“Moses, baby, you all right?” she says, loud enough for the words to reach him where he lies.
“He’s fine,” barks Elliott. “Although I am trying to understand why we found him up in a tree on the Fulcher property.”
“He don’t have to be at the mill today,” says Della, “on account of the fire. Overseer told everyone to stay home.”
“That may be,” says Elliott, like this is news to him. “But, in that case, why wasn’t Moses at home?”
Della doesn’t have a good answer for that, and Elliott knows it.
“Seems to me that, on a day like today, Moses shouldn’t be doing anything other than grieving his sister’s untimely demise.”
“Who says he ain’t grieving?” Della asks.
“He’s got a funny way of showing it,” says Elliott with a hollow laugh. “But then again, so do you.”
Della’s angry, Cecily can tell. But her anger won’t get her anywhere with Elliott. “What do you know about grieving a child?”
“When Rosie lost Ben, you could hear her wailing all the way up at the main house.”
“You want me to wail?” Della asks, her voice rising right alongside her rage. “Would that help?”
If Elliott answers her, Cecily can’t hear what he says.
Della lets out a scream as loud as a screech owl’s. “Is that better?” She does it again. “How about now?”
Elliott tells the men on horseback to get on, that he doesn’t want them wasting all their good daylight. But Cecily knows it’s got more to do with not wanting them to think he doesn’t know how to manage his slaves. “I’ll catch up once I’m through here,” he says, after they’ve agreed on a meeting spot.
As soon as they’re gone, Elliott disappears inside her parents’ cabin, and Cecily and Gilbert shrink farther into the shadows of the house’s crawl space.
“The girls,” whispers Cecily, but Gilbert shakes his head, mouths, “Millie’s got ’em.”
They listen as Elliott turns the room above their heads upside down. She can hear him tear open her parents’ mattress and overturn the trunk where they keep their quilts in the summer. Crockery ricochets off the thin walls, and when all the little animals Cecil’s carved go skittering across the floodboards, Cecily holds her breath.
Della doesn’t try to intervene. Instead, she takes the opportunity to go to Moses.
“Can you get up?” she asks in a voice that Cecily knows she is working hard to control. Slowly, Moses pulls himself onto his hands and knees, and Cecily feels weak with relief.
Her brother is standing on his own two feet by the time Elliott emerges from the cabin. “Care to explain this?” he asks the two of them, but Cecily can’t see what he’s holding.
“It’s a shawl,” says Della plainly.
“It’s Cecily’s shawl.”
“All right. It’s Cecily’s shawl.”
Cecily tries to picture the shawl he’s talking about, and her breath catches in her throat when she realizes he means the blue one she wore to the theater. When Cecily got back to the cabin the night of the fire, she hung it on a peg near the door, and took Moses’s coat instead.
Now she realizes her mistake. Elliott remembers it, must know she was wearing it when he last saw her, down in the cellar. “She wore it to the theater,” he tells Della, as pleased with himself as if he’s just won a game of ninepins.
Cecily’s mama is quicker this time. “No, she didn’t. She came back here and changed.”
“You’re lying,” Elliott says, but there is a tiny fissure in his voice that Della must know she can exploit.
“She wanted to tell me about your plan to take her with you to your new place.”
What Della is saying is true, it’s just the timing that’s off. Thankfully, Elliott doesn’t know that.
“What’d she think you were going to do about it?”
