome-and-glass furniture, which I had hand selected with excruciating thought, now seemed cold and out of place. Everything seemed new and pristine, as if the person living here had no past. It all felt wrong somehow, as if I were a temporary visitor and my real home was elsewhere.

I mentally shook myself, then forced my brain to remember the backbreaking, grueling work my body had been made to endure over the past four months. My nails were nonexistent, my hair a disaster, and I knew more about stripping paint from an assortment of surfaces than any thirty-nine-year-old single woman had any business knowing. If I focused on those things long enough, I might start thinking that a condo with as much personality as a hotel room could actually be a place to call home.

My caller ID clicked in, and when I checked to see the small screen in the receiver, I saw it was my dad. I stared at the number for a long time and listened to two more clicks before they finally stopped and the number disappeared from my screen.

“Melanie? Are you still there?” Nancy’s voice piped through the receiver.

“Yes, I’m here. I don’t have anything else to add—just please cancel my appointments.”

“I’m going to cancel them for the rest of the week, too. You’ve been working too hard and need some good old-fashioned R and R. I’m looking at your schedule now, and if I move a few things around and push a few appointments into next week, you should be fine. I’ll tell Mr. Henderson that you have the flu or something.” I could hear Nancy tapping her pencil against her desk, undoubtedly impatient to get back to practicing her chip shot.

“But . . .”

She cut me off. “But nothing. And don’t accuse me of trying to mother you. This was all Jack’s idea. Wait—there’s my other line again and I’ve got to take it. Enjoy your week off.”