Free The Bracelet by Dorothy Love Page B

Square and headed for the river, where the crowd had gathered for the fireworks.
    Celia shifted her basket to her other arm. “I should know you, too, but I don’t.”
    “Our fathers know each other from Commerce Row. I’ve been away at school every year since I was seven, and my family spends most summers in Europe. I like traveling around and seeing new places, but my mother complains that we are hardly ever at home in Savannah.”
    They stood together on the crowded wharf as the first fireworks exploded above the dark waters of the river and the onlookers broke into applause.
    “I can prove it, you know,” he said.
    “Prove what?” She glanced up at the gray-eyed, curly-haired boy who stood a head taller than she.
    “That the Screven’s Landing haint is real.”
    “Sutton Mackay, are you trying to scare me? Because it won’t work.”
    “Good. If you aren’t afraid, then you won’t mind coming with me.”
    She sucked in a breath. “You’re going over there now? In the dark?”
    “Of course. That’s when the haints come out.” He stepped back and grinned down at her. “Come on. I’ll row us over.”
    “I can’t. My father will expect me home soon.”
    “We can get there and back in an hour.”
    Celia hesitated for only a moment. Something about this boy spoke to her girlish heart. He was courteous. Smart too. And he would be an extraordinarily handsome man one day, if his muscles ever filled out his skinny frame. Her father knew his, so it wasn’t as if she were heading off with a total stranger. And for some reason she found it important to impress him. “All right. But we can’t stay long.”
    “Come on.” The boy grabbed her hand, and they wove through the crowd to a short wooden pier near the offices on Commerce Row. Instinctively Celia glanced up at the darkened windows of her father’s office overlooking the Port of Savannah. From time to time he allowed her to visit to watch the activity on the wharves, where the noise of men loading cotton and timber onto snows and schooners and the screech of railway cars mingled with the piercing whistles of steamships coming up the river from Boston, New York, and New Orleans.
    “Here we are,” Sutton said above the pop-pop-pop of fireworks still raining red and green sparkles into the water. He jumped into a small skiff tethered to a wooden piling and helped her into the boat. He cast off and began to row toward the landing on the South Carolina side of the river. An autumn breeze ruffled the surface of the water awash in moonlight.
    “You ever been to the landing before?” he asked.
    “Once or twice with my father.” She remembered the narrow corduroy road that led through the swampy Carolina lowlands, the slaves working in vast rice fields separated by a network of dikes and ditches. The smell of pluff mud in the tidal creek. The unrelenting sun.
    “But not at night, I bet.”
    “No.” Now that they were in the middle of the river in the dead of night, she was frightened, sorry she had agreed to such a silly adventure. To quell her nerves she took a chocolate bonbon from her basket and popped it into her mouth.
    Sutton pulled smoothly on the oars. “You got any more chocolate?”
    She proffered the basket and he chose a piece. “Thanks.”
    Celia looked up as a muted roar rose from the wharf. The last of the fireworks shot into the darkness. Now the crowd would disperse. Her friends would wonder what had happened to her. Papa and Mrs. Maguire would expect her home. “Sutton, we have to go back.”
    “Why? Getting scared?”
    “No. It was wrong of me to go running off without getting Papa’s permission. He will be worried if I’m not home on time.”
    “We’re almost there. We’ll wait five minutes, and if we don’t see the haint, we’ll start straight home.”
    Moments later she felt the boat bumping the landing. Sutton tied off the skiff and helped her onto the bank. Moonlight illuminated the deserted road. Insects trilled in