CHAPTER 36
LUCY
When Dad headed back to Springfield on Monday morning, Birdie came to pick me up in her truck, which was hardly necessary. She rarely drove anywhere, let alone the short distance to our house, and I had only one bag to carry. I could have walked. Then I wondered if she didn’t trust me to go down the road alone without taking a side trip into trouble. Would she have her eye on me every moment of the day and night? I didn’t know what Dad had told her, but she clearly took the task of watching over me seriously.
I set my bag down in the bedroom once shared by Birdie’s sons, the room I’d slept in so many times. Birdie had put away all the little knickknacks I once kept on the dresser—the jar of buttons, the yarn-haired doll, the children’s Bible that I’d defaced with crayons—though my favorite pink afghan still lay across the bed. The room was sweltering, and it would only get worse as we sank deeper into the heart of August. I opened the window and looked out on the empty pasture and the hills that rose beyond it. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. If I got desperate, I could crack open one of Birdie’s musty Reader’s Digest condensed books, but for once I didn’t feel like reading.
The phone rang, and Birdie came to tap at my door. “He’s on your approved phone list,” she said. Great, there was a list. I was surprised there was anyone on it but Dad.
“Is it Ray?” I asked, following Birdie to the living room, where her old-fashioned phone sat tethered to a tiny table in the corner.
Birdie shook her head, positioning herself in the armchair across from me. “It’s that boy.”
I picked up the receiver and sat down on the arm of the sofa. “Hi,” I said.
“Hey.” It was good to hear Daniel’s voice, even if I was mad at him. “Your dad told me where you were.”
“Nice of you to call.” I hoped I sounded aloof.
“I finally got a phone. Sorry.”
“So what do you want?”
“To know how you are, for one. I can’t believe how much I miss you and how much time I spend worrying.”
“That’s your own fault,” I said. “You’re the one who left. And I never asked you to worry about me.”
“I guess you’re mad at me for talking to Carl. I don’t blame you. But I wasn’t trying to get you in trouble, I was trying to help.”
“Hold on,” I said. I looked up at Birdie, who was feigning interest in her yarn basket. “Could you please, please let me talk to him in private for just a minute?” I asked her. “It’s kind of embarrassing fighting in front of you.”
Birdie took her sweet time getting up and walking across the room to the kitchen. She clicked on her little radio, which was set to the gospel station, and shot me a stern glance through the doorway. She’d probably report this to Dad later and see if I was allowed to talk unsupervised. I spoke low enough that I hoped she couldn’t hear me. “Look, I’ll be honest with you. I miss you, too. I wish you were here, but even if you were, there wouldn’t be anything you could do to help. Everything’s a mess.”
“What’s happening?”
I filled him in the best I could, explaining that I didn’t know who killed Cheri, but Crete knew and had lied to me about it. And my dad was involved, which complicated things. I couldn’t tell him what I knew about Sorrel, because Bess had sworn me to secrecy.
Daniel groaned. I envisioned him raking his hand through his hair in that aggravated way of his. “Wait. Back up a minute. I didn’t follow half of that, with you whispering. How did you end up talking to Crete about Cheri? Did you ask him point-blank and expect him to tell you the truth? And how do you know he’s lying if you don’t know what happened?”
“I sneaked into his house to see if I could find anything out about the trailer, and he came home and caught me in his basement. He knew I’d been asking around about Cheri, and he said he wanted to clear some things up with me.”
“You broke into his house? Are you kidding me? What the hell made you think that was a good idea?”
“I don’t need you to lecture me right now,” I said. “There’s something else.” I peeked at Birdie, who was wiping down the already clean kitchen table. She adjusted the knob on the radio, switching it from gospel to weather. “When I was digging through his papers, I came across something of my mom’s. It looked like a job application, but it had all these weird comments on it about her looks and the fact that she had no family. It felt wrong. I’m wondering if Crete brought her here for the same reason Cheri was in that trailer.”
“Oh … wow.” He was silent for a moment. “Lucy, I’m sorry. I know you’re already mad at me, and I don’t want to make things worse, but don’t you think it’s time to turn this all over to somebody else?”
“I will. I mean, I’m going to talk to Ray. I’m waiting for him to get back to me. He knows somebody with the state police.”
“Why are you waiting? Just make a call and be done with it.”
“It’s my dad,” I said, coiling the phone cord around my finger. “He didn’t really have anything to do with it, and even with the body, he was just trying to send Crete a message. But I’m worried he’ll get locked up, too. I’m trying to figure out how to keep that from happening.”
“I know you don’t feel like he should go to jail, Luce, but Crete and whoever else was responsible, they have to pay for what they did. You can’t spare them to keep your dad safe. You can’t just let them go.”
“Dad doesn’t want me to call the cops.”
“Your dad’s a good guy,” Daniel said. “I know you, though, Luce, and you always want to do the right thing.”
“I want to do my version of the right thing,” I said.
“I’ll be back this weekend. If you want to talk to the cops, then I’ll go with you. I was in the trailer, too. I can back up your claims. Then you can let this go. It’s not up to you to figure it all out. Let someone else handle it.”
It sounded easier when Daniel laid it out. Simple, almost. He couldn’t get here soon enough.
“I’m glad you’re coming,” I said.
“Me, too. We have a lot to talk about.”
After I hung up the phone, reality seeped back in. I knew nothing would be simple after I talked to the police. My dad and uncle could be taken away, the family business destroyed, the Danes forever tarnished. Staying here would be unbearable, and I had nowhere else to go.
I hadn’t told Daniel everything; I hadn’t mentioned the noises in the basement or the locked room. No need to make him worry more than he already was.
I joined Birdie in the kitchen as she got out the flour and lard to make biscuits. “Radio says we’re in for some bad weather the next few days,” she said, wiping sweat off her forehead. “We’re already under a thunderstorm watch. Merle’s getting all antsy, like he does when hail’s coming.”
I was glad she didn’t ask what Daniel and I had talked about. “I was thinking I’d go out looking for gooseberries,” I said. “See if I can get enough for a pie.”
Birdie measured baking powder. “Awful late in the summer for gooseberries.” We both knew I wouldn’t find any, that I just needed a reason to get out of the house. I handed her the salt, pulled milk and eggs from the fridge. “Don’t go far, I guess.” Birdie sighed. “Bucket’s on the porch.”
Merle sat at the back door and watched me cross the pasture. Birdie was probably watching, too, from the kitchen window. I didn’t know her woods as well as I knew my own, so I wandered along the tree line until I found a stone ledge big enough to stretch out on. I stared at the hazy sky, watched two vultures with their white-tipped wings circle slowly, deliberately, waiting for something somewhere to die.
Although I was closer than ever to finding out what had happened to Cheri, I still didn’t know what had become of my mother. I had so many unanswered questions about Crete’s connection to the two of them.
I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, the air so thick that I imagined it could drown me. Being outdoors hadn’t calmed my nerves, like I’d thought it would, so I decided to head back to the house. As I sat up, I got the feeling that I was being watched. Ordinarily, I would assume it was an animal, most likely a deer, but I was feeling more jittery than usual. I looked all around and saw nothing. Then Merle’s insistent barks rang out across the field, and I was on my feet, fighting the urge to look behind me. I jogged back to Birdie’s and found Bess sprawled in the grass, searching Merle’s ears for ticks.
“Are you on my list of approved visitors?” I asked, flopping down next to her.
Bess rolled her eyes. “Hard to believe. I don’t guess anybody else is gonna come see you here in lockdown.”
“Tell me you brought news of the outside world.”
“Well,” she said, ducking her head to pat Merle’s belly, “you already know about Sorrel.”
“Are you doing okay?” I asked.
“You know, I don’t miss him or anything like that. It’s a relief, in a way. But I can’t help wondering if he’d have killed himself if I hadn’t called him.”
“We can’t be sure he did it himself,” I said. “Somebody could have done him in. The paper said he didn’t leave a note.” The article had referred to his wife as “estranged” and said she couldn’t be reached for comment.
“Let’s hope, if he talked to anybody, that he didn’t mention me. I’m having enough trouble sleeping as it is. I heard down at Bell’s that there’d been a fire in his burn barrel. Probably him or somebody else burning anything that connected him to Cheri. Or to me.”
Any evidence from Sorrel, any confessions pent up inside him, were now gone. I didn’t want to think about it. “Any other good gossip at Bell’s?”
Bess perked up a bit. “Yeah, your friend Becky Castle’s back.” Crete’s girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, though I thought of her more as Holly’s mother.
“I don’t know why you call Becky my friend. I don’t even know her.”
Bess laughed. “I thought you guys would get to be pals while you were working for Crete, but she hasn’t been around much this summer.”
“I never saw her once,” I said. “Where’d she go?”
“I don’t know. Visiting relatives, I guess. Pam was bartending, and I asked her how Holly was getting along, and she said Holly was staying with her grandparents and wouldn’t be back at school this year. Pam also said Becky was high as could be. Twitching and scratching like her skin was on fire.”
“Maybe it’s better for Holly, then, not to be here. Remember that 4-H show when we were nine or ten? Her mom just dropped her off there by herself with that enormous rabbit cage.”
“Yeah, I remember. Birdie kept poking us and saying we should be more like Holly, because she was always so quiet and serious.” When Becky didn’t show up to take Holly home, the little girl had set out walking, balancing the cage in her scrawny arms. Birdie had stopped and given her a ride.
“We sucked at 4-H,” I said, and Bess cracked up laughing. I was glad to see her in a good mood again and grateful that she’d come to visit me. I’d missed her.
I blew Bess a kiss as she backed out of the driveway, and she smacked it like it was a mosquito. I blew a dozen more, and she swatted those away, too, before giving in and blowing one back.
“Thanks,” I said to Birdie when I came inside.
She nodded. “A girl needs time with her friends. And you’ve only got the one.”
I started to tell her indignantly that I had more than one friend. But I didn’t, not really, unless you counted Daniel. And then it was only two.
“No gooseberries, I take it,” she said.
“No.”
“A season for everything. Walnuts will fall before you know it.” She poured two glasses of tea and gestured to the kitchen table. “The biscuits are almost ready. I got some apple butter up from the cellar just for you.”
I sat and she stood, waiting for the timer to buzz. She hustled two steaming biscuits onto plates, and we sat there together until they cooled enough that we wouldn’t burn our mouths.
“Tell me again about the day she left,” I said, dipping a spoon in the apple butter.
Birdie pulled her biscuit apart and stared at the pieces. “You haven’t asked for that story in a while.”
We ate in silence, and when our plates were empty, she started talking. “She left you with me when she went. She said, ‘Watch her for me, Birdie, please?’ The way she said it was just like she was going to the store, except she almost always took you along anywhere she went. She hated to take her eyes off you. I went over it in my head so many times after, the way she said it, the sound of her voice, the look on her face. I blamed myself, because I was the last one to see her, and maybe I could have stopped her. But there was nothing for me to notice except the fact that she wasn’t taking you along. She didn’t say ‘watch her,’ like she wasn’t coming back, like she was laying a lifetime of responsibility in my hands. She just said it like she had something to go do, something none too interesting but it had to be done, and it wouldn’t take long because she hadn’t left any of her milk for you. You squawked and kicked when I tried to get you to drink cow’s milk out of a cup, like it was the worst sort of torture and you just wouldn’t bear it.”
I’d heard this part before, how I’d given Birdie no choice but to wean me with sweet tea.
“It took me a long time to accept that she wasn’t coming back; I just didn’t believe it. She wouldn’t leave you. I knew her near as well as Carl or Gabby did, and I knew she wouldn’t leave on her own. Truth be told, plenty of folks were glad to see her gone, had no interest in looking for her, but I walked those woods every day for weeks, hoping she was somewhere lost or hurt and I could bring her back home. Your dad, they got him all talked into postpartum depression and post-traumatic stress from her living in foster care, all these ridiculous things that sounded like they could’ve been true but weren’t. They told him he shouldn’t blame himself for teaching her how to use the gun, for believing her story that she wanted to protect herself from snakes in the woods when she was really planning to shoot herself. He’d seen his mother go through so much, with her fragile state of mind, I guess he was more readily convinced that such things were possible, that it could have been going on without him seeing it. And that filled him up with guilt, near smothered him. He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it coming, but I did. There was nothing to see. She was happy. She loved you, both of you. She was troubled sometimes, but she wouldn’t say why. I figured it had to do with what happened to her right before she and your dad got married.” Her eyes sank. “I don’t suppose your dad ever said anything about that.”
I shook my head. Was it possible she was going to tell me something new after all these years?
“She was attacked, I guess you’d say. Beat up. She got bit, and it got infected. I nursed her, that’s how I knew. Nobody said anything. I don’t even know if your dad knew about the bite, though I’d guess he would have eventually seen the scar.”
Someone had bitten her? “Who was it?”
“I don’t know, not for sure. She wouldn’t say. Neither would your dad, if he knew. There was talk around town that Joe Bill Sump had been to see her. That was right before he took off, and I considered maybe that was why he left. But the bite … the mark it left … well, this is just a guess on my part, but I always wondered if it was Crete who did that to her.”
I picked at my fingernails, not wanting to look at Birdie. Sarah Cole had claimed my mother wasn’t sure who my father was. What if Crete had attacked her? What if he was the other man, the one whose child she didn’t want?
“I did like she said,” Birdie continued softly. “Kept an eye on you. I always have. I always will. You’re like a granddaughter to me, Lucy.” It was strange to hear her say that, yet it made perfect sense. “You grow up feeling the weight of blood, of family. There’s no forsaking kin. But you can’t help when kin forsakes you or when strangers come to be family. Lila found her home here. She belonged with us. She didn’t kill herself, I just can’t believe it. I don’t have proof of anything, but I’ve always had my suspicions. Crete loved her or hated her—don’t really matter which. Either one’ll drive you crazy if you let it. Now, it ain’t my place to tell you what to think of your own family, but you’ve got to look past what you’ve always been taught and listen to what you know in your bones to be true.”