I remember. They worked together late at night, and I guess you could say they grew close.”
Clara twisted her hands nervously on her lap. She was trying to take all of this in, not sure what to believe. First, there was the toothless old woman, who had looked like she materialized straight from an episode of late-night cable television, Fright Show or something. Now this, her mother’s story. Duchess. A woman Clara’s father had hated so much he erased her from his life.
“We don’t talk about this. Nobody has talked about this in many years. Then you show up. What I’m saying about Sylvia and the boy is that they were caught together. Naked in the back storeroom of the shop. Remember we’re talking about the early 1960s. Hell, if that happened even today there would be trouble. Still, it might have all blown over, but Sylvia pressed for a divorce from the teacher. She said she was in love with the boy.”
“Wait. What happened to her?”
“You mean your mother?”
“If that’s who she was.”
“Your father’s name was Stanley?”
“Yes.”
“He spoke Latin?”
Clara nodded. “He ran a corner grocery store up in Savage for most of the years I was growing up, but we had whole shelves in our apartment stacked with books in Latin. I must have been the only sixth grader in the county who’d read Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the original language.”
Nora looked wistful, absently running her hands through her hair. “Sylvia had a nervous breakdown, from what we heard. She had to be institutionalized. Your father moved to the Cities to get away from all this. Start fresh. This Sylvia Meyers was your mother. I’m sure of it. She had the same eyes, dreamy and farseeing. Like she was looking on into a world of spirit none of us could see. Your father and mother were gone as far we knew. Shamed. We thought that was the last of it.”
“She came back, though.”
“For her lover, in December, a few days before Christmas. I think they were trying to run away. They left in a hurry, in the midst of a storm. But the car must have slid off the road into a slough. It turned over at the bottom of the canyon, crushing the roof. Sylvia made it out of the car. She tried to walk back to town, but she never made it here.”
“She had a baby with her.”
“It was Sheriff Steve who found the baby. He took the baby, but he had to leave Sylvia behind. He couldn’t carry both her and the baby through the deep snow.”
Clara’s head was spinning. She sank deeper into the couch, shut her eyes. It was the vision of the woman she had seen, lost in the woods, surrounded by wolves. But there were no wolves in this story. “Why did she take the baby? Why not just leave me if she wanted to run away with this guy?”
“Why do people do anything? Maybe she wanted to hurt your father.”
“I don’t understand why he wouldn’t say anything.”
“What father could bear to tell his daughter such a story? How could he forgive his wife?”
“I’m going to have to say something, aren’t I? Tell them who I am.”
“No. It doesn’t make any difference. You are Clara Warren, the pastor’s wife. You are a schoolteacher. A damn fine one from what I hear. You are an expectant mother. That’s all anyone needs to know. Leave the ugliness in the past.”
Clara sighed. “There must be some kind of article from a newspaper, something to substantiate all this?”
“No. The first newspaper office burned down years ago. Why would seeing something in writing make it more or less true? The only article ever printed didn’t even mention a baby, just the accident and the death of the woman. Sheriff Steve made sure of it. No one knows, really, but a few people like me.”
“And Bynthia.”
“I knew Stanley. If he didn’t tell you, he had reasons for it. He told you enough to bring you here, didn’t he?”
“What did they do with her body?”
“She’s out there, has been this whole time. Sylvia Meyers was buried in the suicide section.”
“The suicide section?”
“Pastor Schoenwald didn’t want her with the saints. She’s right out there at the furthest edge near the woods. Kids still tell stories about her, about the woman in the woods. It’s said that some nights if you are back there in the trees you’ll hear her calling and calling for her baby.”
Nora put her hand over Clara’s and