I took a deep breath and grabbed two fistfuls of red fabric.
Rage. My head split with it, my face burned with it; my fingers were clutched so tight my knuckles hurt. I was a thing of fury, my senses drowning with an anger that filled every cell of my being.
I could barely breathe, and I tried to let go of the fabric for a moment so I could catch my breath, collect myself before trying again. Instead, the coat seemed to clutch me tighter … and the vision tumbled into my mind.
Hair. Bright, glossy, reflecting … Or it was the moon? Amanda’s hair in the moonlight, tangled but still beautiful, dragging on the ground. I was dragging her. And oh, God, she was heavy, but it wouldn’t be much longer, would it? Just a little farther. Just a little farther … rough, uneven earth. No path, just the dirt under my shoes. White shoes. Keds, with laces neatly tied. Amanda’s face … Dear God, what had happened to her face? One half looked like her picture, but the other half looked like—
Blood on my jeans. Blood on my Keds.
Blood under my fingernails.
Her face bloody, her cheekbone broken, I can see the bone protruding. Her mouth torn. Rage, I want to feel it again, crashing heavy down on that pretty face, that face that didn’t look where she was going, that face that killed my baby.
Heaving. Breathing hard. Dragging. But there. There, finally, we are at the edge. The cinderblocks are there. Four of them … so heavy, so heavy, carrying them one by one, the edges ground into my chest, the soft skin on the underside of my wrists. My blood mixing with hers. Sweat is pouring down my forehead but the air is cold on my face.
The car up on the dirt tracks. The weeds flattened, can’t help that. The edge of the pond lapping against the crusted dirt, like it took bites out of the shore. Pretty at night, silvery, shiny, but during the day it’s the dirt brown of every farm pond. Flat and still. No one would want to wade in this pond. No one would swim here. The skiff upside down on the dirt hasn’t been used in many months, maybe years. I’ll put it back where I found it. A few days of dust blowing will leave a coat of grit on its surface, no one will know about its journey tonight.
There. Drop her arms. They make a smacking sound on the plastic tarp I’ve used to drag her, the one that kept the blood out of my car. Her mouth is open. I use my foot to push her jaw shut, but not too hard. Into the skiff, dragging it into the water. Just a little, don’t want her getting any ideas, floating away without me. There’s the rope. Bristly. It hurts my scratched-up wrists but that’s okay, this will just take … Tying, tying, pulling tight, the skiff rocks when I drop the blocks in.
Rest? No, I can’t. I wipe my forehead on my coat sleeve, gulping air. Push off. One oar … Should there be two? Is it lost in the bottom of the pond, well, soon it will have company. How far out: at first I think the middle of the pond but I am very tired now, just a little farther … I put the oar on the floor of the skiff as I pick up one of the blocks and dump it in the water. Her arm makes a cracking sound. I get the second block in and she is perched on the edge of the skiff now as though she is hugging it, holding on, and for a minute it’s like she doesn’t want to go and I feel sad for her. But then I think about what she did to my baby, my angel, and the other blocks seem to weigh a lot less. Splash. Splash. Gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE FABRIC FELL FROM MY CLUTCHED fists, my fingers aching as I flexed them open. Had I blacked out? I was breathing hard, and the sweat on my face was real. I was leaning against the coat closet’s doorjamb and it was cutting into the skin of my shoulder. The red sleeve had fallen back against the coat, which had slipped partway off the hanger. I did not want to touch it again. I did not want to touch it ever again. I heard a sound and realized it was me saying something like “Oh God oh God,” and I swallowed, backing up, and ran right into something.
Someone. They stumbled from the impact and I thought, Please please be Jack, but I somehow knew it wasn’t. As she wrapped her arm around my neck I wondered how long she’d been watching me.
“I told her to be careful,” Mrs. Granger hissed against my ear. “I told her I’d be watching her.”
Her breath smelled like coffee and cinnamon gum, and she was surprisingly strong, or maybe it just seemed that way because the vision had left me weak and shaky. This was Amanda’s killer, I knew it for certain now, and even though part of me knew that I was in terrible, terrible trouble, there was another small part that was at peace for the first time since I had opened the box and touched the denim jacket.
But I hadn’t been meant simply to find out the truth: I needed to stop Amanda’s killer from hurting Rachel. I twisted as hard as I could, and was rewarded with a sharp pain in my side.
“Don’t you dare,” Mrs. Granger said, and I saw the knife in her hand. “I’m not going to kill you on my nice carpet. Isn’t this convenient, me coming home just now, today of all days? Do you want to know where I killed Amanda? Right there, in my kitchen. I was ready for her. She didn’t even notice. I called her and told her I wanted to talk to her, and that evil girl was so hungry for forgiveness she was here practically before I hung up the phone.”
“Please,” I managed, my teeth chattering with fear. It was incredibly eerie to hear the hateful words coming from the woman who’d been so kind to me when she stood on my front porch, who’d greeted us so warmly at her son’s memorial.
Where is Jack? Shouldn’t he be finished in the other room by now?
Mrs. Granger pulled her arm tighter against my neck and I started to choke. Ordinarily I would have been a match for her, but I was shaking too hard, my arms and legs rubbery and twitching with the prickly sensation I sometimes felt after a vision.
“My husband had gone to the store. We were out of Tylenol,” she murmured almost dreamily. “He started getting the headaches, you see, after we lost Dillon. I told him if I felt up to it I might go see my sister, and not to worry if I was gone when he got back. I’d always wondered what I would do if I came face to face with Amanda, and here she was, she came to me. She was standing right over there. And do you want to know something, Clare? I watch Rachel. I watch you girls. I came by your little stand the other week. You didn’t even recognize me. I had on sunglasses and a hat.” She chuckled, as though proud of herself. “You have talent. I’ll give you that. And Rachel … Such a pretty girl, you can’t even tell she’s rotten on the inside. Evil.”
“She’s not … We’re not …” I was trying to scream, to summon Jack from wherever he’d gone, but Mrs. Granger had cut off almost all my air and I could barely manage a whisper. She’s not evil, I wanted to say. Neither was Amanda. She had just made a horrible mistake.
I was starting to black out, and it was nothing like the visions: it was terrifying. I was going to die here in the kitchen. I kicked as hard as I could but my feet were just shuffling on the floor.
Maybe this time Rachel would be brave enough to go to the police with what she knew, but she had guessed wrong. She’d give them the wrong name. How could we ever have imagined it was Mrs. Granger, with her pink lipstick and her kind smile and her pearls? Besides, without knowing where Amanda’s body was, they would never be able to convict Mrs. Granger.
“I’ll have to kill her too,” Mrs. Granger said, sounding more matter-of-fact than unhappy about it. “All three of you. But that ought to wrap things up. You haven’t told anyone else, have you? No? Well, it will all be over soon. You know, Dusty keeps saying we need to start to move on. Can you believe that? I mean, he’s Dillon’s father, how he can—”
Mrs. Granger suddenly pushed me into the closet, sending me toppling into the clothes as I put out my hands too late to break my fall. I heard her howl with anger, and then came another voice:
“Stay there, Clare!”
It was Jack, and I was so relieved that I ignored him and crawled out on my hands and knees.
He was much stronger than Mrs. Granger, and he had her around the waist, but she was kicking at his feet and stabbing wildly with the knife as he tried to gr
ab her arm. I saw with horror that she’d already managed to cut him—the sleeve of his T-shirt was stained with blood.
She was aiming for his neck, fighting as hard as she could, making sounds like an angry cornered dog. With the last of my strength I reached for the fabric of her pants, grabbing as much in my hand as I could, and pulled. She screamed, tripping backward, and I heard the clatter of the knife on the floor right before she landed on me, knocking the wind out of me.
Jack dragged her away and the fabric slipped out of my fingers, but not before I caught a glimpse of the bleak, poisoned place that Mrs. Granger’s mind had become.
Jack never took his gloves off, so the only fingerprints we had to wipe away were the ones on the closet door. It didn’t take too long—my strength came back quickly once I got away from the coat and Mrs. Granger.
I watched Jack tie her up to a kitchen chair, wondering if the rope he found in the garage was the same rope she’d used to tie the weights to Amanda before she tipped her into the livestock pond. Jack had taped her mouth, taking care not to hurt her, not until I’d asked her a couple of questions. She strained against the rope and tried to scream, so Jack clapped his hand over her mouth and nose until she stopped struggling and got more cooperative.
She told us Amanda had been wearing the jacket when she dragged her across the field to the farm pond. It had come off her body along the way, and when Mrs. Granger discovered it lying on the ground on her way back to her car, she knew she had to get rid of it. Even as filthy and torn as the jacket had become, it was still a loose thread.
She’d dumped the jacket at the landfill on the way home.
As I sat shivering, thinking about the jacket’s strange path from Amanda to me, I didn’t miss the confidence with which Jack handled Mrs. Granger. I wondered if it came from working in the clinic. In a way, Mrs. Granger had something in common with the other dangerous animals they occasionally saw, the ones bred for fighting or ruined by abuse. Mrs. Granger had been ruined, too, but she couldn’t just be put down like a rabid coyote or a pit bull who’d attacked a child.
“Here’s what’s going to happen now,” Jack said calmly when she was finally secured to the chair, silent and still. “We’re going to make a call tonight. They’ll be searching all the farm ponds in the county by tomorrow. I don’t think you’ll have to wait too long.”
Mrs. Granger made muffled, angry sounds from her chair, twisting her body as much as the rope would allow.
“I wouldn’t tell them about us if I were you,” I said, my voice scratchy from my throat being squeezed so hard. “Not about Rachel, either. I mean, you could, but then we’re going to have to tell them that you invited me and Rachel here because you planned to kill us. I’ll tell them how I brought Jack instead, and you tried to hurt us and we barely managed to get away … how we were terrified to say anything. I’ll be convincing, believe me.”
For a moment I felt genuine pity for the poor shell of a mother in the chair. I didn’t doubt that the real Mrs. Granger had been a very different person, and I was terribly sorry that she was gone, along with her child.
But I had my own future to think about. Mine, and Jack’s, and Rachel’s. “But if they thought you were going to kill us, too, they might not feel so sorry for you. And don’t forget, we still have the jacket. Are you willing to gamble that you left no trace of yourself on it?”
“Wait for your husband,” Jack said. He’d gotten Mrs. Granger’s cell phone out of her purse and found Mr. Granger’s mobile number at the top of the favorites list. He’d written a text saying to come home right away, that there had been an emergency. All that was left was to hit “Send.”
“Ask for his forgiveness. Maybe he’ll stand by you. I guess you could try running … if he was even willing to let you.… But you wouldn’t have much of a head start.”
Mrs. Granger sagged against the chair, the rope cutting into her shoulders. The fight suddenly appeared to go out of her. I had to admit it was a pretty good plan—far from foolproof, but the best we could do.
Jack looked questioningly at me, his thumb poised over the “Send” button.
“Ready?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A WEEK BEFORE SCHOOL STARTED, Mom and I threw a dinner party.
Mom had walked up Grover Hill earlier in the week with a bottle of sparkling wine and a basket of freshly baked empanadas—and hadn’t come home until after midnight, her eyes puffy and red but her face lit with a hopeful smile. I had a feeling Nana’s visits were going to be more frequent from now on.
In fact, I had been getting the china out of the sideboard on Sunday morning when Mom came into the dining room wearing a shirt she’d never worn before, her hair in a ponytail. “No, no, honey, let’s try something else tonight. I was going through some things.…”
All day long Mom pulled boxes from storage, unearthing all kinds of keepsakes and heirlooms I’d never seen before. Some had even been given to her by Dad’s mom before she died, and when I asked Mom if she wanted to send them to Dad out in Sacramento, she frowned for a moment and then laughed.
“You know, I doubt the cheap bastard would miss any of this—let’s just not tell him.”
She had never, ever said a negative word about my dad before, but as I watched her take out the colorful embroidered napkins his mom had brought over from Czechoslovakia, the shell-handled teaspoons, the red glass goblets—all the while singing along with a Rolling Stones CD I’d had no idea she owned—I realized there was a lot more to my mom than I knew.
The shirt she was wearing, by the way, was one I’d made for her a couple of years earlier. It had started life as a simple linen blouse, but I’d belled the sleeves and added vertical rows of silk ribbon up the placket. At the time she’d said it had a sort of gypsy charm, but I’d never seen her wear it until today. Now she hummed and sashayed around in it like it was her favorite thing ever.
Jack would be over soon to help before the rest of the guests—Nana and her new boyfriend, Rachel, and Jack’s uncle Arthur—arrived. When everything seemed to be under control, I went to my room to wrap the little gift I’d found to cheer Rachel up.
I’d been teaching her simple cross-stitch, and I’d found a set of vintage pillowcases stamped with a retro sunflower design at a garage sale the week before. They were perfect, especially after I added some embroidery floss that I had in my thread box. We’d recently spent a few nights watching old movies, talking and stitching, and Rachel needed a new project.
I knew she’d be fine eventually, but after Amanda’s body was found in a livestock pond four miles southeast of town, Rachel kind of lost it, and I’d been spending a lot of time with her. It was hard to keep everything I knew to myself, but I’d decided not to tell her about my gift for now. As far as Rachel knew, Mrs. Granger had had a fit of conscience, and her husband had driven her to the police station so she could confess to killing Amanda after Amanda admitted hitting Dillon with her car. Mrs. Granger never mentioned Rachel at all, and Rachel was finally starting to believe that she was now safe, especially since Mrs. Granger was awaiting sentencing in the county jail.
It was all anyone talked about. Mrs. Stavros buried her daughter on an overcast day, rain threatening to pour from rolling purple clouds, after a service attended by enough people to overflow the church yet again. After that, she wasn’t seen in town, and she was rumored to be staying with her sister. My guess was that neither she nor her husband would ever return to Winston, that in time it would be like they had never lived there at all.
I went with Rachel to visit Amanda’s grave one day, and she left Amanda’s necklace on the smooth marble headstone.
My mom had gone out to lunch with Mrs. Slade a week after the funeral, but she told me afterward that they still didn’t have much in common. Maybe it was a friendship that wasn’t meant to be. But Mom had better luck with a few other people, friends from her long-ago tennis team and concert band, and before long she was going out a couple of times a week for
a movie or a glass of wine.
I didn’t tell her or Nana what had really happened. I decided it was best if they thought the same thing everyone else did, that Mrs. Granger had simply turned herself in. I thought that if no one knew, then things could simply stay the same. But they didn’t. Maybe I was the one who changed first—after I’d learned and survived, none of the small things that used to drive me crazy seemed to matter. And Mom changed too. She must have been ready for a reconciliation with Nana, after I forced her to come to an understanding about our gift. Whatever the cause, she seemed happier and more energetic than she had in a long time.
And she had been cooking nonstop.
Every day she came home from work at a reasonable hour, loaded down with groceries and produce from the farmers’ market. Soon the house would be fragrant with whatever was simmering on the stove or baking in the oven or cooling on the counter. There was always more than we could eat, and we got into a habit of going for walks after dinner, taking plates of food to the neighbors, the guys down at the fire station, and, on one occasion, the very surprised Garza brothers, the dishwashers at the Shuckster, who seemed delighted to be the recipient of Mom’s zucchini-chèvre lasagna.
My Blake friends were coming down in a few days for an end-of-summer celebration before we all went back to school, and Mom had promised to help me cook and get the house ready. It would be crowded, and I was nervous about my old friends meeting my new ones, but mostly I was excited. I’d told Jack and Rachel all about Lincoln and Maura and Caleb, and I couldn’t wait for them all to meet.
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