“I just—” Leah paused—“I just want you to be sure.”
Kaine sagged against the doorframe and stared into the empty room. Be sure? Of what? That her life as she’d known it was over the day the police showed up on her doorstep and said Danny had been in a wreck? Or how about when the police told her the witnesses said his driving had been erratic? Like he was drunk or falling asleep at the wheel. Danny’s autopsy ruled out alcohol, but Kaine knew that the drugs they found in Danny couldn’t be the full explanation. He’d never used. He wasn’t that type of man. They closed the case as accidental, and they labeled her the crazy wife who insisted her husband wasn’t an addict and that someone had drugged him. Why did she think that? They had asked. But she didn’t have an answer. So it was post-traumatic stress disorder, they assumed. Because of the accident. Because of the violence she’d witnessed in her career, maybe even in her own past. A past Kaine had no desire to remember, let alone admit to. So no, Kaine wasn’t sure. Of anything anymore. It had been years since she had been sure.
“Don’t question me now, Leah, please,” Kaine whispered to her sister. She could picture Leah’s eyes, large and earnest, filled with concern. She probably thought she was coming alongside her, urging her forward with baby steps. Instead she was whacking Kaine across the face with every doubt, angst, and wound Kaine carried inside.
“Kaine, you ran out of San Diego like a cat out of a dog kennel.”
“I was scared. I still am.”
More silence. As if Leah was choosing her words carefully. “You need to talk about it, Kaine. About Danny, about the break-ins . . . about your job.”
“I left my job behind.” Kaine held the phone away from her face and glared at it, pacing out of the empty second bedroom toward the third and final room. Leah had to bring up her job? It had sapped every ounce of life from her before Danny died. It was her passion, her mission, even her ministry, if she spiritualized it. The women she had helped, the stories . . . the violence.
Kaine put the phone back to her ear. “Listen, Leah. Please—give me some time, all right? I need to find my life again. I need to stabilize. Explore our roots and do something for Danny.” Because she hadn’t done enough when he’d been alive. The hours away, the lack of romance, the slow drift apart. Six years of marriage, and now here she was.
“You know I love you, and I’m proud of you.” Leah always needed affirmation, so that’s what she usually offered too. Kaine could use something more tangible.
“I love you too.”
“Kaine?”
“Yeah?”
“I put a box in your trunk before you left. I wanted to be sure you had it when you returned to Great-Great-Grandmother Ivy’s old stomping grounds.”
Maybe Leah had learned something about Kaine. The first seedling of hope grew in her chest. Something tangible was in her car, right now, a gift from Leah.
“What is it?”
“It’s our great-great-grandmother’s quilt.” A smile touched Leah’s voice.
“Where did you get that?” Kaine recalled it from years before, folded at the foot of their grandfather’s bed.
“After Grandpa died, you were away at college all preoccupied with your pre-Danny boyfriend when I went through Grandpa’s stuff. I had it stored in my closet. But I thought now that you are in Oakwood, where Ivy grew up, you might want it.” Leah’s voice waned, as if she didn’t know what to say anymore.
But it meant everything to Kaine. Maybe, since she was in Oakwood, it was time to find her foundation in family roots. What part did the family legacy play in shaping her into the driven, assertive, and now very lost person that she was?
Kaine stepped across the threshold into bedroom number three.
“I’ll cherish it, Leah, I’ll—”
“Kaine?” Leah pressed into Kaine’s choked silence.
Kaine couldn’t respond, couldn’t answer. Her hand lowered, the phone clutched in her hand. The walls of the room closed in, then expanded, and she blinked several times to bring it back to proper proportions. The shaft of light from the four-paned window on the opposite side of the room stretched across the weathered wood floor. The object propped in its path stole her breath, and the last vestige of tentative peace Kaine had found exploded into a thousand invisible pieces.
Chapter 7
Jvy
Her favorite scent of lavender wrapped around Ivy as she opened her eyes a small crack. Her vision was blurry, but she made out the deep green-striped wallpaper that met the white wainscoting in the middle of her bedroom wall. Oh, the ache, the deep ache. Ivy closed her eyes again. Darkness. Stairs. She remembered the hazy sensation of falling.
“What’s her condition?” The voice by her bedside startled her, but Ivy didn’t open her eyes. It was Joel Cunningham. In her bedroom. She wanted to argue him away, but the words wouldn’t formulate in her foggy brain, let alone escape her tongue.
Her father’s voice shattered the remaining blur. “Who did this to her, Joel? I want this fiend caught!”
“Was she—?” Joel let his question hang.
No. I wasn’t. Ivy responded in her mind. Neither of the men were answering each other’s questions, and Ivy had yet to summon the stamina to open her eyes again.
“No. No. She wasn’t.” Finally. Her father answered for her. “She’s badly bruised, as you can see, not unlike the girl we found. I swear someone tried to strangle her, but I don’t think anything’s broken. It appears she was pushed down the stairs in Foster Hill House.”
She wasn’t half dead after all, thank God! But she felt like she was. Ivy tried to move, but her body throbbed in protest.
“How do we know what happened?” Joel was fact-finding already. He was on a case, and now, Ivy realized, she was part of the case. She could have easily been lying on the same table Gabriella had lain on, and in the same condition. The realization was frightening enough and it bought Ivy’s continued silence.
“She was coherent enough when Foggerty found her to tell him she’d been attacked.” There was a tremor in her father’s voice.
“How is it Foggerty found Gabriella and now Ivy?”
“He traps the property, and he wanders. He said he heard moaning in the house and that’s when he came across Ivy.” There was a break now in her father’s voice. Dear Papa.
“Whoever did this to Ivy must have thought she was dead.” Joel seemed to hesitate. “She’s blessed, or else they may have tried to make sure that was the case and hid her like they did the girl. We may never have found Ivy.”
“Dear God.” Her father’s quivering plea sliced through Ivy’s consciousness. She should open her eyes, assure him she was going to be all right, but Joel continued.
“She’ll recover?”