Mine to Tell Read online

  Kyle handed me one of the handkerchiefs. “You’re going to need these,” he said.

  “Oh, my goodness,” I said again, ashamed that someone who wrote couldn’t think of anything more eloquent than those three simple words to say. Twice.

  As I cried into the handkerchief, I watched Kyle pick up the hairbrush and atomizer.

  He weighed them in his hands, as if thinking. “Venture any guess?” he asked, looking at me.

  I dabbed at my tears with the handkerchief, not sure what to think or say.

  He held up the atomizer. “Spread the scent of the flowers,” he said as if he was guessing. “And,” he held up the brush and looked at me, looked at my hair, looked beyond it at something else.

  “Work through the tangles and make it shine,” I said.

  “Good,” he congratulated me. He set the two items down and pointed at the tray. “That’s the thing that holds the small stuff together. Guess that’s the book. The story the two of you are telling.”

  “She was brilliant,” I said, fully in awe. “Thank you, Kyle,” I said, wishing again I had better words to convey what I felt.

  “No, thank you,” he said, as he rose to his knees. “You’re right. I’ve been half rooted, half not. I had some of me but not all. You’re helping me find all. You’ve helped me come alive.”

  He took me by the hand and drew me to my knees also. He hugged me then. Wrapped his arms around me and held me, his warmth spreading into mine. Then he let go and, one behind the other, we left Julianne’s sanctuary, climbing through the trap door and coming to rest in the upstairs room she’d left empty.

  As we started down the stairs, I heard the front door open and my mother’s voice fill the entry room.

  “Annabelle,” she called. She rounded the corner as Kyle and I were halfway down the stairs. “Oh,” she muttered when she saw us, her voice falling. Kyle proceeded down the steps, undaunted by her reaction, her assumption we’d been upstairs alone and up to no good.

  “Hello,” he said as he reached the bottom.

  She barely nodded and turned to me. “You have two messages,” she said abruptly. I came down and stepped past Kyle to take the handwritten notes. “Call your editor, Edith, immediately,” my mother had written, conveying Edith’s usual urgency. And “Trevor called. He wants to speak with you,” was written with more care, more finesse, on the other.

  She was glaring at Kyle, who seemed unaware of her dark stare. “I hope you’ll answer at least one of these right away,” she said, looking at me. I knew she meant Trevor’s.

  I glanced up at Kyle.

  He smiled and nodded. “See you later.” He smiled at my mother, who didn’t return the kindness, and he let himself out.

  My mother turned her gaze on me. “You certainly don’t have to marry Trevor,” she said, “but I don’t like the way you’re carrying on here.”

  I stepped to my mother’s side and put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t jump to conclusions,” I said, looking her in the eye. “Let me tell my story. I promise I’ll tell the truth.”

  Chapter 51

  “Let the dead bury their dead.”

  I lived between houses, cooking and cleaning for Isaac and his boys in one, cooking and cleaning for me and for Samuel in the other. Samuel’s resemblance to Isaac was undeniable, and as he grew Isaac noticed, his eyes staying on the boy who followed me to their house when I worked for them. He eventually spoke to the boy, little words, then fragments of sentences, then full ones. He said more to Samuel than he ever did to me. Even when Isaac’s eyes said he knew now he’d misjudged the boy’s heritage, he still held to his condemnation of me. When Samuel was three, Isaac moved him to his house, the boy crying at first while I sang to him in his new bed in his new room upstairs. But he eventually adjusted and became a part of Isaac’s world as much as he was of mine.

  It was Samuel who came to my door when he was twelve, telling me Isaac was dead, had died in his sleep. None of them but Samuel ever came to my door, he being the only bridge between me and them, his older half-brothers growing cold to me over the years. I hugged him and he let me, our bond slightly diminished by the distinction of the two homes—or the reputation his father had planted in his thoughts.

  No one told me they were sorry for me when I stood next to Samuel at Isaac’s funeral. They told him and his brothers, who stood at his other side, but they only glanced at me and nodded, dislike and condemnation on their faces.

  I wasn’t released by this new widowhood any more than I’d already been freed. Isaac had never been mine and I’d never been his, not legally, not morally, not in heart, not even in proximity. And the chains these faces tried to bind me in were theirs, not mine, their misunderstanding of what was the truth keeping them fettered while I was free.

  I smiled. I nodded. I stood next to Samuel and shared a distant sorrow with them. They mourned the passing of a man of God who’d been wronged. I let him go, hoping he’d at least meet the God he’d misrepresented, and that that God would forgive Isaac his wrongs like He’d forgiven me mine.

  Chapter 52

  “If they were written in detail,

  I suppose that even the world itself would not contain

  all the books which were written.”

  “It’s about time you called,” Edith reprimanded me over the phone. I stood in my parents’ kitchen, my mother circling me as she usually did when I made calls from their house. I made a face at her, and she smiled in return, more peace in her face than I’d ever known.

  “Sorry.” I decided to lie. “The message relays are so slow around here. Miles to travel, poor road conditions, horrible weather.”

  “Knock it off,” Edith said, a bit of laughter in her rebuke. “I’ve got news for you.”

  “What is it?” I asked, not really too impressed with Edith’s mystery or urgency. She was prone to dramatics, the perfect person to be in the media, happy to embellish and widen anyone’s eyes.

  “Award time,” she sang. “Your story has been chosen for the High Point Award for journalism.” She was talking with a true fervor now, not one of her overly dramatized strains.

  My mouth fell open, causing my mother to pause and stare as if she had heard Edith’s news. “High Point?” I finally asked. My mother’s eyebrows knitted together. The term meant nothing to her, but my tone did.

  “Yes. The ceremony is next month, and you have to be here,” she demanded, as if I would need coaxing for such an honor. “You and that young man who’s been helping you. They want him here, too.”

  I still couldn’t muster anything to say, my shock killing my ability to think and reason. The High Point Award. Was there anything more honorable for a new journalist to work toward after this? I couldn’t wait to tell Kyle.

  “And of course now you have to turn it into a book,” she continued, since I was giving her plenty of open air space. The story had already gone AP, quite a few newspapers picking it up across the country.

  I nodded, unable to speak. My mother grabbed the phone from my hand and shouted into the mouthpiece.

  “I don’t know what you’re saying, but Annabelle nodded yes,” she said and then thrust the handset back into my hand.

  “Good,” Edith said.

  “I just can’t believe it,” I finally managed to stammer.

  “Well, believe it. How much more of the story is there?” she asked.

  “Not all that much,” I said.

  She was quiet for a moment. “I wish it could go on forever,” she mused.

  “It does,” I promised. I knew she wouldn’t understand that until the end, but that was all she needed to know for the time being.

  We finished discussing the details and hung up, my mind still in a blur of oblivion. My mother watched me expectantly, so I spelled out as much of it as I could, her eyes growing as wide as mine felt, happiness dancing in them until worry etched across her brow.

  “It’s okay, Mama,” I said. “You know that.” And she did. She’d been
reading everything I wrote, and Julianne’s story had worked on her, too.

  She nodded. Then she looked at me, placing her fists on her hips. “Now for that next call,” she said. “You’ve made him wait long enough. And who knows, maybe he’s got something as special as that Edith woman had for you.”

  Trevor. I wasn’t so sure.

  Chapter 53

  “You shall not distort justice, you shall not be partial,

  and you shall not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds

  the eyes of the wise and perverts the words

  of the righteous.”

  “Last letter,” Kyle said, as he pulled the final envelope from the stack. He eyed me expectantly, showing off that he already knew what it said.

  “Okay, I’m ready,” I announced, dropping onto my sofa.

  He sat down beside me and went through his usual opening ritual. He shook the page out once he had it open. “Here goes,” he said, teasing me. I rolled my eyes.

  June 18, 1930

  Mrs. Crouse,

  The case involving the late Mr. Isaac Crouse and the late Mrs. Beatrice Crenshaw-Herbert has reached a natural settlement by the recent death of the latter and the determination of her heirs to drop the charges.

  I looked up and grabbed Kyle’s forearm. “Your family was in a legal battle with Isaac?”

  “With Julianne,” he said, unruffled.

  “You’re kidding,” I began but didn’t finish. I nodded eagerly, telling him to continue.

  Charges of violation of a verbal agreement to marry the widow Crenshaw-Herbert on March 25, 1907, have been dropped, and all monetary obligations resulting from the breach of promise dissolved.

  “What?” I interrupted again. “He was supposed to marry someone else instead of Julianne?”

  “My great-grandmother,” Kyle said, less matter-of-factly than he may have intended. I frowned, and he continued. “If the charge was true, then the dates of things make it look like he backed out on a proposal and married Julianne instead. A younger woman with more land to bring to his name. It doesn’t say it in her story, but along with her, he assumed the rights to a large part of her father’s land, an amount equal to what would have been her inheritance. My great-grandmother had less to offer.”

  He said it without derision, and I was grateful for that. If this was true, Isaac had been a self-serving, greedy letch and deserved Kyle’s open criticism. But it wasn’t there. Not on his face, not in his words. I tilted my head and studied him. “You’re glad you’re not related to him, aren’t you?”

  He smiled and settled back on the sofa. “There is that,” he said, but he didn’t sound as if he really meant it or that it mattered. He leaned his head against the back of the sofa, then twisted it my direction. “You know what really mattered to me?” he asked.

  My mind raced, trying to guess. I shook my head.

  “The truth. I found an old photograph of your great-grandmother amongst some papers hidden away in our attic when I was a boy. I didn’t think much about it until that one time I came to your house. Remember?”

  I shook my head. Kyle at my house? He was almost nonexistent in my memory, just as he’d tried to be everywhere he went as a boy. He wasn’t that way now, though. He’d transformed, grown, and found himself.

  “The bus dropped me off with you and your brother one day when my parents were gone. I just stayed about an hour and then walked home. I lied to your mother and told her I was supposed to do that. She doubted me, but I went anyway. I was too uncomfortable there after I saw you with Julianne’s picture. I recognized her and asked you who she was. You told me, and all the rumors and family accusations came back to me. Then I had to leave.”

  “Why would your family have her picture?” I asked, half my mind still trying to remember Kyle at my house, ashamed he’d been there, I’d spoken to him, yet I’d apparently cared so little that I’d brushed him off and let him go.

  “Don’t worry that you don’t remember me being there,” he said with that uncanny knack of his for reading my inner thoughts. He patted my knee like I was a child who’d just been caught at something semi-naughty. “I went home and ran up to the attic and dug out that picture, and it was her, all right. I turned it over in my hands and read the back, something I hadn’t done before.”

  I held my breath, terrified that whatever it said would undo the awe I’d gained for her. I wished he hadn’t told me any of this, wished I could stop him before her story was ruined.

  He patted my leg, trying to calm me. “It said, ‘Beauty stands in the admiration only of weak minds led captive.’ That’s Milton. I looked it up later.”

  My gasp went away. I frowned, scrunched my face, wondering what it meant.

  “She was beautiful, your great-grandmother. I can understand how mine would be jealous and spiteful, spiteful enough to try to gain part of Julianne’s inheritance after Isaac passed.” He picked up the letter again, while my mouth gaped, and straightened and finished reading.

  No obligations remain for the estate of Isaac Crouse or his heirs.

  The firm of Lahler and Rite

  Kyle squared himself on the sofa and looked at me. “My family has always been tied to yours,” he said. “My great-grandmother was devastated by Isaac’s dismissal of her, and I guess she carried the pain into her second marriage with my great-grandfather. Mom told me she accused him of having an affair with Julianne. No one knew who to believe, my great-grandmother or my great-grandfather. Was your great-grandmother everything everyone said? Was it my great-grandfather’s weak mind that bothered my great-grandmother, or Isaac’s? And”—he gripped my knee a little tighter—“were you and I related? It all came down to Julianne. But now we know she was nothing like the woman people wanted her to be. My great-grandfather is never mentioned in her story. You and I are not genetically bound.”

  He looked relieved as he said it. I had never known for sure who I was an heir of, and now suddenly realizing the impact of not being related to Kyle hit me hard. “This story comes at a cost for your family, doesn’t it?”

  “It keeps the dirty laundry where it belongs. Isaac and my great-grandmother. They’re our families’ skeletons in the closets, not Julianne. Don’t worry, my mom’s been reading these articles all along. I’ve been getting the newspaper from Cincinnati since the beginning and letting her read it. She’s been relieved to hear it and can’t wait for your book.” He grinned. “All I want to know is who in my family read Milton. I’ve got their genes, whoever they were. I’m the only one interested in the arts or literature. I’m the throwback, like you.”

  “I’m glad we’re not related,” I said. “Could have happened, you know.”

  He gazed off around the room and thought for a moment. “That might actually be a relief to some people if we were,” he said, and he grinned.

  “Well, we’re not,” I said definitively.

  Kyle looked at me long and hard before he stood to go. “This we’ve learned,” he said as he rose from the sofa. “You can’t save your family from ruin and you should love whoever you want.” He winked and went out the door.

  Chapter 54

  “Draw me after you and let us run together.”

  The next time I saw him was today. At my door. His face was the same, but older and more at peace. I drew in my breath, my hand at my heart. I’d always thought of him as perfect, but he was even better now, richer in character, stronger in heart.

  “John…”

  “I’ve come for you,” he said, “just as I came years ago, but this time you’re going with me.”

  I thought of my son, Isaac’s sons, step-grandchildren born and to be born, blood grandchildren yet to come.

  “Come in,” I bade him.

  He followed me in, stepped into the little house that was to have been my prison and looked around as if pleased. “I feel you here, Julianne,” he said approvingly.

  He was right. There was no one else to this house but me. Even my son, Samuel, didn’t call it h
ome. I’d had years here to breathe my essence into the building, and now, now that John was here, I was done. “I have to tell someone goodbye first,” I said. He smiled. It was as if he knew what I knew. Someone was coming after me, someone who would hear my voice and find my words to go with it.

  He wandered to my kitchen as if he’d done it dozens of times before. He looked at the solitary chair at the table. “I’ll be fine here,” he said as he smiled.

  I turned away, hearing the pleasant noises behind me as he made himself comfortable in my kitchen. I pulled out the Bible, this Bible that Isaac had given me, and marked these last letters for you, my someone. John’s wife has passed away, as has Isaac. These two people have taken with them a part of us but left behind polished pearls, of greater value for the strife that formed them. He’s sitting in my front entry room now, watching me underline a few last letters and words in my Bible before I set it in its tin box and carry it up to my attic.

  I’m writing this to you, whoever you are that reads this, that takes the time to learn the truth and understand love and its cost. I don’t know your name, but I know your heart. It’s my heart, too, one you must trust because I’m trusting it with my story… your story… everyone’s story.

  Broken hearts love more deeply when there’s forgiveness and honesty.

  Chapter 55

  “You are our letter, written in our hearts,

  known and read by all men.”

  I entered Cincinnati’s cultural and arts center on Kyle’s arm. His parents and my parents and even Paul Junior came in behind us. The lights and sounds were overwhelming us, a whirlwind of airplanes, hotels, and fast cab rides bringing us to this dizzying spectacle. My new dress was far too glittery, but Edith had sent it to my hotel with a note commanding me to wear it. Kyle looked stiff in his tuxedo, but he was bearing up well. My mother’s hand kept touching my shoulder as she tried to make coherent comments above the din about the glamour and glitz around us, pride and amazement making her babble rather than speak.