Page 76 of Stay Buried

“But I—”

“I need to know you’re safe. I need to know you’ll be there in Amsterdale, waiting for me. Waiting for us to go off and start a new life together. I can’t keep you safe here. And if anything were to happen to you—” My voice faltered. I took her hands and held them tightly, kissed her lovely fingers.

Pearl was quiet, thinking, biting her lip. “You’ll come? You’ll meet me there as soon as you’re able?”

“Yes.”

“Do you promise?”

“I swear on my life,” I said. “Nothing could keep me from you.” I pulled Pearl to me, held her tight, my chin on her shoulder, grateful that she couldn’t see my face; couldn’t know that though I meant the words with all my heart, I didn’t truly believe them.

THIRTY-ONEASHLEY

October 18, 2016

So Frankie was what? A cousin or something of our great-grandmother?” Mal asked.

They were in his motel room, digging through the old trunk. They’d found two diaries with her name written in faded brownish ink on the inner covers. Ash was now reading the one from the fall of 1918 and the spring of 1919, the one that Gram had been tearing the pages from to burn. As fascinated as she was by it all, Ash was deeply unsettled by opening the trunk, holding the diary that was the last thing Gram had held. What she’d been reading as she skimmed through the passages written in Frankie’s tiny, messy cursive didn’t give her any comfort.

“There’s an entry in here that says Frankie’s mother and Margaret were cousins. So, that makes Frankie and Margaret first cousins, once removed. And we’re Frankie’s first cousins,fourtimes removed.”

Malcolm nodded, grinned at her.

“What?” she asked.

“You sound like Mom.”

Malcolm went back to haphazardly pulling things out of the trunk, giving them a quick glance, then dropping them back in. There was no order to what was in there: piles of notebooks, pictures, random pieces of paper. There was an old ledger book full of carefully recorded payments from the patients Thomas Endicott saw. Ash and Mal laughed when they saw that sometimes he was paid in eggs, salt pork, a bushel of apples. Ashley recognized the bookkeeper’s handwriting as Frankie’s.

“And Frankie lived with Thomas and Margaret?” Malcolm asked.

“They took her in when she was thirteen or fourteen. Seems she was orphaned when she was really little, and she was kind of shuffled from house to house until the Endicotts got to town.”

Malcolm continued to riffle through the papers. “Whoa! This must be them,” he said, holding up an old black-and-white photo. In it, a stern-looking man with pale hair and eyes stood with his arm around a petite woman who looked like she was trying hard not to smile. They were in front of the house on Main Street, with the painted sign next to the door that readDR. THOMAS ENDICOTT, PHYSICIAN AND SURGEON.

“Wow,” Ashley said. “I’ve never seen a picture of them before.”

She looked more closely at the serious-looking couple, thought,This is where Gram came from. This is whereIcame from.

“You kinda look like her,” Malcolm said, squinting from the photo in his hand to Ashley’s face. “Around the eyes especially.” Ashley saw the resemblance too; saw herself, her mother, and Gram in this woman’s face.

“I think you do too,” she said to Mal, who had the same dark eyes, the same slope of the nose.

She was sorry she’d never seen a picture of her great-grandparents before; sorry, and a little angry that such a big part of her own history had been kept from her. She understood her mother in this moment; her passion for genealogy, her insistence that to truly understand who we are in the present, we had to look to the people who came before usin the past. This photo, and all the others, had been hidden in a trunk in Gram’s house for years—for Ashley’s whole life, probably.

“And this must be Frankie,” Malcolm said, holding up another photo. In it, Dr. Endicott had his arm over the shoulders of a young person wearing men’s pants and a coat. Her hair was cut short and she had a wry smile. There were a couple more photos of her: one with Margaret, each of them holding a pie and smiling. In another, she had her arm around a stocky girl with pale hair in a dress trimmed with lace. They both looked like they’d been laughing, caught right in the middle of a joke that only they understood.

“Do you think she actually died in the flu outbreak, like Josephine said?” Mal asked.

“I don’t know. And honestly, looking through this diary, I’m thinking maybe what wiped out the town in the spring of 1919 wasn’t influenza. Not the one that hit the rest of the country anyway.”

“Huh?”

“Frankie was keeping the diary at the time of the 1918 flu outbreak,” Ashley explained. “She used it as both a personal diary and a medical logbook, telling what patients she and her uncle saw each day, what new things her uncle taught her, and notes on medical texts she was reading. Between her uncle’s hands-on teaching and her studying his medical books, she sounds like a highly competent assistant.”

Ashley flipped to a page about halfway through the book. “These entries here, they’re from the fall of 1918. She writes about people in town being ill with the ‘Spanish flu,’ and that matches up with the influenza epidemic that was raging all over the country at the time. About half the town got sick with all the symptoms you’d expect—high fever, fatigue, cough, respiratory distress. Fourteen people died. It was terrible. But if you keep going, you see that by January, the flu was over. The only calls the doctor and Frankie had were pretty routine: someone had a baby, a household got a bad case of ‘winter diarrhea,’ whatever that is, a man at the factory lost three fingers in a sawaccident. Well, actually four. They had to amputate his pinkie because it was almost severed—just hanging by a flap of skin.”

“Well, that’s gross,” Mal said, rubbing the fingers of his own right hand.