“Thanks,” she said.
“Thank her when you phone her.”
She tucked her tape recorder, her notebook, the card, and her pen in her backpack.
“I didn’t even remember I’d talked to you,” he said as she zipped it closed.
“I thought you might not.”
“But you still came,” he said. There was a mocking edge to his voice.
She stuffed her Discman in the front pocket of the backpack. “I had to speak to her. You gave me an excuse to do it.”
“Can’t blame you for the initiative. That’s what Carolyn said: you’re a girl of great initiative. She appreciates courage,” he said. He smiled, but the smile was sardonic.
She stared at him, surprised that he called his grandmother by her first name. Minerva would never have been able to get away with that. It seemed…well, Nana Alba would have said it was presumptuous. But people were different here. Times were different, too.
“Can I ask how old your grandmother is?”
“Eighty-three.”
Eighty-three. She would have been nineteen in 1934, same as Virginia Somerset. Only Virginia remained undimmed by thepassage of time, as Beatrice had written in her manuscript. Preserved like a rose that had been pressed in a book, all scent vanishing but the shape of the flower remaining.
“Did you ever meet Beatrice Tremblay?”
“Yeah, when I was a kid. But I didn’t know her well, she dined with my grandparents sometimes.”
“Did you ever hear her mention a Virginia Somerset?”
“Are you using me for your research now?” he asked, again with that faint trace of mockery. “Don’t I have to sign a disclaimer or papers so you can interview me?”
“It’s a casual question, Mr. Yates.” She clutched her backpack with a firm hand and stared back at him.
He smiled openly, apparently amused by her response. “Beatrice called her Ginny. Do you want to see her drawings?”
He opened a drawer and handed her several sketches in charcoal. Minerva set them down on the table. Like the painting, they consisted of geometric shapes, sharp lines, with an energetic quality to the strokes. Abstractions.
“Carolyn doesn’t like them. Never did. But Grandfather would have never let her throw them out,” Noah said.
She looked down at the drawings again. “Then your family has had these for a long time?”
“Since before I was born. I think Ginny gave them to him.”
“Of course,” she said. “They were engaged.”
“For a bit.”
“Did your grandfather ever talk about Virginia?”
“Not to me. He talked to Beatrice about her. Carolyn hated it. They’d get all gloomy and speculate about whatever happened to the girl. My grandfather paid several investigators to find out where she’d gone.”
“And?”
“Carolyn said it was a waste of money. They never turned up anything.”
She looked up at the little painting on the wall and considered the manuscript she’d been reading. Beatrice had clearly been haunted by Virginia, so much so that decades after her death she’dtyped up her memories of the girl. Edgar Yates must have been haunted too, carefully hanging a painting by his former fiancée, keeping her sketches safe and sound, paying private investigators to look into her disappearance.
Had Carolyn been haunted as well, in her own intimate way? Minerva’s great-grandmother had also been haunted by a vanishing that had occurred decades earlier, a tale smeared with violence yet always out of focus because Nana Alba never provided a proper ending to her narrative. It always looped back to the beginning. Until the very end, until she was on her deathbed and whispered the final, quiet dénouement.
