The View from Prince Street (6 page)

“I do enjoy those girls. How is that bakery doing?”

“They're hanging tough. Only open two days a week. They're becoming the queens of the online baking world.”

“I was really worried that the bakery would close when their parents retired. I'm glad they're still there.” She studied the cookie. “So
much of what I used to love is vanishing, and I don't want to lose the bakery as well.”

“Business is booming.”

“Do the sisters have any gossip for you? Those girls always had the pulse of the town.”

I bit into the cookie. “You know me, I'm not the gossip type. I never linger long.”

“Even if you don't like gossip, do it for me. How is Daisy's baby?” Amelia asked.

“Walter is fat and happy and Rachel's twin girls are entering the second grade soon.”

“Now if we can just get Rachel married off.”

“She looks pretty happy to me,” I said.

“You said her French baker moved back to France.”

“You remember? I'm impressed. On your game today.”

Satisfaction coaxed a small smile. “What's happening in town is far more interesting than the social calendar of this place. Honestly, Lisa, if I hear one more old lady bitch about a bad hip, I might break her good one.”

There were times when I wondered how Amelia and I could have been genetically linked. She was as outgoing as I was introverted. And yet, we always got along and were a good match for each other. “Margaret is working for Shire Architectural Salvage now,” I said. “I didn't realize it at the time, but she and her business partner, Addie, cleaned out your basement about a month ago.”

At the mention of the basement, her head cocked. “You had the basement cleaned out?”

I shouldn't have mentioned the basement. The last time we had this discussion, I explained that her attorney had suggested we sell the Prince Street house. Big mistake. The idea of giving up her home upset her terribly. She still clung to the notion that she would return one day.

But Amelia would never be able to move back to the Prince Street house, and we needed the money to pay for her care.

“I told you.” I kept my voice relaxed. “I had it tidied up. It was getting a bit cluttered.”

She relaxed a fraction. “It was chock-full, to the rafters. There were items in that basement that dated back hundreds of years. I bet Margaret enjoyed finding all that history.”

“She loved it. She squealed every time she discovered a new detail. It was like a kid opening gifts on Christmas morning.”

“The girl loves history.” She plucked a stray thread off her blanket. “I wish she could get as excited about the present.”

“She's a free spirit,” I said.

“Margaret McCrae flitters from place to place. Frustrates Daisy, who says her sister has never stayed in one job long enough to get settled.”

Like me, she was unable to put down roots. “Margaret flitters more than I do?”

Amelia immediately shook her head. “No, you're different. You're a photographer and you travel the world to work on your art. Margaret can't hold on to the present for long enough.”

My aunt described what I did in such a purposeful, nice way. The truth was, I was a gypsy, unable to stay anywhere for an extended period of time. “Margaret McCrae and Addie Morgan get on well.”

“I don't know Addie well. Her aunt Grace is a good woman.” She straightened her shoulders, proud of her clarity. “You know the Shires, the Smyths, and the McDonalds go back centuries.”

“I know we've been here forever, but I never really gave it much thought.” I nearly failed history in high school.

“Colonial times, from what my mother used to say. You know, a Captain Smyth built our house on Prince Street.”

I resisted rolling my eyes. I'd heard the story about the Scottish captain who built the lovely brick home overlooking the Potomac
River for his young bride so many times. I hated hearing about it as much as she loved telling the story. “I bet it's a great story.”

She nibbled her cookie. “Don't patronize me, Lisa. You hate the story.”

I laughed. “Busted.”

“I might be forgetful, but I'm not
that
forgetful, Miss I-got-a-D-minus-in-history.”

“Fine.”

Her expression grew serious. “I don't know how long all this clarity will last. Each time, I feel I'm back for good. It isn't true, is it?”

“I'm sorry.”

Nodding, she set her cookie on her top sheet. “Look in the nightstand. There's a book.”

I handed the last of my cookie to Charlie and after wiping my hands on my jeans, opened the bedside table. Inside was an old scrapbook covered in silk fabric that had once been a pale green but was now faded to a dull gray. The binding along the spine was torn in spots, but enough of the fasteners remained to hold together the dozens of yellowed pages.

She held out her hands. “May I look at it?”

Carefully, I laid it on her lap. She traced a large
M
embossed on the front of the book, and her frown deepened as she searched for the memory that skittered out of reach. “I didn't know this book existed until I was thirty years old. I wasn't who I thought I was.” She closed her eyes and nibbled her bottom lip, choking back tears.

“Can I see it?”

She leaned forward and looked at me. “Sure, dear.”

Carefully, I slid the silk book away from her fragile hands, which were knotted with arthritis. I brushed off the cookie crumbs and opened the cover. Inside it read,
Baby's First Year
. “It's a baby book. Is it yours?”

“I believe it is,” she said, smoothing her hand over the first page. The yellowed page creaked as we turned it to the title page. In a thick
bold handwriting, it read:
Amelia Elizabeth McDonald. Born July 1, 1942, 6:24
P.M.
Six pounds, six ounces.

“Amelia, are you sure this is your book? The family's last name is McDonald, not Smyth.”

Slowly, she traced the name McDonald with a bent finger. “I was born a McDonald.”

I'd never heard this story before and suspected she was recalling someone else's life. The blending of reality and fiction was not uncommon. “I didn't know that.”

“I was adopted when I was a year old by your grandparents, Sam and Marjorie Smyth.”

“I never heard a word about that from Mom or Dad. Ever.”

“I don't think they knew. The Smyths are good at keeping secrets. You should know that by now.”

She was right. My mother had battled cancer on her own terms while my father gambled the family money on the stock market. In my seventeenth year, Dad lost everything before having a fatal heart attack. Mom died six months later. If not for Amelia moving back into the Prince Street home with me, I'd have been in trouble. “You never kept secrets.”

“Keeping secrets was a quality I learned from my mother. What came naturally to her was always a struggle for me.”

Scooting to the edge of my chair, I was anxious to confirm the truth of her words. If fact and fantasy were blending, I wanted to snatch as many truths as I could before they floated away like a handful of balloons released into the air.

“My mother, Marjorie Jones Smyth, and Fiona Winter were good friends growing up. They were born on the exact same day and met in elementary school. They were like sisters, from what my grandmother Smyth used to say.”

“Fiona Winter. She married a McDonald.” I was a friend to a McDonald once. Jennifer McDonald. We were like sisters, too. “I never heard any of this.”

A slight shrug of Amelia's shoulder didn't hide the hurt radiating from her now. “Marjorie and Fiona were in love with the same man. His name was Jeffrey McDonald. Very dignified and handsome.”

“A love triangle. Always a good story, but are you sure?”

Amelia stroked the yellowed page, absently tracing the elaborate
M
of her original last name. “My mother never wanted me to know about her love for Jeffrey.” A sly smile tweaked the edges of her thin lips. “She was pulling Christmas decorations out of the attic one year and I was finally old enough to scramble up the stairs and help her. As I was searching for the decorations I spotted a trunk. Inside the trunk were dozens of letters bound together with a faded red ribbon.”

When I was younger, Amelia had been the energetic older aunt who had always been quick with a fun idea. She loved life. When I was six, she took me for a ride in her new convertible sports car along the George Washington Parkway. When I was ten, she hired a hot-air balloon and we drifted over the waters of the Potomac. And when I was nearly eighteen, in the dark days after my parents' deaths and then the car accident, she allowed me to cry when no one else thought I had a right to my tears. When I was twenty, she dragged me to my first AA meeting and told me not to contact her ever again if I didn't start working with the program.

Aunt Amelia never shied from a challenge. A box of letters would have been irresistible. “How long before you doubled back and read the letters?”

Eyes twinkled. “Three days. I had to wait for Mom and Dad to leave the house. I pulled the steps down and crept up the stairs.”

“Where was Dad during all this?” My father was seven years younger than Amelia and his older sister's constant shadow until she moved out of the family home for college.

“Your father was about five at the time. I was supposed to be watching him, and of course, when I put him in bed he did not sleep. He was always a terrible sleeper, much like you.”

“I can picture it now. You're in the attic and Dad is on the bottom rung of stairs threatening to tell.” I had loved my father, but he never failed to use information to his advantage. He could keep his own secrets but no one else's. It was why I had never been able to really talk to him.

“Your father sensed I was up to no good, and he took great joy in threatening to tell Mom that I was in the attic.” She glanced at her polished nails, her grin as devilish as a young schoolgirl. “I told him I'd tell Santa he'd been naughty. Santa would never again come to our house. His eyes grew as wide as saucers, but he tried to hold his ground and insist I was lying. But I wanted to see the letters so badly that I kept twisting the Santa threat until he burst into tears and ran to his room.”

“And you read the letters.”

“I snuck them to my room and read each and every one of them.” Her eyes glistened. “I discovered my adoptive mother was in love with a man named Jeffrey. The letters were dated several years before my parents met. Which made them all the more delicious.”

“What happened?”

She opened her mouth to speak but hesitated and frowned. I recognized the expression. The words and ideas on the tip of her tongue flitted away, out of reach. “She married my father, so I suppose it did not end well for Mother and Jeffrey. I never really knew what happened to him until I found this book. He married another woman.”

She fumbled with the frayed edge of her blanket and I could see her frustration. A woman who had prided herself on her quick wit and memory was losing both to a disease that took its time robbing the mind.

I laid my hand over hers and then kissed the back of her hand. “Let's look at the book and see if it will tell us what happened.”

Worried eyes rose to mine, and for a blink, she searched my face, staring for the familiar. Slowly, she nodded. “It all must be in the book, shouldn't it?”

“It must be, otherwise you wouldn't have it.”

I turned the first page to a picture of an infant girl dressed in a
white christening gown. A round button mouth curled into a wide grin and her little hands were splayed wide open. The photographer had caught her mid–belly laugh. Amelia had been a pretty baby, with wisps of lightly colored hair, which I guessed had been red. I had seen pictures of her as a young woman and her hair was a vibrant copper. As she aged and silver threatened to diminish the luster, she turned to the salons to maintain a color that grew increasingly dark, out of step with her pale skin. However, since she'd arrived here, there was no one to dye her hair, so time and washings had faded it to silver, which I found far more attractive on her.

I angled the book so Amelia could better see it. Age had softened the pages, and I wondered if given a couple more years locked away, they wouldn't have crumbled. “You were a pretty baby.”

She traced the infant's wide, expressive eyes, and with a little more confidence said, “Yes, I was. I always wondered where that red hair came from. I never quite looked like a Smyth.”

“Did your birth mother, Fiona, have red hair?” I asked.

Her light blue eyes darkened with an intensity that hinted of a truth no one in the family had ever mentioned. “Yes, she did.”

Turning the page of the baby book, I stared at a picture of a young couple holding a baby. The inscription at the bottom read:
Fiona and Jeffrey McDonald with their precious daughter, Amelia.
“Amelia Elizabeth McDonald. You really were adopted.”

Her chin lifted up in defiance. “I told you I was.”

I ran my hand through my hair. “Holy cow.”

“I know. Shocker. I was as surprised as you when I found out at age thirty-two.”

“That was over forty years ago. You never said a word.”

“I was in shock at first. Didn't want to believe it. And then my husband became sick. I tried to talk to my mother once, but she said she didn't know what I was talking about. I pressed her, but the conversation went nowhere and she told me not to bring it up again. I thought
about talking to my dad, but if Mom didn't want a subject discussed, he always obeyed her wishes. I thought I could ask her again one day, but she passed and so did my father. Time slipped through my fingers.”

Over the last month Amelia's condition had worsened. Bringing with it all kinds of crazy claims. Once she confused me with her doctor, thanked me for her discharge papers, and told me her niece would arrive soon to take her home. Another time she told me my late mother had come for a visit. We had many conversations and most simply weren't based in reality.