The Impersonator (14 page)

“I still have your last letter,” she had said yesterday. Of course I knew that did not necessarily mean she had brought it with her to Oregon, but some people, especially old people, carry precious letters around with them. I had a hunch that Grandmother was one of those.

She was! In the bottom drawer of the jewelry box left open on the dressing table, beneath her pearls, I found a packet of a dozen letters, all with U.S. stamps in the corner except the one with Queen Victoria’s profile facing left, tied together with a frayed bit of blue picot ribbon. A quick shuffle through the envelopes brought me to the only one addressed in a round, childish hand. It was from Jessie and dated April 25, 1917, about three months before she went missing. Her careless, juvenile handwriting and frequent mistakes would have made her governess blush.

Dear Grandmother,

I hate living here more than ever. Why cant I live with you. I want to go back to Paris. Everybody here hates me and I hate them. The stupid twins broke one of my china cats so I smashed in their favorite dolls faces but only I got punished. Henry is mean all the time but not so much any more since I found out something and I’ll tattle on him if he’s mean again. Ross pretends like Im not here he doesnt talk or look at me even when [blotchy smudge]. He says he wishes I was dead and locked me in the cellar Wensday so I would die and I would have died down there and my bones rotted except for Cook needed some potatoes. I tattled but he wasnt punished very hard. No one ever punishes him.

Yours truely,

Jessie.

Holding Jessie’s letter in my hands gave me the willies. It was as if she were talking directly to me. Or as if I were talking to myself in my young stage voice. We even made our
j
s the same way. Goose bumps pricked my arms all the way up to the nape of my neck.

Twice through was enough to commit the contents to memory. I slid the ribbon around the letters and replaced them exactly as they were, tucked beneath the string of pearls. For an alibi, I picked up Grandmother’s paisley shawl before I opened the door. One of the housemaids was coming down the hall, barely visible behind a stack of starched linens. When she had passed, I went to my own bedroom. I needed to think about Jessie.

Now I understood why Grandmother had been so easily persuaded that I was Jessie. She must have almost expected Jessie to run away, pushed by unhappiness or fear. So she would have expected Jessie to return before her twenty-first birthday to claim her inheritance.

And I was starting to understand what a troubled, unhappy child Jessie had been. Hostile, even violent, and difficult to handle—that much was clear. I found myself rising to her defense. The poor thing had been neglected by hedonistic parents and handed off to nannies and governesses. She had led a lonely, seminomadic life for eleven years with no siblings and few friends her own age. When she was orphaned, her troubles grew like weeds. Living with her relatives was, if anything, worse. Aunt Victoria spent those years devoting herself to a bedridden husband, leaving their four children essentially unsupervised—never mind the ineffectual governess, the late Miss Lavinia. Jessie did not fit in. She had lashed out, hating everyone and everything. No wonder she had run away. She had no one to love, and no one loved her. I was angry at her treatment. I wished I had been there to defend her.

I wondered too what she had discovered about Henry. He would have been seventeen then. Had he been sailing his boat outside the bay? Smoking in the shed? Fondling the housemaid in the closet? Drinking in the laundry room? Bootlegging? No, Prohibition wasn’t in effect back in 1917; it didn’t start until 1920.

Now that I was aware of the history of dislike between Jessie and Ross, his current hostility made more sense. Jessie must have provoked the boy beyond his self-control. That cellar—my dreams had been so strong, yet so vague. Ross had locked her in the cellar once. Could he possibly have become so angry that he would…? Dread crept to the edge of my consciousness. What had happened to young Jessie?

Suddenly, seeing the cellar became an itch that could no longer go unscratched.

Thanks to Oliver’s house plans, I knew exactly where the entrance to the cellar was located, beside the pantry in the kitchen. I opened the door and turned on the light.

“What is it, Miss Jessie?” Marie spoke over her shoulder as she stirred cream into a pot of leek soup. “Is there something you’re looking for?”

“I thought I’d look through the wine for something special for dinner. I don’t mean to bother you.” It was feeble, since I knew nothing about wine other than it came in red and white, but what other excuse could I come up with for wandering into the cellar?

Too busy to be suspicious, Marie said, “No bother, dear. You call if you need some help.”

The cellar was cool, aggressively clean, well lit, and organized with shelves full of bottles, jars, tins, and boxes—so many liquor boxes that I knew Prohibition wouldn’t arrive at Cliff House for decades. Last night, Aunt Victoria had made a point of saying, rather apologetically, that they were just drinking up old supplies, but these boxes looked like recent arrivals. I looked about, then closed my eyes, trying to feel something, anything that would make me think of Jessie. Nothing. The cellar was not scary or damp, and there was no place to hide a dead mouse let alone a dead body. Jessie had not died in some forgotten nook in the cellar. I felt foolish. Finding a corpse on the side of the road had fed my overactive imagination and fired up my dreams.

At the top of the stairs, I nearly collided with my maid, Lorraine.

“There you are, miss,” she said brightly. “I was wondering, did you want me to unpack your things now?”

“No, I—yes! There’s hardly anything to unpack, but the twins told me all my old clothes are still in the closet. I can’t imagine that anything will fit me after seven years, but I thought it would be worth my while to make sure.” I didn’t say that what I was really after was a pair of britches. What I had dreaded most had become an urgent need—to go riding.

I had learned growing up that there were two types of clothing: costumes and day clothes. Good costumes were essential to a successful act so performers naturally put their money there. Consequently, I had little enough to wear offstage, and what there was fit comfortably into one valise.

Together we ransacked the closet, the wardrobe, and the chest of drawers that I had not even thought to open yesterday, piling everything on the bed. Then we went to work unfolding, shaking, examining, trying on, evaluating, taking off, and refolding every item Jessie had owned at thirteen. It was all top quality and custom made. I, of course, pretended to recognize everything, why, I’m not sure. Lorraine was a stolid girl, eager to please but not the sort to look beneath the surface of things.

“Do you know what we need, Lorraine?”

“What’s that, miss?”

“Cartons. Are there any cardboard boxes downstairs?”

“Boxes, miss?”

“Yes, to put these clothes in. Doesn’t the grocery delivery come in boxes?”

“I don’t think so, miss. Or, it does, but the boy takes them back.”

“I know—liquor boxes.”

“Liquor, miss?”

“You know, wine and port and whiskey.” Prohibition be damned, the Carrs had enough bottles of wine and liquor to open their own blind pig. “Go to the kitchen and ask Marie if there are any empty liquor cartons in the cellar. If not, empty some of them.”

“Yes, miss. I’ll be right back.”

Against the east wall stood a tilt-mirror dressing table clad in an eyelet dresser scarf and matching skirt. I sat on the stool and examined the contents of the drawers. Inside the center one I found a beautiful sterling silver brush and a comb engraved with Jessie’s initials:
J B
and a large
C
in the middle for Jessamyn Beckett Carr. I turned over the brush and saw strands of Jessie’s copper hair still tangled among its bristles. Suddenly Jessie was painfully real to me—an unhappy girl who had just brushed her hair a moment ago, who had just stepped out of the room, who would be right back, who would laugh, and talk to me, and marvel at how much we looked alike. This brush was Jessie. The real Jessie.

I pulled out some of the loose hairs and held them up to my own. Indistinguishable. I began brushing my hair with Jessie’s brush—long rough strokes—and when I stopped, a little breathless, our hair was entwined in the bristles. And no one, not even I, could tell the strands apart.

Lorraine clattered in with three empty Seagram’s VO boxes, and I quickly stuffed the brush and comb back in the drawer. “Careful, miss,” she said. “There’s chalk on some of these and it gets on your clothes. But it brushes off.” A few quick whacks of her hand took the green dust off her black uniform.

I felt queasy, as if I had been yanked out of a deep trance.

“Now,” I said brightly, trying to shake the queer mood, “we’ll sort these clothes as we go. Anything too small—and that’s most of this—we’ll put in the boxes. Do you know anyone who might fit these clothes?” She looked baffled. “Someone who is about this size.” I held up a blouse to illustrate.

This unexpected generosity flummoxed Lorraine, who evidently had never been on the giving end of charity. “Well, there’s … the church. First Presbyterian. They give away clothes. My mother got a coat there last week. Nearly new.”

“Fine, then, if we can’t think of anyone in particular, we’ll give them to the church to distribute,” I said, folding a lime-green cardigan that was too short at the wrists for me. “This is so pretty. A shame it won’t fit me.”

“Might I … might I take that one, miss?” She reddened at her own boldness. “Green is my little sister’s favorite color.”

“Why, of course! Will it fit her, do you think? How old is she?”

“Thirteen, miss.”

“Why ever didn’t you say so? Won’t all these things fit her?”

Lorraine looked confused. “So much to one girl, miss?”

“All of this probably won’t fit your sister, but surely she has cousins or friends? I know! She could invite her friends to come to her house and try things on, and everyone could have some new clothes.” Heck, this bounty could outfit half of Dexter’s thirteen-year-olds. Hand-me-downs of this quality were seldom seen.

“That would be very kind, miss.”

We continued sorting until not one but
four
riding habits turned up. With pounding heart I pulled my legs into each pair of jodhpurs, heaving a frustrated sigh when all proved too short. Determined to ride tomorrow, I chose the largest pair.

“Do you know where I can find a needle and thread?” I asked her. “I need to move these buttons.”

“Oh, miss, I’ll do that for you.”

“Thank you very much. Move them as far as possible.”

As I folded the last of the skirts and laid them in the box, I asked, “Lorraine, don’t I remember some caves in the cliff below this house?”

“Caves, miss?”

“Sea caves. On the beach below the house. I was thinking about following the path down to the beach.”

“You can find agates on the beach, miss,” she said, closing one full box and tying it with twine.

“Yes, I remember. Aren’t there caves as well?”

“You shouldn’t go in them. They’re dangerous when the tide comes in. And they’re haunted.”

“Haunted?”

“Some say it’s the spirits of sailors shipwrecked and washed up into the caves to die.”

“Have you been in the caves below this house, Lorraine?”

“Not me, miss. That would be dangerous. And—and, miss … Lorraine is my name for sure but no one calls me that. Everyone calls me Rainy. If it’s all right, miss, I’d like it if you called me Rainy too.”

“Why, of course—it’s a lovely nickname! And an appropriate one considering Oregon’s coastal climate. And you must call me Jessie.”

“Oh, no, miss. That wouldn’t do.”

“Of course it would.”

“I’d be in heaps of trouble with the others.”

“Not if you told them I insisted.”

She shook her head stubbornly. “No, miss, it isn’t right. They’d say I was putting on airs and you was beneath your dignity. Some things just aren’t proper.”

Professional standards were something I could understand—vaudeville had plenty of unwritten rules developed over time to reduce the friction of working with so many different types of people. Evidently the servant class had its own professional standards and I was trying to breach an important one. Know when to fold ’em.

“Okay, I’m sure you know best about that sort of thing. I haven’t had much experience with servants.”

“Oh, but surely when you used to live here before, you had a maid?”

“Umm, well, I meant in recent years.” I could have kicked myself. I was getting careless. Especially with people I liked. Sternly I reminded myself that I was onstage and could not afford to relax for even one moment.

By the time we had finished, Rainy and I had filled eleven large boxes with dresses, coats, shoes, sweaters, skirts, blouses, socks, underclothes—even a couple of rabbit fur muffs. And I emerged with several new additions to my wardrobe—loose-fitting clothing like nightgowns and cardigans, things that had probably been too large for Jessie to begin with—as well as a new friend who thought I hung the moon.

20

What in the name of all the gods in the Pantheon had possessed me to agree to come to church with the family? I had allowed myself to be persuaded when Aunt Victoria pressed me last evening, but in the clear light of day, I regretted my compliance. Church could very well turn out to be a two-hour walk through a minefield.

In my entire twenty-five years, I’d never been to Sunday church. Mother had jettisoned her strict religious upbringing along with her name, and few in vaudeville spent their one free day hunting down a local church of the correct flavor. Those who did make the effort spoke of pointed looks, lips pressed tight, and whispers behind fans. A few weddings and funerals had given me a grasp of the fundamentals, but until we were climbing into the car the next morning, it did not occur to me that I was heading toward catastrophe.