The Shadow Constant Read online

  But she had come for something else.

  There were long wooden moldings stacked into the corner, short squat pieces of wood, a large barrel that sported a painted label she could no longer read, and a handful of metal bands for other barrels long since dismantled. Other pieces sat in stacks, some neater than others; some pieces looked to be partially under dirt, probably having burrowed their way in with time and water.

  She tugged the lamp further so she didn’t get in her own light.

  There.

  In the third stack, flat on its side, sandwiched between a stubby four-by-four and three useless pieces of molding, was the gear. Though she didn’t want to disturb the history stacked there, she wanted the gear. She wondered if Reenie would be mad at her for moving something before it was catalogued, but not caring enough to stop. Reenie would be mad about something, it was really just a question of what. This would certainly fit the bill.

  Kayla turned the gear over in her hand, paying no attention to the red dust it embedded into her skin. The heft of it pulled her in, the sharpness of the corners, the single seam that ran around one edge and had been worn almost, but not quite, non-existent. This had not been hewn at the smithy’s here on the farm; it had been made from a mold somewhere else and brought here.

  The problem was that there were two gears like this in the diagram—one larger, one smaller. Kayla didn’t know which she held in her hand. The diagram had been clear on many things and decidedly vague on others. The overall size of the machine was definitely in the vague category. How exactly it worked and whether or not it actually did were two other fuzzy spots. Kayla loved a mystery.

  Trying not to disturb Reenie’s future catalogue, Kayla moved piece after piece, constructing new piles of odds and ends. She’d learned from experience, that though she would know at a moment’s glance that everything had been touched, no one else would likely see it. They were as blind to that as she was to the nuances of propriety. Her only real concern was that Evan would ask her about it. She was a terrible liar, but as long as no one asked point blank, they’d never know she’d rearranged it all.

  Once she found the second gear she could start to determine the size of the overall machine. Then she would know what to look for to find all the pieces.

      

  The early dawn was cool and wet, one of the things Evan loved about living out here. One of the many things that led him to think it might become permanent. He stood with his bare feet leaching some of his excess body heat into the dewy grass while the sun came up on the other side of the creek.

  The big house, and thus the Overseer’s as well, had been aligned east to west, so the front faced the sunrise, and the back the sunset. Long porches allowed the family to take advantage of the views. But Evan wondered how long it had been since another family had sat there.

  This morning he raised his mug in a salute to Ivy as he passed by. Standing there in tight jeans and a snug white tank that didn’t quite hide the purple of her bra, Ivy looked just a little on the slutty side of normal. It was enough to make him grateful that he’d called both her school and her previous employers for references, or he would have been hard pressed to say this was the same woman who’d interviewed in a standard, pale-blue suit. The same one who held the only doctorate degree among them. The one he couldn’t now bring himself to address as Dr. Lopez. Her thick black hair and dark skin contrasted with her violet eyes, marking her as much Irish as she was Hispanic. Now the odd color of those eyes focused sharply on him.

  “Is everything all right?”

  He didn’t answer, just asked another question, because honestly he thought things were fine, but he couldn’t say for sure. “Have you seen Kayla?”

  “At seven in the morning? She’s usually gone by six.” She came down off the porch to join him.

  And his thoughts turned to his mistake at the interview. He’d really oversold the whole “keep an eye on Kayla” thing if Ivy already knew Kayla’s standard schedule.

  “Can I help? Is she okay?”

  He smiled. “She’s usually just fine. Often found something and just didn’t realize the time had passed. Chances are when we find her, she’ll be engrossed in some project and think it’s still yesterday.”

  Ivy stopped dead. “Seriously? The sun went down and the temperature dropped about thirty degrees. How could a person not notice that?” She’d started sweeping the area visually like he did, probably also wondering where the hell a twenty-nine-year-old woman could have holed up all night on a plantation. She sure hadn’t been in her bed or even her room.

  “There.” He spotted an orange power cable running along the left side of the house. Turning to follow it, he tried to explain. Not that anyone ever really could. “She’s just so focused. You know how you read or get on the computer and don’t realize an hour passed when you only planned to be on for a minute or two?”

  A small nod from Ivy cued him.

  “Now multiply that focus—that intent—by about a thousand.”

  Ivy made a face that said she understood the concept but wasn’t sure she believed the reality.

  So he tried to smooth it over. “I don’t know what it’s like either. But if we find her, you’ll see it. Then you’ll believe. The rest of us neurotypicals will probably never know what it’s like to be that focused.”

  As he rounded the corner and saw the cord disappear into the far left door of the carriage house, she spoke up, “Neuro-typicals? . . . Never mind. I’ve got it.”

  He pushed open the door, the early dawn light falling perfectly into the empty space. The cord fed a lamp that was off, but aimed into a corner. Though nothing looked disturbed or missing, Kayla wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to bring out a light to not touch anything. “Crap.”

  Ivy was sipping her coffee as she tucked one old Converse lace-up sneaker behind the other. Evan wondered if she had matched the purple in her shoes to her bra on purpose. She seemed to be taking cues from him about how worried to be and her voice reflected that. “I think I noticed the megawatt flashlight missing this morning from the set-up room, and I think the door to the smithy wasn’t ajar yesterday.”

  He smiled. “Maybe you have a touch of it, too.”

  She laughed. “Just a touch. Or maybe a good solid smack of OCD. Nothing diagnosable, but I would have marched down and latched the smithy door if I’d noticed it last night.”

  They wandered across the property, silently sipping coffee and high stepping as the yard gave way to the open grounds where the grass was no longer bowed to the mower. He considered going back for shoes, but then decided against it. His time was best spent finding Kayla.

  They went over the creek, walking the foot bridge that was in their most direct path. Three bridges had been built over the maximum width the water might take in high season. Evan had yet to see the need for a bridge so wide and high, but he couldn’t help admiring the solid construction. He felt a strange satisfaction for some dead farmer or possibly slave who had done such great work that the bridge was strong enough to easily hold a horse or two a good 150 years after the building of it. The old wood had worn away where hooves and feet had passed probably tens of thousands of times and he wanted to stop and admire it, but he had to find his sister, so he simply crossed it. The only enjoyment he took was the feeling of well-loved wood under his bare feet.

  Worry weighing in his chest, he traipsed on, his sweatpants ruined with dew and hitchhikers. He had always found Kayla before. Ninety-five percent of the time, everything was fine—except his heart rate. The other five percent she usually wound up fine, too. Only once, in junior high, had she gone off with some boy and gotten herself far from home and far from safe. It was probably a normal teenage girl thing to do, but it had scared the shit out of Evan. And here, out in the middle of Southern nowhere, he remembered that feeling, remembered her scared voice over the cell phone and him rushing to get her, afraid he wouldn’t be in time. That time there had been a bonfire, drugs,
and a gun.

  There were no gangs here, no mean girls in junior high, no guns. But maybe she’d decided to restart the blacksmith’s fire, maybe she’d decided to rebuild the brick hut on her own, maybe she’d constructed a bandsaw and was harvesting soft wood trees and planking them. With Kayla you never knew.

  And he reminded himself that she was smart and that it had been years since she’d needed anything more than a reminder to eat, anything more than a pathway back to the world the rest of them lived in. But old habits died hard.

  “Do you hear that?” Ivy stopped, her head cocked to one side as she listened.

  He did. Just a faint noise.

  “Kayla!?” He yelled it, though that was often as useful as pissing in the wind. She could be ten feet away and not respond if she was in the zone.

  “Ev?” The faint voice came from behind the blacksmith’s, and she peeked around the side of the building, unsurprisingly wearing the same clothing as the day before. “Ivy!”

  Of course, he worried his ass off and she lit up a smile for Ivy.

  “Come see what I have.”

  She probably still had no clue it was seven in the morning. Kayla was clearly alive, healthy and happy. Maybe a little dehydrated, but he couldn’t see it, so he followed Ivy who hadn’t hesitated at all.

  Behind the smithy’s was a cleared patch of hearth stones and hard-packed ground. Littered around the small area were various gears and cranks, an old chain rusted into an unusable twist. She’d made piles of pieces, grouped them in some way that Evan didn’t fathom.

  Ivy seemed to understand even less. “You stayed out here all night?”

  Looking up to the new sun, Kayla took stock. “I guess so. The moon was brightest back here, and the pieces were all over the place.”

  Evan sipped his coffee and quietly looked Kayla over. There was dirt on her jeans and shirt, her hair had slipped her ponytail, and much of it had come down around her face in wisps that he knew Reenie was jealous of and Kay couldn’t care less about.

  Ivy didn’t seem to put much stake in the other woman’s appearance one way or another, “I guess you’ll be sleeping most of the day, huh?” Her surprise at both Evan and Kayla’s quick answers was evident.

  “Nope.”

  “No, she won’t.” He followed it up with the same thing he did anytime someone didn’t understand his sister. “It’s the Aspergers.”

  Ivy frowned at him. “I wouldn’t have thought so. I haven’t read anything about lack of need for sleep.”

  She’d been reading about it?

  A small smile split her face as Ivy seemed to read his mind, too. “I read about everything that interests me.” Then she turned to Kayla. “I’m guessing it’s because you’re so smart. They say daVinci only slept a few hours every night, and lowered need for sleep is most common in the highly intelligent.”

  “I am highly intelligent.” Kayla smiled.

  Evan had almost said it. He knew it sounded better coming from him. From her, it was often taken as arrogant.

  Ivy nodded as though Kayla had simply stated that the sun rose in the east, and he felt an iron weight lift from his shoulders a bit. He’d carried it even when his little sister had lived in a different city. He’d fretted for her daily, been angry with the people around her for not understanding her. He even hated her old boss, Williams, though he’d never met the ass. But maybe here in this insular world he could stop worrying. He could focus on Reenie. On him.

  So he decided to give a little more explanation. Bring Ivy into the circle a little more. “They say it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert at something. That’s five years at full time. Most Aspies hit that mark in their chosen interest before age ten.” He looked from one to the other. “Do me a favor and head up for breakfast in about twenty minutes? I’ll get Reenie to fix us something, or maybe I will.”

  They both nodded at him, then he did something he rarely did. He turned and walked away.

  The last thing he heard as he moved out of earshot was Kayla’s voice. “I’m building it.”

  4

  Back Field

  Evan turned off the old tractor engine for a moment and went through a small handful of soothing rituals. He adjusted his bandanna from where it had worked itself askew and took a long drink from his water bottle where the ice was already nearly gone. Then he stopped and just enjoyed not having his bones rattled.

  There would be no new tractor.

  Though it was planned for, the plantation account was steadily dropping. Kayla had even added fifty percent beyond the calculated total for new ideas, increased-from-expectation costs, and—as she called it—“random plantation finds.” She’d already had a handful of those herself.

  Just yesterday, Kayla bought a second metal detector, thankfully from her personal savings, and today she and Ivy were scanning the yard behind the big house. They’d been digging up all kinds of things. Kayla had already run the half-mile across the field once today with Ivy in tow to show off the silver tea pot they’d found.

  Kayla and Ivy’s unflagging enthusiasm had turned the yard into a Civil-War-era treasure hunt. Reenie was still asleep, having begged off the day, not feeling well again. Since he was pretty sure she wasn’t pregnant, and since he suspected her late night work would pay off in the end, he’d let it go. Now he was grateful that she wasn’t up to see the series of holes the two other women had dug into the backyard. Grass seed already waited in sturdy bags to help put the place back to rights.

  Kayla smiled and told him that Ivy had the great idea to flag the backyard with references for the big items—like the teapot and a gold and pearl necklace. They could then post a sign at the side of the yard explaining how antebellum women had buried their valuables to keep them from being confiscated by Union troops, marauding bandits or even the Confederate government to help pay for the war.

  Highlighting the finds was a great idea. But it meant they needed engraved brass plates for each piece. They needed an all-weather-proof plaque at the side of the yard explaining the markers. And so Kayla’s extra fifty percent dwindled as fast as the calculated amounts did.

  That meant there was no new tractor in the budget.

  And the old one shook him in a way he hadn’t thought possible. It was like being on a five-hour-long wooden roller coaster. He hated those things.

  But he loved the idea of cotton.

  Evan cranked the engine back up and looked over his shoulder at the rows he was digging behind him. They were a little blurred in his vision because of the vibration of the machine under him. They probably also didn’t look quite straight, because they weren’t. But he was a carpenter, not a farmer, and the growing cotton plants would obscure any small deviations in a short while.

  If they wanted the plantation running cotton by next year, he had to get the crop in.

  Obviously, they couldn’t run a whole plantation with four people. And they couldn’t run a museum with just four people either. But they were nowhere near ready to open the doors, and so for now, they were on their own.

  He’d already decided that—as cool as having the plantation running as it had in the 17000s was—there was no way he was planting all the fields. One would be plenty to show people what it would have looked like. To show them a cotton plant up close and, when the season was right, let them pick some of the stiff, fluffy heads. Kayla would set up a room with carding equipment and working cotton gins for people to use and there were plans to put the originals in the garage on display.

  The museum had been Reenie’s crazy idea to save Hazelton House. She wasn’t rich enough to own it outright. She didn’t want to sell it, it had been in her family for generations. And one night, distraught about the options, she’d said, “Do you think I could get a loan to turn it into a museum?”

  There had never been a snowball’s chance in hell of Reenie getting that kind of loan with her negative credit. But then Kayla had gotten fired again, and here they were. There wasn’t enough
money to start a full-scale museum. But they could rent out the back fields—Reenie was already talking to several farmers about that. And they could open the doors with parts of the house and main buildings ready to show.

  It was Kayla who’d said, “Do enough, just enough. Then charge a low admission and get a lot of foot traffic through. Have something fun. As we make money, we’ll add more things, and the same people will want to come back again. Then we can slowly raise the price of admission.”

  Leave it to Miss Math to calculate it all out. While Reenie pondered the idea, Kayla had hung up. Fifteen minutes later, Evan and Reenie’s phones had beeped with an email. There was a spreadsheet with start-up numbers, cost analysis, underestimated attendance and profit, and the subject line “This works.”

  Reenie had nearly cried.

  But never once had she thanked Kayla for saving her family home. She was blind to the fact that Kayla had done it. It was just his weird sister, crunching numbers again.

  So Evan was out here riding the tractor, getting his back chiropracted in the worst way while his heart clenched at the thought of the two of them. He wondered what he would do if never the twain met.

  Dammit.

  He had to quit letting his thoughts wander. When his thoughts went astray, so did his lines. Nothing too bad, but the local farmers might make fun of him. Still, his back would kill him tomorrow if his head didn’t kill him today. He needed some drugs and a good foot rub, and he knew just the woman to blackmail into it.

  With those simple needs firmly in his sights, Evan polished off his water and started through the last turn. He faced away from the house now, the sight of Ivy and Kayla working with some kind of excited frenzy lost to him. He didn’t much think he was one to jump up and down and wave his hands like a girl, but he was jealous that their work—though no less hard than his—brought them such fits of joy.