June

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  There was nothing Cassie could do about that now, but she could be respectful of the old woman’s memory from here on out, which meant shutting this down the fastest way possible. If there was a clear way to do so, Cassie supposed she should pick that option, only it was hard to tell what that was. On the surface, taking the DNA test seemed to be it, because there’d be a definitive answer on the other end. But then, if the answer was yes, that would yield the result exactly opposite to what the June in this scenario would have wanted; suddenly the whole world—or, at best, Cassie, Elda, and Tate—would know that Jack and June had slept together.

  What did Cassie want? Thirty-seven million dollars was nothing to shake a stick at, and if she did the DNA test and it turned out positive, well, it was as good as winning the lottery. Wasn’t it? Only what if she took the test and it said no, he’s not your grandfather? Sure, there’d be Tate’s million dollars, which she wasn’t going to sneeze at. But putting money aside—if she could do that—she wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. Jack Montgomery had thought he was her grandfather; now that she knew that, could she ever truly unknow it? Even if he was wrong about her paternal line, something had made him believe he’d fathered her dad. She knew her grandmother liked her secrets kept, but could Cassie bear not to find out if good little June Watters and big-shot Jack Montgomery had shared a bed, or maybe even a romance, if not a son?

  Maybe Cassie wouldn’t be considering delaying the DNA test if Tate had shown much interest in discovering the ins and outs of their potentially shared history. But it was clear that Tate didn’t want to find out why her father had left everything to Cassie; she only wanted to find out if Cassie’s father was Jack’s son, and Cassie was starting to realize these were two vastly different things. Cassie was pretty sure she was more interested in finding the answer to the first problem than to the second, which was really annoying, because it would be nice to have $37 million, or even “just” a million, as soon as humanly possible. But maybe, more than money, what she wanted was Tate’s help, Tate’s entourage, Tate’s resources. Cassie could already see that the only way to get all that was to make Tate wait for what she wanted.

  Tate came back from the bathroom, and Nick headed off to the dining room, leaving behind a cloud of exasperation, which Tate deftly ignored and Cassie wondered at, briefly, before turning back to her own concerns.

  “Even if I’m not your niece,” Cassie said, her throat feeling suddenly, horribly dry, “because that’s what I’d be, isn’t it?—there’s still a chance…” She took Tate’s hand in hers while it was still accessible and, gripping it tightly, started again. “Since your father named me in the will, and he mentioned me in that note you got—even if I’m not biologically related, well, there’s a chance that he loved my grandmother, right? A chance that she loved him? Even if he didn’t get her pregnant.”

  Tate withdrew her hand.

  Nick appeared, magically, in the doorway.

  “No offense, Tate,” Cassie said, “but I don’t think you want to know the truth. What you want to know is whether your father conceived a child with my grandmother. I think I’d like to know more than just that.”

  Cassie was giddy now, but Tate looked positively alarmed. Cassie hadn’t done anything like this in a long time, taken a risk, jumped into the unknown. She’d forgotten how good it made her feel. In fact, her first impulse, as she stood, was to take a picture, because the room had suddenly grown so still, so taut, that all she wanted was to capture it, freeze it, save forever how particular and dangerous this moment felt. She believed herself to be powerful and brave, especially as she remembered exactly what she’d found the night before, the cause for her celebration, and she knew, at last, that she was going to go and get it, and show them, and try to make them see that her DNA wasn’t all they should be after.

  Cassie came down via the master staircase; it felt like the moment to make a grand entrance. When she returned to the front parlor, sneezing from dust, Tate and Nick grimaced at the periodicals in her arms. True, the whole collection looked like any old stack of long-forgotten magazines: Life, Screen Play, Movie Life. Cassie wouldn’t have thought anything of them at any other point, but discovering them at the back of the closet, under a Montgomery Ward bag after the day she’d had, had given them new meaning.

  She flipped the top magazine open, eyes watering from the flaking pages. On page 57, she stopped at a photograph of the man she’d pictured at the mention of Jack’s name: that dark brow, those handsome eyes, a devilish grin. He had a little girl on his lap. She was laughing up at him, clutching a teddy bear.

  “Jack Montgomery loves his days at home with his beautiful daughter Esmerelda,” the caption read.

  In the Screen Play underneath the Life, a seven-picture spread: “Jack Montgomery and Diane DeSoto’s Beautiful New Home!” The house was one of those Hollywood fantasies—rolling lawns, tall columns, courtyard fountains; it occurred to Cassie that the architect had been trying to conjure up the kind of vintage charm that Two Oaks possessed without even trying.

  A copy of the Los Angeles Times from the sixties held a birth announcement: “Jack Montgomery and Diane DeSoto announce the birth of Tate DeSoto Montgomery.” Tate took the crumbling newspaper into her hands, cooing at the news of her own birth, and Cassie itched again for her camera; there was something about the urgency in the woman’s face that Cassie wanted to secure on paper.

  It went on like that, a six-inch-high pile. As far as Cassie could tell, the magazines’ only commonality was mention of Tate’s father. Cassie watched Tate and Nick as they scrutinized the articles. What would it mean for June to have had a secret love worth $37 million? It would mean June had lied to Cassie and to Cassie’s father, El, and to June’s husband, Arthur. It would mean Jack had lied to his wife and his girls. It would mean both of them had kept their shared secret to their graves. And if Cassie said no to the DNA test, well, she’d be asking Tate and Nick and Hank to help her squirrel out any evidence of this supposed affair, which was pretty much the opposite of what June—secretive, private June—would want. But then, June was gone, and Jack was gone, and Tate and Cassie were the ones left to make sense of the mess their guardians had left for them. Maybe Cassie needed to stop feeling so guilty.

  “Help me,” she blurted, as soon as Tate closed the final magazine. “Help me find out what would have led my grandmother to keep these, and I’ll give you as much of my DNA as you want.”

  Tate smiled tightly. She placed a magazine back onto the stack on the table. “My dear”—she was icy now, superior—“many women stockpile celebrity rags.”

  “My grandmother wasn’t just any woman,” Cassie said, bristling anew at the “townie” reference. “She was the woman who raised me. A very unsentimental, practical person who didn’t keep movie magazines lying around.” Now that she’d mentioned it, Cassie crossed into the back parlor and opened the cabinet that held June’s VHS movies. She tore through the cardboard covers, black-and-white images with the names of the stars printed across the front. How was it she had never noticed that Jack Montgomery’s name was splashed over nearly half of them? She held one up triumphantly. “It can’t be a coincidence that a person who appears in every one of those, and on nearly every one of these, a man who was filming in this town sixty years ago, is the same person who just named me as his sole heir.” But all that time, she was doubting it too, seeing her grandmother bent over Artie’s bedside in his last days, how she’d wept for him, and called him the love of her life. Why shatter that illusion? Why not just let the old bird rest in peace?

  “I’m sure your grandmother was quite special”—Tate sniffed—“but my father had millions of fans, girls who collected posters and Playbills and God knows what else.” A part of Cassie agreed with this; why was she even arguing the other side?

  But Nick cleared his throat. “True, Tate, but it appears he only claimed one of those women’s granddaughters as his own.”

  Both Tate and Cassie gaped at him. H
e crossed his legs nervously in the floral armchair, then uncrossed them, then crossed them again.

  “We’ll go through the house,” Cassie said, since it seemed Nick wouldn’t be of any more use, “and we’ll look for other clues. In the meantime, there have to be people we can ask. Did your father keep a diary? Can we go to his accountant?”

  Nick turned to Tate. “We do have his private papers.”

  Tate hummed a deep, yogic exhale.

  “So we’ll send for your father’s private papers,” Cassie said, “and comb them for any mention of my grandmother. And then we’ll interview anyone who might have known either of them at the time. We can even interview people in St. Jude, people who knew them that summer.”

  “It might not be the worst thing, Tate,” Nick offered, surprising Cassie. “No one knows you’re here. You could lie low for a bit.” Cassie had the feeling he was speaking in subtext about something beyond her reach, but, regardless, she hated how miserable Tate looked; the woman was, after all, her childhood idol.

  Cassie softened her voice and tried to get Tate to meet her eye. “Can’t we just try? For them? Don’t you want to know if they shared something special, something good? Maybe it means something different from what we think it does.”

  The front door jangled open. “You’d think I was speaking Mandarin,” Hank griped, barging into the front parlor bearing armfuls of plastic bags. “They have no idea what egg whites are, and I guarantee the bacon isn’t turkey.” Her cute little nose wrinkled.

  Nick rushed to relieve her load. Hank caught his expression, then turned to take in Tate’s and Cassie’s. “Why so glum?”

  Tate’s hands were placed on her thighs. Centered again, she opened her eyes calmly. Serenity poured out of her as she offered a practiced smile. “Just a change of plans, sweetie. Seems we’ll be enjoying Ohio longer than expected.”

  Time moves differently on a film set; not unlike how it moves in a hospital waiting room, or at an airport gate with a flight delay. The gathered tribe is united by faith and fear, hoping and believing and wondering if they’re asking the impossible, until the good news comes—the scene finally gels, the emotion swells, the assistant director yells the day’s last “cut!”—and everyone breathes a sigh of relief and slips back into their own skin. A day of shooting can feel weeks long, which is how, by the Friday afternoon of the first week of Erie Canal’s film shoot, after only three days of P.A.’ing in Center Square, Lindie felt she’d spent the most important era of her life on a film set.

  By Friday, which was June 3, they’d made a good dent in what the crew was calling the “townspeople scenes,” which required a handful of extras to mill about in the background of Center Square while Jack Montgomery and a few of the actors who’d been flown in from Hollywood shared dialogue. The scene had them talking about their characters’ service in the Civil War, and in the upcoming election in Monroeville (that was the name the screenwriter had given the Hollywood version of St. Jude). Everyone was sure Jack Montgomery’s character, Aloysius “Skip” Branigan, would be elected mayor. When Jack spoke Skip’s lines in his careful drawl, the name fit.

  The biggest shooting days, the ones that would require two hundred extras, were to come the following week, during the election sequence, when the dastardly incumbent mayor would defeat Skip Branigan. Then Skip’s already wounded spirit would plummet into the downward spiral that would ultimately bring about his tragic end on that stormy night out alone on the canal.

  Next week was also when Diane DeSoto, who played Jack’s love interest—an honest farm girl named Mary who’d awaited his return from the war with only her pioneer spirit to protect her—would join the set in St. Jude. Word had it she was flying in on Sunday, and that she and Jack had been pretty cozy back on the MGM lot when they were filming the interiors. That was certainly the impression Lindie had gotten from her movie magazines, and though, only three days before, she’d believed Jack and Diane were the couple of the year, she now wished, for June’s sake, that that was a bunch of rubbish.

  Lindie hadn’t read the script of Erie Canal, but she’d gathered that, although it was supposed to be about the years after the Civil War—when the heroes of the North returned to their old jobs and towns to discover that nothing was quite the same—it was really about men like June’s father, who’d gone to Europe and returned home with hearts and minds that didn’t work the way they were supposed to anymore. This was the primary reason she was glad June wasn’t hanging around set; the topic would surely upset her. But Lindie also liked June’s absence for a guiltier reason: for the first time she could remember, she felt unencumbered. Hours passed when she didn’t think about June once. When she did, she was scheming about getting June an audience with Jack Montgomery, which felt both grown-up and in deliciously direct disobedience of Cheryl Ann.

  That Friday, Lindie loafed around Crafty, waiting for Jack to pass on his way to his trailer when they wrapped for the day. It wouldn’t be long; the light was turning golden, the shadows stretching across the green. The thought of June made the envelope in Lindie’s pocket burn. The missive had been in her possession since she’d gotten home the night before, when Eben had handed it across the table with a bewildered frown, asking what kind of business she had with Arthur Danvers. In the privacy of her room, she’d ripped the letter open, only to discover it contained a letter within a letter. The part addressed to her read: “Dear Linda Sue, I hope you won’t mind me asking you to deliver this. I’m convinced Mrs. Watters is reading June’s mail, and I wanted this to get to her without anyone else tangling in it. Could you do that for me? A.”

  Lindie had read and reread his tight cursive, which was pretty in a womanly way she was happy to scorn. And the presumption! The idea that she’d gladly risk her hide to deliver a note for someone she hardly knew, and certainly didn’t like, someone who’d made a promise to be on a bus from Columbus and then didn’t even have the courage to tell June he wouldn’t be on it—well, Artie Danvers had another think coming if he considered her his ally.

  But then, she’d read the note he’d sent to June. Of course she couldn’t show it to June now, because June would see how much Lindie had handled it, even if Lindie disposed of that second sealed envelope marked “For June’s blue eyes only” (in her state Lindie’d had no qualms about slipping her nail under that envelope’s flap to rip it open).

  Lindie didn’t want June to like Artie. But it was hard to hold this letter against the man:

  June, sweet June—

  I’m sorry I wasn’t on that bus. And I’m sure you’ll find it strange when I say here, again, that I care for you. Believe me—it’s only because I do that I stayed away. Poor girl—I know you are only marrying me because it’s what they’ve asked of you. And so I’ll do my best to keep away until after July 3—maybe forever if I can help it. I want to marry you more than anything in the world. But I can’t bear the thought of forcing you into it.

  Then again, maybe Artie was like most men, and had only written these persuasive words to look good. June was lucky she had Lindie on her side.

  —

  Jack and the rest of the cast played the scene a fourth time as the natural light slipped lower, Jack crossing from camera left to camera right, the actor who played the mayor shaking his hand. For the fourth time, they volleyed the quick exchange of dialogue about the dangerous assignment up the canal, and then the director yelled his “Cut!” and the A.D. yelled “Break for the night!” and everyone breathed a sigh of relief that soon they’d be home, eating their Friday night casseroles.

  Jack picked his way across the lawn, shaking the hands of a few lingering extras, clapping the director on the back with a hearty laugh. Jack’s shadow was long between the shadows of the elms. Lindie straightened her spine and cleared her throat. He stopped in his tracks and beamed her his watty smile. “There you are, Rabbit Legs.” She’d earned this nickname after only a few hours on set, although how he’d picked it up, she had no idea. He seemed so
focused whenever she saw him, on his lines, his fellow actors, the weak-kneed extras, that she couldn’t imagine he’d had the time or energy to learn her nickname.

  “You said to talk tomorrow, sir,” she said. She’d taken him off guard the day before, before she’d gotten Artie’s letters, when she was more sure of what to do, and less apprehensive of the consequences. She’d just stepped into his path and said, “That was my friend June you were talking to about the bus stop. She’d like to meet again.” He’d been due in makeup. She’d expected him to laugh her off set. But instead he’d nodded briskly, as though it were a perfectly understandable request, and told her to find him tomorrow. Well, now tomorrow was today.

  Today, Jack lowered his baritone voice. He leaned in close, so no one else could hear. He smelled like cedar—safe, damp. His brow furrowed. “Is she sure?”

  Lindie wasn’t expecting him to ask that. She certainly didn’t have a considered answer. On her side of childhood, she wasn’t sure of anything; she just leapt in feet first and hoped she survived. Such a query would, indisputably, have sent June for the hills. And then she thought of Artie’s letter in her pocket, how quickly it would sway June back to Artie’s camp. Lindie wanted so much more for June.

  “She’s very respectable, Mr. Montgomery.” Lindie’s throat clamped tight around the truth. “I believe that’s what’s going to ruin her life. She’s going to do all the things she’s supposed to do and she’s going to be miserable because of it.”

  He watched her finish, then nodded slowly: once, twice, before parting his prized lips to tell her his plan.

  Lindie stood below June’s window. It was past ten that first Friday of summer. The moon was bright, just shy of full, and quick-moving clouds acted as curtains before it, first opening, then closing, the night. In spite of this dance above, St. Jude remained positively sultry and still. Plenty of mosquitoes. Plenty of sweat. Lindie fanned herself with Artie’s letter. She knew she had to get rid of it, but she didn’t know how.