The Crimson Brand (10 page)

Circle of friends
, Penny thought and suppressed a shiver of excitement.

“I felt like they all just abandoned me here.”  She prodded another of the spheres, setting it in motion. 

“I asked June if she could take a few of my old things and keep them in storage with our mom and dad’s old stuff, family heirlooms she keeps tucked away in her attic, and she
graciously
,” she put a slight, sarcastic twist on the word, “agreed to do so.”

Penny dropped her eyes from Susan’s face to her younger representation in the crystal sphere.  She preferred the smiling Susan to the sour one.

“Obviously she never looked in this box when I had her put it away.  I think she would have thrown it in the trash if she’d seen it, but she looked when I called her up and asked her to bring it back.”

“Was that what you two fought about?” Penny asked without thinking. She regretted it the moment the words were out.

Susan only chuckled.  “Yes.  This is what we fought about, among other things.”

That was all she offered on the subject, so Penny let it go.  She could always ask Zoe what she’d overheard later, if the curiosity was too strong to deny.

“Why did you ask for it back?” 

“For you,” she said.  “And for me too.  It’s something for us to share.  My friends and your family.”

Penny took hold of Susan’s crystal sphere, removed it from its hook, and lifted it so she could see the face within, backlit by the bright kitchen light. 

“You’re my family now,” she said, again speaking with no premeditation.  Not knowing that she meant to say it aloud until it was out.

Susan’s smile returned, the big one her younger self wore in the crystal.  She reached across the table and took Penny’s other hand in hers.  “I know this isn’t easy for you, Penny.  You’re a very reserved girl, so that means a lot coming from you.  You remind me a lot of your aunt Nancy that way.  Your mother, Di, she was the outgoing one.”

That struck Penny as odd.  If her mother, queen of long silences and personal space, had been the outgoing one, her aunt Nancy must have been as fun to have around as cramps.  Maybe when she was younger her mother had been the joyous young butterfly Susan often reminisced about, but Penny had never seen that side of her.

Susan squeezed Penny’s hand and let it go.

“I think of you as my family now, too.  I have since the day you walked in the door.”

The silver tree drew Penny’s eyes back to it again and again.

Susan, Penny’s mother, and their circle of friends.

And another unanswered question entered Penny’s wandering mind.

“Susan, do you have a new boyfriend?”

Susan looked momentarily startled but recovered with a smile and a snort of laughter. 

“Jenny is such a blabbermouth,” she said.  “He’s just a man I see around town sometimes.  Sweet and charming, but nothing serious.”

There was something in Susan’s smile that suggested
Nothing Serious
might already be shifting toward
Slightly Serious
.

“I’d like to meet him,” Penny said, a little hurt that Susan had been keeping such a big secret from her, though she knew that when it came to keeping secrets, she had no right to complain.

Susan regarded her somberly for a moment, and nodded.  “Okay … if you want to.  I just didn’t want to throw any more new stuff at you when you’re finally starting to settle in.”

“I’m a big girl,” Penny said and smiled.  “I can handle it.”

Susan nodded again, tapping a half-eaten piece of bacon against her plate as if trying to decide whether or not to finish it.  “I guess I’m being overly cautious, but I’ve never had a kid before.  I’m still learning.”

“You’re doing fine.”

They passed the rest of breakfast in a companionable silence.  One her mother would have appreciated.

*   *   *

After breakfast Penny went back to her room and sat on her bed to look through the photo album.  She didn’t know what she might learn from it, but it was a treasure trove of memories, and now it was hers.

The first page displayed a single large black-and-white portrait, too old for her mother to be in it.  The setting was familiar, though.  It was her house, with a large group of strange people posed before it.  An extremely old woman, her remaining wisps of gray hair blowing about her, stood frozen.  She wore a straight black dress, bore a tired expression, and had her arms folded across her scrawny chest.  She was flanked by two younger women, both in white dresses, their hair tucked up into wide-brimmed hats.  Standing before them in two rows of six were a dozen young girls ranging from toddlers to teens, all rather shabbily dressed, but most smiling. 

Penny pulled the photo out and flipped it over.

A scrawled, faded note at the top identified the house as
Clover Hill Home for Girls
, and dated it 1938.

Home for girls?

Below was a list of names in three rows, three on the top row, then six each on the second and third.  She read through them.  She hadn’t expected to recognize any of them, so wasn’t disappointed.

She slid the old photo back into place and turned to the next two pages.

Four photos, all black-and-white except for the last, filled the second page, all four the same girl at different stages of her life.  The first was a cropped and enlarged picture of one of the girls from the first photo, around age ten, Penny guessed.  She was pixyish with short-cropped dark hair, the exact color impossible to tell from the black-and-white representation.  A short note on the back named her:  Penelope Johnson, age eleven. 

The second was Penelope as a young woman, standing in front of the ocean.  She was still pixyish, but her hair was much longer.  It blew out behind her like a sail in a high wind.  In the third she stood next to a rugged but cheerful-looking older man.  Penny slid it out and checked for more helpful notes.  Penelope Johnson-Spruce and Billy Spruce, 1950.

Penny slid the picture back in, bewildered, and examined the fourth more closely. 

It was in color, but old, faded, and grainy.  Billy Spruce was not in this one, but two figures held eternal poses in the background, caught midstride, walking hand in hand.  In the foreground, an elderly Penelope, her dark hair now mostly gray, held a child in her lap.  The child was plumper than the young Penelope but had the same face and the same hair, short and dark auburn.  A second, identical child stood next to Penelope, holding her aged, boney finger in a plump fist.

Penny slid this last photo from its sleeve with shaking fingers and read the back.

Penelope Johnson-Spruce with granddaughters Diana and Nancy Sinclair - 1984
.  

In the background, behind the walking couple, was a familiar rise of land, a hill with a winding trail leading to the top.  Not far beyond the crest of that hill, Penny knew, was Aurora Hollow.

This was her home, her family.  Penny did some quick, rough mental arithmetic. 

Penelope Johnson-Spruce was her great-grandmother.

The couple in the background ….

Penny slid the photo back in place and moved to the next page, a short pictorial life story of her grandmother, Betty Spruce-Sinclair.  The last picture on her page showed her with a thin, balding man.  Thomas Sinclair.  Her grandfather.

She turned to the next two pages and found her mother and Aunt Nancy.

Aunt Nancy’s page held four photos, but her mother’s only three.  The last sleeve was blank.

Numb from the shock of finally meeting all of her long-lost family, Penny first closed the book, then her eyes. 

*   *   *

The rest of the photo album was an uncategorized and unorganized series of snapshots.  A few featured great-grandmother Penelope and grandmother Betty, but most were of Penny’s mom, aunt, and an assortment of friends.  She recognized some of the faces from the laser-engraved spheres on Susan’s silver tree, and she recognized a few from her own memories of the last year in Dogwood.

There was one of her mom—or maybe it was her aunt, it was impossible to tell one from the other—and Susan in the park, the Chehalis River rushing by behind them.  There were other figures in the background, and for a moment Penny thought one was the intensely red-haired figure of her father.  Close scrutiny revealed it to be a scowling man who only looked a little like her father.  There was a definite resemblance, but the man was older, more rugged.  The one photograph Penny had of her father showed a smooth-faced man with wild hair that seemed to dance like flames on his head.  This man had a few shallow wrinkles, a long scar marring one side of his face, and hair that was forcibly tamed and slicked back against his skull.  Penny flipped it over to see if the red-headed man was named but found no clue to his identity, and when she looked at the front again, he was gone.

Penny blinked, studied the photograph, decided it had been her imagination, and put it back.

Another showed Susan laughing, her eyes squeezed shut and a few tears of laughter rolling down her cheeks.  This younger Susan had thick, blonde hair, so long it flowed down beyond the edge of the picture.  Behind her was a much younger, but no less ill-tempered, Miss Riggs.  She regarded the photographer with a forbidding look, her lip curled into a scowl.  Of course, in those days she was still probably just plain old June Taylor.  She’d married in her twenties and divorced only a few years later, Susan had once told Penny.  Susan never told her who had done the walking out, but knowing Miss Riggs as she did, Penny could guess. 

One featured an intense-looking young woman that Penny thought must have been Tracy West.  She could see much of Katie in the face.  The woman was looking over her shoulder at Susan and a man Penny almost recognized.  Both were bent over in gales of laughter.  She was used to seeing Susan like this, but the man … and then she knew who he was.  She hadn’t recognized him because the few times she had seen him in real life there had been no smile or any hint that he ever did anything as friendly as laugh.  It was Katie’s father.  He was older than the others, but still young-looking compared to the man she knew.  He wore a black tuxedo and had draped his arm casually over a younger Susan’s shoulder.  His other arm was wrapped around the waist of his new bride, dressed in lacy white, her veil thrown back over her head.  All three were laughing, as if at a shared joke.  The back of the photo read
Susan Taylor, Markus West, Lynne Davis-West – reception
.

Another was taken right outside Zoe’s favorite shop in Dogwood, the jewelry and gem shop, Golden Arts.  Not that Zoe was at all into jewelry.  Penny didn’t think she’d ever seen Zoe wearing so much as a ring or necklace—Katie was the girly-girl of the group—but Zoe loved the displays and bins of rocks in the back room, as, apparently, had Penny’s mother.  Standing on the sidewalk in front of the display window, comically protesting the need to be photographed with one upraised arm, was the old proprietor of Golden Arts.  He looked exactly the same to Penny.  Despite the raised hand and posture of retreat, he too was grinning. 

Penny found the two that interested her most on the last page.

The first was of a girl whose name Penny didn’t know, though she had been one of the five on Susan’s tree.  She had brown hair and thick glasses that made her equally brown eyes seem small.  She wasn’t smiling but somehow looked serene.  She had a narrow face with high cheekbones.  Though not what Penny might call pretty, she was cute.  Over one arm she had a slung bag with something sticking out of one end that might have been the handle of a wooden drumstick.

Penny knew it wasn’t a drumstick.  Penny knew exactly what it was. 

The other picture was of her mom and aunt, now in their late teens or early twenties.  This time she could tell them apart.  Her aunt looked unhappy but willing at least to hold still for the photo.  Her mother, on the other hand, looked positively radiant, grinning more broadly than Penny had ever seen her do in life.  She was also very, very pregnant.

Penny studied this picture for a long time, taking in every detail of her mom’s face, of her hair, which was thick and flowing and glowed like a garnet in the sunlight.  After a long while, two things in this picture snagged her attention.

The first was a ring, a narrow band of gold on the third finger of her left hand.

A wedding ring.

Penny had always assumed her parents had never married.  Her mother had retained her maiden name, and though she had never, would never, confirm or deny Penny’s suspicions, Penny had always assumed it was because she was not married.

The second thing was a tattoo, small and indistinct in this photograph, on the inner wrist of her mother’s left hand. 

Her mother had never had a tattoo.

Penny didn’t think Susan would miss the old photo album, so she stowed it in her middle dresser drawer under some shirts and decided to take a walk.

“Home before dark, okay?”  Susan knew Penny’s tendency to dawdle when she went for her walks, but since Penny always came back home in one piece, she never made too big of a fuss.

Maybe it’s because she knows where I’m going
.

But Penny didn’t believe that.  Not with all the weirdness of last fall, or Penny’s great liking for long walks on her property, often disappearing for hours at a time with Zoe and Katie.

But Penny had already made up her mind about one thing.  Susan, her mom and aunt, their friends, had once all been Phoenix Girls.

Had she simply forgotten?

How
could
she have forgotten?

Penny decided she’d had enough alone time for the day.  Once she topped the hill and put the house at her back, she pulled her mirror out. 

But who to call?