She gave an inward groan. So what if her mystery seamstress had hated Knights Bridge? Phoebe didn’t. She loved her work. She loved her cottage. She loved her family and friends, being close to them, connected to her childhood.
She was just on edge and overthinking everything because of what had happened between her and Noah. She never should have let herself get so carried away with him. What had she been thinking?
She hadn’t been thinking, obviously.
Once again she opened the yellowed copy of Le Petit Prince, its pages brittle with age.
Lorsque j’avais six ans j’ai vu, une fois, une magnifique image, dans un livre sur la Forêt Vierge qui s’appelait “Histoires Vécues.”
Could her unknown seamstress have taken off to France? Phoebe flipped through the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry novel. She didn’t know what she hoped to find. An old letter tucked in the pages? A signature?
She opened her Diet Coke and methodically checked each of the books, looking for anything that could offer answers, even a clue that would point her in the right direction.
There was nothing.
Had her mystery woman sat here, in this spot, listening to the crickets on a pleasant summer evening?
She heard a knock on her front door. “Phoebe?” It was her mother’s voice. “Can I come in?”
“Of course,” Phoebe said.
She started to get up but her mother was already through the living room. “I worked late and thought I’d stop by,” she said, getting a glass down and filling it with water from the tap. “You don’t mind, do you?”
Phoebe shook her head. “It’s water, Mom. Do you want anything else?”
“No, this is fine.”
She had on her work clothes, a flowered tunic over wide-legged white linen pants with neutral-colored slides. Phoebe had changed into shorts for her gardening. “Mom?”
She drank some of her water, then set her glass on the counter and walked over to the table. She patted the top book on the pile. “The Vogue Sewing Book. My mother had a copy. She taught me to sew. I was never any good at it, but she did her best. I was always more interested in gardening and boys. My best subject in school was math. Isn’t that funny? It didn’t translate into being good with money, obviously.”
“You’ve always managed to get by,” Phoebe said.
“Barely.” She tapped a finger on the front cover of the sewing book. “Ava and Ruby told me about their visit to the library this morning. They said you gave them permission to tell me about the attic room.”
“Did you know about it?”
“No. I’ve only been in the attic once. A friend and I went up there in search of ghosts. We were in junior high…” She sank into a chair, clearing her throat before she continued. “We took French together. My friend was good at it but I just couldn’t get the hang of it. There was a young woman who worked at the library who was fluent in French. She offered to tutor me.”
Phoebe stared at her mother. “What was her name?”
“Debbie Sanderson.”
“Sanderson?”
“She said she was George Sanderson’s great-great-granddaughter but none of us ever believed her. She was here such a short time. It’s been forty years, Phoebe. I was just a kid myself.”
“What was her job at the library?”
“I don’t really know. An assistant, I think. She wasn’t a librarian. I know that much. There was a bigger staff in those days.”
“Four people instead of two,” Phoebe said with a smile. “How long was she here, do you know?”
“It couldn’t have been more than two years. She tutored me for half the school year. She didn’t want any money, but my parents insisted on paying her.”
“Did it work? Did you pass French?”
“I most certainly did pass.”
As she watched her mother pick up the copy of Le Petit Prince, Phoebe envisioned Elly O’Dunn—then Elly Macintosh—at twelve, conjugating French verbs. “What was Debbie Sanderson like?”
“She never wanted to be a librarian, but she had a fantastic imagination and loved to read. She loved to dress up in exotic clothes and speak French to us, and she loved movies, gothic novels and poetry.”
“Poetry?” That caught Phoebe by surprise since she hadn’t discovered any poetry books in the box.
“That’s right. I remember because…” Elly set Le Petit Prince back on the table. “Oh, Phoebe. I haven’t thought about Debbie Sanderson in such a long time.”
“Mom, you’re about to cry. We don’t have to talk about her—”
“It’s okay. It’s not that. I just tend not to let myself go back too far into the past. I didn’t know your father yet when Debbie was tutoring me. He had just moved here. It wasn’t long after he got back from Vietnam. He’d put enough money together to buy a few acres and was building his shed. He was a recluse, really.”
Phoebe pictured her father roaring with laughter when she and Maggie had told him about getting the better of the Sloan boys at the pond at the Frosts’ sawmill. Ava and Ruby had been toddlers at the time, and he’d had them bouncing on his lap.
“He never liked being around a lot of people,” Phoebe said. “But he didn’t stay a recluse.”