It became quickly apparent that little Makayla was damn near expert at knowing when to make herself scarce. I had the distinct sense that Ellen wanted nothing more than to send us trotting after Lily, but instead, she disappeared back into the kitchen.
“Are you coming, or ain’t ya?”
I came. In other circumstances, I might have wondered at the fact that her accent had thickened halfway through that sentence, but right now, I had to focus.
“Almost twenty years ago, a girl named Ana Gutierrez got pregnant.” I cut straight to it.
Ellen displayed no reaction whatsoever to Ana’s name. “Sit,” she ordered.
Sadie-Grace, cowed by Ellen’s tone, went to plop down where she was standing, but I grabbed her elbow and steered her toward the kitchen table. It was made of a light-colored wood, and stained with years of use, rings burned and etched into its surface.
To me, it almost felt like home.
I sat down in a chair that put my back to the wall. Sadie-Grace sat down with her back to the door. Behind her, I could see a fraction of the hallway. To my left, I could see the rest of the kitchen, where Ellen was pouring lemonade out of a white plastic pitcher. The appliances looked old and none of the colors matched, but everything in that kitchen was spotless.
Ellen plunked a mason jar down in front of each of us. “Drink.”
I drank the lemonade. So did Sadie-Grace. And then I circled back to what I’d said before. “Twenty years ago, Ana Gutierrez got pregnant. The baby was a summer baby—or very early fall. Ana came here to give birth.”
I wasn’t sure if I meant here as in Two Arrows or here as in Ellen’s house. I was fishing, and the old woman who sat down in the chair between Sadie-Grace and me was smart enough to know it.
“You tell my sister you met me?” she asked after a moment.
When I’d first moved in with Lillian, I’d viewed my exchanges with her as a form of bartering: I’d answer one of her questions in hopes of her answering mine. We’d progressed past that, these last few months, but Ellen seemed like the type to respect an even trade.
Or better yet, a trade that favored Ellen. Answer the question. Answer any question she asks you.
“I told Lillian about my last visit,” I confirmed. “I told her that I met you.” Then I volunteered the answer to her next question before she could weigh the costs and benefits of asking it. “She said that I shouldn’t come back.”
“Smart girl.” Ellen took a long drink from a mason glass that very clearly did not contain lemonade. “Lil,” she clarified. “Not you.”
I probably should have heard some kind of threat or warning in those words—the implication that not coming back would have been smart—but I couldn’t get past the idea of someone, anyone, referring to the great Lillian Taft, grande dame of society, as a girl.
“You’re going to catch flies with that mouth if you keep gaping at me,” Ellen said mildly.
Nothing about this woman is mild. I had to remind myself of that, and then I circled back around to the point.
“Lillian doesn’t know that I came here today. She doesn’t know that Ana gave birth in Two Arrows.” I waited a fraction of a second to see if that would get me a reaction. It didn’t. “Lillian doesn’t know that you’re the one who arranged for Ana’s baby’s adoption.”
Adoption, a voice in my mind whispered, or sale.
Ellen took her time taking my measure, then allowed herself another healthy drink of the concoction in her jar. “Around here, we’d say that a girl like you, making assumptions like those and talking that kind of talk, was getting a little big for her britches.”
Her accent was still coming in and out. I wasn’t sure what to read into that, but I did have the general sense that this could go badly.
A smarter person would have backed off. “I just want to know what happened to Ana’s baby,” I said.
“That baby is our friend Campbell’s half-sister,” Sadie-Grace chimed in. “Or maybe her half-brother? And there’s this girl Victoria, and she’s the baby’s—”
“Ellen doesn’t care about Victoria,” I told Sadie-Grace.
“There’s a lot of things I don’t care about,” Ellen commented. That, too, was a warning—that I shouldn’t get too comfortable here, just because we were related by blood. “And,” Ellen continued, “there’s a lot of things I do care about. My family. This town.”
Your business, my brain filled in. People asking questions was bad for business. And rich people coming around probably wasn’t great.
“Just tell us about the baby,” I said. “There’s no reason not to. Ana isn’t ever coming back here, and it’s not like whoever ended up with the baby is ever going to be in the market for another one. It’s been nineteen years.”
That earned me a heavy stare. My phrasing—talking about the market for babies—was tiptoeing its way closer and closer to the word sold. It was bad enough, from Ellen’s perspective, that Sadie-Grace and I knew her father had shown his gratitude toward Beth with a healthy check. The woman who ran this town couldn’t be happy about the idea that we knew—or at least suspected—that Audie wasn’t the first child she’d exchanged for a big wad of cash.
“Please,” I said. It would have sounded more earnest coming from Sadie-Grace, but I knew in my bones that she’d take the word better coming from me. There was a long silence—tenser for me than for Sadie-Grace, who didn’t realize that our situation was precarious in the least.
“If I tell you what you want to know, you’ll git?” Ellen asked me finally.
“Immediately and without any further questions,” I confirmed.
Another few seconds ticked by. Each one felt intentional. And then Ellen placed her forearms on the table and leaned toward me.
“Before you go getting high-and-mighty, you should know that with Ana, with that baby? I didn’t take a dime from anyone. That wasn’t business. That was me taking pity on a girl that your world had spit out like she was nothing.”
I wasn’t sure I bought the idea that Ellen had helped Ana out of the goodness of her heart, but I knew better than to say that out loud.
Not when we were this close to answers.
“You helped Ana find a home for the baby.” My heart was beating in my chest like there was actually a person in there with a gun, firing it over and over into my rib cage. Thump. Thump. Thump.
“A good home,” Sadie-Grace added.
A certain kind of home, I thought, but what came out of my mouth was: “Did Lillian help you?”
My brain didn’t really latch onto the question until after I’d asked it. But it made sense. I had no idea how Greer had found Two Arrows—or Ellen or the pregnant Beth. But when it came to imagining the reverse—Ellen looking for a certain kind of home for a newborn—it wasn’t all that hard to picture her asking the one person she knew who ran in those circles.
Two, I thought suddenly. Davis Ames grew up hereabouts. She knows two people who run in those circles.
“Lillian don’t know a thing,” Ellen spat, like she meant that, all the way down to the marrow in her bones. “And she certainly didn’t help.”
“But you found a family,” I pressed. “For Ana’s baby.”
And that family paid Ana, even if they didn’t pay you. She left here with enough money to travel. She never had to ask her family for money. All these years later, she still has expensive tastes.
“Just tell me who took the baby,” I said. “That’s all I want to know, and you’ll never have to see either one of us again.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.” For the first time, Ellen sounded like Lillian.
She sounded the way my grandmother had when I’d realized the truth about my father.
What is going on here?
Ellen took another drink. Looked me over. Looked me down. Opened her mouth—and then, before she could say a word, there was a knock at the door. I wasn’t sure at first that she was going to answer, but she downed the rest of the drink, then stood.
“Don’t take it in your mind to wander,” she warned me. “You hear?”
“I hear.”
“I also hear!” Sadie-Grace added cheerfully. “No wandering for me.”
Ellen snorted and disappeared into the hallway. I heard the front door open, heard a muted, murmured conversation of some kind.
My eyes wandered. Ellen had told me to stay put. She hadn’t said I couldn’t look. The kitchen was small, small enough that I could have reached out and touched the refrigerator from where I sat. There were pictures—dozens of them, if not hundreds—stuck to the side. The latest additions were hung up with magnets: photographs of Makayla and a dozen other kids within five years of her age. Some of them were school pictures, but more had been printed out on plain white paper.
The side and front of the fridge was papered with them, and when I lifted my hand to flip one of the pictures up, I realized there were more underneath.
Years’ worth.
The ones on the bottom were faded and taped to the fridge. I looked through them, half expecting to see my grandmother, before I realized that none of these photographs were that old. The oldest one I could spot featured Ellen, looking more like Lillian than she did now, like life hadn’t yet carved their fortunes into the wear and tear on the skin. The picture in question was a family photo—Ellen and six kids.
The youngest couldn’t have been more than four or five, and the oldest, the teenager was . . .
What the hell . . . I leaned closer, nearly falling out of my chair. The picture hadn’t aged well. I couldn’t make out the details of the faces as precisely as I would have liked, but Ellen’s oldest child bore a striking resemblance to her mother, to my grandmother . . .
And to Aunt Olivia. She looks a lot like Aunt Olivia.
“Anyone ever tell you to keep your hands to yourself?” Ellen reappeared in the hallway outside the kitchen. “I told you not to wander.”
“I didn’t,” I said, letting my hand drop to the side and the years of photographs fall back into place, obscuring the one I’d been looking at.
“I have some business to tend to,” Ellen said, giving me a hard look that said my snooping had not gone unnoticed. “I’ll give you girls one more glass of lemonade, and then I need you gone.”
She walked over to the kitchen counter. Her back was to us as she added ice to the pitcher. My mind went briefly to the business she’d referred to—and the person she’d talked to at the door—but I forced myself to focus on the reason I’d come here.
All I needed was a name.
“One more glass of lemonade,” I countered as she poured. “And the name of the family that adopted Ana’s baby.”
Ellen sat down and took a long gulp of her own drink. “Girl.”
At first, I thought she was addressing me—or possibly Sadie-Grace—but her next words made her meaning clear.
“The baby was a girl,” Ellen said. “Arrived at daybreak. If I’d been naming her, I would have called her Dawn.”
Get to the point, I thought. But somehow, in my head, the words came out muddy. Slow. I felt suddenly like I was seeing double. I tried to say Sadie-Grace’s name. I might have succeeded, but I wasn’t sure.
I was sure that, across the table, Sadie-Grace was now slumped over.
I tried to stand, grabbing at the table in an attempt to find purchase. But all I ended up doing was knocking over the lemonade.
The lemonade.
I could see Ellen in the kitchen, her back to us. I could hear her putting what I’d thought was ice into the drinks.
“What . . .” I couldn’t keep standing. I was going to fall. Things were already fuzzy around the edges, and those fuzzy edges were going black. “Why would you . . .”
“Because,” another voice said from the hallway, “I asked her to.” Heels clicked against the linoleum as their owner strode toward me.
I went down. Ellen caught me under the armpits. I couldn’t even feel her grasp as she lowered me to the floor.
I could barely see the person standing over me. I blinked, forcing things to come briefly into focus.
“You brought this on yourself, young lady,” Aunt Olivia told me. Then she turned to Ellen. “Thank you for your assistance, Mama.”