Be My Love (A Walker Island Romance Book 1) (13 page)

But she already knew the answer, didn’t she?

Joel was worth risking everything for.

Hanna got out her camera, positioning it so that it would film her sitting on her bed. She knew she looked terrible, with puffy eyes and tangled hair, but she didn’t care. Telling him the truth was all that mattered right now, not looking pretty or attractive.

She didn’t have anything planned, didn’t have a script to read from, as she hit the record button. All she could do was speak from her heart.

“Joel, I know you probably won’t want to play this video for too long. But I hope you’ll watch long enough for me to tell you the truth. The truth about what happened...and also the truth about how I feel.”

Hanna swallowed. This was harder than she had thought it would be, yet she knew she needed to keep going.

“Let’s start with the truth about Poppy. It turns out that she left the island with help from my grandmother, as well as from William II. Not only did your great aunt and my grandfather not want to marry one another, but Poppy wanted to follow her dreams and write poetry, and she thought she needed to leave the island and her family to do it. But according to my grandmother, Poppy always planned to come back once she had succeeded. Obviously, she never did. I know learning what Poppy did hurt you, and I’m so sorry about that...but I also know it would have crushed her spirit to give up her dreams.”

The truth about Poppy was the easy part, though.

“Now for the truth about me.” It should have been the more straightforward part—just a few simple words—yet it was anything but easy. “I love you, Joel.” Her voice was shaking now, but she knew she had to get through this, knew she needed to tell him everything that was in her heart. “And I think you love me too. At least, I hope you do.”

She paused again, trying to think how to phrase the next part, yet there wasn’t a choice, not really. She had to keep telling the truth, even if it might cost her Joel.

“And you were right, I am planning to go back to school in Seattle...but that doesn’t mean I ever planned on leaving you, too. Times are different now from the way they were when Poppy was my age and trying to follow her dreams. She believed she had to leave her family and friends so that she could become the person she wanted to be, but I know better. I know that my dreams are so much richer when the people I love are a part of them. And,” she added with a small smile, “I can’t help but think that if there’s anyone in a position to visit me in Seattle and to pick me up to bring me back to the island, it’s a man with his own fleet of ships, who also happens to love sailing them.”

Hanna turned the camera off, then sent it in an email to Joel without editing out a word.

The easiest thing at this point would be to sit back and wait for a response from Joel, maybe let herself recover a little before she pressed on. But since she’d been the one to dig up his great aunt’s history, Hanna knew she’d never be able to live with herself if she left the mystery unsolved and unfinished.

Picking the envelopes and postcards back up and going through them again, she saw that while they’d come from all over the country for two years, four of the postcards showed the same view and the postmark on those envelopes were from Oregon. The view looked out over a town along the coast to a very distinctive ridge.

She scanned the photograph onto her computer and set about an image search. Slowly, she started to go through the results, and when she stumbled onto a web site dedicated to old photographs from the region, she finally found what she was looking for.

All four views were from the same coastal town: Woodburn, Oregon.

Had Poppy spent time there? Had she lived there? Or had she simply been passing through? Certainly, it looked like she couldn’t have been there long, since the postcards had stopped so suddenly. Or maybe the opposite was true. Maybe she’d finally settled down so much that she didn’t need reminders of Walker Island.

Pushing away the thought that she’d hit another dead end, Hanna began to do some research on the town, searching for any clues that might lead her to Poppy. Her eyes were starting to blur when something finally caught Hanna’s eye.

It seemed that this small town in Oregon was known for its annual poetry festival.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Hanna woke up the next morning to the sound of Emily’s raised voice, “No, she can’t come down. And why would you possibly think she’d want to see you again after what you did to her yesterday?”

Joel? Was he here to see her? But by the time Hanna threw on her robe, Emily was already shutting the door.

“Emily, wait!” Hanna called, rushing down to stop her. Sure enough, Joel was standing there outside. “Joel, I’m so glad you got the video I emailed to you!”

“You sent me a video?”

Emily looked just as surprised, and more than a little upset, as well. Hanna put her hand on her sister’s arm. “Thank you for protecting me, but I need to speak with Joel. Alone.”

Emily looked at her for a long moment before finally nodding. Still, she said, “Just holler if you need one of us to throw him out for you.”

“No. I won’t want that.” Finally, Emily headed back into the kitchen, leaving Hanna and Joel standing together on the doorstep.

“You really didn’t get the video?” Hanna asked.

Joel shook his head. And now that she looked at him more carefully, she realized he didn’t really look like someone who had come back to declare their undying love. In fact, he still looked fairly upset, almost the way he had back in Seattle.

Just the thought of their conversation on the B&B porch was enough to bring a fresh pang of pain to Hanna, but she forced herself to hide it away as she asked, “Then why are you here?”

“We started this documentary of yours together and I think we need to finish it together.”

It wasn’t a declaration of love—not anywhere close to it, actually—but the fact that he was here standing on her doorstep wanting to continue working with her to unravel the mystery of what really happened to his great aunt felt important.

“Actually, that’s part of what I needed to tell you in the video I emailed to you. Come inside, Joel. Please.”

For a moment, she thought Joel might not do it, but when he walked in then said, “I believe this will mark the first time a Peterson has been inside a Walker home for more than six decades,” she wanted to leap for joy.

Everything couldn’t be completely lost if he was teasing her with their special joke, could it?

“I found out more about Poppy,” Hanna said once she’d closed the front door behind them. “My grandmother told me what happened.”

Joel stared at her, barely blinking. “Tell me.”

“Grams says that Poppy told her straight to her face that she never loved William II. What she wanted more than anything was to be a poet, but she feared she’d never get the chance if she remained here following her family’s plans for her life. Grams also said that Poppy always intended to come back home after she’d made a name for herself as a poet.” A muscle jumped in Joel’s jaw as if he couldn’t let himself believe that part, and Hanna wanted so badly to convince him that it was true. Hopefully, they’d learn something soon that would prove it to Joel in a way he wouldn’t be able to deny. “I get the feeling that Grams and Poppy became pretty good friends in the time they knew each other. At least, Poppy kept sending her postcards for two years.”

“Why wouldn’t your grandmother have said anything to let my family know Poppy was okay?”

“She made Poppy a promise, Joel, and swore she wouldn’t break it. When Grams makes a promise, she really keeps it.”

“Then why would she have finally broken it now?”

Hanna refused to look away from his beautiful eyes. “For us.”

And for love.

But she could see that he wasn’t yet ready to talk about their relationship—or how everything beautiful could have gone wrong so fast—so she turned the focus back to his great aunt. “Based on the box of postcards that Grams kept, I now know where Poppy went after Seattle. It was a small town, down near Portland, called Woodburn.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am. Especially since I found out that the town is renowned for its poetry festival.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

She stared at him in surprise. “You want to go there? Now? With me?”

“Like I said, we began this together, and I think we should end it together, too.”

She hated the way he spoke of endings, but at least she would get one more day with him as they travelled to Oregon. And maybe, she hoped, that would be enough time for him to realize he cared about her as much as she cared about him and that together they could find a way to make things work out between them.

Even if he was a Peterson who lived on the island...and she was a Walker studying at the University in Seattle.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, as they were boarding the ferry, Hanna took out her cell phone and placed a call to the president of Woodburn’s local poetry society, whose name and number she had found on their web site during her online research the previous evening.

“Hello, Ms. Stevens? My name’s Hanna Walker. I understand you’re the president of the poetry society?”

“If this is about getting your poetry into our newsletter, the deadline has already passed.”

“No, that’s not why I’m calling,” Hanna assured her quickly. “I’m actually looking for information on a poet who might have visited your festival a while ago, probably in the early 1950s.”

“The 1950s?” Ms. Stevens was clearly stunned by Hanna’s request. “Why on Earth are you searching for a poet who might have passed through here more than six decades ago?”

Hanna tried to explain about her documentary as simply as she could, though even leaving out most of the finer details of what had happened on Walker Island so long ago, she was speaking for quite a while. Finally, she closed with, “Poppy’s great nephew and I both need to find out what happened to her. I know it’s a long shot, but we at least have to try.”

“My family means a great deal to me, too,” Ms. Stevens said after a long enough pause that Hanna nearly wondered if she’d hung up during her long explanation, “and if someone had disappeared along the way, I’d want to find them, too. I’ll give you my address and you can come on over anytime you’re ready.”

“How about today? In say, three hours?”

“Three hours? Wouldn’t that mean you’re already on your way?”

“We are.”

Hanna knew it probably seemed a little crazy, going all the way to Portland and beyond, just on the off chance of finding another small clue about Poppy’s whereabouts. Yet, they needed to do this. Not just because of the documentary, but because she and Joel both needed to see this through, regardless of where it took them.

Joel had been quiet the whole time she was speaking on the phone and now, as they drove off the ferry and headed through downtown Seattle, past the street with the B&B that held so many memories both for them and his great aunt, Hanna could feel him tensing up beside her. Slowly though, as they left the city behind and headed south on the freeway toward Oregon, he began to relax, even smiling a little as the sun came out once they were on the I-5. They didn’t talk much about anything important during the three hour drive, but knowing that soon enough they might be facing more difficult revelations, Hanna simply appreciated the chance to be with Joel again.

* * *

Ms. Stevens, or Justine as she quickly reintroduced herself, was a pleasant woman in her mid-forties. Her home was so full of books that at first glance it seemed as if the walls were being held up by the stacks of them, and finding a place to sit involved moving aside at least a couple piles of books. So did setting up Hanna’s camera, which Justine said she had no problem with at all.

“So, you’re looking for someone named Poppy Peterson, who might have visited us in the fifties?” When Hanna nodded, the other woman sighed. “You realize that the odds of finding one person who visited a poetry festival wouldn’t be good, even if that festival were just a year or two back? Sixty years…I just keep worrying that you’ll have ended up wasting your time if we can’t find anything.”

But since Hanna had gotten to spend the day with Joel, no matter what they did or didn’t find out about Poppy, it definitely hadn’t been a wasted trip.

“In the B&B in Seattle, she used another name so that no one in the family could trace her to bring her home,” Joel said. “Penny P. was what she called herself.” Reaching into his pocket, he put Poppy’s final poem onto the coffee table between them. “Hopefully, seeing this might help. It’s the poem my great aunt left behind when she disappeared.”

Hanna put the photo of Poppy and Ava beside the note. “This is her, on the right. The other woman is my grandmother.”

Justine looked back and forth between the photograph and the poem several times when suddenly, it was as if a light bulb switched on inside of her. She stood up animatedly, heading over to the stacks of books and searching through them so quickly that Hanna briefly wondered if they were all about to come tumbling down in a literary avalanche.

“I didn’t recognize the name, of course, but as you guessed, Poppy Peterson wasn’t the name she published under. It wasn’t Penny, either. To everyone back in the fifties, she was Pansy Pendleton. She wasn’t one of the big names of the beat generation,” Justine said as she handed them a slim leather bound book, “but she did spend plenty of time down in San Francisco. There are some people, and I’m one of them, who think that she helped to influence Ginsburg.”

“Poppy was famous?” Hanna asked.

“She was definitely starting to get there,” Justine said with a nod. “The other poets of the time knew who she was and admired her. I believe when she came to our festival that she was working her way up from San Francisco, stopping in small towns to meet with other poets along the way. Apparently, she was planning to stay here around a week, for the event, and then keep moving north. But—” Justine’s excited expression fell away. “One day she was out swimming in the ocean, the next she was in her sickbed with pneumonia. A couple of days after that…I’m sorry, I know how hard it must be to hear this.”