“Grace tried ta beat him ta death with a broom.”
“That’s not true. I told you, I wasn’t wearing my spectacles and he looked just like a wharf rat runnin’
through the kitchen.”
“How would you know what a wharf rat looks like? You’ve never been ta a wharf in all your life.”
So I drove the Sisters, who were completely hysterical, and Harlon James, who probably wished he was dead, to Dean Wilks’ place in their 1964 Cadillac. Dean Wilks ran the feed store, but he was the closest thing to a vet in town. Luckily, Harlon James had only suffered a broken leg, so Dean Wilks was up to the task.
By the time we got back to the house, I was wondering if I wasn’t the crazy one for thinking I’d be able to get any information out of the Sisters. Thelma’s car was in the driveway. My dad had hired Thelma to keep an eye on the Sisters after Aunt Grace almost burned their house down ten years ago, when she put a lemon meringue pie in the oven and left it in there all afternoon when they were at church.
“Where you girls been?” Thelma called from the kitchen.
They bumped into each other trying to push their way into the kitchen to tell Thelma about their misadventure. I slumped into one of the mismatched kitchen chairs next to Aunt Grace, who looked depressed about being the villain of the story again. I pulled the locket out of my pocket, holding the chain in the handkerchief, and spun it around a few times.
“Whatcha got there, handsome?” Thelma asked, pinching some snuff out of the can on the windowsill and tucking into her bottom lip, which looked even weirder than it sounded, since Thelma was kind of dainty and resembled Dolly Parton.
“It’s just a locket I found out by Ravenwood Plantation.”
“Ravenwood? What the devil were you doin’ out there?”
“My friend’s staying there.”
“You mean Lena Duchannes?” Aunt Mercy asked. Of course she knew, the whole town knew. This was Gatlin.
“Yes, ma’am. We’re in the same class at school.” I had their attention. “We found this locket in the garden behind the great house. We don’t know who it belonged to, but it looks really old.”
“That’s not Macon Ravenwood’s property. That’s part a Greenbrier,” Aunt Prue said, sounding sure of herself.
“Let me get a look at that,” Aunt Mercy said, taking her glasses out of the pocket of her housecoat.
I handed her the locket, still wrapped in the handkerchief. “It has an inscription.”
“I can’t read that. Grace, can you make that out?” she asked, handing the locket to Aunt Grace.
“I don’t see nothin’ at all,” Aunt Grace said, squinting hard.
“There are two sets of initials, right here,” I said, pointing to the grooves in the metal, “ECW and GKD.
And if you flip that disc over, there’s a date. February 11, 1865.”
“That date seems real familiar,” Aunt Prudence said. “Mercy, what happened on that date?”
“Weren’t you married on that date, Grace?”
“1865, not 1965,” Aunt Grace corrected. Their hearing wasn’t much better than their vision. “February 11, 1865…”
“That was the year the Fed’rals almost burned Gatlin ta the ground,” Aunt Grace said. “Our greatgranddaddy lost everything in that fire. Don’t you remember that story, girls? Gen’ral Sherman and the Union army marched clean through the South, burnin’ everything in their path, includin’ Gatlin. They called it the Great Burnin’. At least part a every plantation in Gatlin was destroyed, except Ravenwood.
My granddaddy used ta say Abraham Ravenwood musta made a deal with the Devil that night.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was the only way that place coulda been left standin’. The Fed’rals burned every plantation along the river, one at a time, till they got ta Ravenwood. They just marched on past, like it wasn’t there at all.”
“The way Granddaddy told it, that wasn’t the only thing strange ’bout that night,” Aunt Prue said, feeding Harlon James a piece of bacon. “Abraham had a brother, lived there with him, and he just up and disappeared that night. Nobody ever saw him again.”
“That doesn’t seem that strange. Maybe he was killed by the Union soldiers, or trapped in one of those burning houses,” I said.
Aunt Grace raised an eyebrow. “Or maybe it was somethin’ else. They never did find a body.” I realized people had been talking about the Ravenwoods for generations; it didn’t start with Macon Ravenwood. I wondered what else the Sisters knew.
“What about Macon Ravenwood? What do you know about him?”