Scandal in Copper Lake (16 page)

Besides, he didn’t have a clue what it was he needed to do. Stay with Anamaria?

Or walk away?

Chapter 7

S
he was all right.

Robbie had passed on the message from Mama Odette, and in the early dawn hours the following day, Anamaria knew it was true. Mama Odette had read her cards, spoken to her spirit guides, all topped off with a generous dose of good ol’ prayer, and the answers were the same. Anamaria was all right.

Did you ask Auntie Charise what she saw? she’d wanted to know. But by the time she’d finished her bath, and Robbie had carried her to bed and made love to her until she was senseless, it had been too late for calling her family. She didn’t need Charise’s confirmation anyway. Things were different. She’d awakened a few minutes ago to the certainty that her life had changed for good. She had found passion, and her own sweet little girl was now growing safe and protected inside her.

Unwise love and a pretty daughter to remind her of it. That was her destiny, and she accepted it, but was it wrong to want more? To wish that just once destiny could include a husband, marriage and a little convention? To wish that her daughter might always know the love and acceptance of her father and his family?

Lillie and Jass both had that, but they’d had to leave the Duquesne family to get it. They’d been sent away and raised to fit in someplace else so thoroughly that they no longer fit in where they came from. They didn’t know Mama Odette the way they should; they didn’t know the family history, didn’t understand the family gifts, didn’t develop their own gifts. They were Duquesnes only by birth, not by living.

Anamaria couldn’t bear that for her child.

Behind her Robbie stirred, one arm pillowing his head, one leg thrust out from beneath the sheet. She hadn’t asked him to stay last night, though she’d wanted him to. She’d watched her aunties and her cousins never ask for a thing from a man beyond money to help raise their children. Mama Odette had been with the same man off and on for twenty years. She never asked him to go when she got tired of him, never asked him to stay when he was leaving. She accepted what he gave her, just as she accepted what he denied her.

Call it a curse, fate or destiny, but sometimes it sucked.

Easing from the bed, she pulled on her nightgown, then walked barefooted through the house. Light shone in wedges across the floor, reminding her of other early mornings, when she and Glory had slipped outside to sit on the back stoop and watch the stars twinkle out in the face of the rising sun. If it was chilly, they’d wrapped the shawl around them both, and if they were feeling silly, they’d run barefooted across the grass, leaving trails in the dew.

It felt so good to have some of those memories back. Fool
ishly, she’d thought if she’d unlocked one, they would all return, all those years of living in this house with Mama. But she’d been only five years old. She’d lacked the kind of recall adults had. A few memories might be the best a former child could hope for.

After completing her walk through the house, she returned to the bedroom, turned on the tiny frilly lamp on the dresser and took a shirt and capri pants from their hangers. She was about to turn away when her attention caught on the suitcase above. Behind it was the wooden chest, still unopened.
When it’s time,
Mama Odette had told her as she handed over the chest.

She gazed at the chest, then at Robbie, now snoring lightly. He would go through it for her, or with her. He would share the task and his strength if she asked him to. But hadn’t she just reminded herself that her family didn’t ask for things from the men in their lives?

She lifted the box from the shelf, set it on the rug beside the bed, then seated herself cross-legged with the mattress at her back. The filigree latch was stiff from disuse, but it lifted. Her fingers trembled with emotion, but they raised the lid.

She was afraid of what she would find inside, and of what she wouldn’t.

The springs creaked; then soft footsteps circled the bed. A moment later Robbie slid down to sit beside her on the floor, his shoulder bumping hers companionably. He was naked and not the least bit uncomfortable with it, or with the silence that cocooned them in the thin circle of light.

Secured to the inside of the lid was a photograph, the edges curled, the colors faded. When she pulled on it, the tape fell away, landing on the rug.

“Sometimes the daddies let Lillie and Jass come for a visit,” she said softly, cradling the snapshot where Robbie could see it, too. “That was what we called most of the men—the
daddies. There were so many of them, usually far out of our lives. It wasn’t worth it to us girls to remember their names.”

“That’s Augusta. Downtown at the river.” He grinned. “You look like a princess.”

She grinned, too. She’d been standing on a wall that made her head and shoulders taller than both of her sisters, with her hair in beaded braids and her dress fussy enough for any toddler beauty pageant. “I don’t know whether I really liked pink, or if Mama did, but it’s what I’m wearing in just about every picture before I turned ten.”

Glory was in pink, too, eye-popping bright, and looking as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Her arms were around her three girls, and Jass rested her head on Glory’s swollen belly. According to the date on the back, it had been taken two months before she died.

“What else is in there?” he asked, but he didn’t reach in, instead letting her proceed at her own pace.

“I don’t know. Stuff that was in the house, in Mama’s purse and her car. Mama Odette’s been keeping it for me for years, but I never looked. At first, all I remembered was the vision, and I didn’t want to see anything else. Then I couldn’t remember. For a long time, I pretended that none of it mattered. I had more family than most people would know what to do with. I was happy. What did it matter that I never knew my father and couldn’t remember my mother?”

“Then Mama Odette got sick.”

“And it was time. Time for me to remember. To pay my respects to Mama. Someday I’m going to have daughters of my own, and I’m going to tell them all the stories she told me, and I’m going to tell them about her. About how much she loved us. About what a good mother she was, and what a good grandmother she would have been.”

The photo trembled when she mentioned having daughters
of her own. In her lifetime, not one Duquesne woman had had two children by the same father. They were a vast family of half sisters. How dearly she would love to be the first one to break that tradition.

Robbie steadied her hand with his own, his fingers firm and warm where hers were shaky and cold. After a moment, she released the photo to him and took out the next item in the chest. A bonnet, sized for an infant, fine white linen edged with lace and tied with pale pink ribbon. More photos: Glory with Lillie’s father, with Jass’s, with other men neither of them knew in places they didn’t recognize. Enclosed in a folded sheet decorated with a crayoned heart were a few dried dandelions, and beneath it, a half-dozen slim spiral notebooks, held together with a rubber band.

She pulled the rubber band, and it broke. Each cover was marked with a name: Savannah, Peach Orchard, Charleston, Beaufort, Atlanta, Copper Lake. Each held names, addresses with directions, phone numbers, dates and times, all in her mother’s handwriting, which was as gawky as she had been graceful.

“They’re appointment books,” Robbie said quietly.

Anamaria selected the one identified as Copper Lake and opened it. The wire binding was warped, and it crackled the pages as she turned them. “Mama Odette uses a calendar from the local funeral home, and I have a date book. Auntie Charise uses a BlackBerry. She does readings by e-mail and text message and has her own Web site. She’s woo-woo meets high tech.”

His smile came and went as she turned to the last filled pages in the notebook. Glory had shared none of Charise’s organizational skills. There were names with no numbers, dates and times with no names. Sometimes she abbreviated names to initials, then a few lines down wrote them out in full.

The final page held two entries:
Liddy, 5:00,
dated February 18, and the other,
2/21
scrawled inside a heart.

“Maybe her second appointment that evening was a date instead,” Robbie suggested.

“She was three days from her due date. She was big and round and cumbersome and forbidden from having sex. Not what most men find prime date material.”

“You’d still be gorgeous and sexy even if you were about to deliver triplets.”

Anamaria stilled on the outside, but everything inside was fluttering—her heart, her breath, the baby girl she was convinced had found life there. Would Robbie be around when their daughter’s birth grew near? Probably not. She would send him a polite note from Savannah, once medical tests had confirmed what she already knew, and he could acknowledge it or ignore it as he chose.

She thought he would ignore it. Robbie Calloway admitting to his conservative family, friends and clients that he’d fathered a child with a mixed-race fortune-telling fraud? Ignoring their part-black babies was an age-old tradition for wealthy Southern men. If the Calloways had been typical slaveholders, his distant grandfathers, uncles and cousins had done it a time or two. It would be no stretch for him to.

Though it would break another piece of her heart.

He grew serious again. “How sick is Mama Odette?”

A lump formed in Anamaria’s throat, and her vision blurred before she blinked it clear again. “The doctors say she’s dying. She says God doesn’t share his plans for her with such meddling men. When it’s her time, she’ll go, but until then she’s got a life to live.”

“Good attitude.”

“Yeah. I’m going to be just like her when I reach her age—gray and round, speaking my mind, surrounded by sisters
and daughters and granddaughters and nieces. They’ll be sorry to see me go, but they’ll be grateful, too, for the life I lived while I was here.”

He brushed a strand of hair back, tucking it behind her ear. “Don’t those daughters need a father?”

She raised her gaze to find him closer than she’d realized, watching her with such intensity that shivers rippled across her skin. “Duquesne women don’t marry,” she reminded him softly. “We just fall madly in love, then use our babies to mend our broken hearts.”

His fingertip feathered across the curve of her ear. “Is that a law?” he teased. “Can I find it in the Georgia Code?”

Her head tilted, and he continued stroking, along her jaw, the pad of his fingertip bearing a small callus. He had good hands—strong, gentle, unpampered. A woman or an infant could find extraordinary comfort there. “It’s worse than a law. It’s a curse. The price we pay for being extraordinary women with extraordinary gifts.”

He stopped stroking her, and she missed the touch. He didn’t move away but shifted so he could better see her, one arm resting on the mattress, his head resting on that hand. “What happens if you get married anyway?”

“What happens?” she echoed.

“Does your groom burst into flames at the altar? Does he get zapped into some parallel universe? Do all those who have passed before descend on him to keep him from getting to the church on time?” He shrugged. “Curses have to have consequences. What are the consequences of this one?”

She stared at him. It was such a simple question, but she’d never asked it before. Oh, she’d asked Mama Odette
why
often enough to drive a lesser woman crazy.
Why aren’t you married? Why isn’t Auntie Lueena married? Why isn’t Auntie Charise married? Why do we all have different daddies? Why are there no men in our family?

Because that’s the way it is, chile,
Mama Odette had answered when Anamaria was younger, but as she got older, the answer had changed.
It’s the curse of the Duquesne women.

“It’s not a curse,” Robbie said. “It’s tradition. Just like it’s tradition in my family for all the men to go to law school.”

“But your brothers aren’t lawyers,” she murmured, still caught up in the import of his simple question.
What happens?
In two hundred years no one had bothered to find out. Had it just been circumstance that made her relatives stop marrying? Slavery had been a hard life, and then the war had begun, disrupting their worlds. A lot of women who would have married, raised families and lived normal lives had found themselves following different paths after the war. When had it gone from happenstance to destiny, from coincidence to curse?

“Actually, Russ is. He just chooses not to practice. Rick was the first one to break with tradition, and lightning didn’t strike him dead. My grandparents didn’t disinherit him. Society didn’t shun him. And Mitch wasn’t raised as a Calloway, so the family had no expectations for him.”

But Robbie
had
been raised a Calloway, and there were a lot of expectations for him. Marrying within his race and class was one of them.

“It’s just not done,” she said at last.

“But what happens if it is?”

“Nothing happens, because that’s just the way it is. There hasn’t been a marriage in our family in two hundred years.”

“What happened to that one?”

Her laughter was tinged with discomfort. “Two hundred years ago? I don’t know.” But she did. It was part of the history passed down from one daughter to the next. Etienne and Alfreda Duquesne had raised four daughters—Harriett,
Florence, Ophelia and Gussie. At the age of sixty-one, Etienne had died defending the plantation he’d called home all his life. Two days later Alfreda had passed, too.

And a tradition had begun.

She stared at Robbie a long time before slowly reaching into the chest again.

A cracked wallet, holding a driver’s license and Social Security card and stuffed to the breaking point with photographs of daughters and nieces. A tattered storybook that brought tears to Anamaria’s eyes. A well-worn deck of tarot cards. A soft velvet bag of crystals and charms. A Bible, its red cover stamped with gold letters in the lower right-hand corner: Glory Duquesne.