Flight Patterns (22 page)

Not seeing one, she returned to the journal and read the entry.

There are no secrets to bee behavior that cannot be explained by science. The jobs of each bee are preordained at birth: the worker, the drone, the queen. And yet some bees will find themselves far from the hive, wayward wanderers, almost as if their predestination had been to wander far from home and forget they were meant to be just a bee.

Maisy opened the journal to the last entry, noting that it had been written two days before his stroke.
The bees have returned to their hives for the evening, where they will not sleep but continue in their duties for the good of the hive. Yet there's a low hum, not restful or peaceful but agitated. It's as if they, too, sense the ripples in the atmosphere around us. Can predict the approaching change that I've sensed in my old bones since I learned my granddaughter is returning home. I will observe them closely, hoping that they will tell me what I need to do now.

She read the last entry twice, then replaced the journal where she'd found it. She stood by the bed and watched her grandfather for a long moment, wondering what it was he needed to know.

After she arranged the bedclothes up around his shoulders, she left the room, pausing just for a moment in the foyer, the evasive words she'd imagined hearing suddenly as clear to her as if they'd been shouted.
Tell me
.

She turned around for a moment to stare at the closed door, those two words reverberating in her head. Surely she'd imagined it. The stress of the last weeks and her lack of sleep were affecting her.

She climbed the stairs slowly, dreading her empty bed and the quiet of her room because there was no one there to talk through the day with. She still slept on one side of the bed, being careful not to feel the cold absence, the missing indentation on his pillow. Her bedroom had become a mausoleum, a solemn memorial of a marriage that had passed.

Birdie's bedroom door was closed, but there were soft voices coming from Becky's room. As Maisy neared, she recognized Georgia's voice. She sucked in her breath, suddenly angry. Becky was supposed to be doing her homework, and it was typical of Georgia to assume that she could come and interrupt Becky anytime she wanted.

Becky's voice was low. “Mama won't let Birdie do my hair. She says as long as it's clean and cut nicely and I wear it out of my face, then I shouldn't think twice about it.”

Maisy stopped outside the room and looked inside. Becky sat cross-legged on the bed, while Georgia sat on her knees behind her, French-braiding her hair, their backs to the door.

“Well, she's right,” Georgia said.

Maisy's anger jammed in her throat.

Georgia continued. “You're too young to be worrying about your hair. You should use your brain cells for school and tennis.”

Becky groaned. “I figured you'd take her side.”

“Why's that?”

“Because you're sisters. That's what you're supposed to do.”

There was a long pause. “You're right. That's what we're supposed to do.”

“Why is Mama so mad at you?”

Georgia's fingers stalled on the yellow strands. “It's an involved and complicated story, sweetie. Maybe when you're older we can have a long talk.”

Becky let out an exaggerated sigh. “That's what Mama says, too. Can't you at least give me a hint?”

Maisy pressed her lips together, holding back the hot words that threatened to spill out of her mouth.

“Let's just say that your mama and I didn't have the kind of childhood you have. We were raised mostly by Grandpa after Grandma died, and he loved us, but we were two little girls and he didn't have too much experience with being a single dad. That just wasn't something men of his generation ever expected to do.”

“What about Birdie? She's your mama.”

“Theoretically. But I don't think motherhood was anything she ever planned on. She married for love the first time and for security the second time, and us girls were just sort of collateral damage.”

“Did you ever want to be a mother?”

Maisy squeezed her eyes shut, picturing Georgia's face at the hospital the day Becky had been born, the smell of blood and longing and retribution forever linked in Maisy's mind. She remembered, too, the way her heart expanded when she'd held Becky for the first time.

“Not really. At least when I was younger. Not sure how I feel about it now, either.”

Becky twisted her head to look at her aunt, the strands of hair slipping from Georgia's fingers. “What does collateral damage mean?”

“It means that your mama and I had to stick together, because we were being brought up by two people who were raising us by default. Not like you, Becky. You have a mama and daddy who love you very much, and are doing their best to raise you right. If your mama is grumpy or telling you to do things, be grateful. That means she cares and that she loves you. It will make a big difference in your life when you get older.” Georgia's elegant fingers threaded through Becky's hair again, returning to where she'd left off.

“But she's grumpy all the time, and she never wants to listen to what I have to s-say.”

It was the first time Becky had stuttered in the whole conversation with Georgia, and it made Maisy feel hollowed-out, knowing it had been the mention of her that had started it.

“Your mama has a lot going on in her life right now, so be kind
to her. If I thought for one minute, or one second, that she wasn't the best mother in the world, I would have moved back here years ago to keep an eye on you. From the first moment I saw her holding you, I knew that you could search the world over and never find someone who could love you more.”

Georgia's voice cracked, and Maisy wondered whether Becky had heard it, too, had recognized the sound of a broken heart.

The quietly sung words from “Send in the Clowns” from behind Birdie's closed door punctuated the silence. Becky's voice sounded strained. “She's singing it for me.”

“What do you mean?”

Becky shrugged. “She always sings it after one of her ‘episodes'—that's what Mama calls them. It's like she wants me to know she's all right, that her thoughts are in the right place again.”

Maisy could almost hear Georgia's thoughts running through her head, mirroring her own. “The right place?”

“Uh-huh. It's like when you're playing tag and you're on base. She's on base right now, where she's pretending she's in a play and nobody can catch her or take her away.”

“She told you this?” Georgia continued threading the blond strands in and out of the long braid, slowing slightly as she reached the bottom.

“Sort of.” There was a long pause, and Maisy imagined Georgia keeping silent on purpose, waiting until Becky was ready to tell her more. But Becky didn't saying anything else.

Georgia sat back on her heels. “Did you know you're missing a big chunk of your hair?” She held up a small quadrant of hair toward the back of Becky's head. “Looks like it's been cut clean.” Using a hair tie, Georgia quickly wrapped up the bottom of the braid, the shorter strands lying conspicuously untethered on the side of Becky's face. “Did you cut it?”

Becky shook her head. “No.” She began gnawing on her thumbnail, obscuring her voice.

Georgia waited for a moment for Becky to elaborate. When she didn't, she asked, “Then who did?”

Becky tilted her head down so she was staring at her crossed legs, her thumbnail lodged between her teeth. “P-promise you won't be mad?”

“Not if you tell me the truth.”

“It was Madison Bennett. She sits behind me in math.”

Maisy drew in a breath. Why hadn't Becky told her?

“Why would she do such a thing?”

Becky was silent.

“I won't be mad, remember? Just tell me the truth.”

The singing stopped, as if even Birdie were waiting for an answer. “Your friend Bobby that we saw the other day? Madison is his niece. He said something not very nice about you, and she was telling people at school. So I told her to shut up.”

Maisy pressed herself against the wall so she wouldn't be tempted to rush into the bedroom and give her daughter a high five. Not just because it wouldn't be the right thing for a mother to encourage her child to tell another child to shut up, but because she wouldn't want Georgia to see her praising Becky for sticking up for her aunt. Her second instinct was to call the school's principal and ask for a meeting. It was too late, of course, but Maisy made a mental note to do it first thing in the morning, and that made her feel slightly better.

“Do you want to tell me what she said?”

Becky shook her head.

“That's all right. Is Madison a friend of yours?”

“She's one of the popular girls. They have a special table in the lunchroom, and you have to be invited to sit with them.”

“And you haven't been?”

The French braid flopped as Becky shook her head again. “I don't want to. I sit at the jockettes' table.”

“Jockettes?”

“Those are the girls who play sports. But we let other people sit with us if they want.”

“That's nice—to have a group of people you're comfortable with, and still welcome others. It's a good way to be.”

“Did you have a group you hung out with when you were in school?”

The boys,
Maisy thought.
Always the boys.

“Not really. I wasn't into music and ran on the track team—much to Birdie's disappointment. But I loved art, so I hung out with a bunch of the other kids who were into art. I especially liked to paint, although I was terrible at it. That's probably what got me interested in antiques and old china. Well, that and my grandmother's love of collecting it.”

“Did you have a best friend?”

Maisy listened as the bedsprings creaked, and when she stole a glance into the bedroom, Georgia stood next to the bed, her profile outlined by the beside lamp, looking somehow small and lost and alone. “Not really. I didn't need one.”

“Why?”

“Because I had a sister. And that's all I needed.”

Maisy turned from the doorway and tiptoed down the hallway to her own bedroom, carefully closing it without a sound. She stood with her back pressed against the door for a long time, watching the light fade from the sky as a night crier began its endless calling from its perch in a tall cypress, searching for something in the vast darkness it couldn't seem to find no matter how long it cried.

“Life is the flower for which love is the honey.”

Victor Hugo

—NED BLOODWORTH'S BEEKEEPER'S JOURNAL

Georgia

J
ames and I sat in the shade of the giant magnolia tree near the apiary, he with his laptop and I with the thick folder filled with photocopies from the Beaulieu estate ledger. The handwriting was tiny, old-fashioned, and, to make it even more difficult for me, in French. Happily, I needed to know only the words Limoges and Emile Duval. Not that I expected a nineteenth-century estate manager to make it convenient for an American in the twenty-first century to decipher his work, but I'd hoped that the tedium of the last weeks had bought me at least one convenience. But life, I'd learned, rarely made sense, was fair, or cared about what was convenient or easy.

James closed his laptop with an annoyed expression, then put it on the ground. “I just lost the Wi-Fi connection again—I guess I'm too far from the router. I wish I'd brought my personal Wi-Fi hotspot, but I wasn't really thinking ahead when I decided to take the trip down south.”

I shook the pages in my hands. “See? Modern technology is vastly overrated. I'm not having a problem accessing my data.”

He snorted. “But by the way you're squinting, I'm guessing you're having trouble reading it. If it were online you could make the font bigger. And let's not forget that the only reason you're looking at it here in your backyard in Apalachicola, Florida, is because somebody in France decided to make it available online.”

Feeling a lot like Becky, I rolled my eyes. “I'm not a Luddite—really. I think a lot of modern technology is great, especially for research. I just don't think there's a need to be in touch twenty-four/seven. When do people have time to think if they're being constantly barraged by bings and texts and alerts? I've just opted out of all that.”

James leaned back, crossing his legs at the ankles. He was barefoot—that was a first—and I tried very hard not to stare. It was really unfair that a man should have such nicely formed legs and feet. I wondered whether his sisters were built the same way, or if they resented his good fortune.

His eyes narrowed, a darker blue in the shade. “So it has nothing to do with cutting yourself off from a past you want nothing to do with?”

I wasn't angry at him because he'd spoken the truth. I was angry at myself for being so transparent to him. “I already told you why I choose not to have a cell phone.”

“Yes, but I'm assuming your reasons don't really apply anymore.”

His phone buzzed three times, then stopped, and then after only a brief pause it began again.

“Case in point,” I said, pretending he hadn't spoken. “You're obviously annoyed that somebody is trying to reach you, but you're too addicted to your phone to turn it off or just leave it at your hotel. So you end up torturing not only yourself, but those nearby.”

He reached into his pocket and held out his phone. “I didn't answer because I knew it was my oldest sister calling yet again. I've spoken to her several times since I've been here and have exchanged numerous texts and see no need to beat a dead horse. I'm hoping she'll come to realize that and stop—although it's not in her nature to leave things alone where I'm concerned.”

For some reason I felt the need to leap to the defense of a woman
I'd never met. “She's just being an older sister. She obviously cares about you.”

He leaned forward, his eyes probing. “And Maisy always did what you wanted her to do because she appreciated your caring?”

I swiveled to face him, the papers slipping from my lap. “You have no idea—”

The screen door slammed shut and we both turned to find Becky standing on the back steps. She was still in her school clothes, and I looked at my watch in surprise, having no idea it had gotten so late. My stomach growled as I realized I hadn't eaten lunch.

“There's somebody at the front door. For Mr. Graf. She says she's his sister.”

I felt James stiffen beside me, his eyes searching the apiary as if it offered an escape route. “Speak of the devil,” he said, as if our conversation had somehow conjured her. But it was apparent from his face that this wasn't completely unexpected.

I bent to gather up the pages and stick them in the folder. “Speaking from experience, the first few minutes are pretty hard, when you try to remember why you haven't spoken for so long. And then it gets harder from there as you both try to get past that thing between you before you realize that it's not going anywhere.”

“Thanks for the help,” he said, his long legs striding toward the house. He held open the door for Becky and me, and we followed him into the cool air-conditioning.

Maisy and the visitor were sitting on our grandmother's prized antique sofas, found at an estate sale in DeFuniak Springs. I'd spotted them first, their horsehair upholstery splitting at the seams, a foul odor of cat pee and something else I didn't want to identify. But even as a young girl I'd recognized good lines and strong bones, and timeless style and craftsmanship. My grandmother had stopped at the estate sale to find a large gilded mirror to hang in the stairwell, and had instead come back with the two couches. My grandfather had simply smiled indulgently. Grandma had the couches professionally cleaned and reupholstered in an elegant pale gold brocade and had always called them Georgia's sofas.

The woman sitting opposite Maisy now seemed to belong in that room of beautiful furniture. Tall, slender, and elegant, she looked just like her brother, with the same graceful lines and bone structure. She had her brother's golden red hair, and her eyes were the same dark shade of blue, but they were different from his. It took me a moment to realize that they were missing the haunted look that pooled behind his eyes like empty spaces.

She had smooth, pale skin that had obviously been sheltered from the sun for most of her life. She stood as we entered and smiled at James, fine lines appearing around her eyes.

He didn't step forward. “Hello, Caroline.”

Caroline
. His oldest sister, who must be in her mid-forties, since I knew James was about my age, in his mid-thirties. The sister whose calls he'd been ignoring.

“What are you doing here? And how did you find me?”

She took a step forward with outstretched arms. “Aren't I allowed to see my baby brother? Besides, you needed to know what happens when you don't answer your phone. I worry.”

James took a step toward her and met her halfway before embracing her. Even though she was tall and wore heels, she just reached his jaw. When she pulled back, her eyes were damp. “Believe it or not, it wasn't that hard to find you. It's a small town.”

He digested that for a moment before speaking again. “I'm assuming you've already met Maisy. This is her sister, Georgia Chambers,” he said, indicating me. “She's the china expert I told you about who's doing a good job of chasing down Grandmother's china.”

She extended a slender-fingered hand, but her grasp was surprisingly strong, her gaze probing. “It's a pleasure to meet you.” Her gaze slid down my outfit and I braced myself. She wore an exquisite emerald green silk blouse that set off her hair, tucked neatly into a white linen skirt that hadn't dared to wrinkle. Understated. Elegant. Expensive. “Is that vintage Pucci?”

I looked at her with surprise. “Yes, actually. It is. How did you know that?”

“My youngest sister, Elizabeth, and I owned a vintage dress shop in the Village for a while—until she got pregnant with her third and couldn't do it anymore. But I adore vintage clothing. You really have a good eye—that color is striking on you.”

“Thank you,” I said, sending James a wary glance. “He didn't mention your store to me, which you'd think would be a given, considering.”

Caroline actually rolled her eyes, which made me laugh, and I decided right then that I liked James's sister. “He's got that male gene; what can I say?”

Looking seriously annoyed, James said, “If you're done, maybe you'd like to tell me how long you plan to stay and if you need me to arrange for your flight back home.”

Ignoring him, she directed her attention at me. “I'm actually starving. May I take you and your sister and niece to a late lunch or early dinner? James can come, too, if he promises to stop scowling at me.”

“That's very kind of you,” Maisy said, “but I need to stay here. My mother and grandfather haven't been well, and I'd feel better if someone were here.” Almost reluctantly, she added, “Georgia's been with them all day while I've been at work, so it's my turn.”

I sent her a look of appreciation, but she was staring at Becky's upturned and hopeful face. “And you've got homework and a science test tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” I said to Caroline. “James and I were so busy working that we sort of forgot to eat. I'm famished.” I looked at James, expecting him to say something similar, but he just scowled at his sister. I was once again reminded of how little time it took for a sibling to return us to our childhood and the squabbles in the backseat of the family sedan.

Caroline picked up a black quilted Chanel bag—definitely vintage—from the sofa and slid the gold chain over her shoulder. “Great. It's all settled. Are you coming, James? Because you know if you don't, you will be the lead topic of conversation.”

Without a word, he headed toward the front door while I grabbed my purse. As he closed the door behind us, he said, “I suggest we take the car. Caroline isn't used to the heat and would probably melt.”

Ignoring him, Caroline tucked her arm into mine, her fingers clutching a little too tightly, belying her light banter. “I can't wait to get to know you better. I already think we have lots in common.”

I felt James's eyes boring into our backs as we headed to my car.

We spent the entire drive listening as Caroline gushed over how great my car was. She knew a lot more about cars than James did and actually knew how to drive, and even admitted to owning a minivan to shuttle carpools involving her four children under twelve in her Connecticut suburb.

James didn't say a word until I'd snagged a curbside parking spot on Commerce right in front of the Owl Café. He opened my door while I was still hunting for my purse, and I watched as Caroline waited for him to open hers. I remembered what he'd told me about her protecting him after he'd been caught tossing eggs from their apartment window when they were kids. It seemed sisters were the same everywhere, a best friend and a best enemy all rolled up into a single person who would always know you better than you knew yourself. Which told me, too, that there was a very good reason Caroline had come all the way to Apalachicola, and there was more to it than just checking in. I rubbed my arms where her fingers had clenched my arm, convincing me that I was right.

Caroline stood on the wide sidewalk looking down Avenue D toward Riverfront Park and the Apalachicola River in the near distance, the historic brick two-story mercantile buildings with overhangs sheltering the sidewalk like old ladies with parasols. “This is really stunning. Not to sound snobby, but I've always thought that to be a real city there needed to be skyscrapers and lots of neon lights. I've been here all of an hour and I can already see how misguided I've been. Looks like people down here have been keeping this place a secret.”

“It is called ‘the Forgotten Coast' for a reason,” I said. “Unfortunately, developers have set their sights on this part of the gulf, and I don't think they'll be happy until there are condos lining the shoreline here and on St. George Island across the bay.”

She sent me a wide smile that looked just like her brother's. “I
knew
we had a lot in common. I'm a card-carrying member of the National Trust. I've got a real soft spot for preserving our collective history.”

I could almost sense James groaning behind me. Ignoring him, I said, “If we have time, I'll take you to Riverfront Park, where you can see where the old steamboats used to line the docks.”

“I'll look forward to it.” She tucked her arm into mine again, her grip not as desperate this time, and I led them to the door of the restaurant that had just opened for the four-o'clock dinner crowd.

The Owl Café was a childhood memory of after-church brunches with our grandparents and Birdie. The food had always been good, which was why I'd suggested it—that and the image of my grandparents and their friends making me hope for an older crowd. Or at least people who wouldn't remember me from high school.

James finally broke his brooding silence as we waited for our table. “So, really, how did you find me?” he asked Caroline.

“After I failed to get hold of you, I called the Big Easy Auction Gallery and spoke with Mr. Mandeville. He said Georgia didn't have a cell number where she could be reached, but he did say you'd driven here together from New Orleans and that Apalachicola was small enough so that it wouldn't be too hard to find you.