Ciji Ware (63 page)

The chief of Philadelphia Hospital exchanged knowing looks with his fellow physician. “Yes… I explained that to her after I received your letter,” he disclosed somberly. “I expected the worst, of course.”

“And?” Keating asked, holding his breath.

“Mrs. Clayton’s only reaction was a rather expansive smile.”

Both men chuckled and entered the room to pay their respects to the new mother and her bouncing baby boy, whose deafening howls for his supper could be heard echoing throughout the immaculately maintained facility.

Drake Whitaker Clayton was, indeed, making his presence known.

Chapter 27

The sounds of crying slowly faded, and silence enveloped the viewing room of Farrell’s Funeral Home.

Daphne Duvallon gazed with confusion at her surroundings. The casket containing the body of octogenarian Abigail Langhorn had been removed and the weeping mourner had also disappeared. Slowly, the scenes at the Philadelphia Hospital faded from her consciousness, replaced by one thought.

It’s happened again!

It was beginning to feel like a PBS historical series where the audience was allowed to view an exciting, action-packed story one chapter at a time. Her namesake, Daphne Whitaker Clayton, had finally produced a son—but at what cost to her physical and mental well-being?

Well, the
modern
Daphne was exhausted by all this drama, she reflected grimly. She rested her forehead against the harp’s sounding board, considering all she had just learned. It was of some comfort to discover that her namesake’s emotional difficulties were probably not organic, but were personal problems caused by the upheavals and vicissitudes of her tumultuous life. Who
wouldn’t
be on a hormonal roller coaster after multiple pregnancies and spousal rape and abuse, Daphne thought sympathetically.

Libby Girard bustled into the empty room. The manager of the funeral home began picking up programs abandoned on the folding chairs.

“You played wonderfully, just now,” she said, “but then I knew you would. Look how Mrs. Langhorn’s daughter just cried and cried. I’ve noticed that music does that to some people, haven’t you?” Libby prattled on. “It kinda pulls feelings outta a person, doesn’t it? I didn’t even
know
Abigail Langhorn, but when you played ‘How Great Thou Art,’ I got all choked up, too.”

Daphne politely waited out Libby’s monologue and then retrieved her harp case from the casket room to begin the process of securing her instrument and packing up her music. The place gave her the willies. Next time Libby offered her a job, she’d politely say she was booked or had upped her fee or something.

“Would you like to go out the back door so you won’t have to navigate those two steps out front?” the manager suggested.

“Good idea,” Daphne agreed. Then she realized that Libby was leading her toward a set of double doors. She halted abruptly at the entrance and stared into a room filled with ominous-looking stainless steel equipment.

“Oh, Lord!” Libby laughed. “You should see the look on your face! Don’t worry, we don’t have anybody scheduled in here today, though the head nurse up at the hospital was nice enough to suggest Farrell’s to the family of one of her terminal patients and I expect a call any minute now and I—”

“Ah… sorry to interrupt, but I’m late,” Daphne cut in. “What’s the shortest way out of here?”

Despite the bulkiness of the harp case, Daphne made fast progress through the sterile embalming room, out the back door, and across the parking lot to her car. She’d seen enough death this day to last a lifetime.

For the rest of the week, she waited in vain to hear from Sim. By Thursday afternoon, she had invented a number of possible scenarios.

He’d left for San Francisco without saying good-bye.

He’d been bitten by a snake on the Trace and couldn’t get help.

He had, indeed, fallen into the arms of Francesca and was shacked up in a motel outside Jackson.

He was busy tracking and photographing the last birds on his Audubon list and had forgotten what day it was.

She suddenly remembered little Trey—Simon Hopkins III—racing into Hopkins House with exciting news that the great naturalist had just arrived with a prize peregrine falcon. The parallels in her life were positively eerie! There were so many questions left unanswered despite the clues that these journeys back in time provided. Questions whose answers very likely would impact her life
today.
Amadora Bendhar had recommended that she attempt to find out if the truth of these sorties to antebellum Natchez could be proven in
fact.

Daphne glanced at her watch. She had a couple of hours before her Eola Hotel teatime gig. Maybe it was time she found out if she were going bonkers, or if the world she had been visiting these last few months had ever actually
existed.
At least, she could make a start.

Five minutes later, she parked in front of the Armstrong Library and made her way to the second floor. A plump, friendly woman in her thirties looked up from her desk in the reference department, and asked, “May I help you with something?”

“I’m interested in finding out about a mansion that no longer exists, called Concord, the governor’s house, and another plantation that—”

“Oh, that’s an easy one,” the librarian said before Daphne could ask about Hopkins House and the family burial ground at Devon Oaks. “Concord used to be out where the tire plant is now,” she said, confirming what Willis McGee had told Daphne. The librarian reached behind her desk and pulled out a copy of a large-format book entitled
Lost
Mansions
of
Mississippi.
Flipping to page four, she pointed to a grainy photograph of a building that Daphne recognized instantly, except for one feature.

“I didn’t remember hearing Concord had an exterior twin stairway on the front like that,” she said carefully, pointing to two sets of stairs that curved from a grand entrance between stately columns.

“They’re not original to the house,” the librarian explained. “That exterior double marble staircase was probably added in the 1830s when everybody ’round here went mad over Greek Revival architecture.”

So the Concord that Daphne remembered must have been the original mansion that had been completed in about 1795, according to the paragraph adjacent to the photo. This meant it would have existed when the duc d’Orléans came to Natchez with the motley entourage that could have included Jacques René Hébèrt. All the dates meshed!

“Concord burned down in 1901,” the librarian elaborated, “except for those gorgeous sweeping stairs and metal balustrades that stood in a field for the longest time, choked in weeds. Finally, someone just pulled it all down because of the liability.”

“Have you any information on an old plantation known as Hopkins House?” Daphne asked, feeling her heart start to pound. “Doctor Bailey Gibbs of Gibbs Hall told me it blew down in the Tornado of 1840.”

“Oh… if that’s what happened, we might have quite a lot of information ’bout it,” the librarian volunteered, turning to a bank of metal filing cabinets against the wall behind her desk. “There were many eyewitnesses who wrote their accounts at the time, and the newspapers of the day went into scads of detail. Hmmm,” she said, her fingers flipping through a series of manila file folders. “Let’s see… Hawthorne… um… Holly Hedges… Hope Farm… ah, yes…
Hopkins
House.
Here’s a sketch, and here’s a newspaper clipping with a series of letters to the editor bemoaning its loss.”

“Great going,” Daphne exclaimed, squinting at the yellowed newsprint and the date that ran above the banner headline HORRIBLE STORM!! NATCHEZ IN RUINS!!!

She scrutinized the sketch of the house and the newspaper account of the Natchez Tornado of May 7, 1840. Hopkins House, too, looked very familiar to Daphne, although there was no way she’d disclose that to the helpful librarian who offered to photocopy the file.

“Why are you so interested in Hopkins House, if I may ask?” her helper asked cheerily as the copier hummed. “Are you related to the family that owned the place?”

“No… ah… but a friend of mine might be,” Daphne replied. “I have collateral cousins who once owned Devon Oaks, though, the next plantation over.” On the spot, Daphne made a vow to return when she had more time to peruse the file on the home that formerly belonged to Maddy’s and Marcus’s forbears.

“Oh, Devon Oaks,” the librarian exclaimed excitedly. “Then you and I would have been cousins way back when.”

“You can’t be serious?” Daphne replied, amazed.

“Absolutely.” The librarian thrust out her hand, and announced, “I’m a Keating, Rosalie Keating, a direct descendent of Daphne Keating Drake, the mother of ‘Crazy Susannah’ Keating Whitaker, as she was known,” she joked. “Daphne Keating had a brother. John Keating, who founded my line of Keatings and she was also the grandmother of Daphne Whitaker who married that awful Yankee!”

“Your name is
Keating
? Then you have to be related to Otis and Liz.”

“Otis Keating is my first cousin.”

“Naturally,” Daphne deadpanned. “Do you know where any of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century family members are buried?” she asked, thinking to herself that
seeing
was the only way she’d ever believe that all the people in the flashbacks had actually lived.

“Well.” Rosalie Keating said thoughtfully, “‘Crazy Suz’ used to be buried right on the property at Devon Oaks until the family graves were eventually all moved to the Natchez City Cemetery after 1822. I ’spect you’ll find the rest of ’em there, too.”

Daphne slowly absorbed the fact that she and the librarian could both trace their families back to Daphne Whitaker Clayton’s
grandmother
, who was the first in the line to be named “Daphne.”

“
My
name is Daphne,” she announced quietly.

“You’re kiddin’?” the librarian marveled.

“Small town… small world, isn’t it?” Daphne said with a smile.
And
, she mused, it was proof positive that she hadn’t been losing her mind, even if a few Whitakers had!

“What’s your surname?”

“Duvallon, through the Kingsburys, who married into the Natchez Whitakers, and yada, yada, yada.”

“Oh, wait!” Rosalie Keating wagged a forefinger at her. “I know who
you
are. The wonderful harpist. You’re the one who sings with that great group down at the Under-the-Hill Saloon, right?” Daphne nodded. “And you organized the ‘For the Birds’ benefit, which, by the way, was ’bout the hottest thing to hit Natchez, ever.” The librarian cocked her head and gave Daphne’s conservative outfit the once-over. “You look a lot different than you did the other night,” she said, and they both laughed. “You do know, don’t you, that your namesake, Daphne Whitaker, was also a harpist and supposedly mooned over some Frenchman who came through here with the duc d’Orléans way back when, and after her death—so the legend goes—plays on her ghostly harp all over town?”

“Yeah… so I’ve heard.”

“It’s just local lore, of course. Something to amuse the tourists, but it
is
pretty interesting that you’re Daphne
Whitaker
Duvallon and you play the harp so well.”

“Pretty weird.” Daphne agreed. She opened her wallet and paid for the photocopies. “Well… thanks for all your help,” she said, gathering up the copies and her purse. “Once I digest all this, I might be back.”

“Anytime,” the librarian said. “I specialize in genealogical research. Always glad to help out a long lost relative.”

“Thanks,” she murmured. “Thanks a lot.”

Daphne sat in the Jeep parked in front of Armstrong Library and swiftly thumbed through the photocopies. What could possibly be the link between the Hopkins family of Hopkins House, Mississippi, and Simon’s San Francisco branch of the Hopkins clan? Was
this
the reason she’d felt so drawn to the photographer from the minute they met? Had some mysterious connection between their ancestors served to catapult them both back in time—for Sim had acknowledged that he, too, had slipped the time warp the night he’d heard a harp playing at three a.m. at Monmouth Plantation.

She scanned the copy of the hundred-and-sixty-year-old letter to the editor that described in horrific detail the tornado’s terrible destruction to the Hopkins plantation.

“Only chimneys remain, and little of them,” lamented one eyewitness. “Debris was found scattered far a quarter mile, as far as to the banks of Whitaker Creek. It tears the heart to think that a proud family whose members were wiped off God’s earth in the blink of an eyelash should suffer such dreadful losses…”

To Daphne’s surprise and dismay, her throat tightened, and a powerful wave of sadness welled in her chest. If all the Hopkinses who had peopled her visions died in the storm, then Sim
couldn’t
be a descendant. She studied the letter a second time. The missive didn’t say for certain that every single member of the Hopkins family perished in the tornado, though the letter might easily be interpreted that way.