I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(67)
That evening, she treated me to the best table at the best restaurant in town. We sat on the bayside deck, feasted, and watched the sunset outdo itself, no doubt turning on the magnificence for my mom, who clapped and called out “Bravo!” just as it hit its rose-gold, magenta, and blue-opal peak.
We talked and talked. She already knew about the Mystery of Blue Sky House, of course, but I told her again anyway, filling in all the details and updating her on the recent Richmond developments.
When I was finished, and we were forking up strawberry pie, my mother smiled and said, “You and Dev always did love to puzzle things out together.”
“He’ll tell you that he solved all the hardest parts, but really it was me,” I said.
“I suspect you solved them together. Two heads are better than one, especially when they’re your and Dev’s heads.” She paused then said, gravely, “I’m glad you two are back on track. We’re all glad.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Just as long as you—all of you—are clear as to exactly which track we’re talking about.”
“You’re friends, I know.” My mother blinked, innocent as a baby. “But why do we need to rubber-stamp your and Dev’s relationship—or any—as one definite, limited thing?”
“I don’t know about any,” I said. “But this one is rubber stampable. Trust me.”
“I trust you. Now, if only you could learn to trust yourself.”
“Meaning?”
“You’re such a good girl, and I love that about you. But what if you put aside what’s appropriate or expected or even noble—and you know how I like nobility—forget rules and rubber stamps and boundaries and just follow your instincts?”
“Are you going to start in about how brain scientists are taking intuition seriously these days? Because I’ve heard that one.”
“From someone very smart, I expect,” she said. “Who has lovely gray eyes and your best interests at heart.”
“They’re blue-gray, actually,” I said.
“Ah,” said my mother, infusing that single syllable with so much complicated meaning that the only thing to do was ignore it. “Anyway, rubber stamp notwithstanding, I’m glad you two are having fun.”
“Had fun,” I said, wistfully. “I guess I’m suffering a little postadventure depression right now. I wish it weren’t over. It somehow doesn’t feel over. But it is.”
“Maybe it’s not. The world is big and life is long. You never know,” said my mother, giving a shrug that managed to be chic and wise and jaded and careless all at once. It was the kind of shrug for which words like insouciant and urbane were created.
And even though I did know, my mother’s shrug was so persuasive that I allowed myself to have a tiny bit of hope.
Later, back at Blue Sky House, we sat on the living room rug with glasses of wine, and I opened the boxes of Edith’s and Joseph’s photographs, including a few I’d never actually gone through.
“These are marvelous. I love the exuberance of his, the way she seems like a wild bird or a goddess. Clearly, he worshipped her. But I think I like hers of him even more; they’re so personal and intimate that I almost feel guilty looking at them. Who knew a photo of the back of someone’s head or the inside of his wrist could be so passionate?” said my mother.
“I know,” I said, reaching for a stack of photos from one of the previously unexamined boxes. I shuffled through them and then laid them out, one by one, in front of me on the rug.
“Hey!” I said. “These aren’t Joseph.”
“Are you sure?” said my mother.
“This man is dark haired, too, but much slimmer, narrower in the shoulders. Joseph was a big, muscular guy. And the—I don’t know—tenor of them is different from the Joseph pictures.”
My mother slid over to look, but after a glance, she scooted back to her own patch of rug and the Joseph photos she had arrayed before her. “I see what you mean. Those are clever, arch. I prefer these.”
This new batch contained fragments of a man, as did the photos of Joseph, but even though they were just as close-in, they were somehow much more distant. Cooler in mood, more full of angles and straight lines, more full of things rather than focusing on the curved, pliant, warm-blooded terrain of skin and sinew. A man’s hand holding a glass, his nails smooth, his shirt cuff almost blindingly white, an odd signet ring—flat, dark, square stone, heavily carved sides—glinting on his left pinkie. Fingers holding a wool fedora by the brim. A polished wingtip with a slice of sock-covered ankle. Tip of chin, glimpse of neck, knot of tie. Knuckles of a hand that gripped the oval handle of a leather bag, a hint of a name—unreadable—stamped in what looked like gold beneath the handle. Blurred man in a suit standing at the back window, elegant shoulders, dark hair. Dark, I noted, so not John. I remembered reading in the newspaper articles about the trial that John Blanchard was blond.
When I turned the photos over, I saw that each had a faint G.G. penciled in the right-hand corner with a date underneath. I was right about the photos not being of Joseph; all of them were taken during the winter and spring of 1956 when Joseph had been dead for over three years. I took out the daylight ledger and examined the entries spanning that time period but found no one with the initials G.G. Then, I went further back and there it was, many months earlier: George Graham. Nothing more. It was the only entry in the entire ledger with no address. If George Graham had come back during the winter and spring of 1956, he hadn’t come as a paying guest.