Arrowood

by Laura McHugh

  “What did he want?”

  “To talk to you,” he said. “He didn’t want to stick around, though, after we left the station. I’m afraid we rattled him a bit, but I thought it was better to get the police involved and make sure he wasn’t a threat. He gave me a message for you.” He adjusted his cap, his fingers brushing over the spot where the thread embroidering the Midwest Mysteries logo had begun to fray.

  “He wanted to tell you that your dad’s greatest regret in life was not being there for his kids. That was told to him in confidence, but he felt like your dad would have wanted you to know. He thought, in time, that Eddie would have come to tell you that himself—he wanted to make amends.”

  I wondered if my dad had come up with that on his own, or if he’d had to fill out a worksheet for the twelve-step program and when it came to listing regrets he’d checked off all the most common ones. At Dad’s funeral, I was surprised when the priest said that “Amazing Grace” was my father’s favorite song. It made me wonder if there was a part of my father that I hadn’t known, if he had sought grace and redemption, and found it. I later learned from my mother that it was all part of the prepaid funeral plan Granddad had forced both of them to complete years before. It asked which hymn you wanted played at your funeral, and when my dad said he didn’t care, the planner defaulted to the most popular one. The same with the poem printed on the program, which I’d seen on so many others, at so many funerals, that it offered no comfort: Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there; I do not sleep. I knew most of it by heart.

  Josh smiled apologetically. “I hate to do this, but I have to run. I agreed to meet up with a group of people from the website. I’d cancel, but it was already arranged, and some of them traveled—”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “We’re all finished here.” I was disappointed, though. I had thought he might want to stay and talk. I wanted to tell him about Heaney, but it could wait for another time.

  Josh walked away with his head down and his hands in his pockets. A pair of volunteers from the historical society stopped by to sweep for stragglers and escort them out, and once the door closed behind them, I blew out all the candles and sank down onto the stairs, completely drained. I wanted to strip off my uncomfortable clothes and fall into bed, to sleep without remembering my dreams. Before I could work up the energy to climb the stairs, I heard a soft knocking at the door and went to open it, thinking that someone had left a jacket behind, or maybe Josh or Lauren had decided to come back.

  “Hi, Arden.” Heaney stood on the porch with a bundle cradled in one arm, just beyond the sallow glow of the porch light.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be here,” I said.

  He sighed. “I am so sorry, I can’t say it enough times. I know you want me gone, but before I go, there’s something I have to tell you, something you deserve to know.” He handed me the bundle he’d been holding. It was a stack of envelopes with my name in each upper-left corner. They were all addressed to my sisters at 635 Grand Avenue. My letters to Violet and Tabitha, the ones I had mailed to Arrowood. I remembered the one I had inexplicably found in my room upstairs, and wondered if he had lost it there, if he had lain in my bed and read all those letters, all my private confessions, over the years. I felt like I might throw up.

  “I want you to understand why I did what I did,” Heaney said. “I should have told you sooner, but I promised I wouldn’t.”

  “Promised who?”

  “Eddie. Your dad.”

  At my back I felt the warmth and brightness of the house with its Christmas decorations and candles and the lingering scent of cinnamon and apples. It was false, all of it, the illusion of cheer in an empty house. I looked at Heaney’s anguished face, and beyond, into the black, frigid night.

  “Can I please come in?” he asked.

  I didn’t move from the doorway. I couldn’t take my eyes off the letters, my handwriting evolving from block print to sloppy cursive. The envelopes were well worn, the edges soft; they had all been opened, the letters unfolded and refolded over and over, the contents examined again and again.

  “You read my letters.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I was just curious, at first, why you were writing to them, sending letters here. And then you started writing about your mother, how she was doing, how she was struggling. You wrote about your father. His gambling problems, the scams he was running. And I got to know you. I know what you want more than anything else. And I see it now, what it’s done to you, all this time, not knowing. I can help you.” Heaney cleared his throat. “I know where the twins are.”

  The wind sucked at the chimneys, howling softly, embers snapping. Heaney’s words jumbled in my head, as though he spoke a foreign language and parts of speech needed to be rearranged, verbs properly conjugated before they could be translated into something sensible. “What do you mean, you know where they are?”

  “They…their remains. I know where they’re buried.”

  Frost spread through my veins, my chest, crystallized in the hollows of my heart. “You…?”

  He shook his head. “No! No. I had nothing to do with it. I found them.”

  I took a step backward and forced myself to breathe. “If you know, and you had nothing to do with it, then why didn’t you say something sooner? Why didn’t you call the police?”

  His eyelid twitched and fluttered in a series of tiny spasms. “Your father paid me not to. He made me promise I’d never tell anyone, especially not you, and I thought maybe it was better that way, that you and your mother could still think they were alive.”

  “My dad? Is that how you got his watch, the one you said you bought? He gave it to you as payment?”

  “Yes, but that wasn’t enough. Eddie got away with whatever he wanted, his whole life. He ruined things for me. He hurt your mother. I know he hurt you, too. He scammed people for a living. I wanted him to pay, for once. He didn’t have the money, though, or at least that’s what he said—but he knew a way to skim off the trust. He knew how to do it so I wouldn’t get caught.”

  I understood, in a way. I had some idea how he felt, missing out on the life he had wanted, the one he thought he deserved. He’d been a surrogate son to my grandparents, practically living in the house, hoping to marry my mother. In his eyes, my father had robbed him of that, and he wanted to get some of it back. But he had taken it to grotesque lengths.

  He watched me uneasily. “I’m not proud of it, Arden. At the time, I was only thinking about getting back at Eddie.”

  I wondered if Heaney was making the whole thing up, though part of me thought he might be telling the truth. “Did he tell you what happened to them?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “Where are they? How did you find them?”

  “I’ll explain everything.” He hesitated, his hand slipping out of his pocket and pushing his staticky hair back from his forehead. “If you agree not to turn me in for stealing from the trust. You haven’t talked to the lawyer yet, have you?”

  I started to shake my head, and then stopped, not sure I should tell him anything. I had left a message for the lawyer to call me, but I hadn’t mentioned Heaney.

  “I’d pay back the money if I could,” he continued, “but I can’t. So this is how I’ll pay you. I’ll show you where they are, and you won’t have to see me ever again, and that’ll be the end of it. Do we have a deal?”

  I didn’t plan to let him get away with robbing the trust, but I would have told him anything to find out where my sisters were. “Okay,” I said. “Deal. Tell me where they are.”

  “I’ll show you. Get your coat, we can go now.”

  “Now? You expect me to go somewhere with you, alone, in the dark? Why not wait until morning?”

  He exhaled with force, his breath fogging up in the cold. “There’s nothing left for me here, after this. I’m leaving town tonight. If you want to know, this is your only chance.”

  “At least tell me where w
e’re going,” I hedged. If I could get enough information out of him, maybe I could find them on my own.

  “Out on the river,” he said.

  He had a cabin on Little Belle Isle; that would be the obvious place to look. The island could be searched with cadaver dogs. Unless I was wrong. There were other islands. Other hiding places.

  “I want to bring someone with me,” I said.

  Heaney sighed. His gaze shifted to either side of the porch and then back to me. “Fine, but we need to get going.”

  I hadn’t expected him to agree to it, but if he was willing to let Josh come along, it was possible that he was telling the truth, that he was going to take me to the twins.

  “Let me call him. I’ll grab my phone.” I turned away from the door and walked two steps before Heaney slammed into me from behind.

  —

  The gravel parking lot next to the marina was empty except for Heaney’s truck, and only two other boats nestled at the covered dock. They would have to be hauled out for storage soon, before the river began to freeze. I lay on the bench seat in Heaney’s Bayliner, a boat similar in style to the Ruby Slipper, my wrists and ankles bound and my head throbbing where it had smacked into the floor back at Arrowood. The late November wind burrowed under my clothes. There was nothing around for miles, as far as I could tell, but the moonlit river and the harvested fields and the narrow farm road that had brought us here. Heaney had kindly taken the rag out of my mouth, because now it didn’t matter if I screamed.

  I shivered as Heaney untied the last rope that tethered the boat to the dock, fear scuttling up my spine like a leggy insect. He pumped the throttle, flipped a switch, turned the key, and then eased us out of the slip and into the current. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes passed before the boat slowed, and when I craned my neck I could see part of Little Belle, a dark void on the gleaming water. My hands and face were freezing, the beginnings of an earache tunneling inside my already aching skull.

  Heaney pulled up close to the dock and secured one of the ropes, and then he hauled me up over his shoulder and climbed out. There were no other boats here, no lights, no people. It was quiet except for the wind sifting through the weeds and the leafless trees. Like most of the river islands, it was abandoned for the winter. The only way out was in Heaney’s boat, and the keys were in his pocket.

  Heaney carried me down a dirt path into the trees and then gently set me on my feet. My legs buckled and I fell to my knees. I was still woozy. He knelt down beside me. “Do you think you can walk if I untie your ankles?”

  I clenched my teeth and nodded. He cut the cord with a pocketknife and pulled a flashlight out of his coat pocket. He kept one hand around my wrist as we walked, and held the flashlight with the other.

  The woods thinned and we came to a stilted cabin with a deck on the upper level, the lower level enclosed with weathered plywood. A padlock hung on the door beneath the deck.

  “Did your dad ever tell you he had a place out here?” Heaney asked, holding the light under his arm as he dug out his keys.

  He hadn’t. Another secret kept. I supposed the cabin was Heaney’s now, like so many other things that had been my father’s.

  Once inside, Heaney shined the light around. We were in a windowless storage area beneath the cabin. Half the floor was concrete, the rest dirt. A rusted chest freezer sat along one wall next to a generator, the shelves above it crowded with fishing poles, tackle boxes, nets, and coolers.

  He set the flashlight down on top of the freezer, illuminating the door and a set of steps leading up. I wondered if this lower level of the cabin flooded every spring when the rains came and the river rose, if water saturated the dirt floor and turned it to mud.

  “We could go upstairs,” Heaney said. “It’s more comfortable up there. I’ve got an oil lamp.” I slumped to the floor. My nose wouldn’t stop running and I wiped it on my coat sleeve. Heaney hesitated at the foot of the stairs, eyeing a shovel that leaned in the corner, his brows knitting together.

  My throat was too dry, and it was hard to swallow. “Can you untie my hands?” I asked. “My wrists hurt.” He hesitated, thinking about it, and then got out his knife and sliced through the cord. We both knew that there was nowhere for me to go, whether or not my hands were free.

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t know what else to do. I knew you wouldn’t just forget about the trust. If I let you go, I’d lose everything, and I didn’t want to go through that again.” He rubbed his palm over the back of his neck. “I always thought I’d have kids, you know? A family. Your mother and I. She’d promised we would someday. I still thought we’d end up together, even after she met Eddie. I figured if I was patient, she’d get sick of the way he treated her and come back to me. She did come to me, a few times, when she found out he was cheating on her with Julia. I offered to take care of Eddie for her, but she didn’t want me to. She was just leading me on, trying to get back at him, make him jealous.”

  He smiled bleakly. “I envied your dad, how everything came so easy for him. He didn’t appreciate what he had. I almost felt like I’d traded places with him there toward the end—I had nearly everything he’d let go of. Including you.” He took a deep breath. “I wish we could put things back how they were, but I don’t think we can ever go back.”

  Moonlight showed through a gap between the door and the frame. The door wasn’t locked, and I wondered if I might be able to push past him and get out, if there was any chance I could outrun him. Still, I wouldn’t have the boat key. Maybe, though, if I had enough of a head start, I could untie the boat and let it drift into the channel, escaping the island and leaving Heaney stranded.

  I carefully rose to my feet, unsteady. “We can go back,” I said, knowing what a lie it was. As much as I longed to live in it, the past was dead space, flat and airless. We couldn’t go back. Each breath dragged us forward into a raw, new moment in time. “I forgive you. It’s just money. It doesn’t matter. Let’s go back home. We can work this out.”

  He pressed his palms to his temples. “I need to think for a minute.”

  “Do you really know where Violet and Tabitha are?” I asked, taking a step toward him. “Or did you just make that up to get me here?”

  He nodded slowly, looking weary and distracted, his shoulders sinking as he exhaled. “Back when I first started working at Arrowood, about ten years ago, there was a problem with the boiler down in the basement, just like I told you. I had to replace some pipes, and that’s how I found the hidden room under the laundry. Only it wasn’t empty when I opened it up. There was a tiny sliver of tarp sticking up out of the ground—wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t looked close. I had a bad feeling, and it didn’t take much work to find what was under there. I knew what it meant, that the girls were there, buried in the house, and I realized I finally had a chance to put Eddie in his place. I got ahold of him, and sure enough, he was willing to pay a price to keep it quiet.”

  Was that when my father had called Julia Ferris to borrow money? He had told her it was for an investment, and in a way it was. An investment in Heaney’s silence. I glanced furtively at the door, and the shovel next to it, and Heaney moved closer.

  “Let’s go back now,” I said.

  “And call it even.”

  “Yes.”

  He chuckled. “I know it doesn’t work that way.”

  “People will notice if I’m not back. They’ll figure out what happened.”

  He shook his head. “Are you sure? I was thinking. Your arm, those scars—that was no accident. I’m not the only one who’s noticed. People talk. Whoever comes looking for you’ll find Arrowood locked up tight, no sign of a struggle. They’ll see all those sad letters you wrote to your sisters. Maybe they’ll think you just couldn’t take it, being back here—the twins’ birthday coming up, the holidays, and you all alone in that empty house thinking about everything you lost. They might wonder if you walked down to the river and threw yo
urself in.”

  “No. They’ll think it was someone I knew. Someone with a key to the house.”

  He took another step, closing the gap between us, and I lunged for the shovel. Heaney smashed his fist into the side of my head. I crumpled to the floor, pain vibrating through my jaw and down my spine, as though he’d knocked something out of alignment. I’d never been struck like that before. When I looked up at him, he was rubbing his knuckles, a dazed expression on his face as though he wasn’t sure what he had done.

  “I’m sorry,” he breathed. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  I touched my head where he’d hit me, a hard knot already rising beneath the skin. Heaney kept his eyes on me as he backed up to the door and pushed it all the way shut. I curled onto my side, whimpering. It was difficult to focus with the bright pain scything through my skull. Each breath hurt my chest. I thought of the pictures that would be shown on the news along with the story of my disappearance, my expression grim and unsmiling, just as I’d wanted.

  He didn’t know it, but Heaney had guessed the truth about my scars. Maybe he knew me better than anyone, after all, from reading and rereading all my personal letters, my darkest, most private thoughts. I hadn’t told anyone what had really happened the night I broke into Dr. Endicott’s house. After I had shattered the window and accidentally sliced up my arm, I had stood there, holding the poem, watching my blood drip down onto the floor. In that moment, it struck me how wrong it felt to be there. I had never belonged at Dr. Endicott’s, or in my apartment, or at the house Mom shared with Gary, or in any of the temporary homes my father had dragged us to. I’d felt at home in only one place, a place I thought I couldn’t go back to. For years, I didn’t care if I died, which was not the same as being suicidal. I had never slipped over the threshold of wanting to kill myself. In that moment, though, in Dr. Endicott’s basement, living suddenly became unbearable. I had picked up a shard of glass, gouged it into my flesh, and cut deeper, deeper, following the vein.

  Heaney nervously rummaged around the shelves, dropping things into a pile. I spied a clump of tangled fishing line. He hadn’t brought me here with a clear plan; whatever he was doing, he hadn’t thought it all the way through. He only knew that we had passed the point where it would be possible for both of us to leave the island. I tried to remember the prayer to Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, whose help would often arrive at the eleventh hour, but instead, Madame Yvonne’s words hovered in my mind. I hadn’t paid much attention to what she’d said about the Wheel of Fortune card, which had seemed the least important one at the time, though it resonated now. The Wheel of Fortune is unpredictable. It’s a turning point. Everything rests on the way the Wheel turns, and your reaction to it. You can’t choose your fate, but you can choose how to respond. The wheel had spun and landed me here with Heaney, but that wasn’t supposed to be the end. It was meant to be a crossroads. I had to make a choice.