Page 70 of The Guests on South Battery
Iwalked slowly down the stairs at my house on Tradd Street, listening to the reassuring ticking of the grandfather clock in the quiet house. I’d just settled a reluctant Jayne into her bed with an Advil PM, and the twins were already tucked into their beds. They were supposed to be asleep, but I heard Sarah babbling. To whom, I wasn’t sure. Nola and her friend Lindsey were holed up in Nola’s bedroom studying for an AP American history exam the following day.
When I’d gone up to the girls earlier to deliver a plate of sugar-free carob-chip cookies, I surreptitiously checked for any sign of a Ouija board, and had been satisfied that it hadn’t been brought back into our house.
Jack was at his desk in the front room, surrounded by haphazard stacks of paper, making my fingertips itch, and jotting notes on his yellow lined notepad. He looked up as I approached. “How is Jayne?”
“Fine. More embarrassed than anything. She thinks she was holding her breath too long, and that’s why she fainted. It’s funny, though....” My voice trailed away as I thought back to the attic room and the hidden steps.
“What’s funny?” Jack prompted.
“Well, not really funny, but odd. She said she was holding her breath because the stench was so bad. But nobody else smelled anything—until my mother and I did right after Jayne fainted.”
“She is younger,” Jack pointed out.
I gave him a hard stare.
“Well, it’s a documented fact that as you grow older, you lose your sense of smell.”
“Nothing’s wrong with my sense of smell. Or my mother’s. We could smell the construction dust and the mildew, but nothing like the putrid scent Jayne said she smelled—and that I smelled the last time I was in the attic with Sophie, and again right after Jayne fainted.”
Jack tapped the eraser end of his pencil on the paper. “Maybe it was her imagination. She has a real fear of old houses, so she’d probably already prepared herself for the worst, even to the point of thinking she could smell that cat despite the fact that it’s been dead for years.”
He pulled me down onto his lap. “I hope Rich wasn’t insulted that she wanted me to help her out to the car and bring her home instead of him. I was practically in front of the house with the kids in the car headed to the park when you called, so I wasn’t going to say no.”
I was silent for a moment as he buried his nose in my hair. “I think she was afraid he’d trip on his pants if both of his hands were occupied,” I said. “But I’m glad you had a chance to see the house. You should go back during the daytime. The more Sophie tells me about the work that needs to be done, the more I’m beginning to understand why Button wanted to unload it onto a complete stranger. Any of her friends would have thought they’d made her mad and she was punishing them.”
He chuckled, his warm breath caressing the back of my neck. “It was nice of her to allow me to bring back all those photos from Button’s room.” He indicated the frames now standing on the back edge of his desk. I noticed the heavy dust and tarnish on them and made a mental note to clean them tomorrow. I couldn’t ask Mrs. Houlihan, because Jack had asked her never to touch anything on his desk and so she wouldn’t. I’d wondered at her devotion and so had asked her to bake me fudge brownies and she’d refused.
“I’m still not sure what you need them for.” I tilted my head backward to give him easy access to my throat.
“They’re just pieces in a puzzle. Writing a book is like that, you know. Putting together a puzzle. Except sometimes a bunch of pieces are thrown in that don’t fit and sometimes you don’t figure that out until after you’ve wasted a lot of time trying to force them into place.” He pulled back, his gaze focused on the frames. “When I’m writing about real people and real events, it helps me to keep their photos nearby to remind me what I’m really writing about. Helps me to focus. Although I’m still not sure what this story is.”
I picked up the Alabama saltshaker that on a whim Jack had also asked to take with him, my index finger absently tracing the painted date. May 30, 1984. “The only thing I know for sure is that Sumter and Anna Pinckney adored their daughter. Anna especially. She devoted her whole life to Hasell’s care. I just can’t imagine how hard it would be to see your child wasting away with nobody able to tell you why or what you can do to fix it.”
Jack’s eyes were dark. “And Anna was basically doing it on her own. From what my mother tells me, Sumter traveled all the time. Maybe he felt as helpless as Anna, and chose to keep busy by spending as much time as he could outside the house. Or...” He stopped.
“Or what?”
“Or Anna made him feel superfluous, not needed. That she was the only parent who could nurse Hasell properly.”
I peered over at his notes, noticing the wordsHasell Architecture & Constructionthat were underlined three times. “What’s that?” I asked.
“That’s the name of Anna’s father’s company. She had a degree in architecture from Clemson—did you know that? She worked for him when she was newly married, but then left to care for Hasell full-time.”
“Your mother said that Anna’s father’s company built the Pinckneys’ lake house, and that’s how the families originally met. Anna and Button practically grew up together—it’s no surprise that Anna would eventually marry Button’s brother.”
Jack sat up, shifting around piles of paper until he found what he waslooking for. “This is a letter I found in Rosalind’s archives—Button and Sumter’s mother, dated November 1960. It’s from her husband regarding the house in Alabama—which I’m assuming is the lake house. He said he’d hired a local couple—newlyweds—to act as caretaker, general handyman, and housekeeper. He planned to keep them on full-time. Like they really intended to use the lake house as a second home, and made sure it was always ready for them.”
“Interesting,” I said to be polite. Old letters from people long-since dead had never had any appeal to me. Especially since I had other, more direct, ways to communicate with them.
He took the saltshaker from my hand and began to roll it in his fingers. “The way somebody painted that date onto the shakers—it must meansomething. It looks like it might be the only thing that remains from the lake house. And yet, according to these letters to Rosalind, accumulated over several decades, that house was a real haven for her and her family. A very special place that they all looked forward to visiting as often as they could.”
“How do you know it’s the only remaining piece of the house?”
“My mother. I asked her about it. She told me that she’d offered to have her moving people load everything up at the lake house to either salvage or sell before they flooded the lake, and Button told her it should all stay intact. So that when she remembered it, she’d know it was all still there, just underwater.”
Reaching forward, he pulled a photocopied version of a piece of newspaper toward us. “This was after Rosalind’s death, so I’m assuming Button must have clipped it out and added it to her mother’s drawer full of correspondence for posterity’s sake. I’ve read through it several times, and the one thing that sticks with me is that the families on the lake and in the town knew what was coming a full year in advance. And the Pinckneys even had my mother offering to help them empty the house and take care of the contents. Yet Button and her brother did nothing to save anything from the house. Only a salt-and-pepper-shaker set with that date written on it.”
“It could be anything, Jack. Like your mother said, they wanted tokeep the house intact, even underwater—that’s why they only took the shakers. And maybe that’s the date a favorite dog died. Or a first kiss. Who knows? It was with the rest of the collection at the South Battery house where it probably always was—and not salvaged from the lake house at all. I think you’re reading more into this than is there.”
