“Nobody knew who fired the shot but, yes, they killed him,” Verity said. She pointed. “Right out there on the drive in front of the house. The sheriff called in the FBI to help, and they arrested Eugene Rosenthal for the murder.”
“Why him?” Sorrow asked. “If they didn’t know who actually fired?”
“Does it matter?” Verity said. She gestured broadly, sweeping her arm to take in the barn, the door open to the night, the land beyond. “Because he was Jewish. Because he was a jazz musician. Because he was from New Jersey and not from around here. Because it was right at the beginning of the Hoover years and the FBI wanted to prove itself. He was the one they decided to blame, but it never went to trial. He died in police custody.” There was the faintest crack in Verity’s voice. “They said it was suicide.”
“He’s not in our cemetery,” Sorrow said.
“Joyful let his family take him back to New Jersey,” Verity said. “And for the second time in her life, she went from being surrounded by family to having almost nobody. She had two surviving daughters—Pride and Devotion—but Pride left too, a few years later. She ran away. She came back as an old woman, but I don’t think my grandmother ever forgave her for leaving. She definitely never forgave the Abramses for their part in it all. Grandma Devotion wasn’t exactly the forgiving type.”
Sorrow had been so lost in her memories of Patience in the cave by the creek she’d almost forgotten what had turned Verity down this story path to begin with. “Because she was the drive-a-tractor-into-the-pond type instead? Where does that come into it?”
“Simon Abrams had a few children, but the only one who stuck around was George. And George got it into his head that he could finish the fight his father had started,” Verity explained. “He had this foolish idea that people might remember his father more kindly if Simon had been defending Peddler’s Creek from criminal trespassers, not opening fire on little kids playing on their own land. So he tried to prove that our land ought to have been Abrams land all along.”
“Is there any truth to that?” Sorrow asked.
“No,” Verity said. “Not a shred. It was all jealous squabbling. It went to court a few times, but there was no point after my grandmother put the western acres into a trust. That only made George more bitter. The way Mom used to tell it—”
“Grandma?” Sorrow said. “You mean, when she was still—”
“When she was still talking, yes. She told me every time they met George Abrams in town he would take out this watch of his—the old-fashioned kind, on a chain—snap it open, and tell them he was counting down the minutes until the Lovegoods were gone for good.”
Sorrow opened her mouth to say, But that’s my watch. That’s mine.
She stopped herself; she knew how ridiculous that sounded. She remembered the watch clearly, a prized favor unlike any other, and how happy she had been to find it, how proud she had been to add it to her collection. She could feel it beneath her fingers: the metal clasp, gritty dirt on the case, drops of stagnant water seeping through the edges even months after she’d plucked it from the orchard. She hadn’t known who it belonged to. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask, when she had believed so fervently the favors were the orchard’s gifts to her and her alone.
Verity was saying, “It went on like that for a while, with George issuing threats nobody ever took seriously, until one day he was gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Sorrow asked.
“I mean he disappeared,” Verity said. “People looked, obviously. The police came here. Devotion claimed she had caught him dumping lye in one of our wells—the one down in the meadow—and she ran him off. She said he’d probably skipped town because he was too much of a coward to show his face after getting caught. She boarded up the well, and nobody ever saw George Abrams again.”
The sensation of water on her fingers was so strong Sorrow looked down. Her skin was dry. She shook her hand anyway, wiped it on her jeans.
“Nobody in my family ever believed that,” Ethan said. “They’re all convinced she killed him and buried him somewhere in the woods. My dad and uncle used to go looking for his body when they were kids, like it was a game. The way they talk about it now, I think they’re still disappointed they never found a skull.”
“They get that from their father, Eli,” Verity said. “It’s just venom and spite, passed down again and again. Pulling up fence posts around the pond was the least of what he did to get back at my grandmother—and my mother, after Devotion died.”
“What did he do to Grandma?” Sorrow asked.
Verity started to answer, got so far as parting her lips to speak before the stillness came over her and her hand flattened on the tractor fender. The hair on Sorrow’s arms prickled. It was only a question. Verity had been talking, she had been fine, telling a story in her rambling way, and Sorrow had only asked a question. She hadn’t said anything wrong. She didn’t know why those words would have dropped like lead weights, why Verity wasn’t answering. If there had been a line she wasn’t meant to cross, she hadn’t seen it. She hadn’t been looking.
“Nothing as exciting as a Prohibition-era shoot-out.” Verity pushed away from the tractor and headed for the door. “Dinner will be ready soon. Come in and wash up.”
Sorrow watched her go, a shadow moving between the barn and the house, the sound of her footsteps fading. She couldn’t feel the long-ago autumn day anymore, nor the touch of cool stone beneath her palm. She couldn’t feel the weight of the watch, and she missed it. She didn’t want to chase after Verity and navigate dinnertime around a mistake she hadn’t even known she was making. She wanted to take her memories somewhere quiet, turn them over in her mind, examine every shining facet. She wanted to remember again the feel of Patience’s hand on hers. But she was firmly back in the barn, and Verity had walked away, and she could taste the scent of rust and old hay in the back of her throat.
A wrench clattered into a toolbox, and Ethan wiped his hands on a dirty rag. “Dinner?”
Sorrow turned toward the door, then paused. “What was it you stopped yourself saying before? About Grandma?”
He didn’t have to ask her what she meant. “It’s nothing. It’s stupid. My grandfather was totally senile by the time I was old enough to listen to him. I think he was confused, you know?”
“About what?”