Hanna woke up the next morning to the sound of Emily’s raised voice, “No, she can’t come down. And why would you possibly think she’d want to see you again after what you did to her yesterday?”
Joel? Was he here to see her? But by the time Hanna threw on her robe, Emily was already shutting the door.
“Emily, wait!” Hanna called, rushing down to stop her. Sure enough, Joel was standing there outside. “Joel, I’m so glad you got the video I emailed to you!”
“You sent me a video?”
Emily looked just as surprised, and more than a little upset, as well. Hanna put her hand on her sister’s arm. “Thank you for protecting me, but I need to speak with Joel. Alone.”
Emily looked at her for a long moment before finally nodding. Still, she said, “Just holler if you need one of us to throw him out for you.”
“No. I won’t want that.” Finally, Emily headed back into the kitchen, leaving Hanna and Joel standing together on the doorstep.
“You really didn’t get the video?” Hanna asked.
Joel shook his head. And now that she looked at him more carefully, she realized he didn’t really look like someone who had come back to declare their undying love. In fact, he still looked fairly upset, almost the way he had back in Seattle.
Just the thought of their conversation on the B&B porch was enough to bring a fresh pang of pain to Hanna, but she forced herself to hide it away as she asked, “Then why are you here?”
“We started this documentary of yours together and I think we need to finish it together.”
It wasn’t a declaration of love—not anywhere close to it, actually—but the fact that he was here standing on her doorstep wanting to continue working with her to unravel the mystery of what really happened to his great aunt felt important.
“Actually, that’s part of what I needed to tell you in the video I emailed to you. Come inside, Joel. Please.”
For a moment, she thought Joel might not do it, but when he walked in then said, “I believe this will mark the first time a Peterson has been inside a Walker home for more than six decades,” she wanted to leap for joy.
Everything couldn’t be completely lost if he was teasing her with their special joke, could it?
“I found out more about Poppy,” Hanna said once she’d closed the front door behind them. “My grandmother told me what happened.”
Joel stared at her, barely blinking. “Tell me.”
“Grams says that Poppy told her straight to her face that she never loved William II. What she wanted more than anything was to be a poet, but she feared she’d never get the chance if she remained here following her family’s plans for her life. Grams also said that Poppy always intended to come back home after she’d made a name for herself as a poet.” A muscle jumped in Joel’s jaw as if he couldn’t let himself believe that part, and Hanna wanted so badly to convince him that it was true. Hopefully, they’d learn something soon that would prove it to Joel in a way he wouldn’t be able to deny. “I get the feeling that Grams and Poppy became pretty good friends in the time they knew each other. At least, Poppy kept sending her postcards for two years.”
“Why wouldn’t your grandmother have said anything to let my family know Poppy was okay?”
“She made Poppy a promise, Joel, and swore she wouldn’t break it. When Grams makes a promise, she really keeps it.”
“Then why would she have finally broken it now?”
Hanna refused to look away from his beautiful eyes. “For us.”
And for love.
But she could see that he wasn’t yet ready to talk about their relationship—or how everything beautiful could have gone wrong so fast—so she turned the focus back to his great aunt. “Based on the box of postcards that Grams kept, I now know where Poppy went after Seattle. It was a small town, down near Portland, called Woodburn.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am. Especially since I found out that the town is renowned for its poetry festival.”
“Then what are we waiting for?”
She stared at him in surprise. “You want to go there? Now? With me?”
“Like I said, we began this together, and I think we should end it together, too.”
She hated the way he spoke of endings, but at least she would get one more day with him as they travelled to Oregon. And maybe, she hoped, that would be enough time for him to realize he cared about her as much as she cared about him and that together they could find a way to make things work out between them.
Even if he was a Peterson who lived on the island…and she was a Walker studying at the University in Seattle.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, as they were boarding the ferry, Hanna took out her cell phone and placed a call to the president of Woodburn’s local poetry society, whose name and number she had found on their web site during her online research the previous evening.
“Hello, Ms. Stevens? My name’s Hanna Walker. I understand you’re the president of the poetry society?”
“If this is about getting your poetry into our newsletter, the deadline has already passed.”
“No, that’s not why I’m calling,” Hanna assured her quickly. “I’m actually looking for information on a poet who might have visited your festival a while ago, probably in the early 1950s.”
“The 1950s?” Ms. Stevens was clearly stunned by Hanna’s request. “Why on Earth are you searching for a poet who might have passed through here more than six decades ago?”
Hanna tried to explain about her documentary as simply as she could, though even leaving out most of the finer details of what had happened on Walker Island so long ago, she was speaking for quite a while. Finally, she closed with, “Poppy’s great nephew and I both need to find out what happened to her. I know it’s a long shot, but we at least have to try.”
“My family means a great deal to me, too,” Ms. Stevens said after a long enough pause that Hanna nearly wondered if she’d hung up during her long explanation, “and if someone had disappeared along the way, I’d want to find them, too. I’ll give you my address and you can come on over anytime you’re ready.”
“How about today? In say, three hours?”
“Three hours? Wouldn’t that mean you’re already on your way?”
“We are.”
Hanna knew it probably seemed a little crazy, going all the way to Portland and beyond, just on the off chance of finding another small clue about Poppy’s whereabouts. Yet, they needed to do this. Not just because of the documentary, but because she and Joel both needed to see this through, regardless of where it took them.
Joel had been quiet the whole time she was speaking on the phone and now, as they drove off the ferry and headed through downtown Seattle, past the street with the B&B that held so many memories both for them and his great aunt, Hanna could feel him tensing up beside her. Slowly though, as they left the city behind and headed south on the freeway toward Oregon, he began to relax, even smiling a little as the sun came out once they were on the I-5. They didn’t talk much about anything important during the three hour drive, but knowing that soon enough they might be facing more difficult revelations, Hanna simply appreciated the chance to be with Joel again.
* * *
Ms. Stevens, or Justine as she quickly reintroduced herself, was a pleasant woman in her mid-forties. Her home was so full of books that at first glance it seemed as if the walls were being held up by the stacks of them, and finding a place to sit involved moving aside at least a couple piles of books. So did setting up Hanna’s camera, which Justine said she had no problem with at all.
“So, you’re looking for someone named Poppy Peterson, who might have visited us in the fifties?” When Hanna nodded, the other woman sighed. “You realize that the odds of finding one person who visited a poetry festival wouldn’t be good, even if that festival were just a year or two back? Sixty years…I just keep worrying that you’ll have ended up wasting your time if we can’t find anything.”
But since Hanna had gotten to spend the day with Joel, no matter what they did or didn’t find out about Poppy, it definitely hadn’t been a wasted trip.
“In the B&B in Seattle, she used another name so that no one in the family could trace her to bring her home,” Joel said. “Penny P. was what she called herself.” Reaching into his pocket, he put Poppy’s final poem onto the coffee table between them. “Hopefully, seeing this might help. It’s the poem my great aunt left behind when she disappeared.”
Hanna put the photo of Poppy and Ava beside the note. “This is her, on the right. The other woman is my grandmother.”
Justine looked back and forth between the photograph and the poem several times when suddenly, it was as if a light bulb switched on inside of her. She stood up animatedly, heading over to the stacks of books and searching through them so quickly that Hanna briefly wondered if they were all about to come tumbling down in a literary avalanche.
“I didn’t recognize the name, of course, but as you guessed, Poppy Peterson wasn’t the name she published under. It wasn’t Penny, either. To everyone back in the fifties, she was Pansy Pendleton. She wasn’t one of the big names of the beat generation,” Justine said as she handed them a slim leather bound book, “but she did spend plenty of time down in San Francisco. There are some people, and I’m one of them, who think that she helped to influence Ginsburg.”
“Poppy was famous?” Hanna asked.
“She was definitely starting to get there,” Justine said with a nod. “The other poets of the time knew who she was and admired her. I believe when she came to our festival that she was working her way up from San Francisco, stopping in small towns to meet with other poets along the way. Apparently, she was planning to stay here around a week, for the event, and then keep moving north. But—” Justine’s excited expression fell away. “One day she was out swimming in the ocean, the next she was in her sickbed with pneumonia. A couple of days after that…I’m sorry, I know how hard it must be to hear this.”
“It’s better than not knowing,” Joel said.
“Well,” Justine said gently, “your great aunt passed away, and it was such a tragic loss. Who knows what she might have done if that hadn’t happened?”
She might have gone home, Hanna thought. She couldn’t prove it, but something in her heart told her she was right. Poppy had left the island for a while to pursue her dreams, just the way Hanna had for filmmaking school, but she’d never planned on leaving forever.
Hanna reached into her bag for the envelopes and postcards Grams had given her. She’d already arranged them in date order, but now she began to set them out, getting out her phone and pulling up a map to look at the postmarks.
“What are you doing?” Joel asked.
“Plotting her route,” Hanna explained.
It was fairly easy now that she knew what had happened. The early ones worked their way down the coast, bit by bit, to San Francisco. Some headed east, probably pointing to adventures or trips away from the city. For the last few, though, there was a definite sequence. Sacramento, Redding, Roseburg…always heading north.
“She was coming back, Joel.” Her chest clenched at the sure knowledge that Poppy hadn’t meant to leave her family behind. “She was coming back to Walker Island.”
Joel stared at the map Hanna had made with the postcards for a long while before he finally nodded. “She was,” he agreed. “She was coming home.”
He closed his eyes, rubbing a hand over them in obvious exhaustion. In Seattle, he’d been so convinced that Poppy had just abandoned everyone. Even when Grams had told Hanna that she’d gone off to follow her dream, it had still seemed selfish the way Poppy had left and never looked back.
But she had looked back. She had even tried to come back. At least until simple chance—and bad luck—had robbed her of that last homecoming.
There was only one question left to ask. But Joel beat Hanna to it.
“Where is she buried?”