Chapter Thirty-One. Grace #2
Mrs. Wheeler is riffling through her papers. She pulls out a tattered yellow envelope with her address written in fancy, loopy cursive.
“After Daisy ran off, her dad got sick. He passed the next summer. I got behind on the bills. Was afraid I’d have to sell the place.
It might not look like much, but it’s all I’ve got.
” She waves the envelope triumphantly. “Then, a month after he passed, I got this. They came once a month, regular, like clockwork. Always with money inside. Not a lot, mind you. But something. Enough I could make ends meet once I went back to work.”
“When did they stop coming?” Rose asks.
“Back in May. She’s missed two months now. I’m afraid something’s happened to her.” Mrs. Wheeler’s shoulders slump.
“Did you try writing to her?” I ask.
“No return address.” She waves the envelope again. “Always postmarked New York City. But that’s a big place.”
“Did she say what club she was singing in?” Rose wonders.
“No. The letter from the Harrow Home—that was the last real, newsy sort of letter. Then nothing for a whole year. I thought she was dead, you know. Then I got that envelope full of cash. There was a note, too.” She pulls it out of the envelope.
It’s only a few typewritten lines; I read them over her shoulder.
Dear Ma: I’m in New York City now, singing in a nightclub like I always dreamed.
Don’t worry. I love you. “No more notes after that, just the money. But that’s all right. ”
“It must have been a great comfort to you.” Rose’s voice sounds funny.
“It is. It was.” Gently, Mrs. Wheeler slides the note back into the envelope. “I don’t need the money so much anymore. But I liked knowing she was okay.”
Rose coughs again. I turn around, annoyed. She jerks her head toward the corner of the desk, where a framed photo sits among the bills and correspondence and ashtrays.
It’s a photo of the ghost.
The photograph is black and white, but her dark eyes, her pale skin, her nose, her dark bobbed hair …
It’s her. Her gaping red mouth is closed in a smile that’s more of a smirk.
She seems two seconds away from saying something cutting.
Her face is a little sharper, like her mother’s, but her pregnancy could account for the later roundness.
She’s even wearing the same gold filigree earrings.
“Is that Daisy?” Rose asks, gesturing.
Mrs. Wheeler picks up the photograph. “She was a pretty girl, wasn’t she?
A good girl, too, except for that business with Jacob’s boy.
She told me he attacked her, you know. Forced himself on her.
Bill threatened to beat the stuffing out of him, but the boy said she’d been willing, that he hadn’t been the first and who knew how many there’d been before him.
Bill said either she went to the Harrow Home or she went out on the street, but either way she wasn’t going to stay under his roof with a bastard …
He was awful hard on her. What she wrote about a cat being a better mother …
that stuck with me. Maybe I should’ve took up for her more …
But she forgave me, didn’t she? Maybe not enough to come home.
But enough that she wanted to make sure I was all right. ”
Mrs. Wheeler puts out her cigarette in the ashtray on her desk. “I’m sorry she wasn’t the girl you were looking for.”
“Thank you,” Rose says politely. “We ought to be going.”
“It was kinda nice, talking to you girls about her,” Mrs. Wheeler says. “I just hope she’s all right. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe she’s out of work and ashamed she can’t send money. Maybe she’ll come home now.”
Daisy is not all right. Daisy is not coming home again, because Daisy is dead as a doornail.
But if she’s haunting the Harrow Home, that means she never made it to New York City.
So who’s been sending Mrs. Wheeler cash and false hope all this time?
Rose hooks her arm through mine and makes for the door, towing me along behind her. “Thank you again.”
I wait until we’re back in the car to let out a series of swears. “She has to be dead. That photograph—the ghost looks exactly like her!”
“Oh, she’s dead, all right.” Rose ties her blue scarf back over her curls. She looks grim. “I don’t think she ever left the Harrow Home.”
D for Daisy. And she led me right to the bracelet that Aunt Emmeline gave her.
I slump back against the warm leather and sigh. “Maybe whoever’s been sending her mom cash forged that letter about the baby.”
Rose raises her eyebrows. “And told her that a cat would’ve made a better mother?
I don’t think so. That’s not the tone someone with a guilty conscience would take.
And someone feels very guilty about Daisy.
Guilty enough to send her mom cash every month for sixteen years.
” Rose taps her nails against the steering wheel.
“The question is, who? And what happened to make them stop?”
“That’s your question?” I look at Rose in disbelief. “Why would Dad report her missing if she died in childbirth?”
Rose meets my gaze. “Your dad hated Daisy. He blamed her for the rift with his sister. For meddling. I—I don’t think she died in childbirth, Grace.”
I know what she’s implying, but—
“I think your dad killed her. Maybe that’s why Emmeline ran away.
Maybe she found out, and she thought the storm was less dangerous than staying in that house with her brother.
Or maybe he killed Emmeline, too, and staged it to make it look like she took the boat out. They never found her body, right?”
“Right.” My voice is hoarse. I twist my hands together in my lap. Dad can be cruel, he can be violent—but is he capable of murdering his own sister?
In my heart of hearts, I believe he is.
And I believe he killed Daisy.
There’s a reason the ghost wants revenge on my father.
Now we just have to prove it.