Songbird Cottage

by Barbara Cool Lee

  He picked up the obituaries again. "And this is what you found."

  "Yes. A woman who was killed and left behind a little girl named Robin, who was my age. And from there, I was able to find my father, who was mentioned in her death notice."

  "But this is the Fairfield newspaper," he said, looking at the page.

  "Yes. My father was an airman at Travis Air Force Base near there. My mother worked as an elementary school librarian." She pulled out more pages from her thick folder. "This is a profile of her in the school paper. She talks about how she and her husband had no family of their own, since they had both been orphaned, and how she had wanted to work with kids because a kind teacher had helped her when she was in foster care."

  "So there aren't any other relatives," he said. He sounded disappointed.

  "Yeah," she said. "That was the end of the line. I couldn't trace my family beyond that."

  He sat back in his chair. "But I don't get it."

  "What part?"

  "There's no connection to Pajaro Bay."

  The waitress came to clear their plates. "She needs flourless chocolate cake," he told the server without bothering to ask Robin.

  She smiled wanly. "Yes. As a matter of fact, I do."

  When the plate with the gooey chocolate dessert was placed in front of her, he asked, "so how does the cottage connect to all this? You recognized it."

  She took a big bite of chocolate and felt its healing comfort. She swallowed, then said, "After"—she paused, not wanting to talk about Taye, about her divorce. "About five years ago, I was at loose ends. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life. I figured I'd work for my mother's company for a while, get on my feet, that sort of thing. and then"—she paused there as she remembered the intense wave of shock and excitement that had passed over her. "Then I saw an article in a travel magazine. About Pajaro Bay."

  Now he looked really confused.

  "The cottages," she explained. "The Stockdales. I recognized them."

  She pulled out another page from the folder. This one was a scrap, really, with an elaborate drawing in crayon, of a child's cliché of a house: pointy roof, funny crooked windows on each side of a round-topped Dutch door. Vertical lines drawn on the face of the house in gray suggested board-and-batten. Hashed criss-crosses in red crayon marked the brick patio, green scribbles suggested a field of thistles. And a tree with little yellow apples stood back in the distance.

  "I drew about a hundred just like this when I was little," she said.

  "Then, why didn't you…?"

  "Recognize it when we got there?" She shook her head. "I was no more than three years old when I saw it."

  She took another bite of cake, followed by a swig of the Chinotto. "In all these years, it's just been a kind of faded memory. Intensely emotional"—

  He perked up at that, but, being Dylan, didn't interrupt to ask what she meant.

  "—but at the same time, like a toddler's memory, something distorted and unformed, like looking through broken glass. The details of what happened are all there, but I could never put them together into something coherent."

  "What do you remember? And how do you know you were no more than three?"

  "My mother died when I was three. And she's in the memory. In fact, she's the heart of the memory."

  She finished the last bite of the cake, and then set the plate aside and continued: "I was sitting on the floor in a little house of some kind. It was dark, as if it were dusk—or, as I now realize, as if the windows were covered. But there was a bit of light from the open doorway." She looked off at the marina, and the glare off the water seared into her. "My mother was standing in front of a brick fireplace. And she was crying."

  "Crying?"

  "As if her heart was broken," Robin whispered. "As if she felt a pain deep inside. It's the only memory I have of my mother."

  She wiped at her eyes. "When I found out who she was"—she waved at the papers—"when I found this, I searched to find out where we lived. I went to Fairfield and tracked down our home. It was a Mediterranean style condo. There was no brick anywhere. Our unit was on the second floor, with another unit below it. No fireplace. No pointy roof. No wood siding. So I just figured I was wrong."

  "But then you saw the article in the magazine."

  "Exactly. 'Come to the quirky and charming tourist town on the coast', it said. And I saw pictures of little cottages that looked like the one I remembered. So I came here. And I couldn't find the cottage, but I loved it here, so I decided to stay."

  "And you became an expert on Stockdales."

  "Yes. And I learned that my confused little toddler memory was all wrong. There weren't any Stockdales with board-and-batten siding. There weren't any with brick fireplaces, or red herringbone floors. I thought I'd gone nuts. I had been so sure that my memory was of a Stockdale, but then, when I got here, the place I remembered not only didn't exist, but couldn't—it wasn't the kind of house he built. He didn't work with brick, and with board siding."

  "There's brick at Los Colores," he said.

  "Your office building. I know. But that's Stockdale's only commercial building, and it's not his usual style. He did that on commission for the Madrigals, and gave them the early California design they wanted. I even thought that might be it," she continued. "that it was some job he did on commission, to someone else's design. Or that it was an imitation of his work by someone else."

  "And that would make sense."

  "But you see? It didn't exist. I have walked every street in this village. I have examined every house—at least from the outside, and from the inside for as many as possible. And the cottage I remembered just didn't exist."

  "Until now."

  She looked at the little crayon drawing. "Until now."

  Chapter Six

  It was getting dark by the time Robin entered little Santos' Market to buy herself some supper. It had been a very long day. She had gone from the emotional roller coaster of the morning, to an afternoon of contract negotiations with a fussy computer executive buying his fifth vacation home. All she wanted to do now was collapse. But the pasta primavera and chocolate cake had worn off, and she was starving.

  The market was full of people just coming home from work, or the beach, or sailing, and they were all stopping in at the village's only grocery store to grab something quick to eat.

  The store was brightly lit and noisy, with the smell of roast chicken and fresh tamales filling the air. Tired tourists, at their wits' end after a day of wrangling suitcases and beach towels and sand-filled flip flops, tried to keep up, while children with sunburned faces were under foot everywhere. Through the chaos, locals greeted each other and caught up on the latest gossip, which so far didn't include what Dylan and she had found.

  She considered a nice boxed salad with low-fat dressing, finally placing it in her basket and moving toward the checkout line.

  "Hey, there, Pretty Lady," said a familiar voice.

  She looked up and greeted Hector Peña, owner of the local garage—and the town's favorite loopy surfer dude.

  "Hi, Hector," she said quietly.

  "Not happy today, Pretty Lady?" he asked with genuine concern. Everything about Hector was genuine, from his kindness to his nuttiness.

  "I'm fine, thanks," she said. "Just buying supper."

  "My wife is making mine," he said happily. A seemingly normal woman, for some unfathomable reason, had fallen in love with Hector last year and actually married him. The village grapevine was still trying to figure out how it had happened, but Hector just cheerfully went about his business of being sweet and crazy, basking in the love she gave him.

  "You go first," he said to her, moving aside to let Robin go ahead of him in the line. He only had some tortilla chips and salsa. And crumbs on his chin from eating a couple of Mrs. Santos' doughnuts, which he would dutifully report to the clerk to pay the correct charge for them.

  "No, thanks, Hector. I forgot a few things," she said.


  She went back through the store, returning the salad to the refrigerated section, and instead picking up two—no, three—overstuffed handmade tamales, and two chocolate-frosted doughnuts.

  Then she got back in line, wondering why someone like Hector had a little cottage by the sea and a loving spouse, and she was eating tamales and doughnuts for supper and going back to a rented apartment all alone.

  She didn't have far to go.

  When she'd gotten through the gauntlet of checking out, which involved a lot of saying hi and smiling at people when she wasn't in the mood to talk to anyone, she just came out the front door of the market and walked ten feet to the little outside stairs that went up the side of the building. At the top of the stairs, she unlocked the nondescript door of apartment Number One. (There was no apartment Number Two, and she'd often wondered why the owner bothered to put the Number One sign on the only apartment in the whole building.) She went inside.

  She set the groceries on the counter of the tiny kitchenette and dropped her keys and purse on the coffee table.

  The single-room apartment was compact and cozy, and if you were taller than five-foot-three, you had to duck when you left the center of the room and headed over toward the shelves that lined the knee walls to either side of the peak-roofed little attic.

  She ducked down and grabbed sweats and cashmere socks from the shelf where she'd neatly stacked her clothes, then went to the bathroom to change.

  After that, she settled on her favorite chair and ate tamales and doughnuts while contemplating her life choices.

  A woman who looked eerily like her had been living in—or planning to live in—an unfinished cottage being built by either Jefferson Stockdale himself or one of his later imitators.

  Her own mother, she was sure, had found the cottage shortly before she had died.

  Now she'd found it, and what did that mean?

  It meant nothing, she thought, using one of the silver forks her mother had given her for setting up housekeeping to stab the tamale on her plate. It meant that she'd found some long-dead relative, which was great, she supposed, but she didn't feel any different knowing this.

  Somehow, she always thought finding her birth family would give her some sense of closure.

  But she didn't feel any sense of closure, just more questions. More confused. Who was this woman? Birdie was written on the edge of the photo. Was that a place? A name? A code word?

  Would she ever have the answers to what had happened to her family?

  Her phone rang with the distinctive tone that told her it was her mom, and she picked up.

  "How are you, Robin?" her mom's voice came over the phone.

  "Fine," she said, quickly swallowing a bite of doughnut.

  They got to chatting, and Robin found herself telling the whole story of what she'd found: the cottage she'd searched for all this time, but the lack of answers about who had owned it, and why it had been abandoned.

  Her mother listened patiently, though Robin knew it was hard for her to hear the longing in Robin's voice as she talked about her birth family.

  "So what are you going to do next?" her mom finally asked.

  "I don't know," she said. "Dylan thinks the Stockdale-Robles papers might have some information, so—"

  "—Dylan, huh?" The glow in her mother's voice was unmistakeable.

  "He's a friend, Mother."

  She could hear her mother's scoff all the way from San Francisco. "He's a sweet boy you should grab before some other woman gets him."

  "Boy? Mom, he's 42 years old."

  "Sounds all right."

  "It's not all right. He's way too old for me. I'm 28."

  "I know exactly how old you are. Do you think I'd ever forget? But age is just a number. At least that's what I'm telling the pool boy next time he shows up wearing those white shorts."

  "Mom!"

  "What? I'm only saying, if I had a fine hunk of man like that hanging around me, he'd know how I felt about it."

  "But I don't know how I feel about it. I mean, he's got an ex-wife fifteen years older than me."

  "So what? You've got an ex-husband fifteen years older than you."

  "Exactly. And I am never making that mistake again."

  "The Professor was a mistake." She could hear the contempt in her mom's voice. She always called Taye The Professor, and it wasn't a compliment. "He was a know-it-all jerk. But that wasn't because of his age—"

  "—my psychologist said—"

  "—I don't care what your psychologist said about age differences and father issues. Taye was just a know-it-all and you made a mistake. You thought confidence and arrogance were the same thing."

  "We're getting off the subject, Mom. The question is what should I do about the cottage? About what I found out about my birth family today?"

  "I'm not going to tell you what to do."

  "That would be a first," Robin muttered, but she said it with a smile.

  And her mother took it that way, laughing into the phone. "You coming up next weekend? The cousins are coming by and…."

  Robin let her go on about the family barbecue and the arrangements, making noncommittal noises into the phone while her mind was miles away, on the little cottage sitting in a field of weeds outside of town, and her birth mother bringing her there all those years ago…. Why? What did it all mean?

  Finally the call ended with Robin promising to show up for the barbecue and to bring a bowl of Mrs. Santos' potato salad.

  She sat on the chair in the little rental apartment over the grocery store for a long time after that, thinking hard about families and roots and homes, and how she, a successful real estate agent and daughter of a woman who owned dozens of properties, had never once owned her own house.

  Not an investment, not a property flip. But a home. A home of her own. A place where she could plant petunias and put up curtains and maybe, someday, have a family of her own.

  Finally, she got dressed again and headed out of the apartment to go back to her office, where she could write up a standard contract to submit to Dylan for the purchase of a little unfinished barn on four acres of land outside of town.

  Chapter Seven

  Dylan arrived at his office early Monday morning. For the first time in a long time, he was anxious to get to work. He was anxious to see if the client had accepted Robin's bid for the property, and wanted to explain how she was willing to pay the higher price it would surely be appraised at once its lineage was confirmed. He loved win-win situations, and this was a great one. The seller would be thrilled to find out what a goldmine the property was, and Robin….

  He sighed. She would, hopefully, find some peace of mind from owning a house with a connection to her biological family.

  "Hey," Patrick Ojeda, his junior agent, said when he came in the door.

  "Hey," he said back. He went to his desk, which was in the corner in front of a huge wall map of Pajaro Bay. He checked his messages. Nothing on the computer.

  He called the Thackery office. He stood by the wall map and traced out the path of the highway until he put his finger on the general spot where the little cottage must be. He penciled in an "X" to mark the spot. All the while, he held his phone to his ear, and heard the seemingly endless ring of the line at the estate lawyers' office. No answer. It finally went to voice mail and he hung up without leaving a message.

  He checked the time. They should be in by now.

  "Be right back," he said, and got a confirming grunt from Patrick, who was deep in a pile of contracts.

  He went out the door and into the courtyard of the office complex. It was called an office complex on the village charter, but it was hardly a typical one.

  The only Stockdale building originally designed for a business, it was fashioned like an early California house in the Monterey Colonial style. This style was a square, two-story building formed around a central plaza, with open arcades facing inward along each side. He followed one covered walkway all the way to the stairs i
n the corner, his footsteps echoing on the brick floor.

  On three sides of the square there were offices, one above, one below, making six in total. The fourth side faced the street, and was enclosed by an arched entry.

  Los Colores, the building was called, and Stockdale had built it on commission for the Madrigal family. It had gone through several changes of ownership, and gotten quite run-down, before he'd been fortunate enough to be able to buy it a few years ago. Now the building was back in Madrigal hands, and he'd restored it to its original condition.

  It had been a good investment. It gave him essentially free office space for his own business, and the rents from the other five tenants provided a steady income.

  He bounded up the stairs. Thackery & Son were at the far side on the second level, near the elevator he'd installed to meet ADA guidelines.

  As he walked along the promenade, he glanced out to the roof on the other side of the courtyard.

  Then stopped. He'd never really thought about it. The roof tiles on the building were faded by exposure into a beautifully mottled shade of green-blue. He'd always thought of them as verdigris in color, a proper match to the oxidized finish on the brass mission bell hanging in the entrance arch.

  But before the sun had beat down on them for half a century, they would have been just as vibrant a turquoise as the stack of tiles at the little cottage. Could the tiles at Robin's cottage be left over from this job? That might help them narrow down the construction date of the cottage. He'd call Robin and have her look up the year Stockdale had built this building. Maybe it was a clue.

  When he got to the law office, the door was locked. SAMUEL J. THACKERY, SENIOR & SAMUEL J. THACKERY, JUNIOR: WILLS, PROBATE, AND ESTATE PLANNING, the sign by the door said.

  He knocked, but there was no answer. Odd.