Greatest Hits by Laura Barnett

Author:Laura Barnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2019-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

Before they had left New York City, Cass had also written a letter to her mother in Toronto.

They were not crossing into Canada—not on this tour, anyway—but they had a date booked in Buffalo, New York, a city that, on the roadmap Alan spread out across their table in a Sixth Avenue diner one afternoon, seemed unignorably close to her mother and to her half-sister, Josephine.

I’m here, Cass wrote. Well, not in Canada, but America. We’ll be in Buffalo on Wednesday 15 February. I thought perhaps you and Josephine might like to come and hear me sing.

A reply came two days later, care of the Macdougal Street hotel, just as they were packing to leave.

Josephine is still a little young for concerts, Margaret wrote. But we could certainly drive down to meet you for lunch. Len will be at work, I’m afraid—as I would usually be on a Wednesday afternoon. (You may remember that I’m working now, part-time, as a receptionist for our family doctor—I’m sure I put that in one of my letters.) But I will book a day off, and arrange to take Josephine out of school. She’s desperate to meet you. Just tell us where to come.

Ivor, after reading the letter, fixed Cass with a shrewd look. “Are you really sure about this?”

She nodded. “Where shall I tell them to meet?”

“Ask Alan. He has all the answers, doesn’t he? But just so you know, Cassie . . .” Ivor placed a hand on her arm; in the pale light of the morning (it had snowed heavily overnight, and the streets were brilliant with it), his face was grey, its shadows deep. “I think you’re making a mistake.”

Ivor and I will meet you outside the Firelight Café on Main Street at one o’clock, Cass wrote back. (They weren’t due to sound-check until five, and Alan and Tyson thought they should be able make it there from Syracuse by lunchtime, weather permitting.)

Buffalo was a handsome city of broad avenues and elegant skyscrapers built of red brick and glass. The snowfall, here, had been significant—downtown, grimy drifts were still compacted against lamp-posts and kerbsides, but the roads were passable, and cracks were forming in Lake Erie’s frozen skin. The Firelight Café was about halfway along Main Street; it was closed, but Cass and Ivor huddled under its red awning, drawing their scarves up over their ears. The others had gone off in the truck to find a diner, and a phone.

“All right?” Ivor said, his voice muffled by the thick wool of his scarf; and Cass, swaddled in her own, leant in and said, “I don’t know.”

Margaret Steadman did not keep them waiting long. She wore a brown tweed coat with a fur collar, and a cloche hat in a matching shade. From one of her hands, sheathed in brown leather gloves, dangled a tall, large-boned child wrapped in sheepskin, a navy beret perched prettily on her long blonde hair. It was the girl Cass focused on first, not quite

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