Micanopy in Shadow Read Free Page B

more carefully, look for the reason those particular lines were chosen to mark Ada’s grave.
    “I’ve told you the story. The statue was erected soon after my mother was buried. No one knew the donor. We’re not even sure about her surname. ‘Losterman’ was what people thought I said.” Brandy sighed. So the name depended on the anguished recollection of two-and-a half year-old Hope.
    Hope’s stooped and thrust the gladiolas into the granite urn at the monument base and adjusted the flowers, her eyes moist. The splash of yellow and red at the base of Ada’s statue was a jolt of bright color among the gray stones.
    Brandy gazed up again at the figure. A masonry scarf shrouded the head. Around its edges, waves of curving stone suggested a woman’s hair. One delicate stone hand clasped a small book, smaller than a Bible, to her breast. The other reached up, as if beseeching.
    “Act,” it said to Brandy,” before it is too late, before Hope herself is gone.”
    Brandy studied the small nose and deep-set eyes. She recognized the familiar bone structure of the face, so like her grandmother’s and reflected in her own. The unknown donor must have known Ada well. How else to explain the resemblance? Brandy would not be here, neither would Hope, if this woman had never lived.
    Who was she? Why did she come here? How did she die? Hope did not believe her mother committed suicide. Brandy agreed, and Brandy owed them both.

T WO 
    Hope drove with her usual stops and starts back to the pre-World War I cottage Brandy’s grandparents bought years before his death. Hope had lived in the white Craftsman bungalow ever since. Brandy admired its low-pitched roof with a dormer rising behind it and the wide arch above the entrance where she’d often played as a child. Seeing it always gave her a warm feeling.
    When Hope opened the front door, her cat jumped down from its perch beside the window, stretched each white hind leg, and lifted her black chin to be scratched.
    Brandy checked her watch. “I’ve got to be home by 5:00. I need to relieve the sitter before supper.”
    In the familiar living room, Brandy’s gaze traveled from the antique sideboard to the satinwood display cabinet and settled on the portrait of her grandfather near the mantle. Robert George O’Bannon was photographed in his black and gold University of Illinois academic gown, the garment he wore in university processions. Nearby was a photograph of their only child, Brandy’s father, Bradley. He taught social studies at Tavares High School where Brandy attended. He was her inspiration then and now. Brandy and John had named their son after him. On the other end of the mantle stood an eight-by-ten photograph of the Ada Losterman statue.
    Hope led the way into the kitchen. The room had changed little as Brandy grew up—on one wall hung the wooden fish that Brandy’s father had made in shop class fifty years ago. A row of spices stood on a small shelf, alphabetized as carefully as Hope had alphabetized files in her fourth grade classroom. Over the stove hung the familiar bird clock with its startling eruptions of hourly chirps and warblings, a poignant reminder of her grandparents’ love of bird watching. The room had the lingering smell of oven-baked cookies.
    “I’ll put a kettle on for tea,” Hope said brusquely. She ran water into a teakettle and set it on a burner. “A cup of tea and what the English call ‘biscuits’ always sound so civilized in British novels. While it’s heating, we’ll get down the box of Ada’s things.”
    Brandy dropped her bag on the table and followed her grandmother’s brisk stride into her bedroom. Hope had furnished it, like the rest of the house, with acquisitions from the antique store she had shared with an uncle after she retired, and then with his grandson. Brandy sat on Hope’s bed beside the brass headboard and watched her grandmother take a small step stool into the closet. When Brandy tried to