Chapter Thirty-One. Grace
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
GRACE
Somewhere around Chestertown, I switch on the radio and hum along with Glenn Miller. Rosie and I have been riding in companionable silence since we left the hotel. Or is it a worried silence? She’s gnawing on her lower lip, smudging her Fatal Apple Red.
“Are you all right?” I ask.
“There’s something I have to tell you.” Rose darts a glance at me. “There is no cat.”
I squint at her. “What cat? What are you talking about?”
“It wasn’t a cat that scratched your dad’s face.
It was me—her—the ghost.” Rose looks at me again, but I’m shocked into silence.
“I was so mad. No one’s ever spoken to me like that.
Treated me like I was perverse—sinful—wrong.
” Her face crumples, and I hate Dad for making her feel that way.
At the same time, I feel a little relieved that it’s not just me the ghost has inhabited now.
“I didn’t mean to attack him. I sort of blinked, and there was a scratch across his face, and my nail was broken, so I knew I’d done it, but I didn’t remember doing it. ”
“That’s how it was with me and the lipstick on the mirror.” My mind chugs slowly. Rose scratched Dad’s face. There was no feral cat. So … “What about Stanley? Did you—?”
“No. I took one of Auntie’s sleeping pills, went to bed with a book at nine, and slept till Lou came in at six thirty. I would know if I’d gone down to the pool. I would have woken up.”
She’s chewing on her lip again. She isn’t certain of it. Neither am I.
But if I suspect Rose, I have to suspect myself, too.
The ghost has been all over the cottage the last few days.
I saw her in the bathroom mirror when I was brushing my teeth, in the reflection of the toaster, in the dull gleam of the frying pan while I was doing the dishes.
It’s made me jumpy and irritable with everybody.
I want to believe that Rose would know if she’d done it. That I would know. That neither of us is responsible for the death of the boy I once loved (and sometimes hated).
I remember Stan’s face in his silk-lined casket: pale and waxy and wrong.
If there’s no cat, a person raked their nails across his cheek. I don’t want to believe it could have been Rose or me. Who does that leave?
I snap my fingers. “Magnolia! I bet she’s the one who mauled him.”
“Maggie?” Rose is disbelieving. “Really? I know you don’t like her, but…”
“It’s not that.” It’s partly that. “She was always making up to Stan, giggling at every little thing he said. We both know he wasn’t that funny.
And she wasn’t in bed when I woke up, after I left him by the pool.
What if she saw him and went out to flirt with him?
Maybe things got out of hand, like the sheriff said.
Stan was really sauced. And she was hysterical that morning, remember? ”
“It was a bit much,” Rose agrees.
We’re quiet as we follow the signs toward Rock Hall, the little fishing town where Daisy Wheeler’s parents live. Or where they lived seventeen years ago, at least. Kath Johnson said Daisy’s parents worked at the cannery, so we stop there first. The receptionist gives us Mrs. Wheeler’s address.
“What’s the plan?” Rose asks.
We know that Daisy Wheeler became fast friends with my aunt Emmeline, much to Dad’s displeasure; they made plans to go to Europe after Em turned eighteen; then Daisy ran away after she gave birth.
Emmeline was so upset, she took her sailboat out in a storm and drowned.
A year later, Daisy turned up in New York City.
The ghost led me to the letter D and Em’s bracelet hidden under the floorboards.
The clues lead to Daisy … except that she’s alive and well.
She can’t be the ghost, but could she be our mother?
Maybe I’m completely wrong, and the ghost is unrelated to Cooper and me. Still. Something drives me on, a feeling that I’m close, but there’s something missing, some piece of this jigsaw puzzle that hasn’t snapped into place yet.
“I want to get Daisy’s address in New York City,” I explain as Rose turns off onto a smaller avenue. “I’ll write to her. Ask her about that summer. She won’t have any loyalty to Dad.”
The sun glints off the Bay beyond a cluster of clapboard houses. The town is built right on the water, with a marina up ahead. Rose peers at the house numbers and stops in front of 181: a square brown cottage with a concrete stoop and a postage-stamp yard. She parks the car along the narrow street.
I’m about to open the car door when I’m seized with a sudden fear. “What if she’s here?”
“Who?” Rose takes off her blue headscarf and fixes her curls in the mirror.
“Daisy! What if she came back?” My nerves are thrumming, heart racing, breath strangling in my throat. “What if she’s not the ghost, but she is my mom?”
I could be about to meet my birth mom for the first time, and I have a spot on my chin and a dress that’s been let out twice.
“Grace. You have to breathe.” Rose looks concerned. “We don’t know if any of that is true.”
No, Daisy is connected to this mystery somehow.
I feel it in my bones. If Magnolia said that, I would roll my eyes and scoff at her for being simple.
But I feel a deep sense that something momentous is about to happen.
I catch Rose’s pitying gaze and shift against the buttery leather seat, itchy and uncomfortable.
Jesus, I must seem pathetic. Desperate for a new family. For a father who isn’t a monster.
“It’ll be okay. I’m right here, no matter what,” Rose says.
It’s so kind, I almost burst into tears again.
Rose lets me check my lipstick and my pompadour in the side mirror. Then, together, we troop up to the front door. I knock. What if no one’s home? What if we’ve come all this way for nothing? I’m about to knock again when the door is wrenched open.
The woman is small and wiry, with permed dark hair and a sharp, foxlike face. She wears a navy housedress and sensible brown pumps. I don’t see myself in her features, but that’s not proof.
“Can I help you?” Her voice is low and gravelly.
“Are you Mrs. Wheeler?” She seems the right age to be Daisy’s mother.
“Whatever you’re selling, girls, I’m not interested.”
I slam my palm against the door before she can close it in my face. “No! We’re not—we’re here to talk about Daisy.”
“Daisy?” Her hand flies to her heart. She backs into the parlor, which is shadowy and old-fashioned, with the drapes drawn and heavy slipcovered furniture. She picks up a pack of Chesterfields and lights one with shaking hands. “Did she send you? Where is she?”
What does she mean? Is Daisy missing again?
I step inside, Rose close behind me. “We were hoping to get in touch with her.”
Mrs. Wheeler collapses into her armchair. “How do you know my Daisy?”
“Are you all right? Can I get you a glass of water?” Rose asks.
“I’m fine.” The woman exhales a cloud of smoke and gathers herself with visible effort. “Is she in some kind of trouble? Does she owe you money? If that’s the case, I can’t help you. I don’t know where she is. I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
“My name is Grace,” I blurt out. I can’t bear to beat around the bush. “My twin brother and I were born at the Harrow Home in the summer of 1930. I think your daughter might be our mother.”
Mrs. Wheeler stares at me, and my heart races. Is this woman my grandmother? But she shakes her head. “No.” And again, firmer this time: “No, that can’t be.”
“We know Daisy stayed at the Harrow Home. When she ran away, the newspaper said that was her last known whereabouts,” Rose explains.
She went to the library in town one afternoon (while I was busy canoodling with Stanley) and looked at the back issues of the newspaper till she found the article about the runaway from Rock Hall.
“Oh, Bill was so mad about that article. He said now everybody would know what a bad girl we raised. But I didn’t care, if it helped us find her.” Mrs. Wheeler shakes her head. “Yes, Daisy was there. But she only had one baby. A boy. God knows where he is now. My only grandchild.”
“How can you be sure?” I hate the desperation in my voice.
Behind me, Rose coughs. Is she trying to tell me to ease off, or is she irritated by the cloud of smoke in the stuffy room?
“Because Daisy wrote me a letter,” Mrs. Wheeler says pertly.
“Said it felt like he was tearing her in two, but she’d had a beautiful baby boy with a head full of dark hair.
” She eyes my blond pompadour. “He came a few weeks early, so he was a tad jaundiced. Healthy otherwise. She said it was probably for the best that she was giving him up, because she didn’t know how to be a mother.
Said she hadn’t had much of an example, a cat would have made a better mother than me, sending her away like I had. ”
Cooper and I had dark hair when we were babies.
I’ve seen pictures. It turned honey blond as we got older.
But surely Daisy would remember giving birth to a second baby?
The nurses at the Harrow Home didn’t knock the girls out with twilight sleep.
And Birdie O’Neill is an old battle-axe, but I don’t think she’s capable of doping a girl with laudanum to steal her baby.
Birdie was hiding something with her phony claims that she couldn’t remember our birth, though. Maybe she turned a blind eye while Dad delivered a second baby himself and hid it—me—away, so he could pass us off as his.
He must be disappointed he went to all that trouble and only got me and Cooper out of it.
“The papers said that she wrote to you again, from New York City. That she was working in a nightclub,” Rose says.
“She was. Maybe she still is.” Mrs. Wheeler stubs out her cigarette and immediately lights another.
She stands, her knees creaking, then walks over to a cluttered little writing desk tucked in the corner.
Confused, I trail after her through a cloud of smoke.
Rose gives another delicate cough, and I roll my eyes. She can be prissy sometimes.