Hidden Pictures(73)
“Ask my dad, Mallory! It’s true!”
And then over on the pool deck, I can hear my telephone ringing. I have the volume turned all the way up, so I won’t miss Adrian’s call. “Be right back,” I tell Teddy. I flip off the raft and swim to the side of the pool, but I’m not fast enough. By the time I reach my phone, the call has already gone to voice mail.
I see that Adrian has texted me a photograph. It’s an elderly black woman, wearing a thin red cardigan and sitting in a wheelchair. Her eyes have a vacant stare but her hair is neat and trim. She looks well kept and well cared for.
Then a second photo arrives—the same woman posing next to a black man in his fifties. He has his arm around the woman and he’s directing her attention toward the camera, encouraging her to look at the lens.
Adrian calls again.
“Did you get my pictures?”
“Who are these people?”
“That’s Dolores Jean Campbell and her son, Curtis. Annie Barrett’s daughter and grandson. I just spent two hours with them. Curtis comes every Sunday to visit his mom. And we got everything wrong.”
This seems impossible.
“Annie Barrett was black?”
“No, but she’s definitely not Hungarian. She was born in England.”
“She’s British?”
“I’ve got her grandson standing right next to me. I’m going to put Curtis on the line, let him tell you firsthand, okay?”
Teddy stares at me from the swimming pool, bored, anxious for me to come back and play. I mouth the words “five minutes” and he climbs aboard the raft and starts kicking with his tiny feet, propelling himself around the water.
“Hey, Mallory, it’s Curtis. Are you really living in Granny Annie’s cottage?”
“I—I think so?”
“Spring Brook, New Jersey. In back of Hayden’s Glen, right? Your friend Adrian showed me some pictures. But you don’t have to worry, my granny’s not haunting you.”
I’m so confused. “How do you know?”
“Here’s what happened. She moved from England to Spring Brook after World War II, okay? To live with her cousin George. They were on the east side of Hayden’s Glen, which back then was very white and well-to-do. Now my Pop-Pop Willie, he lived on the west side of Hayden’s Glen. In a neighborhood called Corrigan. The colored section. He pumped gas at a Texaco, and after work he would walk down to the creek to catch his supper. Pop-Pop loved to fish. He ate trout and perch every day if they were biting. One day he sees this pretty white girl walking barefoot. Carrying a sketch pad. She calls out hello and Pop-Pop said he was too afraid to look at her. Because again, this is 1948, remember? If you’re a black man and a white woman smiles at you? You look the other way. But Granny Annie comes from Cresscombe, in the UK. A seaside town full of Caribbean migrants. She’s not afraid of black people. She says hello to Pop-Pop every afternoon. Over the next year they get friendly, and soon they’re more than friendly. Soon Pop-Pop is creeping through the forest in the middle of the night, so he can visit Granny in your cottage. Do you follow what I’m saying?”
“I think so.” I glance over to the pool to check on Teddy. He’s still drifting in circles on the life raft, and I feel guilty for ignoring him on my last day, but I need to hear the rest. “What happened?”
“Well, so one day Annie goes to cousin George and says she’s pregnant. Only she wouldn’t have used that word back then. She probably said she was ‘with child.’ She tells George that Willie is the father, that she’s going to elope with him. They’re going to move west to Ohio and live on Willie’s family farm, where no one is likely to bother them. And Annie’s so stubborn, George knows he can’t possibly stop her.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, George is furious, obviously. He tells her the child will be an abomination. He says their marriage won’t count in the eyes of God. He says Annie will be dead to him, and the family will refuse to acknowledge her existence. And she says that’s fine, she never really cared for them anyway. Then she packs her things and disappears. Which puts George in a very embarrassing situation. He’s a pillar of the community. He’s a deacon of the church. He can’t tell people that his cousin has run off with a colored man. He’d rather die than have the truth get out. So he makes up a story. He goes to a butcher shop and buys two buckets of pig’s blood. There was no forensic science back then, blood was blood. He sloshes it all over the cabin, knocks over the furniture, makes it look like someone ransacked the place. Then he called the police. The town had a manhunt and they dragged nets through the creek but they never found a body because there never was a body. Granny called it the Great Escape. She spent the next sixty years on a farm near Akron. She had my mother, Dolores, in 1949, and my uncle, Tyler, in 1950. By the time she died, she had four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. She lived to eighty-one.”
Curtis tells the story with confidence and conviction, but I still can’t believe it. “And no one ever learned the truth? People in Spring Brook still think she was murdered. She’s the local boogeyman. Little kids say she’s haunting the forest.”
“My guess is that Spring Brook hasn’t changed much since the 1940s. Back then it was well-to-do, now I bet you just call it ‘affluent.’ Different words for the same thing. But if you drive over to Corrigan you’ll find plenty of people who know the truth.”