Ready & Willing (33 page)

Now his dark brows arched higher. “Are you jealous, Cecilia?”

Her face grew warm at the question. Try as she would to form a complete thought, nothing would quite gel in her brain. Nor would the words come out of her mouth right when she tried to say what she meant. “I didn’t . . . I don’t . . . It’s not that . . .”

He grinned at her inability to finish a statement. “You needn’t feel jealous, you know. Compared to you, my dear, the river is a pallid, lackluster thing. I would far rather spend time with you than with she.”

Now heat blossomed in Cecilia’s belly, too. But all she said was, “You still miss her.”

He expelled a quiet sound of resignation. “Yes. I do.” A thought occurred to her. “So if you’re bound to that damnable painting, and I took that damnable painting for a little ride, then you’d be forced to come along, right?”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “A ride?”

She nodded, grinning.

“In your motorcar, you mean?”

“That’s what I mean.”

He gave the idea some thought, then he smiled, too. “I only rode in a motorcar when I was alive once. It was an exhilarating experience.”

She laughed at that. “Oh, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Cars have come a long way since your time. How fast did you go that one time you rode in a car?”

“It was ridiculously fast,” he told her. “Almost twenty-five miles an hour.”

“Hah,” Cecilia said. “The speed limit on Third Street is thirty-five now. On the expressways, it’s fifty-five.”

“Fifty-five miles in one hour?” he asked incredulously.

“Do you mean to tell me you could drive from here to Frankfort in an hour?”

“Less,” she said. “Because once you get outside the county, the speed limit goes up to seventy.”

His mouth dropped open at that. “Impossible,” he said. “Nothing can go that fast.”

Cecilia stood and made her way to the stairwell, then took the stairs two at a time. When she stood in the second-floor landing, she gripped his portrait in confident hands and released it from its hook on the wall. Then she carefully pulled it down until she was gazing eye to eye with Silas Summerfield’s oil-on-canvas image.

“Better fasten your seat belt, Silas,” she told him. “Because, compared to what you’re used to, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

ACTUALLY, SILAS THOUGHT A HALF HOUR LATER, THE
ride had been quite pleasant. Certainly smoother than any carriage he’d ever ridden in. Or even the trolley. Of course, that could be because of the fact that, in his current state, he was made of ether and couldn’t feel even the most heinous jolt of her motorcar. His portrait, which was strapped to the seating behind his in much the way Cecilia was strapped to the driver’s chair, might beg to differ. Still, he had but to look at the road down which her little car traveled to see that it was infinitely smoother than the streets of his day. And the pneumatic tires of motorcars bore the weight of their vehicles with considerably more care than had the metal-covered wooden wheels of the carriages to which he had grown accustomed in his day. And as for the scenes passing by . . .

Despite the disrepair into which of some of the houses in his neighborhood had fallen, in many ways, the area had changed little since his time. His section of the Southern Extension—or, as Audrey and, evidently, its other current occupants referred to it, Old Louisville—had originally been populated by only a handful of quite grand mansions on St. James Square. But by the time Silas died, smaller, though by no means small, houses had sprung up all around those, lining Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Streets, shoulder to shoulder, for blocks on end. These homes had filled with families in his time who weren’t quite so well off as their more flamboyant neighbors, but who were people of means, nonetheless.

Silas had bought his house on Third Street when he retired and took occupancy of it immediately after its completion in 1881. He’d wanted room to spread out after having virtually lived his entire adult life in the confines of his boat, and the houses of the Southern Extension had definitely offered that.

The trees lining the streets now were considerably larger than the ones that had grown there in his day. Their roots had spread far enough and grown fat enough now to buckle the walkways, and their branches stretched wide across the avenues to create shady byways where before the sunlight had flowed down unobstructed. The signs on many of the storefronts, if not identical to the ones in his day, were certainly still in keeping with the style of their original shops and businesses, but many others were lit with electricity and neon gas. Many of the houses, too, Silas noted, were no longer private homes, but places of commerce and society. Others, he was surprised to see, had been converted to apartments.

The car bounced over two metal rungs in the street, with Cecilia neither slowing, nor looking left or right, before hitting them.

“Does the trolley no longer run?” he asked.

“Not the one you’re used to,” she said. “There’s the Frankfort Avenue Trolley, which is especially fun on FAT Friday when it goes up and down Frankfort Avenue for free, stopping at restaurants and shops and art galleries. And there’s another on Main Street that’s similar. But neither is really a trolley. They’re both buses altered to look like trolleys.”

“The mood of my time with the convenience of yours,” he said.

She nodded. “Except I imagine you didn’t have to worry about exhaust fumes when you rode the trolley.”

“No,” he said. “And I don’t imagine you’re able to enjoy the grind and clank of the gears whenever the trolley man changes course or speed.”

“No, but I was able to enjoy that in San Francisco,” she said with a smile. “The trolleys there haven’t changed much since your time. I loved riding them. They’re enchanting.”

“Enchanting,” he echoed, swiveling his head first one way and then the other. Another car passed them on his side, its exterior rusted and dented, belching black smoke in its wake. “I wish I could say the same thing about your time.”

“Hey, it’s not like you lived in the Golden Age, pal,” she reminded him without taking her eyes from the road. “Anyone who wasn’t white and male—and rich—in your time had to endure all manner of social and professional inequity. Children were put to work in sweatshops. Women couldn’t vote. Justice, or a lack thereof, was based on the color of a person’s skin. The sky was sooty with coal ash and the water was poisonous in some places. People died of illnesses that are immensely curable now.” She glanced over at him with a wry expression. “Should I go on?”

“That won’t be necessary,” he assured her. He had, after all, already heard this from Audrey.

In spite of that, Cecilia did continue. “You lived a privileged life, Silas. The kind of life most people didn’t have back then.”

“And I worked hard to earn it,” he retorted.

“I’m not saying you didn’t. I’m just saying there was good and bad then, just like there is now.”

“True enough,” he conceded. And, too, he thought further with another glance at Cecilia, this time did have one or two things to recommend it that his hadn’t, not the least of which was women like the one he was with at the moment. He’d always supposed the reason he had never remarried after losing his wife was because he found the lure of the river life too strong. Having spent some—quite enjoyable—time now with both Audrey and Cecilia, however, he was beginning to think perhaps it was because the women of his time, most of them, at any rate, simply did not suit him. Certainly, there had been women in Louisville a century or two ago he had admired. But they had all either moved in social circles other than his own, or they had been married, or they, like he, were wed to their professions or causes.

He wished he knew his fate with regard to this world, whether he would be able to stay here once he and Audrey had completed their mission of saving Nathaniel’s soul. There was a part of him that almost hoped they weren’t successful, so that he might be condemned to haunt her house forever. Because, lately, it didn’t seem like such a condemnation to be relegated back to earth. Lately, it had begun to feel much more like a blessing.

Cecilia drove down Fourth Street—his own street, she had told him, was now a one-way avenue that headed away from the river—and as they drew nearer to Broadway, many of the buildings became more modern and less to his liking. At some point after his death, architects seemed to have lost their creativity and sense of style and had begun to manufacture boxes of dubious originality and little flair. He complained to Cecilia about their lack of splendor and pointed out how that was made more obvious when they were plunked down beside the Beaux Art and Italianate beauty of the Brown or Seelbach Hotels, which he was delighted to see still remained, and which he remembered well from his day. Other structures went by in a blur as she took him on a quick tour, barely noticeable, until Cecilia braked for a stoplight at the intersection of Fourth and Main, whereupon Silas looked to his right and saw something of a quite intriguing nature.

“What’s that place?” he asked, gesturing toward a collection of geometric shapes heaped upon each other, fashioned from what appeared to be glass in varying shades.

“That’s the Kentucky Center,” Cecilia told him. “Also known as the Center for the Arts. It’s cool, isn’t it?”

“Cool?” he echoed.

She smiled. “Splendid,” she clarified, echoing one of the words he’d used earlier, but which her tone suggested wasn’t used much today.

He considered the structure for another moment, then nodded. “Yes,” he said, surprised by his reaction. “It is rather splendid. I should like to see the inside sometime.”

She looked over her shoulder at his portrait, then back at Silas. “Stephen and Finn have season tickets to the Broadway Series, but I’m not sure how people would feel about sitting next to a portrait. Maybe we could swing it, though. The inside is as cool-slash-splendid as the outside. There’s this wall sculpture made of demolished cars you’d probably find interesting, in light of your newfound passion for motorcars.”

Before he could reply to that, the traffic signal turned green, and Cecilia turned the steering wheel to the right. “Before you get too smug about old architectural styles versus new, take a look to your right at the Humana Building.”

She slowed the car as Silas complied with her instructions, and he found himself not just looking right, but looking up, as well. Up, up, up, at a massive edifice fashioned from what looked like pink granite, with a ground floor façade of black and gold, over which flowed a . . .

“Is that a waterfall?” he asked, shocked.

“Yeah,” she replied. “Pretty damned splendid, huh?”

He nodded. “Very cool.” He considered the building for another moment before adding, “It reminds me, though, of a giant cash register.”

She laughed at that. “You wouldn’t be the first to think so.”

She sped up then, and suddenly nothing looked familiar to Silas, especially after they turned left and headed under the entrance to a massive bridge and an elevated highway that blocked both the sunlight and any chance for a beautiful view. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, he saw it—the Ohio River, wide and muddy and serene. It disappeared again when Cecilia took another turn, but after a few more twists and turns, it appeared once more . . . until it disappeared again behind restaurants and parks and hills.

“That’s all?” Silas asked. “Has the city grown so much that it’s hidden the river completely from view?”

“Be patient,” she told him. “There’s a park a few miles up River Road where we can stop and enjoy the view for as long as we want.”

True to her word, it wasn’t long before she was turning her car into what a sign proclaimed was CARRIE GAULBERT COX PARK. There was an expansive blacktop parking lot, but it was surrounded by even more expansive green space that was dotted here and there by pavilions for picnicking, and bisected by boat ramps where one might load small craft. By now, the sun had fallen in the sky to where it barely hovered over the trees on the opposite bank, where the shallow foothills of southern Indiana rose and fell. In Silas’s time, those hills had been great green bumps, vacant of any buildings. Now, though, he could see both private homes and shipyards. The river rippled calm and brown beneath both, the soft waves catching the late afternoon sun and dancing with it before passing it off to another current.

“This is lovely,” he said. “The river looks quite beautiful this evening.” He turned to look at her, offering her a grateful smile. “Thank you, Cecilia.”

She smiled back. “You’re welcome.”

They both turned to look at the river, neither saying anything for a stretch of time. Then he heard her sigh with something akin to serenity.

“I actually come to Cox Park a lot,” she said. “When I lived in San Francisco, whenever I needed to get away from—” She halted abruptly, and the tranquil little smile that had curved her lips suddenly fled. Quickly, she hurried on, “Whenever I needed to get away for a while and be by myself, I used to go to the beach and watch the ocean. It always made me feel better after—”

She halted again, and for one brief moment, Silas felt a pinch of fear and anguish yank at his midsection, and he knew it was Cecilia’s own anxiety spilling out of her and into him. But she reined it in quickly enough that he didn’t have time to explore it. Nor was he able to determine its origin. He only knew what he had suspected before, that something had happened to her before she moved to Louisville that continued to cause her anguish. It was something she kept buried deep inside her. Something she was unwilling to share with anyone.

Something Silas very much wished she would share with him.

But he knew he must tread cautiously if he hoped to learn anything about whatever it was. So he made his tone solicitous—a wildly uncommon demeanor for him—when he asked, “And did you often find it necessary to get away for a while and be by yourself when you were living in San Francisco, Cecilia?”