by Karen White
I felt nearly weak with relief when I found what I’d been searching for. The same staff member appeared again in the reading room doorway. “We’re closing. It’s time to leave.”
I stood as I scanned the entry quickly, not having time to take notes on my laptop, and instead committed the information to memory. I stopped, forgetting to breathe for a moment as I recognized a familiar name.
“My friend is downstairs,” I explained. “I’ll just go get him and we’ll leave together.” Without waiting for an answer, I headed down the stairs.
Tucker stood as we entered and smiled. “All done? If not, we can come back on Tuesday if we need to.”
I stared at him dumbly, irrationally thinking that the overhead lights that were now being shut off should be shining with brighter intensity or at least flashing on and off to illustrate my discovery.
With Tucker taking hold of my elbow, we were escorted out by two staff members and a security guard, who made a great show of jangling keys and locking the door behind us. I stopped on the front step, unable to go any farther without sharing my newfound knowledge.
I faced Tucker, my hands grasping his upper arms. “Leonard O’Hare was Josie and Freddie’s father. Being a doctor, he must have filled out and filed the birth certificates himself so nobody would know. Josie and Freddie were Annabelle’s half brother and half sister.”
He raised both eyebrows, then tugged on my arm. “Let’s keep walking. I think I found something, too, and I don’t want anybody else knowing.”
I walked with him down the steps, impatiently following him as he led us into Forsyth Park, finally stopping at a bench near the fountain. Looking around us, he said, “Sit down.”
I did and waited for him to join me. We must have been walking relatively fast because I was a little out of breath, but was surprised to find that my knee wasn’t hurting me as much as it should have been. I wondered if the exercises Emily was forcing me to do might actually have been doing some good.
“Do you think Lillian knew about Josie and Freddie’s father?” he asked.
“No, I’m pretty sure she didn’t. I guess we’re going to have to tell her.” I squinted at him in the bright sunlight. “You said you found something, too.”
He waited for a moment before reaching into his back pocket and pulling out a yellowed newspaper clipping.
“You stole something from the archives!” My outrage raised my voice enough to have several passersby glance in our direction.
“Shh,” he said. “I only borrowed it. I promise to be there at ten o’clock sharp Tuesday morning to put it back where I found it. But there was too much information for me to memorize and not enough time to jot it down, so I borrowed it.”
“If they find out, they’ll never let me back in.” I tried not to let my curiosity overtake my indignation, but I failed. “So what is it?”
“Well, when I got your text, I knew immediately where to go. A good friend of mine in med school was a Latrobe, so I guess when I first saw the name on a folder, I went through the whole thing to see if it might be the same family. It wasn’t, but the name and the folder I’d pulled it from sort of stuck with me.” He handed the clipping to me, a look of smug satisfaction on his face. “This was one of the items in the folder. It must have been filed there by accident because of the last name.”
I smiled, my guilt lessened somewhat by the promise of discovering something new. Taking the clipping, I held my breath and began to read. It was an obituary for Justine Marie Montet, who’d died on May twenty-fifth, nineteen eighty-one, interred at Laurel Grove Cemetery in Savannah. Predeceased by her son, Frederick Latrobe, and daughter, Josephine Montet of New York City and survived by granddaughter Alicia Montet Jones, of Tattnall Street, Savannah.
I looked up at Tucker. “Josie had a daughter, who lived in Savannah and might still be here.” I looked back again for the street, ready to start walking there now.
“Am I forgiven then? Because if I am, I have something else, too.”
My indignation all but forgotten, I held out my hand. “Show me.”
From under his shirt he produced what looked to be a photocopy of an official document. At least he hadn’t folded it up to fit in his back pocket. He handed it to me. “This was clipped to Justine’s obituary.”
It was a copy of Freddie’s death certificate. I glanced at the birth and death dates to see if they corresponded with what we knew about Freddie, then let my gaze roam over the document to see if I could find whatever it was that had made Tucker borrow it.
“Look at the cause of death,” he said.
My gaze went back to the correct box. “Suicide. By hanging.” I closed my eyes for a moment, and shook my head. “He was only twenty-six years old. What would have made him want to kill himself?”
“Piper, it was Georgia in nineteen thirty-nine and Freddie was a black man. It’s entirely possible that it wasn’t a suicide. Your grandmother mentioned in her scrapbook that he was involved in registering black voters. Back then, men would have killed for less.”
I sat back, my mind spinning. “Josie’s daughter—what was her name?”
“Alicia Jones.”
“We need to see if she still lives here—and it should be easier because we have the street name, too. I know I’m pushing my luck, but let’s look in the phone book and see if we can find her. If not, I’ll go online. I hate to pay for that kind of information, but if I need to, I know a great search engine.”
He stood and reached for my hand. I took his and let him pull me up. “You’re pretty good at this stuff, Piper.”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling oddly pleased. “A lot of it is dull and routine, but every once in a while you’re given a little bit of a mystery to solve, and it makes everything else worthwhile.”
Tucker didn’t move away. “I have a feeling that you’d be good at anything you set your mind to.”
I looked away, embarrassed. “Come on. Let’s get back to the house to find what Helen and George turned up and to see if I can locate Alicia Jones.”
We walked the short blocks back to Taylor Street, and I didn’t think once about how hot it was or even if my knee hurt. I was too busy thinking about what Tucker had said. I have a feeling that you’d be good at anything you set your mind to.
I practically bounded up the steps when we reached the house and then fumbled impatiently with the keys to get inside the front door. Helen was laughing, although it sounded a lot closer to giggling, in the front parlor, and when I walked in I found her and George sitting on the love seat and her hands were clasped in his. He didn’t even have the decency to drop her hands when he spotted us.
“Hello, Earlene,Tucker. We were wondering what was taking you so long. I was just telling Helen about a few of my court cases, some of which have been rather humorous.” He patted Helen’s hand and then stood. “So, did you find out anything new?”
I plopped down in my grandmother’s armchair. “Quite a bit, actually. I discovered that Josie and Freddie were my grandmother’s half siblings. Apparently my great-grandfather had a longtime relationship with their mother and employed her as his housekeeper to keep it simple.”
“I wonder if Malily knew,” said Helen, a line between her eyebrows.
“From what I’ve read in the scrapbook pages, I don’t think she knew,” I said. “But we need to ask her. Might make her tell me more than what’s been written.”
Tucker sat down next to me in my grandfather’s chair, the one positioned to directly face the empty medal wall. “Helen should go with you. Malily’s never been able to tell her no.”
I nodded, then turned to George. “Were you and Helen able to find anything new?”
George gave me a smug smile. “As a matter of fact, yes. We make quite the team, I’ll have you know. She takes excellent shorthand and has a very precise memory. I told her she should be working in a law office somewhere to utilize her skills.”
I forced myself not to grit my teeth. “What did
you find out?”
“After going through miles of microfilm—it’s very hard on the neck, you know. . . .”
Helen interrupted George with a hand on his arm. “We found the burial record and plot for Margaret Louise in Bonaventure. She was buried in nineteen twelve, which predates the magazines that are up there, meaning the room served another purpose after Margaret Louise died.”
“Any luck with more news articles about the baby found in the river?” Tucker asked.
George shook his head. “No. Archives for the Savannah Morning News for the time period we’re looking for are sketchy at best. A bad flood destroyed about a year’s worth of stored newspapers prior to them being stored on microfilm. Some of the major news stories, obits, and the like could be found in other sources, but not so much the little news tidbits.”
I swallowed my disappointment, focusing instead on the one last piece of information we’d learned. “We found Justine’s obituary, and it said she was survived by Josie’s daughter, Alicia Jones on Tattnall Street. There’s a chance she could still live there, so I’m going to go see what I can find, starting with the phone book.” I stood, heading for the kitchen.
Helen stopped me. “Did you find out anything else about Freddie?”
I paused on the threshold. “That he died when he was twenty-six. The death certificate says suicide by hanging.”
Her cheeks paled. “How sad. After reading about him, I was starting to feel as if I knew him. I didn’t expect . . . that.”
“Neither did I. Although Tucker pointed out that a black man, especially one with his background, found hanged wasn’t all that unusual back then. Paying somebody to fudge the cause of death wouldn’t have necessarily been a big deal.”
“No,” she said softly,“it wouldn’t have been.” George took her hand again, and I left the room to make a phone call.
The phone book was where it had always been, on the top step of the kitchen stool tucked beneath the ancient princess phone with the long, tightly curled cord in mustard yellow. My grandparents had been frugal; despite their being comfortably off, spending money to replace something that worked perfectly fine had never been on their agenda.
I flipped the thick book open and found the Js, rapidly moving my index finger down to the top of the Jones list, saying the names quietly to myself, and simultaneously searching for Tattnall Street. The listing, when I found it, seemed innocuous enough, a single Jones, A. but my heart began to pound a little louder in my chest.
Lifting the receiver from the cradle, I held it away from my ear for a moment, listening to the dial tone as if it were a voice from the past. Then I slowly dialed the number. The ringing sounded unusually loud, and I let it ring five times before an answering machine picked up. It was an electronic voice, so I was unable to determine the gender or anything else about the person I was trying to reach. At the sound of the tone, I left a message explaining that I was the granddaughter of Annabelle O’Hare and that she and Josie Montet had been close friends growing up. I asked that if I had reached the home of Josie’s daughter, Alicia, to please call me back. I left my cell phone number, then hung up, my hand lingering on the receiver for a long time, listening to the quiet of my grandmother’s kitchen, and feeling her presence.
When I rejoined the others, they looked at me expectantly. “I got an answering machine, so I left a message. I guess I’ll just wait and see if she calls back before I decide what to do.”
“And if she doesn’t call back, you’ll hire on as your housekeeper to find out what she knows that way?”
Tucker’s face was deadpan, but when Helen began to laugh he smiled. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist.” He stood. “I guess we should head back. Malily hates eating alone.”
Helen pulled out a card from her purse and handed it to George. “Call me.”
I moved toward the doorway again. “Give me about fifteen minutes, okay? I have something I need to do.”
I went out to the Jeep and pulled out the rose clippings Malily had given to Helen, wrapped in damp paper towels. I brought them back to the desolate garden, where the empty soil waited, trying to decide where to plant the roses. I chose the back wall, where they could grow wild, just as my grandmother would have done, untamed and unruly; her garden was the only place in her life where she allowed herself to revisit her past.
The door to her garden shed stuck tight, but I managed to dislodge it by tugging. I found my grandmother’s tools, her trowel and her gloves. Even her large-brimmed hat. I left the hat behind, but put on the gloves, feeling my grandmother’s hands on mine as I pulled them over my fingers that were shaped like hers. I attacked the soil with the trowel, scraping off the hardened topsoil and digging deeper to moist earth, exposing its secrets. I placed the clippings far enough apart so that when they grew they wouldn’t crowd one another, then tightly packed the earth around them to keep them upright.
I knew I wasn’t done. They’d need more nurturing, more direction. I might even have to move them once I determined where the sun would hit them. As I sat back on my heels and studied the tightly closed buds that reminded me of a newborn’s eyes, I knew I’d done something good. Like learning to trot before cantering, it was a place to start. My grandmother had been a horsewoman and a civil rights-crusader, and she had once wanted to be a doctor, but her garden was her story, and I made a silent promise to her that it wouldn’t be forgotten.
I replaced the trowel and the gloves, gently touching the hat before I tugged the door shut. I exited through the garden gate, pausing long enough to take in the lonely rose clippings against the back wall, the late-summer sun casting giant shadows like a bridge from one life to another.
CHAPTER 20
Lillian sat in her chair by the window as night fell, listening to the whippoorwill calling out to the darkening sky. She pushed aside the tray of uneaten food that Odella had brought up, tossing a bite of chicken to the waiting Mardi, who’d been sitting patiently as they’d both waited for Tucker’s Jeep to return.
Tucker had called earlier to let her know that there’d been an accident on the highway, so they’d turned around and had dinner in Savannah. It hadn’t mattered. It had been a long time since Lillian had had an appetite, and now she just used food as a buffer against the medications and alcohol that seemed to be the only things getting her through her days.
Leaning forward, she rubbed her swollen knuckles, feeling the shifting of the seasons in her bones. Like the weathered oak trees in the alley that never alternated colors or dropped their leaves, they showed the approaching autumn in more subtle ways—a change in pitch to their nightly cry, and an almost imperceptible change in the angle of their arch. It was almost as if the oncoming cold of winter alerted them to hover closer to the earth and to one another to help face whatever came next.
Lillian sighed, missing Charlie again. He’d been the one who’d protected her, who’d sheltered her from the storm even when she thought she didn’t need it. She’d been thinking a lot about him lately, and she didn’t know why. He’d been gone for almost fifteen years, and in the time since he died, she had only thought of him with the same nostalgia one might feel for a favorite dress that no longer fit. It was the scrapbook, of course, and all of the memories it brought forth—the good and the bad. And all the things that weren’t written on the pages, but were inscribed instead on the years themselves, as permanent and irrevocable as surviving beyond everyone you’d ever loved.
She turned her head, hearing the sound of a car approaching the house, followed eventually by the front door closing and footsteps climbing the stairs. Despite her sense of foreboding and inevitability, she smiled. Piper with her bad leg wouldn’t take the elevator any more than Annabelle would have.
Mardi ran to the door before anyone knocked, then launched himself through the opening crack as soon as Lillian called out her permission for them to enter. Tucker, Helen, and Piper stood clustered in the doorway like children sent to the principal’s office, and it made Lilli
an want to laugh, realizing how very reversed their situations really were. She was the one who should be afraid, after all.
Lillian indicated the sofa and wing chair near her and they found seats, Tucker and Piper together on the sofa and Helen in the chair with Mardi’s head propped on her lap. Piper handed her more scrapbook pages. “Here’re more of my grandmother’s pages. I’ve got one more left. I haven’t read it, but I’ll give it to you as soon as I’m done.”
Lillian regarded Piper with surprise. “You’re prolonging it, are you? Afraid of what you might find?”
Piper’s eyes met hers with a question, but she didn’t look away. “No. Not anymore. I think I’m hesitating now because I don’t want to say good-bye. It’s the last thing I have of hers.” She reached behind her neck. “Well, almost.”
Gently, she unclasped the chain, then held the necklace in front of her, the gold charms seeming overly bright as they reflected the lamp-light. “I think Lola belongs to you.”
Piper stood, then waited in front of Lillian until the older woman realized what Piper was trying to do. Lillian bent her head forward and waited for Piper to clasp the chain behind her neck before stepping back and sitting down again.
“I’ve made a list of the charms along with when they were added and by whom. There’s still quite a few I’m unsure about—although I assume most of them are Josie’s since we haven’t read any of her pages—yet.”
“Yet?” A butterfly settled in Lillian’s stomach, beating its wings against her past.
“I think we’ve found Josie’s daughter. She lives in Savannah. If it’s her, she might have Josie’s pages.”
Lillian sat back in her chair. “Alicia,” she said.
“You know her?” Helen asked.
“No. I just know of her. I followed Josie’s life. Knew she had a daughter, and that Josie had named her Alicia.” She smiled to herself, remembering when she’d read the birth announcement. “Alicia is my middle name. I always thought that was Josie’s way of telling me that she hadn’t forgotten me.”
