“Go ahead and help yourself.”
“What is it?”
I took a pair of sweatpants out of my pack and slipped them on under my towel, threw the towel in the general direction of the bathroom, and sat down beside her. “My next-door neighbor gave me that right after my aunt died. I think your dad wrote it.”
“Our parents knew each other? Why didn’t you ever show this to me?”
“I tried. I brought the letter with me when I went to see you that year, that was…wow…1993, five years ago. You weren’t there, though, only Latrese Oliver. That was the year she gave me your letter, the one I showed you. I never saw you after that.”
Stella read the letter again, her finger slipping across the paper, following along. “My father wrote this. This is his handwriting.” She considered this, her eyes glistening again. “I’ve never seen his handwriting before. I…I don’t have anything from my parents. He sounds so…paranoid.”
“Do you remember them at all?”
She shook her head. “My earliest memories are of Latrese Oliver, a series of nannies, staff at the house. Nothing about my parents.”
“Did Oliver tell you anything about them?”
“Only that they died when I was a baby, a bad car crash. She said she was close to them and had been appointed my legal guardian.”
“I was told my parents died in a car crash, too.”
“They didn’t, though, did they?”
I shrugged and told her about my father’s grave. What I found. I told her he might still be alive.
Her eyes turned into saucers. “You dug up your father’s grave? Wow, my little Pip isn’t as timid as I thought.” Then her eyes grew even wider. “Do you think my parents might still be alive, too?”
“I wish I knew.”
After a long pause, Stella said, “May I see the books?”
“At least you asked this time.”
I rutted around in my pack and took out the copy ofGreat Expectationsand the Penn State yearbook and handed both to her.
When I handed her the Dickens book, her face lit up. “This is just like mine!”
She found her copy and laid the two side by side. Although my copy appeared new, her copy was clearly worn. Her cover was faded and lined with white, torn in a number of spots. Many of the book’s pages were dog-eared. She kept a highlighter clipped to the cover and made a habit of highlighting her favorite passages. After all these years, I couldn’t imagine she still found new passages to highlight. Every page of her book was probably a solid block of yellow by now.
I flipped through the yearbook and showed her the various circled photographs and explained what I learned about each of the people identified.
“All the ones you’ve found are dead?”
I kept the list I made back at Penn State folded inside the front of the yearbook. I took it out and smoothed the wrinkled paper. “Aside from your parents and mine, Perla Beyham, Garret Dotts, Penelope Maudlin, and Lester Woolford all killed themselves. My neighbor, Elfrieda Leech, she shot herself right in front of me. I haven’t been able to find Cammie Brotherton, Jaquelyn Breece, Jeffery Dalton, or Keith Pickford.”
Stella pursed her lips, her finger hovering over the names. “Do you remember David? He came to the cemetery with me once when we were kids.”
I nodded. “He was there when my neighbor died. I was in her apartment when she shot herself, and somehow he was across the hall in mine. He left a note for me. The note said, ‘Welcome to the party, Jack. He signed it.’” David left a bottle of Jameson too, but I didn’t tell her about that.
“My God, that must have been awful for you.”
Three.
Three what?
Bang!
I shivered.
