I FELT INVIGORATED AFTER AN hour of leaf wrangling out in the crisp fall air. After Jack left I went into the workroom, woke up my computer, and jotted down some strategies for a search. As my hands hovered over the keys I heard Coco’s voice in the front hall. She chatted with Esme and Denny for a couple of minutes, then came into the workroom in her usual whirlwind fashion, clutching a sheaf of printouts.
“Hey, Sophreena,” she said, “I hit a pretty productive vein with Olivia’s maternal grandparents through their missionary society. Thought I’d get these to you early in case you want to get some of the original stuff from them. Three generations of missionaries, her grandparents the last. Lots of info on her grandfather, though not so much on her grandmother,” Coco sniffed. “Even though from what I can tell she did just as much of the work as he did.”
“Different times, Coco,” I said, reaching for the printouts.
“I suppose,” Coco said. “Anyhow, I spoke with a very kind gentleman at the mission society and he’d be happy to get you some better scans of these two photos, for a small fee, of course. Those are just photocopies, one of her grandfather and one of her great-grandfather. Between you and me, I wouldn’t hang either one of those up in the kitchen. They might curdle the milk.”
“They do look a little stern, don’t they?”
“You’re too kind, Sophreena. They look like prophets of doom. The Easter Island statues have more vibrancy than these two.”
She put both hands on the worktable, stiffened her arms, and flexed her back, letting out a little groan.
“Long day?” I asked.
Coco stood and worked her neck back and forth a few times. I half expected her to drop to the floor and assume a yoga position. She’s been known to do that during our club meetings.
“Not so much long, just frustrating. Marydale asked me to give Madison Branch some pottery lessons. You know Marydale’s doing her mother-hen thing with Madison, right?”
“I know she’s concerned about her and wants to help.”
“Yes, well, and I worked with her all afternoon. I think she could probably do pretty good clay work if she could get herself together to concentrate. The girl’s a mess.”
“She’s not exactly a girl, Coco,” I said. “She’s almost my age.”
“Oh, trust me, she’s a girl,” Coco insisted. “A very impulsive, very unstable girl. But Marydale loves her dearly, so I know there’s got to be something to her. I’ll try to get to know her and mentor her if I can.”
“You’re a good egg, Coco,” I said.
“I’m a fried egg,” she said. “I’m going home to sink into a hot bath.”
“Thanks for this,” I said, motioning to the printouts. “Great work.”
“I was taught by the best,” she said as she picked up her bag and made for the door.
I searched through databases on the Internet for a while, trying to catch Olivia’s father’s trail, but Johnny Hargett had left few footprints after he slipped out of Crawford, North Carolina, leaving behind his very pregnant young wife.
All I’d managed to find was an arrest record for John L. Hargett on a drunk-and-disorderly charge in a town about thirty miles south of Crawford. The name Hargett was not uncommon, but the middle initial narrowed things down. If this was our Johnny he’d spent three days in the county jail, was released, and walked out into the sunlight and right off the end of the earth. Or so it would seem. I made a note to follow up. Maybe I could unearth the actual arrest record.
I spent another fruitless fifteen minutes searching, but none of my sources coughed up any information. I decided to go back to mining Olivia’s family artifacts.
Celestine Hargett’s collection of diaries was enough to make my genealogist’s heart go pitter-pat. She wasn’t a particularly inspired writer, but she’d taken her teacher’s instruction in the Palmer Method earnestly and her handwriting was consistent, easy to read, and tidy. And she was dedicated. She wrote in her journal daily, almost without fail. And even in those rare instances when she skipped a day or two she’d do a roundup summary of what had transpired in the gap when she made her next entry. She was open and confessional in the diary—up to a point. She was circumspect enough that she must not have entirely trusted her hiding place.
I located the diaries that covered the period between Johnny and Renny’s marriage and the time he disappeared and brought them to the worktable. Then I went to the closet and grabbed a stack of the dot-matrix printer paper I hoard for constructing timelines. I stretched it out along the length of the worktable, reinforced the perforations with tape, and drew three lines down the length of the paper: one for Olivia’s paternal family, one for her maternal family, and one for historical events to set the family into the context of their times. I ticked in all the birth, marriage, and death dates that we knew and a few major historical markers, then opened the first diary and began to read.
October 25, 1941
I am bone weary, but proud. I put up fifteen pints of applesauce and eight of apple butter today. They looked so pretty I couldn’t help but stand there in the cellar and admire the way the light from the window hit the sides of the jars. Riley helped me gather the apples from the orchard yesterday and Renny helped with the peeling, though the child is really more hindrance than help. She peels one for every four or five of mine and takes off half the apple with her knife. Though that’s better than taking off a finger, which I can see she could do real easy. I saved all her peels to boil up to make jelly if I can get the sugar. Else I’ll strain it out for juice. No sense wasting.
But still and all, I do love having her here. She is good company and sweet as they come. She wants to learn how to do things and is trying her best to please Johnny, which is turning out to be no easy thing. As I feared, he is sulky and short with her when she doesn’t do things the way he wants them done. The two of them put me in mind of younguns dressing up in the big people’s clothes and playing house, neither of them with the first idea about cooking or cleaning or washing clothes nor nothing. Sometimes it is comical to watch, but other times it makes me sick to heart.
I read through several more entries, learning more about how many pints and quarts of things Celestine put by than I really wanted to know. She sprinkled in a little gossip and a few references to what was going on in Crawford. I scanned until another passage caught my eye:
November 24, 1941
Well, you’ll never guess, but we are to be movie stars. There is a man in town who is making a picture show about all us folks who live in Crawford and he says he will show it in the movie house when it is done and we can come see ourselves. I wish we’d got more notice so I could’ve made a new dress, but I’ll have to make do with one I’ve got because he’ll just be taking the movies for the next two days. Everybody’s all excited about it and that’s a right good thing since we’ve mostly just been scared and nerved up about the war here lately and not had too much cause to be lighthearted. Riley says we’ll go into town both days and maybe we’ll even get on there twice. He’s going to wear his good suit and his nice Panama hat one day and his regular old work clothes on the other. I told him I will wear good dresses both days; I’ve got no wish to be up there on that big screen in an old housedress and apron. Renny is going to wear the dress she wore when her and Johnny married. It is store bought and is a little batiste dress with a fluttery skirt and lots of ruffles on the bodice and it fits her little figure to a T. And I know Johnny will go dressed to the nines. He’s got a bit of the dandy in him.
So maybe Olivia would get to see people she knew in the Crawford movie. And maybe one person she never had a chance to know.
As promised, Tony had burned us each a copy of the movie, but with all that had happened we hadn’t had a chance to watch it yet. I decided that should be the first thing on the agenda tomorrow. Maybe a movie would be the thing to distract Beth for a little while—if anything could.