I focused on the folders again, eager to change the subject. “What did you find in the archives?”
“I’m not really sure. Definitely not anything conclusive. However, I did notice something in all the pictures.” She knelt on the marble floor and began to lay out photocopied photographs and portraits. “I’m going to put these down like a family tree to make them easier to identify.”
I got down on my hands and knees and began helping her by spreading them out and lining them up evenly—not that I really needed to; Rebecca was probably even more obsessed with order and structure than I was, lining up each generation with an almost laserlike precision. Even I was impressed.
When she’d finished laying them out, she sat back to admire her work. “What do you see?”
“Well, you’re missing a lot, but I might be able to help you.”
I opened Yvonne’s folder, remembering that she’d told me she’d included copies of any picture or portrait she found of anybody on my family tree. I pulled them out, then filled in some of the missing spots on Rebecca’s impromptu floor chart, stacking any duplicates.
When I was finished, Rebecca repeated, “So what do you see?”
I stared at the sea of faces, all of them vaguely familiar. Some of the slots didn’t have a picture attached to them, but it was easy to spot the family resemblance in the remaining pictures. I saw eyes that could have been hazel and some that appeared green, and I thought I recognized the shape of my nose on several women and a few of the men, going back as far as the 1780s. I noticed, too, that almost all of them wore glasses or some type of eyewear, except for the younger women, which made me aware that I was squinting again in an attempt to see better. I wondered vaguely if vanity might also be a genetic trait.
“I see a lot of people that look a lot like me. Is that what I’m supposed to see?”
Rebecca rolled her eyes. “Look again. It’s pretty obvious. Look at the people in the top half of the family tree, and compare them to the last four generations.”
I looked at the chart again, and frowned. Finally, I said, “I still don’t see it, but I did notice that you have a few pictures of Rose. But they’re all of her as an infant or small child so I can’t really compare her to the girl in the portrait.”
“I know. I searched for her name first, but these are the only pictures I could find of her, which is odd because her name appeared in the newspaper quite a bit as an adult. I found out that following the 1886 earthquake, she traveled through Europe with family friends who lived in England. When she returned, she married her fiancé—who’d been waiting for her since she left—and they traveled all over the world. They really only lived in the house when their daughter, Sarah, was born, and even then Rose tended to be a bit of a recluse. She was quite the phi lanthropist, though, and gave away an extraordinary amount of money to charity. But I cannot find a single picture of her past early childhood. It would seem she might have been a little camera shy.” She pointed to the pictures again. “Come on, Mellie. Look again and tell me what else you see.”
I leaned forward, scrutinizing the pictures more, until noses, eyes, and chins seemed to blur together. It wasn’t until I’d sat up and looked again that I saw what I thought Rebecca was talking about. My gaze traveled across the family tree, then down to the last four generations. I looked up at Rebecca and met her eyes.
Triumphantly, I said, “Nine out of ten of the people in the pictures we have in the top half of the tree have walking canes. Even the two younger women. And all of them are short, and a little on the plump side.” I traced my finger along the marble floor between the pictures, coming to a stop beside my great-grandmother Rose. “All we can tell about Rose is that she was a fat baby, but if you look here at my grandmother Sarah, and my mother, they’re all suddenly tall and slender.” Rebecca had placed my college graduation photo, a picture of me with permed hair and padded shoulders that I wanted to forget, at the bottom of the chart. But even behind the ridiculous eighties hair and clothing, there was no doubt that I was related to Ginnette and Sarah Prioleau.
“Do we have a picture of Charles, Rose’s husband?”
Rebecca shook her head. “Not that I could find. I was hoping that maybe you or your mother might find old photo albums or photographs as you go through the attic.”
“We haven’t made many inroads into that project, but I’ll let you know what we find.”
Rebecca studied the pictures again. “Charles must have been tall and slender to explain the rest of you.”
I sat back, too, thinking. “The remains found in the boat had a congenital hip defect. Maybe that would explain the walking aids.”
Rebecca looked at me with grudging respect. “Good one. I hadn’t put those two things together, but I think it makes sense.”
She began picking up the photocopies and I helped her, taking care to keep them in order. I felt guilty; she’d freely shared this information with me, yet for no real reason I could think of, I’d withheld the journal from her. Despite misgivings, I realized I needed to be forthcoming, too.
I cleared my throat. “I forgot to tell you. Sophie found a journal hidden in my grandmother’s old desk. The writer is unknown, but the book dates back to the late 1800s when my great-grandmother Rose would have been in her late teens or early twenties.”
I reached for my purse and pulled the journal out to show it to Rebecca—who was looking at it oddly—and I wondered if she was remembering asking me about it before and how I’d told her that I hadn’t found anything.
I continued. “The writer’s identity is a mystery, but she refers to another girl about her age whose first initial is
R
, which makes me believe that it can’t be Rose because she didn’t have any sisters, and the two girls in the journal are definitely living under the same roof. But I can’t help but think that the girls in the portrait with the
M
and
R
lockets are most likely the girls in the journal. But who they are, and how the
M
locket was found with the body on our boat, is a mystery.”
I looked up from the journal to see that most of the color had drained from Rebecca’s cheeks. Her eyes met mine and for the first time since I’d met her, I felt something besides dislike for her. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s her, isn’t it? The girl in the boat. And here in the house. She’s here now, watching you. Watching us.”
“What do you mean?” I grabbed her arm, feeling how cold it was.
“Your mother. Keep this book away from her. It’s—dangerous to her.”
“I know. She already touched it. But she’s fine now.”
She shook her head and closed her eyes. “No, no. I had a dream. She can’t touch it again.” She opened her eyes. “Promise me.”
“I don’t think . . .”
“Keep it away from her.” Her voice was harsh, and she seemed to realize it, too. She put a hand on my arm. “When I was a girl, I used to have these premonitions all the time, and they were always right. But then I realized that other kids didn’t do the same thing, and they thought I was weird, or crazy, or whatever. I was ostracized because of it. I changed schools, and learned how to stop dreaming, much how I expect you learned not to see the things you could.” Her lips curled up in a small smile. “The things kids do to fit in.” She shook her head. “Anyway, since the first time I met you, outside on the sidewalk before your mother bought the house, I’ve been having dreams. I don’t remember all of them, but they all seem to center around you and your family. And I’ve been right one hundred percent of the time.”
She regarded me steadily, and I thought she wanted to say more. After a moment, I said, “So what do you think it means?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure you don’t always understand things you hear and see, either. It’s a gift, but not an easy one, is it?”
I studied her for a long moment, recalling how my mother had seen her when she’d held the journal and I wanted to tell that to Rebecca now. But I held back, remembering that Sophie didn’t trust her. And I still had my own misgivings, which I kept telling myself had nothing to do with Rebecca’s relationship with Jack. Despite our shared confidences, I was still convinced that her intrusion into my life wasn’t coincidental, and that even her explanation of writing a story about my mother seemed contrived.
Instead I said, “Let me read you an entry from the journal for a little more insight. Notice what it says about R.” I flipped through the pages until I found the entry I was looking for.
Father took us out sailing again this morning. He was in the Confederate Navy in his younger days, and I think he is a sailor at heart because he loves nothing more than to be out on the waves, filling his sails to make the boat move as fast as the wind will allow. He has always encouraged R to sail, and to love it as much as he does because, I suppose, she is the eldest. But she has no affinity for it at all, and it might be because of her physical affliction. She hides it well so no one, not even her suitor, knows about it, but I see her at the end of the day when her limp is pronounced from the physical exhaustion that is required to mask it when she walks without assistance. I know not to mention it, even in sympathy or in an effort to assist her, because she looks at me with such venom that I feel guilty at having two perfectly formed and healthy legs.
I love to sail, and I have become quite proficient, and Father takes a lot of pride in me for that. But I find myself pretending that I would rather be on terra firma. It is easier to miss doing something I love than to deal with R’s wrath that I have succeeded at something that she cannot—and I am not necessarily referring to the ability to sail.
When I finished reading, I looked up at Rebecca. A small pucker had formed between her eyebrows. “This R sounds like a real charmer, doesn’t she?”
“I know. Which is why I keep saying she can’t be related to me at all. But then again, Jack seems convinced that my ancestors were wreckers, too, so God only knows what other skeletons my family tree might be hiding.”
She only nodded, her gaze intense as if she were committing my words to memory.
I turned back to the journal. “And this morning, when I was showing the journal to Jack, we found a calling card that we believe belonged to the writer of the journal.” I flipped to the back page, frowning when I saw that the card had slipped back inside the little pocket in which it had been hidden. I was trying to stick my pinkie under the flap when the foreman appeared from the kitchen.
“Excuse me, ladies, but we’ve made a hole big enough for somebody to pass through. I’ve already been inside to check to make sure it’s structurally sound and it looks good.”
The journal forgotten, I slid it onto the step and we both stood, then followed the foreman back to the kitchen. As I walked toward the opening, one of the workmen handed me a flashlight. I glanced back at Rebecca to see her watching me intently.
“Total clearance is only about five and a half feet,” said the foreman, pointedly eyeing my four-inch heels. “They were a lot shorter back in the day.”
“Apparently,” I muttered as I reluctantly slid out of my high-heeled pumps. Then I stepped through the bricks, my stockinged feet touching the cool, hard-packed earth as I breathed in two-hundred-year-old air.
“Can I come in, too?” I looked back through the hole to see Rebecca backlit from the kitchen light.
My first instinct was to tell her no, and I wasn’t sure why. Despite our recently shared information, I wasn’t quite ready to make her a full partner.
“Just a minute,” I said. “There’s a really low ceiling, a lot of cobwebs, and not much else. It might not be worth your while. . . .”
I stopped when I saw her foot come through the opening followed by her head and then the rest of her body. She smiled her perky cheerleader smile. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t hear you. What were you saying?”
I wanted to be furious, but I couldn’t. I even felt a little admiration for her bravado, if only because she’d done exactly what I would have if our situations had been reversed.
“I was saying how dark it was in here and how you should bring your own flashlight.”
I heard a click, then saw her holding a flashlight under her chin, hollowing her eyes out and making them appear as black holes. I turned away. “Keep your head down, the ceiling’s really low. There’s nothing much in here besides the trunk.” I gave a cursory sweep of my flashlight over the brick walls, then up to the darkened oak beams that spanned the ceiling in three-foot intervals, with one beam cutting through the middle like the spine in the bleached-out bones of a whale carcass. I allowed the light to touch on them briefly, eager to focus on the trunk. I was slowly lowering the arc of light when Rebecca spoke.
“Hang on. Shine your light up there again.” She flicked her flashlight over to the side of the beam on the farthest side of the room, near the wall. “It looks like something’s scratched into the side.”
We both shone our flashlights at the same spot as we walked in tandem to get a better view, then paused in silence as we read the words.
Wilhelm Hoffmann 1782. Gefangener des Herzens.
We looked at each other. “It’s German,” I said.
She nodded. “Do you know what it means?”
“No.” I shifted, feeling a breath of icy cold stealing up my spine.
“Neither do I. It makes sense that it’s German, though.”
I stared at her, wondering how she knew. “What makes you think so?”
It was her turn to stare back at me. “You need to brush up on your history, Melanie. In December 1782, the British forces abandoned the city to return to England following the end of the war. A lot of the Hessian mercenaries deserted, not being particularly loyal to the British Army. A few were lucky to be hidden by Americans.” She gave a little shrug. “It meant freedom for some, but for others they simply traded in their uniforms for lives of servitude to their supposed rescuers, who demanded payment for their efforts.” Absently, she traced the words with a finger. “It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that your Prioleau ancestors, if they really were wreckers, sent him to work on the coast. Much less risky for the family members if he’s caught, you know?”