The Secret Life of Violet Grant by Beatriz Williams Page B

red to purple. “Deep breaths,” I said.
    â€œWhat package?” asked Pepper.
    â€œYesterday I picked up a package from the post office. Mums had forwarded it to me.” I kept up the pounding as I spoke. “It was a suitcase belonging to a Violet Schuyler. Aunt Julie said she was our aunt, and—this is the best part, Pepper, so listen up—she murdered her husband in 1914 and ran off with her lover. Isn’t it delicious?”
    Dad renewed his spasm of choking. I turned back to him. “Glass of water, Daddy, dear?”
    He shook his head.
    â€œAs you see,” I told Pepper, “Dad’s heard of her. But the point is,we have a precedent in this family for independent women. It’s in our blood.”
    â€œBut Mums isn’t an independent woman,” said Pepper. “She just has a weakness for parties and married men.”
    â€œI’m standing right here, you ungrateful child.”
    â€œTrue, but she’s not a real Schuyler, is she?” I turned to Mums. “Not by blood.”
    â€œThank God,” said Mums. She found her favorite armchair and angled herself into it like a movie star, drink and smoke balanced exquisitely in each hand. “I have my faults, but I haven’t murdered your father. Yet.”
    â€œSmall mercies.” Dad had finally recovered. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his battered gold cigarette case, which had been to Eagle’s Nest and back, comforting him in every trial.
    â€œThat bad, is it?” I said.
    â€œI don’t know what you mean.” He lit his cigarette with a shaky hand.
    â€œNow, Dad. It’s been fifty years since the alleged crimes. Do spill.”
    â€œThere’s nothing to spill.”
    â€œAre you saying she didn’t exist?”
    â€œShe existed, of course.” He exhaled a good-sized therapeutic cloud and inhaled his drink. “But you’ve just about summed up all I know. Your grandparents never talked about it.”
    â€œBut you must have heard something else. Names, rumors, something.”
    A rare sharp look from old Dadums. “Why do you want to know?”
    â€œCuriosity.”
    My father heaved himself up from the sofa and walked to one of the stately sash windows perched above the park. A magnificent thirty-foot living room, the old Schuyler apartment had, thrown open to guests in 1925 by my grandfather and not much redecorated since. We took our drinks from the same crystal decanters, we wobbled across the same Oriental rugs, we sank our backsides into the same mahogany-framedfurniture under the gazes of the same disapproving portraits. Possibly Mums had reupholstered at one point, but the sagging cushions were all Schuyler. Dad jiggled his empty ice. “Well, she was a scientist. Left for Cambridge or Oxford, I forget which, a few years before the war.”
    â€œOxford,” I said.
    â€œShe married a professor, and then they moved to Berlin at some point. He was at some sort of institute there.”
    â€œThe Kaiser Wilhelm.”
    Mums did the daggering thing with her eyebrows. “How do you know all this?”
    â€œIt’s called a
li-brar-y
, Mums.” I dragged out the word. “You go there to read about things. They have encyclopedias, periodicals,
Peyton Place
. You’d be amazed. Proceed, Dad.”
    â€œNo, you go ahead. Obviously, you know more than I do.”
    â€œJust a few facts. Nothing about
her
. What she was like.”
    â€œI didn’t know her. I was born during the war.”
    â€œBut Grandfather must have said something about her. You can’t have just pretended she never existed.”
    â€œOh, yes, they could,” said Pepper.
    â€œShe didn’t get along with my father,” said Dad slowly. He was still looking down at the park, as if it contained the secret to his lost youth: the handsome face that had drawn in my mother’s adoration, the mobile spirit that had