“I’m not upset. I’m confused. This isn’t the first time I’ve wished I could ask my mother questions about her life. Like this picture, for instance.”
He looked at it again. Three people. Two guys in lightweight suits with shaggy hair, a young woman with long hair parted in the middle, wearing platform shoes and a miniskirt.
“What about it?”
She pointed at one of the men. “That’s my dad, the blond guy.” Her finger moved to the other man, the one with his arm around the young woman. “And that’s my Uncle Roy.”
“Okay.” He let his voice rise a bit, giving her room to go on.
“So why does my Uncle Roy and not my dad have his arm around my mom?”
Why did anybody do anything? “Maybe they were goofing around for the camera. Maybe Uncle Roy was trying to get your dad’s goat or something. I have friends like that. Everything’s a competition, a contest to see who can one-up the other.”
“They look like they’re together, don’t they?”
“Huh?” Mitch blinked at the picture.
“Look how he’s holding her. How his hand is on her waist, how she’s snuggled up against him. A Southern girl from a good family, even in the seventies, would only let a boy hold her like that if they were serious about one another. Engaged, even. And look at my dad. He isn’t smiling, but the other two are.”
“And this means…?”
Her shoulders drooped. “I don’t know what it means. All I know is that I’ve never seen this picture before, and there isn’t one like it at my uncle’s place.”
“It could be packed away. My mom has boxes of old family pictures in albums, stacked in the closet under the stairs.”
She glanced at him. “You probably noticed that all the family pride missing in my folks came out in my Uncle Roy in spades. If it was there, I’d have seen it, trust me.”
Mitch heard Adele coming up the stairs, slower than she’d gone down them. A lady would have to be in good shape to act as docent around this place. No elevators.
“I still think you’re reading something into it that isn’t there.”
She would have answered, but Adele came in holding a photograph in a plastic sleeve. “Well, this is a funny thing. Good for you, Eve, but funny all the same.”
Eve took the photo and turned it over. “Oh?”
There was nothing written on the back.
“This is the original,” Adele said. “It must be a mistake. Roy said that all the photos he donated to the trust were copies, except Artimas and Evalyne’s wedding picture. That one’s the real thing.”
“Adele, did you know Roy and my dad? When they were teenagers, I mean. Like in this picture.”
Adele, who up until now had been a fountain of facts and knowledge, dried up like the arroyos of Mitch’s childhood in the summer. She cocked her head.
“Oh, there they are now, dears. The tour group that was supposed to have been here at eleven.” She patted Eve’s arm and ushered them out into the gallery. “You keep that photo, Eve. And you might want to check with your uncle and let him know we’ve returned an original. Feel free to poke around the grounds. I’d better hustle, or I’ll never get them rounded up. People always think they can treat these houses the way they do their own.”
Her voice faded as she clattered down the stairs, and in a moment they heard her greeting the group. The buzz of a busload of people filtered up through the floor.
“Ready to go?” he asked. “Or do you want to look around?”
“No, I’m ready.” Her voice was flat. Preoccupied. “But I’ll be back. That woman was hiding something, and I’m going to find out what it is.”
15
MAYBE MITCH WAS RIGHT. Maybe she was making too much out of a silly photograph. So two teenagers were cuddling. What did that mean? Teenagers cuddled all the time. It was the seventies, for heaven’s sake. Just because her mom was cuddling with the wrong boy…
Wrong in whose opinion? Yours?
Maybe she’d dated Roy at one time and then decided that Gibson was The One after she’d graduated from college. Then why had Adele changed the subject so fast?
Eve hadn’t been coaxing secrets out of guests four days a week, nine months a year for three years for nothing. She could spot a diversionary tactic a mile away-especially from a person who wasn’t used to lying.
Eve pulled out her phone while Mitch stood in the eerie blue light in front of the windows of the dolphin tank at the aquarium. He was lost in a completely appealing, childlike wonder at the swooping and darting of the creatures.
“Dylan,” she said when he answered, “I need you to do something for me on the qt.”
He didn’t even remind her that it was Saturday and he would have been completely within his rights to ignore her number on his digital display. “Sure. What’s up?”
“I need you to get the home number of a docent who works at a plantation called Mirabel. Ever heard of it?”
“I’ve been there, yeah.”
“You have?”
“My senior thesis was on representations of slave culture in the cinema. I’ve been to every place open to the public within about fifty miles of Atlanta.”
No kidding. The things she was learning about people this weekend. “You probably talked to this lady, then. Her name is Adele and she’s a volunteer with the Ashmere Trust.”
“So you need home phone and address?”
“Just phone. I think she has some information for me, but I want to talk to her in private.”
“Am I doing this clandestinely or as a rep of the show?”
“Use whatever method gets you that number.”
“Copy that, boss. I have thumbscrews and cuffs in my date book. Agent Moore out.”
With a smile, she hung up. She’d lobbed him some pretty weird requests since he’d come to work for her, and only once had he come up empty-handed. Of course, as it turned out, that particular member of the state senate had been arrested for shoplifting shortly afterward, so maybe it was just as well she hadn’t had him on the show.
It took Dylan less than half an hour to call her back. “I’ve got your number,” he said without preamble. “Got a pen?” He dictated it, and she wrote it on the notepad she kept in her handbag for this kind of thing.
“How’d you get it? Or should I not press you to reveal your sources?”
“It was easy,” he said with a touch of pride. “I just explained to the girl at the trust’s switchboard who I was and hinted that Adele might be on the scope for the show, and she was happy to give me her phone number. She probably would have given me the lady’s address and all the names of her kids, too, but I stopped her in time.”
Eve thanked him and disconnected. Now what should she do? Call Adele and arrange a meeting so she could force out of her whatever she was hiding? Or come at it in a more circuitous way and hope she let something slip?
Ha. Adele was a Southern lady. No manipulation would work on her. Honesty was the best approach.
“Have you been here so many times that you’re bored silly?”
Mitch ambled up to her, his presence like a breath of air in the stifling confusion of her own thoughts.
“No, actually, I’ve never been here. It’s kind of fun being a tourist in your own town.”
“Forgive me for noticing, but you’ve spent more time on the phone than you have looking at the fish.”
Speaking of honesty…
“I’m still bugged about that photo. I had Dylan track down Adele’s home number so I can talk to her about it some more.”
“Seems to me you’d be better off talking to someone in the family, like your grandmother or your uncle,” he said reasonably. “Up until today, you never even heard of Adele.”
“I’m going to do that, too.”
“Are you sure you want to?” He took her hand and began to walk slowly toward the exit. “I mean, look at it from their point of view. You turn up on their doorstep asking a bunch of questions about a casual photo taken thirty years ago. All weirdness aside, how can it matter now?”