Page 2 of The Lost Hours
I peered inside, looking for a letter or a note. I cupped my hand and tipped the envelope over, shaking it until whatever had been stuck at the bottom came tumbling out into my palm.
Mr. Morton leaned toward me and we both stared at my prize, a gold charm of an angel holding an opened book. I shook the envelope again, waiting for the chain to fall out, but the envelope was empty.
“There’s not even a note,” I said, turning the charm over in my hand, wondering why she had held on to it for so long without giving it to me and feeling an odd disappointment.
Mr. Morton took my hand, squeezing it hard enough to almost be painful. “No, there wouldn’t be. Annabelle had always planned to give it to you in person. It’s a part of your grandmother’s history—part of her life she would want you to know.”
I stood, uneasy with his intensity. “I’ll take good care of it. And I’ll look for the chain, too. Maybe it’s somewhere in her old room.”
He stared at me for a long moment and I thought he hadn’t understood what I said. While I prepared to paraphrase slowly and clearly, Mr. Morton said, “You do that, young lady.” He stood and faced me, a concentrated look on his withered face. “You never know what you’ll find.”
Uncomfortable, I waited for him to gather his things, then quickly led the way back to the foyer.
“You’re a pretty young lady, Piper. I’m sure your grandfather would want you to move on. To find a young man and get married. Start a family of your own.”
“You mean sell the house?”
Mr. Morton shrugged. “That’s certainly a possibility. Even after making allowances for your grandmother’s care, with the remainder of your parents’ and grandparents’ estates, you’ll have a nice little nest egg. Maybe you’ll want to travel for a bit.”
I opened the front door, hearing the distant sound of the church bells. “There’s no place I want to go. Besides, with my back and knee, I don’t think long-distance travel would be a good idea.”
He regarded me quietly. “It’s not always the distance of a trip that determines its value. Sometimes the best trips are only as far as the circumference of your heart.”
Before I could ask him what he meant, he said, “Speaking of trips, Matilda and I are going on a four-month excursion around the coast of South America. It’s been a dream of hers for a long time and I finally figured that now’s as good a time as ever. You might be able to reach me by e-mail, but that would be sporadic at best. If you need something immediately, you can call my office and George will be happy to take care of you.”
“Thank you,” I said, trying not to flinch at the mention of George’s name and impatient now for Mr. Morton to leave. His words had unsettled me and all I wanted was to go back to my darkening parlor and think about all I had lost.
He stepped outside onto the brick steps and pulled an old-fashioned gold watch out of his pocket. A gold key fob dangled from the chain as he studied the clock face and frowned before shoving it back in his pocket. “One more thing. Matilda asked me to find out if her family tree is ready yet.”
Dabbling in genealogy and delving into other people’s family secrets had been the riskiest behavior I’d allowed myself to be involved in since my riding accident six years earlier. I frowned, knowing that my answer would not be something Mrs. Morton would want to hear. “Tell her almost. But I haven’t been able to find any connection between her family and the British royal family as she thought there might have been. Although I have found a family connection to sheep farmers in Yorkshire.”
He stared at me blankly for a long moment. Finally, he said,“I’ll let you tell her that yourself.”
“Just feed me to the alligators instead,” I muttered to myself as he turned away. I imagined his imperious wife, whose aspiration to grandiosity was equal only to her disdain for me for having had the bad taste to have been born north of the Mason-Dixon Line, regardless of the fact that both my parents had been born and raised in Savannah.
Mr. Morton faced me again abruptly, almost making me startle. “I heard that, you know.”
I smiled, my face feeling stretched and unused to the movement of turning up my lips. “Good-bye, Mr. Morton,” I said as I closed the heavy door with the black wreath hanging from it.
I watched him through the leaded glass of the door, trying again to find the tears for the grandfather who had raised me since I was six. I absently fingered the small charm in my hand and blinked hard, willing the grief to find me. But I could only stand there, dry-eyed, as I watched Mr. Morton slowly make his way down the walk toward the square with the statue honoring a fallen war hero. And I wondered, not for the first time, if dying in the quest for glory wasn’t far better than surviving with the livid scars of failure for all to see.
CHAPTER 2
I woke up with a stiff neck and something small and hard pressed into the side of my hip. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa again in the absence of a grandfather to tell me to go upstairs to bed. I sat up, rotating my neck while digging under my hip for the protruding object. It was the small gold charm and I picked it up, a misplaced sense of excitement filling me for a moment. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because a quest for the missing chain might distract me long enough that I might forget about the rest of my life.
I shuffled to the kitchen, my knee and back joining in protest with my neck. I opened the refrigerator for my morning Coke, belatedly remembering the sad display of hospitality I’d shown to Mr. Morton with the remnants of my last can of Coke rescued from the back shelf. Covered casseroles, assorted salads, and a large ham, courtesy of a misplaced sense of duty on behalf of neighbors, my grandfather’s former business associates, and church members, crammed the small space. It was the Savannah way of feeding bereavement, as if all that grieving required extra caloric input. I hadn’t so much as lifted a corner of foil wrap, feeling guilty for not having earned any of it. I had yet to shed a single tear.
“Dang it,” I said to the empty kitchen as I slammed the refrigerator door. Something clattered on the wood floor and I belatedly realized that I’d been holding the charm in my hand and had dropped it when I’d slammed the door. With unaccustomed alarm, I got down on all fours, forgetting to favor my right knee, and began to search for the charm.
I found it resting on the floor, propped next to the overflowing plastic garbage bin, as if a reminder that it needed to be emptied. I picked up the charm, then held it in the light from the kitchen window. Squinting, I studied the back of the opened book, my attention caught by thin black lines etched across the covers. Moving my head closer, I realized that the lines were actually writing but the words were too small for me to read. With as much enthusiasm as I could muster, I walked across the foyer to my grandfather’s study, pausing only a moment as the smell of pipe smoke made me think that I should have knocked on the door first.
I rifled through the desk drawers until I found the magnifying glass still resting on the top of the desk, where my grandfather had read the Sunday paper. A shadow of sadness drifted over me, stilling me for a moment as I willed the grief to come. But I remained as numb and helpless as I had been for the last six years and even that thought couldn’t bring the tears I needed to shed. I held the metal handle in my hand, imagining it still warm from my grandfather’s touch. Instead it felt cold and impersonal as I brought it over to the window to see better.
I held up the charm and the magnifying glass and brought them closer to my eye. Turning the charm around to see the inscription on the book’s covers, I read it out loud.Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim.I looked up, hearing the words as I’d read them. Wasn’t that Latin? I read the inscription again, racking my brain for the high school Latin that I’d done my best to forget in the intervening years.
Putting the magnifying glass back on my grandfather’s desk, I turned to the shelves of books in the off chance that any of my old Latin textbooks might have been saved over the years. Granddaddy never wanted to have anything to do with computers and I didn’t feel up to climbing two flights of stairs to get to my own. And by looking through the library, I was guaranteed that my search would eat up most of the empty morning.
With breakfast forgotten, I spent an hour going through my grandfather’s books and finding nothing remotely resembling anything that would help me translate the Latin phrase. I was about to leave the room when I spied the antique sea captain’s trunk under one of the windows.
