“I stand corrected,” he said. “You might look like Jeremiah when you’re serious, but that smile is pure Adele. Wow. DNA is amazing.”
She glowed, hearing the affection in his voice. “Adele was an incredibly brave woman. She served as a Canadian nurse in World War I. They were called Bluebirds because of the colour of their uniforms. Apparently, she and Jeremiah met in a field hospital. He was so taken with her that he put a bird on his whisky label to honour her.”
Matthew raised an eyebrow. “She’s a brave woman to get involved with rumrunners, but I suppose she’d seen it all during the war.”
She showed him a small newspaper announcement featuring a photo of a smiling young woman with an older gentleman in a white coat. “This is one of my favourite articles.”
MEDICAL CLINIC ANNOUNCES IT IS READY FOR BATTLE!
Dr. Wesley Knowles is pleased to announce that Nurse Adele Savard has been hired to work with him at his medical clinic on Sandwich Street. Nurse Savard, with her captivating blond hair and piercing blue eyes, comes to the clinic with a surplus of medical experience, having recently returned from her position as a Canadian Nursing Sister at a ClearanceStation Hospital in Belgium. This reporter is looking forward to his next visit!
The next page included the newspaper articles Cassie had found about the Bailey brothers and their rival, Ernie Willoughby. At the bottom of the page was John’s death certificate, which Mrs. Allen had uncovered after a bit of searching through the city archives. For a few moments, she and Matthew were silent, reading between the lines of the newsprint, filling the gaps with the new information they’d found in the tunnel.
When Matthew had first dug up the skeleton, Cassie had assumed it belonged to Ernie Willoughby, since she’d just been researching the missing gangster at the museum. She suspected the worst, thinking that her wild ancestor John Bailey had stooped to murder over the raiding of his warehouse and ruination of his business. Then the archaeologists dug deeper and found evidence of a second body—as well as bullet fragments. After a few days, they uncovered what they believed to be a storage room, filled with broken green bottles. To Cassie, it felt as if the last puzzle piece was sliding into place.
Given the violence of the day, the documented rivalry between Willoughby and the latter’s disappearance, and her grandmother’s stories, a shootout seemed the likely explanation for what they’d found. During her research, Cassie had been so focused on Jeremiah that she’d never really paid attention to the fact that John had died the same year the business went bust. If John and Willoughby had both died in that tunnel, it explained why the business had ended so abruptly. She became convinced that the second body belonged to John, and she’d submitted her own DNA to test against his remains, just in case.
But that was all she could find out about the mysterious Bailey boys. The rest was lost to time.
“It must have torn Jeremiah apart to lose John,” Cassie said. “If only they’d quit even one day earlier.”
Matthew looked thoughtful. “I wonder if that’s why he boarded up the wall with those bottles. Grief, regret, probably guilt.”
“My grandmother Alice said that her father rarely spoke of his brother. But his firstborn son was named Johnny. That tells me they were very close. Too close for Jeremiah to talk about.” She flipped to the next page in the album. The photo was a casual family scene outdoors, taken on a warm summer day. It was interesting to see the past mixed in with the present in this photo, because Adele was sitting on the very porch Matthew had recently rebuilt. On her lap she balanced a tiny girl with black ringlets. Jeremiah stood nearby in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, wearing casual trousers and suspenders, with two young boys on either side.
Cassie pointed at the taller of the boys. “That’s Johnny.” Her finger slid to the other son. “This is Edward, but everyone called him Teddy. And this little girl on Adele’s lap is my grandmother, Alice. She was a surprise, I think, coming along eight years after Teddy.”
The next page featured the formal photographs of Johnny and Teddy Bailey, both with matching silver-grey eyes, both in military uniform. “They never came home,” Cassie said softly.
He whistled quietly. “Jeremiah and Adele lived through the First World War and everything else, then lost their sons in the next one. And his brother in between. I can’t even imagine how that must have hurt.”
“Alice was Jeremiah and Adele’s only surviving child. She told me she sometimes heard stories from relatives and family friends, talking about Bailey Brothers’ Best and the rowdy age of Prohibition. She loved hearing about her heroic mother, stitching up rumrunners on the kitchen table. She said that she remembered seeing her parents dance in their living room, and that even as a little girl she could feel the love between them.” Cassie moved through a few more pages, the photographs jumping decades. “Here she is with my mother, and that’s me in her arms.”
“Cute baby,” Matthew said.
“My dad took the photo—it was a couple of years before he got sick. That’s probably the last photo of us all together and happy.”
“What happened?”
“My mother never recovered after Dad died. And about a year after that, my grandmother passed suddenly from a stroke. Mom loved me, and she meant well, but her heart was broken. Sometimes she spent days in bed, depressed. And sometimes she drank more than she should have.
“Then one day, when I was ten, she got really drunk. She started following me around, wanting to hug me, I guess, but I ran ahead and she fell down the stairs trying to catch me. She died.” Cassie hesitated, the brakes in her heart slamming hard as they always did when she thought about what had happened. Then she looked at Matthew, seeing understanding and encouragement in his dark eyes, and realized it was all right to share the pain. “You remember that first day I came to see you at the house and I ran out like it was on fire? That was the first time I’d been there since she died. All the memories flooded back.”
He listened quietly, giving her room to speak. “I’m sorry that happened to you, Cassie. You never deserved any of it.” Then he reached for her hand and held it between his own. “Someone very wise recently told me that I shouldn’t blame myself for my dad’s death. I’m not all that wise, but I hope you know you never deserved any of that sadness. And none of it was your fault.”
She took a shaky breath, waiting for the grief, but there was something about the strength of his hands that took all that away. She felt warm inside. And safe.
“So that’s my story. I’m the last Bailey.”
“It’s your ancestors’ story,” Matthew clarified. “Yours is your own.”
Their burgers arrived then, so she set the book aside and they dug in. As soon as she was done, Cassie took a swig of her beer, preparing to give Matthew the good news.
“I’m glad you’re not going to sell the house,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s going to be tight, paying for everything when I finally getback to the renovations, but I really like the old place. Especially now that I know the stories behind it.”
“Well, I thought you might be interested to hear that I have an auction house interested in your forty-two wonderful, full bottles of Bailey Brothers’ Best whisky.” She paused for effect. “Matthew, they believe each bottle could sell for up to five hundred dollars. In a few weeks, you could be twenty thousand dollars richer.”
