A Tangled Mercy: A Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR JOY JORDAN-LAKE

  FOR Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel

  “Although Blue Hole Back Home is a coming-of-age story, it is also a surprising, moving, and fast-paced mystery. Joy Jordan-Lake has written a fine tale of racial conflict and healing, and she has done so with a fresh and engaging voice.”

  —Bret Lott, New York Times bestselling author of Oprah’s Book Club pick Jewel

  “Reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, Blue Hole Back Home is a haunting story, lyrically told, about the death of innocence under a Southern sun.”

  —Phyllis Tickle, bestselling author and lecturer

  “As I read this novel, I was taken back to my childhood in Mississippi and saw the manipulation of racism that had been pushed down in my memory. It helped me reflect on my past. I hope others will have a similar experience.”

  —John Perkins, Civil Rights leader, author, and celebrated speaker on racial reconciliation

  For Grit & Grace: Portraits of a Woman’s Life

  “Written with much heart and wit, this little gem of a book touches on the ordinary and profound experiences that make up a woman’s life . . . a poignant and satisfying collection . . . funny and sad, inspiring and awfully surprising.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  ALSO BY JOY JORDAN-LAKE

  Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel

  Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe

  Working Families: Navigating the Demands and Delights of Marriage, Parenting, and Career

  Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous: Ten Alarming Words of Faith

  Grit & Grace: Portraits of a Woman’s Life

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Joy Jordan-Lake

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477823668

  ISBN-10: 1477823662

  Cover design by Kimberly Glyder

  For the people of Charleston, South Carolina, whose reply to a violent hate was love and unity, and particularly to all those connected with Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, whose strength, courage, forgiveness, insistence on justice, and unflagging hope have inspired so many others to action and faith for two hundred years. And for my family, who never gave up.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note—and Some Background on the Writing of the Book

  Reading Group Questions for Discussion

  About The Author

  Chapter 1

  Charleston, South Carolina

  April 9, 1822

  Later, Tom Russell would wonder if the very boards of that place—splintered, unpainted, unlovely—had leaked some sort of lethal courage into his blood and made him see things that could not be true. Could never be true.

  Tom sprang away from where he’d been leaning into its side. Even here in the wee hours of morning, even shuttered tight on a weed-strangled lot, the church still thrummed with movement and sound: deep, grieving chords struck through with a raw and dangerous power. Maybe it was only the dark and the mist of predawn, or maybe it was Tom’s state of mind, but the clapboards themselves seemed to throb.

  This was insanity. He would not wait. This meeting, that person, and this place could mean nothing but trouble. Time to walk away. Now. Before it was too late.

  Through the dark, Tom slipped toward the seawall that bounded East Battery. Out on the harbor, square sails sliced through the scrim of fog, and for a moment unhinged from the present, a moment swung open too wide, Tom Russell pictured himself there at the bow. His face, at least. And his build. But no copper disc hung from his neck to label him what Charleston insisted he was: a blacksmith. Who ran a shop on East Bay. And who was the possession of one Widow Russell.

  Instead, the man Tom Russell pictured leaned hard over the ship’s starboard railing, as if by sheer force of will he could make the ship clear the harbor still faster. Before they could follow. Before he’d be shot.

  Tom could see himself standing tall, with shoulders that might have been hammered from iron and a shirt that was unstained with soot or with sweat—whiter than the canvas swelling four stories up. His head was lowering now to a woman who lifted her face to the wind and let her eyes shut—in what he knew was relief. Immense and total relief. In the sure knowledge that they were safe. The two of them. Safe.

  Leaping up onto the bouldered seawall, Tom landed with a jolt that was meant to shake clean from his head that image: two figures, safe, at the bow of a ship sailing toward freedom.

  Delusion, that’s what it was. As deadly as any bullet or noose.

  Chapter 2

  Charleston, South Carolina

  April 9, 2015

  Gripping her coffee and feeling her way through the mist that clung to the water and to the mansions beside it, Kate climbed the steps of the seawall. A thousand miles of asphalt had made her stiff and bleary-eyed, but this view, her first of Charleston Harbor since she’d left as a child, was nothing like she’d remembered.

  Left, Kate thought. Or been dragged away—that was more like it.

  Where she’d recalled sunshine that was searing and gold and houses in a paint box of pastels and roses that spilled in reds and yellows so bright they hurt the eyes, here was a haunted gray silence. Spanish moss swayed from long-armed live oaks that seemed to be reaching and reaching for something they could not quite touch. Brick crafted by slaves walled off the gardens, broken only by wrought iron gates. And low-growing palmettos spiked upward like swords.

  Kate looked out over the water, as dark here before dawn as her coffee. Beneath her, low waves hissed over a strip of pebbles and sand. And for the first time since she’d walked out so bravely on her life in New England—how stupid she’d been to think she was brave,
how incredibly, terribly stupid—nausea and doubt rose together. A thousand miles south she’d driven, all afternoon and all night, thinking that finally, after so many years, she was on a journey to answers.

  But this. These tragic oaks and high walls and wrought iron gates.

  This was like coming stumbling back to some faintly remembered but much longed for home, only to find that no one remembered you here—and they’d locked every door.

  Kate threw back her head for one last long swig of coffee. Time to face facts.

  She checked her phone. No call back yet from the one man still living who might, just might, have some answers.

  She dialed the number for her father’s attorney again—My late father, she corrected herself. The lawyer had often appeared in her dreams as a little girl, his tarantula body with its crooked legs and its scuttling walk. “I’m here on behalf of your father,” the spider-lawyer would spit at her in her sleep, “who sends, of course, his regrets.”

  It was a phrase she’d heard often enough in her waking hours growing up: Your father sends his regrets. Often enough it seeped into her sleep.

  Even now, as a grown woman—a graduate student, for God’s sake, in one of the top history programs in the country—Kate found herself holding her breath like a small, frightened child as she waited for the attorney to answer.

  “Botts here,” snapped a voice at the other end of the line. And before Kate could gather her words, he went on, his small, sniveling voice sounding tighter—angrier, too—than ever. “Katherine, I was planning on calling you back first thing this morning—although I generally refrain from making or receiving calls before six a.m.”

  Kate glanced at the time on her phone: five forty-five. Awake all through the night, she’d lost track of when the rest of the world would be waking up. “Oh. Sorry. I—”

  “I hope you won’t consider for one more moment the outlandish idea of driving down to Charleston. Rank foolishness. Let me reiterate that while attorney-client privilege, which extends beyond the grave, prohibits me from disclosing my client’s reasoning on his testamentary dispositions, I can assure you that there was no provision in the will for you but the modest amount you have already received.” And then he added, an afterthought, “Which I regret—again—to say.”

  Kate sighed. “And I regret to have to repeat that my calling you is not about money. I told my father for years I wanted none of his money—since apparently I was worth none of his time. Look, I’d just like to talk with you, Mr. Botts. I’ve waited my whole life to ask questions, and now, it would appear, I may have waited too long.”

  A silence followed.

  And when Botts spoke again, his voice had deepened to nearly a croak. “My sincere sympathies, Katherine, on the recent loss of your mother. She was . . .” He took several seconds to sort through possible words. “A lovely woman.”

  “She was. Although I don’t recall you or my father expressing that sentiment very well or very often before.” Another silence, only the cry of a gull as it flew in an arc around Kate. “And as to my driving to Charleston, I’m sorry to hear you think it’s a foolish idea, but as it happens, I’m already here. And I’m looking forward to meeting with you. Soon, I would hope.”

  I came, she could have added, because of that lovely woman, my mother.

  That, Kate had to admit—though not out loud to Botts—was the truth that had hounded her here.

  Kate had stood midlecture in Robinson Hall. It had been her first official chance to impress a vast hall full of first-year students and the head of the History Department. She’d arrived with slush inside her black pumps from a frantic, last-minute dash across the Yard. The pants of her power suit sopping from the knees down, she’d dripped icy water across the wood floor as she’d paced at the front of the room and tried to pretend she wasn’t a wreck from the past weeks of grief.

  Approaching the lecture’s climax, she’d faced the hall’s screen to click through a series of daguerreotypes of slaves, their bodies seeming to float above the silver-coated plates of the pictures, their eyes meeting the onlooker’s stare.

  “Could individual players in that late spring of 1822 have known, do you think,” she asked the class without turning, “that in laying plans for revolt they might be changing not just the course of their own lives, not just of the Low Country or even of the South, but the entire course of the nation?”

  And then she’d clicked to the next slide, that picture she’d snapped of an old Polaroid, imported at the last minute into the presentation as an image of the Low Country. This image, grainy and faded, showed a young white woman in a long, billowing dress, a magnolia blooming to her right and a live oak towering on her left. It was Kate’s own mother, Sarah Grace, with satin and lace falling clear to her feet, in a photo that before had seemed simply fitting for this point in the presentation. Now, though, enlarged like this on the screen, it looked downright alarming: the stark white glare of the magnolia blossoms and the billowing dress against the deep shadow of the oak—something alarming, too, in Sarah Grace’s expression, her mouth an attempt at a smile but her eyes stormy and desperate and dark.

  Kate had turned to look out over that sea of undergraduate faces, their sleep-deprived pallor, their eyes deadened by stress to wax-figure expressions.

  In that flash of a moment, her staring up at the screen, it had seemed like a revelation, a brainstorm: rather than slogging on through the flood of guilt and unanswered questions since her mother’s death three weeks ago, Kate could fight back. She could toss a few duffels of clothes into her Jeep, along with the last boxes of her mother’s possessions she had yet to sort through, and she could drive the thousand miles south to the last place Kate remembered her mother as happy. Kate could demand answers from anyone there who might know, and from Charleston itself—with the kind of research she’d been trained to do. The kind of answers she knew how to find in musty old books and archival papers but had never known how to ask for from her own family, while there was still time.

  It had struck her in that terrible, irresistibly beautiful moment that she could go there herself. Today. Right now. That there was no longer any reason to hold off on digging through whys. Not anymore.

  Which was when Kate was sure—so stupidly, utterly sure—what she had to do. And where she had to go.

  “Are you certain,” came Botts’s creaking hinge of a voice from the other end of the line, “that you aren’t simply . . . running away?”

  “Running away?” Kate repeated, incredulous. “From a whole year of loss, you mean?” And from a truckload of guilt, she nearly added out loud, but she could not say that to Botts—him, of all people. “Believe me, I’d run away if I could. Instead I came here. Which is where my meeting with you comes in.”

  Kate drew a breath, her mother’s voice in her ear: A lady knows how to be strong, Kate—and is also smart enough to be sweet, for when just being strong won’t roll the stone.

  Ironic, Kate thought. Poor Sarah Grace. She’d wielded sweetness and smarts expertly. But being strong—she’d struggled as long as Kate could remember with that.

  A pause. The dark harbor water was turning silver as morning broke.

  “If,” Kate made herself add, “you would be good enough to fit me into your busy schedule.”

  Botts seemed to be weighing his words. “I cite for you the 1998 Supreme Court ruling Swidler and Berlin versus the United States. Let me make myself perfectly clear: When we meet, I cannot legally discuss anything that pertains to your father as my client. Or to your mother, in regard to my client.”

  When we meet. Not if but when. He’d already conceded that much.

  “I understand that, yes. Still, I’d be grateful for your time.”

  “Perhaps you’re not aware, Katherine, that I no longer live in Charleston but in a coastal town to the north. As I work very few days in the firm’s central office now that I am mostly retired, I come back to the city only as needed. I will see what I can do about making a
trip soon. How long do you expect to be there?”

  Kate scanned the scene before her: the mansions, the harbor, the cannons that seemed just now to be pointing at her. “I need to speak with my academic adviser.” If he’s still taking my calls. She cleared her throat. “He may have some specific recommendations.” Like my withdrawing from the History Department and taking up waitressing. “Regarding my research, that is. So it’s hard to say yet.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Botts said. And with that, the line went dead.

  Loosing her hair now from its ponytail holder and letting the sea breeze buffet it, Kate passed a hand over her aching forehead—as if she could shut out for the moment what kind of damage she may have done to her life. What was left of her life.

  Even now as the early morning dark was beginning to fade, the shore of Charleston Harbor still lay swaddled in thin bands of white. Nothing moved but a ship gliding silently out toward Fort Sumter and, beyond that, the sea.

  Kate scanned Charleston’s harbor, its edging of historic mansions with white piazzas soaring out from each floor like gulls lifting into the sky. Toward the mansions, a carriage was clattering out from the fog. Its blinkered draft horse arched his black neck against its weight and tossed his white mane as the carriage rolled past.

  Even Kate’s clearest memories had not prepared her for the undertow feel of this place, like being sucked back not just to her own childhood but two hundred years backward in time.

  From her jeans pocket, Kate plucked the pen and scrap of paper she always carried. With a few swift slashes of ink, she blocked in the carriage, the palmettos, the cannons, the ship, the live oaks—and a runner, just now leaping up onto the seawall and stretching his calves.

  The runner’s entrance into the scene was out of place, jarringly so, but also strangely fitting somehow: something strong and graceful—ancient, even—in his movement that linked him with the ripple of the horse’s shoulder and flank, the surge of the ship.

  The runner glanced her way then. For a long moment—too long.

  But she shook off his stare and focused back on her scrap of paper, her pen.