Elena laughed, then immediately burst into tears. James was on his feet again. Everyone in the restaurant eyed them curiously, probably assuming that Elena had come late only to break up with James. Maybe that was so. But James knelt beside her and whispered, “It’s all right. Hey. Come on. Tell me. What’s up?”
“I can’t,” Elena breathed. “I’m too scared to say it aloud. I don’t know who’s listening. I don’t know what I’ve just uncovered.”
“Text me,” James said, raising his phone.At least it isn’t about me, he thought.
Elena sniffed with laughter. “It’s ridiculous. It’s insane.”
“I can handle ridiculous. I can handle insane.” James returned to his seat and stared expectantly at his phone, waiting. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Elena typing what had happened. And then, his phone buzzed.
ELENA: I think my grandmother faked her own death.
James could hardly believe it. Over the course of the subsequent messages, Elena outlined what she’d just seen. There was a photograph of Rosa Tompkins at a Cranberry Cove mansion, taken in the seventies or eighties, long after she wasmeant to have died. As she typed, Elena jumped up and down in her chair, shaking her head.
When the server returned with their food, he found two adults poring over their phones and hardly looking at one another. James could hardly fathom what the twenty-something thought of them. The server snapped the plates onto their table and sauntered away, leaving Elena and James laughing again.
“I don’t know what to say,” James offered.
Elena twirled pasta around and around her fork. “I mean, she hated them. She wrote about corruption and greed throughout most of the end of the fifties. To me, it looks like she was the only person eager to tell the truth about them.” She mouthed, “The cove,” when she finished. She didn’t want to say it aloud for fear of who was listening.
The mystery swelled between them. Elena put down her fork and admitted she couldn’t eat very much. “I can’t help but wonder what my mother knows, or what she suspects. I mean, she always, always, always told me my grandmother was a hero, that she died in 1960, and that the community sorely missed her. But what if she was just a few miles north?”
When the server didn’t return to their table for ten minutes, James chased him down, paid the bill, and asked for to-go boxes so they could return to Elena’s house and keep digging. As they walked through the frigid night, James found himself telling Elena about his ex-wife and her current relationship with Sam Ellison, which had floored him mere days ago. Elena gripped his hand and walked faster. “You said your ex was living in Connersville?” she asked. “That’s where Natalie uncovered all that corruption earlier this year. It must be related?”
“How deep does this go?” he whispered. He imagined his wife, knee-deep in a cagey operation. But that was impossible. Bethany had given birth to their son. She’d made him sandwiches. She’d driven him to swim practice.
He was certain that Bethany didn’t know the extent of this corruption. She was too kind. Too good.
Then again, plenty of people had assumed Rosa Tompkins was “too kind and too good” back in the fifties.
How can we ever know anyone?
Right before Elena opened the front door of her home, James said, “I want you to know that I don’t want to get back with my ex-wife.”
Elena paused with her hand on the doorknob. She didn’t seem to know what to say.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I needed to say it. Maybe I needed to hear myself say it.”
Elena raised on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips for the first time. It was a brief yet powerful moment, charged with all the stars in the sky. And then, she opened the door and led him into the dark foyer, where they could see Carmen, still awake, watching a movie with her friend Jemma. There was a bowl of popcorn between them. They were giggling.
“Hi, Mom!” Elena called. “I have a friend over.”
James had to laugh. It sounded like they were teenagers, trying and failing to sneak in without notice. He waved at Carmen and Jemma, his cheeks inflamed, then followed Elena to the top floor, where they gathered at her mother’s old desk and opened another bottle of wine. James was eager for more kissing, more cuddling, but he knew that Elena’s fiery eyes meant they would be hunting for information about her grandmother for a good deal longer.
“Why would your grandmother do this?” he asked.
Elena clutched his shoulders and widened her eyes. “I don’t know! But I keep coming back to something. Judge Baxter Drury told me I looked just like my grandmother. He knew her. He knew her really well.” Elena turned, opened her mother’s laptop, and began to type furiously: Rosa Tompkins, Cranberry Cove,journalist, car accident. But James saw as clear as anything that there was no proof of Rosa Tompkins’s supposed car accident. In fact, it took ages for them to find any record of Rosa’s death.
Rosa Jethrow Tompkins: 1935-1989. After a brief battle with cancer, the writer Rosa Tompkins passed away in her home in Providence, Rhode Island.
Elena blinked and blinked. “Do you see what I’m seeing?”
James couldn’t believe it either. She’d been alive for years after her supposed death.
They were quiet for a moment, trying to fathom what had gotten into the mind of this brilliant journalist. Elena brought up Rosa’s most recent articles about Cranberry Cove, all from the late fifties and early sixties. “It means she left my mother when she was two years old,” Elena whispered. “It means she left my grandfather with a toddler to take care of. Who in Millbrook knew this had happened? I mean, I can’t believe the gossip channels didn’t find me.”
“Does your mother know?” James asked.
Elena looked stricken. “If she knew about this and always lied to me about the car accident story, I wouldn't know what to do with myself. Then again, it’s hard to believe that she didn’t know. Carmen Vasquez knew everything.” The “knew” hung in the air, purposely past tense.
