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  “She’s worried about you. She hasn’t heard from you since you moved back here, and Jack won’t talk to her about you, either.”

  I glared up at her. “You know we don’t mention that name around here.”

  I felt Mrs. Houlihan behind me and pictured her raising her eyebrows at my mother.

  “Melanie, darling. You and Jack are going to be parents to the same baby. Sooner or later you’re going to have to talk to him. And the ball’s in your court, you know. He did ask you to marry him, and you said no. I think you at least owe him an explanation.” Her look of expectation made it clear that she believed that Jack wasn’t the only one to whom an explanation was owed.

  With exaggerated patience, I said, “I told him no for the same reason Bonnie didn’t tell him about Nola—because she knew that as a gentleman he would offer to do the right thing. Well, I don’t want to be the ‘right thing.’ He’s already made it clear that he doesn’t love me, and I don’t want to marry for any other reason.” I felt those infernal tears welling again. “And I’m certainly not going to waste my time chasing after him to make him change his mind.”

  “But he does love you, Mellie. I know he does.”

  I tried to snort, but it came out as a half sob. “Right. Then why did he respond with, ‘I’m sorry,’ when I told him that I loved him?” I picked up a piece of toast and bit into it, if only to hide the telltale quivering of my lip. Pregnancy hormones coupled with a rejected declaration of love and a marriage proposal based on pity had wreaked havoc on my self-confidence and backbone. I wasn’t sure whether I could ever recover. Besides, I’d lived my life on the premise that if you pretended something wasn’t there it would eventually go away. At least, it usually worked where dead spirits were concerned.

  “It’s all not going to go away, you know, if you ignore it.” My mother, apparently a mind reader as well as a psychic, arched one eyebrow at me.

  I focused on my tea and toast, careless of the crumbs that fell on my navy blue skirt and jacket. The skirt was being held together with a rubber band and paper clips, the jacket buttoned strategically over it to disguise my handiwork. Unfortunately, the straining button was attached to the jacket with only thread and a prayer.

  I felt my mother’s gaze on me and slowly raised my eyes.

  “I also had a dream,” she said quietly.

  The room fell silent except for the sound of Mrs. Houlihan washing something in the sink and General Lee slurping up his food. My mother didn’t have normal dreams, and we both knew it. She had “visions.” The last vision had brought her back into my life to save it. For her to be having another could be no less monumental.

  “What was it about?” I asked as I swallowed dry toast with my tea.

  “A crying baby.”

  The food stuck in my throat. “A crying baby?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve heard it, too, then.”

  I rolled my eyes, realizing too late that I probably looked like Nola. “Can’t I have any secrets from you?”

  She smiled softly. “Not really, no.” Pushing her cup away, she said, “It might not be related to you and your pregnancy, though.”

  I stared back at her.

  “I felt something when I heard the crying. Something powerful, and not necessarily good. But it felt detached, like it wasn’t connected to me exactly, but wanted to announce its presence.” She paused—a pause that, in another situation, I would have called a pregnant one. She continued. “And maybe ask for help.”

  I shivered as my mother watched me closely. I already had too many complications in my life and I wasn’t eager to introduce one more. I’d been telling myself I’d imagined the sound, that it had nothing to do with me. That one more person, living or dead, wasn’t asking something of me that I wasn’t prepared to give.

  I looked down at my empty plate. The ability to communicate with the dead was something my mother and I shared. Our ability was something she referred to as a gift but that I’d always considered a goiter on my neck. Although I’d been unaware of it at the time, it was what had torn us apart when I was a child, but was also what had brought us together again. I was thankful for that, and thankful that we’d been able to send a few troubled spirits into the light without calling too much attention to ourselves. But my own spirit was too troubled to concern itself with things that went bump in the night. Or cried out in the early-morning hours.

  With forced conviction, I said, “I’ve owned this house long enough to know its ghosts. We sent Louisa Vanderhorst and Joseph Longo to their just rewards and I haven’t seen them or Nevin Vanderhorst since. There are a few contented spirits lingering and we are mutually happy to leave one another alone. There’s definitely no baby, or reason for a baby to be here.”

  “That we know of,” my mother added.

  I was about to argue when there was a knock on the door, and my mother and I locked gazes, feeling the same knot of dread in the place where the heart meets the soul.

  Mrs. Houlihan went to the door and let in my plumber/contractor, Rich Kobylt. Since I’d originally inherited the house on Tradd Street, Rich had become as much a fixture here as the falling plaster and cracked foundation. I often wondered whether I should keep a room for him and charge him rent. Anything to help support the never-ending restoration work on the house.

  He stepped into the kitchen, then hitched up his drooping pants before he spoke, and I shrank back. That was always a sign that he had bad news for me, and was always accompanied by the imaginary sound in my head of a cash register cha-chinging as more money was sucked out of my bank account.

  “Mornin’, Miz Middleton, Miz Prioleau.” He nodded to both of us.

  Mrs. Houlihan brought him a large mug of coffee, two sugars and one dollop of creamer, and placed it in his hands. I should charge him for that, too, I thought. I didn’t ask him to sit down, mistakenly believing that the less time he spent in my presence, the less money I’d be forced to spend. Once again, the image of a parking lot on this particular spot on Tradd Street loomed in my head in an enticing way.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, speaking the two words that always followed my greeting to him.

  He held the steaming mug but didn’t drink from it, and I noticed that he was paler than usual under his hat. I’d realized shortly after he’d begun to work on the restoration of the house that he was sensitive to restless spirits and that they sometimes made their presence known to him in disconcerting ways. I still couldn’t tell whether he was in denial or if he really didn’t realize that when paint cans kept emptying themselves, there was more to it than just pranksters or his inability to remember using up all the paint.

  He looked at me apologetically, and I let all the air in my lungs expel in a long wheeze. “It’s not another foundation problem, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said.

  “That’s a relief.” I kept my gaze on his face, trying to determine whether he was telling me the truth. “So what is it?”

  He jacked up his pants again, as if stalling for time, and it seemed that he was as reluctant to tell me as I was to hear. “Well, you know we’ve been making a big pile of mess in your back garden as we excavated the old foundation and replaced it. We didn’t really pay much attention to the stuff we yanked out, because we knew we couldn’t use it again. Well, today I’ve got a dump truck and a loader to clear all that stuff away, and in the middle of the second load that’s when we saw it.”

  If possible, his face went a bit paler.

  My mother stood, and I saw that her hand was shaking slightly. She reached for me and touched my fingers, an electric current seeming to jolt between us. I grasped her hand in mine, remembering our shared mantra as we’d faced our most adversarial spirits: We are stronger than you.

  “Saw what?” I asked, my voice surprisingly normal.

  He glanced behind him, as if he were afraid that whatever he’d unearthed had snuck up behind him. A shiver went through me and I half suspected that he might be right.
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  “Bones. In a small wooden box. Definitely human.” His hand shook a little, sloshing coffee over the side of his mug. “A baby.”

  My mother grasped my hand harder as our gazes met, the weight of the world pressing down on me as the thought ricocheted through my brain and rained down on my already ruined life: Here we go again.

  CHAPTER 2

  I sat on the sofa in the front parlor with my mother on one side and my father on the other. I hadn’t asked either one of them to be there, but I’d almost wept with gratitude when they’d selected their spots on the sofa. I was getting a little too familiar with police lights, yellow crime-scene tape, and dead bodies hidden on my property, but it was still a shock. I’d just barely recovered from finding the remains of Louisa Vanderhorst and Joseph Longo in the fountain less than two years before, and now apparently there was another body bricked into the foundation of the house. I was beginning to take it personally.

  We faced Detective Thomas Riley, whose large frame was folded into one of two matching Chippendale chairs. He had light brown hair bleached blond on the ends, as if he spent a lot of time outdoors, and warm brown eyes set in a face of hard lines and angles that could have been the model for G.I. Joe. Maybe it was my raging pregnancy hormones, but I couldn’t stop staring at him. There was something about Charleston men. Perhaps it was the pluff mud of Charleston’s surrounding marshes or the summer heat that baked the soles of your shoes if you left them on the pavement too long that seeped into the bloodstreams of soon-to-be mamas pregnant with boys. Even if one chose to include He-Who-Would-Not-Be-Mentioned in that estimation.

  “Are you from Charleston?” I asked before I was even aware that I’d opened my mouth.

  He looked at me in surprise and I realized that while I’d been daydreaming about how well his biceps filled his shirt and how big his feet had to be to fit in those large shoes, he’d probably been discussing the human remains found in the foundation of my house.

  “Yes, I am. My mother’s actually from Ireland, but my father was born and raised here. Both he and my grandfather were with the Charleston Police Department, but I’m the first detective in the family.” He grinned, making my hormones dance a little jig, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that no matter how nice the smile, it would always pale in comparison to another smile on another handsome face, a face that still haunted my dreams at night.

  Disconcerted, I sat back. My mother, apparently trying to answer the detective’s question that had been directed at me, said, “Melanie’s only owned the house for about two years. I’m afraid she doesn’t know much about the house’s history except that it belonged to the Vanderhorst family since it was built in 1848. She inherited it from Nevin Vanderhorst.”

  “Is he a family relation?”

  I sat up, knowing where his line of questioning was headed. “No. I met him when I was called here to see about listing his house for sale. But then he died suddenly, and he left the house to me.”

  Detective Riley’s pen paused over his notepad. “You only met Mr. Vanderhorst once, yet he left this house to you?”

  “Trust me, I was pretty surprised, too. My grandfather and his father were best friends, so that must have been enough of a family connection for him.” I decided to leave out the part about how I could see the ghost of Louisa Vanderhorst, Nevin’s mother, in the garden, and how he’d been under the impression that she approved of me. That approval, coupled with the fact that he had no known next of kin, was enough for him to make me the very reluctant heiress to his crumbling house and all of its ghosts. Not to mention a dog and housekeeper, too.

  He raised his eyebrows. “You must have some serious powers of persuasion.”

  I blushed. “There was no persuasion going on, believe me. I hate old houses.”

  Technically, this was said more from rote than from any lingering convictions, but I didn’t want him to think—as many people did—that I had coerced Mr. Vanderhorst in any way. At the time, I’d seen this house as a great, gaping money pit with the potential to be a revenue-producing parking lot. I didn’t completely believe that anymore, but I couldn’t in all honesty say that thoughts of dousing the foundation with gasoline and striking a match didn’t occur to me from time to time. Especially following a conversation with Rich Kobylt in which I’d been told that something else major and expensive needed to be fixed.

  “But isn’t your specialty historic Charleston real estate?”

  I smiled patiently. “Yes, but that’s because I can view the properties without bias. Generally speaking, though, old houses and I don’t get along.”

  He leaned back and put his pen down, as if indicating that what he was about to ask me was off the record. “Why is that?”

  I nodded. “I have several reasons.” I shot a glance toward my mother. “But mostly because the cost of upkeep and restoration seem to be at odds with any kind of retirement plan. They’re sort of like adult children who never leave home and expect you to support them forever.”

  A corner of his mouth quirked upward. “I see,” he said, once again putting pen to paper. His warm brown eyes met mine. “Apparently I’m going to have to dig into the Vanderhorst family history to get a better idea of who the remains might belong to. There were a few other items found along with the remains that also might offer up a clue or two.”

  I didn’t ask what those might be. I was happy to dump the whole problem on him so that my foundation work could be completed and I could begin to rebuild my life. Wanting this whole thing to be over as soon as possible, I said, “You might want to contact Dr. Sophie Wallen-Arasi. She’s a professor at the College of Charleston in the historical preservation department and for some reason is completely fascinated with this house. She knows a lot about the house’s history and would love to tell you all about it. Just make sure that you have a couple of hours to listen.” Sophie was my best friend, a pairing that might be considered one of the wonders of the world. She was tofu to my hamburger, Birkenstocks to my Tory Burch flats, and Goodwill thrift shop to my King Street boutiques. But I loved her like a sister—most of the time—and couldn’t imagine life without her.

  I continued. “She and her new husband, Chad Arasi, took a monthlong honeymoon to Angola to teach green farming techniques to local farmers, but they’ll be back next Thursday.”

  He raised his eyebrows at me again, but I didn’t elaborate. There were many things even a best friend couldn’t explain.

  Mrs. Houlihan had placed several pastries on a plate when she’d brought in our coffee. As my parents chatted with Detective Riley, I nonchalantly scooted to the edge of the sofa to make it easier to reach the plate without anybody noticing. I was still hungry, and too thrilled to be showing signs of an appetite to restrict myself. My hand was halfway to the plate when the pulling at my midsection suddenly eased and the single button on my jacket gave up and shot from the broken thread like a bullet, ricocheting off the silver coffee urn and hitting Detective Riley squarely in the middle of his forehead.

  “Ouch,” he said, half standing from his seated position, his move toward his gun halted midway when he spotted the offending object on the coffee table.

  Mrs. Houlihan, standing in the doorway, saw the bright red mark on the detective’s forehead and began a hasty retreat. “I’ll go get some ice for that.”

  “I am so sorry,” I said, mortified.

  Detective Riley’s gaze settled on my midsection with a questioning look in his eyes.

  “She’s expecting,” my mother said in a conciliatory tone similar to the one she’d used to talk me into wearing the low-cut red gown for my fortieth birthday party that had gotten me in this predicament to begin with. “And she hasn’t had a chance to shop for maternity clothes yet.”

  “Oh,” he said, a confused look passing over his face. “I didn’t realize you were married. . . .”

  “She’s not,” my parents said in unison.

  I cringed, trying to disappear inside the upholstery.

>   The detective actually looked flustered. “I’m sorry; of course I know better than to make assumptions.” He smiled and, apparently calling on the charm that was inbred in all Charleston boys, he added, “I guess I just always assume that all the beautiful women are already taken.”

  “Oh, she’s definitely available.” We all turned to find Jack approaching us from the foyer, followed by Mrs. Houlihan holding a bag of frozen peas and a dish towel. She hastily wrapped the bag in the towel and handed it to Detective Riley.

  “Mother!” I shot her an accusatory glance. There was only one reason Jack had landed on my doorstep.

  Jack laid a package from Blue Bicycle Books on the coffee table, then greeted my parents, shaking my father’s hand and kissing my mother on her cheek. He slowly straightened, a decidedly frosty blue gaze directed at me. “Hello, Mellie. It’s been a while.”

  Granted, he had every reason to be angry with me. When one’s marriage proposal is rejected, the object of the proposal should expect some sort of animosity. But in the month since, he hadn’t called, or sent a message, or even sent Nola over to reason with me. Or to ask me why. Not that any of it would have changed my mind. But it was as if I, and our baby, had simply ceased to exist for him. For a while I’d made myself believe that that’s how I wanted it. Now, after seeing him and experiencing that little bump in blood pressure he always caused, I wondered how I’d even managed to get out of bed each day. Still, he looked way too good to be a jilted lover, and that just made me angrier.

  “Hello, Jack.” I was proud of how neutral I kept my tone. “Are you lost? The erectile dysfunction clinic is on Broad Street. This is Tradd.”

  My mother shot me a warning look. “I called Jack because he’s always been so good at this mystery-solving thing that I thought he could be of some help.”

  “Jack? Jack Trenholm the writer?” Detective Riley stood, still clutching his frozen peas and towel in his left hand. The mark on his head was beginning to swell and darken, leaving me to wonder what he would tell people. I sank down lower in the sofa, all thoughts of pastries gone from my mind at the same speed as the flying button.