“What can you tell us?” Peter asked. “And I’m afraid to ask if I totally messed up the book.”
“You didn’t mess up anything,” Mr.Thornby told him. “I was just saying to Gwen what a terrific job you did. It felt like a magic carpet ride back to that summer we spent together. You described everything perfectly.”
“Thank you,” Peter said. “I appreciate that more than you’ll ever know.”
“Can you tell us about that summer?” Gwen asked, interrupting. “And what happened afterward? I’m curious why you never responded to Valerie’s letters.”
“Because I never received them,” he explained. “You wrote well and accurately about our breakup, which was one of those moments in life when you’re young and foolish and do stupid things. But I did love Valerie, and I thought we’d work everything out. Then life got in the way.”
“How so?” Peter asked.
Mr.Thornby folded his arms across his chest. “I shouldn’t saylifegot in the way. It was her father and mine. When the summer endedand I finished my job in the apple orchard, I went back to Halifax but quickly realized my mistake in ending things with Valerie. I missed her and realized I didn’t want to live without her, so I drove back to Wolfville and knocked on her door. Her father answered and told me that she had taken off to New York to become an actress and he had no contact information. He blamed me, of course, for breaking her heart and causing her to run away from home. He said nothing about a pregnancy.”
Mr.Thornby shook his head with regret.
“What about the last letter she sent on the day of the earthquake? Did that one ever reach you?”
Gwen and Peter waited with bated breath for Mr.Thornby to respond, but he took his time. He looked out the window again.
“I don’t know what happened to that letter from the time she handed it to the cook on the supply ship to the day it was finally delivered to her aunt in Nova Scotia. It was unopened, but it was dirty, and the ink was smudged in places and difficult to read, as if it had been stuck under a sack of potatoes or something. Anyway, by the time I read it, three years had passed. Valerie had just received her first Oscar, and I had moved on. Or at least I thought I had.”
“What do you mean?” Gwen asked.
Mr.Thornby looked down at his hands on his lap and revealed that there had been a phone call—a long-distance call from a telephone booth on the main street of Wolfville to a private mansion in the Hollywood Hills. It hadn’t been easy to reach “Ms.Fontaine,” but with effort, he had finally gotten through. It was his name that had made it past the gatekeepers.
“I told the person who answered that my name was Drew Thornby. She left me waiting on the line for a second. Then she said, ‘Yes, Ms.Fontaine is willing to take your call. Please hold on. Here she is.’”
Mr.Thornby paused before he was able to continue. “I could barely breathe while I waited. I wanted so badly to see her in person.”
CHAPTER 31
1967
Scarlett Fontaine picked up the desk phone. She dragged the cord as she carried it to the large window that overlooked the swimming pool. The view from her living room looked out over the Hollywood Hills, where the setting sun splashed wide ribbons of pink across the sky.
“Drew,” she said with aloofness. “How nice to hear from you.”
Inside a telephone booth in the small town of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Drew was dripping wet, drenched from running through the driving rain in the darkness. “I just read your letter,” he said, still out of breath and panting. “Your aunt Mary came to see me tonight, and she gave it to me.”
Dropping the mantle of Scarlett Fontaine, Valerie frowned as she comprehended this news. Why hadn’t Aunt Mary told her?
Turning away from the window, she carried the phone with her and moved to a blue velvet chair. “You only just received it? Which letter?”
“What do you mean,which letter?” Drew asked. “There was more than one?”
“There were at least twenty,” she told him. “But obviously they never reached you.”
Drew felt suddenly sick to his stomach. “I never received anything. And I didn’t know you were pregnant, Valerie.God!Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you run off like you did?”
“Because you didn’t want me!” she replied, exasperated. “Don’t remember that?”
The anger in her voice was like a glass of ice water splashed in Drew’s face. He fought to make sense of this and speak the truth. “It was a stupid fight, and God knows I regretted it. After I left the farm, I couldn’t bear the thought of being without you, so I drove back to Wolfville and went to your house. But your father said you’d left for New York. He insisted he didn’t have any contact information, and no one else seemed to know anything. None of your friends would tell me anything.”
“That’s because they didn’t know,” she said.
“Yes, but ...”
He leaned back against the glass window while rain pelted the booth. “Please tell me what happened. I saw you inThe Last Castle, and I thought you wanted to go to Hollywood to make all your dreams come true, that you had no regrets about leaving me. But tonight, when I read your letter, I couldn’t believe it. It made me happy because you said you’d had our child and you still loved me. I thought I was dreaming. But now I’m wondering if it was just a cruel joke.”
