The photograph remains on the table, Lenora staring out from it in shades of sepia. Minutes have passed since I first saw it, yet I remain flabbergasted.
Lenora was pregnant.
And even though she hasn’t revealed it yet, I’m pretty sure Ricardo Mayhew was the father. What I can’t begin to understand is what this has to do with Mary. Or, for that matter, Carter.
“Why did your friend Tony insist you work here?” I say. “Because of this picture?”
Carter nods. He’s sobered up in the past few minutes, likely from a combination of coffee and confession. Although what he’s confessing is far from what I expected.
“I started working here because I needed to know.”
“Know what?”
“If I’m Lenora Hope’s grandson.”
“I still don’t understand,” I say.
“On Christmas morning in 1929, a baby was left at the front door of the Episcopal church in town,” Carter says. “The baby was freezing, barely alive. Because it was Christmas, the priest who found him got to the church earlier than normal. If he’d arrived even a few minutes later, the baby would have died. That’s why the church called it a Christmas miracle.”
“That baby,” I say. “He was—”
Carter, like me, can’t stop looking at the picture of Lenora. “My father, yeah. He was adopted by a young couple at the church who couldn’t have children. My grandparents. My father never tried to find out who his birth parents were, mostly because he had no idea where to start looking. Besides, he was literally abandoned. Why bother trying to find someone who didn’t want you? So my birth grandparents remained a mystery. Until Tony found this photo.”
“Why did he think your grandmother is Lenora?”
“Because of the date,” Carter says, tapping the photo. “How many months pregnant does she look to you?”
I peer again at the picture. “Six?”
“That’s what I thought, too. Which means her ninth month would have been—”
“Around Christmas,” I say.
“Exactly.”
Carter doesn’t elaborate, nor does he need to. Since there’s no child of Lenora’s living at Hope’s End—nor even a mention of one—I assume the baby either died during childbirth or was given up for adoption.
“And you think Ricardo Mayhew’s the father,” I say.
“That’s what Mary thought,” Carter says, confirming what I already knew—that Lenora told Mary everything.
And that Mary shared at least some of it with Carter.
He tips back his coffee cup and empties it. “It makes sense, too. In fact, it’s the only reason I could see for Ricardo killing the rest of Lenora’s family. He was a married man caught in an affair with Winston Hope’s older daughter. Either they didn’t approve and he killed them out of spite, or they demanded he make an honest woman out of Lenora and he killed them to get away.”
“And it’s why he spared Lenora,” I add. “She was pregnant with his child.”
And, I suspect, it’s why Lenora’s been covering for him all this time.
“Anyway, that’s why I started working here,” Carter says. “It’s stupid, but I thought that if I saw Lenora—if we came face-to-face—I’d know.”
“That’s not stupid at all,” I say, thinking about my mad urge to stare into Lenora’s eyes, hoping that doing so would give me some small insight into my own life. “I guess it didn’t help once you did see her.”
“Not really. There’s no resemblance that I saw. But it also doesn’t mean we’re not related.”
I finally take a seat at the other side of the table. Either I trust Carter enough to remain within arm’s reach of him or the news of Lenora’s pregnancy has made me toss all caution to the wind. I’m not sure which one it is.
“Have you considered asking Mrs. Baker?”
“For about two seconds, yeah,” Carter says. “But she’s not exactly happy to talk about the past. Neither is Archie.”
He’s right about that. Despite both having been here in 1929, neither seems like the type to willingly discuss anything about that time.
“So you went to Mary instead.”
“Not until I learned what she and Lenora were up to. The typing and all that.” Carter pauses. Long enough to make me think he’s waiting for me to admit I’ve been doing the same thing with Lenora. I let him keep waiting. I might trust him, but only so much. “When I realized we were both working toward the same goal, I got her involved.”
Now I understand why Carter assumes it’s his fault Mary is dead. He thinks she knew too much. As does Lenora. I can still hear her response when I asked her if she thought Mary died because of what she’d been told. Those two dreadful taps.
“There are ways to tell if you’re related to someone,” Carter says. “Blood tests. They’re using them all the time now to settle paternity cases. I thought, well, if they can do that, then there’s no reason to think they can’t tell if someone’s my grandparent.”
“That’s where Mary came in,” I say.
Carter nods before filling me in on the rest. He contacted a lab that could conduct the tests. All he needed were two blood samples—one from him, one from Lenora. Two weeks ago, he went to the lab and got his own blood drawn to be analyzed.
“I convinced Mary to help me with the rest. She agreed to draw a sample of Lenora’s blood for me to take to the lab. After that, all we had to do was wait to see if it was a match. It was supposed to happen the night Mary—”
Carter can’t bring himself to say the rest.
The night Mary died.
“She told me she’d get Lenora’s sample just before putting her to bed,” he says. “I planned to store it in the fridge here and take it to the lab first thing in the morning. When Mary didn’t show, I thought she’d changed her mind or wasn’t able to do it. Then when it looked like she had left Hope’s End entirely, I started to worry my request is what made her leave. Like I’d asked too much of her or put her in an awkward position.”
I’m certain he did. That’s a big request of a caregiver—even a registered nurse like Mary. But she had followed through on it. The bruise I found on Lenora’s forearm is exactly the kind that would appear after having blood drawn, especially from an elderly patient taking the kind of anticoagulant she’s on.
It also means there might have been more than Lenora’s writing inside Mary’s suitcase. A sample of her blood could have been there as well, a theory that only makes Carter feel worse after I share it.
“So it was my fault.”
“You’re not the one who pushed Mary,” I say, as clear a sign as any that Carter fully has my trust.
“No, but I put her in a dangerous situation.”
“That you didn’t know was dangerous.”
Carter looks into his empty coffee cup, as if he longs to refill it with more whiskey. “But I should have. I asked Mary to help me prove that I’m related to Lenora Hope. Some people would kill to keep that from happening.”
“Why?”
“Because if I’m really Lenora’s grandson, I might inherit everything when she dies,” Carter says. “Hope’s End. The house and the land and whatever money she has left.”
“Who gets it now?” I say. “Do you know if Lenora has a will drawn up?”
“No. But if she did, I guess everything would be divided up between the two people who’ve known her the longest.”
Mrs. Baker and Archie. The last time Carter and I sat in this exact spot, I wondered aloud why the two of them stayed. Now I think I know why—they’ll get Hope’s End when she dies.
“So one of them killed Mary,” I say. “Or maybe they both did it.”
A corner of Carter’s mouth twitches, as if he wants to say something but knows he shouldn’t.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I say.
“There’s another reason I think it’s my fault.” Carter pauses, still hesitant. “I left the gate open.”
“When?”
“That Monday. I found it open that morning. I guess it got stuck and didn’t close after the guy who delivers the groceries left. Since I assumed I’d be leaving first thing the next day to head to the lab, I didn’t bother to push it shut.”
“So on the night Mary died, the front gate was open the entire time?”
“Yeah,” Carter says with a sigh. “Anyone could have gotten in.”
I become unsteady. A moment of dizziness as I realize the list of suspects, recently narrowed down to only two, has now grown to, well, everyone. Only when it passes can I say, “Who else knew what you and Mary were doing?”
“Tony,” Carter says. “I asked him not to tell anyone, but that’s no guarantee he didn’t.”
“Do you know if Mary told someone?” I say, thinking specifically of Jessie, who, despite being the closest with Mary, seems to be in the dark about everything. Unless it’s all an act. The fact that I’m even considering it makes me feel both guilty and paranoid.
“Not sure,” Carter says.
“What about Detective Vick? Did you tell him any of this?”