Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters
Page 1
PRAISE FOR EMILY CARPENTER
Burying The Honeysuckle Girls
“Storytelling in the Southern gothic tradition at its most darkly neurotic and tantalizing.”
—Kimberly Brock, author of River Witch
“A hell of a thriller with language as lush as its Southern setting.”
—Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon and The Dead Lands
“Emily Carpenter weaves a masterful web of family drama and spine-tingling mystery.”
—M. J. Pullen, author of the Marriage Pact Trilogy
The Weight of Lies
“Searing murder mystery . . .”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Fascinating . . . An unputdownable read.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A gripping, heart-pounding murder mystery/gothic thriller sure to give readers chills.”
—RT Book Reviews
Every Single Secret
“A true psychological thriller that will leave you breathless.”
—Wendy Walker, bestselling author of All Is Not Forgotten and Emma in the Night
“A knockout.”
—Kimberly Belle, bestselling author of The Marriage Lie
“Heart-stopping, exquisitely plotted . . .”
—Wendy Webb, bestselling author of Daughters of the Lake
Until the Day I Die
“Chilling . . .”
—Publishers Weekly
“Twisty, jaw-dropping . . .”
—Heather Gudenkauf, NYT bestselling author of The Weight of Silence and Not a Sound
“Carpenter’s skill for brilliant and twisty storytelling will have you gasping in surprise.”
—Hank Phillippi Ryan, nationally bestselling author of Trust Me
ALSO BY EMILY CARPENTER
Until the Day I Day
Every Single Secret
The Weight of Lies
Burying the Honeysuckle Girls
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Emily Carpenter
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542016193
ISBN-10: 1542016193
Cover design by Damon Freeman
For those who believe, for those who don’t, and for everyone in between.
May we all be happily surprised in the end.
Contents
Dove
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Dove
Acknowledgments
A Conversation with Emily Carpenter
About the Author
Dove
This was how she knew the end was near.
At nighttime, after she’d gone to bed and begun the welcome voyage toward sleep, her friends would appear. They fluttered the curtains and stirred the dust, bringing with them the smell of long-ago, faraway places.
When she was young, she would’ve thought them ghosts, but at the clear-eyed age of ninety-five she knew better. They were only memories, flickers of her past. The stories she’d kept hidden for so long that she almost didn’t recognize the players when they reentered the stage.
The visits (she liked to think of them as visits) had started in the summer when she still lived at the Alabama house across the road from Pritchard Hospital. In July, she’d seen her mother, the Major, and Dell. Then in August, Ethel and Erma and Jimmy Singley. Also, Old Steadfast and Arthur showed up. Come that September—when the business with the Honeysuckle Girls came to a head—Jinn, Collie, and Trix arrived, laughing and fiercely beautiful. They filled the room with the smell of wine. It was her first night back in California that brought the most welcome guest—her greatest friend and staunchest ally, Charles. He sat on his side of their bed and sang to her, and she kept her eyes on his strong, safe profile until sleep descended.
She was glad to see them all. Their presence brought her comfort. When they were alive, some had not treated her well; some had even been cruel, but she didn’t mind now. That was one of the many blessings of old age. This softening of memory, the melting away of grudges. Forgiveness was no longer something to strive for. Now it entered her room through an open window.
One chilly night toward the end of October, Dove was awakened by a dream she couldn’t remember. She looked at the clock, but she’d left her glasses outside and couldn’t see the time. She could see the shadow man who sat motionless in the slipper chair beside her dressing table. He watched her with eyes that glittered.
“You,” she said, her voice filled with wonder and the edge of a memory she would have rather not revisited.
“You shouldn’t have run, Ruth,” the shadow man said. “You brought so much sorrow by doing that. So much pain.”
“I’m sorry.”
It was all she could think to say, although she knew it certainly didn’t make up for what she’d done.
He rose then, letting the faint light fall over him, and when he held up a length of faded pink ribbon, it seemed to glow in the light of the moon.
“You belonged to him,” he said. “You always belonged to him.”
It wasn’t true, but she knew it was pointless to argue. He’d spoken with the zeal of a convert, and that was a thing she was well acquainted with. As soon as she realized this, she also realized something else, something she should have known sooner, from the first moment she
’d opened her eyes.
The figure in the dark wasn’t a ghost, or an ephemeral memory from her past, but a real flesh-and-blood man. And he hadn’t come as a friend. He’d come for revenge.
Chapter One
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Present
The narrow black ribbon of asphalt unfurled before me like a road to an unknown land. I pointed the nose of the rental car down its path, between the alley of hulking oak trees, and with grim purpose, slammed my foot on the accelerator.
I’d been fearful and fretting about this night for months, and I was more than ready to lay my eyes on the building at the end of this drive. Nothing was scarier than the thing you couldn’t see.
Right now, all I could see were trees. In the soft early-summer twilight, the ancient oaks looked like the horror movie version of the drive leading to a psychiatric hospital. Knotty branches twisted into nightmarish appendages. Tormented limbs, entreating an unseen, uncaring God. But these trees, bark spotty and covered with spongy moss, were the real deal. And so was the institution that remained maddeningly out of sight at the end of this road. PRITCHARD PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL, the elegant metal sign had read. So it had to be there.
“Kudos to Dracula on the landscape design,” Danny said from the back seat, reading my thoughts. “Very on-brand.” Ray-Bans held back his thick, gloriously unruly red hair, giving him that insouciant devil-may-care look. But looks were deceiving with my brother. His anxiety was a constant hum, just below the glossy surface. It was just part of who he was. Maybe part of who he would always be.
The whole flight he’d been doing his nervous throat-clearing thing. Back out on the highway, when we’d passed the newer section of the hospital, New Pritchard it was called, he’d started up the wrist tapping—an antianxiety technique he’d learned from his own ninety-day hospital stay. Good thing the rental company’d had an adapted car with a spin knob and left foot accelerator. With my condition, driving was always a challenge. But at least it kept me too busy to be nervous.
Now if only Danny and Mom could hang on, at least through tonight’s ceremony. I sped up—and also may have muttered something not so nice about my dead grandmother, Dove Jarrod.
I should’ve been above such pettiness. She’d been dead eight years, and I was a twenty-four-year-old woman who’d made her choices deliberately and with the full knowledge of everything they entailed. Danny, two years my senior, and I both worked with our mother at the family business, the Charles and Dove Jarrod Foundation. Danny was Mom’s assistant, and I was the director of fundraising. I’d been there three years, and for most of that time, it had been a safe, steady place to work. Even fulfilling at times—in spite of the fact that I was, in essence, continuously lying to everyone.
But still, I couldn’t resist the jab at Dove. The childish impulse to tell her—wherever she happened to be—just how little I thought of her.
It gave me a charge, but not as electrifying as the one I got from thinking about the adventure that lay ahead. Danny had been sober for almost three and a half years now, and Mom’s anxiety seemed relatively under control. In fact, recently she’d actually gone on a date with a man from her church, a guy who owned an HVAC company and looked like Ernest Hemingway. Consequently, I’d begun to feel like I might be able to extricate myself, to explore what a future apart from my family might hold. Moving not only felt possible, it felt exciting. Like, at last, I could do something for me. Pull out one Jenga block—me—without toppling the whole structure.
And so, this past winter, I’d secretly applied to Colorado State’s occupational therapy program. After two nail-biting months, I had been accepted and was planning on breaking the news this evening after the dedication ceremony. It would be hard, but I hoped they’d understand. I’d head up one more push for the foundation—the documentary shoot that we were wrapping tonight—and then I’d say goodbye to my family, knowing I’d done right by them in every way I could.
This was how decent adult people treated each other, I thought. This was family. See, Dove?
“I really appreciate both of you coming,” Mom said in the seat beside me. Pretty in a new periwinkle-blue dress and pearls, she wore her honey-colored hair in the same low knot that Dove used to. She was kneading her knuckles, and her gaze darted from me to Danny, then out the window. “You can’t know how much.”
“The dedication of a creepy, formerly haunted insane asylum in our dear grandmother’s name?” Danny said. “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
“Psychiatric facility,” I corrected. “And this event will be great for the foundation, bring us recognition outside just the religious community. The women’s program that’s going to be headquartered at Pritchard has already been written up in several journals.”
“I can’t believe she was born here,” Danny said. “Can you imagine?” He caught himself. “What am I saying? Of course we can. We’ve done the time, haven’t we, Mom?”
Mom’s voice was distant. “Yes, Daniel, we have.”
“You know what I can’t get over?” he went on, and I sensed an edge in his voice. That old sharpness he used to get when he’d started drinking but was still sober enough to remember the things he was angry about. “That our grandmother was born in a nuthouse and got out by the hair of her chinny-chin-chin. But then, years later, her daughter and grandson end up in places just like it.”
“Danny—” I started, but Mom interrupted.
“We should pray.” She clasped her hands and closed her eyes, her back hunching. I sighed and checked the rearview mirror. Danny’s head was tilted back, eyes defiantly open, but he’d gone quiet. Mom’s stalwart, unwavering faith was off-limits. We’d both agreed to that a long time ago. He knew as well as I did what kept her boat on keel.
Mom prayed, “Dear Father, you’ve brought us so far, and we thank you for all your many mercies. We thank you for Pritchard—both a terrible place and a wonderful one. Dove did love this place, in her own way. She had good memories here, so many gifts . . .”
I checked the mirror again. Danny was staring out the window.
“. . . a friend, a boy she played with, remember she told me that once? They used to hide gifts for each other. I always thought that was so sweet. So tender . . .”
Her voice faltered, and I settled in for the long haul. I felt a sharp needle of pity for her. Mom did this every once in a while, lost the trail when she was praying and ended up reminiscing instead. It was just one of her quirks, but also one of the ways I realized that her constant, acute yearning for family had never really been fulfilled.
She said Charles Jarrod had been a doting father, delighted by the baby girl he’d had late in life, but he’d died when she was just a child, and Mom clearly felt the loss. Especially in contrast to the chilly, almost formal relationship she had with Dove. My own father, once a sound tech for Dove’s shows, had been a blip on the radar—fathering two children, then melting away into the ether. After that, Mom just stopped functioning. She stayed in her room day and night. Wouldn’t cook meals for Danny and me or bathe us. She even forgot to send us to school a couple of times. When they hospitalized her, someone from the foundation came to stay with us.
Then Dove died and left the bulk of her estate for the restoration of Pritchard Hospital and only a pittance to the Jarrod Foundation. The message conveyed to my mother was all too clear. What was important to us—the foundation—didn’t make a whit of difference to Dove. Her concerns, cryptic and unknowable, took precedence.
But now that we were here, seeing Dove’s dream of reopening the hospital to its fruition, Mom seemed to have reframed the situation. She was beaming, almost tearful, and clasped her hands over her heart.
“This place may have been Dove’s beginning,” she said in a fervent voice, “but by God’s grace, it was not the end.”
“Amen,” Danny said quickly.
“Amen,” I echoed.
Mom looked around the car, seeming to only vaguely recall where s
he was. Then she turned and sent me a bright smile. “Eve, when did you say the film crew would arrive?”
“Our director flew in the day before yesterday. He should’ve connected with the local team, the second camera person and assistant. I haven’t seen any footage yet, but supposedly they got some fantastic B-roll. Tape of the grounds and the cemetery.”
She didn’t answer. I hadn’t realized it, but we’d reached the end of the drive, where the canopy of trees had finally opened up and the exterior of Pritchard Hospital had come into view. She grabbed my right arm, the weak one, and pointed.
“Look! There it is!”
Danny’s tapping finally stilled. “Damn.”
But a laser beam of setting sun had hit my eyes, blocking my vision. I squinted and flipped down the visor, focusing on making my weak right arm wheel the car around a lacy iron fountain without smashing into it. I only caught flashes of the huge building as I drove past. Red brick, stone, and wood. Belfries, arches, and parapets. All flickering between shafts of sunlight like an old-time film reel running past a projector light. I maneuvered the rental into a reserved spot beside a sleek silver BMW, killed the engine, and looked in the rearview mirror.
Okay. Wow.
Old Pritchard Hospital was a Gothic monster of a place. Formidable and reassuring all at once, if that was possible. Two long brick wings extended out from either side of the center spired tower, each anchored by enormous magnolia trees. The facade was a series of lancet and quatrefoil granite-capped windows. I felt a chill travel along the surface of my skin.
“. . . and there’s the hawthorn tree!” Mom was saying. “The one Dove used to talk about. Remember, she planted one at her house in Pasadena? And never let us cut any blooms from it? I wonder if that’s the same one that was there when she was.”
I mumbled something in the affirmative, but I couldn’t say what it was, I was so focused on the massive building behind me. Now that I’d seen the place, even if it was just in my rearview mirror, I felt infinitesimally better. That was the thing about fear. It always encroached in the misty, shadowy unknown. Once I had my hands around a situation—whether it involved my own physical therapy, my mother’s anxieties, or my brother’s addictions—once I could see the threat in broad daylight, the monster lost its teeth.