Micanopy in Shadow (3 page)

They threaded their way among the headstones, brushing past a few pines and a thick cedar. Copper-colored leaves crackled under their feet, and cicada whirred in the shrubbery. How many lives, Brandy wondered, lie hidden under these weathered stones, lives that still make a difference to the living?

Ada’s burial place was easy to find. It stood near the front of the cemetery and faced the street. On Brandy’s visits to her grandmother, they had often come to this monument that looked down on a cluster of ordinary markers. Low fences enclosed the plots of many families, but no relatives gathered around this memorial—not yet. The life-size stone figure of Brandy’s great-grandmother rose above the rest, poised on a large block of granite, its young face lifted toward the road as if in defiance. On the base was carved “Ada Losterman, est. 1899–1921,” and below those words, two verses of a poem. Time had dimmed the letters, but as a college student, Brandy copied them and discovered they were from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. She would get the file out of her desk and read them more carefully, look for the reason those particular lines were chosen to mark Ada’s grave.

“I’ve told you the story. The statue was erected soon after my mother was buried. No one knew the donor. We’re not even sure about her surname. ‘Losterman’ was what people thought I said.” Brandy sighed. So the name depended on the anguished recollection of two-and-a half year-old Hope.

Hope’s stooped and thrust the gladiolas into the granite urn at the monument base and adjusted the flowers, her eyes moist. The splash of yellow and red at the base of Ada’s statue was a jolt of bright color among the gray stones.

Brandy gazed up again at the figure. A masonry scarf shrouded the head. Around its edges, waves of curving stone suggested a woman’s hair. One delicate stone hand clasped a small book, smaller than a Bible, to her breast. The other reached up, as if beseeching.

“Act,” it said to Brandy,” before it is too late, before Hope herself is gone.”

Brandy studied the small nose and deep-set eyes. She recognized the familiar bone structure of the face, so like her grandmother’s and reflected in her own. The unknown donor must have known Ada well. How else to explain the resemblance? Brandy would not be here, neither would Hope, if this woman had never lived.

Who was she? Why did she come here? How did she die? Hope did not believe her mother committed suicide. Brandy agreed, and Brandy owed them both.

T
WO
 

Hope drove with her usual stops and starts back to the pre-World War I cottage Brandy’s grandparents bought years before his death. Hope had lived in the white Craftsman bungalow ever since. Brandy admired its low-pitched roof with a dormer rising behind it and the wide arch above the entrance where she’d often played as a child. Seeing it always gave her a warm feeling.

When Hope opened the front door, her cat jumped down from its perch beside the window, stretched each white hind leg, and lifted her black chin to be scratched.

Brandy checked her watch. “I’ve got to be home by 5:00. I need to relieve the sitter before supper.”

In the familiar living room, Brandy’s gaze traveled from the antique sideboard to the satinwood display cabinet and settled on the portrait of her grandfather near the mantle. Robert George O’Bannon was photographed in his black and gold University of Illinois academic gown, the garment he wore in university processions. Nearby was a photograph of their only child, Brandy’s father, Bradley. He taught social studies at Tavares High School where Brandy attended. He was her inspiration then and now. Brandy and John had named their son after him. On the other end of the mantle stood an eight-by-ten photograph of the Ada Losterman statue.

Hope led the way into the kitchen. The room had changed little as Brandy grew up—on one wall hung the wooden fish that Brandy’s father had made in shop class fifty years ago. A row of spices stood on a small shelf, alphabetized as carefully as Hope had alphabetized files in her fourth grade classroom. Over the stove hung the familiar bird clock with its startling eruptions of hourly chirps and warblings, a poignant reminder of her grandparents’ love of bird watching. The room had the lingering smell of oven-baked cookies.

“I’ll put a kettle on for tea,” Hope said brusquely. She ran water into a teakettle and set it on a burner. “A cup of tea and what the English call ‘biscuits’ always sound so civilized in British novels. While it’s heating, we’ll get down the box of Ada’s things.”

Brandy dropped her bag on the table and followed her grandmother’s brisk stride into her bedroom. Hope had furnished it, like the rest of the house, with acquisitions from the antique store she had shared with an uncle after she retired, and then with his grandson. Brandy sat on Hope’s bed beside the brass headboard and watched her grandmother take a small step stool into the closet. When Brandy tried to assist her, Hope nudged her aside and climbed up on the stool. Hope’s spunk worried her. Brandy’s father and Hope’s foster brother were now gone. She had full responsibility for her grandmother.

Hope set her treasure on the floor, breathing a bit harder, and took a tiny key from a niche in her roll top desk.

“We’ll make a fresh start,” Brandy said. “Take a look again at everything.” She might find a clue in Ada’s belongings. She picked up the box, carried it back into the kitchen, and deposited it on the table.

Hope unlocked the lid and lifted out the few items that deputies had found in Ada’s suitcase at the Haven Hotel. She laid them on the table. It was a pitiful collection—a cloth doll, a small book, two envelopes, and a narrow jewelry box.

Her grandmother set the whistling teakettle off the burner and poured steaming water over tea bags in two pink Depression glass cups. “After I was old enough, Mother Haven told me about that last afternoon. My mother left me playing with the doll.” For a moment Hope’s eyes looked misty; then she went on, “My mother set the suitcase in the hall and asked her to watch me for a couple of hours. When she left the hotel, she carried a folder and handbag.” Hope paused, cup in hand, picturing the scene for the thousandth time. “Fact is, those two things probably held the answers we’re looking for. Both disintegrated in the pond.” Her voice hardened. “Unless somebody took them. Neither was ever recovered.”

She laid the tea bags on matching saucers and spooned a small amount of sugar into each cup. In her slate gray eyes, Brandy saw both sadness and veiled irritation. “The Havens didn’t like to talk about my mother. After they took me in, they wanted me to forget her, especially after they became my foster parents.” She set a fresh sugar cookie on the edge of each saucer.

Brandy touched the over-sized doll. It was soft, seemed stuffed with cotton, and covered by a fabric Brandy couldn’t identify.

“Stockingnette,” Hope said. She set down Brandy’s cup and sipped from her own. “We found a reference in a doll collector’s magazine.”

The doll was jointed at the shoulders and hips and fully dressed, even to its boots. A pleasant enough baby’s face with eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth had been painted in black on its round head. With her fingertips, Brandy lifted the calico dress and white petticoat, now yellowed with age. Blurry words were printed in ink on a small label and stitched to the petticoat.

The lines in her grandmother’s forehead deepened. “You can read ‘1917’ on the label. The word ‘Grady’ is the only other writing we could ever make out. Looks like a ‘M’ after it, like ‘Grady’ is one of two words.”

“Do you think Grady was a person or a place?”

“The truth is, no one ever found out. The town marshall and the sheriff’s office did investigate. They tried to find who was responsible for me. In the end, of course, the Havens took responsibility. They couldn’t adopt me. No one knew if I had a father somewhere with a prior claim.”

“The word ‘Grady M’ on the underskirt might tell us something.”

“After that afternoon, I didn’t get to play with the doll. The sheriff’s men took all this stuff and held them as evidence. When they couldn’t do anything with them, they returned them to Mother Haven to keep for me.”

Brandy ran her fingers lightly over the small brown, canvas-backed book, only about two and three-fourth inches wide and five inches long. The red bands in the American flag on the cover still bore red pigment. Where had she seen a book this size before? Of course, clasped to the bosom of the statue in the cemetery.

“My Episcopal priest told me these Campaign Prayer Books were distributed to soldiers during World War I,” Hope said. “They carried them in their breast pockets.”

Brandy turned carefully to the first page and read,
The Book of Common Prayer, the Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church.
It further advised that the contents were
according to the use of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America together with the Psalter or Psalms of David
. As long as Brandy could remember, her grandmother had attended the town’s small Episcopal Church with sanctuary windows of ruby-stained glass. Was this prayer book why? She opened the next page. Neatly lettered at the top in faint ink she read, “To give you comfort and strength, Ada.”

Hope turned away, as if it pained her to see the delicate handwriting.

“It looks like she gave this prayer book to someone,” Brandy said, “and then somehow got it back.” She felt a constriction in her own chest. “Obviously, it went to someone Ada cared about deeply. Someone she thought might be in danger. Probably a soldier. World War I ended two years earlier.”

Hope murmured, “I put a bookmark at two passages she underlined.”

Brandy turned past twelve pages of morning prayers and found on page 21 what her great-grandmother had underlined so long ago. The inscriptions were brown and faded. She read aloud the
Collect for Peace
:

“
O God, from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed
;
Give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give; that our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments, and also that by thee, we, being defended from the fear of our enemies, may pass our time in rest and quietness: through the merits of Jesus Christ Our Savior. Amen”

It was followed by
A Collect for Aid Against Perils.

“Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord,”
she read, “
and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Savior.”

Brandy compressed her lips for a second. “Ada seems to refer to a peril her correspondent faced, something that worried them both. Likely the war.” She copied the two passages into her note-pad, wishing she had learned shorthand in her journalism classes. Next, she turned her attention to the two envelopes. She picked up the smaller, letter-sized one, and eased out a single page fragment.

“I had to put the page in a new envelope. We didn’t have the original one,” Hope said.

In pale brown ink “P. 3” had been written in the brittle upper right hand corner. Brandy’s lips tightened again and she frowned. The third page of a letter, and part of one at that, was not likely to offer many clues. In addition, the heavy, unlined paper had once been soaked in water.

No woman would write in such a jagged, masculine hand. The first words on the page ended a previous sentence. “…
worry about you. I hear about the Spanish flu in the northern states and fear it will come to Georgia. Tell your mother she will be in danger. I hear it spreads quickly and easily. I’ve been transferred again and will likely find it harder to mail letters. Do keep writing, though, dear girl. I will get your letters eventually. I will have lots to tell you, soon I hope.”

The bottom of the page had been ripped off, and its outer edges singed. Brandy sighed.

Hope set her cup down. Her voice was subdued. “If my mother’s own mother came from Georgia, she probably did, too. We don’t know from where in the state. Her mother must have been around flu victims, though.” She looked disapprovingly at the piece of a page, as if it were deliberately concealing information. “The truth is, I think the letter has something to do with what happened in Micanopy, but there’s no real evidence of that. My mother could’ve carried it to Micanopy for other reasons. This page could’ve been separated from the rest of the letter, and she took the rest with her.”

Brandy made a few more notes. What was Ada’s relationship to this correspondent? He showed concern for her, true, but not enough to explain it. Brandy edged the letter fragment back into the envelope. “At least he sounds literate. But how did the paper get wet and burned? Maybe during the war. The letter had to be significant for her to keep it.”

Hope’s long fingers curled firmly around her cup. “The fact is, I keep thinking my father might’ve written it. Of course, that could be wishful thinking.”

“Identifying him is almost as important as identifying your mother.” Brandy feared the answer would not be comforting, considering the outcome for Ada. She didn’t voice her concern.

Brandy opened the much larger manila envelope, also clearly not old. Inside were four folded newspapers. The first
Gainesville Daily Sun
was dated October 3, 1921, the next ones on the 5
th
and the 11
th
. The final one had appeared October 26. As she settled back to read, the cat sauntered into the kitchen, stretched each hind leg again with care, surveyed Brandy with ears laid back, and leapt into the chair next to Hope. After she settled down with a display of fluffy, white vest, Hope reached over and stroked her black, silky back. She must have read the articles over so often that she knew them by heart.