A Gift of Time

by Beth Flynn

  “So did you break up?” I was conflicted. Part of me was secretly hoping I wouldn’t have to worry about my daughter dating an eighteen-year-old, yet also feeling a real ache in my heart for her pain. It had been a long time ago, but even I remembered the sting of Matthew Rockman telling me he’d no longer need me to tutor him.

  “I guess it was mutual,” she said. “Mom?”

  “Yes, Mimi?”

  “Would it be okay if we don’t talk about it anymore? I mean, Elliott and I already agreed to take each other’s numbers out of our phones. We’ve already decided it’s not going to work. He said something about maybe trying to see me again when I’m older, but let’s face it. He was just being nice. That’s not going to happen and I’m pretty sure I don’t want it to.”

  She blew out a breath and looked at me pleadingly.

  I watched Mimi closely for weeks after that conversation, and even though I could tell she was hurting, she put on a brave face and dove back into her regular activities. School, work, and friends fell back into their usual place, and she even asked to go with me the next time I met Christy Bear for lunch. I was relieved to see she was resilient and had resolved to move on. And I knew Tommy certainly breathed a sigh of relief when I told him about the breakup.

  The discussions with Mimi about Grizz had slowly faded away. Her guilt about Leslie had been absolved, and her curiosity about Grizz had waned. Life was getting back to normal. The kids had been back in school for weeks, and we were almost nearing the end of January. Since I had given up my bookkeeping clients, I had more time on my hands than usual.

  Lately, I’d had Sister Mary Katherine on my mind. I’d recently dreamed about the nun who I’d been so close to when I was a child. The same nun who’d pushed authorities to find me. Was my subconscious speaking to me in dreams that maybe I had some unfinished business with her?

  “How do you even know where to find her, Ginny?” Tommy asked me early one morning in our bedroom. He’d been sitting on our bed putting on his shoes for work.

  “I asked about her when we renewed our wedding vows. I should’ve tried to find her years ago, Tommy. I feel like she’s one of those unresolved things in my life.”

  “So, she’s still alive?”

  “Yes, she’s in a nursing home for retired nuns in Illinois. I’d like to visit her. To tell her I’m alive. I don’t even know if she’ll remember me, Tommy, but she’s been on my mind since last summer, and I’ve been putting it off. Well, with everything that’s happened since then, you can’t blame me for putting it off. But still—I want to see her before it’s too late. Maybe that’s why I dreamed about her. She has to be ancient by now, wouldn’t you think?”

  “I don’t know, Gin. I didn’t know her, so I don’t know how old she’d be by now. If it’s something you feel strongly about, then definitely do it.”

  “Do you want to go with me? I thought I’d take a Friday afternoon flight. Stay two nights and come home on a Sunday.”

  “I don’t think so. Now that Alec is back from his sabbatical in the mountains, we’re taking on more clients, and I’ll be working some weekends. You go, and I can stay home with the kids. Then we won’t have to arrange for them to stay with friends or ask Carter to come here.”

  “I don’t know if I want to go alone. Without you.”

  “I think it would be good for you, Gin.” He stood and walked toward me, gently tilting my chin up to him. “It sounds like you should have time alone with her. If you don’t want to go alone, I’ll go with you. But I’m just thinking this is something you might like to do by yourself.”

  **********

  The next week, I found myself standing in the cozy family room at the Sisters of Mercy Retirement Home in Illinois. It was an old convent that had been condemned as uninhabitable and was slated for demolition years ago when it had caught the eye of a wealthy donor who’d had it restored. I stood next to a roaring brick fireplace and stared at the ceiling and surrounding walls, captivated by the architecture.

  A young novitiate had been sent to collect Sister Mary Katherine and bring her to me. I assumed that meant she was most likely in a wheelchair. I secretly wondered if maybe this had been a mistake. She probably wouldn’t even remember me. It was now 2001. I’d been abducted in 1975. That was more than twenty-five years ago. What was I thinking?

  “It smells like roses, but not a flower or air freshener in sight,” a young woman had commented to me. We made small talk as we waited. She was waiting for her aunt, another retired nun. I’d started to tell her I agreed when I heard a voice I recognized instantly.

  “Guinevere Love Lemon. It’s about time you came to see me!”

  Sister Mary Katherine bounded toward me with an energy that belied her age. Then, clasping my arm tightly, she began to walk me through the warm and inviting halls of the beautiful building. It didn’t feel like a retirement home. It reminded me of an elegant mansion with a lot of bedrooms. She’d explained on the way to her room that she was now almost ninety, and even though she was officially retired, she didn’t have a tired bone in her body.

  In her room, she listened without interrupting as I told her everything that had transpired since that fateful day in May 1975. Her blue eyes were bright, and I expected to see some curiosity in them, but it wasn’t there.

  “I knew you were okay,” she told me confidently.

  “How?”

  She held her hand over her heart. “Can’t tell you how. I just knew. After a while, I felt peace about it, and from what you’ve told me, sounds like I should’ve been worrying about you, but I wasn’t. Something deep inside told me you were fine. I prayed that God would tell me one day it was true. And today is that day. Praise the good Lord, Guinevere.”

  We hugged, and then she looked at the watch on her bony wrist.

  “Do you want to come with me on my rounds?”

  “Your rounds?”

  “I need to fetch Sister Agnes. She’s blind and handicapped. I need to get her back to her room and settled in. Would you like to come with me?”

  “I would love to, Sister Mary Katherine.”

  I stood in Sister Agnes’s room and watched as Sister Mary Katherine lovingly readied the blind nun for her afternoon nap. For a woman nearing ninety, she moved with the agility of a cat. I smiled to myself as I took in the beautiful and tasteful furniture and the window that looked out on a snowy scene that could have come right out of a Thomas Kincaid painting.

  Then I noticed something I found odd. Almost every available space of furniture was covered in framed pictures. I walked to one low dresser and bent over to get a better look. Sister Agnes was blind. Why would she have so many pictures in her room? She couldn’t see them.

  As if reading my thoughts, Sister Mary Katherine said, “They’re her unanswered prayers.”

  I turned to look at the holy sister. “Unanswered prayers?”

  “When she was younger, Bevin was a photographer,” Sister Mary Katherine told me. “Bevin was her name before she became a nun.”

  I looked back at the pictures and noticed they were all black and whites. I picked one up.

  “Sister Agnes, this one is of a man changing a car tire. He’s smiling at you, like he stopped what he was doing so you could snap his picture.”

  “New Orleans, 1950. I was maybe only twenty-five or twenty-six then and had just discovered my love of photography,” said the nun from the bed. Sister Agnes had thinning white hair and a heavily lined face. Her unseeing dark eyes exuded warmth and compassion. “That was Mr. Payroux. He later lost his wife and two children in a house fire. That picture was taken in happier times. If you look closely, you can see his wife sitting on their porch in the background. I went back to visit years after I took that picture and was told by the neighbors that, after his family’s deaths, he’d spiraled into a dark world of depression and drinking. One day, he up and disappeared. Nobody knew what had happened to him.”

  “This was so many years ago, Sister. He must have die
d by now. Is this still an unanswered prayer of yours?”

  “I pray for every person in every one of those pictures that the Lord will see fit to put on my heart what became of them. Sometimes He answers me in a dream. Sometimes, someone like Sister Mary Katherine will help me do some investigating, get me my answers. I have a whole drawer full of answered prayers over there.”

  I watched as her unseeing eyes followed the direction of where she was now pointing. My eyes followed, too, and saw a tall dresser that stood in the corner.

  “Oh, yes, we have a whole drawer full of answered prayers,” Sister Mary Katherine told me proudly.

  I smiled and went back to perusing the unanswered prayer frames. One caught my eye. There was something beautiful yet sad about it. Maybe it was the dog. It was a Rottweiler and brought me immediately back to memories of Lucifer and Damien. I picked it up and studied it closer.

  “Which one are you looking at?” Sister Agnes asked.

  “It’s a little girl and her dog. They’re sitting in tall grass, and she’s smiling, but it’s not reaching her eyes.”

  “Florida. A town smaller than a speck called Macon’s Grove. 1956. That would be Ruthie and Razor.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Tommy

  2001, Fort Lauderdale

  Tommy sat behind his desk at Dillon & Davis Architects. He was still a little high from what he’d learned that morning. He wanted to call Ginny but knew she’d be right in the middle of her visit with Sister Mary Katherine, and he didn’t want to interrupt her. Her plane would be getting in tomorrow afternoon, and he decided he’d pick her up from the airport and take her straight to a pricey hotel on Fort Lauderdale beach.

  Not for sex, although he wouldn’t say no to that. He wanted to celebrate his news, and he wanted to do it in style. He’d already arranged for Carter to spend tomorrow afternoon and Sunday night at their home and get the kids up and off to school Monday morning so he and Ginny could have a night away.

  He looked up from his desk and saw her approaching. Her confident walk sickened him. She still thought she’d won.

  He couldn’t hate her more.

  “Working on Saturday? What are Gin and the kids up to?” Sarah Jo took the seat in front of Tommy’s desk and crossed her legs after she laid her purse on his desk. She slowly perused his office, finally met his eyes, and yawned.

  “Gin is visiting an old friend, Mimi is working, and Jason has games all day.” His voice was cold.

  Sarah Jo studied the fingernails on her right hand. “So what do you want? I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t shopping close by. You’re not calling the shots, remember?”

  She was surprised to see he was smiling.

  “When are you moving?” he asked.

  “I’m not moving, and you know that. We discussed this at that shithole diner a couple of months ago. Or did you forget?” Condescension dripped from every word she spoke.

  “No. I didn’t forget. What I can’t remember is why you think you don’t have to leave.”

  “You know why. I told you—”

  “Yeah, I remember. The threat to tell Ginny about the morning sickness remedy. Well, I’ve decided it’s okay if you tell her. She won’t believe you.” He was following Alec’s advice from before Thanksgiving. Advice Alec had offered about a spiteful client who’d surprisingly become useful in Tommy’s secret feud with Sarah Jo—call her bluff, Tom. Call her fucking bluff.

  Sarah Jo snorted. “What makes you so sure she won’t believe me?”

  “Because it’s your word against mine, and when I show her Moe’s journal, the one I told you about, she’ll read for herself in Moe’s words how it was you who set up her rape. Who’s she going to believe then, Jo?”

  He leaned back in his chair and idly tapped his pen on his knee. He was going out on a limb here. He’d thrown Moe’s journal in the garbage months ago, but he never told Jo that. He had one more hunch, and if he was right, he’d be able to see it on her face. It was worth a try.

  “And when she finds out it was you, I mean Wendy, who tracked down Matthew Rockman and fed him all that information over the phone about Grizz and his gang and who he should talk to...”

  He paused and let the relevance of what he was saying sink in. He was certain by the expression on her face that his intuition was right.

  He leaned forward, and stared at her. “You told me you had friends at Ginny’s high school back in 1975. You would’ve heard the rumors about the school’s star running back being tutored by the missing girl. Then, as time passed, you noticed him making headlines with his legal career. You were always worried about Fess getting in trouble, so you kept up with everything. It explains why Fess and I weren’t on their radar immediately. You would never have implicated your father.” His jaw tightened. “And I have to say, I do believe you thought you were helping me out by not implicating me, too. But you would’ve known about Froggy’s love for Willow—and his festering hatred for Grizz. You would’ve known Blue’s marriage was falling apart. You told Rockman who he should go to. He’d probably moved on and forgotten about Ginny, but you stirred it all up again when you saw him in the news winning all his cases.”

  She shifted uncomfortably in her chair.

  “So I suppose Matthew told you this. That he heard from a Wendy, too? I don’t see how you can be talking to a man you’re supposed to be testifying against.”

  “No, Jo. Your face just did. But I’m sure if I ask him if he’d ever been contacted by someone named Wendy, he’d confirm it.”

  She stood up. “Fuck you! Fuck you all the way to hell, Tommy.”

  She picked up her purse and stomped out of his office. She made her way through the empty and dark lobby, slamming the front door behind her.

  Tommy stood up then, too, but he didn’t smile. He didn’t feel victorious. He felt tired. He was glad it was Saturday, and there was nobody in the other offices to witness what just happened.

  He also made a decision. One he knew Ginny would agree with. He was supposed to testify in Matthew Rockman’s murder trial. Tommy couldn’t implicate Grizz and Blue, but he was smart enough to figure out a way to answer the questions in a manner that would plant reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors. He might piss off the prosecution, but he was willing to take that chance.

  Rockman may have been guilty of being a manipulative, conniving son-of-a-bitch, but he wasn’t a murderer.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Ginny

  2001, Illinois

  I stood frozen and stared at the framed picture in my hand. I could feel a pulsing in my ears as my heart raced. I was aware of every vein in my body. It was almost as if I could feel the blood coursing its way through every artery.

  This couldn’t be. It was too much of a coincidence. I remembered how Grizz had asked me to give Mimi the middle name of Ruth. After Tommy told me about the early part of Grizz’s real childhood, I’d suspected maybe Ruth was the name of his little sister, though I couldn’t confirm it. I also had no proof he was raised in Florida.

  But I did know he had a real love for Rottweilers and that he’d owned a bar named Razors. My head was spinning with possibilities.

  “What’s the matter, child? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Sister Mary Katherine said as she watched me.

  She guided me by the elbow to a comfortable chair. I sat without taking my eyes off the picture.

  “Sister Agnes, where exactly in Florida is Macon’s Grove?” My voice cracked.

  “Oh, it was so small it’s probably been swallowed up by some bigger city by now. It’s right smack dab in the middle of Florida. Nothing but orange groves as far as the eye could see,” she said.

  By now my hand was shaking, and Sister Mary Katherine grabbed the picture from me before I dropped it.

  “Guinevere?”

  I swallowed thickly and took a deep breath. “I’d like to come back after Sister Agnes’s nap and ask her some more questions about this picture. That is, if you think it’s
okay and if she’ll remember.”

  “I can hear you, you know?” came the small voice from the bed. “And I may be blind and infirm, but I can tell you the license plate number of my first car. All of a sudden, I’m not so tired after all.” I could feel her blind eyes swivel toward me. “What do you want to know about Ruthie and Razor?”

  I looked at Sister Mary Katherine. She nodded for me to continue.

  “Everything. Please, sister. Tell me everything you remember about them and why you still have this picture.”

  “Well, it didn’t start with Ruthie and Razor. It started with another child. A baby boy.” My heart thudded. Sister Agnes sat up straighter. “It was 1947, and I was just twenty-two. I’d lost my husband in the war and was aimlessly wandering from relative to relative in the hopes of finding myself. I was so lost then. I was visiting an elderly aunt who lived near Macon’s Grove. She didn’t really live near it since it was in the middle of nowhere, but she lived close enough that she was sought by a man whose wife was in labor. My aunt had a decent reputation as a midwife, and she was closer than a hospital, so when he showed up at her door, she grabbed her supplies and took me with her.”

  She paused and asked Sister Mary Katherine for a drink of water. After she sipped her water, she continued.

  “It was sad. So sad. This little house in the middle of some orange groves. The poor woman was almost delirious with pain by the time we got there. I will never understand why the man just didn’t drive her to a hospital. Anyway, she gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. He was a big one, too. Came out screaming at the top of his lungs. My aunt handed him off to me to get him cleaned up. I brought him into the kitchen to wipe him down. I can still see his round little face.”

  I gulped and wondered if she could’ve been describing Grizz as a newborn. My head became thick with the sound of my blood pulsing. I watched as Sister Agnes’s expression turned wistful.