Family Secrets

by Judith Henry Wall

  After they were seated, Vanessa beat Ellie to the wine list and ordered a California Chablis. Ellie started to protest but was feeling mellow after what had turned out to be a very successful day what with visiting the place where their father was born and meeting the woman who cared for him until Vera took over. When Vanessa lifted her glass and said, “Here’s to Mildred,” Ellie chimed in with “I’ll drink to that.”

  “And to Hattie,” Georgiana added.

  Over coffee they put together a game plan for tomorrow’s day trip to the county where Hattie had been born and raised.

  Vanessa and Georgiana headed for the elevator, but Ellie decided she needed some time away from her sisters and announced she was going to have a nightcap and would be up shortly.

  Or maybe she just wanted to see if any attractive, single heterosexual men were patronizing the bar. And with that thought, she headed for the ladies’ room to freshen her makeup.

  Except for the bartender, the bar was empty. And he was getting ready to close. “It’s a weeknight,” he explained.

  She bought a beer and carried it out to the pool, where she settled herself on a chaise lounge, pulled off her boots, and dialed Boone’s cell phone number. Which was insane. It was after midnight in New York, and he was probably either at home in bed with his wife or in bed someplace else with someone other than his wife.

  She had lied to her sisters. She and Boone were not back together. He had not called her in months. But she was tired of being teased about cowboys and about always being on the lookout for an eligible man.

  As much as she liked the fantasy of the perfect man or even a marginally acceptable man simply showing up at the next table in a restaurant or the next seat in a bar or asking for her help in selecting vegetables at the greengrocer’s and they would both instantly know they were meant for each other, it simply wasn’t going to happen. She had to make something happen.

  As Boone’s phone rang, she wondered if he was looking at the screen to see who was calling. Did he even have her number in his log after all these months? If he was back with his wife, he’d probably deleted her number—just in case his wife was the snoopy sort.

  So why in the hell was she calling him in the first place?

  Why? Because she was lonely. Lonely in a way that being with her sisters could not appease.

  Boone answered, “Hi, babe.”

  His voice was surrounded by a sea of other voices. And laughter. He was in a bar that hadn’t closed down for the night and not in bed with some woman. “Is that a generic babe or do you know who this is?” she asked.

  “Mmmm, let me think. Your number is familiar, but you need to give me a clue.” She hung up and continued to sip her beer. But shortly her cell phone played its musical summons.

  She pressed the green button but didn’t say anything.

  “I’ve missed you, Ellie,” he said in his sexiest voice.

  She turned the phone off. She thought of the word Vanessa had used today. Sincere. Boone was not a sincere man. But if he were here, she would probably go to bed with him. And hate herself for it.

  She was thinking about babies more than ever. Which was probably something hormonal. Something that happened to childless women once their hormones started to wane. The less fertile a woman becomes, the more she wants a baby. Nature’s big fat nasty joke.

  She wondered how old the bartender was and wished she’d looked to see if he was wearing a wedding ring.

  He hadn’t even tried to flirt with her.

  Briefly she considered taking a cab to some other bar if for no other reason than she really wanted a second beer. Except she would have to put her boots back on. And she wanted more than another beer. A whole lot more.

  She worried that she was on the verge of becoming a slut. And with that thought, she picked up her boots and headed for the elevator.

  Lying in bed next to her sound-asleep younger sister with her sound-asleep older sister in the room’s other bed, Ellie didn’t like her chances of drifting off to sleep. Normally she would have turned on the television to take her mind off whatever thoughts were roaming inside her head. Being able to toss and turn herself into a comfortable sleeping position would be nice, too. But since she wasn’t alone and neither option was in the cards, Ellie let her thoughts roam, and they took her straight past Boone to what had happened today at that nursing home in Deer Lodge. Ellie now had no doubt that the woman named Hattie who wrote the letter to Vera Wentworth that was mailed in Deer Lodge, Montana, had given birth to a baby boy who grew up and married a woman named Penelope and fathered three little girls named Vanessa, Ellie, and Georgiana. Their wonderful father. He called her his Elegant Ellie and said he loved walking with her and seeing how people took notice of her excellent posture and her impeccable style. Thoughts of her father took her back to those terrible days when he was in the last weeks of his life. He had tried to talk to her about it—about his dying—but she didn’t have the courage to go there, couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge that he was going to leave them, couldn’t allow him to say whatever he wanted to say to her, and the very next day he lapsed into a coma.

  The hospice people had come with their bed and equipment. Ellie and her sisters and mother took turns sitting with him. Round the clock, they did that, listening to his labored breathing, watching his chest rise and fall. Ellie was with him when he took that one final gasp.

  Ellie had held her own breath waiting for him to take another breath, but there was only a deathly silence in the room. He’d been living one instant and dead the next. She’d called out for her mother and sisters, who came in their night-clothes and wept with her. They kissed his lips and face and hands and stroked his hair and told him how much they loved him and that they would miss him for the rest of their lives.

  Ellie got out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom, where she could blow her nose and wipe her eyes. Then she carefully crawled back into bed and worked on taking her mind down another pathway that had nothing to do with death. Or with pregnancy, motherhood, and babies.

  She tried to compose the first lines of the looking-for-Hattie piece she would write, but she had no idea how the search was going to turn out. Hattie might be dead or demented. She might be angry that they had tracked her down.

  Okay, what now? Ellie asked herself. She had to figure out some way to make herself fall asleep.

  In spite of her best intentions, her thoughts slid down a slippery slope straight to Boone. Maybe he knew who she was all along and was just teasing on the phone. He did say her name when he called her back.

  She didn’t trust him, but she had loved being with him. They were compatible in so many ways. On politics and religion and music and books. They liked the same wines and food. He’d even liked to shop and had good fashion sense. She admired the way he dressed and he felt the same about her. And they were good in bed.

  Maybe it was out of desperation, but in spite of all her promises to herself about not getting overly involved with a man until she was sure about his intentions and his character, she had fallen a little bit in love with Boone. Maybe not just a little bit. If only he had just told her that he was going back to his wife, which was after all a laudable thing to do. She would still have been devastated, but she would have put her feelings on hold while he gave his marriage a second chance. Of course, she would have been praying that his wife was a frigid bitch who had let herself go and was chronically flatulent. But Boone tried to keep it a secret, and when she found out from the friend whose friend had gotten them together in the first place that Boone was back with his wife, she had been doubly devastated. Apparently he thought he could have home cooking and a little something on the side. On Sex and the City, a person whose sole purpose in one’s life was to alleviate horniness was called a fuck buddy. That’s what Boone wanted. Clandestine sex. No strings attached. He wanted a woman who would be grateful for a quick fuck every now and then and not expect more.

  And she was almost of a mind to settle for
that.

  Ellie groaned when Vanessa shook her shoulder and announced it was time for her to get up. “We have another day ahead of us,” Vanessa said in her most cheerful voice. Then she burst into song. “Open wide the windows, open wide the doors. Let a little sunshine in,” which was the same stupid song their mother had used throughout their childhood to wake them up, but at least their mother could carry a tune.

  “God, I feel sorry for poor Lily and Beth if they have to listen to that in the morning,” Ellie moaned.

  She was exhausted but managed to get herself out of bed and dressed. Then she downed enough coffee to make her human.

  An hour and a half later, they were speeding across the middle of no place. Ellie couldn’t believe the vast emptiness that they were now traversing. Traveling on Highway 287 out of Helena, they encountered only an occasional vehicle. There were more trucks than cars, a number of them hauling coal. The long stretches of empty roadway in between the vehicle sightings gave her an otherworldly feeling. She and her sisters were a hell of a long way from New York City.

  There were mountains in the distance, but they had left the breathtaking scenery behind. With no stops for Georgiana to take pictures, they reached Interstate 90 in less than an hour. The traffic increased but not by much. Midmorning, they left the interstate and headed south on a two-lane highway.

  The landscape was hilly and wooded—pretty but not spectacular. Most of the traffic was now huge dump trucks piled high with coal, with no indication they might be approaching a town. “Are you sure this is the right road?” Ellie asked Vanessa.

  “No.”

  “Maybe we should ask someone?” Georgiana said from the backseat.

  “And just who would you suggest I ask?” Vanessa responded, glancing at her watch.

  But soon there was an intersection and a sign indicating that Coal Town was twelve miles straight ahead.

  The twelve-mile drive took them by vast blights on the landscape that even three city girls recognized as strip mines and the source of all that coal piled on all those trucks.

  A billboard announced that Coal Town was home to Bitterroot Mines, a division of Aquila Industries.

  The outskirts of town consisted of a large trailer park, salvage yard, numerous bars, a McDonald’s and several other fast-food establishments, a Super Wal-Mart and a nonsuper Target, and a huge prefabricated Church of the Saved surrounded by a vast parking lot.

  The prosperous-looking downtown was a bit of a surprise. The buildings along the tree-lined street had all undergone restoration or were new buildings with a Gay Nineties look. At the end of the street was Coal Town High School, a handsome brick building of recent vintage with a large marquee out front announcing that the building was the home of the Coal Town Eagles.

  “I have a feeling that Coal Town has changed a great deal since Hattie lived here,” Ellie observed.

  Vanessa parked in front of the high school. The school was all but empty with only a few summer-school classes in progress.

  The school librarian, a tall, angular woman with graying hair, led them to a collection of yearbooks from years past and left them to their browsing. The yearbooks featured high school students and their activities, but each edition also included group pictures of students in the first through eighth grades. Since they weren’t sure of the exact years that Henrietta/Hattie had attended the school, they selected a range of years and carried the books to a nearby table.

  After fifteen minutes or so, Georgina said, “Hey, guys, I found a Henrietta Worth.”

  Vanessa and Ellie came to look over her shoulder as she pointed to a knock-kneed little girl in pigtails standing in the front row of Miss Evelyn Teague’s second-grade class.

  “Maybe her family dropped the Went part of Wentworth,” Vanessa suggested.

  Ellie showed the librarian the picture of Henrietta Worth and asked, “Do you see any sort of familial resemblance between us and this little girl?”

  The librarian studied the picture. “The quality of the picture is poor. All I can tell is that this little girl had scrawny legs and her dress is too small.”

  By the time Henrietta Worth was in high school, she wore her hair in a ponytail. And while the other girls had smiled and tilted their heads coquettishly to one side—as the photographer had apparently instructed—Henrietta’s head had no tilt and her face was without expression.

  Her picture appeared only among the alphabetized class photos. She hadn’t acted in any of the class plays. She hadn’t sung in the choir or been a member of any organization. Her picture did not appear in the yearbook at all for what would have been her senior year.

  “Okay, the form that Henrietta Polanski filled out said that she grew up in Coal Town,” Vanessa pointed out. “Since this girl is the only Henrietta we’ve found, she has to be the right one—unless she lied on that questionnaire.”

  “But why would anyone bother to change their name from Wentworth to Worth?” Georgiana wondered.

  “Maybe they didn’t get along with the West Virginia branch of the family,” Ellie speculated.

  They looked in the librarian’s copy of the current Coal Town telephone directory, a skinny little thing no thicker than a comic book. There were no Worths listed. Or Wentworths. Or Polanskis.

  “That would have been too simple,” Ellie observed.

  “On to Plan B,” Vanessa said.

  They selected the picture taken Henrietta’s junior year. The librarian directed them to the second-floor computer lab.

  Even though class had been dismissed, several students were gathered around their instructor, a geeky young man with an engaging smile. He scanned the photograph of Hattie onto a CD and made several hard copies for them.

  When they returned the yearbook, Ellie asked the librarian if she knew any Coal Town residents old enough to have known Henrietta Worth.

  The woman shook her head. “I’ve only lived here for four years, but I know that Coal Town was all but a ghost town in the sixties and seventies. Mining operations had closed down, and folks couldn’t earn a living here anymore. But Aquila Industries arrived in the late 1980s, and the town has thrived ever since. The high school was built with Aquila money and has state-of-the-art everything.”

  Hayes, the county seat of John Coulter County, wasn’t much bigger than Coal Town, and obviously no benefactor had come along and rebuilt the town. Half the storefronts around the courthouse square were boarded up, and the courthouse was an ugly, square, two-story structure of more recent vintage than the town’s other buildings. “I guess they couldn’t afford an architect,” Georgiana observed.

  They found their way to the court clerk’s office on the second floor, only to learn that the original courthouse had burned down more than fifty years ago, destroying all court records along with birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, and property abstracts. And all these years later, the clerk lamented, they were still trying to sort things out.

  Next they tried the newspaper office. The young woman at the front desk showed them to a dingy back room with long-ago issues of the newspaper bound by month in large folders arranged chronologically. “The newspaper has been bought and sold several times over the years, and our morgue is far from complete,” she explained.

  The sisters pulled out the binders that covered the year leading up to the date that Hattie was first incarcerated at Deer Lodge. Some of the issues were missing. Articles had been torn or cut out of others. They found nothing about the trial of a young woman named Henrietta Worth or Henrietta Polanski. If anything had been printed about the trial, it had been removed or lost.

  Ellie asked if they could see the editor, who seemed quite willing to turn away from her computer and visit with them. Her name was Joan Harris.

  Ellie pitched their story to her.

  “And you came all the way from New York City to find this woman?” Editor Harris asked as she studied the yearbook picture through a pair of reading glasses parked on the end of her nose.

/>   “Yes, ma’am,” Georgiana said. “Or at least we’re pretty sure she’s the one we’re looking for.” Then she explained about the letter from Hattie.

  Even while Georgiana was speaking, the editor turned to her computer and began tapping away on the keyboard. “How’s this for a lead?” she asked. “‘Three sisters raised in New York City have come to Montana in search of a woman they believe to be their long-lost grandmother.’”

  “I’m feeling a bit uncomfortable about this,” Vanessa interrupted. “If our Hattie is still alive, there are some parts of her story that she probably wouldn’t want published in a newspaper article.”

  “No problem,” Joan Harris said. “I’ll identify the person in the photograph as a long-lost relative who grew up in Coal Town and focus the piece on you ladies.” Then she turned to Ellie. “Tell me about your boots.”

  Seventeen

  AFTER making her trek down to the mailbox and back, Myrna went through her usual morning ritual, arranging the mail on her desk in the order it would be opened, seating herself, and pouring her first cup of coffee.

  She tackled the stack of newspapers first, scanning headlines, then checking to see what topics were being addressed by editorial writers and what was being reported in the business sections. She paused to e-mail her children, telling them to read an article in the Wall Street Journal concerning the future of coal.

  She saved the Denver Post until last and gave it more careful perusal since it did the best job covering state news and issues pertaining to the mining industry. She refilled her mug, then looked through the front section. Some articles deserved only a glance, others she read with care.

  A picture on the back page of the front section of the Denver paper caught Myrna’s eye—a head-and-shoulders shot of a somber-faced teenage girl with stringy blond hair. The face looked vaguely familiar.