“He had very nice handwriting, so precise,” she said, gazing at the page. “Was he very bright? Can you tell?”
“Oh, yes. Very bright,” I said. “He wanted to become a doctor.”
“Really? I never paid much attention to what happened to them afterward, after the original fire.”
“Their mother ended up in a mental clinic.”
“What about them—the children?”
“No one seems to know for sure. Lots of rumors suggesting they changed their names, maybe even left the country. Did my father tell you anything more about the new owner of the property?”
“No. What more is there?”
“Not much. There’s a corporation or something involved.”
“It’s not going to be a hotel or something, is it?”
“No.”
She shrugged. “Glad someone is building there.”
“Were you ever there?”
“No. I never had any interest, and your mother and father never wanted to show me the property.”
She handed the diary back to me. She looked like she wished I had told her to take it and just get rid of it or something.
“I don’t really want to know the details,” she said. “I see enough horror stories on the daily news as it is. Well, good night. Sweet dreams.” She hugged me and left.
I stood there thinking about her and suddenly felt myself become as paranoid about it as Kane had been. She wouldn’t come in here and just take it, I thought. But what if she did? What if she took it, and then later both she and my father told me they had decided it was better to bury it again?
Instead of putting it back under my pillow, I shoved it down under some books in a carton at the bottom of my closet, and then I put pairs of shoes and some hangers on top of the box.
It’s making me crazy, I thought. But I couldn’t stop what we were doing now. Maybe I would find a way to get through it faster with Kane.
No matter what that would mean.
* * *
Thanksgiving dinner was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be. Todd Winston and his wife, Lisa, brought their children—Josh, who was ten, and twelve-year-old Brandy, two of the most well-behaved children I knew. Lisa was a fifth-grade teacher, a Charlottesville resident all her life, as was Todd. It was easy to see how both she and Todd had adopted my father to be their children’s grandfather. I used to be a little jealous of how much they loved him and how concerned he always was for their welfare, but I was beyond those days when my childish insecurity caused me to envy and dislike any other girl or woman he spoke to in my presence. He was, as Darlena had said, a Southern gentleman, as polite and courteous as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind.
Aunt Barbara and I were both attentive to every comment or look between my father and Mrs. Osterhouse, who was never as insistent that I call her Laura. I suppose I always had resisted because I knew that was the beginning of breaking down a wall I had put up between her and my father, or him and any other woman, for that matter. I caught little things this time that I hadn’t seen before. When she touched him while they spoke, he didn’t recoil. Occasionally, she whispered something to him, and he smiled. She was at his side as much as she could be, helping in the kitchen, making it possible, as she put it, for me to spend more time with Aunt Barbara. She and I smiled at that.
“She’s very attractive,” Aunt Barbara whispered. “I usually go by first impressions. I think she adores him.”
I looked at the two of them again and for the first time wondered if they had been seeing each other secretly, at least secretly when it came to me. I nodded.
“You’re going off to college,” Aunt Barbara said. She didn’t have to follow it with “He’s going to be very lonely.” I knew what she meant.
I couldn’t help thinking of how Christopher was reacting to his mother finding someone else to love. Our situations were in no way comparable, but I recognized that young children were selfish by nature. They want all the love. It takes time, years, for them to realize that their parents could have enough to go around.
While my father and Laura cleaned up the dishes and silverware after Aunt Barbara, Lisa, and I had helped clear the table, Todd and Lisa and their children sat with us in the living room and asked Aunt Barbara questions about life in New York as if it was truly another country, even another planet. I could see how amused she was and how kind she was with her answers. She made life there seem quite nice, in fact, listing all the advantages, the theaters, the public transportation, and the variety of stores and ethnic neighborhoods.
“Don’t be afraid of New York,” she told them. “It has a lot to offer, and you can remind yourself that you?
?re returning to your world here.”
Lisa looked fascinated.