“I think it’s her journal from when she was with the LFC. Or something like that.”
With trembling hands, I flipped the book over and squinted at the words. Mostly written in blue ballpoint pen, some of the words were smudged beyond recognition and others were written in such tiny handwriting that I couldn’t make them out. But even the words that I could read were difficult to understand. It might have been a journal, but it might have also been her LFC notes. It was hard to tell.
You are here, the first line read. End of the rainbow. Gold is sun. Sun is life. shiny sun safety serenity sanity.
My stomach twisted. I had spent so many years longing to know more about our enigmatic mother, but now that a glimpse into the life she spent with the cult might literally be beneath my fingertips, I wasn’t sure I had the guts. I wanted to remember my mother as the gentle, caring woman she had been, not the incoherent person who had scribbled these notes. I didn’t think she would want me to remember her like that, either.
“I don’t think we should read this,” I said, closing the handbook. “You remember how secretive she was about her journals. She wouldn’t want us to read her private thoughts.”
“She’s not going to mind,” Lanie said softly.
I shook my head, unable to explain the truth to Lanie: I didn’t want to know.
“Josie, this is our only chance to know what she was like after she left us. We have to read it. We owe it to her.” She took the handbook from me and began reading aloud. “Get it out. Start at the beginning. Start here. You are here. You are here. Here. Everywhere you go, there you are.”
“This isn’t going to tell us anything,” I protested. “Listen to her.”
“Come on,” Lanie urged, pulling me down into a seat beside her and spreading the book open on our combined knees. “Let’s just keep with it. Maybe some of it will make sense.”
Lanie’s instincts proved correct: as we flipped the pages, each of us reading silently, our mother’s cursive became less shaky, her sentences more complete. As it became easier to follow her thoughts, I realized it wasn’t a journal in the sense that she was recording present-day events. Rather, she seemed to be documenting major events from her life, both good and bad, and not necessarily in chronological order: there was her marriage to our father (happiest girl in the world) and there was Uncle Dennis’s death (all my fault all my fault all my fault).
Then I came across a sentence that said, And there were the cupcakes. Shocked myself. If J hadn’t . . . Didn’t sleep for a week after. Stupid, careless. But lesson learned: no sense in doing a job halfway.
My stomach dropped. What about the cupcakes? I quickly scanned the page but saw no other references to them. Had she done something to them? But what? And why? Had she . . . had she tried to poison me? With a start, I remembered: that cupcake hadn’t been for me.
It had been for our father.
I turned to Lanie, unsure how to put the wild theories flying around in my head into words, unable to believe it myself, and saw her face completely devoid of color. Was she remembering the cupcake incident as well?
“Lanie? What’s wrong?”
“This,” she said quietly, laying her finger down on another portion of the page.
And I saw her wearing pearls. Pearls. It was a sign. It all comes back to pearls, from the first. That horrid Pearl Leland was only the first.
“Pearl Leland,” I read aloud. “What is . . . Is she saying that Dad had an affair with Professor Leland?”
Lanie nodded, squeezing her eyes shut. “I think so.”
As I watched my sister rock back and forth, arms wrapped tightly around her and eyes shut, I realized there was something more upsetting to her than learning that our father had carried on more than one affair.
“There’s something else, isn’t there?” I asked, touching her lightly on the shoulder.
“Yes,” she whispered. “The night Dad was killed . . .”
“Are you saying Pearl Leland killed our father?” I gasped.
Lanie shook her head. “I think . . . I think Mom did.”
Cymbals crashed in my head; my mouth went metallic. A hundred tiny explosions went off in my mind, the shrapnel falling together into something that looked like order. Still, I resisted.
“No,” I said firmly, ignoring the fact that I had been about to voice a similar concern.
“Listen,” Lanie said, speaking quickly, her voice thin. “The night Dad was killed, I heard someone before I reached the kitchen. They said something that sounded like, ‘First Pearl, and now . . .’ ”
“Are you sure?” I demanded. “Why is this the first time you’ve mentioned it?”
“Because I wasn’t certain what I heard. It wasn’t clear, and I couldn’t make out what it meant. Honestly, sometimes I thought it was all in my head. I mean, it didn’t make sense for Warren to say that, right? And I was certain it was Warren.”
“Then how can you be certain now?”
Lanie swallowed. “Because I’m starting to remember. Not just that. Other things. Like what I saw.”
“Melanie Cave,” I said weakly. “You saw Melanie Cave, remember?”
“I’m sorry, Josie,” she said, her eyes wide and wet. “But it was Mom. And I think I can prove it with the gun.”
I shook my head stubbornly. “They never found the gun.”
“No,” she allowed. “But I’m certain the shooter held it in a left hand. Mom was left-handed.”
“Lanie—”
“And I think I know where it is.”
I looked from Lanie’s grim face down to the words scribbled in the back of the handbook: And there were the cupcakes. Even if Lanie’s memory couldn’t be trusted, something had been wrong with those cupcakes. If she was admitting to poisoning them . . . I thought of the stack of photos she had brought with her to the LFC, my father’s clear absence in them. Had she really been angry enough to attempt murder?
And, if she had tried it once, would she have been determined enough to try again?
chapter 23
It was half past five when Lanie and I arrived on Cyan Court. It was, as ever, a calm little loop of road in a tidy subdivision. I had not seen my childhood home in more than ten years, and the sight of it took my breath away. Part of me had always assumed that the house would forever carry the indelible mark of the tragedy that happened inside it. I expected to find it encased in a perpetual cloud of gloom or fallen into disrepair, my father’s murder permanently visible to passersby.
And yet, there it was, looking perfectly unremarkable. The house stood just as we had left it: a white Dutch colonial with jaunty blue trim and window boxes crowded with the remains of colorful petunias. The porch had been repainted and the swing straightened, but the big elm tree in the front yard remained the same.