mahogany table and chairs, the seats covered in green velvet. Massive oil-on-canvas portraits of the house’s generational residents look on from the walls. Women in elaborate dresses, their midsections cinched impossibly thin. Men in waistcoats, standing with gold-tipped walking sticks or hunting dogs. A little girl in turn-of-the-century white lace.
The adjoining parlor is appointed in slightly more modern fashion. Sofa, burgundy wingback chairs, console TV in a cabinet with built-in speakers. More recent eras of Gossetts watch me from hanging portraits and easel frames atop the TV cabinet. I pause at a triple-matted display of graduation photos featuring the judge’s three sons. Diplomas are framed under each picture—Will and Manford, business graduates from Rice University, and Sterling, the youngest, from the LSU College of Agriculture. It would be easy to guess, just by looking, that he was Nathan’s father. There’s a strong resemblance.
I can’t help but think, Doesn’t Nathan want any of these photos? Not even to remember the dad who died so young? Sterling Gossett is probably not too much older than Nathan in that photo. He didn’t live many more years, I guess.
It’s too sad to contemplate further, and so I move on through the parlor to what I know comes next. I’m acquainted with the layout of the house, thanks to my various porch peeking trips. Even so, when I cross the threshold into the library of Goswood Grove, I’m breathless.
The room is glorious, unchanged from what it once was and has always been. Save for the addition of electric lamps, light switches, a plug here and there, and an enormous billiard table that most likely isn’t quite as old as the house, nothing has been modernized. I run a hand along the billiard table’s leather cover as I pass, snag one of the countless paperbacks stacked there. The judge had so many books, they’ve spread like the growths of ivy outside the house. The floors, the space under the massive desk, the billiard table, and every inch of every shelf is laden.
I drink in the sight, stand mesmerized, drenched in leather and paper and gold edges and ink and words.
I’m carried away. Lost.
I’m so completely transfixed that I have no idea how much time passes before I realize I am not alone in this house.
CHAPTER 11
HANNIE GOSSETT—LOUISIANA, 1875
The river tugs at my clothes as I drag my body up onto the sand, then lay there coughing out water and all that was in my gut. I can swim, and the man threw me close enough to shore that it could’ve been easy to get there, but this river’s got its own mind. A strainer tree spun off in the boat’s wake, grabbed me up as it whirled by, and dragged me down. Took all I had to get free.
I hear a gator sliding through the mud not far away, and I push to my hands and knees and cough up more water and taste blood.
It’s then I touch my neck and feel the empty place.
No leather string. No Grandmama’s beads.
My legs wobble as I get up and stagger to the shore looking for them. I pull my shirt up and check under it. Missy’s reticule slides lower in my wet britches, but the beads ain’t there.
I want to scream at that river, cuss it, but I just fall on all fours and cough up the rest of the water, think to myself, If ever I see that Moses again, I’ll kill him dead.
He’s took away all that was left of my people. The last bit of them is gone in the river. Might be it’s a sign. A sign to make my way home, where I never should’ve strayed from. Once I get there, I’ll decide who to tell about what. Might be the law can go after the men that grabbed Missy Lavinia and Juneau Jane, but the news can’t come from me. I have to find another way to let the sheriff know what’s happened.
Looking up and downriver one more time, I wonder how far it is to a place where I can get a ferry crossing to the home side of that big, wide, rushin’ water. Not