I called Quinn after I finished getting Hope dressed and brought her Barbie dollhouse downstairs to the parlor so she could play in front of the fire Eli had made in the fireplace. He’d gone off to the kitchen to get another cup of coffee and reconnoiter with his client, so it was just the two of us in the room. Hope lay on the Oriental rug and crooned happily to her doll, lost in the innocent imaginary world of a little girl.
I reached Quinn on his way outside with Antonio to start plowing. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did something happen?”
“I decided to get your family’s photo album from Angelica’s trunk after breakfast this morning on the off chance Gino was right that she’d left some clue behind about Zara’s child.”
There was a moment of silence while he digested that, and then he said, “Don’t tell me you found something?”
“Not in the album. I haven’t looked at it yet.” I told him about the secret compartment and the letters. “Did you know about the hiding place?”
“Nope.”
“Do you think your mother knew about it?”
He sucked in his breath. “No idea. If she did, maybe the letters belonged to her. Did you see who they were addressed to?”
“I couldn’t get them out without tearing what was underneath. So, no, I didn’t. Not yet.”
“My old man wrote letters to my mom and me after he left us. I wouldn’t read them. If that’s what’s there, I want you to take them out and burn them.”
“Quinn—”
“I mean it.”
The tension hung in the air between us, as thick as smoke.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
“And don’t read them, either.”
“I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.”
“Yeah, well, if it’s something else, call me, okay? Otherwise, I don’t want to know.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, “if it’s something else.”
He disconnected and I sat there staring at the phone. Eli hollered down from the second floor. “Hey, I just talked to Persia. She said to bring Hope over and she’ll give her lunch at her place and we can get a start on shoveling. Can you put her snowsuit on her? It’s on a hook in the mudroom.”
“Sure, no problem,” I hollered back. I went over and scooped up my niece. “Let’s go visit Persia, sweet pea.”
The letters in that compartment had been there for decades, maybe even a century if they had belonged to Angelica. A few more hours wouldn’t matter. But the moment we were shoveled out, I was heading straight back to the basement to retrieve them and whatever else was hidden there.
* * *
ELI AND I SPENT the next two hours clearing the driveway and called it quits around twelve-thirty, when most of the shoveling was done and my brother announced that if he didn’t eat, he would keel over from hunger.
“You want lunch, too, don’t you? Aren’t you starved?” he asked as we hung our wet jackets, hats, and gloves in the mudroom outside the kitchen.
“I’m okay for now. You go ahead.” I sat down on a ladder-back chair and pulled off my boots. “I need to get something in the basement.”
“Again?”
“I forgot it this morning.”
He shrugged. “Want me to wait for you to eat?”
“That’s okay, I know you’re hungry. This might take a while.”
He gave me a curious look. “Are you all right? You seem kind of preoccupied.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’ll make you a sandwich and leave it on the counter, then head over to the studio.” He pinched my arm. “You’re wasting away, you know that? No flesh on those bones.”
I waited until he was in the kitchen and I heard the clatter of dishes and drawers being opened and shut before I went back downstairs. This time, the spring wouldn’t give when I pressed the panel. I kept on pushing, trying to duplicate what I had done before, until finally it groaned and the panel popped up. I retrieved the packet of letters, but whatever was stuck underneath them was jammed at the back of the compartment. My index finger caught on something sharp and I yanked my hand out. A wood splinter had torn the top layer of skin off like a peeled piece of fruit. I sucked on my finger to stop the bleeding and reached in with my other hand, taking care to avoid that lethal shard of wood.
After a few minutes of wiggling it like a loose tooth that needed to come out, I pulled out a cardboard envelope. Nothing was written on it and the flap was secured by a string wound around two cardboard disks.
“Hey!” Eli’s voice startled me from the top of the stairs. “Luce, are you all right? You’ve been down there so long, I was getting worried you had fallen or passed out.”
“I’m fine. Just finishing up.”
“What are you doing?” He shielded his eyes with a hand and stared down the staircase. “How can you see anything in that dim light? Want some help?”
“Just wrapping up. I can see fine when you’re not standing in the doorway blocking the light, and I would see even better if I had the flashlight that’s supposed to be in the pantry. And thank you anyway, but I don’t need help.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll return it. I promise. Your sandwich is sitting on the counter. I wasn’t sure what you’d like, so I made you the same thing I had. A slice of leftover meat loaf with provolone cheese on a sourdough roll. I thought ranch dressing would be overkill for yours, but I did put ketchup on it.”
“Uh … thank you. That sounds hearty.”
“It’ll stick to your ribs. I’m going over to the studio and I’ll check in on Persia and Hope. See if they want to stay at her place or come back here.”
“Great,” I said. “I’m going to take care of some paperwork and then I’ll probably head over to the villa once Sycamore Lane is all plowed out.”
“It is. I heard a truck drive by while I was eating. Twice,” he said. “You coming up now? I can wait.”
“I need to tidy up first. You go on.”
After a moment, he said, “What’d you find down there, a dead body? You obviously can’t wait to get rid of me.”
“That’s exactly what I found,” I said. “See you later.”
* * *
I CARRIED EVERYTHING UPSTAIRS and sat at the kitchen table with Eli’s monster sandwich, untying the frayed blue satin ribbon that held the letters together. There were at least a dozen, almost all in business-size envelopes addressed to Zara Tomassi at Bel Paradiso, Calistoga, California. The last three were addressed to Zara Ingrasso at 309 East Capitol Street, Northeast, Washington, D.C. Some had no return address and the others had simply 341 Senate in the upper left-hand corner. Gino had said Zara’s father was a congressman, not a senator.
I slipped the top one out of the envelope and started reading. By the time I finished, I could feel the heat in my cheeks after reading an explicit letter to Zara written by her lover. It was addressed to “My dearest darling” and was signed “Your ever-loving Warren.”
I thought about the photo Mick had shown me yesterday of Warren Harding—Senator Warren Harding, before he became president—with his arm wrapped around a young woman who sat on his lap and looked like she was already half in the bag. Were these letters from the same man? It took less than a minute of checking on my phone to find a match for the return address.
Warren Harding—the Warren Harding—had had an affair with Zara Ingrasso Tomassi.
Half an hour later, I had looked through the entire bundle of letters and knew more than I wished I did about what appeared to be a passionate, long-standing affair between Harding and Zara that had begun before she married Johnny Tomassi, when she was still living in Washington, and continued after her marriage.
Had Angelica kept these as blackmail, or was it more for insurance? Maybe she wanted to make sure Johnny didn’t stray from her side again, or maybe she wanted to remind him just how unfaithful Zara had been. She must have found the letters when she had gone through Zara’s things before she burned them on the funeral pyre Gino had stumbled over in the woods near the Bel Paradiso chapel. Back then, an affair between a married woman—especially a married Catholic woman—and the president of the United States would have been a much bigger scandal than it would be today. The kind of scandal that could ruin reputations or even cause a governmental crisis.
There were four more envelopes, which I hadn’t looked at; they were smaller, the size of a social note, and the handwriting was different. All were addressed to Zara at Bel Paradiso, with no return address and a Washington, D.C., postmark. I pulled out the first one and started to read. It appeared to be from a girlfriend of Zara’s or maybe her sister, catching her up on all the latest news in Washington, a chatty, gossipy note. It was signed “Your Adoring Izzy.” I slipped it back into the envelope and wondered why Angelica had kept these letters in addition to the others.
I put them aside and picked up the cardboard envelope. Inside were two professionally taken photographs of a stunning young girl who looked about sixteen or seventeen. A watermark on the back of the pictures had the name of a photography studio and a D.C. address.
This had to be Zara Ingrasso Tomassi. As Gino had said, she was gorgeous. Then there was this bombshell realization: I had seen her before.
Yesterday in the photo of Warren Harding surrounded by a group of beautiful young women, including my namesake Lucy Montgomery. Unless I was mistaken—and I didn’t think so—Zara Tomassi was the drop-dead gorgeous vixen who had been sitting on Warren Harding’s lap at the Studebakers’ party.