Not Quite Clear (A Lowcountry Mystery) (33 page)

Everything I’ve done.

“I really would like to talk about running for national
office in a few years. Maybe four. That would mean us moving away, and of course, we don’t know where we’ll be by then. In our relationship.”

The way he says it leaves no doubt what he means. He’s not wondering whether we’ll still be together. He’s talking about whether there will be rings on our fingers, maybe babies on the way. Houses bought, honeymoons taken. All of it.

“Yeah.” My voice is
so soft it’s barely audible, but it doesn’t deter him.

He keeps talking—about places we might live, how he promises we won’t have to see his parents any more than necessary, but he thinks I’ll really like Birdie and his youngest brother, Bennett, once I get to know them better. I start to feel sick.

It’s the lies. Not the overt ones—though I’ve told those, too—but the latent untruth that’s unraveling
our relationship at its core even as Beau keeps knitting into the future. There won’t be proposals and governors’ mansions and engagements and holidays endured at the Drayton home because, all this time, while he’s been dreaming about the future that waits out there for the two of us somewhere, I’ve been destroying it.

“Stop.” I sit up, distancing myself. Trying to muffle the words, the meltdown,
the truth, but there’s no way now. It’s beyond my ability to control. The need to have the reality of our future out there, in the open so it can stop killing me from the inside. I run a shaky hand through my hair, pushing down the bile threatening to rise. “Just stop, Beau.”

He sits up, too, reacting to the tone of my voice, or the look on my face, or just the general outpouring of dread that’s
filling the room like poison. He reaches for me, then halts. “What’s wrong?”

“I have to tell you something,” I choke out.

“Okay.” He licks his lips. “I have a feeling it’s not going to be something good.”

I shake my head, determined not to cry. I’m going to get through this the way I’ve gotten through the rest of the shit in these past weeks and months—strong and alone. It still isn’t the time
to break down.
 

Soon. Soon, Gracie. Hold on a little longer.

“Do you remember the night the snake bit you?” I laugh at my own idiotic question. “Of course you remember. Well, the reason I didn’t stumble into that snake first was because I saw a ghost, and she warned me away.”

“Why didn’t you tell me there was a snake?” He looks befuddled by my confession, not realizing this is only the start
of the story.

“I couldn’t. She, like, froze me or something.” It’s only now that I admit to myself that Mama Lottie had been after Beau from the very first night. Not him alone, of course, but this is more proof that he’s better off without me. As though I need it.
 

“Okay… Who is she? Why did she help you?”

“Her name is Mama Lottie. She was a slave on the Drayton Hall property when your ancestors
farmed rice there, and she was a powerful healer, to boot.” I suck in a breath, blow it out. “And she helped me because she wanted me to feel indebted to her. She knows about Amelia’s curse, and she said that she could help us break it for good.”

He lights up, relief flooding his pretty eyes. Dimples popping in his cheeks. “That’s great, though!”

“It’s not great, Beau. Do you seriously think
a witch, or voodoo practitioner, or even just the angry slave she was in life is going to do me a favor like that without asking for anything in return?”

Our eyes lock. He sees my despair but doesn’t move closer, instead going still. Swallows, and in my heart, I know that he’s trying to prepare himself for what’s coming. There’s no way he can.

“What does she want, Gracie?” His voice is quiet,
now, and hard. “What have you done?”

This is it—the moment I break his heart. The second it all comes tumbling down.
 

I jump in the water.

“She wants my help to put a curse on your family.”

It takes a moment to sink in, but when it does, he doesn’t react the way I expect. He smiles. “Come on. A curse? By a ghost, after all this time? I don’t buy it.”

For some reason, his response triggers
anger in me. “What, so you don’t believe in curses, now? Maybe you think Millie and I have been making this up the whole time!”

“No, Gracie, calm down. Of course I don’t think that, but it’s harder to believe it’s happening to me. Why? What does she have against our family?” He pauses, thinking. “Besides the obvious enslavement.”

I bite my tongue to keep from commenting that enslavement would
be enough. “She has it out specifically for an ancestor named Sarah Drayton. Mama Lottie says she wasn’t born a slave, that she was a Northerner and from a free family before she was kidnapped and sold. That Sarah and maybe her husband—and others, I don’t know—knew she didn’t belong but kept her because of her talent with healing, improving crops, things like that.”

“That’s terrible, if it’s
true.”

“I seriously doubt she would hang around all this time—” a shudder works down my spine at the memory of her tantrum last week “—or be quite so angry and determined to get revenge if it weren’t true…”

All the color drains from his face over the next thirty seconds, as though all this is finally sinking in to a place where he realizes what it means. “Wait. Are you telling me… Did you
agree
to
help her
?”

“I had to—”

“Oh my god.”

“Beau, I had to! It’s the only way Jack will live. Amelia and I can’t figure out curses and voodoo and witches without help, and you know it.” My heart races. “I told her I wouldn’t hurt you, though. No physical harm, that’s what I said.”

“You’ve been working on this behind my back for…how long? How long have you been pretending to love me and lying to
my face?”

“I’m not
pretending
to love you! I
do
love you! And it’s been killing me keeping this to myself but what choice did I have?” The sheets are balled in my fists, wet with sweat. “It’s just been a couple of weeks, that’s all.”

“That’s
all
?” This time, there’s nothing remotely funny about his laugh. It’s full of disgust and betrayal and disbelief barked out in a hoarse rasp. “How many
times have we talked about being open with each other? Not keeping secrets?”

“I know, but how could you understand
this
?”

Beau takes several moments to answer, visibly calming down. He gets up and starts to dress. I don’t move, numb from head to toe. Hurting on a scale that’s hard to quantify, but I’m partly relieved. This isn’t only my burden anymore.

It crosses my mind to mention that the
curse hasn’t worked yet, but that doesn’t matter. I’m going to find a way to make it work, no matter what.

Maybe he could have eased it from the beginning, had I let him.

He wears the clothes like armor, even though he was in such a hurry to remove them an hour ago. Now, they protect against the girl who couldn’t trust him. Who was too scared of what she would lose to treat him the way he would
have treated her.
Does
treat her.

“Did it ever occur to you that I
would
understand? That I know that your cousin, that baby, your family are the most important people in your life, no exceptions?” He rushes on before I have the chance to respond. “I wouldn’t have liked it, Gracie, but do you actually think I would have stood in your way if you believed this was the only way to save them?”

“They’re your
family
,
Beau. I know you’re not close and you think it doesn’t matter but it
does
. One day, you would have woken up and realized what I’d done, who I’d chosen. You might think you could have forgiven me, but it wouldn’t have worked. Not in time.”

We’re speaking in the past tense. I want to curl up on the bed and die.

“And you get to decide that for both of us, without even talking
to me? Is that it?” His jaw is set in a hard line, reminding me of the first day we met, how I criticized his features as too strong for his face. There’s anger in his eyes, snapping and harsh, the kind he’s never directed toward me.
 

“I did what I thought was best. I know it was wrong. I should have let you go a month ago, in the kitchen.”

“Maybe so, Gracie. Maybe so.” A muscle jerks in his
face. His fingers curl into fists. “What’s the curse? Are you at least going to warn me about the ruination of my future?”

“Beau, don’t.”

“No, seriously. I want you to tell me.”

“I don’t
know
anything, not really. I got her what she asked for, but now she’s angry because she says the curse didn’t work.” My chest aches. I can’t look at him no matter how hard I try. “It’s missing something. Incomplete.
That’s all I’ve learned, and I only have one more day to figure out what and why or she’s going to probably double the curse on us. She threatened Amelia the last time. And you.”

I drop my head into my hands, nothing but a vibrating bundle of misery. I’m not sure what it says about me but even right now, in the thick of this moment, it’s mostly about my failure of Amelia and Jack.

“What did
you get her?” he asks, softly. Not kindly, not with any kind of forgiveness, but maybe, unbelievably, with understanding.

“She needed a piece of DNA from each of Sarah Drayton’s surviving familial lines. There are twelve of them. I’ve checked and double-checked and triple-checked, and there are
only twelve
. So what’s missing? How can it be incomplete?”

He stares at me, disbelief taking over
now. He shakes his head, mouth slightly open, and chuckles. “I can tell you why.”

“You can? How?”

“This is why you should have trusted me, Gracie. This is why you come to me when an event this big happens in your life. So I can
help you
.”

“Help me put a curse on your family?” I snap, wanting him to get angry again. I deserve that. I don’t deserve…whatever this is.

“You don’t get it, do you?
Even now.” His gaze soaks with sorrow, then tears. He looks away, out the window, until he can look at me in the eye again with control. “There’s an illegitimate line of Draytons. It’s not a long one, but I believe…it was Sarah Parker Drayton’s granddaughter Charlotta who started it.”

“She never married.”

He puts a finger on his nose. “Correct, as usual. But surely you know by now that there
are secrets that never make it into the history books or onto online genealogy sites.”

“So she had a child out of wedlock. That must have been a scandal. I’m surprised it didn’t make the papers.” I reconsider in light of all the ways I’ve seen influence wielded in the past two or three months. “Maybe not.”

“Yes, perhaps not. The child was a girl, and she did eventually marry, so none of that
line bear the family name. You wouldn’t be able to find her easily…without help.”

It’s hard to breathe, as though someone tightens a noose around my throat. “You know where I can find them… Her descendants.”

“Savannah. The Ravens. The only ones in the book.”

We stare at each other for a long time. I’m not sure what’s happening now. He helped me.
He helped me find the missing piece of the puzzle
that would ruin him.
 

“Thank you.”

“I’d like to say you’d do it for me, but obviously that’s not true.” He strides toward the door. “Good night.”

He’s gone before I can ask what this means for the two of us. If it’s over, if it’s not. Maybe that’s not true. Maybe there’s time to ask, to chase him down the stairs and finish this thing one way or another, but I’m not ready. I don’t want to know,
not now.

There’s only room in my head and my heart for one thing at a time, and now that I know how to fix Mama Lottie’s spell, that has to be the one thing. It’s cost me my sanity, it’s cost Mel and Leo their freedom and their reputations, and I don’t see how it’s not going to cost me my relationship.

Tomorrow, first thing, I’ll go to Savannah and track down the rogue Drayton. Get Mama Lottie
her piece of hair or whatever. Put an end to this shit once and for all.

All I can do now is curl up on the bed. Every last inch of my skin feels bruised. My organs ache like they’ve been kicked and punched, but it’s really my heart that’s taken the beating. Beau is gone. I don’t know if he’s coming back.

I fall asleep hours later, staring at Henry Woodward as he stares at the wall. He offers
me no words of wisdom, no kind glance of commiseration, no expression that could be interpreted as understanding. As always, what Henry offers is company and silent judgment. Tonight, both give me the smallest reasons to hold on until tomorrow.

Chapter Twenty-Three

It’s not until I get in the car to drive to Savannah by myself that I realize how truly alone I am. Part of me wonders whether this is part of Mama Lottie’s plan, to alienate me from the people I claim to love, but mostly there’s no one to blame but myself.

All I have is Amelia. On another day, in another time, I would be heading off to an interview like this with
Leo in the passenger seat. With Mel on speakerphone. They’re in jail, or the hospital, or maybe at home by now, but what’s the difference? My status with Beau is anyone’s guess. I haven’t heard from him.

It didn’t take me long to find the Raven family online. There’s only one, like Beau said—a husband and wife, one son in high school. Savannah’s not far—a little over three hours from Charleston—though
many natives of either sister city have never deigned to take the short trip down the coast.

I am not a South Carolina native, from Charleston or otherwise, and have adored my trips to Savannah. The towns might be sisters in many senses, but they have vibes, scents, and atmospheres that are unique in every way.

Charleston is austere, regal, restored, glorious, with anything that could cause
an embarrassment tucked away into the eaves and armoires like relatives with a tendency to air their thoughts and grievances with a little too much gusto. Even the ghosts behave, haunting the streets with quiet elegance and charm.

Savannah has a darkness running through the old streets like a silky ribbon. The squares, a beautiful architectural design, seem to house eyes that peer down from the
trees, watching. Waiting to see whether the people that pass below are worthy of their attention. The crazy in Savannah walks around in broad daylight, celebrated by those who pass and greet it in the streets, and the ghosts are tricky, and haunted, like the city itself.