had created.
She stepped away from the desk, trembling with rage. The Director held out papers to her. “This is for you. They came through yesterday.” Her citizenship papers—the one thing she had always wanted. They seemed now a sorry consolation prize for the girls she had lost. She pushed them back at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
And then she was dismissed.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Grace
New York, 1946
The next afternoon, Grace climbed the steps of the rooming house in Hell’s Kitchen. She was exhausted, as much from everything that had happened in Washington as the trip itself, and she was glad to be back home. She was also eager to see Frankie and get back to the ordinary business of her life. It was late Friday, though, and she had already booked the day off. And it wasn’t entirely a bad thing that she had the weekend to rest and sort herself out before returning to work.
Grace reached the top floor of the rooming house and turned her key in the lock to her apartment. She opened the door, then froze.
Sitting in the lone chair, clutching her black patent leather purse, was Grace’s mother.
Her mind whirled. How had her mother found out where she lived? And how long had she been here? Grace’s eyes darted from the unslept-in bed to her wrinkled clothes from the night prior. She searched for an explanation that would make the sight less awkward, but found none.
“The landlady let me in,” her mother said in her birdlike voice, as though that explained everything. Her hair was swept back beneath a salmon velvet cloche hat that matched her Elever swing coat perfectly. Grace could imagine it, the charming smile, little tinkle of a laugh as she talked her way into the apartment.
“Darling, I know it’s awful just to pop in like this,” her mother continued, smoothing the gloves she’d laid neatly on top of her purse. “But you didn’t answer my calls. I was so worried.” Really, that was only part of the story. Grace’s mother wanted to see what she was doing here, what her life was all about.
“How did you know I was here?”
“I went in to Hartford to do some shopping and I ran into Marcia in the dressing room at G. Fox.” Grace flushed at the mention of Marcia’s name—her alibi. She imagined the scene in the department store. Marcia would have been nervous, caught off guard by the unexpected encounter. It wouldn’t have taken much pressing for Grace’s mother to get the address, which Grace had given Marcia so she could forward mail.
“I’m sorry for not telling you myself,” Grace said, perching on the edge of the bed.
“It’s all right,” her mother replied, putting her hand on Grace’s. “We were just so worried.” It hadn’t been just about the appearance of things for her mother—she had genuinely cared. Somehow lost in the haze of her own problems, Grace had lost sight of that.
But that didn’t mean she wanted to go home.
“So this is where you’ve been staying.” Her mother looked around the tiny room, her nose wrinkling involuntarily with distaste. “If I help you pack, we can be gone in an hour. If you don’t want to stay with your father and me, your sister Bernadette offered her spare room.” Staying with her older sister and her three pugnacious children, Grace reflected, might be the only thing worse than going home.
“Mother, I can’t just leave. I have a job.”
Her mother waved her hand as though Grace’s work was irrelevant. “You can send a note.”
“It’s not a cocktail party, it’s a job. And also there’s this.” She reached past her mother and picked up the newspaper she’d left on the nightstand before her trip to Washington. “I saw this happen.” She pointed at the story about Eleanor.
“That woman was killed by a car. How awful. The city is so dangerous. I don’t know why on earth you would ever want to stay here.”
“The woman who was killed left behind photographs of some girls who went missing during the war and I’ve been trying to find out what happened to them.” She left out the part about going to Washington with Mark.
“And is this part of your job?”
Grace faltered. “Not exactly.” She had shared the story hoping it would help to make sense of her staying in New York. But it just seemed to confuse things.
“If these girls have nothing to do with your job, then what are they to you?”
Her mother’s question, a refrain of Frankie’s