30

The quiet voices inside Sapphira’s painting room faded as Luella scanned the different paints, clay sculptures, and art papers. Even though Sapphira had been gone close to two years, the room still looked as if she would walk in at any moment and give an art lesson. Luella had loved her high school art classes with Sapphira. At one time or another, at one location or another, all the Glynn Girls had taken art classes from her. That’s where the bond with Sapphira began, and it had lasted until Sapphira died without warning at seventy-three. She’d been in this very room, painting and probably praying that Siobhan would find her way back, when she had a heart attack. She’d called 911, saying that she needed help, that she’d started feeling sick and dizzy twenty minutes earlier. Gavin was at the station, but by the time the EMTs arrived four minutes later, she was gone.

Luella closed her eyes. Sapphira’s infectious laugh and her fervent prayers for Siobhan echoed in Luella’s memories. Oh, how she missed their fifth Glynn Girl. Maybe that was why she saw Tara as Sapphira the other day. Tara could make a perfect fifth Glynn Girl. It seemed right somehow that she was here with them now, ready to help pack up this room.

“I can’t believe it’s time to take this room apart.” Sue Beth had tears in her eyes.

Dell wrapped an arm around Sue Beth’s shoulders and squeezed. “We knew it was coming. And we’ll save everything that’s precious to us.”

“So…the whole thing?” Sue Beth waved an arm in a circle.

With scissors in hand Tara put one hand on a huge roll of Bubble Wrap and the other hand on the glassine. “It all has to be moved out of here, so let’s get this done before Gavin rips the hardwood floors out from under us, leaving us with nothing but that stinky, yucky subflooring.” She looked at all the supplies. “Not that I know anything about packing up artwork.”

“We’ll teach you”—Luella sighed—“if we can make ourselves get started.”

“Home stretch, girls.” Julep clapped her hands and pushed up her sleeves. “I’ll miss Sapphira’s house too, especially this room, but I’m so grateful we can give all this to Gavin to put an end to my financial mess.”

Gentle morning sunlight spilled across the dark hardwood floors as Dell passed out pairs of nitrile gloves.

Dell lifted the first canvas oil painting from the stack leaning against the wall. Julep talked to Tara, giving detailed instructions for properly packing artwork: place a thin layer of foam on the floor and cover it with glassine, put the painting face down on that and tape it in place, and then add layers of Bubble Wrap with the smooth side facing the painting. More tape and wrap until the packing is six inches thick. The works that weren’t on canvas could be rolled and slid into hard cardboard tubes.

Before long they had a system and were making good progress. Occasionally one of the girls would tell Tara a story connected to a painting even though she didn’t seem very interested. She simply nodded and kept moving.

Luella paused to watch Tara work, observing how she packed the precious artwork with meticulous care. Tara had some color to her face today, and she had the strength to do more than just carry the weight of grief.

Even so, it’d only been a month since her brothers died and only two weeks since she relearned their fate. That was no time at all to deal with the depth of Tara’s loss. But some people had an inner drive to feel normal, and Tara seemed to be one of them. Luella had seen that in Julep after Mitch died. The first few weeks she had been gung ho about donating the bulk of Mitch’s things and eager to participate in any church charity events she could. But then at times the heavy load of grief would catch up to her, and she’d crumble.

Tara had a lot of times of crumbling ahead of her before she’d be able to climb this mountain of grief. Wait! Tara mentioned she was a rock climber. Maybe that metaphor would make sense to her.

Not that this was a good time to share it.

“Luella.” Julep waved her hand close to Luella’s face. “Are you going to pull your weight here?”

Dell winked at her. “She’s probably daydreaming about her new gentleman friend.”

“Ooh, you need to spill all about your most recent date.” Sue Beth sidled over and elbowed her.

Luella made a zipper motion over her lips. “Sorry. I’m not penning a tell-all about my personal life.”

Dell giggled. “That’s because it’s only recently that she’s had a personal life.”

Luella shot a glare at Dell, who shaped her hands into a halo over her head.

Truth be told, things were amazing between Charles and her. So much so that she didn’t want to trivialize it by blabbing to everyone. She pulled out a piece of paper from the stack she was working on. Maybe getting back to work would provide a distraction.

Tara held up a painting of the lighthouse. “This reminds me of a painting I have…only mine has ocean water.”

“Yeah, the world has a lot of lighthouses.”

“True.” Tara put the painting facedown on the glassine.

“Oh, girls! Doesn’t this bring back memories?” Luella lifted the pencil-and-watercolor sketch of the colorful snow-cone stand that used to be on the corner of Magnolia and Mallery. The red-and-white kiosk had an old-fashioned ice shaver that the owner, Mr. Pat, had found in a New Orleans pawnshop. He’d long since retired, but the memory of the refreshing treat served in little yellow paper cups was as strong as ever.

Tara scooted closer and touched the painting with her gloved hands, her fingers barely brushing the thick watercolor paper. “How odd.”

Julep gave a short laugh. “Yeah, I suppose an old-timey stand like that wouldn’t be common in North Carolina. Don’t make us feel our age even more than we already do when hanging around young folks like you.”

Tara smiled, shaking her head. “No, I’ve seen little stands like this in small towns. What’s odd is that this looks like one I’ve dreamed about time and again.” She pointed at the sign next to the snow-cone stand in Sapphira’s picture. “Even down to this advertisement with a long orange drip running down it, as if real juice stained the ad.”

“So like a déjà vu?” Sue Beth wiggled her fingers.

Tara angled her head, studying the art. “I’m not sure that’s the right term.” She looked off to the side, a cloud coming over her face.

Dell’s brows wrinkled as she regarded Tara. “What happened in your dream, honey?”

Tara made a face. “Never mind. It’s not that interesting. And like most dreams, it doesn’t make much sense.” She gestured. “Let’s roll it up and move on.”

“Aw, I need a five-minute break.” Sue Beth sat on the floor and leaned against a set of shelves. “Tell us the dream.”

Julep and Dell sat too, but Luella held the artwork, watching Tara’s face as she studied the piece.

Tara closed her eyes. “In the dream I was a child…maybe five, I think. I was stuck in a hot room and terrified. There was a little boy with me who was a couple of years younger. The room kept getting hotter, and I knew I had to take care of the boy. I was yelling, yanking, and pulling on doors, but I finally managed to roll down a window.”

Julep drummed her fingers on her knee. “Roll it down? From inside a room?”

Tara shrugged. “It’s a dream. What can I say? Anyway, I helped the boy climb out, but he was all red and sweating. So I started asking people for change until I had enough, and I bought him a snow cone, a red one. And the stand looked just like this one. Weird, right?”

It couldn’t be…

The paper slipped from Luella’s hands and floated to the floor. At that same moment something in the closet hit with a horrendous thud. Chills ran up Luella’s arms, but she ignored them and checked to see what had fallen. She found a large set of tempera paints on the floor that Sapphira had never opened.

She’d been saving them for Siobhan to return.

What on earth…

Luella returned the paints to the shelf, going over Tara’s dream in her mind. It had a lot of similarities to an event that had happened to Siobhan and Gavin about twenty-five years ago, only the “room” was an older clunker of a car.

She glanced at the other Glynn Girls, all of whom were staring at Tara and looking as stunned as Luella felt. Was this a dream? Some sort of upside-down world from which Luella would wake?

“Th…that’s quite a dream.” Luella tried to smile. “Thanks for sharing it.”

The others chimed in, muttering much the same.

Tara smiled. “Anytime you need to while away the hours listening to recurring dreams, I’m your girl.”

Julep stood and dusted off her jeans. “Whew, I think I need a break from this packing. How about some sandwiches? I’m famished.” Everyone nodded.

Tara raised an eyebrow. “We ate less than two hours ago.” She looked at her wristwatch. “It’s only 10:30.”

Julep fidgeted with her hands. “Tara, maybe you’d like to go check on Gavin. We’ll fix lunch.”

“He’s at the lawyer’s office, and then he has the meeting with Roy Ashe at the pier.”

“Oh, yeah.” Julep glanced at each Glynn Girl as if asking for help.

Tara picked the artwork off the floor and passed it back to Luella. “But if you guys are going to break for lunch, I think I’ll go for a bike ride before it gets too warm.”

The Glynn Girls all spoke at the same time:

“Good idea.” Sue Beth nodded.

“Nice plan.” Dell gave a thumbs-up.

“Yeah.” Luella smiled at her.

“Okay…” Tara removed her gloves, studying them. She opened her mouth as if to say something more but just shrugged. “See you in half an hour or so.” Then she walked out of the room.

Luella remained at the door of the painting room until she heard Tara leave the house, and then she inched the art room door closed and joined her friends in the center of the room.

The Glynn Girls stared at one another, speechless.

Luella’s mind spun. It couldn’t be. Impossible. Siobhan and Tara, one and the same? This was like a twist in one of her ghost stories. But what else could possibly explain Tara knowing about the snow-cone incident?

Julep took a deep breath, looking at the ceiling, let it out slowly, and then finally broke the stunned silence. “Okay. We need to go over the facts. Surely there’s a logical explanation. People dream things all the time. How many tens of thousands of people do you think have dreamed of a snow-cone cart and begging for money to buy a cone?” She pushed her sleeves back again. “But whatever is going on, we need to figure it out and plan our next steps.”

Sue Beth raised a hand. “What exactly do we remember about the snow-cone incident? Are we sure the stories are the same? It’s not like Gavin’s the only kid to get a cherry slushy after getting overheated. And Siobhan couldn’t have been the only little girl to help another kid out of a car.”

“Right!” Despite Dell’s declaration her voice wavered. “I mean Tara being Siobhan would be crazy. Wouldn’t it?”

Luella set the picture on a bookshelf. “I think the most telling part was that she saved the boy from a hot room by rolling down a window to escape. Good thing the car didn’t have automated windows ’cause Cassidy had locked the car and taken the keys.”

“Yeah.” Sue Beth snatched the hair clip from her head and pinned up her hair again. “Clearly Tara has no idea she was in a car. I’m a little foggy on the details, perhaps because it happened twenty-five years ago. Can someone refresh my memory about whose car the kids escaped from?”

“I can.” Julep nodded. “I’d just had my third miscarriage—the last one before Mitch and I gave up on giving Gavin a sibling. I needed to get to the hospital because the pain was so bad. I thought maybe it was an ectopic pregnancy.” Julep’s face creased. “Mitch was on a jobsite. As a carpenter he was often an hour or two away from home. He headed home as soon as I reached him. Luella and Sapphira were out of state. Sue Beth, you were laid up sick with the flu, which is probably why the details didn’t stick with you. Dell dropped everything to take me to the hospital, but we had to find someone to stay with Gavin. I could see Siobhan in this very backyard playing. I called Cassidy, and she was willing to keep him. I…I thought Gavin would be fine until Mitch could get back in town.”

Luella brushed her hand down Julep’s arm. “It was a reasonable thing to think.”

Julep stared out the window. “While Dell rushed to my house to pick me up, Cassidy walked over to my home. I gave her cash and the keys to my old car so she could buy lunch and dinner for Gavin, Siobhan, and herself. Sometime after Dell drove me to the hospital, Cassidy took both kids with her in my car to find a fix. Apparently she decided to leave them locked in the car. I still can’t believe I was that stupid to leave Gavin with her. Even with as much pain as I was in, I should’ve known better.”

Dell sighed. “It wasn’t your fault. Or mine. We didn’t know at the time how hooked Cassidy was. None of us did. Not even Sapphira. Gavin was a restless, active preschooler—not someone you could pen up in a waiting room—and you didn’t want him to see you in unbearable pain.”

“I remember the reasoning, Dell!” Julep looked down and drew a breath. “But I was his mother.” Her tone was softer now. “And I should’ve known I was putting him in danger.”

Dell patted Julep’s arm. “We were panicked, and you did what you thought was best for him. It’s all any parent can do.”

How long had it been since they had mentioned Cassidy’s name? Years. She was only a few years younger than the Glynn Girls. In some ways she seemed troubled early on. She wasn’t like her free-spirited, artistic mom or her confident, businessman dad or anything in between. By middle school she was unhappy, anxious, and miserably uncomfortable inside her own skin. All of that seemed to grow by leaps and bounds when she was seventeen and her dad died. Luella swallowed a lump. A little more than a year later Cassidy gave birth to Siobhan, and she never named the baby’s father. Around the time Siobhan was born, Cassidy started experimenting with drugs, probably looking for an escape from her anxiety and self-loathing. In the blink of an eye, she was hooked, despite all the love Sapphira tried to give her.

Where was Cassidy now? Luella had thought about her and little Siobhan many nights during her prayers. Cassidy had let her mother name the baby as a thank-you for letting them live in her home and for being a free babysitter. But Cassidy never liked the name Siobhan. Had she changed her daughter’s name to Tara and then abandoned her? That made little sense. Then again, Cassidy’s life made little sense for someone who had been loved deeply by her parents.

Julep continued to stare out the window. “Mitch drove me home from the hospital that afternoon. But when we arrived, there was no one at our place or Sapphira’s. Mitch and I drove all around the island. We were panicked. Then I saw my boy sitting under a tree with red all over his shirt. I thought the worst”—she gave a shaky laugh—“until I realized it was just cherry snow cone. And there was Siobhan, sitting with him in the shade of the live oak, holding his hand and talking to him about the seagulls. She’d gotten them out of the car and bought a snow cone to cool Gavin down. She was a smart girl and resourceful. We took them to the pediatrician to be checked, and they were fine, but only because of Siobhan.”

Luella wiped beads of sweat from her face. Rehashing this situation somehow made it feel even hotter than it should. “So that’s where Tara’s story converges with our memories. It wasn’t long after that when Cassidy left town with Siobhan. Poor Sapphira. What a heartbreak that was, and she had to carry it for the rest of her life.”

A thought struck Luella. “Do you realize this weekend will be the first time in twenty-five years there won’t be any lawyer’s office running an ad in a paper that says, ‘Desperate grandmother looking for Siobhan O’Keefe, born in Glynn County, Georgia, St. Simons Island, on April 1, 1987’? And offering a reward for any leads. According to Sapphira’s instructions, now that the house is in Gavin’s hands, her lawyers will stop paying for the ads.”

Sue Beth pointed to a painting of the ocean. “We girls could’ve gone on a cruise several times for what Sapphira, or her estate, paid lawyers for placing those ads in various newspapers, changing the state or cities she put them in, always hopeful someone would reach out.”

Julep wiped sweat from her forehead. “Tara’s the right age.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. “Maybe there was a reason she was drawn to this house…”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Sue Beth pulled out her cell phone and waggled it. “We should call Hadley. She could put this whole thing to rest by telling us that Tara was born and raised somewhere in North Carolina.”

Luella shook her head. “She was in foster care. It’s possible she could be Siobhan.”

Julep grabbed her own phone from a nearby shelf. “We won’t know until we ask.” Standing in the center of the group, she touched her screen and put the call on speakerphone.

“Hello, Julep.” Hadley’s voice sounded upbeat.

“Good morning. You’re on speaker with all of us.”

“Hi, all. Is Tara with you? Is she okay?”

Dell leaned in. “She’s currently on a bike ride. She’s been helping us with a cleaning project this morning.”

Julep cleared her throat. “Listen, we have an odd question, and we thought it best not to ask Tara directly. At least, not yet.”

“Not a problem. What is it?”

“Where was Tara born?”

Hadley was silent for a moment. “I’m glad you called me instead of asking her. That’s an emotional question for her because she doesn’t know. Her mom abandoned her before safe haven laws existed, so her mom left no clues that could lead people to finding her. If Tara is remembering correctly, her mom was in some major trouble at the time and didn’t want to go to jail. Drugs were involved. Possibly other things too. Tara’s birth certificate is a generated one, created by the state of North Carolina, and the info on it is based on their best guess of where she was born. She knew her birth date, and she remembered she was from Georgia, but she thought the town was called Ocean, and there is no Ocean, Georgia.”

Ocean, Georgia…Luella’s breath caught. Ocean Road was two hundred feet from here, and at a nearby intersection the street name changed to Ocean Boulevard. Residents couldn’t enter or leave Fourteenth Street without traveling on a road named Ocean. So maybe the name Ocean had stuck in Siobhan’s mind when her own name hadn’t.

She leaned in. “What is her birthday?”

“April 1, 1987.”

Luella’s heart about stopped. Julep pressed a hand against the wall, jerking air into her lungs.

Siobhan’s birthday.

“Wait, is this about the ad in the paper?” Hadley continued. “Are you picking up where Sean and Darryl left off? They planned the trip to St. Simons because they believed Tara had a family connection there somehow. Sean and Darryl meant for it to be a surprise adventure for her.”

Luella’s head spun. After decades of Sapphira’s searching for Siobhan, had her lost granddaughter returned home without knowing it? If so, the repercussions of this were staggering. Luella willed her voice to be steady. “Did Tara know her mom’s name?”

“It may not be her real name. Tara said they moved a lot, and her mom changed their names just as often. It was a confusing childhood, to say the least, but her half brothers had the same mom, and they knew her as Cassidy Banks.”

“Cassidy.” Julep sank to her knees.

Luella took the phone from Julep. “Thanks, Hadley. We’re sorry for this strange call. There’s a lot of info that we’re processing. We’d appreciate if you didn’t mention this conversation to Tara just yet. We’ll get back to you soon. We’re proud of Tara’s progress. She’s got some steel somewhere underneath all her pain.” And if she was actually Siobhan, she’d need it. “Listen, we need to get back to work. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us.”

“I’m proud of her too. Don’t worry. I won’t say anything about us talking, but don’t hesitate to call if you need me. Thanks for looking after Tara.”

“Bye, Hadley.”

Silence hung in the room like a heavy blanket. What were they going to do?

“Hello?” Gavin called out. “Finally the house is mine free and clear.”

Luella turned to find Gavin beaming as he came into the room. He waved a folder of papers in his hand. “All that’s left to do is meet Roy at the pier and get a nice, fat check for the shiplap, but I’ve got some time before meeting him.” His brows furrowed. “No whoops or hollers or hugs?” His eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong?”

“Son,”—Julep went to him and cradled his face—“we need to talk.”