by Beth Moore
Cal? What happened to Sergeant? Olivia picked up the box of tissues and goosed Jillian in the ribs with it. “Here, Jillian. Blow your nose.”
“It’s my fault,” Cal stated with a strident conviction that no one in the room could ignore.
“Cal,” Bear said, “don’t start that again.”
“It is. Nobody can tell me it’s not. I should never have let him go over to that place.”
Olivia couldn’t exactly pride herself on emotional perceptiveness, but even she heard the hiss of that blade. Something about the way he’d said the words that place with such distaste, like it was somewhere terrible. Shameful. Olivia saw every drop of blood drain from her granddaughter’s face.
Jillian stood motionless for a few seconds without blinking an eye. Something or other was said but Olivia’s ears were ringing too loudly to hear it and Jillian looked like she’d turned to stone.
“I think this girl has had enough activity today,” Olivia announced. “Dr. Sutherland would have my head on a platter if he knew I’d pranced her all over town. We’d best go.”
Jillian collected herself and leaned over and hugged Mrs. La Bauve. “I won’t stop thinking about Bully or any of you for a single moment. No one at Saint Sans will.”
Mrs. La Bauve reciprocated the embrace, a tear spilling from each eye. “Pray for us, honey. Pray for Billy. We don’t know what we’d do without him.”
“I will,” Jillian whispered through her own tears.
Neither Jillian nor Olivia said anything on the way down the elevator. Something awful and heavy and painful sat down on Olivia’s heart. This was what happened when you opened yourself up to people and sat by their beds and tended to their wounded heads. A terrible wave of nausea engulfed her. “Jillian, I’m going to have to go to the ladies’ room. I don’t want you to walk to the car without me. Can you wait here for me?”
Jillian nodded.
When she came out of the restroom a moment later and Jillian wasn’t where she’d promised to be, Olivia spun into a frenzy. She rushed back into the ladies’ room and called her name, glancing under the stalls. She darted into the cafeteria and checked every corner.
An elderly woman spoke from behind the information desk. “Is that who you’re looking for?”
It was Jillian, standing in the doorway to the chapel.
“Yes.” Olivia cleared her throat and blotted the perspiration on her upper lip. “Thank you.” She headed toward Jillian, but when she reached her and caught the focus of her attention, she stood next to her in silence.
“It’s Officer Sanchez,” Jillian whispered to Olivia.
“Yes.”
“She’s praying.”
“Yes, Jillian. She is.”
Jillian took a step forward and Olivia took her gently by her little finger. “Let me take you home. You’ve done too much today.”
“I promised Mrs. La Bauve.” Jillian tugged her hand from her grandmother’s grasp and walked down the aisle to the second pew, where Officer Sanchez knelt.
The officer looked up at her with surprise and started to get to her feet. Olivia could see that Jillian dissuaded her, shaking her head and whispering something Olivia couldn’t hear, before kneeling beside her.
Olivia watched from the doorway, blood rushing to her face. The awkwardness she felt on her granddaughter’s behalf was agony. She had no choice but to put a stop to it. Jillian was overwrought. It was as simple as that. Just as Olivia started forward to gather her up and take her home, Officer Sanchez smiled at Jillian and held out a hand to her. Jillian hesitated but eventually placed her hand in that open palm.
Officer Sanchez bowed her head. Olivia watched her granddaughter. Jillian’s gaze moved like a searchlight from one wall to the next, from picture to etching, from fixture to floor. Olivia thought how she’d give almost anything for a chance to look through the lenses of Jillian’s eyes right that moment. What did she see? Or what didn’t she see that she longed to see? The room was simple and the walls were stark. The atmosphere was pleasant enough. But expecting God to show up in a hospital chapel was like expecting a gourmet chef to show up in the hospital cafeteria.
Jillian lifted her chin and stared at the ceiling. Then she did the strangest thing. She looked over her shoulder at Olivia. What does she want from me? Rescue? Then, just like that, Olivia knew what Jillian’s eyes were saying.
Come with me.
Olivia’s stomach flipped and her chest constricted. She drew down her eyebrows and shook her head. No.
Jillian peered at Olivia a few seconds longer. Then she faced forward and bowed her head.
CHAPTER 52
FALL 1921
DURING THE FIRST SEVERAL WEEKS following the tragedy, Reverend Brashear walked through his days in a fog. The pastors of other churches came and paid their respects. Some tried to befriend and counsel their fellow servant of God. Even the unredeemed tipped their hats with pity when they passed the grieving reverend on the streets. Loss was no respecter of persons. The holy and unholy alike could enter the horror.
As he began to fumble his way back to life, a lovely young woman began coming to Saint Silvanus. Was it a coincidence? Was there a direct connection? No one knew for certain. But it was around that time the preacher began to heal.
As is often the case, there were those who believed they knew exactly what was happening, and they were not shy about sharing their insights with the unenlightened. Someone said the woman had been seen at the front door of the parsonage—after dark, no less. Perhaps she was only delivering a meal, but who could tell? Did she cross the threshold? There were varying opinions. Soon the idea began to circulate that she had a questionable reputation. A few declared, now that they’d had time to reflect on it, that they were certain they’d seen her on the back row of the chapel on a Sunday before the tragedy.
Rumors piled like kindling, sparks were fanned into flames, and eventually the Reverend R. J. Brashear was charged with the double murder of his wife and child. Not by the sheriff, let it be said, though under civic pressure, he’d circled by a couple of times with questions. No, Reverend R. J. Brashear was charged by the jury holding court on the pews of Saint Silvanus Methodist Church. A handful had remained by his side, calling the ordeal a godless farce, but they could neither pay his modest wages nor shield him on the streets from shame.
CHAPTER 53
JILLIAN FELT CAUGHT in a loop of cartwheels she couldn’t stop. She’d gone with Olivia to the hospital brokenhearted over Bully and come home from the hospital brokenhearted over Cal. Of course, she couldn’t tell anyone that. She’d feel too silly. Looking back on it now, she realized she’d made too much of that dance on Bully’s front porch.
An odd thing was happening between her and Olivia. They were getting a little more practice at being alone, just the two of them. They didn’t have to do it much because somebody else was usually close by at Saint Sans, but it was no longer awkward enough to avoid at any cost.
Olivia came into her room with her bifocals on and wearing her floor-length housecoat. She picked up the novel off Jillian’s nightstand and opened it to the page with the bookmark.
Jillian couldn’t get her mind off Cal or, for that matter, off Bully, so she rolled over on her side toward the nightstand and said, “I don’t feel much like reading tonight, O.” She’d been trying to use Olivia’s new grandmother name as much as possible so that she could stretch the elastic out in it where it wouldn’t feel so tight.
It had been Olivia’s suggestion that Jillian call her something other than Mrs. Fontaine.
“What would you like me to call you? How about Grandma? Or Nanny?” she’d asked, tongue in cheek.
“I don’t think so,” Olivia had said. “Somebody you call Grandma or Nanny, well, you have pictures with her that are in frames. That’s not really us.”
Jillian didn’t have any other ideas. “What do you want me to call you?”
“The way I see it, it’s not for me to say. It’s about what
you feel comfortable calling me. If it’s Olivia, we’ll go with that. If that’s all that’s true, then that’s all we’ve got.”
“Oh,” Jillian said.
“Hmm,” Olivia responded. “Give me a second to think on it. It’s not too bad. Come to think of it, it’s got a nice ring to it. Well, that was easier than I thought it would be.”
“Huh?”
“I like it. Let’s go with it. O it is.”
So that seemed to settle it.
Olivia was utterly undeterred by Jillian’s statement that she didn’t feel like reading tonight. “Well, that works just fine,” she said, “since you’re not the one reading.” She sat right down, got right to it, and Jillian stayed awake the whole time.
Olivia’s reading was mesmerizing. As smooth as silk. She knew just when to speed up and just when to slow down. It was an odd thing to Jillian that Olivia could do it so well with someone else’s story but she could rarely find the right words in the middle of her own. Jillian mustered up the courage to pay her an unsolicited compliment. “You could hire out to publishers to do their audiobooks. I love the way you read.”
It must have embarrassed Olivia because all she said in return was “You’re not asleep yet.”
“I know.”
“Then how am I supposed to know when to turn out the lamp?”
“I’ll turn it out in a few minutes. You go ahead.”
“What happened today keeping you awake?” Olivia asked.
“Which what happened?” Jillian was mortified that Olivia might know how she felt about Cal, especially after he’d spoken so disparagingly of Saint Sans.
“Whichever what happened is keeping you awake.”
“My stitches are itching.” It was all Jillian could think to say, and it wasn’t a lie.
“Friday and they’re out. In the meantime, I saw somewhere on the Internet—”
“You get on the Internet?” Jillian couldn’t help herself.
“Yes, Jillian, I get on the Internet. Do you think I’m stuck in the Stone Age? As I was saying, I saw somewhere that according to recent laboratory studies, popcorn has certain properties medically proven to stop the itches of stitches.”
Jillian bolted out of bed. Olivia popped corn the old-fashioned way with a big heavy pot, its bottom blanketed in oil. After the first pop, she kept the pan moving so the kernels wouldn’t burn. She did it rhythmically to-fro, to-fro, to-fro, to-fro like a metronome. A savory fragrance matching no other, that pan of popping corn wooed all three of the other residents out of their rooms. Olivia oversaw Jillian as she made a second batch.
“Slower, Jillian! And get that fire down!”
“I’m doing it slow, O!”
“Well, slower!” she barked. It was their way. And to them at that moment, their way was sublime.
After the pops were fewer and seconds apart, Jillian pulled the pan off the burner. Olivia took off the lid to inspect it and steam coated her bifocals and everybody laughed. She poured it into a large bowl, set down the pan, looked at Jillian without the least grin, and said, “Perfect corn.” Butter and salt flowed like milk and honey.
Jillian collapsed in her bed as the clock in the great room struck midnight, ending an odd concoction of a day and beginning a new one. She dropped off to sleep with two sentences competing for space in her stitched-up head.
“I should never have let him go over to that place.”
“Perfect corn.”
The next morning Jillian took her coffee out on the back porch. She felt warm and safe. As he left for work, David had seen her there and brought out his grandmother’s quilt to wrap around her.
She closed her eyes and felt the mild winter breeze tickle her nose and blow her messy morning hair. Suddenly a shock of words reverberated from somewhere nearby.
“Death and destruction will still come to the Fontaines and all they touch. They are a brood of crooks and murderers. A curse is upon them. A curse on you, Olivia Fontaine! A curse on your blood! A curse on all that belongs to you!”
Adrenaline shot Jillian to her feet. Stella! But she was supposed to be in jail.
Jillian tripped over the quilt and landed on her hands and knees. Her heart was pounding. She looked frantically at the gate. Stella wasn’t there. She looked through the back glass of Saint Sans into the great room. Stella wasn’t there either. Where was she?
A tall bush on the other side of the fence started shaking and the limbs started rattling. Between the slats in the fence, she saw a figure—a person—run toward the front of the house. Jillian ran through the back door and screamed, “She’s here! She’s here! Call the police!”
“Jillian, who?” Olivia cried out loudly, her face instantly radiating alarm.
“Stella!” The name came out of Jillian’s mouth so shrill and chilling it sounded like the cry of a screech owl.
“Girls, get in Caryn’s room now! Shut the door and lock it!”
Caryn grabbed Mrs. Winsee by the hand and flew with her down the hall screaming for Jillian to follow them.
After several minutes of untethered hysteria, Olivia called the three girls out of Caryn’s room. Jillian could see Olivia’s pistol weighing down the right pocket of her housecoat. Her cell phone was in her hand.
“I just got off the phone with Officer Sanchez. Stella is safe and secure in custody under constant watch.”
“But it was her! I heard her! I know her voice!” Jillian had no uncertainty.
“I believe you, Jillian. We all do,” Olivia reassured her. “Now, tell us how you know it was her.”
“She must have thought you were out there with me, O. She screamed at you.”
“What did she scream at me, Jillian? Tell me what she said.”
“It sounds crazy but she was screaming, ‘A curse on you, Olivia Fontaine!’ She kept shouting weird stuff about curses. ‘A curse on your blood’ and stuff like that. She’s nuts!”
Olivia stumbled, and Jillian reached for her, afraid she was about to faint. She and Caryn helped her sit down.
“Vida?” Olivia lifted her face and spoke to Mrs. Winsee. “Vida, are you listening to me?”
“Yes, Olivia. I’m listening.”
“Everything is fine here. This was just a fire drill. We should have told you in advance before we practiced.”
“You surely should have. And you should have told Mr. Winsee. If this had been a real fire, was he supposed to crawl out the window, him with that bad knee?”
“Vida?” Olivia persisted. “After all that drama, we could use a snack. Don’t you think?”
“I’ll whip up something!”
“Thank you. Why don’t you make us a beautiful spread of yogurt and berries and walnuts? No one can make a yogurt parfait like you.”
As Mrs. Winsee began rummaging through the refrigerator as happy as a lark, Olivia looked at Caryn and Jillian with an expression so serious, the hair stood up on the back of Jillian’s neck. With a nod of her head, she indicated the far end of the room.
Jillian and Caryn settled on the Snapdragon and Olivia took the chair nearby. “Jillian, what you heard was a recording. One that had obviously been meticulously remastered by a reporter for full volume and effect.”
“What are you talking about?”
So Olivia told her everything, including how they now knew Stella had been the one who’d left the flowers with the card that said Atonement.
“What does it mean?” Jillian asked, hanging on every word.
Olivia could generally pummel a paragraph into its frankest phrase to convey what she wanted to say. This time, however, she hemmed and hawed with a rare lack of coherence.
“She said you were cursed. Is that creepy or what?” Jillian inquired.
“Stupid nonsense,” Caryn said.
Jillian tended to be more superstitious than Caryn, more frightened of the dark and far easier to spook than her scientific friend. “I don’t know. It puts chills up my spine.”
Later in the day Olivia asked if
she could speak to Jillian privately. They stepped into Rafe’s room and closed the door.
“I want you out of here as soon as possible, far away from this place.”
Jillian’s heart would have been irreparably damaged except for the fact that Olivia’s expression and the tone of her voice conveyed something entirely different from her forceful words.
“It’s the curse thing, isn’t it? You think it’s real.”
“Jillian, that woman was younger than you when her father, Mr. Steadman Nolan—” She stopped for a few seconds, like she was reading her granddaughter’s expression to measure how blunt she could be. She picked back up uncensored—“hanged himself over losing that lawsuit. A few months later we started getting a string of anonymous letters making those same claims. The letters went on for a year. In fact, I believe it was a year to the day.”
“You think it was her,” Jillian returned.
“Yes. I know it was. Back then I thought it was religious nuts threatening us with the vengeance of the Lord. Many were outraged by the court decision over the lawsuit,” Olivia explained. “Those threats could have come from any number of people.”
“Did you believe in those curses at the time?”
“Not when I was in a rational state of mind. But as time went on, our lives got worse and worse. Rafe, sinking into alcoholism, until he was no longer able to work, no longer able to—” the words looked brutal for Olivia—“to stay sober, even with continual bouts in rehab. I did everything I knew to do until his father demanded I stop.”
“Tough love,” Jillian said.
“Jillian, do not give your grandfather that much credit. No, I don’t believe that was his motive. Nevertheless, Rafe ended up on the streets, Mr. Fontaine further and further into questionable business deals and practices, and me deeper and deeper in . . . well, in whatever I’m in. Nothing went right. Not one thing unless you count a mound of money—made by God only knows what means. Then Mr. Fontaine died, then Rafe. Slowly. One day, one drink, at a time.”
