Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
FRANKIE
Now
Owen messaged Frankie a couple of days later to ask her to come over when she got a chance. Thora’s contacts had come through, and she had information to share, “but not over the phone.”
“So secretive,” Kayla said as she helped Frankie close up the school after their newly added Saturday morning ballet class. “Do you think that means she found something?”
Frankie shrugged. “It’s a long shot. Could be she just wants a visitor to break up her day. I get a feeling she’s over the knee recovery at this point.”
“But Owen is there, isn’t he?”
Frankie paused what she was doing. “Yeah. But he’s… different than he used to be. Quiet. I keep waiting for a good opportunity to talk to him, but it hasn’t felt right so far.”
“Maybe you need to create an opportunity then? We could use his help with the fundraiser. Is he good with his hands?”
A violent blush rushed up Frankie’s face before she had a chance to turn away from her friend.
“Oh,” Kayla said, tone insinuating. “Not what I meant, but good to know.”
“Shut up,” Frankie said before adding in a lower voice. “But third base with him was a formative experience.”
Kayla wiggled her eyebrows. “Maybe you need to revisit it?”
“Don’t even.” Frankie crossed her arms. “That happened in another universe. No.”
“Okay. Well—since you’re no fun, now I’m leaving for real. See you Monday.”
“See ya.”
After stacking the chairs that lined the walls in the ballet studio so that Charlie would be able to sweep it Monday morning, Frankie, too, grabbed her things and headed out, and ten minutes later, she pulled up in front of Thora’s pretty yard where Owen was in the middle of mowing the lawn.
The real smell of cut grass and remembered scents of Herbal Essence shampoo and sunscreen from that last summer they’d spent together mixed in such an overwhelming wave that Frankie could practically see a younger version of Owen pushing a different mower in a different yard overlapping with the man before her.
Maybe Kayla was right and Frankie had to create an opportunity to talk to him.
If nothing else, she wanted to ask once and for all what she’d done wrong to make him ghost her like that.
She didn’t fault him for wanting to move on and be free of commitments when he went off to college, but even back then, it hadn’t been like him to cut ties the way he had.
She shrugged off the memory and exited the car, waving to him as she strode up the porch steps.
She knocked twice, then entered, announcing herself as she did.
“In here,” Thora called from the living room. “Will you be a doll and fetch the lemonade from the fridge too? I made it fresh this morning.”
“Will do,” Frankie called back.
“And three glasses. Owen will be thirsty.”
“Got it.”
Thora sat in an easy chair by the bay window with a ball of yarn and two knitting needles in her lap.
“Feeling crafty today?” Frankie asked, setting the beverage tray down on the coffee table.
“Not especially,” Thora responded drily. “I thought I’d pass the time with what Good Housekeeping will have me believe is an appropriate activity for a woman my age, but Lord only knows how.”
“You don’t know how to knit?” Frankie asked, filling the glasses.
“See there—that’s what I don’t understand. Am I supposed to magically know how at seventy? Seventy-five? At exactly what age will I be bestowed this gift because it sure hasn’t happened yet.” She pushed the yarn and needles off her lap and made to get up.
“No, sit. I’ll bring it to you,” Frankie said.
Thora huffed. “And this gosh darn knee…”
“Is getting better,” Owen said from the doorway.
Frankie looked up and met his gaze briefly before he ran a hand through his blonde strands and excused himself.
“Gotta wash up,” he said. “Be right back.”
“He’s right,” Thora said. “It is getting better. I’m just feeling ornery on account of not having been of more help to you, Frankie dear.”
“Oh?” Frankie sat down on the couch and sipped her drink. The lemonade was on the sweet side, but that was better than too tart.
“Yes, I had my boys in the states we discussed search records these past few days, and not a one of them had any luck. As far as we can tell, there were no mentions of kidnappings between 1990 and 1992. Now that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, only that no one wrote about it.
” She twisted her hands in her lap and drank from the glass Frankie had handed her.
“But?” Frankie leaned forward.
Owen joined them, wiping his hands on a kitchen towel he then slung over a side table on his way to the chair next to Thora. “What are we talking about?” he asked. His cheeks were rosy after exerting himself in the garden, and it was the most like his former self Frankie had seen him.
She handed him a glass of lemonade, which he took with a quick smile.
“I was about to tell her about Hattiesburg,” Thora said.
“Ah.” Owen gulped half the glass in one go.
Frankie looked between them. “What about it?” She set her glass down.
“Since you said your birth certificate lists Jackson, Mississippi, and given that the song in the notebook was dated 1987, I had someone check that area for kidnappings in the mid-eighties too, and…” She gestured for Owen to get her something from the dresser on the opposite wall.
“We found something.” She took the papers from Owen and passed them to Frankie.
The stack was made up of black-and-white print-outs of several newspaper articles dated December 1985, and the top one had a bold headline reading: “LOCAL FAMILY’S ORDEAL ENDS IN CHRISTMAS MIRACLE.”
Frankie pored over the pages, absorbing the story as it played out—from the “MISSING CHILD” notice to the happy resolution.
Three-year-old Nellie Smalls had been kidnapped by the family’s babysitter early December, and the two had vanished without a trace, leaving Nellie’s parents in a nightmare that sounded all too familiar to Frankie.
The babysitter had been pregnant earlier that year but lost the baby, and in one of the press photos, Nellie’s mother was pleading with the other woman to bring her child back.
If she did, all would be forgiven. The plea must have worked because the day before Christmas Eve, the family had woken to Nellie banging on the front door, cold but unharmed.
The similarities were too many to be a coincidence, and with that knowledge, a stone lodged itself in Frankie’s chest. She stood abruptly and started pacing, one hand going to her forehead as the implication hit home.
This was the story that had inspired the song.
She felt the truth of that at her very core.
“Like I said—this doesn’t mean it didn’t also happen to you years later,” Thora said carefully.
Frankie stopped, swallowing hard against the knot in her throat. “Except there’s no evidence that it did.”
What had Estelle done? Had “My Only Child” been the topic of an interview one day (maybe even the interview with Orla Monroe), and she’d decided on a whim to attribute the emotional lyrics to a lived trauma?
Or had she planned to do so all along? Had it been a calculated step to gain clout, sympathy, fame?
“Sorry, I need some air,” she said, rushing to the front door and out onto the porch.
Once there, she sank down onto the top step and buried her face in her hands.
The air was thick with wisteria and lilac, the sweetness engulfing her like a dear friend.
As the minutes passed, she let her arms fall and allowed other impressions through her defenses.
Rough wood against her fingertips. The mild breeze against her skin in the gap between her jeans and socks.
The graceful bowing of the willow’s branches at the edge of the yard.
The door opened behind her.
“Hey.” Owen’s steady footsteps came closer until his scent washed over her too. Bar soap and something warmer, like vanilla rolls.
“I’m not crying,” she said, scooting a few inches when he sat down next to her.
“Didn’t say you were.”
They sat in silence while the sun passed its zenith, and the creek frogs took up their tune. She’d forgotten how easy it was to be quiet together with him.
“You know, Grams is right,” Owen said after a while. “This doesn’t mean Estelle lied about anything other than what inspired the song.”
Frankie looked at him. Up close like this, the lines on his forehead were deeper and the story in his eyes longer.
She resisted an urge to tug on his ear the way they’d teased each other back then.
The fact that she knew what his soft lobe would feel like against her fingertips made her turn away instead.
“You don’t actually believe that,” she said, surprised at how little it bothered her that Thora had invited him into their circle of knowledge. “I don’t believe that.”
Owen stretched his legs out before him, crossing them at the ankles. “Fine, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have a good reason.”
Frankie glared at him. “A good reason to let me grow up believing I’d been abducted?”
He huffed. “When you put it like that.” He paused for an extended beat. “So what are you going to do?”
Frankie rubbed a hand across her brow, a shiver rushing up her spine that had nothing to do with the air brushing her lower back. “What can I do?” she asked. “If she was here, I’d demand answers, but she’s not.”
There had to be answers, right? Even if they were ones she wouldn’t like.
“And the auction? The school?” he asked.
“Starview still needs saving. This doesn’t change that. I just can’t include the notebook as a prize like I’d hoped.”
“But you’re not going to tell anyone?”
“No.” Frankie bit down on the inside of her cheek. “At least not until I know more.” And maybe not even then. For all she knew, Orla was still sniffing around somewhere out of sight.
Owen turned his head to face her. “You’re going to keep looking into this?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
He thought about that for a moment, his blue eyes inscrutable.
“Did you know that I haven’t spoken to my dad in almost a decade?” he asked finally.