Finding Colin Firth: A Novel (31 page)

Oh dear. “Why did she choose you and your husband in the first place?”

Penelope looked up at Veronica. “To be honest? Because we’re wealthy. The girl comes from the wrong side of the tracks, had a rough, impoverished childhood—she’s still a child—and it’s very important to her that her baby be raised with wealth, that he or she never want for anything—whether breakfast or an iPhone. It’s important to her, and she wants a wealthy, Catholic family from Boothbay Harbor only. So we finally fit the bill for a birth mother. But then she met us, and I tried to be what she wanted, but the more time we spent with her, the more dissatisfied with me she seemed to get.”

Veronica poured two cups of tea and gestured for Penelope to sit. “What do you think her issue is?”

“My husband says I’m coming across as forced, that I need to be myself. But I know what kind of image I project—snobby. I’m trying to change that.”

I noticed, Veronica thought. But it can’t be fake.

Penelope added cream and a sugar cube to her tea. “I know I’m not the friendliest person there ever was. And maybe I have a reputation of being snobby. But I’d love this baby with all my heart—and my heart is big, Veronica. I might not show it to everyone, but my husband knows it. And my mother. My sister too—I’d do anything for my family. And this baby, this precious angel I want to love and raise and share my life with—I’ll be
the most loving mother. I know that more than I’ve ever known anything.”

“You need to tell her this, Penelope. You need to say it just like you said it here. You need to tell her from here,” Veronica said, touching her chest. “It needs to be more than words to her. She needs to hear you mean it.”

“I’ve tried—three times. She doesn’t like me.” Tears shimmered in Penelope’s eyes.

“I think you should go see her. Just you. The real you, not this toned-down false you. You in all your real Penelope Von Blun glory. Tell her, from the heart, what this baby means to you. How you want to raise her. Tell her why you’ll raise her baby better than anyone else could. Tell her everything you think about every night before you fall asleep. That’s usually where the truth is.”

Penelope nodded, then reached over and pulled Veronica into a hug. “Maybe I should take home a recipe for your Hope Pie.”

Veronica went over to her pie binder and took out a recipe for salted caramel cheesecake pie. “I don’t think you’ll even need an elixir pie, Penelope. I feel your hope in waves.”

Close to eleven o’clock that night, Veronica was sitting on the edge of her bed, rubbing lilac-scented lotion into her dry elbows, when her phone rang. Nick? Penelope, maybe?

“Hello?”

Bea. Veronica was so surprised to hear her voice that she almost dropped the receiver. After brief hellos and some talk about today’s unusually hot weather and how it wasn’t great for
pie baking, Bea said, “I’ve been thinking, and I would like to contact Timothy Macintosh.”

“I expected that you’d want to.” Veronica wondered what would happen when Bea did call him. How he’d respond.

“Do you have a place for me to start? I did a search for Macintosh in the area, and there are quite a few. No Timothy Macintosh, though.”

“I know someone who might have his current address. I’ll call you right back.” Veronica hung up, a strange pressure pressing on her chest. She called Nick, and he did have Timothy’s address. He lived in Wiscasset, just fifteen minutes away, in the same town where Veronica and Bea had been yesterday during their brief stop at the bus station. Nick had run into him last Christmas while shopping in Best Buy, and Timothy had handed him his card. He was a boat mechanic.

A boat mechanic. Living just fifteen minutes away.

Veronica sucked in a breath and called Bea back and told her what Nick knew. Her stomach churned.

“Thank you, Veronica,” Bea said, and Veronica couldn’t get off the phone fast enough.

She went upstairs to her closet, to the back, where her hope chest was. She’d kept things she’d brought with her to Hope Home, and things she’d saved, move after move, over the past twenty-two years. She reached into the bottom and dug out the picture of Timothy Macintosh and looked at it. Sixteen-year-old Timothy was standing in their spot, wearing that leather jacket, his hands in his jeans pockets, a sweet smile on his face.

It didn’t hurt like Veronica thought it always would, perhaps because of all the opening up she’d done. God, Bea looked a lot like him. She was walking proof that she was his daughter.

Veronica put the photograph in a small manila envelope and wrote Bea’s name on it, then added a note: “Thought you might want to have this. Timothy Macintosh, March 1991.”

She’d walk it over to the inn in the morning and leave it in the mailbox. That settled, she slipped into bed and had a feeling she’d sleep pretty well tonight.

After a long morning of research and interviews, including a heart-tugging breakfast with a woman who’d given her baby up for adoption back in 1963, the year Hope Home opened, and a poignant hour spent with a pregnant fifteen-year-old who would only let her baby be adopted by a wealthy, local couple, yet was having trouble finding a loving enough set of “filthy rich” prospective parents, Gemma stopped by the movie set. She hoped to catch a glimpse of Colin Firth and talk her way into an interview. Her editor at the
Gazette
had said that she’d assigned a reporter to cover the movie being shot in town, but that didn’t mean Gemma couldn’t try to score an interview with the actor herself. Now that she was almost done with her research, she’d be ready to write the long middle section of her article over the next couple of days, and then she’d be done. She’d have to give up the ID card that Claire had made up for her. She’d have to go back to being unemployed.

She’d have to go home and face her future.

But an interview with Colin Firth could be her ticket to a job. A one-on-one with an A-list movie star. An Oscar winner. A handsome Englishman whom everyone respected. It would add a bit of cachet to her clips—and just might get her her
dream job. Maybe even her job back at
New York Weekly.
And once she was employed again as a reporter, Alex would have to accept her plan to stay in the city.

Except he hated the city now. And making him stay wasn’t fair to him.

“Hey, everyone! Colin Firth is signing autographs in the Best Little Diner!” a man called out, and a big crowd rushed toward the harbor and up to Main Street. Gemma was embarrassed by how quickly she took off for the diner; she cut through a brick alleyway that she remembered from her teenage summer days and raced into the diner, out of breath, a crowd hot on her heels. The diner was busy even at eleven in the morning, and Gemma glanced all around, hoping to spot him and get to him before anyone else could.
Excuse me, Mr. Firth,
she’d say,
I’d love to treat you to dessert, perhaps a slice of that delicious-looking blackberry pie on the counter, if I might ask you a few questions for the
Gazette
.
But there was no sign of him in the diner. Not in the booths, not at the counter, not flattened against the wall, trying to escape detection while he awaited his coffee.

“Well, where is he?” a woman shouted, pushing past Gemma.

A waitress was refilling the little sugar bowl at the next table. “Where’s who?”

“Colin Firth. Someone said he was in here, signing autographs.”

The waitress, a short redhead in her early forties, raised an eyebrow. “This again? If Colin Firth were in here, do you think I’d be arranging packets of fake sugar? Or would I be a puddle on the floor?”

“She’s just saying that,” another woman yelled, racing
around to look in the bathroom—including the men’s. “He’s probably hiding in the kitchen!”

“He’s not, I swear,” the waitress called out. “If you’re not here to eat, beat it.”

Maybe Gemma could catch him coming or going from the set, she thought as she left the diner with a large herbal iced tea. She’d recently seen two of his films,
Bridget Jones’s Diary
and
Then She Found Me,
and she’d seen a few others over the past few years—
The King’s Speech, Love Actually,
and
Mamma Mia!
After she worked on her Hope Home article tonight, she’d watch one of his more recent films and sketch out ideas for how to frame the story. Oscar winner arrives in small town Maine. Mr. Darcy comes to town. An Englishman in Boothbay Harbor. Perhaps he’d share what sights he’d taken in while in Maine, if he had, and Gemma could frame it as a bit of a travel piece too. And by a fan girl, of course. She adored Colin Firth and had no doubt she’d be that puddle on the floor herself while standing just inches from him, listening to him talk in that beautiful accent of his. Her mind was whirling with ideas as she neared Frog Marsh, where the number of trailers had quadrupled, and Gemma’s phone rang just as she pulled out her little notebook to jot down ideas. Her mother-in-law’s name flashed across her screen. Oh no.

“Gemma, just what on God’s green earth do you think you’re doing?” Mona Hendricks asked, her voice full of judgmental anger.

Gemma rolled her eyes. Had Alex told her she was pregnant? Granted, they hadn’t talked about telling or not telling people at this early stage, but the later Mona knew, the better. “I don’t know what you mean, Mona.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. You’re pregnant and running around Maine for three weeks? You’re giving Alexander a hard time about moving to Dobbs Ferry?”

Good Lord. Had he sicced his mother on her?

“Oh, he tried to make it out like it didn’t matter to him. He said you two might end up staying in the city because you feel so strongly. Just how goddamned selfish can you be?”

“Excuse me, Mona, but why isn’t Alexander selfish for wanting to move to Westchester when I want to stay in the city?”

“Don’t be daft. You know perfectly well why. You’re pregnant. You’re bringing a life into this world. It’s not about you.”

Like son, like mother. Alexander had said that same thing.

“Mona, this is between me and Alexander.”
Don’t let loose on her. Just get her off the phone. Don’t add to your problems.

“This is a family issue. We’re all here in Dobbs Ferry. And now that you’re expecting, the three of you belong here too. Think of the baby if your own husband doesn’t matter to you.”

“I have to go, Mona,” she said. “Good-bye.”

Anger bubbled in Gemma’s stomach. How dare she!
Think of the baby if your own husband doesn’t matter to you
.

She had to get an interview with Colin Firth. She had to.

After an hour of fruitless calls to find out when Colin Firth was due to arrive in town—even the guy Bea was dating, the second assistant director on the film, wasn’t sure because of scheduling conflicts, according to Bea—Gemma got to work on her article about Hope Home. She couldn’t stop thinking about Lizzie Donner, the fifteen-year-old pregnant resident who was insistent that her baby be adopted by a wealthy family from
Boothbay Harbor, where she herself had been raised in poverty. Gemma’s heart had gone out to the girl as she’d shared her story. Lizzie had thought she’d found the perfect prospective adoptive parents—very wealthy, Catholic like herself, lived in Boothbay Harbor in a mansion on the water, but every time she met with the couple, she found she didn’t like the wife.
I want my baby to have everything she’ll ever dream of
, Lizzie had said.
I thought that was the most important thing. But the wife is so phony and fake—how could she be a good mother to my baby?
Gemma left out that last line as her hands flew over the keyboard of her laptop. She’d promised Lizzie she’d only write the gist of what was important to Lizzie and not disparage anyone, especially since Lizzie hadn’t written off that couple just yet. Gemma thought about her own mother—not fake, but just cold. Her parents were very well off, but money and vacations and expensive summer camps certainly hadn’t made anyone happy.