by Amy Durham
Inside, we navigated the hallways, dodging the steady stream of nurses, doctors, and visitors who also filled the halls. Gwen had called Brooke earlier in the week and arranged everything. She’d agreed to meet us at the hospital coffee shop during her afternoon break.
Coffee Central was in the main lobby of the Gray Building, and a woman sitting alone at a table for four noticed us immediately.
“Gwen Ellis?” she asked, standing up to greet us.
After the introductions and polite hellos, we sat down to talk.
“We appreciate you taking the time to talk with us,” Gwen said, stirring half-and-half into her coffee.
“I hope you didn’t make a special trip,” Brooke replied. “I usually make it up to Camden once every couple of months.”
Luke and I looked at each other, both thinking the same thing. We didn’t have two months.
“We made a day of it,” Gwen said. “Lucas is planning to run the BAA 5K in the spring, so we took a look at the route, then decided to show Layla a bit of Boston.”
“That’s nice.” Brooke smiled at me, then looked at Lucas. “You’re quite the runner, I’ve heard.”
Luke just shrugged. “I enjoy it.”
“You mentioned some family research that might somehow overlap with mine?” Brooke asked, looking back at Gwen.
“That’s right. But Lucas is the one who’s been researching, so I’ll let him tell you about it.”
“Basically I’ve discovered a connection between my family and the Emersons who own the antique store on Old Birch Lane.”
Brooke nodded in recognition, and Lucas went on, leaving out lots of things that no one else needed to know. “I ran across a name in Arthur Emerson’s will that I recognized from some of my mom’s records. Amelia Cutler.”
Brooke smiled. “My great-grandmother.”
Luke went on. “Then we spoke with Patsy Emerson in Camden, and she told us about you.”
“Our family scattered so much,” Brooke said. “I wish we’d managed to stay closer to the ones who are still around, like William and Patsy.”
“Life gets in the way of things sometimes,” Gwen offered.
“Patsy also told us you knew something about what might’ve happened to Leo Emerson and his wife. Some tragic story.” Beneath the table, Luke reached for my hand. “I was wondering if you could tell us about that.”
“The story changed a lot over the years, or so my mom said,” Brooke replied, her smile reaching the blue eyes that matched her scrubs. “I’m sure it was embellished and exaggerated, but I suppose that’s what makes folklore memorable.”
“Folklore makes for an interesting addition to bland genealogy charts,” Gwen said.
“True.” Brooke scooted her chair closer to the table, leaned across in order to talk softer. “Leo was accused of murdering a girl he had courted before he and Lillian married. She had apparently caused them no end of trouble, and her jealousy had become quite the thorn in their sides. Her body was found, partially naked and stabbed to death, on the banks of the creek behind Leo and Lillian’s home. The townspeople immediately accused Leo. Nothing in the story suggests there was any evidence incriminating him, but in those days justice wasn’t always rational. There wasn’t much chance that Leo would be found innocent, so he and Lillian disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Luke and I said in unison. We knew very well that the two of them hardly just skipped town.
My hand felt clammy against Luke’s and my pulse picked up.
“That’s the story,” Brooke shrugged. “Leo and Lillian fled the town to escape being punished for the murder. But personally, I’ve never believed Leo was guilty.”
“And why is that?” Gwen asked, her voice cool and calm. I wondered how she did that when Luke and I were just about to crawl out of our skin.
“My mother always doubted the stories she’d heard from her great-aunts. She said they were terrible gossips, and delighted in telling the gruesome tale of how Leo murdered his former love interest. She much preferred the story she heard from her great-grandmother. She was twelve years old when Leo and Lillian disappeared, and she believed Leo to be as kind and good as a man could possibly be, and she firmly believed he’d been wrongly accused. She always said that if he’d run from the law, it was because the law was wrong.”
“Wow,” Lucas said, clearing his throat. “Quite the family story.”
“Oh, here’s something interesting for your family records.” Brooke’s eyes lit up, remembering. “My mother said her great-grandmother was fond of a little poem Leo’s wife used to recite,” Brooke said. “Think you your acts will bring you joy. But hate and malice you employ. For the things you want you’ll always yearn. Until the day you finally learn.”
Luke nudged my arm with his elbow, and I knew exactly what he meant. Picking up a pen, I opened my notebook and began jotting down the words to the poem.
“Maybe I’ve overly romanticized the entire tale,” Brooke continued, “but I like to think those words have some meaning within the story.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” Gwen reached across the table and patted Brooke’s hand. “Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us. All of this will make for great additions to Luke’s research.”
“It wasn’t any trouble,” Brooke said. “And I hope you’re enjoying seeing the city, Layla, although you’re not seeing much of it here.”
“I bet people from all over come here,” I said. Figuring I had nothing to lose and the potential to gain monumental information, I decided to go on. “I was born in this hospital.”
Brooke looked puzzled. “I thought you moved to Sky Cove from Tennessee this summer.”
“I did.” I took a deep breath and felt Luke’s arm come around my shoulder, a silent show of support. “I was adopted.”
For part of a moment, everyone sat silent, and I could see the wheels turning in Brooke’s mind.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Sixteen. I’ll be seventeen in January.” I held my breath, torn between hoping she had information about my birth and wishing I didn’t need to know.
“Strange,” Brooke said, talking more to herself than to any of us. “Could it be?”
I waited to speak until she looked at me. “Do you know something about my birth mother?” Her eyes locked on mine and had it not been for Lucas’s touch, I would’ve sworn Brooke and I were the only two people in the room.
“I’m not exactly sure,” she said. “And I probably shouldn’t say anything. I didn’t work here at the time. Not to mention that adoption records are confidential for a reason. The information is very personal.”
“Ms. McKenna,” I began, leaning forward in order to speak more directly to her. “I’ve always known I was adopted. My parents have been open about it my entire life. I’ve never had the desire to seek out my birth parents, and in many ways I still don’t. But Luke’s research into his family history has given us reason to believe that our two families might be connected somehow, which is, of course, a surprise. If you have information that could help us confirm that, it would be very helpful.”
Brooke looked from Lucas to me and back again. She probably thought we feared we might be cousins or something, which would put a big kibosh on our dating situation.
Perhaps that’s why she decided to be forthcoming. “It’s just so strange. Before she married Leo, Lillian’s last name was Bostridge. Seventeen years ago, I was still living in Sky Cove, working for a doctor in Camden, and sometime in September of that year, one of the local high school girls, who’s last name was also Bostridge, left town for a few months. The story was that her parents disapproved of her older boyfriend so they sent her to spend some time with relatives in Boston. I’ve always tried not to pay too much attention to the rumor mill, but Sky Cove is a small community, and word spread that the real reason she’d left for Boston was because she was pregnant.”
“Did the rumor turn out to be true?” I asked, the shaking in my vo
ice mimicking the trembling inside me.
Brooke shook her head. “No one ever knew for sure. But she came back to town in March, re-enrolled in Sky Cove Senior High, and went on to graduate two years later.”
“You said her name was Bostridge. Do you know anything else about her?”
“That’s the truly strange part,” Brooke said. “I have no idea if she’s related to Lillian’s family or not, and I hadn’t even realized the irony of the names until this moment.”
“What irony?” I asked.
“The girl’s name was Ashley Bostridge, and in May of this year, she married Seth Emerson, of Emerson’s House of Antiques.”
My stomach dropped. My heart pounded furiously, and sweat beaded on my forehead. Tears welled in my eyes, but I refused to let them spill. Information swirled in my head so quickly that I couldn’t make sense of it all.
Ashley Emerson - with the dark auburn hair and the bright green eyes - was my birth mother. It didn’t matter that we didn’t have confirmation or DNA proof or anything else. I knew it was true.
Hadn’t I felt that strange sense of recognition the first time I met her?
And there it was. The second intersecting event. The two families - Bostridge and Emerson - connecting once again when Ashley married Seth.
My brain pounded, trying to process the information that my heart refused to acknowledge. Luke’s hand gripping mine, and his arm squeezing my shoulders brought me back to reality.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “And I promise to treat this information with the utmost discretion.”
Luke, Gwen, and I stood. The two them of said their goodbyes to Brooke McKenna while I silently walked across the hospital cafeteria.
A bulldozer might as well have just plowed me down. It couldn’t feel anymore bewildering or painful than this. The logical side of my brain knew that the information about my birth was important to the journey Lucas and I were on. But the emotional side of me wanted no part of it, and I felt overwhelming sadness by the thought that I’d somehow betrayed my mom and dad by uncovering what had to be the identity of my birth mother.
Putting one foot in front of the other became almost impossible.
Then Luke took my hand and leaned down to kiss my cheek. “Let’s just go. We’ll talk about it later.”
I appreciated the silence that Lucas and Gwen afforded me, but thirty minutes into the car ride home, I felt like talking.
“I guess we know the other intersecting event now,” I said.
“Yeah.” Luke shifted toward me in the back seat. “Ashley and Seth got married in May and you came to Sky cove in July.”
“It’s too much to just be coincidence.” Gwen spoke from the driver’s seat. “I imagine the two families connecting again through marriage was a powerful force. And with the two of you, apparently both descendants of these families, now in close proximity and involved with each other...” her voice trailed off.
I stared out the window.
“Layla, I’m so sorry,” Luke whispered. “I know you feel awful, and I feel so bad about it.”
I shook my head. “It’s not your fault, Luke.”
“Maybe I’m not responsible, but I still feel guilty.”
“I know.” I looked at him and managed a half-smile. “Just like I know I shouldn’t feel like I’ve done something awful to my parents by figuring out who my birth mother is, but I still feel lousy about it.”
“I wish things were different,” he said.
“Michelle Bradford is my mother.” Saying it out loud seemed to remind me of the fact that no matter who’d given birth to me, the people who’d raised me were my parents. And though I knew it would take some time before I felt okay about it all, I also knew that nothing would ever change the way I felt about my mom and dad.
“Besides,” I continued. “There’s more to be concerned about than just me feeling rotten. After what we saw in the last dream, you’re going to need to be careful and not be around Kara at all. If we’re right, and Leo was falsely accused of harming his old girlfriend, you’ve got to take extra precautions.”
He nodded in agreement. “Next week is full anyway. State cross-country is a week from today, so there’s a rigid practice schedule all week long. Plus, we have the Tolstoy test coming up, and I have two papers due pretty soon. And any free time I have is for you.”
CHAPTER 40
Mom, Dad, and I had just finished Sunday lunch when my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. The caller ID told me it was Lucas. I answered as I headed upstairs toward my room.
“Hey Luke.”
“How are you?”
He’d been so concerned about me yesterday. Finding out that Ashley Emerson was my birth mother had been a shock, and I still hadn’t been able to reconcile that knowledge with my deep love for my parents.
But I would.
“I’m fine.” I stepped into my bedroom and pushed the door shut behind me.
“I wanted to call last night, but I knew you’d be with your parents.”
Sitting cross-legged on my bed, I heard the question he hadn’t asked. He wanted to know if it had been odd or awkward being with them after what we’d learned in Boston.
“It wasn’t weird,” I said. “I thought it would be hard to interact with Mom and Dad normally, but it wasn’t. The minute I walked in the house, everything was familiar and right.”
“I’m glad,” he said. “I was worried about you.”
“I guess my brain sort of compartmentalized everything. It’s like I have this bit of knowledge tucked away and it’s not allowed to affect anything else.”
I didn’t have to do anything with the information I’d uncovered. My parents didn’t have to know. Ashley Emerson didn’t have to know. I could file it away for later, and when I was older, I could petition the court in Tennessee to unseal my records.
But only if I chose to.
Knowing I had the choice was both comforting and empowering.
“Do you think you have a compartment left for something else?” he asked. “Because I have an idea.”
“You do?” I asked, intrigued.
“I thought maybe if we went down to the beach, maybe we could somehow talk to them, or get them to talk to us.”
It was an idea. One worth thinking about. I wondered why we hadn’t thought to try it before. “You mean like when we asked them to show us things in our dreams?”
“Sort of.” I heard him take a deep breath. “We know they were married. We know he was accused of killing his former girlfriend. We know the two of them tried to run away, but they found him and killed him before they could. We saw her die in childbirth sometime after he was killed. We need to know how to keep all this tragedy from happening again.”
“Do you think they’ll show us who he is?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it won’t hurt to ask. And if they don’t show us who he is, maybe we’ll get some kind of clue about how to stop him.”
As much as I didn’t want to deal with all this after yesterday’s revelations, I knew we had to. Something inside me told me this was quickly coming to a head. We needed to be ready.
I did not intend to lose Lucas this time.
At least not to a crazy person.
“When do you want to meet?”
***
We spread the blanket on the rocky sand near the outcropping. I thought it would feel eerie, being here, for the sole purpose of contacting Leo and Lillian, but to my surprise, it felt almost reassuring.
Without a word, Luke laid back on the blanket and held out his arms. I snuggled close, the warmth of him wrapping around me and permeating the heavy jacket I wore.
“Ready?” he whispered.
“Ready,” I answered.
“Okay then.” His arms tightened around me, and I nestled my head on his shoulder. “Show us what you got.”
For a moment, I drifted along on the pure pleasure of being in Luke’s embrace. Other than the fact that we were trying to connect wi
th our dead past-selves, the situation was wildly romantic.
I couldn’t be sure when the present and past merged together, but one moment I was cuddled with Luke, and the next, we sat on the blanket, across from Leo and Lillian.
They looked like us, only slightly older. It was sort of like looking into a mirror that morphed us into young twenty-somethings.
Damp fog rolled off the water, swirling around us, shrouding us in its heavy curtain until it seemed we floated on clouds.
There were no introductions, no pleasantries. I guessed after everything the four of us had been through together, everything they’d shared with us, regular niceties weren’t necessary.
“I had courted Katherine,” Leo’s voice began. “Not with much seriousness, as we were both young, but enough that folks began to expect we would marry.”
In the dream, Lucas took my hand, while Leo went on. I felt the warmth as his fingers slid against mine.
“In truth, I had no intention of marrying Katherine. I had no real knowledge of love and no desire to wed, but I knew enough to realize that I felt none for her. Lillian and her family came to town a few months later.” Leo smiled, his mind in a far away memory. “I was smitten immediately. I like to think Lillian was as well.”
“I was.” Lillian’s voice came a split second later. “Much to Katherine’s dismay. She was jealous, of course, but it amounted to nothing but pettiness.”
A soft look passed between them, and my heart warmed. I let myself imagine for a moment that years from now Lucas and I would look at each other like that.
Leo spoke next. “Carter took her jealousy, combined it with his own, and twisted it into something vile and evil.”
“Carter?” Luke asked.
“Carter Johnston was a local man who took a liking to me,” Lillian said. “I hadn’t noticed him, nor was I aware of his interest.”
“He knew of Katherine’s jealousy and convinced her to help him come between us.” Leo slipped his arm around Lillian and pulled her close. “When we married and it became clear that nothing Katherine did would succeed in separating us, the madness took him.”