“No, I’m Elliott Price. But my mother is a Patterson.”
Marcus snaps at Gilbert to get his attention, then whispers, “That your niece?”
He hesitates for a moment. What choice does he have but to own the connection? If Marcus suspects he’s been lying to him—or, at the very least, withholding the truth—he’ll begin to believe that Price is onto something. “That’s her,” Gilbert confirms in a quiet voice.
Elliott follows Kemp into the shop, and Gilbert and Marcus hurry back to their respective workstations and try their hardest to look busy.
Kemp signals for Price to take a seat at the table, then he roots around in a cupboard for a bottle of whiskey and two dirty glasses. He pours each of them two fingerfuls of whiskey and downs his immediately. “So, how long’s this Cecily Patterson been missing?”
“Since the night of the fire. She was at the theater, up in the gallery, and hasn’t been home since.”
“What makes you think she ain’t dead?” Kemp asks Price, and Gilbert listens hard to what he has to say.
“My sister says she saw her that night. Out on the theater green. And that she didn’t have a scratch on her.”
Gilbert closes his eyes briefly, then remembers that Marcus is not far away. He can give nothing away to him or any of the other men in the shop.
Kemp starts telling Price about the slave rebellion. “Is there any chance she’s tied up in that?”
Price says he doesn’t think so, says that what he’s interested in are the rumors that some of the slaves in the gallery may have faked their own deaths in order to run. “You hear about that?”
Kemp doesn’t commit, which means he hasn’t.
“Everyone’s saying it wasn’t hard to get out of the gallery. That if you’ve got a slave who’s missing, there’s something funny going on.”
Marcus looks over at Gilbert, no doubt wondering if, indeed, something funny is going on. But Gilbert just shakes his head no.
Still, the conversation between the two men grows increasingly animated. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” says Price, “if we come to find out every last one of them Negroes in that theater made it out, and they’re all of them halfway to Philadelphia by now.”
Gilbert can tell Kemp is getting excited. He wants to know what Cecily looks like, how far she’s ever traveled from Richmond, whether she knows any of the roads outside of town, and if she has kin who live in far-flung places that she might be aiming to reach.
“She’s got a mother, a father, a brother, and a couple of sisters,” says Price, “and I own all of them. Or, my father does.”
“Any extended family?”
“None,” says Price, and again Gilbert can feel Marcus’s eyes on him.
Kemp keeps peppering Price with questions. He wants to know if Cecily had a pass with her and if Price has found evidence that she packed any personal effects.
“Her pass will only get her as far as the mantua maker on E Street,” says Price.
“And her personal effects?”
Gilbert watches as Price pauses to contemplate the question. “I haven’t looked,” he says, like he’s embarrassed to admit such an obvious failure. “But I will.”
CECILY
By Saturday morning, Cecily’s throatfeels like it’s full of sand. She eats the rest of the forcemeat patty her mother brought her, but what she needs, more than anything, is water.
Cecily can attribute her exhaustion to two nights spent sleeping in the bottom of a canoe, but she worries the dizziness she’s starting to experience is a sign of a more serious problem. A little while ago, she woke from a trance, sure that Old Mrs. Cowley was in the boathouse and that she had brought her a cure that would turn her into a horsefly. “See?” she told Cecily. “Now you can make it all the way to Philadelphia.”
Cecily promised her mother she wouldn’t leave the boathouse for any reason, but the James River is just a few yards away, and if she can get something to drink, maybe she’ll be able to stop having conversations with people who aren’t there.
She gets up slowly and stands by the door. When she cracks it open, she can see straight down the narrow path that brought her here and all the way to the water. There’s no one out on the river this time of morning, but she doesn’t know how long that’ll last. Cecily opens the door wider and listens to the sounds of the woods. She can hear the soft purrs of a ring-necked duck near the water’s edge and from somewhere above her head comes the tangled call of a persnickety waterthrush. Aside from the sounds of the birds, all she hears is the river rushing past.
She takes a few tentative steps away from the boathouse and turns to glance back at the woods. They look peaceful and perfectly still, so she sprints to the riverbank and falls to her knees at the water’s edge. The river water is so cold it numbs her hands, but it feels good going down her throat. She swallows one handful of water after another, and when she is satisfied, she stands and wipes her hands on her skirt. She looks up and down the riverbank, wishing she had some pot or pail she could fill and take back inside, but sees nothing that will serve as a receptacle.
It’s then that Cecily hears the sound. Like the yelp of a wild turkey, but not quite as loud. She looks back up into the woods, where it wouldn’t be uncommon to see a flock of hens and maybe a tom turkey foraging for food on the forest floor. But there’s nothing there. The sound comes her way again, and this time she looks up into the trees, where wild turkeys like to roost at night. There, in a white oak, just behind the boathouse, sits a small brown boy. She squints to see him better. Moses.
