Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of a serialized novel we will publish over the next four months, with new chapters posted on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Echoes Below

Rebecca sat cross-legged in the cabin of the Yazoo Freshet on Tuesday morning, her laptop balanced on her knees, her headset microphone pulled down over an Augusta Greenjackets baseball cap. Outside, the waters of Clarks Hill Lake were calm, glassy under a deepening August sky, a hush broken only by the distant sputter of a fishing boat leaving the dock.

She clicked the RECORD button on the laptop screen.

“From the edge of the forgotten South, this is High Water with Rebecca Troy, the podcast that surfaces stories long buried, often painted in sepia tones, sometimes soaked in memory and silt.”

Her voice was steady, though her hands weren’t.

“Today, I’m speaking to you once again from my sailboat moored here at Fort Charlotte Marina, in McCormick County, South Carolina. If you’ve been following High Water for a while, you know I’ve talked about this place before, just yesterday in fact. Not just because I live here, but because beneath these waters lies something that seems to dance effortlessly between historical truth and regional mythology.”

She paused, adjusted the gain on her recorder slightly.

“Fort Charlotte is not a landmark you’ll find on most maps hanging in high school history classrooms. In the years before the American Revolution, it was a lonely British outpost on the western frontier — a fort built near the Savannah River, manned by redcoats ostensibly to protect inland settlers.”

Rebecca looked down at her script.

“In 1775, it became the site of the first armed British surrender in South Carolina, maybe in all the Southern colonies, depending on who you ask. And then, over time, it became something else entirely. Almost forgotten. A footnote in the history of America’s fight for independence. Submerged literally.”

She tapped her fingers softly against the hull beside her, like a heartbeat.

“In the 1950s, the U.S. government completed construction of Clarks Hill Dam, flooding nearly 71,000 acres to form what we now know as Lake Thurmond. I still refer to the reservoir as Clarks Hill Lake because I’m old-school and stubborn like that. Whole towns were swallowed by rising water. Graveyards moved. Roads rerouted. And whatever remained of Fort Charlotte? It vanished beneath the rising lake.”

Rebecca leaned back and closed her eyes as she spoke.

“But here’s the thing about history: it leaves fingerprints. The lake might’ve eclipsed the fort, but eclipsed isn’t the same as disappeared. Sometimes the past pushes up from wherever it rests like a fallen tree breaching the surface in a shallow cove.”

She opened her eyes, glanced at the lake through the small round porthole.

“What I want to talk about today is what Fort Charlotte meant – and what it didn’t. To dig deeper into that question, I found myself yesterday afternoon in a town not too far from here, a place that tourism brochures proudly proclaim as ‘the Birthplace and Deathbed of the Confederacy.’”

Her voice tightened slightly, her reporter instincts awakening.

“I traveled the 15 miles or so to Abbeville because for all its Revolutionary War significance, Fort Charlotte here in McCormick County has been co-opted over the years by those who would tie it to a very different story — one soaked not in rebellion against a tyrannical monarch, but in loyalty to a cause best left lost.”

Rebecca once again glanced at her script and swallowed hard. “Fort Charlotte is somehow the focal point for a Civil War legend layered over colonial truth, a curious tale wrapped in myth and mystery and speculation, and, in some cases, guarded fiercely by folks who simply do not want their version of the narrative challenged.”

She stopped recording for a moment, hit the SAVE button, then sat staring out at the lake. That part of journalism always made her throat dry, calling out misinformed and misguided souls she still had to live among. But she knew what she’d heard the day before from the old man on the square in Abbeville, and she knew what she had seen with her own eyes during her years as a truth-teller.

A few years earlier, when she was still pounding the pavement for the Dispatch, she decided to write about a Ku Klux Klan rally on the upper edge of Edgefield County, not too far from the Saluda County line. The organizers had tacked hand-lettered flyers around the county and promised hundreds of attendees, a “massive show of Southern heritage and pride.”

What materialized were maybe eight good ol’ boys in wife-beaters and muddy boots, drinking cheap beer out of styrofoam coolers and arguing over whose turn it was to man the grill. They lit a bonfire in the middle of a cow pasture and nobody even bothered to wear their white robe-and-hood.

Local sheriff’s deputies stood by their cruisers at a distance with their arms folded, expressionless. There were no counter-protests, no vans from the Augusta TV stations, no other journalists besides Rebecca. Just a lot of smoke, racist and antisemitic epithets bellowed over Hank Williams Jr. and Lynyrd Skynyrd playing too loudly from a dollar-store boom box on an open tailgate, and secondhand rage that fizzled into nothing before nine o’clock.

Rebecca remembered the scent of lighter fluid and Miller Lite in the air as she drove away, windows rolled up tight, not a single usable quote in her notebook. She didn’t even bother to write the story and deleted the photos from her camera.

Shaking off the memory, Rebecca stared at the blinking cursor on the laptop screen, listening to the creak of the sailboat as the water shifted against the hull. She wondered if this time she should delete the podcast file on her laptop and move on to another topic.

Whenever she tackled racism and history on the podcast — and the tangled ways they still haunt the present — she always thought of her father. Not because he talked about such things often and openly. Quite the opposite.

It was what he didn’t say that left the biggest impression. His wisdom on the topic was embedded in what he preached with carefully chosen scripture and a slight, knowing look in the pauses between verses.

The Rev. Dylan Troy began his preaching career in 1964, the same year three civil rights workers were murdered by the Klan in Mississippi. Rebecca remembered once, when she was still only a girl, she overheard him tell her mother, “The church is supposed to be the conscience of the community, but sometimes I think it’s the blindfold.”

The Rev. Troy wasn’t the kind of preacher who marched at rallies or courted headlines on the front page of the local paper. He wasn’t usually fiery or confrontational, but he didn’t lie either. And he certainly didn’t pander to the lowest common denominator of human nature.

In the early years of his ministry, he traveled from town to town, a roving evangelist with a King James Bible in one hand and a pair of leather boots on his feet that tracked east Georgia clay through every sanctuary he entered. Rebecca always imagined her father as a young man to be a ’60s throwback to the Southern circuit riders from bygone days – something of a retail prophet who could keep tent revivals enthralled with his booming voice and command of the Bible then counsel those who came to him after the sermons looking for private salvation with a soft voice and a sly sense of humor.

Before he led a church of his own, “Pastor Dylan,” as so many people called him, carried the Gospel to farmers, widows, mechanics, insurance agents, and Korean War veterans who folded their arms and listened for any reason to stop listening to a young preacher who wore his hair just barely down over his ears. And yet, even in churches where nobody wanted to hear preaching about “those people,” he found ways to say what needed saying about what was unraveling in America as Vietnam raged in Southeast Asia and as followers of Dr. King marched on Washington.

Rebecca never heard her father utter the word “racism” from the pulpit. That likely would’ve gotten him kicked out of the church or worse. But he preached the parable of the Good Samaritan with a slight edge in his voice that did turn a few heads. He chose Scripture that with great subtlety made people uncomfortable slowly, gently, methodically, like pebbles placed in their shoes.

He used to say, “You don’t break a man’s heart open with a hammer. You warm it with the truth until it cracks on its own.”

Rebecca had only truly begun to understand the power of that message in her thirties, maybe not fully until after her father died. And she still wrestled with that wisdom today in her fifties.

She had traveled the opposite direction in her own philosophy of essential communication – first in her investigative reporting and now in her podcast – with all the subtlety of a bulldozer. She called things exactly as she saw them. Racism, lies, revisionist history all were fair game for an occasional tongue-lashing on High Water with Rebecca Troy.

Such bravado had cost her dearly. Her father, she now realized, had spent his whole life saying the same things she did, just in the key of grace instead of fury.

Rebecca sat in the hush of the cabin, breathing in the familiar scent of lake water and warm wood. She could almost hear the Rev. Dylan Troy’s voice from a recording of an old sermon, the cadence soft but resolute:

“We are not called to comfort. We are called to clarity. And clarity is a kind of light that sometimes comes gently in the night.”

She rose to refill her coffee, thinking maybe that’s what she was trying to do, too — even if her version of clarity came with a sharper edge. Even if it provoked and scared people. Even if it scared her occasionally.

After a brief nap, Rebecca hit RECORD again. She spoke for another 13 minutes on what she knew about Fort Charlotte with absolute certainty and what she had seen in historical documents and heard other people say about the enduring legend of Confederate gold left at the ruined fort by a vanquished Confederate president running for his life.

Winding down the episode, her voice softened and almost echoed her father’s familiar, well-practiced cadence from his years in the pulpit. “History isn’t fragile,” she said. “But it is political. And what we preserve, what we ignore — that says more about us than it does about the past.”

A long silence held.

“I’ll be talking in future episodes with local historians, archaeologists, and yes, some of the critics who say the mysteries buried with Fort Charlotte under the waters of Clarks Hill Lake should be left alone. If you have an opinion on this issue or a story to share, my inbox is open.”

A pause.

“Until next time, stay curious. Stay brave. And remember — sometimes the water rises not to bury the truth, but to bring it back up.”

Rebecca hit stop on the recorder. The file saved with a quiet ding, and Rebecca stared at the screen for a long moment, wondering whether to hit delete after all, before reaching for the cold cup of coffee beside her.

No mention of Geoffrey. Not yet. No mention of the artifact he had shown her during their rushed catfish lunch at Hickory Knob State Park.

But the door had been opened. And not too far from the deck of the Yazoo Freshet, something was already moving under the surface.

Next up: Dispatch From The Past