Sleeping Dogs

Over the next week Ava gradually adjusted to her new life. The occupants of Woodburn Hall, she soon discovered, followed a rigid routine. They rose early (everyone except for Ava) and breakfasted together, then Maitland would leave for his “Gentleman’s Club,” a stalwart group that met every morning at the downtown diner, while Josephine and Fanny drank their second cups of coffee in the breakfast room. Occasionally Alice or Clara would join them. Ava would stumble into the kitchen around nine, bleary-eyed and drowsy, drawn by the scent of freshly brewed coffee, just as the others were preparing to go about their day. Several times she stumbled in to find the kitchen empty, a note propped against the percolator to indicate where her breakfast might be found.

Some mornings the women would linger over coffee, although they were always dressed when Ava joined them. Josephine was partial to tailored pantsuits and tea-length skirts or, if she was home, a pair of neatly pressed khaki pants and a pastel oxford cloth shirt. Fanny favored brightly colored dresses that showed off her legs. Clara most often wore a pair of jeans and a sweater. Alice, however, wore a never-ending supply of brightly colored tennis warm-up suits. She was partial to Keds and diamonds, which she never went anywhere without; she probably slept in diamonds.

She would come through the kitchen door in the mornings towel-drying her damp hair and shouting, “What’s for breakfast?” in a loud, genial voice. Ava assumed it was from a morning shower, but no, Alice admitted one morning that she liked to swim nude in her pool every day for exercise.

“Nude?” Ava said.

“You’ve been warned,” Josephine said drolly.

“It’s good for the skin!” Alice cried, slapping the underside of her chin.

“Oh, Alice, really,” Fanny said, giggling over the rim of her newspaper. “Aren’t you afraid one of the neighbors will see you?”

“If they do they’re in for the shock of their life,” Alice said.

“I’ll say,” Josephine said.

“Because I’ve got the body of a fifty-year-old!” Alice crowed.

Fanny flattened the newspaper on the table and stared down at a full-color spread of a local garden party featured on the society pages. “Who are these people?” she said, looking closely. “I don’t know a one.”

“The nouveau riche and their garden parties,” Alice said. “They do like to make a spectacle of themselves.”

“This from a woman who likes to swim nude in her backyard,” Josephine said.

Fanny stared thoughtfully out the window. “Papa used to say a lady should have her name in the papers only four times in her life. Her christening, her engagement, her marriage, and her death.”

“He was right,” Alice said.

Ava poured herself another cup of coffee. “What exactly is new money?”

“Anything made after the War of 1812,” Josephine said.

Lunch was usually tomato sandwiches or leftovers from the night before, served in the breakfast room, or if the weather was good on the side verandah. A nap always followed lunch, a holdover, Fanny said, from the old days before air-conditioning, when the downtown stores and businesses used to close for “siesta” at noon so people could go home and sleep during the hottest part of the day.

Television in the house was limited to PBS, the History Channel, Turner Classics, and, of course, the Food Channel. Occasionally, Maitland would watch CNN but Fanny found the news “unpleasant.”

“Doesn’t watching the news just make you want to kill yourself?” she asked Ava cheerfully one day. “If I watched too much of it I’d be tempted to jump off a tall building or ram a knitting needle through my temple.”

“Who in their right mind kills themself with a knitting needle?” Josephine said.

Monday mornings were reserved for hair or dental or medical appointments. Tuesday morning Maitland played golf with a group of friends while Fanny attended one of her church or garden club meetings. Wednesday mornings the housecleaner came, and Josephine and Fanny and Maitland did the food shopping. Thursday mornings Josephine played bridge with a group of cutthroat card sharks called the Trump Queens, while Fanny and Maitland, one day a month, went downtown to collect rents from the shopkeepers along Main Street operating out of the Woodburn Building. Friday mornings were reserved for what Fanny cheerfully called Visiting the Dead, which meant taking fresh flowers out to the cemetery to adorn the graves of deceased family members, an occupation that, owing to the number of dead Woodburns and their kin, usually took most of the morning. Saturdays were for sleeping late, puttering in the garden, and supper clubs. Sundays were for going to church and golf.

Ava found that, true to Will’s promise, the aunts left her alone during the day. They were either gone, working in the garden, or napping. Ava would wander the house like a disconsolate ghost, picking up silver snuffboxes and antique porcelain vases, pressing her nose to the glass display cabinets in the dining room that housed the extensive sterling silver collection, bowls and platters and archaic utensils collected for generations, rows and rows of biscuit boxes and tea caddies and engraved wager cups. The house would be quiet except for the low hum of the central air-conditioning system and the steady ticking of the parlor clock. She would stand in front of the oil portraits and the framed documents and maps from the eighteenth century that covered the walls of every room, squinting to read the ornate antique script. The whole house was like a museum, every nook and cranny filled with items of historical significance. Each time she looked she found something new to marvel at.

And always there was the feeling of other lives lived here among the antiquities, the eerie presence of the hovering dead, cold spots on the stairs, a fleeting shadow out of the corner of one eye.

Her relationship with Will, too, fell easily into a routine. He never showed up at Woodburn Hall before Toddy Time, although he suspended this rule on the weekends, coming early in the morning to take Ava out to Longford or for a drive in the country to show her some site of historical or natural interest.

He was attentive and coyly persistent. He seemed to take for granted that Ava would eventually relent and look upon him as more than a friend, abandoning whatever hesitation she felt about beginning a physical relationship with him. There were times when, sitting beside him on the porch swing on a sultry evening or noting his handsome profile as they traveled down some dusty back road, she had to wonder why she didn’t. It seemed to her then as if she was dreaming, as if she was floating, all time suspended, the image of her and this man as hazy and insubstantial as a mirage.

But then she would remember why she was here, the unwritten novel still lying dormant inside her head, and she would feel a clutch of guilt, tinged with anger that he would expect her to give herself up so easily. As if he found her dreams of being a writer nothing more than a bluff, an idle hobby to fill her days while she waited for something better to come along.

“Come out to Longford and spend the night,” he said one evening. They were out in the pergola in the garden. It was a moonlit night. The sky was clear and dotted with stars.

“I can’t,” she said mildly. “What would the aunts say?”

“They don’t have to know.”

“What do you suggest? Climbing out the window?”

“We could just tell them.”

“Imagine the scandal,” she said.

He kissed her lightly on the neck. “I may have to make an honest woman out of you yet.” He was teasing, yet there was something in his voice, some element of hopefulness that she chose to ignore.

The truth was, she didn’t want anything more permanent than what they had now, the taunts, the helpless thrashings, the feeling that something wonderful waited, if only she could be patient.

One night after supper she and Will walked downtown to see a movie, Mrs. Dalloway. It was a warm balmy night, and when they walked outside from the small theater the sky was still filled with light.

A few people stood outside under the brightly lit marquee.

“Vanessa Redgrave was made for that role,” Ava said. They stood for a moment looking up at the faint stars. “Did you like the movie?”

“It was interesting.” He hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “You certainly felt like you were there, in postwar London, although, I have to say, I’ve never been a fan of Virginia Woolf. I’m never quite sure what it is she’s trying to say.”

“She was talking about choices, I think, and how those choices influence who we become. Clarissa could have chosen Peter and been one person but instead she chose dull old Mr. Dalloway and became someone else entirely.”

“But that’s a romantic view of life, don’t you think? We’re all pretty much who we were meant to be regardless of whom we marry.” He seemed distracted, almost irritated, standing with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans.

She laughed. “Now you sound like a Calvinist.”

“And if she hadn’t been married to Dalloway she wouldn’t have been planning a dinner party anyway. He gave her the safety and stability she needed to plan dinner parties. Peter would have been too busy having affairs and running through her money.”

“But that’s the whole point. She took the safe choice.”

“And now she regrets it?” His voice rose, deep and affronted.

They seemed to be talking about something else now. Several people standing near them turned to stare.

Ava spread her hands, trying to calm him. “I don’t think she regrets her choice, but she does wonder what it might have been like if she’d chosen Peter. Because, you know, she’s become kind of dead inside, she’s become Mrs. Dalloway instead of Clarissa. And you’re right, choosing Peter would probably have been disastrous but she can’t help but wonder if it might have made her feel more alive.”

His expression changed, becoming still and attentive. “Feminine logic,” he said. He was staring across the street at a dark-haired man leaning against the tailgate of a pickup truck. The man seemed to be studying the two of them, his arms crossed over his chest, his legs stretched out in front of him and crossed at the ankles. While they watched, he nodded his head, slowly and deliberately, in greeting.

Will took her hand and, turning, they began to walk home.

“Who was that?”

“No one,” he said.

Halfway home, he let go of her hand. Neither one spoke. They walked now without touching. Something had happened at the theater: she had offended him in some way, and now he would punish her with his silence.

A pale moon sailed over the trees. Insects flew in crazy circles around the streetlamps. Ava wished his feelings for her would fade, but love wasn’t like that. It came on with sudden, terrifying clarity. She’d seen Michael across a crowded cafeteria and known, without even talking to him, that he was for her. With Jacob it had been more subtle.

It was like the steady ticking of a clock; one tick, there was nothing, the next tick, something bloomed.

The following Friday, Fanny asked Will to accompany her to the cemetery and Will surprised everyone at the breakfast table by saying yes. He had come in unexpectedly while they were finishing their last cups of coffee. Ava was in the library reading when he stuck his head in to ask her if she wanted to come.

Since she couldn’t seem to force herself to write, Ava had taken to spending her mornings in the library, reading. She had found a well-worn copy of Anna Karenina, and despite the fact that she had read the novel several times in college, she quickly found herself immersed in Tolstoy’s sweeping tale of illicit love and tragedy. It was one of the characteristics of good fiction, she had found, that rereading only enhanced the story rather than detracting from it, and so she found herself once again caught up in the passionate love affair between Anna and Count Vronsky, even though she knew that Vronsky was no good, that despite his charm and good looks he would betray Anna in the end.

“What are you doing?” Will asked. He was standing in the doorway with his shoulder against the jamb, regarding her with a lazy, amused expression.

“Research,” she said, embarrassed that he had caught her reading when she should have been writing. She was lying on one of the long sofas, and she sat up quickly, holding out the book, which featured a rather lurid dust jacket drawn in the style of a nineteen-fifties romance novel. “Tolstoy.” She wondered how long he had been standing in the doorway watching her.

“I’m going with Fanny to visit the dead. Do you want to come?” He didn’t ask her how the work was coming, which she thought was rather pointed and brought a faint flush to her face.

“Sure,” she said, rising and carefully folding the book flap over to mark her place. “I could use a break.”

She went to get ready and when she came into the kitchen, Maitland and Will were standing in front of the small television set watching Alton Brown mix up Butternut Dumplings with Brown Sugar and Sage.

“He’s kind of a smart-ass,” Maitland said. “But the boy knows his way around a pastry bag.”

They rode out to the cemetery in Maitland’s old Mercedes, Maitland driving with Fanny beside him on the front seat, and Will and Ava settled into the back. The sky was a dark metallic gray. Pear blossoms littered the lawns and drives of the neighborhood. The car was a diesel, and rattled like marbles in a tin plate each time they stopped at a light or a stop sign, shooting out a plume of faint black smoke as they accelerated. It was an older-model sedan, Ava was guessing at least twenty years old, but you wouldn’t know that from looking at it; Maitland kept it in nearly perfect condition.

It was one of the things Ava found amusing, the fact that the aunts lived in one of the largest houses in town yet drove a twenty-five-year-old Rambler. Alice and Maitland were the same.

“It’s like Havana around here,” Ava had remarked to Will, “with all the old well-cared-for cars.”

“If something works you don’t replace it.”

“Yes, but I would have expected BMWs and Jaguars. Or chauffeur-driven limousines along the lines of Driving Miss Daisy.”

He smiled and said gently, as if explaining something to a child, “You don’t draw attention to yourself. You aren’t flashy. It isn’t—polite.”

Maitland was telling them tales of his Phi Delta Theta days up at Sewanee in that jovial manner he had, and they were all laughing because what else could you do but laugh when Maitland started in on one of his tales? He was the amiable grandfather everyone longed to have, a cross between Santa Claus and Colonel Sanders, a big, white-haired bear of a man who made his own mayonnaise and spoke in a nearly unintelligible dialect. Although, curiously, after the nearly two weeks that she’d been in Woodburn, Ava found that she was understanding more and more of Maitland’s speech, much like a child dropped suddenly into a strange culture eventually begins to understand the language.

In addition to her fondness for Maitland, Ava had grown close to Fanny and Clara, too. They fussed over her like she was a child, making sure that she got enough to eat, that her room was comfortable, that her skin was protected when she went out into the sun. For the first time in her life, Ava felt pampered and spoiled.

In the front seat Maitland continued his wild stories, accompanied by Fanny’s relentless giggling.

Ava had asked Will once what Maitland did for a living and Will, after some hesitation, had replied vaguely that he “looked after his investments.” Will was very polite, yet he seemed to imply that she was being vulgar asking such a thing. He told her that Alice had inherited the family home, but Maitland had inherited the family money and Ava deduced that Maitland’s sole occupation in life seemed to be taking care of Fanny. Certainly they had traveled the world, as the wealthy so often do, and they had socialized with celebrities, as the many photographs lining the walls of the Woodburn house attested to.

The cemetery sat up on a hill overlooking Woodburn. It was a pretty place, filled with large trees, shaded benches, and tall, mossy monuments. In the distance, the blue-gray ridges of the Cumberland Mountains rose against an endless sky. A narrow road wound its way past iron gates, bisecting the cemetery into old and new areas, and off this main road ran other less-traveled paths. The Woodburn plot was toward the back of the older section surrounded by an ornate iron fence that stood chest high.

Maitland parked slightly off the road, got out, and went around to open the door for Fanny. He was always courtly and respectful in his treatment of her, and Fanny was always gracious and affectionate toward him. Their marriage seemed a testament to true love and devotion, and it made Ava wistful to see the care they took of each other. Their son, Sumner, may have been a disappointment to both of them, but they never spoke of him in other than tender terms; they kept whatever pain he had caused them private.

Ava had overheard Josephine discussing Sumner with Clara and Alice, and she had gathered from their conversation that he was the family black sheep, although no one ever came right out and said why. He was an engineer for the state highway department and was married to a woman Fanny detested, someone who “hadn’t had Sumner’s advantages,” as Fanny euphemistically put it. (“White trash,” Will translated.) Sumner rarely visited the aunts but Fanny spoke to him by telephone every Thursday afternoon, calling him at his office so she wouldn’t have to talk to the trashy wife.

Ava didn’t wait for Will to open her door; she climbed out, although he would have come around and opened it if she had sat patiently as Fanny did, if she had expected it of him. Like Maitland, his manners were impeccable; he opened doors for women, stood when they entered a room, performed all the small courtesies that modern women so often found archaic and chauvinistic, and yet in Will, perhaps because of his good looks and self-deprecating manner, these courtesies seemed charming.

Fanny had brought enough flowers to fill a vendor’s cart, and when Maitland opened the trunk, she laughed in that airy way she had, and said, “Goodness, I’ll have to start using silk. They’re cheaper and they last longer, and you can’t tell the difference now!” She and Maitland were both formally dressed, he in a sports coat, good slacks, and a shirt and tie, and she in a black dress and low-heeled sandals.

Ava and Will helped them carry the flowers and distribute them where Fanny indicated. She walked cheerfully among the gravestones, chirping like a little bird, and Ava was struck by how animated Fanny seemed here in this tragic place, almost like a girl at a school dance. After a while, Ava and Will wandered off to leave the elderly pair to their careful work.

They strolled along the narrow paths, reading the headstones. The smell of rain was in the air; the sky gradually darkened. Behind them, Fanny and Maitland kept up a steady chatter.

When they had walked far enough to not be overheard Ava said, “I always thought a Southern accent was a Southern accent, but really there are several different dialects. The aunts, Clara, and Alice all speak differently from some of the shopkeepers in town.”

“They speak what used to be called ‘Old Nashville.’ ”

“So you mean it’s a class difference?”

He smiled indulgently but didn’t look at her. They had stopped at a tall monument that read Crawford in large carved letters.

“But you and Fraser don’t speak ‘Old Nashville.’ I mean, you don’t talk like me, but you don’t talk like the aunts either.”

“Really?” he said teasingly. “I don’t talk like you?”

She threw a pinecone at him.

“Unfortunately, the Old Nashville dialect is dying out.” He pulled her suddenly into his arms and began to mimic the aunts’ pleasant voices. “Why, Ava, my dear, how lovely you look this fine morning with your beautiful hair and your eyes the color of pecan shells.”

She pinched his waist and he let her go. They walked along a tree-lined path, stopping at a stone that read, In memory of our dear daughter, Hester Anne, who fell asleep in Jesus, 12th April, 1882, aged 16 years. He hath done all things well.

“Sixteen,” Ava said. “How sad.”

“We forget how quickly people died back then. You could wake up in the morning feeling fine and be dead by sundown.” Behind his head a line of gray clouds drifted like smoke.

“Speaking of history,” she said, as they began to walk again, “I’m curious. I was thinking about Clara and that little cottage she lives in behind your aunts’ house.”

She had been sitting on the kitchen steps this morning, drinking a cup of coffee and marveling at the garden that stretched beside the house and half a block beyond. A narrow alley ran behind the garden and the carriage shed, bisecting the block, and on the other side of the alley sat Clara’s little yellow house. A paved street ran behind Clara’s house. It was odd that the cottage faced the back of Woodburn Hall and not the street. The significance of this had slowly dawned on Ava.

“You said that Clara’s mother and father worked for your family. Has her family always lived in that house, the one that Clara lives in now?”

“For generations. It was given to her ancestress, Hannah, by my ancestor Randal.” He was quiet for a moment as if considering how much to say. “Hannah married a freedman, a carpenter named McGann. They went to New Orleans and had three daughters, and when Hannah and McGann died, Randal went to New Orleans and got the three children and brought them back to Longford.”

“Why would he do that?”

“They were orphans. They had nowhere else to go.”

“That was generous of him.”

“He was a generous man.”

A sudden gust of wind rattled the leaves. The sky seemed to be descending, pressing against the tops of the tall trees.

“Damn,” Will said. “I left my tools in the yard.”

They could see Fanny and Maitland behind the iron fence, Fanny squatting beside a grave and Maitland standing above her. She was laughing at something he’d said. They had started at one end of the Woodburn plot and were making their way slowly among the headstones, stooping to remove dead flowers and replace them with live ones.

“They seem made for each other,” Ava said. She and Will were sitting on a bench under a spreading oak tree. The sky was ominous but the rain was holding off. “I’ve never seen two people more in love.”

Will seemed to have fallen into some kind of brooding introspection. He had his eyes closed, leaning his head back against the trunk of the old tree. “They grew up together,” he said. “They were childhood sweethearts. The Sinclairs and the Woodburns have been neighbors for generations.”

“Well, theirs seems a love match. I can imagine that that didn’t always happen when there was money involved. I’m sure there were plenty of arranged marriages in those days.”

He stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed them at the ankles. It was apparent from his expression that he thought she was being vulgar again. “The Woodburns don’t have money. Not anymore, anyway.”

“Oh, come on,” Ava said. “With that incredible house filled with all those historical treasures? The stuff alone must be worth millions.”

“If they sold it.”

“Right.”

He opened his eyes and tilted his head forward, regarding her intently. “But you see, that’s the thing, they never would. It’s been in the family for generations, and they’d never sell any of it, no matter how much money it would bring. How do you put a value on a silver goblet once touched by your great-great-grandmother’s hands?”

Ava tried, for a moment, to understand this, but it was difficult. She’d been raised to travel light. Material possessions, her mother had tried to teach her, were not important. They were not important when you’d never had any, but Ava imagined that it would be quite different if you had.

“They’re caretakers,” Will said. “They’ve kept it together through flood, and tornadoes, and war. That’s how they look at it. And that’s why Sumner is left out of Fanny’s will, because they know he’ll break it up into pieces, all that family history, and sell it off bit by bit.”

“So they’re leaving everything to you?”

“God, I hope not.” He leaned forward, rolling his shoulders and resting his elbows on his knees, letting his hands dangle. “There’s been some talk of donating the house and most of the collection to the State Historical Society. They’d turn it into a museum, and that way everything couldn’t be sold off piecemeal.”

“Would you want that?”

He looked down at his feet. “It’s a lot of responsibility, caring for all that history. I’d rather it go to the museum so my children and grandchildren can come and look at it together in one place the way it was meant to be.”

Ava said, “Your children?”

He turned his head, grinning at her. “All twelve of them.”

“I knew you were a masochist.”

“I’ve always wanted a large family.” He hesitated, still looking at her. “How about you?”

She shook her head. A faint breeze stirred her hair. “I have enough trouble just looking after myself,” she said.

Ava had never thought seriously about having children. She had spent her entire adolescence fantasizing about being on her own, about having only herself to care for. Being Clotilde’s daughter had made her like that.

All the girls she met in school were enamored of her mother. They developed crushes on her, imitated the way she talked, the way she laughed.

“Your mother is so young,” they said. “She dresses like we do.”

They didn’t understand that having a mother who was more like a sister than a mother was a hard burden to bear. Who took on the adult responsibilities when the adult wasn’t willing, or capable? Who worried whether the bills would get paid, who made excuses to the landlord? Ava did.

“You’re an old soul,” Clotilde always said to Ava as she stood wringing her hands in the doorway. “But you need to lighten up. You need to learn to trust in the universe.”

But where was the universe when the rent came due? When the car needed repairs or the utility company came to shut off the lights?

Ava was ten when she realized completely and irrevocably that Clotilde wasn’t like other mothers, would never be like other mothers. It was parents’ night at one of the many schools Ava had attended over the years they spent on the run. Clotilde sailed in wearing a short, brightly colored dress, and all the other mothers, sedate and matronly, took one look at her and closed ranks. Clotilde laughed her tinkling laugh and said to Ava, “Show me where you sit,” as if it was some kind of game they were playing. She smiled brightly at the fathers, who smiled back, their foreheads glistening with sweat.

“Is that someone’s mother?” a voice behind her hissed, and Ava felt a sudden wash of shame so intense she thought she might be sick. There was something wrong with Clotilde, as she had always suspected. She saw her mother then as the others must see her: Clotilde’s too-short dress, her hair that fell in thick waves down her back, her pale lipstick, her reckless, absurd little laugh. Why could she not have thick ankles and doughy legs like the other mothers, women who rose every morning to make their children hot breakfasts before bundling them off to school? Mothers who put down roots and built nests and made sure their children never had to worry about lunch money or overdrawn bank accounts?

As a small child Ava had seen her mother as a playmate, someone always ready with a story or a bit of fun, but now that she stood on the cusp of adulthood she saw Clotilde as a continuous source of humiliation and embarrassment. She was just so different.

Clotilde didn’t seem to feel embarrassed at all. She laughed and twittered and smiled at all the adoring children and fathers who gathered around her like bees around a fragrant flower.

Flighty. Ava would later read the word in a book and understand instantly that it described her mother.

Later that same year Clotilde went to the hospital for a hysterectomy and Ava stayed with a neighbor, a staid, sedate spinster. A librarian. They ate microwave dinners on metal trays in front of the TV, and Ava slept on the sofa. The apartment was dark and dank, and it smelled of cat. But everything was tidy. Everything was in its place, the lace doilies on the backs of the chairs, the dishtowel on its little hook, the silk flowers in the middle of the kitchen table.

“It’s a shame,” the librarian said that first night, tucking Ava in. “Your mother is a young woman and now she won’t have any more children.”

She said it with a peculiar expression on her face, a faraway look of longing and loss, and Ava understood that the woman was mourning her own childlessness. Ava pictured Clotilde lying bandaged head to toe in a hospital bed, and she felt a sudden pang of homesickness for her mother and for the lost siblings she would never have.

But even then, it was her own loss she was thinking of. It would have been nice to have someone to share the burden of her childhood with, a playmate, an ally, a witness.

Fanny had almost finished in the family plot. There was only one grave left to decorate, tucked away in the corner beneath a small neat headstone. She stepped forward, holding a bouquet of delphiniums against her breast. Maitland followed her but she lifted her hand and waved him away, and something in her dismissive manner, in the respectful way he dipped his head and stepped back, made Ava ask, “Whose grave is that?”

“Charlie Woodburn’s.”

“Who is Charlie Woodburn?”

“Her first husband.”

Ava watched as Fanny tenderly plucked the dead flowers from the vase on top of the grave and replaced them with fresh ones. There was something in her slow, imposing movements that made Ava think again of icebergs. Everyone thought the South a land of jovial, open-faced people but there was much here that was hidden away, dark and dangerous.

“Fanny was married before Maitland?” she said. “No one told me that.”

“We don’t talk about it.”

At his tone, Ava swiveled her head and looked at him. An insect whined in her ear. A ridge of swiftly moving clouds hung over the distant mountains. “But Maitland and Fanny were childhood sweethearts. You said so yourself.”

“Yes, they were.” Will sighed, as if realizing she wasn’t going to let this go. “But then Fanny met Charlie Woodburn up at Vanderbilt and they eloped against the family’s wishes. It was a painful time. That’s why we never discuss him. That’s why there aren’t any photos of him in the house.”

“What happened to Charlie?”

“He died.”

“How?”

“I believe he drowned.”

“And then after she was widowed, Fanny married Maitland?”

“After a while, yes. After Sumner was grown.”

She looked at him in astonishment. “So Sumner was Charlie’s son?”

“Yes.”

Ava was quiet for a moment, considering this. There was something here, she could feel it, something in the way Maitland had stepped away contritely to let Fanny tend the grave, something in Will’s reticence to speak of the matter. She, of all people, recognized evasion when she saw it. She said, “Charlie’s name was Woodburn?”

He hesitated, looking at his hands. “Yes,” he said finally.

“So he was related to your family?”

“Fanny and Charlie were very, very distant cousins. He came from a different branch of the family from Josephine and Fanny and me.” He took her hand, trying to draw her against him, but she resisted.

“Come here,” he said mildly.

“She must have loved him very much to have tended his grave all these years. The father of her only child. A man she was willing to run away with against her family’s wishes.”

He let go of her hand. It was obvious that he was unwilling to speak further of Charlie Woodburn. But Ava had a stubborn, perverse streak, and once her curiosity was aroused there was no stopping it. She said, “I understand Fanny not wanting to talk about him, but what about the rest of you? Why so secretive?”

His expression changed then, became flat and distant as it had that day at the river. “Because that’s what families do,” he said coldly. “We keep each other’s secrets.”

He rose and walked off toward the Woodburn plot. She watched him go, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, his shoulders rounded as if against a cold wind at his back. She had always been a watcher, a chronicler of other peoples’ lives.

It was easier sometimes to guess at other peoples’ secrets than it was to face her own.

All the way home from the cemetery, Maitland and Fanny chattered as if they’d just come from a cocktail party. Will stared moodily out his window. No one mentioned Charlie Woodburn.

Ava put her forehead against the glass, aware of Will’s silent brooding presence beside her. She felt that she had disappointed him. He had given her the chance to be incurious, deferential, and she had failed. She would always fail. Perhaps he was realizing this now as he had not realized it before, with fatal certainty and clarity.

The storm, which had held off all morning, finally broke. In the front seat Maitland and Fanny chattered and teased each other like a pair of young lovers, as if they were the only two people in the world. Ava tried to picture Fanny as a girl, running off with a handsome scoundrel and leaving Maitland to nurse a broken heart. It was hard to imagine.

When they arrived at the house, the rain was falling steadily. Josephine had made a quick lunch of tuna sandwiches and sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, and afterward, she and Fanny and Maitland went upstairs to lie down for a siesta while Ava and Will cleaned up the kitchen. He was quiet but humorously attentive. Whatever disappointment he might have felt in her at the cemetery had obviously been tidied and put away. Smiling, he promised to take her four-wheeling tomorrow before Alice’s party.

Alice Barron was throwing a barbecue so that Ava could meet some of the “right people.” “And I promise they won’t all be as old as Methuselah like the rest of us,” she had assured Ava. She was standing in the library holding a Gin Rickey in her hand when she said this, surrounded by the afternoon cocktail crowd. It was a few days after Ava first met Fraser Barron and learned more than she cared to know about Edgar Allan Poe.

When they had finished in the kitchen, Ava and Will walked together out onto the back porch. The rain had diminished to a fine drizzle. Ava crossed her arms over her chest and followed him down the steps.

“Do we really have to go to this barbecue?” she said.

He raised his eyebrows in mock alarm. “You’re the guest of honor. Unofficially, of course.”

“Oh, shit.”

He laughed. “It won’t be bad, I promise. They aren’t going to run you out of town on a rail if they don’t like you.”

“That’s encouraging.”

He kissed her and walked out into the yard. “I’ll be back at Toddy Time. Try to get some writing done,” he said, and walked off whistling.

It was easier said than done.

She spent the next half hour observing the contents of her room, and then she went online and checked her messages, spending nearly an hour writing emails. Finally, with an act of sheer will, she signed off and pulled up a new file on her screen. She sat for a long time staring at the glaring brightness of the empty page.

The trees outside the window were filled with a silvery light, and the sky beyond was a vivid glaring white. The rain had stopped, and in the noonday heat, the landscape seemed still and slumberous. Ava forced her attention back to her computer and wrote “I watched as my mother’s boyfriend spread a map on the kitchen table. ‘Pick a spot, any spot,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Wherever you choose is where we’ll move, kid.’ ”

She sat back in disgust, massaging her forehead with her fingers as if to loosen the words she knew lay buried there. They stayed blocked, awaiting some magical incantation from her, some spell. She could see now why well-known authors were often alcoholics, why they used stimulants and alcohol to force the flow of words, to entice their muses like children leaving cookies for Santa Claus.

The idea of writing a coming-of-age novel about a girl and her flighty mother, which had seemed so brilliant in Chicago, now seemed sentimental and unmanageable. What had she been thinking? Every word she wrote felt like a guilty confession, personal and humiliating, as if she was exposing herself, naked, to the world. She would have to begin again, writing this time from a third-person perspective to distance herself from the main character, Lorna.

She let her eyes wander about the room, coming to rest finally on the copy of Rebecca she had found in the library. It was leaning against the lamp on the bedside table where Ava had left it. She had read Du Maurier as a girl, had spent one whole summer entranced by the Cornish coast with its windswept halls and lonely ghosts. She rose, went over, and opened the book, reading one random passage after another. Du Maurier made it look easy.

“It isn’t easy,” she said to Clotilde, who watched impassively from the mantel. She had never known Clotilde to suffer from writer’s block. All her stories had begun with, “Once there was a girl,” or “In the middle of a dark wood there lived a witch/troll/ogre,” and from there they’d spooled out with ease.

Ava went back to her computer, rereading what she had written, and then deleting it. She sat staring at her screen, trying to imagine Lorna and her mother, Margaret, but all she could see was herself and Clotilde. After a while even those images flickered and petered out. It was no use. The words wouldn’t come.

The only other novel she’d ever attempted had been a rambling historical romance that she’d never finished. Perhaps she’d been kidding herself all along about being a writer.

She yawned and lay down on the bed. She felt limp, discouraged, devoid of all energy and ambition, as if the heat and humidity had combined into some kind of unseen entity that was slowly draining her of life.

The bed was soft and fragrant. The room was cool and quiet.

She slept.

When she awoke nearly two hours later she was surprised at the length of time she’d slept. It was one of the symptoms of her sleep disorder that her dreams were always vivid and in full color. She’d been dreaming again of water, cold and deep and green. Only this time there’d been a bridge of lacy ironwork and, in the sky above it, a silvery moon that filled the sky with light. There was a sense of melancholy and loss about the dream, and she found herself in a blue mood when she arose, dispirited and irritable. She went into the bathroom and splashed her face with cold water and then combed her hair. That helped a little. She could hear Fanny, Maitland, and Josephine out on the side verandah, the distant murmur of their voices interspersed with periodic laughter.

Through the long windows of her bedroom she could see Clara in the garden, trimming roses. She hesitated a moment, then turned and walked down the wide hallway and out the back door. The sky was a hazy blue. As she walked across the grass she could see Clara’s hat moving slowly along the curved wrought-iron fence separating the garden from the front lawn.

The garden ran parallel to the house and was surrounded on three sides by a tall wrought-iron fence covered in trailing vines. Along the back, facing Clara’s little yellow cottage, ran a boxwood hedge, and in the far corner equidistant between Clara’s house and the Woodburn house stood a columned pergola covered in wisteria. The garden beds were set out in rectangular patterns, with masses of flowering shrubs and perennials along the front and side, facing the street and the house, and neat rows of vegetables on the interior. A raised bed of herbs stood in the corner closest to the kitchen. A series of stone paths crisscrossed the garden, with small wooden benches scattered throughout, and in the corner closest to the pergola stood an old oak tree, its massive limbs providing a shady respite from the summer heat. An ornamental pond filled with goldfish and a small fountain curved along one side of the pergola and filled the garden with a pleasant splashing sound.

“Hello,” Clara called when she saw her, stopping to wipe her forehead with the back of one gloved hand.

“You know it’s nearly Toddy Time,” Ava said to her.

Clara made a dismissive gesture toward the house. “Some days I make it and some days I don’t,” she said.

“I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea of cocktail hour in the Bible Belt,” Ava said, falling into step beside her.

Clara chuckled. “It was different back when we came of age. During Prohibition everybody drank.”

“Did the aunts’ father drink?”

“The Colonel? Oh, no. Not him.” She shook her head. “He was a very upright old gentleman, very proper and well-mannered. He wouldn’t allow so much as a drop of brandy in his house. It was the girls, Josephine and Fanny, who learned to drink up at Vanderbilt and then brought the habit home with them. And later, after he died, and it was just the three of them shut up in the house, then the parties got so wild.” She stopped for a moment, staring at the house, her eyes distant with the murky vision of the past.

“The three of them?” Ava said. “You mean Josephine, Fanny, and Celia.”

Clara startled, picking up the shears from the basket she carried on her arm. “No, not Celia. She’d gone to live with a cousin after her papa’s death.”

“Who then?”

Clara hesitated. “Charlie,” she said.

“Charlie Woodburn? Fanny’s first husband?”

“Yes.” She’d stopped to clip one of the pink roses growing along the fence, and Ava was hopeful that she’d continue with her story of Charlie but instead she held up the rose for Ava to sniff. “Souvenir de la Malmaison. Isn’t it lovely? It’s a bourbon rose named by Empress Josephine from specimens sent back by Napoleon.”

“It smells wonderful. The whole garden smells wonderful.”

“That’s because it was planned so that the prevailing winds would blow the fragrance toward the house.”

“Really?” Ava knew nothing about gardening, recognizing only a few of the flowers she saw.

“See,” Clara said, pulling forward the tip of a shrub covered in white flowers. “Tea olive. And this is myrtle, and this is mock orange.” Ava obediently sniffed each of the plants Clara indicated, murmuring her approval. “And here in this bed are the peonies and the pinks and the sweet violets.”

“What’s this?”

“Clematis,” Clara said. “Although you shouldn’t touch it because it causes skin irritation for some people.” Ava quickly drew her hand away. “And of course you know that foxglove and nightshade are poisonous, as well as all varieties of rhododendron and azalea.”

“I guess that explains why you wear gloves when you garden,” Ava said, and Clara chuckled, bending above a pot of sweet peas and marigolds. Ava trailed behind her, working up the courage to speak. There was so much she wanted to ask about Charlie, and it had occurred to her that Clara might be willing to talk, but now that she was here, she wasn’t sure how to start. Finally she began, blurting out portions of their strange trip to the cemetery. When she finished Clara was quiet, clipping shoots off the branches of an old gardenia. Ava knew from Clara’s silence that she had blundered, but her curiosity got the better of her. “So who was he? This Charlie Woodburn.”

Clara continued snipping, and then said quietly, “He was a man best forgotten.”

“So he was a bad person?” When Clara didn’t answer Ava said, “How did he die?”

Clara eyed her from under the brim of her straw hat. “What did Will say?”

“He says he drowned.”

“Well, then,” Clara said, sliding her shears into her basket. “I guess he drowned.”

Ava walked to the end of a row of summer squash and stood staring at Clara’s yellow cottage, visible through an opening in the tall hedge. She had been schooled in the art of listening. Clotilde had had a knack for befriending lonely people, and it was not unusual for Ava to come home for dinner to find a stranger seated at the table. Sometimes they were neighbors and sometimes they were people she had found God knows where. The thing Ava had learned listening to old people talk was that their age allowed them a particular farsightedness when it came to examining their own lives. They could look back with the benefit of regret and experience and see where they’d gone wrong. They could say, “I should have done that,” or “It was wrong that I did that,” with a cold, clear certainty.

It was for this reason that she knew that once she got Clara talking about Charlie Woodburn, she would find out the truth about who he was and what had happened to him. But it was getting Clara started that was going to be the problem.

“It was more than sixty years ago,” Ava said. “I don’t understand why no one wants to talk about it.”

“Have you ever heard the expression ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’?”

“Yes.”

“Well, down here we say ‘You don’t have to be a chicken to know a rotten egg.’ ”

Ava turned around and looked at her. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means some things are best left forgotten.”

“But nothing ever stays forgotten. It just festers.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” Clara said, shading her eyes with one hand and gazing up at the house. “Down here, denial is always best.”

That night Ava had an episode of sleep paralysis.

She was tired; she had slept poorly the night before, waking several times to find the room flooded in moonlight. On this evening she awakened three times, the last time to a feeling of dread so pervasive she couldn’t move, lying in terror, her body heavy and stiff, her mind agile and fully awake. From somewhere deep in the house she could hear a clock ticking, and she forced herself to concentrate on the steady rhythmic sound as the therapist had taught her to do, drowning out the unreal sensations with the real.

Gradually the thumping of her heart subsided. She lay on her back and stared at the moonbeams rippling across the ceiling. After a while she found that she could move her eyes, and so she did, shifting them to the left and feeling her heart clutch again in horror.

Someone was sitting in the chair beside the window, a tall, dark figure, smoking.

After that, she switched on the lamp and lay in bed, rigid with terror, until falling into a restless sleep sometime after four o’clock. When she awoke again it was morning and sunlight flooded the room. In the cheerful light of day it was often difficult to remember the terror of the night before. She felt that old familiar dread, curled in her stomach like an embryo. The episode last night, coming so soon on the heels of the other nightmares, left her feeling uneasy and apprehensive. It had been years since she had suffered from nightmares and waking hallucinations, and yet now, in the space of less than three weeks, she had suffered two narcoleptic events.

She hoped it wasn’t a sign of things to come.