But Amelia can’t unsee it. Nor can she ignore that Brandy had approached her as a client and shown her the lost baby ring.
Today, however, is about confronting Bettina’s family, and she pokes her passenger back to consciousness as she exits the interstate.
“Hey, we’re almost there.”
Jessie stretches and looks out the window. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, and they’re traveling a straight, narrow east-west highway bordered on both sides by a grassy shoulder, tall Southern pines and utility poles. No houses, no businesses, no other cars on the road. No hotels or motels or even inns in the immediate area, but Jessie had rented what she’d described as a storybook cottage.
“Are you excited, Mimi?”
“Nervous is a better word for it, and maybe a little . . .” She swallows a lump, thinking of Bettina, wondering how many times she’d traveled this same road as a little girl growing up in the area.
Chances are, not many. She’d never learned to drive, and her family had been too poor to own a car. She’d never even been out of Georgia until a church youth group outing took her to Memphis. That’s where she’d met Calvin, who was there visiting family. He was a few years older, already living in New York City.
“It was love at first sight, child,” Bettina had told Amelia. “Your daddy and me, we just knew we had to be together.”
They’d written letters for a year. Calvin had proposed in one of them. He’d only been to Marshboro once, for their wedding. As far as Amelia knows, Bettina had never returned after taking the bus to her new home in New York.
Their life together had been just as impoverished as her childhood had been, but Bettina wasn’t one to complain about such things. About anything. That stoic, accepting nature had gotten her through some difficult times, but it had expedited her own demise, as far as Amelia’s concerned. Her mother had ignored ominous physical symptoms until it was too late. It had taken Amelia a long time to forgive her for that, for dying—and for not telling Amelia the truth about how she’d come to her and Calvin . . .
Only for that truth to become a lie when Amelia’s DNA linked her right back to Bettina.
The speed limit drops to 45 mph, and she spots a trooper hidden behind a clump of palmettos just beyond.
A little farther down, it drops to thirty as they pass a painted sign that reads, “Welcome to Marshboro, Georgia, Population 710.”
“It’s grown since I checked a few months ago. It used to be only 706.”
“Wow.” Jessie runs a hand through her short dark hair, and it spikes above her widow’s peak. “Ithaca is small, but this is . . .”
“A post-millennial metropolis. That’s what Auntie Birdie predicted back in 1989, when she came up for Daddy’s funeral.”
“She was a regular Nostradamus.” Jessie consults the directions on her phone. “Keep an eye out for Main Street. That’s where our cottage is.”
They’re on it. It’s the only road in town. They pass a firehouse, a gas station with a Circle K, and a luncheonette.
“Slow down, Mimi—that’s it!” Jessie points at a small structure just ahead.
It’s white with a blue-painted door, perched between two churches. She spots a tire swing dangling from magnolia branches in front of one and knows Bettina’s family had been congregants there. She’d shared fond memories of that swing.
“In springtime, child, that big old tree was just covered with blooms, and my cousins and I would pump our legs so hard, trying to soar up there and pick one.”
As she pulls into the cottage’s dirt driveway, Amelia sees that the church is, indeed, Second Baptist, and the sign out front reads “48th Annual MLK Fundraiser—All Are Welcome—9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, 1/14.”
As she and Jessie take their bags from the trunk, an elderly white woman ambles over from across the street. She’s wearing bare-toed slippers and a housedress.
“You must be Thelma! I’m Jessie, and this is Mimi.”
The woman fumbles in her pockets. “Nice to meet y’all. I’ve got the keys right here some—” She breaks off, gaping at Amelia, as if seeing her for the first time.
“Are you . . .”
“She’s on TV!” Jessie announces.
“You’re an actress?”
“No, I’m on a program called The Roots and Branches Project.”
“Well, bless your heart! I’ve never seen it. But you do remind me of someone, that’s all,” Thelma says, looking again at Amelia as she pulls the key from her pocket. “Why don’t we go on inside and I’ll show you around.”
As they follow her toward the door, Amelia looks back over her shoulder, feeling like she’s being watched from every window along the street.
Marshboro, Georgia
Seated in a window booth, Gypsy sips her third cup of coffee, craving a cigarette, and stares across the street at the little white house with a blue door.
Years ago, before she and Perry left New York, she’d learned how to cover a paper trail. Leaving an electronic one is a new concern, and the reason she’s numb with exhaustion, having just spent seventeen hours driving a thousand miles from New York.
“But you flew here from Cuba, Gypsy,” he’d pointed out yesterday afternoon as she was leaving.
“Well, I couldn’t have driven, could I?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea, a woman on the road alone in the dead of night, dead of winter . . . I’ll come with you.”
“What? You know I need you here to take care of Stockton Barnes and his daughter.”
“I thought you were going to hire someone to do that, like the Harrisons,” he said, as if they were discussing whether to send shirts out to be laundered.
She’d reminded him, yet again, that this—tomorrow—will be different. It has to be handled precisely according to her plan, and he needs to be the one to do it.
“Is everything okay, ma’am?”
She turns away from the window. The restaurant has emptied since she sat down an hour ago, and the waitress stands beside her table. “You haven’t touched your fried chicken. I’ve never had a customer who didn’t . . .”
She talks on, just as she had when Gypsy first arrived, ordered coffee, and sat staring at the menu. She’d blabbed about how the fried chicken is the house specialty, has won awards, people come from all over just to taste it. Gypsy only wanted caffeine, but ordered the meal just to shut her up.
Now she pushes the plate away, knocking into her water glass and sloshing some on the paper place mat. “Sorry—Aunt Beulah, is it?”
“Uh, yes, this is Aunt Beulah’s, ma’am.”
“But you’re not Aunt Beulah?”
“She’s, uh, not a real person. It’s just a name. I don’t know if there ever was a—”
“Then you won’t be offended,” Gypsy cuts in, “when I tell you that the chicken is lousy.”
The woman’s eyes widen in dismay.
What are you doing?
Gypsy clamps her mouth shut. She’s exhausted, nerves frayed, body still aching from clenching the wheel through Washington, D.C.’s rush hour last night and Savannah’s this morning, with a Carolina ice storm in between. Exhausted, and steeped in the hot fury that had ignited ten days ago, when she’d discovered that Margaret Costello’s daughter is alive after all.