“How do you know all this?” Milly asks, in the same brittle, impatient tone she’s been using ever since our Sunday brunch with Mildred Story.
Aubrey sorts through rows of small boxes crammed into the filing cabinet. “I looked it up on the library website last night.”
“Okay, but why?” Milly asks, as Aubrey extracts one of the boxes. She opens it and pulls out a blue plastic reel about the size of her palm.
“Remember what Oona said at Kayla’s Boutique?” she asks. She might as well be speaking Greek right now, because half of that doesn’t make sense to me, but Milly nods. Aubrey turns toward me to explain. “Oona is a woman whose sister used to date Uncle Anders, and Gran didn’t like her, and she died twenty-four years ago, which is…” She pauses, frowning at the machine until she locates a peg where she can attach the reel.
“What’s Kayla’s Boutique?” I ask, and Milly catches me up while Aubrey feeds one end of the film into a chute beneath a glass surface on the machine. Aubrey hits a button, causing the blue reel to spin, and the screen comes to life with the front page of a 1997 issue of the Gull Cove Gazette.
“So you think—what? Those things are related?” I ask, as Aubrey twists a dial to bring up a different page.
“I don’t know,” she says. “But I’m curious about what happened. These editions are from November, a month before our parents got the you know what you did letter.” We’re quiet for a few minutes while Aubrey runs through the reel, weeks’ worth of newspapers scrolling in front of our eyes. “I don’t see anything,” she finally says, pressing a button to reverse the film. When it’s all back on the reel, she removes it from the machine and stuffs it back into its box.
My mind’s been somewhere else while the newspaper pages flashed before us. “Do you guys remember that day we went to Dr. Baxter’s?” I ask. “All that stuff Hazel was saying?”
Milly’s mouth twists. “I’ve been trying to forget, but yes.”
“Sorry. But you know how Dr. Baxter almost knocked over the table?” Aubrey nods distractedly as she replaces the box in the filing cabinet and takes out another one. “He did that on purpose.”
Aubrey pauses halfway through pulling the reel from the box. “What?”
“He was watching you guys, totally clear-eyed, and then you said something—I don’t remember what—and he banged his knee on the table and started acting all confused.”
Milly puts her hands on her hips, frowning. “You never said anything about that.”
“I thought Dr. Baxter was doing us a favor,” I say as Aubrey starts up the process of loading the blue reel onto the microfilm machine. “Getting everyone out of an uncomfortable situation. But then Archer got that letter, and—I don’t know. Maybe we were talking about something he didn’t want anyone to know.”
Milly’s face goes splotchy. “Look, my mother was not impregnated by one of her brothers. That’s—”
“That’s not what we were talking about,” Aubrey interrupts. Her eyes are on the screen as she spins the dial to keep pages moving.
“Yes we were,” Milly says testily.
“At first, yeah. But Dr. Baxter didn’t do anything until I said, ‘I’d more easily believe they all killed somebody than that.’ ”
There’s a long beat of silence. I can’t think of a good response—I’d completely forgotten about that until right this second—and nobody speaks again until Aubrey says, “Here it is. December twenty-second, 1997.” She twists a dial to enlarge an article on the screen with the headline LOCAL WOMAN DIES IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT. Milly and I lean over her shoulder to read the rest of the article.
Milly speaks first, her voice breathless with relief. “It was a car accident,” she says. According to the coverage, Kayla Dugas, who was then twenty-one, left a downtown bar one night and drove her car into a tree a half mile from Cutty Beach. The autopsy report showed she had a blood alcohol level over the legal limit, but just barely. “She was alone.”
“Cutty Beach, though,” Aubrey murmurs, her eyes locked on the screen.
“Your father is the only one who ever talks about that,” Milly says. “And Kayla’s car accident didn’t happen on the beach. It happened near it. It’s a reference point, that’s all.”
“Hmm.” Aubrey is still staring at the article. “It says here that