Ginny
2001, Fort Lauderdale
The weeks after our Thanksgiving cruise flew by in a frenzy of activity. Between Christmas, the start of a new year, and our busy family schedule, it seemed every day on the calendar had something penciled in. There were also some things during that time that weren’t on the calendar. One that stuck out was that Mimi and Elliott had ended their relationship.
I’d waited up that night for her first date with him after we returned from our cruise. She quietly let herself in the front door and was heading up the stairs when I called her back down. When I saw she’d been crying, I knew something was wrong.
She let me hold her as she sobbed for almost five minutes that finally ended in a fit of hiccups. I made some tea while she washed her face. We sat in the den, and she told me how Elliott had taken her to a nice restaurant for dinner and they’d run into one of his ex-girlfriends, who’d made a scene.
“It was just so humiliating, Mom. She was older than him and obviously still loved him. She asked if he’d resorted to picking up little girls from the playground at elementary schools.”
I listened as Mimi told me how Elliott’s ex-girlfriend must have been drinking. She was making such a scene that they were all asked to leave by the restaurant manager.
“I just saw him in a different light, I guess. He wasn’t defending himself to her. I felt like he was embarrassed by me. I don’t think that I’ll ever look at him the same way.” She looked down at her mug as tears rolled down her cheeks, “I think he cares more about what others think than he does about me.”
“So did you break up?” I was conflicted. Part of me was secretly hoping I wouldn’t have to worry about my daughter dating an eighteen-year-old, yet also feeling a real ache in my heart for her pain. It had been a long time ago, but even I remembered the sting of Matthew Rockman telling me he’d no longer need me to tutor him.
“I guess it was mutual,” she said. “Mom?”
“Yes, Mimi?”
“Would it be okay if we don’t talk about it anymore? I mean, Elliott and I already agreed to take each other’s numbers out of our phones. We’ve already decided it’s not going to work. He said something about maybe trying to see me again when I’m older, but let’s face it. He was just being nice. That’s not going to happen and I’m pretty sure I don’t want it to.”
She blew out a breath and looked at me pleadingly.
I watched Mimi closely for weeks after that conversation, and even though I could tell she was hurting, she put on a brave face and dove back into her regular activities. School, work, and friends fell back into their usual place, and she even asked to go with me the next time I met Christy Bear for lunch. I was relieved to see she was resilient and had resolved to move on. And I knew Tommy certainly breathed a sigh of relief when I told him about the breakup.
The discussions with Mimi about Grizz had slowly faded away. Her guilt about Leslie had been absolved, and her curiosity about Grizz had waned. Life was getting back to normal. The kids had been back in school for weeks, and we were almost nearing the end of January. Since I had given up my bookkeeping clients, I had more time on my hands than usual.
Lately, I’d had Sister Mary Katherine on my mind. I’d recently dreamed about the nun who I’d been so close to when I was a child. The same nun who’d pushed authorities to find me. Was my subconscious speaking to me in dreams that maybe I had some unfinished business with her?
“How do you even know where to find her, Ginny?” Tommy asked me early one morning in our bedroom. He’d been sitting on our bed putting on his shoes for work.
“I asked about her when we renewed our wedding vows. I should’ve tried to find her years ago, Tommy. I feel like she’s one of those unresolved things in my life.”
“So, she’s still alive?”
“Yes, she’s in a nursing home for retired nuns in Illinois. I’d like to visit her. To tell her I’m alive. I don’t even know if she’ll remember me, Tommy, but she’s been on my mind since last summer, and I’ve been putting it off. Well, with everything that’s happened since then, you can’t blame me for putting it off. But still—I want to see her before it’s too late. Maybe that’s why I dreamed about her. She has to be ancient by now, wouldn’t you think?”
“I don’t know, Gin. I didn’t know her, so I don’t know how old she’d be by now. If it’s something you feel strongly about, then definitely do it.”
“Do you want to go with me? I thought I’d take a Friday afternoon flight. Stay two nights and come home on a Sunday.”
“I don’t think so. Now that Alec is back from his sabbatical in the mountains, we’re taking on more clients, and I’ll be working some weekends. You go, and I can stay home with the kids. Then we won’t have to arrange for them to stay with friends or ask Carter to come here.”
“I don’t know if I want to go alone. Without you.”
“I think it would be good for you, Gin.” He stood and walked toward me, gently tilting my chin up to him. “It sounds like you should have time alone with her. If you don’t want to go alone, I’ll go with you. But I’m just thinking this is something you might like to do by yourself.”
**********
The next week, I found myself standing in the cozy family room at the Sisters of Mercy Retirement Home in Illinois. It was an old convent that had been condemned as uninhabitable and was slated for demolition years ago when it had caught the eye of a wealthy donor who’d had it restored. I stood next to a roaring brick fireplace and stared at the ceiling and surrounding walls, captivated by the architecture.
A young novitiate had been sent to collect Sister Mary Katherine and bring her to me. I assumed that meant she was most likely in a wheelchair. I secretly wondered if maybe this had been a mistake. She probably wouldn’t even remember me. It was now 2001. I’d been abducted in 1975. That was more than twenty-five years ago. What was I thinking?
“It smells like roses, but not a flower or air freshener in sight,” a young woman had commented to me. We made small talk as we waited. She was waiting for her aunt, another retired nun. I’d started to tell her I agreed when I heard a voice I recognized instantly.
“Guinevere Love Lemon. It’s about time you came to see me!”
Sister Mary Katherine bounded toward me with an energy that belied her age. Then, clasping my arm tightly, she began to walk me through the warm and inviting halls of the beautiful building. It didn’t feel like a retirement home. It reminded me of an elegant mansion with a lot of bedrooms. She’d explained on the way to her room that she was now almost ninety, and even though she was officially retired, she didn’t have a tired bone in her body.
In her room, she listened without interrupting as I told her everything that had transpired since that fateful day in May 1975. Her blue eyes were bright, and I expected to see some curiosity in them, but it wasn’t there.
“I knew you were okay,” she told me confidently.
“How?”
She held her hand over her heart. “Can’t tell you how. I just knew. After a while, I felt peace about it, and from what you’ve told me, sounds like I should’ve been worrying about you, but I wasn’t. Something deep inside told me you were fine. I prayed that God would tell me one day it was true. And today is that day. Praise the good Lord, Guinevere.”
We hugged, and then she looked at the watch on her bony wrist.
“Do you want to come with me on my rounds?”
“Your rounds?”
“I need to fetch Sister Agnes. She’s blind and handicapped. I need to get her back to her room and settled in. Would you like to come with me?”
“I would love to, Sister Mary Katherine.”
I stood in Sister Agnes’s room and watched as Sister Mary Katherine lovingly readied the blind nun for her afternoon nap. For a woman nearing ninety, she moved with the agility of a cat. I smiled to myself as I took in the beautiful and tasteful furniture and the window that looked out on a snowy scene that could have come right out of a Thomas Kincaid painting.
Then I noticed something I found odd. Almost every available space of furniture was covered in framed pictures. I walked to one low dresser and bent over to get a better look. Sister Agnes was blind. Why would she have so many pictures in her room? She couldn’t see them.
As if reading my thoughts, Sister Mary Katherine said, “They’re her unanswered prayers.”
I turned to look at the holy sister. “Unanswered prayers?”
“When she was younger, Bevin was a photographer,” Sister Mary Katherine told me. “Bevin was her name before she became a nun.”
I looked back at the pictures and noticed they were all black and whites. I picked one up.
“Sister Agnes, this one is of a man changing a car tire. He’s smiling at you, like he stopped what he was doing so you could snap his picture.”
“New Orleans, 1950. I was maybe only twenty-five or twenty-six then and had just discovered my love of photography,” said the nun from the bed. Sister Agnes had thinning white hair and a heavily lined face. Her unseeing dark eyes exuded warmth and compassion. “That was Mr. Payroux. He later lost his wife and two children in a house fire. That picture was taken in happier times. If you look closely, you can see his wife sitting on their porch in the background. I went back to visit years after I took that picture and was told by the neighbors that, after his family’s deaths, he’d spiraled into a dark world of depression and drinking. One day, he up and disappeared. Nobody knew what had happened to him.”
“This was so many years ago, Sister. He must have died by now. Is this still an unanswered prayer of yours?”
“I pray for every person in every one of those pictures that the Lord will see fit to put on my heart what became of them. Sometimes He answers me in a dream. Sometimes, someone like Sister Mary Katherine will help me do some investigating, get me my answers. I have a whole drawer full of answered prayers over there.”
I watched as her unseeing eyes followed the direction of where she was now pointing. My eyes followed, too, and saw a tall dresser that stood in the corner.
“Oh, yes, we have a whole drawer full of answered prayers,” Sister Mary Katherine told me proudly.
I smiled and went back to perusing the unanswered prayer frames. One caught my eye. There was something beautiful yet sad about it. Maybe it was the dog. It was a Rottweiler and brought me immediately back to memories of Lucifer and Damien. I picked it up and studied it closer.
“Which one are you looking at?” Sister Agnes asked.
“It’s a little girl and her dog. They’re standing in tall grass, and she’s smiling, but it’s not reaching her eyes.”
“Florida. A town smaller than a speck called Macon’s Grove. 1956. That would be Ruthie and Razor.”