“Thank you,” Beatrix said, grateful it hadn’t been harder.
She looked over her shoulder, confirmed that the last stragglers were filing out, and aimed one degree shy of what she actually wanted to know. “Did you and my mother ever address the possibility of giving Peter Blackwell a high school scholarship? Before he passed the wizarding exam, I mean.”
“That’s an odd question. Why would you want to know that?”
“Did my mother say she would never consider him for a scholarship?” she pressed, gripping the seat of the pew with both hands.
“Ah.” Mrs. Price sighed. “Yes, she did.”
Beatrix tried to swallow but couldn’t. Her “why?” came out as a croak.
The sanctuary was empty save for them, but Mrs. Price lowered her voice anyway. “She was concerned about the effect his, ah,backgroundwould have on the reputation of this town and our scholarship effort.”
The urge to rage and scream overwhelmed her. It couldn’t be. It simply couldn’t be.
But Mrs. Price, though disagreeable in many ways, was not a liar. She was far too interested in telling everyone the truth as she saw it.
“I shared her concern, naturally,” the grande dame added. “But I really did think a mind as sharp as his should not be allowed to go to waste.”
“Why would she do something so—so horrible?”
She didn’t expect a substantive answer. But she’d forgotten that Mrs. Price had known her mother a long time. Far longer than she herself had.
“When your mother was ten,” the widow said, “your grandfather sired an illegitimate son in Baltimore.”
Beatrix gasped.“What?”
“He always wanted a boy, and he doted on the child—lavished attention on him, left him a substantial legacy. More than he left your mother. She never forgave either of them.”
Beatrix stared at nothing, shocked silent by this abrupt rearranging of her family history. “What happened to him?” she asked finally. “My uncle, I mean?”
“He went to college somewhere out West, if memory serves.” Mrs. Price made a sharp sound that was almost a laugh. “I suppose he wanted to put as many miles between himself and Cecilia as he could.”
What this suggested about her mother made her heart constrict.
Mrs. Price, perhaps recollecting to whom she was talking, laid a hand on her arm in a way that was clearly intended to be comforting. “You must understand how she would view a boy like Peter Blackwell.”
Beatrix had on many occasions wished that her mother could be returned to her briefly—for advice, for consolation, for a tight hug. Never before had she wanted her back to rebuke her.
“Peter Blackwell,” she said, voice trembling, “had no one to lavish money on him. His situation was entirely different.”
“True—but she wasn’t really seeinghim.”
Yes. And that boy had grown up to subjugate her as payback. Did he see her at all when he looked at her, or just her mother?
“I suppose you must have heard about this from our omnimancer, though howheknew—” Mrs. Price stopped, tapping two fingers to her lips. “Your father hired him to clean Cedarlawn around that time. I don’t think the arrangement lasted more than a few weeks, but he could have been in the house when we were discussing the matter.”
Beatrix stared at her. “Over pineapple upside-down cake?”
“Well, I—I suppose so, now that you mention it,” Mrs. Price said, cocking her head. “Your mother did love to make it.”
Beatrix’s anger abruptly took a new turn. Coincidence could not explain how her dream was accurate to the smallest detail. It took an eyewitness’ touch. Blackwell, promising he wouldn’t speak to her about her mother, had found an exponentially more vindictive way to communicate.
She found her trio—sister, friend, roommate—in the fellowship hall and waited without comment until they were ready to be driven home, church being the one regularoccasion worthy of putting her father’s decrepit Studebaker on the road.
If she could have handed the keys over and walked home, she would have. But Lydia was too young for a license—she had nearly a year to go before she hit the minimum age for “lady drivers”—and Rosemarie became too old when she turned sixty that spring. Ella’s three attempts to get a license ended about as well as such efforts usually went, and she hadn’t had the time to try again.
Beatrix started the car and hoped everyone would talk to each other—not to her—until she could escape to the forest. But the car was quiet, save for the customary sputtering of the engine. Lydia, sitting next to her, kept glancing her way.
