Olivia leaned back in her chair. “I knew Kit was a born diplomat the day the children killed Uncle Freddy.”
As she meant, Elise and Kathy looked at her with eyes wide with horror. “Everyone was in hysterics. You see, Kit had been giving the children swimming lessons, but they were forbidden to get in the pond without adult supervision.”
“And Uncle Freddy was an adult.” Kathy was frowning, not sure she wanted to hear this story if it had a tragic ending.
Olivia nodded. “That’s exactly what I said then.”
Chapter Eighteen
Summer Hill, Virginia 1970
Olivia was hanging sheets on the line and Kit was helping her keep them from touching the ground. The washerwoman they’d hired had a sick grandchild so the task had fallen to Olivia. She had a feeling the child wouldn’t be sick if it weren’t change-the-bedding day.
But in the weeks since she and Kit had called a truce, they’d become good at helping each other with chores. They’d worked together to clean up the big kitchen garden. Nina had come over and mumbled about feeling guilty for not helping, but then, as always, she’d run off after Bill.
“‘I’ll bet thee a thousand pounds to a crown we have a boy tomorrow nine month,’” Kit said.
Olivia cracked up because she knew he was quoting from the movie Tom Jones.
It was a very hot day and she and Kit were dressed so differently they may as well have lived in separate countries. Olivia wore long sleeves, her collar up, and a wide-brimmed hat. Her long legs were encased in cotton trousers that reached to her ankles. Kit had on nearly nothing.
“What about your feet?” Kit asked. “They’re open to the sunshine. Doesn’t that scare you?”
“You laugh, but you don’t know what sun does to your skin. When you’re forty you’ll look sixty.”
“And you’ll always look twenty,” he said in such an admiring way that she blushed.
The old men had delighted in teasing her about the way she and Kit were now working together.
“You two have certainly become friends,” Uncle Freddy said.
“I never would have thought that could happen after the way you two started out,” Mr. Gates said.
“I truly believed that our Livie hated young Kit,” Uncle Freddy said.
Letty was confused. “But she cooked a second lunch just for him. I thought she liked him.”
“Did she?” Uncle Freddy asked. “I don’t remember that.”
Mr. Gates agreed. He didn’t remember that either.
“It was the best fried chicken I ever had,” Ace said. “How could you forget that?”
“They didn’t,” Olivia said. “They’re just pulling your leg.”
That phrase made the children’s eyes widen.
She didn’t want to be caught in one of their twenty-minute-long “why” sessions, so she changed the subject. “Who wants strawberry Popsicles?” She narrowed her eyes at the men, but her warning just made them laugh.
It was the next day, as she and Kit were hanging up the laundry, that he heard the screaming. When he dropped one end of the sheet, it scraped the ground.
“Hey!” Olivia said. “I just washed that. You’re going to have to—”
“Quiet!” His voice was a command and in the next second he took off running.
Olivia tossed the sheet into the basket and ran after him. It wasn’t until they’d rounded the trees that she heard the children crying. And there was a low moan of such anguish that it made chills run down her spine. She would have stopped, afraid of what she was about to see, but Kit didn’t slow down.
When she saw the pond, she halted. To her left were the children, clinging to each other and crying loudly. To her right, Mr. Gates was sitting at the edge of the slimy old pond, his legs in the water. Pulled onto him, facedown, like some sea creature dragged up from the depths, was Uncle Freddy. All of him was wet, with nasty pond weeds clinging to him.