Chapter Thirty-Five #2
“And don’t forget I have that big silver tea service still in my car,” Greta said.
“Why would someone living out here have a silver tea service?” Beth asked.
“Someone—our great-grandma, maybe—liked to invite friends for afternoon tea,” Kit suggested. “Or maybe she had teas for the campers? It would seem a little odd, in a camp like this, but maybe not. Remember, some of the earlier guests were from well-to-do families from cities to the south.”
“How do you know they had money?” Abby asked.
“They were able to leave the cities where they lived, in the middle of summer, to spend a few weeks for a ‘wilderness experience.’ That’s straight from one of the brochures I found in the desk,” Kit explained.
“They’d travel by train to get up to Maine, then they’d have to have hired a wagon or something to bring them west to the camp.
How many working men back then do you think could afford to take off for weeks at a time and pay for a family vacation like that? ”
“Good point.” Beth nodded.
Greta nudged another box, longer and wider, in Kit’s direction. “Open this one.”
When she opened it, Kit recognized the pearls she’d seen draped around the neck of an affluent-looking woman in a photo.
“I’m not sure who that is,” Greta said.
“Well, someone had exquisite taste in jewelry.” Kit held up the long strand. “I think this should be Beth’s. She’s a June baby and pearl is her birthstone.”
Beth reached for the pearls and draped them around her neck.
“You look like a princess, Aunt Beth,” Abby told her. “Or a duchess.”
“I do feel a bit royal.” Beth wrapped the long strand around her neck three times. “Definitely fit for a queen. I wonder who these belonged to. Or where they came from.” She examined the necklace carefully. “I bet these are really old.”
“No doubt they are. I remember Maxine telling me that one of her great-great-grandfathers was a sea captain. Maybe he brought those back for his wife.” Greta handed Kit a small velvet box. “And this last one’s for you, Kit.”
Kit set the box on the table and opened it. Inside sat a platinum band with a large emerald in the center, emerald in cut, perfect in color.
“Oh, it’s beautiful!” Kit took it from the box and held it up.
“Put it on.”
Kit slipped it onto the ring finger of her right hand. It was too big but fit her middle finger perfectly.
“Your fingers are smaller than hers,” Greta observed.
When Kit looked up, questioning, Greta said, “Maxine. It was her engagement ring.”
Kit took off the ring that had promised Maxine a lifetime of love. It was beautiful, but in the end, it had not brought her good luck.
“I think you should wear that one. Maxine wore it every day. She never took it off,” Greta said. “I think wherever she is, Maxine would be delighted to know you have it and that you’re wearing it. I’m thinking she knew you’d come someday. I think she was holding on to it for you all along.”
“If she never took it off, how did it get to you?” Abby asked.
“When Jake Geller got the call to come get Maxine’s body—he’s the undertaker here in town—he said she’d given him written instructions regarding her cremation months before.
She’d even given him that blue-and-white urn she wanted her ashes in.
She told him that he was to remove her ring before she went to the crematorium and to give it to me to hold on to.
I said, For how long? And he said, She didn’t say.
So I held on to it along with the other pieces that had been in her room.
I figured she’d let me know what to do with it soon enough. And then there you were.”
“Did you know?” Kit asked softly. “That she was my mother?”
Greta sighed. “I didn’t know, but I suspected something real odd was going on.
Remember I told you I’d come to the house to see Maxine, and Barbie sent me away, said Maxine didn’t want to see me or anyone else?
Then not long after that, Barbie and Ed moved away practically in the middle of the night, and the next thing you know, Barbie has a baby girl?
I can tell you, when Barbie answered the door the day I came out here, she was no more pregnant than I am right now.
And the state I found Maxine in after Barbie left?
” Greta shook her head. “I strongly suspected the baby Barbie had not given birth to was a baby she took from here. And there was something so familiar about you that first time I saw you in Ruthie’s.
It struck me how you carried yourself like Maxine.
You walk like Maxine. And then I saw your Abby.
She looks a lot like Maxine—she has her smile—and I’m not the only person who noticed.
” Greta took a deep breath. “And then there was this: When I found Maxine in such a state after Barbie and Ed left, Maxine kept saying, She’s gone.
I thought she was talking about Barbie, but now, I believe she meant you. ”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know. I just suspected. I figured the truth would be in the DNA. I didn’t know about the baby in the blanket chest, though. That was sure a surprise.”
“I hope I never have another surprise like that one.”
“Oh Lord, me either. Anyway, I hope you’re okay with it. I know Maxine got crazy there for a while, but she had good reason. And she wasn’t a bad person, Kit. I don’t want you to hate her or be angry with her forever.”
“I have a lot of feelings about Maxine, but hate has never been one of them. I am angry, though, for a lot of reasons. The lies, for one thing. I wish my mother had relented and let me know Maxine as my aunt—and by my mother, I mean Barbie. I think I would have loved Maxine.”
“You would have. There’s a lot of her in you.” Greta smiled. “I mean the good things, not the wacko stuff.”
Kit laughed. “I appreciate that.”
“Wow, that’s some story,” Abby said softly. A moment later she brightened and said, “Do you really think I look like Maxine?”
When everyone assured her that she did, she said, “It’s so odd to think about her being my grandmother. Especially since I knew Nana so well. When I think of my grandmother, I think of Nana, not Maxine. I don’t know if I ever will.”
“You’re confusing acknowledging Maxine as your grandmother, and calling her Grandmother.” Kit turned the emerald ring over and over in her fingers. “Same as I know she was my mother, but I could never call her that. Mom was my mother.”
“I wonder if Mom didn’t want you to know about Maxine—especially about Maxine as your birth mother—because she was afraid you’d want to be with her instead of Mom and Dad.
Like she didn’t want you to think of anyone as your mom but her.
” Beth put the watch back into its box. “Like maybe you’d prefer Maxine to her because Maxine was so special—everyone said so.
I bet Mom recognized her sister wasn’t like other women. ”
“I think that’s the answer, Mom. Remember I said how hard it would have been for Nana not to have been jealous of her sister?
I think she maybe tried not to be, and lived with her feelings, but when it came to you, she wasn’t about to take that chance.
That you’d be drawn to Maxine the same way everyone else had been. ”
“That’s very astute of you, Abby.” Beth turned to Kit. “I think your daughter may have just figured out why Mom and Dad had Banks write that no-way-out agreement, and why she lied about being an only child.”
Kit nodded slowly. “It’s all falling into place now.
I can see Mom reacting that way, and Maxine, in her grief over Miles’s death, being willing to let Mom take me.
Mom would have wanted the agreement made so that Maxine could never contact me, which Mom surely knew her sister would do once she came to her senses. ”
“And just think, all this came out because I wanted a quilt from that blanket chest,” Greta piped up.
A while later, after they’d emptied Greta’s trunk of the remaining items she’d stored in her house, Kit told Greta about finding Miles’s last book, how it was all about his and Maxine’s love story, and her conversations with the agent, which had ended with Kit agreeing to explore movie rights for the once-lost-now-found manuscript.
“So you’re gonna be a very wealthy lady,” Greta said. “Your father’s work is going to be made into a movie!”
“It’s hard to think of him as my father. As a matter of fact, I don’t think of him that way at all.”
“He was a good man. You would have liked him, and I know he would have liked you, too. He would have been proud to have been your father,” Greta told her, then added, “He loved Maxine very much. She was his world.”
“I know,” Kit said. “I read the book.”