I could not help the bloom of excitement in my guts.
“Well.” Mrs. Mank stood. “At least you were in time for supper. I’m quite hungry, Merry, and supper smells heavenly.”
I wasn’t hungry but I ate too, and then helped clean up.
I took up Mrs. Mank’s cocoa for her.
I bathed and went to bed. Though I was tired, sleep eluded me.
Mrs. Mank had known Mamadee. She held Mamadee and Mama to be no-account. She had not just chosen me out of the ether or on the say-so of Fennie or Merry Verlow. She had come close to an admission that she had made some attempt to interfere before Mama would ruin me, whatever “ruin” meant to Mrs. Mank.
When? When had she made her observations and drawn her conclusions? Before Daddy was murdered? Before Fennie Verlow sent us to Merrymeeting and her sister, Merry?
Did it matter?
And where? I did not remember Mrs. Mank from the first part of my childhood in Montgomery and Tallassee. Given how young I was, the lack of memory more than likely meant nothing. Mrs. Mank might have known Mamadee for years and years, and just not been around when I was a little girl in my daddy’s house.
Mrs. Mank had spoken of Mamadee with a distinct, personal disdain. Perhaps they had known each other in childhood, and that was how Mrs. Mank came to know that Mamadee’s father was “nobody.” What did the term “nobody” signify to Mrs. Mank? The snobbery innate to the term angered me. Grady Driver was nobody, and so was I.
If Mamadee’s daddy was nobody, did that mean that her mama, my great-grandmama, Cosima, was not?
How was I going to get to New Orleans and, once there, find my brother? And before Mama returned. Before I could plan such a trip, I had to know more about where Ford might be in New Orleans or even if he were still there. It made sense to locate Dr. Evarts. If Ford were in college somewhere, Dr. Evarts would know. Surely he would tell me if I asked. I was Ford’s sister, who had been a little girl when Dr. Evarts became Ford’s guardian. Dr. Evarts could not believe that I was Mama’s agent or that I had designs on Ford’s money. Surely not. Oh, hell—yes, Dr. Evarts might very well think just those things about me.
All I could do was find the man. There must be some chance that if I did, even if Dr. Evarts would not tell me where Ford was, some clue might come my way. Why, Ford might be on break from college, and visiting with Dr. Evarts, and open the door when I knocked at it. That was hope, not wishful thinking, and hope was good, hope was necessary. Faith in myself, and hope for a good outcome. Faith and Hope, my aunties. I needed to think about Ford.
I was putting too much into the consequences of finding him. Likely it would turn out a wild goose chase. If Ford proved to be hateful, I told myself with what I felt was adult rationality, I would be free to walk away from childhood and the wreckage of my family. That’s how young I really was.
Sixty-one
MRS. Mank’s plans for me made me more determined not to be diverted from either seeking Ford or any information about my family that I could unearth. The trip to Tallassee had been a severe disappointment. It was here on Santa Rosa Island that I had remembered, and not forgotten again, the memories of the events of my first months at Merrymeeting.
On the shelf over my bed, the hallucinatory bird book had reverted to being an old edition of the National Audubon Society Field Guide to Eastern Land Birds. I put it in my overalls pocket again, along with my oyster knife, before going downstairs and helping myself to a key to the attic from Miz Verlow’s key safe. Though she was in the kitchen with Perdita and might emerge at any time, I did not fear her surprising me, nor her anger if and when she discovered that I had taken the key.
When I turned the knob of the door to the attic, experimentally, though, it gave easily: It was unlocked. I dropped the key back into my overalls pocket. Once through the door, I closed it behind as quietly as I could.
I stood in the dark, waiting for my night sight. The whispers and shuffles of the small dark lives of the critters that lived in the attic reassured me. I felt more than a little bit like one of them, just trying to survive in a predatory world. And in the dark. The bird guide, my oyster knife and the egg locket weighted one of my pockets. If the critters did not frighten me, that thing in the trunk had, not so very long ago. Whether an oyster knife, a bird guide or the egg locket would be any protection was questionable, but they were what I had.
When I could see enough of the steps, I moved up them cautiously until I found the light chain and its cool white ceramic knob, seemingly hanging there waiting for me. A tug shed the filthy light of the row of bulbs above over the shrouded, secretive, and unreadable shapes crowding the nearly full space.
The snick of a key engaging the lock of the door at the bottom of the attic steps reached my ears. I heard no one. Mrs. Mank might be able to move without my hearing her, but no one else ever had. And she was not in residence. What noiseless someone or something had locked the door behind me?
Whatever the answer to that weird little mystery, I had a key in my pocket.
Slowly I began to explore the attic again. There was no way to do it systematically. Despite all the efforts that Roger and I had made over the years to store like with like and make everything accessible, it was almost as if someone came up and disorganized whatever we did—or else the miscellany rearranged itself.
The lights went out. I stood rigidly still in the dark instant. For all the light to go out, either someone or something had pulled the chain, which I had not heard, or had removed the fuse. I didn’t have a spare fuse in my pocket, nevermind the fuse box was in the pantry. Again my vision adjusted, so I was not totally blind, and the light of day leaked in at the portholes in the eaves.
I groped my way to the one where the tarp that Roger and Grady and I had used was still spread out. The candle stubs we had abandoned had long since melted in the heat to an amorphous puddle, staining the tarp underneath. The wicks made black hyphens in the yellowed wax. I had no lighter or matches, nor had I planned well enough to bring a flashlight. I crouched over the melted wax and flattened it as best I could with my palm. Rolled into a crude cylinder around the longest piece of wick, it would have to pass for a candle. It only stood up because it was not tall enough to fall over.
Taking it with me, in hope of discovering a way to light it, I continued my exploration. The candle comforted me. I might be able to use it or not. But I had it. It might even light if I could find a lighter or matches. In the meantime, I wanted to find the old trunk, the scary one.
Stubbing my toe hard on the cast-iron base of an old sewing machine, I staggered against it. The thing was so heavy as to be unmovable and to my relief, held me up enough to avoid going flat on my face. My looks would not be improved with a Singer treadle pattern on my face, to say nothing of putting an eye out on the projecting ironwork. Don’t run with a cast-iron sewing machine stand in your hand, Calley; you could poke your eye out. The ludicrous thought made me snicker.
Balance regained, I slid along the edges of dressers and tables, grasped the ears of chair backs, and fetched up finally near another of the portholes in the eaves. It was fabulously webbed and filthy, but I was not much cleaner by then, so I patted the screen in the porthole with the palms of my hands gently, to shake loose some of the accumulated grime. A clearer air wafted in, and I breathed of it gladly, even as it emphasized just how thick and dusty the air that I had been breathing really was.