I held my hands up in surrender, though it would not be easy. As I went inside, I tried hard not to even think of questions to not ask, and failed. Who was in the trunk? It must be someone who belonged to Birchie in some way. It was her house, after all. Exactly how long had it been up there? I’d only had one look at the bones, but they were old. Old enough to unhinge entirely from one another. Also, the trunk had been buried deep in the back room. When I was a girl, that back room had already been too packed to allow me entrance. Had the trunk been present, moldering and foul, while I played dress-up? It could have been there longer than I’d been alive, the heaps of history growing up organically around it, burying it deeper every year.
I hoped it had been. I hoped it had been there for a century or more, a bad legacy passed down to Birchie from someone long dead. My storyteller’s brain was hunting narrative. Ellis Birch was by all accounts an overprotective father, and also overproud. Perhaps these were the bones of Birchie’s missing suitor, the one who was supposedly run off to the state line. Maybe they were older still, the remains of a Yankee soldier, killed during the throes of Reconstruction. They could have traveled in this trunk with Ethan Birch, the real reason he fled Charleston and founded Birchville. If this was only a box of bad history, then it would all be over soon. Remains that old required anthropologists, not cops.
All I had to do was wait. Let Frank get the story. He would tell me, and tell the police, too, in the best frame possible. The bones were something Birchie knew of, that was clear, but I could not believe for even a breath that they were a thing that Birchie did.
The kids were still in the kitchen. I could hear the clatter of dishes and the buzz of young voices. Birchie and Wattie were alone in the living room. They sat primly side by side on one of the Victorian love seats.
“Are you okay?” I asked Birchie, going right to her and kneeling.
“I suppose. Such a mess!” she said. “I’m so sorry. I never thought—”
“Hush, now.” I kissed her. “Don’t apologize. Don’t talk about it at all. Frank says not to even talk to me, okay?”
She nodded, but I looked into her bright blue eyes until I was sure that she was there and hearing me. I turned to Wattie, taking her hand in mine. I could feel her own live bones, intricate and frail, and they seemed more fragile than her weathered skin.
“You and me, we have to get on the same page now,” I told her.
“I’ve been on your page since the day that you were born, sugar,” Wattie said, but then she added tartly, “Though all this week I wondered if you might be illiterate. Don’t worry. I’m not going to let her say a word.”
“Good,” I said, though my heart sank. If Wattie didn’t want her to talk, that meant Birchie had plenty more to say. I wasn’t asking questions, and I was still learning too much.
Keeping Birchie quiet would take both of us. The Fish Fry proved that Birchie’s illness had progressed past Wattie’s powers to thoroughly contain it; Birchie might at any minute say the world’s least convenient truths. Or worse, she might say self-incriminating nonsense. She did have Lewy bodies. She saw awful rabbits humping all over the town. What if the Lewy bodies made her remember things that never were?
I fixed Wattie with a stern gaze and said, “That trunk belongs to Birchie?”
“I thought we weren’t going to talk about this,” Wattie said.
“I’m making sure we’re protecting the right person. Is it hers?”
Wattie’s wide, full mouth compressed, and her sparse, white eyebrows knit, but after a moment she ducked her chin in a nod.
“Okay. Hear me now,” I said, sounding just like Frank. “If the police ask, you say you only helped Birchie move the trunk because she asked you. I’m sure she was very agitated due to her illness. The illness that means she can’t be held responsible for anything. So you probably agreed to help her move that trunk with no idea what was in there.”
Wattie’s nostrils flared. “My mother didn’t raise me to be a liar.”
“Well, you’ve gotten pretty good at it all on your own, then,” I said sharply, but my heart sank. Of course Birchie had told Wattie what was in the trunk. She told Wattie everything. “Okay, that was cheap, but I had no idea Birchie was ill until last week, so maybe I was owed that shot.” She looked away, but I saw that my words had landed with her. “For the record? My mother didn’t raise me to be a liar either. Lucky for you, I don’t always take her good advice.”
“Hmf. The world would be a better place if we all listened to our mothers—and our grannies, too,” Wattie said.
“Maybe. Did your mother teach you how to keep your mouth shut?”
“You’re a caution, girl,” Wattie said, smiling a little in spite of everything. “You spent half your childhood in that attic, and you never knew he was up there, did you? It’s fair to say that I know how to keep things to myself.”
I shook my head. “Hush, now. We let Frank talk, and we sit tight.” But the information sank in anyway. He. The person in the attic was a he. A he was so much more human than an it, and worse, Wattie knew that the remains were male. Still, it didn’t mean she had known the him personally, or that she had had anything to do with his death or his interment in a sea trunk. “Don’t say another word. Frank believes it’s better if I don’t know who’s in there.”
“I told you already,” Birchie piped up, agitated.
“Birchie, please, please, please stop talking,” I said, reaching across Wattie to pat at her.
“I told you the first night you were here,” Birchie insisted. “I told you at dinner.”
It was morning, Birchie’s best time, and she sounded so certain. Nevertheless, I was pretty sure we hadn’t discussed who might or might not be dead up in her attic over the roasted game hens and fresh tomato salad.
“I can’t remember how to make that cornbread,” Wattie said, sudden and loud. Birchie started and looked at her, blinking. “I can’t remember how much flour and how much cornmeal.”
“Two to one,” Birchie said. “Two to one, you know that. And three good-size fresh eggs.”
Wattie shook her head. “You better start at the beginning.”
Birchie seemed to sink back into herself. “I need to get your mother’s bowl, because in that bowl we can eyeball how high to put the flour and such. I keep it second bottom cabinet, left of the stove. . . .” As Birchie walked us through the process of making her signature dish, I realized that Wattie had done this before. It was a coping mechanism for Lewy bodies, taking Birchie step by step through something that was second nature. Something she remembered in her hands and nose and mouth, not just her mind.
Lavender came in with a tray full of hot cocoa and a worried face.
“Where are Hugh and Jeffrey?” I asked.
“Eating fifty more cinnamon rolls. They are going to puke if they don’t stop.” She set the tray down. “Can we have the laptop back? We were doing something.”
“Sure,” I said.
It was still sitting on the coffee table. She picked it up and turned to go, saying, “And when you get a second, can you call my mom? I told her you were busy with the cops, but she’s having kittens.”
“You called Rachel?” I said. I didn’t need Lavender’s confirming nod. When things went to shit, girls called their mothers. My own mom smelled like chamomile and honey, and I half wanted to run home, crawl into her lap, and abdicate all pretense of adulthood. Instead, I had to call Rachel. She must be foaming. “Jesus, please us.”