She must have been trying to make up her mind once and for all the night she dreamed about that messy closet for the second time. Nanny Lucy was in her dream, telling her that answers were in the closet; then she faded away in a gray fog. The next day, when Flynn and April left for their jobs, Nessa gathered up half a dozen boxes from the garage, popped them into shape, and taped the bottoms.
“Okay, Nanny Lucy, let’s go find all the answers so you can rest in peace. If you’ve got any more secrets or anything else to keep chipping away at the pedestal that I had you on, let’s get it over with.” She sighed when she opened the door. Where to begin was the big question. Nanny Lucy had always said that everything had a place, so what had happened here? Nessa stared at the messy closet and shook her head slowly.
“Might as well drag it all out and then sift through it,” she muttered as she got started.
Pulling the stuff on the closet floor out into the hallway, she realized that there was an order to the chaos. She found one pink rubber flip-flop, a ziplock bag full of small items like ponytail holders and barrettes, and one Cinderella sock—all items that she’d left behind when she was a little girl. She wrote Flynn’s name on one box, April’s on another, and her own on a third, and then sorted the coloring books, puzzles, and all their old memories into the right places.
The stuff on the first and second shelves seemed to belong to Nanny Lucy’s children, and Nessa had to guess at a few things, but most of the items didn’t leave much doubt. She wrote Matthew’s name on the last empty box. Matthew’s toy guns with his initials on the belt went into the one labeled for him. Rachel’s Barbie dolls went into hers. Isaac’s first little New Testament went into his box.
When Nessa reached the top shelf, where the suitcase was stored, she had to bring a chair from the kitchen to stand on. There was very little on the shelf—an old railroad hat and a tiny box that held two gold wedding rings. What had Nanny Lucy thought when she put those rings away? Had she been relieved that she didn’t have to keep up the farce of being married to a cheater, or had it made her sad? Nessa carefully opened the suitcase and added those two items to it and then carried everything, box by box, out to the garage and stacked the boxes up in one corner.
“The quilt tops were on top of the suitcase,” she said as she went back into the house. “The hat was Grandpa. The quilts were you.” She had picked up the chair to bring it back to the kitchen when she noticed the corner of something yellow sticking out from the bottom of the top shelf. She set the chair down, held on to the back of it, and stood on it again. Sure enough, there was an envelope stuck in the crack between the shelf and the wall. She yanked it free, got down off the chair, and then sat down.
She turned it over and over in her hands. There was no name on the front of the envelope, but it was sealed. How a corner had gotten stuck was a mystery because the thing was downright hefty. Hoping that it was a long letter from Nanny Lucy explaining more about her decisions, she ripped into the paper, and hundred-dollar bills tumbled down onto the floor.
“Why did you hide this money?” Nessa frowned. “And in that closet, of all places. Were you saving up so you could divorce Grandpa?”
Nessa counted the bills as she picked them up—twenty-four in all. Then she noticed that the date on them was the previous year. She drew her brows down in a deep frown and carried the money to the kitchen. “Are you testing me or whoever cleans out the closet? I’ll share this with Flynn and April, but why did you put it up there unless . . .” Nessa clamped a hand over her mouth. “You knew you were sick, didn’t you? You put this money there for us grandkids to find. This was probably the last of your quilting-business money.”
She stared down the hallway at the empty closet and then looked toward the living room. “On the outside, you were prim and proper and God-fearing. But on the inside, you were like this closet—messy and locked up—and you knew your family was all in a jumble, too.”
She put the chair back where it belonged, laid the money on the dining room table, and was about to leave the house when Waylon came wandering down the hallway. “I wish you could talk to me,” she told him, “and tell me what was going on here those last months before she died. I guess I’ll never know what she was thinking when she put that money up there on the shelf. Do you think she was really losing her mind, like my dad says?”
The cat meowed loudly, jumped up on the sofa, and curled up to take another nap.
“A lot of help you are,” Nessa said. “I’m going to the falls to try to figure out why she put money away on that shelf. Did she really leave it for us cousins, or was she up there hiding things and just tucked the envelope away?”
When she was halfway there, the noise of tires crunching gravel told her that April was home. That meant Flynn would be there in a few minutes, but Nessa didn’t care. There was a slow cooker of stew on the counter, and they were both adults. They could make their own supper, and she would eat when she got back.
When she reached the water, she kicked off her flip-flops and waded out into the cool water until it came up to the edge of her cut-off denim shorts. She was deep in thought about her grandmother when a big splash startled her so badly that she whipped around to see what was going on. Tex was swimming toward her, and Jackson was taking off his shoes at the edge of the creek. She took a couple of steps, and then her foot landed on a slippery rock and she lost her balance. On instinct, she sucked in a lungful of air just before the water covered her face, and then she came up sputtering. Jackson was right beside her, a big grin on his face and laughter in his blue eyes.
“I haven’t seen you here in a whole week. I thought you were mad at me,” he said.
She pushed her wet hair out of her face. “I’ve been here every evening.”
“But did you get in the water or just sit on the bank?” Jackson swam over to the falls and climbed up to the top.
She followed him and sat down beside him. “I swam, but I wore a bathing suit, not my clothes.”
“Well, it couldn’t be any cuter than what you’re wearing now,” he said.
“If that’s your best pickup line, it’s no wonder you’re still a bachelor,” she told him.
“It’s not a pickup line,” he protested, “it’s the truth. Why didn’t you wear your bathing suit tonight?”
“I didn’t plan on swimming. I was just coming to the falls to think for a while,” she said. “I cleaned out the hall closet today. I always thought my grandmother was perfect. That’s why I’m here.”
“Because Miz Lucy was perfect?” Jackson asked. “I’m sorry to burst your bubble, darlin’, but nobody on this earth is perfect.”
“Don’t I know it,” she sighed. “Did you ever think that someone was?”
“Yep. I always thought Uncle D. J. was the greatest man on earth, but I found out different when I moved in with him,” Jackson answered. “He had his faults, and so did Miz Lucy.”
“I’m finding that out. When the court settled the issue of the will, I just knew I could find it—whatever it is—here in Blossom, because this is where I was happiest when I was a little girl. I’m beginning to think that whatever it is, it’s just an elusive dream anyway.”