Secrets of the Greek Revival Page 14

  A half hour later, Betty returned to the lobby and gave the good news. “Follow me to your cousin,” Betty said to Ellen with a smile.

  “Can we come, too?” Sue asked.

  “The doctor is worried that Cynthia might be overwhelmed by too many visitors at once, so he only approved Ellen. We’ll see how it goes today, okay?”

  Ellen knew Sue hated being left out of the important moment and was probably wishing they’d said Cynthia was her cousin instead. Tanya was more patient. She wished Ellen good luck as Ellen followed Betty.

  Ellen followed the nurse through a common area. A few patients sat together around one table playing Dominoes, and another sat on a sofa watching an old console television. From the common area, Ellen followed Betty past a big dining area where two employees were wiping down tables and tidying up chairs.

  One man sat in a wheelchair further down the hall staring, like a sentinel, at all who passed by. As Ellen neared him, he clicked his tongue at her, reminding her of the days when she was young and construction workers used to make the same sound, taunting her as a sexual object. Where she was annoyed as a youngster, she was entertained as a middle-aged woman. She smiled at the man and winked as she passed him.

  “Who are you?” he shouted after her, reminding Ellen of an angry version of the caterpillar from Alice’s Wonderland. His face was even kind of round and insect-like. She imagined him smoking a hookah. “Who are you?”

  She turned and waved but soon regretted having given him the attention. She could hear him shouting after her all the way down the hall.

  Ellen followed Betty around a corner, where they reached a set of double doors. Betty entered a code into a keypad before the doors swung open.

  “Welcome to Extended Care,” Betty said. “This is where our long-term patients live.”

  Ellen followed Betty past a nurse’s station and down a long hallway. All of the doors leading from the hallway were closed save one. Ellen glanced through the open door to see a man in a leather jacket sitting beside a woman, who was tucked under covers in a bed. Ellen thought a husband was probably visiting his wife or a brother his sister. She could tell by the way he looked at her—with sadness, despair, and affection—that he was related to her.

  They came to room 12.

  “This is Cynthia’s room.” Betty knocked on the door and said, “It’s Nurse Betty. I’m coming in with a visitor today.”

  Ellen didn’t know what to expect, but her heart pounded against her ribs as she followed the nurse inside Cynthia’s room. The blinds were pulled up, and the afternoon sun shone into a very plain and sterile room, like most hospital rooms Ellen had visited and even stayed in throughout her life. Lying on the bed beneath a crumpled sheet with her eyes open and her face blank was a strikingly bright-eyed woman with pale blonde hair and a pale face—an older version of the woman in the photograph. Now that she saw the woman in person, Ellen could see a definite resemblance to the girl she had seen at the Gold House.

  Cynthia didn’t look at them as they entered.

  “Your cousin Ellen is here,” Betty said. “She’s been looking for you.”

  This got the woman’s attention. She furrowed her brows and turned what seemed to be horrified eyes toward Ellen.

  Ellen stared back, speechless.

  “Do you remember your cousin?” Betty asked the patient.

  Cynthia looked Ellen up and down, from head to toe, studying her, but said nothing. She continued to frown and to furl her brows as though Ellen were repugnant to her. Clearly agitated, Cynthia lay back in her bed and pulled her sheet up to her chin. Then she stared off and ignored her visitors.

  “Maybe I should go,” Ellen said to Betty. “I didn’t mean to upset her.”

  “She has never reacted to anything or anyone before,” Betty said. “So this is actually progress. Go ahead and try to talk to her.”

  Ellen took a deep breath and let it out slowly as she moved a little closer to the bed. “Hello, Cynthia. I’ve been looking for you because, well because I was wondering if you could tell me if you once lived at the Gold House with Dr. Piers, and…”

  Cynthia glared at her and her nostrils flared. Was this confirmation or just crazy behavior?

  “Could you nod your head if you ever lived at the Gold House? Were you a patient of Dr. Piers?” Ellen asked.

  Cynthia’s eyes widened, but she did not move her head.

  “And did you have a daughter?” Ellen asked.

  At this, Cynthia jumped out of the bed and stepped within inches of Ellen. She stared Ellen down, like an enemy about to attack.

  “I ain’t never seen her act like this before,” Betty whispered. “Let’s back out of the room, nice and easy.”

  Chapter Seventeen: Bud’s Story Begins

  As Sue drove everyone home, Ellen told them about her encounter with Cynthia.

  “I think she’s the right Cynthia,” Ellen said when she’d finished her story. “But I can’t be sure. I’ll try to visit her again tomorrow after work.”

  “I’ll remind Betty to add you to the list of approved visitors,” Jan said.

  “But we’re supposed to meet at Home Depot to pick out the exterior paint color tomorrow afternoon,” Sue said. “Unless you want to trust Tanya and me with that.”

  As much as Ellen wanted to have some input in the color choice, she didn’t want to ask them to wait on her. She knew they’d been looking forward to making a decision (she had been too) and that Ed’s team would be ready to start on it at three o’clock tomorrow.

  “Y’all go ahead,” Ellen said. “I trust you.”

  Tanya reached over and touched Ellen’s shoulder. “Are you sure you don’t want us to wait in the car while you meet with Bud? Just in case he tries to pull something?”

  “What could he pull in Earl Abel’s?” Ellen asked. “I’ll be fine. I promise.”

  A few hours later, Ellen sat across from Bud at the diner not far from the historic district. They had each ordered coffee and had made small-talk about—of all things—art, until their coffee arrived and they’d each taken a sip. Then Bud’s face turned a shade paler.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” Bud said.

  “It sounded pretty serious.” She took another sip of the hot coffee.

  “Indeed it is.” He looked around the diner for the third time before adding, “You need to know this isn’t easy for me, but I have no choice. I have to tell you…I need someone to know the truth, and I can’t tell Millie. She can never know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just hear me all the way through before you judge. Can you do that for me?”

  “I can try.”

  He lowered his voice again. “To give this a little context, there’s something else you need to know,” he said with a frown. He held an empty sugar packet and kept folding and unfolding it, never taking his eyes from it. “I’m in stage four, pancreatic cancer. The cancer has spread to my liver. The doctor won’t give me a deadline but says that many patients survive two more years with the right treatment. That was two years ago.”

  Ellen covered her mouth. Her first thought was who would take care of his wife and mother-in-law. Would they be moved to a nursing home? They’d lived in that one house their whole lives, probably thinking they’d die there, too, and now that didn’t look possible, unless they could afford to hire home care.

  “So you can see, I’m living on borrowed time.”

  “I’m so sorry to hear this. Millie must be devastated.”

  “Millie doesn’t know.”

  “What?”

  “I refused treatment. The doctor told me the side effects included weakness, vomiting, and the list goes on. Who would take care of the girls?”

  “You mean Millie and her mother?”

  “That’s right. There’ve only been a few times I’ve had to call someone in to help me, and the girls hated it. They made me promise not to let strangers in their business. It was humiliating, they said.”

  �
�But you can’t do it alone. And,” she hesitated, “what about when you’re gone?”

  “I’m going to keep my promise to them. After that, it’s out of my hands.” Then he added, “I never expected them to outlive me.”

  Ellen didn’t know what to say. She took another sip of coffee.

  “And now it’s time to be practical. I have something I need to confess.”

  “I’m listening.”

  He fidgeted with the empty sugar packet again. “You need to let me explain some things before you get all offended and upset with me, okay?”

  She was beginning to feel even more nervous and uncomfortable, not sure she could handle the enormous burden he seemed to want to unload on her. But what could she say? No thank you? I don’t want to hear your story after all? “I’ll do my best.” Besides, she had no choice. She had to hear it.

  “All right, then.” He clasped his hands together on the table as sweat broke out on his forehead. “Amy isn’t a ghost.”

  Ellen covered her mouth. She wasn’t sure why she was shocked—hadn’t she suspected this all along? So the girl was alive. And her name was Amy. Ellen clasped her hands together in her lap, holding on for dear life, as she waited for him to continue.

  “At first, I thought she was a ghost, just like everyone else. She was so white and so thin. She was even smaller back then—and faster. Sometimes she seemed to disappear into thin air.”

  “When did you realize she wasn’t a ghost?”

  “Maybe six months after the first time I saw her. I had gone back to the dry creek bed to empty a pan of hot oil on a big mound of fire ants when I saw her watching me from a tree branch.”

  “She was up in a tree?”

  “Yes she was. Just like a squirrel, eating a pecan.”

  “Did she say something to you?”

  “Not at first, but I thought, why would a ghost need to eat? So I kept looking at her from the corner of my eye as I poured the oil. I don’t think she knew I’d seen her. She was mashing pecans together in her hands and plucking out the meat like she hadn’t eaten in days. That’s when I realized she was a child who was alive and starving.”

  “So then what happened?” Ellen leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table, hugging the warm mug of coffee with both hands.

  “Well, I’d just cut up and fried an entire chicken—way too much food for me and the girls—so, without looking up at her, I said, ‘Do you want some fried chicken?’” He took a sip of his coffee. “She jumped from the tree and ran off, and I didn’t see her again for another week or so.”

  “I wonder how she survived,” Ellen said.

  “There’s a café on the other side of the green belt from my property. I later learned that she ate from the garbage cans behind that café.”

  “Poor thing.”

  “Yeah. She did that for almost a year before I finally got her to trust me.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “I found her nest one day in the attic, so I started taking food and leaving it for her on that old wooden table. She was probably nine or ten years old back then. She didn’t know her age or her birthday, but that’s our guess. This went on for months. You have to understand. She was wild, like a feral cat. She had no social skills and the language of maybe a second grader. I eventually taught her how to read.”

  “It’s hard to imagine.”

  “From the time the house was abandoned to the time I got her to trust me—for that whole year—she was all alone. But she was actually better off on her own than she was when there were others living in that house.”

  Ellen furrowed her brows. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m getting off track. I’ll get to that.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police, or Children’s Protective Services? Why didn’t you try to get her help?” Ellen couldn’t stop herself from interrupting him.

  “I did. I called them that very day I first saw her, but she ran away. The cops thought I was crazy. They couldn’t find any evidence that anyone lived at the Gold House.”

  “Did they search the attic?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t been in the attic yet, so I didn’t think to ask.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Millie?”

  “At first, I didn’t want to worry her. She had just had her third and final surgery and was coming to the realization that she would never walk again.”

  “I see. And later?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  Ellen narrowed her eyes.

  “Look, I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself.”

  Ellen nodded and sighed. “Please. Go on.”

  He took another sip of his coffee. “About three months after that day I first saw her, I took a bowl of chili over to the Gold House to leave on the old table, when this time, she was waiting for me.”

  Ellen gasped. “Did she speak to you?”

  He nodded. “She said the same thing she said to Millie. She said, ‘Where’s my momma?’ I told her I didn’t know but she was probably dead.”

  Ellen jerked back her head. “How could you?”

  “I believe in being straight with people.”

  “You could have fooled me. And she was a little girl!”

  “She didn’t believe me anyway. She started crying and said, ‘You’re wrong.’ I asked her if she’d like to take a bath and get cleaned up. At first she said, ‘No,’ but when I told her I’d buy her new clothes, she agreed. She finished her chili and then followed me home.”

  “What about Millie?”

  “At first, I wasn’t going to hide her from Millie. It just so happened that Millie wasn’t feeling well and was taking a nap, and I didn’t want to disturb her. I took the girl upstairs and bathed her.”

  “You bathed her?” Ellen narrowed her eyes again.

  “Don’t look at me like that. It wasn’t like that at all.” Then he added. “Not then.”

  Ellen shivered and sat further back in her chair, wanting more distance between them.

  “Just hear me out.”

  Ellen nodded without saying anything.

  “I asked the girl if she’d like me to help her find a home, and she said she was waiting for her momma to come back for her—that if she left, her momma wouldn’t know where to find her. I told her I’d tell her momma where she was, but then Amy ran away, and I couldn’t find her for weeks.”

  “Sounds like she was scared to death. Did you ever look for her mother?”

  “The mother is probably dead,” he said. “Where else could she be? And why would she abandon her own daughter?”

  “You should have done some research.” Ellen decided to withhold her suspicions that Amy’s mother might be alive and a patient at the state hospital. She needed to hear his story before she could determine how trustworthy he was.

  “I did, but I wasn’t lying when I said that house is haunted. Amy’s no ghost, but there is something there, and it just might be her mother.”

  “Did you ever try to look for her mother, just in case?”

  “Sure, but I had nothing to go on, and in those first months, dealing with Amy was like dealing with a wild animal. It took a long time for me to get her to trust me. Then, by the time I could get her to cooperate, well…” Tears formed in his eyes. He cleared his throat. “Well, I started to see her as the little girl I’d never had.”

  Ellen looked away, down at her mug of coffee. “But if that’s the case, why didn’t you tell Millie?”

  Bud shook his head. “I don’t know if you can understand this.” Then he muttered. “Maybe this was a mistake.”

  “I’m listening. I’m trying to understand. Talk to me.”

  “When I met Millie back in the sixties, I was nothing. I had nobody. My parents were dead, and my older siblings had pretty much abandoned me. Hell, they had their own problems.”

  Ellen waited for him to continue as he wiped the tears that were flowing from his eyes.

  “The only choice I had was t
o enlist. I served in Viet Nam and came back worse off than before I’d left. I was an alcoholic and would have succeeded in nothing but throwing my future away had Millie not come into my life. I’m telling you, she saved me from myself, and I’ll be forever grateful.”

  That still didn’t explain why he didn’t tell her about Amy. Ellen took a deep breath and fought the urge to interrupt.

  “But she and I hadn’t been married long when the accident happened. From that moment on, my whole life became about taking care of her.”

  “That must have been hard.”

  “Like I said, she saved my life. So it was my turn to save her back.”

  “So why couldn’t you tell her?” Ellen was trying to be patient, but she was failing.

  “Because I didn’t have anything of my own—never did. The house we live in belonged to Millie’s family. And then my life belonged to her. Every waking moment became about taking care of her—and by then I was taking care of her mother, too. I just wanted one thing to be my own. This little girl needed someone. I could be the father she needed, the father I never had.”

  “I see.”

  “I liked having another life away from Millie. I know I was a selfish son-of-bitch not to tell her. And every day I would wake up and think this was the day I would tell her, but then I’d put it off, wanting to keep it to myself.”

  “I’m surprised Millie never suspected anything,” Ellen said before taking another sip of her coffee. By now it was cold, so she waved to the waitress for a refill.

  “The idea to dress Amy in the same kind of white dress all the time—that wasn’t meant to trick Millie. That was meant to keep the neighbors from catching on, especially Mitchell Clark, who’s been obsessed with the German gold for as long as I can remember.”

  “So you encouraged Amy to pretend to be a ghost?”

  “Well, if she wouldn’t let me find her a home, then we needed to protect the one she had.”

  “It’s too bad you couldn’t help her get psychiatric help.”

  “Oh, that was out of the question. The doctor is what got her all screwed up in the first place.”