Page 47 of My Favorite Lost Cause (The Favorites #2)

MAREN

T here are two important calls the following week: one from Marais & Wolfe, dropping the bit in the contract about weigh-ins. I guess it’s good news, though it does mean I’ve got to be in New York for a fitting one week from today and Barcelona not long after.

The second call, which matters far more to me, is from Andrew.

“I’ve got some good news,” he says when I pick up the phone. “I did a little investigating, and that developer? He’s done this to several other people. There’s actually a lawsuit being brought against him for trying to use a loophole to take some Native American land in the center of the state.”

I’m slow to see how any of this helps us. A guy who’d try to take land from Native Americans isn’t going to feel worse about taking it from a moderately well-off venture capitalist.

“So is the lawsuit going to stop him from doing it to us?” I ask.

“No,” Andrew says. “But I’ve now got several reporters looking into the story.

Once they start investigating which government officials have been helping him along, people won’t be able to back off fast enough.

I’ve also got a representative down there promising his staff is looking into your situation.

Give it a week, and the state will reverse everything it’s said to date. ”

Wow. Andrew has often said he hopes something will work, or that it’s possible . I’ve never heard him say it definitively like this.

“It sounds like you think it’s really going to work out,” I whisper, stunned.

“It one hundred percent is going to work out, Maren. I’d stake my life on it.”

I sink back into my chair. I can’t believe it’s about to solved, just like that.

“I can’t thank you enough for helping us,” I tell him.

He laughs. “I can think of some ways, but given that you’re still in South Carolina, I imagine Charlie would object.”

My shoulders sag with relief. I suspected I’d made my feelings clear enough when I canceled our lunch in the Hamptons, but this confirms it. “Yeah, he probably would.”

“Look, Maren. I just have to say something. Based on his reputation, he doesn’t want any of the things you do, unless something’s changed.”

I swallow hard. That’s the ugly truth, isn’t it? The truth I have been reluctant to face. “No, nothing’s changed.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “And you know I’m interested, but that’s not why I’m saying what I’m about to: don’t let him waste too much of your time. I let Kristen waste far too much of mine, and it’s probably my greatest regret.”

Also true. Whether Charlie and I say it aloud or not, this is a waste. It will go nowhere.

“Thanks,” I reply. “I know. I’m fully aware that this…is ending.”

“When you’re ready to move on, I’m here,” he says.

I tell Charlie what Andrew said about the house and Charlie simply rolls his eyes. “I don’t see why he couldn’t have put it in an email,” he grouses, jealous of a phone call about the house my friend is helping him save for free .

I can’t believe he’s the same guy who pretended to have an eleven PM Zoom meeting with Tokyo in order to get two girls out of his apartment.

The person he is with me—and to some extent, the person he’s always been with me—feels like the real one. But when we go back to New York…who will he be then?

Two days later, we get notified by the state that the house is no longer condemned. There’s not going to be an inspection at all.

We don’t need to be here, then. We’re completely off the hook. I wait for Charlie to suggest he should really get to San Antonio, should really go into the office, and he says neither.

But the end is coming, either way.

So I finally buckle down to read Margaret’s last few entries.

August 10, 1917

William was given several days’ leave before he ships out. He went to say goodbye to his mother but spent his final day here with me. He’ll sleep in the shack tonight, which seems insane, given that all the boys’ rooms are empty.

We had such a lovely day together. He kissed me again in the shadow of the house and told me not to see him off in the morning because it would be too hard.

He said he’s marrying me the day he gets back, out in the gazebo if possible, though Mama will probably want a church wedding, and he gave me a ring that belonged to his grandmother.

Just a tiny emerald ring, but I love it more than I’d ever thought I could love anything.

Now he’s sleeping out along the water, yards away, and…

why are we wasting these last hours? I pray the war ends quickly, but there are no signs of it, and they say that a million boys were killed at Verdun.

A million. How is such a number even possible?

If the worst happens, how bitterly will I regret spending this night away from him?

What am I trying to preserve when everything I have belongs to him?

August 11, 1917

I went to see William. He asked why I was there and I will say no more here, but I’m glad. No matter what happens, I’m glad I did it.

So she slept with him. She must have. I’d love this were it not for one thing: that previous owner of the home, the woman who left her mansion and died in the shack where my cottage now stands. Increasingly, I’ve suspected it was Margaret and now I’m nearly certain.

I scan ahead. She and William exchange letters.

She writes him daily while his tend to come in batches of five or ten.

They start off cheerfully enough—the biggest issue is lice, which is what she hears from her brothers as well.

I want to believe all this , she writes, yet…

a million boys dying in a single battle.

So many lives lost. And that’s how it happens, isn’t it?

A million boys writing home to their mothers and sisters and sweethearts, complaining of lice and rain and rations and then…

they’re gone, as if they were never there at all.

Five people I love are there. Plus all the boys I went to school with.

What are the odds that they’ll all come home?

That they won’t simply be taken in a single battle?

And then, it happens.

December 1, 1917

Sam is dead. We learned it weeks ago and I couldn’t bring myself to even write the words here until now.

Sweet, sweet Sam is dead. I can’t imagine a world without him.

Papa is so quiet now, so gray. Mama as well.

Sam’s death has broken them, and I fear they can’t be put back together.

Millie returned to her family in Columbia—a war widow when she barely got to be a bride.

He’s buried somewhere in France, but Papa says we’ll give him a headstone here too, when Mama’s better.

Margaret decides she won’t leave for teacher’s college after all.

Her parents need her close. There are more letters from William, less cheerful ones.

His closest friend lost both legs, and William was inches away when it happened.

He sleeps with Margaret’s photo next to his heart and says he wishes now they’d married, selfish though it would be, because very few of them will come out of this alive.

She receives word that his regiment is moving toward Belleau Wood, in the north of France, and then, it begins: day after day of Margaret asking, “Why hasn’t he written?” and consoling herself with reports of slow mail and batches of letters arriving months later than they should.

I turn the page. More questions. More suggestions that a mail boat was blown up, that the fighting is too heavy for news to leave at all, and then…the journal just stops. I flip through the blank pages and toward the back is tucked a small, folded letter, one that’s been read many times.

I unfold the letter—it’s dated just a few days before William left for the front.

Dearest Margaret,

I’m writing you now from the attic of my aunt’s home and will leave this in my mother’s care, only to be sent on to Riverbend if the worst has happened.

There’s too much to say and also very little.

The important bit is that I have loved you with my entire soul, and you made the few years I got brighter than I’d ever dreamed years could be.

I knew I loved you that very first night.

Do you remember it? You seemed to hate me for some reason—I’m not sure I ever asked why—and I made that joke about your yellow dress to bring you down a peg, while thinking I’d never seen anyone so lovely.

You were too young and I knew it, but seeing you fritter all that beauty and intellect away on George Graves killed me.

I tried so hard to stay away from you, but I couldn’t quite manage it.

It was in my best interest, because the minutes I’ve had with you have meant more than every other minute I’ve had put together, but if you’re reading this, I’m not sure it was in yours.

Don’t grieve for me, because I intend to find you again. Do you remember those myths you loved? Baucis and Philemon. Hero and Leander. What they had in common was that they found each other in death, and we will too.

All my love, William

I curl up in bed and weep. I weep for Margaret and William, for Sam and Millie, for all the other boys that didn’t come home. I guess I’m crying for me and Charlie, too, because already I can feel the end coming.

Eventually, I rise and go outside with the dogs at my heels, heading for the hill Charlie once mentioned, the high point of the property. I knew he was right, that the graves were probably there, but I didn’t want to look.

I climb, pushing through the underbrush, until I finally reach them. Seven graves, all in a row. The four boys, all of them dead within a year of each other. Helen Ames, who died in 1964 and her husband Richard, who died the next year. And finally Margaret, who died September 12, 1993.

She died on the day I was born.

A chill crawls up my spine…and yet I’ve known there was a connection between us since I first walked into the house. In some ways, it’s not even a surprise .

Was it her they found in that shack by the water? Did she say goodbye to the end of a long, unhappy life in the place where her sweetest moments transpired?

I go into town and buy a couple things I don’t really need at the Stop-n-Shop. The real reason I’m here is to talk to Martha, or anyone else who might know what happened to Margaret in the end.

She greets me with a wide smile and her typical comments about the weather before asking how that cute friend of mine is.

“He’s good.” I blush, then lean into the counter. “Hey, you don’t happen to know anything about the people who built Riverbend, do you?”

Her mouth purses and her brow furrows as she considers the question. “Not too much. I think it was a big family—a bunch of boys who were lost in the war, maybe?”

I nod. “Charlie said somebody died there. I’m just trying to figure out who it was.”

She laughs. “I’m guessing a bunch of people died there. If you scare easy, I wouldn’t think on it too hard.”

I hitch a shoulder. “It’s not that so much. But Charlie said that someone went down to the shack to die. It’s sort of weird, right? I was just trying to figure out who it was.”

She starts scanning the paper goods I’ve stacked before her. “I guess you’ve tried the Internet?”

I hold open a bag so she can drop the stuff in. “Yeah. I can’t seem to find anything. I know when it might have happened, but that’s it.”

“What about microfilm?” she asks. “Go to the library in Beaufort and ask for microfilm from the local newspaper around the time it happened. That might shed some light on the situation.”

I thank her and head to the car, throwing the stuff in the trunk before I text Charlie to tell him I’m going to be late.

The librarian in Beaufort is enthusiastic. “I love when people actually know about microfilm,” she says, so I don’t mention that I’d never heard of it before today. “Most young people think they can just find anything online and if they can’t, it doesn’t exist.”

As it turns out, however, old copies of the Oak Bluff Daily Record were never digitized.

My shoulders sink. Another dead end.

“I do have physical copies if you don’t mind combing through them,” she adds.

My eyes spring open. “Yes, that would be perfect. I’m looking for information about someone who died on September twelfth, nineteen ninety-three. So maybe the two weeks from that date?”

It takes her an hour to locate the correct year, and then the correct month. Eventually, she drops a big box of newspapers on the table before me. Three days after she died, I find the headline:

Margaret Ames, 95, Found Dead on Property

Margaret Ames, one of Oak Bluff’s oldest residents, was found on Tuesday by concerned friends after she failed to show up for church on Sunday.

Miss Ames, who never married, was the youngest of five children and lived at Riverbend her entire life.

Tragically, her four other older brothers all died during World War I, a loss her parents, Judge Richard Ames, and his wife, Helen, never recovered from.

Miss Ames is said to have lived with her parents until their deaths in the 1960s, and then remained in the house alone until she was found this week.

Miss Ames’s body—found clutching a bouquet of dried roses—was recovered after nearly a full day’s search of the house and property, and was eventually discovered in a small shack “in great disrepair,” according to someone at the scene.

Her location contributed greatly to the difficulty in finding her, but foul play is not suspected.

“The heat alone would have killed her,” said Betsy Squires, a longtime member of the Oak Bluff Methodist Church. “I can’t imagine why she would have gone out there.”

I curl up in the hard wooden library chair and cry with my face pressed to my knees. I’m weeping for Margaret and William, yes, but also myself.

Not everyone gets a happy ending. Sometimes you just get one tiny moment of joy in a very long life, and you cling to it forever. I guess I already knew this—I just thought I might be an exception.

I’m pretty sure I won’t be.