Happiness Key (19 page)

Wanda surprised her. “Now, that’s a sensible hairstyle for Florida. Especially for a little girl who likes to get all sweaty riding her bike up and down this old oyster-shell road. A very good choice.”

“You are such a pretty girl, it just makes that clearer,” Janya said kindly. “And now your lovely blue eyes are so easy to see.”

“I think next you should get your ears pierced,” Tracy told her. “Get some cute earrings, maybe sapphires to match your eyes. You have great ears. I had to have mine flattened against my head when I was your age.”

“Yuck.” Olivia wrinkled her nose.

“Her father does not like a fuss,” Alice said.

Tracy winked at Olivia. “Just tell me if you’re interested. I’ll talk to him and see what he says.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Not as much as having them pinned to your head. Just think about it.”

Olivia looked a little happier. “May I look around?”

“You bet. Make yourself at home.”

The little girl wandered off.

“Well, we all make fashion mistakes,” Wanda said.

Tracy motioned the others into the living room, where she had dragged the boxes. “She’ll think twice next time she decides on such a big change.”

Alice wandered in behind them. “It’s always been long. Karen used to brush her hair and braid it. I couldn’t keep up…well enough.”

“By the time it grows out, you won’t have to worry,” Tracy said. “She’ll be old enough to do whatever the style of the day requires. You’ll be so tired of watching her play with her hair, you’ll wish it was this short again.”

“She was so unhappy when they came home.”

Wanda put her arm around Alice’s shoulders for a moment. “That’s how we learn.”

Alice nodded, but she still looked sad. Tracy wondered if Lee was right and being here with them was a bad idea for Alice, after all.

“I’ve gone through everything else,” Tracy told them after everybody found a place to sit. “His dresser, closet, even his medicine cabinet.”

“What did you think you’d find
there?
” Wanda sounded interested. “You think Herb was dealing drugs?”

“Not unless there’s a black market for Preparation H. No, I thought maybe I’d find some kind of medical ID bracelet, you know, with next of kin.”

“You’re reaching.”

“Am I ever. Anyway, I’ve skimmed through some of these boxes, but it takes time to look at every little piece of paper and memento.”

“Well, dig in.” Wanda was already elbow-deep in one. “Maybe we can get through them tonight.”

The box Tracy looked through was filled with papers. Receipts, most of them recent, a few from the last place he’d lived, where none of the present residents had ever known him. Tracy had managed to track down the developer who had been in charge of those renovations, and he had confirmed that Herb and all his old neighbors had gone elsewhere.

Herb had conducted a love affair with useless paper, but apparently not with anything important. By the time she reached the bottom of the box, she didn’t know one more thing that could help.

“He ate a lot of tuna fish,” she said, kicking that box to the side. “Maybe he held stock. Maybe he’s related to the Starkists.”

“He kept a record of every chess game he played over at Grambling or the rec center,” Wanda said. “Every single move he could remember. And he must have gone to a lot of movies when he lived in town, because he kept notes on those, too. What he liked and what he didn’t. Maybe he was afraid he’d forget and pay for a movie he’d already seen.”

“If he was anything…like me, it wouldn’t matter.” Alice looked up and smiled a little. “I always forget….”

“She forgets how they end,” Olivia said, when Alice didn’t continue. “She says it doesn’t matter if she’s seen them, because the end is always a surprise.”

Everybody laughed. “Don’t worry, Alice,” Wanda said. “That happens to me, too. Ever since the change.”

“What did you change into?” Olivia asked.

“A badass, mean-spirited, middle-aged woman.”

“Like a witch?”

“You got it.”

Olivia giggled.

They worked in silence for a little longer, until Janya held up a small box. “This was at the very bottom. Look inside.” She displayed it on her lap. Tracy couldn’t see well enough to be sure what was there, so she moved closer.

“Medals? War medals?”

“It seems so, yes.”

Tracy took them and held the medals up to the light. The first was heart-shaped, with what looked like the profile of George Washington on it. She flipped it over and read out loud, “For military merit.”

Wanda joined her and took the medal from her hands. “I know what this is. This is a Purple Heart. See the purple stripe in the ribbon, even though it’s faded? My uncle had one. A soldier gets one if he’s killed or wounded.”

“Interesting. Would you know what this one is?” Tracy handed her the second, which had a figure like some kind of Greek god with a broken sword.

Wanda turned it over. “1941 through 1945. I guess it’s some kind of commemorative medal. If you served in the war, you got one. My uncle had one of these, too. He let us play with all his medals. Said that a man does what he does ’cause he has to, not for some shiny hunks of metal.”

Wanda handed them back to Tracy. “This all seems familiar, and not because of Uncle Willie. Maybe Herb told me he got these in the war, only I’m as bad as Alice and can only remember I heard about them somewhere.”

Alice smiled, not offended. “That’s not likely. He
never, well, talked about…the war. Said the whole thing was not something…”

“He wanted to remember,” Wanda finished for her, after a long pause. “I can understand that. My uncle wouldn’t talk about it much, either.” She nodded as if that sealed it. “But there’s something nagging at me here.”

Medals sounded familiar to Tracy, as well. But she was tired, and her brain was refusing to make connections. She had gotten further on the floor than expected, spreading the adhesive, then combing it with the ridged side of the trowel, placing the tile exactly on the line, placing spacers so the tiles would be straight, setting them in with her new mallet. She had expected to hate the whole process. Instead, she had turned on the radio and sung along, and time had gone quickly, particularly when she began to make real progress. There was still a lot to do, and every muscle in her body ached. But seeing this through to completion might not be as bad as she’d feared.

“We need a break,” Wanda said, when no answers were forthcoming. “A pie break. I brought plastic plates and forks. Herb’s supplies are pretty lame.”

“I think there’s coffee and a coffeemaker,” Tracy said. “Herb certainly won’t mind.”

Together they got the coffee brewing, and found powdered creamer and artificial sweetener, which Wanda said was as bad as using canned apples in a homemade pie. There was one small can of ginger ale for Olivia.

“I follow a vegetarian diet,” Janya said, as Wanda was cutting the pie. “I will be fine if this is something I can’t eat.”

“Not a vegetable in sight in this pie, but not one bit of meat, either. We can leave the whipped cream off your piece, if you prefer.”

“No, I consume dairy products.”

“Never could understand why you people don’t eat meat. We’d be overrun by cows, we didn’t butcher them.”

“If you didn’t butcher them, you wouldn’t breed them and need to eat them.”

“You got cows in India, don’t you? Don’t you worship them?”

“Hindus respect the lives of animals. The cow’s milk nurtures us.”

“Well, I respect a good juicy steak most of all.”

“Wanda!” Tracy shoved the plates at her. “Will you please—” She tempered what she was going to say. “Dish up?”

“Nothing wrong with a little religious discussion. Broadening to the mind.”

Tracy caught Janya’s eye and shrugged. Janya continued to look serene. Tracy didn’t know how the other woman managed it.

They took their plates into the living room. The pie was scrumptious. Tracy wondered how she had lived her entire life without eating grapefruit pie. Wanda looked pleased by all the compliments.

“This is nothing. You ought to taste my Key lime. No question it’s my best.”

As they finished, Tracy told them what she’d done on the floor. She’d just completed her description when Wanda slapped her hands together. “I know why those medals sound familiar. Where’d you put Clyde’s discharge papers?”

Tracy realized why she was asking. This was the same thing that had eluded her. “I can get them. But are you thinking maybe the medals aren’t Herb’s? Maybe these are
Clyde’s
medals?” She was already halfway into the
other room to retrieve the appropriate file folder. “Here we go.”

She fished out Clyde’s papers and scanned them. “Here it is, and you’re right. These medals were listed.” She handed the whole folder to Wanda.

“So these are Clyde’s. Herb has Clyde’s papers, why not his medals?”

“Is that the right question?” Janya asked. “Isn’t the right question why Herb had these things at all?”

“Or why Clyde Franklin just disappeared after the war, and Louise had to have him declared dead,” Tracy said.

“She did?” Alice asked.

Tracy realized they hadn’t filled Alice in on that part yet. She explained about Clyde’s death certificate. But as she did, an idea was forming.

“Look, I’ve got a thought about this, and you may think I’m crazy, but hear me out. Here are some things we know so far. Herb had a daughter. And from the article about Louise, we know Clyde had a daughter. Clyde was declared dead by his wife, but Herb lived on, and he did it right here in Palmetto Grove.”

Wanda interrupted. “No, he lived somewhere else for at least a while, remember? Kentucky, for starters. And there was that florist in Georgia he was paying regularly.”

“But he came here to finish his life. The preacher I talked to told me that Herb had quit his job in Kentucky and gone
back
to Florida.”

“So yes, he lived here before,” Janya said.

“And we don’t have a single paper for Herb except his birth certificate until
after
Clyde was declared dead. Herb springs to life only after Clyde croaks. Am I the only one who gets this?”

The others stared at her.

“Clyde and Herb are the same man!”

Nobody said anything. Finally Olivia spoke. “I wish I could watch TV.”

“Not now, dear.” Alice leaned forward. Her eyes were sparkling. “No one can be two people. Either Herb was Herb, or he was Clyde. At least when he was born.”

Tracy noticed that Alice had gotten the sentences out without so much as a pause to breathe. “Wanda, you’ve got the folder. Pull the birth certificates, okay? Both of them. What are the differences you see first thing?”

Wanda got them and held them side by side. “Clyde’s looks like the original, folded and refolded and torn around the edges. Herb’s is newer, thinner, probably a copy. The kind you write off for.”

“When people assume somebody else’s identity, they write off for the birth certificate of somebody about their own age who died. I think they can even use that person’s Social Security number.”

“Not so easy anymore,” Wanda said. “Kenny told me about that once. Criminals do it all the time. Used to be easy. Before computers and such, criminal types would go to graveyards and get the names of babies off the tombstones, then get their birth certificates, then get Social Security numbers, and suddenly they could be somebody else. Harder now, though.”

“But this happened a long time ago. I think for some reason Clyde Franklin decided he wanted to be somebody else. So he became Herb Krause, wrote off for Herb’s birth certificate and got his Social Security number—or applied for one, who knows?”

“But who was Herb Krause to him?” Janya asked.

“Wasn’t Herb born in Maine? Or wait, was he?” Wanda looked it up. “No,
Clyde
was from Maine. Herb was from…Montgomery, Alabama. How would Clyde
have known somebody named Herb Krause from Alabama was dead? He went cemetery-hopping there?”

Tracy was putting it together, but Janya came up with an answer first. “Herb could have died anywhere, even nearby. But we can’t forget the war, because so many men died at that time. Perhaps they served together? We know Clyde was there, perhaps this Herb was there, as well.”

Tracy took up where she left off. “Yes, that makes sense. Why not just choose a name he could be sure of? Maybe Herb—the real Herb—died in combat, and Clyde knew enough about him, where he’d lived and everything, to write off for his birth certificate. Maybe they were friends.”

“So how do we prove this? Because right now it’s just a story we’re making up as we go along,” Wanda said.

“We find out if a man named Herb Krause with the same birthday died some time ago. Maybe starting with the war, then fanning out.”

“How can you find this information?” Janya asked.

“My husband, Fred…” Alice looked up. “Fred was too young to serve, you know. But he told me…” She shrugged. “They brought home his brother’s friends, he was older, Fred’s brother, and he was at Guadalcanal. And some of the men who served with him were brought home to be buried.”

“He could have been buried in a military cemetery,” Wanda said. “Like Arlington. Aren’t World War II soldiers buried there? Maybe Clyde just went to Arlington and got some name off a grave.”

“Or they were buried in the countries where they fell,” Alice said. “Then brought them home if the families could manage it. They wanted their sons…”

Tracy was making mental notes. “So he could be buried where his family lived. I guess I can make some
calls to Montgomery. I’ll check online, too, and see if there’s a list of soldiers buried in military cemeteries.”

“Well, we got us some mystery.” After everyone had absorbed that, Wanda made it official. “We got us a man who might not be the man we thought he was. A man hiding himself right here in plain sight until the day he died.”

“We need more proof, but I’ll bet my life the man we knew as Herb was really Clyde Franklin and declared dead by his wife in the fifties,” Tracy said. “And before he disappeared, he grabbed his own documents and medals, which is why Herb had them.” Tracy wasn’t sure whether to be pleased they had traced things this far or discouraged because nothing they’d found had turned up a family.