And now here I was, in the private archive, without my dad or my mom, or even a bowl of rocky road ice cream, in sight. Things were changing pretty quickly around here, for a town that never changed at all.
The room was paneled and dark, the most secluded, airless, windowless room of the third-oldest building in Gatlin. Four long oak tables stood in parallel lines down the center of the room. Every inch of every wall was crammed with books. Civil War Artillery and Munitions. King Cotton: White Gold of the South. Flat metal shelving drawers held manuscripts, and overflowing file cabinets lined a smaller room attached to the back of the archive.
Marian busied herself with her teapot and hotplate. Lena walked up to a wall of framed maps of Gatlin County, crumbling behind glass, old as the Sisters themselves.
“Look—Ravenwood.” Lena moved her finger across the glass. “And there’s Greenbrier. You can see the property line a lot better on this map.”
I walked to the far corner of the room, where a lone table stood, covered with a fine layer of dust and the occasional cobweb. An old Historical Society charter lay open, with circled names, a pencil still stuck in the spine. A map made out of tracing paper, tacked to a map of modern-day Gatlin, seemed like someone was trying to mentally excavate the old town from beneath the new. And lying on top of all of it was a photo of the painting in Macon Ravenwood’s entry.
The woman with the locket.
Genevieve. It has to be Genevieve. We have to tell her, L. We have to ask.
We can’t. We can’t trust anyone. We don’t even know why we’re seeing the visions.
Lena. Trust me.
“What’s all this stuff over here, Aunt Marian?”
She looked at me, her face briefly clouding over. “That’s our last project. Your mom’s and mine.”
Why did my mom have a picture of the painting at Ravenwood?
I don’t know.
Lena walked over to the table, and picked up the photo of the painting. “Marian, what were you guys doing with this painting?”
Marian handed each of us a proper cup of tea, with a saucer. That was another thing about Gatlin. You used a saucer, at all times, no matter what.
“You should recognize that painting, Lena. It belongs to your Uncle Macon. In fact, he sent me that photo himself.”
“But who’s the woman?”
“Genevieve Duchannes, but I expect you know that.”
“I didn’t, actually.”
“Hasn’t your uncle taught you anything about your genealogy?”
“We don’t talk much about my dead relatives. No one wants to bring up my parents.”
Marian walked over to one of the flat archival drawers, searching for something. “Genevieve Duchannes was your greatgreat-greatgreat-grandmother. She was an interesting character, really. Lila and I were tracing the entire Duchannes family tree, for a project your Uncle Macon had been helping us with, right up until—” she looked down. “Last year.”
My mom had known Macon Ravenwood? I thought he had said he only knew her through her work.
“You really should know your genealogy.” Marian turned a few yellowed pages of parchment. Lena’s family tree stared back at us, right next to Macon’s.
I pointed to Lena’s family tree. “That’s weird. All the girls in your family have the last name Duchannes, even the ones who were married.”
“It’s just a thing in my family. The women keep the family name even after they’re married. It’s always been that way.”
Marian turned the page, and looked at Lena. “It’s often the case in bloodlines where the women are considered particularly powerful.”
I wanted to change the subject. I didn’t want to dig too deep into the powerful women in Lena’s family with Marian, especially considering Lena was definitely one of them. “Why were you and Mom tracing the Duchannes tree? What was the project?”
Marian stirred her tea. “Sugar?”
She looked away as I spooned it into my cup. “We were actually mostly interested in this locket.” She pointed to another photograph of Genevieve. In this one, she was wearing the locket.
“One story in particular. It was a simple story, really, a love story.” She smiled sadly. “Your mother was a great romantic, Ethan.”
I locked eyes with Lena. We both knew what Marian was about to say.
“Interestingly enough for you two, this love story involves both a Wate and a Duchannes. A Confederate soldier, and a beautiful mistress of Greenbrier.”
The locket visions. The burning of Greenbrier. My mom’s last book was about everything we had seen happen between Genevieve and Ethan, Lena’s greatgreat-greatgreat-grandmother and my great-greatgreat-greatuncle.
My mom was working on that book when she died. My head was reeling. Gatlin was like that. Nothing here ever happened only once.