Chapter One
[Friday]
ST. ELIZABETH SITS SMACK DAB ON THE GEORGIA coast, so when the weather forecasters start talking about a hurricane headed our way, even if it’s still way out at sea, conversation at the salon tends to center on the storm. I knew from prior experience that the Piggly Wiggly shelves would be emptied by people stocking up with enough groceries to last through Armageddon; flashlights and batteries would disappear from the hardware stores; and cars, vans, and campers would clog every road as people headed inland to escape the flooding and power outages. The forecasters were saying Hurricane Horatio would probably turn north before it got to us—as most of the storms did—and come ashore somewhere in the Carolinas, so I didn’t plan to panic just yet (although I might buy a box of Twinkies, using the rationale that the preservative-rich sponge cakes would outlast life as we know it, never mind a hurricane-induced power outage). I was in the minority, however, as most of the customers at Violetta’s, my mom’s salon, joyfully wallowed in worrying about worst-case scenarios.
“I’ve heard it’s going to be as bad as Hurricane Floyd in 1999,” one customer said.
“These late-season storms are always the worst,” her husband said wisely from the waiting area, which consisted of two chintz-covered chairs, a matching love seat, and a couple of tables.
“I was in Charleston for Hugo,” another woman said, “and we lost power for well over a week. This can’t possibly be that bad.”
“My sister’s house was flattened by Andrew,” an elderly woman piped up from the Nail Nook, where our manicurist, Stella Michaelson, was painting her toenails a vivid orange.
Ah, hurricane one-upmanship, a popular pastime on the coast whenever the forecasters start talking about named storms.
“I’m evacuating,” a client said later that afternoon as I highlighted her hair. “Len and I are going to stay with his folks in Atlanta. I’m not living on canned ravioli like we did before we got the power back after the last storm. Although, the way his mom cooks, it’s a toss-up. What are you and Violetta doing, Grace?”
“Oh, we’ll ride it out,” I said, carefully folding a foil around a section of hair. “This house has lasted almost two hundred years . . . I don’t suppose Horatio will be able to blow it down.” And my mother, Violetta Terhune, owner of the house and the salon that occupied the front rooms, wouldn’t leave for anything less than a tsunami. It was like she believed her presence in the house would help it withstand wind and rain and hail and flooding.
“You’re lucky,” my client said. “They built to last in those days. We bought in that new area, Delta Bayou, and I swear our condo is made of plywood and tissue paper.”
I made commiserating noises as I put her under the heat lamp.
As the last customer left for the day and Mom locked the door behind her, the five of us took a deep breath and relaxed, prepping our stations for the next day. I liked the salon at times like this; it felt more like a home than a business. Dust motes danced in the sunbeams angling through the wooden blinds. The comfy waiting area and the hanging ferns and potted violets clustered on the windowsills made it feel homey, as did the wide, heart-of-pine floorboards. The figurehead from the Santa Elisabeta, a Spanish galleon that sank off the Georgia coast in the 1500s, provided benevolent supervision from her spot on the wall behind the counter.
As I swept, our shampoo girl, seventeen-year-old Rachel Whitley, stripped off her smock, revealing her usual black attire. After a brief flirtation with being a beauty contestant this past summer, she had reverted to Goth-type clothes and ragged jet-black bangs flopped into her kohl-rimmed eyes. Her pale face with its slightly lantern-shaped jaw stood out against the black hoodie zipped up to her neck. “Guess what I’m doing tomorrow night?” she asked, her eyes sparkling with mischief. She dropped into my styling chair and spun it in circles.
“Going on a date?” Stella asked, aligning her polish bottles in the cabinet and closing it. Her white Persian, Beauty, swiped at her shoelace, and Stella shooed her away. “With that nice Braden?”
“We’re just friends now,” Rachel said.
I couldn’t tell if she was sad or not that they weren’t dating anymore.
“Studying for your AP History exam,” Mom suggested teasingly. Her periwinkle blue eyes twinkled behind rimless glasses. Comfortably rounded, she had short gray and white hair she gelled into soft spikes that framed her face becomingly, giving her the look of a kind Beatrix Potter hedgehog.
“You’re close,” Rachel said. “I’m going on a ghost-hunting field trip with my science class!”