Page 37

Chapter 33

I stared at the woman sitting before me, barely comprehending what I was seeing. Who I was seeing.

Wren Street.

In the flesh. Not dead, a pile of remains by the mill, but 100 percent alive.

Her eyes blazed and her lithe body was clad in dark leggings and a soaking wet oversized T-shirt that clung to her. She also didn’t have the dreadlocks she used to have. Her hair was shorn in a buzz cut. She cocked her head with an expression of patient impatience. She looked a little like Finch and Falcon. Exactly like Temperance. I burst into wild cackling laughter.

“They think you’re dead,” I gasped. “They found your remains at the mill.”

“The fuck are you talking about?” she asked, her voice sharp.

“Or maybe I just thought you were dead. I’m not thinking clearly.”

She settled beside me, drawing up her knees and propping her arms on them. “It’s just as well.”

My head was still full of the disturbing nightmare I’d just had, and I was having a hard time accepting that I was truly awake. “They know I’m in here. They were following me.”

“I know. It’s fine, at least for now,” Wren said. “I was hiding in the woods when you blew those grenades earlier, and after you left, I crawled in. I saw you crawl in later and run deeper into the mine. They were outside looking for you, but I’m pretty sure the rain slowed them down. They couldn’t find your blast hole in the dark, and I heard them say they’d come back at dawn. And they made sure we can’t leave. They left a lookout.”

“Jamie,” I said.

She nodded. “I texted Emmaline and told her to try to contact the next county’s sheriff’s department or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. We should sit tight. Wait until daylight and one of the good guys shows up . . . hopefully before the bad guys do.”

“How long have you been in town?” I asked. “How long have you been watching me?”

“A few weeks, on and off. I’ve been low-key staying with the Dalzell girls in their mother’s house. They told me what was going on after you and Alice stopped by. I was just in the trunk of Emmaline’s car when she dropped you off at your house.”

I nodded slowly, trying to assemble the puzzle pieces.

“Emmaline said you found some gold nuggets,” she said.

I shook my head. “I don’t care about any gold. I was just trying to figure out why Mayor Dixie and the rest of the old guard didn’t want us to find this mine. They killed a deputy who was coming to talk to me. They killed my husband, Peter.”

“I know.”

“They killed him because he was talking to Alice about you and your friends and what you were doing at the Dalzell-Davenport house.” And because Jamie wants me for himself.

“I think those remains they found might be a friend of mine,” Wren said.

I stared at her. “Who?”

“Someone I met in New York and who was living with us for a while at the Dalzell-Davenport house. But I want to hear your story first. I’ve been dying to contact you so we could talk, but me and the Dalzells . . . well, we weren’t sure if we could trust you.”

I wanted to laugh at that.

“You were having a dream, weren’t you? Just now?”

I nodded. I still felt the shock and relief at seeing my mother, at being so close to her again. I peered down the shaft. The drill that I’d tripped over was gone.

Had I been walking in my sleep and thrown it over the ledge into the water like in my dream? Or had I just imagined it was there in the first place? Or . . .

. . . or had it never been there in the first place?

Jesus, I was really losing it.

“You know,” Wren said, like she could read my mind. “It’s because of the carbon monoxide.”

I looked backed at her. “There’s gas? Down here?”

She nodded. “They didn’t properly seal it when they blew the entrance up back in 1864. There’s been gas leaking from this hole for probably over a hundred and sixty years. Haven’t you noticed how everybody’s just a little off their rocker in Juliana? Nobody remembers anything, everybody’s got the shakes. It’s like Whoville on really good bud in that town. You and your husband probably had it worse because you were living right on top of it. It fucked me up when I lived there. I couldn’t sleep. I had nightmares.”

I thought of that hallucinatory afternoon with Jamie. The nightmares and bizarre visions. If Wren was right, my whole family had been breathing in poisonous gas for months. Mere. Poor old Ramsey. For some reason, Peter had suffered the worst. His insomnia, his irritability, and then constant sleeping. It would be a tidy explanation for all of it, wouldn’t it?

Except for the dream I just had. The curses I’d heard those poor, doomed women and children pronounce on their murderers before jumping to their deaths. Curses that matched up with the things we had all experienced in the past few months . . .

“I’ve seen you with Temperance,” Wren said, jolting me from my thoughts. “I followed you and Mom to the school on open house day. Tell me about her.”

My eyes reflexively filled, thinking of Mere, but I swallowed the tears back. “She’s extraordinary. Really smart and sunny. Imaginative. She’s my daughter Mere’s best friend.”

Wren’s eyes looked shiny, and she wiped her nose. She looked like she wanted to say something but didn’t, just glanced away, nodding.

“Why didn’t you take her with you when you left before?” I asked. “Why did you leave her with Lilah?”

“I knew she would be safer with her than with me. My mom is a good person. She has no idea who these people really are, and she never will, if the old guard has their way. That’s how they keep their power, by making sure everybody else stays in the dark.” She laughed. “Quite literally, in one aspect.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a long story, how this nightmare started.”

“We’ve got till sunrise. Tell me.”

* * *

Wren Street wasn’t the average Juliana girl. She had excelled in painting in high school, and it wasn’t long before she was being showered with scholarships, most notably from the prestigious Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which she accepted. Wren missed Juliana, but she blossomed in New York, in and out of the classroom. She loved her classes. She loved the nightlife even more. She went to underground parties, funky, off-off Broadway shows, avant-garde performance art pieces. She also was introduced to a wide range of drugs. At one of the many drug-fueled parties, she encountered a young woman named Madge Beatty. Just a few years older than Wren, Madge was from Toronto, a college dropout who moved to New York. Madge’s parents were from Canada and happy enough to let Madge live off her Beatty family trust fund and create art.

Madge Beatty was everything Wren aspired to be. Worldly, sophisticated, and truly gifted. A trustafarian, the girl jokingly called herself, someone with plenty of money but who chose to live simply. Madge was a sculptor who worked in pine wood and gold leaf. She had a fire-hose work ethic and a manic desire for her art to leave a legacy. Wren was blown away with Madge’s talent, and soon the two became close, moving into a broken-down Brooklyn warehouse that Madge had bought as a twenty-first birthday gift to herself.

Wren had asked about one of her sculptures, the figure of a girl, naked, lithe, an enigmatic expression on her wooden face as Madge had dripped molten gold over her. The gold spattered on the tarp below, and Wren thought it looked like a Klimt painting come to life. Madge said the piece represented her great-great-great-grandmother who’d worked in a gold mine down in Juliana, Georgia.

Wren was stunned. “You mean Juliana, where I’m from?” She’d never met anyone outside of the town who had any connection to the place. Everyone she knew from there stayed there.

Madge confessed the truth: she’d always been obsessed with the origins of her ancestor, how she’d come to work in the mine. When she’d found out that Wren was from Juliana, she’d befriended her, hoping Wren would help her discover more. She didn’t want Wren to think badly of her. “I just couldn’t believe that I was going to meet someone from that town,” she said. “It seemed like . . . destiny.”

Wren didn’t think badly of Madge. To the contrary, she was intrigued. “But,” she assured Madge, “there was never a gold mine in Juliana.” She knew Juliana’s history backward and forward.

Madge hadn’t backed down. “Oh, there was. My ancestor worked in it until the town elders heard Sherman was coming on his way to Atlanta, so they herded all the workers, the women and children, inside and disguised the entrance. Sherman marched through, never realizing he was marching right past a gold mine.”

Wren sat in stunned silence.

“They never got them out,” Madge went on to tell her. “The town elders buried those women and children alive. They murdered all those defenseless people. Only my ancestor, who was twelve years old, got away. She ran all the way to Canada.”

Madge explained to Wren that the miners and their families were the poor, working class. They didn’t associate with the wealthier families in Juliana, the old guard. Each group had their own churches, schools—or lack thereof. They even lived in a completely separate part of town. It would’ve been easy enough for the town elders to convince everyone that Sherman had shipped off the women and children and that no one was to speak of the tragedy or the mine. When the men came back from the war, the town elders probably fed them the same bullshit, and as the years passed by, a lie became the truth.

Wren was enthralled and horrified by the story. She and Madge stayed up all night, discussing a new idea: move down to Juliana and investigate the century-old murder—maybe make a podcast about the incident. But then, a few weeks later, Wren discovered she was pregnant as a result of a casual dalliance, and their plans were put on hold.

Wren made the decision to keep the baby and returned home to Juliana. She had the vague but heroic goal of discovering the truth about what had happened in her hometown on her own, this new baby becoming a symbol of sorts of Juliana’s fresh start. For a while, things went well, but then reality hit hard. Wren’s addiction resurfaced with a vengeance, and when Temperance turned three, Lilah insisted Wren move out. Wren traveled for a few years, always returning to Juliana to see her daughter. When she did, she slept in the town square.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Wren was at a low point, financially and emotionally. Madge and her motley group of trustafarian friends, needing to flee New York, came down to Juliana to help Wren out. They all moved into the abandoned Dalzell-Davenport place, where Madge helped Wren wean herself off the pills and convinced her to return to their original mission from those college days—locating the site of the gold mine and blowing the whole story wide open. The podcast they were going to make would take the world by fire. It would be a reckoning with the past. An examination of the enduring theme of the way the privileged class view the working class as expendable. A transgressive, rebellious, beautiful work of art.

Since Wren had gotten nowhere asking questions in town, they would start their investigation by contacting the spirits of the dead women and children. The three Dalzell girls joined them, and a stream of eclectic guests rotated through the house. They bound everyone to secrecy and held séances. Some of the group experienced strange, hallucinatory experiences, which they attributed to psychic phenomena. When Wren found George Davenport’s books and surmised they were living close to the mine, she was ecstatic. She found the spot where they thought the original entrance had been, written on a page in Davenport’s ledger. They were so close to uncovering the story.

Then Wren received the death threat. Two of the Dalzell girls returned to their mother’s place and then a few of the others bugged out as well. Even Madge was getting antsy, stir-crazy, and bored with the podcast idea. She left one night without even saying goodbye.

Wren, alone and scared, came to the terrible conclusion that she had to go, too. Temperance would be safe with Lilah, and when enough time had passed, and the furor had died down, Wren could send for her. Taking only Davenport’s notation of where the mine was located with her—the ripped-out page from the ledger—she hitched rides out to California. Peter, using the phone number Alice gave him, had contacted her out there, explaining who he was and what he suspected about Juliana. She’d come back then, holing up at the Dalzell girls’ house on the outskirts of town.

“Peter knew something was wrong with this place,” Wren said to me now. “Very wrong. I think he believed I was the only person he could trust who would tell the truth.”

“Why did you tell Alice Tilton that story about it being Sherman who’d murdered the women and children?”

“She’s been my best friend since we were kids,” Wren said. “I had to tell her something—what I was doing in the house—but I didn’t know that I could totally trust her. She was dating Jamie Cleburne. If she married him, she’d become one of the old guard. Maybe she’d try to stop us from doing the podcast.”

“Okay, that’s what I still don’t understand,” I asked. “Why would the old guard go to such lengths to keep the truth from coming out? It’s been over a hundred and sixty years. No one’s alive who was involved.”

“I don’t understand it either.”

“But they killed my husband and Deputy Inman and . . .” The realization hit me. “Madge. You think the remains at the mill that Inman found are Madge.”

She nodded.

I held her gaze. “So old guard has murdered three people. But I don’t believe it was to hide some piece of ancient history. I believe they did it because they’re hiding something they’ve done recently.”

“I agree. Something big,” Wren said.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling even worse than I did before. What could be bigger than three murders? I had no idea, but we were about to find out.

Just then, I felt a strange sensation. That of the earth rumbling beneath me, as if it was realigning itself. Swaying and sliding into a new formation. And then, a percussive wave hit us followed by a deafening explosion that rocked the walls around us, showering down rocks and dust on our heads.