Chapter Seventeen #2
Grace stopped short, and the woman spun around.
Eyes just like her own, echoed in another face.
Nell Carter Covington.
Her mother.
“Thank God! Grace Carter Covington. Where have you been?” Grace’s mother asked angrily.
Her eyes filled with tears, caught between relief and fury, the same way that Walt had just made Grace feel. Grace was pierced with guilt as her mother grabbed her, hugging her hard enough to make it hurt.
“Aunt Nell,” Lillie said warmly. “It’s so good to see you. Let us go in.”
Lillie led them inside, deftly removing her hat, and instructed Waters to inform her mother to come down.
He gave an uneasy look in Grace’s direction, but Lillie’s voice turned to steel. “Now, please, Waters.”
He hurried away.
Lillie brought them into the sitting room, fussing over Nell and calling for tea. There were flowers starting to droop in their crystal vases—the only sign that things were not truly right in the Carter home.
“Mother, what are you doing here?” Grace said.
“Looking for you,” Nell said sharply. “Clove refused to take my calls. I had no idea where you were. At this fair, with hundreds of thousands of strangers. You have no idea the agony you have put your father and me through these last few days.”
“I’m fine, Mother. I’m sorry. I should have let you know that I was all right.
” It was strange to see her mother in this house.
She looked like her older brother Reginald, but she had their mother’s high cheekbones and deeper lines etched around her mouth.
Grace could see the resemblance all the more clearly in the large portrait of her grandmother that hung in the hallway.
“I couldn’t reach you,” Nell said. “And with this terrible mess Oliver is caught up in…”
“He didn’t do it,” Grace said, reaching to squeeze Lillie’s hand.
“Of course he didn’t,” Nell snapped. “But reason stands that if it wasn’t Oliver, that means someone else is still out there…”
She trailed off as Aunt Clove appeared at the landing above them. She had dark circles under her eyes, and she looked irritated as she came down the stairs in her dressing robe.
“Nell,” she said curtly. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
“You wouldn’t take my calls. I understand you’re up against it with everything that’s happened, Clove, but for goodness’ sake. When you refused to communicate with me and no one would let me speak with Grace, I had to come out here myself to make sure my daughter was all right.”
“Your daughter is no longer welcome in this house thanks to the part she has played in all of this. Or did she not tell you?”
There was a beat of silence. “Excuse me?” Nell’s voice dropped.
“Ask her yourself about the role she played in deliberately concealing the nature of Oliver’s relationship with that actress—”
“Harriet, Mother,” Lillie said loyally.
“Which has now destroyed my son, his future, our family name. I never should have let her step foot in this house.”
“You think that Oliver’s choice to hide a relationship from you is somehow Grace’s responsibility and not his own?” Grace’s mother was incredulous. “That’s fine. Grace, go fetch your bags. We’re going now.”
“My bags aren’t here, Mother,” Grace said calmly. “Didn’t you hear what Aunt Clove said? I’m no longer welcome in this house.”
Nell’s voice dropped to an octave Grace had never heard before. Her crisp, upper-class enunciation drew out each word. “What do you mean, your bags aren’t here?”
Grace didn’t answer.
Nell turned to Clove, biting out each word. “Where has my daughter been, if not under your roof ?”
Aunt Clove stared coolly back at Grace’s mother without answering.
The tension stretched between them, building until Grace could bear it no more.
“I’ve been staying in a friend’s vacant apartment,” she said. “It belongs to his aunt.”
“Oh, good heavens,” Aunt Clove said, turning away, as if this were the most shameful thing she’d ever heard. As if she had nothing to do with the necessity of it.
Nell was shaking with rage.
“You turned out my daughter, your husband’s own flesh and blood, to fend for herself in a city flooded with hundreds of thousands of people.
You refused to take my calls to admit this.
My daughter, who I entrusted to your custody?
” Nell’s voice was rising to hysterics. “Money cannot buy decency. Or integrity. Or even the barest scrap of sense. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Grace barely had time to relish in her mother’s takedown of Aunt Clove before she turned on Grace next, her face pale with rage but pricked with red.
“And you. You are coming home with me.”
Grace planted her feet in the plush carpet, feeling it sink beneath her.
Her grandfather’s imposing gaze settled on her from the oil portrait.
“I’m not leaving until Lillie and Oliver are all right,” she said softly. “Both of them.”
Nell laughed, as if she could not believe what she was hearing. “What did you have in mind, Grace? Being some sort of detective?”
She said it like it was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. Grace’s face stung like she’d been slapped, but she wouldn’t let it show.
Especially in front of Aunt Clove.
With as much dignity as she could muster, she picked up her mother’s bag.
“Let’s talk over dinner,” she said, as though Aunt Clove were not there. “I have some information that might be of interest about Oliver’s case.”
“If you have something that could help Oliver, you should be sharing that with his lawyer,” Aunt Clove said.
“I’m sorry. This information is for family only,” Grace said, turning her back on her aunt. She called over her shoulder as she sailed out the door, “And you’ve made it very clear that we are not that.”
Nell’s ire had cooled a little by the time they’d walked several blocks and the revolving silhouette of the Ferris wheel came into view.
“You have to at least see it,” Grace said, wheedling. “Since you’re here.”
“Fine,” Nell said, fixing Grace with a steely gaze. “But you’re telling me everything while we do.”
They entered the fair’s turnstiles and, seeing it through Nell’s eyes, Grace was hit anew by the wonder of it all.
It washed over her in a wave of elation, flooding her with the feeling of possibility.
The energy was electric. It felt like watching thousands of flowers suddenly erupting into bloom at once.
“How many buildings?” Nell asked faintly, glancing up at the towering Tyrolean Alps.
“More than a thousand.”
“And how many countries are here?”
“Sixty-two.”
“It would take weeks to see it all.”
“A month, at least,” Grace countered. She breathed in the sugar-scented air and thrust the program into her mother’s hand.
It was astonishing what human beings could collectively do when they put their minds to it.
Fossils of dinosaurs! A blue whale’s skeleton!
Live reenactments of military battles and firefighters putting out blazes!
Premature infants in incubators! Elephants that went down slides!
Morocco’s twenty-five rare Arab stallions!
It hit Grace’s veins like a drug. She wanted to see it all. Take it inside of herself to carry around like a cupboard of secret, hidden treasures that she could take out and look at until the day she died.
She felt something that was almost like pride as Nell admired the fair’s architecture, the pottery and looms, the women they passed in traditional Irish and Japanese dress.
They found a restaurant modeled after a coal mine and examined the menu, commenting on the way Grace’s father would have liked the ham and fried egg sandwiches.
As the heaping plates appeared in front of them and grease dripped from her fingers, Grace told her mother everything that had happened.
For the first time, it tumbled out of her. The way Oliver had gotten her into the party. How it had felt to watch Harriet die in front of her. Being thrown out of the Carter home, and all the reasons she believed Oliver was innocent. How Theodore had provided the use of his apartment.
“Time to come home,” Nell insisted. “I’m grateful that this gentleman helped you, but the arrangement is unseemly. You’re a smart girl, you must know what this looks like.”
“He’s Oliver’s friend. And since when have you cared what others think?” Grace asked.
“I always care more for my children than I ever have for myself,” Nell said crisply. “Now, there’s a train home tonight and I expect you to be on it with me.”
Grace was quiet. She suddenly felt guilty that she’d forced her mother to come looking for her. It had been irresponsible and unkind, and the train ticket, the restaurant meals, were all things her parents couldn’t really afford.
And yet something hidden deep within her healed at the knowledge that her mother had dropped everything to come for her. Nell had been a shadow of herself ever since Walt left. But this had brought her flickering back to life, into something solid Grace could hold again.
She stole glances at her mother as they paid the bill and walked out to the Music Pavilion. For a moment, she looked a little more like the woman in Grace’s memory.
“Your father would love this,” Nell said wistfully, taking in the thousands of incandescent bulbs that lit up the Palaces.
They dimmed and changed in colors of red, white, and green, electrifying the sky.
Grace fixed her gaze on them, knowing better than to tell her mother about the Fare article she had written; that she was perhaps going to provoke a murderer.
And that at that very moment, Walt was likely wandering in the Tunnels nearby.
Grace felt the guilt of that settle in deep and squeeze her chest, making it hard to breathe.
But she suddenly couldn’t bear to bring him up, to reveal that nothing had changed, and see the way her mother’s heart would crack just a little more all the while pretending it wasn’t.
Perhaps it was selfish, but she had relished the way her mother had listened with full attention, reaching out to stroke Grace’s hair when she told her how it had felt to see Harriet die.
She hadn’t known how much she needed it until she felt herself soaking up her mother’s attention like a sponge.
And she wanted to hold on to that for just a little longer.
“We should go,” Nell said, checking the time. “Let’s get your things. The last train is leaving soon.”
They walked beneath the city’s leafy trees and misty streetlamps, Grace leading the way through the streets until the train station appeared, glowing in the night. A light rain had begun to fall.
“But this is the station,” Nell said, frowning as the realization dawned. “I thought we were going to the apartment to collect your bags.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Grace—”
“I can’t go with you tonight,” Grace said.
“They’re burying Harriet tomorrow. And as much as I want to make you happy, there are things I need to do here first.” Grace wrapped her arm around her mother’s waist, smelling the rosewater of her hair.
“I’m an adult now, may I remind you,” she said, already feeling Nell beginning to argue.
“But I’ll be better about being in touch, so that you won’t worry. ”
“Of course I’ll worry,” Nell snapped.
“I promise I’ll be careful,” Grace said.
Grace handed her a piece of paper with the studio address on it.
Nell clutched it in her hand.
“I can’t lose both my children,” she said. Her eyes welled with tears.
At the sight of them, Grace’s suddenly filled, too.
“I am the person you taught me to be,” Grace said. “You do what your heart says is right, no matter how it looks to other people. And I am your daughter.”
“And look at you go,” her mother said. She smiled, watery and brave. “Go, and go, and go. And then come back to me,” she said.
She cupped Grace’s cheek.
“In the meantime, I’ll be having a word with my brother Reginald,” she said. She gathered her dress resolutely in her hand. “If you prefer not to witness the aftermath, I’d stay clear for a few days.”
Grace snorted. “I love you.”
Her mother embraced her, then whispered fiercely into her hair. “No one tells of the freedom you have when you’re no longer bound by society’s opinion.”
“I’m afraid that some days I’m not there yet,” Grace said.
“Nor am I. But I’m on my way.”
Grace watched her mother buy the train ticket, feeling something within her fissure.
She’d been the reliable one, the responsible one, for years now. That had been a gift she could give her parents, becoming one less weight for them, in case they collapsed under what they already carried.
And yet this had been a gift her parents had given back to her, too. That she was worth fighting for as well. Worth worrying over.
Grace waved fiercely, stepping on her tiptoes and watching the train pull away, as though it could go back to the place where her father still sifted flour like snow in the kitchen, where Walt papered the walls with his drawings and she hid in the knotted boughs of the juniper tree.
Back to childhood and all the versions of herself that didn’t exist anymore.
She waved at the train until it disappeared.
And then she went home to try to catch a murderer.