The Blue Bottle Club (3 page)

Brendan sat on her bed in the dark and stared out the bay window at the multicolored lights that twinkled below her. Sometimes, late at night, it was hard to distinguish the stars in the sky from the lights on the mountainside. It was like having the whole midnight firmament for a blanket—above, below, and all around.

There were perks, certainly, to this "ideal job" she held. This house on Town Mountain, for one. Five minutes from the station, overlooking the historic Grove Park Inn and the western mountains. Four bedrooms, a vaulted great room with a glass wall facing the view, a state-of-the-art kitchen, a hot tub on the back deck. She could never afford this house if she left broadcasting to search for a more "meaningful" career.

But the airing of tonight's spot on the demolition of Cameron House convinced her that she had to do something. She could have phoned it in, for all the impact it made. She had watched it three times in editing, once at six, and now again on the eleven o'clock wrap-up, and it got worse every time. She looked catatonic, bored out of her skull, with a smile so phony it threatened to crack her face. When she heard herself intone those hideous words "the end of an era," she cringed and hit the mute button. The screen filled with images of Cameron House, once a showplace, now seedy and dilapidated. Its last moment of glory. By this time tomorrow, the Montford mansion would be a mass of rubble—nothing left except this blue bottle.

Brendan turned off the television, flipped on the bedside lamp, and scrutinized the cobalt glass. It was junk, probably—might bring a buck or two from an antique dealer—but it was unusual. Ten inches high, made in the shape of a small house, with a long neck. The outlines of a door and two windows were pressed into the sides; her fingers absently traced the image. The glass was filthy from years in the attic, and the cork was stuck tight.

She set the bottle on the bedside table and leaned back against the headboard, sighing. She wouldn't be able to sleep for a while; she might as well watch Letterman. Where had she put that remote?

Out of the corner of her eye she spied it on the edge of the table and turned. The light from the lamp streamed through the clouded bottle, casting a blue glow over one side of the bed. Brendan squinted and picked up the bottle, moving it closer to the light.

There was something inside. . . .

She gripped the cork and pulled, but it wouldn't budge. After trying vainly for a minute or two, Brendan took the bottle into the kitchen and rummaged in a drawer for a corkscrew. Maybe she could pry it out.

On the third twist of the corkscrew, the dried-up cork split into a dozen pieces, scattering debris over her counter and kitchen floor. The remnants of the cork dropped into the bottle. Brendan held it up and peered inside.

There were papers of some sort, rolled up and squeezed in through the neck of the bottle. Her pulse began to race, but reason immediately stepped in to quell her excitement. This wasn't an SOS floating on the ocean, for pity's sake. It was just an old glass jar. Still, she was determined to find out what was inside.

After ten minutes of fiddling with the papers, she managed to extract them using a table knife and a pair of needle-nose pliers. She took them back to the bedroom, spread them out on the bed, and began to read.

The first page sent chills up her spine. I,
Letitia Randolph Cameron, on this
twenty-fifth day of December, 1929, here set forth my dream. . . .

Good grief,
Brendan thought,
this stuff was written sixty-five years ago.
Letitia Cameron. Middle name Randolph. She must be related somehow to Randolph Cameron, the stockbroker who renovated the house in the twenties. His wife? No, more likely his daughter. Christmas Day 1929. Two months after Black Friday, the day of the stock market crash that brought on the Great Depression.

Brendan shuffled through the rest of the pages. There were similar declarations from three other people named Eleanor James, Adora Archer, and Mary Love Buchanan. None of the rest of the names meant anything to Brendan, although she vaguely remembered something about a clothing store called Buchanan's, down Biltmore a block from Pack Place. The building, she thought, that now housed the Blue Moon Bakery.

She scrutinized the papers. Letitia Cameron's was written in a fine, feminine hand. Eleanor James's penmanship was more angular, a no-nonsense style. Adora Archer's was a back slant full of flourishes, and Mary Buchanan's a legible, down-to-earth print. A small pen-and-ink sketch was included, a representation of a child opening a Christmas package.
Amazingly lifelike,
Brendan thought. The picture was signed with the initials MLB.

Clearly, they had all been young—teens, perhaps—when these statements had been written. The ink was faded and uneven, the paper coarse and brittle. Unless Brendan missed her guess, these pages had been hidden away, untouched, behind a rafter in the attic of Cameron House, for more than six decades.

Her imagination latched onto the image and would not let go. Four young girls, best friends, writing out their dreams for the future and placing them in this blue glass bottle. There had to be some kind of ceremony, of course—girls that age loved drama. She could envision them sitting in a circle, solemnly committing their dreams to one another, promising to be friends forever.

It was an intriguing scenario that raised an even more compelling question: What had happened to those four girls? Had they, indeed, realized their dreams, lived out the fulfillment of the destinies they had envisioned for themselves? They would be in their eighties now—were they even still alive to tell the story?

The story.

Brendan's heart began to pump, and tears sprang to her eyes. Here it was, right in front of her. The demolition of the historic Cameron House wasn't the real story
This
was the assignment she had been looking for. The human narrative that had been building, layer upon layer, for the past sixty-five years.

She gently fingered the yellowed pages and traced the lines of faded ink. This was what had been missing in her life—passion. This was a story that could change her future, that could put meaning and significance back into her work. This was the direction she had been searching for.

She didn't know how she knew it, but she knew. She would find these women, track them down, tell their stories. She would do profiles, a whole series, maybe. If—

Please, God
she thought suddenly—the first genuine prayer she had uttered since her parents' deaths when she was twelve.
Please, let them still
be alive.

2

FILM AT ELEVEN

U
nder normal circumstances, Brendan despised archives research— especially searching for the kind of obscure information that dated back to the twenties. All the old newspapers were on microfilm, which translated into motion sickness, eyestrain, and terminal sciatica as she sat in the down-town library and peered into a microfilm reader for hours on end.

But this time, at least, she wasn't just doing her duty, logging facts to supplement another dull story This time she was a detective, searching out truths that had been hidden for more than sixty years.

Norma Sully, the reference librarian, brought out an armful of reels and dropped them on the desk with a clatter. "That's all of'em."

"Thanks, Norma." Brendan shuffled through them and pulled out the reel dated 1930.

"What did you say you're looking for?" Norma hovered at Brendan's side and peered over her shoulder.

Brendan looked up. "I'm not sure, exactly." She pulled her notepad out of her bag and held it up. "These four women. They were teenagers, probably, at the outset of the Great Depression."

"Cameron, Archer, James, Buchanan." Norma read the list aloud and scratched her head. "Cameron. Is that the Cameron of Cameron House, the report you did on the demolition over to Montford?" She grinned and pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose. "Real nice piece, Miss Delaney. Caught it on the news the other night."

Brendan sighed and suppressed an urge to throttle the old gal. Even though that report had set her on a quest that might bring her the story of her life, every time she was reminded of it, she could hear that sappy "end of an era" comment. She clenched her teeth and said, "Thanks. And yes, it's the same Cameron. Right now I'm looking for anything on the family, or any of these other names."

"Well, I'm not old enough to remember the Depression, but I've lived here all my life, and it seems to me I remember Mama talking about those days."

Brendan closed her eyes and braced herself for a trip down memory lane. Norma Sully was a competent reference librarian and had on occasion been extremely helpful to Brendan. But the woman could talk a blue streak, and once she got going there was no stopping her.

Norma, however, didn't seem to be in a garrulous mood. She reached over Brendan's shoulder, threaded the tape, and made a dizzying run through the reel until she found the place she wanted. She pointed a gnarled finger. "Might try startin' with the obits," she suggested cryptically. "Lots of suicides around that time."

Then she was gone, and Brendan was left staring at the dimly lit screen that bore the obituary column:

LOCAL FINANCIER TO BE BURIED MONDAY.

Whether Norma was a genius or a psychic, Brendan didn't know and didn't care. But one thing was certain: She would get a dozen roses and a big box of chocolates for her efforts. For there on the faded screen was the obituary of one Randolph Cameron, dead at the age of forty-six, survived by his wife, Maris, and daughter, Letitia. Services to be held at Downtown Presbyterian Church under the direction of Reverend Charles Archer.

Brendan sat in the parking lot of Downtown Presbyterian and held the photocopy of the obituary in trembling hands. The pastor who had conducted Cameron's funeral was named
Archer.
Another clue; another connection.

She tried to calm her racing heart. She knew from experience that this would very likely turn out to be a dead end—no pun intended. The chance of anyone knowing anything about the Camerons, or even about this Reverend Archer, a former pastor of the congregation, was slim. Still, it was the only lead she had, and she intended to follow it.

Brendan's stomach clenched, and for a minute she thought she was going to be sick. The last time she had set foot in a church was for her grandmother's funeral three years ago, and—except for Christmas and Easter, when Gram forced her to go—nearly twenty years before that, when her own parents, or what remained of them, were buried in a closed-casket service.

She remembered that funeral as if it were yesterday—her grandmother holding her hand, stroking it until little Brendan thought the skin would rub off. She could still hear the preacher talking about God's loving purposes. But what kind of love took a twelve-year-old child's parents away in a senseless, violent accident?

It had been raining when they went to the cemetery, and Gram had tried to console her with an image of God weeping for her loss. But Brendan, wise beyond her years, knew better. God didn't cry God let a drunk driver walk away unharmed while her parents, who had never done anything but love her, lay dead on the highway. If God was, as the preacher was saying, all-knowing and all-wise and all-powerful, then God must have known it was going to happen and had done nothing to stop it.

Brendan had decided, right then and there, that a God like that didn't deserve to be worshiped, and that she would never speak to him again. On the rare occasions when her grandmother insisted she go to "God's house," she complied, resigning herself to the sentence like a convicted but innocent felon, counting the days and months and years until she was old enough to be reprieved.

By the time she was thirty and attending Gram's funeral, Brendan had revised her childhood theology somewhat. She no longer held God accountable for the deaths of her loved ones—at least not consciously. She simply accepted the reality that if there ever had been a divine Presence behind the creation of the world, that Presence had long since vanished from the universe. Things happened because they happened. God could neither be blamed for bad fortune or adored for imagined blessings.

The imposing edifice that loomed over her now, impressive with its stonework, stained glass, and spires pointing heavenward, was, she reminded herself firmly, merely an empty shell, a mausoleum to the memory of a deity who no longer inhabited the place. She felt the emptiness clutch at her heart, a visceral, palpable reaction. Bile burned her throat, and she took a deep breath to still the churning in her stomach. It was a building, nothing more. Why then did she feel such apprehension about going in?

From the cavernous depths of her leather bag, her cell phone began to ring. Brendan pulled herself together and groped in the bag until her hand closed around the phone. She flipped it open, jerked out the antenna, and snapped, "Yes?"

"Where are you?" a strident voice demanded. It was Ron Willard, the station manager.

"I'm in my car, sitting in the parking lot of Downtown Presbyterian Church. I got my first lead on the blue bottle story, Ron, an obituary for Randolph Cameron that says—"