by Nicole Baart
“I’m not allowed to talk about the patients,” Anika said quietly as Nora sat down beside her. She held out the cigarettes and Nora took one even though she didn’t want it. “But it’s just about time for my smoke break.”
“Thanks,” Nora said, because it felt like the right thing to say.
Anika reached over to light Nora’s cigarette and they were quiet for a drag, two, while Anika inhaled deeply and squinted out over the parking lot.
“Tiffany came about two weeks ago.”
“She did?” Nora was incredulous. “You said she hadn’t been by!” She had no idea that Tiffany had made the drive, that she had managed to visit Key Lake without Nora realizing it. Had Donovan known?
“I said lately. Depends on your definition of lately.” Anika blew a perfect ring of smoke and turned to regard Nora. “She knew that Lorelei didn’t have long. Her blood pressure was dropping, her breathing was erratic … she had days. I told Tiffany so.”
“And she came to say goodbye?”
Anika fixed Nora with an indecipherable look. “She had a little girl with her.”
Everlee.
Nora didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. They had kept Everlee a secret from Lorelei because they thought the truth would be more than she could handle. It had the potential to undo everything they had worked for. But something inside of Nora splintered at the knowledge that Lorelei had met her granddaughter—if only once. She took a long drag on the cigarette in her hand to stop herself from completely breaking down. They hadn’t meant for it to be this way.
“She’s the daughter of a friend,” Nora improvised, her voice cracking.
“Give me a break, Nora. The little girl is Tiffany’s kid. Anyone could see that. Cute as a button, too.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Anika looked around, leaned in. Jabbing her cigarette at Nora, she said: “Because they didn’t come alone. A lawyer met them and closed the door to Lorelei’s room.”
“Roger Estes?”
“That’s the one.”
“Why?”
Anika shrugged. “Only one reason you need a lawyer when you’re dying.”
So stupid.
Nora could have screamed. Could have kicked herself. Lorelei Barnes wasn’t a rich woman, but she had land. Enough of it to set Tiffany and Everlee up for life. Enough of it to make them a target for someone like Donovan Richter.
He didn’t care about his $10,000. He cared about Tiffany’s million.
“I have to go,” Nora said, dropping her cigarette and grinding it out with her heel. Her pulse was galloping, pounding so hard and heavy in her chest she could hardly breathe. She was already several steps away when she remembered that against all odds, Anika had helped her. Had made her realize that nothing was quite what it seemed. Over her shoulder, she said: “Thank you.”
“You’re not the first person to come around asking about Lorelei,” Anika called.
Nora stopped dead in her tracks. “What?” she whispered, turning slowly.
“Yesterday. A man came in. Good-looking, tall. Tattoos peeking beneath the cuffs of his sleeves.” Anika snuffed out her own cigarette and stood up. “You know, Tiffany’s type.”
No.
When Nora wrenched open the car door and threw herself inside, Ethan reached for her. “What’s wrong?” he asked, searching her face. “What happened?”
“Just drive.”
He steered away from Pine Hills but paused at the intersection, waiting for her to give him directions.
“I don’t know!” she shouted, casting about. “I don’t know where to go, I don’t know what to do …”
Ethan put on his blinker and turned on a side street. He drove halfway down the first block and pulled close to the curb, then put the vehicle in park. “Okay,” he said, swiveling to face her. “Tell me what happened. What’s wrong, Nora?”
“Tiffany came here a couple weeks ago.”
“So?”
Nora put her head in her hands and tugged her short hair as if trying to draw the truth from her own mind. She was putting the pieces together, filling in the blanks, but the situation was so surreal she didn’t know if she could trust herself.
“Talk to me,” Ethan said.
“She came with Everlee.”
“And?”
“And they met with Lorelei’s lawyer.”
“So?”
“Lorelei was worth a lot of money. Land rich. If I remember correctly, she had a hundred acres.”
Ethan tapped the steering wheel, calculating. “What’s an acre of farmland worth? Six thousand? Seven?”
“More.”
“That’s almost a million bucks.”
“Don’t forget the acreage and farmhouse.”
Ethan whistled low.
“But Lorelei didn’t know that Tiffany had a daughter. If she left everything to Tiffany—”
“And Tiffany was going to run—”
“Where would that leave Everlee?” Nora finished. What was Tiffany thinking? She had a false identity and enough money to disappear, but she went back to Key Lake all the same. And then she left Everlee behind. Why? Did she have any idea how much danger she had put her own daughter in? Herself? Lorelei’s land was no secret, and Nora felt like an idiot for not considering the possibility sooner. Of course Lorelei would leave everything to Tiffany. And of course it would leave Tiffany agonizingly vulnerable to a man like Donovan. Especially now that—Nora could only assume—Everlee was named in the will.
“She’s gone,” Nora whispered. “We’ll never find her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tiffany wore a wig for the driver’s license photo. That’s why we found her hair in the sink at the farmhouse. She has a new name, a new identity …”
“You’re not kidding.”
“No, I’m not.”
“What’s her new name?”
But Nora shook her head. “I can’t tell you. A Jane Doe name. Not so generic that it’s obvious, but common enough that there are hundreds who share her name across North America. Maybe thousands.”
“Okay. So if she runs using her new identity, it’ll be hard to track her down.”
“Nearly impossible,” Nora moaned. “Especially if she doesn’t want to be found.”
“But if you had a plan, surely you knew where she was going.”
“Tiffany kept that detail to herself, but there were possibilities.” Nora ticked them off on her fingers. “New York City because: of course. Washington State because there was a poster of Mount Rainier in her childhood bedroom and she loved it. Arizona because Lorelei had taken her there one spring and she said the whole state smelled like orange blossoms. And Detroit because it’s where her mother died.”
Ethan pushed a hard breath through his nose.
“Impossible, right? And Tiffany’s nothing if not unreliable. For all I know she’s headed to Salt Lake City or Charleston or Orlando.”
“Her car?”
“She’ll switch the plates a couple times, sell it, buy a new one.”
“What about titles?”
Nora gave him a withering look. “You’re so naive.”
Ethan just stared at her. After a moment he said, cautiously: “What about her father?”
Everlee’s father. The great mystery, though, of course, Nora knew the truth. But that line on Everlee’s birth certificate matched her mother’s: blank. It would take a lot to prove what Nora knew to be true. Never mind the fact that she doubted anyone really wanted the truth. The closest thing Everlee had to a dad was Donovan Richter, and Nora was sure that he would stop at nothing to bring home his girl. He had so many reasons.
What was Tiffany thinking?
Nora turned away and studied the street outside her window, the neat homes that seemed to sit cheerfully behind the long stretches of idyllic sidewalks. Key Lake really was a pretty community, a slice of the American dream right down to the stars and stripes hanging from an eagle-topped flagpo
le attached to a pristine front porch. The annual Key Lake Fourth of July parade went right down a street like this, and she and Tiffany had gone every year, perching on the edge of the painted curb and pretending to hate it but secretly loving every minute. Especially the marching band. For some reason the marching band always made Nora’s heart feel swollen and tight.
“I love her,” Nora admitted quietly. The tears on her cheeks were sudden, unexpected, and she swallowed against the knot of hopelessness in her chest. “But Tiffany’s the opposite of dependable. If she gets spooked, she runs. I just never imagined that she’d leave Everlee behind. What are we going to do?”
Ethan was still for a long time. But when he spoke, a part of Nora wished he would have just kept his thoughts to himself. “Maybe we’re not supposed to find her,” he said carefully, slowly. “Maybe Everlee would be better off if we didn’t.”
The only reason his words hurt so much was because they were Nora’s dirty little secret. The idea that plagued her. She had spent the last seven years of her life fighting to keep Tiffany and Everlee together. What if, after all they had been through, she had been wrong? About everything?
Nora wasn’t sure she could ever forgive herself if the world they had created turned out to be a lie.
LIZ
“NORA IS IN KEY LAKE,” Quinn said, staring at the screen of her phone.
“What?” Liz looked up from the sink. “She can’t be.”
“She just texted me.”
Liz didn’t know what to say. How to feel. Such secrecy, and from the woman who had once been the very center of Liz’s universe. When Nora was born she was just over six pounds, but by the time Jack and Liz took her home from the hospital she’d lost a couple of ounces. One afternoon, on a lark, Liz wrapped her baby girl up in a blanket and tucked her in an old Louis Vuitton shoe box. She was a perfect fit. Downy head, petal pink cheeks, rosebud mouth pursed in a tiny pout. Her whole life contained in a small, neat rectangle. It was hard to believe that once upon a time, Liz had known all that there was to know about her daughter. The sprinkling of freckles across her shoulders, the way her nose crinkled when she was upset. Who her best friend was and how she liked her eggs cooked (scrambled with cheddar cheese) and that any problem could be fixed with a gingersnap cookie and a glass of cold milk. Who was this stranger? What had she done?
“Is she coming here?” Liz asked, turning back to the soapy water, the final sticky dish.
“I think so. I don’t know.” Quinn put her phone down on the counter and reached for a towel. “She has to, right? I mean, I haven’t even told her about the fire.”
“Or the strange man who stopped by my house last night,” Liz added.
“What?” Quinn spun on her, shocked.
But Liz just reached for the towel in Quinn’s iron grip and dried off her hands. “It’s him, right? It has to be.” But the thought didn’t make her scared, it made her angry. Gone was the woman who teared up about things she couldn’t control anyway. Liz could do something about this, and heaven help her, she would. “Now tell me everything you know.”
“Nothing.” Quinn shook her head almost furiously. Liz wanted to grab her by the chin and tell her to knock it off. “I swear, absolutely nothing. Nora brought Lucy to me a couple of days ago and asked me to look after her. No, she told me to. She didn’t give me a choice.”
Liz peered over her shoulder at the closed bathroom door. Quinn had drawn Lucy a bath and brought her an old ice-cream bucket filled with cups and plastic containers, an old spray bottle and some sponges. Hopefully that would keep the girl occupied for a while. Breakfast had been abandoned. Even Liz couldn’t stomach the blueberry pancakes anymore.
“Okay,” Liz said, all business. “Clearly we know who she is, we just need to figure out why Nora is trying so hard to keep her a secret.”
“You said we need to talk.” Quinn crossed her arms over her chest, regarding her mother with a skeptical look. “Do you know something about this?”
Liz sighed. “No,” she said. “Not about this. Not about why Lucy is here now and seems to be in some kind of danger.” She thought about the missing child poster and stifled a little shiver.
“But …”
“But I think I know why Nora ran. Why she never told us about Lucy.” Liz came here for this exact reason, to share this knowledge with Quinn, but at the moment of revelation she found herself wavering. Really? Did Quinn need to know? What good would it do now? But the set of her daughter’s jaw told Liz that it was too late. She sighed. “Let’s sit down.”
“I don’t want to sit down.”
“Fine.” Liz put her hands on her hips. Took a deep breath. “Years ago I overheard your father having a conversation with someone.”
“Go on.”
“He was in his office, on the phone. And I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but he was obviously very upset. I was going to step in, but then I heard what he was saying.”
“Mom?”
Liz pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes for just a moment. Gathered enough courage to say: “He was telling someone to ‘take care of it.’ He said: ‘If you don’t get rid of it now, I’ll ruin you.’ ”
“What was ‘it,’ Mom?”
“Lucy. I mean, I think.” Liz was overcome with the need to explain, to wipe away the look of horror on her daughter’s face. Of course Quinn looked like she was going to be sick! What did she know of the things Liz had worked so hard to keep hidden? Nothing at all. And now, for it all to come out like this. It was almost too much. “The conversation could have been anything, right?”
“But you think Dad knew Nora was pregnant and he was threatening her. Telling her to get an abortion. Why?”
“Because he was afraid.”
“And ashamed,” Quinn said bitterly. “You hide things you’re ashamed of.”
Liz didn’t argue. Especially because she intended to hide her own shame—at least for a while yet. Right now, Quinn didn’t need to know about her father’s multiple affairs, about the way that he stopped pretending when his kids were older because the ruse was too complicated to maintain. “I have needs,” he had told Liz. Blithely. As if he were confessing to a craving for brownies when she had instituted a weeklong sugar fast. What was she supposed to say? Do? She had two choices: endure or leave. And leaving wasn’t really an option at all.
“It makes sense,” Quinn said finally. Fatally. But then she looked up, her eyes flaming with fury. “He stole her from us. He did this.”
“Quinn, there’s obviously much more to the story than just this. I think—”
They were interrupted by the squeal of the bathroom door. Lucy stood in the opening, wearing a pale green sundress. Her hair had been toweled dry but not combed, and as Liz watched, Quinn walked over and straightened the girl’s dress where it was bunched on one shoulder.
“You look lovely,” Quinn told her. “Let me get the comb and we’ll go through your hair, okay?”
While Quinn was gone, Liz studied the child. It hurt to admit, but she didn’t feel anything, not really. Even though she knew that she should—even though she wanted to. This little girl was her granddaughter. Of course, she had been hoping for exactly this with JJ and Amelia’s firstborn—a little girl, a daughter once removed. But the sudden arrival of Lucy—of this half-grown child who had unexpectedly been thrust into their world already living and breathing and embodying her own memories and personality and a life that was completely separate from Liz—was unsettling. Granddaughter. The word felt complicated and heavy on her tongue, overripe with consonants. I’d like to buy a vowel, she thought. Something to make this word—this reality—more palatable.
She wondered what would have happened if she had walked into the office that night so many years ago. If she would have confronted her husband. Thrown things. Yelled. What would their lives look like now?
“Who are you?” Lucy asked after a few moments. She didn’t seem scared, just hesitant, curious. And oh, but she was adorable
. Slight and wispy, big familiar eyes, thin shoulders, sweet mop of hair that, though unnatural, suited her remarkably well. She would have fit in perfectly with the childhood version of Nora. And JJ. They took after their father—and Liz’s stomach coiled at the thought. It was Quinn who favored her mom.
“I’m Quinn’s mother,” Liz said, taking the safest route possible. “Remember? And Nora’s, too. My name is Liz.”
If she expected some bolt of recognition to flash across Lucy’s face, it didn’t come.
“I own this house,” Liz said. It was a foolish thing to say. What did Lucy care? But Liz wasn’t sure how to relate to a six-year-old anymore, and she had grasped at the first thought that flitted through her mind. “I did all the decorating.”
Lucy looked around as if taking it in for the first time. “I like the pillow on the couch,” she said eventually.
It was a bold print, one Liz had created with oil paint and an old canvas that she’d had to scrape. The texture had created strange shadows on the strike-offs that the mill had sent her, but instead of correcting the tones, Liz had decided to print the fabric as is. She loved it more than one should love an inanimate object. “Thank you,” she said, pleased. “I designed it myself.”
“The pillow?”
“The fabric.”
Lucy wandered into the living room, picking up things as if looking at them through new eyes now that she knew Liz had pulled all the pieces together.
“Did you design these, too?” Lucy asked, her fingers raking through a small bowl of smooth glass shards.
“No.” Liz left her seat and went to join the child near the window. “That’s sea glass.”
“That’s not the sea,” Lucy said, pointing at the lake.
“No, it’s not. But a long time ago a ship sank in Key Lake and sometimes the glass from all the windows still washes up on shore.”
“What kind of a ship?”
“It was a steamboat. A boat with a big paddle on the back. Have you ever seen one of those?”
