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CHAPTER 1
EVERYONE IN TOWN KNEW THE COFFIN WAS EMPTY.
I think that’s what packed the pews—the pure curiosity of the thing. They didn’t come for love or admiration. Nope. They came for the show. They came because it was big news. A juicy scandal that jolted our small southern town like spikes of summer lightning.
Hometown boy Matthew Walton was finally laying his wife to rest. By the time my mother’s funeral began, it was standing-room only.
Though it was only midafternoon, I was already drained. Sweat bled through the back of my shirt, gluing me to the wooden bench. As the inept fan buzzed overhead, a quick, darting movement caught my eye. A small bird flitted among the rafters. Trapped. I knew exactly how it felt.
As the priest droned a pallid eulogy, venomous whispers began to surge from the hushed crowd behind me. The hateful words oozed up to corrode my skin, exposing muscle and tendon and jittery nerve endings.
“. . . hate to speak ill of the dead, but we’re all thinking it.” “Personally, I couldn’t stand the woman.” “That Sarah Walton. Always thought she was so much better than the rest of us.” “Yeah. Snooty bit . . .”
The voices trailed off as the priest wound down. But the quiet round of chuckles that followed made my teeth shriek, like biting down on tinfoil. My throat ached with the urge to scream. To tell them how they were all vapid, backward simpletons, just like my mom always claimed.
Of course, I’d yell into their outraged faces. Of course she thought she was better than you. Because she was. She was better than all of you put together.
My mother was far from “snooty.” She simply couldn’t tolerate these small-town divas with their sly prejudice and malicious gossip. She’d rejected them long ago, and they’d never forgiven her for it. But she was brilliant and brave and . . .
Gone.
The word slammed around in my brain, keeping time with the bird’s desperate circling. I could almost hear its fragile heart, beating so fast it was bound to rupture.
My hands clenched in my lap. My legs strained with the effort of staying in my seat. God, I wanted to see their shocked expressions when I shot to my feet, spun around, and—
I flinched at a sudden thump. The bird, in a bid for freedom, had crashed into the false security of the stained-glass window. It tumbled to the floor in a heap of floating feathers. My heart stuttered, and the rage dissipated on a wave of exhaustion. My fists relaxed. The urge to scream subsided as I stared at the crumpled creature lying so still on the ground. A life snuffed out in an instant, just like that.
The eulogy ended. Jaw set, I followed my dad’s stooped form to our place near the altar. As his narrow shoulders hitched, I finally let my gaze drift to my mother’s beautiful, empty coffin. I sidled away, gulping. Pain pinged my temples. An iron band tightened around my scalp. Squinting against the pain, I focused on the details. Burled walnut, mahogany inlay, brass handles, and the casket’s manufacturer discreetly embossed in the lower left corner: johnson & sons.
The words roared out of nowhere, a newspaper article I’d seen years before began to scroll through my mind in neat, orderly rows.
Johnson & Sons have manufactured fine quality caskets locally since 1921, when Johannes Johnson immigrated from—
My hands twitched. Not. Now.
I struggled to concentrate on something else before the words overwhelmed me. Before they became too big for my skull. I tried to look somewhere else, anywhere else, but my gaze kept drifting back to the flower-draped coffin.
Roses, lilies, and a huge spray of reeking blue carnations that Mom had always called by their Old English term, “gillyflowers.” The Gillyflower. Queen Elizabeth Tudor’s favorite blossom. She surrounded herself with them at court . . .
The information swelled, marching across my vision in glowing green columns. The genus and origin of each type of blossom, followed by dates and significant events of Elizabeth’s reign. The words expanded until details of every European monarch since Charlemagne flowed before my eyes in a translucent overlay of glowing green columns.
August 12, 30 B.C., Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, committed suicide.
1775, Russian czarina Catherine the Great defeated the Pugachev Rebellion.
On and on it went, until the chapel and the mourners—the real world—filtered away. I felt myself swaying, listening only to the symphony of knowledge in my head. Then, cutting through the din, the sound of my mother’s voice, low and incessant.
A true photographic memory is extremely rare, Hope. It is imperative that we devise a way to keep your mind organized. People with your kind of eidetic abilities must learn to contain all that information, to tamp it down, or it will overwhelm you. Concentrate. Stay firmly grounded. Focus only on what is right before you.
My training kicked in. I shoved back the mass of useless information, spooling it down into the mental image we’d come up with. A battered gray filing cabinet, like the one in Mom’s office. In my head, I slammed the door for good measure and glanced over at my dad.
He hadn’t noticed. That was no surprise. Pasting on a smile, Dad heaved a quiet sigh as curious mourners began to thread their way toward us for handshakes and awkward hugs.
Firmly grounded. Focus on what’s right before me.
Yeah. ’Cause that’s so much better.
The endless line passed, leaving behind a sickly odor. Too many flowers mixed with a crap-ton of cheap cologne. My gut began to rebel as Dad turned to me, brown eyes owlish and distracted behind thick frames. When he couldn’t quite meet my eyes, a last phrase—a straggler—loosed from the billions I’d tucked neatly away. It curled and flapped like a ribbon set loose on the wind.
A miasma arose. The decaying bouquet of a doomed queen’s garden.
Who wrote that? The answer came to hand like a well-trained dog. Oh, right. It was—
“Well, thank God that’s done and we can all get back to our lives,” my grandmother said as she marched toward us. “Though I still say it was a ridiculous waste of money to buy a casket, Matt. You could’ve had a nice little memorial service, but—”
“Hope and I needed closure, Mother,” Dad said. “Leave it alone.”
Beatrice “Mother Bea” Walton gave a nod to the petite, round-faced woman who had moved to stand at my father’s side.
“Stella, honey,” she said, “would you be a dear and go make sure the car’s ready?”
“Of course, Mother Bea. Happy to.” Stella proffered a tremulous smile before rushing off to do my grandmother’s bidding.
My father’s new girlfriend was a nice lady. A librarian. And one of the few people in this town my mother had genuinely liked. I didn’t blame her for jumping at my grandmother’s command. Everyone from the mayor to the bag boys at the grocery hopped to when Beatrice Walton issued an order. I was always mildly surprised when they didn’t bow.
I didn’t really blame Dad for being with Stella either, though it had only been seven months since Mom died. When he’d fallen apart, Stella had been the one to pull him back together. She’d tried to befriend me, too. But I didn’t want a friend. I wanted my mom.
After Stella scurried off, my grandmother directed her words at my father, her son the scientist. Her youngest, her pride and joy until eleven years ago, when he’d gone against her wishes and married my mom, taking on five-year-old me in the process.
“I assume you’ll get Hope registered at the high school come the fall,” Mother Bea said. “No more of that silly homeschooling, now that your wife’s gone.”
Mother Bea never called my mom by name. Just “your wife.” I shot a look at Dad. He wouldn’t look at me. But when he nodded to my grandmother, a cold dread began to spread through my veins.
High school? Actual high school? This was a joke. Had to be.
When I was younger, I’d begged to go to “real” school, but Mom wouldn’t hear of it. And waste your talents on that inbred travesty they call an education system? Hardly.
Now they meant to thrust me into that world of Friday night football games, pep rallies, and “good ole boys” with decapitated Bambis in the back of their mud-spattered pickups?
The very thought filled me with horror.
“And the letter?” Mother Bea was saying. “You’ve explained about the letter?”
Ignoring her, I turned to Dad, confused. “What letter?”
For an instant, he only glared at his mother. Finally, he forced a sickly barely-there smile and reached for my hand.
“Hope,” he said, “a few weeks ago, I received an email from your mother’s sister, your Aunt Lucinda. She’s invited you to spend the summer with her in Scotland. Isn’t that wonderful, honey? You’ll get to meet your mother’s people. I’ve told her you would come, of course, and—”
“What?” The word bounced against the walls of the empty chapel like the poor, doomed bird. “What are you talking about?”
“W-we”—my dad stuttered over the word—“that is, Stella and I, feel that it would be good for you to get away, honey. You need to heal. We all do. And . . . well . . . we’ve planned a little trip ourselves. A—a cruise. So I thought . . .”
He trailed off, helpless in his betrayal. Mother Bea gleamed with triumph as he reached into a pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. He smoothed it out, and pressed it, limp and damp, into my hand.
Dear Matthew,
As I’ve already offered my condolences, I shall not do so here. This letter is, instead, in reference to your daughter. I wish to request that Hope come spend the summer with me, here at Christopher Manor. As you are aware, the manor is located in a lovely area of the Scottish Highlands. I feel its pastoral landscape could be soothing to Hope. As there are other young people who live at the manor, she will not lack company of her own age.
Attached you will find the pertinent information regarding the first-class ticket I have selected. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Your sister-in-law, Lady Lucinda Carlyle
Postscript: Please inform Hope that I also believe there are insights she might gain at her mother’s childhood home which would not be feasible for her to discover in her current circumstances.
My lungs constricted as I let my eyes rise slowly from the paper to stare at my dad, the man who’d raised me since I was five years old. The only parent I had left.
My voice came out so small. “You’re sending me away?”
“No!” he exclaimed. “No, it’s not like that, Hope. It’s just that now—”
Before he could say more, the pale-lipped funeral director arrived to usher us out to the waiting limo. I jammed the paper into my own pocket as the two of us slipped inside. Deciding to ignore the fact that my dad wanted to get rid of me, I turned to him on the wide leather seat. I had more urgent issues to deal with.
“Dad.” I tried to infuse calm into my voice as we pulled out behind the flashing police escort on our way to the gravesite. “Please. Please don’t bury that awful . . .” I had to stop. Swallow. “What about the video?”
“Not this again.” He mumbled as he leaned back against the stiff seat, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose.
With a sharp exhale, he nudged the glasses back into place and turned to face me. “Sweetie,” he said. “I know you think you saw something. And I believe you. I do. But we researched it for weeks. None of the U.S. or foreign networks recognized your description of the news footage.”
“I know what I saw, Dad.”
He scraped a hand across his mouth. I recognized the gesture as poorly-disguised annoyance. I’d seen it before, though not often. Once, when I’d accidently deleted his paper on ‘Karenia Brevis,’ the organism responsible for red tide in the Gulf of Mexico. And again at eight, when I’d scribbled Socrates’s speech to the Athens jury in permanent marker on his office white board.
“This isn’t easy for me, either, Hope.” His voice was hushed and so, so sad. “But we have to face facts. Your mother was inside that lecture hall when the earthquake struck. No one on the lower floors survived. It’s been over seven months now, honey, and I . . .”
His jaw flexed. A lone tear escaped and rolled down my father’s cheek. “It’s time to let her go.”
After the quake, I’d become obsessed with the news. I didn’t sleep, I barely ate. The extra pounds I’d always carried around had melted away as I pored over each picture, every article, hundreds of hours of news footage. The video had aired only once, on one of the satellite channels in Dad’s office.
Most people wouldn’t have noticed.
I wasn’t most people.
With crystal-clear recall, my mind never stopped replaying the ten-second clip.
The girl’s body lay only a few yards from the collapsed university high rise. She’d obviously tried to run when the building came down, but an immense beam had fallen, crushing her beneath its weight. The footage had panned over her mangled corpse for only an instant, but it was all I’d needed. The neon-pink flyer crumpled in the girl’s limp hand was ripped and bloody and coated with white dust. I could make out only the first few words, written in Hindi, then in English.
Today’s lecture series with renowned author and historian Dr. Sarah Walton is can—
That was it. That was all. But I knew, I knew, what that last word really was.
Not can. Canceled.
For some reason, my mother had canceled her lecture that day. She had not been inside that tower when the earthquake brought it down.
Ecstatic at first, my father had contacted the American embassies in Mumbai and New Delhi. Then every hospital, shelter, and rescue organization. But as the days and weeks dragged on, he’d slowly let the hope and faith that we’d find her just slip away. When I refused to let it go, his look had turned from pity to concern.
“Hope.” He spoke carefully over the limo’s purring engine, as if to a small child. “We’ve been over this so many times. If Sar—” He paused, took a deep breath through his nose. “If your mother was alive, she’d have contacted us. If she was injured, someone else would have. They’ve identified all the survivors. I’m so sorry. But, sweetheart, it’s time to move on.”
I threw up my hands. “Oh, you’d love that. ’Cause if she’s dead, you can stop feeling so guilty about hooking up with Stella.”
Since the day my mom—the sun around which we both revolved—went supernova, Dad and I had existed in a kind of wobbly orbit. Two orphaned planets. Polite, unfailingly cordial, but never quite synchronized.
“Bet you wouldn’t just throw me out like this if I was your real daughter,” I muttered, staring out the glass at the trees whipping past.
My dad flinched, hand pressed to his heart as if to keep it from stopping.
I hadn’t cried when he made me go with him to pick out the coffin. I’d remained stubbornly mute while Dad and the funeral director made all the arrangements. During visitation the night before, I heard my grandmother whisper how I was an unnatural, cold child.
None of it had touched me. It wasn’t real.
It took the horrified, wounded look on my father’s face for it to finally break through. I heard it happen, a quiet snap deep inside.
“Dad?” I choked. “Daddy? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t. It’s just that I—I can’t . . .”
“I know, sweetie.” He pulled me across the seat to wrap me in his arms. “I know.”
The tears came then. Because he was right. They were all right. My mother was dead, and I had been so stupid.
