The Echoes: A Novel

PROLOGUE

ESMÉ

Monday, July 2, 1928

4:32 p.m.

Esmé nearly escapes.

She’s just shoved her tweed-covered suitcase under the thick chain link and is about to duck under, grab the suitcase, and dash up the metal stairs. But the ship official—the man Esmé thinks of as a gendarme—appears three steps up. He glares down at Esmé, crosses his arms over the straining buttons of his blue uniform. Then he pulls out his baton, gripping it so hard in one hand that his knuckles go white and whacking it ever so slightly into the palm of the other.

Esmé quickly halts, with one foot under the chain, and her boots almost slide out from under her on the slick floor. Oh, why did she have to be spotted by this gendarme—the one who’d nearly caught her two days before, sneaking around outside of steerage?

She tries to turn around, but suddenly she’s shoved forward. The chain, waist-high for most adults, strikes petite nine-year-old Esmé Chambeau across her neck. She gasps, tries to push away from the chain. Her eyes water.

Even as her vision blurs, Esmé makes out that the gendarme is grinning at her predicament: either get trampled or escape the crowd by ducking under the chain, only for him to catch her. And then will she ever be let off the ship? Will he throw her in the ship’s jail—as he’d screamed at her when he’d tried to chase her down? Or will she be sent back to France?

The crowd shouts questions at the smugly silent gendarme about when they will be able to disembark. Esmé is overwhelmed by their strident voices, by festering human smells churned over four days of choppy ocean crossing. Sparkles dance before her eyes. A sudden lurch of the SS Île de France sends the crowd tumbling forward. The chain cuts into Esmé’s neck.

For a horrible moment, her eyes bulge and her breath squeezes out of her windpipe.

The great ship shifts again, opening enough space for Esmé to move back from the chain, gasp for breath. But then her feet skid, and she falls backward. A man behind her curses, and the mucky bottom of the man’s boot descends toward her face. Esmé throws her arms over her face, squeezes her eyes shut. Hands grab her ankles. The gendarme, pulling her toward him. She kicks as hard as she can. He yelps but doesn’t let go.

And then, suddenly, someone grabs Esmé under her armpits, swoops her up.

Esmé opens her eyes. She’s in the arms of Monsieur Durand, who yells at the crowd to make space. She inhales deeply—such sweet relief, even this stale, sour air—but then cries out and points at the gendarme. He’s holstered his baton but holds up her suitcase, as if he means to bash it to the floor. His taunting look suggests that her suitcase is trash. That she is trash.

She must retrieve the suitcase! She doesn’t care so much about the clothes, even the new ones that Mémère carefully made, though she could ill afford the new fancy silk and cotton and her hands are twisted with arthritis. But Esmé cannot lose her few relics of Papa: letters, and a cap he’d left behind from the U.S. Army.

Esmé again struggles to free herself, but Monsieur Durand is strong, large, and she barely moves at all. He glares at the gendarme with such bold fierceness that the crowd falls silent around them. And the gendarme hands over her suitcase to him.

As Monsieur Durand carries Esmé back through the crowd, she lets her head sink to his shoulder. For the first time since she left her home in Sainte-Menehould with Mémère and Father Bernard and Madame Blanchett to travel to Marseille to board this big boat, Esmé cries.

Back in the hold, now half-empty with the crowd by the stairs, Monsieur Durand carefully lowers her to the floor. He hands Esmé’s suitcase back to her. Then he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and offers it to her with a gentle smile.

Esmé wipes her nose. The handkerchief is surprisingly fresh, lavender scented. Soothing.

She holds the handkerchief up to him. You can keep it, Monsieur Durand says, amusement tingeing his voice. It’s the least I can do.

Monsieur Durand and his three children—he is a widower, he’d explained—had been in the cots by Esmé and her chaperone. The youngest child, a baby girl, had been fussy the whole passage, but Esmé had taken over feeding the baby tinned milk and changing her diapers. Esmé had helped Mémère, after all, tend to babies in the village when their mamas were sick. His older children were still too little to be of any help.

Now Monsieur Durand regards Esmé with concern. Why did you run?

Minutes before, when the SS Île de France shuddered and shook, Monsieur had reassured his children, as well as Esmé and her chaperone, that the ship was slowing to come into port. Esmé had grabbed her suitcase, run from the hold, and wormed her way through the crowd already gathering before the stairs.

I must see her, Esmé says. Lady Liberty.

She’d been dreaming of le statue de la Liberté ever since Mémère had told her she must make this trip, had shown her a picture of the statue from an old war bond her American grandmère had sent to them. Mémère had told her that the berobed lady with the strong arms, the uplifted flame, was a gift from France to America and would be waiting to welcome her.

Often during the crossing, Esmé had conjured an image of Lady Liberty whenever sadness heaved in her chest. And on the night she had briefly escaped from steerage to explore the rest of the ship—oh, the resplendent ballrooms and dining halls on the first cabin level, with their marble floors and velvet-and-mahogany furnishings and silver lighting fixtures—she found herself out on a deck. Even more grand than the elegant rooms, Esmé discovered, was the vast, blue-black ocean. She’d stared over the railing at the moonlight speckling and shimmering on the ocean surface and imagined Lady Liberty waiting for her on the dark horizon.

Will you be all right? Monsieur Durand asks. He casts a wary glance at the woman approaching them. She is tall, thin, with a long, hard face. Her dress is filthy and stained and, Esmé knows all too well from having to share a cot with her, smells of sickness. Her hair, which had embarked as an elegant swirled updo, will soon disembark as a messy crow’s nest. It had not been an easy crossing for Madame Blanchett, Esmé’s chaperone.

Even so, her expression now is fearsome, and she bears down upon Esmé and Monsieur Durand with thunderous purpose.

For a moment, Esmé is tempted to beg Monsieur to take her wherever he is going, to plea that she could work as a caregiver for his children.

But she had promised Mémère that she would telegraph her when she was safely with her American grandmère.

Oui, Esmé finally answers. Then she realizes she has said nothing of what awaits her. She blurts, I am going to a place called Kinship. In Ohio. What odd place-names, so different from those of the villages and provinces of her home. A pang of homesickness flashes over her. Would it be so bad, to be sent back to France? "To be with my grandmère. And her daughter."

Mémère had told her that her aunt—Papa’s sister—is a sort of gendarme. A sheriff. This struck Esmé as odd—there are no lady gendarmes, at least not in her village of Sainte-Menehould. As she thinks of the rough gendarme, doubt creeps into Esmé’s heart. What if this aunt of hers is mean like this gendarme? She frowns. My papa’s family.

Monsieur Durand tilts his head to the side, regarding Esmé with kindness and a little sadness. He gently pats her cheek. "Oh, cher enfant. If they are your papa’s family, then they are your family, too, non? You will be fine."

He hurries to the back of the hold, barely nodding at Madame as they pass, eager to get back to his own children.

Suddenly Madame Blanchett is by her side. She puts down her suitcases, grabs Esmé’s arm, digs in her fingertips. Madame, a woman from the village who often bragged that her rich cousin in Saint Louis longed for her to visit, had been paid handsomely to accompany Esmé for the whole of the trip. Esmé pulls away, weary of being grabbed by adults.

Madame narrows her eyes on Esmé. "What were you thinking, idiote? Her voice is like the odd hissing noises Esmé has heard on the ship from time to time. I had to send Monsieur Durand after you, and watch after his snotty children!"

Well, she hadn’t done a good job watching after them, had she? She’d abandoned them.

Esmé’s mind churns with doubts about Madame. Will she abandon her, too? Mémère had said they’d cross in second cabin. But after they got on the ship, Esmé had seen Madame confer with someone—another passenger—and an exchange of tickets and money took place. She suspects Madame sold their comfortable berth to a passenger who was unhappy at the ship being full except for steerage and pocketed the gain. While cleaning up after Madame on the trip or bringing her broth, Esmé had what Mémère and Father Bernard would call an uncharitable thought—that it served Madame right, for trying to profit off the tickets both of her grandmères had surely paid dearly for.

Pick those up. Madame points to her two suitcases.

Esmé stares at the three cases and looks around for Monsieur. Perhaps he could help?

But he is nowhere in sight, and people are shoving past them—it’s finally time to exit steerage. Sorrow rises in Esmé’s heart. Instinctively, she knows she will never see Monsieur or his children again. She has heard the mutterings, how America is a vast place, easy to get lost in.

Esmé forces a bright smile. Madame, I am sorry to cause any trouble. I could make the rest of my way to…—she hesitates, wanting to get the name of the place that will be her new home just right—to Kinship, and you could go straight on to your cousin’s in Saint Louis.

Madame’s face draws long with shock, eyebrows up and chin dropping into her stringy neck. Esmé waits for her expression to clear, for her to halfheartedly ask, Are you sure? and then to agree, and try to disguise her relief at being rid of Esmé and free to go on about her own way.

Instead, Madame’s eyes suddenly glint. "Oh no, ma chère."

Esmé startles at her tone. For the first time on this trip, Esmé’s stomach nervously roils.

I will make sure, Madame says—then pauses to smile, another first for this trip—to get you to your appointed destination.

Esmé tucks her suitcase under one arm. Then she picks up both of Madame’s suitcases.

A half hour later, Madame and Esmé emerge onto the deck. It’s a bright, hot day, and the sunlight blanks Esmé’s vision.

But once it clears, Esmé gazes around, desperate to see her.

And then she does—afar in the distance, on her own island. Lady Liberty.

CHAPTER 1

LILY

Tuesday, July 3, 1928

7:30 a.m.

Mist rises and hangs in the morning’s still-cool air over the summer-warmed pond, making it near on impossible for Sheriff Lily Ross to see more than a few inches below the barely rippling surface over the edge of the canoe. But she puts on a show for Chalmer Fitzpatrick and his grandmother, MayBelle, watching from the dock on the pond’s edge. Lily pokes her paddle into the water, as if she might stir something more sinister than stocked fish in a man-made pond.

MayBelle Fitzpatrick isn’t so easily fooled—or mollified.

You ain’t looked t’the middle yet. The elderly woman’s wobbly voice carries with surprising vigor over the water. She doesn’t bother disguising her annoyance with Lily. Done told you that’s where I saw her.

True, MayBelle had said as much after Lily came across her just a half hour earlier, sitting folded up on the top of the Bronwyn County, Ohio, courthouse steps in the posture of a little girl sent to sit in a corner, though the large liver spots and loose skin of her scrawny arms belie her age—as much as ninety-seven years, by some accounts, though MayBelle claims ninety-two. There are no records for her birth, and she’s outlived her husband.

This was the third time this week that the old woman had come to the courthouse with the same complaint, though never quite so early. Lily had gently shaken her by the arm, afraid of sending her tumbling down the steps, but MayBelle had jolted awake and stood up with surprising swiftness and litheness, then poked her face right up to Lily’s and intoned: There’s a girl floating facedown in Chalmer’s pond.

Lily, who had checked the pond on the previous two complaints, had carefully guided MayBelle back down the steps and to Lily’s automobile, parked near the courthouse. On the drive back to Chalmer Fitzpatrick’s property—mostly cattle farm, except for the hilliest part—MayBelle had been quiet, staring out at the lush, leafy woods flashing by.

The stuffy automobile intensified MayBelle’s scents of sweat from her long walk mixed with talcum powder and lilac perfume. The latter reminded Lily of her mamaw—Mama’s mother, who had passed away when Lily was fifteen. The reminder of her own mamaw stirred Lily’s heart to tenderness, and she’d glanced over at MayBelle, tried to engage her by pointing out her own farmhouse as they drove past, other people’s farms, the surprising sight of a large owl out in the daytime. MayBelle had suddenly turned to her, fixing her opaque gray eyes on Lily with a sharp stare, then intoned: Stop your jabbering! I seen her, I did. Floating in the middle of the pond. Blue dress. Alice in Wonderland blue. From the storybook. The puffy short sleeves. Big white bow in her hair. Dark hair. The hair fanning out in the water. Long, thin arms.

Lily had driven on in silence, considering these new details. In her first two reports, MayBelle had simply reported a girl in the water.

Now MayBelle frantically hollers, "I done told you—the middle of the pond!"

Mamaw! Chalmer’s chastisement is gentle enough, though frustration edges his tone. The sheriff hasn’t found anyone because there’s no one to find—

Lily paddles to the middle of the pond.

The fishing pond is just one part of Chalmer’s huge project: an amusement park, set to open on July 4. The Kinship Daily Courier has been covering it frequently and enthusiastically, and not just because Chalmer owns The Mill—the lumberyard on the north end of Kinship, the county seat of Bronwyn County. Chalmer’s Meuse-Argonne Memorial Park will be free to all veterans and their families, and a nominal charge to all others with the proceeds going to the local veteran’s fund. It will have, in addition to the fishing pond, shooting and archery ranges, a stage and dance floor for bands, singers, and other entertainers—even a gasoline-powered generator for lights for evening dances—a games area including bowling, pony rides, and more to come. It’s the biggest development in the county—well, truth be told, in the region—in years. Not like the magnificent Coney Island in Cincinnati, but yet—an amusement park, right here. Lily’s children—as well as Mama’s change-of-life baby, Lily’s little brother who is about the same age as her son—are certainly talking about it with great excitement.

Slowly, Lily stands up in the middle of the canoe, careful not to tip to one side or the other. Here, where the sun more directly hits the water, the mist is nearly gone. Lily notes writhing dark shapes of fish darting about just below the pond’s surface. She guesses: carp, trout, catfish. Probably some crappies.

Plenty of fish. But, as before, no body.

The last of the mist dissolves, and sunlight glints on the water.

It’s impossible even to imagine a body floating here.

Lily slowly sits back down on the canoe bench and paddles to the dock. Chalmer rushes over to grab the front of the canoe. Unnecessary—and irritating. But she doesn’t shoo him away.

She’s deferential because her brother Roger and Chalmer had been close. Before the Great War, Chalmer, though only a few years older than Roger, had been the baseball coach for Roger’s high school team. And in the war, Lily’s now deceased husband, Daniel, had been a gunner, Roger his assistant gunner, and Chalmer their ammo man. Roger had pulled a soldier who had panicked in the trenches back to safety. Chalmer, in turn, spotting a sniper, had tried to save Roger—but Roger had died from sniper fire, in Daniel’s arms. Chalmer had sustained an injury as well, a bullet in his thigh that also nearly took his own life.

Now Chalmer offers a hand to help her out of the boat, and as she rises and steps to the dock he lifts his eyebrows in a semi-amused look as he tethers the canoe to the dock. Now that irritates Lily. MayBelle’s worries may be unrealistic, but they’re not entertaining.

So Lily steps toward MayBelle, as carefully as if approaching a skittish deer, and gently takes the elderly woman’s hands into her own. Thin, loose-skinned, and liver-spotted though her hands may be, there’s a corded strength in MayBelle’s grasp.

Mrs. Fitzpatrick, I did look carefully, Lily explains, her tone somber and respectful, but all I saw were fish. Is it—is it possible you might be thinking of a nightmare?

MayBelle jerks her hands away and gives a surprisingly strong stomp, wobbling the dock. Not a nightmare. MayBelle rolls out her lower lip, like a pouting child. No one believes me. I’m no fool, or crazy—

Mamaw, Chalmer says, his voice soothing, no one thinks that—

"She does."

At first, Lily thinks MayBelle means her, but the older woman points up the hill to the house. Oh. She must mean Chalmer’s wife, Sophia. Lily knows her from the Presbyterian church and the Woman’s Club. Well, Lily is aware of Sophia. Lily doesn’t really know her. Neither of them attends either organization regularly; Lily only goes when Mama insists it’s been too long and she’d better put in an appearance. Lily’s general impression of Sophia, however, is that she’s a quiet, somewhat mousy woman. Not someone who would sass her husband’s beloved mamaw.

Now, Mamaw, you know Sophia has been gone for a few months. She’s not been here to think about any of us. He looks over MayBelle’s head at Lily, lowers his voice. Sophia’s spent most of the summer so far in Virginia tending to her aunt. She got back a month ago, when a cousin took over the care, and then returned to Virginia after receiving word that her aunt had passed away. Sophia got back from the trip to the funeral last night.

Ah, that’s right. Chalmer had met Sophia in Virginia. After the war, he had gone off to college—one of very few people in the area who had done so. For that matter, only a lucky few—like Lily and her brother—had the opportunity to go to high school. When Chalmer returned to Bronwyn County, he’d brought a wife with him and had quickly settled down to take over the lumber mill from his father, who had just passed away, only months after his mother. Chalmer’s only sibling, a much older brother, had long settled up in Columbus—and had no interest in returning to either the county or the lumber mill.

MayBelle gives Chalmer a hard look and a sharp poke with her elbow. I can hear you. And it ain’t like I’m too delicate for the topic of death.

Lily puts her hand to her mouth, shielding an impulsive smile. MayBelle may be ninety-two—or ninety-seven—frail-looking, and skinnier than a switch from a willow tree, but she is just as tough.

Now, since neither of you believe me, I’m going home, MayBelle declares.

Home, Lily learned on her previous two visits, is a log-and-mortar cabin at the top of the highest rise on the property where MayBelle still lives alone in the simple home her husband’s grandfather—the first known white settler in Bronwyn County—had built on his land grant.

Lily casts a worried look at Chalmer. Should MayBelle really be left to her own devices for the day? Or at all, for that matter?

Chalmer sighs. How about we go to my house, for now, and you take a nap on the sleeping porch? His large farmhouse tops a nob, just high enough to overlook pasture cleared for beef cattle in one direction and woods set aside for hunting and, now, for the Meuse-Argonne Memorial Park in another. This pond is the park’s closest feature to the house, a corner of which is visible from the dock.

MayBelle gazes across the pond, as if to a far-off time and place. Regret flashes across her face. The old woman’s shoulders slump, and for the first time this morning her expression softens. But not, Lily notes, in peace. More like in defeat.

MayBelle lets Chalmer gently guide her off the dock and up the path back to the house. As Lily follows, something nags at the back of Lily’s mind—old talk of a feud between MayBelle’s husband and his brother that yet continued among the descendants. Maybe what MayBelle imagines she sees in the pond is a manifestation of lost relationships or regrets over what should have been repaired long ago but has been allowed to fester into a sorrowful heirloom, passed down father to son.

Mama would know the story; she could ask her at lunch—oh. Another nagging thought: Lily and her mama had had their own tiff this morning. And Lily had said a few things that she’s already regretting.

As they finish the climb up a gentle slope and come around a bend, the Fitzpatrick house pops into full view: a grand two-story, wrapped in clapboard freshly painted white, with a wraparound porch. Bright red geraniums grace neat beds around the porch. A gray-blue porch swing—just like the one at Lily’s house, and many other houses, made by a local craftsman—hangs stiffly from the porch roof.

It should be, Lily reflects, an inviting tableau. But she eyes her Model T, parked just a few yards behind her on the main gravel drive up to the house, and suddenly longs to get away. Out here, in the clearing around the house, the heat is more intense than in the woods. Sweat trickles down Lily’s neck, under her dress’s collar.

Lily inches back toward her Model T as Chalmer nudges MayBelle toward the house. Let’s get you inside. Sophia will be glad to see you, make you a nice cool glass of lemonade before you take a nap—

MayBelle’s fight returns, spurred, it seems, by Chalmer’s patronizing tone. She pulls away from his grasp of her elbow. Sophia ain’t never glad to see me. And I don’t need a nap this early in the day. But the lemonade—yes—

Lily’s by her automobile, one hand on the door handle, impatiently waiting for MayBelle to go into the house, so Lily can wish Chalmer good luck and get on about her day.

But MayBelle turns, her gaze twisting back to Lily. Dark foreboding in the elderly woman’s eyes makes Lily want to look away, but she dare not.

"Mayhap I was seeing what’s yet to be, MayBelle hollers, punctuating that last word—be—so hard that it seems to take shape and strike Lily. But a fancy modern woman like you—reckon you don’t believe in the sight, do you?"

Here in the now bright, hot July morning, goose bumps run over Lily’s arms.

Mamaw! Chalmer starts. Don’t—

Lily gives him an admonishing look and he snaps his mouth shut. She lets go of her automobile’s door handle and comes a little closer to MayBelle, offering a reassuring smile. "I believe there is more to this world than we can ever