CHAPTER SIX
They got the shutters closed. They checked the generator not five minutes before the electricity from the mainland kicked out for good. They fought with the radio, which was simply too old and cranky to accept help. And all the while they worked in near silence.
Gen couldn’t allow herself the luxury of getting too used to Rafe. She couldn’t rely on him. Even so, she couldn’t ignore the swell of delight every time she turned around to find him close by. She couldn’t deny the fact that he filled her house with a music that harmonized beautifully with her own. She couldn’t avoid the way her body reacted to his proximity, anticipated his touch, ached for more.
So she concentrated on the storm, the house, and getting in touch with Annie, which was becoming a more complicated problem by the minute.
“I can’t disappoint her,” Gen insisted yet again as she listened to the wind climb another notch in pitch.
“It’s dark out,” Rafe reminded her. “You wouldn’t make it ten feet without ending up on a reef somewhere.”
“Not reefs,” she corrected wearily. “Marshes.”
“Whatever. You can’t go.”
She paced the living room, her eyes on the solid expanse of black where the windows had been. The shutters were holding off the storm with no problems, but the weather service had indicated that the worst might be yet to come. Gen couldn’t hold still. Maybe it was Rafe’s continued warnings, maybe it was her inability to get hold of Annie, but something was very wrong. Something hung in the air like a faint chill, and she couldn’t escape it. Something that gnawed mercilessly at her propelled her back again across the hardwood floor until Rafe escaped into the kitchen at the back of the house.
“It only takes ten minutes to get across the island on the moped,” she insisted again, pitching her voice over the constant howl of the storm.
Rafe leaned his head out, obviously having figured out the intricacies of sandwiches. “The what?”
“My bike.”
He shook his head. “You’re going to take a bicycle out in a hurricane. No wonder I’m here.”
“It’s not... oh, forget it. I’ll just go back into the shed and get it.”
He stepped all the way out now. “No, you won’t. You know better, Gen. We’ll try again in the morning.”
“But what if it’s worse out then?”
“Annie’s with her grandmother,” he reminded her.
Gen only laughed. “Her grandmother doesn’t believe in little girls’ fears,” she informed him.
“Please, Gen,” he pleaded. “Just wait till morning. She’ll make it through one night all right. I promise.”
Gen bit her tongue to keep from telling him about the kind of promises he made.
She was starting to believe it. To just assume that somehow Rafe had jumped right from a battlefield hospital in the 1800s to her front lawn, that she was caught in some kind of bizarre time loop caused by the electric disturbance of the storm and her emotional instability. That she was not just Genevieve O’Shea Mallory, but whoever that shadowy woman was who walked through the Confederate hospital in Richmond.
There had to be a better explanation. There had to be some kind of proof that this was all just a silly mix-up of some kind.
Finally Gen came to a stop, right in the middle of the room. Instinctively she lifted her head, as if she could see through two floors and into that dusty, claustrophobic little room at the top of the house.
It would give her something to do. Something to keep her mind off Annie.
She didn’t move for a very long time.
“Go on,” Rafe said, as if he were privy to her thoughts. “I think I’d like to know, too.”
She glared over at him for a moment. Around them the house shook from sudden thunder. The trees screamed in protest at the wind’s mauling. The world was a maelstrom of energies, all unleashed on her little house. Well, maybe this was the proper time to dig up ghosts, or to put ghosts to rest. With one last sigh of protest, Gen headed back upstairs.
The trunks were still there, hunched in the shadows like somnolent beasts. The generator didn’t power the dim bulb up here, so Gen brought candles and flashlights and set them out, which formed shadows to climb the walls and swayed in tune to the wind. She fought those same shivers she’d had before, whether of dread or portent, she couldn’t tell. Gen had never set much store by prescience before. After the past few days, she might just have to change her mind.
The first trunk must have belonged to the dead Confederate soldier. Gen didn’t have the nerve to name him amid these shadows, as if she would call up yet another just by chanting his name enough. His clothes were all there, his shaving razor and strop, his boots way at the bottom. She pulled them out, still fairly supple after all these years, to give to Rafe. Two ledger books with careful, exact script in them, and a packet of letters. Gen set them aside.
She closed everything else back in, amazed at the wealth of artifacts she’d already found. Wondering why they had been hidden rather than honored. The War of Northern Aggression, as her neighbor in Atlanta still called it, was a matter not just of pride in the South, but of deep reverence. People defined themselves still by what regiment their great-granddaddies had ridden in, what fierce battles they had survived, and which they had finally died in. Sabers were hung over fireplaces and souvenirs brought out with amazing regularity to be shared and mourned over.
