“You want to know? Okay, maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s time you understand exactly what this so-called gift of yours can do. How it can destroy people. And families. I was still in high school when your grandmother promised she’d never use the gift again, but she broke her promise. When you were ten.”
The year we moved.
The year Dad left us.
“Oh, Clare … I’d always planned to tell you someday, but I just wanted you to be ready. To be a little older, so that you—”
“I’m old enough now.”
My mother sighed, rubbing her fingers along her temples. “We’d gone over to her house for a barbecue. Some of the neighbors were over. Your father and a couple of the other men were helping fix a trellis and you and I were helping in the kitchen … Anyway, your father got dirty and your grandmother gave him an old T-shirt to wear, promising to wash his shirt. I didn’t think anything of it. But the next week when she brought it back to me, all clean and folded …”
I almost asked her to stop. Because I knew, deep down, what was coming.
“She told me she couldn’t help it.” Mom’s voice dropped to a whisper. “She said when she touched it she felt … all your father’s emotions … his discontent, how trapped he felt, how—how he wanted to escape, to be with … her, with Renee.… She said I needed to know, so I could ‘make decisions.’ She meant so I could leave him, of course.”
“Oh, Mom …” My anger drained away instantly. My dad. Of course it had to do with my dad. The man who’d stuck around just long enough to make sure that when he left, he’d rip big enough holes to ruin both our lives. “I’m so sorry.”
I’d never known the exact story about Dad and Renee and how they ended up together. She’d been his assistant, that was all I knew. Mom had told me they’d started dating after the divorce, but he’d moved in with Renee shortly after he left us. And a few months after that he’d taken a job in Sacramento, where they bought a house together.
But I’d never come out and asked. I guess I hadn’t really wanted to know.
“Sorry.” Mom laughed, a short, bitter sound. “Not as sorry as I was. After my mother told me I had no choice but to confront my husband about the affair he was having. So I did. And he didn’t even try to deny it. He never even asked me how I knew—that was how little he cared. He was gone a few days later.”
“But Mom—if he was that unhappy, he would have left anyway—”
“Not like that!” Now my mother was crying in earnest. “Not with me … humiliated … Straight into the arms of his assistant, of all the women in the world, that’s such a cliché, Clare, you don’t even understand.”
But I did understand.
I knew exactly how my mother felt: abandoned, tossed aside, unwanted. It was exactly how Dad had made me feel, too. But somehow, she didn’t see that we had that in common. In her mind, she was the only one who’d suffered from what he’d done.
“You can’t blame this on Nana,” I said. “All she did was tell you what he was already doing.”
“Don’t you get it, Clare? If your grandmother had kept it to herself—if she’d never gone looking into things that didn’t concern her—that affair would have burned itself out. Your father would have gotten it out of his system and we would have had some dignity.”
“Are you kidding me? Are we talking about the same guy? My dad, Joe Knight? The one who sent me a birthday card two months late? Oh, yeah, all he needed was a little time, right? And he would have been husband and father of the fucking year.”
“Clare!”
I had never talked to her like that before, but I wasn’t going to stop until I was through. “You put all this on Nana,” I said shakily, barely able to control my fury. “But it was never about her. It was Dad’s fault, not hers. You made us move, you turned your back on her … you even made it about me. Do you have any idea how—I thought I was a freak, Mom. All because you made the things I could do seem shameful. I’ve tried so hard to do what you wanted, to make you happy, but I’m not going to anymore.”
“Clare …”
“No.” I jerked away from her. “No. I’m going to my room. I want to be by myself. You already ruined Nana’s life, I’m not going to let you ruin mine too. I am who I am, Mom, and you need to decide if you can love me this way or not. Or it won’t matter what else happens. You can’t make me safe by pretending I’m someone I’m not.”
I didn’t turn around as I ran for my room, slamming the door, but I could hear her sobbing even after I got into my bed and pulled the covers up over my head.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I WOKE AROUND NINE THE NEXT morning, groggy and disoriented. I lay in bed for a while thinking about Jack and Rachel and Amanda and Dillon, about the secrets simmering below the surface of the town as they prepared for tomorrow’s festival.
When I finally got up, Mom was gone, but the house smelled amazing. Wandering into the kitchen, I found a German apple pancake sitting on the stove, still warm. It was perfect, puffy and sprinkled with powdered sugar. It broke my heart, thinking of my mom rushing to make it for me before she went to work.
I knew that getting up early to bake was a kind of apology. I owed her an apology too, but I wasn’t sure where to start. I was still angry, but everything was muddy now, confusing and unclear. Yes, it was wrong of my mother to shift the blame to Nana for what my father did, but she was only human … heartbroken, left with a child to raise by herself, needing to make a living for us both.
It wasn’t until I’d poured myself a glass of juice that I noticed my mother had left something else for me. Neatly folded next to the coffee maker was a soft green shirt, with a note on top in my mother’s careful handwriting.
Clare—I wore this when I was pregnant with you. Your grandmother did the embroidery. I could never bear to give it away.
Love, Mom
I unfolded the shirt. It was a simple style, with an Empire waistline gathered with tiny pin tucks. The neckline had been embellished with a trailing design of flowers and leaves in silk embroidery floss a shade lighter than the cotton fabric. The handwork was beautiful, French knots dotting the chain-stitch flowers, leaves in satin stitch. Nana had shown me how to do a few of these stitches when I was little, but my attempts had always been a mess.
I held the shirt up to my cheek. There was a faint spicy scent, as if it had been stored in a drawer with sachets.
I felt a wave of sadness for my mom. She had never been comfortable showing her emotions. Even now, when I knew she had to be lonely, she never talked about it. The stack of books on her nightstand grew, and she distracted herself with more work, but she needed friends.
I thought of Mrs. Stavros, alone with her grief and her drinking.
And I wondered: Could they help each other? Could my mother help her old friend move forward with her life? I knew Mrs. Stavros would never get over the loss of her daughter, but maybe she could turn herself around enough to stop hiding in her own house, have some friends, maybe work. If her ex-husband was as rich as everyone said, she probably didn’t need the money, but if she didn’t do something she was going to waste away in her mansion.
Maybe getting back into her old life would be a good start for my mom. I could talk to Mrs. Stavros, maybe invite her over for coffee, tell my mom she was coming only when it was too late for her to cancel.
The day stretched out long and empty in front of me. I needed to call Rachel but I didn’t have the energy for that yet. And besides, she was busy getting ready to leave town later in the afternoon. With her gone, that would be one less person I needed to worry about tomorrow, on the actual anniversary.
The whole town was holding its breath, trying to get through the next forty-eight hours. The crazy thing was, there were no guarantees; even if nothing bad happened tomorrow, what about the day after that? And the one after that?
There was no end date on trying to discover what had happened to Amanda, and who had killed Dillon. Walking around Winston, you go
t the feeling that if we all got through this week, there would be this huge sigh of relief and everyone would be able to pretend nothing bad had ever happened. The tourists would come back. The businesses would start earning profits again. Alone in their houses, the grieving parents would continue to mourn the children they had lost, but out in the streets of town Mrs. Granger would smile and greet people and move ahead with her life. Maybe, in time, her husband and Mrs. Stavros would too.
The only loose thread in this whole plan was me. I had the visions, the jacket, the need to find out what happened. Now, maybe, I had an ally. But if last night I had felt like I could trust Jack completely, in the bright light of morning common sense returned. I wanted to see Jack, have him beside me as I hunted down the truth. But I was going to take one precaution … just in case I was making a huge mistake with him.
I got the plastic bag from my backpack, trying not to look at its contents. It was cool and squishy in my hands as I went down into the cellar. Most houses in Winston didn’t have basements, but the dress shop had been built over a dirt cellar used for storage long ago. When my parents renovated, they’d had some foundation repairs made but left the cellar alone. I remembered seeing spider nests, old broken glass, and bits of paper and ancient trash down there. We’d never used it for storage because of the damp and dirt, but long ago my ancestors had, and there were niches and decaying wooden shelves lining the walls.
The single bulb overhead did little to illuminate the space, and the dust made me sneeze, but I took my time, considering and discarding half a dozen spaces before I found a relatively sturdy shelf in one corner. It had been constructed of raw lumber many decades ago, and as I brushed dust off the boards with my sleeve, I saw that something had been written on the wood.
I squinted in the near darkness. A single word had been written in a childish hand: “Josie.” My great-great-grandmother. Alma’s daughter, raised by her mother’s sister, who went on to work in the shop upstairs, who passed her mother’s dark gift on to her own daughter and, many years later, to me.
I wondered what she had kept down here. Incomplete projects, maybe, or patterns. Yard goods or a stash of fabrics she’d collected. Or maybe this was where she kept her private things—journals and treasures, love letters and hopes for the future. Whatever she’d stored here, it was long gone.
I touched the wood, wondering if I’d be able to feel the connection across time. But all I felt was the dirty, splintering board. I slid the plastic bag far back on the shelf—and my fingertips brushed against something.
My heartbeat quickened as I closed my fingers around a small round object and brought it into the light. A button. I rubbed it on my shirt to get rid of the layers of grime, and saw that it was beautiful, made of shimmering mother-of-pearl and edged in scalloped silver.
Turning it this way and that in the light of the bare bulb, I was certain that this small treasure had belonged to my great-grandmother. I felt like Josie had left it there just for me to find, as reassurance that everything would be all right, that I could trust my gift.
I slipped the button into my pocket, feeling like I had found the thing I didn’t know I was looking for.
Half an hour later I was showered and out the door, pedaling across town to the Stavros house, the button tucked in the pocket of my shorts. I liked knowing it was there, especially since I wasn’t entirely sure what I was doing. I felt like I was trying to arrange a playdate for my mom, like somewhere along the line the tables had gotten turned and we’d switched roles. But I was trying to help Mrs. Stavros, too. I had run out of ideas for trying to figure out Amanda’s disappearance, but maybe coming at it from a new angle would spark something.
It probably made more sense to start with my mom, but that was going to be a tough sell. Mom could be really stubborn, and if she knew I was trying to push her into a friendship, she’d probably resist. But once they were in the same room … well, wasn’t there a chance that something would spark?
As I coasted onto Elderberry Circle, my ankles getting sprayed by the sprinklers as I rode past the beautiful lawns, I felt hopeful that this would help me move on too. Dillon’s death, Amanda’s disappearance, they were just sad statistics, lives ended too early, leaving heartbreak and pain behind. But nothing I did now would change that.
Walking up the Stavroses’ drive, I noticed a car I knew parked next to the dark red Acura that had been there the day before: a sleek blue Mercedes with a crystal charm hanging from the rearview mirror.
Rachel’s mom’s car.
I’d ridden in it half a dozen times when she took us out for dinner or to go shopping. She didn’t like to ride in Rachel’s car because she said it messed up her hair.
What was she doing here? Rachel had never mentioned her mom and Mrs. Stavros being in touch. Had they kept their friendship up without Rachel knowing? Or was Mrs. Slade just checking in on an old friend, someone she knew was struggling, maybe coming over to talk and have coffee?
If she hadn’t seen Mrs. Stavros in a while, though, she was in for a shock.
While I was standing there trying to figure out what to do, the front door flew open so forcefully it bounced against the wooden bench on the front porch, and Mrs. Slade backed out, tripping on one of her pink wedge-heeled sandals and grabbing the bench to steady herself.
“Get out, get out.” Mrs. Stavros was standing in the door sobbing, her hair even more of a mess than it had been yesterday. Her face was shiny with tears and her bangs were stuck to her forehead, mascara smudged under her eyes.
“Heaven, I’m telling you, you’ve put us all at risk.” Mrs. Slade looked angry, and she jammed her foot in the door so Mrs. Stavros couldn’t pull it shut. “I’m going to go now, but I’m coming back when you’re sober, and we’re going to figure out a plan. Just promise me you won’t talk to anyone else.”
“We’re going to figure out a plan,” Mrs. Stavros mimicked, her face twisted as she echoed Mrs. Slade’s words. “You always had to tell everyone else what to do, Brenda. But you’re not the one who lost a daughter. So you don’t get to push me around anymore.”
“Heaven, you know how terrible we all feel about that, how much we miss Amanda—”
“Right, I know, but you still get to go home to Rachel and Adrienne and Cal. The perfect little family. What do I have? Nothing. Nothing. And it was every bit as much Rachel’s fault as Amanda’s. What’s fair about that? Huh?”
She swayed on her feet, blinking, trying to focus on Mrs. Slade, who looked like she was about to jump out of her skin. “Quiet,” she hissed. “Do you want the whole neighborhood to hear?”
“But I said—”
“I am very sorry about Amanda, and I always will be, you know that, Heaven, but it was not the same. Amanda was driving. Not Rachel. And I will not let you drag her down with you, I swear to you—”
“I’ll talk to whoever I want,” Mrs. Stavros said, almost to herself. “You can’t make me stop.”
I backed down the driveway as carefully as I could, glad I’d worn my rubber-soled Converse sneakers. I couldn’t let them see me. I could still hear the sound of Mrs. Stavros’s crying and Mrs. Slade’s tense, fast talking as I coasted down the circle.
My head was full of questions, the shock of what I’d overheard numbing my senses. I was dimly aware of cars, lawn mowers, kids yelling in the park, but it wasn’t until I almost ran into a car door that I realized that if I didn’t calm down, I was going to get into an accident. I turned onto another residential street, pedaling slowly and taking the long way down the hill, crisscrossing the neighborhood and avoiding the main road.
Mrs. Slade was angry that Mrs. Stavros had been talking to someone—and it didn’t take a genius to guess who she meant. Me. Mrs. Slade had somehow found out that I’d visited Mrs. Stavros, and she wasn’t the least bit happy about it.
Amanda was driving.…
It was every bit as much Rachel’s fault as Amanda’s.…
I felt the beginnings of a headach
e. I’d reached the bottom of Lycester Court, where I could turn right toward my house or left across town to Rachel’s. I’d steered to the left even before I was aware of deciding.
“So you’re my self-appointed bodyguard now?”
Rachel was digging into her single scoop of strawberry ice cream from the Frosty Top. She seemed mostly back to normal, if exhausted; nearly all traces of the instability in the last few days were gone.
I was probably the only person in town who didn’t think much of the Frosty Top’s twenty flavors, but that was because I wasn’t all that into ice cream, period. My thing was the kettle corn they sold down by the pier, hot and salty and sweet and fresh out of the warmer. But I was so desperate to get Rachel out of the house that I told her we could go to Frosty Top and I’d even pay. Now we were sitting out on the pier having ice cream for lunch, ignoring the tourists walking back and forth who irritated the guys who were there to fish. We always sat in this one place where the fishing was supposed to be bad, and since no one ever dumped bait here, the gulls didn’t tend to mess it up as much.
I pushed my Gummi bears around in my melting vanilla yogurt, not really feeling like eating.
“Rachel … I need to ask you something.”
“Okay,” she said, wiggling her bare toes and admiring her pedicure.
“I just wondered …” I hesitated, knowing I was about to risk the one good friendship I had here in Winston. I took a deep breath, carefully setting my yogurt cup down on the splintery pier. “Where were you the night Dillon Granger died?” I asked quietly.
There was a long pause, and when Rachel spoke again her voice was strange—thin and hollow. “What are you talking about, Clare?”
The inside of the car. The phone in my hand. The jolt, the bump, the pain.
“When someone threw him off the cliff. When they made that nine-one-one call from the truck stop. I just wondered where you were.”
Hanging by a Thread Page 17
