“There are no trains that early.”

“We’ll . . . we’ll get a carriage to take us to the nearest train station out of the city. You’ll go home and Kat and I will continue on to Arizona.”

I know this is what I must do. I am obligated by integrity to take Kat to her mother. This is what I would want done for me if our places were reversed.

I make for the stairs, suddenly realizing I haven’t fed Kat her supper and the day is gone. I need to make us all something to eat and then pack Kat’s and my things. And at some point I need to ring the sanatorium to make sure Candace is indeed still alive and well enough for visitors. And then, somehow, I need to find a way to tell Kat her mother isn’t dead after all.

Belinda is still full of questions as she takes the stairs behind me. “When are you going to telephone the police? How will I know when he’s been arrested? Will there be a trial? Will I have to come back and testify against him? Am I supposed to tell people back home I am not married? What am I going to tell Elliot?”

“For the love of heaven, we don’t know the answers to those questions!” I call out over my shoulder. “No one does. Let us just get through today.”

We enter the kitchen. Kat has left her drawings and crayons on the butler’s table and I see she has run out of paper. Perhaps she has gone back upstairs to fetch more.

I step out of the kitchen to call up the stairs to her, but as I enter the foyer, I see her in the library at Martin’s desk. She has a piece of paper in her hand and is reading it.

Candace’s letter.

Kat is sounding out the words in Candace’s beautiful handwriting. The letters are in script, and she doesn’t know the cursive letters well. But she does know them.

I rush into the room and she looks up, tears trailing down her stricken face.

“Mama . . . ,” she whispers, but not to me.

14

Up until this moment I’d not heard Kat say the word mama. I’d called myself Mam to her, and if I instructed her to give Mam something or do something for Mam, she would readily do it for me. I’ve felt like I was her mother and so I’d been expecting that when I did hear something akin to that word coming from her, she would be talking to me. But she’d been able to parse out the words in Candace’s letter, and it was Candace she was referring to now.

Martin told me Candace had died at home in the middle of the night. I’d asked him early on if Kat had seen her mother or had been able to say good-bye, and he’d replied that the body had been taken away by the undertaker while Kat still slept. Martin had thought it unwise for a five-year-old to behold her mother’s dead body. Kat had been told when she woke up that her mother had gone to heaven, and then she and Martin left Los Angeles for good five days later. I had imagined Kat’s reaction to the news of her mother’s passing half a dozen ways: tears, shock, rage, pitiful silence, and also just as I see her now with Candace’s letter in her hand. She looks as though she’s been put under a spell and will disappear if I don’t run to her. I am at her side in seconds and I kneel so that her face and mine are close. I put my hands on her shoulders.