Blackberry Winter: A Novel

by Sarah Jio

  I smiled. “Well then, you’re lucky. Do you know how many people hate their jobs?”

  He hopped over the counter with a box of dry cat food in his hands, pouring a generous portion into a white dish on the floor near the door. “Pascal,” he called. “Here, kitty.”

  Moments later an overweight black-and-white cat appeared, eyeing me cautiously before settling in for his meal.

  “Can I make you something?” Dominic asked, turning to the enormous espresso machine. It felt funny being the sole customer at the café, sort of like being backstage at a theater before curtain time.

  “Oh, you don’t have to make anything for me,” I said.

  He turned on the coffee grinder and its hum filled the air with a comforting lull. “I insist.”

  I grinned. “Well…”

  “It’s no trouble,” he said. “I’m making myself a cappuccino. You like hot chocolate, right?”

  “You remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” he said. “And I always see you sprinkling cinnamon on top. Would you like me to mix some spices into the cocoa? I could make a Mexican hot chocolate. You’d really like it.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  He spun around to retrieve a canister of cocoa powder. “I don’t mean to pry,” he said, “but why is it that your husband…” He paused. “He is your husband, right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Right,” he continued. “Why does he always give you a hard time about ordering hot chocolate?”

  I smirked. “So you’ve heard him tease me, I take it?”

  Dominic nodded.

  I shrugged. “I’m married to Seattle’s biggest coffee snob.”

  Ethan had lived in Seattle his entire life, born and bred. He’d grown up with the espresso culture and was suspicious of anyone who didn’t share his love of fine coffee, or worse, anyone who pronounced espresso “expresso.” Our kitchen was home to eleven French presses, a percolator from nineteenth-century Italy, two traditional coffeemakers, and an espresso machine that cost more than most people’s cars.

  “So he’s tried to convert you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Ethan just doesn’t understand why I can’t get into coffee.”

  He handed me a brimming mug, artfully swirled with cinnamon-dusted whipped cream. “For you,” he said, grinning. “And for the record, I don’t think there’s anything shameful about being a connoisseur of hot cocoa.”

  I smiled, slurping a generous mouthful of whipped cream. “I like the way you put that,” I said. “‘Connoisseur of cocoa.’”

  Pascal purred at my feet before sauntering back upstairs. I eyed the old brick fireplace across the room. The mortar crumbled in places, but a painted tile just above the hearth caught my eye. I squinted to get a better look, but couldn’t make out the scene painted on the ivory-colored placard. Funny, all the times I’d visited the café, I’d never noticed it. I made a note to inspect it more closely on my next visit.

  “So what if it’s not a good business venture?” I said. “It’s the coolest café in town.”

  Dominic gazed around the little room and nodded. “It is a special building, isn’t it?” he said, grinning. “It’s actually kind of shocking that someone didn’t gut the place and turn it into a Starbucks.”

  I smiled, glancing at my watch. “Well,” I said, “look at me, keeping you like this. I better get back out there and brave the weather. I have an editor who needs a story.”

  “Where are you headed?”

  “To the Herald building on Alaskan Way,” I said. “If I can get there.”

  “Let me walk you,” he offered, a little self-consciously. “At least until you find a cab.”

  “I’d love that,” I said, and together we made our way out to the snowy streets.

  Despite the blizzard churning outside, the newsroom bustled as if the thermometer registered a balmy seventy degrees. It didn’t surprise me, though. Newspaper reporters rarely play hooky. Dedication is in their blood, which is why I wondered if I was really cut out for the job. So much had changed since last May, since…I wondered if I still had what it took.

  “There you are!” I turned to find Abby approaching my cubicle. The paper’s research editor, she had a sense of humor I’d warmed to immediately. On my very first day at the Herald, she had walked up to my desk after my first staff meeting, looked me in the eye, and said, “I like you. You don’t wear pointy shoes.” She then inhaled the air around my desk. “But do you smoke?”

  “No,” I said, a little stunned.

  “Good,” she replied. Her face told me I passed her friendship test. “I’m Abby.” At that moment, I knew we’d be instant friends.

  Abby had a knack for finding obscure facts about anything or anyone. The color of the former mayor’s daughter’s hair, for instance, or the soup served at a now-defunct restaurant on Marion Street in 1983—you name it, she could find it. She had come to my rescue more than a few times in the past few months when I was on deadline but lacked the material I needed to pull together a decent story. “Frank’s looking for you,” she said with a knowing smile.

  I rubbed my forehead. “Is he chewing on his pencil?”

  “Yes,” Abby replied. “Sound the alarms. I believe I saw pencil chewing.”

  “Great,” I said, shrinking lower into my chair to avoid being seen above my cubicle walls. Abby and I both knew not to cross Frank when he chewed his pencil. It signaled a fire-breathing editor on the loose.

  “Do you know what he wants?” Abby asked, sinking into my guest chair.

  I turned on my computer and watched as my monitor slowly lit up, illuminating a photo of Ethan and me in Mexico three years earlier. How happy we looked. I sighed and turned back to Abby. “Frank wants me to write about the storm.”

  She shrugged. “So? Doesn’t seem like such a big deal to me.”

  “That’s just it,” I said. “There’s nothing big about it. You can’t write a story about weather—a good one, anyway.” I collected some loose papers on my desk and straightened them into a neat stack, shaking my head. “I don’t know, Abs. Maybe it’s me. I can’t seem to get excited about any story these days.”

  “Honey, then take yourself off the piece,” she said. “Do you want me to talk to Frank about giving you some days off? You know, you never really stopped to rest after”—she paused to search my face, for permission, perhaps to say what came next—“after your hospital stay. Besides, unlike me, you, my dear, have job security. You’re a Kensington, after all. You can call the shots.”

  I wadded up a press release on my desk and tossed it in Abby’s direction with a grin. “Very cute,” I said. “I may have married a Kensington, but I am not a Kensington.”

  Ethan’s family owned the newspaper, one of the last family-owned dailies in the country. I’d been writing under my given name, Claire Aldridge, before I met him, so it didn’t make sense professionally to change it. Besides, I rather liked the statement it made to his very traditional parents, Glenda and Edward Kensington. Both shareholders in the newspaper, they managed the business from afar, leaving Ethan to run the day-to-day affairs, since his sister, Leslie, had no interest in holding down a real job, with her schedule studded with society events and salon appointments. His grandfather, Warren, the paper’s patriarchal editor in chief, checked in less now that he was in his eighties and in ailing health, but his name remained at the top of the masthead.

  The newspaper, founded by Ethan’s great-grandfather at the turn of the century, was a family institution, one all Kensingtons, including our future children, if we had them, were expected to participate in.

  “Well,” Abby continued, “I still think you should play the Kensington card and get some R and R. It’s been a tough year. Why not give yourself some time to regroup, rest?”

  While I was quick to change the subject when others brought up the past, it didn’t bother me when Abby did. “Thanks,” I said, nodding. “But I’m fine. Really.”

  I
looked up to see Frank’s face peeking over the top of my cubicle, pencil firmly planted in mouth. “There you are,” he said. I could hear the urgency in his voice. “Anything to report?”

  I cocked my head to the right, wondering if pencils still contained the type of lead that causes poisoning. Perhaps that could explain Frank’s slightly neurotic behavior. “Report?”

  “On the story.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “I was just, uh, talking to Abby about that.”

  “Good,” he said, tucking the pencil behind his ear. “Get me an update by this afternoon, if you can.”

  “Will do,” I replied, nodding as Frank spun around and walked back to his office.

  I turned to Abby. “Help.”

  She clasped her hands in her lap. “So, a story about a snowstorm.”

  “Yup.”

  “Remember what I said about taking some time off?”

  “Not going to do it.”

  She nodded. “All right, then, let’s get to work. Have you started interviewing?”

  I shook my head.

  “What’s your angle?”

  “I don’t have one.” I sighed in defeat, before remembering what Frank had said about the storm in 1933. “Frank wants to title the piece ‘Blackberry Winter.’”

  “Blackberry what?”

  I tried to focus. “Winter. It’s what forecasters call a late-season cold-weather event, I guess. Frank said something about a similar storm happening on the same day in 1933. It practically crippled the city.”

  Abby sat up straighter in her chair. “You’re kidding.”

  I shrugged. “Frank has this crazy idea that the storm has returned in some significant way. He wants me to do a then-and-now exposé. Can you believe that? A feature on weather. I can’t think of a more dull assignment.”

  Abby shook her head. “Dull? Claire, you can’t be serious. This is good stuff. Have you even started looking into what went on in that snowstorm in 1933?”

  I shook my head. “Honestly, Abby, I think I’d rather go clean the toilet than start researching this story. I’m in trouble.”

  “All right,” she said. “Give me an hour, and I’ll find you something good. You know I love an excuse to search the archives.” She looked wistful. “The 1930s and the Great Depression—I’m sure I’ll find something good.”

  I shrugged. “I hope so.”

  Abby stood up and nodded with assurance. “Order Thai. I’ll be back at noon.”

  “I’ll try,” I said, poking my head out into the hallway. “Not sure if any delivery guys will be driving in this weather.”

  “Tell them you’ll tip forty percent,” she said. “Good research requires pad Thai.”

  Ethan’s office, on the other side of the newsroom, was locked when I walked over to see him a half hour later. As I knocked on his door, it occurred to me that I had begun to feel more like his employee than his wife. In the past few months, we’d shared a bed, but little else.

  “Hi, Claire,” Ethan’s assistant, Tracy, said from her desk a few feet away. She gestured to Ethan’s door. “You just missed him, sorry. He had a meeting, then he’s off to a lunch meeting.”

  “Oh,” I said, forcing a smile. “With who?”

  Tracy paused for an uncomfortable few seconds. “Um, I think he said he was joining Cassandra at that new Italian place down the street.”

  “In this weather? They’re open?”

  “They opened especially for her,” Tracy said, her tone indicating slight annoyance. “She’s doing a review, you know.”

  I helped myself to a piece of butterscotch from Tracy’s candy dish, tossing the wrapper into a nearby trash can. “And Ethan is moonlighting as an assistant food critic?”

  Tracy shrugged. “She said something about gnocchi.”

  “Gnocchi.”

  She nodded.

  “He hates gnocchi.”

  Tracy gave me a sympathetic look.

  On paper, it made perfect sense that the managing editor of the paper would join the food critic for a tasting event. But Tracy and I both knew the truth: At that very moment, my husband was having lunch with his ex. “Thanks,” I said, collecting myself. “I’ll catch him later.”

  Up until recently, it hadn’t bothered me that Cassandra, the paper’s food critic and Ethan’s former girlfriend, worked three doors down, and that she seemed to delight in including him on her frequent lunch and dinner outings. But lately, well, I couldn’t help but worry. Cassandra, tall, blond—everything I wasn’t—hadn’t dated anyone seriously since they broke up, just a few months before Ethan and I had met. And the rumor among newspaper staff was that she had never got over him. I walked past her desk, also empty, and nervously tugged at my wedding ring.

  Lunch arrived at noon, and I tucked a twenty-dollar bill into the hand of the deliveryman, whose hat was covered in a fresh dusting of snow. “Thanks, ma’am,” he said, nearly bumping into Abby on his way out the door.

  “I smell Thai!” she exclaimed, clutching a thick file folder.

  I opened up a box of noodles smothered in peanut sauce, and the sweet scent wafted in the air. “One spring roll or two?”

  “Two,” Abby said, taking a seat on the floor, where she opened up the file folder and began spreading papers on the carpet. “Research makes me hungry. And just wait until you see what I found.”

  I handed a plate to her and took a seat beside her on the floor. “So?”

  “So,” she said, handing me a photocopied newspaper clipping dated May 7, 1933, “read this.”

  I scanned the first few paragraphs of the story, but nothing jumped out at me. “It’s just a roundup of the police blotter for the week,” I said. “Transients arrested, petty theft—am I missing something?”

  “Yes,” Abby said, before taking a bite of noodles. She pointed to a paragraph halfway down and I redirected my eyes. “Snow halts visit from Prince George.”

  “Really? You’re getting excited about a visit from a dull British monarch?”

  “Well, it’s the backstory that’s fascinating,” she said, handing me another news clipping. “Apparently, he was courting a Seattle woman. If it weren’t for the storm, Seattle may have had its very first princess.”

  I frowned.

  “No love for royals?”

  “Abs, I didn’t even have Diana fever when everyone had Diana fever,” I said, setting my half-eaten plate on my desk with a sigh. “There’s got to be something else.”

  I picked up the news clipping again and read it halfheartedly, hoping to find something, anything—and then my eyes stopped.

  “‘Three-year-old Seattle boy, Daniel Ray, reported missing on the morning of May 2, from his home in Seattle. Suspected runaway.’”

  “Sad,” Abby said. “Lost the day of the snowstorm.”

  I nodded. “My sister has a three-year-old. They don’t run away at that age.”

  “So you think he was abducted?” Abby asked, leaning in for a closer look at the article.

  “Well, it’s the only thing that really makes sense,” I said, standing up and taking a seat at my desk. “But let’s see what we can find out. I keyed the boy’s name into a library database and several results popped up. I clicked on the first, and scanned the page to find more details from the police. The boy’s mother was Vera Ray. I read quickly before turning to Abby. “She came home from work, and he had disappeared,” I said. “She found his teddy bear in the snow.” I placed my hand on my heart. “My God, how heartbreaking.”

  Abby nodded. “Do you think they ever found him?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, clicking through the remaining articles. “There doesn’t seem to be any conclusion here.”

  Abby leaned back against the wall near my file cabinet. “What about the mother?”

  I searched for her name, and clicked on the first result that came up. “Look,” I said. “Her name is in several police reports.” I selected all and sent them to the printer down the hall.

  I keyed
in the boy’s name again, and studied one of the article clippings more closely. “This is all from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, not the Herald. Did we not report on it?”

  Abby eyed the list of articles. “Oddly, it looks like we didn’t,” she said. “The Herald must have missed the story entirely.

  I clicked on another link, this one returning an article with a photograph of the young boy with light hair and plump cheeks. His big, round eyes stared back at me. I clutched my belly, feeling the familiar ache, and closed my eyes tightly.

  “Claire,” Abby whispered, “are you OK?”

  “I will be when I figure out what happened to this boy,” I said. I couldn’t explain it to her, or even to myself, but there was something about this child, little Daniel Ray from 1933, that spoke to my heart.

  Abby grinned. “So I take it you found your story?”

  “Yes,” I said without taking my eyes off the screen.

  Chapter 5

  VERA

  “There, now,” said someone hovering overhead. “Take a drink. It will do you good.”

  Where am I? Whose voice is that? I opened my eyes and the hazy scene slowly came into focus. Caroline. Tawny flames flickered in the fireplace. A scratchy wool blanket clung to my lap.

  “Auntie Vera, are you awake?” Little Eva, Caroline’s daughter, pressed her cheek against my chest. Not much older than Daniel, she possessed a level of maturity beyond her years.

  My eyes burned and my head ached. I clutched my feet in agony. They stung and throbbed like no other pain I’d felt.

  “Frostbite,” Caroline said softly. “You’re lucky we found you when we did. I’ve been bringing them back to room temperature for the last hour. I think we saved your toe.”

  She inspected my right foot, then placed a glass of water in my hands. “Drink.”

  I buried my face in the pillow on the sofa, but Caroline gently tilted my chin forward, pressing the glass to my lips. I let the fluid seep into my mouth, choking a little as the cool water washed down my parched throat.