The names had been printed in the newspaper, and when she’d seen Henry’s name, recognized it from the luggage tag, she knew she had to go. She’d almost called the funeral home to suggest bringing a fresh suit of clothes, but then realized that she couldn’t. Not ever. But she’d remembered to ask the undertaker how tall he’d been, so that when she made his doll replica, it would be exact. That was how she knew how long the tie needed to be and where it would fall when she’d placed Henry in his seat on the plane.
But the funeral for the man she’d never met but knew so much about had been years before—before C.J. had grown up to be just like his father. Before Cal was born and then Gibbes. Before Cecelia had died. This last was what had convinced Edith that she couldn’t be a passive bystander anymore, quietly working in her attic to solve a crime from bits and pieces of discovered wreckage. Her silence since the crash and the discovery of the suitcase and the letter had been just that—passive. But Cecelia’s death had pushed Edith to reach out to Henry’s widow—the faceless woman whose first name began with the letter J. Not to condemn her. Never that. Edith knew too well what J. Holden had been through. Knew how each beating had diminished her, had warped her thinking to the extent that she could place a bomb on a plane and not expect anything to go wrong. Could not anticipate anybody else getting hurt. Nobody except somebody who’d lived that life, who’d felt her own psyche lessened, would know that.
No, Edith had reached out to Mrs. Holden to let her know that she was not alone. That she—and Cecelia—and doubtless countless others formed an odd sisterhood. One where the members survived in secret and sometimes even enacted a revenge that was as stealthy as the violent acts they’d been forced to endure.
Edith slid open the makeshift drawer she’d created beneath the sea-glass table for odds and ends. Among the rubber bands, buttons, paper clips, and glue, she kept one large envelope identical to the one she’d already sent to Henry Holden’s widow.
Every once in a while, Edith toyed with sending her another letter. Maybe she hadn’t received the first one, the one with the handkerchief Edith had taken from the suitcase and the note from Edith explaining that she knew how the plane crashed. How the killing of innocent people had been an accident but the death of Henry P. Holden was not. That the secret would forever be safe with her.
Using her thumb and forefinger, Edith picked up the small dopp kit she’d painstakingly made, with tiny replicas of combs and razors and little soaps made from slivers she’d taken from C.J.’s bar of soap he’d left by the sink. With a tiny dab of model airplane bonding glue, she stuck the dopp kit in Henry Holden’s lap.
Over the years, while working on her plane model, putting each piece together as it was discovered buried in the marsh or in a farmer’s field, that one niggling fact wouldn’t leave her alone. Henry Holden’s suitcase hadn’t contained a dopp kit, although there’d been an indentation among the tightly packed items just big enough for one to fit. It wasn’t until Edith had read a newspaper report about the plane’s two-hour delay at LaGuardia that it had begun to make sense to her.
Technically, the dopp kit shouldn’t be on Henry’s lap. But she was vain—vain about her attention to details and the small objects she’d made for the kit. As long as she knew that it was wrong, that the actual dopp kit had been obliterated, vaporized in the first second of the blast by the bomb neatly tucked inside of it. Luckily for Edith, it hadn’t been in the suitcase, where it was supposed to have been. If it had, she never would have found the suitcase in her garden. Instead, Henry Holden had retrieved the dopp kit after his dutiful wife had dropped him off at the airport and presumably given him a chaste parting kiss. He had retrieved it because he was going to Miami and was—possibly? probably?—going to see somebody where a closer shave might have been required. Something he could take care of once they were in the air, in the tiny onboard bathroom. So he’d taken it out before checking his suitcase to be loaded beneath the plane.
The dopp kit, so carefully packed by his loving wife, just like the rest of his things, had stayed in the overhead space, ticking away, while Henry and the other forty-eight passengers and crew on board waited at La Guardia before finally taking off again two hours past the time they were supposed to.