The Keeper of Happy Endings

by Davis, Barbara

  “Life has left her a bit fragile, but she’s managed to cope. She told me she lived here once.”

  “When I was a girl, yes.”

  “And she left abruptly. Do you know why?”

  “My father drove her away.” She paused, staring into her glass. “No, that’s not true. He sent her away. She and my brother were going to be married when he came home, and then . . .”

  “The telegram came.”

  “That he’d gone missing, yes. They found his ambulance all shot up. There was blood everywhere, but no body. Just his jacket in the road with a bullet hole through it. Someone—a farmer, I think—saw the Nazis marching him into the woods. It wasn’t unusual for them to shoot someone and drag their body into the woods to bury. Sometimes they just left them for the animals. My father didn’t tell me about any of it until Anson was safely in Switzerland.”

  “But no one ever told Soline your brother was alive.”

  “No, he’d sent her away by then. I was shuffled off to boarding school a few days after the first telegram and was still there when the second arrived. Conveniently out of the way.”

  “Because he never meant for them to be married. Not from the minute she set foot in this house.”

  Thia’s eyes narrowed. “You seem to be in possession of a lot of information, Miss Grant. What, may I ask, is your connection to Ms. Roussel?”

  “I’m a friend,” Rory replied, hoping it was still true. “And I lease a building from her for a gallery I’m opening next month. That’s how we met. I found some things of hers when I took possession and offered to meet her to return them. One of the items belonged to your brother, a shaving kit with his initials on it.”

  Thia closed her eyes briefly, lower lip quivering. “She kept it all these years.”

  “You remember it, then.”

  Thia nodded. “My father took it from her. He didn’t want her to have anything of my brother’s when she left—and certainly not anything with his initials on it. I thought it was terribly mean of him, so I snuck into his room and found it, then slipped it into her box when she went down for breakfast.”

  “It was you,” Rory said, smiling. No wonder Soline had adored her. “She assumed it was your father. She thought he might have been sorry about the way he’d treated her.”

  Thia’s mouth thinned. “My father didn’t believe in guilt, Miss Grant. Or love. To him, they were signs of weakness.”

  “Do you know why he sent Soline away?” Rory asked quietly. “The real reason?”

  Thia stared into her lemonade. “I didn’t then. But I know now.” She glanced up, sighing. “I know a lot of things now. I suspect you do too.”

  “The baby, you mean.”

  “Yes. The baby.”

  “Her name was Assia,” Rory said softly, remembering that the child would have been Thia’s niece. “It means ‘comforter.’ Soline wanted so much to have a piece of your brother to hold on to, to keep his memory alive through their daughter. When she died . . .”

  Thia set down her glass and clasped her hands tightly in her lap. “There are pieces of the story you don’t know, Ms. Grant. Pieces no one knows except me. And even I didn’t know them until recently. Soline’s baby didn’t die.”

  Rory stared at her, confused, then horrified. “What are you saying?”

  “I assumed you knew and that was why you were here.”

  Rory shook her head, struggling to digest what she’d just been told. “How could I know? How is it even possible?”

  “My father paid people to lie,” Thia replied evenly. “To say the baby died so Soline could never come back and make a claim on my brother. He didn’t care what happened to either of them when he thought Anson was dead. He just wanted them off his hands. But when that second telegram arrived, he knew Anson could never know about the child. He had to be sure there was no chance of her ever turning up with a baby in her arms. So he wrote a nice fat check—to arrange for a discreet adoption. Then he wrote to Anson in Switzerland, saying Soline had run out on him, that she had refused to tie herself to a cripple. He needed my brother to hate her so completely that he’d never even think about looking for her.”

  A wave of disgust washed through Rory as she listened to Thia lay the details end to end. “Your father thought of everything.”

  “Yes.”

  Rory dragged a hand through her hair. She had no words for what she was feeling. Rage. Loathing. Raw grief. None of it seemed adequate. To steal a woman’s child and sell it to strangers. His own flesh and blood. It was unconscionable. And it would fall to her to break the news to Soline.

  “I haven’t even told Soline that Anson is alive. How am I supposed to tell her this?”

  Thia’s brows shot up. “You came here without telling her?”

  “I just found out yesterday, and before I said a word, I needed to understand what happened and why. Soline’s been through so much over the years, and it’s left her fragile. I was worried about how she’d take the news that the man she loved with all her heart came home from the war and never bothered to look for her.”

  “It wasn’t Anson’s fault,” Thia said abruptly. “When my father told him Soline left because she didn’t want him if he was going to be a cripple, it broke something in him. It’s why he opted to stay in Switzerland for his rehabilitation—and because my father persuaded him it was the best place for him. And he did learn to walk again, but he came home so broken and bitter I hardly recognized him.”

  “But you told him the truth when he finally came home, didn’t you? About the baby and what your father had done?”

  “How could I tell him? I didn’t know myself until my father died and I had to go through his papers.” She stood, crossing to a nearby closet, and threw open the door, revealing a stack of cardboard storage boxes. “This is what putting your father’s affairs in order looks like. Anson was out of the country when he died—naturally—so it fell to me. I had no idea the man was such a pack rat. I threw out tons. And then one day, I came across this.”

  After a few moments of poking around, she produced a dark-red ledger book held closed with a pair of heavy rubber bands. “It was headed for the throwaway pile until I looked closely at the entries—and what else I found inside.”

  “What is it?”

  “The truth,” Thia replied as she pulled off the rubber bands and handed it to Rory. “It’s all there. All the payments and the paperwork, everything my father needed to erase Soline and the baby from our lives. I need you to look at it before I say more.”

  The words felt vaguely ominous, hovering between them like a threat. Rory held her breath as she opened the book. The name D. Sheridan nearly leapt off the page. She remembered Soline mentioning her, but seeing it here, presumably in Owen’s handwriting, made her sick to her stomach. There were other names too: a Dr. Marcus Hartwell, an Elliot Mason, Esq. A doctor, a lawyer, and the Family Aid Society.

  Thia hovered as Rory began turning the pages, scanning long lists of entries. Charitable contribution. Medical expenses. Charitable contribution. Charitable contribution. Court fees. Documents. Charitable contribution. The first entry had been made on October 24, 1943, the last on August 12, 1972. Dates. Dollar amounts. It was all so neat, so careful, as if the entries were mere business expenditures.

  “Twenty-eight years,” Rory breathed, still staring at the book. “The entries become more sporadic over time, but some of these payments are five figures.”

  “Hush money,” Thia said matter-of-factly. “At least that’s my guess. He would have been ruined if word got out that he’d paid to get rid of his own grandchild. And there was Anson to consider. He knew the Purcell dynasty would topple if Anson caught so much as a whiff of this. Not that it mattered. Anson never wanted it to begin with. I’m sure my father’s spinning in his grave as we speak, knowing I’m mistress of his house and running the family business.”

  “Anson didn’t want it?”

  Thia shook her head sadly. “My brother hasn�
�t spent a collective month under this roof since he came back from Switzerland. Not that I blame him. There was always so much unhappiness here after my mother died. My father was never a kind man, but he got worse when he lost her. You’d think the idea of a grandchild would have softened him.”

  “How long have you known about all of this?”

  “Four months, give or take.”

  “And Anson still doesn’t know?”

  “No.”

  Rory struggled to keep her tone even. “You didn’t think your brother should know he and Soline had a daughter?”

  “Of course I did.” Thia’s eyes pooled with tears. “I’ve thought of little else since I found that book. I had no idea what to do with what I’d learned. I tried to tell him once, when he called from London on my birthday, but he threatened to hang up and never call again if I so much as mentioned her name, and I believed him.” She shook her head, chin quivering. “Soline isn’t the only one left fragile by all of this. What happened during the war changed my brother. Coming home finished him.”

  “But he knew her, Thia. He loved her. I don’t understand how he could believe your father’s lies about a woman he loved.”

  “He didn’t at first. In fact, they fought like sailors over the things my father would say about her, that she’d always been after his money, but in the end, even that hadn’t been enough to make her stay if it meant pushing her husband around in a wheelchair. It was like he was punishing Anson for loving her. There were times when I was afraid they would come to blows over her.”

  “So what changed?”

  “I don’t know. One day it was as if someone flipped a switch. All of a sudden, Anson refused to even say her name. And he didn’t want anyone else saying it either. It’s still that way. Anytime I’ve tried to talk to him about it, he’s ended the conversation. It’s like she poisoned him.”

  “That must have made your father happy.”

  “I suspect it did. He got what he wanted. But then, he usually did. Even if it meant destroying the people he was supposed to love. He certainly destroyed Anson.”

  “And the baby,” Rory replied. “He just gave her away. His own grandchild, and he had no idea where she was or what happened to her.”

  “Oh, he knew.” Thia’s eyes slid away. Her voice had taken on that ominous quality again. “The woman who ran the Family Aid Society sent him a copy of the adoption decree, proof that his money had been well spent. That’s the kind of monster he was. No concern for the child, just his plans for Anson and the Purcell empire.”

  “How very tidy.”

  “That was my father, determined to get what he wanted at any cost. And Dorothy Sheridan was only too happy to help—for a fee, of course. I did some checking when I found the ledger. It appears the police got wind of Miss Sheridan’s enterprise in 1972. That’s why the entries in the ledger stop. She disappeared, and my father was finally off the hook.”

  Rory felt cold all over. “It’s inconceivable. Soline has spent forty years grieving a daughter she believed dead and buried, and she’s been out there the whole time. How could a woman do something so despicable to another woman?”

  Thia studied her through narrowed eyes. “You seem awfully protective of her. Driving all this way. Asking all these questions.”

  “Yesterday a friend of mine, a reporter who was helping me dig up a photo of your dead brother, unearthed one taken two years ago. I think questions are in order.”

  “Why did you want a picture of Anson?”

  Once again, Rory felt she was being accused of something, and it irked her. “I wanted to frame it and give it to Soline as a gift. Because she’s my friend. She was your friend, too, once.”

  “Yes. She was.”

  Thia’s voice was softer now. Rory felt herself soften too. “She told me about your sketches and the dresses she made for you, how you wanted to live in a garret and paint. It broke her heart that she never got to say goodbye, but your father wouldn’t let her.”

  Thia pulled her arms around herself protectively. “He sent me to some horrible all-girls’ school. When I came home, she was gone. I thought she’d abandoned us—abandoned me. By the time Anson came home, I’d grown to hate her. Not only for leaving me but for leaving him too. My brother and I were close once, but when he came home he was so cold and withdrawn. I thought if I hated her, too, it would make us close again, but it only made him angrier.”

  “He used you,” Rory said softly. “Your father, I mean. He made you hate Soline, and then he used that hate to fuel your brother’s pain.”

  Thia’s eyes flicked to hers. “I told you he was a monster.”

  “I’m sorry. I realize this is hard for you too. I just wanted a picture. I never meant for it to turn into all this.”

  Thia blew out a long breath. “I think it’s time for you to see the family photos.” She rose and went to the closet, returning a few moments later with a pair of leather-bound albums. “My mother was a fanatic about family photographs. She kept an album for each of us. This is Anson’s.”

  Rory laid the album open in her lap, the yellowed pages crackling as she flipped through the usual milestones. First Christmas. First steps. First haircut. Eventually, the chubby toddler became a schoolboy. Anson at eight or nine, in a baseball uniform, freckles, and a gap-toothed grin. There was another of him in a football uniform, down on one knee, squinting against the sun. A few pages later, he stood grinning in a dark suit and crisp white shirt, a white carnation on his lapel. Prom night. And finally, on the next-to-the-last page, dressed in uniform khakis, his fair hair cropped close and combed back from his forehead: a boy no longer.

  It was strange to see him grow up that way, a page at a time. In her mind, he’d been little more than a ghost, and now, here he was in black and white—and somewhere in the world, very much alive. She stared at the young man in the photo again, square-jawed and movie-star handsome.

  “No wonder Soline fell head over heels. Your brother was gorgeous. And I can see the family resemblance. You have the same nose and cheekbones.”

  “We both look like our father. The same hair and eyes.” She paused, folding her hands carefully in her lap. “Who do you take after?”

  Rory blinked at her. “Me?”

  “Would you say you look like your mother?”

  It seemed a strange question, though she supposed Thia was entitled to a few questions of her own. “I have my mother’s coloring, and we have the same nose, broad and straight, but she’s not nearly as tall as I am. I think I must have gotten that from my father’s side.”

  Thia opened the second album and slid it into Rory’s lap. “I think you should have a look at this.”

  Rory found herself staring at a little girl of five or six in footie pajamas. She had a pair of perfectly matched dimples and a head full of pale ringlets. “Look at those curls. How adorable.”

  Thia’s face remained carefully blank. “Look at the next photo and tell me what you see.”

  Rory squinted at the photograph, taken several years later. A ruffled party dress and lace-trimmed socks, the curls tamer now, pulled up into a messy bun pinned with tiny white flowers, like a princess or a fairy. And strangely familiar. “This is you?”

  “Yes.”

  “My mother has almost the same picture of me. She dressed me up to play the piano for her friends, but I froze. I can’t get over how alike they are.”

  “Who is your mother? Was she originally from Boston?”

  Rory was still staring at the photo. She looked up. “I’m sorry . . . what?”

  “Your mother. What’s her name?”

  “Camilla Grant.”

  “And her maiden name?”

  “Lowell. Why?”

  Thia slid a folded sheet of paper from beneath the remaining albums and handed it to Rory. “It’s time you see this.”

  Rory scanned the document warily. The paper was heavy and yellow with age, neatly typed, and stamped at the top with the word COPY in red ink. It
was dated January 17, 1945, had the words CERTIFICATE OF DECREE OF ADOPTION at the top, and was signed at the bottom by the clerk of the Circuit Court. But at that moment, there was only one word on the page that mattered—Lowell.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  RORY

  Rory felt her heart skitter against her ribs, like a stone skipping down the walls of a bottomless well. There was nothing to get hold of, nothing to break the sudden sensation of falling. Why was her mother’s name on this piece of paper? And what was the paper doing among Owen Purcell’s things? She was dimly aware of Thia beside her as she scanned the page again.

  State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations

  Department of Vital Records

  Certificate of Decree of Adoption.

  Maiden name of natural mother: Soline Louise Roussel

  Name of natural father: Unknown

  Name of child at time of birth: n/a

  Name of adoptive mother: Gwendolyn Lucille Lowell

  Name of adoptive father: George Edward Lowell

  Name of child after adoption: Camilla Nicole Lowell

  Rory laid the paper in her lap and stared at it, head spinning. Her mother’s name—and her mother’s mother. What did it mean? Finally, she looked up at Thia. “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “She’s . . . You’re saying . . .” She broke off again, pressing the flats of her fingers to her eyes. “I don’t understand.”

  Thia pulled in a breath, as if gathering her words. “Your mother is the baby listed on the adoption decree, Rory. Which makes Soline your grandmother. And my brother your grandfather.”

  “It has to be a mistake. One of those weird coincidences you read about in the tabloids. There are Lowells all over Massachusetts.”

  “Look at the picture again. It’s not a mistake. Or a coincidence. You can demand a blood test if you need confirmation, but I knew the instant I saw your face. You’re a Purcell—because your mother was a Purcell. Or should have been.”