“That’s nice? I think you’re understating it by a lot. It’s more than nice. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.” She shuffled the papers and continued. “He talks about reading her letters over and over again.” She looked up. “Later, he tells her that she’s his heart and that he wishes they could make their love public but understands why she wants to keep it quiet.”
“Why would they need to keep it quiet?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe her father wouldn’t approve?”
Joe nodded.
“He talks about working for her father at the mill, and they mention the war overseas and the weather and various things about their day-to-day life, but the really fascinating part is that toward the end, he confides in her. He tells Alice that he wants to share a secret with her, something his mother cautioned him never to tell anyone.” Her voice rose with emotion. “John says his father is in prison for murder and goes on to say that his great-grandfather was a Negro. He says . . .” She rifled through the papers, stopping when she located the right one. “‘Could you love a man whose family is such as mine?’ John says he’ll be in agony awaiting her reply.”
Joe leaned in. “So what happened then?”
“In the last letter, John talks about Alice coming to visit him in the barn to reassure him that none of it matters, that she loves him for who he is. And he’s so relieved. He loves her back and says there will be no more secrets between them. He says he has good news, that her father has given him permission to escort her to the Barn Dance, and that he will be driving the wagon to take both Alice and her sister Pearl to the dance that night.”
He nodded. “So odd to hear my grandmother’s name as part of this.”
Kathleen looked up at him and nodded, tears slowly running down her cheeks. She wiped them away with the back of her hand. “John says he hopes the news about the dance will make her smile because he is smiling as well. The last letter is signed, ‘Yours forever.’ He was so happy. You can tell.”
Her voice caught in her throat. She set the pages on the table and covered her face with her hands, her shoulders beginning to shake. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I can’t help it,” she stammered.
Her crying startled Joe. When she’d first begun to read the letters, she’d seemed merely intrigued. Now she sobbed as if there had been a death in her family. He crouched down beside her chair. “Kathleen, are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay. I can’t help it. I’m just . . . I’m . . . I don’t know why, but I feel absolutely devastated. This wave of emotion just came over me. They were so in love, and we know the night of the Barn Dance was her last night, and it’s just not fair, is it?” She looked up at him, her eyes brimming with tears.
“No, it’s not fair.”
“There’s nothing we can do to stop it either,” she said, sounding a little bitter.
“Because it already happened,” Joe said. “Believe me, I’ve been there.” It came back to him—the helpless feeling of holding the dying woman in his arms, the horror at the sight of her blood, frantic in the knowledge she was slipping away from him. All this time, he hadn’t known that the man he’d been dreaming about had been John and the woman that he as John had loved was Alice. Attaching names didn’t lessen the intensity of the feeling. If anything, it made it more real and more terrible.
“She was so young. She’d barely had a chance to live, and then she died. It’s just so tragic.”
“I know.”
Kathleen got to her feet, and he rose as well. She surprised him by wrapping her arms around his neck and then holding tight. With her head nestled against his shoulder, she said, “I know this sounds crazy, but I feel like Alice wants me to find out the truth of what happened to the two of them.”
“I don’t think it sounds crazy at all.”
“Thank you,” she murmured. “Will you help me figure out what happened?”
He brushed the top of her head with his lips. “Of course I will.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
1983
After Kathleen left, Joe went to the kitchen to phone his father. He hadn’t called home since the night he’d arrived, but his father had called him several times over the last few weeks. Their conversations had been pleasant but guarded.
His parents still hoped he’d go back to Trendale. He tried to reassure them, saying that the dreams had subsided and he was feeling much better. “I’ve been sleeping really well,” he told his mom.
“And are you eating well too? Regular meals? Nutritious food?” She’d always been a bit of a worrier, something that had seemed grating when he’d lived at home. Now, given the distance and the time apart, he heard the love behind the worry and found it touching.
“Really well. Vegetables and everything.” That particular call had ended on a good note because he’d finished by talking to Linda, the only one in the family who’d never thought he was losing his mind. She just missed her brother.
And he missed her too. Funny how he’d taken the people in his life for granted.
During these phone calls, his dad would never elaborate on the reason he’d cut Pearl out of his life. If Joe broached the subject, his father would abruptly steer the conversation elsewhere. It wasn’t hard to read between the lines. The man didn’t want to talk about it.
Today, though, Joe was determined to find answers. He dialed his family’s number, nervously wrapping the cord around his finger while it rang. When Linda answered, he spent a few minutes listening to her excitedly chatter on about her baton lessons before asking to speak to their dad.
The initial greeting gave way to small talk about the weather. Joe waited for the first pause in the conversation before telling his dad everything that had transpired since they’d last talked. He started with his discovery after the thunderstorm. “Inside the metal box there was jewelry, a book of poetry, and love letters from a guy named John to your aunt Alice. It mentions them going to the Barn Dance here in town. Pearl’s friend said Alice died the night of the Barn Dance and that she was shot. It was an accident, he said. Do you know anything about that?”
His father sighed. “Joe, this all happened before I was born. Honestly, I never heard that Alice was shot. I knew she died young, and I assumed she died of some illness. My mother never talked about her. I sensed it was a sore spot, so I never brought it up.”
Joe couldn’t help himself. “It seems like not wanting to talk about things runs in the family.” He braced himself for some backlash; his dad didn’t take well to anything resembling criticism. Instead of being irritated, his father chuckled.
“We’re not the best communicators—that much is true,” he said. “That’s probably something I should work on.”
“Probably. And as long as you mentioned wanting to work on it, how about you start with this? What exactly happened that made you cut your mother out of your life?”
“This again.” His father’s voice had a tone of resignation.
“Yeah, this again. Neither of you will tell me, and since she’s dying of cancer, I’m thinking it has to come from you.”