“Poetry sucks.” Sadie closed her notebook. “The disguise isn’t working, you know.”
“Disguise?”
“Riley told me there were people in Pine Lake who wouldn’t be happy to see you’re back.” Sadie pulled an imaginary cap. “A hat and a pair of glasses aren’t going to hide those tats.”
“Pine Lake hasn’t seen these tats.” Tess’s flip-flops hit the ground and then Tess did, too, dropping down in the sand right next to Sadie like she’d been invited or something. “So have you found any likely suspects?”
“Suspects?”
“Riley told me you’re looking for your biological mom.”
Sadie stilled. A tingling swept up the back of her neck. Riley shouldn’t have said anything. The fact that she did made Sadie want to curl in on herself, like the turtle she’d seen the kids playing with by the reeds. Instead she pressed her notebook against her chest and gave the woman her best back-off glare. But all Sadie could see in the shiny surface of the woman’s sunglasses was her own distorted reflection.
“You’re in Pine Lake, Sadie.” Tess shrugged a shoulder. “It’s tough to keep a secret here.”
Sadie turned away and squinted over the water like it didn’t matter, though she couldn’t help wondering what else Riley had told this woman.
“I’ve been away from this town for fifteen years, but I’ve been recognized at least twice since I arrived.” Tess wrapped her arms around her knees. “Now the whole town knows I’m here. I give it a day or two before folks start asking who the young redhead is who’s hanging around Camp Kwenback.”
“Riley’s got my back.”
“And I’ve got hers.”
“What’s your problem?” Sadie reached for her backpack. “I’ve got nothing to do with you.”
“You’re putting my friend in a difficult situation. And you’re putting yourself in a worse one.”
Sadie fumbled for the zipper. “You don’t know anything about my situation.”
“Have you thought about what you’re going to do when you’re done here?” Tess rocked herself back so the sun fell on her face. “There’s still enough summer left to stay on the northern circuit, but big cities are better to hide in. Will you be hopping a train to Buffalo? Or will you be jumping the freight train that cuts through the southernmost part of town, the one that goes direct to Cleveland?”
Sadie twitched at the mention of that Ohio city, but she figured it was just coincidence that Tess mentioned it. No way did Tess know about her cousins in Ohio, because she hadn’t even told Riley about them.
“I’d advise against Cleveland,” Tess continued. “You can usually depend upon a train station for a safe public place to sleep, but not that one. Not while I was last there, anyway. I had to dodge a lot of junkies and some tough guys looking for lost young girls to pimp out. And the Dumpster-diving wasn’t so good, either. You’d do better in Cincinnati—”
“I’ve got no reason to go to Cincinnati.” Sadie shoved her notebook into her backpack and zipped it back up. “Or Cleveland or any of those places.”
“Yeah, it’s all the same, right? Whether you go to St. Louis in November or New Orleans in December. It’s just the weather that’s different. Every day you wake up, beg for change, hang out, and then, if you’re lucky, score some happy-happy.”
Sadie eyeballed her. “Oh, I get it now. This is the scared-straight talk, right?”
Oddly, Tess laughed. “Someone tried that on me once. Didn’t work. So just consider this a little advice from one runaway to another.”
“I don’t go anywhere near drugs.”
“Glad to hear that.”
Tess’s smile was thin and Sadie couldn’t help but squint at her more closely. When she’d first seen Tess at Camp Kwenback, she’d pinned her as a hard-working woman. It showed in the ropiness of her arms, built like she used them all the time doing something real physical, like the guys always fixing the roads under the elevated train in Queens. The woman had a face that didn’t like to smile, and Sadie thought she might work a little too hard to radiate hard-assness. But a runaway? Being a runaway implied being young and a little clueless, and looking at this woman, Sadie just couldn’t imagine that.
“You’ve got me all wrong.” Sadie swept the backpack over her shoulder. “I’m no runaway. I’m here for a reason.”
“Then you’ll be going home soon, right? Because there’s nothing out here that’s worth leaving home for.”
“Depends on the home, doesn’t it?”
Tess turned her face away to look down the far end of the Bay. “You’ve got me there.”
Sadie flexed her hand over the strap of her backpack, hesitating. She didn’t want to leave the beach, but the library closed early on Wednesdays and there wasn’t anything else she could do except wander around town. And it was nice on the lakeshore, warm and quiet. She’d come here to write descriptions of the folks on the beach, but she also had a couple chapters of War and Peace left to read. She didn’t like the idea of this woman running her off.
Then Tess murmured, “I know why you like this place.”
“Who wouldn’t like this place?” Sadie squinted across the shore, to the bristly island in the middle, the one she could see so sharply with Riley’s borrowed binoculars. “Cool water, soft sand.” Cute lifeguard.
“This side of town is a hell of a lot nicer than Cannery Row, where I grew up.” Tess let go of her knees and threw her hands back to support herself. “I imagine Disneyland would be like this, full of clean-scrubbed people.”
Sadie had been to Disney World once. She remembered it because it was noisy, full of people and scary robotic creatures in the dark.
“I used to sit right here, too.” Tess shifted her butt deeper in the sand like she was putting down roots or something. “I used to smoke cigarettes and watch everyone having a good time. I used to wonder why the hell I couldn’t have been born into a nice, shiny, happy family.”
A startling thought popped into Sadie’s mind. “Are you adopted?”
“Nope.”
“Then stop talking like you were.”
“There were plenty of times I wished I had been.”
She groaned aloud, not caring if it was rude, because what did this woman know about having a huge part of yourself kept secret forever?
“The first time I wished that,” Tess said, “was when the cops arrested my mother. They called the house in the middle of the night, looking for an adult to come fetch her from the holding pen.”
“Wow. TMI.”
“Public knowledge.” Tess shifted her weight onto one arm as she swept her hand across the expanse of the lakeshore. “Talk to any of the locals and they’d tell you the same story about Mrs. Hendrick.”
“Should I break out the tiny violin?”
Tess’s lips stretched into a grim smile. Then she motioned toward the mother and three kids, still playing the card game. “Do you think she’s a possibility?”
Sadie squinted down the far end of the beach, like the question wasn’t worth the bother.
“A woman like that,” Tess persisted, “the kind who takes her kids to a sandy lakeside on a midweek afternoon…she’s your ideal birth mother, isn’t she?”
Sadie shot to her feet, not caring that she kicked some sand on Tess. Her spine straightened like someone had stuck a ruler up her back. “You can talk, talk, talk all you want, but you’re not getting rid of me. Not before I find my birth mother.”
Sadie realized how stupid she sounded, like a little girl looking for Mommy, but she couldn’t help herself. This woman couldn’t possibly understand. Even Izzy didn’t understand. Sadie wasn’t sure that even Riley understood, not completely, because Riley’s adoptive parents were still alive.
Sadie’s first vivid memory was of her mother. Sadie had been strapped into something, a toddler seat or a bouncy chair, she supposed. She had a stuffed rabbit in her hand. It had pink fur and Xs for eyes. She knew the memory was real and not something she’
d thought up later because she still had this toy, Bunzy, back in her room at Nana’s, now gray and worn and sour-smelling.
But in her memory Bunzy smelled like vanilla. In her memory Bunzy was in her hand, and then Bunzy was gone. She must have cried out because, a little while later, her mother came into the room. Sadie didn’t remember anything her mother said, just the tone of her voice, the way she made her forget about the rabbit. And then suddenly Bunzy was in her hand again. But when she looked up, her mother had disappeared.
“Sadie.”
Sadie flinched. The Tess-woman’s voice was soft and round. At first she couldn’t believe the voice had come out of a hard mouth like that. But Tess was looking up at her from under the bill of her cap, and the sun at that angle cut through the lenses of the sunglasses, so Sadie could see that Tess was looking at her—searching her face—with the strangest, tightest, and oddest of expressions.
“We all want perfect parents,” Tess said. “Hell, I did, too. But the truth is, your birth mother may not be one of them.”
Sadie swallowed down her own sigh. She had had this conversation with the guidance counselor at her middle school, the social worker who followed up once a year after she’d been transferred into her nana’s custody, and all the well-meaning adults who felt they knew what was best for her—to wait, always wait, until she was mature enough to handle the “possibility of failed expectations,” and what they called “the inevitable emotional upheaval.”
One set of parents dead and a grandmother in a nursing home. Uh-uh, don’t talk to Sadie Tischler about emotional upheaval.
“I’d settle for a mother who just didn’t disappear.” Sadie wiggled her feet into her flip-flops and turned away.
“Sadie.”
Over her shoulder she barked, “What?”
“Ask Riley.”
“Ask Riley what?”
“Ask Riley what happened when she found her own birth mother.”
Chapter Eleven
Riley’s old friend from high school Claire Petrenko had a certain effect on people. Riley figured it had something to do with the fact that Claire had once been a Buddhist nun, because during the six-mile ride back from the Pine Lakes train station, Riley had opened up like a spigot, telling her everything that had been going on at Camp Kwenback.
“So let me get this straight.” Claire sat in the passenger’s seat of Riley’s car. “You’re telling me that Camp Kwenback is now housing a dementia patient, a teenage runaway, and ex-juvenile delinquent Theresa Hendrick?”
“Just another day in the life of Riley Cross.”
“You poor thing.”
“Trust me, I didn’t plan for this.” Riley turned the car onto the graveled road that led to the lodge. “It just happened. One moment it was just Mrs. Clancy and me, and the next—”
“The next you know, the universe is sending you lost souls.”
“That’s a Buddhist thing, right?”
“Sort of.” Claire ran her fingers through her short hair, just growing back after the last round of chemo. “Last year, when Jenna showed up at my door, she said she wanted to help me after my mastectomy—but really, she was just running away from her divorce. She was broken, the poor woman, and in desperate need of support.”
Riley tried to keep up with Claire’s thought processes. “So you think Tess is running away from a divorce?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what Tess is running away from, though I know she was once married. I was actually talking about you.” Claire hung her elbow out the window and gazed off toward the debris piled around the old mini-golf. “Every once in a while, whether you’re ready or not, Karma sends you lost creatures. Since I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I’ve got a farm full of blind possums, three-legged goats, and one crippled raven, and darned if I know why.” Claire gasped as she caught sight of Tess working amid the piles of wood. “In Buddha’s name, she’s gone blond.”
“It suits her, don’t you think?” Riley could just glimpse Tess walking between the trees. “The ink-black hair made her look like a vampire.”
“Did you ask her?”
“Ask her what?”
“About the burned-out farmhouse in Kansas.” Claire turned, the whites of her eyes bright. “When Jenna, Nicole, and I went looking for her last year, all we found was an abandoned wreck. It was practically still smoking.”
“I mentioned it once.” Riley turned into the parking area in front of the lodge and took the far spot. “She didn’t answer, and it was like the walls came down hard. And, honestly, I haven’t had more than a fifteen-minute conversation with her since, and it has all been about the renovation of the mini-golf.”
“We’ll have to do something about that, won’t we?”
Riley stepped out of the car, then pulled Claire’s suitcase out of the backseat. Claire came around and pushed the button for the handle. Claire hadn’t opted for reconstructive surgery after her mastectomy so her T-shirt billowed over her chest. In pink letters it said Chemo Ninja.
“You’re back!”
Riley glanced up to see Sadie’s head pop up over the railing of the porch.
“Thanks for holding down the fort, Sadie.” Riley squinted across the empty parking lot. “Any chance a busload of vacationers arrived to check in?”
“Um…no.”
“A minivan full of hikers?”
“I didn’t see—”
“How ’bout an SUV full of bicyclists?”
Sadie screwed up her face. “You said that the only one coming this week was your friend Claire.”
Apparently not all fourteen-year-olds picked up on sarcasm. “Claire, this is Sadie,” Riley said, as they bumped the luggage up to the shade of the porch. “Sadie, this is another good friend of mine from high school, Claire.”
Claire thrust out her hand. “A pleasure to meet another redhead. The three of us should have some kind of secret handshake.”
Sadie’s face pinched in perplexity as her gaze grazed Claire’s short hair. Riley realized that Claire’s hair had come in dark, and it was too short yet to see the auburn highlights.
“So,” Riley asked, “is Mrs. Clancy still awake?”
“She’s dozing on the back porch. I made some of that Cape Cod chicken salad for her. She ate it right up.” Sadie bounced on the balls of her toes. “Her hair needed a good brushing so I took care of it while she ate.”
“I’m sure she loved that,” Riley said as she pushed open the door to the lodge. “I’m going to get Claire settled and then—”
“Riley?”
Sadie stood on one foot, pulling on her fingers in agitation.
“Yes?”
Sadie said, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Uh-huh?”
Sadie’s gaze skittered to Claire, and then that gaze searched for a landing spot somewhere on the porch floorboards.
Claire caught the vibe. “Riley, I’ve been dying to give Bob’s belly a good rub ever since I hopped on that train. You come fetch me when the room’s ready.”
As Claire’s footsteps receded, Sadie slid her hip onto the porch railing. “So I was thinking,” Sadie repeated, “I noticed that you’ve got those ledger things that you write in to track reservations and who is registered and what room they’re in, right?”
“One for every year,” she conceded, “though I’ve been doing both ledgers and the computer registration since eighteen months ago because the new program is glitchy—”
“Do you save past years’ ledgers? Like in a big box somewhere?”
Riley thought about the low-beamed attic over the guest rooms, the boxes and boxes of photo albums and memorabilia and stuff from her grandparent’s bedroom she hadn’t had the heart to throw away.
She knew where this was going. “You know you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, right?”
“That’s such a weird expression. I mean, if you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, why can’t you just use a magnet?”
“You know wha
t I’m talking about.” It pained her to think that Sadie’s search would probably lead to one dead end after another. “In these ledgers, they’ll all just be names to you. They won’t mean anything—”
“You’d know them though. All those people who stayed here.”
“Many of them, but not all.”
“Maybe you’ll see a name and remember something you’d forgotten. Maybe I can make a connection with the research I’ve been doing.”
Riley hesitated. Sadie had been here a week now. She’d left just about every morning to bike to the library and returned each night sunburned from the beach. She’d also tagged along a couple of mornings when Riley went bird-watching, peering through the binoculars with the awe of a newbie. She’d been a great help around the lodge, playing cards with Mrs. Clancy in the evenings, keeping watch at the reservation desk when Riley had to pop into town. Riley had to admit that she liked the young girl’s company. But with each passing day, Tess’s concerns about legal complications weighed more heavily on her.
In for a penny, in for a pound. “Let me take care of Claire first,” Riley said. “Then get ready to get dusty.”
A half hour later Claire headed to the mini-golf to say hello to Tess, and Sadie bounced behind Riley as she led the way up the stairs to the second floor. In the ceiling halfway down the hallway hung a chain that connected to the pull-down stairs to the attic. She tugged on the porcelain grip and unfolded the stairs. Testing each creaking wooden riser, she made her way into the gloom.
The central air conditioning her grandparents had reluctantly added to the lodge twenty years ago didn’t quite reach this space, so climbing the stairs was like walking into soup. The air smelled of pine resin and musty books. Decorations for various holidays were stacked up on one side, Fourth of July taking up a goodly amount of space. Riley had a moment’s thought that there might be some decaying old fireworks in some of those boxes, until she remembered that it was her grandfather who took care of the fireworks, and he kept a separate storage space in the barn. These eaves were mostly Grandma’s, and the boxes were packed so tight there wasn’t enough space between them to slip the width of a pencil.
Senseless Acts of Beauty Page 10
