CHAPTER 45
March 19, 1960
Peggy Andrews rose quietly from the four-poster bed; the lamps with red fabric shades cast a sunrise glow. Wren slept soundly on his side with his legs stretched their full length, his toes poking from the end of the sheets. Staring at him, she realized she loved him.
My God, what had her mother kept her from all these years by telling her of the dangers of boys and sex? Of pregnancy, and the evils of Wren?
Peggy reached for anger and hate for her mother but found instead pity. What danger her mother had experienced, the ripping loss of Daddy downed in Pearl Harbor, moving across the country to be with her sister, whom she then lost. It was no wonder Mother savored safety.
Today Peggy would meet the woman who claimed that Whisperwood was her story, and that did not fall under the category of “safe” at all.
The first thing Peggy and Wren had done after they’d landed in London and checked into the hotel was take a cab to the British Library in North London and request access to the newspaper archives. They’d asked for the Oxford papers from late 1940 and in silence read the articles about Flora Lea Linden. Peggy had been overwhelmed by the sadness and mystery of this loss, of the unsolvable disappearance of someone who had been deeply loved by her family. She cried and tears dropped onto the curled and yellowed papers.
“How did they bear it?” Peggy asked Wren.
“I’m not sure it is something you bear. But it does explain the letters and calls and telegrams from her. I would never give up, either. Not for something like this. Never.”
Fairy tales, and this one in particular had consumed her life and her education. Now she was living inside her own very real life story, living it out one breath at a time, lingering until Wren woke so she could slip on the flowered dress and meet Hazel Linden.
Hazel stood at her kitchen counter and sipped her tea while she waited for Mum and Kelty to arrive. She tried to empty her mind of expectations, but that was like trying to stop the sun from now rising outside the window, turning the day dusky gray to gold.
Eight-thirty a.m.
Right now Hazel was meant to be waking in a first-class sleeper car with Barnaby, the ship coasting into dock as they rose for tea and their first view of Paris. Guilt washed over her in a damp sweat. She’d left him on the platform, his angry face mottled. And she understood—if he had done the same to her, she’d have been just as enraged. Kelty had helped Hazel with the luggage while Midge just looked confused and wanted to know if they could now eat the chocolates.
Hazel had tried to apologize to Barnaby, to explain that she had no choice, but he’d stopped her. She tried to ask if they could delay the trip just one day and he glared at her. She’d left him there with his luggage. Had he gone on without her?
Hazel cracked the kitchen window and let in a damp spring breeze, full of a loamy smell that meant the ground was bursting with new life, an aroma of green. Birds chirped and sang and trilled. She’d thought she wouldn’t sleep last night but she had, and deeply.
The idea, and it crept up on her slowly, that this author might be Flora had turned to hope.
Back in the hotel room, sustained by coffee, Peggy stood in front of the hotel room’s full-length mirror and assessed herself, attempting to view herself as Hazel might do.
Behind her, Wren zipped his pants and ran his fingers through his hair before slipping his arms around her, pulling her close in that way that made all her thoughts disappear, fall fast down the drain of her never-ending sink of worries. Together in the mirror they gazed at each other’s reflections.
“Just look at us,” said Wren. “What a mighty fine pair we are.”
“In England,” she said with a smile she was learning to see and feel on her face more often.
“It’s time,” he said.
Peggy turned and threw her arms around Wren, as if this was the way they’d been all their lives, as if this was how they’d always touched and talked. “I still don’t know what to say when I see her,” said Peggy. “Even though I spent most of the night thinking about it.”
Wren stepped back and tapped her forehead. “Always thinking, this one.”
She laughed, and he kissed her, and they headed out the hotel room door and down the long green-carpeted hallway. She pushed the elevator button.
Hazel buttoned her thin pollen-yellow coat with the belt that tied into a neat bow. Mum and Kelty waited outside on the front stoop. Hazel shut the door and locked it. “Okay, let’s go.”
They climbed out from the back of the cab a block from the hotel and the sky domed over them, blue and curved, high and cheerful, cloudless.
Kelty asked them, “Do you think you’d know Flora if you saw her?”
Mum answered quickly, “I would know her the second I saw her. If she’s mine.”
Hazel felt a trill of love. Mum might have married and loved and had another child, but she would know her own daughter in less than a breath. Loss lived alongside them both, yet somehow Mum had loved again.
“I think I would, yes,” Hazel said. “When I was looking at Iris, I was trying to find Flora in her, but just couldn’t. Of course I could have just asked her to show me her wrist and looked for the bunny ears.”
Camellia spoke up. “The butterfly wings.”
“The angel wings,” Kelty said.
And they smiled at each other, the old quip revived.
Then Kelty asked, “Do we have any idea at all what this Peggy Andrews looks like?”
“I know only her age—twenty-four. I have no clear idea what she might look like.” She gazed at the entry. “She said she’d meet us in the lobby.”
“I am dying to know what this woman might possibly have to tell us,” Kelty said as they stood in front of the red-lettered façade of The Savoy, the roundabout full of cabbies coming and going, the doorman in a black top hat with a white rose at his lapel opening the door with a swish. “And this better be good because I’m not accepting any cockamamie stories about magic floating in the air.”
Even through the worry burrowed in her bones, Hazel laughed at her best friend as they entered the shining and flower-filled lobby.
Peggy looked about her. The hotel restaurant yawned open to the lobby. A marble floor entryway with a round table and a flower arrangement of roses, daffodils, hydrangeas, ranunculus, greenery, and tulips spilled from a white porcelain urn. Peggy stopped to stare at the blooms, touching the edge of a yellow daffodil to make sure it was all real: the hotel, the day, the flowers. The petal fell off in her hand, and she closed her fingers around its silk and tucked it into her purse.
The restaurant filled quickly, a din of voices in which a sentence or two slipped Peggy’s way for her to pick up. Peggy scanned the lobby. “I don’t know what Hazel Linden looks like. How will she know who we are?” she asked Wren.
“I guess she’ll ask at the front desk and be directed to us.”
“But I used your last name, not mine.”
“I don’t think it’s hard to find two Americans, one whose first name is Peggy. Let’s just wait here in the lobby like you said in the note. If she doesn’t arrive, I’ll go ask the front desk if anyone has been asking after us.”
“Thank you, Wren. Thank you for being here. Thank you for bringing me.”
“You,” he said. “Thank you for you.”
Heat flowed to her cheeks, the warmth of him so near. Only a minute passed when the concierge in her bright red uniform approached. “Are you Peggy Andrews?”
“I am.” Peggy placed her left hand over her heart as if that could keep it from banging out of her chest.
“There are some women looking for you.”
“Women? As in more than one?” she asked.
“Yes, three of them.” She pointed across the large lobby.
“She probably didn’t want to do this alone,” Wren said.
“What if she brought her mother? What if they make a scene? What if they brought police or an attorney?”
Wren smiled. “What if none of that is true?”
Peggy took Wren’s hand and they walked across the foyer.
Hazel and Kelty stood in the middle of the lobby, glancing back and forth between the elevators and the restaurant. A nervous Camellia had gone to powder her nose. The blooms from the wild bouquet on the round table emitted such a lush fragrance it nearly made Hazel dizzy.
A man and a woman approached them. The woman’s brown hair was wound into a knot at the base of her neck. She wore a green dress and matching cardigan with pearls, which made her appear like a child playing dress-up.
Hazel searched the woman’s face, looking for evidence of Flora in the way she walked and clung to the man’s arm. He was tall with blond hair still damp at the edges, wearing a pair of tweedy trousers and a cream-colored sweater, looking like he’d just jumped off a fishing boat.
Their gazes met. “Are you Miss Linden?” asked the woman.
“I am.” For all her wondering about what to say, Hazel merely held out her hand and said, “Hallo, I’m Hazel Linden.”
When they shook hands, Hazel waited for the tremor, the knowing, the tingle that would tell her if this was her sister.
It could be. It was possible. The upturned nose, the tiny frame, the brown eyes a bit more golden. And yet something essential was missing. Something… Flora.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Peggy said quietly.
Camellia emerged from around the corner and reached Hazel’s side. She gazed at Peggy Andrews, then in a strong, sure voice said, “It’s not her.”
“No, it’s not,” Hazel said.
Peggy looked to Wren. “What is she talking about?”
Wren smiled sadly. “I think Miss Linden was hoping you’d be her sister. The lost sister.”