option.
Sliding the scrapbook aside, I stood and limped into the bedroom, where I dragged the box from under the bed, where I’d put it. I wasn’t sure why I’d felt the need to hide it. The only person who would recognize any of the contents would be Lillian Harrington-Ross and I couldn’t see the old woman coming inside the cottage to snoop. Maybe I’d only meant to hide it from myself.
I tossed the box on top of the quilted bedspread and slowly lifted the lid. I peered inside at the necklace, its once shining gold now burnished to a dull bronze. Picking it up, I let the odd shapes of the charms slip through my fingers like a rosary, the words forgotten. I spotted a bell, a musical note, a high-heeled shoe, a heart, a rearing horse, and a sailor’s knot. My eyes blurred, obstructing my vision of the rest of the charms. “So you must be Lola,” I said to the empty room, gingerly touching the forgotten memories and smiling at the innocence of young girls, wondering if I’d ever been so naive.
I put Lola back in the box, the tapping sound of metal against metal like impatient fingertips. My smile faded quickly as I spotted the yellowed news article. My hand hovered over it for a moment before delicately lifting it with two fingers, then held it as I read it again:
The body of an unidentified Negro male infant was pulled from the Savannah River this morning around eight o’clock by postman Lester Agnew on his morning rounds. The body was found naked with no identifying marks and has been turned over to the medical examiner to determine the cause of death.
I dropped the article back into the box and lifted the lid to shut it, but my gaze caught on one of the charms on the necklace that I’d noticed once before. I studied the tiny needle-sized spokes of the wheels, the sunshade and handle of the baby carriage spun from gold and began to feel sick.
I slammed the lid shut and shoved the box back under the bed before flipping off the lights and closing the door. Fingering the gold angel around my neck, I returned to the scrapbook and closed the pages with a quiet thud. I stared at it for a long time, feeling as if Fitz and I had just taken that final jump again and were still falling in a timeless void, waiting to hit the ground.
Helen listened to the jangling of Mardi’s collar tags to help guide her to the old tabby house, not that she really needed a guide. She’d lived at Asphodel Meadows her entire life and could easily have found her own way. But she pretended for Mardi’s sake, because the Lab strongly believed that she needed his help.
Using her cane in front of her, she walked slowly but purposefully toward the Georgian four-over-four house that had been the principal residence of Harringtons while the main house was being built back in eighteen seventeen. It was where her parents had lived briefly during their endeavor at domesticity and the births of their two children and where they stayed on their infrequent trips home from whatever remote corner of the earth they were attempting to civilize. Even Malily’s remodeling of the tabby structure and updating it with every modern convenience hadn’t been enough to entice her only daughter to come home to stay.
It was where Tucker had moved two years ago with Susan and the girls after he’d given up his medical practice in Savannah in an effort to focus on Susan’s needs. It really had never occurred to any of them how insurmountable her needs had been, or how the end of her life could offer no answers.
As Helen stood on the brick walk leading up to the house, she turned her face upward, picturing the double chimneys and graceful portico that had been added to the tabby facade in the last century. She remembered it as being a lovely house on the outside, but the interior during her childhood there with her parents had been decorated with loneliness and disappointment and even now she avoided it as much as she could.
She didn’t bother to knock
Sliding the scrapbook aside, I stood and limped into the bedroom, where I dragged the box from under the bed, where I’d put it. I wasn’t sure why I’d felt the need to hide it. The only person who would recognize any of the contents would be Lillian Harrington-Ross and I couldn’t see the old woman coming inside the cottage to snoop. Maybe I’d only meant to hide it from myself.
I tossed the box on top of the quilted bedspread and slowly lifted the lid. I peered inside at the necklace, its once shining gold now burnished to a dull bronze. Picking it up, I let the odd shapes of the charms slip through my fingers like a rosary, the words forgotten. I spotted a bell, a musical note, a high-heeled shoe, a heart, a rearing horse, and a sailor’s knot. My eyes blurred, obstructing my vision of the rest of the charms. “So you must be Lola,” I said to the empty room, gingerly touching the forgotten memories and smiling at the innocence of young girls, wondering if I’d ever been so naive.
I put Lola back in the box, the tapping sound of metal against metal like impatient fingertips. My smile faded quickly as I spotted the yellowed news article. My hand hovered over it for a moment before delicately lifting it with two fingers, then held it as I read it again:
The body of an unidentified Negro male infant was pulled from the Savannah River this morning around eight o’clock by postman Lester Agnew on his morning rounds. The body was found naked with no identifying marks and has been turned over to the medical examiner to determine the cause of death.
I dropped the article back into the box and lifted the lid to shut it, but my gaze caught on one of the charms on the necklace that I’d noticed once before. I studied the tiny needle-sized spokes of the wheels, the sunshade and handle of the baby carriage spun from gold and began to feel sick.
I slammed the lid shut and shoved the box back under the bed before flipping off the lights and closing the door. Fingering the gold angel around my neck, I returned to the scrapbook and closed the pages with a quiet thud. I stared at it for a long time, feeling as if Fitz and I had just taken that final jump again and were still falling in a timeless void, waiting to hit the ground.
Helen listened to the jangling of Mardi’s collar tags to help guide her to the old tabby house, not that she really needed a guide. She’d lived at Asphodel Meadows her entire life and could easily have found her own way. But she pretended for Mardi’s sake, because the Lab strongly believed that she needed his help.
Using her cane in front of her, she walked slowly but purposefully toward the Georgian four-over-four house that had been the principal residence of Harringtons while the main house was being built back in eighteen seventeen. It was where her parents had lived briefly during their endeavor at domesticity and the births of their two children and where they stayed on their infrequent trips home from whatever remote corner of the earth they were attempting to civilize. Even Malily’s remodeling of the tabby structure and updating it with every modern convenience hadn’t been enough to entice her only daughter to come home to stay.
It was where Tucker had moved two years ago with Susan and the girls after he’d given up his medical practice in Savannah in an effort to focus on Susan’s needs. It really had never occurred to any of them how insurmountable her needs had been, or how the end of her life could offer no answers.
As Helen stood on the brick walk leading up to the house, she turned her face upward, picturing the double chimneys and graceful portico that had been added to the tabby facade in the last century. She remembered it as being a lovely house on the outside, but the interior during her childhood there with her parents had been decorated with loneliness and disappointment and even now she avoided it as much as she could.
She didn’t bother to knock
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