Page 99 of The Attic on Queen Street
“And one more thing,” Yvonne continued. “I doubt that you waking Jack up in the wee hours of the morning will bother him at all.”
•••
I peeked into Nola’s bedroom, where I found her sleeping on her side, Porgy and Bess spooning against her chest. A faint scent of ash mixed with roses floated past me, evaporating as soon as I detected it. Either the Frozen Charlotte had returned to Nola’s bedroom or Evangeline had. Either way, I wasn’t afraid. Not of Evangeline or Louisa, anyway.
A strip of light shone under Jack’s door, but for once his keyboard was silent. I tapped gently on the door and waited a moment. With no response, I tapped again. “Jack? Are you in there?”
The air seemed suddenly saturated with the heady sent of fresh roses just as the latch clicked and the door slowly moved inward. I stuck my head in the opening. “Jack?”
I looked behind the door, then allowed my gaze to travel around the room until it settled on the large bed and the shirtless man sprawled on top of it, facedown, his laptop still open and sitting precariously near the edge of the bed.
I tiptoed across the room as quickly as I could, avoiding stacks of books and notepads, and lifted the computer, my only intention to place it on his desk. Instead, my gaze was drawn to the rotating album of family photos he used as his screen saver. I stood in the middle of the room smiling at the photos of our children and of our intact family, which included me. He’d removed the photos of the children from his office when he’d left the house to live in an apartment, leaving behind all photos of me. This display gave me a sparkle of hope, a glimmer of light the new Melanie tried to extinguish with the thought that the screen saver was old and forgotten, since nobody really looked at their screen savers anyway.
My thumb accidentally brushed the computer’s trackpad, replacing the photos with a full page of text. My gaze automatically traveled to the header.power, greed, and dirty deeds: the hoax that felled a criminal family dynasty.
“Can I help you?” Jack stood in front of me, his pantherlike stealthiness a reminder of his having been in the Army. His eyes blazed as he took the laptop from me and shut the lid, almost pinching my fingers. With deliberate movements, he placed the computer on the far edge of his desk, out of my reach.
“I wasn’t... I mean, I didn’t...” I swallowed, mobilized the new Melanie, and took a deep breath. “I just spoke with Yvonne and learned something interesting. She said you wouldn’t mind if I woke you. I was just moving your computer so it wouldn’t fall on the floor.”
The shadow of a smile graced his face. “Did she, now?”
I nodded, surreptitiously appreciating his shirtless status and how the shadow of his unshaven beard summoned unwholesome thoughts of his pirate ancestor. He watched me swallow again as I attempted to ease my dry throat.
“We’re pretty sure we know who Evangeline was. It’s a lot of conjecture and coincidence, but everything points to John Vanderhorst as her father. Because...”
“...there’s no such thing as coincidence,” we said, finishing the sentence together.
He didn’t say anything else, allowing the room to settle into an odd quiet, making me improbably nervous with the need to fill it. As if I no longer knew how I should behave in a darkened bedroom with my half-naked husband. As if I was afraid of what would happen next if I didn’t fill the silence.
I began to jabber, barely pausing long enough to take a breath. Afraid to stop. “So it’s not about Evangeline not having a last name. It’s about her not being able to use it. Remember Nola telling us about the sense she had that the girl who’d appeared in her bedroom didn’t want to show her face? I wonder if it had less to do with it being burned and more to do with being taught to be ashamed of her parentage. She didn’t want Nola to see her face more from habit than not wanting Nola to see the scars.
“I’m glad we found Evangeline’s final resting place, and at least now we know what that symbol is, although we have no idea what theclockface means—but Yvonne is still digging. I’m thinking we should bury Evangeline’s toys with her and the dog bones. Maybe that will put a stop to Frozen Charlotte showing up every time I turn around. But I can’t stop wondering why she’s visiting Nola and why Nola thinks Evangeline is there to protect her from the tall man, although I have no idea whom she’s referring to.”
I took a deep breath and waited for him to speak, for the serious look on his face to transform into anything else. Finally, he said, “Yvonne was right.”
“About which part?”
“About how I wouldn’t mind if you woke me up.”
I swallowed, the sound ridiculously loud. “I’ll let her know.”
He smiled his trademark grin, which always did funny things to my heart and turned my bones to the consistency of warm grits. He reached up and pulled something out of my hair, then held it up to reveal a lone Cheerio. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever known who could make flannel and cereal sexy.”
His hand dropped, the Cheerio making an audible click as it hit the wood floor. He tilted his head. “Do you remember that kiss you gave me in the foyer downstairs while I was attempting to speak with Desmarae on the phone?”
I nodded dumbly, ashamed to admit that I could barely think of anything else.
“That wasn’t an almost kiss, was it?”
I shook my head.
“That was the real deal. The kind of kiss that almost makes me believe in do-overs.” Jack stepped closer, his eyes studying my face while his hands cupped my head, his thumbs stroking my cheeks. “What is it about you, Mellie, that I can’t resist even when I’m at the end of my rope and I’m blaming you for putting me there? I’ve been using these long weeks to try to work it out in my head, trying to think of how to move past everything. But I keep hitting mental roadblocks.”
I watched him, not daring to move or to close my eyes. “Yvonne said something else.”
Jack’s eyebrows rose.
“She said we should accept that we’re both wrong, then take a leap of faith.”
