June (41 page)

After the Jell-O, Bob rose. He returned with a shoe box. Betty cleared a spot on the lace tablecloth, but instead of leaving the room for a round of dishes, the older woman stayed, elbows perched on the table as though she was an excited little girl.

“My dad liked to take pictures,” Bob began, groaning as he sat down—his knees must hurt him. “He had one of those old-fashioned cameras. He’d snap anything that caught his eye. You know there was a party up there at Two Oaks when they were shooting
Erie Canal
? Well, he took some pictures that night.” He opened the box and took out a stack of brittle square photographs, white-framed and rippled along the edges in an old-fashioned way. Cassie felt a rush of pleasure just glimpsing them. How alive they were, how real, those captured moments—even though they’d taken place a full sixty years before. They brought to mind the picture of Elda she’d taken in profile out in the backyard, and familiar concerns surged through her: Would that shot be any good? Would she have to burn and dodge the grass in the lower right corner? She felt alive for a moment, truly alive; hungry to make, to see the world through her lens. Her hands ached for her camera, and, pleased and surprised, she smiled.

Bob handed a picture to her, just then, in the wake of her smile.

Cassie gasped. Not just because the image brought to life a Two Oaks Cassie had only imagined—a big white tent filling the side yard; a small band playing inside, brass instruments gleaming in the light from the stringed lanterns—but because she recognized the people in it. They were dressed to the nines, hair done, lipsticked and heeled, but their faces were unmistakable. She had seen them before.

The dream people. That woman with the mole on her chin, and the teenage sisters whose features were too small for their faces, those three old men sitting in the round office, that couple dancing cheek to cheek. She couldn’t say anything about it, of course. She knew what sensible people like Bob and Betty would make of her dreams.

Once the initial recognition faded and she picked out face after face, what Cassie felt was not so much shock as inexorability. She’d known all along that St. Judians were clogging up her home, hadn’t she? It was fitting to see them gathered around the mansion in these photographs, the mansion that had held their attention even after they were no longer physically in its shadow. She tapped their faces as though they were her classmates suspended in elementary school pictures—people she knew but whose particulars she couldn’t quite recall.

Bob beamed at her enthusiasm. “I wish I remembered more. I was a kid, you know? Spent most of the night trying to steal a bottle of booze.” He chuckled. “And then Walter and I set off a firecracker in Mrs. Dowty’s mailbox.”

“Bob!” Betty elbowed him.

“Should have heard her scream.” He was laughing outright now. Betty met Cassie’s eye and pulled a “he’s hopeless” face, but his laughter was contagious and they all giggled until he wiped his eyes.

“Show her,” Betty urged.

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“The picture,” Betty pressed. “The special one.”

He didn’t look too pleased, but Cassie saw Betty would win this, and every, tug-of-war. Bob pawed down through the box, finding what he was looking for at its very bottom. He examined it inside the box, out of sight, as though he didn’t want Cassie to see it just yet. Cassie leaned forward. Betty told him to show her, Bob, show her, and then he lifted the picture into Cassie’s hands.

Another snapshot, just like the rest. Only this one showed June Watters and Jack Montgomery, side by side. They were dressed up. He wore a dark suit with his hair slicked back; a cigarette was tucked into the corner of his mouth. His eyes twinkled with amusement; his broad chest filled his suit coat perfectly. June was just a whisper past a girl—womanly, but dewy—her hair twisted up and dress fastened just over the tops of her breasts.

Jack and June were not touching. It did not even look as though they had been standing together. But when Cassie saw the picture, she saw what she had been looking for since the beginning. There it was, what she had wanted since the day Nick had shown up on her doorstep and told her Jack had left her everything.

There was no word for what she saw, but it was tangible, the current between these two people who were now dead and buried. The proof was there in June’s hand, splayed up into the space between her body and Jack’s. It was there in Jack’s warm gaze, landing directly onto the side of June’s lovely, smooth face. They were gorgeously young. And, whether or not they had known it, it was obvious to Cassie’s eye that they were in love.

“He’s my grandfather,” she said softly. Bob and Betty shared a look. Cassie couldn’t take her eyes off her grandmother’s calm, bright expression. Something unhitched inside her; she felt deliciously calm.

“Do you know,” Bob said gently, “June and I shared a good friend. Linda Sue. People called her Lindie. She might be able to help you.”

“I tried writing her.” Cassie laid the photograph down. “In Chicago. The letter came back return to sender. Do you have her address? A number?”

Bob looked confused. “I thought you knew her. She says you’re friendly.”

“Friendly?” Cassie searched for any memory of an old woman who’d call her “friendly” and she came up blank. Betty looked as confused as Cassie felt.

“Mrs. Shaw,” Bob explained to Betty.

It was Betty’s turn to gasp. She sat back in her chair, mouth agape and touched, on its edges, with a warm smile. “Why, Cassie,” she said in a delighted voice, “she lives across the street from you. In that funny old wooden house on the other side of your side lawn.”

“It’s the house she grew up in,” Bob explained. “Came up for sale a few years ago, and she moved back from Chicago after she retired. It’s a good, strong house, Betty.”

Which was how Cassie found Lindie at last.

It’s an unusual thing, to be old and still clutching the secrets of your childhood. Moving back to St. Jude, living, once again, in the shadow of Two Oaks, Lindie found herself returning to a mind-set she’d all but abandoned sixty years before. She waited for the end of the day with bated breath, for the light to enter the master staircase, and when darkness came, for the shadow of someone in the window she still thought of as June’s. And also, yes, she found herself reliving that awful night—and all that had come because of it—more times than she could count.

It was because of June that she’d moved back. Lindie had an official list of reasons for her colleagues at the university, and for the many friends she and Isabel had shared before Isabel lost the fight to breast cancer. “I love the quiet of a St. Jude evening,” she told them as they frowned at her across dinner tables, wondering why on earth this lauded activist and professor emeritus would move back to the small Ohio town where she’d been born. Or: “my family’s house came up for sale and I couldn’t resist.” But the real truth was that June, having finally raised Cassandra and seen her off to a life in New York, had asked Lindie to come back and help her. Whether moving back was an act of love, or a way to repay a lifelong debt didn’t much matter to Lindie, because she got to live near June again.

Of course, June ended up not being around much in that small window they had before her brain cancer was diagnosed; only five years and change, and much of that time June was not in residence. After a lifetime of begging June to devise ways Lindie might pay her debt, Lindie very much appreciated the fact that her friend had finally come up with something concrete. It was a relief to know Lindie was giving up her beloved South Side house for June’s freedom—just as June had done for her so many years before.

Lindie respected June’s privacy. It was no one’s business what an old woman wanted to do with her twilight years, and, lord knew, June had cut her teeth on secrets—which was largely Lindie’s fault—so Lindie understood that secrecy had become her way. Once Lindie was settled back into the wooden house of her youth—she claimed her father’s bedroom, but, otherwise, things went back to almost exactly as they’d been—she received her instructions with a respectful nod, and she kept her opinions to herself:

“Cassie is not to know. You will send her one letter for every week that I am gone, on Tuesdays; here is the stack of letters—you will see they are dated and stamped. You will check my answering machine on a regular basis, and, when she calls, you’ll call me immediately—here is my private mobile number—and tell me at once so I can get back to her myself. Above all, no one is to know where I am, or what I am doing.” And Lindie nodded solemnly and saluted and tried not to look so delighted that June was finally getting what she’d been denied for decades, and tried not to notice how shabby Two Oaks was looking these days, or ask who’d be taking care of it in June’s absence.

But the fact that Lindie respected June’s way of doing things didn’t mean she agreed with them. Cassie, for instance—poor Cassie. Would it really scandalize a twenty-first-century college student to discover that her grandmother had a life? And then, once June was diagnosed, why not just tell the poor girl she was sick? Why wait until it was too late for irrevocable wrongs to be righted? Why insist Lindie stay away from the girl, even after June was gone? Were the secrets June had kept truly that poisonous, even in the face of death?

Lindie had watched Cassie arrive in the frigid heart of December. She’d considered cutting her way across the snowy lawn at once, knocking on the door, and inviting the poor girl for Christmas dinner. But by then it was already too late. That was the problem with secrets, wasn’t it? They festered and grew until they infected everything around them. Lindie couldn’t just go to Cassie and pretend she didn’t know June, or that she’d simply known her casually; June was Lindie’s best friend, her first love, the person with whom she had covered up a murder. Lindie wasn’t a good liar; she knew the truth would be written all over her, and what would come next would only further ravage Cassie, who was justifiably angry with her grandmother for seeming so cold and distant. Lindie knew Cassie would only see June’s private dealings as further proof that June had not loved or trusted her.

But Lindie hadn’t counted on Jack. That old devil. He’d promised June he’d keep everything hush-hush, understanding, as Lindie did, that hush-hush was June’s way, and it was June’s way or the highway. But Lindie supposed he figured that, once June was dead, and he was gone as well, giving his granddaughter what he wished he could have given his son, and his son’s mother—a lifetime of happiness, or, in lieu of happiness, a vast sum of money—was his business, not June’s.

June was rolling over in her grave.

Meanwhile, Lindie had been watching Cassie, spying on her with those movie stars—Jack’s daughters—and with that boy Cassie liked. Watching how she seemed to finally blossom in their company, which was a relief, because before they showed up, Lindie had fretted about whether the girl was on suicide watch. And then the photographers arrived, and, though Lindie wasn’t an Internet wiz, she was no Luddite, and she surmised that the lid had been blown off everything—that June and Jack’s secret, which she had, for so long, been the only one to keep—was finally out of the bag.

Once the movie stars left, once the photographers found their next mark, Lindie supposed it was inevitable that Cassie would come for her. Lindie had kept June’s secrets for decades, and that had been right; it had been June’s way. But it was not Lindie’s way; when Cassie asked her for the truth, she knew she was going to tell her. Every night before she went to bed, she could taste the bitterness of that truth on her tongue.

Betty called after the tuna casserole, filling Lindie in in euphemistic St. Judian terms. “Poor thing seems to want to know if you know anything about her grandmother’s romantic life? But I just don’t know if she’ll get up the nerve to ask. And I told her I’m sure you don’t know a thing.”

Lindie’s confession was upon her.

Finally, on a Sunday afternoon, Cassie knocked. Lindie waited just inside the front door and counted to ten. She didn’t want to appear too eager; she knew what kind of effect that can have on the young. Of course she’d seen the girl grow, in June’s pictures and stories, and, yes, she’d been spying ever since Cassie moved into Two Oaks, but, when Lindie opened the door, she was surprised at how fresh the girl looked. New. She was expert at a scowl, and she’d dressed herself like a sulky, half-baked version of herself—dirty hair, filthy T-shirt. Her nails were bitten down to the stumps of her fingertips. But Lindie could see the real Cassandra under all that camouflage.

“Hello, Cassie.” Lindie had spent her early life pretending to be something she wasn’t; not anymore. “I expect you want some lemonade.”