Page 88 of Deadly Little Scandals
My brain didn’t really latch onto the question until after I’d asked it. But it made sense. I had no idea how Greer had found Two Arrows—or Ellen or the pregnant Beth. But when it came to imagining the reverse—Ellen looking for acertain kindof home for a newborn—it wasn’t all that hard to picture her asking the one person she knew who ran in those circles.
Two,I thought suddenly.Davis Ames grew up hereabouts. She knows two people who run in those circles.
“Lillian don’t know a thing,” Ellen spat, like she meant that, all the way down to the marrow in her bones. “And she certainly didn’thelp.”
“But you found a family,” I pressed. “For Ana’s baby.”
And that family paid Ana, even if they didn’t pay you. She left here with enough money to travel. She never had to ask her family for money. All these years later, she still has expensive tastes.
“Just tell me who took the baby,” I said. “That’s all I want to know, and you’ll never have to see either one of us again.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.” For the first time, Ellen sounded like Lillian.
She sounded the way my grandmother had when I’d realized the truth about my father.
What is going on here?
Ellen took another drink. Looked me over. Looked me down. Opened her mouth—and then, before she could say a word, there was a knock at the door. I wasn’t sure at first that she was going to answer, but she downed the rest of the drink, then stood.
“Don’t take it in your mind to wander,” she warned me. “You hear?”
“I hear.”
“I also hear!” Sadie-Grace added cheerfully. “No wandering for me.”
Ellen snorted and disappeared into the hallway. I heard the front door open, heard a muted, murmured conversation of some kind.
Myeyeswandered. Ellen had told me to stay put. She hadn’t said I couldn’t look. The kitchen was small, small enough that I could have reached out and touched the refrigerator from where I sat. There were pictures—dozens of them, if not hundreds—stuck to the side. The latest additions were hung up with magnets: photographs of Makayla and a dozen other kids within five years of her age. Some of them were school pictures, but more had been printed out on plain white paper.
The side and front of the fridge was papered with them, and when I lifted my hand to flip one of the pictures up, I realized there were more underneath.
Years’ worth.
The ones on the bottom were faded and taped to the fridge. I looked through them, half expecting to see my grandmother, before I realized that none of these photographs were that old. The oldest one I could spot featured Ellen, looking more like Lillian than she did now, like life hadn’t yet carved their fortunes into the wear and tear on the skin. The picture in question was a family photo—Ellen and six kids.
The youngest couldn’t have been more than four or five, and the oldest, the teenager was…
What the hell…I leaned closer, nearly falling out of my chair. The picture hadn’t aged well. I couldn’t make out the details of the faces as precisely as I would have liked, but Ellen’s oldest child bore a striking resemblance to her mother, to my grandmother…
And to Aunt Olivia. She looks a lot like Aunt Olivia.
“Anyone ever tell you to keep your hands to yourself?” Ellen reappeared in the hallway outside the kitchen. “I told you not to wander.”
“I didn’t,” I said, letting my hand drop to the side and the years of photographs fall back into place, obscuring the one I’d been looking at.
“I have some business to tend to,” Ellen said, giving me a hard look that said my snooping had not gone unnoticed. “I’ll give you girls one more glass of lemonade, and then I need you gone.”
She walked over to the kitchen counter. Her back was to us as she added ice to the pitcher. My mind went briefly to thebusinessshe’d referred to—and the person she’d talked to at the door—but I forced myself to focus on the reason I’d come here.
All I needed was a name.
“One more glass of lemonade,” I countered as she poured. “And the name of the family that adopted Ana’s baby.”
Ellen sat down and took a long gulp of her own drink. “Girl.”
At first, I thought she was addressing me—or possibly Sadie-Grace—but her next words made her meaning clear.
“The baby was a girl,” Ellen said. “Arrived at daybreak. If I’d been naming her, I would have called her Dawn.”
