The Cherokee Rose. Tiya Miles

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СКАЧАТЬ pay my own expenses.”

      “That’s easy, then. Sold. Take a slew of photos. Good ones. I can’t afford to send a photographer down there.”

      “I will. Thanks, Lauren.” Ruth gave her boss a smile, then turned on the heels of her clogs.

      Back at her desk, she shut down her MacBook, slipped it into its quilted sleeve, and grabbed her bunchy leather bag. She snatched the travel mug from her desk and stopped to refill it with the dregs of coffee left in the staff kitchen.

      As she pushed through the metal door into the clear autumn day, she felt again that hint of coolness. The weather was on the cusp of change. She was going south just in time.

      Ruth hurried to her Volkswagen Beetle and plopped her mug into the holder. She would stop by her apartment to throw together a travel bag and ask her upstairs neighbor to collect her mail. She had no one to call, no one who would miss her. Ruth and her father rarely spoke these days. Even if she were to pack up and move away from Minneapolis–St. Paul, her father probably wouldn’t notice until Christmastime when she failed to turn up at his high-rise condo for their awkward annual dinner. Her grandparents on both sides had passed away. She had no siblings.

      Ruth programmed her GPS with the address of the Chief Hold House and waited for her route to upload. The digital map glowed green in the dashboard. She was headed straight down I-75 to a small, rural town in the state where her mother had been born.

      4

      As she stretched to wipe the window ledge, Sally Perdue hiked up the baby. Her dust mop, dulled by the grime of countless cleanings that never seemed to make this old house shine, flopped on the end of its stick. From his seat on her hip, the baby lunged for the mop, reaching sideways with a chubby fist. “No, no, baby.” Sally’s voice was gentle. “This is Mama’s, and this is Junior’s.” She handed him a rattle. He reached again for the mop, his blue eyes tracking dust set in motion by his mother’s hand. Dust motes rose like dandelion seeds where they stood on the staircase landing, a space one-third the size of the trailer Sally shared with Eddie Senior.

      Sally blew a puff of air through her lips. Not much more now. Just the stairwell and the hallways, the butler’s pantry and foyer. Thank the Lord Eddie Junior takes good naps. Sally had finished the second floor while he slept in his seat. She had mopped and polished the main floor while he rode on her hip in a fancy made-in-Canada sling she had gotten as a hand-me-down from one of the former docent’s daughters.

      Sally cooed at her son once, twice, looking into his eyes while he gurgled. She lifted him out of the sling and bent to strap him into the bouncy seat. “Almost finished, Junior. Gotta make it pretty. Somebody’s fixin’ to buy this place.” Sally plopped a kiss on her baby’s cheek and popped a pacifier into his mouth. She pressed the button that made the seat rock back and forth, then wiped a palm across her damp hairline.

      Raising the sling over her head and stuffing it into her diaper bag, Sally grasped a fold of her T-shirt and flapped it in and out. She cranked the iron handle of a leaded-glass window, hoping for a breeze. The noise of a construction truck rumbled in. Maybe a digger, maybe a bulldozer. Mason Allen. Beyond the dip of the elegant hill on which the old plantation house stood, the land was being cleared for a condo development.

      Sally touched a hand to the paneled oak wall beside her. Its planes and ridges felt like vertebrae beneath her thumb, fragile and hollow, thinning with age. She had begged for this job back in high school—talked her way into it when she heard the previous cleaning lady had quit in a huff, complaining of an odd smell in the attic that just couldn’t be gotten rid of. A dead bat, Sally had thought at the time. She had seen worse around her trailer, even before Eddie Senior moved in. The director of the house museum called an exterminator and hired Sally on the spot, desperate to see the place spruced up in time for the garden show that year. The pay was low, but better than what Sally made cleaning at the nursing home. And she had always wondered about this brooding house on the hill, visible for miles. She had been curious about its history even before her fifth-grade class took the standard tour for county kids. If she had made it to college, or even out of high school, before getting together with Eddie Senior, she would have taken some kind of class on Southern history. But working here had given her the next best thing, a chance to soak in all that drama of the past.

      The story went that James Vann Hold, the man who built the plantation when this all counted as Indian land, was the handsome son of a full-blood Cherokee mother and European father. Hold got to be filthy rich investing family money in slaves, trading deerskins and crops, and making shady business deals. He was murdered in the prime of manhood, and nobody knew who did it. Sally recalled the script by heart from overhearing the docents. They never really changed it up unless a black person took the tour, in which case they said “servants” instead of “slaves.” She had cleaned the place only a year before the state closed it down. She had been hired back today to get the house ready for auction. Sally was glad for the work, such as it was. Lord knew, Eddie Senior took a paying job only when he had a mind to.

      Junior dropped his passy. Sally tucked it into her bag and stuck a clean blue one in his mouth. She dusted ornate mirror frames, wiped down silvered glass, swept the formal stairway and long oak halls. When she finished the foyer, she was parched and thought that Junior must be, too. After climbing the stairs to where he sat rocking contentedly on the landing, she pulled out his bottle of formula. What a good baby.

      The rude honk of a horn blared through the open window. Shit, Sally thought. Eddie. She flew into motion, lifting Junior and hooking him to her hip with one arm beneath his padded bottom, grabbing the diaper bag in one hand and the bouncy seat in the other. She jogged down the staircase, jostling the baby and his things while the horn bellowed.

      “What the hell took you so long, Sally?” Eddie was mad, his face puffing out and in from his worked-up breathing.

      “Sorry, Ed, sorry.” Sally reached inside the open rear window to unlock the door and throw the bouncy chair inside. She eased into the passenger seat and held Junior out to his daddy. “Could you take him for a spell? I need to lock up.”

      “Jesus Christ. I thought I told you to be ready when I got here.”

      “I won’t be but a minute.”

      Sally ran back to the house and opened the double entry doors. She reached for the oval sign that hung on a hook beside the door chime’s soundbox. Exiting, she pulled the doors shut behind her, turned the oblong metal lock, and listened for the click. Hearing it, she twined the ribbon of the sign tightly around the neck of a brass doorknob. Closed, it read. With her back to Eddie Senior, Eddie Junior, and the winding driveway that led into town, she pressed her hand to the heavy wooden door panel. “Bye, now,” she whispered to the house.

      “Get a move on, Sally!” Eddie shouted. “This kid of yours is gone and shit his pants.”

      Sally turned her back to the red-brick mansion, its eaves and porches, porticoes and columns. As she hustled down the broad front steps, a stiff breeze followed her, carrying with it the meadowy scent of late-summer wildflowers. The wind caught and parted Sally’s short red hair, cooling the nape of her neck.

      While Eddie careened the beat-up car around the circular driveway, the breeze kept on blowing, flipping the sign to read, Open.

      c

      The drive stretched into a frustrating trek, heightened by Cheyenne’s nervous anticipation.

      After what felt like two hours, rather than the fifty minutes promised by her GPS, she found herself pulling in front СКАЧАТЬ