by Gwen Florio
But then, who wouldn’t be vengeful? Nora thought that, for the rest of her life, she’d see Robert Evans’s face, the sheepish smile, the apologetic shrug, just minutes before his death. She’d done the right thing by Robert – albeit belatedly – turning in the phone when she’d found it. Wasn’t it enough to see Alden punished?
Did Bobby’s face rise before her mother whenever she closed her eyes? Had her mother ever been tempted to do the right thing, after she’d done the very worst thing? She had to have known, when she’d taken Nora and Grace into the very room where she’d shot him, showed them where his blood had darkened the floor, that Grace would demand justice. But did justice have to come at the hands of her own daughter?
Nora took the gun from its case.
Walked it across the lawn.
Sat down on the dock and let her feet dangle in the water, just as she had that first time when Alden had rowed around the bend and pulled her into a legacy she hadn’t realized was her own.
She watched the sun rise on a world washed clean by the previous night’s rain, chevrons of geese honking overhead, the year-round flocks seeing their numbers grow daily as their cousins from Canada arrived.
Murph found her there, her joints gone stiff as his own during her long hours on the dock’s unforgiving boards. He shoved his face against hers, giving her cheek a swipe with his tongue for good measure. She sent a couple of texts, put a hand on the dog’s warm broad back and pushed herself to her feet and walked weeping back to her trailer.
Grace arrived well before Holiday and Satterline.
She and Nora sat on opposite sides of the front step, Nora in jeans – it was finally cool enough to wear them – and a T-shirt, Grace proper in a blue pin-tucked blouse, navy skirt, hose and pumps, the rosewood box in her lap, hands wrapped protectively around it. Could nothing crack the woman’s composure?
‘I want to let her sleep as long as possible. I’ll wake her when I hear their car turn into the lane.’
Grace gave a brief nod, permitting this last bit of mercy.
Nora wondered if they’d arrest her mother on the spot. She tried to recall the legal details of her own brush with the law. Surely there’d be an investigation first? There’d be the indignity of the initial booking, the mug shot. Some hearings, maybe – red meat for the press. Bail, at some point. She’d have to put up Quail House as a guarantee. Unless, of course, a judge could be convinced that an elderly woman posed no threat to society and could be counted on to show up for all her court appearances.
Which is how it almost certainly would have gone years earlier. But now, Nora could imagine the justifiable outrage such a decision would provoke – a wealthy white woman given the kind of consideration never, ever shown to black murder suspects and precious few white ones. A few minutes’ extra sleep seemed the least she could do.
Murph paced, whining. He’d been like that ever since she emerged from the trailer, where a shower and clean clothes had failed to restore her spirits. Every few minutes he climbed partway up the stairs, laid his head on her knee and stared urgently before resuming his pacing. The cat, who’d started all the trouble, was nowhere to be seen.
The minutes oozed past.
‘Probably ran into traffic on Fifty,’ Nora said. Anything to break the silence.
‘In the middle of the week?’
Grace had a point. Beach traffic clogged the road on weekends, but most days it stretched straight and empty, an irresistible temptation to speeders.
A greenhead or two buzzed around them but bumbled away, as though knowing fall lurked. The sun rose higher, a friend after weeks of blazing enmity, lulling Nora – her nerves scraped raw after the events of the previous day and the sleepless night on the dock – into a half-doze.
Then, the car.
She jolted upright. Surely it was too soon.
Grace stood in a single fluid motion, the box now clutched to her chest. ‘Get her.’
‘Grace …’
There was still time. Grace was an elderly woman. She could snatch the box away, race to the river, do what she should have done the previous night.
The black car came into view.
Grace’s words hit like hard-flung stones. ‘Do you want them to take her away in her nightclothes?’
Nora pushed open the front door. Her steps echoed in the hallway, past the parlor, the kitchen, the dining room, the library and to her mother’s bedroom at the back of the house, Murph shoving past her, leading the way, trotting now, casting anxious glances over his shoulder.
She stopped outside the bedroom. ‘Mother?’
She tapped on the door. ‘Mother?’
Murph gave her a disgusted look and nosed it open.
Penelope lay on her side, her back to Nora, a bony bare shoulder peeking from beneath the sheet. Nora tiptoed over, pulled up the shoulder strap of her mother’s nightgown, and shook her gently. ‘Mother. Wake up. There’s something I need to tell you.’
Penelope fell over on to her back. Her eyes stared sightless at the ceiling.
Nora backed away. Her breath came harsh, drowning out the sound of three pairs of feet moving deliberately toward the room. Bodies moved like shadows around and past her, hovering over the bed.
A scream gouged the air, Grace’s composure finally cracking with a long, drawn-out ‘Nooooooooo’ that carried fifty years of pain and frustration and thwarted judgment.
FIFTY-NINE
Nora parked truck and trailer at the far end of Commerce Street, where there was space enough to accommodate them.
She lowered the truck’s windows a few inches to give Murph some air and told Mooch, caterwauling in his plastic carrier, to knock it off. ‘We’ve got a lot of miles ahead. You’re just going to have to get used to it.’
She walked the few blocks to the coffee shop, back stiffened against the curious stares of passers-by.
Grace had been wrong in thinking Penelope had cheated everyone by checking out – even though Brittingham had assured Nora that the coroner would almost certainly rule the death as accidental.
‘It’s pretty clear that her heart just stopped,’ he said. ‘Given her age and everything she’s been through recently, I’m not surprised. There’s no note. I don’t see any need for an autopsy.’
A few days after her death, Nora, Grace and Kwame all received registered letters from George Hathaway, the Smythe family attorney. Enclosed in each was another letter, sealed.
‘Mrs Best wrote these letters some years ago and asked that they be delivered to you upon her passing along with a separate letter that she asked me to mail to the Attorney General’s Office,’ Hathaway wrote.
Nora’s letter detailed an abbreviated version of the account she’d given Grace and Nora of Bobby’s death. She also penned an apology to Grace and a longer one to Kwame, as she wrote in her letter to Nora.
I don’t expect either of them to forgive me, or you either, for that matter. I only ask that you live your life unafraid, as I wish I had done.
The Attorney General’s Office had released a short statement, to the effect that one Penelope Emmaline Smythe Best had confessed to the 1967 killing of Robert Gerald Evans, and that ballistics tests on a recently discovered Baby Browning gun bore out her account. Case closed.
Chateau, black and white alike, would feast for years on the story.
Nora would forever be the child of a murderer. But, unless the Evans family chose to reveal it, Bobby’s liaison with a white girl, and Kwame’s parentage, would remain a secret best kept.
Which is what Nora told her brother over coffee that morning.
‘If you choose to tell, I’ll corroborate it. And I’ll add that, no matter how you feel about it, I’m happy to have a brother. Whether you want to see me again, or have anything to do with me at all, it’s up to you. But you’re the only family I’ve got now.’
She held her coffee cup in front of her face as she spoke, the steam rising between them, obscuring Kwame’s face. She put it down, r
eminding herself one last time of the vow she’d made as she’d driven into Chateau the night Robert was killed. She was done running, done hiding from things.
She’d failed, badly, on that promise. But she could try again. Hence, her call to Grace, asking her to pass along a message to Kwame requesting this meeting. She’d been surprised when Grace agreed, more surprised still when he showed up.
‘I don’t know about us seeing each other again,’ Kwame said. ‘Might take me a while. A long while.’
She held the cup so tightly she was afraid it might crack within her grip. She let go of it and flexed her fingers. ‘That’s fair.’
‘Our mother,’ he said, as though testing out the notion.
‘She kept a picture of you, you know. From the newspaper. I found it on her nightstand. I thought she’d just forgotten to throw away that day’s paper. But there were photos of both you and your father with that story. And then, the day of the march in town, she was there. I thought I spotted her and told myself I was seeing things. But she’d said something to me about being able to drive, even with the boot on her leg. Now I realize she didn’t want to miss a chance to see you in person.’
He lifted his own coffee cup and stared into it as though expecting answers to emerge.
‘I don’t mind telling you that I’m having a hard time dealing with all of this.’ He set it down without drinking.
‘Me, too.’
They shared a brief, rueful smile.
‘I have something for you.’ She put a fat envelope in front of him.
He regarded it as one might eyeball a snake charmer’s basket, waiting for the cobra to raise its head, spread its hood, hiss a warning.
‘What is it?’
‘A deed to the house. It’s in both your name and Grace’s. I worked it out with Emerson Crothers and Mr Hathaway to make sure there won’t be a tax penalty.’
He reared back as though a snake indeed had slithered from the envelope.
‘I don’t want it.’
She nudged it toward him. ‘I don’t blame you. Everything needs fixing. The bricks need pointing, the floors refinishing, and the rugs are worn through. Now that I’m taking the cat away, it’ll probably be overrun with mice again within the week. Oh, and the river is eroding the bank, taking a little more of the lawn every year. At some point, it’ll be lapping at the back patio.’
‘When you put it that way, I can’t imagine why you want to get rid of it.’
She guffawed and was gratified when, after a moment, he joined in. For a split second, they were two siblings, enjoying a laugh at their own expense.
‘Mother would spin in her grave. Maybe. On the other hand, you’re family. Better you than strangers. That said, you can always sell it. Em assures me he’s got half a dozen clients in Washington who’ll fight each other to pay way more than it’s worth.’
‘White people.’ Kwame shook his head.
‘Rich people,’ she said.
‘Same thing, usually.’
They sipped their coffee in silent contemplation of the gulf between them.
‘Couldn’t you just keep it and rent it out to those same rich people?’ he asked after a time.
‘Sure. But I’m never coming back here. That saying – “You can’t go home again.” I had to find out the hard way that it’s true. It would have been, even if all this hadn’t happened.’
But it was more than that, more even than the fact that a young man had bled out as her mother stood over him, gun in hand.
For her whole life, she’d listened to her mother spin fantasies about the women who’d once populated Quail House. It had never occurred to her that many of those women must have been slaves, washing and scrubbing and polishing the pretty things handed down through the generations, the things Penelope so cherished. The house and everything in it felt tainted.
After Penelope’s body had been taken away, and Satterline and Holiday and the local police and coroner and even Grace had left, she’d wandered the rooms in the echoing silence, fingering the heavy, dusty drapes at the windows, the acres of book in the library, and wondered what it might be like to touch a match – several matches – to such ready fuel. Wasn’t that how great houses that shield corruption are supposed to meet their end? Manderley ablaze; the madwoman on the ramparts of Thornfield, backlit by dancing flames.
Instead, she grabbed a few keepsakes – framed photos of her parents and grandparents and, after a moment’s hesitation, the tea service – and fled to the safety of Electra before temptation could get the upper hand.
Kwame fingered the envelope. ‘Where are you headed?’
I don’t know.
She’d thought herself done running when she arrived in Chateau, returning to a ready-made home, taking the easy way out of her dilemma. Wherever she landed next, she’d have to make her own home.
‘For now, I’m going back to Colorado. I got a call yesterday. They caught the woman who killed my ex. Her husband nearly killed me. There’ll be a trial. They want me there for the court hearings.’
She’d imagined going through a similar scenario with her mother, with Grace and Kwame sitting in the courtroom, the judgment in their eyes far exceeding anything the legal system might administer.
Now she’d be the one demanding justice. She wondered if the woman – a longtime grifter who’d been calling herself Miranda Gardner when Nora met her – had a family who would come to her court appearances, let her know she wasn’t alone in the world, that no matter how much damage she’d done on the worst day of her life, someone still loved her.
She rose from the table. ‘Please tell Grace I said goodbye.’
That wry smile again. ‘She’d probably say good riddance.’
Nora smiled back. ‘She probably would.’
Kwame started to say something, then stopped.
‘What is it?’
‘She’s got your cell number, right?’
Nora’s heart leapt. ‘Yes. But I can give it to you just in case.’
‘I’d like that.’
She tiptoed out on to a limb.
‘If you give me yours, I’ll text it to you.’
She held her breath.
He recited a string of numbers. She punched them into her phone.
‘Just in case we ever need to be in touch,’ he said. ‘About the house, or something.’
Or all the things our families never talked about.
They looked into each other’s eyes. Penelope’s eyes.
Maybe they’d see each other again someday. Maybe, on that day, she and her brother would hug.
On this day, Nora was just grateful for the handshake he offered.
Murphy’s nose poked through the lowered window as she approached the truck. Right on cue, Mooch resumed yowling.
Driving the truck on its own, the trip to Denver would take a full three days. Hauling the trailer – and without the frantic, sleepless energy that had propelled her return to Chateau – it would take considerably longer.
She felt a moment’s pang as she steered the truck past the outskirts of town, on to the highway, the cornfields spooling past, the arches of the Bay Bridge rising before her, leading her up and out of the Eastern Shore, back on to the mainland and west toward the unknown. Again.
Which, given what now constituted her known world, was newly attractive.
There’d been a second letter – just a note, really. It fell to her lap when she lowered the truck’s sun visor on her first drive to town after Penelope’s death. She imagined her mother on that last endless night sitting at her dressing table, writing the few lines, folding the paper in triplicate, slipping it into the envelope. Puzzling over where to leave it. Not the coffee canister – Nora would dip into that as soon as she awoke; might find her too soon. Not beneath Nora’s pillow in the upstairs bedroom. She had to know Nora would never sleep there again.
So, the truck, probably holding her breath as she crept past the trailer, hoping the sound of the truck’s door
opening and closing wouldn’t wake Nora, sleeping – maybe – in the trailer just a few feet away. A smile of satisfaction at this final small feat. Then, hurrying back to the house and preparing a last cup of tea, swallowing a pill between each sip.
I won’t ask your forgiveness for the unforgivable, Penelope wrote.
My cowardice deprived you of a brother and him of a mother – and, worst of all, of a father. All because I didn’t want people to think poorly of me. Now they will think the worst, and rightfully so. I hope you will leave Chateau and the rot within it behind. Just know that the same danger lurks in every town. In these past weeks, you’ve shown me that you’re braver than I. I love you and, even more than that, I’m proud of you.
A greenhead fly flew through the open window, landed on her neck and helped itself to a great, bloodthirsty chomp. Nora smashed it against her skin, flung its carcass away and drove on.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Eternal gratitude to my agent, Richard Curtis. Respect and a healthy serving of amazement to editor Carl Smith, who guided a manuscript written in the midst of the pandemic into coherence. Deep thanks to the rest of the Severn House team – Kate Lyall Grant, Natasha Bell, Katherine Laidler, Jem Butcher, Michelle Duff and Kathryn Blair. J.J. Hensley provided key gun-related phrasing. When I sought information about Porsches, Beth Major reminded me that Dennis Major (license plate: No Decaf) would have recommended a Boxster. Apologies to my parents for the heresy of giving the names of our beloved black Labradors, Kathleen Mavourneen and Michael Murphy, to Chesapeake Bay retrievers. In memory of Nell, who slept across my feet, effectively keeping me in my chair as I wrote. And, always, love to Scott for his unwavering support for this crazy writing life.
