Chapter Twelve #3
In anticipation of a girl, the room shined in pink and white with baby block balloons, centerpieces of pink and white rosebuds over cloths of white lace.
An arch of more balloons and flowers rose over the mommy-to-be chair.
They enjoyed the female energy—as Cleo called it. Pink champagne and pink lemonade flowed before, during, and after a lovely lunch finished with pink-frosted cupcakes.
They sighed over tiny onesies, tiny frilly dresses, laughed over games.
And Cleo won a basket filled with lotions, candles, bubble bath, and more by naming the most songs with baby in the title.
On the drive home, Sonya glanced over as Cleo hugged her basket. “How did you know all those songs?”
“Some from a childhood where people liked to sing, and the rest? Owen. Stick with Owen long enough and you end up knowing all the songs.”
Cleo gave the basket a grin. “I got the best prize, and that was a lot of fun.”
“It was. I just really loved the girly-girlness of it all. And Anna looked so happy. Ready to get back to the hunt?”
“We’ll see what the men came up with, change into get-it-done clothes, then I’m ready to put in some time. Did you smell this candle? Night-blooming jasmine. Mmmm!”
“Show-off.”
Before the weekend turned to weekday, they’d found small treasures in a carefully handwritten guest list, a menu for a garden party, and an invitation to a garden party hosted by Mr. and Mrs. Owen Poole.
Given the date—and a quick check of the Poole family history book—Sonya determined Owen and his second wife, Moira, would have been married two years.
She spent some evenings sorting through what they’d found, creating boxes for each bride or family group. She would do better, she thought, better than leaving it all neglected in drawers or forgotten in trunks.
What seemed too impractical to display, well, she’d have the individual boxes, something future generations could go through.
She wanted to think of others living in the manor, appreciating its beauty and resilience, having the connection with those who’d come before.
What they didn’t find nagged at her. In all the hours of hunting, they hadn’t found a wedding dress worn by any of the seven brides.
“I understand Astrid’s,” she said to Trey. “It would’ve been ruined, and Lisbeth’s, likely the same. I can see Johanna’s, Agatha’s, because they died in their wedding dresses. I thought we’d find Marianne’s, Catherine’s, and I really hoped we’d find Clover’s.”
“Patricia Poole would have ordered anything that belonged to Clover removed, probably destroyed.”
“You’re right. I need to stop obsessing about it and get to work. You need to get to work, too.”
“I do.” Trey took his go-cup of coffee, called to his dog. Sonya walked with him to the door, kissed him goodbye, waved him off in a steady shower of rain.
Then she stood as the silence of the manor fell around her and looked up at Astrid’s portrait.
“I’m not giving up, and I won’t. Just putting it away for a few hours.”
She went upstairs, Yoda at her heels. She sat at her desk, took a breath.
“Ready when you are, Clover.”
When the music started, Sonya booted up and got to work.
Later, she saw Cleo make her sleepy morning trek to the kitchen, then her awake and ready return trip.
“Rain’s supposed to stop in another hour or two, but I’m sticking with the studio today.”
“On your secret project?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Check the closet.”
“Always do.”
Sonya barely noticed the rain, then only noticed when it stopped, as Yoda gave an apologetic little whine.
“Need to go out? Good time for a break and a caffeine boost.”
She took him down, let him out. After she got a Coke, she took it with her to join him.
“Smell that? Fresh. We can take ten minutes in the fresh.”
She got his ball from the shed, tossed it for him while the cat, who’d followed them out, watched from her perch on the doghouse.
“Okay, break’s over. I need to…”
She felt it. Sly fingers curling in her belly. Tugging, pulling. Toward the woods.
“God. Not again, not there. I have to…” The ball dropped out of her hand as she started forward.
“Jack, Jack, please watch them. I don’t know where I’ll go, what I’ll see.”
Her body felt limp and light even as her heart picked up a fast, heavy beat. The wet leaves shimmered in the sunlight, and the shadows behind them seemed too deep and darkly green.
Compelled, she walked into the woods that seemed to close in all around her. The air, thicker, wetter, dropped over her until she felt it was an effort to simply breathe.
Here and there, a sunbeam sliced through the green dim, a misty sort of light that struck her as otherworldly.
She heard the stream bubbling, small animals rustling, the insistent call of a bird, shrill in the quiet.
And there on the path, the mirror, its blurred glass surrounded by predators.
She held back just a moment, looked behind her. Yoda hadn’t followed. So she braced herself and walked forward.
Walked through the glass and into the past.
Where it was spring. The sun washed down through leaves tenderly green and just starting to unfurl. Rather than thick, the air felt light, breezy. Trilliums popped up to show their color as she remembered they had a few months before in the spring of now.
Ahead, a sleek gray dog flushed birds out of the brush. They rose in a cloud of feathers and annoyance into a sky of tender blue.
The two people walking the path stopped, looked up, and laughed.
The man, tall in his brown jacket and trousers, called to the dog.
“Behave, Rex.”
“He thinks he is.” The woman spoke, her voice as light as the air.
She wore a long skirt of dove gray and a white blouse trimmed in lace under a deeper gray jacket, its sleeves puffed at the shoulders. Her hair, richly black, curled at the sides under a straw boater.
She recognized them now. Owen Poole and Moira, the woman he married and made a family with two years after the wedding-day death of Agatha.
“He’s young yet, and full of energy.”
Moira lifted her eyebrows as Rex leaped into the bubbling stream to drink. “So it appears.”
As she started to walk on, Owen took her hand. “Moira, I wanted to walk with you here today to have a private word.”
“We’ve walked here before.”
“We have. In the past year we’ve walked together here, in the gardens, in the village. I hope you know how much those walks, those talks have meant to me.”
“And to me as well.”
“I wish to walk by your side for the rest of my life. To have you beside me, Moira. I’ve come to love you, love you deeply, and ask you here if you would do me the very great honor of becoming my wife.”
“Owen.” She pressed her free hand to her heart. “I never expected … I thought…”
He gripped that hand. “Tell me you feel more than friendship for me, though I treasure your friendship. Tell me, if not now, you might feel more in time.”
“Owen, I’m … I’m breathless.” She let out a dazed sort of laugh. “I couldn’t—I wouldn’t let myself believe you felt or could feel for me as I do for you.”
He brought the hand he held to his lips, pressed a kiss on it as he looked into her eyes. “If you feel as I do, you are madly, wildly, desperately in love with me.”
Tears sparkled as she laughed. “I am, and have been, and will be.”
He drew her close, and from where she stood, Sonya could see her tremble into the kiss.
“Will you be mine, darling Moira? Will you make me the happiest man in all the world and be mine?”
“I am.” She laid a hand on his cheek. “And have been. And will be.”
She didn’t tremble now, but gave a quick cry of joy as she answered his kiss.
The dog jumped out, shook the wet away, and splattered them both with it.
Laughing, hand in hand, her head tipped toward his shoulder, they walked on.
Sonya knew she wasn’t meant to follow, had seen what she’d been meant to see.
She stepped back into summer and thick green, and looked down the path.
They had given each other words of love, of marriage, of the future in the very same spot where Hester Dobbs had killed Arthur Poole.
“It means something,” she murmured. “It means love triumphs. Light, no matter how the dark spreads, always pushes through. I needed to see that. And I need to remember it.”
So she would, she promised herself as she started back down the path toward the manor.