Nobody
"I wish you'd come with me," Gerard Perrault said, watching his wife drink her coffee. "You can use a break after all that packing and unpacking you did. I'm sure I can get an extra airline ticket for you."
"I'd love to go, but with my gallery show coming up next month, I can't take time away from my work."
Both Erica, an artist, and her architect husband worked out of their home; however, Gerard frequently had to travel to meet with clients. Sometimes he went alone; other times, his wife accompanied him. Until recently, the couple lived in a Manhattan high rise with a security guard on duty twenty-four hours a day. Two weeks earlier, they moved into a restored Mississippi plantation house that was surrounded by nearly five hundred acres of what had once been cotton fields but were now meadows and woodlands.
"I hate to leave you here all alone. Maybe I should postpone the trip," he offered.
"Don't worry about me. I'll be fine. That security system you had installed here will keep everyone out."
"Maybe we shouldn't have moved so far away from the town."
"Stop with the regrets!" Erica chided him. "You spent almost a year making this old place a showcase. It's perfect for us! You've got your home office, and I've got my studio. And let's face it, living in the country is bound to be much safer than living in New York."
The following morning, Gerard put his luggage in the cargo area of his SUV and kissed his wife goodbye.
"I'll call you when I get to the airport."
"Be safe."
"It's your safety I'm worried about, not mine."
"I'll be here behind locked doors. You'll be flying more than five hundred miles an hour in a plane thirty-five thousand feet in the air."
"When you put it that way ...," he laughed and leaned in for another kiss.
"You'd better get going. You don't want to miss your flight."
One last embrace and he was gone. When Erica returned to the house, she realized it was the first time she had ever been alone inside. The moment the door closed behind her she felt a sense of anticipation as though something momentous was about to happen.
"I must be getting nervous about the opening of my show," she reasoned. "Speaking of which, I'd better get to work."
She headed up to the master bedroom to change into her unofficial uniform: ripped jeans and an old T-shirt that was already stained with paint. As she passed by the antique cheval mirror in the corner of the room, she caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a young man.
"What the ...?"
During the time it took to utter those two words, the reflection changed. The man was gone, and the artist was looking at her own face and figure.
"Great! Gerard hasn't even reached the highway yet, and already the solitude is affecting me."
Determined not to be the kind of woman who cowers when no man is around to protect her, Erica pulled her hair back into a ponytail and headed for her studio.
* * *
A dozen completed paintings leaned against the walls of the huge, well-lit atelier. The only work-in-progress rested on an easel in the center of the room. A small table, covered with paint tubes, brushes and palettes, stood beside it. Like the finished pieces, the one she was currently working on was inspired by the cubism movement. Geometric shapes—squares, rectangles, triangles, circles and rhombi—of various vibrant colors represented aspects of the theme of her show: Paris nightlife during the 1920s. The subject of her current painting was Josephine Baker, the African-American singer and dancer who once headlined at the Folies Bergère.
With Édith Piaf playing on her stereo to set the proper mood, Erica put fresh paint on her palette and picked up a brush. She turned to face the canvas and was startled to see the face of a handsome young man rather than the Picasso-like shapes that were meant to represent Josephine Baker. Although the image vanished within moments, she recognized it as the same face she had seen in her cheval mirror.
Many people would fear for their sanity if they were "seeing things" but not Erica. She was an artist and viewed the experience as nothing more than a flash of inspiration.
Despite wanting to have her entire Evening in Paris collection finished in time for the opening of her show, she removed the incomplete painting from the easel and replaced it with a blank canvas. The portrait she began to outline would be done in a more traditional style rather than cubism. The subject was to be a striking young man with dark hair and blue eyes. Although she had only gotten two brief glimpses of his face, every feature was ingrained in her memory.
Once the rough sketch was done, she squirted flesh-colored oils on a clean palette. Finally, picking up a new brush, she began to paint. It was as though each brushstroke was guided by an unknown hand. Unlike her cubism artwork, she took great pains to achieve an actual likeness despite having no live model posing in front of her. These painstaking attempts at accuracy tired her, and by midmorning, she was exhausted.
I need some sleep, she thought and put her palette and brush on the table.
Normally an energetic person, Erica had not taken a nap during the day since she was five years old. Admittedly, she had been working harder than usual lately. In addition to the Josephine Baker painting, there were three others she hoped to paint in time for her show. One would feature the windmill above the Moulin Rouge, another would be of two people sitting at a sidewalk café and the last would be the most iconic symbol of Paris, the Eiffel Tower.
With the gallery opening two months away, finishing one painting and creating three more was an ambitious undertaking. After all, the great Picasso took roughly three weeks to do a single painting. And now, she was working on a portrait of an unknown man, a work that would not fit into her Evening in Paris collection.
After sleeping through lunch, the artist woke up at two o'clock and made herself a cup of strong coffee. Still tired, she had another.
"I need to get back to work. I've got so much to do yet."
Erica was rinsing out her Starry Night coffee cup in the sink when she heard the doorbell ring. Rather than go to the foyer to answer, she did so from her phone.
"Yes," she said into the video doorbell app.
There was no reply, so she looked at the screen. A brief flash of a face appeared. It was that of the same man she had seen twice before. She ran to the foyer and threw the front door open but saw no one on the veranda, the front lawn or the driveway.
"He's obviously a figment of my imagination. But how can an imaginary person ring a doorbell?"
* * *
The following day, Erica forced herself to put aside the young man's portrait and work on the Josephine Baker painting. Thankfully, she was able to paint most of the day, stopping only for lunch and bathroom breaks. It was quite different from the previous day when she could only paint for brief intervals before exhausting herself.
Still, as she dabbed bright reds, blues and yellows onto the white canvas, her eyes frequently strayed to the portrait standing against the wall. All she had managed to paint was the flesh of his face and neck. Since there was no hair, eyes, nose or mouth, it looked as though it were a portrait of a ghost rather than a living man.
She painted long into the evening without tiring. It was nearly midnight when she forced herself to stop.
"I don't want to overdo it. Besides, I'll probably finish Josephine tomorrow or the day after at the latest."
After a hot bath and a glass of wine, Erica went to bed. Her dreams were haunted by the face of a young man with dark hair and blue eyes, that same handsome face that seemed to be playing a bizarre game of hide and seek with her for the past two days.
Late the following evening, after painting the yellow trapezoids that were meant to represent Ms. Baker's iconic banana skirt, the artist stepped back from the easel and pronounced her work complete. Rather than start on the Moulin Rouge's windmill, she decided to call it a day.
"I'm going to throw a frozen dinner into the microwave, check my email and then stream a movie before I go to bed."
On both the computer and television screens, she caught a glimpse of the handsome stranger. In the past, she had "seen" images in her mind that she later put on canvas, but never one that seemed so persistent. Artists often go through periods. Picasso famously went through his blue period, his rose period and his African period. Was her subconscious mind inspiring her to switch from cubism to realism? Was she now to take a "warts and all" approach to art?
"My handsome stranger doesn't have warts," she laughed. "His face is beautiful like that of a Raphael Madonna."
Having browsed her movie choices on Netflix, she chose a foreign thriller, dubbed in English. Five minutes into the movie, the phone rang. It was Gerard. No big surprise there; he had called her three times already that day; six times the day before and five times the day before that. After twenty minutes of mundane conversation, her husband finally said goodnight.
"I don't know why he calls so often. All he does is tell me how much he misses me and warn me to keep the door locked. I hope he doesn't behave this way every time he goes on a business trip from now on."
Although it was only ten o'clock, Erica went to bed after the movie came to an end. She wanted to be well-rested when she began to work on her Moulin Rouge windmill. Moments after she placed her head on the pillow, she fell asleep. The next nine hours she spent in the company of the handsome stranger. He spoke not a word to her, but his eyes were warm and full of love.
"What a dream!" she exclaimed when her eyes fluttered open in the morning.
As she lay awake in bed, she felt the same sense of loss and longing she sometimes experienced when she came to the last page of a good book or the credits of a great movie she did not want to end. She closed her eyes, and his face readily came to her.
The strident ring of her cell phone broke her concentration.
"Why are you calling so early?" she demanded to know.
"Did I wake you?" Gerard asked.
"Yes, you did. I was up late last night working, and I barely got any sleep," she lied.
"I'm sorry. Why don't I call you later?"
Without waiting for a tender goodbye, she ended the call. Her previous mood was broken beyond repair, so she got out of bed to start her day.
* * *
For close to an hour, Erica stared at the blank canvas, trying to imagine brightly colored geometric shapes joining together to form a windmill. When she first envisioned the Evening in Paris collection, she had definite ideas of how each completed painting would look. Now, however, she was second-guessing herself.
"What's wrong with me?" the frustrated artist wondered. "If I were a writer, it would be called writer's block. But is there such a thing as painter's block?"
Hoping to clear her head, she put on a pair of comfortable shoes and headed toward the backyard, what Gerard jokingly referred to as "the lower forty." As she walked along a path through trees and overgrown bushes, she attempted to visualize what the land would have looked like before the Civil War brought an end to slavery. She wondered how much of it was devoted to cotton and how much, if any, was set aside for food crops and ornamental gardens.
Lost in her reverie, she nearly tripped over a section of wrought iron fence that was lying on the ground, a relic from the plantation's antebellum past. Just beyond the fence were more than a dozen headstones.
"This must have been the family graveyard," she surmised.
All the people buried there shared the same last name: Roundtree. Furthermore, all had been buried before 1861. She wondered if the family lost its home during Reconstruction or if the last Roundtree male was killed during the war. Seeing the grave of a child who died at the age of three saddened her.
"I must think happy thoughts," she told herself. "Jazz music, the Folies Bergère, the lights of Paris ...."
One headstone stood roughly twenty feet away from the others. There were no graves beside it, giving the final resting spot the impression that the person buried there was being ostracized. Could it be the black sheep of the Roundtree family?
Erica drew nearer to the stone, wanting to read the epitaph written on it. The engraved words, barely legible after more than a century and a half, sent a chill down the artist's spine.
Here lies the body of a man who died.
Nobody mourned. Nobody cried.
How he lived. How he fared.
Nobody knows. Nobody cared.
"What a cruel thing to put on someone's headstone! Even if the man was a stranger to the Roundtrees, wouldn't a simple UNKNOWN be kinder? Hell! An unmarked grave would be more respectful than this!"
But why would someone go through the trouble of burying a stranger in the family graveyard? Plantations had separate burying grounds for their slaves. Why not bury the stranger there? The answer was obvious. The stranger must have been a white man, possibly even a Yankee soldier who had met his end on Roundtree land.
Erica was intrigued by the possibility. She imagined a poor young soldier, barely out of his teens, dying on a Mississippi plantation, far away from home. A frightened youngster with only strangers to ....
"Strangers! Like the face I've been seeing for the past few days."
What if that handsome face was not one created by her artistic mind? What if he was the spirit of the young man buried beneath that pitiless headstone?
We have a graveyard on our property, she mused. Do we also have a ghost in our house?
* * *
Although Erica managed to sketch the rough outline of the Moulin Rouge windmill on her canvas, despite giving it her best effort, she could not decide on the shapes she would use to construct it. Two things kept intruding on her mind: the face of the handsome stranger and the grave of the unknown man.
"I must know more about them. Maybe, once the mystery is solved, I can concentrate on my work."
Ignoring her ringing cell phone, she went to Gerard's home office and turned on his computer. A Google search of the family name Roundtree produced more than fifteen million results, so she narrowed the field by typing in the name of the Mississippi town where the plantation was located. That lowered the number to a million and a half. Adding the word graveyard, cut that number by more than half. However, four hundred thousand links were still way too many to search.
After visiting more than a hundred web pages and finding nothing about the unusual grave, she gave up the Internet search. Hoping local sources would have more information, she found the addresses of the town newspaper, the public library and the county historical association before shutting down the computer.
Still wearing her torn jeans and stained T-shirt, she grabbed her handbag and keys. As she backed her car out of the garage, the face of the stranger momentarily appeared in her rearview camera.
"I'll find out who you are if it's the last thing I do!"
The only useful article in the newspaper archives was one written in 1954 and concerned the plantation itself. The original house on the property was built in 1790. As the Roundtree family prospered and grew in number, renovations were made and additions were built. Once it reached its current size in 1822, it was christened Magnolia Manor. In 1830, Hamish Roundtree died, and the house was passed on to his son, Seamus. When the Civil War broke out, Seamus's son, Charles, enlisted in the Confederate Army. Sadly, his eventual fate was never learned.
Could it be Charles's grave she had seen? Had he somehow angered his father so much that, despite being buried in the family graveyard, his remains would not be identified by name? What could he have done that would bring him such disgrace?
"He might have deserted," Erica theorized. "In the heat of battle, he could have turned his tail and run home. But then, how did he die? Did someone at Magnolia Manor kill him for his cowardice? Or did he lose his life in a so-called duel of honor?"
Thus, the puzzled artist left the newspaper office with more questions and no definitive answers.
Her next stop was the library where she found a book on Mississippi genealogy authored by a historian from Natchez. While many prominent local families had several pages devoted to them, there was scant information about the Roundtrees. It consisted of only three generations: Hamish; his wife, Beulah; Seamus and his wife, Justina; and Charles who married a woman named Varina Culp in 1858. The only other reference material she found was a book on the architecture of the Old South. It contained a photo and a description of Magnolia Manor, but nothing was written about the family who built it.
Her cell phone rang again as she pulled into the historical association's parking lot. She saw her husband's name on the caller ID and turned off her phone.
"Sorry, honey, but I've got no time for banalities now."
Odessa Runyan, the retired history teacher who manned the front desk, proved most helpful.
"We have several items that belonged to the Roundtree family," the elderly woman proudly declared.
"I don't suppose you have any family portraits?" Erica asked hopefully.
"No, we don't. They must have been removed when that damned Yankee carpetbagger bought the place. Sorry," Odessa said, remembering she was speaking to a woman from New York. "I didn't mean ...."
"Don't worry," the artist assured her. "I'm not offended."
"Anyway, a man from Boston bought Magnolia Manor after the war. He must have removed the portraits, and God only knows what he did with them. Once he died, the place became a school for young ladies. It remained an educational institution until the 1930s when it was closed during the Great Depression. After that, the plantation went through several owners, none of whom stayed very long."
Could it be because the house is haunted? Erica wondered.
"One of them did, however, find a box of Varina Roundtree's items in the attic and generously donated them to our association."
Odessa led the way to a glass curio case. Most of the exhibits on display were of a personal nature: a hair comb, a pin cushion, a necklace, a porcelain teacup and a matching saucer.
"What's that book?" the artist asked.
"Varina's diary."
"May I see it?"
"Yes, but it mustn't leave this room. You can sit at the table and read it, but please be careful. It's old and the pages are delicate."
Like most young women, Varina filled her diary with romantic and often silly notions about life and love. Born and raised on a sugar cane plantation in Louisiana, she met Charles Roundtree when he was on a business trip to New Orleans. They fell in love, and a year later she was on her way to Magnolia Manor to be married. Erica was disappointed that the bride-to-be gave no physical description of the man she claimed to love.
Since there were less than ten pages left in the diary, the reader was not optimistic about finding the answers she sought. Still, she forced herself to keep reading. One of the remaining pages was devoted to describing the grandeur of the plantation, two to how nice her future in-laws were and five to the preparations for the wedding. The last two pages caught and held Erica's attention. According to the bride, a strange man entered the house during the ceremony.
"The poor man was quite mad!" Varina wrote, "He claimed I was his wife, yet he was a complete stranger to me!"
"Was I wrong in assuming that the handsome stranger was Charles Roundtree? Could he have been that insane man who interrupted the couple's wedding instead?"
"The deranged lunatic then tried to grab me by the arm and drag me away," Varina continued. "It's no wonder that ...."
That was all there was. Erica had come to the end of the diary. She returned the book to the curio cabinet and went in search of Odessa Runyan.
"Have you read that diary?" she asked the old woman.
"Yes. Why do you ask?"
"The last entry ended so abruptly. I need to know what happened at the wedding ceremony."
"I believe a madman broke into the house."
"Yes, but what happened after that?"
"All I know was what I read in the diary."
* * *
When Erica returned home, she went straight to her studio. She removed the canvas with the pencil outline of the Moulin Rouge windmill and replaced it with the portrait of the handsome stranger. Satisfied with the skin tones of his face and neck, she began to work on the dark hair, giving it subtle highlights with a lighter shade of brown.
The artist's brush made repeated journeys from palette to canvas as the portrait grew in detail. Once the hair was completed, she switched from brown shades to blue and added his eyes. By the time she was ready to paint his mouth, the sun had set. She was not aware of the passage of time, however. Her mind was focused solely on completing the portrait.
She was squeezing more paint onto her palette when the studio door burst open. Her head popped up in surprise to see her husband in the doorway.
"What are you doing home?" she asked, annoyed by the intrusion.
"I've been calling you all day!" he cried. "But I kept getting your voicemail."
"I was busy, so I turned my phone off."
"Too busy to check your messages? I was worried sick about ...." His eyes had gone from her face to the canvas on the easel. "What is that?"
"It's a portrait."
"I know that. But why are you painting it? What happened to the Evening in Paris collection you were going to show at the gallery?"
Erica had no time for a full explanation, so she gave him a truncated one.
"This is the face of the ghost that haunts this house."
"Ghost? What are you talking about?"
Intent on finishing her work, she turned her back on her husband and continued painting the mouth.
"There's also a strange headstone out in the family graveyard."
"You've obviously been working too hard," Gerard declared, fearing for his wife's mental health. "You need a break. Maybe we can go away for a few days. I don't ...."
Having made her last brushstroke and completed the portrait, the artist stood back to examine her work and suddenly vanished. The journey back in time was so sudden that Erica was unaware it had happened. One moment she was standing in her studio, wearing ripped jeans and a paint-stained T-shirt, and the next she was in a ballroom, dressed in an elaborate antebellum gown.
"Are you all right, my love?"
She turned and looked up at the face of the man standing beside her.
"It's you!" she cried, immediately recognizing the dark hair and blue eyes.
"Yes, it's me," he laughed uneasily. "Who were you expecting?"
"Shall we get on with the ceremony?"
The full realization then struck Erica. The second man was a minister. The handsome stranger was the groom of a wedding, and she was the bride.
"Am I Varina Culp?" she asked.
"Yes, but you'll soon be Varina Roundtree."
"How did I get here?" she asked herself.
"Do you, Charles, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?" the minister asked.
Erica's anxiety grew as the white-haired clergyman droned on with the usual "for richer or pooror, in sickness and in health" rigamarole.
"I do," the handsome bridegroom replied, looking down adoringly at her.
What do I do now? I can't go through with this; I'm already married.
"And do you, Varina, take this man ...."
The reverend's question was cut short when an uninvited guest suddenly barged into the ballroom. Friends, neighbors and family members were awed by his appearance. He still wore a pair of Tom Ford jeans, a Ralph Lauren shirt and Nike sneakers.
"Get your hands off her!" Gerard screamed.
Seamus, the groom's father and master of Magnolia Manor, confronted him.
"Who are you, sir? And what do you mean by disrupting my son's wedding?"
"I don't know how she got here, but she's not marrying your son. She's my wife."
Seamus turned to his bride and asked, "Do you know this fellow?"
Although torn between the two men, Erica saw the pain in Charles's eyes and made her choice.
"I've never seen him before."
"Erica! It's me, your husband. You must remember me. We were married in Manhattan, right after you sold your first painting back in 2018."
"This man is clearly mad!" the groom exclaimed.
"Darling, none of this is real," Gerard insisted. "These people are all ghosts. They died more than a hundred and fifty years ago."
"You're insane!" she cried.
Although several of the male guests tried to restrain him, the twenty-first-century architect was intent on reaching his wife. Sheriff Deacon Cleghorn, who was a close friend of the Roundtree family, stepped in.
"Come along now," he ordered.
"Let go of me!" Gerard shouted and broke free.
Moments later, he had hold of Erica's arm. Sheriff Cleghorn, believing the bride was in danger, took out his gun and shot the intruder.
* * *
"I do."
With Gerard dead, Erica felt no qualms about taking her vows. She knew it was 1858 and that the Civil War would begin in three years, but she didn't care if her happiness was to be short-lived. Her overwhelming love for Charles would not be denied—not by the coming war or the century and a half that had previously separated them.
The following day at breakfast, Samson, one of the Roundtrees' most trusted slaves, asked to speak to his master. The body of the madman had been dragged outside after the shooting, and he wanted to know what was to be done with it.
"Put him in the family graveyard," Seamus replied.
"With our relatives?" Charles asked with surprise.
"We can't bury him with the slaves," his father insisted. "Mad or not, the man was white."
"All right, but I insist you put him as far away from Mother's resting place as possible."
"Take care of that, Samson," the master ordered.
The slave buried Gerard Perrault—still wearing his blood-stained Tom Ford jeans, Ralph Lauren shirt and Nike sneakers—in a plain pine box in the farthest corner of the family graveyard.
After returning from her honeymoon in New Orleans, Erica—now going by the name of Varina—suggested a stone be placed above the madman's remains.
"He couldn't help it if he was insane," she reasoned.
"We'll need a name for the stone. Who was he?" Charles wondered.
"Who knows?" his father said. "Who cares?"
"Nobody, I suppose," the widowed former artist replied, feeling a twinge of guilt over her betrayal.
Nobody but me.
This story was inspired by the writing on an actual gravestone.
No, Salem, Picasso did not go through a "cat period."
