"Yes," Elspeth said. "And Beau, I do not know what happened to him. I only know what Meredith told me. He was on his way to the hospital, and he never arrived. That is all I know."
Outside, in the garden, the two girls were laughing under the big tree, and I looked out at them, and I thought about Jared, and about the night he never reached the hospital, and about the baby girl he never met, and I knew that there was still more to learn.
Chapter 17
— The Mother Arrives
The next morning, while Elspeth and the girls were still asleep upstairs, there was a knock on the front door. It was a slow, careful knock, the knock of someone who was not sure she was welcome, and who had come anyway. I went to the door and opened it, and I found an older woman standing on my step, with grey hair pulled back in a neat knot, and a dark coat, and a small leather bag held in both hands.
"Mr. Langley," she said. "My name is Marlene Hargreaves. I am Veronica's mother. I know I have no right to come to your door, and I know you have every reason to turn me away, but I have something to tell you, and I could not tell it on the telephone, and I could not write it in a letter. I had to come and tell you in person."
I looked at her face, and I saw that she was afraid, and that she had not slept, and I stepped back and let her in.
"Come in," I said. "We will talk in the sitting room. Poppy is asleep upstairs, and I do not want her to hear this."
She followed me into the sitting room and sat on the edge of the sofa, her bag in her lap, her hands folded over it, and she looked around the room, and then she looked at me, and she took a breath, and she began.
"I know what my daughter did," she said. "I know what she did to your little girl, and I know what she did to you, and I am ashamed. I raised her better than that, Mr. Langley, or I thought I did, and I do not know where I went wrong, but I know that what she did was wrong, and I have come here to tell you the truth about one of the things she has been hiding for years."
She opened her bag then, and she took out a folder, old and worn, with papers inside, and she set it on the table between us, and she pushed it toward me with both hands, and she said, "These are the adoption papers, Mr. Langley. The papers my daughter signed, six years ago, when she gave her baby away. I signed them too. I signed them with her, in the hospital, on the day she left."
I opened the folder and looked at the papers. They were adoption papers, in order, with signatures at the bottom, and I read the names, and I saw Veronica's name, written in her careful, elegant hand, and beside it, in an older, shakier hand, the name Marlene Hargreaves. I set them down on the table, and I looked at Marlene, and I said, "Tell me what happened. Tell me everything."
She told me that Veronica had been alone when the baby was born, and that she had been frightened, and that she had not known what to do, and that Marlene had come to the hospital as soon as she heard, and that she had held her daughter's hand. Veronica had decided to give the baby up for adoption, and Marlene had supported her, and the two of them had signed the papers together, and the baby had gone to a family in Wilmington.
"She never spoke of her," Marlene said. "Not once, in six years. She acted as though the baby had never existed, and I let her, because I thought she needed to forget. But she did not forget, Mr. Langley. She never forgot. She thought about that baby every day, and it ate at her, and it changed her."
I asked her if she knew about the girls, and she said she knew, that Rosalind had come to see her, and that Elspeth had written to her, and that she had known for a long time that the baby had gone to Elspeth, and that she had never told Veronica, because she had been afraid of what Veronica would do.
"I was right to be afraid," Marlene said, and her voice shook. "Look at what she did to your daughter, Mr. Langley. Look at what she did to a little girl who had done nothing wrong. She did it because she could not have her own daughter, and because she wanted Poppy to be hers instead."
She took a pen from her bag then, and she took a sheet of paper, and she wrote out a statement, in her own hand, saying that she had signed the adoption papers with her daughter, and that the adoption was real, and that the baby had gone to Elspeth. She signed it, and she dated it, and she gave it to me, and she said, "Take this, Mr. Langley. Take it to your lawyer. I will say it again, in front of a judge, if I have to."