The Lost Hours (10 page)

“No,” I said, feeling the mix of exhilaration and terror push through me again, “I won’t be.”

My attention was drawn to a movement in the doorway and I realized that Helen had already turned her head. The older woman whose picture I’d seen in the newspaper stood with her hand gripping the doorframe, the fingers bending in the wrong directions. She wore a striped silk blouse and matching skirt, her blond hair and makeup elegant yet understated. I knew Lillian Harrington-Ross was ninety years old but she looked at least twenty years younger. A fleeting memory of my own grandmother with her weary face and long, uncut hair made me wince.

“Are you pouring drinks, Helen?”

“Yes, Malily. Yours is waiting on the shelf.” Helen gave me a wink and for a moment I forgot that Helen was blind.

I stood to greet the newcomer and realized my hand was shaking. Lillian approached with her glass, appraising me with eyes the color of emeralds.

“Malily, this is Earlene Smith. She’s renting the caretaker’s cottage for a few months while she does genealogy research. Earlene, this is my grandmother and owner of Asphodel Meadows, Lillian Harrington-Ross.”

Lillian slowly took a sip of her sherry. “Yes,” she said, pausing for a moment, “I remember you mentioning her.” Her gaze took in my scuffed sandals, wrinkled linen pants, and pink button-down blouse with the coffee stain on the front courtesy of the idiot driver in front of me that morning on Abercorn Street. Lillian’s eyes returned to my face and stopped for a moment while I held my breath. “Have we met before?”

I shook my head. “No. I don’t think so.”

The old woman stared at me for a moment longer. “You must remind me of someone else, then.” She moved to the sofa and then added as an afterthought, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Smith.”

“Likewise,” I said, my voice cracking as I resumed my seat. I glanced over at Helen and found the blind woman’s empty gaze fixed on me. Mardi nuzzled my hand and I focused on scratching his large head. “And please call me Earlene.”

Lillian sat up with a straight back and elegantly sipped her sherry. It was only one o’clock in the afternoon but I wished that I’d asked for something stronger than tea.

“Helen tells me your parents are from Savannah but that you were raised in Atlanta.”

I bartered for time by taking a long drink of my iced tea, completely blindsided by my own shortsightedness. In all of my hasty preparations to come here, it had never once occurred to me that I would need an alternate background for Earlene Smith. There had once been a time in my life when acting before I could think of the consequences had served me well, but those days were long over and I needed to learn to stop thinking like the competitive jumper I no longer was.

I put my glass down on the table, missing the coaster and feeling Lillian’s eyes staring at me coldly. I quickly stood, nearly tripping on the dog, and retrieved a cocktail napkin from the armoire to wipe up the drops of condensation.

“Yes,” I said, trying to think calmly so I could remember whatever story was going to come out of my mouth. “I was raised in Atlanta. My father was a doctor there.”

“In what hospital?” Lillian took another sip of her sherry but her eyes never left my face. “My grandson received his medical degree at Emory and was at Piedmont Hospital for his residency in general medicine.”

I focused on the wadded cocktail napkin in my hands. “I . . . I don’t really remember. He—well, both of my parents died when I was six. I moved to Savannah to live with relatives after that.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, her tone flat, as if at her age the news of death was no longer news. “With whom did you live in Savannah?”

I looked over at Helen for some sort of reassurance but she seemed to be inwardly focusing on her iced tea. “My father’s aunt and uncle. He worked for one of the banks on Bull Street and my aunt was a homemaker.” I took another drink from my glass, trying to wash down the lump that had lodged itself in my throat. I’d never done this much lying in my entire life. “Harold and Betty Smith. They were originally from Augusta, I think.”

An imperial brow lifted. “Augusta? I don’t believe I know anybody in Augusta.”

Nor ever saw any need to,
I wanted to add. I’d taken an instant dislike to the old woman, my dislike having nothing to do with Lillian’s aristocratic attitude. It had more to do with the words in the letter her grandson had sent.
On your behalf I did ask her about your grandmother and it took several moments for her to even recollect that she had once known her.

“Yes, well, they’re gone now, too.” I lifted my glass to my dry lips only to realize that I’d already drained the last of the iced tea.

Helen stood. “Well, then, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I’m going to go rummage through my desk in the library and get the keys to the cottage for you.”

“Yes, thank you,” I said, trying to restrain myself from begging her to stay so I wouldn’t be left alone in the same room with her grandmother. Even Mardi deserted me, moving as fast as the heat of the day would allow him.

“I understand you’re one of those people who likes to dig into other people’s business.”

I stared at Lillian for a moment, not yet comprehending. “Oh, you mean a genealogist? Yes, I guess. In part you’re right. But I really only dig as far as my clients want me to.”

“And who are your clients now?”

I desperately wanted another glass of iced tea if only as a prop to give me time to formulate answers. I glanced over at the armoire and then over at Lillian and decided against it. “I’m afraid that my clients are confidential. It’s part of my contract with them whether or not they want confidentiality.”

“I see,” said Lillian, although it was clear that she didn’t. She considered me with steady, unblinking eyes and I was suddenly very aware that this woman missed very little. Despite being only three years younger than my grandmother, Lillian Harrington-Ross shared little else with Annabelle Mercer. A sharp stab of loss pricked at the place around my heart and I turned away from those eyes that seemed to see everything.

To change the subject, I blurted, “I was admiring your garden out front. What were those tall, yellow flowers?”

The old woman took a long sip of her sherry. “Those are asphodels—the flower this plantation was named for, which is why I cultivate them here.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen them before.”

“It’s doubtful that you would have. They’re generally found in Greece, where they grow wild. They’re mostly associated with the dead.” She took another sip of her sherry, her eyes shifting from me to the shuttered window. “Do you know Greek mythology, Earlene?”

I swallowed, my throat tight and dry. “No. I’m afraid that I don’t.” I shifted uneasily in my seat, watching the shadows as they seemed to unfold and stretch themselves into the room. This old woman and her house made me feel as if I were pushing on the screen of a second-floor window, not sure when it would give way and send me tumbling to the ground below.

I shouldn’t have come
. I watched the dust motes float across the window and thought of the scrapbook pages waiting in the car. On one of my brief perusals through the pages, I had paused long enough at yet another mention of the names Josie and Lily and a new one, Lola. And there, in my grandmother’s girlhood writing,
Best friends forever.
But there was no connection now to the cold elderly woman sitting in front of me and the petite blond girl sitting next to my grandmother and another girl on a pasture fence in a faded picture with curling edges.
I shouldn’t have come,
I thought again.

Lillian continued. “According to Greek mythology, Asphodel Meadows is where the souls of people who lived lives of near equal good and evil rest. It’s a ghostly place and a less-perfect vision of life on earth.” Her lips turned up with what resembled a smile. “Not quite hell, but not exactly heaven, either.”

“The flowers are beautiful,” I said, afraid I’d blurt out the truth if I didn’t say something else. I glanced at the doorway, hoping Helen would return with the key so I could leave.

“My ancestors had a sense of humor,” Lillian continued as if I hadn’t spoken. Her words were slightly slurred and I wondered if the old woman was almost drunk. “Or maybe they thought that living in purgatory here on earth would shoot them directly to heaven when they died.”

My knee hurt and my head was beginning to.
I shouldn’t have come
. I wondered why I hadn’t let George talk me out of it or why I’d felt the need to come in the first place. I’d told him everything, even showed him the scrapbook and newspaper clipping, but he’d still come up with a dozen reasons why my coming to Asphodel was a bad idea. Even I’d had my doubts. Knowing my grandmother’s past wouldn’t bring her back or give me another chance. And maybe the attic room with the empty bassinet and blue baby blanket had nothing to do with her. Or maybe they were never meant to be found.

I opened my mouth to excuse myself, to apologize for taking up their afternoon and to thank them for the tea before leaving as quickly as I could, when my gaze caught a flash of gold appearing in the neck fold of Lillian’s silk blouse.

It was a small gold angel with outstretched wings and holding a book, pierced by two holes to allow a chain to pass through the charm. It was unremarkable, really, except that it was identical to the one I now wore around my own neck, safely tucked inside my shirt.

Helen finally appeared and I stood abruptly, finding it suddenly hard to breathe in the dark, stuffy room. “I’m sorry, but I really must leave now. If you’ll just tell me where the cottage is, I’m sure I’ll have no trouble finding it.”

Without moving, Helen held out a key ring with a single key dangling from it. “That’s fine. I’ll call or have somebody stop by later on to see if you need anything.”

I took the key, trying not to snatch it from Helen’s grasp in my haste. After listening to Helen’s directions, I said a quick word of thanks and my good-byes to both women, then left, ignoring the pain in my knee and quickly forgetting my doubts about why I was there. It wasn’t the fact that Lillian Harrington-Ross had an angel charm identical to the one my grandmother had left for me; instead it had everything to do with the reason why an old woman who claimed not to even remember my grandmother would be wearing it around her neck.

Dum vita est, spes es.
Where there is life, there is hope. With a grim determination I hadn’t felt in years, I limped down the steps of the old house toward the garden with its uncanny familiarity. The scrapbook pages in the backseat fluttered as I pulled open the door, the sound like a whisper from the dead.

I put the car in gear and headed toward the front drive, my tires spinning on the gravel as I felt the cool gold of my angel charm pressing against my skin like an old memory, just as cold and twice as persistent.

Impatiently, I wiped my sleeves across my cheeks as I moved beneath the spiky shade of the old oaks, glancing at the GPS and seeing again that I was still out of satellite range, and that my grandfather’s car and I were just a little blip on a huge screen of vast emptiness.

The scratch of cricket wings chirped outside the casement window in the small living room of the caretaker’s cottage. The setting of the sun had done little to ease the heat from the day and the only air conditioner was the window unit in the single bedroom. I pulled the damp pink knit camisole away from my skin one more time before focusing my attention on the marred surface of the coffee table and the scrapbook pages that lay on top of it.

My arm swept down the top page, a magic wand to peer into the past, my eyes moving over the handwriting of a young woman with precise A’s and dotted I’s. The letters were neat and tidy, just like the grandmother I’d known, yet I still couldn’t quite picture the young girl bent over this scrapbook, her pen scratching against the thick paper.

I glanced up at the photo of the three girls I had perched against a table lamp I’d placed on the coffee table for better light. They seemed to be staring at me expectantly, waiting to begin their stories. With a deep breath, I turned back to the scrapbook pages, lifted the torn cover off of the first page, and began to read.