He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“She buckled me onto a ride at Disney World and then walked away.”
His mouth gaped open as if a bomb had dropped on his head. A hundred questions, she suspected, were clamoring in his lawyerly mind, trying to connect logic and motive. “She left you for good?”
She nodded. “It was the last time I ever saw her.”
“That’s . . . ,” he started. “Well, there’s no words for it, Quenby.”
She tried to smile. “I didn’t think you’d ever be at a loss for words.”
“There’s nothing funny about abandoning a child.”
“I suppose not.” She dipped her spoon into the yogurt again.
“No wonder you don’t want to visit Disney World. I’m sorry—”
She intercepted his apology. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“What if something happened to your mother?”
“Unfortunately, she had a history of leaving. I don’t think the police ever suspected foul play.”
Leaning back, Quenby closed her eyes, remembering it so clearly again. In the minutes after climbing off Dumbo, she’d thought surely her mother must have gone to get them ice cream or a pretzel. That if she’d wait, her mother would appear soon, frazzled and apologetic, wanting to surprise her with the treat.
Then she had thought her mother had gotten lost or injured or taken against her will, but adults didn’t get kidnapped in Fantasyland. And if she’d gotten lost or hurt, Jocelyn would have called Grammy, at least once in the last ten years of Grammy’s life.
When she was younger, Quenby had often wondered if Jocelyn had been angry with her. If somehow it had all been her fault. But it was completely irrational. No child should be abandoned, for any reason—her counselor had reiterated—even if the parent was mad.
She turned toward the window, the strands of sunlight fading as the clock slipped backward. What would her counselor think of her now, all these years later and still afraid to find out what happened to her mother?
She curled her fingers around the edge of the envelope. Baby steps.
Samantha stepped back into their space, carrying two drinks. “A latte for each of you.”
They both thanked her as she set their drinks beside the parfaits. “Would you like anything else to eat?” she asked. “The galley is full.”
They shook their heads.
After she left, Lucas picked up the remote and turned the TV screen back on. “Would you like to watch a movie?”
Quenby stared at the menu of options, her mind wandering again. She shouldn’t have confided in him. He had the perfect family, and he must wonder—what was wrong with her that made Jocelyn want to leave?
“Quenby?”
His voice jolted her back to reality. “Yes?”
“Do you want to watch a movie?”
“Please.” Perhaps a movie would take her mind off the file that was now on the table beside her.
He scrolled through the options. “You pick.”
The movie featured at the top of the screen was an older one about Queen Victoria, filmed thirty years ago. The actress who played Queen Victoria was dressed in a beaded ivory gown with orange blossoms in her hair.
Quenby pointed at the image. “I interviewed her earlier this year.”
“Queen Victoria?”
“Very funny,” she said. “Hannah Dayne.”
“I thought she stopped giving interviews years ago.”
“I talked with her via phone. She asked me to write about refugee children.”
“Brilliant of her.”
“It was,” Quenby replied. “She’s been quietly assisting refugees in Yorkshire, but if readers found out about her involvement, they might be more interested in her reappearance than the plight of the people she wants to help.”
“You want to watch her movie then?”
“I think we need something more whimsical.” She pointed at another icon. “Like Pride and Prejudice.”
He groaned, but without much conviction.
She smiled. “You’re a closet fan, aren’t you?”
“I admit to nothing.”
“Right. Superpowers.”
He started the movie, but before the Bennet sisters began dancing at the ball, his mobile rang. It was Mr. Knight.
“He wants to speak with you again,” Lucas said before turning on the speaker.
“Hello, Mr. Knight.”
“Do you have your computer?”
Quenby flipped her iPad screen up from the keyboard. “It’s right here.”
“Look at the panoramic picture of the house again,” he instructed.
She pulled the picture up on her iPad, and she and Lucas studied the tangled web of branches, leaves, and vines surrounding it.
“That tree,” Mr. Knight said, almost breathless. “The one to the right of the Mill House.”
She enlarged the photo and examined the dying yellow leaves, the emerging green to replace them. And she realized it was like no other tree in the forest around it. Where the sunlight hit the branches, the waxy new leaves glowed.
“Magnolia,” Mr. Knight said.
The words in Brigitte’s letters flooded back to her. The tree in her father’s yard. The tale of Cinderella.
Eyes wide, Quenby glanced at Lucas. “It’s a wishing tree.”
Chapter 46
London, February 1953
The girl clung to her mummy’s hand as they skipped over puddles on the pathway that threaded through Kensington Gardens. Rosalind watched them closely, mesmerized by their camaraderie. It was an anomaly to her—a mother and daughter who actually enjoyed one another’s company. Not once, in her memory, had Lady Ricker wanted to be with her.
Rosalind visited the garden nearly every Sunday and sat on a bench by the Long Water, even on days like this when the clouds drizzled a winter rain. Her umbrella and Burberry trench coat were the stoic color of stone, though she longed for a brash red, emerald, or sapphire to pierce through the gray.
But neither she nor her coat could stand out in London or anywhere else in England. Her role for the moment was to be like everyone else, one of a thousand raindrops blending smoothly into the lake before her. Not making any waves. Even her string of boyfriends had been as bland as the autumn sky.
The narrow stretch of water, dividing the gardens from Hyde Park, transported her back a decade, to that fateful spring afternoon when she’d jumped out of the blue Wolseley and watched her old life plunge over a cliff. It was so surreal that sometimes she thought she’d dreamed it.
But it had been no dream. Eddie Terrell, the fool, had left a bag of banknotes behind in the car. She’d discovered it before they left the Mill House, when she was throwing her suitcase into the boot. The moment Brigitte had leapt from the car, the baby in her arms, Rosalind knew exactly what she was going to do.
She’d stopped the car before the edge of the bluff, removed the money. Then she’d snapped her life in two.
The past behind her, she opted to embrace her new existence in shadows of her making. Lady Ricker, she felt certain, would want her dead, even in this decade after the war. Rosalind knew far too much about her mum’s dealings with the Nazi dreck. The secrets she had to keep.
If her mum was able to change her colors, acting as the loyal wife of a British MP even as she supported Fascism, then Rosalind figured she could be a chameleon as well. Changing her colors until Lady Ricker died—from a vibrant modern woman into the drudgery of browns and grays.
She didn’t regret what she’d done all those years ago. Brigitte might have thought she was much older, more mature, but Rosalind had only been sixteen when she’d parachuted into Breydon Court. And she’d known little about how to survive on her own.
Brigitte was three years younger, but she already knew how to care for herself and for someone else.
The mother and child in the park drew closer, both laughing as their umbrella bobbed overhead. Her eyes should
remain on the lake water—staring was akin to making waves—but she couldn’t seem to help herself. The woman with her short brown hair brushed back over her ears, wearing an olive jumper over her plain dress, looked like an older housewife version of Brigitte. If it was Brigitte, the girl clinging to her hand might be Rosalind’s daughter.
Rosalind stayed frozen on the bench, squeezing the wooden crook of her umbrella as the two walked by her, seemingly unaware of the stone lady on the bench.
It wasn’t Brigitte—or at least, she didn’t think so. Nor was it Rosalind’s child. Baby would be nearly ten now, and this girl looked to be no more than five or six.
Almost every week, she spotted a mother who reminded her of Brigitte, though she never pursued her inquiries. If she ever did find Brigitte, she wasn’t sure what she’d say. Probably she would do exactly what she’d done long ago and walk away.
Just because Rosalind had carried the baby in her womb didn’t mean she was the right one to care for her into adulthood. The baby had deserved a fresh life where no one would try to harm her. And a mum who knew how to mother well.
When the rain clouds took a respite, Rosalind closed her umbrella and propped it beside her. A boy stopped by her bench, a stack of newspapers tied up in a cord under his arm. He eyed her plain coat. “Two pennies for a paper?”
She studied his plain clothes in return. “I’ll take one,” she said, wanting to contribute to the boy’s welfare more than read the words on his paper. The world and its news moved rapidly around her, but Rosalind didn’t—couldn’t—waver.
The woman and girl were near the reeds around the water now, feeding something to the ducks. She turned her attention to the Times in her lap.
February 8, 1953.
Then she read the headline near the bottom of the page. Twice.
The paper boldly announced what she’d been waiting for. Lady Ricker was finally dead, the enemy of influenza taking her life.
According to the writer, Mum had left behind two children in London—a boy named Anthony and a girl named Louise. There was no mention of Lady Ricker turning traitor during the war. And more importantly, no mention of her oldest child.
Rosalind slowly lowered the paper, her hands trembling as a shell of stone seemed to crack near the top of her head, shooting down the seam and crumbling in a thousand pieces at her feet. Then she smiled.
She’d thought it would be many more years before she was free, but finally her life was about to begin.
CHAPTER 47
_____
A chauffeur sped Quenby and Lucas toward the tearoom to meet Alexander. Quenby had suggested Lucas rent a car at the Jacksonville airport, but he’d refused to drive in the States. And he insisted that she rest.
As they’d crossed the Atlantic, she and Lucas had forgone their movie and launched into a new discussion about Brigitte and the possibility of her planting a magnolia tree near the garden, like Cinderella’s wishing tree.
But how did Brigitte obtain seeds for a magnolia? The beautiful trees grew across England, just like they did in the States, but acquiring magnolia seeds near the Mill House, during the war, seemed an impossibility.
After Lucas fell asleep, Quenby had chipped away at that question until she realized that Brigitte, the refugee, wouldn’t have access to magnolia seeds or the money to purchase them. But Brigitte, a young woman after the war, could have returned to plant it.
That thought revived her.
If Brigitte had left the Mill House after Olivia’s death, why hadn’t she tried to find Dietmar? Or had she tried and failed after Dietmar changed his last name? And most important, had Brigitte hidden something under this magnolia like her father had done all those years ago?
The answers, she hoped, were back in Newhaven.
Humid air clung heavy on her skin as she stepped out of the car and into the elegant tearoom. Palladian windows overlooked a floral garden, and bouquets of summer flowers decorated every table.
A gentleman in his fifties crossed the floor and welcomed them. He was taller than Quenby by a solid foot, his brown hair thinning, and he wore a taupe linen suit over his lanky frame.
“Thank you for meeting me here,” Alexander said, motioning them toward a table.
Quenby chose a seat by the window, and Lucas held it out for her. “I have to admit my curiosity,” she replied as she hung her handbag on the chair.
“And I must admit mine as well.” Alexander sat across the table, resituating his crooked fork into a perfect line. “My aunt says you are writing a story about the Ricker family.”
Quenby wove her fingers together, rested her chin on their nest. “Who is your aunt?”
“We’ll get to that,” he said with a warm smile. “Please, tell me first about this story of yours.”
She dropped her hands onto the marble tabletop. There were no warning signs flashing, like there’d been with Evan, though she knew well that she couldn’t rely solely on intuition to judge a man’s character. But if Alexander was willing to tell her his story—and she hoped he was—then she needed to tell him the basics of what she’d found.
“I’m afraid there’s not much of a way to cushion this,” she said. “I believe Lady Ricker operated a safe house for Nazis during World War II.”
His face didn’t register the sort of shock she’d imagined. “That’s not new information for the family.”
“The Rickers know?”
“Of course,” he said with a nod. “Janice did a lot more than just operate a safe house.”
Before he expounded, the server stepped up to the table with a plate filled with fruits and cheeses. Then he brought a pot of Darjeeling tea. Alexander, it seemed, had already ordered for them.
She smeared the creamy Brie on flatbread while their host poured the tea. “I come here often,” he said, splashing milk into his cup. “It reminds me of home.”
“You’re from England?” Quenby asked as she stirred a cube of sugar into her tea.
“Kensington. I lost the British accent during my freshman year at an American high school.”
“Did the other kids beat it out of you?” Lucas asked.
“They teased it out of me, I suppose. I wasn’t confident like my parents at that age. My mother, on the other hand, clung to her accent until she passed away.”
Quenby waited, hoping he would expound on his mother, but instead he said, “My dad stayed back in London when we moved to the States, but his absence didn’t make much of a difference in our lives. My parents separated when I was very young, and I didn’t see much of him after that.”
Over English tea and finger sandwiches, Alexander began to tell them his story.
“My mother kept me so entertained that I hardly missed my father. She worked as an actress in London, but she always wanted to leave England.”
Perhaps Brigitte became someone else in her adult life. An actress who could move people to laughter and tears. Perhaps the stage took away some of her own pain. For the Brigitte in Quenby’s mind had grown into a woman who was fiercely courageous and strong. Mr. Knight had said she loved to pretend. With a new name, perhaps she’d hidden herself in plain sight on the West End.
“My mother hated the cold of New York and the drudgery of the movies in Hollywood. She ended up performing on the stage at Disneyland for a season. When Disney built the Magic Kingdom, we moved to Orlando.”
Quenby’s heart beat faster. “What was your mother’s name?”
“In London, she was known by her stage name, Eliza Cain.” He took another sip of the milky tea. “But her real name was Rosalind.”
He looked across the table as if Quenby should recognize the name, and she tried to hide her disappointment, wiping the crumbs off her lips with a cloth napkin.
“Was Rosalind related to Lady Ricker?” she asked, feeling foolish for not knowing where this woman fit into the Ricker family.
He nodded slowly. “Rosalind was Janice Ricker’s oldest daughter.”
Quenby blinked,
processing this new information. “I’ve read extensively about Lady Ricker and no one ever mentioned Rosalind.”
“That’s because Janice didn’t tell anyone about her. In fact, she tried to kill her.”
Quenby shuddered. “Why would she try to kill her daughter?”
Alexander glanced out the window as a couple clothed in matching tennis outfits walked by. “Janice didn’t work with just anybody in Germany, you see. She collaborated with Rosalind’s father. The man who became my grandfather.”
Quenby blinked, stunned. “Lady Ricker had a lover in Germany?”
He nodded. “She and Oskar met when she was touring in Europe, while she was still married to her first husband. She became a devout, albeit secret, Fascist who was focused on helping Oskar first and then Hitler and the Third Reich at any cost. Unfortunately, when Rosalind returned to England, she knew too much. My grandmother couldn’t risk having anyone find out what she was doing.”
“How did Lady Ricker and Oskar communicate?” Lucas asked.
“Through a wireless.”
“And perhaps through the letters.” She told him what they’d found under the floor of the Mill House. “Brigitte believed the letters were coded.”
This time he looked stunned. “I didn’t think anyone else knew about Brigitte.”
Foamy waves lapped the beach outside Jacksonville as Quenby buried her toes in the warm sand, her jacket doubling as a towel underneath her. Lucas leaned back on his elbows beside her, bare feet crossed over his jeans.
Two boys raced through the surf in front of them, battling the string of a ladybug kite that dipped toward the water. The older boy pulled back on the string before it clipped a wave, and the kite soared again in the breeze.
Over tea and sandwiches, Alexander had told them what happened after Rosalind arrived at the Mill House and then after Eddie Terrell died. How she’d tried to fake her own death and left her daughter with Brigitte. Rosalind had followed Brigitte and the baby, he said, until they reached a village nearby. Then she ran north and folded herself into the crowds of London. After Lady Ricker’s death, Rosalind had embraced life as a new woman, released from the chains of being the daughter of a German officer and an American aristocrat turned British. After joining the theater, she’d married a man her mother would never consider respectable. In a few years, Rosalind didn’t consider him respectable either, but she stayed in the marriage for a decade before she relocated herself and their son to California.
Catching the Wind Page 24
