by Ann Cook
Hope faced her. “My mother started out from the hotel on a day in October like today—about one o’clock.” For a moment she gazed at the block of nineteenth and early twentieth century houses, collecting her thoughts. “Mother would’ve been twenty-three then. In 1921 the train station was called Micanopy Junction. She probably got on the train in Jacksonville. A woman testified she saw her in one of the cars. Later she was seen at the station here. It’s long gone, of course. The woman said my mother looked around, like she was searching for someone.”
The pickup crept on down Cholokka Boulevard. “We know a driver picked her up in a buckboard and took her to the Haven Hotel. The driver didn’t remember anything special about her. Lots of people visited here in those days. Young women didn’t usually travel alone then, but she had me with her. She chose the cheapest hotel. That might tell us something.”
With a sun-browned hand, Hope pointed to the right. “The hotel stood back there. It burned in the late thirties, like a lot of other wooden buildings in town. By then I was already grown.”
“Your mother started out walking?”
The look in Hope’s gray eyes softened. It always did when she talked about the mother she could scarcely remember. “She talked to Mrs. Haven and asked her to watch me. She promised to be back soon. She didn’t sign the guest book or pay for a room. Mother Haven got the idea she hoped to stay somewhere else that night.”
“So she walked down town?”
“That’s probably why she didn’t take me.” Her eyebrows arched at Brandy. “People expected to walk then. They were the better for it.”
The little truck coasted along Cholokka Boulevard, past the two-story town hall and library. Once it had been a school where her grandmother taught, and Brandy played on the swings when she visited. They passed the rustic Micanopy museum then neared the two-block downtown that comprised Micanopy.
“My mother walked right along here,” Hope added. “It was about three-quarters of a mile from the hotel.”
The boulevard had widened to four lanes. Brandy looked across the grassy median at the uneven row of nineteenth century brick and stucco buildings. Tourists in shorts, T-shirts, and sunglasses strolled along the sidewalk, passing in and out of the antique shops and bookstores. It looked much the same in the days when Brandy’s grandfather or grandmother had taken her into town for ice cream. Hope nodded toward a one-story building with mullion windows. “My mother went into the dry goods store. It was located here then. Caleb Stark Sr. owned it. He testified she came in and asked if she could find work. He didn’t promise anything, and she didn’t give her full name, worse luck. He said she used the telephone before she left. He had a wall phone with a crank that customers could borrow. Not too many folks in town had phones yet, of course, but we never knew the person she called. The woman at the central exchange didn’t remember the call. Whoever it was, wasn’t talking.”
“Who else saw her?”
“The town marshall. Briefly, he said. A minister at the Smith Street Baptist Church noticed her walk by. That was about two hours later.”
Brandy jotted a few more notes. She’d heard the story before, of course, but it never hurt to take a fresh look now that she planned to investigate. “The town’s never had more than seven hundred people. Looks like the marshall would remember someone new.”
Her grandmother scowled. “I agree.” She pulled into a diagonal parking space before a sidewalk shielded from the sun by a flat overhang. A pharmacy sign hung above the sprawling store. “My mother walked into this very building.” Hope backed the pickup away from the curb. “I cut some glads before you came, and I’d like to put them by the grave. We can go right past the Smith Street pond on the way to the cemetery. You might like to see it again.” Brandy nodded.
“After that, you’ll want to take another look at the few things your great-grandmother left behind.” She cast another searching glance at her granddaughter. “The sheriff’s office didn’t find them helpful. I have more faith in your intuition, and that’s a fact.”
Brandy sighed to herself. A tall order, Grandmother. She couldn’t depend on her intuition, although sometimes she did have feelings she couldn’t explain. In the Tavares case she’d felt so close to a dead woman that she really thought she saw her. John blamed an over-active imagination. Then there was the strange, globular light near the Suwanee River and Cedar Key—others saw it, too. That light had helped her. In Homosassa she felt in tune with long ago Seminoles—even the settlers they preyed on. Brandy shivered. But she couldn’t summon intuition. It wasn’t like ringing a buzzer for a maid.
When they reached the end of Cholokka Boulevard, Hope mashed down on the accelerator and whipped around a corner to the right, past a tall Queen Anne house with a circular turret. Hope took Brandy there once when she was five. She’d disgraced herself by spitting watermelon seeds on the polished floor. Brandy hoped different people lived there now.
Hope rounded another curve, stopped in a narrow road, and cut the engine. Farther down the block, Brandy could see the church with its towering steeple surrounded by a white picket fence.
“The pond’s down there,” Hope said. She gazed to the left. “This month there’s water in it. When the weather’s dry, there isn’t.” Her eyes softened again. The small pond was coated with green scum, its edges choked by weeds and grasses. Turkey oaks shaded the dark water.
“It doesn’t look large enough for anyone to drown in.”
“Of course, it doesn’t. Would you pick that place to kill yourself?” Hope gunned the engine and headed down Smith Street toward the cemetery.
A few minutes later they passed between the pillars. A sign read Micanopy Historic Cemetery, Est. 1826.” On each side of the road headstones stood in untidy rows for several acres, some barely thrusting above the brown grass, others tall and well cared for, some discolored with age and moss-grown. A few in a newer section gleamed white, their bases decked with artificial flowers. The only fresh blossoms lay withering on graves. Overhead, thin bands of sunlight drifted down through the branches of oaks. The first scent of autumn hung in the air.
Brandy’s grandmother parked the pickup and both women stepped out into the hushed grounds. Hope retrieved the yellow and red gladiolas from the back of the truck.
Brandy frowned. “Should you be walking on this uneven ground after your operation?”
“Lord a’ mercy, I’m fine,” Hope snapped. “Still strong as an ox.”
Brandy knew better than to argue with her grandmother, but she knew Hope had trouble with arthritis in her joints and spine. She’d had a knee replacement two months ago. At least Brandy would be with her if she stumbled or fell.
They threaded their way among the headstones, brushing past a few pines and a thick cedar. Copper-colored leaves crackled under their feet, and cicada whirred in the shrubbery. How many lives, Brandy wondered, lie hidden under these weathered stones, lives that still make a difference to the living?
Ada’s burial place was easy to find. It stood near the front of the cemetery and faced the street. On Brandy’s visits to her grandmother, they had often come to this monument that looked down on a cluster of ordinary markers. Low fences enclosed the plots of many families, but no relatives gathered around this memorial—not yet. The life-size stone figure of Brandy’s great-grandmother rose above the rest, poised on a large block of granite, its young face lifted toward the road as if in defiance. On the base was carved “Ada Losterman, est. 1899–1921,” and below those words, two verses of a poem. Time had dimmed the letters, but as a college student, Brandy copied them and discovered they were from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. She would get the file out of her desk and read them more carefully, look for the reason those particular lines were chosen to mark Ada’s grave.
“I’ve told you the story. The statue was erected soon after my mother was buried. No one knew the donor.
We’re not even sure about her surname. ‘Losterman’ was what people thought I said.” Brandy sighed. So the name depended on the anguished recollection of two-and-a half year-old Hope.
Hope’s stooped and thrust the gladiolas into the granite urn at the monument base and adjusted the flowers, her eyes moist. The splash of yellow and red at the base of Ada’s statue was a jolt of bright color among the gray stones.
Brandy gazed up again at the figure. A masonry scarf shrouded the head. Around its edges, waves of curving stone suggested a woman’s hair. One delicate stone hand clasped a small book, smaller than a Bible, to her breast. The other reached up, as if beseeching.
“Act,” it said to Brandy,” before it is too late, before Hope herself is gone.”
Brandy studied the small nose and deep-set eyes. She recognized the familiar bone structure of the face, so like her grandmother’s and reflected in her own. The unknown donor must have known Ada well. How else to explain the resemblance? Brandy would not be here, neither would Hope, if this woman had never lived.
Who was she? Why did she come here? How did she die? Hope did not believe her mother committed suicide. Brandy agreed, and Brandy owed them both.
TWO
Hope drove with her usual stops and starts back to the pre-World War I cottage Brandy’s grandparents bought years before his death. Hope had lived in the white Craftsman bungalow ever since. Brandy admired its low-pitched roof with a dormer rising behind it and the wide arch above the entrance where she’d often played as a child. Seeing it always gave her a warm feeling.
When Hope opened the front door, her cat jumped down from its perch beside the window, stretched each white hind leg, and lifted her black chin to be scratched.
Brandy checked her watch. “I’ve got to be home by 5:00. I need to relieve the sitter before supper.”
In the familiar living room, Brandy’s gaze traveled from the antique sideboard to the satinwood display cabinet and settled on the portrait of her grandfather near the mantle. Robert George O’Bannon was photographed in his black and gold University of Illinois academic gown, the garment he wore in university processions. Nearby was a photograph of their only child, Brandy’s father, Bradley. He taught social studies at Tavares High School where Brandy attended. He was her inspiration then and now. Brandy and John had named their son after him. On the other end of the mantle stood an eight-by-ten photograph of the Ada Losterman statue.
Hope led the way into the kitchen. The room had changed little as Brandy grew up—on one wall hung the wooden fish that Brandy’s father had made in shop class fifty years ago. A row of spices stood on a small shelf, alphabetized as carefully as Hope had alphabetized files in her fourth grade classroom. Over the stove hung the familiar bird clock with its startling eruptions of hourly chirps and warblings, a poignant reminder of her grandparents’ love of bird watching. The room had the lingering smell of oven-baked cookies.
“I’ll put a kettle on for tea,” Hope said brusquely. She ran water into a teakettle and set it on a burner. “A cup of tea and what the English call ‘biscuits’ always sound so civilized in British novels. While it’s heating, we’ll get down the box of Ada’s things.”
Brandy dropped her bag on the table and followed her grandmother’s brisk stride into her bedroom. Hope had furnished it, like the rest of the house, with acquisitions from the antique store she had shared with an uncle after she retired, and then with his grandson. Brandy sat on Hope’s bed beside the brass headboard and watched her grandmother take a small step stool into the closet. When Brandy tried to assist her, Hope nudged her aside and climbed up on the stool. Hope’s spunk worried her. Brandy’s father and Hope’s foster brother were now gone. She had full responsibility for her grandmother.
Hope set her treasure on the floor, breathing a bit harder, and took a tiny key from a niche in her roll top desk.
“We’ll make a fresh start,” Brandy said. “Take a look again at everything.” She might find a clue in Ada’s belongings. She picked up the box, carried it back into the kitchen, and deposited it on the table.
Hope unlocked the lid and lifted out the few items that deputies had found in Ada’s suitcase at the Haven Hotel. She laid them on the table. It was a pitiful collection—a cloth doll, a small book, two envelopes, and a narrow jewelry box.
Her grandmother set the whistling teakettle off the burner and poured steaming water over tea bags in two pink Depression glass cups. “After I was old enough, Mother Haven told me about that last afternoon. My mother left me playing with the doll.” For a moment Hope’s eyes looked misty; then she went on, “My mother set the suitcase in the hall and asked her to watch me for a couple of hours. When she left the hotel, she carried a folder and handbag.” Hope paused, cup in hand, picturing the scene for the thousandth time. “Fact is, those two things probably held the answers we’re looking for. Both disintegrated in the pond.” Her voice hardened. “Unless somebody took them. Neither was ever recovered.”
She laid the tea bags on matching saucers and spooned a small amount of sugar into each cup. In her slate gray eyes, Brandy saw both sadness and veiled irritation. “The Havens didn’t like to talk about my mother. After they took me in, they wanted me to forget her, especially after they became my foster parents.” She set a fresh sugar cookie on the edge of each saucer.
Brandy touched the over-sized doll. It was soft, seemed stuffed with cotton, and covered by a fabric Brandy couldn’t identify.
“Stockingnette,” Hope said. She set down Brandy’s cup and sipped from her own. “We found a reference in a doll collector’s magazine.”
The doll was jointed at the shoulders and hips and fully dressed, even to its boots. A pleasant enough baby’s face with eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth had been painted in black on its round head. With her fingertips, Brandy lifted the calico dress and white petticoat, now yellowed with age. Blurry words were printed in ink on a small label and stitched to the petticoat.
The lines in her grandmother’s forehead deepened. “You can read ‘1917’ on the label. The word ‘Grady’ is the only other writing we could ever make out. Looks like a ‘M’ after it, like ‘Grady’ is one of two words.”
“Do you think Grady was a person or a place?”
“The truth is, no one ever found out. The town marshall and the sheriff’s office did investigate. They tried to find who was responsible for me. In the end, of course, the Havens took responsibility. They couldn’t adopt me. No one knew if I had a father somewhere with a prior claim.”
“The word ‘Grady M’ on the underskirt might tell us something.”
“After that afternoon, I didn’t get to play with the doll. The sheriff’s men took all this stuff and held them as evidence. When they couldn’t do anything with them, they returned them to Mother Haven to keep for me.”
Brandy ran her fingers lightly over the small brown, canvas-backed book, only about two and three-fourth inches wide and five inches long. The red bands in the American flag on the cover still bore red pigment. Where had she seen a book this size before? Of course, clasped to the bosom of the statue in the cemetery.
“My Episcopal priest told me these Campaign Prayer Books were distributed to soldiers during World War I,” Hope said. “They carried them in their breast pockets.”
Brandy turned carefully to the first page and read, The Book of Common Prayer, the Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church. It further advised that the contents were according to the use of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America together with the Psalter or Psalms of David. As long as Brandy could remember, her grandmother had attended the town’s small Episcopal Church with sanctuary windows of ruby-stained glass. Was this prayer book why? She opened the next page. Neatly lettered at the top in faint ink she read, “To give you comfort and strength, Ada.”
Hope turned
away, as if it pained her to see the delicate handwriting.
“It looks like she gave this prayer book to someone,” Brandy said, “and then somehow got it back.” She felt a constriction in her own chest. “Obviously, it went to someone Ada cared about deeply. Someone she thought might be in danger. Probably a soldier. World War I ended two years earlier.”
Hope murmured, “I put a bookmark at two passages she underlined.”
Brandy turned past twelve pages of morning prayers and found on page 21 what her great-grandmother had underlined so long ago. The inscriptions were brown and faded. She read aloud the Collect for Peace:
“O God, from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed; Give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give; that our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments, and also that by thee, we, being defended from the fear of our enemies, may pass our time in rest and quietness: through the merits of Jesus Christ Our Savior. Amen”
It was followed by A Collect for Aid Against Perils.
“Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord,” she read, “and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Savior.”
Brandy compressed her lips for a second. “Ada seems to refer to a peril her correspondent faced, something that worried them both. Likely the war.” She copied the two passages into her note-pad, wishing she had learned shorthand in her journalism classes. Next, she turned her attention to the two envelopes. She picked up the smaller, letter-sized one, and eased out a single page fragment.
“I had to put the page in a new envelope. We didn’t have the original one,” Hope said.
In pale brown ink “P. 3” had been written in the brittle upper right hand corner. Brandy’s lips tightened again and she frowned. The third page of a letter, and part of one at that, was not likely to offer many clues. In addition, the heavy, unlined paper had once been soaked in water.