Page 24 of Moonshine and Magnolias
Hal opened his mouth to argue, then shrugged. “Dr. Do-Gooder over here. Tell me when you need me.” He shoved the gloves into his back pocket, thenwalked to the Chippendale secretary and browsed the shelves. “God, it’s all musty stuff and books in here.”
Rob resolutely did not point out the obvious fact that a library was supposed to have books. “Why don’t you search the registries and see if you can find Uncle Louis?”
His brother exaggerated a yawn, but he took a book and began to carefully turn its pages.
Rob turned back to the diary. Caroline wrote about dances and visitors, but none of them described his uncle. He found the dated passage referenced in the tour outline. It brought to light the ballroom as it was one hundred years ago – the place for the musicians, the swoosh of dresses, the mixed society and scandalous songs. She lamented knowing it would be one of the last dances at the Hall. Claremont was changing. The South was changing.
Her writing was unfiltered and true, without the self-consciousness of knowing what she wrote would have historical value. There was nothing extraordinary in her words, but the melancholy tone transported him to her world with just a few sentences. He made notes on the relevant passages, then carefully replaced the diary and removed another.
“Hey, I keep forgetting to ask you if you noticed the family pictures in the dining room.” Hal stopped under the portrait of Isaac Clayton. “I think Uncle Louis might be in one of them.”
“Really.” Rob looked up from the book, hiding his surprise that Hal had been aware of anything beyond the coffee.
“Yeah. If you had dragged your attention away from our hot hostess, you might have noticed it yourself.” His brother pointed his thumb at the picture. “The one with this guy and the woman, probably Caroline unless there were other teen girls. I think Louis is in the background.” Hal covered his heart with a fist. “As a good assistant, I’ll make it my job to figure out who those people are. This I so vow.”
“Vowing to do some real work for a change. Impressive.” Rob shot his brothera grin, then returned to the box and removed another stored diary on his list, this one from Annie Stephens Clayton, Isaac’s great-grandmother, who had left detailed instructions on soap making with special herbs to treat different skin conditions. Her clay-fired cooking pot and thermometer were on display in the rec room. He let out a low whistle when his eyes lit on another box – one with a date in the late 1920s, the author unknown.
Hal hurried to his side. “What is it?”
Blood pounded in Rob’s temples as he carefully removed the storage container and opened it.
“Well well well,” his brother said. “What do we have here?”
Rob indicated Annie’s diary with his chin, but kept his gaze on the treasure in his lap. “Put that one away. With your gloves on,” he finished as Hal reached for the book with his bare hands. “It could be nothing, you know. This could belong to Isaac’s dad or brother or someone else.” They’d been disappointed so many times before, but the thrumming in his body didn’t know the difference.
“It could also be something.” Hal moved his hand in a circle to speed him along. “Open it up.”
Inside the box lay a plain, burgundy book. Rob swallowed hard over the lump in his throat.
His brother’s voice was hushed. “That’s the same style as the ones we have.”
He removed it and put it on the padded surface, then glanced up. “Ready?” At Hal’s nod, Rob sucked in a breath and opened the journal somewhere in the middle.
The neat, round script belonged to Louis and brought Rob to the nineteen hundreds by the whisper of old papers. He blinked, but the writing strokes didn’t disappear or change or dissolve. He wasn’t imagining it.
He read out loud. “‘If I have one more meal full of peaches, I will grow a pit.’”
“Holy shit,” Hal said.
That summed it up nicely. Rob’s hand hovered over the pages of the past.Seeing actual proof that Uncle Louis had been at Fountenoy Hall had made the years of suppositions and questions and disappointments into something more absolute.
“This is it.” Hal clapped his hands. “Hot damn! There has to be something in there that we can use to find the treasure and break the curse. Oh, man. I got to call Dad.”
“Do it later. Now, put the gloves on, sit down, and carefully – very carefully – go through the pages. Don’t set the book down flat. Let me know if you find anything relevant. Also cross check the dates of the guest book for his name. I’ll see if I can find more of Louis’s journals, but I need to finish up with the tour before I can help.”
Hal took the diary to the Queen Anne-style desk. Rob kept his eyes on his brother until he was satisfied Hal handled the book correctly, then refocused on the box.
But he didn’t reach for a new diary. More secrets lay inside, waiting for him to uncover and use for his own gain. He removed a glove and popped one of his ever-present antacids in his mouth to quell his sour stomach . He was where he should be, where his family had worked so hard to place him, so close to discovering what his uncle had left behind. So close to stealing a treasure from a woman who invaded his thoughts when he’d much rather she invade his bed. So close to being done with it all.
His thumb beat a cadence against his knee. He glanced at his brother, whose nose was buried in the journal’s pages. “Do you ever wonder what Uncle Louis was like as a man? Like why he volunteered to fight in the War?”
“Duh.” Hal snorted. “He was able-bodied and male, and believed in the American dream and all that jazz.”
Rob pressed on. He wanted something deeper, something that would bring humanity to this journey and justify the theft. “Why he started working for the government afterward? Why he never married?”
His brother turned in his seat, one arm draped over the back of the chair. “What do you want to do, write a book about it? Louis Upshaw: The Man, the Mystery? Please.”
Hal had a point. Maybe thinking about Uncle Louis that way was a waste of time. It would be easier to finish his quest, somehow tell Wendy the truth without pissing her off, and let the past go. Rob returned to the journal on his lap, making notes for the tour.
