Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

the family plot, in coffins, not fifty yards away in unmarked, shallow graves? Wouldn’t some word have come down to us? I mean, word came down they’d disappeared. If they’d been murdered, wouldn’t it have come down all the more?”

“All this is idle speculation,” she said, and her fierce eyes strayed from his for the first time. “Maybe no one knew.”

“But someone had to know. Whoever buried them knew and chose to keep it secret. And if you were the murderer, wouldn’t that count as a pretty good incentive for you to shut your trap?”

“I won’t abet your obsessions by engaging further in this pointless exercise.”

“But it isn’t pointless, Tildy. The point is, maybe Harlan didn’t kill her after all. Maybe he didn’t off himself. Maybe someone else murdered both of them and buried their remains. The questions being, who, and why.”

Tildy sat, lips pursed in a recalcitrant way, and Ransom noticed that her spotted hands had turned white on the head of her cane. “You know something, don’t you?”

“What do you mean? I’ve told you everything I know.”

“Look at you, you’re blushing!”

“You’re mad. Stark raving.”

“Call it madman’s intuition, then. Tildy, for the love of God, if you know something, don’t hold out on me. It’s not just me, it’s Claire and Hope and Charlie, too.”

She sat there, fuming, undecided; then with her cane’s trembling rubber tip, she tapped—tapped unerringly—a sterling frame, hidden far back in the thickets of family photos on the piano. “There is this. I don’t think it will tell you much.”

Ransom picked it up. Though her face was slightly out of focus, he recognized Addie right away. She was standing on the piazza at Wando Passo, leaning on the point of a closed parasol. She looked tireder, more prosaic than the woman in the portrait, but more real and solid, too, and as Ran squinted at her, Addie squinted back, as though she could almost make him out, as though Ran were the figure in her dream, or fantasy. After the first moment, though, it wasn’t Addie but the handsome black man standing beside her in the shadow of the overhang that drew Ran’s attention. With his solemn stare and coat of good but slightly worn black gabardine, he looked familiar somehow, though Ransom couldn’t immediately say how.

“Who’s this?” he asked.

“Open it,” she said.

Turning the frame, he struggled with the fittings, but all he found, when the blue velvet back came off, was a single line in antique cursive: “A. H. D. with J., Wando Passo, Aug., 1865.”

“‘A. H. D.,’” said Ran.

“Adelaide Huger DeLay. She married my great-grandfather, Harlan. He was the son of Percival there.” She pointed to a young man’s portrait on the wall. “Adelaide and Harlan had a son named James. The property passed through him to my father.”

“Yours and Clive’s?”

“Mine and Clive’s.”

“And ‘J.’?”

“A slave named Jarry. I know little about him except that he was plantation steward.”

“Why was this picture taken?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why would the mistress—Addie—pose for a picture with a slave?”

Tildy frowned and tightened her grip on her cane. “Happenstance, I expect.”

“And you showed me this because…?”

She glared at him, recalcitrant, and the doors slid back.

“Oh, what?” said Tildy, with annoyance.

Della merely blinked and didn’t go away.

“All right, all right,” she said, struggling to rise.

As Tildy hobbled off, Ran’s eye lit once more on the portrait. At second glance, something in Percival DeLay’s expression seemed familiar, too. Ran gazed into his agated, dark hazel eyes, then back down at the black man in the photo.

“Who the hell are you?” he said, addressing “J.” “Who the hell are you?”

The mystery engrossed him deeply, so deeply that it took Charlie’s tearful “Doddy! Doddy!” to pull Ran from the undertow.

“What’s the matter, buddy?” Ran knelt and took him in his arms. Over Charlie’s shoulder, Percival and J. gazed on…. Ran blinked at them, blinked down at his son’s unhappy face, his agated, dark hazel eyes. Like a boulder on a mountaintop, something in Ran’s mind began to teeter.

Before it had a chance to roll, Hope filed in, followed in short order by Alberta Johns, Tildy, Della, and a frowning, blue-clad female representative of the Charleston police. From the doorway, they glared at him as though he were, in fact, what Ran, in his worst nightmare, had feared he was and, till this moment, hesitated to believe.

Alberta was holding something out to him—a gun? Sadly, no. Not that, nor a remote. It was, in fact, his cell phone. The dial was lit. The basket lady looked at him with dour eyes. “Someone wants to speak to you,” she said.

THIRTY-THREE

As the fever advances, it grows more regular, and, with each repetition, worse. Every second night, between five and eight, Addie’s chills begin, succeeding rapidly to fever, which rages through the night, all the following day, worsening toward evening. Addie’s pulse accelerates to the point where Sims can no longer accurately count it. Her mouth fills with a foul, viscous phlegm. Lapsing into delirium, she lies whimpering and gnashing her teeth, and as she struggles to breathe, her chest heaves like a panting animal’s on a summer day. Toward dawn, the fever breaks and she passes into a debilitated rest. The reprieve lasts between ten and twelve hours. Then, as the shadows lengthen toward dusk, it starts again. From onset to onset, the cycle lasts forty-eight hours, and with each onset, Paloma ties another knot.

There’s one knot in the string when Jarry leaves for Charleston. Using cedar bark and pitch to caulk the seams of Wando Passo’s lighter—the oakum, too, has been a casualty of the Nina’s encounter with the Niagara—Jarry loads the boat with rice and sets out with an eight-man crew. The freshet is running, and the men must bight a line to trees along the riverbank and warp themselves upstream by the capstan. It takes ten backbreaking hours to reach the railroad bridge at Mars Bluff and most of the night to unload the lighter