I find him staking dahlias against his own little caretaker’s house. His hat off and his shirtsleeves rolled, most of his face in the shadows. He seems younger to me than he has before—less hard edged and maybe more lonesome—and I’m near enough to the stream to hear the water running through, its movement over rocks, so that it isn’t so silent right here where he works.
I shouldn’t be here, I know, by myself, near dark. If he knew, my dad would not be pleased; Danny either. Danny would say I’ve gone too far, that some risks should not be taken. But I am here to see this thing through, and I don’t feel frightened.
I wait until he sees me. I stand here leaning against an old birch tree, watching him work, watching the gold eyes of a rabbit glow from beneath a holly bush, eyeing all the stuff that’s grown up between his house and the estate—the hedges, the trellis, the passion-flowers laced through the trellis. The dahlias have peaked and their faces are heavy—big, rust-colored accordion-fold faces that are too heavy for their stems. He props each bloom back up by force of a meshy metal cage. He steps back to look at the whole, and then he turns, and that’s when he sees me. His back goes straight as a rod; his shoulders hunch.
“Katie,” he says. That’s all. He pulls the gloves off his hands—the right one, the left—and drops them. He fits a pair of garden shears into the pocket of his pants. “Forget something?” He just stands there, daring me to explain myself. That gold-eyed rabbit comes flying out from beneath the bush. Scuttles in the air between us, then past me, is gone into the woods.
“I found something,” I tell him, for it seems the best way to start.
“You found what?” He clips his words, uses as few as possible.
“I mean, in the library. In a box. Inside a book. Great Expectations.”
He levels me with a long stare. “You always did strike me as the bookish type,” he says. He puts a hand around his chin, which he scratches slowly, as if there’s no real itch. It gets so quiet between the two of us that all I can hear is the stream beyond, the buzz of a bug, a stick breaking somewhere in the woods. Squirrels, I think. Or that rabbit.
“It’s a photograph,” I tell him. “A picture I think you should have.”
He drops his hand. His brow goes crinkly. He doesn’t move or say a word, just stares at me with those flinty eyes. I step toward him, reach into my bag, and retrieve the image. I balance it on my palm, stretch my hand toward him. He still won’t move. He watches my face first, and then my hand, studies my eyes again, finally leans forward. Leans and lifts the photo from my hand and balances it on his own palm. I want him to say something, one thing, but he does not.
“May 1954,” I tell him, because night has started to come on in a hurry and maybe it’s too dark now for him to read the tiny blue words. “The Devon Horse Show. Your mom. She won the blue ribbon.”
He looks from the photograph to me, and back down to the photo, and from a branch somewhere high above, a blackbird screams. I hear the scramble of the rabbit beneath bushes close to the stream, the running around of squirrels, another bird. “Where did you find this?” he finally demands.
I tell him again. “Inside a book. Inside a box. At the library.”
He turns and stands that way—his back to me, his body in the shadows, his shoulders shifting down, his head bending toward the photo. “It just seemed like you should have it,” I tell him, because he won’t talk and somebody has to. “There are these boxes,” I start again. “Seven of them at the library, and I’ve been sorting through them. I’ve been trying to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“This place. Miss Martine. The dig. Things that disappear. People.”
“Seems more like spying.”
“The boxes are anyone’s to sort through. Local Lore. They just arrived one day—stacked outside near the book-return slot when Ms. McDermott got to work. They needed cataloging, and I volunteered. I mean, I’d started working for Miss Martine, and then there was that turtle shell, you know, the one that Owen found, and it had that indentation inside, and then my dad, at home, has been working on a painting—he restores paintings, that’s what he does—and it’s an Everlast painting, as it turns out, and I don’t know: I wanted to understand.”
It’s a long speech, and it gets his attention. He turns and faces me, and his eyes are brisk and bright though his face is muted by shadows, and he doesn’t look mad, doesn’t even seem confused. More like he seems relieved. “Miranda Everlast Thomas.” That’s what he says.
“Excuse me?” He has said the name softly. I step closer.
“My mother’s cousin,” he says. “She died a couple months ago. Her son’s been cleaning out her house, readying it for a sale. Or so I’ve heard. We’re not personally in touch, and from what I understand, he was rather estranged from his mom.”
I shake my head, bewildered.
“She was my mother’s best friend, too,” he explains, “besides being her cousin. My mother trusted her, from what I understand. Let her in on some secrets. Miranda Everlast Thomas. Her boxes. Her lore.” He shakes his head, as if some big piece in a puzzle he’s been mulling has been settled into place. He forgets that I am here, seems to.
“So you really are Miss Martine’s son,” I say.
He smiles vaguely. “It seems you had established that.”
“I mean, I was only guessing: from the photographs, the newspaper stories. The storm. Local Lore. Guessing from that.”
He looks at me for a long time, then looks again at the photograph in his hand, which I’m sure he can hardly see by now, not where he’s standing, not at this time of day. The stream sings its song and there’s a rustling in the woods. Some lightning bugs have begun to put their lamps into the night. “This is the only formal portrait ever taken of my mother and father together,” he says now. “I’ve been looking for it for a long time.” He takes another long look at whatever part of the photo he can still see, then slips it in his pocket.
“The second gazebo?” I ask.
He nods. “I needed help,” he says, “to move this earth around. It’s old earth. It falls hard on itself.”
“We were digging for this all along? A photograph?”
He nods again, shrugs. “My mother passed away last year,” he says. “I wanted this back.”
“Gone?” I step back, feel a shudder rip its way up my spine, think of Ida poking Reny, all the things folks keep to themselves.
“She died, Katie. Her time had come.”
“Died?” I turn and look up at her house—through the trees, toward the mansion, where just that single light is on. I think about my mother’s flowers blooming in the pachysandra patch for a ghost of a woman, an idea. I think of rescue. “But I thought…” I turn back around to look at Old Olson, but the shadows really are falling fast, and I can’t read his eyes anymore. I wait for him to explain, to fit the pieces together, but he turns now, straightens a dahlia that has fallen lightly against its mesh cage. His gloves remain on the ground, where he tossed them. He keeps his back to me.
“Old Olson?” I say, finally.
“Listen, Katie,” he says. He turns back around, crosses his arms, looks up at the sky, starts speaking. “It’s just the way it is, okay? Just the way it was.” This, I realize, is a story he hasn’t often told. An entire history, long buried. “She had never been well, my mother,” he starts again. “After she lost my father, and I was born. My first memories are of her being far away, of me, running down that hill”—he gestures—“tossing pebbles in the stream, hunting for fish, finding an owl. My mother near, but distant. They sent me to school after a while—her mother and her father, I mean. I’d come home for the summers, for Christmas, but mostly I grew up in other places. Grew up loving this place, most of all. Grew up missing her.”
“So you came back?”
“At one point, her father died, her mother was gone, and what was I going to do, really? Who could care for this place? She wasn’t even forty, but she was frail. I was through with college. So yes, Katie. I came home. I stayed. She loved it here, despite everything, and when she wanted to leave, I took her. She wore scarves, big sunglasses, hats. No one was much looking for her anymore. Nobody noticed.” His words are quiet. He doesn’t move. A slight breeze moves through my hair. “Cancer,” he says.
Cancer. A word we both understand.
“I thought she was still here,” I say. “Up there.” I point to the house, to the light on the hill. “I thought…”
“You thought what I wanted anyone who wondered to think. What everyone needed to think, if I was to stay here and still honor my mother’s secret. It was easier to let people imagine her alive. Easier to pass as her gardener than a son. We had lawyers who helped.” He smiles. “The privilege of money.”
Way above Old Olson’s head, the first pale star has come out. Something quick and small moves through the air above—a couple of bats, maybe—and the dry, hot air of the day is starting to feel perforated with something sweeter. There are a million images in my head, a thousand questions.
“How did you know the portrait existed in the first place?” I ask him.
“At the very end she spoke of it. Said she’d had it hidden. I thought she meant that it had been locked in that trunk. I guess she meant that she had given it to Miranda. They’d had a falling-out after I was born. They weren’t on speaking terms, long as I knew my mother.”
“Then Miranda passed on.”
“Then her son cleaned out her house.”
“Then the boxes just looked like Local Lore,” I say. “Like nobody special’s story.”
“I guess that’s right.” He touches the outline of the photo in his pocket. He settles his hip and bends his knee, like a man leaning up against a fence.
“What is in the trunk?” I ask.
“Everything she would have left with,” he says, not bothering to make the mystery a mystery anymore, “had she had the freedom to leave.”
“Where was she going?”
“To Virginia, with my father.” He leaves it at that for a moment, lets the story hang, then continues. “They were planning to elope the night he died, and so she’d packed her trunk. There was a storm. She didn’t care. She hired a taxi to take her to the train, but the taxi couldn’t get far—rain everywhere, floods, splinters of trees on the ground, and the taxi stalled. My father boarded the train without her. Her father went to find her. Three days later, she learned my father was dead. When her father understood that she was carrying me, that she had planned to escape with a horseman, to elope, he buried her trunk in the ground. He didn’t want a soul to find it, didn’t want a trace of it anywhere. She was sixteen. Four months later I was born, and she didn’t leave this place after that. It was said she’d gone to Europe. A lot of things, really, were said.”
I nod, tip my chin to the sky, wipe a tear from my cheek. More stars have begun to appear and brighten. Hello, Mom, I think. Hello, Miss Martine. “So what is next?” I ask. “For you?”
“I’m leaving, Katie. Hurts too much to see the old place empty. Have lost my strength for it.”
“And Ida and Reny, and Yvonne and Peter…?”
“They’ll stay with the new folks, if they want. Go off, if they want. They’ll be able to choose; it’ll be part of the terms.”
I bite my lip. “That’s nice of you,” I say.
“They’re family, Katie. That’s what you do.”
I nod again, and through the descending darkness I see him smile. “I want to show you something, Katie,” he says. He begins walking and I follow—down the path, under the trellis, toward the bridge where Danny and I stood in the dark and kissed. Seems like a long time ago. I stay three steps behind him, fitting my boots into his boot prints. Just short of the stream he stops and pulls back the branches of a big tree, and because it’s all so shadowy out here right now, he takes my hand and lifts it up, against the bark, where I find the hard head of a nail.
“Turtle shell,” he says.
I shake my head, don’t understand.
“They’d rendezvous here by the tree,” he says. “My mother and my father. The shell was their sign.”
“So they hung it there? On a nail on a tree?”
“A story my mother loved to tell,” he says. And then, out of nowhere, he laughs. An owl hoots back as if to answer, and now Old Olson laughs again.