Shakespeare's Christmas (19 page)

It was another copy of the memory book.

I opened it, hoping fervently that Anna had written her name in it. No name.

“Shit,” I said out loud. When I’d been young, and we’d gotten our yearbooks, or memory books, or whatever you wanted to call them, the first thing we’d done was write our names inside.

One of these books had to be Anna’s. If Jack’s basic assumption was correct, if the person who’d sent the memory book page to Roy Costimiglia wasn’t a complete lunatic, then the other book belonged to either Eve or Krista, and it was someone very close to one of them who had sent the picture. Like someone in their house. A parent.

Dill was using the third bedroom as a study. There was a framed picture of Dill holding a baby I presumed was Anna. The snapshot had obviously been taken in a hospital room, and Anna looked like a newborn. But to me all babies looked more or less the same, and the infant Dill was gazing at so lovingly could have been Anna, or it could have been another child. The baby was swaddled in a receiving blanket.

I cleaned, scrubbed, and worried at the problem. I straightened and dusted and vacuumed and polished and mopped, and the activity did me good. But I didn’t solve anything.

When I went in Anna’s room yet again to return a Barbie I’d found in the kitchen, I looked more closely at Anna’s collection of framed snapshots. One was of a woman I was sure must be Dill’s first wife, Anna’s mother. She was buxom, like Varena; and like Varena her hair was brown, her eyes blue. Aside from those superficial similarities, she didn’t look at all like my sister, really. I stared at the picture, trying to read the woman’s character in this likeness. Was there something tense, something a little desperate, in the way she was clutching the little dog on her lap? Was her smile strained, insincere?

I shook my head. I would never have given the picture two thoughts if I hadn’t known that the woman had eventually killed herself. So much despair, so well hidden. Dill had an unstable mother, had married an unstable wife. I was frightened that he could see something deep in Varena that we didn’t suspect, some inner weakness, that attracted him or made him feel comfortable with her. But Varena seemed sane and sturdy to me, and I have a built-in Geiger counter for the ripples of instability in others.

It felt odd to see Varena’s clothes hanging in half of Dill’s closet, her china in his cabinets. She had really and truly moved into Dill’s house. That intimacy bore in on me how much Varena would lose if Anna was someone else’s daughter, for surely there would be the scandal to end all scandals . . . media coverage, intense and drenching. I shivered. I knew how that could affect your life.

The wedding was so close. One more day.

Very reluctantly, I reentered Dill’s office and opened the filing cabinet. I had put on a pair of fresh rubber gloves, and I kept them on. That shows you how guilty I was feeling.

But this
had
to be done.

Dill was an orderly man, and I quickly found the file labeled simply “Anna—Year One.” There was a separate file for each year of her life, containing drawings, pictures, and a page of cute things she’d said or done. The school-age files were crammed with report cards and test scores.

As far as I was concerned, Anna’s first year was the most important. The file contained Anna’s birth certificate, a record of her immunizations, her baby book, and some negatives in a white envelope marked “Baby Is Born.” The handwriting wasn’t Dill’s. There was not a thing there that would prove Anna’s identity one way or another. No blood type, no record of any distinguishing characteristic. A certificate from the hospital had Anna’s baby footprints in black ink. I would ask Jack if the Macklesbys had similar prints of Summer Dawn’s. If the contour of the foot was completely different from Anna’s, surely that would mean something?

Blind alley. Dead end.

Suddenly I remembered the negatives marked “Birth Pictures.” Where were the family photo albums?

I found them in a cabinet in the living room and blessed Dill for being orderly. They were labeled by year.

I yanked out the one marked with Anna’s birth year. There were the pictures: a red infant in a doctor’s arms, streaked with blood and other fluids, mouth open in a yell; the baby, now held by a masked and gowned Dill, the baby’s round little bottom toward the camera—presumably this one had been taken by a nurse. In the corner of the picture, her face just visible, was the woman in the picture in Anna’s room. Her mother, Judy.

And on the baby’s bottom, a big brown birthmark.

This was proof, wasn’t it? This was indisputably a delivery room picture, this was indisputably the baby born to Dill and his wife, Judy. And this baby, shown in a third picture cradled in the arms of the woman in the picture in Anna’s room, was absolutely positively the original Anna Kingery.

The elation at finding something certain helped me through the pang of guilt I suffered as I extracted the key picture from the album. It, too, went in my purse, after I’d returned the photo album to its former position.

I finished my cleaning, surveyed the house, found it good. I put the garbage in the wheeled cans, swept the front and back steps. I was done. I went back in to put the broom away.

Dill was standing in the kitchen.

He had a pile of mail in his hands, was shuffling through it. When the broom hit the floor, Dill looked up sharply.

“Hi, Lily, this was mighty fine of you,” he said. He smiled at me, his bland and forgettable face beaming nothing but goodwill. “Hey, did I scare you? I thought you heard me pull into the garage.”

He must have come in the back door while I was sweeping at the front.

Still tense all over, I bent to retrieve the broom, glad my face was hidden for a moment while I recovered.

“I saw Varena downtown,” he said, as I straightened and moved to the broom closet. “I can’t believe after all this waiting, it’s finally going to be our wedding day tomorrow.”

I wrung out a dishrag I’d forgotten and draped it neatly over the sink divider.

“Lily, won’t you turn to look at me?”

I turned to meet his eyes.

“Lily, I know you and I have never gotten close. But I don’t have a sister, and I hope you’ll be one to me.”

I was repelled. Emotional appeals were not the way to make a relationship happen.

“You don’t know how hard it’s always been for Varena.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

“Being your sister.”

I took a deep breath. I held my hand palm up. Explain?

“She would kill me if she knew I was saying this.” He shook his head at his own daring. “She never felt as pretty as you, as smart as you.”

That didn’t matter now. It hadn’t mattered for more than a decade.

“Varena,” I began, and my voice sounded rusty, “is a grown woman. We haven’t been teenagers for years.”

“When you’re a younger sister, apparently you have baggage you carry with you always. Varena thinks so, anyway. She always felt like an also-ran. With your parents. With your teachers. With your boyfriends.”

What crap was this? I gave Dill a cold stare.

“And when you got raped . . .”

I’ll give him that, he went right on and said the word.

“. . . and all the focus was on you, and all you wanted was to get rid of it, I think in some way it gave Varena some . . . satisfaction.”

Which would have made her feel guilty.

“And of course, she began to feel guilty about that, about even feeling a particle of righteousness about your getting hurt.”

“Your point being?”

“You don’t seem happy to be here. At the wedding. In the town. You don’t seem happy for your sister.”

I couldn’t quite see the connection between the two statements. Was I supposed to wag my tail since Varena was getting married . . . because she’d felt guilty when I got raped? I didn’t have any active animosity toward Dill Kingery, so I tried to work through his thought.

I shook my head. I wasn’t making any connections. “Since Varena wants to marry you, I’m glad she is,” I said cautiously. I wasn’t about to apologize for being who I was, what I had become.

Dill looked at me. He sighed. “Well, that’s as good as it’s gonna get, I guess,” he said, with a tight little smile.

Guess so.

“What about you?” I asked. “You married one unstable wife. Your mother’s not exactly predictable. I hope you see nothing like that in Varena.”

He threw back his head and laughed.

“You take the cake, you really do, Lily,” he said, shaking his head. He didn’t seem to find that endearing. “You don’t say much, but you go for the throat when you decide to talk. I think that’s what your parents have been dying to ask me for the past two years.”

I waited.

“No,” he said, quite seriously now. “I see nothing like that in Varena. But that’s why I dated her for so long. That’s why our engagement went on forever. I had to be sure. For my sake, and especially for Anna’s sake. I think Varena is the sanest woman I ever met.”

“Did your wife ever threaten to hurt Anna?”

He turned white as a sheet. I’d never seen anyone pale so fast. “What—how—” He was spluttering.

“Before she killed herself, did she threaten to hurt Anna?”

It was like I was a cobra and he was a mouse.

“What have you heard?” he choked out.

“Just a guess. Did she try to hurt Anna?”

“Please go now,” he said finally. “Lily, please go.”

 

I’D CERTAINLY HANDLED that well. What a masterly interrogation! At least, I reflected, Dill and I had been equally unpleasant to each other, though I might have the edge since I’d talked about something new, something that wasn’t common currency in Bartley—at least, judging by Dill’s reaction.

I was willing to bet I wouldn’t be invited to go on vacations with Dill and Varena.

It seemed possible that Dill’s first wife had been capable—at least in Dill’s estimation—of harming her baby. And page 23 was missing from a memory book that was most probably Anna’s.

I understood what the word “heartsick” meant. I tried to comfort myself with the thought of Anna’s birthmark. At least I’d learned one fact.

As I backed out of Dill’s driveway I discovered I didn’t want to go home.

I began cruising aimlessly—shades of being a teenager, when “riding around” had been a legitimate activity—and didn’t know where I was going until I found myself parking at the town square.

I went into the furniture store, and a bell tinkled as the door swung shut. Mary Maude Plummer was typing something into a computer at a desk behind a high counter in the middle of the store. Reading glasses perched at the end of her nose, and she was wearing her business face, competent and no-nonsense.

“Can I help you?” she asked and then looked up from the computer screen. “Oh, Lily!” she said happily, her face changing from the inside out.

“Come go riding,” I suggested. “I’ve got the car.”

“Your mom let you have it?” Mary Maude dissolved in giggles. She glanced around at the empty store. “Maybe I can, really! Emory,” she called. Out of the shadows at the back of the store, Emory Osborn materialized like a thin, blond ghost.

“Hello, Miss Bard,” he said, his voice wispy.

“Emory, can you watch the store while I take my lunch hour?” Mary Maude asked in the gentle, earnest voice you use with slow children. “Jerry and Sam should be back in just a minute.”

“Sure,” Emory said. He looked as if a good wind would whisk him away.

“Thanks.” Mary Maude fished her purse from some hidden spot under the counter.

When we were far enough away that Emory couldn’t hear us, Mary Maude muttered, “He should never have tried to come to work today. But his sister’s here, and she’s managing the home front, so I think he didn’t have anything else to do.”

We went out the front door like two girls skipping school. I noticed how professional and groomed Mary Maude looked in her winter white suit, a sharp, unwelcome contrast to me in my sweats.

“I’ve been cleaning Dill’s house,” I explained, suddenly self-conscious. I couldn’t remember apologizing for my clothes, not for years.

“That’s what you do for a living now?” Mary Maude asked as she buckled up.

“Yep,” I said flatly.

“Boy, did you ever think I’d end up selling furniture and you’d end up cleaning it?”

We shook our heads simultaneously.

“I’ll bet you’re tops at what you do,” Mary said, matter-of-factly.

I was surprised and oddly touched. “I’ll bet you sell a lot of furniture,” I offered and was even more surprised to find that I meant it.

“I do pretty well,” she answered, her voice offhand. She looked at me, and her face crinkled in a smile. “You know, Lily, sometimes I just can’t believe we grew up!”

That was never my problem. “Sometimes I can’t remember I was ever a teen,” I said.

“But here we are, alive, in good health, single but not without hope, and backed by family and friends,” Mary Maude said, almost chanting.

I raised my eyebrows.

“I have to practice counting my blessings all the time,” she explained, and I laughed. “See, that didn’t hurt,” she said.

We ate lunch at a fast-food place decorated with tinsel and lights and artificial snow. A Santa Claus robot nodded and waved from a plastic sleigh.

For a little while we just got used to each other. We talked about people we’d known and where they were now, how many times they’d been married and to whom. Mary Maude touched on her divorce and the baby she’d lost to crib death. We didn’t need to talk about my past; it was too well known. But Mary asked me some questions about Shakespeare, about my daily life, and to my pleasure it was easy to answer.

She, too, asked if I was seeing someone special.

“Yes,” I said, trying not to stare down at my hands. “A man from Little Rock. Jack Leeds.”