He’d been specifically asked, from beyond the grave, not to show the things Mimi had entrusted to him to Ella. And though she hadn’t said it in so many words, he’d read it as implying that he wasn’t to open the boxes or look at the contents either, or at least not yet, but rather to squirrel them away until some unspecified time in the future.
The problem was, how was he supposed to use his ‘best judgment’ when he had no idea what it was he was judging?
Needless to say his wife, Mary, felt it was an open-and-shut case. ‘You have to honor Mimi’s requests, Jim. It’s not complicated. This was her property, after all. She trusted you to do what she asked.’
‘Yes, but what did she ask, exactly?’ Jim challenged Mary.
‘For you to put the boxes away and forget about them.’
For a few months, Jim Newsome had managed the first part, putting the crates, unopened, into the rafters in one of his dry barns, far away on the part of his property where nobody ever went. But ‘forgetting about them’ was never an option. On the one hand, he naturally wanted to do right by his friend. But on the other, these things had in fact belonged to Ella’s parents. Wouldn’t they have wanted their only child to have them? Allowing her to make up her own mind about whatever it was that had been hidden inside? Jim Newsome felt guilty that he, a virtual stranger, should be in possession of things that, by all natural laws, ought to have been Ella’s. Mimi Praeger wasn’t infallible, after all. What if her desire to protect her granddaughter was unfounded in this case? What if the contents of the boxes provided a link to Ella’s parents, to her past, that would prove vital to her future happiness?
What if …?
There were too many ‘what ifs’ for Jim Newsome’s liking. So early last Sunday morning, he’d walked up to the barn, opened just one of the four boxes, and come to a decision. The next day he’d telephoned Ella and arranged today’s meeting.
‘I apologize for meeting you here and not at home,’ he said quietly, his thin lips barely opening wide enough to let the words out. ‘But I daren’t tell Mary I contacted you. She means well, but she doesn’t see this the way I do. I wouldn’t want to upset her none.’
‘Of course not,’ said Ella. She didn’t want to upset Mary Newsome either, or risk having the meddlesome, disapproving old biddy looking over her shoulder when she read … whatever it was she was going to read. God, she was excited!
It had been torture since she’d met with Mark Redmayne in the Hamptons a few weeks ago, exchanging polite encrypted messages about possible future missions and ‘next steps’ for her training with The Group, while being unable to discover anything further about the ‘secret’ being kept from her. (Or about Gabriel’s whereabouts, for that matter.) Ella had gone over every possible scenario in her mind that might conceivably have involved both Athena Petridis and her mother – anything that Mark Redmayne would want to conceal from her. But nothing seemed to stick. Besides, until she was summoned back to active duty with The Group, until she was in a position to intercept more data traffic on the matter, it was all conjecture anyway. Blind guesswork. Ella had been climbing the walls with frustration when she got Jim Newsome’s call. But how wonderfully ironic it would be if she learned the truth about her parents, not from the duplicitous Redmayne or his acolytes at Camp Hope, but from her parents themselves? What if Jim’s boxes, his precious papers, held the answers she was looking for? What if they’d been there all along?
‘I’ll drive out to the barn the back way like you suggested and park where I can’t be seen from the road,’ she reassured Jim. ‘I’ll spend a few hours going through what’s there, and take anything really important with me when I’m done. I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mind holding on to the rest for now, just until I move into a bigger place with more storage.’
Jim Newsome nodded. ‘Surely. Mind you, I don’t know myself what’s in all of ’em. Felt it wasn’t my place to pry more than I needed. So I’m not sure exactly what you’re gonna find.’
‘I appreciate that,’ said Ella.
‘If you’d like me to keep you company, I’d be happy to.’
‘Thank you.’ She squeezed his hand, genuinely grateful. ‘That’s really kind. But I’ll be OK. This is something I need to do on my own.’
Ella Praeger had changed since Jim Newsome last saw her, back at Mimi’s funeral. Physically: her hair was shorter and dyed a dark brown that suited her, and she looked fit and lean, like an athlete. But it was the personality changes that struck Jim the most. Almost all the rough edges were gone, all the weird, uninhibited behavior. Sitting opposite him now was a mature, rational, poised young woman. Confident and calm, the kind of person who could handle a lot more than her grandmother might have imagined. Jim wanted to tell Ella all this, but the words stubbornly refused to arrange themselves into the compliment he intended. Settling instead for an awkward hug, he handed her a hand-drawn map to the hay barn and a set of keys to the locks on all four boxes.
‘You know where I am if you need me,’ he told her. ‘Good luck.’
Jim’s map was excellent and, despite the winding, single-track roads, Ella found the hay barn relatively easily. She vaguely remembered seeing it during her childhood on one of her long, aimless rambles around the valley, but she’d never been inside the traditional red-timber structure with its pitched roof and wide-plank doors. Other than the addition of electricity – no heat, but three bare light bulbs operated from a single switch located by the door – it had been virtually unaltered since it was built in the late 1800s, although, like everything else on the Newsome ranch, it was in excellent repair; as ‘safe and dry’ a storage solution as Mimi could have wished for.
It was cold though, bitterly cold, and Ella was glad of her fingerless gloves and her expensive goose-down puffa jacket as she climbed the wooden ladder into the loft where Mimi’s boxes were lined up like soldiers against the back wall of the barn.
Fumbling for the keys with half-numb fingers, she crouched down and unlocked all four in turn before lifting the lid of the first box, slowly and with infinite care. The boxes themselves were identical, antique, mahogany by the looks of them, and with a simple but pretty gilt inlay forming a border around the lids. Each one was about two feet wide and perhaps ten inches tall, so clearly there were no large objects inside. Some books maybe, or jewelry, or a few small items of clothing folded up. Hopefully some photographs. Unearthing Redmayne’s secret was important, of course. But there was more to Ella’s excitement than the chance to outsmart The Group and play them at their own game. That was only one piece of her life. The thing she longed for above all else were more images of her parents: fresh pictures with new and different expressions, to breathe new life into her stale fantasies. Letters would be wonderful too, or keepsakes, trinkets; anything truly personal that could form a bridge between the dead and the living, spin a gossamer spider’s web to connect the present with the past, what was still here with what was forever gone, never to return.
The first box, the one Jim had opened, was a surprise and a delight. There were no dark secrets here. Inst
ead it contained what must have been Rachel’s wedding veil, simple netting trimmed with antique lace, as well as an order of service from the church, some dry pressed flowers, presumably from the bouquet, and an entire small album of photographs from Ella’s parents’ wedding.
Ella’s stomach lurched with emotion, as if someone had thrown a medicine ball at her stomach. There was her mother, laughing, her long, wild blonde tresses tumbling over her face and shoulders beneath the veil as she leaned in towards Ella’s father, towards William, her naughty, intimate expression completely belying the demure look of her floor-length gown. Where was that dress now? Ella wondered.
Her father’s face was equally mesmerizing, lit up with love and adoration. How young and happy and certain they both looked. Equally interesting was Mimi, in the front pew of a church Ella didn’t recognize. She looked small and out of place in her staid cotton dress with the high collar, and later at the reception with a glass of champagne in her hands that almost looked as if it might have been Photoshopped on. She had a sour look on her face, likely brought on, Ella mused, by her having to mingle with the sort of people she would usually have avoided like the plague. Bohemians. Fashionable types with flowing robe-like dresses and tattoos, many of them smoking what looked suspiciously like joints. My parents’ friends, thought Ella. Scientists and doctors, presumably, letting their hair down at a party. But it was crystal clear from the pictures that Mimi didn’t approve.
Had her parents already joined The Group by then, or did that come later, after their marriage? Ella scanned the faces of the guests for anyone else she recognized but there was no one she knew. Putting the album carefully down to one side, so she would remember to take it back with her to the city tonight, she gingerly closed the lid of the first box and opened the second, then the third, alternately amused, touched and entranced by what was inside. So much so, she almost forgot about Mark Redmayne and his ‘deception’. A lot of what was in the boxes was junk – old books and clothes and tax returns, carefully filed for a future that never came. But here and there were nuggets of pure gold; priceless treasures from a childhood lost. There was the hospital bracelet Ella had been given at her birth, and a tiny heart-shaped box containing what must have been one of her baby teeth. An engraved watch, its strap broken, that had been given to her father as a college graduation present. A notebook of her mother’s with some doodles in it and what read like snatches of song lyrics.
Lovely things. Personal things.
Ella frowned.
Why on earth would Mimi have wanted Jim to keep all this from me?
What could possibly upset me here?