“When I came back, he knew. Deep down, he knew who I was, and he started following me. Waiting for me in town. When he saw me walking home that night with Annie.” The vision materialized so vividly across my mind that I could hardly draw breath. “He wanted to hurt me. Make the demons go away.”
There was no reaction in Caleb’s expression. He was placid and cold, like none of this surprised him. And that was exactly what I wanted him to think about—the fact that he knew his father. I couldn’t imagine what kind of horrors he’d endured growing up in that man’s house.
“You knew what he was,” I said. “Didn’t you?”
He sucked in his bottom lip, a gesture that made him look like a little boy, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. But then he lifted the pistol, pointing it at me.
My hands reflexively flew up in front of my face. I was shaking all over, still searching the road for any sign of a car. But this was a remote stretch. It would be a miracle if there was anyone for miles.
“You were there,” I stammered. “You were five years old, Caleb. You have to remember.”
His jaw clenched.
“I think you know that she didn’t jump from the falls that day. Deep down, you always knew that, right?”
A gleam shone in his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“They didn’t find her body because he buried her.”
His lips parted, his eyebrows coming together. “What?” If he was lying now, it was convincing.
“Nathaniel told me. Right before he tried to drown me in the river.”
His chest rose on a sharp inhalation of breath. This, I could tell, was the thing he really needed to know.
“Yes,” I answered. “I killed him.”
The gun went off, the sound exploding in my ears, and it echoed into the hills. I waited for an eruption of pain in my chest. My stomach. But when I looked down, there was no bloom of red. He’d fired the gun, but he hadn’t shot me.
Slowly, my eyes lifted. Tears glimmered in Caleb’s eyes as he stared at me, and I didn’t know if they were for Nathaniel or for Susanna. Only one of them deserved any kind of pity.
“He held me under the water.” My voice broke. “He held me there while my daughter watched from the riverbank.”
He believed me. It was etched deep in the lines of his face. The tears brimming in his eyes finally spilled over, but his face didn’t change. He stood there, freed from the lie he’d been telling himself for his entire life. He’d been a child who believed the story he’d been told because he needed to survive. Now it was time to let that story go.
“You’ll find our mother buried under the oak tree at the corner of the woods beside the falls. She deserves a grave, Caleb.”
He moved to reach for his belt, and I flinched, drawing my cuffed hands back to my chest. But he hooked one finger into a small set of keys and tossed them to the ground, turning his back to me. I watched, completely numb, as he got into the car. Stood there frozen as it pulled onto the road.
Leaflets of paper flew out the driver’s side window as he took off, fluttering in the air before they floated to the ground. I walked toward them as they scattered in the road, stopping short when I looked down at the one beside my feet.
It was the photograph. Nathaniel’s sharp-edged form. That cigarette in his hand. My mother, face turned as she smiled at him. She’d had no idea what that sinister love would set into motion.
Thirty-Two
July 2, 1950
It comes on an ordinary day, at an ordinary hour, and the moment I feel it, my whole world stops.
That buzz in the air is one I know. I can feel it reach into the house, wrapping its tendrils around me.
The door.
Moonlight is cast across the wall of the sitting room, making everything look black-and-white. I see myself in the reflection of the kitchen window, the strap of my nightgown slipping from my shoulder. I’m standing over the stove, where the kettle is whirring, my blond hair hanging in a braid that almost reaches my waist.
Not now.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.
I meet my own eyes, letting myself paint that image in my mind. Me. In this home. A mother. A wife. I’ve prepared for this, but I still have to press my hand over my mouth to muffle the sound that breaks in my chest. I have to breathe through it so that I don’t wake her.
Through the open door of my bedroom, Annie is asleep beneath my quilts. I can hear her breathing.
The burn in my throat is nothing to the pain behind my ribs as my feet take me across the kitchen. She is bathed in blue light, her hair like silver. She’s asleep, I tell myself. Eamon will be home any minute. She won’t wake. She won’t even stir.
I have no choice but to hope it’s true.
It’s been almost eighteen months since I last saw the door, and every day that passes is a day that Caleb Rutherford could discover the truth. It’s only a matter of time before the it finds its way into the light. When it does, I’ll have lost my chance.
I step into the room, rounding the bed. Annie’s cheeks frame a perfect pink mouth, and I press my lips to her temple. I inhale her scent as deep into my lungs as I possibly can.
There isn’t time to second-guess it or wait for Eamon’s headlights on the road. My feet take me to the dressing table, and I pull the ring from my finger. I drop it into the dish below the mirror and remember the words I wrote on that envelope—a message that will be carried through time, back to me.
Trust me.
I hope that I will.
I open the back door, not bothering to wrap a shawl around my shoulders or take the lantern with me. The tobacco fields are so thick that the wind makes the leaves look like dark water in the moonlight. That vibration on the wind is even more alive out here, and I follow it into the nearest row. The plants swallow me up, my bare feet sinking in the soft, damp soil, and I walk, hands catching the leaves as I pass.
I see it a few paces later. The chipped red paint. The shimmer that surrounds it in the air.
The door sits in the middle of the field, hidden from the rest of the world.
I am a stone sinking into a deep, dark sea. And I’m not coming back.
I reach the door with a final, silent footstep, and the wind picks up, pulling my nightgown around me. It’s the same door that has appeared for the last five years, and the last time I opened it, I’d been someone else. I had no idea what waited on the other side.
The weight of the locket is suddenly heavy around my neck, and I reach inside my nightgown, pulling it free. It clicks as it opens, and I turn its face toward the moonlight. The hands are set to 2022. A place where I exist, where a thirty-three-year-old June Farrow is caring for her ailing grandmother and trying to keep the farm running. Afraid of the future. Grieved by the past. And I’m putting every bit of hope I have in her.
I lift my unsteady hand, and the moment my fingertips touch the doorknob, I don’t give myself time to change my mind. I turn it. Pull it open. What lies on the other side is a blackness I have never seen. It’s a darkness that eats itself. A thick wall of nothing.
I’m shaking as my foot crosses the threshold. My breath is a storm inside my head, and when I pull the door closed behind me, the crack of moonlight becomes a sliver. A knife in the dark.
It disappears with a click.
I’m
I