“Thank you, Leia,” she said, such foreign words that it was practically like hearing Rachel speaking Klingon. She added, in her old familiar bossy tone, “Come home soon.”
Her lips to God’s ears, I thought as we went to the dining room and hung the pictures on the same old nails that had once held up Ethan and Ellis. I wanted to go home. Or at least I wanted this part—bones and sorrows dug up sixty years too late—to be over. Even the regular human heartbreak of my grandmother’s aging, her failing mind and memory, would be better than digging in these ancient, moldy secrets. Reading assisted-living brochures and fighting with Birchie and Wattie was shitty, unless the other choice was watching Regina Tackrey send them both to prison.
“Yours is higher,” Rachel said as she stepped back to eyeball the pictures.
Even I could see that she was right. The schooner had a slightly longer wire, but the patches of shiny wallpaper were hidden.
“It’s good enough,” I said.
“It’s going to drive you crazy,” Rachel said, meaning that it would drive her crazy. She was leaving, though, and the schooner listing a half inch lower than the clipper ship was not going to keep me up at night. I shrugged it off, but she said, “Let me fix it.”
Not everything was fixable, even by my stepsister.
“How will you do that? You think Birchie keeps a hammer in the house?” I asked her, and that ended the discussion, fast. Birchie kept no tools at all. Maybe she had banished them superstitiously, like Sleeping Beauty’s mother on a spindle-burning run sixty years after her kid had gone down for the Big Nap.
Birchie and Wattie came in bearing a pot of oatmeal with berries and a platter of biscuits and bacon. Strictly spoon and finger foods, I realized, and sure enough there were no forks on the set table. No knives either, not of any kind. Wattie had even prebuttered the biscuits and put out the honey pot instead of jam.
“You might as well eat,” I told Rachel. “It will save you a stop.”
Birchie was pretty good at first glance. She was dressed in a long floral skirt and a lightweight summer twinset. Maybe her eyes were a little overbright, but her fluffy bun was tidy and her powdered cheeks were pink with liquid rouge. She knew who Rachel was with no cuing. Considering the hell of yesterday and the stress of the morning’s agenda, she was better than I expected. We kept up a steady stream of kindly conversation around her, talking routes and road times over the meal. Birchie put in a comment here and there. Most of them made sense. Only one was directed at the rabbits. By the time we were ready to see Rachel off, I was moderately reassured that Birchie wouldn’t attack Cody Mack with the honey twirler.
In the entryway Rachel thanked Birchie and Wattie for the hospitality, kissing each of them on the cheek. She saved me for last, holding me tight and whispering, “See you soon, preg,” in my ear. Soon? She was an optimist. I was worried that Digby might get himself born in Birchville after all.
“Should we walk Rachel out?” Wattie asked Birchie, cuing her, but Birchie didn’t answer. She was staring back at the dining room, toward her own seat.
“Birchie?” I said, and a laugh got out of her.
It was cousin to yesterday’s high-pitched, tittering noise, the one that had been a harbinger. It raised every little hair on the nape of my neck.
“Birchie?” Wattie said, trying to call her back. She took my grandmother by the shoulders and gently turned her to face us. “Birchie?”
Birchie stopped laughing, and her eyes focused.
“My father is a boat,” she told us, and her voice was filled with wonder.
23
Cody Mack arrived sporting mirrored cop sunglasses and a smirk. He was carrying a briefcase, of all things. It was brown faux leather, very glossy, with bright brass corners, downright odd for the occasion. The hinges were dusty. It looked like a prop you’d give a kid playing a big shot in the high-school musical, so the audience would understand he was important.
Frank Darian arrived with him, carrying his own actual briefcase. Frank looked tired, and this would be one of his last acts as our lawyer; he’d advised that it was time for us to hire a criminal attorney. A really good one, he’d said, handing us a list of names, and those words scared me more than anything. It had nothing to do with his own ongoing troubles with his divorce either. He’d made that clear. When the DNA results were back, when it was proved definitively that Birchie had been hiding her own father’s body in her attic, he thought Tackrey would pursue the matter. Vigorously, unless public opinion shifted. She was running opposed in the primary for the first time in years.
They came into the parlor, and Birchie and Wattie did not get up from their side-by-side spots on their love seat. I took my cue from them and stayed planted in the chair closest to Birchie, steaming in a welter of separate hatreds. I hated that my family was in the wrong. I hated that Cody Mack, racist jackass, was here repping law and order. I had pent-up urges to make all this stop pinging through my body with no place to go. Most of all I hated feeling helpless.
Frank took up a vigilant stance in front of the fireplace, feet spread, hands behind his back, and we all exchanged polite, cool greetings. Or everyone but Birchie did. She said nothing, though her face indicated that a smell had come into the room.
Cody swayed his hips forward and back before plunking the showy briefcase down on the side table that sat catty-corner between Birchie and me. He took his time, popping the tabs and swinging the lid up. The briefcase was even dustier inside. He must’ve dragged it down from his own granny’s corpse-free attic as some kind of compensation thing, because it was dead empty except for three swab kits, each in its own small box. He could have carried them in a plastic Piggly Wiggly bag, or with his hands.
“So this here is going to be easy, and it don’t hurt,” Cody told Birchie, who had yet to overtly acknowledge him. As he spoke, he reached for one swab kit and unpacked it, laying the pieces out on the bottom of the open briefcase: a padded envelope, a clear evidence bag with a zip top, a swabbing stick sealed in paper, a pair of bright blue latex gloves, and a little pile of forms and stickers. “If you cooperate, I can be out of your house in five flat minutes. Less,” he continued, snapping on the gloves. Now that he was addressing her, her gaze had dropped. She looked down at her hands, folded tidy in her lap, almost demure. Wattie, beside her, took a near-identical posture, both leaning in so that their sloping shoulders touched.
“Please walk us through the process,” Frank said, for Birchie’s benefit.