I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(35)
Startled, I said, “Am I wrapped up in a man?”
Louise laughed. “Well, we’ll save that question for another time. But I meant are you her great-granddaughter?”
“No. Honestly, I hardly knew her. I was stunned when I heard she’d left me this house. We met briefly just a few weeks before she died.”
“Must’ve been some meeting.”
Louise leaned toward me, her eyes alight with questions. But even though I’d told my and Edith’s story to Joliet, I found I didn’t want to do the same with Louise. She was gregarious and friendly enough but somehow not the kind of person you wanted treading with you on anything like sacred ground. Even having her in Edith’s house felt a little uncomfortable. So all I said was, “Yes, it was.”
When it became obvious I wasn’t going to elaborate, Louise, without taking a deep breath or clearing her throat or any other ordinary preamble to a lengthy monologue, took off full speed ahead.
“But if the folks here thought her opening a guesthouse was scandalous, I can only imagine how they reacted when the real scandal hit. Since the whole affair only came to light after we’d moved, I never got all the details. My mother surely got filled in by some of her friends back home, but she never shared the information with me, probably thought the story wasn’t fit for children’s ears, and then my mother, poor woman, died when I was only fourteen—car accident—so I never did get grown up enough to hear much. My father remarried after about a year or so. A very nice woman. I called her Marjorie but she became a true mother to me. Not that I didn’t miss my mother, of course. Did and do. But anyway, for me, the story of the scandal kind of died with Mom, and by the time I moved back here, this town was so built up and different that most of the old-timers were long gone. I know it involved covering up a murder, though, and the downfall of an officer of the law. I think I do sort of remember the man in question. Tall man. Well respected. At least until the scandal. I’m not sure how Edith was involved, but it had to be something, well, disgraceful, didn’t it? For her to just up and leave the way she did. I get the idea that people thought she’d come back when it all blew over, but she never did. I don’t know that anyone heard from her ever again. And, now, look at this: here you are, not even a blood relative, living in her house.”
“A murder?” I said. “Whose murder?”
“I don’t know. After I moved back here and saw this house and got my memory a little jogged, I asked around a bit, but either no one had heard or they weren’t telling. As I said, looks like there’s no one much left around here who lived through that time period. It was all such a long time ago, and I heard a lot of the families my family knew sold their houses for big money back at the start of Antioch becoming a major resort town instead of just a nice, quiet beach town. You know, you could do that.”
“Sell, you mean?”
“This place has been kept up beautiful, and it’s a desirable location. Not right on the beach, but I’m sure you could get a nice amount for this place.”
Until Louise Smits told me this, I hadn’t realized just how very much I wanted to keep the house. I shook my head.
“I won’t sell it. I don’t even know how long I’m staying. I’d been thinking a week, but even if it turns out to be longer, I have to go to school in September. I can’t imagine selling this house, though. I think Edith would have wanted me to keep it.”
Louise looked skeptical, but she said, “Well, that’s good then. There’s something sad about an empty house.” She smiled at me. “Maybe you’re this house’s fresh start, Clare. And I don’t know if you’re in need of a fresh start, but maybe this house is it. Isn’t that a nice thought?”
“Yes,” I told Louise Smits. “It really is.”
*
The Antioch Beach library was like something out of a good dream, if you’re the kind of person who dreams about libraries, which I am: pale gray stone with a peaked roofline; a Gothic arch wooden door with spear-shaped, wrought-iron hinges, dull red and very churchy; a cool, high-ceilinged interior full of long windows, the smell of books, row upon row of shelves, and lots of rustling. The rustling—part page turning, part whispering, part shushing, part quietly shuffling feet, part just the books and people breathing—is so much my favorite part of any library that it’s possible I imagine more rustling than is actually there. In any case, to my ears, this library was like a dovecote, like a forest in autumn, like a roomful of dancers in tutus.
The woman working in the tiny periodicals room had two sets of glasses, one on her nose, one on top of her head, both on beaded chains around her neck and the no-nonsense expression all librarians worth their salt maintain up until the moment you ask for help finding something, at which point they turn beatific and actually seem to emit light. The name on her desk’s nameplate read simply Pat, which struck me as perfect.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I was wondering if you might have issues of the Daily Bee from December of 1956 through maybe March of 1957?”
Her severe expression softened right on cue, but she raised her eyebrows and said, “The Daily Bee is a daily. That’s one hundred twenty-one newspapers.”
“Really?”
Pat raised her eyebrows again. “You’re welcome to do the math yourself.”