Cleo felt like her insides were screaming. She didn't know how to feel. If Eddie was telling the truth, the locket around her neck didn't only belong to Charlotte's grandmother; this made Gracie Cleo's grandmother too. The only thing was, Lewis had once mentioned Charlotte's grandfather; he wasn't Max. He must have been Gracie's first husband.
Questions rang through Cleo's mind. If Gracie and Max had always loved each other, why had she married someone else to begin with? Why had Eddie been sent to live with a family that wasn't his own instead of with Max? Max wouldn't have shunned him, Cleo was sure of that. Also, she realized this made Eddie Charlotte's half uncle (She preferred not to think of the fact that she was her half cousin). Did she know about him? Did her mother?
"Cleo, are you alright?" Eddie asked, noticing the stricken look on her face.
"Your parents were Max and Gracie..." Cleo whispered, mostly to herself. She reached up and touched her silver locket tenderly as she often did when she was nervous. It reassured her somehow.
Eddie's brows sank deep into his forehead. "You know them?"
"I know Max, I told you where he lived." Cleo reminded him. She wondered if she should tell him that she knew quite a bit about Gracie as well. "Max made this locket for your mother." She lifted it up to show him. "She threw it away fifty years ago."
"How did you get it?" Eddie wanted to know.
"My friend Emma found it and let me keep it because I liked it so much." Cleo explained, stroking it again as though it were a pet cat rather than a piece of jewelry. "There's two others similar to it, like a set. Max made those too. Emma and my other friend, Rikki have them."
Something inside Eddie clicked. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two black and white photos. One was of Gracie standing on the pier next to Julia and Louise. All three of them were wearing the lockets. The other was of a slightly older Gracie. Her stomach was rounder, Cleo assumed it was because she was pregnant. She was wearing the locket there too. But how was that possible? From what Max had told her, Cleo knew that Gracie had been under eighteen when she'd thrown the locket away. And yet, here she was wearing it again. Was it possible that he had made another one for her? But it didn't look like another one, it looked just like the one Cleo was wearing now.
"You are wearing your grandmother's locket." Eddie said in a tone of wonder. "How about that?"
Cleo took another look at the pregnant photo of Gracie. "This doesn't make sense."
"Mr. Sertori didn't have that talk with you yet?" Eddie half-joked.
"No, not that!" Cleo exclaimed. "The locket! These photos are years apart."
"So?" Eddie didn't understand what she was getting at.
"Gracie was somewhere between sixteen and eighteen when she got rid of the locket." Cleo explained, forgetting that he might want to know where she had learned all of this from and might stumble onto her secret. She was in too much shock for that thought to cross her mind. "She's looks like she's nearly thirty here."
"Are you sure it's the same locket?" Eddie asked.
"Pretty sure." Cleo couldn't tell which color stone was on the locket Gracie was wearing. Maybe Louise or Julia had loaned theirs to her? That didn't make much sense either but it was still something to go on. A new thought came to her. "Have you seen Max yet?"
Eddie shook his head. "He wasn't home when I stopped by. I plan to go by again before I leave."
"Can I come with you?" Cleo asked, glancing down at the photo of them at the pier. She had to get some answers.
He thought it over for a moment. "Sure. I'm going by tomorrow we could meet at the juice net."
"Okay." Cleo agreed.
He could tell she didn't want to give the photographs up just yet. "You can keep them for now."
Mr. Sertori returned home just as Eddie Watsford was leaving. Cleo looked drained and bemused.
"How'd it go?" Mr. Sertori asked her.
"Fine." Cleo sighed softly to herself. She poured a glass of orange juice but forgot to drink it, leaving it out on the counter for hours until someone noticed it. "It went fine."
She walked up to her room, pulled out her cell phone and called Rikki, Emma, and Lewis on the four way. "Can you come over? There's something I have to show you."
Less than half and hour later, Emma, Rikki, and Lewis were all gathered in her room.
"Look at this." Cleo thrust the two photographs at them.
"Aren't those the old mermaids?" Emma gasped, looking at the one of them on the pier.
"Charlotte's grandmother." Lewis remarked motioning to the second photo.
"My grandmother." Cleo told them.
"What?" Rikki and Emma gasped at the same time.
"My father's name is Eddie Watsford. She's his mother." Cleo explained in an almost breathless voice.
"Wait..." Emma pointed to the locket Gracie was wearing in the second photo. "Why does she still have the locket in this one?"
"I don't know." Cleo shrugged. "I've been trying to guess how she possibly could have gotten it back..."
"but if she'd gotten it back, Emma never would have found it." Lewis pointed out.
"Unless she threw it back there again." Rikki suggested.
"It's just so confusing." Cleo mused. "I don't know what to think or how to feel about it."
"I can't believe you and Charlotte have the same Grandmother." Lewis said suddenly.
"Want to be even more surprised?" Cleo asked them.
Lewis looked to her expectedly.
"Max is my grandfather."
"But I thought Gracie married someone else." Emma said, crinkling her brow in confusion.
"She did." Cleo told them. "but I guess she thought he was dead or something and went back to Max for a while."
"Do you think that's what he means when he says he lost her?" Rikki wondered aloud.
"I don't know." Cleo admitted. "But tomorrow, I'm going to ask him.
"Do you think Charlotte knows about Eddie?" Emma asked, looking over at her own reflection in the mirror on the other side of the room.
"I don't think so." Lewis remembered Charlotte talking a lot about her grandmother, a little about her grandfather, and she mentioned one uncle but his name wasn't Eddie. Also he was an uncle from the other side of the family.
"Funny how she thought she was so much better than us because of her relation to Gracie and you were her granddaughter all along." Rikki pointed out.
"I wonder if Max would have told her so much if he'd known that Gracie had another granddaughter." Emma pondered aloud.
"All I know is that someone's been keeping something from us." Cleo said finally. "Something Miss Chatham and Max haven't told us." She clenched her jaw tightly and looked back at the two photographs which were now spread out side by side on the bed. "And I'm going to find out what it is."
AN: Please review!
