“I guess there’s only one way to find out.”
Carrie was nodding. “I’m going to think about it.”
“You’re doing a good job. The enthusiasm shows.”
“I hope it makes up for the lack of experience. It’s too bad Jon and I can’t merge. His years and my energy. What a team.”
When Georgia entered the office, Marianne was sitting at her desk and got up to speak to her. She was sixtyish, with champagne-blond hair lacquered into a bubble, and a ready smile that gave the impression she liked her job. Marianne appreciated their small campus and limited student body.
“Edna’s been waiting about ten minutes. She said she was going to do her homework.”
Georgia had no doubt that Edna had been as good as her word. She tried not to see her granddaughter through a grandmother’s lens, but she wasn’t the only one who thought Edna was remarkable. The girl was intelligent, reliable, a natural leader. Samantha, who at Edna’s age had been surly and defiant, was doing a wonderful job of raising her only daughter, and it showed. But then the adult Samantha was a wonderful person.
Georgia alerted Marianne to a couple of items that had come out of the faculty meeting, then she headed to her own office to find her granddaughter.
Edna was sitting at Georgia’s desk, rocking back in her comfortable desk chair. She didn’t look up, too busy examining something in her hands.
Georgia stopped in the doorway. “What do you have there?”
Edna looked up and grinned. “A bracelet. It’s pretty. Is it yours?” She held it up.
“No.” Georgia thought back to her day. She’d had a handful of students in the office for one reason or another, including two girls. “Where did you find it?”
“On your desk.”
Georgia guessed one of the girls had probably lost it. Maybe the clasp had opened and it had slipped off her wrist. “Just leave it there, sweetheart. I bet the owner will come in on Monday to see if it’s here.”
“It’s got all kinds of little things on it. Animals and houses and other cool stuff.”
“They call that a charm bracelet. They were popular when I was a little girl, and I guess they still are. You buy a bracelet, then you buy or ask for charms that relate to things you do. It’s kind of a record of your life.”
Edna reluctantly set the bracelet on Georgia’s desk. “I’d like one.”
“If you’re still interested at Christmas, that might be a good thing for your Santa list.”
Edna grinned. Of course she hadn’t believed in Santa Claus since she was five, but she liked to play along.
Georgia had been at the school for too many hours, and she was ready to leave before anything else happened. “Did you do your homework?”
“I did most of it at school. I just had a little more, so I’m all finished.”
“Then let’s blow this joint.”
Edna collected her backpack and a fleece jacket she’d tossed on a chair. “Mom’s going to be at the Goddess House when we get there?”
“I have to stop by my house first, so probably. She said she’d make dinner for us.” For the first time Georgia noticed that her office had actually been cleaned. The rug looked freshly vacuumed, and her wastebasket had been emptied. Even the shelves and the uncluttered portions of her desk looked as if they had been dusted.
Apparently Tony had begun to take her seriously, which was a nice insight to take into the weekend.
“Can we stop on the way up the mountain and look at the view?” Edna asked.
Georgia put her arm around her granddaughter’s shoulders. The girl strongly resembled her mother. Same dark hair and olive skin, but green eyes instead of the golden-brown of Samantha’s, and a straight, sloping nose.
As she sometimes did, Georgia wished she knew where those green eyes had come from. Her own eyes were the color of her daughter’s. Samantha never talked about Edna’s father; his identity was the one secret she held close. But she had told Georgia that he had brown eyes, like her own.
Quite possibly the green was at least partly due to an ancestor in Georgia’s own family, but that was a secret, too, one Georgia would never have the answer to. She had no information about her parents, at least nothing she wanted to know. She’d come to terms with that years ago, but sometimes? Sometimes when she looked at Samantha and Edna, she yearned to be able to tell them exactly who they were.
Other than her beloved daughter and granddaughter.
“We’ll stop at the overlook,” she said, smoothing Edna’s wild hair back from her oval face. “Maybe we can get a good photograph or two before the sun starts to set.”
Edna gave her a quick hug, and Georgia forgot everything except how glad she was to be this child’s grandmother.
Chapter Four
WHEN SHE WAS growing up, Cristy’s father would often make her sit in a corner of the parsonage basement as punishment. While he paced back and forth in front of her, shaking his head, she would unsuccessfully squirm to find a comfortable spot on the unforgiving wooden chair. Then, just as she was certain her father had forgotten she was there, he would ask why she had done something—or sometimes, why she hadn’t. He would listen to her halting explanations, and finally hand her a sheet of paper and tell her to list everything she had done wrong, and what she had learned from the consequences.
The child Cristy had tried to cooperate, but in later years the teenager had refused. The Reverend Roger Haviland had never touched his daughter in anger, but when Cristy couldn’t or wouldn’t do what he wanted, he’d always left her there to consider her sins until bedtime. Had he ever asked what she’d learned from this “ritual,” she would have told him that after thinking about it, she had concluded that all sins were best committed after dinner.
But he had never asked.
Today, as she got out of Samantha’s car and gazed up at the old log house that was home until fate tossed her elsewhere, her father’s question sprang into her mind. Not why she had done what she had, since that was irrelevant, but what she had learned.
Standing under the shade of a massive oak tree at the bottom of a rock-crusted hillside, she realized she had carried away two things from her eight months in prison. One, that trusting anybody, no matter how nice they seemed, was foolish. And two, that there was no point in fighting for justice, because the world wasn’t a just or fair place. You were either lucky or you weren’t.
Samantha walked around the car, stretching her arms over her head. “Long trip. How are you doing?”
Cristy’s stomach was tied in a million knots. She was sorry she had eaten lunch, because even now, hours later, she wasn’t sure the hamburger was going to stay down. After lunch and shopping she had napped most of the way here, but the sleep hadn’t relaxed her.
She felt Samantha watching and met her eyes.
“I say we take a walk,” Samantha said. “Just a short one. Once everybody gets here you’ll be bombarded. My mom. Edna. Fresh air might be a good transition.”
Overhead a bird was chirping in rhythm, as if practicing feathered Morse code, but otherwise the clearing was silent. No noise from the road, no hunting dogs in pursuit of some small, terrified creature. The silence seemed to thrum with foreboding.
“It seems so...” Words eluded her. “Large,” Cristy finished at last.
“The house?”