Be My Love (A Walker Island Romance Book 1) by Lucy Kevin Page B

conversation moving easily from movie sets to artists’ studios in Seattle to everyone’s stories about the festival. Joel could have joined in. Instead, he sat back, watching Hanna at work. This side of her, the side that went out and tried to learn all about people’s lives, was just as beautiful as all the others. She got answers from people because she genuinely seemed to want to know about them. She genuinely cared.
    “Are all of you studying anthropology?” Hanna said to the group of college students who had come in from Vancouver for the festival. “I know I might be biased, but I think that you would find a trip to Walker Island really amazing for your studies. And just to have fun, too.”
    Always the island. Joel couldn’t blame Hanna for how everything came back around to it—not when his own life revolved around it, too. And not when he loved Walker Island just as much as she did.
    Yet that was the problem right there. It was Walker Island. Every mention of it inevitably came with a reminder that they weren’t just two people who were falling for each other. On the contrary, they each came with deep family histories full of heartache and betrayal. But for a little while, at least, he’d been able to forget the past, and concentrate, instead, on the way that Hanna seemed to give other people’s lives more meaning just by paying attention to them.
    Just the way she has with mine.
    Hanna reached over to touch his hand. “We should probably find Mandy. I want to see if she can tell us anything before we go.”
    When they found the B&B’s manager in the kitchen, she asked, “How was your evening?”
    “The room was lovely and the bed was very comfortable.”
    Joel thought Hanna was blushing a little as she said it, but not enough that anyone who didn’t know her well would notice.
    “We were hoping that you might know someone who remembers this place from the fifties that we could speak to?”
    “My grandmother used to run the hotel, but now it’s just me. But I know pretty much everything there is to know about the history of the place.”
    Hanna took out the photograph of Poppy and Ava, pointing at Poppy. “I’m trying to find out more about this woman. We were wondering, if you have any old account books or journals, perhaps we could find out if she was a guest here.”
    “Why are you looking for her?” Mandy asked. “Who is she?”
    “Her name is Poppy.” Hanna looked across to Joel, a question in her eyes. When he nodded that it was okay to say more, she said, “Poppy Peterson. She was Joel’s great aunt and the woman in the picture with her is my grandmother. We think this picture probably dates back to the late forties or early fifties. She’s been, well, missing for a very long time, and we’re trying to figure out what really happened to her.”
    Now Mandy looked sympathetic. “I’m happy to help if I can. Just give me a minute.”
    She went off into the back room and when she came back, she said, “These are the working ledgers from around that time. They’re like a big diary of the old place.”
    The stack of ledgers was huge and Joel had to admit that, all along, he’d known there was only a limited chance of finding any reference to his Great Aunt Poppy here. And yet, he’d still taken two days off from Peterson Shipping during the busiest season of the year to dash across to Seattle with Hanna.
    It was madness, looked at that way...madness that only worked if he didn’t allow himself to look too hard at it.
    “I think I have something!” Hanna declared after only a few minutes of reading. “Joel, you’ll be able to tell better than I can.”
    Surprised that she could have found anything so quickly, he read through a couple of housekeeping notes on the need for more towels and a request for an afternoon off that didn’t seem like anything special, even though it was signed ‘P.’
    But then, he took a closer look at the handwriting.
    “Do you see how similar her