Chapter Twelve #3
“I wonder if anyone contacted her about this coming summer. Did she have a laptop? Maybe there are emails . . .”
Banks chuckled. “Maxine didn’t like electronics. She wrote everything down by hand.”
“But—how did she function? Order supplies and send emails?”
“There were no emails. Maxine did not live in the electronic world.” He laughed. “When she needed something, she picked up the phone and made a phone call.”
“But that’s so . . .”
“Old school. Yes, indeed, it was. But that was Maxine. She didn’t like the anonymous aspects of electronic communications.
She didn’t want her information out there in the netherworld, as she was fond of saying, so she ignored it.
If you wanted to talk to Maxine, you called her on the phone or you drove out to the camp.
Her one concession was a cell phone in case of emergencies, but I suspect it needed charging more often than not. ”
Kit’s head was spinning. There were so many questions, so much she didn’t know. She felt a migraine coming on. “So how would we know if anyone was planning on showing up this summer?”
“I highly doubt she took any reservations. Remember she’d shut down for two years. Is there a chance that someone who’d camped there three or four years ago decided to come back and called to make a reservation? Sure. It’s possible. But Maxine would have told them the camp was closed.”
“Okay. That’s good to know.”
“Next question.”
“Maxine had made actual plans to marry Miles? Did her family know?”
“Oh, yes. Her parents were relieved when she told them they were going to get married. Her mother was helping her plan the wedding. They’d be married right there at the camp, and—”
Kit interrupted his thought. “Why relieved? You said her parents were relieved.”
His eyes shifted to a pen on his desk and he picked it up and rolled it between his fingers.
“I guess they thought she’d never get married, she’d never leave the camp, and I suppose that worried them.
Sadly, that’s exactly what happened. She’d been planning to move to Chicago with Miles, and I guess they thought that would be a great life for her. ”
“So they really must have liked him?”
He seemed to hesitate for a moment. “I believe they did, once they’d gotten to know him. The first two summers, I think they weren’t sure of him, but over time, they did approve. In the end, they thought it was for the best. Of course, they didn’t live to see what happened.”
“I’m confused. I thought it had been a whirlwind romance. That he stayed there that one summer and they fell in love and everything happened in that first year that they met. That he went back to Chicago, then decided to come back to marry her.”
“Oh, no, no. He went back to Chicago at the end of the season, yes, but he came back every year for, oh, let’s see, at least two years—maybe three. Remember, he was writing constantly, year-round. Maxine told me he wrote at a feverish pace, and that he wrote all of his first drafts here.”
Kit rubbed her temples.
“You’re looking overwhelmed, Kit.”
“I’m trying to put together a timeline in my head of when everything happened. I need to figure out what happened between my mother and my aunt, and when.”
Unexpectedly he asked, “Did you have dinner plans?”
“No, I—”
Banks stood. “Let’s walk on down to Ruthie’s. Always good to be early on meat loaf night. The place fills up fast and she sells out by six.”
Later, having dined on the absolute best meat loaf she’d ever tasted—and yes, they did sell out by six—Kit sat against the headboard in her room at the inn, a hardcover book she’d grabbed from the inn’s library shelf on her lap, her notebook atop the book, and tried to work up a list of what she knew.
The first entry on her list: Miles appears at the camp for the first time.
After that, she wrote down what she considered significant years in the relationship between Maxine and Miles.
She didn’t know for certain how many years there had been, but she knew the date the affair ended: November 26, 1969. The day Miles died.
Kit stared at the date. Almost six months before she was born in late February 1970.
She knew her parents had already moved to Pennsylvania before she was born, but had that been before or after Miles’s death?
Had Maxine grieved the loss of her love without the comfort of her sister and her parents?
Had their feud already erupted by then? She’d hoped to pry some clues out of Banks over dinner, but he was too cagey for her.
Imagine, she mused, being outwitted by a man in his eighties.
It was so frustrating. She knew of only one person who knew, and he wasn’t talking.
But there was one person who might know something of interest, and she just might be willing to spill a bean or two.
Kit picked up her phone and found Greta’s number, called it, and was forced to leave a voicemail.
“Greta, hi. This is Kit Porterfield, Maxine’s niece. I was wondering if you’d have some time to get together with me this week so we could get to know each other a little better . . .”