“What gave me away?”
“Just a hunch,” he replied. “But it sure took you long enough.”
She sat forward slightly. “What do you mean?”
“It’s been more than half a century since the quake,” he said. “And your famous cousin has been gone for a quarter of a century. You’re her family. Didn’t you wonder what happened to her when she was here?”
It was a blatant accusation of not caring enough, but Gwen let it roll off her back because she was grateful for Jeremy’s candor—and for the fact that he seemed to have a genuine understanding of the situation and Scarlett’s lifelong estrangement from her family. Not to mention her desire for privacy. He must have known her personally, and he must have known her well.
“We didn’t even know she spent time in Alaska,” Gwen explained. “We thought she went to New York that year. It was pure luck that we stumbled across the newspaper clipping and recognized her.”
Jeremy sipped his whiskey. “It’s a wonder no one picked up on that before now. I thought for sure when she won that first Oscar that the gossip magazines would be calling, but no one ever did.”
“Amazing,” Gwen said. “But it’s a grainy photograph, and you’re the main focus.”
“Lucky for her.” He sipped his whiskey again.
Gwen sat forward. “Yes, because she valued her privacy, especially at the end of her life.”
His eyes narrowed. “You talk like you knew her, but judging by the look of you, you couldn’t even have been born when she passed.”
“You’re right. I never met her, but I wish I had. My grandmother kept in touch with her over the years, but that was Valerie’s only connection to Nova Scotia after she left. She never came home again. Are you aware that I’m the curator of the Scarlett Fontaine Museum in NovaScotia? It’s in the house where Valerie grew up. I manage the collection, so I guess you could say I’m a bit of an expert on her life.”
He laughed at that. “No, you’re not. No one is.”
Gwen felt a chill of unease. “But you must knowsomething,” she said. “You’re the only person on record who knows about ... let’s just call it the lost year.”
He smirked. “I do know a bit about that.” He said nothing more, and she wondered if he was intentionally drawing out the suspense and taking some pleasure in it.
“Can you confirm that she had a baby here in Alaska?” Gwen asked.
Jeremy regarded her with ire, and she worried that she’d pushed too hard and too fast.
Finally, he nodded. “I can confirm it. But it wasn’t Scarlett Fontaine who had the baby. It was Valerie McCarthy, a nice girl in a bad situation.”
Gwen frowned. “How bad?”
He shook his head at her, as if she should know about this. “Her father was a tyrant. He sent her away to put her baby up for adoption and—”
“I do know about that,” Gwen said, interrupting him. “That he was very strict.”
Jeremy sipped his whiskey. “Based on what she told me, she had no one when she came here. No one who cared about her.”
“Not even the father of her baby?” Gwen asked.
Jeremy shook his head morosely.
“So ...” Gwen sat forward and rested her arms on the table. “You were close to her? She opened up to you?”
“I wouldn’t say we were close,” he replied, “but she was an honest person, and we had a lot in common.”
Gwen found that difficult to believe, because Jeremy was—according to Douglas Warren, the museum curator—a petty thief and feared by half the town of Valdez.
“How did you become friends with her?” Gwen asked.
Jeremy stared into his glass and swirled the amber liquid around. “She worked with a girl who was ... let’s just say she was a friend of mine.”
Gwen picked up her pen. “What was her name?”
