The Peach Keeper (2 page)

Willa shook her head and went back to folding shirts, trying to ignore the invitation, now sitting on the table. But it kept catching her eye, fluttering slightly, as if caught in a breeze.

She flopped a shirt over it and tried to forget about it.

When they closed up shop that evening, Rachel headed off to meet her boyfriend for an evening hike, which
was so annoyingly healthy that Willa made up for it by taking a brownie out of the snack case and eating it in three big bites. Then she got in her bright yellow Jeep Wrangler to go home to do laundry. Wednesday nights were always laundry nights. Sometimes she even looked forward to it.

Her life was monotonous, but it kept her out of trouble. She was thirty years old. This, her father would say, was called being an adult.

But instead of heading straight home, Willa turned onto Jackson Hill, her private daily detour. It was a steep mountain slope and a dramatic drive, almost foreboding, but it was the only way to get to the antebellum mansion at the top, locally known as the Blue Ridge Madam. Ever since renovation had started on the place well over a year ago, Willa had made these secret treks up the hill to watch the progress.

The place had been abandoned years ago by the last in a series of shady developers. It had fallen into disrepair and had been slowly disintegrating when the Osgood family stepped in and bought it. Now almost fully restored, and soon to be a bed-and-breakfast with a banquet hall, the wide white Doric columns were back, spanning the length of the house in a dramatic neoclassic fashion. The lower portico now had a period-piece chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The upper portico had cast-iron chairs on it. And it was now a startling mass of windows, whereas before they’d all been broken and boarded up. It looked like something out of the old South, a plantation manor where women
in hoop skirts fanned themselves and men in suits talked about crop prices.

The Madam had been built in the 1800s by Willa’s great-great-grandfather, the founder of the now-defunct Jackson Logging Company. It had been a wedding gift to his young wife—a beautiful, delicate woman from a prominent family in Atlanta. She’d loved the house, considered it her equal, but she had hated this mountain town called Walls of Water, hated its lonely green wetness. She’d been known for throwing elaborate balls in hopes of coaxing the citizens to become as fine as she wanted them to be. It never happened. Not able to make society out of what she had, she’d decided to bring society to her instead. She’d persuaded her friends from Atlanta to come for visits, to build homes, to treat this place as a playful paradise, something she’d never felt herself, but she’d been very good at convincing others. It was the particular magic of beautiful, unsatisfied women.

And so a rich society had formed in this tiny North Carolina town surrounded by waterfalls, a town once populated mainly by rough logging men. These well-to-do families were curious, incongruous, and stubborn. Not welcome at all. But when the government bought the surrounding mountain forest and turned it into a national park, and the local logging industry dried up, it was these families who helped the town survive.

The irony was that the Jacksons, once the finest family in town, the reason for the town’s existence in the first place, lost all their money when the logging
stopped. The memory of who they used to be, and the money they used to have, sustained them for a while. But then they couldn’t pay their taxes and had been forced to move out of the Madam. Most who had the last name of Jackson left town. But one stayed, a teenager named Georgie Jackson—Willa’s grandmother. She was seventeen, unmarried, and pregnant. She became, of all things, a maid to the Osgood family, who were once great friends to the Jacksons.

Willa pulled to the side of the road just before the turn to the driveway up to the Madam. She always timed it so that she got here after the crew had left for the day. She got out of her Wrangler and climbed onto the hood, leaning back against the windshield. It was late July, the hottest, thickest part of summer, alive with the drone of lovesick insects. She put on her sunglasses against the setting sun and stared up at the house.

The only thing left to the renovation was the landscaping, which apparently had gotten under way just that day. That excited Willa. New things to study. She could see that there were wooden stakes and string markers making a patchwork of squares across the front yard, and there were different-colored dashes painted on the grass, indicating where the underground utility lines were so workers wouldn’t dig there. Most of the activity, however, seemed centered on the area around the only tree on the flat top of the hill, where the house sat.

The tree was right at the precipice of the left slope. Its leaves grew in long, thin bunches, and its limbs were stretched wide. When light hit the tree at just the
right time in the evening, it actually looked like someone on the edge of a cliff, about to dive into the ocean. A backhoe was parked next to the tree, and plastic strings were tied around the branches.

They were going to take it down?

She wondered why. It seemed perfectly healthy.

Well, whatever they did, it was guaranteed to be for the better. The Osgoods were known for their good taste. The Blue Ridge Madam was going to be a show-place again.

As much as Willa didn’t want to admit it, Rachel was right. She would love to see what the inside looked like. She just didn’t think she had any right to. The house hadn’t been in her family since the 1930s. Even getting this close felt like trespassing … which, if she was honest with herself, was one of the reasons she did it. But she’d never even had the nerve to get close enough to look in when she was a teenager, and it had been a right of passage to break into the decaying house. In her youth, she’d pulled every prank known to man, and had been so good at it that no one had known it was her until the very end. She’d been a legend her graduating class had called the Walls of Water High School Joker. But this place was different. It’d had a mysterious push-pull effect on her, and still did. Every teenager who had ever broken into the house had come away with stories of mysterious footsteps and slamming doors and a dark fedora that floated through the air, as if worn by an invisible man. Maybe that was what had always kept her from getting too close. Ghosts scared her, thanks to her grandmother.

Willa sat up and reached into the back pocket of her jeans. She brought out the invitation and read it again. It said to RSVP with the enclosed card, so Willa looked in the envelope for the card and brought it out.

She was surprised to find a Post-it attached to it that read:

Willa:

Your grandmother and my grandmother are the only two surviving members of the original club, and I’d like to plan something special for them at the party. Call me and let’s try to work something out.

Pax

Her handwriting was pretty, of course. Willa remembered that from high school. She had once taken a note that Paxton had accidentally dropped in the hallway and kept it for months—a strange list about characteristics Paxton wanted her future husband to have. She’d read it over and over, studying Paxton’s sloping
y
’s and jaunty
x
’s. She’d studied it so much, she found she could replicate it. And once she’d had that skill, it had been impossible not to use it, which had resulted in a very embarrassing encounter between uppity Paxton Osgood and Robbie Roberts, the school’s own redneck lothario, who’d thought Paxton had sent him a love letter.

The Walls of Water High School Joker had struck again.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Willa jumped at the voice, her heart giving a sudden
kick in her chest. She dropped the invitation, and it flew on the wind to the owner of the voice, standing a few feet to the right of her Wrangler.

He had on dark trousers with a blue paisley tie sticking out of one of his pockets. His white dress shirt was translucent with sweat, and his dark hair was sticking to his forehead and neck. Mirrored sunglasses hid his eyes. The invitation hit him flat against his chest and flapped there like a fish out of water. He smiled slightly, tiredly, as he peeled it off, as if this was the last thing he wanted to deal with right now. This was a sign, she thought. Though of what, she had no idea. It was just what her grandmother would say when something unexpected happened, usually accompanied by instructions to knock three times and turn in a circle, or put chestnuts and pennies on the windowsill.

He took off his sunglasses and looked up at her. A strange expression came over his face, and he said, “It’s
you
.”

She stared at him until she understood.
Oh, God
. To be caught here was one thing; to be caught here by one of them was something else entirely. Mortified, Willa quickly slid off the hood and darted inside the Jeep. It was a sign, all right. A sign that meant
Run away as fast as you can
.

“Wait,” she heard him say as she started the engine.

But she didn’t wait. She kicked the Jeep in gear and raced away.

TWO
Whispers

P
axton Osgood had stayed late to finish some paperwork at the outreach center, so it was dusk when she left. She drove home, following the flickering lights of lampposts as they popped on, like drowsy fireflies leading her way. She parked in front of her parents’ house and got out of her car thinking that, if she timed this right, she would be able to have a quick swim before changing and heading back out to the Women’s Society Club meeting that evening.

This plan was carefully hinged on not facing her parents. She’d spent weeks tinkering with her schedule just so she wouldn’t have to stop and tell them about her day the moment she came in. This impatience, this avoidance, was a fairly new development, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it. Up until now, she’d
never really minded living with her parents. Once a season, when she went to visit her Tulane sorority sisters in New Orleans, they would all marvel that Paxton still lived at home. They didn’t understand why she’d gone back to live with her parents after graduation in the first place, when she had the money to do whatever she wanted. It was hard to explain. She loved Walls of Water. She loved being a part of its history, of keeping it going. It struck a deep, resonant chord in her. She
belonged
here. And since Paxton’s twin brother Colin’s job took him all over the country, and sometimes overseas, Paxton felt it was only fair that their parents have at least one child nearby.

But last year, as age thirty loomed ahead of her like a black balloon, Paxton had finally made the decision to move out, not to another state, not even across town, but to a townhouse that her friend and realtor Kirsty Lemon was trying to sell, a mere 6.3 miles from Hickory Cottage. She’d measured it on her car’s odometer and offered it up as a major selling point to her parents. But her mother had been so upset at the thought of her leaving, of breaking up their happy little dysfunctional unit, that she’d been forced to back out. She did, however, move out of the main house and into the pool house, a small step but a necessary one. This was just going to take time.

The pool house gave her some privacy, but unfortunately there was no way to get to it without walking through the main house, so her parents always knew when she was coming and going. She couldn’t even bring in bags of groceries without her mother’s
commentary. This was what her daydreams had come to. She fantasized about keeping a box of doughnuts on her kitchen counter and having no one comment on them.

She walked up the steps to her parents’ sprawling home, called Hickory Cottage because of the large number of hickory trees on the estate. In the autumn, the entire backyard became a mass of lollipop-yellow leaves, so bright they lit up the night like daylight. Birds nesting in the trees would get confused because they couldn’t tell what time of day it was, and they would stay awake for days until they dropped out of the branches with exhaustion.