I marched through Indo’s rooms as though surveying them from above. I knew, from experience, that even a pile of clothes on the floor could be a person. But she wasn’t in the crimson living room, huddled in the Indonesian cushions on the rickety couch, and she wasn’t hunched in one of the creaking, precarious chairs on the screen porch. I circled back around, into the living room, toward the bedrooms, when Aggie stepped before me from the kitchen. Her whole being was need: “Mr. John was such a good boy, I can’t believe he killed her, ohhhh.” And there were tears and she wanted to touch me, to pull at my clothes, so I dodged her again—grief seemed to slow her down—and slipped into the hallway that led to Indo’s inner sanctum.
The door was halfway closed, but I wasn’t shy. I pushed it open. Indo’s bedroom hadn’t changed since the last time I was there: rosy pinks, medicinal pistachio. She was propped upright, head turbaned, mosquito net pulled back at either side, as though she were a queen holding court in a tropical deathbed. She looked so much older. Her skin was waxy, her cheeks hollow.
I heard Aggie coming. I shut the door, slamming her and Fritz out. The dog barked and she cried. I turned the brass key in the lock. It made a satisfying click.
“You’re a sight.” Indo’s voice was like ripped paper.
“Congratulations,” I growled. “I found out your brother likes to fuck everything in sight. I suspect you already know he raped your own sister—excuse me, half sister—and Mrs. LaChance and god knows how many other helpless women. So what? You’re all just going to let him keep doing it, aren’t you? You’ll scream at your little girls to cover themselves and pay off your maids to keep their mouths shut. So what I don’t understand is why, if you sat by all these years and let it happen, now you want me to be the one who gives a fuck. That journal isn’t proof anyway, Indo. No one’s going to believe me based on that—no one who’s going to do anything about him.”
Indo sat patiently through my tirade. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
A cruel laugh rose up through me. But her expression didn’t change. “Come on,” I said. “Blood money? Kitty’s journal? You kept throwing me bones, and I did what you wanted—I fucking found out the secret, just like you wanted me to, and for what? She already fucking knew, Indo. Ev already knew John was her brother and it didn’t matter. Do you understand me? She’s as sick as her father. She knew John was her brother and she still wanted to have his baby.
“But John didn’t know. So you know what I did? I told him. Just like you wanted me to, I fucking told him what I’d found, and you know what he did next? He murdered his crazy old mother and he killed himself and I’m supposed to have that on my head?”
I was crying now, wiping the tears away with my bare arm. “No,” I answered myself. “No,” I said striding to the bed, so that I was near to her neutral face. “No, I know who wanted me to tell, and it was you, and so I told, but now, Jesus, Indo, now what the fuck was any of it supposed to mean, why would you do that to them, why would you do that to me?” And my words were swallowed by angry sobs that racked my body, and I felt an instinct to make the marks on Indo’s neck that had been around Pauline’s, but I restrained my hands. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.
I hugged my arms around myself to calm down, trying to find some sense of quiet in the midst of Fritz’s yapping and Aggie’s racket and the storm within me, but it took a long time before I could form rational thought.
Indo blinked up at me calmly. “My dear,” she said thinly, as though she was an unwilling adult forced to lure a child out of a tantrum. “I see that you’re terribly upset. But I’ll confess your thoughts sound … muddled. You’ve been through a hideous ordeal, and no one can blame you for having disordered thinking, for mixing up the truth with gothic fantasy.”
It was as though I was speaking to a different woman here, in this pastel dowager’s room. The feisty Indo I had met on the path only two months before, swearing at her dogs as they swarmed me, hardly seemed to exist anymore.
She went on. “My brother is unscrupulous. But to accuse him of such unspeakable acts …”
I couldn’t understand why she was so blind to her brother’s proclivities. Ev’s unquestioning acceptance of her father’s rapes—or seductions, as she might have called them—though alarming in and of itself, at least confirmed I’d been right about Birch. But how Birch’s own sister, who’d lived only a few hundred yards from him for most of their adult life, and shared a home with him as a child, could be so oblivious to his violations of his own family was beyond me.
And then I realized: he had probably violated Indo too. As his sister, she was likely one of his first victims. Maybe it had happened so long ago, when they were both so young, that she had buried those memories deep, and all she could remember about them was that she hated her brother.
There was a pounding on the bedroom door just then. “Ms. Linden! Ms. Linden! Are you all right?”
Indo sighed and rolled her eyes at the door. “Don’t mind us, Aggie,” she pronounced, before putting her hand to her forehead. Her eyelids fluttered and her mouth seemed to suck at the air like a fish stranded ashore. I sagged with pity for the old, dying woman. She loathed her own brother and couldn’t allow herself to know why or what that knowing would mean.
On the other side of the door, I heard Aggie’s and Fritz’s retreat.
“Indo,” I said, softening my voice, feeling weary myself, stifling a desire to crawl onto the foot of her bed, “if it wasn’t who Birch raped, what on earth did you want me to find?”
She sniffed haughtily. “It hardly matters now.”
“Why not?”
She raised her hands as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I’m dying.”
“But you were dying at the beginning of the summer.”
“Exactly. I only had a few months to take what I know and find the proof to back it up. Sure, I’ve got memories and tales, but those don’t mean much without hard physical evidence.” She sighed. “But I didn’t have the stamina. Naturally, I thought all was lost. That I’d missed my chance to bring this corrupt family to its knees.” She pointed her finger at me. “And then you waltzed in, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and I thought: aha!”
“Aha, I’ll give her my house?”
“Once this family crumbles, someone else will have to live here. Might as well be you.”
“Why not just punish Birch with whatever you know? Why take them all down with him?” I had no idea what her bombshell was, and suspected that it would prove inconsequential in the face of Winloch’s reach. Still, it seemed awfully harsh to want to punish every Winslow if only Birch was at fault.
“Because the cancer has spread to all of them!” she shouted, strong now. I remembered her earlier words to me about cutting out a tumor, had come to assume, given her diagnosis, that she had been talking about herself. But now I understood that she was speaking metaphorically, and she meant the Winslows. “It was different when Mother and Father were in charge. We made sacrifices. We kept secrets. We didn’t marry the people we loved because they were the wrong sorts of people.” That last sentence seemed to take the wind out of her, and she slumped back against her pillow. “But under Birch’s watch … There is no order. There is only corruption … So little appreciation of how those sacrifices must be repaid.” Tears began to form in her eyes. “My painting …”
I felt moved by her great need for that beautiful thing. I still had no idea what proof she needed, or what I would do with it if I found it, but I wanted her to know there was still time. That I could help her get some peace. Before I could say so, she spoke, her strength regained.
“Maybe if you weren’t so blinded by greed, you’d—”
“Greed?” I balked.
She ticked off her fingers. “My house. Galway’s bed. Ev’s friendship. Pauline’s secret.” She held them up triumphantly. “You’re covetous. I thought that flaw would help my cause—that your desire to own our secrets, to collect
shiny treasures like a crow, would give me my proof. But I was wrong. You never wanted to help me bring my family down.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You only wanted to assimilate.”
“I just want to help you,” I said quietly, giving her one last chance.
She gestured around the room. “The funny thing is, none of this is even mine to give.”
I took it all in—the dresser lined with enamel boxes, the small painting of Clover and the cove below, a crocheted shawl slumping over a useless chair. I was dizzy. And confused. And angry. And exhausted. “Fine,” I said, walking toward the door, done with her.
“Stop.” The command was sharp. “Wait.”
Even though I wanted to have the will to leave, I wanted answers more. So I did as I was told.
Indo sighed. “It’s not mine to give you because it’s all stolen.”
“You’ll have to do better than that.” My hand was upon the door.
“My mother’s journal kept track of it all in the beginning,” she said. “What was stolen. When. And where it went.”
Even though I couldn’t pin down exactly what she was saying, she was telling more than she ever had. My mouth began to water. I let go of the door handle. “In the beginning?”
“I don’t want you to think ill of her. She was a good woman. The moment she became a Winslow, she loved this brood with all her heart. But it was this particular single-mindedness, this loyalty, that led her to come up with the idea. You have to understand, the Winslows were in trouble. After Samson lost his marbles, my grandfather Banning nearly ran the family into the ground with bad investments. We stood to lose everything, even Winloch. But we didn’t, thanks to my parents.” What she was saying was consistent with what I’d guessed at, from the bankruptcy papers I’d found to Bard being behind some kind of windfall that had changed the Winslows’ fate. I let her go on.
“What they stole, how they stole it, became a kind of instruction. A way of life for the Winslows. First we took goods. Then ideas, deeds, investments. I won’t lie and say I regret it. My parents saved us. I truly believe that, Mabel. Perhaps I should be ashamed that it has taken me a lifetime to acknowledge my forebears’ sins. To understand that they did wrong even as they were doing right.”
She sat up straighter in bed. “But I see that now. And I’m the only one. You think Birch gives a damn? You think he’s doing anything to stop this dangerous legacy? Not a bit. He’s ten times worse than my parents were. More sophisticated. More greedy. My parents were saving us. He just wants to get richer.”
“So he’s stealing too.” My mind was swirling with all she was implying, even if I wasn’t yet able to pin her down. I wanted to know how, exactly, the Winslows had stolen what they had, and from whom, and when it had begun, and what they were stealing now. “Who—”
“My dear,” she pronounced in an almost bored tone, “there are always parts of the world in disarray. Just as there are always people willing to better their lot by helping unload what their countrymen no longer need. It’s not half as hard as you’d imagine to locate what is no longer being appreciated. Most folks are desperate to trade their worldly goods for freedom.”
“Like where?”
“Over the years? Everywhere, really. The Far East. Darkest Africa. Central America.”
“I’ll need dates.” My mind was racing. “Specific countries. What was stolen. If you give me something I can trace, I’ll start digging.”
Her vigor drained as soon as I tried to pin her down. She leaned back upon her pillows like a sullen child. “I already told you. I don’t have any proof. I asked you to find it and you didn’t. So there’s no point in trying to stop him anymore.”
“Indo,” I began to plead, desperate, “you have to tell me something more if you want my help.” My mind grasped for an incentive. “The Van Gogh. You want it back, right? Well, let me help bring your brother down and you can have it back.”
She began to laugh then, right in my face, a mean laugh as though I was the biggest idiot in the world. I felt my face turn hot. I heard the sound of Aggie and Fritz back on the other side of the door.
“I mean it,” I insisted. “I can help you.”
“Oh no,” Indo yelped, overcome by a manic cackle that filled the room, “oh no, my dear Mabel, no one—not even you—can help me now.”
I tried to talk to her again, but her laugh filled the room, drowning out my voice. She was as crazy as her niece and brother and everyone else in this godforsaken place. She wasn’t going to help me, even though helping me would help herself.
The door handle started jiggling below me. I could hear something metal jimmying the lock. I had to get away. I needed air, and space to think.
When the key fell to the floor and Aggie and Fritz burst through the door, I hurtled myself toward the opening, angling around them and out of the room as they rushed to Indo’s side. Their needy combination was like poison to my ears as I ran from the cottage and out into the afternoon.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
The Theft
Where could I go? To whom could I turn? Indo drained of knowledge, Ev gone mad, Galway revealed to be unfaithful, I had no one—not at Winloch, not anywhere. As I tore away from Indo’s cottage and over the hill—running simply because my feet had to keep moving or I might lose my mind—I realized that, in the span of a summer, Ev’s family had swallowed all knowledge I had of who I was and what I believed. I wasn’t whole anymore, I thought, before realizing, with chagrin, that I hadn’t really ever felt whole. This terrible realization stopped my feet short. I was young, still so young, that I thought my lack of wholeness was somehow my fault. I had no idea everyone feels this way—that the most essential part of growing up is figuring out where your empty places are and learning how to fill them by, and for, yourself.
I was at the base of the hill now, Dining Hall in sight, on the road that would lead me out of Winloch. I could hear the faint rumble of a motorboat, the drone of a lawn mower, the chattering of the chipmunks bustling in the undergrowth beside the road. But any immediate human sounds—save my own—were few and far between, and I realized, with a startle, that the only person with whom I had ever felt close to whole was my brother. Even before the incident, he’d been sheltered from the facts of life by a brain both too big and too small for what the world required, but what he knew of me was essential, pure. True. He believed I was good. He believed I was kind. He believed I had the answers.
For the first time that summer, I wondered: what would Daniel do?
Daniel wasn’t afraid of anything, which is a nice way of saying he would wade into an icy river if you commanded him. He sought out justice, which made him impossible to lie to. And he was pigheaded, a nasty way of saying he never let a question out of his grasp.
I had to find out what the Winslows had stolen. Were stealing, if Indo was to be believed. I was furious at her vagueness and sad she was going to die. But I couldn’t let that affect my search. Call that greed if you must (Indo had), but it was the only thing I knew to do next, because it’s what Daniel would have done, had he been able. I wasn’t doing it for Indo anymore; I was doing it for myself.
I had to look at Kitty’s journal again. “In the beginning.” It held answers.
I raced toward Bittersweet, sure Ev wouldn’t have dried, dressed, and made it back from Bead Beach so quickly. I would pry the journal from its hiding place under the porch’s loose board, head for the woods, and gather my wits. Knowing it documented what the Winslows had stolen would surely give me new eyes with which to read it. Once I found what Indo had been alluding to, I would figure out how to use that information. I would find the proof she wanted.
I was almost to the steps when I spotted Ev sitting on the porch couch. She was flipping through a magazine, her back to me, oblivious to my gaze. The sight of her head—blond, tousled—was so familiar that my memory called up the smell of her salty scalp. Affection tugged at my heart.
But then I remembered what she had told me
at Bead Beach. All this time, even when I’d learned she’d been lying to me about the inspection, or using me to hide her true intentions to leave Winloch with John, I’d believed there was still something strong at the core of our friendship. That we shared a moral universe: don’t marry your brother, rapists are evil, et cetera. But on Bead Beach, she’d declared who she really was. I realized, in one, tragic, honest, relieving rush, that Ev and I were never really going to be friends again. That maybe we’d never been friends to begin with.
I’d used her too, hadn’t I? Hadn’t I believed that aligning myself with her would better my lot? That I deserved what she had? It was hard to know what was real about any of our friendship now that I knew how far apart we were. Was she even pregnant? Had she ever been? Had I liked Galway only because he was part of her world? Did it matter anymore?
Wait, I told myself, it won’t do any good to chew it all over—there will be time enough. Later. So maybe we weren’t ever friends. So what?
I had to get that journal. I had work to do.
I pushed open the screen door. She glanced up at the sight of me. “Where’d you run off to?” As though none of what had been said between us on Bead Beach had occurred.
“Are you hungry?” she continued. “I asked Masha to bring sandwiches.” I remembered the picnic I’d abandoned. My stomach growled. Ev smiled. She knew the way to my heart.
I calculated whether I could retrieve the journal and keep the secret of the hiding place in the time it would take Ev to, say, go to the bathroom. I glanced down at the loose floorboard, only a foot from where she sat. My look to the board was fleeting—a split second at most—but that was all it took. Ev followed my gaze.
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