Page 87 of My Favorite Lost Cause
There’s too much to say and also very little. The important bit is that I have loved you with my entire soul, and you made the fewyears I got brighter than I’d ever dreamed years could be. I knew I loved you that very first night. Do you remember it? You seemed to hate me for some reason—I’m not sure I ever asked why—and I made that joke about your yellow dress to bring you down a peg, while thinking I’d never seen anyone so lovely. You were too young and I knew it, but seeing you fritter all that beauty and intellect away on George Graves killed me. I tried so hard to stay away from you, but I couldn’t quite manage it.
It was in my best interest, because the minutes I’ve had with you have meant more than every other minute I’ve had put together, but if you’re reading this, I’m not sure it was in yours.
Don’t grieve for me, because I intend to find you again. Do you remember those myths you loved? Baucis and Philemon. Hero and Leander. What they had in common was that they found each other in death, and we will too.
All my love, William
I curl up in bed and weep. I weep for Margaret and William, for Sam and Millie, for all the other boys that didn’t come home. I guess I’m crying for me and Charlie, too, because already I can feel the end coming.
Eventually, I rise and go outside with the dogs at my heels, heading for the hill Charlie once mentioned, the high point of the property. I knew he was right, that the graves were probably there, but I didn’t want to look.
I climb, pushing through the underbrush, until I finally reach them. Seven graves, all in a row. The four boys, all of them dead within a year of each other. Helen Ames, who died in 1964 and her husband Richard, who died the next year. And finally Margaret, who died September 12, 1993.
She died on the day I was born.
A chill crawls up my spine…and yet I’ve known there was a connection between us since I first walked into the house. In some ways, it’s not even a surprise.
Was it her they found in that shack by the water? Did she say goodbye to the end of a long, unhappy life in the place where her sweetest moments transpired?
I go into town and buy a couple things I don’t really need at the Stop-n-Shop. The real reason I’m here is to talk to Martha, or anyone else who might know what happened to Margaret in the end.
She greets me with a wide smile and her typical comments about the weather before asking how that cute friend of mine is.
“He’s good.” I blush, then lean into the counter. “Hey, you don’t happen to know anything about the people who built Riverbend, do you?”
Her mouth purses and her brow furrows as she considers the question. “Not too much. I think it was a big family—a bunch of boys who were lost in the war, maybe?”
I nod. “Charlie said somebody died there. I’m just trying to figure out who it was.”
She laughs. “I’m guessing abunchof people died there. If you scare easy, I wouldn’t think on it too hard.”
I hitch a shoulder. “It’s not that so much. But Charlie said that someone went down to the shack to die. It’s sort of weird, right? I was just trying to figure out who it was.”
She starts scanning the paper goods I’ve stacked before her. “I guess you’ve tried the Internet?”
I hold open a bag so she can drop the stuff in. “Yeah. I can’t seem to find anything. I know when it might have happened, but that’s it.”
“What about microfilm?” she asks. “Go to the library in Beaufort and ask for microfilm from the local newspaper around the time it happened. That might shed some light on the situation.”
I thank her and head to the car, throwing the stuff in the trunk before I text Charlie to tell him I’m going to be late.
The librarianin Beaufort is enthusiastic. “I love when people actually know about microfilm,” she says, so I don’t mention that I’d never heard of it before today. “Most young people think they can just find anything online and if they can’t, it doesn’t exist.”
As it turns out, however, old copies of theOak Bluff Daily Recordwere never digitized.
My shoulders sink.Another dead end.
“I do have physical copies if you don’t mind combing through them,” she adds.
My eyes spring open. “Yes, that would be perfect. I’m looking for information about someone who died on September twelfth, nineteen ninety-three. So maybe the two weeks from that date?”
It takes her an hour to locate the correct year, and then the correct month. Eventually, she drops a big box of newspapers on the table before me. Three days after she died, I find the headline:
Margaret Ames, 95, Found Dead on Property
Margaret Ames, one of Oak Bluff’s oldest residents, was found on Tuesday by concerned friends after she failed to show up for church on Sunday.
Miss Ames, who never married, was the youngest of five children and lived at Riverbend her entire life. Tragically, her four other older brothers all died during World War I, a loss her parents, Judge Richard Ames, and his wife, Helen, never recovered from. Miss Ames is said to have lived with her parents until their deaths in the 1960s, and then remained in the house alone until she was found this week.
