Loralee continued for her. “Until that package arrived for your grandmother. There was a letter in it and a handkerchief.”
Merritt pushed the handkerchief off her lap as if it were a large insect. “After she read the letter, she stuffed it back in the package, along with the handkerchief, and threw it in the garbage. Then she packed up the sewing machine and put it away. I never saw it again.” She slid off the rubber gloves and let them fall to the ground as she stood.
Her hands were shaking as she looked at Gibbes. “How? How is this here?”
He stood and tried to take her hands, but she was too jittery, walking around the suitcase without looking at it. “My guess is that it fell from the plane and my grandmother found it.”
Merritt rubbed her hands against the sides of her skirt, trying to erase years of dirt that clung to the suitcase. “That’s the only part that makes sense. Then she opened the suitcase before it was buried. That’s how she knew about the tie that she put on a passenger in that awful plane model up in the attic. And that’s how she knew about the handkerchief. Because she got the address from the luggage tag and then mailed a handkerchief to my grandmother in Maine with a note—a note that said something that made my grandmother crawl into herself and stay there for the rest of her life.”
Merritt clutched her head with both hands, as if she were afraid it might explode if she didn’t hold it together. “How is this possible? That my grandfather’s suitcase—assuming it’s the same Henry P. Holden—is buried in the backyard of the house where my husband grew up one thousand miles away from where I met him? There’s a connection here that I’m not sure I want to know. This suitcase was buried, hidden because somebody never wanted it to be found.” She shook her head, as if it were a snow globe with all the words and thoughts swirling around in random patterns.
“We can figure this out together,” Gibbes said, but Merritt backed up toward the rear porch, out of his reach.
“I need to be alone right now. I need to figure things out on my own.” She ran up the steps and through the kitchen door, letting it bang shut behind her.
Gibbes stared at the closed door before shifting his gaze to Loralee. “What just happened here?”
Loralee struggled to keep standing, leaning heavily on the back of the bench. “She’s not used to sharing her emotions, and when they all demand to come out at once it’s confusing. Just give her some time to sort things out, and to realize that she’s not alone.”
“Let me help you upstairs, Loralee; you look exhausted.”
She wasn’t going to argue with him. “Thank you,” she said, her eyes resting on the open suitcase, remembering something she wanted to put in her journal. Secrets, like chickens, always come home to roost.
She took a step toward Gibbes and her knees went wobbly as a pain she’d not yet experienced seemed to split her in two, the insides of her eyelids illuminated with white-hot heat.
She was aware of Gibbes’s arms around her, gently lowering her to the bench, and then heard his soothing voice. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
Loralee shook her head, trying to find the strength to push at his chest. “No—Merritt can’t know. . . .”
But Merritt was already running back down the steps toward her, Loralee’s name on her lips, as her eyes flew back in her head and another pain slashed through her. Her last remembered vision before the pain consumed her was that of a worried Gibbes and Merritt staring down at her as a plane flew overhead in the blue sky behind them, long white streaks trailing behind it.
chapter 29
MERRITT
Fires in buildings are dark, not bright. The black smoke quickly blocks any light from the flames themselves, and a person trapped in a burning building may become disoriented because he or she cannot actually see to evacuate.
I opened my eyes in the visitors’ lounge at Beaufort Memorial, gasping not from thick, dark smoke but from imagining my lungs filling with icy water too black to allow any light from above. I stood and began pacing around the perimeter of the room, Loralee’s sandals gently tapping the flecked white linoleum. I almost laughed as I realized my thoughts had moved to the waiting room decor, another sign that Loralee’s presence in my life had affected me in more ways than one.