Lost Souls at the Neptune Inn, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Betsy Carter
Cover design by Joanne O’Neill
Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First Edition: August 2020
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Carter, Betsy, 1945- author.
Title: Lost souls at the Neptune Inn : a novel / Betsy Carter.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Grand Central Publishing, 2020. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020008871 | ISBN 9781538763919 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781538763902 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Love stories. | Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3603.A7768 L67 2020 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008871
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-6391-9 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-6390-2 (ebook)
E3-20200623-DA-PC-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part 1 Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part 2 Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part 3 Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part 4 Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Acknowledgments
Discover More
About the Author
Also by Betsy Carter
For Susan Kamil
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But home was a dream
One I’d never seen till you came along.
—Jason Isbell
“Cover Me Up”
Part 1
Like a piece of shattered glass, New Rochelle slips into New York with its jagged southern coastline butting against the Long Island Sound. The winters are colorless and cold, and the Sound turns a discouraging metallic green. But in springtime, cherry blossoms and lilacs perfume the air. The Sound becomes a tropical blue, hospitable to the sailboats that pour into its waters. On land, the flouncy three-story Queen Annes and plainspoken Cape Cods come alive with the sounds of lawn mowers and the smells of fried chicken.
In this congenial suburb, Geraldine and Earle Wingo ran the bakery founded by her parents, Shore Cakes, the oldest bakery in town. The smell of melting butter and cinnamon oozed from its whitewashed façade, strawberry shortcakes and chocolate cookies filled the shelves, and its walls were covered by photographs of New Rochelle sunsets and various shots of a humpback whale that once swam so far inland that the New York Times even sent a photographer.
Both her parents were gone now, but Geraldine still had her mother’s Italian looks: olive complexion, midnight black hair and dark whirlpool eyes. With her feisty nature, she was the opposite of soft-spoken Earle, whose pale blue eyes played like chimes against his milk-white skin and wavy blond hair.
The young Wingos’ story seemed a happy one in a happy place, hardly worth telling, until, on an early March afternoon in 1929, as the sky turned black and a hollow wind blew through town, Geraldine gave birth to a girl baby.
Geraldine was in labor for three hours, easy as these things go.
After that, “easy” went the way of the wind.
Chapter 1
It was Earle who wanted a baby.
At twenty, Geraldine wasn’t ready to give herself up to a child.
Once the prom queen of New Rochelle High, she tended to herself with the fastidiousness of a cat. Each day, she massaged Pond’s cold cream into her skin and dabbed 4711 cologne onto her wrists and neck. She brushed her hair with one hundred strokes and spread Vaseline over her fire-red lipstick. With her curvy figure, held in place by a girdle, Geraldine enjoyed the way men’s eyes blanketed her with something more than admiration, and she blushed when they told her that she smelled like gardenias. Why on earth would she give all that up for a child? In her vanity and wanton thoughts, she defied God and the Catholic Church.
Earle was an Episcopalian. He found it funny the way Geraldine crossed herself before having sex, and the clatter she’d make rubbing her fingers over those old beads of hers. Did she really think all that confessing would make God overlook the silk stockings and garters she wore?
She told Earle and her priest that her reasons for not wanting a child were practical. “The bakery’s starting to make money, and we’ve just bought our first house. Let’s not rock the boat.”
But in the late twenties, a childless woman was considered as odd as an unmarried man in his thirties. Geraldine saw how the ladies patted down their hair and ran their tongues over their teeth before speaking to Earle—beautiful Earle. She knew he had other choices. So, grudgingly, she allowed herself to get pregnant, and in 1929, just before the country slid into a depression, Geraldine gave birth. Earle wanted to name their daughter Shirley Mae, after his mother. But Geraldine insisted on Emilia, her grandmother’s name. They compromised and called her Emilia Mae.
During the first two months of her life, Emilia Mae howled in colicky pain for hours each day. Earle spent his time at the bakery, leaving Geraldine to wash, feed, diaper, and try to console the inconsolable baby. Geraldine tried everything—rocking chair, castor oil rubs, singing lullabies—but nothing quieted Emilia Mae. Sleep-deprived and desperate, Geraldine took the baby’s screams as an affront. Often, she’d run out the door as if her house were ablaze with her daughter’s shrieks. No one had told her how a baby would claw at her, body and mind, how she would be lucky if she had time for a shower, much less to run a brush through her hair once or twice.
Earle would come home from work by six thirty. He’d sit with Emilia Mae writhing in his arms and sing to her in his sweet high-pitched voice. She was a chunky baby with light strawberry hair and narrow chestnut eyes that defied you to look away from her. He’d kiss her ample tummy, and nibble on her ears. He’d tell her what a precious girl she was and how her tiny ears smelled like butter cookies straight from the oven. Because he loved her so much, he said, he would try not to eat them. Of course she smells like butter cookies fresh from the oven, Geraldine thought. I spent the last hour cleaning up Emilia Mae’s vomit and bathing her. Earle can afford to be all goo-goo-eyed over this baby. If I saw Emilia Mae only two or three hours a day, slept seven hours a night, and had normal days of talking with real people, I could be damned goo-goo-eyed as well.
By June, whatever hormonal gumbo had kept Geraldine afloat had been sucked dry by the baby’s constant wailing. Before Earle even took his jacket off at night, Geraldine would shove the baby at him and demand: “You take her. I’ve had enough.”
Emilia Mae was two months and twelve days old when Earle and Geraldine sat across from each other one Saturday morning. Earle had just looked in on Emilia Mae. “She’s sleeping like an angel.”
“An angel, pph.” Geraldine made a spitting noise.
“Let me ask you a question,” he said.
One of the things that attracted Geraldine to Earle was his lack of guile. What he said was what he meant, and mostly what he meant was as uncomplicated and well intentioned as a priest’s sermon on Christmas Eve. So it never occurred to her that with this question, Earle was about to wheel in a heap of trouble that would sit between them for years.
He put his elbows on the table and leaned toward her. “You do love this baby,
It was a rhetorical question, and Geraldine could have nodded or said “Mmm hmm” and left it at that. But she’d been up half the night with Emilia Mae. Her hair was dirty, and her eyes were tiny as apple seeds. She wore her lavender robe, the one with calla lilies embroidered on it, the one that was so sexy and fluid against her skin that Earle hadn’t been able to keep his hands off her whenever she wore it. Now it was stained with breast milk and crusts of spit-up, and Earle hadn’t laid a finger on it or her since Geraldine’s belly was big enough to bend the calla lilies out of shape. In short, Geraldine, who had enough guile for both of them, didn’t bother to phrase her answer in order to please Earle. Instead, she spoke what she felt. “I would love this baby if she didn’t make me feel like a monster, or if for one moment, I felt she loved me back and didn’t bawl her eyes out every time I came near her. If she let me sleep through the night or gave me a moment to shower or fix my hair, that would be nice.” Her voice was harsh as the sound of raked rocks. “I know she’s your precious lamb. That’s because by the time you get here, she’s exhausted herself from carrying on all day with me. Then she lies in your arms like a rag doll, and you go all moony. You get to go to work, put on clean clothes, talk to other grown-ups—the things normal people do.” She stood up in front of him and outlined her body with her hands. “This is how I look on a good day. This is not normal.”
Earle spoke quietly. “C’mon honey, give it time. She’ll grow out of whatever this is. Everyone has trouble adjusting in the beginning.”
But time was running out. Earle could tell that whatever initial love Geraldine might have felt for her daughter was drying up. In a desperate attempt to cure the colic, Earle began adding Pepto-Bismol to Emilia Mae’s bottles when Geraldine wasn’t looking—a drop or two here and there.
Late one afternoon, after Emilia Mae had been wailing for two hours and filled three diapers with inky liquid diarrhea, Geraldine scooped her out of the crib and held her overhead like a trophy. The gesture only made Emilia Mae scream louder. That’s when Geraldine noticed her tongue. She dumped Emilia Mae back into her crib and ran to the living room, where she telephoned Earle at the bakery: “Come home immediately,” she shouted, her voice panicked.
“Is everything all right? The baby? Did something happen?”
“The baby is alive. But no, everything is not all right. Nothing I care to discuss on the telephone. Please, come home now.”
Earle ran the ten blocks home and threw the door open. “What’s wrong?” Geraldine thrust Emilia Mae into his arms and pried open her mouth. “That,” she said, pointing to the baby’s tongue. “That’s what’s wrong!”
“What am I looking at?” asked Earle. “I don’t see anything.”
“Are you blind? Do you not see the color of her tongue? Look again!”
Earle lifted Emilia Mae so she was facing him. “Oh, it’s black. I see it now. I’m sure it’s completely normal.”
“Normal? Are you crazy? A baby with a black tongue is not normal.” Her voice rose with each sentence. “You know who has a black tongue, don’t you?”
“I have no idea,” said Earle.
“The devil, that’s who.”
“Oh Geraldine, you don’t really believe that, do you?”
“I most certainly do. How else can you explain it?”
“I’m guessing there are at least twenty other explanations, none of them having to do with the devil. Jeez, Geraldine, you take this church stuff too seriously.”
“You don’t know a Goddamn thing about my church stuff. But I’m telling you, we are seeing the work of the devil in our child.”
Emilia Mae was sobbing now, a low, sorrowful wail different from her colicky screams. Her mother’s voice was shrill, and her father was holding her too tight. It was as if she knew she was swaddled in trouble.
“Tell you what,” said Earle, trying to keep his voice calm. “I’ll take her to Dr. Rogan just to make sure everything’s okay. Why don’t you stay here and get some rest?”
“That old guy won’t know any more than we do,” said Geraldine.
“I’ll take my chances,” said Earle, as he bundled up the baby.
Dr. Rogan examined Emilia Mae while Earle told him how Geraldine saw the devil’s work in the baby’s black tongue. Dr. Rogan waved his hand as if sweeping away cigarette smoke. “Bah, she’ll be fine.”
He asked Earle what they fed her. “Have you added anything to her formula? Juice, medicine, anything like that?” Earle thought for a moment and mentioned the Pepto-Bismol. He told Dr. Rogan how he’d given Emilia Mae a spoonful now and again to quiet her colic.
Dr. Rogan had a pale, wide face with squinty gray eyes. His lips were always pressed together, as if he was trying to puzzle something out. It was startling when he opened his mouth wide enough for Earle to see his bridgework and let out a guffaw. “There’s your devil. I’m afraid the culprit is the Pepto-Bismol.” When he pulled himself together, he told Earle that Pepto-Bismol contained a chemical that, when combined with sulfur in saliva, formed a black compound called bismuth sulfide. “You tell that wife of yours that the devil, in this case, is her own husband.” He laughed again. “Next time Emilia Mae goes colicky, try a hot water bottle on her stomach. The colic should go away within a month. Pepto-Bismol! The devil! Honestly, I thought I’d heard everything.”
When Earle came home, he told Geraldine that he’d been feeding the baby small doses of Pepto-Bismol. “Dr. Rogan says that stuff can turn a tongue black. He had a good laugh about the whole devil thing.”
“Well, Dr. Rogan may think that’s hilarious, but he doesn’t live with this child.”
“Oh, Geraldine. Come now, she’ll be fine. Dr. Rogan says it will just last a few more weeks.”
Geraldine’s body went slack. “All that screaming, it’s gotten to me. I can’t seem to do anything right with her. Why didn’t you tell me about the Pepto-Bismol?” She started to cry. “Really, I’m at my wit’s end.”
“I know, honey,” said Earle, wrapping his arms around his wife. “I’m sorry. I was only trying to help.”
“I’m trying too, Earle, I really am.”
“I know you are. She’s an infant. Her tummy hurts. She wants us to make it go away. But she can’t tell us, she can only cry. That’s what babies do when they hurt. She needs your love.”
“I love her, I do. I just don’t like her very much.”
“You’re a good mother, you really are. Remember, only a few more weeks.”
“A few weeks seem like forever,” said Geraldine, wiping her nose on Earle’s jacket. “Anyway, no more Pepto-Bismol, okay?”
“Deal,” said Earle. “Can we just love this child and go back to being Mr. and Mrs. Earle Wingo?”
Geraldine leaned her head on his shoulder. “I’d like that.” She smiled. “I’ll do my best.”
Chapter 2
Geraldine tried.
She sang to Emilia Mae, songs her mother used to sing to her.
She went back to brushing her hair more than one hundred times a day, but it never got back the gloss of its youth.
She dressed Emilia Mae in lacy bonnets and hand-knit sweaters.
She worked for years to lose the weight she’d put on while pregnant.
She took Emilia Mae to the park each day and pushed her back and forth on the swing.
She tried a fashionable up-do hairstyle, but it made her Romanesque nose jump out of her face.
At night, she read stories to Emilia Mae.
She dabbed on Guerlain, Joy, and Evening in Paris, but no one told her she smelled of gardenias.
She’d read that getting angry made you furrow your brow and cause permanent wrinkles. She tried not to furrow her brow.
Geraldine was older now, old enough for men to pay her no heed other than in a polite way.
She tried to love her daughter, and in a familial way, she did. But she still couldn’t forgive Emilia Mae for stealing the part of her that had turned heads and run wild. Even her own husband, who used to come at her with renewed hunger every time they made love, seemed to have lost his appetite for her since Emilia Mae’s birth. Emilia Mae had made Geraldine a mother, and for all the poetic things said and written about mothers, no one seemed to think they were sexy.
