But I still had no answers. I propped the photo against the saltshaker, noticing once again that the bride’s eyes seemed to follow me as I moved. I went back to the clipping. The wedding took place in Annie’s parlor, at 304 Crockett—in my shop! According to the article, the new Mrs. Hunt was attended by Mr. Hunt’s eight-year-old daughter, Caroline. With that as a prompt, I pulled out the other wedding photo, the one in which the wedding couple was posed with the young girl in banana curls. Now I knew her name, too: it was Caroline. Her mother, Delia, was dead. Annie was her new stepmother.
And then Annie and Adam’s story added another chapter. A clipping announced the arrival of their first child, Crystal, on June 14, 1890. Twin daughters Pearl and Amber were born in 1894. And then I found one more document, a gilt-edged page that looked like it had been taken out of a family Bible. At the top, in elaborate blue letters, were the words Our Family. In faded ink, in an old-fashioned Spencerian script, each of the four Hunt daughters was listed, with the marriages of three of them (Pearl, it appeared, had never married), plus the names and birth dates of their children and their marriages and the names and birthdates of their children. Annie and Adam had had ten grandchildren and sixteen great-grandchildren. He had died in 1927. She followed him in 1943. I did a quick mental calculation. She must have lived in the Crockett Street house—the building that was now mine—for over sixty years. Sixty years! No wonder the place was filled with her energies.
I was still studying the names when Lori knocked at the kitchen door, excited and bubbling over with some news. Winchester got to his feet to greet her. She was wearing sandals and he gave her a wet kiss on her toes.
She bent over to fondle his long ears, then straightened up again. “You are not going to believe this, China,” she said, “but I have found my grandmother!”
“Wow!” I exclaimed. “Really? Lori, that’s wonderful!”
“Yes, really!” Lori flung herself into the chair on the other side of the kitchen table. “I just got off the phone with Aunt Jo, who tracked her down through an acquaintance in Sherwood. She’s in her eighties now, but she’s apparently healthy and living not far from Dallas. I’m going to drive up and see her tomorrow. She’s very excited about the prospect of getting together.”
“Dallas!” I said. “I guess it’s a small world, after all. You’ve been so lucky, Lori. Some people look for years before they find their families.”
Her mouth trembled. “Not so lucky with my mother, I’m afraid. She died in a car crash three years after I was born. She didn’t have any other children.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “But it’s wonderful that you’ve found your grandmother. What did you say her name is? Her given name, I mean.”
“It’s Lorene,” Lori said. “Why?”
“Lorene?” I pulled in my breath and the hair prickled on the back of my neck. “Take a look.” I pushed the “Our Family” page across the table. “Under Crystal’s name. What do you see?”
Lori looked down at the page. “Why, it’s Lorene,” she said, frowning. “What is this page, China?”
“It’s a family genealogy,” I said. “Crystal was this family’s second daughter. Lorene was her first child.” I got up and went around the table. Over Lori’s shoulder, I pointed. “According to this, Lorene married a man named Gatley. Their daughter’s name was—”
Lori gasped. “Laura Anne! My Laura Anne! This is my mother, China! My mother!”
I put my hand on Lori’s shoulder. “I think your name belongs on that page, too.” I pointed at the photograph propped against the saltshaker. “This is Crystal’s mother. Her name is Annie. She used to live in the house where you have your studio. She is . . .” I calculated. “She is your great-great-grandmother.”
There was a long silence as Lori took it all in. “But how in the world did you find all this out?” she asked at last. Her eyes were brimming with tears. “China, I don’t understand!”
“I don’t, either,” I said, although I did, more or less.
Lori had been searching for her mother. Searching desperately, because she had lost everyone in the world she had loved. Because she needed to find out who she was.
Annie understood that need, because she had once been alone in the world, too.
And somehow, by some magic better known to shamans and sages than to us ordinary people, the two had found each other.
“Would you like some tea?” I asked, heading for the stove to turn on the kettle. “I’m ready for a cup.”
“Oh, please,” Lori said. “Tea would be wonderful.”
I might have been imagining it, but I thought I heard a bell.
Author’s Note
When I traveled through the countryside in Swabia and saw a savin [Juniperus sabina] bush in a farmer’s garden, it confirmed what I had in many cases already suspected, that the garden belonged to the barber or the midwife of the village. And to what purpose had they so carefully planted the savin bush? If you look at these bushes and shrubs you’ll see them deformed and without tops, because they have been raided so often, and even at times stolen.
An 18th-century German traveler,
quoted by Edward Shorter
A History of Women’s Bodies, p. 186
Rue in thyme is a maiden’s posy.
Scottish saying
Lad’s love is maiden’s ruin, but half of it is her own doing. [Lad’s love and maiden’s ruin are two folk names for the same abortifacient, Artemisia abrotanum, southernwood.]
Devonshire saying
For several years, I’ve been wanting to include the history of women’s use of herbal contraceptives and abortifacients in one of the China Bayles mysteries. But in our culture, today, these plants are almost never used for these purposes; in fact, the memory of these properties is buried and all but forgotten. So it wasn’t easy to imagine
