June Read online

  Mr. Abernathy directed them through both binders, tapping his knotty finger on the pages and offering fact after fact—who had written the article, the collection where he’d discovered it, and any identifying details in the photographs (“That’s Mr. Hammacher’s barbershop, down on Main Street. He had a speaking part in the film but it didn’t make the final cut”). But when Cassie pressed for more speculative or personal details about anyone in the photographs, about Diane or Jack or even June, Mr. Abernathy’s face would cloud. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he answered carefully a few times, until Nick shot her a look and she decided to hold her questions until the end.

  As soon as they finished looking through the second Erie Canal notebook, Mr. Abernathy held up a finger and said, “Nineteen fifty-five! Big year for St. Jude, but could have been bigger.” He sat back in his chair and folded his hands over his little hump of a belly. “The movie was only here for a month, and then things went back to normal. I guess if it had been a hit or something it might have made a difference—there would have been tours, that kind of thing. It would have turned St. Jude into a tourist destination. Have you seen it?”

  “What, Erie Canal?” He’d been talking so long, she was surprised to be asked a question. “No. Have you, Nick?”

  Nick shook his head. “It’s hard to get your hands on.”

  Mr. Abernathy mused for a moment, clearly weighing what to say next. He settled on “Well, I’d be curious to see what you think.” He paused judiciously. “I’m not one for movies.”

  But before Cassie could dig for dirt, he went on. “What would have truly changed the game for St. Jude was if the interstate had come just east of town on its way down to Cincinnati.” Turned out Mr. Abernathy had a whole notebook devoted to what he called “a little-known bit of St. Judian lore.” According to him, a contractor named Mr. Ripvogle, based in Lima, had nearly won a construction bid that would have “transformed this town. Everything seemed to be in place, but the national bill wasn’t passed until 1956, and by then Ripvogle was off the project. There was some talk he tried to bribe the governor”—he wagged his finger—“which was a no-no.”

  It was the first time Cassie’d heard him speculate. Although she wasn’t remotely interested in this particular topic, she feigned interest, hoping she’d be able to get him to guess about Jack and June; if he knew anything about an affair, it would be based on rumor and innuendo, not hard facts.

  He clapped his hands sharply then, and said, “Oh, how rude! I’ve forgotten you’re descended from Lemon Gray Neely!” He got down another notebook, all about Two Oaks, and asked did she know that Neely’s wife, Mae, had died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918 in Two Oaks’s master bedroom? And had Cassie seen Neely’s mausoleum down at the Elm Grove Cemetery? And did she know how rich Neely had been in his heyday? First the oil, then the land? “And then, when he died—poof! Gone.” He leaned forward and said, “Your grandmother should have gotten everything.”

  Should: another speculative word.

  Cassie leaned forward to match him. “But she didn’t?”

  He grimaced and shook his head, as though Cassie’d been the one to bring it up. “I don’t like to gossip.”

  “Please make an exception for me.”

  He glanced hesitatingly between her and Nick, then leaned forward in his chair and lowered his voice, as if someone was listening at the door.

  “Well, it all comes down to money. That’s the trail history leaves, at least. June and her mother, Cheryl Ann, moved into Two Oaks in 1952, and lived with Mr. Neely and his maid, Apatha. They were related to him only tangentially—Neely’s wife, Mae, had been the aunt of Cheryl Ann’s husband, Marvin—who was also your grandmother’s father. But Mae and Marvin were both dead. So it was quite generous of Neely to invite them in.” He paused for a moment to let Cassie catch up. “In the meantime, June gets engaged to Arthur Danvers, Clyde Danvers’s brother. Now Clyde was a real man about town. He knew everyone; he built that Three Oaks development over there on the other side of town, he owned every building on Main Street—well, the ones that Mr. Neely didn’t own. I always wondered if there was some kind of arrangement there. The marriage of a Danvers to Mr. Neely’s potential heir would have really been something.”

  “But it wasn’t?”

  “That’s just the thing. June marries Arthur, becomes a Danvers. Mr. Neely dies, and so does Mr. Danvers—the older one, Clyde, I mean. June and Arthur move, almost at once, back into Two Oaks with Cheryl Ann, and they nurse her through her final illness and June has their child—your father, Adelbert. But here’s what’s strange: Mr. Neely was a millionaire, many times over. He owned land, ran oil fields, and had plenty of cash. Two Oaks was a grand home, certainly, but the real prize was his money. And I knew June and Arthur, and they didn’t live like that. They were always just getting by, making enough to take care of themselves and their son, and do what they could to maintain Two Oaks. But it was hard on them. That place required a lot of upkeep.”

  “Believe me,” Cassie interjected, “I know.”

  “But they should have had plenty of money!” He was in his own world now, incensed by the injustice of inadequate facts. “If Mr. Neely left everything to June, they should have been living in luxury. So the question remains: where did all that money go?” Mr. Abernathy flipped to a page in the third binder. As far as Cassie could tell, it was a town record covered with figures and acronyms she didn’t understand.

  A phone rang out, piercing the silence.

  Mr. Abernathy looked alarmed. Cassie turned to find the source of the sound. Of course—it was Nick’s phone. Nick grabbed the little machine from his pocket. Cassie caught a glimpse of the screen. It said “Tate.” Well, she thought, he’d silence it and call Tate back when Mr. Abernathy was done. But, instead, Nick stood and held up a finger. Then he answered. “Yes?”

  Cassie glared to get him to hang up. But he was absorbed in the conversation, blind to her, as though everything had evaporated but the sound of Tate’s voice. “Well, good, that’s progress, but did you tell him I’d call back?” It was clear, from his tone, that this was not an emergency. “No, nothing important. Yes, I can talk.” Then he held up his hand in a vague gesture of apology and strode out of the room.

  Cassie watched him go in shock, then turned back to Mr. Abernathy and apologized. The old guy looked suddenly exhausted, confused; the call had interrupted his train of thought. Cassie’s blood boiled at Nick’s selfishness. She pointed to the paper. “What does it mean?”

  The ancient man looked down at the paper uneasily. He rubbed one eye like a baby. She knew she should let him off the hook, but now she was thirsty. She’d never known anything about this part of June’s life. She tapped at the numbers to redirect him.

  He sat as upright as he could, nodding down at the page, translating. “Only a month after Neely dies, and someone is selling off his land. Acres and acres and acres of it. Someone made a lot of money, but that money left this town. I don’t know where it went, but it didn’t stay here, I’m sure of that.” His gaze drifted up and out the window before him.

  “So what do you think happened?” Cassie asked. “Who was it? Who got the money?”

  His eyes squinted. His voice grew foggy. “It’s the historian’s job to stick to the facts.”

  She was impatient at this coyness; he’d been happy to guess at the truth only moments before.

  Mr. Abernathy closed the binder and shook his head.

  “Please,” she pleaded. There was so much she didn’t know. So much she hadn’t known she didn’t know. It seemed necessary, all at once, to understand who had stolen from her hardworking grandparents.

  Mr. Abernathy stood with effort, carefully tucking one binder under his arm and leaning on his cane to take it back to the empty spot where it belonged. Cassie gathered up the others and followed him. She could tell he didn’t want her to place them in their spots herself, so she passed them to him and waited for him to complete the tas
k alone. Her “please” hung in the air, but she wasn’t going to beg again.

  Mr. Abernathy brushed off his hands and turned to her, opening them in apology. It would have made a great shot.

  “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “That’s the problem. People die and your chance to ask goes with them.”

  Cassie’s heart flipped at his wisdom. It was tragic and cruel and true. She was furious at herself for losing the chance to ask June about Arthur and Jack, to find out what it had been like to lose her only child, Adelbert, in the accident, or how she’d felt about moving down to Columbus to raise her only grandchild. Cassie would never hear from June about losing her father in a foreign war, or watching her mother auction off their things. Or what Two Oaks had been like when June was a girl, or Mr. Neely. All of it was gone.

  Cassie had been so bound up in her own life that it had never occurred to her to be interested in June’s. And now it was too late.

  Mr. Abernathy patted her on the shoulder. “You need anything else, you know where to find me.” He was ready for her to go, she could tell, ready to sleep away the afternoon. She felt the urge to lift this old treasure into her arms and carry him to his bed, to read him a story and tuck him in, to watch how quickly sleep would overcome him. But instead she thanked him, apologized again for Nick’s departure, and let him escort her unsteadily to the top of the porch stairs. The light was turning orange outside, the afternoon already fading toward evening. She had her camera, but she could tell it would cost him something if she took his picture.

  “Oh,” she said, turning quickly at the top of the stairs, “Mrs. Deitz mentioned you might have pictures of a party the Erie Canal people threw at Two Oaks toward the end of filming? It sounded like quite an event.”

  “I was there,” he said. “Diane DeSoto asked me to hold her gloves. But I’ve never been much for crowds. I didn’t stay long.” Mr. Abernathy’s small, square shoulders rose up to his ears, then slumped down with his exhale. “People throw out everything. I can’t rightly remember who was taking pictures that night, but even if I could, I doubt they’re still in existence.” He gripped his cane tightly, his ire ignited by people’s stupidity, and he looked sad as she descended the stairs.

  —

  She kept her mouth shut for most of the drive home, until the stupid GPS urged them into the outskirts of St. Jude. They were only moments from Tate and Hank, and Cassie couldn’t stop herself. “That was rude.”

  Nick glanced over at her, then back to the road.

  “You should have turned your phone off. And you definitely shouldn’t have answered it.”

  “It was an important call.”

  Fury uncoiled itself inside of her. “More important than that old man? More important than finding out what happened to my grandmother? I thought you were here to help me.”

  “I’m here,” he said briskly, “because it’s my job.” His jaw tightened. “Some of us have them, Cassie.”

  What nerve.

  That night, Cassie’s back was a damp pocket of sweat against her sheets. Her thirst did battle with her bladder. Two Oaks was restless too, creaking and moaning, rattling and shifting. It liked having a person in every one of its beds, and proper dinners taken at the table, and the sound of laughter rafting through the front windows. But something wasn’t right yet—all was not as it was supposed to be. The tall, golden-haired girl, for example—she was good at what she did, goodness knows, Two Oaks was grateful someone had finally thought to mop—but she was perfunctory in her gestures, doing only what must be done. In its heyday, Two Oaks had considered itself the kind of house that inspired its people to greatness, but everyone inside it now seemed to just be getting by.

  Cassie flopped and tossed in her hot bed, incensed anew every time she thought of Nick’s smug little face, and his dig at her about how “some of us” had jobs. Also, he’d been dead wrong to take that phone call. Did these people truly believe they had more worth than the Mr. Abernathys of the world? That they could waltz into someone’s life expecting her to give up her DNA? Two could play at that game. She would make them wait even longer for the test, even though she had to admit that, so far, they’d turned up no evidence of an affair. And how was it any business of Nick’s whether she had a job? What if she did have a job? That would teach him. Okay, fine, she didn’t, technically. (“Well, what’s your endgame?” he’d sniped—she could see him so clearly in her mind’s eye, and she sat up in fury.) She savored the fantasy of letting slip that she was a very important, highly paid corporate attorney. Or a doctor! A research doctor. A research doctor with a specialty in infectious diseases. She finally found sleep with the taste of sweet, juicy victory upon her tongue.

  Did she dream? Maybe. When she opened her eyes to the bright room, she realized that, for the first time since she’d moved in, she couldn’t quite put her finger on where she’d gone in the night. Surely she’d been somewhere inside these four walls, surrounded by strange souls. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to place herself back inside the dream she must have been having, but her mind was a black, empty drum.

  She strained to hear voices. She knew they would already be awake, even though it was murderously early on the West Coast. People who judged you for not having a job invariably woke before the sun. She pressed her feet into the floor, baptized in new wrath at the promise of Nick’s expression when he caught her trudging down the stairs still in her pajamas. Being judged in her own home! It would not stand.

  —

  She found them in the kitchen. The women were in their yoga outfits, and Nick, of course, was on his device, one bare elbow—unsheathed from his dark blue button-down—resting on the rickety table. She frowned at it like it was a bad dog.

  Tate was reading a Deepak Chopra paperback. Hank was standing on a chair before one of Cassie’s kitchen cabinets, scrubbing with a wet rag. The sum total of the food Cassie had possessed before these people arrived—a can of green beans, two cans of tuna fish, and a pickle jar with one perfectly good specimen still floating inside—was in a stack by the recycling bin. She lifted the camera to her eye and took a picture.

  “Good morning!” Hank chirped when she heard the click. Nick gave a start, a small wave without eye contact, then scurried into the pantry and then the dining room, all while still on his phone.

  Tate closed her book as Cassie crossed to the chair Nick had just occupied, realizing that the linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor were a good ten shades lighter than they had been when she’d turned in. Mopping! Damn Hank and her industry. But the smile Tate offered Cassie actually seemed to warm the room, melting even Cassie’s icy mood.

  Cassie wondered if this was her new normal—Two Oaks full of successful, busy people who awoke at dawn. The full repercussions of what she had proposed were finally settling in: these people would stay until they found something that would prove or disprove an affair, at which point she’d give them her DNA. She hadn’t much considered what that proof would look like. Or why she wanted it. She’d half-expected they’d just steal from her hairbrush and do the test on their own, but that didn’t appear to be on the agenda. She should find herself a lawyer. She really should. But, despite Hank cleaning like a maniac only a few feet away, ponytail swinging as the sponge squeaked and scrubbed, unpleasant as the previous evening’s interaction with Nick had been, Cassie had to admit that Tate was an oasis, and that, as a whole, the last few days had been, well, better than most of the days in the months preceding them.

  “Espresso?” Tate asked, pushing her Prada glasses atop her head.

  Cassie noticed the shiny silver espresso maker over Tate’s shoulder, on the countertop beside the stove. Where had that come from?

  “Hank, make her an espresso?” Tate asked, a command masked as a question.

  “Of course!” Hank enthused. She hopped off the chair and snapped off the yellow gloves she’d brought home from the grocery store the day before, slapping them down over the sink. She crossed the kitchen an
d spooned beans into the grinder, which purred at the press of the button.

  Cassie caught a glimpse of Tate’s serene face again. It wasn’t Tate’s fault—or even Hank’s—that Nick had been a jerk. “Sleep okay?” she asked, like a hostess was supposed to.

  “Like the dead,” Tate insisted with a calm smile.

  “That mattress is ancient,” Cassie said. “And I should have vacuumed.”

  Tate smiled indulgently.

  “My room is so pretty!” Hank had gotten the third bedroom, the one Cassie liked least. It was the darkest of the bunch, and scratching animal sounds filled the walls at night.

  Hank crossed back to the sink and filled a shot of water, then poured it into the reservoir at the top of the espresso maker. Her hands worked quickly, next filling and tamping the beans into the brew group. Cassie had pegged her as a former yoga teacher, but maybe she’d been a barista in another life. Once Hank slid the ground beans into place, she pressed another button and placed a small white espresso cup—also new to Cassie—under the spout. Back at the sink, she snapped on her gloves and crouched before the undercounter cabinet. She was like a hummingbird; Cassie wondered how many calories she had to consume to keep this up all day.

  “Does every bedroom have a fireplace?” Hank asked. The cabinet under the sink was a time capsule of toxic cleaning products and rags furry with dust, and Hank wrinkled her nose, which Cassie had come to learn was the closest she got to expressing disgust.

  “Yeah,” Cassie said, resenting that a proper grown-up like Nick probably knew the details about the fireplaces: the kind of tile inlaid around each one, and where the wood in the mantelpiece hailed from. She had no idea.

  “What’s…this…?” Hank asked, pulling an unidentifiable brown wad into the light.