Heart of Evil

Page 6

It was absurd, even for a ghost hunter, to believe that someone from the past was calling out to him, trying to reach him.
Logic—and then feelings. That was Jackson Crow’s motto. It was only logical that he think about Ashley now, and logical that even after all these years, he wanted her to need him.
Logic…
Somehow, it just wasn’t working. Feelings were taking over. And thoughts of Ashley and Donegal Plantation.
2
Ashley surveyed the expanse of the property one last time; everything was going extremely well. Children were playing and laughing, the camp looked wonderful and there were activities going on everywhere.
She headed for the house. It was time for her to become Emma Donegal and get ready for the evening’s battle.
But as she walked toward the house, she slowed, paused and looked over at the cemetery. The gate was locked.
Still, a creeping feeling of unease swept over her.
She shrugged it off; a dream was a dream. Good God, she’d dreamed once that she’d kissed Vance Thibault in high school one day, and she loathed him! She hurried on toward the house, trying to forget her unease.
Her grandfather, Frazier Donegal, was sitting on the back porch. She grinned; he looked spectacular, she thought. Frazier was eighty-three, but he showed little sign of slowing down. Today he was dressed in a frock coat, pinstripe breeches and high riding boots—a pure gentleman of the age with his full head of snow-white, a Colonel Sanders mustache and goatee, and bright blue eyes. She worried about him constantly; his health was good, but he was eighty-three.
He was really in the mood today, though, she thought. He was sipping a mint julep. He didn’t even like mint juleps.
“There you are!” he said. “I was starting to wonder.”
Ashley sat in one of the wicker rockers across from him. “Last-minute details in the stables,” she told him. “Charles Osgood didn’t want to be a Yankee.”
Frazier rolled his eyes and shook his head. “It works, you know, for the property, it works. But why on earth everyone always wants to be on the losing side, I’ll just never know. Did he finally accept his assignment?”
“He did—but Ramsay Clayton stepped in at the last minute to let him play Marshall Donegal,” Ashley said.
“Oh?”
“I don’t think Ramsay cares. It’s all play to him,” she said.
“Ramsay is a good fellow. You think he was trying to appear magnanimous in front of you?” Frazier asked.
Ashley shook her head. “There’s never going to be anything between Ramsay and me, Grampa, there just isn’t.”
He lifted his hands. “I was just asking about his motives.”
Ramsay had asked Ashley out the previous year; she had always liked him. He was a good artist, and a handsome man, but she had never felt the least bit of chemistry with him. He had accepted her wish that they just maintain a good friendship. Ramsay had been on the rebound, having broken up with his longtime lover. She wondered if she was still on the rebound—even if she had been the one who had run from Jake.
“I honestly believe Ramsay just doesn’t care,” Ashley said. “I think he’ll have fun saying, ‘Oh, Lord! I had to be a Yankee.’ No, Ramsay isn’t trying to impress me. Griffin even asked me to be his friendly companion for a dinner he had—and I said no. They all understand that the friendships we have are too important.”
“Well, then, good for Ramsay. And you—you better get dressed,” Frazier told her.
“Yep, I’m on it.”
She rose and walked into the house from the riverside.
The original architects had taken advantage of the river and bayou breezes when they had built the house. It hadn’t been changed much since the day it had been built. One long hallway stretched from the front of the house to the back, and before the advent of air-conditioning, the double doors on each end had often been kept open. The house had one unique feature: double winding staircases to a second-floor landing that led to the six bedrooms, three on each side of the house on that floor. The stairway to the third floor, or attic, where there were still two rooms that could be guest rooms or let out to renters, was on the second floor, bayou side, of the house.
Beth Reardon was in Ashley’s room, sitting at the foot of the bed and drawing laces through her corset.
Her skin was pure ebony; she was tall, regal and beautifully built. But she had chosen to get into the action. She was wearing a cotton skirt and cotton blouse and her hair was wrapped up in a bandana. She gazed over at Ashley. “Hey! Time is a-wasting, girl. Where have you been?”
“Settling an argument over who had to be a Yankee,” Ashley told her.
“Yankee. That’s the North, right?” Beth asked. Beth was from New York, and before that, her family had lived in Jamaica. Her accent, however, was all American, and none of her ancestors had been in the United States during the Civil War.
Ashley frowned.
Beth laughed. “Just kidding! Come on, I took history classes.”
“Sorry!” Ashley said.
“You should be. Let’s get you in this ridiculous contraption. So, people really churned butter in these things? No, wait—your relatives sat around looking pretty while the slaves and servants churned the butter, right?”
“Actually, in our family, everyone worked. And I think that everyone had to sweat when churning butter. Most of the time, the plantation mistress had to work really hard.”
“Supervising?”
“And making soap and doing laundry and all the rest,” Ashley said. “Well, maybe if you were really, really, really rich you just sat around. We were rich, but not that rich, and if we’re ever going to be rich again, it’s up to you, since I can barely boil water.” Beth had come to work at Donegal as the chef less than a year ago, determined to make the restaurant one of the most important in the South.
“Anyone can boil water,” Beth assured her. “And you cook okay. You’re not great, but, then, you are one hell of a storyteller. Step into the skirts already, I’m dying to see this show.”
Arranging the layers of clothing that constituted the formal dress of a Southern plantation mistress took some time. They both laughed over the absurdity of the apparel that had been required in Louisiana despite the heat and the humidity. Ashley told Beth, “It’s worse for the guys. The authentic uniforms are wool—those poor little puppies just die out there.”
“Well, honey, I think I’m glad that I’m the unpaid help for this shindig, then,” Beth told her, grinning. “Cotton like this—it’s nothing. And I do love the bandana! Poor Emma.”
“Yes, it really was poor Emma,” Ashley told her. “Lots of the soldiers left journals about what happened at the battle. It was only after the war that the rumors about Emma having killed her husband got started. It’s as if someone wanted to sully her name. Of course, nothing that we can find was written about her having been charged with the crime.”
“But it was a different time. Maybe she did the unthinkable. Maybe she took a lover. Maybe even, God forbid, he was a Yankee or a carpetbagger!”
“Maybe,” Ashley agreed. “From all the family lore, she loved her husband, she was devastated when he died, and she managed to hold on to the property and raise her children here, even though the South lost and carpetbaggers did sweep down on the South. Carpetbaggers were even more despised than Yanks,” she explained. “They were the people who weren’t fighting for a cause—their cause was just to prey off the vanquished and get rich.”
A few minutes later, Ashley was ready, and they headed back to the porch that faced the river. A crowd had already gathered, since the schedule for the day was printed out on brochures that attendees could pick up at the entrance to the property. A high-school student, seeking extra credit in history, was usually given that job.
Ashley came out to stand next to her grandfather, looking out over the property as she could see it from the back porch. Bright tape in blue and gray cordoned off the areas where the reenactors would move during the events, though they no longer went into the cemetery for the moment of Marshall Donegal’s death and the tactical retreat of the two surviving Union soldiers.
She found herself staring at the cemetery off to her left again. An odd tremor washed over her, but she quickly forgot it and looked at Frazier.
“Nice crowd today,” he said quietly. Ashley squeezed his hand.
The small band—posing as the military band that had been part of Marshall Donegal’s cavalry unit—launched into the haunting strains of “Dixie.”
Frazier Donegal began to speak midway through, giving an excellent history lesson. He didn’t shy away from the slavery question, admitting that cotton was king in the South, and sugarcane, and both needed workers. The citizens of the South had not invented slavery; many had clung to it whether, in their hearts, they accepted the injustice or not. Few men like to admit they were wrong or cruel to their fellow human beings. And they had hardly been magnanimous when it meant they would also lose their livelihood. It wasn’t an excuse, but it was history. Then as now, prejudice was not something with which a man was born—it was something that was taught. He spoke with passion, conviction and sincerity, and a thunderous round of applause greeted his words; he would have been a great politician, Ashley thought. Except that he had never cared about politics; he had always cared about people.
The first roar of close fire sounded from the stables area, and people screamed and jumped. It was all sound and black powder. There was no live ammunition at the reenactment.
The Yankees, mounted on their horses, rode in hard from the east, dismounting at the stables to use the buildings as defensive positions as they began their attack.
Ashley went on to introduce herself as Emma Donegal. She told about the beginning of the war, and how her husband, Marshall Donegal, famed for his exploits in the Mexican-American War more than ten years earlier, had returned to the military, raising a cavalry unit for the Louisiana militia that would be ready to join the Confederate army at any time. But federal forces were always spying in Louisiana. It would be the Union naval leader, David Farragut, a seasoned sailor, who would assault New Orleans and take the city in 1862, but before that time, Union forces snuck down regularly to survey the situation and report back on the Confederate forces guarding the city. The battle at Donegal Plantation began when the federal spies who had participated in the bar brawl rode swiftly to the plantation in uniform, hoping to engage the Confederates before they could summon more men. At Donegal Plantation, however, four of the spies died at the hands of the small Confederate force to be found there, and the only Confederate casualty was Marshall Donegal himself, who had succumbed to the onslaught of the federals, killing three before falling in a pool of his own blood. She explained that history longed to blame her—Emma Donegal—but she was innocent. Truly, she was innocent! The world hadn’t changed that much; people loved to talk, and everyone wanted there to be more to the story. There simply wasn’t. She and her husband had been married thirteen years; they had four children they were raising happily together. She was heartsick at her husband’s death and survived her grief only because she had to keep food on the table for her children.