Best Friends Read online

  Take a peek in the windows to see who lives here now. The house on the left end belongs to the Morrises. They have four children. The oldest are twins, and Lacey is one of Ruby Northrop’s good friends. Then there’s Travis, who’s six, and Alyssa, who’s the youngest kid in the Row Houses … at least until the Fongs, who live at the other end of the row, have their baby. On this weekday, all the Morris children are in school, Mr. Morris is at work, and Mrs. Morris is answering her e-mail.

  Next door to the Morrises lives Mr. Willet. He’s been alone since Mary Lou moved to Three Oaks. At first he felt relief when his wife was safely settled into her new home. For more than a year she had been unable to dress herself or take care of herself, and Mr. Willet had been having more and more trouble doing these things for her. Now he misses his wife of fifty years desperately, and his days seem very long and lonely. He’s getting ready to visit Mary Lou, which he does nearly every day.

  Dr. Malone and his daughters live in the house to the right of Mr. Willet. There’s not much to see through their windows just now because Dr. Malone is at his dental office on Main Street, and Margaret and Lydia are at Camden Falls Central High School. Margaret is a junior this year, thinking about going to Mount Holyoke College or maybe Smith College, and she’s working hard, especially in her language classes. At the moment, Lydia is supposed to be in her algebra class, but she has allowed herself to be talked into leaving campus (which is forbidden unless you’re a senior) and is now walking across the street with her friends to where Bud the hot dog vendor has brought his cart. She can think up an excuse for her math teacher later.

  Min, Ruby, Flora, and (for the time being) Aunt Allie live in the house to the north of the Malones. On this morning the only one at home is Aunt Allie. She had intended to spend the hours before lunch revising her latest short story but has abandoned her computer and is on the phone with a real estate agent. Min is working at Needle and Thread with Gigi, and Flora and Ruby are at Camden Falls Elementary. Neither Flora nor Ruby is concentrating on her schoolwork just now. Flora’s mind is on her research project, the one she’s working on for the town birthday celebration, and Ruby is lost in the world of witches and Alice Kendall. Despite the tears she was able to shed at the rehearsal, she’s wondering if her performance was really as good as she thinks it was. Is she truly a good actor, or is she just good for a nine-year-old?

  Next door to Min’s house is the one belonging to the Walters. The Walter children are in school, but Mr. and Mrs. Walter are at home, planning for the opening of their store. They’re sitting at the kitchen table together, creating a grand opening flyer. If Olivia could see them, she would think that they haven’t seemed so happy in a long, long time.

  To the right of Olivia’s house is Mr. Pennington’s, and today he is in his backyard, feeling as happy as the Walters are. Last summer, when he was having a hard time, he didn’t get around to planting his vegetable garden, but this year he’s feeling up to it. He’s standing by the weedy patch that two years ago was the home to neat rows of lettuce and beans, and he’s making a chart of what he’ll plant where. He thinks that this summer he might try growing beets. “Is that a good idea, Jacques?” he asks, and Jacques wags his tail.

  Robby Edwards and his parents live on the other side of Mr. Pennington’s house. Right now Robby is in school and Mr. and Mrs. Edwards are both at work. Robby likes school (even though his special class moved from the high school back to the elementary school last fall), but he’s eager to graduate and start working. “I want responsibilities and a paycheck,” he tells Mrs. Fulton, his teacher, as they study a math worksheet. “And a girlfriend.”

  The Fongs live in the house on the right end of the row. They’re not home, either, although when they are at home these days they enjoy working on the nursery for their baby girl, who will be born soon. Today they’re at their studio on Main Street. They have offered to exhibit the artwork that will be entered in the competition during the town celebration, and they’re trying to figure out how to display it.

  “Just think,” says Mrs. Fong as she eyes their large workspace, “by the time the exhibit opens, our baby will be here.”

  When Flora moved to Camden Falls at the beginning of the previous summer (which seemed now to be both a very long time ago and a very short time ago), there were many days when she wanted to be alone, so she would escape to Min’s attic. Eventually, she began to explore it. She had hoped the attic might be like one in a book — hiding a doorway to another world or at the very least harboring a trunk full of treasure. But Min’s attic had proven to be of the more boring kind. It held boxes of old clothes (but not even very old clothes) and boxes of dishes, plus some furniture of dubious quality that wasn’t being used but that Min couldn’t bear to part with. At last, though, Flora had discovered a carton holding old letters and keepsakes and papers and journals. Careful examination of some of the letters had led Flora to a mystery. It wasn’t, she had to admit, quite as exciting as the mysteries Nancy Drew usually found herself thrust into (often on the very first page of the book), involving spies and thieves and jailbirds. But as homegrown mysteries go, Flora’s wasn’t a bad one.

  Flora had learned that long ago (in 1929, before Min was born) Min’s father had done something that had lost a lot of money for a lot of people. A bit of reading had revealed that he hadn’t done anything wrong; as a stockbroker he had made investments for his clients, and when the stock market crashed, sending the country into the Great Depression, his clients lost their savings. Those clients had blamed Min’s father for their losses, which led to a chain of events that, Flora realized, had affected more than just the people whose investments had been lost. Employers lost their businesses and had to let their workers go. The workers, now with no income, were forced to give up their homes or to find lower-paying jobs. Babies were born into poverty when they once might have been born into prosperity.

  Flora’s mystery grew more interesting when she learned that Mary Woolsey was connected to it. Mary’s father had been one of the people whose money had been invested and lost by Min’s father. The fortunes of Mary’s parents had changed, so Mary had been one of the babies unexpectedly born into a poor household, her future a question mark. As Flora came to know Mary better, a new mystery arose. Who had sent Mary anonymous gifts of money for decades after her father was lost in a fire at the factory he’d begun working in after the stock market crash? Mary had thought it was Min’s father, acting out of guilt over the changes he’d caused in the lives of the Woolseys. But Flora, feeling like quite a good sleuth, had eventually realized that that wasn’t possible, and the mystery remained unsolved, Mary’s benefactor a question mark himself. Or herself, thought Flora.

  Flora had become interested in how this one moment in the life of Lyman Davis, her great-grandfather, had affected so many other people. Now, with Mary’s help and Min’s permission, she was doing a project for the town birthday celebration, planning to interview people living today in Camden Falls whose lives had changed because of her great-grandfather. And she was going to start with Mrs. Jacob Fitzpatrick, the woman Mary Woolsey had suggested she visit.

  “I’ve been sewing for her for several years now,” Mary had told Flora in Needle and Thread one day. Mary earned her living doing mending and sewing, and several times a week she came to Needle and Thread to pick up articles of clothing that had been left for her or to drop off finished pieces.

  “Mrs. Fitzpatrick?” Min said. “Sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing. She’s a very nice woman, Flora. Are you going to interview her for your project?”

  “I guess,” said Flora, suddenly nervous about talking to a complete stranger.

  “She’ll be perfect,” said Mary. “I think you’ll see why after you’ve spoken with her.”

  Flora looked at Min. “I don’t know Mrs. Fitzpatrick at all. I feel funny calling to ask if I can interview her.”

  “I understand completely,” said Min. “How about if I call her for you?”


  “Oh, thank you!” replied Flora, who had been afraid that Min might tell her to buck up and face her fears.

  So it was arranged that after school on Wednesday, Aunt Allie would drop Flora off at Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s house on the eastern edge of Camden Falls and return in thirty minutes to pick her up.

  On the appointed afternoon, Flora sat in the front seat of her aunt’s car, a notebook and tape recorder in her lap, butterflies in her stomach.

  “Wow,” she said softly as Aunt Allie drove up a winding drive. A great stone mansion loomed ahead of them.

  Aunt Allie stopped the car in front of the house, and Flora reached for the handle of the door, then hesitated.

  “Do you want me to come in with you?” asked Allie, and Flora looked at her gratefully. “Or I could wait here in the car.”

  The door to the house opened then, and out stepped a smiling woman wearing a tweed suit. “Flora?” she said. “I’m Mrs. Fitzpatrick.”

  Flora smiled back at her and said to Aunt Allie, “You can go. It’s okay. Thank you for driving me here.”

  “I’ll see you in half an hour,” Allie replied.

  Flora followed Mrs. Fitzpatrick through the doorway, and when she stepped into the grand entrance hall, she turned around and around, like someone in a movie. The hall was bigger than Min’s whole living room. Oil paintings hung on the walls, each lit by its own tiny individual lamp. From the center of the ceiling swooped a chandelier decorated with what Flora thought must be hundreds of crystal pendants.

  This was the house belonging to the descendant of someone who had lost all his money in the crash of 1929?

  “Your grandmother explained your project to me,” said Mrs. Fitzpatrick. “Very interesting.”

  Flora nodded. “Thank you. I didn’t know anything at all about my great-grandfather until I moved here.”

  “Come. Let’s sit in the drawing room,” said Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

  The drawing room. Flora had never met anyone whose home included a drawing room.

  Mrs. Fitzpatrick led the way into a lavishly furnished room with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over a sloping lawn. She indicated a chair, which Flora sat in, and then she lowered herself into a matching chair.

  Flora opened her notebook and said, “Do you mind if I tape our interview?” (Min had told her to say this, adding, “It’s rude to start recording without asking first.”)

  “Not at all,” replied Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and Flora switched on the recorder.

  Flora, feeling more nervous than ever, nevertheless began the short introduction she had rehearsed. “In nineteen twenty-nine,” she said, “my great-grandfather, Min’s father, was a stockbroker here in Camden Falls. When the market crashed —”

  “I believe that day was called Black Thursday,” interrupted Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

  “Really?” Flora made a note in her book. “When the market crashed, a lot of my great-grandfather’s clients lost their fortunes. Was your father one of them?” Flora was beginning to think that either Mary had made a mistake, or that she wanted to show Flora that some of Lyman Davis’s clients had not lost their fortunes and had continued to do well for themselves.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Fitzpatrick. Flora looked so surprised that Mrs. Fitzpatrick laughed. “I know. You wouldn’t guess it by looking around. But the truth is that my father lost, well, not every penny he had — that would be an exaggeration — but almost all of his money. I wasn’t born yet, by the way, so I don’t remember any of this.”

  “Did your family live here then?” asked Flora.

  “They lived in Camden Falls but not in this house. They lived in another large house, though. It wasn’t quite as big as this one, but it was still a beautiful old home. It isn’t too far from your house on Aiken Avenue, Flora. Anyway, by January of nineteen thirty, my father realized just how much trouble our family was in, and according to my older brother, who remembers this night very well, our father sat down at the dinner table one evening and announced that they were going to have to move. He told my mother and my brother that he was going to sell the house and all of their belongings, and that they were going to move in with his younger brother. The next day he called the household staff together and told them the same thing, adding that he would have to let them go.”

  Flora nodded, thinking of her great-grandfather saying the same thing to Mary Woolsey’s mother and the rest of the staff at his house.

  “My brother told me,” Mrs. Fitzpatrick continued, “that when Father made this announcement, the gardener hung his head, two of the maids began to cry, but the chauffeur smiled.”

  “Why did he smile?” asked Flora.

  “Mr. Pennington? Because he —”

  “Excuse me,” said Flora. “The chauffeur’s name was Mr. Pennington?”

  Mrs. Fitzpatrick nodded. “Rudy Pennington, I think. Why?”

  “Rudy Pennington is the name of our neighbor!”

  “At the Row Houses?” asked Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the junior Rudy Pennington, then. He’s the son of the man who was our chauffeur. And his father was smiling because … I’m not sure exactly, but I think he saw losing his job as an opportunity. Flora, if his son is your neighbor, you ought to talk to him, too. I imagine he’ll have an interesting story for your project, and a very different one from the one you’ll hear today.”

  “Okay,” said Flora, making another note in her book.

  Mrs. Fitzpatrick, staring out a window now, said after a moment, “My father was a man of his word. The staff was let go, and he really did sell the house and my family’s possessions. But what happened in the next few years was that my father and his brother joined forces to start a store in town. The store thrived, so they opened another store, then bought a third business and more businesses after that. By the time I was a teenager, Father had built this house, and I’ve lived here since. I taught all my children not only to be smart with their money but to be charitable as well.”

  “Do your children live in Camden Falls?” asked Flora.

  “My daughter does. Sheila DuVane. I’m very proud of her.”

  Sheila DuVane? Could that be the Mrs. DuVane who had long been helping out Nikki’s family? Flora couldn’t think of a tactful way to phrase that question, so she made yet another note in her book. Maybe she would ask Min about it later.

  Flora looked at her watch. The half hour was almost over. “This has been really interesting,” she said to Mrs. Fitzpatrick. “Thank you very much for talking to me. It was actually Mary Woolsey who suggested that I interview you.”

  “Oh, Mary Woolsey.” Mrs. Fitzpatrick stared out the window again. “Now, that was a sad story.” Flora was about to ask what she meant by this when Mrs. Fitzpatrick continued. “I suppose you’ve heard about the fire at the factory.”

  Flora nodded. “Do you remember it?”

  “Not well. I was just a little girl when that happened. But I do remember my mother saying from time to time that after the fire her friend Isabelle was never the same. Isabelle was the sister of Mary’s father.”

  Flora jerked to attention. Mary had never mentioned any relatives, only her parents.

  “My mother also said,” Mrs. Fitzpatrick went on, “that if someone wanted to leave his life behind and start over fresh, with a new identity, the fire afforded an easy way to do that.”

  Flora was pretty certain that her mouth dropped open at this remark, but the doorbell rang then, and Mrs. Fitzpatrick rose to her feet, saying, “That must be your aunt.”

  Flora followed her back to the hallway. The interview was over.

  “This is the dress for the baby?” said Olivia. “Wow.” She was sitting on the floor in Flora’s bedroom. The room was a mess, awash in fabric scraps, bits of paper, open books, and pattern pieces. The half-finished dress, which Flora now held out for inspection by Olivia and Ruby, was not the first one Olivia had seen Flora make, but she never ceased to be surprised by what her friend could do.


  She touched the front of the dress. “What’s that called again?” she asked.

  “Smocking,” replied Flora.

  “I love it.” Olivia examined the tiny stitches that formed a picture of the cow jumping over the moon.

  “We’d better hurry and finish our baby presents, all of us,” said Flora. “The shower’s less than a week away.”

  The Row House neighbors were planning a baby shower for the Fongs. It was going to be held at Olivia’s house, and it was supposed to be a surprise for Mrs. Fong. (Mr. Fong was in on the secret.) Olivia recalled her tenth birthday party, held the previous autumn, which had indeed been a surprise. But adults, she felt certain, were harder to surprise than kids. Still, surprise or not, the shower would be fun, and Olivia, Ruby, and Flora had decided to make their presents for the baby. Now, however, the shower was just days away, and none of their gifts was finished.

  “How’s your present coming?” Olivia asked Ruby.

  “Well …” said Ruby.

  “You have been working on it, haven’t you?” asked Flora.

  “Well …” said Ruby again.

  “Ruby,” said Flora.

  “We’re having a lot more play rehearsals now than before!”

  “Okay,” said Olivia calmly. “Show us what you’ve done. Maybe we can help you. I only need a couple of hours to finish my present.”

  “First let’s see yours,” said Ruby.

  Olivia opened a paper bag and carefully withdrew a package wrapped in tissue paper. “It’s a photo album,” she said. “I bought the album, but I’m making a cover for it — it’s going to say BABY in pink-and-white-checked fabric right here — and I decorated some of the pages. See? Mr. and Mrs. Fong can take pictures of the baby’s ‘firsts’ and put them in the album. This page is for her first walk in her carriage, this one is for her first Halloween, this one is for her first steps. All I need to do now is finish the cover.”