The Story Keeper (35 page)

But the box called to me as well. What else waited inside?

Evan measured its weight, then set it down again. “There’s more in here. More of something, anyway. I can hear it moving around.” He scanned the room. “Let’s see what we can find to get it open.” He spotted a screwdriver on the shelf and moved toward it.

“You’re going to
destroy
it?” I was horrified.

“I’m going to either spring the lock or skillfully pry it open. There’s a difference.” He cast a one-sided smirk my way, blue eyes twinkling against dark curls.

“Ohhh . . . kay . . .” Doubt thinned the word. The antique lover in me hated the idea of damaging anything that had survived so long. “But promise me you won’t wreck the box.”

“I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”

If I’d needed further motivation to ransack the dairy barn
for potential surgical equipment, that was enough. The search yielded a paint scraper, an old-fashioned ice pick, the wedge-shaped metal pin from a trailer hitch, a ball hammer, and a tire iron, along with the screwdriver.

“Please don’t use that,” I begged, motioning to the tire iron. “We can take this thing to a locksmith. I’ll pay for it. Seriously.”

“
Pppff
f
! Locksmith?
Just watch me work.” He bent over the box, tools in hand. He attempted the drawer lock first, sprang it almost expertly.

“Now you’re scaring me,” I confessed as he moved the screwdriver from one end of the drawer to the other, wiggling it loose like the cork on a champagne bottle. “It looks like you’ve done this before.”

“Reruns of
Castle
.”

“I love that show.” One more thing we had in common.

The drawer released enough that he could wrap his fingers around the edges and work it free. “Bingo. I think we’ve got more of the manuscript. But . . . that’s
not
what I heard rattling around in here.”

Setting the find aside, he focused on the lid while I leafed carefully through the new pages, running a finger over the indentations of letters and imagining fingers pressing hard against typewriter keys.
Whose
fingers?

The answer lay on a simple, typed cover sheet, tucked upside down, halfway through the stack.

Sarra Creek
, the original author had titled the work. The page gave the manuscript a date and an author, as well. “This was written in 1936 by a Louisa Anne Quinn. Was that a relative of yours? A grandmother maybe?”

“Not that I know of. There are no Quinns in the family, but if it’s that old, obviously my mother didn’t have anything to do
with writing it. She had possession of it, though, and if she kept it in the cedar chest, it was important to her.” He lined up an eyeball near the lock, trying to trip the lid with the ice pick. “I have a feeling the answer is . . . right . . . in . . . here.”

The tool slipped and skittered across his finger, drawing blood. Grimacing, he shook his hand in the air. “That didn’t go so well.”

“Have you had a tetanus shot?”

He rolled a look my way.

“I was just asking.” We leaned toward the box together this time, our faces so close the heat of his skin touched mine. “I could try.”

“Do you know anything about skeleton locks?”

“Not really. Do you?”

“Only what I’ve seen on TV.”

A puff of irreverent laughter chased the moment. I couldn’t help it. “I’m sorry. It’s not funny. Promise me you’re not going to try to muscle it ope
 
—”

There was a slight gap beneath the rim of the lid now. I’d been so busy looking at the damage, I hadn’t even noticed. “Wait! I think you got it already.” I hooked a fingernail in the crack, lifted upward, felt some sort of latch restrict the movement.

“Allow me.” Peering through the gap, Evan slid the paint scraper in and tripped the hook. The lid yawned upward of its own volition, the box seeming to take on life, finally determined to tell its story. Dust fell inward, danced in the window light, swirled over the faded red satin interior and an assortment of old photographs
 
—scenery shots for the most part. Someone had been cataloging them with rubber bands and envelopes that were far newer than the sepia images.

Evan leafed through the stacks quickly. “That’s my mother’s handwriting on the envelopes. She always ended her letters with
big swirls like this.” He paused, pulled something from one of the stacks. “Look at these.” Three Polaroids rested in his hands, the top two a shot of Sarra Bridge and a shot of the creek with the words
Sarra Creek Mill Site
written beneath. The third photo had adhered itself to the back. Carefully prying it free, Evan revealed the blotched image of a carving in a tree.
Sarra
, the scars in the bark read. Below, a notation in the white space read,
His carving for her.

Evan studied the writing, running a finger over the caption. “My mother may not have written this manuscript, but she was researching it.” He scooped the photos from the box, set them aside, tapped a padded satin base that looked like it had been shaped to hold chalices and a plate. “And this isn’t a silverware box either. It was made to hold a communion set. Give me that screwdriver. There’s a compartment under here.”

I didn’t even bother begging him not to damage the container. Inside me, the voice of rampant curiosity was screaming,
Smash it on the floor if you have to!
Whatever secrets remained, I was desperate to know them, to find answers.

The warped wood again surrendered its hold in small increments, Evan working the screwdriver around the rim while I tried to help with the paint scraper. Something shifted and slid, rattling against the side of the box as he raised it to get a better angle.

Evan glanced up, his wide eyes finding mine.

“That’s not paper.” A pulse fluttered in my throat, a wild anticipation.

“No, it’s not.” Finessing the screwdriver into the gap, he worked the inset again. “It’s . . . going to . . . be a real . . . disappointment if . . . those are the keys.” A grin dimpled his cheek, and for a split second, I lost track of the operation.

The pressure against the paint scraper vanished, and my hand
flew upward, flipping the satin-covered inset like an overweight pancake. It landed on the table with a clatter, but neither of us bothered to look.

Instead, we leaned over the box together. There were no words for what waited inside, yet what waited inside made all the words real. Partially hidden beneath a sheet of notebook paper lay the aged corner of a leather-bound book, the edge of a gold cross, and a stiffened leather cord with a knot tied in it.

Evan lifted the paper, exposing the rest. The proof of everything. Tangled around the journal lay an ancient leather string bearing carved, ivory-colored beads, wampum shell, and a bit of blue sea glass. At the end, a small, hand-carved locket box bore the timeworn etching of a Maltese cross.

I touched it carefully, opened the lid, exposing the images carved in relief. The Virgin Mary and, on the opposing side, the image of the Christ.

“Sarra’s prayer box.” I swallowed hard, pushed back the unexpected tears. “The story keeper’s box.”

Beside me, Evan gently lifted the worn leather book, parted the pages in a way that mirrored my own reverence. Long rows of faded script awaited
 
—lines and upsweeps, the thin strings of ink left between characters as the pen rushed to capture thoughts on paper, the blots of pauses and stopping points as the writer contemplated words. Field notes and drawings
 
—berries, stems, leaves, animals, mushrooms, a bird’s feather with descriptions of the colors jotted in the margins.

And then suddenly . . . the image of a woman. Sarra as she sat on her knees, a reverent smile on her wide, full lips, her palms and eyes lifted heavenward. Above the sketch, a note waited in the long, carefully formed curves of an educated hand.
Sarra, a Melungeon girl, October 17, 1889.

“That’s the first sketch he drew of her. When he watched her offer her morning prayers.” I scanned the opposite page, took in the description of the scene I had already envisioned from Evan’s manuscript. This version was written in Rand’s handwriting, in his own words. The ink had faded to little more than a shadow in places, almost gone altogether. On the opposite page, Rand had added a note:

It is my hope that, should my family receive this book, they will think upon me with pride and some measure of compassion for the wild ramblings of my body and soul. I have walked my path and prayed that I might find God upon it. He has, instead, found me and called me to a purpose.

Yours now and ever,

Randolph Augustus Champlain

My fingers trembled as I touched the signature, thought of the hand that had rested there so long ago, leaving a slight spread of ink as the writer paused, looked up, studied the strange young girl for whom he had risked everything.

“The story’s true. It’s all true,” I whispered.

Evan’s gaze met mine. “My mother never told me she had these things. She never indicated that Rand and Sarra were any more than a bedtime tale. A folk legend that gave Sarra Creek its name and Sagua Falls its rainbow.”

I studied the bone box and the beads. Their smooth surfaces and carved indentations touched a familiar place in me, reached for something I couldn’t frame into words or pictures or thoughts. “Rand and Sarra weren’t someone’s invention. They really lived. What happened to them after the winter was over? Did he go home or did he stay?”

“My mother never told us the end of the story. It was always just this romantic tale of star-crossed lovers who jumped over Sagua together rather than being separated. That’s where Nathaniel and Anna’s escape scene in
Time Shifters: The Reckoning
came from. Of course, Nathaniel had the benefit of a time portal . . . and near water, the burst of quantum light from the portal going into hyper-phase would create a rainbow, giving birth to the legend of the lovers at the falls.”

“Now you’re scaring me again.”

A shrug and a grin answered as he reached for the manuscript with the mysterious name typed on the title page. “But someone took the time to write this story in 1936, long before my mother ever heard of it. Based on the dates, this Louisa Quinn could have actually
known
Rand or Sarra, or both of them.”

Carefully, he returned everything to the box, then stacked the manuscript drawers and handed them to me. “Here, take these.”

“Where are we going?” Adrenaline raced through my body. I wanted to learn all that these pages and the journal would reveal.

Evan’s face mirrored the wild need to discover, to finally know. “Up to my office . . . where we can spread all of this out and find the rest of the story you came here for.”

Epilogue

I
move to the curtain, draw it aside just a sliver, and look out. The view both electrifies and terrifies me. It’s so much to assimilate all at once. Life is changing in a thousand different ways, and I can’t quite take it all in.

“You scared a little?” Lily Clarette asks, her hand resting on my shoulder. She looks so young in the simple, royal-blue dress that skims her slender form, her hair pulled away from her face, then left to spill down her back in loose curls. The style still feels strange to her. She fingers the fashionable silver clip with the tasteful smattering of rhinestones.
Here, this’ll bling it up,
Jamie had said as she slipped the barrette in after arranging my sister’s hair. It drives Jamie crazy that someone as naturally beautiful as Lily Clarette won’t wear more than a touch of mascara and refuses to even think about heels.

“I’m scared . . . a lot,” I admit. There’s no point trying to hide it. My mind has been creating, re-creating, and worrying over this moment for months now. Lily Clarette knows. She’s had her head bitten off about it more than once, poor kid. Her admin job at Vida House has become a baptism by fire. Now I’m sorry I got her into this. How in the world is she going to make it there
without me? After a year in New York, she’s still gobsmacked just trying to navigate the subway, and she doesn’t understand that walking through the world looking like you’re apologizing for your presence will get you into all kinds of trouble in the big city.

I should’ve answered the question differently when George Vida asked it.
No,
I should have said. A simple no would’ve avoided this whole mess, or at least the part that affects me.

“Look, there’s Coral Rebecca and Evie Christine.” Lily Clarette stretches a finger toward the audience but keeps it hidden behind the curtain. “They made it! They came! I wonder if they brought all the kids and everybody.” Her face lights with excitement, and even that makes me feel guilty. It’s unmistakable how much she misses the family, how she yearns for the Blue Ridge. I’m afraid she has stayed in New York this past year just to avoid telling me she doesn’t want to be there. “Oh, and Marah Diane! They
all
came.”

I stand slightly awed. A row near the back is slowly filling with the women of my family. Even Coral Rebecca’s husband, Levi, has come along. When Lily Clarette suggested sending the tickets, I’d thought there was almost no possibility they’d ever be used. Now I feel it in the part of me that can’t explain the events of this watershed year in any other way
 
—the truth of infinite possibilities. No stretch of the imagination, no far-flung splinter of hope is too remote for God. If I’ve learned one thing, that is it.

In the end, this is what I have decided about my family, about the place I’ve come from, with all its beauty and tragedy. Yes, I can put my hands and my feet and my heart to work trying to remedy the things that are within my power, but so much of it isn’t. What can’t be understood and neatly sewn up must simply be let go, not in the way of giving up, but in the way of understanding who is really in control of it.

“I knew they’d be here. I knew it’d happen,” Lily Clarette says, and I admire her blind faith, even as I realize that all faith is blind. We can never really know, except in hindsight, how prayers will be answered. “I’m gonna sneak out and say hi and tell them not to run off afterward. I’ll take everybody out to eat, okay?”

“All right. If they want to.” But there’s a little pinprick inside me, a worry.

Lily Clarette sees it as I let the curtain fall. She’s the wishbone in a tug-of-war between two worlds, and in all these small things, she feels the splitting apart of flesh and bone. “I’m just gonna say hi, Jennia Beth. I’m not gonna jump in the back of the truck and run off to home.” Her bottom lip pooches out a little. I see the tiny sister I sat up with, watching an early snow drift downward outside the window as we rocked in my grandmother’s chair, my mother curled in bed, not seeming to want anything to do with the baby yet.

“I know.”

She hesitates then, the pout deepening, reaching her eyes. “But . . . ummm . . . I wanted to let you know somethin’. But never mind. It can wait. It’s no big deal.”

“What?” It is a big deal, I can tell.

She pulls in a breath, a monumental one, and straightens her slim shoulders. “Well . . . I was gonna tell you after we got home from church last Sunday, but when I went home for Labor Day vacation, y’know, and I stayed over with Mrs. Hall at the Mountain Leaf, and I told you I talked her into sellin’ Marah Diane and Coral Rebecca’s goat-milk soaps and creams in the store?”

“Yes . . .”

“Mrs. Hall said somethin’ else, and I’ve been thinkin’ about it.” Her bottom teeth worry her lip, pull it inward. The next
words take a minute to form. “She said maybe in a few years, she’ll have to close the pharmacy in Lookin’ Glass, because old Mace is gonna have to retire, and they can’t hardly get pharmacists up there anymore. Lots of the drugstores have gone outta business already. Mountain Leaf is the only pharmacy still around for almost an hour’s drive.”

She pauses, and I’m left to wonder where she’s going with this. Time is running short now if she wants to go say hi to the family before the event begins. “I’ve read that there’s a lack of pharmacists everywhere,” I agree hesitantly.

My sister nods with enthusiasm. “There is, and Mrs. Hall said, if I wanted to work there at the pharmacy and drive down to the community college, I could live in the apartment up above the shop, and she’d help me get my school paid for so I can get my basics toward my pharmacy tech. If I like it and think I wanna go for my pharmacy degree instead, she’d help me pay what it costs . . . whatever I can’t get in scholarships, I mean.”

My sister blinks up at me with my mother’s wide, beautiful golden eyes, and I stagger back a step, trying not to openly react. There’s a part of me that misses Lily Clarette already, and she isn’t even gone yet. It’s quickly at war with the part that knows this is probably the right thing for her. I think of her award-winning work in the high school science fair and how she soaked up every inch of the Museum of Natural History a couple months ago. She loves medical shows and the Discovery Channel and the science programs on PBS. She has even refined my grandmother’s formulas for herbal goat-milk soaps and creams. She’s working on creating an online store that will sell my sisters’ wares far beyond the Blue Ridge.

I remember her in the woods when we were searching for Hannah, the way she knew the landscape in intimate detail, how
marked she was and still is by those generations of Appalachian women who understood the hidden gathering spaces and the ancient study of healing roots and leaves.

I know she is her own person. She is not an extension of me.

Her gaze searches my face, the hopeful light slowly dimming . . . being purposely dimmed. She doesn’t want to disappoint me. “I probably shouldn’t’ve brought it up right now, but I been thinkin’ about it, that’s all.” She scoots off to the side-stage exit of Clemson’s Tillman Hall Auditorium and leaves me to contemplate all that she has just revealed.

I peek through the curtain again, watch her slip into the main hall and greet my sisters. She looks out of place among them now, in her fashionable blue dress. She’s slightly embarrassed about it, I can tell, but the hugs they exchange say it all. They still love her.

I close the barrier, feeling like an outsider, a failure who somehow can’t bridge the gap as my youngest sister does.

She reappears a few minutes later. “They can’t stay after,” she says, looking disappointed. “They don’t wanna get home way after dark.”

“We could book hotel rooms for them.”

Lily Clarette returns a look that warns me not to be pushy. “Marah Diane says she’s not much on restaurant food, anyhow. And they left all the littler kids back home with Aunt Sudie.” She shrugs toward the door. “Come say hi a minute, at least, ’kay?”

I check my watch. We’re ten minutes from go. “Come on,” my sister insists. “They drove all this way.” She waves toward the door again, and I notice an envelope in her hand. I ask her about it as we exit the stage.

“What’s that?”

“Marah Diane carried it to me. I hadn’t had a chance to open it yet. She’s got somethin’ for you, too.”

I slow a bit, suspicious even though I don’t want to be. My sisters and I have formed an uncomfortable peace over Lily Clarette, and I’m still afraid of anything that might tear it apart. Lily Clarette is the thread slowly binding us with haphazard, uneven stitches. We all love her, and we all want her to be happy.

I hesitate at the bottom of the steps, thinking that perhaps I should have my sister collect the envelope
 
—whatever it is
 
—for me. I can’t let anything spoil this day. It’s too important. A year of nonstop work has gone into it.

“Come on, Jennia Beth.” Lily Clarette takes my hand, urges me through the second exit and into the corridor. Marah Diane, Coral Rebecca, and Evie Christine are there, looking uncertain and incongruous in their long cotton dresses, black Sunday stockings, and plaited hair.

We exchange greetings, talk about the drive. Coral Rebecca says, “So this is where you went to college.”

“Well, here and then NYU for grad school,” I answer without thinking.

Marah Diane puckers up a bit.

“Thank you for coming. It means a lot.” I stretch out my arms. All of a sudden, I want to hug my sisters. I just . . . do. It feels as natural as breathing. I know their scents, how much each one holds on or doesn’t, whether the hug will linger or be quick. We haven’t changed so much in some ways.

Marah Diane’s hug is quick. Stiff. Reserved.

“Clemson’s a big place,” Coral Rebecca chatters, trying to provide soothing background music, like the white noise at the dentist’s office, intended to ensure that no one panics and bolts. “We like to never found the way.”

“It took me quite a while to get used to it,” I admit, reminding
all of us of the eighteen-year-old girl who left home so long ago. The girl we’ve all almost forgotten.

“Well, it ain’t Towash, that’s for sure,” Evie Christine pipes up, and we stifle irreverent laughter into our hands.

I ask them again if they can’t stay afterward, and I make the hotel offer.
It doesn’t hurt to try,
I tell myself. It would be nice to have the time together with my sisters and the older nieces they’ve brought along.

“You come on and see
us
,” Coral Rebecca interjects. “Whenever you can. You don’t hafta just run home for book meetin’s over in the Gap and then leave out right off, y’know. You can come just for visitin’.”

“I will.” Maybe there is a way forward for us. With all of our differences, we are still a family.

Silence threatens. I check my watch, glance toward the stage doors.

“I read that copy of the book you had Lily Clarette carry home to us,” Marah Diane pipes up. “It was real good.”

A glimmer sparks inside me, glows and flutters
 
—a firefly light, an answered prayer. “Thank you. That means a lot.”

“Daddy looked at it too.” She punctuates that with a lemon-juice look, warning me not to read too much into it. “To make sure if it was okay for all a us to be readin’. I guess he thought it was. He give it back to me, anyhow. Didn’t say much, ’cept not to be takin’ what it says too serious.” She nods toward my other sisters. “Evie Christine’s got it now.”

“It kep’ me up half the night,” Evie Christine admits with genuine enthusiasm. “Coral Rebecca told me it would. I wanted to load me a 30-gauge and go after that Brown Drigger and them other men myself.”

We laugh together, and I ask them to at least stay around for
a few minutes after so we can talk more. Lily Clarette and I have to go. We hug good-bye without really resolving the question. Marah Diane is already fretting about the trip home. Just before we part ways, she takes something from her skirt pocket and slips it into my hand
 
—an envelope. It’s nothing remarkable. Yet my other sisters watch me receive it. There’s something inside. An object that feels cool and hard, like a small stone. Coral Rebecca and Evie Christine know what it is, I can see.

“This come from Daddy.” Marah Diane’s eyes avoid mine. She knows there hasn’t been more than a word or two exchanged between my father and me during several visits home to meet with Evan while he was rewriting and filling in the gaps of
The Story Keeper
.

“Daddy sent it?” Some wounded part of me wants that to be true but doubts that it is. I consider just handing it back, saying I don’t need it. I feel the envelope’s thickness. There’s a folded sheet of paper inside too. I see Lily Clarette clutching hers, still unopened. Was there one for each of us?

Marah Diane is giving me the death stare when I turn back
 
—the sort that sharpens the knife between sisters but also cuts away the pretense that exists between friends. “You can ask a spotted mule to turn white on Monday, Jennia Beth, but it’s still gonna be a spotted mule Tuesday.” It’s her way of telling me that Daddy is who he is and I’m only hurting myself by thinking things should be different.

“You’re right.”

She blinks, shocked by those two little words. Emboldened, she presses the case a bit further. “He let us come here. He’s grateful about what you and Lily Clarette done to help fix up the house.”

“I know.” The bonus check George Vida threw my way for
the Evan Hall contract solved a number of short-term financial issues. I still wonder if George Vida was the one who put
The Story Keeper
partial on my desk in the first place, but he’s never confessed. No one has. At times I wonder if Hollis might have been the culprit, or even old Russell, the cleaning guy. I caught him lingering over an advance copy of the manuscript months ago, but he wouldn’t admit to anything.

The mystery remains, and maybe that’s as it should be. It makes a better story that way.

I finger the envelope as I say good-bye to my sisters. I wonder what’s inside, but at the same time I’m afraid to know. My name has been scrawled on the flap in uneven print that doesn’t seem familiar. It’s hard to form a mental image of my father taking time to write each of our names on envelopes, tuck something inside, close the seals. Perhaps one of my sisters is responsible.