Free Not Quite Right (A Lowcountry Mystery) (Lowcountry Mysteries Book 6) by Lyla Payne Page A

fifteenth birthday and stop on an entry that takes place in the late summer:

    16 August, 1899

    The heat is so suffocating that there’s no benefit to being indoors. The entire family has taken to sleeping out on the piazza on pallets, which means little chance of my sneaking away to see James, but the slightest breeze through the pecan and oak trees brings immeasurable relief. It’s afternoon now, when the heat becomes visible in waves hovering above the packed dirt on the lane and the grasses in the field.
    James and I meet across the river, some distance from my family home, toward the place that once belonged to the Middleton family. They still own the land, I suppose, but the Union army burned most of the house. When I think about the marvelous library the Middletons had amassed, volumes brought from all over the world, my heart feels its loss. Why would men burn books? Why ruin valuable antiques and put a beautiful home to the torch, instead of using those things to their advantage?
    So much about the war makes little sense to my girlish head. At least, that’s why Charles Jr. says I don’t understand—because men do things when their blood boils that their heads can’t make sense of, either. He doesn’t know much about women, I don’t think, because sometimes the unfairness of this world makes me so hot I’d like to strip naked and swim in the river like a wild child, just to show people the angels won’t rain down hellfire because of it.
    I don’t see why God would put people on this earth and make them different colors just to keep us apart. We’re all his children, that’s what the Good Book says. We’re to love one another—who’s to say what kind of love he means? My daddy? My mama? The preacher? Surely not.
    All I know is that the pure, undiluted joy that pummels me at the sight of James rowing across our little branch of the Cooper River cannot be wrong. It cannot be a sin to love another person so much that you’d do anything for them, that you’d die to keep them from hurting.  
    “I’d rather live alone on this plantation my whole life than pretend to love someone other than you,” I told James this afternoon, my eyes so starry he blurred around the edges.
    He’s so beautiful. I don’t think he believes how he appears to me, no matter how many times I tell him. It vexes me how no one else can see it—not Bessie and certainly not Charles Jr., though he loves James almost as much as I do. As if such a thing were possible.
    “I don’t want to think about you alone, Charlie.” He always calls me Charlie. It’s his particular name for me, regardless of the fact that Papa and Bessie often shorten my name to Lottie in affection.
    I think it’s because of his mama, though he doesn’t much like to talk about her.  
    His mouth turned down at the edges as he contemplated the future drawing nearer to both of us by the day. I longed to turn his lips up into a smile. I long to do other things with his lips, things Mama would flog me for thinking, but there’s no way to stop. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t.
    “You’d rather think of me loving someone else? Even if it’s pretend?”
    “No. I don’t want to think about tomorrow at all.”
    I know James wants to go to school up north. He doesn’t want to be a worker, or a sharecropper, or anything else that colored people are allowed to do around here now that the North won the war. He’s smart. He has ambition, and I love him for it. But I know it will take him away.
    He knows it, too.
    What he doesn’t know is that I’m going to run away with him. No one does. It’s a secret, warm in my heart like the flicker of a new candle growing stronger with each breath of oxygen I provide. I want to hold it there for a while longer, nurture it into a fire so strong and so bright that no amount of blustering or tears can snuff it out.
    “Let’s not think about tomorrow, then. Let’s talk about right now,” I told this boy in the