by Liz Johnson
“Have you been to this house before?”
Millie’s mind had been somewhere out the window and across the green fields, and she jumped at his question. “The house? To my grandma’s house? Yes, I’ve been there. I grew up there.”
The car swerved a little before Ben righted it. He worried his lip with his upper teeth for a long moment, and she could almost see the gears in his mind trying to parse her story.
There was no use hiding it—no reason to. “My parents took off when I was a toddler. They decided they didn’t like being parents. It was too hard. Too exhausting. Too much.” A lump formed in her throat, and she tried to swallow it away. But it refused to budge, so she cleared her throat and tried to speak around it. “They left me with Grandma Joy one day and never came back for me.”
Okay, it was out there now. No taking it back. It just hung like a funeral shroud in his car, like she’d killed any chance of a normal conversation.
She opened her mouth to apologize for dropping a bomb on their road trip, but his question beat her to it. “You haven’t seen them since?”
“Once, when I was seven or eight, I thought I saw my mom outside my school.” She shrugged and tried to conjure up that memory and the hope it had carried for so many years. If it had really been her mother, then maybe she had wanted Millie. Maybe she had realized what a terrible mistake she’d made. Maybe she’d loved her.
But the memory was faded, like a book read too many times, its pages smeared and unclear. Maybe Millie’s young eyes had seen what she so desperately hoped to.
“Wow.”
She’d almost forgotten she wasn’t alone, that she wasn’t drumming up those old memories for her own private torture, as she usually did. “You probably had great parents, huh? Packed up your car and sent you off to college with a box of cookies and a tank of gas.”
Ben snorted. “Hardly. My mom was a different sort. She was a bit of a hippie, and she never gave it up. We lived in communes and were always moving. She never seemed to have a job, and there was always a parade of guys staying with us.” His knuckles on the steering wheel turned white and then relaxed as he took a deep breath.
Millie didn’t want to ask. She didn’t have any right to. But she did anyway. “Were you close with her?”
Ben licked his lips, which were working hard to fight a frown. He was silent so long that she thought he might not answer the question. Finally he shrugged. “My mom has a lot of problems. She made a lot of mistakes.”
She nodded, giving him a silent nudge to keep going.
“When I was a kid, I thought she was the best. She always cut the crust off my PB&J sandwiches. Our house was mostly clean, and she pretty much let me do whatever I wanted.”
“Where is she now?”
He didn’t say anything, and his gaze never left the road.
“Do you know where she is?”
He gave a quick nod but didn’t expound.
“Do you spend much time with her?”
“She’s otherwise engaged. And she will be for another seven to ten.” His words carried the tiniest hint of bitterness, and Millie’s stomach fell to the floorboard.
There was no doubt what he meant. His mom was in prison. And he seemed to think she belonged there. But why?
She wanted to press. She wanted to ask for any teeny detail. But she had no right to do so, so she took a side path and asked something else she had no right to. “What about your dad?”
He narrowed his eyes at the road, and this time his knuckles didn’t relax. “I never knew him. I’m not even sure my mom knew who he was.”
He said it so matter-of-factly, but it twisted in her chest, tugged at her insides. That was Grandma Joy’s story too. At least, that’s what she believed.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. If there were other words to say, she didn’t know them.
“It’s all right.” The words were more growl than she expected, and he coughed before continuing. “I made peace with that a long time ago.”
She nodded toward a drive off the two-lane country road not even an hour from St. Simons. “Take that one.” He did, and they bounced along the gravel toward a square, two-story white house. Its paint was chipped and unfamiliar trucks were parked next to rusted tractors in the yard, but her childhood home had never looked so wonderful.
As he parked the car, she blurted out a thought before it was fully formed. “Do you think that it would have made a difference—knowing your dad? At least knowing who he was?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He crawled out of the car and looked at her over its top. Shadows from the giant oak tree in the yard danced across his face. “Why?”
And then she said the very last thing she’d planned to. The very last thing she should have. “I wonder what difference it would have made if Grandma Joy had known about Claude Devereaux.”
twelve
Claude Devereaux. Grandma Joy and Claude Devereaux.
Ben stumbled to keep up with Millie, who marched toward the front door of the house. He might have called out to her and demanded to know the connection between her grandmother and the wealthiest family in Louisiana, except for the twitching blinds at the window.
Someone was inside and close. Someone whose help they needed. But all he wanted to do was grab Millie by the arm, spin her around, and insist she tell him the truth. Of course, if the wild look in her eyes right after she had spoken meant anything, she hadn’t meant to tell him any of it. Not a single syllable.
He needed to know more than ever. But there wasn’t time to uncover the truth when the front door at the top of a short flight of stairs swung open halfway. A young woman with mousy brown hair and a baby on her hip filled the opening. Her glare was enough to send goose bumps down his arms. He wouldn’t be surprised if she had a shotgun at the ready.
But Millie wasn’t deterred. Gravel crunched under her feet with precise rhythm, and her shoulders squared, as though this home and all of its precious memories belonged to no one else.
“We already believe in Jesus. We don’t got nothin’ you want. We ain’t buyin’ nothing you’ve got.” The woman—too young for that moniker, really—poked her chin toward their car. “You best be gettin’ on your way. My Danny will be back soon enough.”
“Ma’am, my name is Millie Sullivan.” She spoke like the other woman hadn’t cordially told them to get off her property. With a wave of her hand toward him, she said, “This is my friend Ben Thornton.”
Maybe she leaned a little heavily on the word friend. Maybe he was reading too much into it, like everyone else seemed to be doing these days.
“I grew up in this house.”
Millie was halfway up the stairs, and the woman had closed the door partway. Now only her eyes and scowl were visible through the crack. “We ain’t interested in sellin’. We bought it fair and square.”
Millie chuckled, and although he couldn’t see her face, he could imagine her smile. She didn’t have three quarters in her pocket, and this woman thought she wanted to buy the house out from under them. Not likely.
“Of course. You bought the home from my grandmother. Joy Sullivan?”
The door creaked to a stop, held open with the toe of a house shoe, and the scowl turned from distrust to curiosity. “Mrs. Sullivan? This was her family’s home.”
Millie nodded quickly, eating up the last couple steps to the top and meeting the other woman eye to eye. She reached out a hand and introduced herself again. “My name is Millie.”
The woman’s gaze dropped to the outstretched hand, her eyes narrowing. Finally she looked back up and toed the door open another six inches. “Samantha. Sam. Williams.”
“I’m so happy to meet you.” Millie reached out farther until Sam moved her baby to the other hip and opened the door enough to shake her hand.
“I met your grandma. She was a kind woman.”
Millie nodded again. “She still is.”
“Terrible what happened to her.”
He
still couldn’t see Millie’s face from his place at the bottom of the stairs, but he could see her back grow tense and her knees below her shorts lock. She mumbled something that sounded like agreement.
“What’re you folks doing out here?” Sam made it sound like they were on top of a distant hill instead of forty miles outside of town among a sea of other family farms.
“I was hoping to ask for a favor.”
Sam began to close the door again. “We ain’t got much.”
“Oh, no. It’s nothing like that.” Millie looked over her shoulder at him, and for a split second he forgot that she had been hiding something from him. He saw only the kindness in her smile, the warmth in her eyes. The reminder that they were a team—that he was part of a team. For the first time in his life.
The truth hit like a baseball bat to the gut—not that he’d ever swung one. He’d been on his own for so long that he’d forgotten what it meant not to have to do life alone—if he’d ever actually known. And it was nice. No, it was so much better than nice. As he tried to find the word to describe his life after meeting Millie, she offered Sam the barest minimum of their story.
“You see, my great-grandmother built this house with her husband, Henry, and my grandma thinks she may have left something here. Maybe paperwork of some sort. Have you ever found anything like that?”
Sam patted her gurgling baby on the back as he chewed on his own fist. She looked closely at Millie, then at Ben. Her gaze burrowed into them, searching out every half-truth and concealed lie. “What’s her name?”
“My great-grandma? Ruth Holiday. Well, Ruth Jefferson after she married.”
Sam’s mouth dropped open like Millie had given the secret password, and she pushed the door all the way open. “We found a box of letters and such up in the attic. They was all addressed to Ruth. All of ’em.”
Millie shot him another look, this one filled with hope. He bounded up the steps to her side as they followed Sam’s sweeping arm into the house.
“Can we look at them?” Millie asked.
Sam nodded and closed the door behind them. It wasn’t much cooler inside than it had been in the direct sun, and Ben hooked a finger into the collar of his shirt. It was already damp, and air thick enough to cut wasn’t helping the situation. He added another roll to his sleeves. It didn’t help either.
“You can have ’em if you can find ’em. They’re up in the attic, far as I know. But there’s some other stuff too.”
“Some other stuff” turned out to be a euphemism for a lifetime of junk crammed into a space smaller than Millie’s apartment and hotter than an oven. One small vent on the floor didn’t do anything to keep air circulating except mock them for every deep breath they tried to secure. After climbing the pull-down ladder and traipsing into the gray unknown, Ben wasn’t confident they’d find anything at all, except possibly a stubbed toe.
Millie walked right into an old chest and clapped her hand over her mouth. It didn’t do much to muffle the subsequent scream. “Ow!”
“You all right?”
“I’ll live. But they might have to take the whole foot.” She dug into her pocket and pulled out her phone to turn on its flashlight while mumbling, “That’s what I get for wearing flip-flops on a treasure hunt.”
He followed her example and held up his light against the darkness. “I thought the treasure was at the Chateau. Aren’t we just looking for clues?”
“Who knows at this point?” Her beam illuminated a pile of boxes, and she snaked her way toward it. “Over here.”
They opened every lid and peered in every box. They found baby books and baby clothes and little pink baby shoes. They found photo albums and high school yearbooks from the 1950s. They found crayon drawings and pieces of art.
But there were no letters to Ruth.
Kneeling before the bottom box on the stack, Millie leaned back and crossed her arms. Her shoulders slumped, and her chin rested against her chest.
He couldn’t blame her. She’d had a long day, and it was only midafternoon. They were both covered in dust and sweat, and he’d give his car for a glass of sweet tea right about then.
Pushing himself off the floor, he followed the beam of his flashlight through the maze of wicker and wooden furniture. For people who claimed not to have much, the Williams family sure did have a lot of junk. But he kept going, searching for anything cardboard. Preferably it would have the name Ruth scrawled along the side. But he’d settle for anything that looked out of place.
Deeper in, he had to duck his head to keep from smashing it against a beam. And that’s when he saw it. Covered in dust and buried beneath a mound of old painting tarps was a white box—or at least it had been white at some point in its life.
It scraped along the wooden floor as he pulled it out from its hiding place and flipped the lid open. It was filled with papers yellowed with time. Newspapers and stationery. Envelopes and postcards. And a bundle of them were tied up with blue ribbon.
“Millie. I found it.”
Scraping and scratching to move things out of her path, she clawed her way across the narrow room. She didn’t have to duck, and she didn’t slow down until she reached him, her hands landing on his back. “What is it?”
“Look at all these letters.”
She knelt down, the sagging of her shoulders all but gone. Gently she lifted one of the envelopes from the mess below and pulled out the letter. “George.” She said his name in hushed reverence, and Ben racked his brain for any memory of the man from what Millie had told him of the diary. Certainly she hadn’t told him every little detail, but he knew that George had been important to Ruth.
“The gardener?”
She nodded. “She . . . she broke things off with him—” Looking up, she shook her head. “No. That’s not quite right. They were never seeing each other.”
He was listening to her. Mostly. Except when he undid the ribbon bow around the packet of letters and pulled the first note free. His eyes skimmed the contents, and his stomach twisted into a loop tighter than the script on the page.
Millie rambled on. “She told him she couldn’t spend time with him anymore because of—”
“Claude Devereaux.”
Her eyes went wide, and she nearly dropped the letter in her hand.
The truth seared through him, and he wanted to yell at her that he had a right to know, that he deserved to know. Instead, he took a deep breath in through his nose and let it out through his mouth.
“What exactly is it with Devereaux and your family? What did you mean earlier about if your grandmother had known about him?”
“Nothing.” She looked away as though holding his gaze was far too much weight for her to carry. It seemed the pressure of knowing too much and telling him too little covered all of her as she sagged against the box and put her head in her hands. “I don’t know what to say.” Her fingers muffled her words as the paper crinkled in her fist.
A twinge of heartburn caught him off guard, and he smashed his fist into the spot right below his sternum. It didn’t do much to stem the fire, which could have been a product of betrayal.
But that would require him to care about Millie and whatever they had shared. He didn’t. He wouldn’t. He’d felt sorry for her. He’d been intrigued by her offer. He’d wondered how she was making ends meet caring for Grandma Joy all by herself.
He did not care about her. Not even a little bit.
Yeah, that wasn’t true either.
“I’m sorry.” When she finally looked his way again, she’d rubbed two sooty black stains around her eyes. “I should have told you before. I meant to. I planned on it. I wanted to. I just thought that . . . that if I did . . .”
“I wouldn’t help you.” He didn’t have to be a great detective or treasure hunter to put those pieces together.
She nodded. “I do need your help. But also”—she took a big breath that filled her shoulders and lifted her chin even higher—“I like your help.”
; “You have a funny way of showing it.” He could have bitten his own tongue off. He had no business being so outright rude to her. She was obviously about to tell him something important, and he’d just given her every reason to leave him behind. Pressing his forefinger and thumb into his eyes, he sighed. “I’m sorry. Go on.”
Biting her lips until they nearly disappeared, she lifted one shoulder. “No. You’re right. And if you want to walk away, I won’t blame you.”
“Just—” He ran his fingers through his hair and pressed his other hand to his waist. He could take her up on her offer and walk away forever. The money wasn’t going to be enough to make much of a difference in his life anyway. Okay, sure, it was better than nothing. But it wasn’t going to change his course. He was still going to have to work three jobs, still going to have to make right what he could. “Just tell me what’s actually happening here. Who is Devereaux to you?”
“I don’t know for sure. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. That’s what I’m hunting for.” She held up the letters in her hands. “Claude was at the Chateau the same summer that Ruth was there.”
“You already told me that.”
“But . . . but . . .” She seemed to be searching for words, and he wanted to throw the pile of envelopes with Devereaux’s seal at the wall.
“Just tell me when this all started. Tell me why you took the job at the Chateau. Tell me whatever you want. Just tell me the truth.” His voice had risen with each word, and suddenly a dog outside the house barked loudly. He refused to let it distract him from watching her reaction.
Another deep breath. Another long pause. Her gaze wandered to a different time and place. And then she started, presumably at the beginning.
“I was visiting Grandma Joy at the home a couple months ago. She looked at me so closely, like she could see right into my heart. And then she said the strangest thing: ‘You are your father’s daughter.’ I laughed because she’d often said how much I looked like him. Then she got very serious. It was strange, but I knew that she remembered. She was fully lucid in that moment, and she said, ‘But I’m not.’”