A Timely Concerto (21 page)

After such a long introduction, she paused for breath. Howard or Howie or whatever his name was didn’t like it but Adam looked intrigued.

“Come into the parlor,” he said, waiting for her to move forward so he could descend the rest of the way down the stairs. “We need to talk.”

“Dad! What are you doing?” Howard said, voice terse.

“Be nice,” Adam said. “This woman is your three times great grandmother if I have my generations right.”

Vinnie whooped aloud with delight and even Joe cracked a smile. Sylvia didn’t know what to think or say so she followed Adam into the parlor and sat down.

“Explain why you sound as crazy as she does,” Howie said to his father.

Adam nodded.

“It’s the letters,” he said. “If you would go into the rear parlor, son, and bring me the packet of letters that you will find there in the roll-top desk. They are all in a big manila envelope marked “Lillian’s letters.”

Adam turned back to Sylvia.

“When I was about fifteen, I was up in the attic hoping to find some kind of treasure, something of value. There was – and still is – all kinds of things up there and I came across several letters, tied together with ribbon and tucked into an old trunk. I read them and was fascinated. I knew that my great-grandmother wrote them and I believed them. If I understood them, she came back through time travel. I saved them all these years and wondered but I never imagined that anyone would show up here.”

Sylvia nodded. Her throat tightened with tears as she realized that this elderly man was her great-great grandson, that his grandfather had been her daughter’s child. Despite the extreme oddity of the situation and the surreal sense that it must be a dream, she felt a connection to him. When his son came back, yellowed, fragile letters in his hand, she accepted them and opened the first one with care.

Her daughter’s familiar handwriting burned into her consciousness and she read the first letter through her tears. There were several, perhaps a dozen although she did not stop to count them. As she finished them, she handed them to Joe, who then passed them to Lavinia. Adam’s son read them too. After the last one, she looked up and had no idea what to say.

“If I put together the story correctly, then the first Howard Speakman died before he could marry or have any children,” Adam said. “I assume from something you said earlier and from the letters that she first knew Howard as a ghost and that they fell in love.”

She cleared her throat, which felt like scrapping up gravel from the bottom of a fish tank to clean it.

“Yes, that’s what she said before she vanished,” Sylvia said. “I didn’t believe her, however.”

Lavinia chimed in. “I tried to tell you, Mom.”

“I know – now,” she said. “I didn’t believe it then. I thought it was nonsense.”

Adam shot a glance at his son and nodded.

“It sounds like it would be – but it’s not. Without Lillian, my great-grandfather would have died. It was her love and the antibiotics she brought from the future that saved his life,” he said, turning to Joe. “Are you Lillian’s father?”

Joe shook his head. “No, I’m her stepfather.”

Lavinia could not be quiet. “I am her sister so that makes me both your aunts, removed a few times but your aunt just the same.”

Sylvia sat in stunned silence, disbelief like a cloak around her.

Lillian, her daughter, must be long dead.

Howard, the man, the ghost, must be dead and buried with Lillian.

Lillian and Howard were matriarch and patriarch of the Speakman family.

Her ghost was now her son-in-law or he had been, once.

Sylvia could bear no more; she put her head into her hands and sobbed, cried for her daughter long lost to her and wept for the family members she had just met. Life, it seemed, was an endless circle and she had, many years too late, come home.