Not Quite Dead (A Lowcountry Mystery)

Chapter Seventeen

Gramps has been home a week and a half, and since he refused the feeding tube and therapy, time is running out. He sleeps away most of every day, and hardly anything but loose skin covers his bones. He's eaten, of course, when he gets too hungry, but his cough is terrible afterward and he does it only when the pain in his gut becomes unbearable.

Not that he's shared any of this, or complained much at all, but I'm not blind. Aunt Karen sees, and so do Will and Melanie when they stop by once a day to say hi. There's a hospice nurse living in the main floor guest suite, a sweet old black woman named Lynette, and she says it won't be much longer.

I'm lying in bed, trying to sleep even though the first streaks of dawn lighten the sky. Amelia hasn't come, but Aunt Karen swears every day that she'll be here soon. Each one that passes without her pulling into the driveway increases my anxiety over what's happening in her life, because she can't have changed that much. We both love Gramps with such endless ferocity that she wouldn't miss this, not by her own choice.

If she is willingly missing the last couple of days with Gramps, then she's no longer the girl I knew. She's someone else entirely, and it's going to turn my world upside down all over again to realize that not only have I lost her, I'll never get her back. Not the way she was. The way we were.

Anne has been a daily visitor, and though it's not exactly a comfort when she shows up, the day has started to feel incomplete, somehow, without her. She's an anchor, a constant, which is a pretty weird thing to say considering she shouldn't be here at all. She still wears her impatience like a second set of clothes but pulls it tight around herself now instead of trying to fling it onto me.

Gramps's hospital stay sobered Anne, too. I'm not silly enough to think she's worried, or cares about how I feel, but she might realize that she's not going to budge me from Gramps's side again. I'm not sure how much dead people know, but it doesn't take a trained eye to know she won't have to wait long.

The thought fills me with self-pity, so I sit up, grabbing my laptop from beside my bed in an attempt to do something other than think about myself. The clock on my phone says it's only six in the morning, and no one's arriving for the picnic until eleven. Lynette and I made all of the food last night, so there's plenty of time to poke around the genealogy site I signed up for the other day.

Beau has been around as often as Will and Melanie, quiet but supportive. In the background. There haven't been any more kisses, but the mayor's ever-present sexiness manages to distract me anyhow. He's doing exactly what I asked him to the first time we went out to dinner—be my friend. It's making me love him.

The way family history websites are set up is giving me trouble, since they're designed to work from the present generation backward, not the other way around. It's harder, even, since Mary was a woman. Her last name wouldn't have survived, and there's a good chance Read wasn't the surname of the cousin that took in the baby girl, since Anne's diary suggests it was a woman, and she was probably married.

I give up after another unsuccessful hour and a half of scouring birth and death records in the state of Virginia during the appropriate time frame. There are simply too many to make it a simple task, but slow and steady wins the race, I suppose. Anne Bonny's not going anywhere.

The dead joke only plays in my mind, but it makes me snicker at the old pirate's expense. I'm still too chicken to be a smart-ass to her face.

In the shower, which I've been visiting at least every other day now, I decide it might behoove me to reach out to a professional, since genealogical research isn't my forte. There are several professors at the University of Iowa who might be able to help, but it's best to go local when the history is region-specific. There might be someone at the College of Charleston, or maybe one of the big North Carolina schools that specializes in this sort of thing.