The World of Pretty Colors Read online

  “I had someone come in to make sure the house was clean. They also stocked the pantry and fridge with things you might need. To get to a grocery store, you have to drive all the way back to Cape and that can be a pain. There are a couple of little stop-in-shops fairly close by in the little neighboring towns but not the kind of places you would do any real shopping.”

  Emma unscrewed the top from the bottle and took a long drink of water. Finally, in between the hiccups she still had, she was able to respond. “OK, I have a vague memory of someone I called Uncle Steve, but my dad didn’t have any living siblings, and you’re certainly not my mom’s brother. Why didn’t you mention any of this yesterday?”

  “I’m sorry but there really were a lot of things that, truth be told, I didn’t know how to explain to you yesterday. Also, I had no way of knowing what you do and do not remember. Hell, I don’t even know what you do and do not know. Obviously, you know a little more than I realized since you asked about the pictures.”

  “You deliberately didn’t tell me about meeting me here today.” Emma replied.

  “Honestly I did. I wanted to see how you were going to react to this place. Let’s face it Emma, you’re a young woman who has spent most of your life in the city. Being this far out in the country can be quite daunting to a lot of people. Leaving you out here alone without knowing how you might react, well it made me a little uneasy. Call me a silly protective old man, but I was concerned.”

  Emma smiled and shook her head. “Steve, I have a doctorate in archeology. I have been in places that would make your hair stand on end. I am also no longer a child and am perfectly capable of spending the night alone.”

  Smiling back at her Steve responded. “I’m sorry; I know I seem to be behaving like a total jackass. I haven’t been around you since you were a child. I knew from Hattie that a lot of your childhood memories had been lost to you. I was concerned about them flooding back in on you and you here alone.”

  Emma’s opinion of him just went up a notch or two.

  “Come on into the dining room and I’ll show you some things in that box you noticed as we came through.”

  Emma turned to follow Steve out of the kitchen. “I think I should get my notebook. I found it after Mom’s accident. She left me a pretty interesting story about the family and why she never brought me back here.”

  She went into the living room and returned with the notebook. Steve was already seated in one of the side chairs leaving the head of the table open to her. Before she could sit down there was a loud knock at the front door.

  Emma looked over at Steve. “Are you expecting someone, because I’m damn sure not?”

  Steve frowned as he shook his head. He stood up and followed Emma as she turned back toward the living room to answer the door. He caught up with her as she reached for the handle.

  Before Emma could get the door opened all the way a figure larger than life stepped in and grabbed Emma up in her arms.

  “Sorry honey, I meant to be here earlier, but I sort of got side tracked along the way.” The large bag that was thrown over the woman’s arm had clunked Emma in the back nearly knocking the wind out of her. She released Emma, turned and headed toward the kitchen. As she went she called back over her shoulder, “Hi Steve, it's good to see you again after all these years.” Charlotte continued as she made her way through the house.

  Steve turned to Emma but before he could get anything out of his mouth she was already speaking. “I had no idea she was going to follow me up here. You two know one another?”

  “Yes, I know her. She is your Aunt Charlotte and she used to come here to visit your mom when you were little. You don’t remember that?”

  Emma thought about it. “I know I should remember all of this, but a lot of that time is lost to me.”

  “Hey, are you two coming or are you just going to stand there chit chatting?” Charlotte called from the area of the kitchen.

  Charlotte, like Emma, had long thick red hair but where Emma’s was straight, Charlotte’s was curly. Not quite Little Orphan Annie curly, but close. She had a fuller figure than Emma but not heavy by any means. Steve didn’t know what it was about the women from this family, but they never seemed to age and were all very attractive. Steve also knew he might be a little biased, but he didn’t think that was the case.

  Emma and Steve turned to follow Charlotte to the kitchen each of them wearing a questioning look of confusion.

  They walked into the kitchen as Charlotte made her away around it. She seemed to remember where everything was without so much as missing a step. Emma commented, “Aunt Charlotte, I’m surprised to see you remember where everything is.”

  “Why should I have trouble remembering? The last time I was here was just before Hattie passed away.”

  Steve and Emma looked at one another in total disbelief and this time it was Steve who spoke up.

  “What do you mean you were here just before Hattie died? To my knowledge you haven’t been here since Cathryn left here with Emma.”

  “Oh, come on Steve, you and Emma both saw those recent pictures of her in the living room. Where do you think they came from? You had to have known that Cathryn hadn’t sent them to her. When she left here, she never looked back and swore to protect Emma from all this. If she had known I still had anything to do with Hattie she would have shut me out of her and Emma’s life as well. Emma, I know you may think I have betrayed your mother, but I knew that this was something that at some point you were going to have to come and face.”

  Emma was growing tired of all the mystery. “OK, it’s time that people started talking and making sense around here. I came to get answers and even Mom thought I should do this Aunt Charlotte. That notebook out there on the dining room table was something Mom left me. It gives me some idea of things but it’s a long way from being clear. I was thinking that maybe Mom was losing her mind after reading it but now I’m wondering if all of you are a brick or two shy of a full load.”

  “I think we all need to go into the dining room and start getting this worked out and let’s try not to muddy the water in the process.” Steve was the one who responded to Emma.

  Charlotte stopped them. “If I know my niece her luggage is still in the car as is mine. I think we should get everything in before we get down to business. I have a feeling that this ‘revealing’ process won’t be handled in a few minutes.”

  Emma wasn’t happy about this, but Aunt Charlotte was right. It was best to get the unloading done before they started tackling the family history slash secrets. All three headed out to the two cars parked out front, Steve’s it turned out, was parked out back.

  They unloaded the cars and taking everything into the house set it down in the living room.

  Steve brought up the question of sleeping arrangements. “Which rooms are you ladies planning on taking?”

  Emma thought about this for only a moment and responded. “I thought I would take my old room upstairs.”

  “Why don’t you take the one down here and I’ll take one of the rooms upstairs?”

  “I know I would be more comfortable in my old room Aunt Charlotte and you can take the one down here.”

  “Then it’s settled, we’ll both take a room upstairs and that way neither of us will be far from the other. Since there are phone lines in both rooms up there, we won’t have to worry about whether or not we have cell service if we should need to make a call in the night.”

  “There is only one bath up there, Aunt Charlotte but I don’t mind if you don’t.”

  Steve spoke up at this point. “As your aunt might know if she has been visiting here all this time, without me knowing I might add, there has been a little bit of a change up there. It’s still only one bath but you’ll find that things up there aren’t quite the same.”

  The stairs were accessed via a small hallway between the dining room and downstairs bedroom. You entered the kitchen by going through the dining room. In the dining room you first encountered th
e large table on your right. To your immediate left was a china cabinet and just past it was the entrance to a short hallway.

  Turning left into the hallway, straight in front of you was another door to the downstairs bedroom. On your right was the doorway to the dressing area and downstairs bath, to your left was the stairs.

  They plodded up the long steep steps to the second floor. You came out in a nice little sitting area that protruded outward over the front forming a five-sided alcove. There were windows on all five sides, again allowing plenty of light into this little area. To your right was where the upstairs bathroom door was located. Maybe you should say where it once had been because the door was now gone. There was only a wall in its place now. The two upstairs bedrooms were located on either side of the stairs over the back of the house. Emma’s old room had been the one to the right and she turned in that direction.

  Emma entered her old room and although most of her personal things were still there, the furniture had been changed to a more grownup set. There was now a door that lead into the upstairs bath in her room or that was what she assumed until she put down her luggage and stepped into a nice big walk-in closet. She stepped out of the closet and noticed there was a new door on the opposite side of the room.

  Emma walked over to it and opened that door. What she found was a half bath with toilet and basin and to her right was another door. She opened the door and she found the large tub and shower with a door on the other side. She walked over and opened it and it led into another half bath. The door to the other bedroom was open and Steve and Charlotte were standing there watching her as she came into the room to join them.

  “OK, this is different. When did all this happen?”

  “Your grandmother started this about two years ago in hopes that you would be back.”

  “I wish I could remember her better than I do but I don’t. I really have problems remembering things that took place before my dad died. It’s like in losing him I lost so much more, and Mom never talked about any of it after we left. I did ask at first, but she always said that she didn’t want to talk about it. After a while I just stopped asking.”

  “I suggest we go back downstairs and unpack later.” Charlotte turned away to set her makeup bag on the dresser before continuing. “We can figure out how best to start once we are back down there and see what we have.”

  Returning downstairs Emma was the one to ask. “Where do we start this?”

  Steve turned to her. “I suggest we start with that notebook.”

  Charlotte was ready to find out what her sister had left for her niece. “OK, let’s start with that notebook. I’m still confused about that. When did your mom give it to you?”

  Emma shook her head. “She didn’t. It was in her things the police returned to me after the accident. When I finally took the time to open it there on the first page was a letter to me asking me to read the contents of the notebook and try and sort all this out.”

  “She never mentioned it to me. I thought because she refused to ever speak of her time here, she just buried it all.” Charlotte dropped her head a little and spoke in a softer voice. “I don’t blame her for never mentioning it to me. I always felt I had a lot to do with why she left.”

  “No Aunt Charlotte, you didn’t. She talks about what you had discovered in the note book, but she didn’t blame you. Basically, she said you were the one who brought it to light for her and how she didn’t believe you at first. When you first told her what you had found and your perception of it, she thought it was all a part of your over active imagination.”

  “Well it wasn’t sweetie. It was all there if you really looked. At some point someone had to question the lack of any early photos of the women of this family and the early deaths of the males. The family and the secrecy surrounding everything had to have left everyone with a lot of questions.

  Emma opened the notebook and started pulling things out of pockets. There were pages of written notes but also there were maps, copies of surveyor reports, satellite photos, list of people with the dates of births and deaths, what looked like a complete history of the family and a lot of the area.

  “Well, you can’t deny that being a historian comes in handy when you want to go looking in the past.” Charlotte commented.

  “Yes, but what was she looking for?”

  Charlotte and Emma responded to Steve’s question at the same time, “a grave.”

  Steve’s had been taking a drink from a soda he had when the two women had made that announcement and gasped in surprise and got choked.

  Emma reached over and whacked him on the back real hard nearly knocking him out of his chair. It stopped him from choking, but his back burned where she had hit him. He had no doubt that there was a big red welt in the middle of his back. Yep, he had been right about the girl being able to take care of herself. Anyone, man or woman, who packed that kind of punch wasn’t someone you wanted to mess with.

  “Damn girl, what did your mother feed you after you left here?”

  “Sorry.”

  “What grave?” Steve asked

  “Mary Devon’s.”

  “Emma, you mean this has something to do with that old tombstone that used to be out by the pump house in back of the house. The one someone found laying out in one of the fields?”

  “That would be the one. What do you mean used to be?”

  “I haven’t noticed it being there for the past few years.”

  “I moved it.” Charlotte told them.

  “Why?” Steve didn't understand the logic behind the move.

  “When?” Emma asked.

  “To protect it.” Charlotte addressed Steve’s question then turned to Emma.

  “I did it about two years ago.”

  “Where did you put it Aunt Charlotte?”

  “I wrapped it in an old sheet and then in plastic and put it in one of the pump houses. Hattie said that no one knew how it got there or where it even came from. They had no idea of where the person was that it belongs to either.”

  “We all know the story Charlotte but why is it so important? As for where the person is, they’ve got to be in a cemetery somewhere. At least I hope they are.”

  “Steve, where it was found there was once a small settlement of houses and maybe there might have been a small graveyard as well.”

  “I know about the place you are talking about, Emma. It was out by one of the bends in the river on the northern side. It was where settlers once lived then later the sharecroppers. At one time there were about a dozen houses there. There were still a couple of them left when I was a kid. My dad helped Jason Sr. tear them down back in the early sixties. There was never any mention of a cemetery out there however.”

  “Hattie told me about the old houses, and she said the same as you but never any mention of a cemetery.”

  “So, how much did Granny know about any of this Aunt Charlotte?”

  “Well, that’s the thing Emma, she started putting two and two together over the years but was never able to come up with a working theory on the whole thing. You have to understand she entered into this family just as ignorant as your mom and probably so was Hattie’s mother-in-law. Would you marry into a family where your husband dies young and if you have more than one child, you’ll probably lose them. Especially if they are female? Hattie only knows of one girl in this family who reached adulthood since the turn of the twentieth century. That is until you came along, Emma. Even if they were boys more than one living to adulthood just didn’t happen.”

  Emma took out a stack of papers stapled together and handed them to Steve. “Those are the list of all the men in the family and how they all died. Surprisingly Mom was able to trace every one of them back to before the Civil War. She was able to determine the generation when this all started. It started with the son of Grayson Rodgers and his name was also Jason.”

  “You’re kidding? She was able to trace all of them?” Steve asked.

  “Yes, every one of them.
I don’t think it would have been all that hard really. They were all born here in this house or later in a hospital in Cape. All of them, except one, died within a few miles of here as well. The fact that they were all connected to a fairly large land holding in the area made them all news at the time. The first Jason was killed by a sharecropper he had evicted. It would seem that the ass was a wife beater and a drunk. Jason evidently tried to keep him on because of his family but finally had to evict him. The ass got drunk one night slipped back here and put a bullet in him.”

  “So, he was killed in this house?” Steve’s eyes were wide as saucers

  “Not here in the house but out there in the fields somewhere.” Emma couldn’t help but smile at the look on Steve’s face. You expect that kind of response from a girl but not from a guy.

  “What Steve, you thought you were going to see blood starting to drip down the walls?”

  “Cut it out, Charlotte.”

  “So, whatever happened started with him because his dad evidently died a few years later in his late fifties and he passed away in his sleep.” Emma interjected before Charlotte and Steve could get started in on one another. Emma wasn’t sure what was going on with those two, but something was.

  “Why do you think it has something to do with that headstone?”

  “I don’t know Steve, and even Mom couldn’t quite put it together either, but she really believed it has something to do with all this.

  Steve turned to Charlotte. “Did Hattie have any idea on that?”

  “No, she didn’t. Emma did your mom find something that tied the headstone to anyone or anything here?”

  “There is nothing positive Aunt Charlotte. She had tried to find out what she could about this girl, but it hasn’t been easy. If there is a graveyard and if this headstone is from there then the girl was the wife or daughter of a sharecropper. She may or may not have anything to do with it at all, but it just seems a little odd. Right now however, it is the best lead we have. I want to get a better look at that headstone.”