Mom caught my expression and laughed. “Or maybe not. Finish that bagel, Grace Ann, and pick up a broom. We’ve got a lot of work to do today.”
She moved toward the house, but I walked to my car where it sat at the curb, liberally plastered with wet oak leaves but luckily undamaged. Looking for the tennies I was sure I’d tossed in, I patted a hand across the nappy carpet in the foot well. A piece of paper under the passenger seat crackled when my hand brushed it. Extracting it, I smoothed a wrinkle from the photocopied page. My gaze fell to the familiar handwriting.
14 October 1832
My dear Felicity,
As you predicted, I have been delivered of a boy, Quentin Cyril Dodd. My heart swells with love for him and I understand most clearly now how you dote on young Robert and my darling goddaughter Emily. Quentin is so pleased to have an heir that he has presented me with a string of lustrous pearls, which I cannot wait to show you. He is so generous to me and I do love him so.
When I look back over the past year, I almost feel like I’m leading a different life. In only twelve months I have travelled from the grief of my father’s death to the comfort of my husband’s home and the joy of birthing my son. In my new life, I don’t mind so much that mother is now Mrs. Angus Carlisle. We rarely correspond these days, and although I miss Rothmere—South Carolina seems so far away—my life is here with Quentin and his people.
Congratulations to Andrew on his election to the state house. Mayhap I’ll visit you in the governor’s mansion one day.
Your dear friend,
Clarissa Dodd
Laying the page carefully on the seat, I hooked two fingers into my tennies and started toward the house, comforted by Clarissa’s happiness and her apparent recovery from her stomach problems. It had crossed my mind reading the earlier letters that Annabelle—if it was, indeed, Annabelle who poisoned her husband—was poisoning her own daughter because she was poking into her father’s death. If so, marrying Quentin quickly had probably saved Clarissa’s life. Killing a husband was one thing—by all accounts Cyril was no saint, not that his philandering justified murder—but poisoning a daughter! Lucy Mortimer might romanticize the Rothmeres, but Annabelle, at least, sounded like a real piece of work to me. Lucy’s likely protest popped immediately into my mind: “But she was only a Rothmere by marriage.” I smiled.
A clump of black and white caught my eye, and I bent to pick up a water-logged stuffed penguin from the lawn where it had blown from who-knows-where. Feeling its heaviness in my hand, I thought about the time and energy it takes to build a house or a relationship and how swiftly a hurricane or an infidelity can turn it to rubble. Or how geographical distance or ongoing slights and abuse can erode a relationship more slowly, like termites chewing at a home’s foundation. But I believed almost anything could be rebuilt. Shoot, Georgians had rebuilt the entire state after Sherman razed it. And look how Cyril rebuilt Rothmere after it burned, how Braden had come back strong and compassionate after his bouts with depression (and would, hopefully, fully recover from his fall), how Mom and Althea had started Violetta’s after their husbands’ deaths.
Patching drywall and wood was the easiest form of rebuilding, I thought, padding around the side of the house to drag a trash can around front. Wounded souls and relationships, on the other hand . . .
My cell phone rang and an incautious step sent mud squishing coolly between my toes. I wiggled them. “Hello?”
“I’m in Atlanta and thought I’d drive down for the weekend,” Marty said, a smile in his voice. “I heard a rumor about a hurricane down there. Need any help with cleanup?”
“I don’t know.” I pretended to hesitate. “Know anyone with a carpentry background and strong muscles for hauling tree limbs out of salons?”
“That’s me. Hammer wielder and chainsaw operator extraordinaire. And I’m a good kisser, too.”
Sunlight warmed my face. “Come on down.”
Slipping the phone back in my pocket, I squeezed water out of the soggy penguin, letting it rinse the mud from between my toes. Clean felt good. I set the penguin on an unbroken section of veranda railing where he could supervise cleanup operations, and balanced on one foot at a time to lace up my shoes, sockless. Then I walked toward Mom, who was coming around the side of the house with a broom in one hand and a shovel in the other. Time to get to it.