Sins of the Fathers (19 page)

When the phone rang again, Katharine ran to answer, hoping Tom was calling back to invite her up after all. Instead, a raspy voice said, “Miz Murray? This is Lamar Franklin. I looked out that book we were talking about, the one on Confederate privateers, and it has some stuff you might be interested in. I’m coming down to the history center later today. I’ll run it by your place this afternoon.”

Katharine did not want the man coming by her house, and she doubted that the book would be of much interest, but after he had gone to the trouble of “looking it out” for her, glancing through it would be the least she could do. “Thanks. I’ll be here. Do you know where we live?”

“Yes, ma’am, and I got directions from Mapquest.”

She hung up and smacked her cheek in disgust. “Stupid, stupid, stupid. Not an hour after promising Elna and Anthony that you will have this house finished and ready to party in six weeks, you have committed yourself to stick around the house all afternoon waiting for a man you don’t really know and aren’t sure you can trust, who is bringing you a book you don’t want to read. You, my dear, need a brain transplant.”

“Meow,” agreed the little cat, who was watching her from the door.

She called Hollis to tell her they needed to pick up their pace, but Hollis wasn’t home.

She called the upholsterer and told him she had made a decision about fabric. It was true. She had carried the swatches for the living room couch and chairs with her to the phone and made the decision while waiting for him to answer. What she had done was lay them all on the counter, close her eyes, and reach for one set.

“Chairs are for sitting on, not worth hours of agonizing,” she informed the little pig. He beamed approval.

“You know what I like about you?” she asked him. “Unconditional love.”

The upholsterer agreed he could pick the couch and chairs up Monday and have them back in three-to-four weeks. “No longer than that,” she warned.

She called the glazier and informed him if he couldn’t get out to her house the following week to repair her kitchen-cabinet doors, she would need to call somebody else. He assured her he would be there Wednesday, at the latest.

She called the painter, who still had three rooms to complete, and told him he needed to get them done within two weeks. Accustomed to having her hesitantly ask, “Could you please come out sometime soon?” he protested at first, but when she persisted, he agreed he could show up on Thursday.

“Early on Thursday,” she instructed.

She poured herself a glass of tea marveling at how much she had accomplished in such a short time. Why hadn’t she been firmer with all of them weeks before?

The bathrooms still needed towels. She went to her computer and looked up the Bloomingdale’s Web site but then, remembering Hasty’s jibe, she logged off that site and pulled up the site for the JCPenney Outlet Store. She ordered a dozen sets of towels to match various bathrooms, paid for them by credit card, and gave her name and address for delivery.

Only when she had logged off that site did she feel a shadow of doubt. She seldom bought things over the Internet, and she had never bought towels without feeling them first.
I should have bought one set,
she worried.
Then, if they were okay, I could have bought more.

It’s done,
her father reminded her,
and they’ll be fine. Thank God you have money to buy towels at all. You’re doing great, honey bunch.

She grinned at the ceiling. “I am, aren’t I?

Feeling very accomplished, she headed toward Tom’s library. She deserved a little R& R with pirates.

Tom’s books confirmed what he and Hasty had said: pirates had been driven out of Southern coastal waters by the early seventeen hundreds, several decades before the Bayards bought their island. Had the first Bayards discovered the pirate grave planted on their new property and decided to locate their family cemetery beside it?

No. That grave didn’t look three hundred years old, and it was too much of a coincidence for both the pirate and Elizabeth to have both been Mallerys. Had Mallery families been common in Georgia then? Katharine couldn’t recall ever having heard the name.

She headed back to her computer and looked up Mallerys on ancestry.com.

She jumped when the telephone rang, and couldn’t believe she’d been working for an hour. As soon as she answered, she heard the excitement in Dr. Flo’s voice.

“The letters arrived! Agnes sent them before she died. And I had a message from her lawyer when I got home, asking me to call him. I did, and he said on Wednesday morning she had instructed him to notify me upon her death, and told him she had sent me instructions concerning the property. He didn’t know what they were.”

Katharine felt her heart skip a beat. “So what were they? And what do the letters say?”

“I haven’t opened the envelope yet. As soon as I saw it, I had to call and tell you. I am so pleased Agnes kept her promise before she died.”

“I am, too.” Katharine understood the impulse that made Dr. Flo call. When you live alone, you can generally deal with the bad stuff on your own. What is hard is having something special to share and nobody to share it with. She was flattered that Dr. Flo had called her. She was getting very fond of a woman she had known only casually a week before.

“Quick, see what Agnes said and call me back.”

“I’ll do that. And Monday, after Tom goes back, shall I bring the letters up so you can see them?”

For the first time since Tom’s call, Katharine was glad he wasn’t coming home. “Bring them today. Tom called a little while ago and said he can’t get home after all.”

“He’s not ill, is he?” Having your own husband drop dead in an instant makes you keenly aware it could happen to others.

“Oh, no, he’s fine, but his boss isn’t.” She explained about the party, touching lightly on Ashley when she’d rather have used a cleaver. “I could come down to your place this afternoon, if you like.”

Before Dr. Flo could answer, Katharine remembered she couldn’t. “Drat. Somebody’s dropping off a book this afternoon and I don’t know how to get in touch with him to tell him not to come.”

“Why don’t I bring them to you?”

“I hate for you to always have to come here. Besides, I want to see your gardens.” They had been featured in the
Journal-Constitution
more than once.

“This isn’t the afternoon for that. It’s best if I come to you. Besides, I know the way to your house and you don’t know the way to mine, and your car has had enough miles put on it in pursuit of the Gilbert family history this week. Shall we say around two? I promise not to even peek until then, but it may kill me.”

“I sure hope not. By the way, I have some news, too. I’ve been doing a little research into the matter of pirates this morning. Tom has a couple of books about them that I skimmed through, and I’ve also been looking up Mallerys on my new computer—which I got connected last night.”

“Good for you. Did you find Mallery the Pirate?”

“No. In fact, I’ll be interested in knowing what the letters tell us, because pirates were gone before the Bayards bought the island. What is more puzzling, there were no Mallerys in Georgia during the years when Elizabeth was growing up.”

“What?” Dr. Flo sounded like she thought she hadn’t heard correctly.

“There were no Mallerys in Georgia. I checked the 1830, 1840, and the 1850 censuses, thinking I’d find out who Elizabeth’s relatives were, but I couldn’t find a single Mallery in Georgia. In fact, I found very few in the South. There were five hundred Mallery listings elsewhere in the United States, mostly in New York and Connecticut.”

Dr. Flo gave an evil cackle that startled and delighted Katharine. “So Burch had himself a Yankee ancestress. I wonder if he knows.”

“He rattled off his family history pretty easily, so he probably does, but I doubt he’d tell us where she came from.”

“Then unless these letters shed some light on that, I doubt if we’ll ever know—which means we won’t be able to find out where our pirate came from, either.”

“Couldn’t we check all the male Mallerys in the country in her generation?”

Dr. Flo chuckled. “Yes, but not only would that be tedious and time-consuming, but ‘pirate’ isn’t likely to be listed as a profession in the census, either.”

Katharine felt her elation oozing away. “Do you ever get discouraged looking up all this stuff?”

“Frequently. A whole lot of the process is picking the most promising-looking trail and following it until you discover it was the wrong one. Did you find anybody who looked promising?”

She consulted her notes. “Not really. In 1860 two Mallery men lived in Savannah, but John was a carpenter and George was some sort of agent. I couldn’t read some of it.”

“Some of that handwriting is dreadful.” Dr. Flo commiserated.

“No, this was beautiful, but so full of curlicues and flourishes, I couldn’t read those two words. Neither man appeared in the 1870 census, so they could have gone to sea as pirates, I suppose—except there weren’t any pirates.”

“They could have simply moved. What race were they?”

“Nothing was put in that column.”

“White, then. The color of normal.”

Katharine was embarrassed by her deduction, but forced to agreed with the conclusion. “I don’t think they were pirates, anyway. My best guess is that Mallery the Pirate was a relative of Elizabeth’s from the North.”

“A no-good white man who shamed his family and had to be brought back to a backwater little island to be buried.”

“Maybe not,” Katharine objected. “Maybe he loved his sister or cousin very much, repented in the end of all his wrongdoing, and asked to be brought back there to be buried near Elizabeth. If we’re making it all up, I prefer stories with a happy ending.”

“I keep telling you, girl, in genealogy you seldom get endings at all, happy or otherwise. Trailing threads are the norm. In this case, since it will be next to impossible to figure out where Elizabeth Mallery came from without asking Burch—who probably wouldn’t tell us if he knows—it will be impossible to find out if she had a brother, much less a cousin. The biggest question I have about all this is why that pirate was buried with my relations.”

“Which the letters might answer. I got one solid thing out of my research into Mallerys: names for the cats. I’m going to call the female Phebe, spelled with no
o,
and the male Savant. Those were members of the Mallery clan in 1850. Can you imaging saddling a little boy with the name
Savant
?”

“It would have been a burden to bear,” Dr. Flo agreed. “Are they settling in all right?”

“Skittish, but the little one is currently sleeping on my feet. That’s progress, I guess. And speaking of progress, I went to the history center after you left yesterday and found a book on the history of McIntosh County. It had a whole chapter on John McIntosh Kell.”

“The one Burch claimed was a famous Confederate naval commander?”

“Yes, and he was. But there were other interesting facts in the book, too. Did you know General Sherman issued an edict that gave all the barrier islands from Charleston to Jacksonville, plus all the land up to thirty miles from the coast, to blacks after the war? No whites were supposed to live there at all.” Katharine didn’t mention that Sherman had designated the land a “reservation.” She was too ashamed of that fact.

“Do! That would have taken in most, if not all, of McIntosh County. You know it never happened. Those plantation owners didn’t give up all their land.”

“I didn’t seen any evidence that the edict was enforced,” Katharine admitted. “In fact, the author said there were still a good number of whites in McIntosh County in 1870, and he claimed that some of the plantation owners hired their former slaves and paid them in land. That sounds like they were still around. But there was a black man in charge of the county for several years. He came down with the Freedmen’s Bureau and set himself up as a dictator, it sounded like. Whites were terrified of him, but some of the black folks grew pretty prosperous.”

“Maybe that’s why Marie and the children came from Haiti. Her profession was listed as seamstress. She may have been able to make more money in Georgia, although it looks like she’d have gone to one of the cities where there were more people needing a seamstress.”

Katharine was about to ring off when Dr. Flo thought of one more thing she wanted to say. “I found a historic cemetery in Darien this morning that will let me bury my people there, but I still want to go back for the disinterment. I don’t trust either Burch or his lawyer, and I don’t want them simply moving Claude, Marie, and little Françoise over the bridge to the old slave cemetery.”

“I think you’d be wise to be there. Burch seemed in a pretty big hurry, and he might figure you’d never come back to see where they were buried. I talked to Posey, and she’d like to go, too, if you don’t mind. Then we can go back to her cottage for a few days more.”

“How kind. I’d love that. But do you have time for this, with all you have to do?”

Katharine gave one hurried thought to the house and the next six weeks, and knew she ought to say, “Actually, I can’t. I’m sorry.” Instead, she was already saying, “You know me—any excuse to get to the ocean.”

Dr. Flo sounded pleased. “We’ll give Granddaddy a sendoff to remember. See you in a little while.”

Katharine fixed some lunch for herself and Rosa, and discovered that the little cat was now following her around the kitchen. The big one hadn’t come out of his retreat between the washer and dryer.

When the phone rang again, she hoped it wasn’t Dr. Flo calling to say she wasn’t coming. On the other hand, it could be Tom, telling her to pack.

Instead, the voice on the other end was incoherent. All she could discern was tears and a rush of disjointed words. “…ruin everything…how could you?”

“Who is this?” Katharine demanded. She looked at caller ID, but the number was blocked.

“Miranda. Miranda Stampers.”

“How did you get this number?”

“Chase.” She said the name like it was honey. “He knew the name of the woman who owned the house you were staying in down on Jekyll, and so he got her number on the computer, and I called her and said you lost an earring in our store and I wanted to call and tell you I’d send it to you. She gave me your number.”

That would have been Julia, the housekeeper, not Posey. Posey, like Tom, always checked caller ID and only took calls from numbers she recognized. Katharine always answered, afraid one of her children or a friend had had an accident and borrowed somebody else’s phone.

“What are the chances of that?” Tom once asked.

“If it’s one in a zillion and it ever happens, I want to be there,” Katharine had replied.

Now she was there with Miranda on the other end, and she wouldn’t remonstrate with Julia, because if she actually had left an earring at Stampers, she would want to know.

“What did you want?”

“Look, I’m sorry about the other calls. We—I mean, I thought maybe if you got scared, your friend wouldn’t come back to sign the papers. But now Chase’s daddy says she already signed and he’s gonna start work next week. Next week! He’s gonna cut down trees, tear up the clearing, drive away the animals…” She burst into tears again.