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Chapter 23

J amie offered to stay, but I told him I needed some time to get my head together. He made me promise I’d check in with him later, and when his truck was at the end of our drive, I set the iPad up on the dining room table. If evidence of the reason Peter had left me was on this device, I had to face it on my own.

I watched every recorded video session Peter had made with Alice, and the evidence couldn’t have been clearer. The woman was not having an affair with my husband. She was obsessed with one thing and one thing only, the subject of her every session with Peter: Wren Street.

Alice and Wren had been childhood friends, born and raised in Juliana just down the street from each other, and inseparable, at least until college. Alice had gone to the University of Georgia to study early childhood education, but Wren—a poet and artist—had gotten a painting scholarship to Pratt, the prestigious art school in Brooklyn.

At Pratt, Wren had fallen in with a group of wealthy kids from several prominent families. Unlike Wren, these new friends all had trust funds to bankroll their futures as artists, and after graduation planned to pursue a nomadic lifestyle with nothing to tie them down other than a bank account to deposit their monthly checks and a vague allegiance to a privileged, whitewashed version of Rastafarianism. They included Wren in their plans.

Unfortunately, in her junior year, Wren had gotten pregnant by a man she refused to name and had returned home to Juliana to have the baby. By then, she was heavily into drugs. Cocaine, pills, and weed, mostly. Lilah sent her to a variety of rehabs in Atlanta, but eventually the money ran out, and Wren still didn’t have a foothold. Lilah threw her out of the house, keeping the baby. Wren’s art school friends swooped in, ready to circle the wagon around their wayward cohort. And to give her cash, I thought. They all hunkered down together in the abandoned Dalzell-Davenport house.

It was the last file I opened that revealed what I was looking for. Alice was sitting in her sunny kitchen, wearing a Georgia Bulldogs T-shirt. Her hair was back in a ponytail. Dark circles shadowed her eyes. She and Peter exchanged pleasantries.

“So why do you think Wren didn’t just leave Juliana?” Peter asked. “How do you think she talked all those rich kids from New York to come down here and join her? And why did they do it?”

“I assume she wanted to be near Temperance, even though Lilah wouldn’t let her see her. But I think it was more than that. I ran into her once, at the Food Lion. I couldn’t believe I was seeing her, but she wasn’t the same. She was . . . different.”

“Different, how?”

“Wren always loved Juliana. I mean, we all do. But when we talked, she seemed obsessed with it. She said she wanted to redeem the town.” Alice made air quotes around the word. “She said that’s why her friends had come down. To help her redeem Juliana.”

“Did she explain what that meant to her?” Peter asked.

Alice nodded. “During the Civil War, General Sherman marched through Georgia. Juliana was just one of his many stopovers on his way to Atlanta. In every town he passed through, he burned any kind of industry he came upon that could be of any help to the southern army. He destroyed mills and railroads and coal mines.”

This information jolted me. Of course! The picture I’d seen in George Davenport’s box at Jamie’s store—those soldiers had been sitting beneath an American flag. Jamie had it wrong. They were Union soldiers, not Confederates. Union soldiers who stopped in Juliana.

“So Sherman burned Juliana’s mill?” Peter asked. I leaned forward.

She shook her head. “No. That’s the thing. None of the three mills were burned. In fact, Wren said she’d discovered the mills weren’t built back in 1832 like the people around here say. She said she found old books—history books—that proved they were built after the war.”

George Davenport’s history books, I thought.

“So then, Sherman just passed through town?” Peter asked.

“Not according to Wren. She was convinced that Sherman came here and killed people. The wives and children of the town’s men who’d left to fight in the Confederate Army. Like a revenge thing. A war crime.

“She spent a lot of time out at the Dalzell-Davenport place,” Alice went on. “Your house now. She said when she went out there, she could feel them. That she dreamed about them at night. A bunch of women and children, trapped somehow.”

A chill ran up my spine.

Onscreen, Peter was quiet. I thought of his dream about the winged demon-horse. I wondered if there had been others. More realistic ones, he was thinking about.

“She said she heard them singing,” Alice said.

My breath left my body in a whoosh. I felt faint.

“Singing?” Peter asked. His voice had a strange tightness to it that Alice probably hadn’t picked up on, but I did. He was disturbed by what she was saying, too.

“Yes. The women and children Sherman killed. She dreamed about them singing.” Her face had gone pale, and her voice had a tremor in it.

“How did he do it?” Peter asked in a low voice. “How did Wren think Sherman killed them?”

“She said he shut them up in an abandoned mine and left them there. They suffocated to death.”

“A mine?” I shouted at the screen.

“A mine?” Peter asked at the same time in his calm therapist voice.

“A gold mine. Wren said there was a secret gold mine in Juliana that nobody knows about.”

“Interesting.”

Interesting didn’t begin to describe it. I was leaning forward now, my hands out, like I could reach into the screen, grab Alice, and shake the next revelation out of her.

Alice fidgeted in discomfort. “I can’t quit thinking about it—Wren up and moving to California. She didn’t mention it during that conversation at the Food Lion. And as long as I’ve known her, she’s always wanted to live in Juliana. She loved this town, and it really bothered her that there might be something bad that happened here.”

“Not just something bad,” Peter corrected. “Mass murder.”

Alice nodded wordlessly. She looked ill.

“Did you guys stay in touch?” he asked. “After she moved?”

“She only texted Lilah a couple of times and me once. She basically just cut off communication with both of us because she said she needed space to rebuild her life. She doesn’t even speak to Temperance. I don’t know . . . I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m starting to believe that she didn’t move to California. I think that someone”—she pressed fingers to her temples—“might’ve done something to her.”

“What do you mean by that?” Peter asked.

“I mean, I think someone killed her, in Juliana, and then they texted all of us, pretending to be her in California.”

Peter seemed intrigued. “Can you expound on that?”

“After I saw her that one time, but before she moved, I went over there once, to the Dalzell-Davenport house. To try to talk her into moving in with me.”

“Tell me about that.”

Alice sighed. “I just felt like her friends, those people she was hanging out with, weren’t good for her. Those Pratt trustafarians were just so . . . out of touch with real life. Wren wasn’t like them. She was so sweet, and she really valued people. The transformative power of art. She wasn’t a taker. Anyway, when I saw her, I wanted her to come home with me for other reasons. She had become really . . . different.”

“Different, how?”

“Jumpy. Irritable. She’d gotten really paranoid. All of them were. And they slept all the time—”

I straightened, my heart skittering inside my chest.

“They were all having the weird dreams. Hearing voices, like Wren. Wren said that as the women and children were dying in the mine, they sang this one hymn.”

I went cold.

“What hymn?” Peter asked in a quiet voice.

“It’s an old one, written around that time. It’s called ‘The Vacant Chair.’ ”

My eyes had gone unfocused, and I could feel my hands trembling. Peter didn’t respond either. I wondered what he was thinking. He’d obviously downloaded the song because Alice mentioned it. Did he remember that I’d told him that song had been running through my head?

Alice continued. “Wren didn’t want to move in with me. She said she wanted to make a podcast about the murders, what Sherman did. She was angry. She felt like it was something, like a sin, that affected Juliana. That there was a darkness here. She said she could feel it, because she was sensitive, an artist and an empath, and so could some of her trustafarian friends. She said she could feel that death ruled over Juliana.”

My heart slammed against my ribs. I’d felt that. The night I was lost in the woods. But I’d chalked it up to the margaritas.

“But I think she meant it literally, too,” Alice said. “She told me she had gotten a death threat. Somebody put a note in the Dalzell-Davenport house mailbox saying that if Wren kept trying to dig up history, she’d be the one dug up next, or something to that effect.”

Everything stilled around me. Everything. The sun coming in through the old windows, the fine, white dust motes floating through the air, the chilled air shooting out through the vents.

Peter spoke. “Why do you think anyone would care so much about something that happened over a hundred and sixty years ago in this town that they would threaten Wren?”

Alice shook her head. “I don’t know, but Wren took it seriously. She was scared. For herself, and for Temperance, and Lilah. And now I’m scared, too.”

I paused the recording and sat back in my chair. A few things had become clear to me. Peter had been taping his sessions with Alice because she was sharing some potentially criminal information, and he was a mandatory reporter. He also knew he wasn’t at his best, not by a long stretch, and there was a good chance he was going to miss some of the details by only taking notes.

He had been taking Alice’s concerns seriously. So seriously, that he’d started looking into the uncapped well issue in greater detail. And then, at the party, he’d told Lilah that he thought the well story had been made up to keep us from exploring our property. But why would the old guard do that?

Was it because of the gold George Davenport had found? Was the old guard afraid we were going to somehow find it and claim it as ours? If so, it made no sense. If they’d known about the gold when we bought the house, they’d never have let us move here. But they did let us buy the place, with the so-called dangerous well. Why? It felt like I was just steps away from putting the pieces together—making this all make sense—but I couldn’t quite make the leap.

I closed the iPad and headed upstairs to George Davenport’s room. His bookshelf held dozens of books, a handful about Georgia state history. Most were university press or self-published, authored by Georgians about niche parts of the state’s history: the Trail of Tears, the land grab, the infamous, thieving Pony Club.

There were two books on the Georgia Gold Rush. I flipped through each, hoping Davenport had dog-eared a page, or underlined a paragraph that would guide me. Sure enough, I found a page marked with a small, pressed flower. A wild violet. I skimmed the page, my eyes stopping on one passage.

While the predominant method of mining in areas other than Dahlonega and Auraria were smaller operations that utilized placer mining, panning, and open-pit excavation, there was some tunneling. There was a smattering of unnamed mines established by the Cherokee people. In the area of present-day Acworth, the Allatoona Mine produced gold for at least four to five years. Several other mines are purported to have existed for short periods of time—one in particular was rumored to have produced a reasonable quantity of gold somewhere in the vicinity of Juliana, Georgia.

I flipped through the rest of the book but didn’t find any further mention of a gold mine in or around Juliana. But—along with his discovery of gold nuggets on his property and a dose of dementia—it had been enough to convince George Davenport. Before he got sick, he was clearly on a mission to try to find the old mine and blow the entrance to high heaven. Wren had probably also found this passage.

My phone rang, jolting me out of my thoughts. I hit the speaker.

“Billie Hope.” Dixie Minette’s voice rang out, calling me as she always did by my first and last name in that southern twang. “I need to talk to you about Major, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay, sure.”

“He’s feeling poorly, and I think he should rest for a few days. I just wondered if you had someone else at the restaurant who could fill in for him.”

I thought fast. “I’m sure the rest of the servers can take care of everything until he’s back on his feet. Can I do anything to help?”

“No, don’t you worry about that,” she said in that exaggerated drawl that precluded any possibility of disagreement. “He just needs to rest. That’s all. Thank you so much, darlin’.” She hung up.

Darlin’ . That was a first.