The Keeper of Happy Endings(96)

“How very tidy.”

“That was my father, determined to get what he wanted at any cost. And Dorothy Sheridan was only too happy to help—for a fee, of course. I did some checking when I found the ledger. It appears the police got wind of Miss Sheridan’s enterprise in 1972. That’s why the entries in the ledger stop. She disappeared, and my father was finally off the hook.”

Rory felt cold all over. “It’s inconceivable. Soline has spent forty years grieving a daughter she believed dead and buried, and she’s been out there the whole time. How could a woman do something so despicable to another woman?”

Thia studied her through narrowed eyes. “You seem awfully protective of her. Driving all this way. Asking all these questions.”

“Yesterday a friend of mine, a reporter who was helping me dig up a photo of your dead brother, unearthed one taken two years ago. I think questions are in order.”

“Why did you want a picture of Anson?”

Once again, Rory felt she was being accused of something, and it irked her. “I wanted to frame it and give it to Soline as a gift. Because she’s my friend. She was your friend, too, once.”

“Yes. She was.”

Thia’s voice was softer now. Rory felt herself soften too. “She told me about your sketches and the dresses she made for you, how you wanted to live in a garret and paint. It broke her heart that she never got to say goodbye, but your father wouldn’t let her.”

Thia pulled her arms around herself protectively. “He sent me to some horrible all-girls’ school. When I came home, she was gone. I thought she’d abandoned us—abandoned me. By the time Anson came home, I’d grown to hate her. Not only for leaving me but for leaving him too. My brother and I were close once, but when he came home he was so cold and withdrawn. I thought if I hated her, too, it would make us close again, but it only made him angrier.”

“He used you,” Rory said softly. “Your father, I mean. He made you hate Soline, and then he used that hate to fuel your brother’s pain.”

Thia’s eyes flicked to hers. “I told you he was a monster.”

“I’m sorry. I realize this is hard for you too. I just wanted a picture. I never meant for it to turn into all this.”

Thia blew out a long breath. “I think it’s time for you to see the family photos.” She rose and went to the closet, returning a few moments later with a pair of leather-bound albums. “My mother was a fanatic about family photographs. She kept an album for each of us. This is Anson’s.”

Rory laid the album open in her lap, the yellowed pages crackling as she flipped through the usual milestones. First Christmas. First steps. First haircut. Eventually, the chubby toddler became a schoolboy. Anson at eight or nine, in a baseball uniform, freckles, and a gap-toothed grin. There was another of him in a football uniform, down on one knee, squinting against the sun. A few pages later, he stood grinning in a dark suit and crisp white shirt, a white carnation on his lapel. Prom night. And finally, on the next-to-the-last page, dressed in uniform khakis, his fair hair cropped close and combed back from his forehead: a boy no longer.

It was strange to see him grow up that way, a page at a time. In her mind, he’d been little more than a ghost, and now, here he was in black and white—and somewhere in the world, very much alive. She stared at the young man in the photo again, square-jawed and movie-star handsome.

“No wonder Soline fell head over heels. Your brother was gorgeous. And I can see the family resemblance. You have the same nose and cheekbones.”

“We both look like our father. The same hair and eyes.” She paused, folding her hands carefully in her lap. “Who do you take after?”

Rory blinked at her. “Me?”

“Would you say you look like your mother?”

It seemed a strange question, though she supposed Thia was entitled to a few questions of her own. “I have my mother’s coloring, and we have the same nose, broad and straight, but she’s not nearly as tall as I am. I think I must have gotten that from my father’s side.”

Thia opened the second album and slid it into Rory’s lap. “I think you should have a look at this.”

Rory found herself staring at a little girl of five or six in footie pajamas. She had a pair of perfectly matched dimples and a head full of pale ringlets. “Look at those curls. How adorable.”

Thia’s face remained carefully blank. “Look at the next photo and tell me what you see.”

Rory squinted at the photograph, taken several years later. A ruffled party dress and lace-trimmed socks, the curls tamer now, pulled up into a messy bun pinned with tiny white flowers, like a princess or a fairy. And strangely familiar. “This is you?”

“Yes.”

“My mother has almost the same picture of me. She dressed me up to play the piano for her friends, but I froze. I can’t get over how alike they are.”

“Who is your mother? Was she originally from Boston?”

Rory was still staring at the photo. She looked up. “I’m sorry . . . what?”

“Your mother. What’s her name?”

“Camilla Grant.”

“And her maiden name?”

“Lowell. Why?”

Thia slid a folded sheet of paper from beneath the remaining albums and handed it to Rory. “It’s time you see this.”