The Shadow Constant Read online

  Evan looked back and forth between Ivy and Kayla after that and Kayla wanted to jump up and shout “What did I do?” But since she felt that way on a nearly daily basis, she reined the impulse.

  Reenie remained blank-faced. “I bet your degree left you with a lot of student loans.”

  A small smile played across the dark-haired woman’s features. “No, it didn’t. I left school with all my bills paid and a bit in savings. My mother was a stripper and a high school dropout. She told me to get an education and have a better life. So I stripped my way through college and grad school.”

  Oh. That explained a lot. Maybe Ivy thought she was dressing conservatively. And Kayla had to ask, “Did that cause a lot of trouble with your boyfriends?”

  Evan started to stand and walk away, but just before he did he gave her that look, the one that she knew meant she had ‘stepped over the line’ and could expect an awkward silence in return. And she wanted to shout at him again, but though she held her ire, she did ask it. “What? It’s a legitimate question!”

  Ivy laughed. “It wasn’t a problem. There were no boyfriends—”

  “But you’re so pretty!” With her almost-violet eyes and long wavy hair, Ivy had a classic face with a touch of the exotic. Even her skin was pretty. And if she was taking it all off . . .

  Ivy laughed again. “I’m gay.”

  “Oh.” Kayla struggled with what to say next. But that was a problem she was deeply familiar with. So she almost knew what to do. Almost. Kayla figured if she’d already dug herself into a hole, she should say something nice to get out of it, right? “That explains a lot.”

  Over Ivy’s shoulder she could see Evan put his face in his hands. But Ivy just laughed again, a deep, rich sound that went straight to the heart.

  Kayla smiled. And then she looked at Reenie, surprised to find that her surely-future-sister-in-law was almost smiling herself.

      

  “Really?” Kayla stared incredulously at Ivy, who stood there with a shovel propped under one arm. Kayla held her own shovel, but with much less authority.

  “Of course.” Ivy made her “serious” face, but Kayla didn’t trust it.

  “I really don’t think digging it up is wise. In fact, it seems like the exact opposite of wise.”

  Ivy smiled. “It won’t smell. There’s been plumbing in the house for over a hundred years.”

  Reenie came out then, old jeans and a T-shirt, a shovel in hand, though she didn’t seem to know why. “What are we doing, ladies?”

  That’s when it hit Kayla. Reenie had been jealous of Ivy—afraid that the slightly slutty doctor would steal Evan away. That was just bad math, as far as Kayla could tell. Evan loved Reenie. He loved her when she was “on,” when she was the star of the party and talking to everyone and running everything. And he loved her when she was “off”—sour and brooding like she was to Kayla a lot of the time and to Ivy all the time.

  Then at breakfast, Reenie asked Ivy how she wanted her eggs. She’d asked Kayla, too, but it was clearly Ivy she was suddenly much more relaxed around. Because she’d learned Ivy was gay. Ivy was not going to steal Reenie’s man. Case closed. Happy face on. Then Kayla and Ivy had come out here to do Ivy’s digging and now here was Reenie, dressed to match, shovel in hand, not a clue in sight.

  Ivy smiled. “We’re digging up the outhouse!”

  Reenie recoiled. “That seems like a bad, bad idea.”

  “That’s what I said!” Kayla found herself facing Ivy, siding with Reenie for once. “Why are we digging up old people’s poop?”

  Ivy sighed. “How many times do I have to say it? There’s no crap down there! It’s all gone, decomposed. To everything, there is a season, turn turn and all that. What is down there are all the old dishes . . .” She looked pointedly at Reenie on that one. “Silver maybe. Anything a house slave may have chipped or bent. Rather than getting punished for it, they made it disappear. Down the outhouse.”

  That snagged Reenie’s attention.

  And then Kayla was the only one standing there. Ivy and Reenie—now best buds—had moved to where the bathroom first stood, and they were breaking ground. Chattering like magpies, they didn’t notice that she’d walked away. And Kayla began to wonder if Ivy hadn’t seen Reenie’s jealousy problem and announced that she was gay to help smooth things between them.

  Maybe she wasn’t even gay. Maybe she’d just said it so Reenie would get that stick out of her butt.

  Regardless, the two of them were now in business and Kayla was off on her own again, shovel forgotten. The blacksmith’s was down the hill and Kayla had adopted it as a workshop. In the last week she’d hauled a generator down there to run her lights and a small machining tool. She’d been ordering random gears online, causing delivery guys to have to drive their clumsy trucks up the long, rutted drive on five different occasions over the week.

  Ivy had talked her into redrawing the diagram. First on paper, then on an oilcloth that Ivy had taken two days to fabricate the way the original would have been. She’d found the proper ink and made Kayla duplicate all of it with a quill.

  Ivy and Reenie both let out soft swear words when she finished. Reenie almost touched the still-wet ink, but pulled her hand back at the last moment, saying, “It’s uncanny.”

  Evan shrugged. He’d always known they’d never starve: Kayla had the skills to be a first-rate forger, able to mimic anyone’s handwriting. Sadly, her non-existent lying skills got in the way. So she was limited to lost oilcloth diagrams.

  The paper one was now in the smithy, spread out on a workbench. For Ivy, not her. Kayla could still see it all in her head. Hell, she’d drawn two exact duplicates of the thing; she didn’t need a reference in front of her. Which was a good thing, because the place Reenie had sent the original for ‘protection’ still hadn’t found it. Though they had promised they would not give up searching, they made it clear that they were claiming the loss and marking it as “unfindable” on their records.

  Reenie had also searched what she could on Eli Whitney . . . which wasn’t much. There just wasn’t a lot to be found. A handful of books existed, all at the fifth-grade level. Reenie had first scoffed, but then gave up and read one. She did find a sample of handwriting someone claimed was Whitney’s. And Kayla had to admit that it looked nearly identical.

  Reenie was beside herself, convinced that she’d lost a priceless document.

  Kayla was much less certain.

  For one thing, handwriting was an art in those days. Students were taught to write by mimicking their teachers. Whitney’s early work was as a tutor, so there were likely a handful of his pupils around the South who had attempted to copy his penmanship. And between the four of them here at Hazelton House they had exactly zero knowledge about handwriting analysis. So Kayla didn’t put much stock in the handwriting.

  Secondly, the machine didn’t work. Whitney had invented the cotton gin. He also designed interchangeable gun parts—and possibly invented the concept. Why would he make such a crappy machine? No, while this was fun to build, it wasn’t likely the work of one of the greatest inventors of his time.

  She threw open the shutters on the north side of the building and flipped on the light, shoving the dark back into the corners. Still, the awning over the firepit and work area was blocking much of the sun. She sat down and started chipping out teeth in the latest wheel she’d turned on her small lathe. Most people would have checked the circumference to be sure they had it scaled to the correct dimensions. Most people would have measured twice and cut once. But Kayla didn’t. She didn’t even pre-mark the wood. She didn’t count the number of notches in the gear, check the width of the wheel or the angle she cut the teeth at.

  She just saw what the wheel needed to be and she chipped out what didn’t belong.

  She smirked to herself. She was the Michelangelo of gears.

  Gears for a machine that likely didn’t even work. Still, it beat digging up shit.

    
 

  Evan had finished planting the cotton seeds in the back field. He was hot, sweaty and in that strange state where he was both miserable and elated. No one saw him slip into the back door at the Overseer’s House and that was probably a good thing. If anyone tried to speak to him he’d likely just grunt and walk away.

  Hauling back the door of the avocado-colored fridge, he pulled out a very modern glass pitcher of lemonade. That was all Reenie—the pitcher and the fact that it was always full of homemade lemonade—and for a moment he had the vicious dual thought of both enjoying that something here wasn’t of completely shitty quality and wondering if Reenie had bought it on a credit card and was still paying off the pitcher.

  He slapped an equally pretty glass onto the equally ugly counter and poured it full. Chugging it down, he then poured a second glass and a third before heading out to the porch to decompress.

  Every muscle felt like screaming. One day in the cotton field was too much. Three days was ludicrous. And for a moment he stood at the railing of the long back porch realizing it wasn’t coincidence that he could see all the fields from this spot. He was only the most recent man to stand here and sip from a glass of lemonade, exhausted after a full day’s work.

  The setting sun illuminated the land and he could imagine it all plowed and almost see slaves out there putting away the day’s equipment. What Evan couldn’t conjure were the thoughts of those slaves or the overseer. His own body sweated from every pore, and his satisfaction was from a job well done, work that was his and his alone.

  The history here denied that satisfaction to anyone who would have come before.

  Ivy would not have been welcomed. With her Hispanic heritage she would have been relegated to slave quarters and set to mending for pittance wages. Kayla would have been locked in a closet for her oddness. The fact that she was incredibly smart would have only exemplified the disparity in her. Only he and Reenie could have been happy here, and he didn’t believe he could ever have a happiness built on the backs of others.

  So he drank his lemonade and sweated in response to a job already finished and chose to think of more pleasant things. He surveyed the women, all clustered in the space between the back of the main house and the nearby outbuildings.

  Kayla stood in the doorway to the carriage house, the sun setting behind her. The red sky was a beautiful sight, but she couldn’t see it from where she lurked. Reenie and Ivy were still digging the pit they had started that morning and had sorted a decent collection of broken pieces of things that he couldn’t understand the value of.

  He thought for a moment that he saw Kayla squint, but then she went into the carriage house and closed up, latching the main carriage door she’d left open. She resumed her post almost out of sight at the small door on the far left.

  Evan watched each of them one at a time, simultaneously feeling oddly protective and thinking that he needed a shower before anyone came within smelling distance of him. As he turned to take care of it, he saw Kayla cock her head at something in the distance.

  It wasn’t unusual for her to look at something intently. She could be watching the way the grass bent in the slight evening breeze for all he knew. But he always checked. Kayla was still his little sister, so whatever she was staring at intently was always his concern. Following her gaze required that he turn and look out the front windows. The continuing lack of curtains in the main room made it easy to see through from the kitchen.

  With a small jolt, he realized what Kayla had been staring at, and why she’d been so reticent to come out of the shadows.

  A man in a dark suit was making his way up the long drive. His wingtips pressed into the gravel with each step he took.

  Though he wasn’t trying to conceal himself, neither did the visitor announce his presence. The drive was long and once anyone was past the small concealing trees that lined the first fifty-plus feet off the road, they were clearly visible to the household. Again, Evan applauded the careful design of Hazelton House.

  He stood still, not even lifting his glass for another drink, and watched the figure coming up the driveway.

  As he approached, the man took off his suit jacket and pushed up his sleeves; he loosened his tie and tipped his head as though cracking or stretching his neck a bit. He looked left and right, surveying the grounds, then—bold as day—walked up the front steps and knocked on the door.

  Evan considered going over and answering it for a second or two, but decided his rank smell left him in no position to greet anyone, let alone a newcomer in a suit and tie. Briefly, the thought passed through his head that the man was an antebellum historian, coming to interview—too late—for Ivy’s job. But they hadn’t posted any location information in the ad . . . so it couldn’t be that.

  No one seemed to hear the knocking and Evan thought about yelling for Kayla, but something stopped him. There was something in the way his sister had stared at the man as he’d come up the drive. She hadn’t come around to greet him, and Evan knew that she knew it would be the polite thing to do. She’d been carefully trained how to greet people, what to say, and that she should welcome people to her home. Had she tucked herself into the shadows at the carriage house on purpose?

  As though he were familiar with the place, the man in the suit stepped off the porch and headed around the back of the big house. Evan positioned himself in Kayla’s room, where he could see the back area clearly.

  Ivy and Reenie were still digging, their heads together like girls at a slumber party. Evan had no idea why Reenie was suddenly okay with everything that was Ivy. But he didn’t want to question it; Reenie had always been what his mother would have called “mercurial” in her moods. So he didn’t pay attention to their new friendship, only that they still did not see the stranger who was rapidly closing the distance.

  He could see Kayla, still lingering in the shadows of the carriage house. The setting sun and the doorway obscured her to anyone who wasn’t looking, but Evan could tell her gaze was aimed around the side of the house. She knew the man was coming and she knew from where, too.

  Evan felt better that at least one of them was paying attention and disliked his own instantaneous concern. When had he become so paranoid?

  As he came into view, the stranger put on a smile and threw out a warm “Hello!” to Ivy and Reenie.

  It never failed to amaze Evan how Reenie could paste on a sincere-looking smile at any time. “Hello.” She spoke it as though the stranger were an old acquaintance and she walked forward to him in a way that would have had Evan questioning whether or not she knew this man if he didn’t know her as well as he did.

  Adjusting his jacket to his other shoulder, the man held out his open hand to the land around him. “I just wanted to say hello. I noticed someone was fixing up the plantation. The place looks great, by the way.”

  He turned in an admiring circle, and Evan faltered back a step, hoping to not be seen by any of them. He still wanted to keep his eye on Kayla, who for some reason hadn’t moved.

  The man offered another smile, his voice holding just a hint of awe, “May I take a look around?”

  “Oh, of course.” Reenie smiled. And no wonder, her pride and joy was being admired—even before it was in its glory again. Even as she dug up the pieces of the past from the outhouse.

  Stepping forward, the man checked out the pieces of broken dishes, “That’s the family china pattern, huh?”

  This time it was Ivy who beamed at their holdings. “Yes! According to my cell phone, it’s a pattern that started around the early 1800s—Crown Bavaria. There’s also some Spode and Wedgwood.”

  “Wow.” He sounded sincere. Evan almost laughed. He would never be able to get that level of interest into his voice over broken china. But then the topic turned. “Do you mind if I walk around a little? I’d love to see the outbuildings.”

  Only then did Kayla step out of the shadows, surprising Evan and the women. If she shocked the stranger, he didn’t show it.

&n
bsp; “No. I’m sorry, but we aren’t ready to show the place.”

  Reenie’s eyes narrowed to daggers, but she smiled to cover her ire. “Oh, sure, it’s not ready but—”

  She was cut off by a smooth but firm Kayla. “None of us is clean enough to lead a tour. But we’ll be open to the public in about four months. We’d love for you to come back then.”

  This time she smiled at the man and Evan barked out a laugh that had him slapping his hand over his mouth. Kayla’s mimicry skills had made a show; she had become Reenie—Reenie with an agenda. She did not want this man looking around.

  Reenie had her own agenda. “It’ll be fine, I’m sure. Are you a neighbor?”

  Ivy watched the back and forth like it was a tennis match, growing more confused with each volley. The man watched, too, and tucked his hands into his pockets, rocked back onto his heels. “Right over on Docket.” With his head, he nodded in the direction of the subdivision down the main way.

  But as Evan watched, he saw Kayla step behind the man and shake her head at Ivy. She’d bypassed Reenie, knowing there was no ground to be gained there. But Ivy was still a possible ally. Evan was getting ready to step out on the porch, dirty and sweaty clothes be damned, just as Ivy stepped up.

  Softly, she put her hand on Reenie’s arm, looking regal in the gesture despite the too short cut-offs with white pocket liners hanging slightly past the hem. Despite the once white wife-beater that did nothing to conceal the black bra beneath it, clearly delineated against her dark skin in the fading light. “Kayla’s right.” Then she looked to the man. “We can’t. There’d be legal issues if anything happened.”

  Something in Reenie shifted, and she conceded.

  Laughing warmly, the man stepped closer to Ivy. “I promise, I won’t sue you. I’ve just always been fascinated with this place, and this is the first time I’ve had a chance to see it.”