“Harper.” He sighed. “One thing at a time.”
“Tomorrow morning, then?” She’d pack Olivia’s manuscript and read it along the way.
Finn clicked on the flashlight. “I’ll pick you up at nine.”
40:Isadore
SEPTEMBER 2006
“Simon didn’t kill her...” Isadore whispered, clutching the worn copy ofSparrow Islandto her chest as the truth about Greta needled its way through walls she’d thought impenetrable.
“No, he didn’t,” Harper Rayne replied gently like she wasn’t certain how Isadore would respond. It was the best of news on one hand, but in the strangest of ways, it also felt like the worst. At least it did to her mother’s heart.
“We thought—Olivia and I...” Isadore leaned against her husband’s shoulder on the sofa and closed her eyes. That terrible night, what she remembered of it, replayed like theBlack Dragonsmovie, permanently etched in her mind when she so wanted to forget.
Her memories, crushed like the seeds, continued to haunt her: Greta on the pillows in Olivia’s tower, the pile of her blocks by the starlit lake, Simon’s cruel taunting, saying their daughter had drowned.
But now this young woman was here at her home, all these years later, with a different story. Someone had found Greta wandering in thewoods, she said. They’d taken her to an orphanage, and she’d lived until the age of sixty-four, growing fully into an adult.
But Isadore had been tricked before. Betrayed. She wouldn’t be fooled again.
“I was sure he drowned her.” Isadore spoke the words to herself before focusing back on Harper. The woman had arrived less than an hour ago with Finn Sterling, the manager of Olivia’s estate. And she looked quite uncomfortable now, sitting on the sofa beside Isadore, like she wasn’t certain how to tell the rest of this remarkable story.
Finn, on the other hand, had settled into Peter’s wingback chair to pet Clooney, their collie who’d befriended him the moment Isadore and Peter invited the pair inside.
Isadore straightened her back, smoothing out the wrinkles of her baby blue pantsuit like it would help clear her mind. She was no longer Izzy Brooks, the frightened girl who’d run away. That horrific night on the shore of Ashe Lake had changed her for a lifetime.
“Where did you find my book?” Isadore asked.
Harper glanced at Finn before looking back at her. “It’s a long story.”
Peter wove his arthritic fingers through hers like he’d done a thousand times since he’d promised to love and cherish her for a lifetime. He had courted her for three years before they married, driving every Saturday from Elms to the home she shared with Olivia and Jim. In the first months, he’d been the intermediary with her parents and the professor, but it slowly became more.
Almost sixty years ago, they wed in secret, and they’d spent the decades restoring every inch of this old house together as they worked to redeem much of what had been lost. Peter was more handsome than any man on the silver screen. The best of fathers to their son.
“I never should have left that night,” she said quietly.
“If you’d stayed, the men would have killed both you and Jim,” Peter reminded her.
He was right, of course—she and Olivia had to rescue the baby—but she should have gone back after the men left. Instead, she and Olivia were both convinced that Simon had taken his daughter’s life.
“I named her Greta,” Isadore told Harper and Finn. “After Greta Garbo. She was the most beautiful girl.”
A tear slipped down Harper’s cheek. “Her caregivers called her Angeline.”
“The professor liked to call her Angel,” Isadore said, wondering at the woman’s tears. “She probably thought it was her name.”
Finn glanced at Harper. “An angel must have been watching over her.”
Isadore looked out the front window, at the thread of Ohio’s great river below. “I should never have believed Simon.”
“Too much happened that night to sort through,” Peter replied, his voice still steady in his eighty-ninth year. She found strength in it.
“I told Greta to hide if another man came for her, but she was so young. I didn’t think she understood.”
“Why was someone looking for her?” Harper asked.
Peter answered. “Simon stole money from his father and Olivia and then promptly lost it in some sort of gambling scheme with the Cleveland mob. His colleagues probably thought kidnapping Greta would encourage Professor Farrow to repay his son’s debts. And if Olivia hadn’t run away, Simon might have taken her life so he would inherit the estate.”
