Beautiful Creatures

  Because one thing was clear. Someone, something, wanted me to get into that study, as much as somebody else wanted to keep me out.

  Amma slammed the door and drew a key out of her pocket, locking it. I heard the click and knew my window of opportunity had slammed shut, as quickly as it had opened. She crossed her arms. “It’s a school night. Don’t you have some studyin’ to do?”

  I looked at her, annoyed.

  “Goin’ back to the library? You and Link finished with that report?”

  And then it came to me. “Yeah, the library. As a matter a fact, that’s where I’m headed right now.” I kissed her cheek and ran past her.

  “Say hi to Marian for me, and don’t you be late for dinner.”

  Good old Amma. She always had all the answers, whether she knew it or not, and whether or not she would willingly give them up.

  Lena was waiting for me at the parking lot of the Gatlin County Library. The cracked concrete was still wet and shiny from the rain. Even though the library was still open for two more hours, the hearse was the only car in the lot, except for a familiar old turquoise truck. Let’s just say this wasn’t a big library town. There wasn’t much we wanted to know about any town but our own, and if your granddaddy or your great-granddaddy couldn’t tell you, chances were you didn’t need to know.

  Lena was huddled against the side of the building, writing in her notebook. She was wearing tattered jeans, enormous rain boots, and a soft black T-shirt. Tiny braids hung down around her face, lost in all the curls. She looked almost like a regular girl. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to be a regular girl. I was sure I wanted to kiss her again, but it would have to wait. If Marian had the answers we needed, I’d have a lot more chances to kiss her.

  I ran through my playbook again. Pick ’n’ Roll.

  “You really think there’s something here that can help us?” Lena looked over her notebook at me.

  I pulled her up with my hand. “Not something. Someone.”

  The library itself was beautiful. I had spent so many hours in it as a kid, I’d inherited my mother’s belief that a library was sort of a temple. This particular library was one of the few buildings that had survived Sherman’s March and the Great Burning. The library and the Historical Society were the two oldest buildings in town, aside from Ravenwood. It was a two-story venerable Victorian, old and weathered with peeling white paint and decades worth of vines sleeping along the doors and windows. It smelled like aging wood and creosote, plastic book covers, and old paper. Old paper, which my mom used to say was the smell of time itself.

  “I don’t get it. Why the library?”

  “It’s not just the library. It’s Marian Ashcroft.”

  “The librarian? Uncle Macon’s friend?”

  “Marian was my mom’s best friend, and her research partner. She’s the only other person who knows as much about Gatlin County as my mom, and she’s the smartest person in Gatlin now.”

  Lena looked at me, skeptically. “Smarter than Uncle Macon?”

  “Okay. She’s the smartest Mortal in Gatlin.”

  I could never quite figure out what someone like Marian was doing in a town like Gatlin. “Just because you live in the middle of nowhere,” Marian would tell me, over a tuna sandwich with my mom, “doesn’t mean you can’t know where you live.” I had no idea what she meant. I had no idea what she was talking about, half the time. That’s probably why Marian had gotten along so well with my mom; I didn’t know what my mom was talking about, either, the other half the time. Like I said, the biggest brain in town, or maybe just the biggest character.

  When we walked into the empty library, Marian was wandering around the stacks in her stockings, wailing to herself like a crazy person from a Greek tragedy, which she was prone to reciting. Since the library was pretty much a ghost town, except for the occasional visit from one of the ladies from the DAR checking on questionable genealogy, Marian had free run of the place.

  “‘Knowest thou aught?’”

  I followed her voice deep into the stacks.

  “‘Hast thou heard?’”

  I rounded the corner into Fiction. There she was, swaying, holding a pile of books in her arms, looking right through me.

  “‘Or is it hidden from thee…’”

  Lena stepped up behind me.

  “‘… that our friends are threatened…’”

  Marian looked from me to Lena, over her square, red reading glasses.

  “‘… with the doom of our foes?’”

  Marian was there, but not there. I knew that look well and I knew, though she had a quote for everything, she didn’t choose them lightly. What doom of my foes threatened me, or my friends? If that friend was Lena, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  I read a lot, but not Greek tragedy. “Oedipus?”

  I hugged Marian, over her pile of books. She hugged me so tightly I couldn’t breathe, an unwieldy biography of General Sherman cutting into my ribs.

  “Antigone.” Lena spoke up from behind me.

  Show-off.

  “Very good.” Marian smiled over my shoulder.

  I made a face at Lena, who shrugged. “Home school.”

  “It’s always impressive to meet a young person who knows Antigone.”

  “All I remember is, she just wanted to bury the dead.”

  Marian smiled at both of us. She shoved half her pile of books into my arms, and half into Lena’s. When she smiled, she looked like she could have been on the cover of a magazine. She had white teeth and beautiful brown skin, and she looked more like a model than a librarian. She was that pretty and exotic-looking, a mix of so many bloodlines it was like looking at the history of the South itself, people from the West Indies, the Sugar Islands, England, Scotland, even America, all intermingling until it would take a whole forest of family trees to chart the course.

  Even though we were south of Somewhere and north of Nowhere, as Amma would say, Marian Ashcroft was dressed like she could have been teaching one of her classes at Duke. All of her clothes, all of her jewelry, all of her signature, brightly patterned scarves seemed to come from somewhere else and complement her unintentionally cool cropped haircut.

  Marian was no more Gatlin County than Lena, and yet she’d been here as long as my mom had. Now longer. “I’ve missed you so much, Ethan. And you—you must be Macon’s niece, Lena. The infamous new girl in town. The girl with the window. Oh yes, I’ve heard about you. The ladies, they are talking.”

  We followed Marian back to the front counter and dumped the books on the re-stacking cart.

  “Don’t believe everything you hear, Dr. Ashcroft.”

  “Please. Marian.” I nearly dropped a book. Aside from my family, Marian was Dr. Ashcroft to nearly everyone around here. Lena was being offered instant access to the inner circle, and I had no idea why.

  “Marian.” Lena grinned. Aside from Link and me, this was Lena’s first taste of our famed Southern hospitality, and from another outsider.

  “The only thing I want to know is, when you broke that window with your broomstick, did you take out the future generation of the DAR?” Marian began to lower the blinds, motioning for us to help.

  “Of course not. If I did that, where would I get all this free publicity?”

  Marian threw back her head and laughed, putting her arm around Lena. “A good sense of humor, Lena. That’s what you need to get around in this town.”

  Lena sighed. “I’ve heard a lot of jokes. Mostly about me.”

  “Ah, but—‘The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.’”

  “Is that Shakespeare?” I was feeling a little left behind.

  “Close, Sir Francis Bacon. Though, if you’re one of the people who think he wrote Shakespeare’s plays, I suppose you were right the first time.”

  “I give up.”

  Marian ruffled my hair. “You’ve grown about a foot and a half since I’ve last seen you, EW. What is Amma feeding you these days? Pie for breakfast, lunch, and
dinner? I feel like I haven’t seen you in a hundred years.”

  I looked at her. “I know, I’m sorry. I just didn’t feel much like… reading.”

  She knew I was lying, but she knew what I meant. Marian went to the door, and flipped the “Open” sign to “Closed.” She turned the bolt with a sharp click. It reminded me of the study.

  “I thought the library was open till nine?” If it wasn’t I would lose a valuable excuse for sneaking out to Lena’s.

  “Not today. The head librarian has just declared today a Gatlin County Library Holiday. She’s rather spontaneous that way.” She winked. “For a librarian.”

  “Thanks, Aunt Marian.”

  “I know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have a reason, and I suspect Macon Ravenwood’s niece is, if nothing else, a reason. So why don’t we all go into the back room, make a pot of tea, and try to be reasonable?” Marian loved a good pun.

  “It’s more like a question, really.” I felt in my pocket, where the locket was still wrapped in Sulla the Prophet’s handkerchief.

  “Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.”

  “Homer?”

  “Euripides. You better start coming up with a few of these answers, EW, or I’m going to actually have to go to one of those school board meetings.”

  “But you just said to answer nothing.”

  She unlocked a door marked private archive. “Did I say that?”

  Like Amma, Marian always seemed to have the answer. Like any good librarian.

  Like my mom.

  I’d never been in Marian’s private archive, the back room. Come to think of it, I didn’t know anyone who had ever been back there, except for my mom. It was the space they shared, the place they wrote and researched and who knows what else. Not even my dad was allowed in. I can remember Marian stopping him in the doorway, when my mother was examining a historical document inside. “Private means private.”

  “It’s a library, Marian. Libraries were created to democratize knowledge and make it public.”

  “Around here, libraries were created so that Alcoholics Anonymous would have somewhere to meet when the Baptists kicked them out.”

  “Marian, don’t be ridiculous. It’s just an archive.”

  “Don’t think of me as a librarian. Think of me as a mad scientist; this is my secret laboratory.”

  “You’re crazy. You two are just looking at some crumbling old papers.”

  “‘If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.’”

  “Khalil Gibran.” He fired back.

  “‘Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’”

  “Benjamin Franklin.”

  Eventually even my father had given up trying to get into their archive. We’d gone home and eaten rocky road ice cream, and after that, I had always thought of my mother and Marian as an unstoppable force of nature. Two mad scientists, as Marian had said, chained to each other in the lab. They had churned out book after book, even once making the short-list for the Voice of the South Award, the Southern equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize. My dad was fiercely proud of my mom, of both of them, even if we were just along for the ride. “Lively of the mind.” That’s how he used to describe my mom, especially when she was in the middle of a project. That was when she was the most absent, and yet somehow, when he seemed to love her best.

  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 great-great-great-great-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 se
en happen between Genevieve and Ethan, Lena’s great-great-great-great-grandmother and my great-great-great-great-uncle.

  My mom was working on that book when she died. My head was reeling. Gatlin was like that. Nothing here ever happened only once.

  Lena looked pale. She leaned over and touched my hand, where it rested on the dusty table. Instantly, I felt the familiar prick of electricity.

  “Here. This is the letter that got us started on the whole project.” Marian lay out two parchment sheets on the next oak table. Secretly, I was glad she didn’t disturb my mom’s worktable. I thought of it as a fitting memorial, more like her than the carnations everyone had laid on her casket. Even the DAR, they were there for the funeral, laying those carnations down like crazy, though my mom would have hated it. The whole town, the Baptists, the Methodists, even the Pentecostals, turned out for a death, a birth, or a wedding.

  “You can read it, just don’t touch it. It’s one of the oldest things in Gatlin.”

  Lena bent over the letter, holding her hair back to keep it from brushing the old parchment. “They’re desperately in love, but they’re too different.” She scanned the letter. “‘A Species Apart,’ he calls them. Her family is trying to keep them apart, and he’s gone to enlist, even though he doesn’t believe in the war, in the hope that fighting for the South will win him the approval of her family.”

  Marian closed her eyes, reciting:

  “I might as well be a monkey as a man, for all the good it does me at Greenbrier. Though merely Mortal, my heart breaks with such pain at the thought of spending the rest of my life without you, Genevieve.”

  It was like poetry, like something I imagined Lena would write.

  Marian opened her eyes again. “As if he were Atlas carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.”

  “It’s all so sad,” said Lena, looking at me.

  “They were in love. There was a war. I hate to tell you, but it ends badly, or so it seems.” Marian finished her tea.