Seeking Carolina (25 page)

“I would wonder where Gram and Poppy got the money to keep her there so long,” Nina said, “but I guess I don’t have to.”

“There’s more money left than there should be,” Emma said. “Either they invested well or got an infusion of cash from someplace else, but even a million and a half doesn’t last that long when you’re keeping your daughter in a long-term care facility and raising her four girls.”

“Willa Germaine, the lawyer in Danbury, said she would look into the banking stuff for us,” Johanna said. “Right now, the most important thing is getting to Killian. She was so nice on the phone. She actually remembered all of us from the adopt—”

“Johanna.” Nina halted her with a light touch to her arm. Johanna’s cheeks instantly warmed. They were all looking at her. She could feel it without looking, but she did. One at a time. Nina and Emma wore the same incredulous expression. Julietta, of course, smiled.

“You can’t possibly mean for us to drive all the way up there,” Nina began, “and face whatever it is we must face without warning.”

“Let’s do it,” Julietta said. “Today. Tomorrow. Before we chicken out.”

“There’s no chickening out of something we never agreed to do in the first place.” Emma shook her head. “I won’t be shamed into this.”

“Just hear me out, will you?” Johanna waited for them to quiet. “Worst case scenario, we call and find out she’s not there, that she died, that she’s lost in the system. We’re still going to go up there because that’s where she was. Maybe we’ll never see her again, but we can see where she lived. We can ask staff what she was like. Or maybe, maybe she’s still there. If she is, she might not know who we are, or she might weep with joy to see us again. Whatever the scenario, finding out beforehand isn’t going to make it easier. Isn’t it better to drive up there with hope?”

“You’ve not taken one thing into account,” Emma said. They all waited. “Maybe there’s no hope, Jo. Either she’s dead, vanished, or erased, just like the women in Gram’s stories about the locket.”

“What about the happy one?”

“If it were a possibility, she wouldn’t be in Wolf Moon Lodge in Killian, New Hampshire,” Nina put in. “I’m with Emma. Let’s call first.”

“That’s your decision,” Johanna said. “But I don’t want to know what they say. I’m going up.”

“I’m going with you,” Julietta said. “As long as Dr. Sam says I can leave the hospital.”

“Your release papers are already signed and dated,” he said. “But I must caution you on taking unnecessary risks.”

“See?” Emma gestured to the doctor. “He agrees. This is a dumb idea.”

“I did not say that, Mrs. Chambers.” Dr. Sam held up a finger. “I said no unnecessary risks, but if Julietta goes to Killian understanding what she might find there, I see no risk. In fact, I think discovering what happened to your mother after the accident is a very good thing. A healing one. For all of you.”

“We will have each other,” Johanna pressed. “The truth can’t hurt us. Only pretending it’s not there can. And if any of us has a problem—”

“She means me,” Julietta interjected.

“Fine, if Julietta has an issue of any kind, we’ll be in a place able to deal with it.”

“That’s true.” Nina chewed at her lips. “I don’t know. Emma?”

Emma fidgeted, her gaze darting from face to face. Of all her sisters, she was the one Johanna was least close to. Though they looked most alike, they were furthest apart in personality. Caution to Johanna’s wild, Emma had always played it safe.

Who would have ever thought you’d be so cautious?

Charlie’s words came back to hit her, suddenly and pitilessly, square between the eyes. Johanna’s whole body flushed. All the travel, all the moving, all the floating through life, through relationships. Even the bakery. Johanna skimmed the edges of life with a caution she had never recognized for itself, hiding it behind a shield called wild. Wild Johanna Coco would take any dare, run any risk whether financial or physical, but she had run away from Charlie when she was just a girl and had not risked her heart again. She distanced herself from the sisters and grandmother she loved, never even asked about the mother who disappeared not once but twice, or the father who died protecting his baby girl…

“Emma.” Nina moved closer to her sister. “We’re all scared.”

“What if I just don’t want to know?”

A tear rolled down Emma’s cheek. Another followed. Johanna felt her own eyes well, her throat start to close.

“Is that what you really want?”

“Yes. No. I just…I just want this not to be.”

“But it is,” Nina said. “Listen, little sister. Come with us. We’ll make it the road trip we never took during our college years. If you don’t want to go in, you don’t have to. Just come with us. No pressure. I swear to you.”

Emma put her head in her hands and cried. Nina was first to take her into her arms. Julietta and Johanna huddled around them, a knot of sisters, sorrow and tears. Dr. Sam’s chair scraped along the floor. Then he was gone. Johanna could almost feel a shift in the air with his leaving, the sort of cool drifting in from an open window in January. The chill crept up her back. She held her sisters tighter and the chill became warmth easing through her blood. The sorrow ebbed, making way for something more. Something better. Johanna could not quite define it, but it made her smile.

“All right,” Emma said when they broke apart. “I’ll come. But I’m not making any promises about getting out of the car.”

* * * *

The tense, four-hour car ride was only halfway over. Getting Julietta home, packing an overnight bag, and getting back into the car happened in less than twenty-four hours. Now, two hours closer to the answer they’d all been wishing a lifetime for, the anticipation was like ants under Johanna’s skin. When her phone rang, she hit her head on the car window, but answered it gratefully.

“Hello? This is Johanna.”

“Hello, Johanna. This is Willa Germaine. I have some news that might come as a bit of a shock.”

“Who is it?” Emma whispered. Johanna mouthed,
attorney
, and put a finger to her lips.

“Well, I’m sitting. What do you have for me?”

“Good news. I found out where the money came from…”

Five minutes later, Johanna tapped out of the phone call. Her sisters waited silently. Even after shaking her head clear, it took another few seconds for her to find her voice.

“The account I found in the drawer,” she began, “was the one Gram and Pop used for Mom’s expenses. The account in town has a good amount in it, but nothing like the one in Danbury or Michigan. That one seems to have only been used for our college educations since it was opened in 1993.”

“What?”

“Where’d it come from?”

“Why did they never tell us?”

Her own questions coming out of their mouths had Johanna holding up her hands in surrender.

“Two words,” Johanna said, “Bruce Johnson.”

“Uncle Boo?” Emma asked.

Johanna nodded. “First there was the settlement apparently awarded to Gram and Pop and put in the Danbury bank account back in the 1980s. Remember I told you Bruce Johnson was some kind of big deal in the computer world? Apparently, he had a lot of money stashed away. The Michigan account was set up in 1993 with money bequeathed to them for the sole purpose of taking care of our mother and us.”

“But…there were no trust funds set up?” Nina asked. “That doesn’t seem likely.”

“Attorney Germaine said the same thing. The civil court award went directly to Gram and Poppy. This she knows because her firm did the whole thing. The inheritance, she believes, must have gone directly to them, too, because otherwise there would have to be trusts. She’s going to look further into it.”

“So the one in town,” Nina said, “must have been what money they earned over the years. Social Security checks and that sort of thing. Smart old birds. No money, no gossip. I wonder why no one ever questioned how two elderly people on Social Security raised four girls and put them all through very expensive colleges.”

“We never asked,” Johanna reminded them.

“True.”

“As with all things, Gram had a reason for keeping her secrets,” Julietta said. “I always knew there was something going on behind that sassy smile.”

“Poppy, too,” Johanna added. “He must have been in on all of it.”

Julietta shifted in her seat. “He was, sure, but Gram called the shots. I always thought of Poppy as being quiet, and figured it was because he couldn’t hear very well. But finding out all this? Pop was sad. Really sad.”

Johanna got a flash of her grandfather’s face, of the always-smile on his lips. Sweet. Kind. Gentle. And sad. Yes, sad. How had she never noticed?

“Gram hid her secrets in the everyday,” Nina said. “We never questioned anything because we never had to. How did she do it? How did she live her life on top of all these secrets, and do it so well no one ever suspected a thing?”

“Now it’s all coming out,” Johanna said. “All her secrets unraveling bit by bit.”

“And still in her way.” Nina laughed. “Don’t you see? The locket, the stories, the wish. She orchestrated the whole thing so we would do exactly what we are doing. She made us ask the right questions that would lead to all the answers.”

“I think you’re giving our dear grandmother a bit too much credit.” Emma said. “We didn’t ask because, deep down, we didn’t want to know. We’ve lived on the edge of all this our whole lives, and now we’re diving headfirst into the deep end.”

“A little dramatic, Emma, don’t you think?” Nina asked.

“And you making Gram out to be some sort of mastermind isn’t?” Emma stretched. “Whatever. I have to pee. Let’s stop at the next coffee place or something.”

Standing in line for coffee while her sisters used the ladies’ room, Johanna tried once again to get Poppy’s sad smile out of her head. Gram soothed her grief by making sure her granddaughters would never feel any, but her grandfather drifted from day to day, his thoughts most likely never far from the daughter he’d lost to tragedy, and mental illness. Had they seen her in all that time? Or simply sent checks to the facility keeping her? Hard as she tried to remember a weekend taken here or there, Johanna could not nail down a memory to fit properly.

“You’re far away.”

Julietta’s whisper in her ear startled Johanna to the present. She kissed her sister’s cheek. “Just thinking about Poppy.”

“I miss him.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“And Gram.”

Johanna winced. “I haven’t even had a chance to miss her yet. It’s been a little nuts since I got home.”

“And you hadn’t really seen her in eight years,” Julietta said. “I guess it’s going to take a while for it to sink in that you never will again.”

Straightforward. Blunt. Brutally so. Johanna could neither be upset by her sister’s honesty nor by her lack of understanding how much the truth hurt to hear. Right was right, and denying it didn’t make it less painful. Johanna linked their arms.

“You want a donut with your coffee?”

“No, thanks. I’ve had yours. I can’t eat this crap anymore.”

Moving forward in the line that never seemed to get any shorter, Johanna waved to Nina in the dining section of the rest area. “Emma and Nina got a table, if you want to sit. I don’t mind waiting alone.”

“I’ll stay with you.” Julietta stared straight ahead, eyes unfocused.

“You okay?”

“Just thinking about what Nina said about Gram setting all this up for us to figure out.”

“You don’t agree?”

“To an extent, but there’s more to it, Jo. There has to be.”

“What are you saying?”

Julietta turned to face her. “The wish, Jo. It isn’t just part of the story. It’s—”

“Can I help you, ladies?”

The line that never seemed to get any shorter was suddenly gone. Julietta’s lips pressed into a thin line. Ordering their coffee, paying, bringing it to their sisters served to further them from Julietta’s unspoken assertion, but Johanna did not forget it, any more than she could forget the sound like chimes, the head like cotton, and her blood crackling like pop-candy when Julietta had said,
I wish
.

* * * *

The sprawl of Wolf Moon Lodge appeared along the country road like the mushrooms Poppy used to gather in the woods. White. Rustic. Sufficiently New Age while maintaining a quintessential New England feel. The facility seemed more spa than psychiatric hospital. Johanna, having taken her turn at the wheel for the last hour of their journey, pulled into the drive curving through the outbuildings and ended at the oversized French doors of the Welcome Center.

“We should have called in advance,” Nina leaned front to say. “We probably need permission to enter or something.”

“Then we check into the bed and breakfast and come back tomorrow,” Johanna said. “Come on. Let’s go in.”

Julietta was already out of the car. So, too, was Emma. Johanna slipped an arm about her waist.

“You sure?”

“No.” She smiled. “But I’m here. We’re in this together.”

They climbed the wide stairs, pushed through the French doors, and entered the main lobby. Nina rang the little bell on the front desk.

“Good afternoon, ladies.” A tall, thin man stepped through the open door behind the desk. His hair was graying and his face was lined, but he did not appear old as much as tired. “Can I help you?”

“We hope so”—Nina squinted at his nametag—“Darren. I’m Nina Coco-Allen. These are my sisters, Julietta, Emmaline, and Johanna. Our mother was, maybe is, a patient here. Carolina Coco?”

“Coco. The name is familiar, but…” He smiled and suddenly, he seemed younger. “Ah! The mystery is solved. If you would wait here, I’ll be right back.”

Darren returned moments later, large envelope in hand and trailed by several other staffers all looking to the sisters expectantly. He reached into the large envelope and pulled out a smaller one.

“This arrived shortly before the holidays,” he said, “along with the necessary legal documents and a note asking that we hold this letter until one or all of you showed up to claim it.”

Nina took it from his hands.

“This is Gram’s handwriting.” She showed it to her sisters. Their names were scrawled across the front. “But…how?”