“No, I don’t suppose he would have, would he?” There was a coldness in her tone that made Oliver flinch, but he tried to pretend that neither the look nor the words affected him.
Just as he’d tried all his life to pretend that looks and words such as Germaine Wagner’s had no effect on him.
“It’s only gossip, Oliver,” his uncle had told him over and over again. “They have no more idea of what really happened than anyone else. The best thing to do is simply ignore them. Sooner or later they’ll find other things to talk about.” His uncle had been right. As the years had gone by, fewer and fewer people gave him that curious look, or tried to ask him thinly veiled questions about what had really happened to his sister all those years ago. But of course Oliver had never known any more about it than anyone else. By the time he’d come home from college and gone to work for the paper, it had all but been forgotten.
Except that every now and then, with people like Germaine Wagner, he still found that a look could slice open old wounds, a tone of voice could sting. But there was nothing he could do about it; like Oliver himself, the Germaines of this world were going to have to go to their graves still not knowing the truth.
“I really don’t remember that much about my father,” he said carefully now. “Which, I suppose, is part of why I’m here. I thought that maybe now that the Asylum’s finally going to be put to a good use, it might be time for me to write up a history of how it came to be here in the first place.”
“Caring for the mentally ill was a perfectly good use for the building,” Germaine replied. “My mother was very proud of her work there.”
“As she should have been,” Oliver quickly assured her. “But it’s been so long since it was closed that I really don’t know much about it myself. And I suspect that whatever historical material still exists is upstairs in the attic here. I thought I’d see what I could find.”
He waited as the librarian pondered his request. Germaine Wagner, over the years, had come to think of the contents of the library as her personal property, and tended to consider so much as a one-day-overdue book as a personal affront. As to letting someone paw through the boxes and boxes of old documents, diaries, and memoirs that had migrated into the library over the course of the eight decades since it had been built, Oliver suspected that she would take his request as an invasion of her privacy.
“Well, I don’t suppose there’s any real reason why you shouldn’t be able to see what’s there,” Germaine finally said in a sorrowful tone as if she was already regretting having to make the admission. “I suppose I could have Rebecca bring down whatever we have.”
As if the librarian’s mere mention of her name was enough to summon her, a girl appeared from the back room.
Except that she wasn’t a girl; not really. Rebecca Morrison was in her late twenties, with a heart-shaped face that radiated a sweet innocence, framed by soft chestnut hair that fell in waves from a part in the center. Her eyes, slightly tilted, were a deep brown, and utterly guileless.
Oliver had known her since she was a child, and when he’d had to write the obituary after the automobile accident that left sixteen-year-old Rebecca an orphan, tears had streamed down his face. For weeks after the fatal car crash, Rebecca hovered between life and death. Though there were many people in Blackstone who had fallen into the habit of referring to her as “Poor Rebecca,” Oliver was not among them. It had taken months for the girl to recover from her injuries, and while it was true that when she emerged from the hospital her smile was sad and her mind was slower, to Oliver the sweetness that imbued Rebecca’s personality more than made up for the slight intellectual damage she had suffered in the accident.
Now, as she smiled at him, he felt the familiar sense of comfort her presence always gave him.
“Oliver wants to see if there is any information about the Blackstone Asylum in the attic,” Germaine Wagner briskly explained. “I told him I wasn’t certain, but that perhaps you could look.”
“Oh, there’s a whole box of things,” Rebecca said, and Oliver was