Chapter Forty-Five
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
“We must call Germaine,” Edwina says. “She’ll know how to find out more.”
Edwina dials the black rotary phone, which turns out to be real, and tells Germaine what we think we’ve figured out, though I still can’t believe it. We can hear Germaine’s voice, quickening and rising in pitch and volume.
“She’s going to close the shop and come right over,” Edwina says.
It doesn’t feel real. My mother has disappointed me so many times, but could she really have kept something like this from me?
This isn’t just a white lie; it’s a lifelong betrayal.
When was she going to tell me the truth?
Before we left for England? On the plane somewhere over the Atlantic?
Or was she going to wait until we were immersed in solving a fake murder that had nothing to do with why she’d wanted to come here?
“We’ve got to be right,” Wyatt says. “Susan Marie Crowley, nine-year-old Sukie, became Sukie Sanders.”
“Who took the name Skye?” Amity says. “It is close to Sukie.”
“My grandmother always thought it was a stupid name,” I say. “I never asked.”
“The magic arches, the crooked spire, the bluebells, the way your mother must have told you about Stanage Edge, they weren’t a story, they were memories,” Wyatt says.
Edwina takes a bottle of sherry from a cupboard and pours four little glasses.
“Are we celebrating?” Amity says.
“I’m not up for that,” I say.
“This is medicinal.” Edwina hands me a glass. “You’ve had a shock.”
I down the sherry like it’s a shot of tequila.
“My mother used to call the bathroom ‘the loo.’ I thought she was being pretentious.”
“There were no other signs?” Amity asks.
When my mother and I visited Indiana when I was little, I’d sleep in her childhood bedroom, in her old twin bed with the pine headboard and nubby chenille spread.
There was a heavy old maple dresser, and on the wall above it, a framed drawing of a unicorn.
Like the one doodled on the inside back cover of the Melling School book.
“Did you ever see photographs of your mother as a baby?” Amity asks.
“Maybe? I was only eight the last time I was in Indiana. I don’t remember much. Grampa Hal smelled like black licorice, and Granny Lou’s hugs lasted too long. She served chicken and noodles over mashed potatoes.”
The Indiana house was nothing like our house in Buffalo, which had so many mementos from my father’s past—his baby book filled with photographs and notes about the first time he rolled over or ate solid food, the white wicker bassinet he slept in as an infant, his first shoes, preschool photos against a painted backdrop of fir trees, the library card he got in kindergarten.
The Indiana house was sparse, with little decoration other than lace doilies on the tables and some framed photographs of my mother and her parents.
I take out my phone to look at the photos of the book that Kim sent.
I wish I had the Melling School book with me.
If my mother really was Sukie, did she get this book after the fire?
Or was it saved from the fire? If this is the book she’d been reading in the bathtub when the fire started, then I’d had a link to my mother’s past all along.
“I knew it! I knew your mother had an extraordinary story!” Germaine bursts into the cottage holding some papers. “She was one of us. You’re one of us! She was bringing you home.”
She spreads her papers on the coffee table.
They’re newspaper articles she found online and printed out before coming over.
Most offer the same details about the fire that we’ve already learned.
A few of them include a photograph, dark and grainy, of the remains of the house, stone wall stumps and what looks like half a chimney.
One has a picture of the exhausted fire brigade that fought the blaze.
Another shows a fire truck and a canvas hose, depleted, on the ground.
Off to the side is a thin, fair-haired girl in a long cotton nightgown and bare feet.
A wool blanket is wrapped around her narrow shoulders.
Her head is tipped up toward the ruins of the house.
Her profile, with a prominent forehead, delicately tilted nose, and what’s often called a weak chin, is as familiar as my own.