by Karen White
Maisy and her sister watched his slow progression. When Maisy turned to look at Georgia, her own confusion was mirrored in her sister’s eyes.
“What was that about?” Georgia asked, annoyance creeping into her voice. Not at their grandfather, but at her inability to snap all the puzzle pieces in place.
“I don’t know,” Maisy said.
Their grandfather stopped at the base of the back porch steps and Georgia began walking toward him to help.
Maisy stayed where she was, deep in thought. Could it be just confusion caused from his stroke and medication, and that was why he couldn’t remember those parts of his past? Or maybe, like a jigsaw puzzle, there were still too many pieces missing, and he was too afraid to imagine it all together and see the whole picture?
A bee droned near her and she started to walk quickly back to the house, not fast enough to make the bee chase her, always mindful of the things in this world that had a nasty habit of biting you when your back was turned.
chapter 27
Bees see colors in the ultraviolet range that humans cannot. Some flowers have colored maps like little runways to show the bees where to land. Humans are blind to these special markings, but the bees see them.
—NED BLOODWORTH’S BEEKEEPER’S JOURNAL
Georgia
I sucked in a deep breath as my sneakers pounded down Water Street along the river, the bent arthritic arms of a docked shrimp boat almost prehistoric against the orange sunrise. I heard James’s running feet next to me, keeping pace, but I didn’t look at him, preferring to be in my own thoughts.
As we approached the Grady Market I allowed myself to slow down, gulping in the warm air already thick with humidity despite the early hour. With my hands on my hips I forced myself to keep moving at a brisk walk, my lungs protesting.
James thudded to a stop next to me, breathing heavily, his skin coated with a thick sheen of sweat that did nothing to lessen his attractiveness. He grinned at me and I had to force myself not to look away. “It’s like running through water,” he managed to say through gasping breaths.
“I told you that you should find an indoor treadmill. We locals have gills, so it doesn’t bother us as much.”
He laughed, exposing those perfect teeth. I wondered whether he had any idea of his appeal. “I’ve been running four miles every day since I arrived. I thought I’d get used to it by now. Guess it takes longer to grow gills.”
“As I said”—I panted, leaning on a bench, trying to force more air into my lungs—“you have to be born with them.”
His phone beeped and I gave him my “I told you so” look that I’d given him when he’d strapped it to his arm at the beginning of our run. I didn’t listen to music when I ran, finding the exercise a good way to untangle my mental threads. The only time I did listen to music was when my past wanted to push beyond the locked door where I liked to keep it.
“It’s Caroline. She wants us to stop by after our run. Says she has something new to share.” He looked up. “She’s already waiting for us.”
After the conversation the previous day with Lyle and our grandfather, I was no longer sure that I wanted to dig any deeper into the mystery of the stolen truck or the origins of the Limoges pattern. Whatever the answer, it had been hidden for so long and so well that there had to be a reason. I already had enough complications in my life.
“I’m glowing pretty profusely, and really need a shower before I see anyone.”
“Glowing?”
“Yeah,” I said, brushing back sweaty hair that had escaped my ponytail. “I keep forgetting you’re not from here. In the South, horses sweat, men perspire, but women glow.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “Well, you’re certainly glowing. Like a lighthouse beam.”
“Gee, thanks.” I frowned. “Can you tell her I’ll be there in an hour?”
“You’re fine,” he said, pulling on my elbow and crossing Water Street. “Although you might be cooler if you wore something more appropriate for warmer weather.”
I looked down at my capri running pants and long-sleeved sweat-wicking athletic top. It wasn’t what I usually wore when I ran in New Orleans. I’d just felt the need to cover myself up when I ran through the familiar streets of my hometown. “It’s all I brought with me,” I said, avoiding his eyes.
“For a quick cooldown we could go run down your dock and take a dip in the bay,” he suggested.
“And there you’d be wrong. It’s only early May, but the water temperature is probably in the eighties. It never really gets cooler than sixty even in January.”
“No kidding. Sounds like a nice place to be in January.”
“It is,” I said. “But we’d like to keep that to ourselves. Meaning if you tell anybody and tourists start flocking down here to make this like Panama City, I’ll have to kill you.” I flinched, remembering what Caroline had said about his state of mind after his wife’s death. He didn’t appear to notice.
“Sounds like you still think of this place as home.”
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, considering my answer. “Regardless of how far you go, home will always be the place you started. There’s really no way to change that, no matter how much we wish we could.”
His eyes were warm with understanding as we resumed walking. “My grandparents’ house on Long Island was beautiful, every detail and piece of furniture carefully selected. But when my grandmother talked of her home, she was referring to the farmhouse where she was born. I don’t even think they had running water.”
“In Italy?” I asked, wanting to form a picture of this woman in my head.
He shook his head. “No. My great-grandmother was French, but she married an Italian and lived on a farm in the south of France, where they raised my grandmother and her many siblings. It was crowded, but she says there was lots of love. She said the hardships meant they just loved harder. It made them stronger.”
“That’s probably why she loved her French china. Because it reminded her of home.”
“Probably,” he said, although his brows knitted as if he was contemplating an internal question.
“What is it?” I asked.
“After going though all those catalogs and researching so much about china, it just occurred to me that Haviland Limoges has never been a ‘workingman’s’ china, right? In other words, it wasn’t something you would see on a farmer’s table.”
“No, generally you wouldn’t. It’s always been considered fine china, and always marketed to the well-heeled.”
Our gazes met. “So where did it come from?” James asked. “And why did they never sell any of it when they were so destitute after moving to New York?”
His phone beeped again and he looked down at it. “Caroline says she’s waiting in the garden at the back of the hotel.”
We passed the front of the old mercantile building with the French flag dangling over the entrance to the former French Consulate—now converted to a hotel on the second floor and the Grady Market on the first—and headed around the block to the back of the building. The garden was a beautiful oasis in the middle of downtown, a lush greenscape of flowering bushes, potted flowers, various benches, and strategically placed oak barrels—harking back to the building’s origins as a shipping-supply company and hardware store—all connected with brick walkways.
Caroline sat in the shade on one of the benches, a stack of papers and a thick catalog next to her. She was tapping something on her iPad, but looked up with a smile as we approached.
“Before you say a word, you must tell me what that beautiful fragrance is.”
I’d smelled it too as we’d passed the plantings in the middle of the garden, and I’d recognized it immediately as something my grandmother had cultivated in the backyard, equally pleasing to bees as to humans—my grandfather’s only input into my grandmother’s garden.
It reminded me of my conversation with James, and one more thing I needed to tell him about what home meant. How sometimes it took only a whiff of one of my grandmother’s flowers and I would be back in Apalachicola again, holding Maisy’s hand and telling her the bees wouldn’t hurt her as long as I was there.
“It’s pittosporum,” I said. “I’m surprised there are still a few blooms left—it usually blooms in late spring for only a couple of weeks. Definitely subtropical, though, in case you were thinking of planting it in your garden in Connecticut.”
“You’re a gardener?” Caroline asked.
I shook my head. “No. My grandmother was, though. I always imagined I’d be one, but my job keeps me pretty busy.”
“I imagine it does. I love to garden. Not because I’m good at it—I’m not—but because it gets me out of the house and allows me to let my thoughts wander. That’s not always a good thing, is it, James?”
“No. Because when you start letting your thoughts wander they always land on me. Maybe you should start collecting antique china instead.”
I lifted a foot behind me to stretch my quads. “You’re up early, Caroline. I’d hoped to squeeze in a shower before our meeting.”
“Four kids in six years means I’ve forgotten how to sleep. So I might as well be up and productive.”
James used the bottom of his shirt to wipe the sweat from his forehead, revealing more than I needed to see. “You can go for a run with me tomorrow morning at six.”
Caroline grimaced as if her brother had just suggested she eat sawdust. “No, thank you. I’ll wait until I get back home to my Pilates trainer. We do that inside in the air-conditioning.”
She looked past James to me, peering at me from above her Chanel sunglasses. “You look more like a cheerleader than a runner.”
Knowing she had meant it as a compliment, I grimaced. “My mother wanted me to be a cheerleader, so I tried out for track instead.”
Caroline laughed. “I certainly understand that. We should write a book on oldest daughters and their mothers.” She shrugged. “I swore my whole life that I wasn’t going to be a lawyer like my mother. I don’t know who was more surprised when I decided to go to law school, her or me. But enough of that.” She patted the seat on the bench next to her. “I’ve got so much to show you. I must say, if this is the sort of detective work you get to do in your job every day, I definitely chose the wrong profession.”
“It’s not all that glamorous, believe me. I’m basically a glorified Dumpster diver.” Ignoring the seat next to her in deference to my dripping face and hair, I perched myself on the armrest on the opposite end of the bench.
“Thank you for the collector’s encyclopedia for Haviland and Co. Limoges. I found what I was looking for, but I was hoping you’d let me borrow it for a few days, because I’d like to read the rest of it. The history of the company is really interesting.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “You can even take it back home with you if you’re not done with it when you leave. I’ve got more editions of it back at my office.”
“And I’m sure you need to be getting home, Caro,” James said, giving his sister a hard stare.
“I’m enjoying myself too much right now to want to leave. I haven’t spent this much time with James in years. The history of this place is truly remarkable. Did you know that this little town has tons of historic homes and buildings, and even a few on the National Register?”
I smiled. “I don’t think it’s possible to grow up in a place like this and not love history or old things. It’s probably why I moved to New Orleans—same kind of vibe.”
James cleared his throat. “If you don’t mind, Caroline, some of us are melting and would like to take a shower, so if you could go ahead and share what you’ve learned?”
Pointedly ignoring him, Caroline said, “Be glad you never had a brother. All right, then, where were we?” She touched her iPad screen to wake it up. “Elizabeth went to Grandmother’s house yesterday and took more pictures. I told her the first photo of the soup cup wasn’t clear, and that we needed a photo of the bottom, too. She also did an exact inventory and shared that with me. Because of the helpful encyclopedia that Georgia gave me, I made a list of serveware Haviland Limoges of the late nineteenth century made in blank number eleven. Not exacting, as I’m sure you can guess, but I wanted to give Elizabeth some kind of guideline in determining what was missing. Did you know there was such a thing as a covered muffin server? The dome is higher than a pancake server.”
Caroline tapped in her password, then opened her photo album on the iPad. “But first, here’s a better picture of the soup cup. Now that you can see it better, is it the same?”
She handed the iPad to me and I took it, then stared at the clear picture of the soup cup, the bright pattern, the bees in flight connected by swirling dips of green paint. Clear enough to bring back the day in my mother’s closet when I’d thought it was a small thing to keep a secret, a rare moment of sharing something with Birdie, the only thing worth remembering the fleeting sense of being cherished.
“Going on memory, I’d say it’s definitely the same one,” I said, sliding onto the bench next to Caroline, who seemed oblivious to how I must look or smell. I held the iPad away from me, as if the photo might change. “Did she take a picture of the bottom?”
“Yes. Just swipe for the next photo. There are more pictures of the other pieces as well as the mark on the bottoms.”
I stared at her for a moment. James came to my rescue by reaching over and showing me how to use my index finger to swipe across the screen to bring up the following photo. The next one was clearer, showing small yet familiar letters. On one line was “H&Co,” underneath that the capital letter “L,” and then beneath both, in a curve that looked like a smile, the word “France.”
“Is that the marking you were looking for?”
I nodded. “It’s the Haviland blank mark used from 1888 until 1896. At least, I think that’s right—I’ll have to look it up to be sure, but I’m around this stuff so much it’s practically engraved in my mind. And it’s the same mark on the teacup and saucer, verifying that at least those pieces are part of the same set. I don’t always like to assume that, but now I know they are.”
“Does that tell you anything?” Caroline asked.
“Confirms more than tells me anything new. We were pretty sure we knew the blank, and this marking tells us that we’re right, because it’s in the correct time period. It narrows down where I need to look in the ledger for the Beaulieu estate, as well. I’ve got about one hundred years of entries and I’m in the eighteen seventies now, but I’m going to jump ahead and start with 1888.”
“Could your soup cup be part of my grandmother’s china?” James asked.
“I can’t rule it out,” I said quietly, as I slowly flipped through more photos—dinner plates, salad plates, a sugar bowl with a lid. A honeybee sat on top, suspended in porcelain.
“Maybe this will help,” Caroline said as she slid out a piece of paper she’d stuck between the pages of the Haviland & Co. catalog. “It’s the list of missing pieces Elizabeth sent to me.”
I hesitated just for a moment before taking the paper from her. It was from a lined piece of notebook paper, the spiral edge shredded from being ripped out. “It appears that my grandmother’s set contained only the basics—twelve eight-piece place settings with a few serving dishes, such as the cream and sugar and a couple of covered vegetable dishes.”
I looked down at the paper, easily reading Caroline’s handwriting, which was as neat and precise as she was. Missing items: teacup and saucer (James), soup cup, and large piece—unknown.
“That’s all?” I asked.
Caroline nodded. “Elizabeth and Lauren—another sister—have gone through every single piece of china, crystal, and silver and itemized it all. There are twelve of all the d
inner, salad, bread-and-butter, and dessert plates, yet only eleven of the teacups and saucers, of course.” She glanced at James, and I blushed, realizing he must have taken the blame for their destruction.
She continued. “There are eleven soup cups and twelve saucers, so it’s a logical assumption that a soup cup is missing. As for the large object, all we know is that there was always a hole in the middle front of the china display in the cabinet. Both Elizabeth and I remember our grandmother saying she was saving the spot. We both assumed she was waiting to either buy the piece or be given it as a gift. Elizabeth used the list I sent her of pieces made in blank number eleven to see what might have been the right size, but that’s pure conjecture. Elizabeth thinks it could be a covered cake plate, or a coffeepot. Possibly even a teapot.” She shook her head. “I just wish we’d thought to ask while she was still alive. Although, to be honest, I never liked the pattern very much. I’m afraid of bees.”
My mind was so busy whirring in circles that I didn’t think to start my lecture I usually gave about why people shouldn’t be afraid of bees. I lowered the iPad, needing to get away from the bright colors and intricate design. It was so unique, so special. So personal. So unlike any china pattern I’d ever come across.
“I think we have more questions than answers now, but I’m fairly confident that this was a custom design. Otherwise we would have run across it by now, or at least one of my contacts in the field would have seen it at some point. Even a limited-run pattern would be listed somewhere. It may have been created for somebody who had a last name that had something to do with honeybees or even flowers.”
“Or it could have been commissioned by somebody who just liked bees,” James said. “It would be helpful to find the soup cup, to verify that it came from the same set. It’s such a long shot that I just can’t believe it without seeing it and knowing for sure. But we’ve looked everywhere in the house—the attic, the closets, the dining room, and kitchen cabinets. I’m thinking we need to assume it’s gone.”
