An Accidental Woman (46 page)

“Were there?” Griffin asked.

“There must have been. Lisa certainly did well in school. Someone had
to have inspired her, and it surely wasn't Harlan. Oh, she was smart to begin with, but that doesn't always translate into academic success. It didn't with her mother.”

“Where did you come in?”

“Lemon? Milk?”

“Black, please.”

She set an eathenware mug in front of him. “The more appropriate question would be
when
did I come in, and the answer is, too late. My sister stopped calling me somewhere between Hollywood and Sacramento. I'd write, thinking someone would forward my letters, but they always came back marked ‘addressee unknown.' I used to dial information from time to time to see if there was a phone listing. Whenever I got one, I called it. Harlan would answer and say Stacia was out. He would give me a little tidbit of information about what she was doing or how the baby was, tempting me, letting me know what he had and I did not. Then he would tell me not to call again or write or try to visit. He said Stacia didn't want it.” Profoundly sad, she added, “It was probably true.”

“Why is that?”

Camille took up her own mug, and sipped from it as she leaned against the counter. When she answered, her voice held an element of defeat. “When we first came to this country, we had lofty dreams. Hers were always more so than mine, which meant that she had more at stake. I found a lovely place here in Lake Henry. I found work and friends. There is nothing lofty about my life here. I certainly didn't find the wealth Stacia and I dreamed about, but I've been happy. Stacia was never happy. Her life was a disappointment to her. She would have been embarrassed to have me see it.”

“Why didn't you go after her?” Griffin asked.

Her eyes flew to his. “Didn't I just answer that?”

She had. Indirectly. Dismayed, he realized that he was voicing his own frustration, which had to do with his own sister, not with Stacia.

While this realization registered, Camille continued. “The truth is I was afraid of her. She was always temperamental. I reasoned that she knew where to find me, and that if she wanted to see me or wanted me to come to visit, she would call. I didn't want to impose myself on her. Then
she died. I didn't learn of it until months afterward, when I made one of those chance calls and got through. Lisa was eight at the time. He said she was fine.” Her spine seemed to stiffen. “No, I did not believe him. I wanted to see for myself. So I flew out there. I waited at the schoolyard.” She chuckled softly, sadly. “Like in the movies. Just like that. I was prepared to ask a teacher who she was, but I recognized her right away. She was the image of Stacia. She recognized me, too. She'd seen pictures, but it was more like there was a mystical connection.” She smiled, shrugged, said in a self-mocking way, “I always imagined there was that, because I needed it. It was probably more a case of her looking at me because I was staring at her.”

“Did you talk?” Griffin asked.

“For a bit,” Camille said, and took another sip of her tea. When she spoke again, it was from the distance of years. “I do think there was a connection. I told her who I was. I told her a few of the things Stacia and I used to do when we were children. I gave her pictures that I had. I gave her my address and my phone number. I told her that if she ever wanted to call me, she should. I told her that if she ever needed help—with
anything
—she should call me.”

“Did she ever call?”

“Not until after the accident.”

“Were you the one who gave her the name of the lawyer in Chicago?”

“No. She got that herself. She was a resourceful young woman. She had to be, raising herself. She did tell me about the arrangements, so I knew where the baby was born, and we talked about her coming to Lake Henry. I didn't know she would actually do it until she arrived. It was really quite seamless. She showed up one day and signed on with Charlie. He found her a room to rent. We led our own lives. We both knew it was safer that way.”

“You never met secretly?”

“Never as aunt and niece. She was Heather by then. My niece was Lisa. I talked with Heather the same way I would any lovely young woman who had newly come to town. We became friends, and visited as friends do. I do Micah's bookkeeping, though Heather's taken over most of that. I've helped her with the computer. I do take comfort in her being here,
and I believe she feels the same. But our relationship has evolved naturally, as one between friends might. No one in town suspects anything more.”

More quietly, Griffin asked, “Not even Micah?”

She answered in kind, little more than a whisper. “No. Not even Micah. If he's going to know, she'll be the one to tell him.”

Griffin studied the name on the paper. “How did you get this?”

“That baby was my grand-niece. I was at the hospital the day she was picked up by her adoptive family. If you're in the right place at the right time, you hear the right things. I was, and I did. I interpreted that to mean that I was meant to keep an eye on the child.”

“Have you?”

“Covertly. I'm good at that,” she added. “The adoptive mother was initially from Chicago, hence the lawyer there handling the adoption. She had an illness that precluded her ever having children of her own. As it happened, she died when the child was eight, the same age Lisa was when her mother died. Is that eerie?”

“Very,” Griffin said. “What happened after that?”

“All good things, relatively speaking. Obviously, there were never any other children, and the father hasn't remarried. But he's been successful at what he does. They live in Florida, in a luxury condo. He appears to adore the child. He spends time with her. She wants for nothing. She's fourteen now, not so little a girl.”

“What will she feel about Heather?”

“I don't know.”

“Will she cooperate with us?”

“I don't know. I've never talked with her.”

He held up the paper. “Does Heather have this?”

Camille thought about that a moment. Then she took in a deep breath. “No. She does not. There were times when I was tempted to share it, but I thought that giving the child an identity might make it harder for her. For the most part, she doesn't think about the child, any more than she thinks about that night in Sacramento. There's too much pain involved. Far easier just to push it from her mind. But then there's the anniversary of the child's birth, and Heather gets melancholy. She never says why. But
I can tell. That's the day when she seeks me out, even just for a cup of tea. She needs to be with family that day.”

* * *

She whispered a smiling hi against his throat. He didn't know if she was awake enough to take in what he had to say, but he told her anyway.

Cassie, whom they called at first light with the news, wasn't sure that a trip was necessary. She had a friend with a law firm in Miami whom she felt would gladly meet with the family and do the asking. After all, what did they need? A mouth swab? A strand of hair? It seemed a simple enough request.

But Poppy wasn't thinking about physical evidence. She was worried about the emotional impact on a fourteen-year-old child having her biological mother suddenly reenter her life. That was heavy enough under normal circumstances, but Heather wasn't just any old biological mother. She was one who was charged with the murder of that child's biological father. It would be a double whammy for an unsuspecting child.

* * *

But there was work to be done in Lake Henry, and it wouldn't wait. He had promised to help Micah, and so he would. Fallen limbs had to be cleared, and not only from the section of mainline they had focused on the night before. The entire sugarbush had to be scoured, downed wood removed, and damaged tubing repaired, and it had to be done fast. Loss of one day's sap wouldn't break the season; loss of many more than that might.

Having no choice but to let Cassie handle the Florida arrangements, he drove to the sugarbush early Monday morning. Poppy was behind him in the Blazer—significantly behind, for safety's sake. Though the road had been sanded, pure ice lay beneath. Indeed, Poppy's chair skidded down the entire length of the ramp outside her house before they realized that without electricity, the coils didn't work. She had whooped through the skid and laughed at the end, as she might have done taking a wild slalom run, but it was a sobering moment for Griffin, who felt he should have anticipated the problem.

The day was gray and cold, but dry and so beautiful that it was hard to believe the sugar season was in doubt. Everything on the roadside wore a coating of ice that held it perfectly still in the headlights' beam, frozen in time, gloriously delineated, highlighted, and framed. It was a crystalline world marred only by fallen trees, and those came in bunches, slain giants that had been on the wrong side of the hill. Smoke rose from each chimney he passed, the fires within providing the only source of heat. Windows were dark; lights were out all over town. There were no shovelers, only the occasional Lake Henryite holding an ice pick, gazing in bewilderment at what looked like a world of glass.

This time, Griffin and Poppy weren't the only ones coming down Micah's drive. Pete Duffy was already there, quickly joined by Charlie Owens and his two oldest boys, John Kipling and his cousin Buck, Art Winslow and three burly men from the mill, Leila Higgins' husband, and half a dozen men from the Ridge. All had chainsaws, crampons, and thermoses of coffee.

Griffin was as gratified that they'd come as he was by the humble look Micah wore each time another truck pulled up. There was a sense of
community here. Hard feelings could be set aside when more important things came to the fore.

Micah didn't say much. None of the men did. It was too early and their task too urgent. Working with maps that showed the grids of the sugarbush, they broke into teams of four each and set off up the hill.

* * *

The last of the men and their white puffs of breath had disappeared when the women began to arrive, and none came empty-handed. The kitchen quickly filled with food and the kind of quiet talk that Poppy found to be as soothing as the lake on a warm summer night. With oil lamps burning in place of lights, and the fireplace ablaze with logs, there was an air of gentle camaraderie that even Missy and Star seemed to feel. Though Poppy kept a close eye on them, they were content to wander about, lean against a thigh or sit on a lap, and tune in and out of the talk.

The kitchen table was piled with sandwiches and the counter held bowls of soup when the men returned for lunch. As they ate, they huddled together, giving Micah reports of what damage they'd found and what repair was needed. On the positive side, Micah's team had finished removing debris from the crucial portion of mainline that had split, and could have the line repaired by the end of the day. On the negative side, there was enough other damage, both to trees and to tubing, to warrant two more days of work in the woods.

* * *

If all of the same men showed up for the next two days, he could recover with a minimum of loss. If not, he was in trouble.

He wanted to ask them. Wanted to
beg
them. But there was that last breath of pride.

* * *

Bud Grinelle insisted that it was absurd to discuss any child possibly fathered by Rob DiCenza until Heather Malone admitted that she was Lisa Matlock—which Cassie couldn't have Heather do until they had the firepower of a child willing to submit to DNA testing.

On that score, what she learned from her law school friend suggested that willingness might be harder to achieve than she had thought. She fully expected that the DiCenzas would fight the release of blood samples from Rob's clothing, but she had hoped to speed things up by cooperation on the Florida end.

“Norman Anderson may be a problem,” she explained to the few of them remaining at Micah's that evening. “My friend spent a while talking with one of her partners who's had dealings with him. Norman is a decent man who has made a great deal of money over the years as the president and chairman of the board of a group of banks in the southern U.S. He isn't lavish with his money. He isn't showy. He's a quiet, private person who values that privacy above everything else—except his daughter. He adores her. Apparently, they were always close but became even more so when his wife died, which, I'm told, was also handled in a quiet, decent, private manner. He absolutely will not want the publicity from something like this.”

“Neither did I,” Micah charged, “but I didn't have a choice. Neither will he, if this goes to court.”

“The problem is that he may beat us there,” Cassie explained. “If we
don't win him over now, he's apt to file for an injunction to keep a lid on things until his lawyers can present a case saying why the rights of this child need to be protected.”

“No one's trying to violate her rights.”

“He may hope that if he slows things down, we'll cave in and just plead guilty, and it will be over and done without his daughter having to be involved. It's a delay tactic.”

“How long can it go on?”

“Months, Micah.”

“But if Anderson works with us,” Griffin argued, “won't he be able to control the publicity? His daughter's confidentiality will be guaranteed, won't it?”

Cassie nodded. “That's what we'll argue. My friend has a meeting with him set up for tomorrow. She wants to assure him on the confidentiality angle, but she also wants to tell him about Heather. She feels that if they lay things out for him, there's a chance he'll be sympathetic to our position.”

* * *

“Fifty-fifty, maybe.”

“That's lousy. What if you were there? Would it help?”

“I offered. My friend asked her partner, but he felt too many lawyers would turn Anderson off. He said I'd be better off staying here by the phone.”

“What about me, then?” Poppy asked. Her stomach started to jump, but it was the opening she wanted. “I'm not a lawyer. I'm just an ordinary person. What if I was there representing our side?”

Maida stirred from the background. “Poppy, you don't travel that way.”

“But what if I did?” Poppy turned back to Cassie. “What if I was there to give Heather a personal face? Would it help?”

Cassie smiled crookedly. “It wouldn't hurt. You're certainly not threatening.”

“I evoke sympathy.”

“I did not say that.”

“Well, I
do,
” Poppy insisted. “I've never used my disability before, but in this instance, I don't care. If my traveling that distance in a wheelchair makes him take notice and think, really think, about my friend Heather as a human being, I'll do it.”

Griffin put a hand on her shoulder. “Wait a few days. Once the sugarbush is cleared, I'll go with you.”

“This won't wait.”

“Then I'll go with you,” Maida offered. “I'm an old hand at the Florida route.”

But Poppy shook her head, very sure of what she wanted. Her stomach was still jumping. She figured it would do that the entire time she was away from Lake Henry, and it had nothing to do with homesickness. Before the accident, she had traveled at the drop of a hat. She had traveled since—to Cape Cod, to Boston, even as far afield as Pennsylvania—but always by car and never alone. She hadn't had to worry about the mechanics of wheelchair travel, or about finding herself in a strange place with no one to help. Now she thought about both of those things, and they frightened her. But just because she was frightened of something didn't mean she shouldn't try.

“I need to do this,” she said with quiet confidence. Her eyes were on Maida.

Micah may have said something. Or Cassie. Poppy heard a little bit of a buzz. But Griffin was silent. He understood. And Maida?

She studied her daughter for a long moment, then crossed the short distance, bent down, and gave Poppy the hug she had been wanting for so very long.

* * *

But she kept her doubts to herself. She needed to do this alone.

“It's not like I haven't gone places since the accident,” she reasoned, talking in spurts to calm herself. “My dad felt strongly that the accident shouldn't keep me tied to Lake Henry. He tried to plan a trip a year. He had a Blake Orchard van adapted for me, kind of like my Blazer is, except rather than my driving, I was a passenger. We'd go for four, five days sometimes, but we did day trips all over New England. We had our favorite places, my dad and me. He was a special man. Do you think Norman Anderson is like that?”