The blood buzzed in Angelina’s head and her knees grew weaker. Angelina couldn’t speak, her lips slack and useless, unable to form words. Again, Mrs. Chamberlain didn’t seem to require an answer and turned away, toward Astrid. “Is that clear, Astrid?” she practically hissed.
“Yes, Mother,” Astrid agreed.
Angelina’s eyes moved sluggishly toward Astrid. Astrid was gazing at her lap again, her expression blank. She’d helped them, yes, when she believed their secret would remain undetected. But Astrid was no match for her mother. She never had been.
“Now then,” Mrs. Chamberlain said, reaching for a match on the mantel and striking it quickly. She held the diary over the fireplace grate and brought the match to it. The pages ignited quickly, the flame billowing so that Mrs. Chamberlain was forced to let go of it. It fell into the fireplace where it continued to burn to ashes.
A sob rose up Angelina’s throat, her hands shaking as she willed herself to remain calm. This was a warning. A bone-chilling warning of what was to come.
The war John was fighting had found Windisle Plantation. The storm approached. And Angelina was its eye. Defenseless.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“I called you last night,” Marco said. “You never called me back.”
Clara grimaced and turned toward him. She sincerely felt bad for basically ignoring his attempts to get hold of her the last week. “Sorry, Marco. By the time I got your message it was late.” The truth was, she’d been talking to Jonah and had seen his call come through. It’d been an easy choice to let it go to voicemail.
“And I knew I’d be seeing you today. You were amazing out there, by the way. You’re going to knock them dead at the performance.”
“Thanks,” he stepped closer, leaning his head forward and peering at the place where she still had a bruise on her forehead. She’d dabbed stage makeup on it before heading to work, but she’d apparently sweated it off. “What happened?”
Clara brought her fingers to the sore spot on her forehead. “I walked into a door.”
Marco raised a brow, looking dubious. “You? One of the most graceful, sure-footed people I know, walked into a door?”
Clara laughed, uncomfortable with her obvious lie—she’d never been good at coming up with believable falsehoods but wasn’t willing to get into how her bruise had actually occurred.
“Even the most graceful trip or stumble every once in a while.” Sometimes graceful people fall over fences onto their faces as a matter of fact, she thought with an internal cringe.
“I guess. Anyway, I—”
“Hey Marco,” Roxanne said, coming up behind him, a flirtatious smile on her face. He turned toward her. “I was wondering if you have some time tonight to go over the scene in the—”
Clara took the opportunity to duck away and head toward the door. She didn’t want Marco to offer her a ride. She didn’t want to engage in idle chitchat with anyone. She wanted to get on the bus and lose herself in her own thoughts, the roar of the bus’s engine allowing her to drift from the world around her back in time to Angelina’s. And maybe, if she let her mind wander, some of those elusive puzzle pieces would begin to fit together.
She also wanted to spend more time looking through Justin’s folder, the folder now kept safely in her duffel bag.
Thankfully, the bus was coming around the corner as Clara walked to the stop at the end of the block. She jogged to make it just as the doors opened and she swiped her phone, smiling in greeting to the driver.
Each time she boarded a bus, it reminded her of her father, how hard he’d worked day in and day out for her. How he’d come home with a smile on his face even though he must have been exhausted. The thought always caused a pang of love to tighten her chest. It’d been so long since they’d sat and talked about their days, about the funny things that happened at work, to the frustrating prima donnas she’d dealt with dancing. How she missed him. Down deep to her soul.
Clara took a seat on the mostly empty bus, leaning her head back and enjoying the white noise of the engine, and for the first time all day she sat still and gave her muscles a rest.
Physically, she enjoyed the stillness, but the ten minutes didn’t serve to connect any drifting puzzle pieces in her mind. Clara sighed in frustration, sitting up and lifting the Chamberlain family file from her bag.
She rifled through it, reading over a few of the documents she’d already looked at, and then opened a manila envelope near the back that contained several old letters to Herbert Davies that appeared to be business correspondence, but that she already knew were letters from his wife, Astrid.
She hadn’t had time to read through all of them the day before, because the script was so formal and full of flourishes that reading was slow-going.
She’d read enough to know that Astrid was working with Herbert in his construction efforts, but no more. But she took the time then to read through a few more, stopping at several lines that Astrid had written in all capitals and underlined in two heavy strikes of ink. “We must never choose safety over right. Safety is the blanket under which cowards sleep. Safety smothers hope and extinguishes all fight.”
Clara read the lines once, then again. They had obviously meant something deeply to Astrid. Clara noted again the way the writing grew bold and slightly shaky as if her hand had trembled as she’d clutched the pen and scrawled the words.
Clara returned the letters to their envelopes slowly, feeling troubled. But why? What was she missing?
Her brow drew inward as more puzzle pieces appeared, still without any matches. The picture was there, she felt it. She just needed to arrange the pieces properly so it became clear. She’d call Jonah when she got home and ask him what he thought.
Safety is the blanket under which cowards sleep. Who had been the coward? And what safe option had someone chosen over right?
She straightened the large stack of papers in the folder, the family tree at the top catching her eye.
Clara ran her finger down the list of names she’d already looked at, her finger stopping at Jonah’s as she circled it lightly, her finger halting when she noted the date. “Oh my God,” she whispered, stuffing the folder quickly into her bag as her stop came into view. And of course, he hadn’t said a thing.
Clara looked at her phone, noting the time. She had just enough to make it to the shop about ten blocks from her house where she’d seen something that would be perfect for the occasion of which she’d just learned.
**********
Clara took a deep breath before rapping loudly on the gate where Myrtle had let her out a few days before.
If she hadn’t been shown the gate, she would have never known there was an entrance other than the one covered in thorns at the front of the property.
What she now knew had at one point been an unpaved driveway, was so overgrown by reedy grass that it looked like a field, and apparently, even the sedan that Clara had seen parked inside and knew must be used at least occasionally, could not keep it flattened permanently.
If an outside observer looked around that side of the wall, they would see that the river all but butted against it, only separated by that weedy strip of what looked like marsh.
It looked unstable, and perhaps dangerous, and she certainly wouldn’t have ventured beyond the tall grass had she not known that there was an entry gate beyond it.
“Who’s there?” Myrtle demanded.
“It’s Clara, Myrtle,” she said and there was a pause before Clara heard Myrtle unlatching the gate and then pulling it open.
“Clara dear, is everything okay?” She stood at the entrance, blocking the opening, squinting mightily without her thick glasses, and Clara’s heart squeezed.
This old woman who could barely see was acting as Jonah’s protection, a barrier of love from the outside world. And somehow Clara knew she would fight viciously to defend him.
“Yes, Myrtle, everything’s fine.” She held up the gift, offering it to Myrtle. “It’s a birthday present for Jonah. Will you give it to him for me? I called his phone but he didn’t answer, and then I called his name at the weeping wall, but he didn’t answer there either, and I’d . . . I’d really like him to have this.”