Summer in the South Read online

  ALSO BY CATHY HOLTON

  Beach Trip

  The Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes

  Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes

  Summer in the South is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Cathy Holton

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Holton, Cathy.

  Summer in the South : a novel / Cathy Holton.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52634-2

  1. Domestic fiction. 2. Southern States—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.O494434S86 2011

  813′.6—dc22 2011000708

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Title-page photograph: © iStockphoto

  Jacket design: Christine Van Bree

  Jacket photograph: Johner Images/Alamy

  v3.1

  To Mark

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Kristin Lindstrom and to the entire team at Ballantine, most especially my editor, Kate Collins, and Kelli Fillingim. Thanks to Sam Holton, Lauren Holton, Jordan Holton, and all the girls of the Birthday Lunch Club for their unfailing source material (none of you are in this one, I promise.) To Randal, a very special thanks for a weekend I’ll never forget, and for sharing with me tales of her illustrious family.

  And, as always, thanks to Mark, my partner in all things.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  1931

  Woodburn, Tennessee

  1998

  The Traveler

  Woodburn

  The Tale-Tell Heart

  1919

  Woodburn, Tennessee

  Sleeping Dogs

  Twins

  Burn Barrel

  Our Town Is Rife with Suicides

  Longford

  1927

  Vanderbilt Nashville, Tennessee

  A Superstitious Kind of Delicacy

  House of Hair

  Golden Girl

  Courtship

  Hippie Girl

  1931

  Woodburn, Tennessee

  The Progress of Love

  Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

  1931

  Woodburn, Tennessee

  About the Author

  1931

  Woodburn, Tennessee

  The body was lying on a table in the basement of the Purdy Funeral Home. The town was too small to have need of a morgue. The few accidental deaths or homicides that occurred within the town limits were brought here or to McClendon’s.

  Josephine stood just within the doorway, steeling herself for what she must do. The heat in the room was stifling. The worst summer heat in ninety years, the newspaper said, but not a drought. It rained nearly every day so the land was like a swamp, a jungle. Strange insects dropped from the vine-strangled trees, and bizarre fungi bloomed on the walls of the houses like exotic flowers. A summer like no other.

  The body was covered by a sheet. Two naked lightbulbs hung from long cords above the table. Across the room Sheriff Gillespie stood talking in a low voice to two deputies. They were chuckling and jostling each other like men at a barbecue, but when they saw her they rose quietly, dipped their heads, and left the room.

  The sheriff took his hat off and walked over to her, his gun creaking in its holster.

  “Good evening, Miss Woodburn.”

  “Good evening, Sheriff Gillespie.”

  “I’m sorry to have to ask you to do this but Mrs. Woodburn seemed …” He hesitated. “Well, she seemed not herself, and you were the next of kin. Procedural matters and all that.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” She moved closer to the body before he could take her arm. He followed behind, creaking softly.

  “It’s not a pretty sight,” he said gruffly. His demeanor changed, becoming all businesslike and brisk as he lifted a corner of the sheet to expose the face.

  Josephine had a sudden sensation of falling from a very great distance. She swayed on her feet. The sheriff put his hand out as if to steady her, but she ignored it.

  “That swelling is usual in cases where the body’s been in the water for a while. And those bruises and lacerations to the face.” He hesitated here and she was aware again of the change in his demeanor. It occurred to her that he was trying to impress her. “Well, that could have been caused by rocks or debris in the river.”

  Maitland had moved up on her other side. She had not heard him come in. His youthful face was pale, and she could see that his hands were trembling, his cuff links blinking under the lights. He glanced at the face and then quickly averted his eyes and Josephine saw in that glance all she needed to know. She felt a quick stab of guilt and despair. She had sent the letter that brought him here, to this.

  She turned and laid her gloved hand protectively on the sheriff’s arm. “I’m not sure what to do. I’m not sure what to say. You’ll have to guide me, Sheriff Gillespie.”

  He blinked and cleared his throat. He looked down at her hand. “Is this the body of Charles Woodburn?” he asked in a stern, officious voice.

  “Yes,” she said and he dropped the cloth, easing back into his former affable self. She let her hand rest on his arm a few seconds longer than was necessary and then withdrew it.

  There was a faint scent of whiskey and unwashed linen in the room, and underneath it all a sweet, fetid odor. She had not noticed it before, or if she had, it had not registered consciously. The shock of seeing him had driven everything else from her mind, the dreadful swollen face, once beautiful, so monstrous now. The inner man finally revealed.

  “We found a bottle of whiskey in his pocket and surmise that he fell into the river near your place, intoxicated, and drifted downstream past the Haskell Bridge,” the sheriff said.

  She said nothing. He continued, “That would explain the lacerations. There are many rocks, and the current is swift.”

  She stood staring down at the swollen, shapeless thing that had been Charlie Woodburn. So much tragedy in life. So much cruelty.

  Beside her, Maitland stirred. He said, “Will there be anything else, Sheriff?”

  She heard the quaver in his voice. She thought, Some things can never be forgotten. Some things can never be forgiven.

  “No, that’s all. There’ll be an inquest but we’ll keep as much of it out of the papers as we can in deference to the family.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Maitland took her arm and without another word, the two of them turned and walked out.

  1998

  The Traveler

  When Ava was small, Clotilde told her stories of ghosts and ruined castles and lonely moonlit roads. Most children would have been afraid of such tales but Ava welcomed the shivers of fear and trembling possibility they sent up her narrow spine. She preferred the gnomes and changelings and lonely, misshapen creatures because they seemed more familiar to her than the beautiful princesses and handsome princes that wove themselves in and out of Clotilde’s rambling tales.

  “Tell me a story,” Ava would say, climbing sleepily onto Clotilde’s lap, and Clotilde’s girlish face would go still and then brighten as the words came to her.

  T
hey owned few books in those days, not because they were poor but because Clotilde liked to travel light. She preferred rented rooms furnished with the cast-offs of other people’s dismal lives to possessions of her own.

  “I’m a traveler!” she always said, and when Ava was older and asked her morosely, “But why?” Clotilde’s face, still girlish, softened for a moment. “Because when you leave one place and move to another, you get to start over. You get to become whoever you want to be.”

  To help in this metamorphosis, Clotilde sometimes changed her name. Over the years she was Dharma and Abrielle and even (ironically) Magdalena. But it was the name Clotilde that she most often used.

  “Clotilde was the Queen of Sardinia!” she exclaimed, grinning sheepishly at whatever man was currently in her life. “Besides, the name means ‘famous in battle.’ ”

  Clotilde saw no more harm in changing her name than she did in moving every six months. “What’s in a name?” she liked to say.

  Ava, who had been born Summer Rayne Dabrowski, inevitably responded, “Everything.”

  Around the time she was in third grade, not long after they moved to Cincinnati and just before they moved to Cleveland, Ava had jettisoned Summer Rayne in favor of Margaret, after the name penciled into her well-worn copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Margaret Anne Govan. And later, not long before she started high school, she had abandoned Margaret in favor of Ava, still foolishly believing, like Clotilde, that she could leave her girlhood behind just by changing her name.

  “Tell me a story,” she would say when she was still small enough to believe in Clotilde’s tales. “Tell me a story about my father.” And she would snuggle down in her narrow bed and wait for Clotilde to begin, wait for the words to form behind the smooth mask of Clotilde’s girlish face, and come tumbling out of her sly rosebud mouth.

  “Once upon a time there was a handsome prince of the Underworld, and he fell in love with a beautiful princess. But she was betrothed to someone else, and when her father found out that she had been tarrying with the prince of the Underworld, he had the two of them locked up in a tower behind a pair of huge paneled doors.

  “ ‘You cannot live apart,’ cried the angry king. ‘Let’s see how you shall live together, day after day, night after night, with only each other for company!’

  “And although the two were given water, slid through a panel in the massive doors, they were denied food.

  “ ‘Live on your love for each other!’ roared the cruel king.

  “ ‘Give us bread!’ they wailed, shut up in their tower tomb. ‘We are hungry!’

  “Their pitiful cries went on for days and weeks, becoming ever weaker and more pitiful as the days went on. Finally they stopped. When the villagers crept close there were no sounds but the growls and slurps of voracious eating, the sharp clatters of teeth against bone, the sound of flesh being torn and devoured.”

  It was one of Ava’s favorite stories. Years later she would remember it and, closing her eyes, would see the youthful images of her parents entombed behind paneled doors, waiting like tragic ghosts for her to come and free them.

  When Will Fraser called and suggested that she spend the summer in Woodburn, Tennessee, Ava thought the idea preposterous. What little she knew about the South had come from bad cinema and the stories of Flannery O’Connor, and it had always amazed her that someone as cultured as Will could have come from the land of monster truck rallies and corn bread festivals.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d invited her. They had gone to college together at Bard, and had kept in touch over the past seven or eight years through emails, phone calls, and the occasional visit. Communication between them was sporadic and due mostly to his efforts. Ava considered them to be casual acquaintances. He’d come to Chicago several times on business and had looked her up. Each time he’d asked her to spend some time in Tennessee, she’d laughed. She had made the mistake of telling him that she wanted to be a novelist—he had a manner that invited confidences—and he insisted that his sleepy little hometown would be the perfect place for her to write her first novel. He didn’t seem to understand that, unlike him, she had to work for a living. She had school loans to pay and a job in a prestigious Chicago ad agency that it had taken her some time and effort to land.

  But this time when he called, things were different. Her life was undergoing a series of cataclysmic upheavals. In less than six months her estranged mother had died of a brain aneurysm, her career had stalled, her affair with her boss, Jacob, had wound down to its inevitable conclusion, and most disturbing of all, she had received a condolence letter out of the blue from a man purporting to be her father. Coming one on top of the other, these events had left her shaken, confused, and understandably depressed.

  Sunk in a dense fog, she hadn’t had the strength to pretend that things were fine when Will called.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  “I’ve been better,” she said truthfully.

  On his last trip to Chicago a few months before, she hadn’t seen him. He had called and left a message saying he was in town, but she had planned a rendezvous with Jacob that night and so pretended she hadn’t gotten the message in time, calling Will later to apologize. She felt guilty for weeks about standing him up, and yet the truth was, they had only known each other for a short time in college. He was two years ahead of her in school, and was friends with her first love, Michael. In those days Will was a tall, dark-haired boy, very well mannered but shy, with a slight Southern accent.

  “Another trust-fund baby,” Michael had called him dismissively and it was true. There were plenty of those at Bard, although Will didn’t seem like old money. He shopped at thrift stores like the rest of them and drove an old battered Volvo station wagon. The truth was, Ava hadn’t really paid much attention to him; she had been so caught up in her tumultuous love affair with Michael, and Will had simply been a quiet backdrop to all of that. A silent witness.

  Once she and Michael had quarreled in a bar several miles from campus and Michael, in a fury, abruptly left, taking the car and leaving her stranded at two o’clock in the morning in an unfamiliar part of town. Will, who had been watching from the bar (he had grown accustomed to their violent arguments and no longer intervened), insisted on driving her home. She was dismayed to find herself crying, and raged against Michael on the ride home while Will listened silently. He insisted on seeing her up the rickety stairs of her Victorian apartment building to her front door.

  “Would you like me to wait?” he asked.

  “No. Thank you.” She knew Michael would return later and there’d be another row, and she didn’t want Will to see it. She was embarrassed suddenly that he’d already seen so much of their dysfunctional relationship.

  “All right. Good night.” He touched her briefly on the arm and a faint tinge of color appeared along his brow. Ava realized then that he had a crush on her.

  “Good night,” she said.

  She never told Michael how she’d gotten home and he never asked, but a few weeks later he mentioned rather casually that Will Fraser was engaged to a girl he’d gone to boarding school with. After that, there was a wariness between Will and Ava whenever they met, something that Ava noted at first with mild regret and later didn’t notice at all. By the time Will and Michael graduated a year later, the two had drifted apart and Ava rarely saw him.

  She saw Will briefly at graduation. He was standing on the lawn among a small knot of friends and family. He’d grown very thin and pale, and when she remarked on this to Michael he smiled unpleasantly and said it had something to do with the fiancée. A broken engagement or something like that.

  “Women,” Michael said, shaking his head. “God knows why we put up with you.”

  “You’ve got spinach in your teeth,” Ava lied, and while he hurried off to check, she strolled over to congratulate Will.

  He smiled when he saw her and introduced her to his family. His parents had died in a car accident when he was a chi
ld, and he’d been raised by two great-aunts, Fanny and Josephine. They smiled politely at Ava. They were both elegantly dressed, with pale skin and clear gray eyes. Very attractive, both of them, although they must have been in their sixties. The smaller one, Fanny, smiled shyly and took Ava’s arm.

  “So you’re Ava,” she said. She wore a silk dress belted tightly around her narrow waist and a short little jacket.

  Josephine, the taller one, let her eyes flicker coolly over Ava. “Goodness, Fanny, don’t clutch her so.” She was dressed in a gray suit that matched her eyes, and she seemed rather reserved, like Will, only in him this reserve came across as shyness, while in her it seemed cold and distant. “You’ll have to excuse my sister,” she said to Ava. Sistuh. “As you can see, she’s never met a stranger.”

  It was an odd thing to say, and yet spoken in that beautiful accent it sounded like music.

  “What lovely hair you have,” Fanny said.

  Ava smiled. “Thank you.” It was her best feature and she was rather proud of it. She had left it down today, and it fell in red-gold waves around her shoulders.

  “Aren’t you chilly?” Josephine asked, noting her sleeveless dress.

  Ava laughed. “After Chicago, this is nothing,” she said.

  “So you’re from Chicago?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Ah,” Josephine said in a tone that could have indicated surprise or disapproval or resignation.

  A faint bloom of color appeared in Will’s face. He raised his head and looked around the crowded lawn. “I wonder what’s happened to Uncle Maitland,” he said.

  Somewhere south of Owensboro the landscape changed, became more rolling and green. Great clouds of yellow pollen hung in the air. The light in Chicago had a sharp, clear quality but here it came in at odd angles, filtered by tall trees and masses of greenery lining the roadway.