Please Remember This (26 page)

And why did they think that she could add authenticity to their festival? Surely she would be the least authentic exhibit there. The only thing about her that had anything to do with Nina Lane was her mitochondrial DNA, and she gave her blood to the Red Cross, not to the Nina Lane Birthday Celebration.

But it seemed that she had escaped. Gordon did not want her to appear at the Birthday Celebration in Fleur-de-lis, and there was no way on earth she was going back to California to attend an event next year. That would be easy. It would be there. She would be here.

Nonetheless, she was restless and nervous all afternoon, and since she was usually the least jittery of people, the high school kids who came in for their after-school shift were looking at her strangely. “Are you all right?” one of the girls asked, her voice both gentle and timid. “Did something happen?”

Tess was not about to bewilder them with the complexities of her life history, but she found herself untying the strings of her jade green Lanier Building Coffee Company butcher’s apron. “Do you mind if I go out for a minute?”

“No, of course not. You know we don’t.”

A moment later Tess was crossing the street to the Old Courthouse. Both Phil and Ned had offices there, but it never occurred to her to climb up the stairs. She went into the basement.

Ned was again at work on his computer. This time the screen was covered with dense, single-spaced prose. The diagrams and drawings on his desk suggested that his work had more to do with engineering
than with history or tourism, but that was better than playing Minesweeper.

“We’ve got strangers in town,” she said.

He leaned back in his chair. “Phil made me have lunch with them. God knows why. You can’t imagine any two people less interested in the
Western Settler.
Nina Lane was. They should be.”

For all that Ned claimed to accept that the boat was his own personal obsession and that no one else was obliged to be interested in it, in truth, he was always startled when people weren’t. Tess found that innocence quite endearing. She waited for him to say more. He didn’t … which meant that Gordon had said nothing about knowing that she was Nina Lane’s daughter.

She spoke. “You remember that night when your friends were here and you stopped by my house? If you had stayed, would you have wanted the lights on or off?”

“The lights?” He stared at her, startled at her change of subject. “The lights? I suppose if I had to choose, I would have voted to keep them on, but trust me, that would have been way down on the list of things I’d care about.”

Tess patted him on the arm. He had given the right answer.

He was still eyeing her suspiciously, utterly puzzled. “I don’t suppose there’s a chance in hell that you’re going to tell me why you asked that question.”

He was right. She wasn’t going to tell him. No, wait a minute, she was. This was Ned, engaging, forthright, surprisingly sexy Ned. “You’ve met Gordon
Winsler. He was the younger of those two men. Believe it or not, he was my boyfriend for a while in college, and he insisted that the lights—”

“Whoa.” Ned held up his hands, trying to stop her. “I don’t think I need to hear this.”

“That the lights be off so he could pretend I was Nina Lane.”

Ned’s hands fell to his sides. “That bites.”

“Yes, it does.”

He gave her a twisted grin of sympathy. “And here I thought you were just being high-minded about not wanting to get a book contract for a memoir about having no memories. You’ve already been burned. Did it really hurt?”

“It did,” she admitted. She had never discussed this with anyone before. “I felt unclean, unimportant, unwanted … you name it, I felt it.”

“I can imagine,” he said warmly. “Well, no, I probably can’t imagine how bad it was. People are always saying they can imagine something precisely when they can’t.”

“You’re getting off the subject.”

He grinned again. “I usually do. So the organizers of the Celebration know who you are?”

She nodded. “But it’s okay. It’s complicated, but okay.” She explained, as best she could, the theory of a monogamous relationship between reader and writer or writer’s books. Ned seemed to understand, which was amazing in light of how bad her explanation was. “So they don’t want me to do anything. But then they completely contradicted themselves by wanting me to appear at something next year.” She
explained that, and even though this explanation was a lot better, Ned was starting to frown.

“Have you told Phil about this?”

She started to say no when Phil himself interrupted from behind their backs. “Tell me what?” He was at the office door. “I just got in and heard Tess laughing.”

“Actually, I’m not sure how funny it is,” Ned said. “Go ahead, Tess, tell him.”

Tess assumed that she was to tell Phil about Gordon and Brian’s future plans, not about her own sexual humiliations. She complied.

“They want to start a rival festival.” Phil was frowning too. “They certainly haven’t said anything to me about that. I wondered why they weren’t objecting to people selling railroad memorabilia. But this explains it.”

“It does?” Tess was bewildered.

“They are committed to this year, and they need to protect their reputations as organizers so all the logistics will be fine, but from their point of view, the less the event has to do with Nina Lane, the better. The serious fans will be disappointed and more inclined to go somewhere else next year. Brian and Gordon are laying the groundwork now.” He grimaced. “And I played right into their hands.”

It wasn’t often that someone outfoxed Phil Ravenal. “So what are we going to do?”

“We’re stuck with the vendors … and activities in the park will be good for Main Street. So we need to be sure that the program is good and that it is about Nina Lane. Last year those guys were saying it was
harder and harder to find someone with something new and different to say. I bet they didn’t even try this year. The speakers will probably be people everyone has heard a million times before.” Phil pulled out his list. “So if we want to keep this the primary Nina Lane event, we need to make sure this year’s program is strong.”

He looked up, and Tess recognized the expression. “Oh, no,” she said firmly. “I’m not going to make an appearance, Phil. You know I’m not.”

Ned’s chair creaked. “He didn’t ask you. And”—Ned’s voice was very firm—”he’s not going to.”

“I’m not?” This was from Phil.

“No, you’re not.”

The two brothers were looking at each other, their gazes steady and focused. It was Phil who looked away first. “I’ll start with Sierra. I’m sure she’ll say no, but maybe Wyatt and Gabe will come through for us.” He pulled out his little notecase and started writing. “They say that they saw her all of four times, but that’s four times more than anyone else in the crowd. And Sprawl Press. They make enough money off Nina Lane that at least they could pay for printing a program and maybe even the parking shuttle.”

So Phil got to work, but over the next week Tess was surprised at the tension she sensed in him. He was consulting his list more frquently and seemed distracted, less able to hide when he was thinking about something else.

“You’re worried about the Birthday Celebration, aren’t you?” Tess finally said one morning when they were alone.

“Not for this year. But in future, it could be a problem. All of our calculations and projects took the Celebration for granted. It’s been a big source of revenue and publicity. There is no way we can replace it.”

“Replace it? Surely it won’t come to that.”

“Oh, there would continue to be something here for a couple of years, but the weaker the link with Nina Lane, the more it will look like every other town’s Pioneer Days craft show. We’re now getting vendors and visitors from both coasts. Name me one other town this size that gets that.”

That was true. The Nina Lane Birthday Celebration was the only time during the year that the Best Western imposed a two-night minimum stay. It was the only day when all the cashier lines at the grocery store were staffed from six in the morning until ten at night. The beauty parlor closed so that the stylists could help at the other retail establishments. After the Celebration there was more money in local pockets and better dinners on local tables. But that would change if the Celebration became merely a regional event.

“But Sprawl Press is doing something. Won’t that help?”

“This year it will. This year is going to be great. It’s next year that I’m worried about. And the year after that. Sprawl Press has no loyalty to Fleur-de-lis. They’re going to follow the fan base.”

Tess couldn’t remember when she had heard Phil admit to being worried. He had always been challenged by problems.

Could she make a difference? Probably. All she had to do was promote the festival. Phil would tell her
what to say—how this was an honor to her dear mother’s blessed memory …

Would she do it if it would save a child from being flattened by an oncoming train?

Yes, of course.

Well, what if it were an adult? Would she do it for an adult?

Ned and any of his family, yes. And she probably ought to add Sierra to that list; she owed her. That would be one way of repaying her, and really, when you thought about it, was it right to only save people that you love?

But exactly how would her giving a speech to a collection of crazy people stop an oncoming train?

Her stomach, her mind, and her heart were twisted into dreary, little knots. She wasn’t sleeping. She would stupidly doze off early, at nine, even eight-thirty, and then she would wake at three A.M., exhausted but unable to go back to sleep. She would sometimes walk to the Lanier Building in the gray predawn light, hearing the slow chug of the newspaper truck and the rhymthic slap of the papers landing on the driveways.

So she tried staying late at work, hoping that perhaps working would keep her awake and get her back on a reasonable schedule. She was simplifying her displays in preparation for the Nina Lane crowd. No longer did a silk-trimmed hat rest on an artfully draped dresser scarf with a necklace flowing over the crown of the hat. The hats were all together, the necklaces were all together, the linens were hung in stiff rows on padded hangers.

She worked with dim lights so that no one would
think that the building was open, but one evening around ten she heard a rap on the locked glass door.

It was Ned. “I stopped by your house, and since your car was there and you weren’t, I thought I’d try here.”

She stepped back, letting him in. She hadn’t seen him in several days. He seemed well rested and confident. His eyes were clear, his shoulders straight. “You look good.”

He blinked. He was always surprised when someone noticed his physical presence, because he never thought about it himself. “I guess I feel pretty good. But I shouldn’t. My brother screwed up, and I’m—”

Tess interrupted. “Phil made a mistake?”

“He does have some blind spots. People who are very emotional or needy … he sometimes reads them wrong.”

Maybe he was too afraid of becoming like them. “Was it Sierra?” She was certainly emotional and needy.

Ned nodded. “He put way too much pressure on her to appear on the program, and now he says that she’s suddenly started talking about closing Celandine Gardens. I thought I’d go out and see if I can tell what’s on her mind. Would you come?”

Close Celandine Gardens? That would be as bad for the town as losing the Birthday Celebration. “Let me get my purse.”

The sun had set and the light was fading. The big patch of wild orange daylilies that grew around the city-limits sign had closed, but the Queen Anne’s lace shone white in the dusk.

Ned drove easily, one hand on top of the steering
wheel. “Phil’s not coming down too hard on you, is he?”

She shook her head. “He hasn’t said a word—not that it matters. I’m being much harder on myself than he would ever be.”

“I wondered.” Ned slowed as he prepared to turn off County Route Five. “And maybe I can bail you out. You bought me time with that needlework stuff last month—don’t look so surprised. Phil told me it was your idea, and it didn’t take much of a brain to figure out why you’d done it. So it looks like it’s my turn now, and while I may not be the most obvious candidate to talk about Nina Lane, I’ll do something—”

“Wait a minute,
you
will talk about Nina Lane?” He was doing this so she would not have to. “What would you
say?”

“I have no idea,” he replied cheerfully. “But don’t worry, I’ll come up with something. I’m good at this sort of thing. I’ll reread the trilogy, and—”

“You’ll reread the trilogy?” That seemed far beyond the obligations of friendship.

“Sure. I may have said that Phil didn’t know how to love. I didn’t say that about me. I am a little squeezed for time, since I figured I’d stop trying to plan the museum as a whole and just put up an exhibit of more of the Lanier family stuff, really pushing the Nina Lane connection. That’s why I haven’t been at the courthouse for a couple of days. I went over to St. Joe and got Marie’s clothes out of the meat locker. I’ve been at the schoolhouse working on them.”

So he was working on the artifacts. No wonder he seemed to be feeling so well.

His giving a talk at the Celebration and putting up more exhibits would not save the event for Fleur-de-lis, but they would help. They might give the town another year. And these activities were giving him a mission again; the work had brought him back to life. By helping her, he had helped himself.

Tess let her head rest against the seat back. She felt taken care of, watched over, protected. She liked the feeling. She couldn’t remember when she had last felt this way, probably when she was little and her grandparents were still young enough that she wasn’t worrying about them. She’d felt a hint of it the first night she had been in Fleur-de-lis and had gone shopping at Kmart. She had felt as if it was all right to make mistakes because she had enough money to make mistakes. She had wondered if that was how people who were loved felt.

I may have said that Phil didn’t know how to love. I didn’t say that about me.