June (17 page)

Henry Abernathy lived outside of town, off Lake St. Jude, on what the old women had referred to as one of the “fingers.” Neither Cassie nor Nick had understood what that meant until they found themselves tracing the edge of the water up and around what could only be described as a finger, into a much newer development than where they’d been that morning. The GPS’s instructions were measured as they closed in on the house. The brown water slopped restlessly against the rocky banks; the lake had been polluted for as long as Cassie could remember, and, though plenty of boats were moored just along the shore, she’d never seen anyone swim in Lake St. Jude.

The house stuck out on its own little peninsula off of the aforementioned finger, like a hangnail, a wooden structure shaped like a modern interpretation of a whaling ship, tall and compact with too many windows to count. Mr. Abernathy waved his cane down at them and told them to come around the back and up the stairs. Cassie took a picture of him from the driveway, before they climbed to the back porch, which overlooked a wide swath of water.

He was older than the old ladies—maybe even ninety—but just as vibrant. He was wiry and strong, like a Jack Russell, with bright, clear eyes. He was eager, the second they came in the door, to show them his extensive archives, which took up most of the top floor of the house. “Business closes down? I take their bags of receipts. Grandpa dies? I say, ‘Give me all those old albums with strangers you don’t know in ’em.’ ” His blue eyes twinkled. “Then I play detective.”

On the wall, Cassie noticed a photograph of a dirigible flying over the vast Goodyear plant just outside of town. In what had once been some kind of rec room stood shelves and shelves of identical five-inch navy binders. “My son built these,” Mr. Abernathy said proudly, knocking the sturdy pine. Cassie’s eyes skimmed the identical typed labels stuck to the outsides of the binders, which, on one side of the room, were grouped chronologically (starting all the way back in 1867) and, on the other, alphabetically by subject (“Goodyear Plant,” “Lake St. Jude,” Schillinger’s Drug Receipts”). Mr. Abernathy had been employed by the county clerk’s office, but it was clear this magnificent collection was his true life’s work. When Cassie mentioned this, he nodded proudly that he’d been approached by more than one local library and historical society, asking him to donate all his papers. He chuckled. “They won’t know who gets what until they read my will.” Cassie wondered if all old men were essentially the same—pleased at the thought of heirs scrambling for their legacies.

Nick asked about
Erie Canal,
and Mr. Abernathy hauled down two binders marked with the name of the movie. Inside were dozens of clippings and paraphernalia—a pressed corsage that Diane DeSoto had supposedly worn in the cotillion sequence, a prop election flyer, not to mention the articles (from the
Columbus Dispatch
and the local paper, the
St. Jude Caller
) that sported photographs of Diane and Jack stepping out of limousines and laughing in front of the small brick fire station that still stood on Montgomery Square.

Mr. Abernathy directed them through both binders, tapping his knotty finger on the pages and offering fact after fact—who had written the article, the collection where he’d discovered it, and any identifying details in the photographs (“That’s Mr. Hammacher’s barbershop, down on Main Street. He had a speaking part in the film but it didn’t make the final cut”). But when Cassie pressed for more speculative or personal details about anyone in the photographs, about Diane or Jack or even June, Mr. Abernathy’s face would cloud. “Well, I don’t know about that,” he answered carefully a few times, until Nick shot her a look and she decided to hold her questions until the end.

As soon as they finished looking through the second
Erie Canal
notebook, Mr. Abernathy held up a finger and said, “Nineteen fifty-five! Big year for St. Jude, but could have been bigger.” He sat back in his chair and folded his hands over his little hump of a belly. “The movie was only here for a month, and then things went back to normal. I guess if it had been a hit or something it might have made a difference—there would have been tours, that kind of thing. It would have turned St. Jude into a tourist destination. Have you seen it?”

“What,
Erie Canal
?” He’d been talking so long, she was surprised to be asked a question. “No. Have you, Nick?”

Nick shook his head. “It’s hard to get your hands on.”

Mr. Abernathy mused for a moment, clearly weighing what to say next. He settled on “Well, I’d be curious to see what you think.” He paused judiciously. “I’m not one for movies.”

But before Cassie could dig for dirt, he went on. “What would have truly changed the game for St. Jude was if the interstate had come just east of town on its way down to Cincinnati.” Turned out Mr. Abernathy had a whole notebook devoted to what he called “a little-known bit of St. Judian lore.” According to him, a contractor named Mr. Ripvogle, based in Lima, had nearly won a construction bid that would have “transformed this town. Everything seemed to be in place, but the national bill wasn’t passed until 1956, and by then Ripvogle was off the project. There was some talk he tried to bribe the governor”—he wagged his finger—“which was a no-no.”

It was the first time Cassie’d heard him speculate. Although she wasn’t remotely interested in this particular topic, she feigned interest, hoping she’d be able to get him to guess about Jack and June; if he knew anything about an affair, it would be based on rumor and innuendo, not hard facts.

He clapped his hands sharply then, and said, “Oh, how rude! I’ve forgotten you’re descended from Lemon Gray Neely!” He got down another notebook, all about Two Oaks, and asked did she know that Neely’s wife, Mae, had died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918 in Two Oaks’s master bedroom? And had Cassie seen Neely’s mausoleum down at the Elm Grove Cemetery? And did she know how rich Neely had been in his heyday? First the oil, then the land? “And then, when he died—poof! Gone.” He leaned forward and said, “Your grandmother should have gotten everything.”

Should:
another speculative word.

Cassie leaned forward to match him. “But she didn’t?”

He grimaced and shook his head, as though Cassie’d been the one to bring it up. “I don’t like to gossip.”

“Please make an exception for me.”

He glanced hesitatingly between her and Nick, then leaned forward in his chair and lowered his voice, as if someone was listening at the door.

“Well, it all comes down to money. That’s the trail history leaves, at least. June and her mother, Cheryl Ann, moved into Two Oaks in 1952, and lived with Mr. Neely and his maid, Apatha. They were related to him only tangentially—Neely’s wife, Mae, had been the aunt of Cheryl Ann’s husband, Marvin—who was also your grandmother’s father. But Mae and Marvin were both dead. So it was quite generous of Neely to invite them in.” He paused for a moment to let Cassie catch up. “In the meantime, June gets engaged to Arthur Danvers, Clyde Danvers’s brother. Now Clyde was a real man about town. He knew everyone; he built that Three Oaks development over there on the other side of town, he owned every building on Main Street—well, the ones that Mr. Neely didn’t own. I always wondered if there was some kind of arrangement there. The marriage of a Danvers to Mr. Neely’s potential heir would have really been something.”

“But it wasn’t?”

“That’s just the thing. June marries Arthur, becomes a Danvers. Mr. Neely dies, and so does Mr. Danvers—the older one, Clyde, I mean. June and Arthur move, almost at once, back into Two Oaks with Cheryl Ann, and they nurse her through her final illness and June has their child—your father, Adelbert. But here’s what’s strange: Mr. Neely was a millionaire, many times over. He owned land, ran oil fields, and had plenty of cash. Two Oaks was a grand home, certainly, but the real prize was his money. And I knew June and Arthur, and they didn’t live like that. They were always just getting by, making enough to take care of themselves and their son, and do what they could to maintain Two Oaks. But it was hard on them. That place required a lot of upkeep.”

“Believe me,” Cassie interjected, “I know.”

“But they should have had plenty of money!” He was in his own world now, incensed by the injustice of inadequate facts. “If Mr. Neely left everything to June, they should have been living in luxury. So the question remains: where did all that money go?” Mr. Abernathy flipped to a page in the third binder. As far as Cassie could tell, it was a town record covered with figures and acronyms she didn’t understand.

A phone rang out, piercing the silence.

Mr. Abernathy looked alarmed. Cassie turned to find the source of the sound. Of course—it was Nick’s phone. Nick grabbed the little machine from his pocket. Cassie caught a glimpse of the screen. It said “Tate.” Well, she thought, he’d silence it and call Tate back when Mr. Abernathy was done. But, instead, Nick stood and held up a finger. Then he answered. “Yes?”

Cassie glared to get him to hang up. But he was absorbed in the conversation, blind to her, as though everything had evaporated but the sound of Tate’s voice. “Well, good, that’s progress, but did you tell him I’d call back?” It was clear, from his tone, that this was not an emergency. “No, nothing important. Yes, I can talk.” Then he held up his hand in a vague gesture of apology and strode out of the room.

Cassie watched him go in shock, then turned back to Mr. Abernathy and apologized. The old guy looked suddenly exhausted, confused; the call had interrupted his train of thought. Cassie’s blood boiled at Nick’s selfishness. She pointed to the paper. “What does it mean?”

The ancient man looked down at the paper uneasily. He rubbed one eye like a baby. She knew she should let him off the hook, but now she was thirsty. She’d never known anything about this part of June’s life. She tapped at the numbers to redirect him.

He sat as upright as he could, nodding down at the page, translating. “Only a month after Neely dies, and someone is selling off his land. Acres and acres and acres of it. Someone made a lot of money, but that money left this town. I don’t know where it went, but it didn’t stay here, I’m sure of that.” His gaze drifted up and out the window before him.

“So what do you think happened?” Cassie asked. “Who was it? Who got the money?”

His eyes squinted. His voice grew foggy. “It’s the historian’s job to stick to the facts.”

She was impatient at this coyness; he’d been happy to guess at the truth only moments before.

Mr. Abernathy closed the binder and shook his head.

“Please,” she pleaded. There was so much she didn’t know. So much she hadn’t known she didn’t know. It seemed necessary, all at once, to understand who had stolen from her hardworking grandparents.

Mr. Abernathy stood with effort, carefully tucking one binder under his arm and leaning on his cane to take it back to the empty spot where it belonged. Cassie gathered up the others and followed him. She could tell he didn’t want her to place them in their spots herself, so she passed them to him and waited for him to complete the task alone. Her “please” hung in the air, but she wasn’t going to beg again.

Mr. Abernathy brushed off his hands and turned to her, opening them in apology. It would have made a great shot.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “That’s the problem. People die and your chance to ask goes with them.”

Cassie’s heart flipped at his wisdom. It was tragic and cruel and true. She was furious at herself for losing the chance to ask June about Arthur and Jack, to find out what it had been like to lose her only child, Adelbert, in the accident, or how she’d felt about moving down to Columbus to raise her only grandchild. Cassie would never hear from June about losing her father in a foreign war, or watching her mother auction off their things. Or what Two Oaks had been like when June was a girl, or Mr. Neely. All of it was gone.

Cassie had been so bound up in her own life that it had never occurred to her to be interested in June’s. And now it was too late.

Mr. Abernathy patted her on the shoulder. “You need anything else, you know where to find me.” He was ready for her to go, she could tell, ready to sleep away the afternoon. She felt the urge to lift this old treasure into her arms and carry him to his bed, to read him a story and tuck him in, to watch how quickly sleep would overcome him. But instead she thanked him, apologized again for Nick’s departure, and let him escort her unsteadily to the top of the porch stairs. The light was turning orange outside, the afternoon already fading toward evening. She had her camera, but she could tell it would cost him something if she took his picture.