The Lost Hours (40 page)

“I wonder if Malily knew,” said Helen, a line between her eyebrows.

“From what I’ve read in the scrapbook pages, I don’t think she knew,” I said. “But we need to ask her. Might make her tell me more than what’s been written.”

Tucker sat down next to me in my grandfather’s chair, the one positioned to directly face the empty medal wall. “Helen should go with you. Malily’s never been able to tell her no.”

I nodded, then turned to George. “Were you and Helen able to find anything new?”

George gave me a smug smile. “As a matter of fact, yes. We make quite the team, I’ll have you know. She takes excellent shorthand and has a very precise memory. I told her she should be working in a law office somewhere to utilize her skills.”

I forced myself not to grit my teeth. “What did you find out?”

“After going through miles of microfilm—it’s very hard on the neck, you know. . . .”

Helen interrupted George with a hand on his arm. “We found the burial record and plot for Margaret Louise in Bonaventure. She was buried in nineteen twelve, which predates the magazines that are up there, meaning the room served another purpose after Margaret Louise died.”

“Any luck with more news articles about the baby found in the river?” Tucker asked.

George shook his head. “No. Archives for the
Savannah Morning News
for the time period we’re looking for are sketchy at best. A bad flood destroyed about a year’s worth of stored newspapers prior to them being stored on microfilm. Some of the major news stories, obits, and the like could be found in other sources, but not so much the little news tidbits.”

I swallowed my disappointment, focusing instead on the one last piece of information we’d learned. “We found Justine’s obituary, and it said she was survived by Josie’s daughter, Alicia Jones on Tattnall Street. There’s a chance she could still live there, so I’m going to go see what I can find, starting with the phone book.” I stood, heading for the kitchen.

Helen stopped me. “Did you find out anything else about Freddie?”

I paused on the threshold. “That he died when he was twenty-six. The death certificate says suicide by hanging.”

Her cheeks paled. “How sad. After reading about him, I was starting to feel as if I knew him. I didn’t expect . . . that.”

“Neither did I. Although Tucker pointed out that a black man, especially one with his background, found hanged wasn’t all that unusual back then. Paying somebody to fudge the cause of death wouldn’t have necessarily been a big deal.”

“No,” she said softly,“it wouldn’t have been.” George took her hand again, and I left the room to make a phone call.

The phone book was where it had always been, on the top step of the kitchen stool tucked beneath the ancient princess phone with the long, tightly curled cord in mustard yellow. My grandparents had been frugal; despite their being comfortably off, spending money to replace something that worked perfectly fine had never been on their agenda.

I flipped the thick book open and found the Js, rapidly moving my index finger down to the top of the
Jones
list, saying the names quietly to myself, and simultaneously searching for Tattnall Street. The listing, when I found it, seemed innocuous enough, a single
Jones, A.
but my heart began to pound a little louder in my chest.

Lifting the receiver from the cradle, I held it away from my ear for a moment, listening to the dial tone as if it were a voice from the past. Then I slowly dialed the number. The ringing sounded unusually loud, and I let it ring five times before an answering machine picked up. It was an electronic voice, so I was unable to determine the gender or anything else about the person I was trying to reach. At the sound of the tone, I left a message explaining that I was the granddaughter of Annabelle O’Hare and that she and Josie Montet had been close friends growing up. I asked that if I had reached the home of Josie’s daughter, Alicia, to please call me back. I left my cell phone number, then hung up, my hand lingering on the receiver for a long time, listening to the quiet of my grandmother’s kitchen, and feeling her presence.

When I rejoined the others, they looked at me expectantly. “I got an answering machine, so I left a message. I guess I’ll just wait and see if she calls back before I decide what to do.”

“And if she doesn’t call back, you’ll hire on as your housekeeper to find out what she knows that way?”

Tucker’s face was deadpan, but when Helen began to laugh he smiled. “Sorry. I couldn’t resist.” He stood. “I guess we should head back. Malily hates eating alone.”

Helen pulled out a card from her purse and handed it to George. “Call me.”

I moved toward the doorway again. “Give me about fifteen minutes, okay? I have something I need to do.”

I went out to the Jeep and pulled out the rose clippings Malily had given to Helen, wrapped in damp paper towels. I brought them back to the desolate garden, where the empty soil waited, trying to decide where to plant the roses. I chose the back wall, where they could grow wild, just as my grandmother would have done, untamed and unruly; her garden was the only place in her life where she allowed herself to revisit her past.

The door to her garden shed stuck tight, but I managed to dislodge it by tugging. I found my grandmother’s tools, her trowel and her gloves. Even her large-brimmed hat. I left the hat behind, but put on the gloves, feeling my grandmother’s hands on mine as I pulled them over my fingers that were shaped like hers. I attacked the soil with the trowel, scraping off the hardened topsoil and digging deeper to moist earth, exposing its secrets. I placed the clippings far enough apart so that when they grew they wouldn’t crowd one another, then tightly packed the earth around them to keep them upright.

I knew I wasn’t done. They’d need more nurturing, more direction. I might even have to move them once I determined where the sun would hit them. As I sat back on my heels and studied the tightly closed buds that reminded me of a newborn’s eyes, I knew I’d done something good. Like learning to trot before cantering, it was a place to start. My grandmother had been a horsewoman and a civil rights-crusader, and she had once wanted to be a doctor, but her garden was her story, and I made a silent promise to her that it wouldn’t be forgotten.

I replaced the trowel and the gloves, gently touching the hat before I tugged the door shut. I exited through the garden gate, pausing long enough to take in the lonely rose clippings against the back wall, the late-summer sun casting giant shadows like a bridge from one life to another.

Lillian sat in her chair by the window as night fell, listening to the whippoorwill calling out to the darkening sky. She pushed aside the tray of uneaten food that Odella had brought up, tossing a bite of chicken to the waiting Mardi, who’d been sitting patiently as they’d both waited for Tucker’s Jeep to return.

Tucker had called earlier to let her know that there’d been an accident on the highway, so they’d turned around and had dinner in Savannah. It hadn’t mattered. It had been a long time since Lillian had had an appetite, and now she just used food as a buffer against the medications and alcohol that seemed to be the only things getting her through her days.

Leaning forward, she rubbed her swollen knuckles, feeling the shifting of the seasons in her bones. Like the weathered oak trees in the alley that never alternated colors or dropped their leaves, they showed the approaching autumn in more subtle ways—a change in pitch to their nightly cry, and an almost imperceptible change in the angle of their arch. It was almost as if the oncoming cold of winter alerted them to hover closer to the earth and to one another to help face whatever came next.

Lillian sighed, missing Charlie again. He’d been the one who’d protected her, who’d sheltered her from the storm even when she thought she didn’t need it. She’d been thinking a lot about him lately, and she didn’t know why. He’d been gone for almost fifteen years, and in the time since he died, she had only thought of him with the same nostalgia one might feel for a favorite dress that no longer fit. It was the scrapbook, of course, and all of the memories it brought forth—the good and the bad. And all the things that weren’t written on the pages, but were inscribed instead on the years themselves, as permanent and irrevocable as surviving beyond everyone you’d ever loved.

She turned her head, hearing the sound of a car approaching the house, followed eventually by the front door closing and footsteps climbing the stairs. Despite her sense of foreboding and inevitability, she smiled. Piper with her bad leg wouldn’t take the elevator any more than Annabelle would have.

Mardi ran to the door before anyone knocked, then launched himself through the opening crack as soon as Lillian called out her permission for them to enter. Tucker, Helen, and Piper stood clustered in the doorway like children sent to the principal’s office, and it made Lillian want to laugh, realizing how very reversed their situations really were. She was the one who should be afraid, after all.

Lillian indicated the sofa and wing chair near her and they found seats, Tucker and Piper together on the sofa and Helen in the chair with Mardi’s head propped on her lap. Piper handed her more scrapbook pages. “Here’re more of my grandmother’s pages. I’ve got one more left. I haven’t read it, but I’ll give it to you as soon as I’m done.”

Lillian regarded Piper with surprise. “You’re prolonging it, are you? Afraid of what you might find?”

Piper’s eyes met hers with a question, but she didn’t look away. “No. Not anymore. I think I’m hesitating now because I don’t want to say good-bye. It’s the last thing I have of hers.” She reached behind her neck. “Well, almost.”

Gently, she unclasped the chain, then held the necklace in front of her, the gold charms seeming overly bright as they reflected the lamp-light. “I think Lola belongs to you.”

Piper stood, then waited in front of Lillian until the older woman realized what Piper was trying to do. Lillian bent her head forward and waited for Piper to clasp the chain behind her neck before stepping back and sitting down again.

“I’ve made a list of the charms along with when they were added and by whom. There’s still quite a few I’m unsure about—although I assume most of them are Josie’s since we haven’t read any of her pages—yet.”

“Yet?” A butterfly settled in Lillian’s stomach, beating its wings against her past.

“I think we’ve found Josie’s daughter. She lives in Savannah. If it’s her, she might have Josie’s pages.”

Lillian sat back in her chair. “Alicia,” she said.

“You know her?” Helen asked.

“No. I just know of her. I followed Josie’s life. Knew she had a daughter, and that Josie had named her Alicia.” She smiled to herself, remembering when she’d read the birth announcement. “Alicia is my middle name. I always thought that was Josie’s way of telling me that she hadn’t forgotten me.”

“But you had no other contact with her?”

Lillian’s knuckles began to hurt and she rubbed them, trying to make the pain go away, and knowing that nothing would ever take it away completely. “No. We’d made a clean break. There was no more contact.”

Piper leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “Was it Josie who added the baby carriage charm to Lola?”

How easy it would be to say yes.
Lillian shook her head, the effort exhausting her. “No. Alicia wasn’t born until nineteen fifty and we stopped adding to Lola when we split up the scrapbook in nineteen thirty-nine.”

“So who did?”

Lillian fisted her hands, wishing she had a drink. As if reading her mind,Tucker stood and moved to the wet bar, then poured her a generous glass of sherry. She took her time sipping from the glass, her eyes never leaving Piper. “That would be jumping ahead in our story, wouldn’t it? We’ve still got a few more pages in Annabelle’s scrapbook, and you’ve got most of mine still to read. That way you’ll have all the information you need before you start jumping to conclusions. But maybe that’s your nature. Is it, Piper? To jump ahead of yourself before you’re prepared?”

She watched as Piper’s cheeks darkened. Before Piper could defend herself, Tucker stood again. “That’s enough, Malily.” Tucker moved back to the wet bar and poured three more glasses of sherry.

Lillian looked down at her hands, knowing he was right. “All right. Why don’t you tell me what you learned today? I’m eager to hear how events have been distorted by the historical record.” The weight of Lola on her chest surprised her. It was the weight of years pressing against her chest, pushing the air out of her lungs.

Tucker brought over the drinks and Helen clasped hers with both hands as she spoke. “Why don’t you read from your scrapbook first? You haven’t gotten very far.”

“My eyes hurt, and it’s hard for me to read the handwriting. Why don’t we have Piper read it?” She wasn’t sure why she’d said that, only that she realized how much Piper sounded like Annabelle, and how when she’d been ill, she’d enjoyed listening to the sound of Annabelle’s voice reading to her. It was a rare place in her memory, a place untouched by adulthood.