“It’s Anna. Would you open the door, please?”
“I’d rather not.”
“I’m going to work. Before I leave, I’d like to see you.”
She didn’t reply. Last night I had respected her privacy, but I didn’t think it smart to let her isolate herself for this amount of time, especially since someone other than she may have been searching the house.
“I am going to open your door,” I warned her.
“You can try, but it’s locked.”
I did, and it was. “Aunt Iris, when I got home last night, it looked as if someone had searched my room and Uncle Will’s study.”
She didn’t make a sound. It frustrated me that, unable to see her face, I couldn’t tell if this was news to her. “Was anyone else here last night?”
“I don’t remember.”
“There was a cell phone in my room, in my suitcase. It’s gone.”
“It wasn’t yours,” she said.
“Where is it now?”
“I don’t remember.”
“There was a newspaper article about my mother’s death and a draft of a letter to the police, asking for information about it. Did you take them?”
She didn’t answer.
“Somebody did,” I said.
“I’m glad they’re gone. William was being foolish.”
So she knew about the documents. “I want them back.”
“The past is the past. I tried to tell William that. He wouldn’t listen to me. We can do nothing about the past.”
“We can understand it!”
I strode down the hall to the room with the blue-flowered wallpaper. It was time for me to face the contents of the mahogany bureau, to learn whatever I could from the bits and pieces left behind by my mother.
I entered the room and, after a moment of hesitation, slid open the small top drawer of the bureau. Combs, hair fasteners, and several pairs of earrings — simple, inexpensive ones, like the kind I would buy — lay with a note written in my uncle’s hand: These are for Anna. I liked the necklace next to them, a chain with a pendant. I touched it gently, then held it up to the window light, admiring its clear golden drop — amber, I thought. I fastened it around my neck and felt the way it rested against my chest, as if it belonged to and had been waiting for me.
I opened the next drawer and found underwear, ordinary stuff. In the next were T-shirts. I held them up to me, wondering if my mother and I were the same size; we were.
In the next drawer I discovered jeans. Straightening up, I held them against me. Yup.
I opened the last drawer. It was filled with scarves — red, pink, purple — some plain, some with geometric shapes. I picked up a filmy pink one and draped it around my neck.
Footsteps sounded in the hall, and I turned quickly to see Aunt Iris standing in the doorway. She cocked her head to one side, studying me, then stepped into the room.
“You would look so much better, Joanna, with your hair out of your face.”
Anna, I was about to say, then caught myself. Maybe, if I pretended to be Joanna, she would talk as if we were in the past and tell me things I needed to know. I opened the top drawer again, picked up a comb and an elastic band, and pulled my hair up on my head.
“Better, much better,” she said, “but don’t let it hang like a horse’s tail.”
I twisted my hair into a bun and pinned it in place, feeling a little creepy, knowing that this was what Mr. Gill had wanted me to do.
She nodded approvingly.
I tried to think of something to talk about that would seem natural coming from Joanna. “I have appointments with two clients today.”
She sighed. “We have plenty of money. You should focus on your studies.”
“But you have clients,” I argued.
“Mine can be trusted,” she replied. “It’s yours that bite.”
I laughed, trying to be agreeable. “I like helping people, the same way you like helping animals.”
“You must be careful whom you help,” she said. “Forget about Mick.”
“Mick?” I asked.
“Let go of the past. It’s over now. Nothing can be done.”
“Mick?” I repeated.
Her eyes sparked. “Stop pretending, Joanna! I know what you’re up to!”
I wondered if Mick were my father. “You mean my. . my lover,” I said tentatively.
She looked stunned. “Your lover?”
“Well, who else’s?” I replied, frustrated.
My aunt shook her head. “You should have married Elliot Gill when you had the chance. He would have provided for you and Anna.”
“Because he is Anna’s father,” I responded, not trusting what Mr. Gill had told me last night.
My aunt took a step back. “He is? That’s not what you told me.”
I played with my scarf, afraid that if I said much more, she would realize I wasn’t Joanna.
“You said he was from California,” Aunt Iris went on. “You said he lied about himself, gave you a false name, and never told you he was married.”
Their stories matched. “That’s right,” I replied. “I was joking about Elliot. But I can’t stop thinking about Mick,” I added, hoping she would explain why she wanted Joanna to forget him.
She said nothing more, but I had observed her response, the way she flinched at his name. As soon as possible, I would check my mother’s appointment book to see if I could find a reference to him, although the initial M began a lot of common names. Maybe Erika’s father would know who Mick was. I would call him at work.
Work! “Oh no, I’m going to be late!” I said, dropping the scarf on the bureau and rushing past Aunt Iris. I grabbed my purse from my room and dashed to my car. Flying up the rutted driveway, I sent cats racing in all directions.
“NEW HAIRSTYLE, VERY professional,” Marcy observed when I entered the shop that morning.
“It’s cooler this way.”
“It’s perfect with that necklace, pretty and professional.
The fact is, people like pretty women and pretty things, and it’s foolish for a businesswoman not to use those assets.”
“I guess.”
She laughed her tinkly laugh and turned back to the display she was creating.
The shop was busy through lunchtime, then the crowd dwindled at the usual hour — three o’clock. Marcy gave me a list of names and addresses to enter into the store’s computerized database while she worked on her laptop. We drifted in and out of conversation, and I kept waiting for her to bring up last night’s “date.” To my relief, she didn’t.
At three thirty she rose to stretch, then glanced out the front window. “I was wondering when he’d show up.”
“Who?”
“I’ve been biting my tongue,” Marcy admitted, “trying not to ask how it went last night.”
“The party was nice.”
She lowered her head to look at me over her reading glasses. “Zack was not exactly his charming, cheerful self this morning.”
I nodded but said nothing.
“I’ll stay out of it,” she said. “Given my track record before I met Dave, the last thing you want from me is romantic advice.”
She returned to her computer, and I retyped a misspelled address — three times. Zack entered the shop.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
If the normal “hi” were sung the length of a half note, we held ours for just a sixteenth.
“Hello, Zack,” Marcy said. “How is everything with your father?”
“Fine. I was hoping to talk to Anna. Can she take a break?”
“She has earned one,” Marcy replied, “but it’s up to her if she wants to take it now.”
Zack turned to me. “We need to talk.”
“I’m listening.”
“I mean outside.”
I glanced at Marcy. She had walked behind Zack, pretending to be adjusting something on a shelf, but turned her head toward me and gave a slight nod.