When I Meet You

by Olivia Newport

  “You won’t hear me arguing,” Jillian said. “Do you have a theme in mind for the decorating?”

  “I have some ideas, but it’s Nia’s inn, so ultimately I’ll defer to whether she thinks they’ll work.”

  They wandered into the dining room, where the table was already set for the next day’s breakfast.

  “Wednesday,” Jillian said. “Usually a small crowd except in the summer. She’ll do an egg casserole of some sort and homemade scones.”

  “Makes me want to happen by before work.”

  Nia returned with Nolan, who looked not one bit sheepish, and they sat at the end of the table with no place settings.

  “Nolan,” Nia said, “I know you’ve been in my kitchen a thousand times, but before you leave tonight, we should pull open the drawers and cabinets so you know what’s there and available to work with. We don’t need any surprises on the night of the dinner.”

  “Can’t he just bring everything he needs?” Jillian suggested. “Cook with the pots he’s used to?”

  “He might forget something,” Nia said, “and he should have some idea of what is available to improvise with. Slotted spoons, extra pots, and whatnot.”

  Good point.

  A choke of air announced the front door had been breached, and Nia cocked her head toward the hall. In another minute, Leo ushered Marilyn in.

  “Oh good,” Marilyn said. “You’re all here. I thought I was just dropping in on Nia.”

  “What’s up?” Nolan asked.

  “Good news, I think,” Marilyn said, “but it will take some reconsidering. We’re still a couple of weeks out, and at the pace of ticket requests we already have, we could have quite a few more reservations than the seats we were planning even with adding the third seating. The dinner is turning out to be a smashing success—perhaps the best event of the weekend. Of course, we can always start saying we’re sold out, but I wonder how many more we could accommodate.”

  “How many are we talking about?” Nolan said.

  Jillian watched the color in his face fluctuate through several shades, each paler than the other. Not much flapped her dad, but apparently cooking for an increasingly large crowd did.

  Marilyn turned to Nia. “I know you said you could easily find space for between forty and fifty at each seating. I wonder if we can push that to seventy. I can rent additional tables and chairs if you think you have a place to put them. The expense will be well worth the extra ticket sales.”

  “Seventy! Goodness. Let’s see.” Nia stepped out of the dining room, and the others trailed after her. “On occasion I’ve put as many as twenty-five in the dining room, and maybe I can squeeze in four more. I was planning to use the parlor and part of the lobby. We can use more of the lobby, I suppose, and make a quiet space in the library for eight or ten.”

  “We have to think about where Jillian will present from,” Marilyn said. “Everyone must be able to see her.”

  “Agreed,” Nia said.

  Jillian continued to watch Nolan’s face while this virtual reconfiguring went on in the minds of Marilyn and Nia. His eyes roamed between the two of them and the spaces they pointed to as his usual affable expression dimmed.

  “Perhaps we can have the high school students who will be the wait staff assist guests in turning and carrying chairs.” Marilyn pointed to the wide staircase. “If Jillian stands there, and we wait until after dessert to bring people in from the outer areas, they should be able to see her. I think I can find more students to help.”

  “Well, there you have it,” Nia said. “I think that could work, though I suggest keeping the seatings at no more than sixty-five.”

  That was still almost two hundred meals for Nolan to prepare—more than two hundred if he was expected to feed the volunteer high school students, which only seemed fair, since they would be spending their entire evening at the Inn.

  “Very well,” Marilyn said. “I will make the arrangements. Thank you for being flexible. It would have seemed a shame to walk away from the additional ticket money this will raise.”

  No one had asked the chef.

  “Dad?” Jillian said. “How does that sound? Do you need more help?”

  “I’m sure I can find it,” he said. “It’s all for a great cause.”

  Marilyn said good night, and Nia turned to the others. “Nolan, it looks like we may need both your pots and mine.”

  “We’ll figure it out.” Nolan’s complexion had recovered.

  “Now about the decorating?” Nia turned back toward the dining room. “Veronica, you said you had an idea?”

  “Trunks!” Veronica said.

  Jillian blinked at her.

  The front door opened again, and Kris Bryant entered. “A little birdie told me you’d all be here. I have ice cream.”

  Jillian tilted her gaze at Nolan. “Did you text Kris?”

  “I plead the fifth,” he said, “but I hope she brought cherry chocolate chip chunk.”

  Jillian avoided speaking the name of that flavor aloud because too often she tripped on the repetitive sounds, but it was one of Nolan’s favorites.

  “Also butter pecan.” Kris raised her sack.

  “Then we’re moving this meeting to the kitchen,” Nia said. “I’m not having ice cream dribbled on my table set for breakfast.”

  In the kitchen, Nolan dished out ice cream, and the decorating discussion resumed.

  “I was inspired by a conversation Jillian and I had,” Veronica said. “Steamer trunks used on ocean liners and railroads represent heritage for a lot of families because they represent how families got from one country to another or from one part of the country to another.”

  “I was thinking in terms of table decorations,” Nia said.

  “I’m still working on that,” Veronica said, “but steamer trunks or other vintage-looking luggage could establish some ambiance, and we’ll work off of that for the rest.”

  “We just gave away valuable space to Marilyn for extra seating,” Jillian pointed out.

  “True,” Veronica said, “but we don’t need a lot of pieces. They just need to be elegantly and strategically placed. I’ll bet we’ll have people telling stories around the tables in no time about what luggage reminds them of in their family histories. It could be the perfect setup for your talk.”

  “I think she’s right.” Nolan licked his spoon. “It might even help with getting people to sign on as Friends of the Society with regular donations.”

  Jillian smiled. Nolan had lost his stunned expression. The ice cream helped.

  “I’ve got some we could use,” Veronica said.

  “I have one.” Kris peered into a now-empty ice cream carton.

  “So do I,” Nia said. “Several. I’ll pull them from the guest rooms temporarily.”

  Jillian ran her tongue over her bottom teeth, not ready to volunteer her trunk—as much as she loved the decorating theme.

  “I’ll make some calls for a few more,” Veronica said. “What about dishes?”

  “Leave that to me,” Nia said. “I’m not having any disposable nonsense in my Inn. It would completely undercut the effort of the evening. We’ll have to wash and reset quickly between seatings, but I think I can come up with the china.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I have my grandmother’s china,” Kris said. “Sixteen place settings.”

  Nia nodded. “I’ve seen it, and it will do nicely.”

  “I’ll make centerpieces from knickknacks at the store,” Veronica said.

  “The classy ones.” Nia pointed a stern finger.

  “Absolutely. With candles and low lighting.”

  Nia stood. “Thank you, everyone. You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.”

  Back at home, Jillian and Nolan sprawled in the living room, Nolan on the navy couch surrounded by cookbooks and Jillian on the favorite purple chair and matching ottoman with her laptop and a yellow legal pad.

  “Okra soup,” he said.

&
nbsp; “Too unfamiliar.”

  “Creamy pumpkin.”

  “Out of season.”

  Nolan alternated flipping pages in three cookbooks. Jillian opened the 1910 census. The correspondence in the unclaimed trunk was addressed to Miss Lynnelle Bendeure in Cleveland in the spring of 1909. If she returned to Cleveland, for some reason without her luggage, and was present there in April 1910 at the address on the letters, she would show in the census. Having a fixed address removed the guesswork from the initial search.

  Not there.

  Nobody by the name of Bendeure at that address, in fact. Nobody living at that address at all on the dates of the census.

  “Herbed monkey bread,” Nolan said.

  Jillian laughed. “Marilyn would love printing that on her menus.”

  “Blanquette of veal.”

  “Ew to all things veal. People have principles about baby cows, Dad.”

  He flipped more pages.

  Jillian widened her census search to all the counties of Ohio. No Lynnelle. No Bendeure.

  “Spinach venison quiche,” he said.

  “People won’t eat Bambi either.”

  “It’s not actually Bambi.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Coq au vin.”

  “‘What is that?’ people will say.”

  “Chicken.”

  “Maybe you could just say chicken.”

  “And have people think this is another rubber chicken fundraiser? No thanks.”

  He flipped more pages.

  Jillian moved her census search to Colorado. Lynnelle Bendeure’s trunk arrived in Denver. But did she? She might have arrived but never gone home, or she might never have arrived at all.

  Jillian clicked through one Colorado county after another while Nolan turned pages.

  “Lamb brochettes.”

  “Getting closer,” she said—though she was getting no closer.

  “Yorkshire pudding.”

  “Don’t ruin it now.” Jillian moved her computer off her lap and crossed the room to the trunk. With the gloves on, she pulled out the family Bible and returned to her chair.

  “What’s going on, Silly Jilly?”

  “I just want to write down some of these names.” The family section on the opening pages listed multiple Bendeures. Not all of them had death dates entered prior to 1909. They should have been in the Ohio census. It was unlikely the entire family had left the state—and a family business—in the months between Lynnelle’s journey and the census. It was less than a year.

  Her trunk was abandoned.

  She was not in the census in either state.

  The family disappeared.

  This was going to take some digging. Jillian jotted down names from the family tree on her legal pad, not yet ready to tell Nolan her primary suspicion was a preinternet version of identity theft.

  Or worse. Get what you need and then do away with the identity—and the person you stole it from—altogether.

  “Well, if you won’t let me serve monkey bread or Yorkshire pudding,” Nolan said, “I’m going to bed.”

  “You’ll come up with the right thing,” Jillian murmured.

  As Nolan checked the locks before going upstairs, Jillian moved to her office. The family tree had yielded Lynnelle’s middle name, which could be a useful piece of information.

  Lynnelle Elaine Bendeure.

  On a large whiteboard hanging on the wall of her office, behind her desk, Jillian began to scribble.

  Lynn E. Bendeure.

  Elaine Bendeure.

  Lynne Bendeure.

  Lynnette Bendeur.

  Lyn Bender.

  Lynnette Bender.

  Elaine Bender.

  Ellen Bender.

  Jillian started plugging these variations and dozens more into the search bars of archived Colorado public records—births, marriages, and deaths. She started in the counties around Denver and moved out from there. As fast as she could think of a variant, she recorded it, typed it in search bars, and checked it off as attempted. Her eyes drooped, her handwriting deteriorated, and still she kept going into the yawning hours of the night.

  When she finally got a hit, she was so blurred with fatigue she nearly cleared the search bar without acknowledging the result. Rubbing her eyes, she looked again.

  It was an ordinary enough name for 1909. It could be anybody.

  Yet the thought niggled.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Nolan had to be in his Denver law office on Wednesday but not until midmorning. He showered, dressed in the dark suit—the one his daughter said made him look like a shark attorney when he first bought it—and took his briefcase down the rear stairs that would deliver him to the space between the doorways to Jillian’s office and the kitchen. Judging from the aroma that greeted him, she was already at work, which would have been true on many days no matter what time he descended.

  He looked into her office. Not only was she working, but she wore the same jeans and soft plaid flannel shirt she’d had on yesterday.

  “Jilly.”

  She looked up. “Good morning.”

  “You didn’t go to bed, did you?”

  The shake of her head sent her curls, free from any restraint, rattling in several directions.

  “How much coffee?” he asked.

  “Don’t go there.”

  Nolan moved into the office and set his briefcase in one of the chairs Jillian kept opposite her desk for infrequent visitors and more frequent overflow research piles. “Thinking of redecorating?”

  In addition to her whiteboard full of scribbles and lines and arrows and circles in five different dry-erase colors, another wall served as a makeshift bulletin board featuring the Pinkerton’s correspondence and select financial documents. On a third wall, Jillian had removed the artwork above the bookcases and taped up sheets of easel paper. The whiteboard often was a temporary tool. The rest of this was wholly uncharacteristic of the way Jillian worked.

  “What’s going on, Jillian?”

  “I have to be able to see these letters, Dad.” Jillian opened her fingers and let a pen drop to her habitual yellow narrow-lined legal pad. “Something is niggling, and the information is there. It has to be. So I took the liberty of making some photocopies.”

  “The approach is not without merit.” Nolan faced the display of letters. “But shouldn’t you sleep?”

  “I need to figure this out.”

  “We’re not on a deadline, Jillian. There’s no real client and no rush. I’m just doing Rich a favor. Whatever happened was over a hundred years ago. No one is in imminent danger. We haven’t begun to sort out if there would be any legal recourse.” In fact, he doubted there would be. They didn’t have much to work on that would lead to true evidence, and even if they did, statutes of limitation would work against them. All Rich wanted was peace of mind for the museum.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Jillian said. “Obviously we only have one side of the conversation, but if we deduce the right things, the narrative will crack right open. That’s not so different from genealogy research. And the family Bible will be a big help there.”

  “I’m not doubting your skills, Jilly. Just whether the urgency was worth losing a night’s sleep.”

  She shrugged. “I was going to think about it all night anyway.”

  “You have a theory, don’t you?”

  “I can’t prove anything. I copied a few of the financials because they are mentioned in the letters. But it’s hard to guess which ones they were talking about. I’ll probably need all of them eventually.”

  “You don’t have enough wall space for that. You’re not planning to wallpaper the dining room, are you?”

  “Hey, that’s an idea!”

  “Veto!”

  “In any event, I think there are gaps.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The records are not all there. Missing dates. Missing lists. Missing reports. Like somebody deliberately removed certain
documents.”

  This wasn’t like Jillian. The thoroughness of her approach to the data was characteristic, but losing sleep and papering over her office because of a long shot that had no pressing consequence made little sense. And Jillian was one of the most sensible people Nolan knew. Her theory about the trunk’s owner wasn’t the only thing niggling at her. It was just all she was prepared to admit to—and she was hedging around even that.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Nolan said. “I was planning to make some copies of my own. I need a set for Luke, and I want to take a set with me to Denver. I have a colleague I think could help. If I also make you a complete set, while I’m doing that, will you go in the kitchen and have a proper breakfast? Yogurt and fruit?”

  “I could be persuaded.”

  “Have you got space in your schedule today for a nap?”

  “Not in preschool, Dad.”

  He’d pushed too far.

  “Whatever you do,” Jillian said, “don’t put the sheets through the automatic feeder on your cranky copier.”

  “I’ve handled a few important papers in my time.” He went to the living room to retrieve documents from the trunk’s three drawers, listening to Jillian’s movements to be sure she held up her end of the bargain. Occasionally she liked to remind him that if they didn’t share a home, he wouldn’t know whether she slept or when she ate or how much coffee she consumed or that she never switched to decaf. But so far it was an idle threat. After attending college in Denver, she’d moved back home and never once talked seriously about moving out. Still, a father was entitled to recognize the old undercurrents of behavior in his own child.

  At least when he left the house, Nolan knew Jillian had eaten and even showered. He left one set of the financial documents with her and took two with him. His first stop was the Victorium Emporium. The shop wasn’t open for daily business yet, but a text message brought Luke to the door.

  Inside, Nolan set a stack of papers on the counter. “I tried to get the best quality I could, but the old typewriter ink is faded in places.”

  “Or gloppy in the wrong places.” Luke put his finger on a number. “Is that an eight or a three with extra ink smudged in it?”