Page 66 of The Lost Hours
“Let’s go then,” said George as he touched Helen’s arm and led her through the door of the small room and back into the attic.
They waited until Tucker and Piper followed; then Helen paused, turning slightly back toward the secret room. She thought she’d heard something—something that sounded like a baby’s crying but could have been a bird in the chimney or the moaning eaves of an old house.
With a shudder, she turned her back and allowed George to lead her from the attic, aware all the time of the little room with more secrets than could be contained in a mere span of years.
CHAPTER 19
I’d made the walk so many times from the house on Monterey Square to Forsyth Park that I probably could have made it with my eyes closed. In my early days in Savannah, when I was just starting to learn the secrets of her garden, my grandmother would take me to the park to study the flowers. We didn’t study them as a botanist would, captivated by their propagation and their ability to survive in the heat of summer. We studied them instead as a photographer would, focusing on the individual elements of each bloom: the shell-like interiors, the tiny veins inside delicate petals, and web-thin stamens that most people never bothered to see. But the beauty of the flowers was dependent on these elements, and my grandmother and I would smile at each other, sharing our private knowledge of the wonderful, secret world of the garden that seemed to exist only for us.
Tucker and I walked without speaking, being careful to make sure our arms didn’t touch. As we passed the edge of the park along Gaston walking toward Whitaker, Tucker finally spoke. “You and George, are you . . . ?”
I almost choked. “No. Definitely not. I think he would probably like to, but, well, no. If I had a brother, that’s probably how I would feel about him: nice enough, but not somebody I’d want to kiss.”
Eager to change the subject, I turned to Tucker. “I appreciate you doing this. I know you have other places you could be.”
His pace slowed. “Please don’t make me out to be some kind of a hero. I have my own reasons.”
“I know. Because of Susan. But I still think you’re a bit of a hero.”
He stopped and I stopped, too, and we faced each other on the sidewalk. “Why?”
I didn’t even have to think about my answer. “Because you get out of bed each day. Because you try. Because you love Lucy and Sara even though you’re still not sure how to show it. But you try.”
He stared at me, his eyes darkening, and I wondered if I’d made him angry again. Finally, he said,“I could say the same thing about you, Piper Mills.”
I blinked in confusion and looked away, then continued walking toward Hodgson Hall, feeling his presence next to me as he caught up.
I’d become a regular fixture at the Georgia Historical Society during my years of burying my past life by hiding in someone else’s as a genealogist. Tucker and I climbed the familiar broad brownstone stairway with heavy curving balustrades to the solid mahogany doors tucked under a two-columned portico.
When we entered the great hall with its soaring three-story-high ceilings, Tucker stopped and looked up. “I guess they’re pretty serious about their history here.” I followed his gaze to the wall above the entrance, where engraved in gold leaf on red mottled marble were the wordsNo Feasting, drinking, and smok-ing or amusements of any kind will be permitted within its walls.
I put my finger to my lips. “Quiet. They’ll ask us to leave.”
He raised an eyebrow, then rolled his eyes in an exaggerated version of Lucy’s favorite move, and I had to cough to hide my laughter. Shaking my head, I led him over to the reference desk to show my ID and sign in.
I was already a registered user, and after doing an online search of their catalog, I’d called in ahead of time so that the boxes and folders of information I’d requested had already been pulled from the repository. I clasped my laptop—one of the few articles for note-taking actually allowed in the library—and we headed through the main hall with its large, vaulted windows, which had been designed in a time when there was little artificial light or ventilation, and into the reading room. We sat down at one of the four large tables made of slabs of solid walnut supported by cast iron, and stared at each other over the boxes and folders that had been pulled for us.
“What do we do now?” asked Tucker.
I slid a large box across the table toward him. “These are all from various personal collections housed here. I asked for them to be pulled because they contained newspaper clippings and obituaries from the years nineteen twenty-five through nineteen sixty. I want you to look for anybody with the last names of Montet, O’Hare, Harrington, or Ross—either birth or death information. My preliminary online searches have only shown Josephine’s death information, but only because she was relatively well-known at the time of her death. But I can’t find any of her birth information, and there’s nothing on Freddie, which makes me think that he used another last name for legal documents. Anyway, after we verify that we’re looking at the right person, we’ll look through the newspaper obituaries on microfiche. That’s where you find all of the interesting data—as in remaining family, where they were living, and where they’re buried.”
He frowned. “What will you be doing?”
“I’ll be upstairs going through microfiche. They’ve got death registers from nineteen nineteen to nineteen ninety-four, so I’m bound to find something—assuming I can find the right name.”
He continued to regard me. “You’ve done this a lot, then.”
I nodded. “Kept me busy.”
Tucker eyed the boxes in front of him. “What time does the library close?”
“Five o’clock. And at four forty-five they’ll come and start making you pack up. They’re very strict about it.”
Sliding the box toward him, Tucker said, “Then I’d better get started.”
I made my way to the microfiche machines and, after retrieving the films for the dates I’d requested, worked in relative silence for several hours and through lunch, my stomach rumbling its protest but I was unwilling to stop. I was no longer afraid of discovering my grandmother’s story; I was simply eager to know it. Somewhere in the last months I’d begun to see my malaise of the last years as less of an inevitability, or a genetic response to failure. Instead, in discovering my grandmother, I realized that I’d inherited a lot more from her, and my curiosity and need to push further and get there faster might even be related to the drive she’d once had as a young woman.
My stomach rumbled again and I thought of the granola bar I’d tucked in the pocket of the sweater I’d brought to keep me warm in the cool air-conditioning. But the staff ’s eagerness to keep the researchers alert by the near-arctic temperatures was matched only in their desire to keep crumbs off of rare manuscripts and documents, and the first sound of a crinkling wrapper would bring staff from all corners of the building, resulting in us being tossed out on the sidewalk.
