Forever and Always Read online

  “Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll take care of him.”

  I hugged Pappa Al, too. He picked me up, swung me around and told me he thought I’d make a fine daughter. I told him I already had a husband.

  Knowledge came to his eyes. “That’s who you are,” he said. “You’re the—”

  I didn’t have to use any True Persuasion to cut him off. I just gave him a human look and he didn’t finish that hideous phrase.

  He set me down, put his hand on the top of my head, and said he’d pray for me. I thanked him, then ran to the car where Linc was waiting. As we drove away, I waved until he was out of sight.

  “How much?” I asked as soon as we were back on the road into the little town.

  “You mean how much money did he con me out of?” Linc asked, grinning. “Fifty grand.”

  “What’s that? One week’s pay?”

  “Less than half,” he said, glancing at me. “I thought I’d start off small before he got the studio to send my paychecks directly to him.”

  We laughed together and were silent for a while. Whatever Linc gave we knew was for a good cause. For a moment I enjoyed feeling Linc’s pleasure at having found something to do with his life—for that’s what I felt that he was going to do. I wasn’t really able to foresee the future, but I could easily imagine Linc heavily involved in the school in East Mesopotamia. A school for “special” kids, the ones who caused no one any problems and so were often neglected. I could imagine Linc using his fame—and his beauty—to give benefits to raise money for the school. Or schools.

  I quit thinking of Linc’s possible future when he pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall. “Wait for me while I go get something,” he said. “Need anything?”

  I said no; I was content to sit alone and think. Moments later, he returned with a bag. Inside were bottles of lemonade, bags of pretzels, and a little light, the kind that clips on to a book.

  “You read, I’ll drive,” he said as he handed me the plastic bag his grandfather had given him. In it was the diary written by Amelia Barrister, 1840 to 1843.

  It took the whole trip back to 13 Elms to read the diary. I didn’t tell Linc but the sadness I felt from the diary made it difficult for me to hold it.

  In 1840, Amelia had started the diary as a young bride full of hope. She’d grown up in Ohio, met her husband at a church social, and married him three months later. She wrote of her excitement about going to live on her husband’s “farm.” A few pages later, she wrote that tomorrow she’d see it, that she’d heard so much about the place she dreamed of it.

  There wasn’t another entry for eight months, and when she did write, the tone was of a severely depressed woman.

  Linc and I couldn’t imagine how she must have felt to find out that the “farm” was for breeding and selling human beings. “And her husband was the breeder,” I said.

  In 1842, Amelia’s tone began to lighten; something had changed. When she mentioned Martin, the name nearly leaped off the page. “She’s in love with him,” I told Linc, looking at him. If he was Linc’s ancestor, had Martin looked like Linc?

  In 1843, Amelia wrote that she was ill and stayed in her room most of the time. I ran my hand over the page. “She’s expecting a baby and she doesn’t know if it’s her husband’s child or Martin’s.” Amelia hadn’t written that but I felt it. “She wants her husband to sell Martin, to get him off the plantation before the child is born. If the child is dark she knows her husband will kill Martin.”

  “What about her and the baby?”

  “She knows that if the child is dark that she and the baby will be killed, but she hopes that maybe she can save Martin. But her husband won’t sell him. Martin’s too smart; he runs everything.” That made Linc smile in pride. “So what happened?”

  I continued reading, but there wasn’t much more. Amelia never wrote of her dilemma, but I could feel it. At last I came to the passage, “Martin was hanged today.” Dutifully, Amelia had written that Martin had tried to lead the slaves against them, so her husband had had to hang him.

  “Martin supposedly led a revolt with a plantation full of women and children?” Linc asked angrily. “Go on.”

  Amelia wrote that she’d given birth to a child in the early morning so she’d not seen the hanging. The birth had not gone well and she was invalided; the doctor said she’d have to spend the rest of her life in her room. Her child was to be given to the “servants” to raise.

  That was the end of the diary. I closed the book and held it. “Her husband locked her away. She was never allowed to leave the room where the baby was born. Never to go outside again, never to speak to anyone. She was condemned to solitary confinement for the rest of her life.”

  “And the baby?”

  I took a breath. There were times—like this one—when I wished I had no power to see or feel things. “He was moved to the slave quarters and her husband made sure his incarcerated wife saw the child grow up. The child played beneath her window. Her husband also made sure…” I took a breath. “He made sure his wife saw the boy in chains when he was taken away to be sold.”

  I put my hand on Linc’s arm to calm him.

  “Think one of those bills of sale was for my ancestor?”

  “I think so. Martin’s name would probably be on the certificate as the father and my guess is that the child was sold to someone in East Mesopotamia, Georgia.” Suddenly, I thought of something. “You know, don’t you, that this makes you and Delphia and Narcissa blood relatives?”

  Linc gave such a heartfelt groan that I laughed, and our laughter helped dispel the horror of the story in the diary. If her husband had killed Amelia, it would have been kinder. But she had been locked up, isolated. She’d been allowed to see her child grow up, but she hadn’t been allowed to hold him, kiss him. And she’d had to watch as he was put in chains, to be taken away to be sold.

  “What happened to her?” Linc asked. “What happened to my great-great-whatever grandmother Amelia?”

  “I don’t know. I only know what I feel from this book. Maybe there’s something else about her in the library.”

  “In that glass cabinet next to the fireplace? Maybe tonight—”

  “No, tonight there’s ‘something special,’ remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember,” Linc said.

  “We need to make a plan for tomorrow,” I said. “While you’re giving massages—”

  “What?!” Linc yelled and an argument ensued. He said he was absolutely not, under any circumstances on earth, going to massage a bunch of lazy, rich women.

  “You can ask them things,” I said. “It’s all well and good to find out about the past but as far as I can tell, that only tells us why your child felt at home here. His mother and he moved from one place to another, but they have remained here—at 13 Elms, I mean. Why? Is something here?”

  “What was it that that Changer called it?”

  “A Touch of God,” I said, trying not to betray myself. I didn’t want Linc to know how badly I wanted to know what that was. I wanted to find Linc’s son and I was beginning to feel that we would, but what I really wanted in the long run was to find my husband and Bo. A Touch of God, I thought, and wondered yet again what it could be.

  “No massaging,” Linc said as we pulled into the driveway of 13 Elms. “Tomorrow I’m going to the church and talk to people.”

  I said nothing. The last thing we needed was for him to go to the church and ask questions. Why had the church said that the woman killed in a car crash was Lisa Henderson when it wasn’t? he’d ask. How did Linc know another woman had been killed? they’d wonder. If it wasn’t in the newspapers that she’d had a child, why was Linc asking questions about a child?

  No, I could see that it was better that Linc let me use what small ability I had to find out what I could my way and not make people more suspicious than they already were. So far, no one suspected me, with my ugly black hair, as being the woman they’d read about. Besides, that was yeste