Past & Present Page 14

  It was time to make an appointment with Randi.

  23

  By the time Chantelle arrived the next morning, I was ready to climb the walls. I’d barely managed not to look at the photos without her; only the thought of Chantelle’s disappointment stopped me. I placed the wedding band and photos of Anneliese wearing it, the earrings, brooch, and jeweler’s loupe on the table in front of her, and set about making tea. Outside of informing her that Louisa had been wearing the earrings, and the ring and brooch had been in the jewelry box, I stayed silent. It was important that Chantelle form her own conclusions.

  She took her time, carefully studying each item in turn, and then going back again. “Did you make the appointment with Randi?”

  I nodded. “I see her tomorrow morning.” The breathy-voiced shopkeeper at Sun, Moon & Stars from last year had answered the phone. I’d been surprised, and a more than a little bit impressed, when she remembered me. Then I realized they’d have caller ID and felt embarrassed.

  “Good. You should take all three of these. The ring, we know for sure that it belonged to Anneliese. The photographs prove it. Ditto for the earrings.”

  “What about the brooch?”

  “It definitely has a vintage vibe, and the fleur-de-lis makes me think Anneliese might have purchased it as a souvenir in Quebec City.”

  “My thoughts exactly. Did you want to see the rest of the jewelry?”

  “Do you mind?”

  I pushed the box in front of her in answer and sipped my tea while she opened each organza bag, then the leatherette box. It took her less than ten minutes to come to the same conclusion that I had. There was nothing else in the jewelry box that would have belonged to Anneliese.

  “When you see Randi, do you think you should take something that belonged to Sophie?”

  “I’m allowed to bring up to three items to the session. I could take a few other things with me, in the event Randi relaxes the rule, but if she doesn’t I think these are the most important.”

  “No argument here. Now, let’s open that chocolate box.”

  I did as instructed, removing a manila envelope neatly labeled “Sophie 1961 to 1969.” Inside was a small stack of photographs, which I placed in front of us. It saddened me to think that the years 1956 to 1961 had gone unrecorded, that no one had cared enough to take this little girl’s picture from age three to seven, or if they had, to protect them from getting lost. I glanced at Chantelle and knew by the way her eyes glistened with tears that she was thinking much the same thing.

  Sophie at age eight could be best described as a sturdy child. There were four photos. She was smiling broadly in three, and eating cotton candy in the fourth. There were rides in the background, a Ferris wheel and a roller coaster in one, and merry-go-round and a covered caterpillar in another. She wore stretchy pants and a patterned sweater that had a vaguely European look, and not in the Paris runway fashion sense. Her shoulder length hair was as dark and wavy as Horst’s had been fair and straight. I looked for some sign that Horst Frankow was her biological father and found none.

  She did, however, bear a striking resemblance to Anton Osgoode, right down to the dimple in the middle of her chin. I bit my lip, craving my cocoa butter lip balm but resisting the urge. The lip balm was my tell and I didn’t need Chantelle asking a bunch of questions right now, especially as my own memories continued to flood in.

  “I recognize the caterpillar ride,” I said. “It used to be at the Ex. My dad would bring me there every year. These pictures must have been taken there. In fact, I’m sure that’s the Food Building in the background of this one.”

  The Ex, as Torontonians affectionately referred to it, was the Canadian National Exhibition. It ran from mid-August to Labor Day, and had been going strong since the nineteenth century, though admittedly it was a bit long in the tooth these days. But back in 1961, it would have been in its heyday. Besides the amusement park rides and games, I remembered the CNE Bandshell, where up-and-coming or going-going-soon-to-be-gone-and-forgotten musical acts performed. There was also the International Pavilion, which had seemed so exotic with its bonsai trees from Japan, lavender sachets purportedly from France, and the colorful Russian nesting dolls that had charmed and fascinated me. But by far my favorite was the Food Building with its tiny powdered sugar donuts and samples of everything from pancakes to pasta.

  “My first time at the CNE was a few years ago when I moved to Marketville with Lance the Loser,” Chantelle said. “I remember the hustler at the entrance gates, that guy who sold invisible dogs in a plastic harness on a leash, and the way he called out: ‘Doggie, doggie, who wants a doggie?’ But I don’t recall seeing a caterpillar ride.”

  “It was in the kid’s section of the amusement park, probably deemed unsafe sometime in the last couple of decades. The ride was a string of cars that wound around an undulating track. As it gained momentum, this canopy would come over each of the cars so it resembled a caterpillar. The darkness inside scared me the first time I went on it, but it got old pretty fast.”

  “If Sophie was at the CNE, in all likelihood her foster parents at the time lived in the Toronto area,” Chantelle said. “I also think these were taken by a new pair of foster parents. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they have taken photos before this?”

  “Someone could have taken her for the day. A friend of the family, maybe.”

  “I suppose it’s possible. Whatever the scenario, we’re no further ahead since we don’t have any idea who took the pictures.”

  Maybe we weren’t any further ahead, but for the first time since we’d started this investigation I felt a connection to Sophie. Nostalgia can do that to you.

  The two photographs of Sophie were labeled “Christmas 1961” on the back. There was the obligatory one on Santa’s knee, Sophie looking embarrassed. My guess was that by age eight she had stopped believing—if she’d even kept believing after Anneliese’s death. I felt a rush of empathy for this black-eyed girl. How many homes had she lived in by the time this picture was taken?

  The other photo had been taken of Sophie standing in front of a Christmas tree, a wide smile on her face. The tree had been decorated with an assortment of mismatched glass ornaments, homemade paper streamers, and tinsel. I smiled, remembering my own elementary school efforts as I carefully cut red and green construction paper into strips, taping each one into circles and linking them together. A silver star, made from aluminum foil by the looks of it, topped the tree.

  “It reminds me of the tree my dad and I would decorate when I was growing up, right down to the aluminum foil star and the mismatched ornaments,” I said.

  Chantelle laughed. “Six kids at Christmas, you should have seen our tree. There were popcorn strings and ornaments made out of cotton wool and scraps of felt and whatever else we made in school. My folks didn’t have a ton of money, but we each got one present from mom and dad, and one from Santa, plus our stockings. The gift from our parents was always something sensible like pajamas or slippers. Santa brought the toys and dolls, and the stockings usually held socks, underwear, gum, and our favorite candy. There was always one present for the whole family to share. Those thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles were our favorite. My dad would set them up on a card table in the games room in our basement and we’d all take our turn putting them together.”

  “You had a games room?”

  “Yeah. Ping pong table, pool table, jigsaw puzzle table, one of those hockey games with the metal hockey players, dollhouses, you name it. There were storage crates for each type of toy, and there was hell to pay if we didn’t clean up when we were finished playing. It was organized chaos in that room, especially when we were all down there playing with our friends. I sometimes wonder how my parents stood the noise.”

  Growing up as an only child with a single father, I couldn’t begin to imagine the noise, or the crowded games room. I wondered what it would have been like, but I didn’t feel a sense of envy. I had treasured our quiet Christmases, one of the few
days when my father wasn’t working on a job site, and I always got a good stash of books to keep me busy and out of trouble for when he was. Dolls and other toys had never interested me much.

  “I wish there was someone else in the picture,” Chantelle said, interrupting my thoughts. “Something to give us a clue.”

  I nodded, but my attention was already on the next picture, a five-by-seven photograph of Sophie in white leather go-go boots and a lime green mini dress with an ivory lace Peter Pan collar. She’d grown several inches taller, and her dark, wavy hair, parted in the center, now reached halfway down her back. I flipped it over to see if anything had been written on the back. There wasn’t. “How old are we when we finish grade eight?”

  “Thirteen?”

  “That’s what I thought. I think this is her graduation photo from the eighth grade. Which means we have another five-year gap.”

  “The boots are cute, but what a ghastly dress,” Chantelle said. “The nineteen sixties at its most hideous.”

  I’m not sure if anyone looks good in lime green, and the color did nothing for Sophie’s sallow complexion. She was right about the boots, though. They were cute.

  “If it is from her graduation, it’s the only one. My guess is the school arranged to take pictures of every student. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to tell us who the photographer was, let alone where the school was.”

  “The school would have been nice, but as for the photographer, I don’t think it would matter. The odds of them still being in business would be remote and they would have taken thousands of student photographs over the years. What else have we got? And don’t tell me another five-year gap.”

  “Your wish is my command,” I said, flipping to a photo of a large group of teenagers in front of the Horseshoe Falls in Niagara Falls, the Maid of the Mist cruising the Niagara River in the background. The kids were smiling in the way you did when you were instructed to say “Cheese.” It took me a few moments to pick out Sophie.

  “Has to be her grade eight school trip,” I said. “Niagara Falls was the typical end-of-year road trip at my school. We started with the Skylon Observation Tower, all of us feeling smug that the Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side was prettier than the American Falls. Then onto Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks, and the floral clock. I never did get to ride on the Maid of the Mist.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged. “Logistics? It was owned by an American company, which meant it left from the US side of the Falls. Imagine getting thirty kids and three teachers across the Rainbow Bridge just to do a short boat tour.”

  “Still, a school trip to Niagara Falls sounds good to me. We never did anything like that at my school in Ottawa.”

  “Really?”

  “Not that I remember. The first time I visited Niagara Falls I was on my honeymoon with Lance the Loser.” Chantelle’s voice cracked a little. Although Chantelle would never admit it, I knew she still harbored feelings for him. Or maybe it was because she’d lost and was used to winning. Either way, she was still hurting.

  I pushed the photograph toward her and handed her a magnifying glass. “Do you recognize anyone? Besides Sophie?” I didn’t tell her I’d already tried and failed.

  She frowned in concentration, moving the magnifying glass from face to face. After a few minutes she looked up and shook her head. “No luck, but I could scan it and try to enlarge it on screen.”

  “Go for it. I’m not holding out a lot of hope, but it can’t hurt.”

  Chantelle got to work on scanning the photo, emailing a copy of it to both of us for later viewing. In the meantime, I laid five strips of small black and white photos on the table, four poses to a strip.

  “These were taken inside one of those shopping mall photo booths,” I said. “Sophie looks more mature than she did in her grad picture. What do you think? Grade nine summer? That would make her fourteen.”

  Chantelle slid back into her chair, the scanning complete. “Hmmm.” Chantelle studied the photos. “I wonder who the guy hamming it up next to her is? Looks like he’s in his late teens, too old to be a boyfriend and too young to be a guardian. Maybe a friend of her foster family?”

  The boy was mugging it up for the camera, sticking his tongue out and crossing his eyes while Sophie attempted to mimic him, her smile of happiness infectious. I felt my throat constrict in recognition. It had been fifty years since these were taken, but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind. The young man in the pictures was Corbin Osgoode.

  My grandfather.

  24

  So Corbin knew Sophie Frankow when she was a girl, and possibly later as an adult. It went a long way toward explaining his insistence that I stop communicating with Olivia. His mother knew about Sophie’s existence as a three-year-old child. Olivia may have kept track of her, or found her later in life. Certainly the Osgoodes would have had financial resources to do either. The last thing Corbin wanted was for me to learn about his illegitimate half-sister.

  I wondered if Chantelle had made the connection, then realized there was no reason she would. She’d never met my grandfather. The only photograph of Corbin she’d seen had been alongside a thirty-year-old article in the Toronto Star.

  Once again, I knew I should tell Chantelle what I’d learned from Olivia. And once again, I didn’t. All I knew was that I was going to have copies made of the filmstrips. Whether I confronted Corbin with it, or managed to see Olivia one more time and show it to her, remained to be seen.

  “There’s only one photo left from this batch.”

  Sophie was blowing out candles on a white-and-pink frosted birthday cake, her wavy hair now reaching her waist. I counted the candles: sixteen. “She was born on March twenty-third. They probably let her stay in the system until after she graduated from the tenth grade in June.”

  “At least someone threw her a party,” Chantelle said, “though I can’t imagine being turned out to fend for yourself at sixteen with nothing more than a grade ten education.”

  There wasn’t anything to say to that, so I slid all the photographs back in the manila envelope. “Ready to tackle the rest of the chocolate box?”

  “Bring it on.”

  It contained a mixture of loose photographs, greeting cards, and a thin letter-sized envelope. I sorted the pictures and cards into two piles, setting aside the envelope. “Photos or greeting cards first?”

  “Let’s stick with photos.”

  It became quickly apparent that all the photos were of Louisa. Each one had been dated on the back, along with the occasion, Sophie’s handwriting small and cramped.

  Money may have been scarce, but as with most first-time mothers, every early event had been recorded for posterity. “Louisa’s First Christmas, 1982,” “Louisa’s First Easter, 1983,” “Louisa’s First Canada Day,” and finally, “Louisa’s First Birthday.” There were a handful of Louisa crawling and walking with the aid of a coffee table, and then without. They were duly labeled “Louisa Learning to Crawl” and “Louisa Learns to Walk.” Louisa’s resemblance to Anneliese was evident from the beginning.

  The photos thinned out after the first birthday, though the annual Christmas and birthday photos continued. With the exception of a couple of girls, the kids in the photos changed as Louisa grew up and made new friends, but the homemade birthday cake remained the same: chocolate with pink icing, a number candle in the center. The photos stopped after her graduation in grade eight, leaving a significant gap until the last photo, her grade twelve graduation and prom in 2000.

  “It could be Anneliese in that prom photo,” Chantelle said. “That peacock blue really suits her coloring. She looks beautiful.”

  She did indeed. The dress was sleeveless with a fitted, sequined bodice and a floor-length taffeta skirt. Her blonde hair had been swept into an updo, with loose tendrils softly framing her face. She was wearing the pearl drop earrings.

  “I wonder how many special occasions Anneliese’s earrings have seen. If they
could only talk.”

  “Maybe the greeting cards will do some talking,” Chantelle said.

  It was wishful thinking. As with the photographs, all the birthday cards were to Louisa. There was one for every year from age one to eighteen, all signed, “With all my love, Mom.”

  “She must have moved out after grade twelve to attend university or college.”

  “We can ask Louisa, but I can’t see where it matters to our investigation.”

  Chantelle had a point, but it was her defeated tone that had me worried. Was she losing faith? Her usually perfect posture had given way to slumped shoulders. I knew from investigating my mother’s disappearance that for every positive lead there were a dozen that went nowhere. But she was new to this.

  “You’re probably right. Anyway, we’re down to this single white envelope.” I twirled my fingers and hands like a magician, chanting abracadabra. Chantelle rolled her eyes, but at least I had her laughing. I opened the envelope and took out a newspaper clipping, laying it down on the table.

  For a moment we sat transfixed, the silence between us palpable as we read, then reread, what was before us.

  It was a clipping from an obituary in the Toronto Star dated April 19, 1987.

  Anton Arthur OSGOODE: 1922-1987

  Passed away in Toronto with his family by his side on April 18, 1987, at age 66, following a brief battle with lung cancer. Anton will be deeply missed by his beloved wife, Olivia (née Rosemount), his son, Corbin, and his daughter-in-law, Yvette.

  Anton was especially proud of his lengthy career at Eaton’s Department Store, where he started as a sales clerk, and worked his way up to Head Buyer, Glass and China. He was a loyal employee and was valued until his retirement in 1986. Anton’s buying trips frequently took him to England, Ireland, and beyond. He loved to talk about his shipboard adventures before air travel became the standard.