“Meaning?”
“You know—always hunting the ladies. But I spoke with Cassandra at a tea event today, and she said that Will kept good relationships with his ex-lovers. That he was charismatic. But I think she was hinting that men didn’t like him . . .”
“Okay. Helpful.” He scrawled away, turning a page and writing more. “And what was this Cassandra’s relationship with him now?”
“She’s in a new relationship; she was done with Will a couple years ago, I guess, but she said there was a rumor that he dated a married woman, or something like that—some sort of scandal. I don’t know. With stuff like this, you have to sift through the gossip and determine what’s just falsehood.”
“Sure.”
“Oh, and another thing. Sofia told my mom that there’s going to be some sort of autumn ball on Saturday, sponsored by the chamber of commerce, and she thinks a lot of Will’s old girlfriends will be there because he was well-known in the business and arts community.”
“Huh.”
“She says it’s all sold out, but I think I can get tickets.”
His eyes twinkled at me. “You have connections?”
“No, not exactly, but here’s another weird thing that happened. I was at a restaurant with Falken—you remember him?”
Erik nodded. Falken had helped him buy a very special gift for me once.
“Anyway, this man came up to us because he heard me say my grandma’s name. He said something about how he loved my grandma and our whole family, and he was in our debt, or something. I told Grandma and my mom, but they’d never heard of him.”
“Huh. So?”
“Well, he gave me his card. Said if he could ever do anything, blah-blah. And he works at the chamber of commerce.”
Erik grinned. “Hana, my little ace in the hole. Can I be your date?”
“First I’ll see if I can get tickets. If so, I wouldn’t want any other date.”
This pleased him.
“There’s something else,” I said. “Come with me.”
I stood up and held out my hand. He took it, and I led him into the living room and pointed at the wall. “Will Kodaly painted that.”
“Wow.”
“If you look at the caption, it says it’s a town in Hungary. When I Googled him, I found a picture of him in this same town. I don’t know if this has any meaning, but I wanted you to see his art. Oh, and this,” I said, going to the wall and holding up the painting of Cassandra. “He painted it.” I pointed at the woman at the fence. “That’s Cassandra, one of the women I just mentioned.”
“Ah. And did he always paint the women he dated?”
“Cassandra suggested he did. She said he was able to work rapidly and he was always looking for subjects. I told her she could have this if she wants it.”
His eyes left the painting and rested on me. “You’re a nice person.”
I set the painting down. “It’s been such a long day. I’d love to rest my feet here for a minute.” I pointed at the couch, one of our favorite places. “Did you have any other questions?”
He looked at his notebook. “This is good for now.” He tossed it onto my coffee table and lunged forward, tackling me against the pillows.
I screamed with laughter, but soon, under the intensity of Erik Wolf’s kissing, I felt very, very serious.
And the thing that grew within me twined another tendril around my heart.
Chapter 6
The Baby in Békéscsaba
A giant inflatable witch floated on a plastic broom in front of the Riverwood Chamber of Commerce. I paused to contemplate her cheerful face; apparently Halloween decoration designers wanted to present a dichotomy of cheerful fun contrasted with a traditional symbol of evil. I had experienced my fill of witch tales in the last month; I shivered slightly and marched up the pumpkin-lined steps.
Henrik Sipos had been very glad to hear from me; he assured me that he could meet with me this morning for whatever I might wish to discuss. He had been so accommodating, in fact, that I had started to suspect his motives; however, since he could also have rightly suspected mine, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.
A sign in the lobby told me that “H. Sipos, Director” could be found on the second floor, so I climbed the white stone stairway and sought room 204. I didn’t have to look for the number; the first door I passed was wide open, and the man I recalled as Henrik Sipos sat behind the desk, peering over his glasses at a computer monitor.
In the moment before he saw me I was able to study him, unobserved. Even though he was sitting, it was clear that he was a relatively tall man, and a thin one. I hadn’t paid much attention to that in the restaurant, confused as I had been by his presence. He smoothed his well-trimmed white mustache with one finger while he read something on his screen. His desk was filled with papers, but they were neatly arranged, and the radiator behind him had been turned into a sort of table that held framed photographs. His gray suit looked well-worn but elegant. On his lapel was a pumpkin pin that flashed an orange light every other second.
He sensed my presence and glanced at the door. His face lit up with happiness and he stood behind his desk, then moved swiftly around it to approach me, his hand held out in welcome. “Miss Keller! How wonderful to see you! I am so glad you came to pay me a visit.”
“Yes, well—thank you. Yes.”
He ushered me to a seat across from his desk and sat back down himself. “Things are rather busy here around the holidays, as you can imagine,” he said, still smiling. “All of our businesses try to increase foot traffic and we attempt to facilitate that in a variety of ways.”
I didn’t really want to hear his commercials for the chamber of commerce. “Mr. Sipos,” I began.
“Henrik!” he shouted jovially. “Do call me Henrik.”
“Um—okay. The other day, you sort of took me by surprise. You said you knew my grandmother?”
He nodded, then shook his head. “Yes, know her, but I also don’t know her. Did you mention me to her?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And she probably said she had never heard of me,” he said, beaming.
“She did, yes.”
Nothing got this guy down. He continued to grin at me. “The fact is, your grandmother last saw me when she was four years old. I myself was just a little boy. A toddle.”
“Toddler,” I corrected.
“Ah, yes! A toddler.” He lifted his hands and put them out before him, then listed from side to side to simulate the uncertain walking of a baby. “But you see, your grandmother was much beloved in my family always, because she was the daughter of Natalia.”
He said the name of my great-grandmother with such reverence that I got the chills, and again the face of Natalia rose up before me, gentle and smiling, almost as though she were in the room. “How did you know her?” I asked.
He sat back in his chair and sighed. “There is a story. Do you have time to hear it?”
As if I would leave without hearing it! “Yes, sure,” I said.
He nodded. “My mother is still living. She is ninety years old; her name is Stefania Sipos. In 1960, she lived in Békéscsaba, Hungary.”
“My grandmother was born in Békéscsaba,” I said.
“Yes.” His eyes twinkled at me. “The only child of Natalia, yes?”
I nodded. “My great-grandfather was killed in the revolution. In 1960, he had already been dead for four years.” For some reason this made me want to cry.
Henrik Sipos nodded. His smile disappeared with my mention of the revolution, and he looked like a different man.
I looked at my hands for a moment, and I thought of my great-grandmother’s hands, veined and gnarled but always somehow beautiful, and possessing a very strong grip when they held on to mine. I looked back up. “But back to Békéscsaba.”
I didn’t correct him this time. I was hanging on each word, waiting for clarity.
“My mother doted on me. She would walk me around town in a little carriage, and everyone knew me. I often feel that I have a vague memory of those days, of all the friendly faces that would peer at me in my comfortable buggy. But perhaps I manufactured those memories, ya? From the many times my mother told me the story.”
I nodded.
“Everyone in town knew me, whose baby I was. There was no danger in our little town, no real conflict, except hurt feelings from town gossip or little fights about whose food was better, or whose horse was faster, or whose child was smarter.”
I managed a smile, but a misery grew in me. Something was going to happen to that baby in the past. To little Henrik Sipos.
Big Henrik Sipos cracked his knuckles with an absent expression. “One sunny day in May my mother walked me down a street full of shops, peering into one after another to say hello to the proprietors, or to dart in for a quick purchase. She left my buggy on the sidewalk because it was large and hard to get through the doorways. She would tuck her little bags in a basket behind the carriage.
“At the end of the block was a candy store, and my mother had a sweet tooth. She pushed my stroller just past the doorway—just past, she said—because she wanted me to be in the shade. It was a rather warm day, and my eyes were watering from the sun. She regrets it now, regrets every choice that she was forced to recall, again and again.”
I gasped. I knew what was coming. Poor Stefania.
“My mother went in to get her candy. She liked a chocolate called Macskanyelv—means ‘cat’s tongue,’ because it was thin and shaped that way, like a tongue. She got a box of them that day, but never bought them again, couldn’t look at them. She didn’t even like cats afterward. Because she walked out of that little store and my carriage was gone. Simply gone. No one had seen a thing, heard a thing. The buggy hadn’t blown anywhere because there was no wind.”
He looked up at me, amazed by the memory and his own role at the center of the mystery. “Years later people told us they could hear my mother’s scream in their memories—so chilling they thought that witches had come to their town.”
“Oh, Henrik,” I said.
“Oh, at first she wasn’t afraid. She assumed a friend or shopkeeper had wheeled me into a store to pick me up or pet me or pass me around, as people sometimes did. They called me Kis Henhen.”
Little Hen-hen.
“Did she call the police?” I whispered.
“Yes, yes. Everyone flowed around her; the police were there in no time. They were stern, serious. They took statements from everyone, drove everywhere, did all that they could do.”
“But they didn’t find you?”
“No.” Henrik shook his head. “Two weeks went by. My mother became thin, frail. My father could not get her to eat.”
In a burst of something like light, I felt her misery. Saw her refusal to look at her own face in the bathroom mirror. Saw what she saw as she eyed her husband’s razor on the edge of the sink . . .
“Oh, your poor mother.”
“Why do we always blame ourselves?” he asked, shaking his head. “For accidents, for things out of our control? But we do.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
His face brightened. “But here I am before you! And my mother lives here in Riverwood, in a little in-law apartment in my home!”
“So—what happened?” I asked.
I knew the answer before he said, “Your great-grandmother happened!” and beamed at me, his hands folded together as if in prayer.
I sat up straight and stared at him. I don’t think I blinked for the remainder of the story. Henrik smoothed his tie. “My father was greatly distressed. His son was gone, and his wife was dying of despair. He asked the people in town to help him, and one of the young mothers said that he should go to see Natalia.”
A looming image: my great-grandmother’s old, sweet face. She would have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight then. My age. “Natalia.”
“Yes. She lived in town in a little apartment near her parents’ house. Just her and her daughter Juliana, who was four, almost five years old.”
“Yes.”
My grandmother as a child. My chills increased, causing something between pleasure and pain.
“People said that Natalia could see things. That she had helped them find lost watering pails or stray chickens, or once even an old grandpa who had wandered away. She never claimed to be anything—they just went to her.”
“Who went to Natalia? Your father?”
He shook his head. “For some reason my father wanted the police to go. He knew one of the investigators—a man named Joe Rohaly. They were about the same age. Rohaly took my absence personally. He couldn’t sleep at night, wondering what he had missed—what all of them had missed. My father—Istvan was his name—convinced Joe to hear this woman out, this Natalia who worked as a seamstress and a sometime babysitter.
“So they go to her house one night. Natalia was reading to her daughter, Joe told me, the little girl in her lap.” He paused in his reverie and looked at me. “I got the accounts from my mother and father, but also from Joe, who is an old man today. Still alive, yes! These old Hungarians never die.”
“Does Joe live here in Riverwood?”
“No, no. He is in Budapest these days. He sits by the Danube and paints watercolors. A very strong old man, and kind.” He seemed to be assessing my mood. Then he added, “I also got the account from Natalia. She was alive, too, when I came to America. I talked to her once, over coffee at a Chicago diner. It was an emotional reunion. She hugged me and called me kis Henrik, and csoda baba. Means ‘miracle baby,’” he said.
I nodded. My great-grandmother. Alive again, her feet striking the pavement as she walked to a meeting with the boy she saved. “Go on,” I said.
He scratched his head. His phone rang, and I jumped. He picked it up and said hello, then, “Oh yes, Celia. Absolutely. I’m in a meeting right now, but I can do that around noon. Does that work for you? Splendid! See you then.” He hung up the phone and jotted a note on his calendar, then looked back at me.
“Where were we?”
“Joe went to Natalia’s house.”
“Yes. Natalia told me that Joe had brought her a bear, a stuffed bear that belonged to me. She held it in her hands and she felt things right away, but she didn’t want to tell the policeman what she felt.”
“What was it?”
“That a boy had died. That he lay unblessed in a box.”
“Oh God.”
“Yes. She feared the boy was me. But then her little daughter took the bear and smiled at its face and told her mother that Henrik missed it.”
“What? Did my grandmother know you?”
He shook his head. “No, not then. She had never heard my name.” He cleared his throat. “So Natalia looked in her daughter’s eyes, and then she looked at the bear. And she kissed it. She put her lips on the bear’s fuzzy face, where the child would have put his lips.”
My eyes filled with tears, and Henrik handed me a box of tissues.
He said, “Then she knew that I was still alive, as her daughter had suggested.”
“So why did she see a boy in a box?”
Henrik sighed. “He was the boy I was meant to replace.”
Chapter 7
The Woman with Magic Fingers
Henrik Sipos looked at his watch. “It’s a long and complicated story, isn’t it? Let me hurry and finish.” He pushed some files out of the way and set his elbows on his desk. “There was a girl in a nearby farm town. Her name was Hajna. Her husband had died, and she had only her baby. She had been nursi
ng the child through a terrible flu, and the baby died.”
I took another tissue.
He nodded wisely at me. “They say that something in her died then, too. That she became a ghost walking around. All she knew was that she could not live without her child—exactly how my mother felt a few days later. Hajna’s mind offered her a solution the night her poor boy died. He lay still on the bed and she prayed over him, alone. But then she was convinced that the angels told her to find another boy, and to tell the world that he was her son. No one yet knew that her boy was gone.”
“The poor girl,” I said.
“She had no coffin, but she had a wood box of her husband’s. She tore an old dress with a satin skirt and lay her child on the satin bed. She closed the box and put it in her backyard, under an awning. Then she went to start her husband’s ancient car, and she drove two towns over, to Békéscsaba, to find her new son.”
“Oh, Henrik!”
“No one ever saw her because she strode up to my carriage with confidence, and anyone glancing at the scene would think she was the mother of the child. It was as if she were invisible.”
“How did Natalia see that?”
He shrugged. “She told Joe that she saw the baby, fat and happy, while another boy lay dead. She said she felt that one boy was meant to fill the chasm of grief left by the other.”
“Joe said he leaned in and studied Natalia’s eyes, which were wise and calm. He said, ‘Where?’ She didn’t know, but she told him what she saw: chickens pecking, a rusty car, a blue barn.”
“My god.”
“Joe went back to the station. Whatever he said convinced them, and they looked up every woman in the region who had given birth in the last two years. Then they sent cars around, looking for a blue barn. It took only one day.”
I leaned forward. “What happened to that poor girl?”
He nodded. “Joe said when they saw the barn, they called for backup. Then the cars pulled into the sad little driveway. She lived in poverty. She came to the door holding me. Joe said he recognized me right away. He felt great relief to see me alive. I was drinking a bottle and smiling at him. Then he turned his attention to the girl, who was not healthy. She was thin and pale and her eyes were unfocused.”
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