Page 41

I studied the pictures on the wall and did my best to look relaxed. However, the more I stood here, the sillier my quest seemed. I was going to ask Sara Morgan if she remembered a woman who worked a bakery counter in 1943 and 1944. What were the chances?

Finally, an older woman, leaning heavily on a cane, came to sit in the room. Judging by her appearance, I guessed her age to be mid- to late seventies.

Squinting, the older woman openly assessed me. “Who are you here for? Getting a little late for visitors.”

“I’m here for Sara,” I said.

The woman’s gaze brightened as if all conversation was welcome. “Sara doesn’t get many visitors.”

“Really?”

“It’s hard to hold on to family when you’ve reached your nineties. I think her last son passed last year. Heart attack.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He was sixty.” She smiled. “My name is Edith. Sara and I are friends.”

“Oh.” I shifted in my seat, knowing I had a narrow window of opportunity before I had to return to the shop and finish the day’s work. The kids would be arriving on Monday, and we were going to begin our first day of employee training.

“Are you Sara’s family?”

I tapped my index finger on the white USB box. “No. She’s been a customer of our bakery for a long time. I wanted to drop off cookies.” And pump her for information about the 1940s.

“That’s so sweet. What did you bring her?”

“Cookies. Maple. My dad tells me that’s her favorite.”

“I love sugar cookies.”

Glancing at the Union Street Bakery box, I hesitated before asking, “Would you like a cookie?”

She beamed. “I’d love one.”

I broke the seal on the box and held it out to her.

“These are lovely. When I was expecting, I craved sugar all the time.” She smiled at me as she nibbled the edge of her cookie. “When is your baby due?”

I stared at the bump. “December.”

“A Christmas baby. I was a Christmas baby. My only word of advice is not to wrap the baby’s birthday presents in Christmas paper. I hated that.”

“I’ll try to remember.”

“And don’t take the birthday picture around the tree. The mingling of dates leaves a kid feeling cheated.”

“Got it.” Great, I’d not only made a kid by mistake, but I was further traumatizing it with a Christmas birthday clearly loaded with disappointments. “I’ll remember.”

Before Edith could comment more on my baby’s birthday, Sara arrived in a wheelchair. Though she was slumped over, her eyes were clear and bright. “Those Union Street Bakery cookies?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I lifted the lid and held the box close to her as she peered inside like a child. Dad had always said that cookies were magical. Always made people happy.

She bit into a cookie. “Who are you?”

“I’m Daisy McCrae. You know my dad.”

“Frank?”

“That’s right.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You worked in the bakery as a kid.”

“I did.”

“Moved to Washington, DC, from what I remember. Big shot finance person.”

Here I’d thought I’d been invisible behind that counter, but the way this woman talked, you’d have thought we were part of the same family.

“I’m not in finance anymore. I manage the bakery now.”

Frowning, she nibbled her cookie. “Why?”

“Do you want the long version or the short?” I quipped.

She chuckled. “At my age the short might be best.”

“The company I worked for went out of business. Mom and Dad needed help. It was a perfect match from the get-go.”

She stared me as if she didn’t believe me but let it go. “You didn’t come here to talk to me about why you moved back or to give me cookies.”

Edith leaned over. “She’s pregnant. Her baby is due at Christmas.”

Sara raised a brow. “This isn’t your conversation, Edith. It’s mine. You got lots of visitors, and I don’t.”

Edith’s brows rose. “I don’t see why I can’t talk.”

Sara glared at the cookie clutched in Edith’s hands. “Looks like you already had one of my cookies. Now go over there and wait for your son. He’s never late.”

Edith took a big bite out of her cookie and moved several seats over.

Sara grunted, smiling behind her cookie. “She always is trying to horn in. She gets visitors all the time and I don’t, and still, she wants a piece of what I have.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t worry about it. I bet she was a pesky kid on the playground. People don’t change.”

I was looking at a couple of old ladies, and to my shame I’d not thought much about personalities. I saw old. Sitting here with Sara, I could now see I’d underestimated her.

“So why are you here? I know my memory is bad, but I’m pretty sure we’ve never formally met.”

“No, ma’am, we’ve not met.” I scooted to the edge of my seat. “My sister sent me here to see you.”

“Rachel or Margaret?”

“Rachel.”

“I always liked Rachel. Good woman.” Her gaze narrowed as she stared at me. “You’re the adopted sister.”

The adopted sister. There was no malice behind the description, but it always needled, made me feel a little less. “That’s right.”

“So, Daisy, the adopted one, what can I do for you?”

“We’re renovating the bakery. Knocking out walls. We found a recipe box dating back to the 1940s.”

“Good years. I was in my late twenties, and I was between my first and second husbands. I was full of piss and vinegar during the war.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

She met my gaze, searching for any trace of sarcasm. “That’s right. Don’t you doubt it for one minute. I was a catch back in the day.”

I could have plowed on with my questions but sensed she wanted to talk. She’d already said she didn’t get many visitors. With the clock ticking to return to the bakery, I relaxed back in my chair.

“What were you doing between husbands one and two?”

Her gaze twinkled. “Other than getting into a bit of trouble, I was working at the torpedo factory. Making bombs. There were a lot of dames like me working in the factory then. The boys were all off to war.”

“The town was different then.”

“Not the hustle and bustle it is now, but we thought it was mighty fine. The music and the dancing. I was a USO dancer. And I was good. Cut a swing better than anyone.”

“You lived in Old Town.”

“Rented a room near your bakery on Union Street. Old lady had a boarding house.” She paused. “Old lady. I think Miss Carol wasn’t more than fifty or fifty-five. Here I’m forty years past that age.”

“My sister Rachel said you were regular at the bakery.”

“Every morning I bought a croissant.” She scrunched her face in a smile. “So good.”

The sharpness of her memory gave me hope. “I was trying to find a gal who worked in the bakery about then. Her name was Jenna.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the picture I’d found and handed it to Sara.

She studied the picture through her thick glasses. “Brings back memories, this picture does.”

“What do you remember about the bakery?”

“Well, your daddy wasn’t more than ten. He was a scrappy little kid who liked cookies.”

Dad’s round belly came to mind. “He still eats cookies.”

“And Lord, what a whiner he was. Always begging for attention.” Her eyes glinted. “I didn’t like him then. He made me swear off kids. Of course, that promise lasted less than a year. Met my second husband, and our son was born in forty-five.”

I laughed. “Dad said my sisters and I were enough to break a man.”

“Don’t take any of his bellyaching. He was the worst.”

I tucked the nugget aside, knowing one day I’d use it. “Do you remember any of the women who worked in the bakery?”

She glanced at the picture, the wrinkles in her face deepening. For a moment she didn’t speak, and then she tapped her gnarled finger on Jenna’s face. “I do remember her. She was a firecracker.”

I studied Jenna’s smiling face and thought about the obituary in the paper. What had happened? “She met a serviceman, I think.”

Slowly Sara nodded. “She did. A fine-looking boy. Not much more than twenty-one or -two. He was marine infantry. Was all full of himself.”

“You remember him?”

“I remember the three of them at a USO dance. That’s how they met.”

“Three of them?”

“He always traveled with his buddy. They came up on the train from Quantico whenever they could get leave. Memory serves they were training officers. Joey and Walter.”

Joey. Joey Lawrence had signed for Walter’s belongings after he’d died. I pulled out the picture of Jenna and the two men. “Which one was Walter?”

She studied the picture but after a moment shook her head. “I couldn’t tell you. So many GIs then. They ran together.”

“But you remember Jenna at the dance with Joey and Walter?”

“Sure. One of them took her out for a dance and had a devil of a time letting her go to dance with the next soldier. He stared at her all night. Made me realize why I divorced my first husband. He never stared at me with so much lust.”

I studied the smiling faces of the men in the photo. Both looked so happy, and I could have sworn both were in love with her. “So he loved her.”

“Well, he sure did lust after her.” She cackled. “But he did like her. Saw both those soldier boys a couple of times at the bakery.”

“I read about Jenna in the paper. She died giving birth.”

For a long moment, Sara was silent as if some details escaped her. And finally, she said, “There were customers who wouldn’t speak to her when she was expecting. Called her bad news.”

Overwhelming sadness washed over me, as if it weren’t Jenna who had been hurt but me. I thought about my kid being diminished because I wasn’t married to her father. Homicide came to mind when I thought about anyone hurting my kid.

“Must have been hard on her.”

“I think it was.”

“Did she have family in the area?”

“She came from the western part of the state. I don’t remember where exactly, but I know Alexandria wasn’t her home.”

“Why did she come to Alexandria?”

“Said she wanted to see a real city. Wanted more than the country.” She broke off a piece of cookie and ate it. “And then her man died in the war, and she didn’t want no more parts of the city. She hated it all.”

“But she didn’t go home.”

Sara folded gnarled, thickly veined hands in her lap. “Not unmarried with a baby in her belly. She told me they’d not take her.”

“She and Walter didn’t get married.”

“She talked about it. I know she loved him. But if they got married, I never knew it.”

Single motherhood scared me. I didn’t have Gordon, but I had family. I wasn’t alone and I would make it. “Jenna had no one.”

Sara nodded. “I didn’t hear about her dying right away. I was working and newly married. But a couple of weeks after the fact, I came by the bakery. Mr. McCrae told me what had happened. They were all torn up.”

“What happened to the baby?”

“I suppose he went home with her kin.”

“In the western part of the state.”

“That’s what I hear.”

Frustration had me scooting to the edge of my seat. “You’ve no idea where?”

“Well, west.”

“I heard she was from Frederick County.”

“Maybe, I don’t know. Honey, it’s been almost seventy years. I think I’m doing well, considering.”

“You’re doing great.” I shuffled through the towns in the western part of the state near Frederick County. I wished I’d paid closer attention in fifth-grade geography.

Sara nibbled her cookie, frowning as she dug through her memory. “Her daddy owned an apple farm.”

“My sister Rachel buys fresh apples from an orchard out in that area.”

“Jenna came from apple country. Said she eaten enough apples to last her a lifetime.”

“Did she ever talk about her family?”

Sara frowned. “Not much. She was too sweet a gal to say a bad word.” She cocked her head. “She did get a letter from home once. Made her cry. Explains why home might be the last place to go with a baby.”