“My kids love being taken care of. Love not working too hard. Love having Mama to bail them out and give ’em ice cream money.”
The words ice cream money nearly slipped past, but then I heard them.
Not money for ice cream; money from ice cream. Dairy Bar proceeds, funding Bo’s hard living and Bonnie’s imprisonment in the family’s summer home. If I had just left the Dairy Bar parking lot instead of pulling into Parks. If I had only ignored blind nostalgia. How many times had I had that thought? If I had just.
“Your malts are really crappy.”
Bea cackled until she had to wheeze for breath. “They sell real good, though. And those two little shacks keep me, my kids, my grandkids.” She paused. “Half the town,” she muttered. “You’ve no idea.”
I did, though, because she’d already been clear. Worth a million. I didn’t think she was rounding up. “They only fear you.”
Bea gave the wheel a wide turn. Gravel pinged the bottom of the truck. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, having a son that fears you.”
Joshua. She was saying something about Joshua. “My son doesn’t fear me.”
“Sure, sure. Nothing to worry about with you in charge.” She shook her head and squinted out the windshield with purpose. “Kids raised on shaky ground always bounce back.”
We made a sharp turn, and the gravel fell away. The tires grew quiet. Tree branches scratched at both sides of the truck. The sounds of the deep woods went silent around us. We drove for a long time, the smell of wet and decaying leaves coating my throat. I tasted lake air.
Bea slowed the truck to a crawl, dragging through bramble and scrub, then stopped.
My focus darted between Bea’s hands and the oar. The right moment—
But Bea was faster. “I’ll get this,” she said, sliding the oar away. “Get out, and try to remember who’s got the gun here.”
I had not seen a gun, but I believed in it. I slid out, using the truck’s door to stand upright and stare into the clean black of my surroundings. A slim moon hid behind roiling clouds.
“Where—”
Bea’s voice hissed in my ear. “Shut it.” The oar handle nudged me forward. I stumbled, wondering if Bea could see anything. Maybe now was my chance to dash away, use the dark to my benefit. I hesitated.
“Do something funny,” she said. “I won’t even have to look at the mess.”
She shoved me forward into the dark. The green smell of the lake gave me courage. “No wonder.”
She sighed and prodded into my back with more force.
“No wonder your kids are no good,” I said.
“You think you’re better? Your father should have taken you out and drowned you like a kitten.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t think of that,” I said.
“I’m pretty sure he did.”
I staggered forward. “You knew him.”
“Oh, hell, yes. I knew that piece of crap.”
“We agree on this.” I stopped, let the oar dig into me. “You knew him. From coming to your lake house?”
“Lake house,” she grunted. “You sound like one of them fudge shoppers. Ain’t no summer home, sweetie. That is my grand inheritance, or it would be, if I could outlive a few more cousins.”
I stumbled over something, and Bea wrestled me back up. In the dark, I could identify the barest outline of a low roof against the sky.
Through my rising panic, I tried to think of something to say. “My dad—”
“Never thought much of him,” Bea said. “Or your mother. Or you. Didn’t put two and two together soon enough when you showed up in Parks.” A flashlight beam appeared, pointing out the rusty locks on a metal door. Bea fidgeted with a ring of keys, then used a series of them to turn groaning locks. “Wished I’d realized it was you first time I saw you. I would have yelled across the street, ‘If it isn’t little Leeanna Winger from Sweetheart Lake!’ You’d’a turned tail and we wouldn’t be going through this dance.”
The door opened. Bea’s sharp fingernails squeezed and directed me. The flashlight lit a narrow path in the floor. The place, whatever it was, smelled like mouse droppings and grass, dank decay, and water damage. Like a garage. It was stuffy, hot, the air bad.
Bea reached for my hands. I fought, slapping her away.
The light swung into my face. Bea’s voice sliced at me: “But you’re the one that gave me the idea. Single woman on her own. Just her kid.”
I heard the threat and let my hands be guided together behind my back. It was thick tape this time.
“‘Where is the father?’ I ask myself,” Bea said. “Everybody notices, but nobody cares enough to find out. Leely would have done that. She’d’ve stole Aidan and run and I’d never see my grandbaby again.” Bea’s breath came hot and snorting as she wound the tape tight. “You were the warning I needed and then—well, things fell together.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. Charity Jordan being murdered was not a flick of a domino. “You killed a girl and then stole Aidan so that his mother couldn’t. Your sense of justice is screwed.”
Bea grunted. She was using her teeth to tear the tape. “Justice is what I say it is. Bonnie’ll tell you the same thing, soon as she gets her boy back. We all got our own right and wrong. Don’t tell me you don’t.”
So that was Bonnie’s deal. Watching over the kidnapped baby while everyone else in the family did boo-hoos for the cameras and played straight-faced games with the police. And her reward? A boy for a boy. And Bo’s reward: his boy, all to himself.
“You’d have done the same for yours,” Bea said. She pushed me up against a wall and let me crumple to the floor. My foot hit the flashlight, sent it rolling. The rough wooden wall caught at my clothes. “Hell, I’m pretty sure you did the same for yours already. We’re not that different.”
“I would never kill anyone.”
“I’m not going to kill you.” Bea began to tape my ankles together, the adhesive pulling at my skin.
I heard hope fluttering its wings in my chest, but couldn’t listen. I knew what this looked like. “I would never leave anyone to die.”
“Is that so?”
There was nothing to say. If Bea knew my father, then she probably knew where he was. Probably had even known how he got there and who paid for it. Mrs. Bea Ransey kept up on her Sweetheart Lake news; she probably got the Vilas County News-Review delivered to her Parks, Indiana, front door each week. Clicked her tongue over property values and obituaries. Stored away bits of news like a squirrel packing its cheeks.
Bea gave my head an awkward pat, leaving her warm hand on my forehead.
She wouldn’t do it. She can’t.
But the old woman was only holding my head so that she could find my mouth and force an oily cloth inside. I bucked and bit until Bea pinched my nose and shoved the cloth between my teeth.