I jerked them away. “Oh, God. No. No, Eli.” I stabbed my hands into the dirt again. Eli grabbed for them again. “Darl, I won’t let—”
I cut him off with a ragged groan. My fingers curled around something small and oval, maybe a rock, maybe not. I pulled upward. The small object fit neatly in the palm of my hand, encased in wet clay. I lifted it into the lantern light between Eli and I, scrubbing it with my thumbs, the damp red dirt falling away. A texture as fine as hair emerged. I speared my fingers through that, and stretched it out. A thin necklace. Before I brushed the last crust of dirt from the object attached to that necklace, I knew what it was. A moment later—the marble crusted and dirty but the tiny diamond catching the lantern light—Clara’s family pendant lay in the light for the first time in a quarter-century. In the bottom of the hole the puddled clay showed just the edges of what must be vertebrae. I had pulled the necklace from the bones of Clara’s throat.
I looked at Eli’s stunned expression. Comprehension, agony, pity, and fury filled his eyes, until I couldn’t bear his sight or mine. I closed the pendant in my fist and bowed my head.
“Tell me what you’ve always known,” he said.
“I was here when Swan killed her.”
He sagged back on his heels, free of the past, but ruined. Both of us. We sat across from each other, and cried.
Restless, Swan had been standing at her bedroom window when she saw Darl and Eli left the mansion, crossed the back lawn and went down the terrace steps. The light from the terrace lamppost showed the tools they carried. Swan pressed a hand to her heart, measured the painful, racing beat, turned slowly, and sat down on the day bed. I’ve lost. I’m losing Matilda and I’ve lost Darl, and this is how it ends. She was suddenly very tired.
Across the room, Matilda stirred. A nightlight cast soft shadows on her. From that darkness, her slurred voice rose urgently. “Swan. Swan.”
Swan held the daybed’s white iron footboard, rose weakly to her feet, and crossed the room with the thudding in her chest making it hard to breathe. When she reached Matilda she knew instantly it was very bad. Matilda gasped a strange sound. Swan sank down beside her, slid one arm beneath her neck, took her trembling hand, and bent over her. “Something’s wrong,” Matilda whispered. “With me. With us.” Shards of fear joined, hardened, began to shine. Intuition or coincidence, fate, timing, the arrival of last chances and lost hopes. “I’ll call the nurse,” Swan said.
“No. Please. I don’t want to be an invalid. I see that coming.”
Small agonies rose in Swan’s chest. She bowed her head to Matilda’s. “Don’t go.”
“Set them free. Save them. Our granddaughters. Save them from our mistakes.”
“Stay and help me.”
“Let me go. Let yourself go. That’s the love we have to give them.”
Matilda did not quite shut her eyes. She sighed. Swan gathered her closer, rocked her, and cried very quietly, the only safe way. “Sister,” she whispered.
Eli looked at Darl across Clara’s grave, listening as she told him everything, how it all happened, and why. He watched the pain pour through her, like a ripple in her skin, and it twisted him inside. She looked at him as if there was no doubt he hated her, and he didn’t know how, yet, to admit he could forgive her. A part of him said he shouldn’t. A part of him said nothing should have mattered to her but the truth, and goddamn her family. Rage boiled up in him.
She finished speaking—ragged, exhausted, covered in tears and the dirt of Clara’s grave, on her knees—like him. He stood, took the shovel that lay beside them, turned, and slammed it against the stone flower vase. Sparks flew from the steel on marble. The sound rang through the forest. The shovel’s handle split in two, and chips of marble cascaded around them. A shard of it flicked across Eli’s face beneath one eye, leaving a bloody welt. Darl didn’t move. A trickle of blood slid from a scratch on her chin. She never took her eyes off him.
“I’ve written it all down,” she said. “Everything about my grandmother and me. What happened, and how. Everything except Matilda. I left her out. My confession is in an envelope in the library. Tomorrow I’ll take that envelope to the courthouse and hand it to the district attorney. All I ask you—all I beg you—is that you never tell anyone about Matilda’s involvement.”
Her sacrificing words make Eli’s knees weak. “I want to know why you couldn’t tell me before.”
She sagged a little. “God help me,” she whispered. “I love you, but I love my grandmother, too.”
Eli stepped around the open grave and dropped to his knees in front of her. “Give me the necklace,” he ordered hoarsely, and held out his hand. She has to choose, and she’ll choose me. Darl placed Clara’s pendant on his palm. “Choose,” he ordered. “Choose between me and what this stands for. Choose between me and Swan. Choose, and walk away with me, and never look back.”
“I can’t,” she whispered. “Swan’s in me, she’s part of me—everything we are, everything she suffered through to make a life for herself, for Matilda, for Karen. For me. I won’t leave her.”
Eli took Darl by the shoulders. “You just gave me my pa back. Free and clear, innocent. But I want my girl, too.” Tears slid down her face. She shook her head. “You have to let go of me. I’ll punish Swan my own way.”
The bell at Marble Hall began to ring.
I was numb. Eli wanted to forgive me, but I wouldn’t let him. Leon, who had sequestered himself in a downstairs room that night, stood by the big iron bell on its marble post, shadowed by the landscape lights and the weird cast of the swimming pool’s submerged lamps. When Eli and I climbed the terrace steps I saw the tears on Leon’s face and the water running from his soggy clothes. He jerked his head toward the pool.
Swan lay on wide marble steps that descended into the shallow end, her head pillowed on one arm along the marble lip, her hair streaming in the water around her shoulders. A fine mist rose from the pool. Her white gown and robe floated around her. The sight she made was haunting and unreal. Angel and spirit, free of gravity, unbound by anyone’s rules but her own.
“I found her and pulled her to the edge,” Leon said. “She’d come down from her room. Nobody saw her.” He paused. His throat worked. “I’ve called for an ambulance.” Another pause. “Karen’s upstairs with her grandma.” Leon looked over at the mansion with grief in his face. “Miss Matilda’s dead.”
I lunged past him, running towards the pool, and heard Eli’s strides behind me. Plowing into the water around the steps, I sank down beside my grandmother, pushed her hair back, and took her face between my hands. Her eyes were shut; even in the dim light I saw the terrible, pinched color of her skin. “Swan,” I called quietly. “Grandmother.” She opened her eyes, those stark blue orbs going lifeless even then, and looked up at me. “I know where you took Eli,” she said.
I nodded. “I’m in charge, now. I’ve told him everything.”
Her gaze flickered beyond me as Eli stepped down into the water on her other side. His face grim, he leaned over her, simply holding her gaze. I realized dimly that Leon had followed and now stood over us all, on the pool’s edge. “I have to go see about Karen,” he said grimly, then left us for the house. Alone with Swan and Eli, I repeated what I’d said. “I’m in charge, now, Grandmother. I make the decisions. I’ve told Eli what we did. I’ll deal with the consequences.”
“You always amaze me.” Her gaze remained on Eli. His eyes bored into her mercilessly. He slowly raised his hand before her face, then let Clara’s pendant descend from the dirt-encrusted necklace clenched in his fingers. It shimmered in the misty light. “You killed your sister,” he said. “And you let my pa die for it.”
She acknowledged the truth with a dip of her eyelids, then wet her lips with her tongue. “Push me under the water. Do it. My family carved yours from the finest stone. I made you what you are. I mad
e you worthy of my Darl. You’re strong enough to kill me.”
My skin crawled. I hunched over her and watched Eli with open agony. His face tightened. Tears glimmered in his eyes, but the goodness in him surfaced like a hard polish. “I can’t hate you more than I love Darl.” He flung the pendant aside.
I was crying now, silently but with blessings. Swan’s eyes went to me. “Then you do it.” Her voice was a bare breath, wheezing and pained. “Prove you can do what you have to do. I taught you how.”
I shook my head. She had brought us there for a perverse baptism—returning her soul to her, but also giving ours back. I slid one arm under her shoulders and stroked her cheek with my fingertips covered in the soil of the Stone Flower Garden. “I love you. You never understood that.”
“Yes, I did. But I couldn’t let you. For your sake. And for mine. Love is so hard.”
“No, it’s not. Let me just hold you, now. Whatever happens, I’ll be here.”
I broke her. I saw the love in her face, the apology, the lonely peace. Eli had asked me to choose, but I couldn’t, so Swan was choosing for me. Setting me free but settling the truth on me like a stone weight, my choice being how to carry it. “Granddaughter,” she whispered. “My heart is gone. You have it.”
I kissed her forehead, her eyes, her cheeks. It was the first time in my life I had ever touched my lips to her skin. She died in my arms, floating.
Darl refused to leave her grandmother’s body, or Matilda’s. She and Karen, who was fractured with grief, followed their grandmothers’ corpses to the hospital morgue, and then the Burnt Stand Funeral Home. Holding hands, they sat all night with the sheeted bodies in a cool, shadowed room with marble floors. People from all over the county heard of the two deaths and came in silent respect, sitting on blankets in the darkness, under the cloudy moon and the shadows of the autumn mountains, until by dawn the rain-dampened lawn of the funeral home was filled with a waiting crowd.
Eli walked the blocks through town to the Broadside house, turned on the lights downstairs, woke Mama and Bell, and told them simply that Swan and Matilda had died in the night. Mama bent her head in prayer. Bell cried. Eli tried to decide what truth he needed to tell them, but couldn’t. Pa was innocent. They had to hear that, and soon. He groaned inside himself and heard Darl’s words, over and over. I was there when Swan killed Clara.
“What’s troublin’ your heart?” Mama asked Eli. He shook his head. She let him alone, for the moment. Bell stayed with little Jessie but Mama dressed and walked back through town with him. The crowd on the lawn—stonecutters and merchants, townsfolk and farmers—parted for her to pass. She settled on the funeral home’s veranda and began to read out loud from her Bible. People nodded along with her. Eli seated himself in a straight chair next to Leon, in a dark corner. “What were you and Darl doing in the woods?” Leon ventured wearily.
“I’ll tell you when I know how to say the words,” Eli said. Or what words to say, he added silently. Leon nodded. They smoked cigars and said little else. It was easy to imagine Swan and Matilda gliding past the veranda with youthful hope, easy to curl smoke into the air and picture the tragic half-sisters stepping through its veil toward their lost loved ones—their beloved daughters, their innocence. Eli looked into the cold autumn morning, hidden in smoke and silver mountain mist. He thought his grandpa must be watching from the vapors, reunited at last with Matilda. And Pa was watching from that other world, too. Eli hunched over, his head down as he pretended to nurture the cigar, hiding his emotions. Pa, I know you’re with me right now. Forgive me for ever doubtin’ you. Forgive me. I love you. Talk to me. Tell me what to do.
The answer rose silently in Eli, echoing his father’s heart, letting him know how to offer and receive forgiveness.
Leave no stone unturned, no love forgotten.
Carve the rest away.
Dawn cast shards of light through pale curtains, dappling our grandmothers’ shrouded forms. Karen and I sat on a couch across from the draped gurneys that held their bodies, in a small room at the funeral home, not meant for the public. A single wall sconce lit our faces. Karen rested her head on my shoulder. I put my arms around her and closed my eyes against her thick chocolate hair. We had cried all we could.
You have my heart.
Swan’s words hurt and hurt again, painful with their irony, their joy, their confession. I missed her, I mourned her, I hated her, I loved her. Most of all, I knew what she’d left me to do. I’d tell everyone the truth about Swan and me. About Clara. My heart was gone, too. Only the truth and Eli could give it back.
“I don’t know what else to say to my grandmother or yours,” Karen whispered in a tear-soaked voice. “What will we do without them?”
I kissed her hair.
“We’ll love as best we can and never give up,” I said.
Just as we’d been taught.
Eli rose to his feet as Darl stepped out onto the veranda of the funeral home as the sun rose higher over the mountains. Leon stood at the sight of Karen, who followed Darl. The crowd got to its feet respectfully. Mama closed her Bible and folded her hands over the fine, parched white leather, burnished by her fingertips. Her eyes, beneath tousled gray hair, shimmered with sorrow. Darl’s haunted blue gaze went to her, then to Eli, asking for no mercy. Everything inside him twisted at the sight of her, unfurled, coiled, demanded release, and found calm. She gripped Karen’s hand, then released it. Karen stared at the respectful crowd in dull amazement, then found herself in Leon’s capable bear hug, and wound her arms around his waist.
Darl stepped to the edge of the veranda. “I have something to tell all of you,” she began, and understanding knifed through Eli. She turned to him and Mama. “To you, most of all,” she said. And then, to Karen. “And to my cousin, Karen. I’m sorry to do it this way, but if I learned anything from our grandmothers, it’s the strength to do what has to be done.”
Her head up, Darl riveted her eyes to Eli’s. The love in her gaze tore him apart. She was about to ruin herself for his sake, and he couldn’t let her. He leapt forward, startling her. “Let me,” he said. She opened her mouth in protest, but he slid a hand along her jaw and pressed his little finger over her lips. Before she could speak again he looked at Mama. “Swan told us the truth before she died. She’s the one who killed her sister twenty-five years ago. Her by herself. She confessed to Darl and me before she died.”
The crowd gasped. Karen made a garbled sound and said, “Oh, Darl,” in incredulous sympathy, and when Eli looked at her and Leon, even Leon couldn’t help a stare of horrified surprise. Mama’s face stilled, and a look of beseeching hope mingled with sorrow in her eyes. That hope burst into full understanding. She clasped her hands to her heart. Pa was innocent. It had been proved. It had been proclaimed.
Eli turned his gaze back to Darl’s stunned, upturned face. She searched his eyes. He kept his finger over her lips and said to the crowd again, “She killed her sister and let my Pa get the blame. It was all her doing. Just her.”
Darl’s lips moved slightly. Why?
“I love you,” Eli said, and slowly enclosed her in his arms.
She slid trembling hands up his back and held onto him for dear life.
It all happened so fast after that, as if Swan’s death had been the key to a door that now swung open easily. That afternoon Eli and I led Leon and Karen to the Stone Flower Garden along with the county sheriff, the coroner, the funeral home director, and several other local officials. There, with due process, we dug up Clara’s bones. I forced myself to look at them, and felt Eli’s strong grip on my hand as I did. The funeral director carried the remains away in a rubber bag, followed by the others. Eli, Leon, Karen and I stood by the empty grave alone as autumn leaves sifted down on us, already filling the hole.
“I’m so sorry for you,” Karen said to me, hugging me, then stepping back, her face angui
shed. “For what your grandmother did. And that you have to live with it.”
“I’ll be all right. I can manage better than I realized.” I looked up at Eli. His dark eyes were quiet and sad, supportive and victorious. There was too much emotion for either of us to sort through, at the moment. Karen touched his arm. “I’m sorry for you, too. For what our family did to yours.” Her voice broke. “I’m sure if my grandmother were here she’d apologize for Swan and beg us to understand how Swan could do something so horrible—”
“We’re all family,” Eli said quietly. “And we’ll still be family. It all comes down to that.”
Leon cleared his throat. “It’s the end of Hardigree Marble. The company’ll never be the same without Swan and Matilda. Neither will the town.”
“I disagree,” I said. I turned to Karen. “My grandmother’s will divides the company between you and me.” I paused. “And the mansion, too. We both own Marble Hall, now.”
“Oh, Darl.”
“It’s only fair. She and Matilda were both Hardigrees. Everything belonged to the two of them, whether people knew it, or not.” We all stood there for a minute, absorbing the news. Swan’s attorney had brought me a copy of her will only hours earlier. I put a hand over hers. “Are you sure you’re going to stay here?”
She looked at Leon. “Yes.”
“Then I’m giving my half to you. The company, and the estate.” I nodded to Leon. “To both of you.”
“Darl, you can’t,” Karen began, and Leon was already shaking his head.
The Stone Flower Garden Page 30
