Secrets of the Lost Summer (35 page)

Twenty-Seven

G
ran was the first to suspect. I think she knew before I did. “You’ll get through this. I will be there with you. You’ll do what’s best for the baby. We all will.”

“Gran, I’m not… I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

“You are, and I’m thinking about your future, and this baby’s future.”

We kept it from Daddy for as long as we could. He raged and cried and I knew I had to tell him everything—about my cabin, about Philip, about how Philip was on the run from the police. I could see that the baby was one more thing that reminded Daddy that the world as he knew it was ending. He was already desperate, and now here I was, pregnant.

I walked out to the pond. Only a few stones of the foundation of my hideaway cabin remained. I sat on my boulder and stared at the water, and I knew I would never come here again.

Daddy had searched my room, looking for any remnants of my time with Philip. “You’re to have nothing of that man’s near you. Do you understand me, Grace? Tell me you understand.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, “but I know what you’re saying.”

“It’s for your sake.”

I knew that he was terrified if anyone discovered that Philip stole the Ashworth jewels, I’d be accused of harboring a criminal, even of complicity in the robbery.

A few months later, when it was obvious that I was expecting, he told people I was visiting a friend who owned a farm in upstate New York and hid me in my room in Knights Bridge. Daddy and Gran took good care of me in those last cold, lonely months. Gran kept thinking of alternatives to giving up my baby, but Daddy had everything arranged.

“A childless couple who used to summer on one of the lakes in the Swift River Valley will adopt the baby,” he said. “They’re good people. They’ve wanted a child for years. They’ll give the baby a life we can’t. This way, you’ll both have a chance.”

I had no choice. I had to do what he wanted me to do. By spring, I knew Philip wasn’t coming back. Not that he didn’t want to. He couldn’t. I read everything I could about the war that was erupting in Europe and what was going on in Great Britain. I read about the Royal Air Force. Once, I tried to run away to England. I got as far as Boston before Daddy found me. He was alone. Gran wasn’t with him, and I thought he would do something terrible. Instead, he looked at me with tears in his eyes. “Do you think I want to give up what could be my only grandchild? It’s what’s best, Grace,” he said, his voice cracking. “It’s what’s best.”

“What if Philip comes back after the war? What if I wait and care for our child—”

“Does he know about the baby?”

I could tell that my father knew the answer already, but I shook my head. “He’s a good man, Dad,” I whispered.

“I believe you, Grace. I believe he’s a good man. I believe he would come back for you if he could.”

“Are you just saying that to keep me from killing myself after you take my baby from me?”

“I’m saying that because this man was the love of your life. I can see it in your eyes.”

“Is, Daddy. He is the love of my life.”

“Grace. Ah, Grace.”

As my due date came closer, Daddy and Gran drove me to a small, private lying-in hospital near Boston. He’d packed some of my books. “You’ll make a fine teacher, Grace. Maybe one day…” He didn’t finish but I knew what he wanted to say: Maybe one day I would find another man.

I went into labor two days later. I wasn’t allowed to hold my baby, or to be told if I’d had a boy or a girl. I woke up alone, and it was done. My baby was gone.

I always knew I had a boy. Even now, decades later, I can still remember the feeling of him moving inside me. My father said he didn’t know whether I’d had a boy or a girl, but I could tell he was lying—to spare me, to help me forget when we both knew I would never forget.

We resumed our new lives in Knights Bridge. Eventually I got a job as a teacher. I loved my work, and I looked forward to each day. It would be easy to say that I never looked back to that long-ago summer, but I did.

I looked back all the time.

Twenty-Eight

D
ylan wasn’t sure at first, but then it was obvious that Grace wanted to talk, and that she had the strength and the capacity after her ordeal at Carriage Hill Pond. Otherwise he wouldn’t have stayed. He wasn’t there to upset her.

She made him pull up a chair and sit down. The wind had picked up, blowing out the last of the rain, the fog, the clouds. He could see patches of blue sky. He didn’t argue with Grace. He suspected most people didn’t argue with her, but he knew he would never forget finding her out in the Quabbin woods.

When she looked at him, she had the eyes of a teenager…of a young woman in love.

“The day you walked in here with Olivia,” she said, “it was as if Philip had come back to Knights Bridge. I thought I was losing my mind. Finally I realized that you’re his grandson.”

And her grandson, Dylan thought. “You didn’t recognize my father?”

“Not then. Now…” She fixed her gaze on the view out the windows. “I see now that he bore a strong resemblance to my father.”

“This story’s all in your book?”

“It’s all there. At first I thought I was writing it in case my son found his way to Knights Bridge and wanted to know about his roots. Then I realized I was writing it for myself, and for Philip. So that people would know who we were and what we meant to each other.”

“You never told anyone about him?”

“Gran and Daddy knew but I never told another soul, not even my closest friends. I buried that summer very deep. I never spoke about it again after I came home from the hospital. I knew Gran and Daddy wanted to pretend it never happened. They thought that would be best for me.”

“Did you find out what happened to Philip?”

She took a shallow breath and nodded. “He died early in the war. He was a fighter pilot—a hero. I only found out years later, but I knew he was gone, because I never heard from him again.”

Dylan leaned in close to her. “I’m sorry, Grace.”

“If he’d come back, what would he have thought of me?” Her voice was a whisper now, and her face was pale. “How could I have told him I gave up his child?”

“He’d have understood.”

Grace looked at him as if he were channeling the man she’d loved. “I hope so. I think so.”

“There was a war on. The circumstances…” Dylan tried to picture what their lives must have been like. “He’d have wanted what was best for you and his son.”

His son.
Dylan’s throat caught.

“Philip was…” Grace raised a hand and pushed back her hair, and for a fleeting moment, she might have been a teenager again. “He was a good man, Dylan. Your grandfather was a good man.”

“Did you ever search for the couple who adopted your baby?”

“I never did. My son—your father—belonged with them. They were his parents.”

“They were decent people, Grace. My father loved them.” Dylan reached over and put his hand on hers. “I think he knew. I think you’re the reason he came here.”

“Not the jewels?”

“Well, nothing like throwing a fortune in lost jewels into the mix. What happened—was Lord Ashworth planning to sell the jewels in Boston and then claim they’d been stolen?”

“Something like that,” Grace said. “He was broke, or at least by his standards he was. He also resented his sister for having inherited the jewels. Philip followed him to Boston and…” Grace shrugged her bony shoulders. “You know the rest.”

“He knocked his brother-in-law on the head, grabbed the jewels and ran. Ashworth didn’t tell the police the whole story because he’d look bad, and Philip didn’t because who’d believe him?”

“And because Lord Ashworth was his dead wife’s brother, and his daughter’s uncle,” Grace said quietly.

“Hell of a treasure hunt.” Dylan rose and kissed her on the cheek. “You’re a good woman. I’m proud to know you. I’m proud to be your grandson.”

“I wanted my baby to have a good life.” Her voice faltered. “Did he?”

“He did, and he died the way he would have wanted, just too soon.” Dylan grinned, thinking of his father. “He’d have liked it that I’m here with you.”

“He’d have liked for you to find those jewels, too, wouldn’t he?”

Dylan laughed. “No doubt. Now get some rest, okay? I hope you’ll reconsider keeping that book of yours in the vault until after you’re gone. I imagine I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to wait to read it. You say it’s all in there, huh? Your whole life story? Everything
,
Grace?”

She gave him a mischievous smile. “Well, maybe not quite everything.”

He started to ask her if she knew what happened to the Ashworth jewels, but she was asleep. He left, driving straight to Carriage Hill and Olivia. He found her out back in her ever-expanding herb garden. “Noah was right. My presence here has changed everything. I have to go back to San Diego. I have someone I need to talk to—Loretta Wrentham, the woman who told me about Grace’s house. She’s my lawyer. We’re friends.”

“She knows something?”

“More than she’s admitted,” he said, certain he was right.

“Do you think Philip took the jewels back to England with him?”

“And risk getting caught with them?” Dylan shook his head. “No. I think he left them here. He expected to come back for them—”

“And for Grace,” Olivia said.

“And for Grace,” he repeated, picturing her as a teenager, saying farewell to the man she loved. He took Olivia into his arms and kissed her, knowing he’d be back, that he’d make love to her again. “Olivia…”

She smiled. “I’ll see you soon.”

He drove up the road to the house he’d inherited from his father. It felt different now. He saw a young woman starting a new life here with her bitter father and her stoic grandmother, facing more than they had ever anticipated having to face—eviction from their hometown, its removal from the map, a devastating hurricane, the onset of war and, most of all, giving up a baby to other people to raise.

Maybe the story wasn’t unique, but it was their story.

And it was his story, Dylan thought.

He got back in his car and drove to Logan Airport and was on his way to San Diego by nightfall.

The day after Dylan left for San Diego, Olivia’s parents, sister and grandmother all descended. Olivia brought them out to the terrace. Mark showed up, and Jess eyed him in that neutral, repressed way she sometimes had. Since Dylan’s abrupt departure, Olivia had gone crazy working on designs for everything that went with artisan soaps—packaging, bags, cards explaining the ingredients—and then went crazy in the kitchen, throwing together a pot of soup and digging out her grandmother’s recipe for molasses cookies.

She sat restlessly with her family on what had turned into the most beautiful day yet that spring. They were still absorbing Grace’s reasons for taking off to Carriage Hill Pond. At Grace’s request, Olivia had told her parents and sister what she knew about Philip Rankin and the summer of 1938.

Her father sighed. “Your grandma was a co-conspirator in getting Grace out of Rivendell.”

“She wanted to borrow my car,” Audrey Frost said. “What was I going to do? Tell her no?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

She waved a hand in dismissal. “No one tells Grace Webster no. Not these days, anyway.”

Her son kept his gaze on her. “Did you know about this jewel thief?”

“No.”

“But you suspected something?”

“She’s older than I am. We didn’t get to be friends until later.”

Olivia could see her father wasn’t buying that one. He leaned forward. “You’re being evasive, Ma.”

She picked up a warm molasses cookie. “I haven’t made these in years. They smell wonderful, don’t they?” She took a bite, then sighed. “I always had a feeling Grace had a transforming experience that summer. It was before I knew her.”

“A transforming experience?” Randy grinned, sitting back in his chair. “What do you old ladies talk about while you’re playing canasta?”

“We’re journaling.”

“Journaling?”

“Watch out,” she said, eating more of her cookie. “I might write my own book.”

Jess laughed, and Mark patted her knee, a subtle gesture that Olivia didn’t think anyone else noticed. He belonged in Knights Bridge, with Jess. Olivia pictured Dylan at a Frost gathering but wondered if he’d let himself belong anywhere.

She put the thought out of her mind. “If you stole a fortune in jewels and didn’t want to take them back to England with you, where would you stash them?”

Her father winced. “Don’t let that get around. We’d have every idiot in the universe here with a metal detector.”

“I didn’t think about a metal detector,” Olivia said.

Her mother helped herself to a cookie and sat back in her chair in the shade. “You could spend the next twenty years scouring the Quabbin woods and not get anywhere.”

Jess smiled at Mark. “Lost treasure. Stolen jewels. Do you really think I’d ever be bored here? No wonder Dylan McCaffrey decided to clean up his yard himself.”

Olivia noticed a bee buzzing in the lavender. “Dylan didn’t know until I wrote to him that his father had bought Grace’s house. I think they both came here looking for answers.”

“Some secrets are best taken to the grave,” her mother said.

“Not Grace’s,” Olivia said. “That’s why she wrote her book. She wanted her secrets to come out and for us to know that she’d loved a man, and she’d had a child and had the strength to give him up and to carry on with her life.”

Olivia bolted up out of her chair and down a mulched path, past lady’s mantle and catmint to a rosebush she was nursing along. She’d wanted her family there, but she’d thought she could talk objectively about Duncan and Dylan McCaffrey, the decades-old jewelry robbery and Grace Webster’s secret past. But she couldn’t.

Her mother joined her. “I moved up our trip to California. We’re going next week. If I wait for everything to be perfect here, for us both to have time, I’ll never go. I’ll have my cell phone and email.”

Olivia realized her mother’s statement wasn’t as much of a non sequitur as she’d thought at first. “Mom…”

She took a deep breath. “You and Jess will be fine. We all have our own lives, even if we all live right here in Knights Bridge.”

“Dylan McCaffrey doesn’t belong here. At least that’s what he believes.”

“Is that why he left?”

“He said he had business in San Diego, but I also think he needed time.”