Arrowood

by Laura McHugh

  A few days after my return, Mrs. Ferris stopped by with an enormous arrangement of snapdragons, lilies, and gladiolus that probably weighed more than she did. After setting the bouquet down on the hall table, she enfolded me in an unexpected hug. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured, before letting me go.

  “Wait here,” I said. “I have something of yours.” She stood next to the flowers, a quizzical look on her face, and waited as I went to the study and returned with a folder.

  “Medical records,” I said. “I found them in Granddad’s things. I shouldn’t have read them, but I did. I had no idea you’d lost a child.”

  Mrs. Ferris stared at the folder, her eyes losing focus. “That was a long time ago.”

  “I overheard you talking to my dad once, at my parents’ last Christmas party. You told him you hadn’t forgiven him. Was it something to do with this?”

  She frowned. “I lost a baby. It had nothing to do with your father.”

  “What was it, then, that you said he had to make up to you?”

  She smiled wanly. “I was angry with your father because he had pulled me back in. Eddie and I were together off and on for a long time, but I put a stop to it completely when your mother was pregnant with the twins. I didn’t think I could live with myself anymore. Eddie had a way, though, of weakening my resolve. That’s what I was saying at the party—I hadn’t forgiven him for dragging me back to him. I hadn’t forgiven myself, either. We were both to blame, after all.”

  “You said before that the two of you weren’t in love.”

  “It’s true, we weren’t. I was. But not him.” She squeezed my hand, her bony fingers warm and strong.

  “I want to talk about something else,” she said. “The work you sent me by accident, those hundred pages you wrote about your family—I shared it with the others at the historical society. I hope you don’t mind. I was a bit shocked, actually, after you seemed to be struggling so much with the profile. We’ve been looking for someone to write a new edition of Legendary Keokuk Homes, with more of a focus on the families and the stories behind the houses—something we could sell to all the tourists we’re hoping to bring in. I think you’d be perfect for it. We’d pay you, of course. Not much, but I’ll see what we can work out.”

  I had never expected that Mrs. Ferris would be the one to hand me such a lifeline. I thanked her, and she gave me a bittersweet smile.

  “I’m truly sorry for everything,” she said. “I still wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t gone to meet your father in the carriage house that day.”

  “It still could have happened. If Dad hadn’t called Mom and gotten into a fight on the phone, she wouldn’t have left me alone with them in the bathroom. But maybe something else would have distracted her.”

  Mrs. Ferris’s forehead creased. “Hmm. She said they were fighting on the phone?”

  “Yeah. He called to say he’d be late, and she wanted him to come home. She was angry about him taking money out of their savings account.”

  She shook her head. “She might be remembering wrong. I don’t think he called her that afternoon. At least, not while he and I were together. There’s no phone line in the carriage house.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he called on his cell.”

  “Arden, it was 1994. He didn’t have a cellphone. None of us did.” Her voice had sharpened.

  “He could have called from somewhere else, after he left?”

  Her lips pressed into a tight seam, fine lines feathering out around her mouth. She nodded slowly. “It’s possible. I thought he went straight home, but maybe he didn’t. I don’t really know. Not that any of it matters now, I suppose.”

  Memory, as I knew better than most, was not reliable, the truth a shadow that reshaped itself over time. Maybe Mrs. Ferris was wrong about the phone call, and maybe she wasn’t. Maybe Mom believed every word she had told me. Maybe her version of that terrible afternoon played in her head like an endless film, the same as my version played in mine. Maybe, to her, it was true. Even if it wasn’t.

  “Do you think she drowned them?” I asked. Mrs. Ferris appeared frozen for a moment, her mouth slightly ajar, eyes unblinking. Then her gaze drifted toward the staircase, to the second floor, where the twins had died.

  “It’s hard to imagine that anyone could do that and try to lay the blame on an eight-year-old child.”

  She hadn’t said no.

  I thought back to all the water in the house, the leak in the bathtub that led me to the button, the flood in the laundry room that took me down to the basement and the hidden room, the dripping faucet on the third floor, where I had found Mom’s medical records.

  I imagined my mother in a daze of pills, angry at my father, about the money, about the affair, about her life not turning out as she’d planned. I imagined her filling the tub and watching my sisters slip below the surface. Trying to decide if she could do the same to me, if she could hold me down and still pass it off as an accident. My father coming home before she could find out. Mom hadn’t wanted me to come back to Arrowood, or to talk to Josh Kyle about his book. Maybe she had been worried about what I might find, what I might remember.

  I had always had a vivid memory of the twins safe in the bathtub that afternoon, though my father had said it was a fever dream. But the other things my mother said—that she had left me alone with them, that I had overfilled the tub—brought no glimmer of recognition. I couldn’t recall the smell of the bubble bath, the feel of the metal handle twisting in my palm, the screech of the faucet. I didn’t remember any of it. Could that mean that it hadn’t actually happened, that my mother had made it all up to cover up her crime? The fortune-teller had told me to trust myself, that the truth would come from within. I didn’t believe that I had drowned my sisters. I believed that my mother had done it.

  I called her as soon as Mrs. Ferris left, my heart hollowing out like the dark mouth of a cave as the phone rang and rang, dread seeping in. Finally the answering machine picked up, my mother’s recorded voice artificially giddy. You’ve reached the Swansons! Please leave a message! Have a blessed day!

  “Mom,” I said. “It’s Arden. I have some questions about what you told me.” I wasn’t sure how much to say on the machine. I wanted her to call me back.

  There was a clicking sound, followed by Gary’s voice grating in my ear. “Arden? It’s Gary.” As if I couldn’t tell. “I know you’re dealing with a lot right now, and I want you to know your mother and I are both praying for you.”

  “Is she there? I need to talk to her.” I could hear faint television voices in the background.

  “Your mother has suffered greatly for many years,” he said, “and now she’s finally giving it all up to the Lord and letting herself be healed. I hope you’ll be able to find peace in our Savior as well.”

  “Did you know?” I asked. “Before this all came out, did she tell you? What did she say?”

  “We’re praying for you, Arden,” Gary continued, deaf to my questions. “We’re praying real hard.”

  She had fooled him, too.

  —

  Lauren was the one who suggested selling Arrowood and buying the Sister House. We could live there together, she said. I can rent the upstairs for summers and holidays until I move back. It could be a Sister House again. Not newlyweds, not widows, and not exactly sisters, though close enough. Two women starting out.

  I hoped that Granddad would have understood. I was grateful that he had given me the house—I never would have found the twins if he hadn’t—but I couldn’t live there anymore. I’d thought that coming home would fix me, but it wasn’t Arrowood that I had been longing for. I’d been drawn back to this dying town at the convergence of two rivers, the place where I had been born, where the Arrowoods had lived for one hundred and sixty years. The place where I had once been whole and might one day be whole again.

  The lawyer explained that it would take some time to get Arrowood on the market and find the right buyer, but there was nothing
standing in the way of selling it. Courtney offered to guide me through the process of buying the Sister House from the bank, which I could get started on right away, and Ben promised to help with the restoration, to repair the porch and cabinets and floors, to piece it all back together.

  —

  It was one of those deceitful winter days, so bright and sunny that you’re convinced of its warmth until you step outside and feel the wind’s teeth. I had spent the past few months sitting by the radiator in Granddad’s office, working on Legendary Keokuk Homes and finishing my long-neglected thesis while frost encased the windows and the river froze and snow blew into dunes around the house. The snow was gone now, and days like this made it seem like spring was a possibility.

  Mrs. Ferris had come by earlier in the morning to let me know that I was a shoo-in for the teaching position I’d applied for at the Catholic school, thanks in part to the stellar reference she had provided. It didn’t hurt, she added, that the school’s gymnasium had been a generous gift from my grandparents and bore the Arrowood name.

  Now, my coat buttoned up to my neck in the chilly house, I waited, watching out the window for Josh to pull into the driveway. Staked into the dead grass along the sidewalk out front, a red and white Sutlive Real Estate sign shuddered in the wind. Courtney had stood in last month’s melting snow in her high heels and pounded the sign firmly into the ground with a mallet. In the flower beds surrounding the porch, squirrels dug up the bulbs Heaney and I had planted before they had a chance to bloom.

  Josh took my hand as I climbed into the van and pressed his lips against my cold fingers. He looked worried. “Are you sure you’re ready?”

  I attempted a smile to reassure him that I was, and he leaned across the console to kiss me, his fingertips trailing along my jawbone, my skin warming in the wake of his touch. We drove through the quiet streets, past the abandoned elementary school and the Sister House, away from the new Walmart and the old factories, to the edge of town, the good side of the Catholic cemetery.

  Josh parked at the top of the hill, on the gravel drive. I wanted to see the new headstone on my own, and he understood. He squeezed my hand and released it, and I looked back, halfway down the hill, to see him waiting in the biting wind, there if I needed him. On the slope beneath the sycamore trees, I traced my name on the stones of the three other Ardens. I had somehow outlived them all, and I hoped that I had a long way to go before the time came to join them. I would be the fourth Arden Arrowood to lie on the hill, and the last.

  My father’s grave was nearly a year old, the ground smooth and covered with bleached winter grass. I thought of the panicked moments as I’d drifted downriver in Heaney’s boat, Dad’s voice calm and clear in my head. He never got a chance to make amends, but I hoped he knew that I had forgiven him, that a part of him would always be with me.

  Next to Dad’s grave lay a mound of bare dirt with a new granite marker, flanked by two marble angels. ARROWOOD, read the chiseled block letters. Beneath that, VIOLET ANN & TABITHA GRACE, DECEMBER 12, 1992–SEPTEMBER 3, 1994. For my sisters, who had been together at the beginning and the end, it was fitting to share a stone. The interment had been private, just me, and I had watched the pearl-colored casket lowered down. Though I knew now where they were, where they rested, I couldn’t think of them buried in the cemetery or hidden beneath the house; I couldn’t picture them tucked into the earth. They existed for me as they always had, in memory.

  I had brought along one of Singer’s photographs that I’d stolen from Josh, the one of me with the twins on the day they went missing, and I bent to place it on my sisters’ grave. It was an accidental gift from Singer, that he had captured this moment, Violet and Tabitha as I would always remember them: laughing beneath the mimosa tree in the front yard of Arrowood, clover crowns in their hair, matching white shirts with yellow buttons shaped like ducks—and me, watching over them, smiling, no hint of the darkness to come.

  Before turning to go, I closed my eyes and whispered a prayer to the burning saints, that they might watch over us all, the lost, the found, the living, and the dead, and light our way home, wherever that might be.

  In memory of Floyd and Telka Silvers and the little white house on South Fourteenth Street

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  * * *

  Thank you, as always, to my family—the Runges, McHughs, Gilpins, Gipsons, and Berners—and especially Brent, Harper, and Piper.

  Huge thanks to all the people who helped bring this book into the world. I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with the exceptionally kind and gifted Cindy Spiegel and the fabulous folks at Spiegel & Grau and Penguin Random House, including Annie Chagnot, Beth Pearson, Jennifer Prior, Elizabeth Eno, Sandra Sjursen, Julie Grau, and publicist extraordinaire Maria Braeckel. In the U.K., the wonderful Selina Walker at Century Arrow, and Judith Murray at Greene & Heaton. And, of course, my hardworking agent, Sally Wofford-Girand.

  Much love to my dear Beasties: Ann Breidenbach, Nina Furstenau, Jennifer Gravley, Jill Orr, and Allison Smythe.

  Many thanks to Veronica Runge, Lisa Gilpin, Diane Berner, Ellen Runge, Jessica Kirby-Runge, Barb and Bill McHugh, Paula Parker, Elizabeth Anderson, Hilary Sorio, Angie Sloop, Sally Mackey, Thomas Jacobs, Ryan Gerling, Dan Sophie, Nicole Coates, Melinda Jenne, Emily Williams, Amy Messner, Julie Hague, Sarah Norden, Liz Lea, Mary Atkinson, Angela Scott, Taisia Gordon, Adonica Coleman, and Martha McKim. Long overdue thanks to Helen Breedlove and Janice Blisard—I’ve never forgotten what you taught me. I’m also incredibly grateful to all the librarians, book clubs, booksellers, writers, and readers who have supported me along the way.

  I owe a great debt to the cities of Fort Madison and Keokuk, Iowa, my first homes. I took liberties in my portrayal of Keokuk and the surrounding area, though many of the landmarks mentioned in the book are real. Special thanks to the Samuel F. Miller House and Museum, the Lee County, Iowa Historical Society, and Tales of Early Keokuk Homes by Raymond E. Garrison for providing inspiration, and thank you to Diane and Kevin Berner, whose historic Second Empire home inspired aspects of the Arrowood house.

  To my grandparents, Floyd and Telka Silvers, thank you for giving us a place to call home. I wish that we could all be together again in the little white house.

  BY LAURA MCHUGH

  The Weight of Blood

  Arrowood

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  * * *

  LAURA MCHUGH is the author of The Weight of Blood, winner of an International Thriller Writers award and a Silver Falchion Award for best first novel. The Weight of Blood was named a best book of the year by BookPage, The Kansas City Star, and the Sunday Times, and was nominated for an Alex Award, a Barry Award, and a Goodreads Choice Award. McHugh lives in Missouri with her husband and children.

  Facebook.com/​lauramchughauthor

  @LauraSMcHugh

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