by Vicki Grant
I wanted to say the right thing, but before I could even think of what that might be, he said, “Hungry?” Smiling again.
I was.
There were meat pies and potato salad and chicken sandwiches. Flakes of pastry freckled Eddie’s lips and then the back of his arm when he wiped them away.
I dug into the potato salad. It was creamy and salty and a little tangy from the chunks of pickle.
“Good?” he asked.
“I’m in heaven,” I said.
Sixteen
I HAD TROUBLE sleeping again that night, and it wasn’t just from thinking about Eddie. I’d drift off for a while, then there’d be a little noise—a twig snapping or a branch brushing against the window—and I’d lurch up, sure I was in the fire again or that someone was trying to break into the cabin.
I’d sit there paralyzed, my knees against my chest and my heart pounding, until I managed to convince myself that it was just the wind, or an animal, and then I’d unfold myself and try to go to sleep again.
At six thirty, I gave up and went to get some breakfast.
I was locking the cabin door when I noticed it. A bird’s wing on my front step. A robin, maybe, or a swallow. Something small-boned like that.
So that’s what I heard, I thought. An animal of some sort, leaving me a little gift. I tried to figure out which animals would do that, but nothing came to mind. The wing was so delicate—bleached white, stripped clean, almost pretty. Maybe Eddie would know. I took it inside and put it on my bedside table. While I was there, I decided to grab the jacket he’d given me. It was cool that early in the day.
I headed over to the staff cafeteria. Glennie was just leaving. She had a mug in her hand and bags under her eyes. Her skin was the color of uncooked pastry.
“You okay?”
“Bad case of ginfluenza. Just heading to bed now. But not to worry, darling.” Brave smile. “Plenty of rest and the latest issue of Glamour, and I should be all better by cocktail hour. Hey…”
She reached out and rubbed the sleeve of my jacket. “Eddie give you this?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“I recognize it.” She pulled back my collar and checked the label. She smelled of Nivea cream and something sour. “Yup. Holt’s Junior Miss. That’s Libby’s.”
“Libby?” I didn’t understand.
“Eddie’s conquest of 1963.”
I couldn’t get the jacket off fast enough.
“No. Stop. Enjoy it. She’s not here this year—and anyway, that girl has more clothes than she knows what to do with. I’m sure that’s not the only garment she left at his place.” Glennie dipped her fingers into her hot tea, pulled out the bag and tossed it on the ground. “Oh, and speaking of delectable young men…a bunch of us are going into town Saturday night for some fries. Interested in coming along?”
“Don’t think I can.” I’ll be in my cabin sobbing.
“Sure? Finlay will be there…”
I shook my head. Another good reason not to go.
“Neither French fries nor Finlay can lure you out? I admire your self-restraint. Offer me a couple of stale Cheezies and anyone younger than Oliphant, and I’d be there like a shot.” She laughed at herself, then headed into the Harem.
I’d lost my appetite. I took a table near the back of the cafeteria and sat there, picking at my toast, hating my jacket, hating Libby and Glennie and maybe Eddie too.
I found this at the cottage and thought it would look good on you. That’s all he’d said in his note. Not as if he claimed to have bought it for me or anything. I wasn’t at the Arms last year. Why shouldn’t Eddie have had a girlfriend back then? Who cares about Libby?
That’s what I told myself. But the walls of the cafeteria were covered with old staff photos, and I couldn’t resist checking out the 1963 group shot.
Libby Braithewaite wasn’t hard to find. She was slim and blond and utterly, tragically pretty.
Mrs. Smees didn’t look up when I came in to work.
“How was your anniversary?” I said.
She slapped down her pencil. Her beehive drooped to one side like a tent missing a pole. “My personal life any business of yours?”
All I needed. The jacket. Libby’s face. And now Mrs. Smees in one of her moods.
The morning dragged on. The EddieEddieEddie of the sewing machine just reminded me of all the other girls cooing his name and how much prettier than me they were.
Eddie stuck his head in the door at five after four. That smile. He probably didn’t even remember whose jacket it was. “My two favorite gals! Isn’t it time you called it a day?”
“Take her, if you want. I got work to do.” Mrs. Smees squared a pile of papers on her desk and slammed the stapler through it with the heel of her hand.
Eddie looked at me like, What’s up with her? I gave him a tight little shake of my head. A warning. He laughed at my fear and launched himself onto the edge of her desk.
“Oh hey, Muriel. I’m doing a story I thought you might be able to help me with.”
“Didn’t I just say I have work to do?”
“You can staple and talk at the same time. I know you can. Seen you do it—”
She slapped down another ream of paper and looked at him with that mean little smile. “Okay. What?”
Didn’t bother him at all. “You were at the Arms in ’47, weren’t you?”
“No. I was at the Adairs’ then.”
“Close enough. Must have been very young.”
“Get on with it, Eddie.”
“I’m writing an article on the Bye-Bye Baby. What really happened that night.”
“Oh for the love of God.” She grabbed a bunch of files and got up from her desk, her chair spinning out behind her. “That’s what you’re wasting my time with? Load of nonsense, the whole thing.”
“You mean the disappearing baby? I know that didn’t happen.”
“So what are you writing about then?” She yanked open the filing cabinet and started shoving papers in.
“The truth. People saw a real baby there that night. Where did it come from? Who was the—”
Mrs. Smees whammed the cabinet shut so hard my fillings rang. “Is news that slow, Eddie, that you have to report on some hogwash a bunch of drunken teenagers made up decades ago?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t think they made it up.”
“You don’t? Well, I do. And I should know. I was there.”
Eddie reared back, a laugh stuttering in his throat.
“What’s so funny?”
“You were at the clearing that night?”
She started counting the pillowcases for the third time that day.
“Yes, I was. You’re not the first person to be young, you know. And I’m telling you, there was no baby, disappearing or not. There was just a bunch of snotty-nosed college kids with more money than brains thinking it would be funny to stir things up for a while. I’m sure you know the type. So do yourself a favor. Drop the whole thing. Now, why don’t the two of you get out of here and let me get my damn work done.”
Seventeen
IT WAS ALL part of our investigation. That’s what Eddie claimed, and it seemed like a good excuse. We waited until dark and then headed up to the clearing.
“See what I mean?” he said as we fumbled through the woods, the flashlight giving off a dim yellow cone of light. “You’d never find the way if you didn’t know where it was. That’s why I think it had to be someone from around here.”
A tree blocked the path. “Under or over?” he said, then scooped me up and over it.
“You can put me down now.”
“I could.” He didn’t. “I feel like I should be hunchbacked and cackling madly as I whisk the terrified maiden off to my forest lair.”
“Your cackle wouldn’t terrify me.”
“You haven’t heard my cackle.”
“Well, if it’s anything like your chortle, it wouldn’t scare me at all.”
“Know w
hat I don’t understand?”
“What?” Another joke.
“No. I’m being serious. If the mother was from around here, why would she go to the clearing to have her baby? She’d know there could be kids up here.”
At the moment, it was difficult caring a whole lot about trivial matters like what my mother was thinking the night she had me, but I did my best to focus.
“Didn’t Sandra say no one ever came up on Tuesdays? If the mother’d known that, she probably figured it was safe. Maybe she didn’t know the dance was canceled.”
“You’re an excellent addition to our investigative team, Miss Blythe.”
He trudged on through the woods, me in his arms, not saying much. I kept thinking I might actually have a boyfriend. I imagined lying in bed in the dark at the Home, telling Sara or Tess all about him.
Then I realized Tess probably wouldn’t have been there. She’d have snuck out through the window to see her own boyfriend. And the idea just popped into my head.
“She was meeting someone,” I said. “Didn’t you say that tree’s sort of a landmark?”
He laughed the way you do when something’s right. “Think they were going to run away together?”
“I don’t even know who they are. I feel like we’re just making this story up.”
“Fun, isn’t it?” He put me down. “Et voilà! The clearing.”
The moon was high and bright and turned everything shades of blue. The clearing wasn’t much bigger than Mrs. Smees’s office. The forest floor had been worn down to bare earth except in the middle, where there was a dark circle of rocks and the ashy remains of a fire. I heard a truck honk in the distance, but otherwise the only sounds were the scuffles of our feet and the rustle of leaves.
“Got your bearings?” Eddie said.
“Not really.”
He pointed with the flashlight. “The highway, north. We’re pretty close, actually. The Arms, south. Then all the way down the west side, over there, the road into the resort.”
“And beyond the road are the guest cottages, right? And then what? The Adairs’ place?”
“Yup.”
“What about over there?”
“To the east? Woods, woods, woods and then Miss Cameron’s. You’d have to be Alexander the Great to figure out how to get in from that side.”
“Maybe the mother came in during the day. While it was light.”
“She’d still need a machete.”
“Sounds like one of those magazines Bas reads while he’s waiting for the wash. Machete Mama.”
“Machete Mama and the Disappearing Baby.”
“I’d read it.”
“Who wouldn’t?” He waved the flashlight around the clearing. “Okay. Let’s see if we can figure this out. We know there were about twenty kids here. Mostly drunk. Our informant, the former Sandra Smithers, is huddled by the fire when she notices a townie named Dougie Pratt romancing a college girl named Cecily Ingram. A re-creation of events might help, don’t you think?”
“Sure. I’ll play Cecily—or do you want to?”
“No. Please. Ladies first.” He took my hand and led me to the far side of the fire circle. “So I imagine they’d be around here. Dougie’s been eying Cecily all night. He’s moved by the glow the fire casts on her chestnut hair, the way the flames dance in her opalescent eyes, etcetera, etcetera. Maybe someone brought a guitar and is playing, um—what’s a hit song from around 1947?”
“‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’?”
“Very romantic. But okay. Doug takes another swig of rum—”
“Gin. Sandra says it was gin.”
“—gin, then screws up his courage and asks her to dance. Miss Ingram? May I?”
I shrug like, Why not?
“Much to Dougie’s astonishment, she says yes.”
Eddie put one arm around my back and took my hand with the other. “They glide expertly around the clearing…you call that gliding?”
“Sorry. Not much of a dancer. You knew that going into this.”
“She isn’t much of a dancer, and yet there’s something magnetic about Cecily Ingram. She pulls him closer—are you listening?”
“I’m concentrating on gliding.”
He wrapped my arm around his neck. “Cecily pulls him closer and whispers in his ear…”
“This is getting silly.”
“No, that’s not what she says. She says, ‘Take me to the tree, my darling.’ He doesn’t need to be told twice. He spins her through one last pirouette, then discreetly leads her out of the clearing.”
Eddie found another path, and we sort of danced along that for a minute or two, until we came to a large boulder.
“Careful,” he said. “This is where I chipped my tooth.” I did my best not to think how that happened. He tiptoed me around the backside of the rock. “And here we are. The tree!”
“The tree,” I said.
“So this is where Dougie and Cecily would have come.”
“Uh-huh. Yeah.”
And suddenly we were awkward, two strangers stuck making conversation at a bus stop.
I said, “Guess it hasn’t changed much since then.”
“Little bigger maybe.” He put his hands in his pockets, shrugged.
“Oh, right. They grow, don’t they?”
“Trees? So I’ve heard.”
“But not boulders.”
“No.”
We’d come all this way. All the joking and the whispering and the almost-accidental touching and not-so-accidental touching and then to just stand here like this, talking nonsense. I thought of Joe and that screen door creaking between scared and excited.
“They probably weren’t standing,” I said.
“No. Unlikely.”
“Well, maybe we shouldn’t.”
“Not if we’re re-creating it, I guess.”
I took his hand, and we sat on the ground.
“You think they’d be sitting?” I said.
“Doubt it.”
I lay down. He lay down beside me. Two corpses in the morgue. I could see the Big Dipper and the North Star. I was pretty sure Doug and Cecily hadn’t been looking at constellations either.
I cleared my throat. Eddie rolled over onto his side, facing me.
“I was thinking about it, and my guess is he probably had his arm around her,” he said. “Like this maybe.”
I said, “I don’t want to play this game anymore.”
“Oh,” Eddie said and moved away.
I pulled him back. “Why don’t we kiss for real?”
Eighteen
I NEVER WANTED to leave. I’d have been happy spending the rest of my life in the woods, cut off from civilization, surviving on nothing more than a diet of ferns and berries and Eddie. But we apparently had lives to get back to.
He helped me to my feet. I was cold when I stepped away from him, so he opened his shirt and wrapped me in it. It was hard going in the woods in the dark, even with his arm around me, and, oddly, that made me think of my mother.
“How’d she do it?”
“Hmm?” Eddie seemed a bit dozy. Neither of us had gotten quite enough oxygen in the last little while.
“The mother. How’d she make it out of the woods? She must have been exhausted after the birth, and it’s a long way.”
“She might have gone the other way.” He didn’t sound that interested.
“There’s another way?”
“An old logging road. Pretty much grown over. It’s shorter, but it takes you out to the resort road, not down through the woods. Not many people know about it.”
“Show me.”
Big whimper. “We’d have to go back to the clearing again.”
“It’s your article.” He laughed and muttered something in my ear that I didn’t quite hear but liked the sound of.
We backtracked to the tree, skirted around the heart-shaped rock and found the logging road. The ground was higher here, and when Eddie pointed the flashlight I could just mak
e out the clearing below. We walked for a while, and then he suddenly stopped.
“One more thing you should see, since you dragged me all this way…” He waved his flashlight over a large squarish hole in the forest floor, three feet deep or so, just off to the side of the path. “The famous Passion Pit.”
I peered into it. “It almost looks man-made.”
“Dad said there used to be a hunting cabin back here when he was a kid. I’m guessing this is all that’s left of it.” Then he whispered into my hair, “We should check it out sometime.”
I was past the point of blushing.
We headed out onto the logging road. In no time, we were scrabbling through bushes and onto the long driveway into the resort. I recognized where we were. Couldn’t have been any more than a few minutes to the highway.
“We made it,” I said.
“Yes, we did.” Hands in my hair. “I think we should celebrate.” Legs on either side of mine. Lips on my neck.
And then a car rounded the corner, lighting us up like prisoners caught scaling the jailhouse wall. I jumped away, my arm across my face.
The car stopped. The window rolled down, a man stuck out his head.
“Eddie.”
“Uncle Ward.” It was the man I’d seen with Mr. Peters in the restaurant.
This was Ward Adair.
Eddie pulled me over to the car, leaned his arm against the roof, didn’t even try to do anything with his hair, his shirt. “What are you doing out at this hour?”
“I could ask you the same thing.” Mr. Adair was unshaven and bleary-eyed but when he smiled, handsome as a spy. “But I won’t.”
Eddie laughed. “This is Dot.”
“How do you do? Mrs. Naylor said I’d probably meet you sometime soon. Didn’t imagine it would be at three in the morning.”
I went red, a hot spot in the darkness.
“Three?” Eddie laughed. “Why are you out?”
“Looking for Len. Haven’t seen him, have you?”