“It’s hard to tell yet. We have another few days for the drive,” Vanna explained. “But come on. I’ll show you the room we’re keeping everything in.”
The small storage room was chaos. Daisy spotted a couple of volunteers who usually helped at the thrift store. Agnes was one of them.
“Do you already have the names of families who need the pajamas?”
“Sure do,” Vanna said. “Reverend Kemp knows which families are the neediest. Along with that, if anyone comes to ask, we’ll gladly give to them. Some offer to volunteer with parish chores in return.”
Vanna leaned her arm against Daisy’s. “I don’t suppose you just came to drop off the clothes for kids.”
“You’re right, I didn’t. Can we go to your office or are you too busy? I don’t want to interrupt.”
“You’re not interrupting. Let’s have a cup of tea. With cold setting in, I need several cups a day.”
Vanna went into her office, turned on the electric kettle, and waited for it to bubble. A mug tree stood nearby and she procured two mugs from it. One said Oh, Happy Day, the other said Lift Up Your Eyes.
Vanna had three tins of tea sitting on a tray. She said, “I have a strawberry herbal, a cinnamon rooibos, and orange pekoe. Which would you like?”
“I’d like to try the strawberry—just something light for now.”
As Vanna readied the tea, she glanced over at Daisy more than once. “A light tea means you want to talk about a heavy subject.”
“I don’t know how heavy it is, but I just want you to be relaxed with me, and see if you can remember anything about the time Margaret was in New York.”
“So this isn’t about the murder, per se.”
“No. I just think we need to learn something about Margaret’s background.”
“Let me think.” Vanna set Daisy’s mug in front of her while she took her mug to her desk and sat behind it. Daisy needed no complements to her tea, and Vanna didn’t seem to either.
As they let the tea cool, Vanna said, “New York. I was so hurt when she left for New York. My mother was absolutely heartbroken. Up until then, she thought Margaret would come back into the fold. I thought she might too when she got a taste of New York. But that wasn’t to be.”
“And you said you didn’t hear from her often?”
“I sat down with a box of memorabilia a couple of days ago. It brought back memories that hurt.”
“I understand if you don’t want to talk about this.”
“It hurts me because I didn’t do a better job of staying in touch with Margaret.”
“What happened immediately after she left?”
“She did write me letters then, basic ones that I looked through, but they didn’t have much information. They were all about her need to get away. She found a job in a bar. My mom would have been scandalized. But Margaret insisted she could make more with tips as a waitress in a bar than any of the day jobs she tried to get. Later, I received a few e-mails, but they were lost. E-mail servers changed. I deleted many.”
Vanna suddenly went quiet.
Daisy waited, wondering what the woman was thinking.
“Vanna? Did something you found make you sad?”
“When I couldn’t find anything else, I sorted through years of photos of my husband and kids. I found one of Margaret too. She sent it to me about a year before she met Rowan. Do you want to see it?”
“Sure, I do.”
Vanna pulled her purse from a desk drawer. She slipped the photo out of a zippered pocket and showed it to Daisy.
Daisy stared at the photo. It was of Margaret in front of a building. She’d written on the back, Mother and Dad would be proud of what I’m doing now, but I still hope to find an acting job in the future.
“I wonder what that means,” Daisy said. “What kind of job did she have?”
“I don’t have a clue. I didn’t hear from her again until she married Rowan. She was acting off-Broadway when she met him. There are so many holes in her history. Do you think Glenda knows more than she’s saying?”
“I think it’s certainly possible.” If only Daisy could tap into Glenda’s history too. What kind of information would flow out?
Chapter Eighteen
After work Daisy locked up the tea garden, made sure the security alarm was set, and walked the back route to Jonas’s store. Jazzi had a peer counseling meeting tonight after school, and Daisy would have to pick her up in about half an hour. That gave her time to talk to Jonas about what she’d discovered with Vanna.
As she walked along the back of the properties, the clear cold night swung itself around her with a breeze. She hadn’t worn her hat. Instead of putting up the hood to her jacket, she slipped the band from her ponytail and let her hair blow free. There were times like this when she just wanted to be alone with her thoughts, letting air with the scent of woodsmoke clear any clouds away.
She was anxious to see Jonas for many reasons. One of them was that she missed him when she didn’t see him. She was so used to talking to him every day that when she didn’t, something in her life just felt missing. Jonas seemed to want to be with her too, dropping in at the tea garden or coming over to the house, not even minding if she was babysitting Sammy. Together just seemed to be better than apart.
The path was wet from melting snow as she walked over gravel, macadam, and grass. Each of the stores had motion detector lights to the rear of their property as well as on the front. As she approached the back of Woods, she could see that Jonas’s truck was still parked there. She knew he had collected reclaimed wood
