Regina gritted her teeth, but the conversation had already moved on, Fran asking, “How old was Alice?”
“Nine or ten?” Frank looked at Mary. His voice was uncharacteristically low. “How old was Mama when her little sister drowned?”
“Ten.”
Regina straightened up in her seat. “Wait, you’re saying her sister drowned? I didn’t know that. I knew her sister died, but I pictured her getting a chill, getting sick.” She frowned, realizing Mary had said only died.
Frank shook his head. “No, she drowned.”
“Where?” Fran asked. “In this lake?”
“This lake. It was before Papa built the house. Long ago.”
They fell silent. Two children had drowned. Regina thought about the legend of the lady in the lake and knew better than to tell her family about that.
Fran was first to break the spell. “How awful. What was her sister’s name?”
“Eugenie.”
“Another one!”
“Alice named her daughter after the sister she lost all those years ago. Imagine that—she didn’t name any of us Eugenie because she was afraid. But when the last baby was born, Alice’s mother said she was just like the lost little girl, blond like Alice. So Alice named her Eugenie to please her mother.”
Regina looked up. Last baby? “I was her last baby.”
Bebe rolled her eyes, but Fran stayed on course. “And then her daughter drowned in this lake too.”
“When she was about the same age as the first Eugenie,” Edith agreed.
“She had to have been reliving that nightmare from her childhood,” Pace agreed. “What year would that have been?”
Again it was Mary who knew. “Nineteen-ten. Back when Grandfather Pace owned it. The family used to stay in the cottage in the summer.”
“It was different then,” Frank reminded them. “That’s why William dammed up Swift Creek, to make the lake calmer. It’s deeper, much bigger, and it doesn’t have that swift current.”
Edith added, to Fran, “That’s what she meant when she said she didn’t want to live here.”
Fran tsk-tsked. “Everybody loves to live on the water, but if you have small children, you have to be so careful.” This was met with an awkward silence, and Fran hastened to add, “I’m not saying anyone was careless.”
The silence stretched until Bebe said, “Alice does blame herself.”
“I blame myself too,” Mary said.
Fran said, “No! Children can get away from you.”
Edith took Mary’s hand. “You weren’t responsible.”
Regina lifted her head and heard the unspoken understanding that circulated among them as if they were speaking aloud—if Mary wasn’t, who was? Alice.
“So you see,” Frank summed up, “Alice feels responsible for both. Two children drowned on her watch.”
“Not on her watch,” Bebe said indignantly.
“No, of course not. But that’s how she feels,” Frank said. “There was a portrait of the little girl, the sister, with Grandmother Wilcox and Alice, painted not long before the little girl drowned. It was always hanging in the dining room at the Rectory. You remember that picture, don’t you?”
Frank was addressing Edith and Pace, who said in unison, “Oh yes.”
All three remembered the Rectory from the old days.
“Whatever happened to it?” Edith asked.
Regina, who had calmed, spoke up. “It’s in the attic.”
Mary stood. “Oh, all that old stuff.” She gathered the last dishes. “At some point, we’ll probably have an estate sale.” She glanced around the table, and her eyes settled on Regina. “Take anything you want from the attic, but there’s nothing of value. It’s a fire hazard. We’ll have to get rid of it all eventually.”
Regina thought immediately of the hairpin.
Frank took a big breath and, as was his genius, changed the subject again. “Sophie’s here.”
Edith said coolly, “Oh, is she? Where is she staying?”
“Mrs. Marsden’s. We agreed she’d go to the hospital early tomorrow.”
Mary called from the kitchen, as they all stood, “Ree is going to pick her up tomorrow and take her there.”
“Who is Sophie?” Fran asked.
Pace answered. “Alice’s first cousin.”
The women drifted to the kitchen after Mary while the men gravitated to the sideboard. Frank opened it, producing cognac and crystal snifters.
Edith was explaining to Fran about Sophie. “Papa and Mama met through Sophie. Sophie invited Papa home for dinner, and that’s how he met Mama.”
Pace corrected her from the dining room. “Sophie didn’t invite him. Grandpa Wilcox did.”
“But he did it because of Sophie.”
A rustle of understanding passed among the older Hannons.
Bebe, ever anxious to be in the know, translated for Fran. “In those days, when a young man came to call on a young woman, it was a declaration of intention. Papa was interested in Sophie. Then he met Alice and married her instead.”
“O-o-o-o-h.” Fran’s eyebrows signaled comprehension.
“I don’t know if it was exactly like that sounds,” Frank demurred, lifting his glass in a toast. “Papa might have been interested in Sophie when he first came to the Rectory, but they had some sort of falling out and Sophie went away. She got engaged to somebody else, then Papa and Mama got married.”
Fran sensed a juicy bit of drama. “Are Sophie and Alice close?”
No one answered, but the implication was clear.
With a glance at the men, who were moving toward the living room, Fran moved closer to the other women and lowered her voice. “Was somebody carrying a torch?”
Regina looked at Mary, expecting disapproval, but Mary was turned toward the sink. Bebe looked ready to pounce, but she also glanced at Mary.
Edith said, “I don’t think Alice and Sophie ever particularly liked each other.”
Mary glanced back, acknowledging that point.
Bebe could no longer resist. “The official story is that Papa came to court Sophie, but when he proposed, she refused him. Then he married Alice.” Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “But the way Grandma Wilcox told it, Papa came to court Sophie and fell in love with Alice.”
Mary and Edith exchanged a look.
Edith said, “I have to admit, I’ve heard it that way.”
“He and Sophie quarreled over something,” Mary said.
“Over what?” Regina asked. She had always been a little curious about the story of William and Alice and Sophie.
“Over him being in love with Alice,” Bebe said. “Sophie was in love with Papa and thought she was going to marry him. He proposed, because in those days, if you courted a girl, you didn’t back out. But she could see he was in love with Alice and she was too proud to accept him.”
“I don’t know how you, or anybody else, could know what went on between them,” Mary said in mild rebuke. “Sophie went home to her Aunt Emily in Charlottesville. Then the news came that Sophie was engaged to someone else. By the time she was married, William and Alice were engaged too. That’s all anybody knows.”
Bebe clearly was not convinced. “Sophie married a man with a whole lot of money.”
“Poor Sophie,” Edith said.
Again, it was Bebe who jumped in to explain to Fran. “Her husband lost everything when the market crashed in 1929, and he committed suicide. Went out to a bird blind in the woods and shot himself.”
“Oh no!”
Bebe was in full throttle. “And she was penniless, and Papa had to give her money all through the worst times of the Depression.”
Mary cut in. “Which he was glad enough to do, Bebe. We were remarkably fortunate.”
“And I believe she paid him back,” Edith added.
Bebe said under her breath to Fran, “After she married another rich old man for his money.”
Regina bristled, but Edith intervened. “S
ophie lost everything. She did what she had to do. We always had money, but then we lost Eugenie.”
“So much tragedy,” Fran said. “A lot of good fortune over the years, and yet so much heartbreak.”
The kitchen fell silent except for the clinking of plates. Edith, Fran, and Bebe drifted out to join the men in the living room, and in the kitchen, Regina found herself alone with Mary.
Regina bit her lip and homed back in on what was becoming almost an obsession with her. “Why did anybody ever think the gardener’s son murdered Eugenie?”
Mary dropped her shoulders and braced her hands on the sink. “Ree—”
Regina persisted. “He was accused and investigated. For more than one death.” Her voice was low but urgent.
Mary looked past her, and Regina turned to see that Frank had come into the kitchen behind her.
Frank answered her question. “There was a series of murders in Richmond. And when a child died here, the papers picked up on it. Tiberius was working in Richmond at the time and he was here when it happened. They just ran with it.”
Mary said again, with quiet but firm emphasis, “But they couldn’t prove anything.”
“He was here? Do you mean actually here at the house?”
Mary and Frank exchanged a look that Regina couldn’t fathom right before Frank replied. “The gardener still worked here, and his son helped him when he was in town.”
“But was he here that day?”
Frank answered. “I wasn’t here myself, so I don’t know.”
Frank and Regina turned to Mary, who said, “I didn’t see him.”
14
Didn’t You Know
Alone in the attic, Regina paced. Replaying the night in her mind, she seethed at Bebe’s repeated attacks and said out loud, “She hates me!”
Mary had only mildly defended her, as usual without squashing Bebe, and whenever Regina managed to defend herself, she came up looking even worse.
She flung out her hands. “I did not raise the subject of the murder!” Of course she hadn’t. Why would she bring that up at dinner? In front of Alice?
She growled, shook it off, and asked herself how had it come up? The angry old man, the gardener. They’d been, as usual, safely reliving the glory years, the parties, the servants, the gardens. Pace had mentioned the curmudgeon who was a magician with the roses. Alice herself had latched onto the man who frightened the children. Alice had repeatedly cast them on the shoals that night, steering them from the idyll to the crash, from the roses to the gardener.
Sam Rawley. Regina turned the name over in her mind and on her tongue. It was entirely strange; she had no memory of it. She had only ever known him as the angry old man on the Shackley Road. What arrested her now was the fact that she was sure she’d told Mary at the time everything the old man had said, apart from the most violent obscenities, which she had not been able to bring herself to repeat. You fuckin’ Hannons think you fuckin’ own the world.
She shuddered and closed her eyes. Then opened them. She had told Mary what the old man had said about Tiberius. Mary had explained about the nanny but said nothing about the son suspected of murder. Mary, once again, prevaricating.
Something else—by the time Regina’s memory kicked in, she was four or five, living with Mary, with Mimi, in the cottage, which Regina always knew had once been a gardener’s house. The angry old man Sam Rawley once lived in the cottage where Regina lived with Mary. The fact bristled with significance.
Regina sat in her rocking chair and leaned her head back. He lived there until when? Until William put him out. Why? So Mary could have it? Sam Rawley lived in the cottage during the thirties. Regina was living with Mary in the cottage by the late forties. When did the change happen?
She sighed as she rocked. She had only other people’s memories and very little access to those. The years between the heyday and Regina’s earliest memories were shrouded. And in those years, the market crashed, Gigi died, Sam Rawley was turned out of his home, Regina screamed in the night, and Alice Hannon fell down a rabbit hole of grief, fear, and guilt. All Regina had to go on were the old man’s ravings and Mary’s incomplete and unsatisfactory explanations. How could she penetrate the past?
All those old things, Mary said so dismissively. Fire hazard, clear it out, get rid of it all. But also take what you want.
Regina stood and prowled, nowhere near sleepy. She found the hairpin where she’d left it on her desk, unwrapped it, and examined it again. Curling silver petals chased with fine lines, a faceted crystal in the center. She tucked it into a pocket of her purse.
Then she remembered that she meant to look more closely at the boxes from her father’s study. She squeezed through the door to the children’s rooms. The boxes were heavy, dusty. She pushed them aside, sneezed. The locked writing box. Where was the key? Her search now focused, Regina patiently sorted through the rest of the boxes. No key. What could she do about that? Force it open? She pried gently, poked it with a letter opener. What right had she to snoop in William’s writing box while he was still alive? She would do it if she could but knew she couldn’t ask Mary where the key was. The key would probably be in the locked middle drawer of the desk in the study.
She returned to the familiar part of the attic and stood in front of the window that overlooked the lake, but in the lamplight, she saw only her own face reflected. A fond early memory of her father pierced her heart—following William through the rose garden on a hot summer day, asking the name of each rose, then asking what each name meant. Now he was dying and they were unreconciled. Why? How did she get into this standoff, rejecting her father because she felt he had rejected her?
But she knew.
In the late nineteen-forties and into the fifties, the years of Regina’s childhood, prosperity returned to Blue Lake, and on Christmases, the Hannons reunited. William hired caterers who decorated the house with greens, polished the silver, put up an enormous tree, and cooked not just a feast on Christmas day but a steady supply of meals and hors d’oeuvres for all the family who came to stay in the house.
For Ree, the holidays were depressing. She was in an awkward situation. She called the grown Hannon children by their first names: Frank, Edith, Pace, Bebe. Mary, Mimi, had always done so in front of her, and no one had ever told her to do otherwise, least of all her brothers and sisters. The grandchildren called the older Hannons aunt and uncle. It dawned on Regina one Christmas that she was the only child who didn’t say aunt and uncle. She asked Frank if she should call him Uncle Frank, and he laughed and said, “Of course not, I’m not that old.”
Ree was left feeling vaguely uncomfortable. She stopped calling her siblings by their first names. But she didn’t call them aunt and uncle. She referred to them awkwardly and indirectly, sometimes even as Lucy’s mother or, to one of the children, your father.
Frank, Edith, Pace, and even Bebe treated her differently from the other grandchildren. They treated her as a sibling, she now understood. Ree especially adored Frank, who made her feel as though she belonged, but she didn’t see him except when the whole family was together. As far as Regina knew, she was Mary’s child. Everyone treated her as if she were Mary’s. She was in practical fact Mary’s child.
Christmas of 1953 was eagerly anticipated, the height of that era in her childhood when she played in the attic until the hoard of grandchildren descended and displaced her. Everyone was coming, with their spouses and children, including Bebe’s English husband and their children. Pace and Bebe both had new babies. Worst of all, Robert was there, which meant that Mary was unavailable to Regina. And although Frank was there, he was one of a crowd that totaled—including Alice and William, their five elder children and Ree, and the grandchildren, spouses and all—twenty-one. Altogether, eight Hannon grandchildren would be in the attic. Edith’s oldest, Angelica, was nine, one year younger than Ree. The others ranged from seven to three years old.
Edith’s second child, who was seven, innocently asked, “Why
does she look so different?” Pointing at Ree, meaning she looked unlike Mary and Robert, who were both dark-haired.
Angelica, who should have known better, said, “She’s adopted.”
The rest of the children accepted this and moved on, but Regina recoiled in horror. She had never been told she was adopted, and although she was relieved not to be Robert’s child, she was stunned to think she was not Mary’s.
The house was full, even her attic refuge unavailable, the outdoors cold and rainy. Mary was preoccupied with Robert. William and Alice were the center around which the rest of the family revolved. Edith and Pace and Bebe were managing their children and visiting with one another. Regina stood uncertainly in the hall, wringing her hands, until she felt the weight of a gentle hand on her shoulder.
Frank smiled down on her. “How are you doing, pretty girl?”
Regina said in a quavering voice so soft that Frank bent to hear, “Angie says I’m not really a member of the family.” She couldn’t bring herself to use the word adopted, struggling to hide her tears.
“What’s that?” Frank gave her shoulder a soft shake. “Why, that’s ridiculous. Look.” He pulled her aside and pointed at her reflection in the mirror over a side table. Then he gently turned her by her shoulders so she was looking at the portrait of Alice as a young woman. “That could be a portrait of you in a few more years. Don’t you think so, Beau?”
Edith’s husband said, “Don’t I think what?”
Everyone, including Alice, stopped to listen. “Doesn’t Ree look just like Mama?”
“She is a young Alice Wilcox,” Frank’s wife agreed. “The very image.”
Regina blushed, momentarily pleased, but then her eyes met Bebe’s and what she glimpsed there struck her heart cold. Whatever pleasure she got from being called the very image of the matriarch was more than offset by a deeper worry.
At the end of the night, Regina trailed Mary and Robert back to the cottage. She was a Hannon, but she was not allowed to stay in the house, wasn’t one of “the children” in the portrait or the children staying in the children’s rooms in the attic. The separation felt like banishment and made her ashamed, though she could not have said of what. If she was a Hannon, the image of the beautiful Alice, why then was she never allowed to stay in the house? What had she done?
Blue Lake Page 12
