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  IN EARLY JUNE 1964, the Benevolent Home for Necessitous Girls burns to the ground, and its vulnerable residents are thrust out into the world. The orphans, who know no other home, find their lives changed in an instant. Arrangements are made for the youngest residents, but the seven oldest girls are sent on their way with little more than a clue or two to their pasts and the hope of learning about the families they have never known. On their own for the first time in their lives, they are about to experience the world in ways they never imagined…

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  Small

  Bones

  VICKI

  GRANT

  O R C A B O O K P U B L I S H E R S

  This is for Flight Lieutenant R.B. Grant, DFC, and the many

  brave and foolish young men like him.

  Raise your glasses high, boys.

  Raise your glasses high.

  Here’s to the dead already

  And here’s to the next to die.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Prologue

  July 9, 1947—Sometime after midnight

  IT WAS DARK and he didn’t know where he was going. He pulled over to check the map she’d drawn for him, but a lot of good that did. She hadn’t been there in years. She’d scribbled vague lines on the back of a soup label and said, “The turn is right before the gas station, or maybe right after,” then she’d drawn a long squiggle and, at the edge of the label, a box with a roof on it.

  She’d pushed the paper across the kitchen table and said, “You’ll find it. Not much else around there. Whole reason I left.” Then she’d rubbed a smudge of blood off her hand and creaked to her feet. She didn’t have time for this. She had her own pressing matters to attend to.

  He chucked the map out the car window and got back on the road, gravel machine-gunning the bushes. He’d keep heading east.

  A deer materialized in front of him, its eyes flat and shiny as new dimes. The man swerved but didn’t slow down. He had to be back before dawn.

  He was angry with her but knew he had no right to be. An old woman could hardly be expected to drive three hours along deserted back roads. Likewise, he certainly couldn’t be left to deal with—he struggled for the words—female issues. So he had to drive. She had to take care of the rest. Simple as that. He’d been through worse.

  His headlights stuttered over the potholes. He hadn’t passed a car or a house in what seemed like hours. Even so, he found himself worrying that someone might happen upon the crumpled map at the side of the road and use it as evidence against him. He gripped the steering wheel and drove faster, his neck jutting toward the dashboard, a cartoon drawing of a guilty man on the run.

  He was being ridiculous. Guilty? He leaned back, loos-ened his tie and took his first real breath in miles. He hadn’t done anything wrong.

  It was that damn girl. This was her fault. What had she been thinking? Or had she been thinking at all? That was the problem with kids today. They didn’t think. They had it soft. Too many cheap novels and silly movies filling their heads with romantic crap. Love conquers all? That certainly hadn’t been his experience.

  She wasn’t a child, for God’s sake. She was seventeen. Old enough to know better. Well, she was paying for her foolishness now, wasn’t she? He took off his hat and threw it in the backseat. Two families, two fine old families, could be ruined by this.

  “Damn girl.” He said it out loud this time. “Damn bloody girl.”

  It was just a turn of phrase, an affectation he’d picked up in England, but it made a picture pop into his head. He saw the white shirt soaked red with blood. The gray face. The crazy eyes. His anger melted into something closer to fear.

  He reached across the passenger seat and pushed the edge of the towel away with his finger. The baby’s face turned toward him. He jerked back in shock. He hadn’t really expected it to be alive still.

  There was a jar of milk on the car floor and a tiny spoon in his coat pocket. He was supposed to feed it if it got hungry. He didn’t know the first thing about babies. Was it hungry?

  It wasn’t crying. It must be fine. That’s what he told himself.

  He stepped on the gas. What if he’d already passed the turnoff? What if the Mounties stopped him? How would he explain a newborn baby, especially one like this? Dinner napkin for a diaper, umbilical cord pinched off with a clothespin—they’d know there was something fishy. Who would he say it belonged to? What if it died? The questions wouldn’t stop.

  And then there, almost miraculously, was the gas station she’d mentioned, and just after that a road and, pointing the way, a sign half obscured by alders. Only the word Benevolent was legible. It gave him the creeps, that word, but he shook his head and carried on.

  In minutes he was crawling up the long driveway. He pulled onto the lawn—he didn’t want to get too close to the house—and killed the engine. He leaned his elbows on the steering wheel and rubbed his face in his hands.

  Do it. Just be done with it.

  He opened the car door, and the hinges shrieked. But no lights turned on, no dog barked, so he picked up the baby—small and alien as a newborn kitten, face like a rotten apple—and got going.

  He wondered if he was doing the right thing. It wasn’t too late. No one had seen him. The girl thought it was dead anyway. He could turn around, drive back down that deserted road, or another one just like it, and leave the baby somewhere no one would ever find it. It wouldn’t survive long. Which was worse? A merciful death or a miserable life? It was a fair question and not the first time he’d had to ask it.

  The baby squirmed. A tiny fist, gnarly as a wad of gum, jutted out from under the towel in some kind of salute. It’s a tough little bugger, he thought. Then, despite himself, She’s a tough little bugger. It’s a she.

  There was no going back now. He began picking his way across the lawn toward the Benevolent Home for Necessitous Girls. He realized that once upon a time, before the house had become an orphanage, someone grand must have lived here. The lord of the manor, no doubt, had had lots of foundlings left on his doorstep.

  The thought shamed him. A foundling. A common foundling.

  He turned around and got his old coat from the car. (She’d grabbed it from the hook by the door. Ran down the driveway after him. Insisted he take it.) It was July and would be sizzling by noon, but at three in the morning, it was cool and damp, and the baby was so horribly small.

  He wrapped her in his coat, placed the bundle on the front step, then banged at the door until a lamp flicked on in a third-floor window. He was back on the road by the time he saw light flood across the verandah and a silhouette appear in the doorway. His shoulders relaxed. Someone will look after her, he thought. She’s someone else’s problem now.

  He had three more hours before he’d be home. Plenty of time to think. More t
han he would have liked. He no longer had anything to distract him from the truth.

  And the truth was this: The girl wasn’t to blame. He was. He was the arrogant jerk who’d gotten this whole sorry thing started. He’d spend the rest of his life trying to figure out how to make it right.

  One

  June 1964

  Just outside Hope, Ontario

  THE BOY WAS LOOKING at me again.

  I stood up to get something out of my suitcase. A baby laughed. I turned to see what was so funny and there he was, right behind a lady tickling her little girl. That’s what I was really smiling at, but the boy must have thought I was smiling at him because he looked me straight in the eye and he winked.

  A real wink. Not a there’s-a-little-something-in-my-eye type of flutter or the full-fledged facial spasm of a homicidal maniac. This was a genuine hey-baby-how’s-it-going wink.

  It got me right in the spine. My legs buckled. I dissolved into my seat without getting whatever it was I wanted out of the suitcase. I didn’t move again for ages, but inside my heart was clacking away like a Morse-code operator on a sinking ship. Mayday. Mayday. Mayday.

  All I could think was, I wish Tess were here, or Toni or Cady. They’d know what to do. They wouldn’t just sit there, staring at the greasy black bristles on the neck of the man in the row ahead. They’d look at the boy with their eyelids at half-mast and say, “I beg your pardon,” and then they’d turn back to whatever they’d been doing and leave him there, blushing like a fool.

  Unless, of course, he was cute, in which case they might go, “Take a picture, why don’t you? It lasts longer.” They’d say it with a smirk and a hand on one hip, and if he were worth bothering about at all, he’d understand it was an invitation to come back with an equally snappy remark. Make them laugh, and they might even let him talk to them for a while.

  I wondered if the boy was cute.

  I didn’t know. He winked. I disintegrated. I barely saw him. A madras shirt. Blondish-brownish hair. Could have used a comb. Freckles.

  There’s no way I could have seen freckles from where I was. He was four rows back, and I’d only caught a glimpse of him. I must have been making up the freckles part.

  I had to stop doing that.

  Just a few days earlier, Mrs. Hazelton had taken my hand in both of hers and said, Dot. Look at me. You have. To keep. Your wits about you. This is serious. No more flights of fancy. No more daydreaming. You’re on your own now. I need you to promise me you’ll do that.

  I turned away from the man’s neck and looked out the window and tried not to cry. Fields, some with cows, slid past me. Barns I knew gave way to barns I’d never seen before; then they gave way to trees, trees and more trees. It made me feel like Little Red Riding Hood. On my own, in the woods, wolves all over the place.

  Every so often a cliff or a stand of fir blocked the sun, and then the train would go dark and the window would turn into a mirror, and I’d catch little flashing reflections of the lady behind me with the hat like a coconut layer cake or the lady with the baby or the boy.

  His cheek was leaning against the window, and his arm was stretched out across the back of the empty seat beside him. His hair fell over his forehead as if he played in a band or something. He may have been asleep.

  I realized he was indeed cute, and my heart went ape again.

  And that brought me back to missing Sara and Toni and Malou and Betty and Tess and Cady and Joe the cook and the Little Ones and even Mrs. Hazelton, who I knew I drove to distraction but who up to this point had always managed to resist the urge to send me off into the woods alone.

  I realized this was exactly what she meant by flights of fancy. I was hardly some kid in a cape, tripping through the forest with nothing to protect me but a basket of goodies. In a few weeks, I’d be seventeen. I was on a passenger train with comfortable seats and a bell I could ring for the conductor if I needed him. I had $127 in my brand-new purse. I had my very own suitcase, full of my very own clothes. I was wearing lipstick. A cute boy had winked at me.

  A day earlier, all that would have sounded like one of my fantasies. I’d spent my entire life as a penniless, poorly dressed, unwinked-at orphan—and yet right now I’d have given it all up to go back to the Home. Suddenly, I had almost everything I’d ever dreamed of, but it didn’t make me feel better. It made me feel like I needed to pee and/or throw up.

  That probably sounds crazy. The average person hears the word orphanage and thinks gruel—or, in our case, lima-bean casserole—but it wasn’t like that. I had a lot of happy memories. Bath nights. Holding the new babies. Lighting farts on fire. Toni killing herself as Mrs. Hazelton stood there tapping her foot while I tried to come up with some plausible explanation for the burn hole in the seat of my pants. Sara and I in the common room, doing the twist to the CHUM 150 hit parade long after everyone else had gone to bed.

  There were some not-so-happy moments too, of course. Sharon falling down the cellar stairs with the potato peeler in her hand. Joe walking up the driveway with Puss ‘n Boots in his arms, her neck at such a terrible angle that we didn’t even have to ask. Patsy’s grandmother showing up and taking her back. Marlene getting adopted, and Belinda getting adopted, and even Sharon getting adopted despite the scar.

  The time I realized it was never going to happen to me.

  The next stop was Firth. I could get off there and hop a train home. Malou might not have left yet. I could maybe even catch Sara.

  That made me feel better until I remembered Mrs. Hazelton saying, You can’t. You can’t stay here. There’s nothing here for you.

  Even at the time, I knew she was right. The night before our little chat, I’d stood on the lawn, with Sara’s arm around my shoulder and little Lindy sobbing all over my pajamas, and watched the fire rip through the Home.

  By morning there was nothing left of our big white house but a charred black blotch. It was as if someone had tried to draw the place, then gotten mad because it didn’t look right and scribbled the whole thing out with a giant Magic Marker.

  I told Mrs. Hazelton it didn’t matter. I could stay somewhere in town. I could work at the Welshes. I’d cleaned there three afternoons a week for the last two years and never had any trouble.

  “No,” Mrs. Hazelton said, like it was out of the question.

  So I said I could work at Loretta’s Diner or take in sewing. Mrs. Hazelton knew I was a good seamstress, but she just kept shaking her head, no matter what I came up with.

  She’d let go of my hand. She said, “Dot… Dorothy…” and then I knew I didn’t stand a chance.

  “The people in Hope are decent—I’m not saying they aren’t—but here’s the hard truth. You stay in town, and you’ll always be an orphan. Get a good job, marry a nice man, raise fine children—it won’t make a whit of difference. You’ll still just be a girl from the Home, and whether they mean to or not, they’ll look down their noses at you.” She put a smile on her face, but it was about the size and shape of a fingernail clipping so didn’t offer much in the way of comfort. “Leave Hope and you can be whoever you want to be.”

  She made it sound so reasonable, so easy, but it wasn’t, and it made me angry. All those years, any time a girl got adopted and I didn’t, she told me I shouldn’t be sad. I was the lucky one, she used to say. I was the one who got to stay at the Home with my friends—and now here she was, telling me I had to just ditch it all and get out.

  “Where would I go?” I said, or more like screamed, but she didn’t even flinch or say, Watch your tone, young lady. She just raised her eyebrows like, Well, let’s see…

  We were sitting in the study of her cottage, right behind where the Home used to be. There was a long, flat box on the desk between us. It was the type of box a dress would come in, but it was old and dusty, so I hadn’t given it much thought.

  Now she slid it closer and took off the lid. Whatever was inside stunk of mildew, but it was wrapped in tissue as if it was something precious.

&nb
sp; She peeled open the paper and took out a man’s overcoat. A large man’s overcoat. Long. Beige. Double-breasted. Missing one button and half of another. She spread it on the desk, but it didn’t want to lie flat. It was as if someone’s elbows were still in the sleeves.

  I felt like I was watching a magic trick or at least that part where the magician does stuff to distract you from what he’s actually up to.

  Mrs. Hazelton was up to something. She was throwing me out and trying to make it seem like she wasn’t.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?” she said. I bit down on the inside of my cheek. No way I was letting her bamboozle me.

  She flipped back the hem and looked at the label. “One hundred percent cashmere. Must have cost a pretty penny. Beautiful stitchery. You’ll appreciate that.”

  She patted the hem back down, and then, without even looking at me, said, “This is what I found you in.”

  She let that sink in for a moment.

  “Tiny, tiny little thing you were, wrapped up in this big coat. I almost didn’t see you. Three in the morning. The verandah pitch-dark. For a second, I thought someone had just chosen an odd time to drop off some hand-me-downs.”

  My face went prickly from the inside out. Mrs. Hazelton had always just shaken her head when I’d asked her before, as if it was all some giant mystery. As if I’d just appeared at the Home one day out of thin air. Poof! A genuine magic trick.

  The only reason I knew I was born too early was because I had to go to the doctor every year so he could listen to my heart. Once, he’d mentioned it was because I was premature, and for the longest time I thought that meant I hadn’t started my period yet. (Toni straightened me out on that one. Nearly peed her pants laughing first, of course.)

  Mrs. Hazelton unbuttoned the coat and laid it open. A big green stain more or less the shape of Africa had almost eaten through the lining.