Charming Grace Read Online Free Page A

paused. “And so do I.”
    I wasn’t even to Ladyslipper Lost, yet. Just bellowing nervously as I walked. Harp had already become a kind of morbid legend, his missing status written up regularly in our own Dahlonega Nugget weekly newspaper, but also a favorite topic in the big newspapers down in Atlanta and even other major newspapers across the south. Imagine a twelve year old boy fading into the mountains so well even the best hunters and their trained dogs couldn’t find what was left of him.
    Land of Want and Plenty , one terrible urban rag had said, showing a picture of our white-columned mansion at Bagshaw Downs next to a grainy grade-school photo of a lean, unsmiling Harp. For the first time in my life, I knew just how privileged I was. And how unliked.
    I had seen Harp in a dream, sleeping the long sleep among our seductive orchids. The woods closed around me, silent and deep and suddenly revealing I was fully, completely, lost. It was as if the massive old oaks and beeches and hickories and cottonwoods had slyly shifted the earth to which they were anchored, moving that loamy carpet and me with it by subtle degrees, the way the tide moved me along the beach at Daddy and Candace’s summer house down in Florida.
    I walked on, yelling to Harp’s ghost, hearing nothing in return, peering down the hillsides, trying to remember all the instruction G. Helen had given me for finding Ladyslipper Lost. She would have made the trek with me, but she was hostessing the entire family tree of Bagshawnian splendor. On the May weekend of my corpse-hunting expedition about three hundred Bagshaws and Bagshaw relatives from all over the country convened at Bagshaw Downs for the biggest family reunion in American Bagshaw history. It was a safe bet that any Bagshaws still left in England were wishing they’d immigrated back in the early 1800’s, too. If they had they’d be sunning on the lawn behind a porticoed white mansion, eating Swedish meatballs and barbecued ribs washed down with champagne, and dancing to the music of a band trying hard to mimic The Carpenters .
    “You have to watch our Bagshaw kin closely,” G. Helen told me. “They’re far too dignified to steal the silverware, but they will count it and scheme to nab the serving pieces when I die.”
    Step by step I tiptoed into a dappled hollow, pushing aside the branches of tough green laurels much taller than I, peering in rebellious wonder, then gasping with delight. In front of me, the land opened into a broad, deep woodland like something from a fairytale. Soft mounds of brush and the occasional bit of handmade nail or a shred of an old board marked the ruins of gazebos where Victorian Southerners had sipped lemonade and dangled their lewd, bare feet in the springs. Crumbling stone walls circled soft pools of dark water. Somewhere in the nooks of the steep hills around me, the faintest trace of a forgotten buggy road had carried wealthy city ghosts up to the cool mountains to visit their Bagshaw hosts, escaping the muggy heat of Atlanta.
    At Ladyslipper Lost. Here.
    I put both hands to my heart and stared. The forest floor was decorated with the most incredible pink flowers. They resembled their name, delicate little pink slippers no more than a few inches long, each hanging like a Christmas ornament from a graceful green stem about a foot tall. Those stems rose from clusters of large, dark green leaves. Ladyslippers , I whispered. For one or two brief weeks in the enchanted month of May, they treated me to a sight few people got to see. Hundreds of orchids in bloom. “Ladyslippers,” I repeated.
    I advanced into that magical kingdom like a small princess, ten years old, permed auburn hair up in a disco-gold scrunchy, feet clad in high-topped sneakers, the rest of me decked out in little-girl designer jeans and a luxurious silk top from the junior miss racks at Neiman Marcus, down in Atlanta. I stopped suddenly. I saw red on the orchids.
    The brilliant contrast