I kissed my hand and put it back on his leg. Let it grow warm there, between us, as he wept.
We rode on like that for a good while, until he cleared his throat and tried to talk in a businesslike tone. “What I don’t understand is what he possibly could have been doing there. At Mrs. LaChance’s. Why would he drive a maintenance truck out there? And why on earth did he kill them?”
“I told John something that day,” I said carefully. “Something John might have wanted to confront Birch about. Maybe he invited Birch that night, so they could end it.”
“But why did Father drive a maintenance truck? Why not just come in his own car?”
“If the murders were premeditated, the maintenance truck was the perfect foil. No one would guess it was Birch behind the wheel. Especially if he drove over after night fell.”
Galway let this sink in. And then he asked the question I knew was coming. “So what did you tell John?”
I withdrew my hand from his leg. And then I told Galway what I had told his sister, and half brother, before him. “That your father was his father.”
Galway took the news stoically. “How’d you find that out?”
I told him about my discovery of the P. in Kitty’s journal, and how Masha, against her will, had confirmed John’s paternity. I told him of Ev’s pregnancy, and seeing John and Ev making love, and their subsequent elopement and planned departure. I told him I couldn’t bear to think of their life together not knowing who they really were to each other, and I told him, not quite knowing how to tell any more—but feeling that I must—that Ev had already known, that she had wanted, somehow, to be with her own half brother in that way. I told him that the way Ev had guessed John was her brother was that Jackson had come to her, and asked her if she knew that CeCe and Birch were his real parents, because someone in the family had confessed Birch’s sexual secrets, that he had raped his sister—and who knew what other relatives—not to mention the maids, and that that was the real reason Jackson had committed suicide. The knowledge that he was the product of a brother and sister’s miserable incestuous union had been too much to bear.
I told Galway almost everything, but held back the part about Indo insisting Kitty’s journal offered more secrets, or what those secrets were—that the Winslows had stolen, and been stealing, from others for years. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Galway, it was more that, riding beside him, I couldn’t imagine delving into anything unproven. My throat was raw from talking. I wanted to leave it all behind—Indo’s dying wish, and what the journal might offer, and who had stolen it, and how I might be able to use it to prove a much deeper conspiracy than Birch’s rapes. I felt as I had when they had pulled me from the river, my body cold, my heart colder, but relieved, lighter, now that I had released my darkness into the world. I just wanted to believe that the truth, enough of it, had set us both free.
Galway slowed to the side of the highway. Chunks of macadam ticked under the belly of the car. I wondered if he was going to throw me out as John had. I would have accepted my fate.
But instead, Galway opened his own door. The traffic rushed past us, someone laid on a horn, the air in the car suctioned in and out, and at the changed pressure, the girl in the backseat stirred and grumbled.
Galway swayed at the edge of the rushing traffic. I knew that he was considering changing his fate. A Mack truck would make his departure quick, if painful. I undid my seat belt and placed my hand on my door, knowing I wouldn’t get there in time if that was what he chose. But instead, he crossed in front of the car, lurched toward the forest line, bent at the waist, and vomited.
We stopped for a late lunch on the outskirts of a small town. Galway made Lu wait in the car so we wouldn’t be seen together, which I thought was a bit overzealous—we were hundreds of miles from Winloch, a nondescript family riding in a nondescript car—but she was game, folding herself under a blanket in the backseat. Now that she was safely in our care, she seemed giddy at the intrigue of our situation, as though we were in a spy novel. As I sipped my chicken soup and kept an eye on the car from our window booth, my heart almost broke with the thought of what she’d been bearing alone, and what she’d have to face once all this action was over.
“So what’s the plan?” I asked Galway. He had regained his color and will. As he sipped his coffee, I pushed away the realization that he looked like a younger version of his father.
“White River Junction,” he said.
“What’s in White River Junction?”
“Someone’s meeting us,” he murmured, summoning the waitress for the check, ordering Lu a gyro.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
The Handoff
White River Junction lies at the confluence of I-89—connecting Boston to Burlington—and I-91, which runs from Canada down to New Haven. The signs leading toward the town, as we made our way south on 91, seemed to advertise it as a bustling metropolis. But when we curled down the off-ramp and Galway turned in to the parking lot of an abandoned-looking warehouse, I’ll admit to feeling disappointed. We pulled behind the long, wide building so we were invisible from the road. Then we waited.
Galway checked his watch. Turned to address his little sister. “You sure you want to do this?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“Do what?” I asked.
“You won’t be able to come back until he’s either in jail or dead,” he said. “You can contact me, but the rest of them—”
“I don’t want to see the rest of them. I don’t want him to ever know where I am. But I want him to know there was a witness, Galway. I want him to be afraid I’ll tell.”
Galway nodded as a navy pickup came around the back of the warehouse. I could make out a black-haired woman at the wheel. She was alone.
She parked nose to nose with us and hopped down from the truck. Her gait was easy, her legs long, her hair glistening. She sauntered over to Galway’s window. He unrolled it. She leaned in and smiled.
“Thanks,” said Galway.
“I owe you big-time,” she purred. Her voice itched at me—I had heard it before. I knew who she was, but it seemed impossible he would have asked her here without warning me. She caught the look on my face and smiled again, sympathetic. Stretched out her hand. “Marcella.”
I touched her fingers. They were warm.
“And you,” she said, turning her smile toward the backseat, “must be Luvinia.”
Lu straightened and smiled. “Thank you for helping me.”
“Like I said,” she gushed, eyes casting over her husband again, “big-time.”
She got in the backseat. They schemed. It seemed Marcella, as Galway’s wife, had access to his trust. She would use it to obtain the necessary documents and tickets to ferry Lu out of the country. “She can pass for eighteen,” she said, appraising Lu, “if we cut her hair.” With a careful eye, I watched this woman who had shared Galway’s bed, and realized the seriousness of what we were discussing. Worry began to gnaw my gut. “We’ll set you up,” she said. “You can trust us. Your brother has helped a lot of people.”
I kept my mouth shut, but I wondered what exactly “helping” people meant. Smuggling children out of the country? Because that’s what Lu was, after all.
“Want to take a walk?” Marcella asked, bringing me out of my reverie.
Lu and Galway deserved time alone together, but that didn’t mean I had to talk to Marcella. I slammed the door shut behind me, crossed my arms, and made my way to a loading dock, littered with disintegrating cardboard boxes. Marcella got a cigarette from her truck, lit up, and smoked, her long throat tilting toward the sky.
She came toward me, inevitably. Leaned against the concrete. She smelled delicious. “Galway helped my mom and me get to this country. I admired him. Then he offered to marry me, see if he could pull some strings, get me a green card.”
“And did he?” I asked miserably.
“I’ll tell you a secret: I even thought I loved him.”
That w
as a secret I didn’t want to hear.
“But then, right after we got married, I met someone. Like, the someone. I admire Galway. But I’m not meant to be his wife.”
This made me feel only slightly better.
“He loves you,” she offered. I could feel her eyes darting over my face. “I’d know even if he hadn’t told me.”
I kicked at a pebble with my foot. “Oh, you would? How on earth would you know?”
“How he looks at you.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “I speak from experience: don’t waste your time being afraid of love.”
Lu flattened her palm on the passenger window of Marcella’s truck, a smile tucked bravely in the corners of her mouth. We had already cried, and hugged, and established that she’d send me an untraceable e-mail, as soon as she was safe, with the word turtle in it, so I’d know she had made it. I can still see her face in the moment they turned out of view, when Galway and I became just us two.
We sat in silence together. He started up the car.
“Let’s not go back,” I suggested.
He sighed. “I always knew what a monster my father was. But then, you know, I believed in Winloch more. In the Winslows. I thought we were sane. Honorable.” He shook his head. “I have to stop him. I have to try to save our family.”
We paid cash for a bed at the HoJo’s. Lay down beside each other.
“What happened to Abby?” I asked as the shadows grew long.
Tears filled his eyes. He waited for them to abate before he spoke. “When I got over there after you called me …” He began again. “Look, she was aggressive. She wouldn’t let anyone near her. Father came over— I know,” he said, as I startled. “I called the police, and got Father, just so someone with authority was there, but when Abby saw him, well, she went …” His eyes opened wide with admiration and sorrow. “She charged him. I thought it was just a dog who’d witnessed violence and snapped. I had no idea she was attacking her owner’s murderer. We called animal control.”
“They killed her?” I cried, my body dissolving into full sobs. Some part of me had known all along, but it was too much to bear.
We slept hard: like babies, like rocks, like the dead.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The Service
We reached Winloch by early afternoon. We were fortified and ready: we would confront Birch in broad daylight, in front of Tilde—what was he going to do, murder all three of us? We’d tell him we had a witness, the person who’d driven John’s truck out of Winloch and disappeared for good, but we wouldn’t reveal the witness’s name. Sometime tomorrow, he and Tilde would receive a call that Lu had just run away from camp. By then, Lu and Marcella would be long gone, with the lead time of a full day and a half. Birch would eventually suspect that Lu was the witness to his acts of murder—if he didn’t already—and, if he really was as much of a monster as he had already proved himself to be, would begin to hunt his daughter down the second he suspected she might speak against him.
As far as I was concerned, Tilde was our insurance policy. As unfeeling as she seemed, I had started to believe that her warning in the rowboat came out of a desire to protect me, just as her barking orders to Hannah to cover herself on Flat Rocks came from a need to shield that child. Tilde was the one who’d stopped Birch from breaking down the Bittersweet door. The one who’d insisted we put up the bolts in the first place. I was starting to believe she was in the business of protecting people from her husband.
If offered the choice between Lu and Birch, I was betting that Tilde would choose her daughter. That she would keep her husband at bay as long as she could, give Lu the chance to run. Galway wasn’t sure of this—he had become a nihilist overnight, sure he knew nothing and could trust no one (save me)—but I held fast to the promise of Tilde’s benevolence, because it was all we had.
It was another blinding late summer day, but we had brought Maine’s chill with us. Through my unrolled window the lake wind flowed. I wrapped my arms around myself as we turned the corner where Ev and John had discovered me the night I’d tried to run away.
Galway caught sight of the Dining Hall and exhaled. On a normal sunny afternoon like today, the building would be abandoned, quiet, the Winslows lost in outdoor pursuits. But today, the road leading to and from it was lined with cars. We slowed, parked at the back of the line, and got out.
As we walked toward the Dining Hall, Galway took my hand. We were going to end this, once and for all.
We mounted the steps quietly, but it was obvious, as soon as we swung open the doors, that every Winslow I’d ever met—Ev, Athol and Emily, Banning and Annie, the Kitterings, even CeCe—was gathered there, dressed in black and seated in makeshift rows as though to create a congregation. The crowd was facing the closed, gated kitchen, in front of which Birch stood, hands folded, head bowed. He lifted his eyes at the sound of us. And then they all did, the great herd of the great family, the young and the old, each and every one, lifting their blond heads and casting their blue eyes upon us.
Birch gestured to a seat that had been saved for Galway in the front row. Galway squeezed my hand—I thought it was a temporary good-bye—but he held his ground, and the doors came to rest behind us. Panic settled on me; were we about to be indicted of something? Why else would they all be here, waiting for us? I nearly dropped Galway’s hand, longing for the virtual anonymity I’d enjoyed in my early days at Winloch. I felt the impulse to apologize, then run.
The Winslows turned back to Birch, but his eyes stayed upon us. A faint smile grew at the corners of his lips. I couldn’t bear to look at him, but to look away would be to show my fear.
“I trust you received the message I left in Boston,” Birch’s voice boomed across the space.
Galway didn’t skip a beat. “Yes, Father. We came as soon as we could.”
Birch dismissed us in a glance. Then he spoke to the gathered group. “As I was saying, she was a strange woman, but her oddities didn’t detract from her unique vision of the world. She was funny. She was stubborn—” At this, there were some chuckles from the family, and a dissolve, from a woman on the left, into a sob.
It dawned on me that someone had died. That this was a memorial service.
“Linden was my sister,” Birch solemnly intoned, confirming my fears, “and death won’t change that. I’m glad the end was quick—” His voice cracked as he fought back crocodile tears.
So Indo had finally died. A stunned, numb sadness settled in my chest. As Birch pretended to struggle, letting his shoulders quiver enough to gain sympathy, but not so much that he was rendered speechless, I realized how perfectly in control he was. He was playing the convincing part of the devastated mourner, and nearly everyone believed him.
He had won. She had lost. I believed, without a shadow of a doubt, that it was partly my fault that she had given up, and that he held all the power now; I had been unable to find the proof she wanted, needed, to expose him. That I had failed her only meant he was now free of her. I’d even lost Kitty’s journal; worse, someone else—probably Birch—had it in his clutches. And now Indo was dead and her horrible brother was standing before a roomful of his followers, smugly eulogizing her, tasting victory, and there was nothing I could do about it. Fury mounted inside me, at my own incompetence, at the cancer that had eaten Indo up, at the horrible man before me, tricking everyone with his false grief.
“My sister was a materialist,” he continued, his supposed sorrow ebbing, his hands gesturing animatedly, as though he were running a PowerPoint presentation. “She loved beautiful things. Not expensive things, not necessarily, not diamonds, not lavish vacations or caviar, but little boxes she collected from her travels. Fabric from the souk. Photographs taken on a backpacking trip to Machu Picchu …” Birch went on, but something he’d said caught, like a fishhook, at the corner of my mind.
Indo—a materialist. That was certainly true; her small red cottage was packed to the gills with collections and whimsy, an abundant stockpile of too-muc
hness. She loved her things. And then, I thought of it—the Van Gogh. In her bedroom, on the last day we’d spoken, she’d cried out for it: “my painting.” But when I had tried to use the Van Gogh as an incentive to tease out more information, she had started to laugh maniacally, insisting it was too late for her. I’d thought her mad. But maybe there was something more concrete at play. Maybe she had started laughing—and wanted the painting in the first place—because it, in itself, was important.
I had to get to it. Perhaps it could tell me what Indo had not.
Birch droned on. The congregation grieved. But I knew that to truly memorialize Indo wouldn’t be to sit in a closed room listening to someone she hated speaking in platitudes about her. To honor her would be to carry on her cause.
Knowing it would cause a disruption, but not caring anymore, I pulled my hand from Galway’s and backed out of the double doors behind us. I would run as fast as I could.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The Truth
I sprinted down the stairs, up the road and over the hill, into the long meadow. Past Clover and the other cottages, and toward Trillium. I dashed to the screened-in porch. No one seemed to be inside. I placed my hand on the screen door and yawned it open, heart pounding, bracing for a gun, or a bear, or a vampire, but then I was just standing on Birch and Tilde’s porch. The summer room’s doors stood open, and the Van Gogh waited for me like a piece of ripe fruit ready to be plucked. I walked toward it.
“Lovely, isn’t it,” came a reedy, small voice the instant I stepped in line with the painting. I wheeled around. There, in the chair where Athol had caught me the night of the wedding, sat Gammy Pippa. She was as small as a girl, wrinkled, knobbed. She listed to one side. The scent of talcum powder wafted off of her.
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