Ellie neatly packed away the needle and scissors, though she would certainly never see that particular sewing kit again. She ran her finger across the embroidered top of the sewing box; Emmie had a matching box, she remembered. Oh Emmie, she sighed to herself. Stodgy, dear, sweet, conventional Emmie. She knew she would probably never see her twin again. It was just too risky.
She had cried when she and Richard discussed this, the need for her to sever any ties to her past. “It’s for the greatest cause, love,” Richard had said. “You know Nathaniel isn’t a strong reader; losing those cards is going to be a big blow to his ability. Most of the Guild sides with me already and now he’ll lose a lot of government credibility. It’ll cripple him, but he’s not above personal retaliation for anyone involved. Or their families.”
This was after Richard had returned from Washington D.C., where he’d confirmed that a certain reporter was going to publish all sorts of unsavory facts about the government’s involvement in Vietnam. The Guild readings had shown that this reporter’s findings would begin to swiftly turn the tide of public opinion regarding the war. And Nathaniel hadn’t wanted that. Not at all. He felt the Guild should use its government influence to intervene, to silence the reporter. And so the schism began, the rift that would quickly rip the Guild apart. For some Guild members felt the war was just and wanted to continue to assist the administration, while others felt the war was unjust and objected. Yet other members, such as Nathaniel, likely didn’t care about justice at all and were concerned mostly with retaining the power and wealth of the Guild. Durendal stood divided.
And now, here she was. She sat alone in her single quarters at Durendal, since she and Richard had been careful to hide their relationship and marriage. “Nathaniel wants me dead, and if he knows we’re connected, he’ll be after you too,” Richard had said. Ellie would have argued with him, but she and Richard were the strongest readers in the Guild and she knew he spoke the truth.
After tonight, they could be together freely as husband and wife. Tonight they would escape with as many cards as they could. Take that, Nathaniel. Her own card (she’d become oddly attached to it) was already hidden at a pre-determined rendezvous point, along with the new identities Richard had purchased for her and for himself. So now all Ellie had to do was wait, sitting silently on her bed, brushing her silky light brown hair.
The hours passed and the velvet dark of the moonless night wrapped itself around Savannah. Finally, an alarm sounded, splitting the night as voices yelled from a distance. Ellie stuck her head out the window, searching for the deadly licks of yellow flame. She didn’t see the fire, but of course, Durendal was huge—there was plenty you couldn’t see from her vantage point.
Ellie counted to one hundred before a knocked sounded at her door. “Eleanor!” a woman’s voice yelled. “Get out of there, we’ve got a fire!” Ellie pulled the quilt tightly around her nightgown and flew to open the bedroom door, joining the other woman who was fleeing down the long corridor.
Chaos reigned in the front courtyard. Guild members and household staff tumbled over one another, crying out to each other in the starlight. The fire department hadn’t arrived yet. As planned, Ellie circled to the rear of the west wing. No one paid her any attention.
She crouched behind a shrub, but she could still clearly see the French doors ahead of her that opened to a tiny side courtyard. This was the door through which Richard would escape, after he’d raided the Counsel Room and taken as many Oracle cards as he could.
Ellie waited, the wind stirring her hair, snagging a lock on a crooked branch. She freed her hair and saw the door creak open. She nearly leapt up as Richard’s face came into view, but then stopped short. Richard wasn’t alone.
Of all the many entrances and exits at Durendal, Richard had chosen this particular point because it was so rarely used. It was an odd little nook near the back of the west wing, and he’d figured it was the place he was least likely to run into Nathaniel.
He’d made the wrong choice. For there at the doors, approaching from the other direction was Nathaniel. Five minutes sooner or later, and Richard wouldn’t have been spotted. Damn it, Ellie thought, as she remain crouched, biting her lip in frustration. She ducked further behind the shrubs.
“Why, Richard, what a surprise,” Nathaniel drawled affably. Ellie could no longer see the door, but she grimaced at the memory of Nathaniel’s broad face.
“We need to get out of here Nathaniel, before that fire spreads. Come on,” said Richard.
“Sure do, sure do. Though I’d have reckoned you would have taken a shorter route to egress, my boy, considering this state of emergency.”
“I was in the back hall archives catching up on some research when I heard the alarm.”
“A likely tale,” Nathaniel replied, “But let’s cut the bullshit, boy. You took something that belongs to me. Several somethings, in fact. I checked the Counsel Room on my way out and it seems to be lacking several Oracle cards. And as leader of this fine Guild, I believe I should rectify that situation.”
“You’re crazy, Nat. The building’s on fire, we need to clear away.”
“Well,” Nathaniel paused and pointed at Richard’s knapsack. “Whether I’m crazy or not, you’d best be returning what you took.”
“I don’t have anything that belongs to you. I’m leaving.” Footsteps sounded in the courtyard. Ellie ventured a quick glance around the shrub again. Richard was walking away from Nathaniel, toward the front of the estate. She wondered where she should meet up with him now, and how they’d get away without Nathaniel having them followed. Run, Richard, she thought. Stop talking and run now.
“Oh Richard!” Nathaniel said. Richard stopped, turning to face Nathaniel, defiance written on his handsome dark features. “You sure you don’t want to hand over those cards?”
“Go to hell Nathaniel.” And with that, Richard’s eyes widened, shock on his face. For he was able to see something that Ellie was not: Nathaniel had a gun, and that gun was pointed at Richard. Richard pivoted and ran, but fell to the ground only a second later as two shots rang out. Ellie was still watching. She brought her hands to her mouth to stifle a scream at the sight her young husband lying on the hard bricks of the courtyard, his chest covered in spreading pool of darkness. Nathaniel crossed the courtyard, looked calmly down at Richard’s body and with a steady hand fired another single shot into Richard’s chest. He bent over to pick up the knapsack that had fallen from Richard’s shoulder and began to dig through it.
Ellie tried to hold back a sob, but was betrayed by the smallest of wimpers escaping her mouth. Nathaniel looked up sharply and glanced at the surrounding grounds. Ellie held her breath until he returned his attention to the knapsack, and then slowly, quietly, she crept away through the trees, a wraith in a nightgown, carrying nothing but a light quilt and a burden of grief and hate so heavy that it threatened to crush her very soul. A trembling cry came over her and she felt again for the not-yet-fluttering child inside of her and it was only this that kept her upright and moving.
She didn’t look back.
Chapter 23. Hippies.
The woman stood silently at the door. Her clothes were all wrong to my eye. My grandma had always worn bohemian style clothing, lots of swishing and jangling, while this woman was wearing a conservative mint-green blouse and pants set. Her gray hair lay in a short, tight perm instead of long, loose waves, but her face was identical to my grandma’s.
I started to speak and the woman held up her hand to silence me. “What do you mean ‘was,’” she said.
“I beg your pardon,” I replied.
“You said ‘was.’ That Eleanor was your grandmother. Past tense. Did something happen to her?”
I felt the tears brimming in my eyes. “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but she died. Just this past April.”
“Oh, Eleanor,” the woman said, her voice a sad whisper. She raised her arm against the frame of the door, bracing herself there quietly.
“I think you should come in,” she told me.
We stepped inside the house, greeted by the smell of lemon furniture polish and fresh flowers in the front sitting room. Each book, knickknack and picture primly held its place and a uniform series of vacuum tracks marched across the pale peach carpet with a sort of feminine military discipline. Emmaline was evidently the tidier twin.
Gavin and I took a seat on a floral slip-covered sofa as Emmaline slowly lowered herself to a striped armchair. Her head was bowed and her hands trembled slightly as she placed them in her lap. She did not immediately speak and when she looked up at me again, tears were flowing freely down her face.
“I’m sorry, what did you say your name was, again?” she asked, her voice uneven.
“I’m Lucy and this is my friend Gavin.”
“And you’re Ellie’s granddaughter?”
I’d never heard my grandmother call herself Ellie but I nodded as Emmaline leaned over toward an end table, pulling a tissue from its lower shelf. She dabbed at her eyes and nose and sighed quietly.
“What—what happened to my sister?”
“She had a stroke. It was really unexpected because she wasn’t sick or anything.”
“A stroke. That’s what took my father, too,” Emmaline said. “Not that Ellie would’ve known that. It’s been so many years since…”
“I know,” I said softly. “Did something happen between the two of you? To make you lose contact?”
Emmaline fidgeted with the tissue in her hands. “We had an argument and she moved away and we haven’t spoken since,” she said flatly, looking away from us. “How rude of me, I haven’t offered either of you a drink. I’ll bring out some water.” Emmaline left the room, trailing a light rose scent. That was wrong, too, I thought. My grandma always smelled of cinnamon.
I wondered what argument could have been bad enough to sever the contact between twin sisters for several decades, but didn’t think it would be polite to ask. Emmaline returned with glasses of water and settled back into the striped armchair.
“Grandma never talked much about herself,” I said. “What was she like when she was young?”
Emmaline leaned back in the armchair, closing her eyes and smiling, her lashes still wet. “Ellie was too clever for her own good. And funny…and beautiful, though of course I probably shouldn’t say that about my identical twin. And, oh, how she loved to boss me. She was six minutes older and she never did let me forget it. She was the leader, I suppose, and I was the follower.”
“Did you guys always live here?” I asked.
“Yes, this was our parents’ home. They moved in just after the war. And it belonged to one of my mother’s aunts before that. So we grew up here. Everyone knew the Gibson girls,” she said, sounding bemused. “We were proud of being twins. We always had Mother put us in matching dresses, up until our senior year, anyway. That’s when Ellie started wearing those horrible clothes,” she laughed.
“Horrible clothes?” I asked.
“Oh yes. That was the beginning of the day of the hippy, you know. It all seemed so shocking then—her clothes, her music, those weird hairy boys she started to date. Father just hated those sloppy young men. Of course now, it all seems so…” she shook her head at the memory, still smiling.
I grinned at the thought of my grandmother as a young hippy. I could totally see her with a guitar and a fringed vest, protesting the war. I looked over at Gavin, thinking he might be bored, but he was listening as intently as I was. Emmaline excused herself and left the room, returning a few minutes later with a thick photo album.
“She was still kind of a hippy even recently,” I said as Emmaline showed us picture after picture of the two girls throughout their youth. “Like, not so much with dating hairy men, but really into farmer’s markets and that kind of thing. But then again, most people in Boulder are kind of like that.”
“Boulder? As in Colorado? I never did know where she’d ended up. It’s been so long.” Emmaline sighed. “I’ve missed Ellie every day. She was very special to me.”
“Me, too. I mean, I miss her every day, too,” I said. I looked down at a picture of my teenaged grandmother and her sister at what looked like a Christmas party, both open-mouthed with laughter. “I’m glad we were able to find you. It’s good to hear about her—about her history. She didn’t talk about her past much.”
“Well, ask me anything,” Emmaline said. “I have plenty of stories.”
I looked over at Gavin and he gave me a small nod. “There is one thing I wanted to ask about…” I said.
“What’s that?” Emmaline replied.
“I’m looking for something that my grandma used to have. It’s a card. A tarot card, actually, one of a set. It would have a picture of a lady on it. Have you seen anything like that?”
“No, I haven’t seen anything like that. She doesn’t have any personal belongings here. I cleared her things out years and years ago.” Emmaline said, her voice suddenly clipped and business-like. Had I offended her somehow?
“Um, it’s no big deal,” I said. “I was just wondering.”
Emmaline stood up abruptly, glancing at her watch. “I’m sorry; I didn’t realize how late it was. I have an appointment, so I’ll have to say good bye to you both. It was nice to meet you.”
“Would you mind if we stayed in touch?” I asked. “I’d like to get to know you.”
“Yes, that would be fine,” she said, speaking quickly, ushering me and Gavin toward the door. It was as if she couldn’t get rid of us fast enough.
I pulled a pen and paper from my bag, jotting down my name, address, phone number and email. “Here’s how you can reach me. It was nice to meet you.”
“It was a pleasure, Lucy. You take care, now,” she said. We stepped outside and she quickly shut the door behind us.
“That was odd,” Gavin said, once we were back in the car.
“Yeah, I would’ve thought she would have wanted to have dinner together at least. I think I upset her when I asked about the card.”
“It’s possible she took it wrong,” Gavin said. “Perhaps she thought you were out to be greedy with your grandmother’s things.”
“Maybe. I didn’t mean to sound that way.” I said. “I am officially out of ideas about where to look for that card, though.”
“She could have hidden it anywhere. For all we know, your grandmother had another home that the reading referred to. I don’t think we have any other leads.”
“No, but it was still nice to meet a new relative,” I said. “I’ll have to call my dad and tell him. I’ll bet he doesn’t even know that his mom had a twin sister.”
“So many secrets,” Gavin sighed, his voice tinged with some deep melancholy. I looked over at him, but he kept his eyes on the road.
WE MADE THE DRIVE BACK to Sacramento to catch our flights. Gavin went with me to my gate, carrying my bags for me as we walked. When we arrived he set my laptop down on a blue vinyl chair in the waiting area. I placed my bag on the adjoining chair.
“Thanks for the help,” I said. “Have a good flight back to Savannah.”
“Yes, I will.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Well, goodbye then.”
“See you later.” I watched him turn and walk away, his long legs striding quickly across the concourse. Several other women checked him out as he passed. Irrational tugs of jealousy pulled at my heart; it wasn’t as if we were dating, after all.
He passed the Starbucks and stopped, turning around abruptly. Hurriedly, I averted my eyes, pretending to look out the windows. I didn’t want him to know I’d been watching him. From the corner of my eye, I saw that he was walking back toward me. He must have forgotten something.
Suddenly he was in front of me. He placed a hand on each of my shoulders and looked earnestly down at me. My breath caught in my throat as our eyes locked.
“It’s not you, Lucy.”
“What?”
“You’re not the mistake,” he whispered.
“Well, hell, Gavin, I could’ve told you that. I’m the best idea you ever had,” I teased, but he didn’t smile.
“I’m the mistake,” he said. “I shouldn’t have kissed you, because it’s unfair to you. I couldn’t be with you.”
“Why not?”
“You’re so young and you’re free and you deserve something better than this.”
“Better than what?”
“Than me. Better than the issues and baggage that I bring.”
“But, what,” Gavin shook his head, he wasn’t going to answer my questions.
“Go back to Matt,” he said. “Patch it up, have fun, just enjoy being eighteen.”
“No,” I said, and stood on my tiptoes to press my mouth to his, flicking my tongue across his lower lip. He pulled me closer and held me tight as he returned the kiss, deeply but gently, until he carefully pushed me away from him.
“Goodbye, Lucy,” he said, nearly inaudibly, and walked away, leaving me breathless as I stared after him.
Chapter 24. Home Movies.
“Me next, me next!” Stella’s friend Jana waved her hand back and forth goofily above her spiky black hair. We were all lounging around on the living room floor as I read cards on the rug. Tonight I was holding what Angie referred to as “the last girl adventure before everyone leaves for college.”
“Will there be half-naked chicks pillow fighting?” Matt had jokingly asked earlier that day. We weren’t dating again, but as if by a cautious truce we were speaking, at least.
I’d rolled my eyes. “Matt, in all my years of overnight parties, that has never happened. Not even once.”
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