In the dusty stack I found half a dozen more canceled checks, all with Eliza’s spidery signature. She’d paid Pine Breeze every month on the first or second day like clockwork. Why? What did she care? Who was A to her that she would pay to hide his lover?

I might have lingered over this question longer, except that another letter captured my attention—at least my shock, and then, though I wouldn’t have cared to admit it, my horror. It was simple enough in appearance, in an ordinary white sleeve with a dampobscured postmark.

Mrs. Finley, you must give up that girl’s baby. That baby should never be born. He’s going to cause a world of pain to many people—not just myself. You may go to hell too, for all I know, just for protecting her there and helping her give birth to that thing. I don’t know. But the best thing you can do is send her home and let her mother deal with it. Her mother knows what to do. Her mother wouldn’t pussyfoot around like you people are. This isn’t a matter for an institution, it’s a matter for family and you know it. You’re interfering, you’re not helping. Send that child home or else there will be consequences.

There was no signature.

I wondered if Lulu knew anything, but I only wondered it briefly. I’d never get it out of her. She’d buried my mother deep—and her own mother beside her. She’d marked their graves with a secret sign that she’d never share with anyone, especially not me.

What to do, then? My grandmother was dead, and her daughters were silent. I didn’t understand it, but I was determined to find a way around it.

I thought again of the nameplate on the office door. Could Marion Finley still be alive? If she was getting threats like the one I held before me, maybe she’d had a good reason to help keep my mother’s indiscretion quiet; though that train of thought brought me right back around to my own family, and the question of whether or not anyone really knew.

Someone outside the Pine Breeze staff knew, this much was clear.