Keeping her voice calm, she said, “I didn’t think his widow wanted the police to have it.”
He reached down and gripped the name tag, then wrenched it loose with a single hard tug. He looked at her with an expression that was half triumph, half sneer. “Is she the one? The one who put the bomb on the plane?”
She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. But she had experience with that and was able to stop herself from reeling, keeping her eyes on his. “Yes,” she said calmly. “How did you know?”
He took a step toward her and she dropped her eyes, but didn’t move back. “I know what you’ve been doing up in the attic, Edith. I saw the mangled bodies and the blown-apart plane, even though you tried to hide it from me. I even made my own LEGO airplane so I could pretend I was working alongside you, helping to solve the mystery. And I saw the shoe-box model you made of a woman in her kitchen making a bomb with sticks of dynamite and an alarm clock. You destroyed it, didn’t you? Right after Mama died you destroyed it. It’s just taken me this long to figure out why.” He thrust his finger at her, jabbing her in the chest. “I assumed you’d demolished all the evidence so nothing could ever be proved. But I was wrong.” His face was half jeer, half incredulous disappointment.
Edith kept her voice calm. “The damage had been done. People died, but it was an accident, Cal. You do know that, don’t you? She didn’t mean to blow up the plane—that wasn’t meant to happen. She was sick in her head. You don’t understand what happens to a woman’s mind—a woman who’s been beaten and belittled for so long that she can’t think straight anymore. She can only think in the present, and not anticipate things going wrong—just the single focus of ending her torment. And all those people who died—there was no way to bring them back. I wanted that poor woman to find some peace, although I don’t know whether she ever could.”
Edith knew before he spoke that her words would not sway him.
“No matter what you say, or what trials you think you’ve been through in your life and at the hands of my grandfather, nothing, nothing justifies you being an accessory to murder. Yes, that’s what you are. A murderer. You knew the plane’s explosion wasn’t an accident, and you found out who had caused it. But you kept it to yourself.”
She broke her own rule and raised her voice. “Because I felt a kinship toward her. She left a letter in the suitcase. He hurt her, Cal. Like your grandfather hurt me. Like your father hurt your mother. Except she had the courage to make it stop.”
Without warning, he reached up and slapped her hard on the face, knocking her down. “You don’t even know her first name,” he spat.
She looked up at him and wiped the blood from her cut lip. “I didn’t need to. Because I could have filled in the blank with half a dozen names. Like Cecelia.”
Cal took a step toward her, and she closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see the next blow, but refused to shrink back.
“Grandma?”
Gibbes’s voice came from the top of the stairs.
“Don’t come down here, Gibbes. Not if you know what’s good for you,” Cal called out.
Edith opened her eyes. “Go back to your room, sweetie,” she managed, tasting blood in her mouth. “I’m all right.”
Cal looked down at her, his eyes softening as if seeing her for the first time and wondering why she was on the ground and bleeding from her lip. He knelt beside her and tucked her hair behind her ears, then pressed his forehead against hers. She realized that he was crying, his tears warm and sticky on her face.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.” He pressed his forehead against hers even harder, as if he could melt inside her and disappear.
She reached up and placed a hand on his cheek. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”
“I can’t . . . I can’t let this go. You know that, right?”
“Please don’t, Cal. Let it be. I have carried this knowledge on my shoulders for all these years. Let it die with me. No good can come of it.”
He took her head in both his hands, and she felt the power in them and the gentleness, too. He’d always been that way, ever since he was a little boy playing fire and deciding that everybody would live, and that the perpetrator was caught and blame and justice correctly attributed. It was a fatal flaw in his character, the thing that would one day destroy him.
He pulled away and stood. “I have to leave. I can’t stay here anymore, knowing what I know. Knowing what you’ve done. I don’t know where I’m going, or what I’ll do, but I can’t stay here.”
Edith scrambled to her hands and knees, pulling herself up using the hall table, her limbs heavy and sore. “Please stay. We can work through this. Do some kind of penance together—community service, maybe. Something good.”