Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

“What on earth of?”

“Everything!” Claire said. “If you really want to know, I’m terrified Marcel hired me for purely nepotistic reasons—is that a word?”

“Are you related?”

“Practically. We’re such old friends, you see, and I was desperate for work. But I’ll tell you both, I made a promise to myself: if I’m not great, I’ll quit. You won’t have to fire me, I’ll run not walk straight through that door!”

“We’ll hold you to it!” said Deanna, with a bluff, collegial laugh.

“Please do!” Claire said, laughing back and putting this one in the column headed Hate.

“Claire lives out at Wando Passo Plantation, Deanna,” Jessup intervened. “Her great-great-grandparents—no, make that great-great-great—disappeared from there at the end of the Civil War.”

“You don’t say,” said Deanna. “Where did they go?”

“Don’t look at me,” said Claire. “I went to Wando Passo exactly once when I was small—for a picnic when I was twelve. No, thirteen. The year before I went away to boarding school. Since then, the two of you have probably spent more time in South Carolina than I have. Family history was never my long suit anyway.”

Both women turned to Ben. “Well, as I was telling Claire, Deanna, what I know comes from Samuel Hilliard’s diary. Hilliard was rector at the Episcopal church in Powatan during the war. Your great-great-great-grandparents were parishioners of his. The man—whose name escapes me at the moment—was a Confederate artillerist at Wagner.”

“Wagner?”

“Battery Wagner. It was a sand fort on Morris Island that guarded the entrance to Charleston Harbor from the south. If you saw the movie Glory, you know the place. The Fifty-fourth Massachusetts made their famous charge there. The Federals sent their whole ironclad fleet down here and pounded it for months. Wagner was an awful place, from the descriptions. The men inside lived standing up, elbow to elbow, in a windowless room called a bombproof, the sick together with the healthy and the living with the dead. And this was Charleston, in the summer. Harlan DeLay—just when you stop thinking of it, right?—was killed when the battery was evacuated in ’63. Hilliard went out to the plantation and performed the burial in absentia—or whatever the expression is.

“Then, two years later, in September 1865, one hot afternoon, who should stroll into downtown Powatan…”

“You’re kidding,” said Claire.

Ben nodded. “Harlan DeLay.”

“Wait,” said Deanna. “You said—”

“I know,” he preempted her. “The casualty report turned out to be in error. DeLay had been captured and incarcerated at Fort Delaware, a Union prison in Delaware Bay. It took him five months after Appomattox to get home. Apparently, he walked. Several people—including Hilliard’s wife—saw him on King Street that afternoon. They hailed him, but Harlan walked right past them like a ghost. He went into Pringle’s Dry Goods Store, bought one item, a bag of birdshot, then set out for Wando Passo on foot. That was the last time anybody ever saw him. Or your great-great-great-grandmother either, Claire.”

“Adelaide,” she said.

“Is this beginning to ring a bell?”

“A small one. Her portrait’s in the library. She had a child, I think.”

“A little boy of three. He was orphaned when they disappeared.”

“I do recall Clive and my aunt Tildy saying something about this.”

“So that Sunday,” Jessup continued, “right after Harlan reappeared, Adelaide failed to show up at morning service. Hilliard rode out to pay a call and found the table set for dinner. Someone had made biscuits and fried chicken, but the food was scattered, and the house was full of flies. He looked for them, made inquiries, and finally paid a visit to the sheriff. A search was made—that was when they found the child. He turned up in the quarters, but his father and mother were never found. Foul play was suspected, but no proof came to light. No word was ever heard of them again. It was as if one September afternoon—right around this time of year, in fact—Harlan and Adelaide DeLay simply dropped off the face of the earth.”

“That’s quite a ways to fall….”

Tucking a pair of jet-lensed granny shades into the pocket of his suit, Marcel Jones breezed into their midst, smelling of the outdoors and Grey Flannel aftershave. “Morning, all.” Gazing down at them from canopy level—he was six foot six—Jones smiled a smile that was boyish, sweet, and ever so slightly sly with the innocent slyness of one who, from the confident redoubt of his good looks, can afford to be indifferent to appearances. “So, who was this who disappeared?”

“My great-great-grandparents.”

Jessup frowned and held three fingers up.

“Great-great-great,” Claire corrected. “From Wando Passo, just after the Civil War.”

“The War of Northern Aggression, don’t you mean?”

Claire smiled at this sly dig with lidded eyes.

“I don’t think I’ve heard this story.”

“You don’t know them all,” she said. “Apparently, neither do I. You’ve piqued my interest, though, Ben. I’m going to call my aunt Tildy when I get home. If anybody has the scoop, it’s her.” She looked back at Marcel. “Nice suit.”

He looked down. “This?” A four-button one of English whipcord in a restful and arresting shade of isingreen, this was set off by a plain black T that gave the ensemble a thrown-together air that Claire, who knew him well, was having none of.

“‘This?’ What, little ol’ me?” Taking her revenge belatedly, she laughed. “Why, I just reached into my closet with my eyes closed and the light off and pulled out the first thing that hit my hand. If it had been a Roman toga or a bearskin rug, I’d be wearing that.” As she mocked, her finger came out of the O-ring, her shoulders dropped, something full of wicked, happy energy was set loose in her expression.

To the uninitiated, it might have appeared she disapproved of his clothes, but this was not the case. Her old friend’s flair was just so un-Ran-like that it inclined Claire toward a giddy, comic mood. Jones was one of those large men who tower in any crowd, resembling visitors from some far country where people grow twenty-five percent larger than