Chapter Nineteen. Rose #2
“I was born at the Harrow Home on August twelfth, 1930,” Grace says. “My twin brother was born seven minutes later. Or so I was told.”
It’s as though someone cut Mrs. George’s puppet strings. She flops forward, burying her face in her hands. I exchange alarmed looks with Grace, but Sadie rocks up a moment later, her brown eyes shining with tears. “You’re not her. You’re not my baby.”
“No.” Grace looks a little sorry for it.
“We didn’t mean to mislead you,” I add quickly. “We didn’t know that you and Gr—Gertie would look a bit alike.”
It’s probably best not to use Grace’s real name. If Mrs. George phoned Mr. Harrow and complained that his daughter was calling on old patients, asking questions, there would be the devil to pay.
“How did you find me? We were promised discretion.” Mrs. George’s voice is tart. “And if you already know that I’m not your mother, what do you want?”
There’s a note of fear in her voice. Does she think we mean to blackmail her?
“Nothing nefarious,” I assure her. “We only want to ask a few questions. Gertie is looking for her mother.”
“What if her mother doesn’t want to be found?” Mrs. George asks.
Grace leans forward. “She does! I know she does.”
Mrs. George shakes her head. “She may not. She may consider that part of her life well behind her. I don’t mean to be cruel, dear.
But your mother may have a husband who knows nothing of her past. She may prefer to keep it that way.
” Mrs. George glances up at the framed photographs on the mantel.
In one, she poses with her handsome husband and a baby in her arms. A little girl with two braids and a small scowling boy in overalls stand in front.
She has a picture-perfect family—all resting on a seventeen-year-old secret.
“My mother’s dead.” Grace is convinced that the ghost and her mother are one and the same.
“I don’t want to make trouble for anybody.
I just want to know who she was. I don’t even know her name.
All I know is that it started with the letter D.
And we were born in August, so she would have arrived at the Harrow Home in late March or April.
Your stays would have overlapped. Do you remember any girls who fit that bill? ”
Mrs. George recrosses her legs at the ankle. “Do you promise me that you won’t go knocking on any more doors? I won’t be responsible for that.”
“I promise,” Grace says. I hold my breath, my heart beating fast.
“Well, the staff called us Miss so-and-so. Some of the girls used noms de plume. Assumed names,” she explains, for a befuddled Grace.
“But we used one another’s Christian names in private.
There are three girls who might fit…” Grace’s eyes go wide.
The hope on her face breaks my heart. “Dessa Slaughter came in April. She was a college girl, dead clever, and a big reader. She liked Austen, too.” Mrs. George glances at the bookshelf.
“And ‘Slaughter,’ you know, that’s memorable.
She wanted to be a schoolteacher. She was the closest thing to a friend I had in that place …
Then there was Dovey Mae. Her last name started with an M, I think.
Marshall?” She squinches up her face, trying to recall.
“No, Martin. She was a stocky girl. Tall, and rather coarse. Said it came from growing up on a farm with a whole pile of brothers … And then there was Daisy Wheeler. She kept to herself, but we worked in the laundry together. We all had chores. Idle hands, you know.”
Grace nods. “Were any of them carrying twins?”
“Not that I knew. I delivered in June, before any of them. But we mostly complained about how our feet and our backs ached, how big we were getting, and the chores. The warden fired the maids, right before Memorial Day, so then I had to make beds in addition to washing the laundry and hanging it out to dry, and there I was big as a house! We were all mad as hornets because there weren’t any new girls coming in to help—”
“There weren’t any new girls coming in? Why?” Grace is intent.
Mrs. George shrugs. “I haven’t any idea.”
Grace hesitates, dejected, then brightens. “Do you know if Dessa or Dovey Mae or Daisy stayed in the south wing, on the first floor, in…”
I elbow her. She mustn’t reveal that she’s been at the Harrow Home herself. She trails off, but Mrs. George doesn’t seem to notice. She’s lost in memories.
“I was up on the second floor. Dovey Mae was down the hall. I don’t know about the others.” She fidgets with the lace trim on her housedress. “It was a long time ago, and I was eager to forget.”
“You don’t know what became of any of them?” For a moment, her lips thinning with impatience, Grace looks a bit like her father. “You didn’t keep in touch? Even with Dessa?”
“No. It wasn’t the sort of place you wanted to remember.” Mrs. George scoffs. “Although there were several articles in the newspaper about Daisy’s disappearance. Back when it first happened.”
Daisy Wheeler disappeared? Grace goes still. Could Daisy be our ghost?
“One of the girls went missing?” I ask.
“It turns out, she ran off,” Mrs. George explains.
“She snuck away from the Home in the dead of the night. There was no note, nothing. Her mother was convinced something terrible had happened to her. But then her father died, a year later, and Daisy wrote to her mother. It turned out she was in New York City, working in a nightclub. There was an article in the paper about it. ‘Rock Hall Runaway Turns Up in the Big Apple.’”
Oh. Grace and I exchange disappointed glances.
Mrs. George cocks her head. “I hear the baby. If that’s all…”
“One more thing.” Grace fumbles in her pocketbook, then holds out the bracelet, the tarnished bronze gleaming in the sun. “Do you recognize this?”
To her credit, Mrs. George gives it a good long look. “I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“Do you think it could have belonged to Dessa? Or Dovey Mae?” Grace presses.
“I doubt it was Dovey Mae’s. She was a real tomboy. Got into it with the warden because she wanted to wear trousers, and he wouldn’t allow it.”
That certainly sounds like Mr. Harrow. How dare girls have legs.
Mrs. George rises. “The baby will be awake any moment, if he isn’t already.” She walks toward the door.
I follow her cue like any good Miss Parker’s girl, but boarding school has never felt so far away. “Thank you for your time.”
Reluctantly, Grace puts the bracelet back into her pocketbook and stands. “One last question. Please. Did you see much of the matron while you were there?”
“Mrs. Harrow? No. She did most of the cooking, but I didn’t work in the kitchen.
” Sadie pauses beside the front door. Her jaw is set, but her hands are shaking.
“My husband doesn’t know about that part of my life, girls, and I would prefer to keep it that way.
I answered your questions as best I could.
I hope that I can trust your discretion? ”
“Of course.” I can’t imagine being married for years, having three children together, and keeping such an enormous secret. I suppose women do it all the time. “But Mr. George seems like a nice man.”
“Even nice men don’t want to marry a girl who got knocked up by her tennis coach when she was fifteen.
” For a moment, pretty Mrs. George looks hard.
As though she’d gladly garrote the man with his own racket strings.
Then it’s gone, like a cloud passing over the sun.
“I was a fool. I thought he loved me. And now I have to see him every Sunday at church. Let that be a lesson to you, girls.”
My heart aches. “You won’t hear from us again. Right, Gertie?”
“Right,” Grace says quickly. “Thank you. Truly.”
Mrs. George opens the door, and Grace and I go out into the bright sunshine.
Grace sighs as we head down the sidewalk. “I should have asked outright whether the matron was expecting! Or if Dessa or Dovey Mae had dark hair,” she whispers. “That baby was not crying! She just wanted us to leave.”
“Well, can you blame her?”
“I guess not.” Grace beams. “Dessa Slaughter. Dovey Mae Martin. One of them is my mother, Rose. We’re going to find her!”
I look over my shoulder. Behind us, in the doorway of her pretty house, I get one last glimpse of Sadie Haddaway as she buries her face in her hands and sobs.