Alma (7 page)

Alma had a tall cola with ice and a long straw in front of her. Clara sipped a cup of steaming coffee.

They had ordered spaghetti with meatballs, and Alma knew something very important was happening when Clara asked the waitress to put aside two pieces of apple pie for their dessert. Alma looked around as they waited for their food.

“Well,” Clara began, pulling Alma’s attention back to the table, “you’re probably wondering what’s going on.”

Alma nodded, slurping the last bit of cola up the straw.

“You’re now looking at Liffey’s new waitress!” her mother said, smiling. “That means a small raise, more hours, and tips!”

“That’s great, Mom,” Alma said.

“And it means I could buy you this,” Clara added, placing a small box before Alma. “It’s a bit early for Christmas, so let’s call it an un-birthday present.”

“What is it?” Alma asked, though she could guess from the shape of the box.

“Open it and see.”

Alma removed the coloured paper carefully so it could be taken home and reused. Inside was a white box with red trim. Alma opened it.

The pen was black, with a brass clip on the cap and a brass circle near the base of the barrel.
Alma pulled off the cap. The nib had a square tip. “Waterman” was etched into the gold-coloured nib in graceful flowing letters.

“A calligraphy pen! It’s beautiful,” Alma said, looking up. “Can I keep it?”

“Of course, ninny.”

“Honest and true?”

“Honest and true.” Clara smiled. “You can use it to write your stories.”

“Thanks, Mom.” The cap went
click
when Alma replaced it. “I’m going to write a story in Carolingian hand first. It’s more than a thousand years old. Then I’ll write one in half-uncials. That’s the hand used in Ireland from 600 to 800. It’s not as old, but it’s prettier.”

The waitress arrived and placed plates of steaming spaghetti on the table.

“Cheers,” Clara said.

“Cheers,” said Alma, clinking her water glass against her mother’s.

When Alma came home from school Friday she found a bulging file on the kitchen table, an accordion-sided container with a string on the flap wound around a stiff paper button. “RR Hawkins” had been written on the edge of
the file with a fountain pen above a label that said “Inter-library Loan.” A note from Clara said Miss McGregor had sent it home with her. Alma could keep the file for a day or two, but it must be returned Monday at the latest.

Alma shucked off her coat and hung it up. She took the file to her room, sat on the couch and unwound the string. She lifted the papers out and put the folder aside. Alma slid to the floor and, using the couch as a desktop, began to go through the material, all the while hoping against hope that there would be more books by RR Hawkins. There were newspaper stories, magazine articles, book reviews, just as the other file had contained, but more—not much more, but some. Alma got out her new calligraphy pen and began to make notes.

After RR Hawkins disappeared, she moved to New York and attempted to remain unnoticed, but interest in her as a writer was high and she was found out. She had a baby, a girl, letting it be known that her husband was still in England. “Maybe Mom was right!” Alma noted in brackets. The press eventually dug up the fact that there was no husband. There was a scandal that drove RR Hawkins into hiding again.

She was discovered, a few years later, by a fan, in a Boston department store. The press pounced on her again. But this time she apparently decided not to run. She had bought a large house in one of the better neighbourhoods and refused all requests for interviews and public appearances. It was almost, Alma thought as she read, as if the more people wanted RR Hawkins to be public, the deeper they drove her into seclusion.

RR Hawkins continued to publish. Her daughter grew up, went to college, married a composer and moved away; Alma couldn’t find out where. The husband died young. Overcome by grief, RR Hawkins’s daughter returned home to her mother. She never remarried. She seemed to desire seclusion as much as her mother.

There was one last item in the file. On a scrap of yellowed newsprint was a photo of two women emerging from the door of an imposing, two-storey house. One was considerably taller than the other. Their faces were shadowed by the overhanging verandah. The caption under the photo said, “Seen at their house on Kavanagh Street in Boston are the author RR Hawkins and her daughter, Olivia.”

C
ould it be? Alma wondered. She did a quick calculation in her head. Yes, Miss Lily was about the right age. Had she and Miss Olivia moved to Charlotte’s Bight from Boston? Were they on the run, attempting to find an out-of-the-way place to live a private life? No. Impossible. The question and answer buzzed round in her head like pesky mosquitoes. Unable to put the issue out of her mind, she grabbed a sheet of paper and drew a line down the centre. At the top of the column on the left she wrote “Could be” and, so excited that she didn’t bother to form her letters properly, she put “Not possible” above the right-hand column, adding an exclamation mark for good measure.

What were the clues? she asked herself.

1. “Miss Lily is tall, like the woman in the photo,” Alma noted in the left column. On the right side she wrote, “Lots of women are tall!”

2. “Miss Lily likes books.” “Lots of people like books, including me, and Mom, even Miss McAllister. And Miss McGregor.”

3. “The letters I copy for Miss Lily sometimes refuse interviews and invitations to talk to audiences, the kind of requests made of famous people.” Alma could think of nothing to put down in the right-hand column.

4. “Miss Lily’s letters have no return address, as if she doesn’t want people to know where the letters come from.” “That’s silly,” Alma scribbled on the right side of the line. How could she
get
the letters she was answering if the sender didn’t know where she lived? Unless the letters came to her indirectly. Through her publisher, maybe. Alma penned a question mark between the columns.

5. “It’s
Miss
Lily, not Mrs. Somebody.” As if the old woman in the dark study who reminded Alma of Miss Havisham had never married.

6
. “Miss Lily has a daughter named Olivia
Chenoweth.”
Alma had always thought Chenoweth was the surname of both women.
But if Olivia had married and her husband had died, she’d have a different surname, her husband’s.

7. So, they could be Olivia Chenoweth and Lily Hawkins. On the right, Alma reluctantly scribbled, “Lily doesn’t begin with an R!!!”

8. But, “Could Miss RR Hawkins have another name? A nickname or a family name?” Alma couldn’t imagine Miss Lily accepting a nickname.

Alma had been thinking so hard, her head hurt. Time and time again she told herself her imagination was running wild. To think a world-famous writer would come to live in an old wooden house in an out-of-the-way place like Charlotte’s Bight! Alma decided she was being a dunce. She wanted RR Hawkins to be close by, so her mind was making things up. She had always put RR Hawkins on the list of authors she would love to talk to, so she was trying to make it come true.

Still, she insisted, it
could
be.

Alma decided to find out, once and for all.

She would have to think like a detective. She must, when at Miss Lily’s house, keep her eyes open. Observe, like Sherlock Holmes. But she had to wait. She couldn’t just march
over to the Chenoweth house, push open the big wooden door and snoop through the place with a giant magnifying glass. It would be three days before she had the opportunity to put her plan into action.

Even then, how
could
she find the answer to the mystery? Alma repeatedly asked herself over the next few days. She could simply ask Miss Lily, but that seemed rude, especially if Alma was right. It would mean that all Miss Lily’s efforts to keep her identity secret had failed. Alma didn’t want to be the one to let the secret out, the way Pandora had released the evils from her box.

The following Tuesday afternoon as Alma was ambling home from school, enjoying the sunshine, she caught sight of Russell Stearns, walking jauntily along the sidewalk on Grafton Street, his black postman’s bag fat with letters, his blue uniform rumpled, his ruddy cheeks puffed up as he whistled tunelessly.

“Afternoon, Alma,” he said as he passed.

“Hi, Russell,” Alma replied. Then, to herself she whispered, “Of course! Why didn’t I think of it before? It’s perfect!”

She started to run.

“Dear RR Hawkins,” she began, barely able to contain her excitement as she wrote, in pencil, with an ugly backward slant to disguise her own hand.

Alma was sitting on the rug in her room, a sheet of plain writing paper in front of her. She had already addressed the envelope to RR Hawkins, c/o Seabord Publishing Company, New York City. Her plan was simple. If Alma’s suspicions were correct and the woman she worked for was the famous author, the letter would come right back to Charlotte’s Bight and Alma herself would copy the reply!

Alma struggled to hold herself back. She was tempted to put everything she wanted to say to RR Hawkins in the letter, but, she reminded herself, she might be wrong about Miss Lily. Best to go slowly, she told herself. So she wrote, “I have admired your books for a long time and I wanted to know if you have written anything since you finished the Alterworld Series.” Alma left a space, then wrote, “Yours sincerely.” She wrote the
A
in her name and then caught herself.

“Stupid!” she muttered, vigorously erasing the error. Then she wrote “Hattie Scrivener,” because she had always liked the name Hattie
(she had even tried to change her name to Hattie but her mother wouldn’t let her), and a scrivener was a writer and Alma wanted to be a writer someday.

Then Alma thought of another problem. When she mailed the letter it would go to the post office in Charlotte’s Bight, where the stamp would be cancelled before the letter was sent on to New York. The cancellation imprint would show the name of the town and the date. So Miss Olivia and Miss Lily would know where the letter originated.

“Oh, well,” Alma concluded, “there’s nothing I can do about that.”

Another thought struck her: Miss Lily’s letters to her fans
must
go back to her publisher to be mailed from there, otherwise every letter she sent would show that it was mailed in Charlotte’s Bight! And in such a small place, she would be easy to find! That was why none of the envelopes Alma wrote out had return addresses!

She smiled to herself, pleased with her Holmesian powers of deduction and logic, as she sealed the letter to her favourite author inside its envelope. She placed the stamp exactly, in line with the top and right edge of
the envelope. She put on her coat and went out to post the letter. Before she dropped it in the mailbox she crossed her fingers.

“Here’s hoping,” she said.

W
hile Alma waited impatiently to find out if her “Hattie Scrivener ploy,” as she called it, was successful, she worked on her story. Miss McAllister had assigned a short story, to be completed before school broke for the summer holidays, and there was a prize for the best one. Alma wanted to win the prize.

Before long, she had completed chapter 1, where Sammy goes to the library and discovers a secret door.

As the days passed, Alma’s excitement each time she entered Miss Lily’s house diminished, until she went a whole day without once thinking about her clever trick to solve the RR Hawkins mystery. Alma began to fear that, as happened so often, she had let her imagination capture her and carry her off. Perhaps, after all, Miss Lily was just a slightly eccentric and more than slightly scary old lady living in Charlotte’s Bight with her slightly eccentric daughter whose name happened to be Olivia.

Alma’s home underwent changes. With her increased salary and longer hours, Clara was able to purchase bright, colourful material to make a tablecloth and curtains for the kitchen. She bought an almost complete set of dishes at a garage sale. “No more cracked teacups in
this
house,” she told Alma on the day she brought home the cardboard carton full of dusty dishes with a cornflower pattern around the rims. There was a new doormat with “Welcome” printed on it, and a boot tray, and for Alma and her mother, new galoshes that didn’t leak.