The Lost Hours (28 page)

Tucker stood, then reached over to shake the moonflowers, their drops raining on the brick walkway. “What about Helen? She told me you’ve been sharing your scrapbook with her. Isn’t that enough?”

Feeling agitated, Lillian stood, leaning heavily on her cane. “No. No, it isn’t. Helen doesn’t need any life lessons from me; she’s never once looked back on her past and wished she’d done something differently.” She shook her head. “I need to tell Annabelle’s granddaughter. I need Annabelle’s forgiveness.”

“She’s dead, Malily. It’s too late.”

His eyes were dark with terror and pain and Lillian wished she could make it go away with a kiss as she’d done when he was small. She knew he wasn’t referring just to Annabelle, but that the ghost of his wife’s suicide lingered near him still, his guilt and regret unwilling to let her remain buried.

She touched his arm. “Until you bury me, it won’t be too late. ‘Where there is life, there is hope,’ remember?”

He shook his head. “I think you’re making a mistake, but if you want me to contact her, I will.”

She looked into his face and saw the boy he’d once been: the wild, reckless boy full of mischief and practical jokes. Lillian refused to believe that the boy was gone forever, hidden inside this sad shell of a man. Her lasting hope was that the revelation of her secrets would set all of them free—free from lives spent looking backward and wrestling with past mistakes.

Lillian stood on her toes and reached up to kiss him on his cheek. “Yes, I’d like you to.”

He put his hands on her shoulders and she looked up into his eyes, feeling much shorter than she remembered. Had he always been so tall? Or was she just shrinking? Becoming smaller and smaller until she would simply cease to exist? Perhaps that was what death would be like for her: a crumbling into dust, where pride and old wounds didn’t matter anymore.

A corner of his mouth lifted before he spoke and Lillian caught a glimpse of the old Tucker. “You’re really a big bully, you know. Always managing to get your own way. I don’t fall for this old-lady act at all. I never have.”

She smiled back, relieved to see his smile again. “I know. You’re much too smart for that. You got that from me.”

He grinned again, revealing his elusive dimple and her heart didn’t seem to ache as much. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he said, “I’ve got to go to the stables, see if today is the day Captain Wentworth is ready for a rider.”

“Captain Wentworth?”

Tucker dug the tip of his boot into a crack in the brick walk. “The new rescue horse. I let Earlene name him. After the Jane Austen character. I figured we wouldn’t be keeping him, so it didn’t matter.”

Lillian watched him closely. “So what do you think of this Earlene?”

He grew still for a moment, his eyes focused on the coppery waves of the magnolia leaves. “I can’t really put a finger on it, but there seems to be something . . . missing. I mean, where are her family and friends? She doesn’t talk about her past at all, and is here to study somebody else’s life. She reminds me of a college buddy of mine who was lost a leg in a hunting accident. He acted shell-shocked, barely able to focus on what was going on around him, sort of living those last moments before the bullet hit him again and again. Like he was afraid to move forward in life in case something like that happened again.”

She didn’t say anything, wondering if he realized how much he’d just described himself.

“What about you, Malily? What do you think?”

Lillian sat back down on the bench and stretched out her legs, willing the aching in her feet to stop. “She loves my garden.”

Tucker nodded, understanding as she knew he would. “I’ll see you at supper.”

She raised an eyebrow, but didn’t risk saying anything in case he changed his mind. She watched as he walked back toward the garden gate, stopping once to pick up something from the brick path. He turned it over in his hand and studied it for a moment, then pocketed it before snapping the latch closed behind him.

I sat in the kitchen of the cottage, the air cool enough to leave the windows open. A breeze stirred the scrapbook pages in front of me on the table, the paper rustling with impatience. I’d put the scrapbook aside to go through Lillian’s papers, knowing already that I’d find nothing I needed in them. What I needed was Lillian’s scrapbook pages to read alongside Annabelle’s, but I knew Lillian wouldn’t part with them, especially to a stranger.

Dutifully, I’d taken notes on everything I’d seen in Lillian’s papers, and when Tucker had sent over a family tree—via Helen—that Susan had made, I’d plugged everything into my genealogy software if only because it gave me something to do while I waited for the answers I sought to come find me.

The blue knit sweater and baby blanket lay on the table next to the scrapbook as a reminder of why I was here. I felt the softness of the sweater again and raised it to my nose, still smelling the mothballs and dust. I was no closer to discovering who had owned these two things, or who had lived in the hidden attic room of my grandparents’ house than when I’d first arrived. But somehow I didn’t feel as despondent as I should have.

I gave the girls riding lessons four times a week—up from the proposed twice-a-week schedule because Lucy had asked and because I really wanted to. She was good—really good—with the confidence and ease of a much older rider. But she also had a hint of recklessness and fearlessness that made me outwardly scold her. Secretly, though, I applauded her sturdy little character, knowing she had what it took to be a solid competitor when the time came. Sara made me laugh with her plodding pony and Lucy made me remember what it had been like to be fearless. Through them, I found myself easing my way into days in which I didn’t dread getting up in the morning.

I stared at the scrapbook bundle for a long moment before opening it up and finding the place where I last stopped. Most of the entries I’d read so far were filled with the mundane aspects of my grandmother’s adolescent life: outings with Lillian and Josie, horseback riding on Lola Grace at Asphodel, and more mentions of Freddie. She never wrote about any romantic feelings toward him, but the sheer number of times his name was mentioned made me wonder.

With the sweater and blanket cuddled in my lap like a small child, I began to read:

 

 

 

I sat up at the mention of Paul Morton’s name. He had said he’d known my grandmother, but that was all. I smiled to myself, thinking of old Mr. Morton as a young boy with a secret crush on a girl five years older than himself and wondering why he hadn’t mentioned it to me.

I turned back to the scrapbook pages and continued to read. I skimmed over the entry from 1935, a simple laundry list of Annabelle’s household chores and her duties with her father, quickly turning the page in the hope that her next entry might be more interesting. I wasn’t disappointed.