“I did,” Annie admitted, giggling. “And the next year I couldn’t stand him.”
Alice laughed too. “So if it’s not love letters, what did you find?”
“Come over and have some coffee, and I’ll show you.”
“It had better be something good for me to come all the way over there.”
“Alice! You live next door.”
Alice laughed again. “All right. All right. I’ll be right over.”
Annie hung up the phone and went to open the front door. Alice was already making her way across the autumn-brown grass from the carriage house next to Grey Gables. She waved as Annie came out onto the porch.
Annie waved back. “Look at you. That’s a great jacket.”
“You like it?” Alice’s eyes sparkled as she modeled her quilted jacket and pleated slacks in blue silk. “Notice anything else?”
She came up the steps and stopped to let Annie look her over.
“That’s a new necklace, isn’t it?”
Alice nodded and then turned her head to one side and then to the other. “Earrings too.”
The necklace and earrings were sapphires set in reddish gold, delicate and tasteful, an ideal complement to Alice’s blue eyes and auburn hair.
“Very nice. Is that the new line?”
“Just picked up the samples today, and I have a big Princessa jewelry party scheduled for next Tuesday afternoon. What do you think?”
Annie opened the front door, and they both went inside.
“I think you’ll sell a ton of those, but they’ll never look as perfect on anyone else.”
Alice laughed and shook her head. “You’re such a flatterer. Now what’s this amazing find you were going to show me?”
“Do you remember Susan Morris?”
“Susan Morris.” Alice was silent for a minute. “The name sounds familiar. Susan Morris. Susan Morris. Oh, of course. She moved to New York ages ago, didn’t she?”
“She was going to be a dancer and went to live with her aunt so she could go to some fancy school there, remember?” Annie showed Alice the packet of letters. “We used to write each other during the school year. I haven’t thought about her in years.”
Alice picked up one of the envelopes. “Yeah, I remember her now. Her family had that house off the far west end of Elm Street. But if she wrote to you while you were in Texas, how’d these end up here?”
“I brought them back with me one summer. It was a year or so after Susan moved to New York. She’d written me that she was planning to be in Stony Point again, and I thought it would be fun for us to look at the letters we wrote when we were ‘little kids.’ We were all grown up then and beyond that kind of silliness. Guess I never got back home with them, and of course Gram would never throw anything out.”
“And that was when?”
“About the time I turned 15.”
Alice shook her head. “Practically ready for the old folks’ home by then, huh?”
Annie laughed. “You want some coffee?”
“That’d be great.”
The two women went into the kitchen. Alice sat at the big kitchen table while Annie filled the coffeepot.
“You and Susan must have had a good time looking at those letters,” Alice said.
“Actually, she didn’t end up coming after all. She had a chance to be in a dance troupe that summer and didn’t make it back to Maine. I never saw her again, and we pretty much lost touch after that.”
“Yeah, I know how that can be. I bet she did all right as a dancer, tall and slim and pretty as she was. I remember wishing I had long blond curls like hers. She came back, you know. To Stony Point.”
“She did?”
“I’m pretty sure she did. Couldn’t tell you exactly when—a long time ago—but I did hear she was back. I never really kept up with her, though. John and I had our troubles, and then the divorce, and everything made it pretty hard for me to mind anyone’s business but my own. Susan must have left again sometime. She’s not here now, that’s for sure.”
Annie sighed. “That’s too bad. We always had such a good time together. Gram taught us both to crochet.”
“Yeah, she was over here all the time.”
“Now, don’t be jealous. Gram spent plenty of time with you, and when it mattered too.”
“She did that.” There was a sudden wistfulness in Alice’s expression. “I could still use her advice and her shoulder to cry on.”
“Me too.”
Annie swallowed down a sudden tightness in her throat. Gram hadn’t been gone long, and sometimes Annie ached just to hear her voice again. But Gram wouldn’t have held with self-pity. Not for a minute.