Bittersweet

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  “Isn’t Masha here?” I whispered, as Galway pulled me into the unlocked Dining Hall, which smelled of yeast and last night’s brisket.

  “She’s visiting the grandkids.” He pushed me against the wall and kissed my neck before breaking for the kitchen. “Forbidden meats!” he yelped in joy.

  I hopped up onto the kitchen counter. He fed me. Bacon, crispy. Eggs, scrambled. Warmed blueberry muffins he found in the freezer and drizzled with honey. He slipped a honey-dipped finger into my mouth and then danced his hands up and under the sweatshirt I’d borrowed and thrown on over nothing. “Not here,” I whispered, as he tried to wrap my legs around his waist. “I see you’ve regained your strength,” I added, extricating myself and heading for the stairs. He followed me, as I’d known he would.

  In that great vaulted attic room that held the Winslow secrets, Galway pushed the papers from the nearest table and ripped off the sweatshirt, took my breasts into his hands and lay me down. He put his lips between my legs. The table was cool against my back, his mouth hot at the very center of me until I came, hard and fast, and then, before I could gather myself, he entered me, until we were somewhere else, together, moving and crying out as one.

  At the other end of lust, we held each other, spent. He helped me get dressed. I took in the mess we’d made of the papers and remembered he’d had some news.

  “Right!” he exclaimed, now all business. “I haven’t told you. I asked the family accountant if I could look at some of the financial files—told him I was working on this project for the family tree—so he said I could stop by.”

  “Where are they kept?”

  “In the family vault.”

  I raised one eyebrow.

  “Yeah, it’s ridiculous,” he said. “But listen. I started looking back around the time of the bankruptcy stuff, and Banning Winslow almost filed.”

  “I thought he did file.”

  “No. All the paperwork was filled out—that’s what we have—but at the last minute, it looks like he borrowed money or had some new source of income.”

  “Who would have lent them money? No one had any.”

  “Doesn’t matter. What matters is that in May of 1933, there’s a deposit made in the Winslow account of two hundred thirty-five thousand dollars. The Winslow debt is paid off immediately, with enough to spare to get the family through another month. And in June, there’s another deposit: a hundred and ten thousand dollars. This goes on. Not every month, sometimes not every year, but, Mabel, the money grows and grows until they’ve got millions in there, earning hefty interest. They’ve got enough to invest and grow, and they make it out of the war just fine.”

  “Where do you think they were getting that kind of cash?”

  He shook his head. “No idea.”

  “How long did it go on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, did the deposits end when the war did?”

  His eyes darted warily away from mine. “We should focus on the thirties. That’s when it began.”

  He was keeping something from me. But I saw that pushing him would only bring silence. “You say Banning was the one who almost filed?”

  He nodded. “He was in charge.”

  “I found something too.” I told him about what I’d discovered the night of our first kiss, how Bard was Banning’s second-born son, and how quickly he’d come to power—ousting his father and older brother, Gardener, in the midthirties in one fell swoop. I explained how this upheaval of leadership led me to suspect that Bard was the one who’d single-handedly saved the family’s fortune. He’d done something major to wrest the reins of control from a father who’d nearly ruined the family with his shaky investments of their trust.

  How Bard had overcome his elder brother’s inheritance of the family line was another matter, but I suspected that when Gardener saw how determined Bard was to overthrow their father, he’d willingly stepped aside. As I explained my theory to Galway, my confidence in it grew, and I felt sure that Bard was the one behind the cash deposits Galway had discovered.

  “I just wish we could know what changed,” I mused, as Galway began to pick up the papers we’d pushed to the floor. Why had the money started coming in when it did? Why had Bard seized power when he had? “What was Bard doing in May of 1933?” I continued.

  “Well,” said Galway, holding up a piece of paper, “in September of 1932 he got married.”

  Right—he’d married Kitty. I thought of her journal, the journal Indo had insisted held secrets, but in which I could find almost nothing. It was too much of a coincidence to believe that Bard’s sudden rush to power didn’t have something to do with whatever secrets his wife’s journal held. I just had to dig deeper. And tell Galway about it. He’d know what I should look for.

  I was about to begin when he froze, putting a finger to his lips.

  “What?” I mouthed.

  He pointed downstairs as I heard the door to the Dining Hall close. Manly footsteps marked their way across the wooden floor. We listened as they headed into the kitchen, then stopped at the sight of our dirty dishes.

  “Hello?” came the voice.

  “Stay here,” Galway mouthed, then called back, “Hello?” I knew I was supposed to hide. I masked my footsteps in his, finding a spot in the far corner behind an old cabinet.

  It was Birch. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “Hungry,” Galway said.

  “You’ve made a mess.”

  “Which I intend to clean.”

  I heard the water go on. I made out Birch’s words: “Good, Son. I can’t be expected to clean up all your messes.”

  After that, the old pipes began to moan, masking the voices of both father and son. I strained to hear Galway’s response. But I failed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The Pile

  “I don’t want to subject you to their scrutiny,” Galway apologized formally after his father left. He helped me clean up, but it wasn’t lost on me, as we placed the discarded papers on the table where my naked body had been less than an hour before, that he hadn’t touched me since Birch’s departure. Galway planned to go back to Queen Anne’s Lace and sleep for a few hours, then head to Boston in time for another busy week of work. I wouldn’t see him again until the weekend. “We’ll tell them soon,” he said, and I thought of John and Ev’s secret, part of me doubting we would be any different. When he wasn’t looking, I slipped the Winslow family tree into the sweatshirt’s center pocket. An act of defiance.

  I fell into bed smelling of the man who had made me new. It was early in the day, but it may as well have been midnight as far as I was concerned. I was grateful Ev was nowhere in sight—I had no way to explain the transformation my life had just undergone, and slipped into a slumber that seemed to last a hundred years.

  I awoke to the clatter of something falling. A teacup, a saucer. I was ravenous. I wrapped myself in the duvet and fumbled out to the kitchen, searching for the shattered ceramic, but there was nothing there. Maybe the accident had happened hours before, Ev had cleaned it up, and it had echoed in my head until my dreams could no longer contain it.

  I felt as if I’d been in a cave. I burned a quesadilla, then wolfed it down so quickly I scalded my tongue. I drank three glasses of water and finally remembered to check my watch—it seemed probable it was late that Monday night. But it was 4:18 a.m.—I had slept for eighteen hours straight.

  From the porch couch, I listened to the morning’s arrival. First the wood thrush roused, then the nuthatch and the black-capped chickadees, and somewhere, far away, a woodpecker tapped on a trunk, until morning had gained its momentum and Winloch was brought fully into Tuesday. Only then did I wonder about Ev’s whereabouts.

  First, I called Abby’s name. The dog usually came readily—one could catch the cheerful jingle of her tags as she ran up through the woods—but I strained to listen and heard nothing. I stood at the porch door and called again, then whistled. Nothing. Ev’s tennis shoe
s were just where she’d kicked them off on Sunday evening before the skinny-dip. That seemed like months before, but I reminded myself it had been only thirty-six hours. I went back into the bedroom. Ev’s bed was “made” (the coverlet wrinkled and pulled up haphazardly, as close to neat as Ev ever left it). Heart beginning to flutter, I walked through the cottage, noting the unwashed cereal bowl in the sink, Ev’s jacket hanging on the coatrack.

  I went back into the bedroom and inventoried her goods. I couldn’t put my finger on what was missing, but her usually overflowing drawers seemed to pull open too freely. I ran my hand across her bureau. How many times had I seen her sitting on the edge of her bed brushing her locks? She never went anywhere without her Mason Pearson hairbrush. But today it was nowhere to be found. I peeked under her brass bed. Her suitcase was missing. Ev had packed. She was gone.

  Panic rose like bile. I obsessively circled the house, hoping to find a note, a map, some kind of clue. I turned up the couch pillows—perhaps she’d hidden something for me there (a promise to send for me? A gift? An apology?). But no such luck.

  She’d been so happy the night of our skinny-dip, as though she and John had finally come to some kind of peace. How could I have been so stupid? They had made up. He had agreed to leave his mother behind. They had run away. As I raced through Bittersweet, I felt more and more sure Ev and John had proceeded with their escape plan.

  I showered quickly, annoyed by having to wash. I scrubbed Galway off me, wincing at the raw parts of myself that had seemed badges of love and maturity only hours before. Already, I cursed myself for that night, rejecting its memory: if I hadn’t been with him, Ev would still be with me. She’d been able to leave only because I hadn’t come home. I should have kept my promise to Birch, and told on her. He would have kept her here.

  I pulled on fresh clothes and headed out into the already humid morning. Now would be the moment to tell Birch his daughter had left Winloch. I had agreed to that, hadn’t I? But then, I had no alibi for being out of the house during Ev’s departure and, given Galway’s reaction to his father’s near discovery of us in the Dining Hall, no good reason for telling him the truth about why I hadn’t been able to stop Ev from leaving. And yet: I had promised. What if Ev was in trouble? I felt sure she was with John—I felt it in my sinking gut that she had left me, definitively, for him—but what if she wasn’t? I could never forgive myself if Birch could have helped her but for my keeping her departure a secret.

  As I strode over the hill into the great meadow, toward Trillium, morning sun warming my limbs, I remembered the tone of Birch’s voice with Galway in the Dining Hall, how he’d ignored CeCe, his own sister, on Winloch Day, and the quick kick he’d deliberately delivered to send Fritz flying.

  My feet diverted to Indo’s door.

  I checked my watch again. It was 7:30, a perfectly reasonable hour to knock, especially in a state of concern. Indo would be levelheaded, cynical even, about Ev’s departure, and calm my nerves with her reassuring pessimism. I’d laugh when she called Ev a selfish little brat, and nod when she told me I was ten times the girl Ev was.

  I knocked twice on the locked door to the kitchen, but the world was still. Fritz’s familiar bark did not come. I tried again, this time on the window, my raps peppering back off the water. Nothing.

  There was another door to Indo’s, on the water side, up into her screen porch. I’d noticed that it, too, was lined with locks, but the wood of the doorframe was so punky that a sturdy push might break through. I knocked.

  I heard a whimper in response—what I took to be an animal, but I’d been wrong before.

  “Indo?”

  Fritz raced from the bedroom hallway, through the living room, and onto the porch. He clawed at the screen. He wasn’t being territorial. He wanted me to come inside.

  I tested the handle and sized up the frame, then took in the rest of the meadow to see if anyone was watching. With one hefty slam against the door, the rotting wood gave way.

  I followed Fritz into the cottage, back past the bathroom, and to the surprisingly elderly bedroom I’d glanced over that first day in Indo’s cottage. As I pushed open the door, I uttered a silent prayer that I wouldn’t find her doing what I’d found Athol and the au pair—or, for that matter, Ev and John—engaged in the last time I’d followed an animal-like sound. I was met with the single gruff woof of one of Indo’s lesser dachshunds. I followed his nudge to the sight of Fritz pawing at a pile of clothing upon the pistachio rug. I stepped closer. Indo’s favorite pup was licking frantically at the pile. And then I realized, from the graying braid sticking out from below the clothing, that the pile was Indo.

  The next moments passed as though I were in a dream. I called Indo’s name. Felt for a pulse. She was breathing, but her eyes remained closed. I called for help, but no one could hear me. I told her I would return, running back the way I’d come. As I vaulted off the porch I started shouting “Help! Help!” and ran in the direction of Trillium—I could only imagine the expression of annoyance I’d meet on Tilde’s face—when Lu and Owen bounded up the steps from Flat Rocks.

  “Indo’s unconscious,” I gasped, gesturing toward Clover. “She collapsed.” Owen, resourceful boy that he was, declared, “We’ll call 911.” The three of us ran toward the Dining Hall. At Indo’s cottage I peeled off, calling, “She’s in the bedroom.” They headed toward the only Winloch phone (why hadn’t I thought of that?). Indo’s hand was cold by the time I made it back to her side.

  “Indo,” I said, “Indo,” shaking her by the shoulder. Fritz frantically licked her ear, and I tried to gather him into my arms, but he was determined to help her. I inventoried her—intact arms and legs, no blood, no vomit, no urine. After an exhaustive tally, I watched her chest rise and fall, then touched her cheek—it was soft and worn, like a beloved children’s blanket.

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Is it raining?” she asked in a dry voice.

  I started giggling—hysterical, nervous, relieved. Pulled Fritz away.

  “What happened?” She glowered.

  “I found you here, on the floor. Lu went to call the ambulance.”

  She tried to get up but couldn’t even lift her hand.

  “Do you remember what happened?” I asked to keep her speaking. “Why are you here on the floor?”

  She shook her head, baffled.

  “The EMTs will be here to help you any minute.”

  “No,” she said vehemently, “I said I don’t want any goddamn doctors.”

  “It’s okay.” I took her hand, as much for my own comfort as for hers.

  “What time is it?”

  “Eight in the morning.”

  “What are you doing here so early?” she asked. Something had shifted in her questions—she was fully present now. She seemed to know who, and where, she was.

  “I was having—I was just wondering if you’d seen—” I was going to say “Ev,” but she cut me off with an exasperated growl.

  “I can’t hold your hand; you’re going to have to figure it out for yourself.”

  I took my hand off hers. I thought she was speaking literally. “I just thought you might have seen—”

  “You think I can give you my house if you don’t have proof? Numbers and figures, written down and added up by men. They stole it, they grew it, they live off it and know the truth of where it came from. Blood money, blood money, blood money.” She moaned as if in excruciating pain. “My poor mother! She made me promise—keep it a secret, keep it a secret—but I can’t anymore. I can’t. You can only cut out a tumor for so long before it simply infects the whole body. The time for sentimentality has passed.”

  “You should rest,” I said firmly. I’d been wrong; she was not herself.

  She lifted her head in a remarkable feat of strength and looked right at me. “Mabel Dagmar, listen clear. I gave you my mother’s diary because it tells the truth. The truth you have to find. If you want to be a Winslow you will have to change what being a Winslow means.
You will have to take them all down.”

  “The truth?” I asked meekly, as I heard an ambulance whining toward us through the woods.

  “Pay attention to the when of it,” she said, her eyes rolling back in her head.

  “But I’ve read it over and over,” I whispered, as the siren grew louder. She did not respond. “What am I supposed to be looking for?” I might as well have been asking a wall.

  The siren was met with a rising chorus of howling, barking canines drowning out the Winloch silence until the blaring vehicle halted outside. The EMTs descended upon us, shaking the little cottage with their efficiency. They rolled Indo out to the flashing vehicle, and loaded her in as bewildered cousins emerged from their cottages, grasping their robes around themselves. At the far end of the meadow, Birch and Tilde poked their heads out of Trillium.

  As the EMTs closed the door of the ambulance and Birch started to run toward us, I put my arm around Lu’s shoulder. Two words ricocheted through my head: blood and money.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The Threat

  I took Indo’s dogs back to Bittersweet, tossed their hair-covered pillow onto the floor of the kitchen, and ordered them down. Fritz gratefully licked my hand, as though not a thing had changed. I thought, with a pang of sadness, of how much Indo doted on him. Sure, he’d stayed by her side when she collapsed, but he didn’t seem to care now that she was gone.

  Lu knocked sulkily on the door half an hour later. I didn’t tell her Ev was gone, but she seemed to take it as a given; we both knew Ev would have never allowed Indo’s mutts into her domain. I washed my hands and fixed us egg sandwiches and black coffee. Lu slumped dramatically on the porch couch.

  “Indo’s going to be okay,” I said, intending to comfort her, instead opening the floodgates. She sobbed, her salty tears falling on the crusts of the leftover toast. “Really,” I said, “you’re a hero; thank you for calling, I didn’t even think of that,” but still she bawled on. I took the plate from her. “We did everything we could,” I said, rethinking all of it, telling myself we really had, when she mumbled something incoherent. I asked her to repeat herself.