Chapter Twenty #2
I bit my lip, considering. I had to get back to Black Bass and deal with the spray paint situation. But…everyone was down at the lake, for the foreseeable future. The graffiti on the cabin was mostly blocked from view by the oak tree.
Which meant that I could afford to spend a few minutes digging through some of these old boxes. Just in case.
Some of the boxes were heavy, poorly packed, and without a clear label, so I spent a while sorting through the bottom two shelves, none of which had anything notable.
I pulled the next box from the highest shelf, and the resulting cloud of dust made my eyes burn. I dusted off the top, and sucked in a breath.
There were two haunting words scrawled in Rig’s chicken scratch: Winona Hayes.
My instincts had been right. Margo’s, too. He lied to us. When he said he didn’t remember her—that wasn’t true.
With shaking hands, I opened it.
A small silver jewelry box sat on the top. I lifted the lid carefully. It was one of those with a spinning ballerina, and it started shouting a song immediately. I snapped it shut, panicking, but reminded myself that I was very, very alone.
I took a deep breath and opened it again.
Two small rings sat inside, and a tangled necklace that looked like an antique, tinged with age and rust. There was also a small, dainty suede bag, that had once held something special but was now empty.
The velvet-lined box was beautiful and still somehow looked clean and fresh.
A waft of jasmine accosted me, and I wondered if it was Winona’s perfume, lingering after all this time.
It gave me a swoop of haunted sadness that was almost staggering.
I set aside the jewelry box and kept poking around. My eye was drawn to a red-and-white-striped book, larger than the others. On the front, in looping cursive, was Hayes Family Recipes.
Inside, there were pages and pages of meticulously written recipe cards. At least fifty, from chicken casseroles to Coca-Cola cake. From the years of use, there were grease stains and spots of flour sprinkled across the pages.
Although I knew almost nothing of Winona except for the photo we’d found in the floorboard, I’d been building a mental picture.
A cold mother, an unloving partner, content to abandon her daughter.
A terrible best friend, who’d left my own mom in shambles.
She was useless, shallow, unkind, selfish—wasn’t she?
I knew it was just a few pieces of paper bound together, but Winona felt so real to me.
Once upon a time, she’d been a woman who loved to cook, who’d collected recipes over the years, who’d worked to practice and perfect them with painstaking efficiency.
In my hands, I wasn’t just holding a piece of Winona but a piece of Steph, too.
The woman in the photo hidden beside her bed, whom she’d never known—she was right here. Real, solid proof that she’d existed.
Stuck between two sticky pages, I found a picture. I grew faint, clammy, and slid slowly to the ground, no mind for the dirt or dust. There was nothing on earth but this photograph.
It was me and Steph. Holding hands between our high chairs.
We wore matching overalls, and our sparse baby hair was tied up in bows—Steph’s was green, and mine was yellow.
Behind us stood our mothers. They had their arms around each other, their cheeks smashed together, and their eyes were resting on us. Their daughters.
There was so much love—so much glowing affection—not just in the way they stood holding each other but in the way they gazed at the two of us. The heartache it gave me was indescribable.
I forced myself to turn the photo around, look away from our four matching smiles.
I was dizzy and overwhelmed as I ran my hands over the well-loved book, thinking about what it all meant.
Winona was not a woman who was spontaneous or aloof.
Who ran off in the middle of the night for no reason. Of this, I felt sure.
And then I thought of the interview in the office this morning. Margo asking Rig what he knew about Winona and where she might have gone. Why she’d never returned to her family, her daughter. His deflections, his confusion.
I’d never known Rig to lie before, but about this, he was. None of it made any sense.
I flipped to the last page of the cookbook, and in the back folder, there was a small, unlabeled envelope.
Inside, there were two Greyhound bus tickets.
I felt a pounding in my ears, the blood rushing. These tickets had never been used—they were one-way, from Lavender to Atlanta. The date read 04/04/98.
Yesterday, my dad had told me that Winona had run away the night of my first birthday: April 4.
With a cold, awful sort of dread, a new theory took shape and held me hostage. I wondered if Margo and I had only been dancing around the truth, not quite there. I wondered if this was what Steph had been piecing together all those years ago, the real mystery she’d been trying to solve that summer.
She hadn’t been trying to discover why her mom had left Dread’s Cove in the middle of the night.
But why she hadn’t.