a practiced eye around the room. It was tidy. Immaculate, actually. Just the way she liked it.
She returned to the kitchen to eat a late dinner. People sometimes teased her about being a neatnik, a control freak. But she liked order. She felt able to cope with anything as long as there was a certain amount of harmony in her life. In Eliza’s mind, order equaled harmony.
Sitting at the breakfast bar, she riffled through the mail as she ate the warmed roasted squab. She could almost feel the storm inside the eighth-floor apartment. Rain sheeted down her windows, the wind howled. She pitied anyone still out in the tempest.
Once she’d finished eating, she took her hot tea and the newspaper that had come in the mail and went to sit in her cozy chair in the living area. The Maraville Bugle arrived weekly—a hometown paper for a woman who hadn’t been to Mississippi in ten years.
Boston had been her home since her second set of foster parents had moved to the city a couple of years after she’d graduated from high school. While Eliza was not technically a part of their family, they’d invited her along and she’d gone. After high school she’d tried a semester of college, but it wasn’t what she’d wanted. She had felt restless and had had no direction, so had been happy to move east. She’d lived with the Johnsons until they’d been transferred to California six years ago. Eliza still missed Dottie and Al and kept in touch.
A couple of years ago, before she’d met Stephen, Eliza had given in to a bout of nostalgia and had begun a subscription to the weekly paper from her hometown in a vain hope of feeling connected to her past.
At first, it had been strange reading about places and people she remembered but hadn’t seen in so many years. But as the months went by, she began to feel a tenuous connection. She had even taken a chance and contacted her former foster mother, Maddie Oglethorpe. Maddie’s house in Maraville was the closest thing to a real home Eliza had ever had.
She thought about the old Victorian house on Poppin Hill, in her mind envisioning a weathered clapboard building standing in lonely splendor atop a small knoll on the outskirts of the sleepy southern town.
For a moment a kaleidoscope of images flooded her mind. The shock of losing her mother when she’d been only four. The uncertainty and fear when she’d suddenly been thrust into the foster home on Poppin Hill to live with strangers. People often said young children didn’t remember much, but she recalled every day at Maddie’s with her foster sisters.
April, Jo and Eliza. Wild girls with no place else to go, they’d carried chips on their shoulders the size of elm trees as they’d grown into rebellious teenagers. But they had ended up closer than sisters. There had been laughter and shared confidences, plans and dreams.
Jo had dealt with her anger at the world by challenging authority every chance she got. April had seemed vain and conceited to those around her, but underneath was a girl desperate to know her family. Eliza’s own insecurity had been covered by a brash bravado and clinging dependence. A jumble of images from those days—poignant, funny, bleak—flashed through Eliza’s mind now.
Their lives together had ended abruptly when Eliza was sixteen. In the space of two days, the world as she’d known it had changed. Nothing had ever been the same.
She shook off her somber mood and scanned the front page. Opening up the paper, she stopped in surprise. There in a sidebar column on page two was a report of Maddie Oglethorpe’s stroke and hospitalization.
For a moment, emotions swelled in Eliza. She felt like the uncertain sixteen-year-old she had been all those years ago—alone, adrift, afraid—after being forced from Maddie’s home. The last twelve years might never have been. She was transported back in time to the last day she’d seen her foster mother.
The older woman had seemed indomitable. She had been the strength of that household, caring for the girls, making ends meet on a limited income and the small stipend from Social Services.
Eliza had written to her frequently since that initial contact two years ago, sending her cards at Christmas, even calling her a couple of times to chat on the phone. They’d made tentative plans more than once about getting together, but Eliza hadn’t gone back to Mississippi and Maddie hadn’t come to Boston.
The news of her stroke shocked Eliza. She couldn’t imagine Maddie sick at all, much less gravely ill.
Checking the date, she saw the paper was only three days old.
She picked up the phone and dialed Information to find the number for the Maraville hospital. It was now after midnight, but a hospital was staffed twenty-four hours. There would be someone on duty who could give her an update on Maddie’s condition.
Several frustrating moments later she hung up. No one would give her any information. She was not a relative. Maddie didn’t have any relatives after her father had died. That had been one reason she’d opened her home to foster children in need of family.
There had to be someone in town who could find out how Maddie was and let Eliza know.
The first name that came to mind was Cade Bennett’s. The old hurt resurfaced. Eliza knew he wouldn’t give her the time of day. Not after those hateful words he’d said to her that last day in Maraville.
If April or Jo were still in town, she could have called one of them. The only person she could come up with was Edith Harper, Maddie’s best friend. But when she called Information, there was no number listed for her. Was her phone unlisted? Surely Maddie would have written if anything had happened to Edith.
Dammit, who could she call?
Not for the first time, Eliza felt the aching loss of her best friends. Sisters united, they’d called themselves. She rubbed the small scar on the tip of her index finger. She remembered the day the three girls had pledged undying friendship and sisterhood. Blood sisters.
It had been Jo’s idea. They had been thirteen at the time. Three girls with no family to call their own banding together. Eliza’s parents were dead. Jo’s mother was too caught up in drugs and abusive men to care about her only child. April’s parents were unknown.
To solidify their bond, they had each cut a fingertip and mingled their blood. What a mess they’d made, cutting deeper than necessary. Blood had spattered their clothes and the bedspread. Maddie had been upset with the mess they’d made, but the bond had never wavered until the day they were sent to different foster homes throughout the state of Mississippi.
It was all because of the accusations Jo had made. Angry at Maddie for reasons Eliza never knew, Jo had accused their foster mother of beating her, and she’d had the injuries to prove it. Social Services had stepped in immediately after the sheriff had interviewed Eliza and April the next morning, swiftly taking each of the girls from Maddie’s home and placing them elsewhere.
By the time her junior class in Maraville had held its prom that spring, Eliza had been living in Biloxi with the Johnson family. She never knew where April and Jo had been sent. In the twelve years that had followed, she had not heard from either of them. Nor, as far as she knew, had Maddie. She’d asked in earlier letters, but Maddie had said neither had ever contacted her.
Losing touch with Jo and April had been devastating. Eliza had tried to find them but ran into brick walls at every turn. She’d kept to herself at her new school and was grateful her second set of foster parents had invited her to remain with them when she’d turned eighteen. They had helped her far more than she’d deserved.
It wasn’t
