The Caretakers

by Maxwell, Eliza

  43

  KITTY

  Something is there, right in front of her, but Kitty can’t figure out what it is.

  Red and blue lights flash through the trees from the police cars and ambulances that circle the big house.

  Fallbrook is once again dealing with the dead.

  Deirdre is still there giving her statement, but they’ve already questioned Kitty, not that she knows anything. One of the nice young men in uniform walked her home.

  She sits on the porch, tired now, and watches for her sister to return. Aiden sits at her side.

  The lights are bothering her, bringing back memories she wasn’t looking for and doesn’t want.

  “Something’s not right,” she says in a quiet voice. The creak of her rocker is the only reply. Aiden is pretending not to hear.

  “Aiden,” she says, louder this time. “Something’s not right.”

  He sighs. “Kitty cat, let it go.”

  She stares at him, surprised and hurt. “You sound like Dee. Don’t treat me like a child.”

  “What do you want me to say, then?” he asks, but he’s put out, irritated by her nagging.

  “Something’s not right.”

  Her rocker creaks faster, and she stares determinedly ahead. The lights keep flashing. Why do they keep flashing? Everyone is dead.

  “Not everyone,” a voice whispers in her ear. She turns her face away from Aiden and stares at the figure by her side.

  “Who did she love, Kitty?” the figure asks. “It wasn’t Pynchon. That was just a little crush. Who did she really love?”

  “Mr. Pynchon,” Kitty murmurs, but her voice is weak. Unsure. “She did.”

  “And?”

  “Aiden, and me, and Mam.”

  The ghost at her side pulls a face.

  “Ghosts shouldn’t pout,” Kitty says. She turns her face forward, her mouth set in stubborn lines.

  “Let it go, Kitty,” Aiden begs.

  “Am I so forgettable?” the voice murmurs in her other ear. Kitty swats at it like a fly.

  “Go away. You’re dead,” she says.

  “Oh yes, I’m dead. But she still loved me best.”

  “Stop it!” Kitty shouts, but that hated laughter fills her ears. She holds up her hands, presses them to her head. “Stop it, I said.”

  “You know exactly what happened, Kitty. You don’t have to ask. You know what happened. Because you saw.”

  The blood. Blood on someone’s face and hands. Blood dripping down like tears, and a blank, hollow space behind her eyes.

  Cora.

  Standing in the entryway.

  Cora.

  Whom Deirdre loved the best.

  Cora.

  The hatchet falling from her hands.

  It was Cora who swung the little ax. Cora who took their lives.

  Tears cloud her vision, and colors swirl together. The green of the trees blends with the blood red in her memories, until a murky fog is all that remains.

  Out of the fog comes a hand. A pale, shaky hand. The hand of a girl who grasps the handle of a fallen bloodied ax.

  “No,” Kitty cries. “No.”

  “Shh. Shh, now. What’s all this?” Deirdre is here now. Deirdre. Her sister. Hers.

  Kitty looks up at her with tears and fear pouring from her eyes.

  “Cora killed them, Dee. Cora killed them all.”

  Her sister’s outline wavers as more tears form, and Kitty’s chest heaves in great, earth-shaking sobs. But Deirdre’s arms come around her and hold her tight while she cries.

  “I know,” her sister whispers. “It’s okay. I know.”

  “Then tell me the truth!” Kitty shouts, jumping from the chair and wrenching out of her sister’s embrace. She stares at Deirdre’s pale face, so old now. Old and incredibly sad.

  “Tell me the truth,” Kitty pants. “Deirdre, I need to know. Did I . . . did I reach down and pick it up? The hatchet was there, then someone picked it up! I saw it! Did I do it, Dee? Did I kill Cora? Did I?”

  Deirdre’s eyes close slowly, and her shoulders slump. She looks small suddenly. Small in a way she’s never looked to Kitty before.

  A woman with a lifetime of secrets carried on her back.

  44

  TESSA

  “You can’t go now,” Margot insists. “We have two dead men lying in the middle of a house we own. The police are probably already on their way to question us.”

  They’ve watched the footage together. It took a while to find the right file, then there it was. Margot was right all along.

  “Stall them,” Tessa says. “Can I borrow your pants?”

  “No!” Margot shouts.

  “Margot! I can’t walk out of here in these.” She holds up her shredded, bloodstained trousers. “Please?”

  Margot sighs and begins unbuttoning her jeans.

  “Not a word about them being loose on you,” she says. “I own a bakery, remember.”

  Tessa kisses her sister on the cheek and hands over her own pants to exchange.

  “You look beautiful, have I told you that?”

  “Don’t suck up. It’s gross.”

  Tessa bites her lip. “There’s one more thing.”

  Margot glares at her.

  “I need to borrow your car.”

  After a few choice words, Margot gives up her keys in return for the keys to Tessa’s car, which is still parked at Bracknell Lodge.

  “Thank you.” Tessa pulls her sister into a quick hug.

  “You need a shower,” Margot says, but her arms are tight as she returns the embrace. “For the record,” she continues, “this is a bad idea. Let the police handle it. Or at least wait until I can go with you. You don’t know what you might find.”

  Tessa hesitates.

  She knows what she thinks she’ll find.

  Valerie Winters’s body.

  “I have to be sure,” Tessa says.

  She’s heading toward the emergency room exit when she spots two uniformed officers speaking with a man in scrubs seated behind the intake counter.

  Quickly, Tessa ducks around the corner.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” a nurse says behind her.

  “Hi!” Tessa replies brightly. Too brightly, by the suspicious way the nurse angles away from her. She dials it back. “Maybe you can help me. My brother-in-law was brought in earlier.”

  From the corner of her eye, Tessa sees the man in scrubs stand. He walks from behind the desk, then leads the two officers in the direction of Tessa’s hallway.

  She turns her body awkwardly so that her back is facing the police as they pass.

  “Ma’am, you’ll have to check with the medical receptionist at the main desk.”

  “Oh, is that not where I am?” Tessa asks as she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, using her hand to shield her face from the people passing by.

  “Uh, no,” the nurse says slowly. She holds out an arm, ushers Tessa out of the hallway, and directs her to the information desk.

  “Thank you so much,” Tessa says, then turns and walks out of the double sliding exit doors that lead into the parking lot.

  “Ma’am, that’s not where you need—”

  But Tessa doesn’t look back.

  In borrowed clothes and a borrowed car, Tessa speeds northeast.

  She eases off the gas when she realizes she’s twenty miles over the posted limit.

  Lake Cormere is less than an hour away.

  Oliver could have taken Valerie Winters anywhere in the northeast. Anywhere within a few days’ drive. But he chose Lake Cormere.

  She’s sure of it.

  Oliver was relaxed that day. It was a good day. He had bad ones, when the injustice of it all had rubbed him raw, and the magnitude of what he’d lost made his voice harsh and his eyes dark.

  The bad days filled the editing room with hours of tough, emotional footage. The good days were easier. The days when his humor came through, and his heart.

  “It’s easy
to see why you believed him,” Margot murmured as they watched together. “Why the world believed him. Have you changed your mind?”

  Tessa frowned. “I was convinced he was innocent of Gwen Morley’s murder. The evidence just wasn’t there. Winters even admitted there was another suspect. But Oliver confessed to killing Valerie.” She shakes her head. “It puts everything in doubt.”

  “This wasn’t in the series,” Margot said, gesturing to the screen.

  “You’ve seen it?” Tessa couldn’t hide her surprise.

  “Of course I’ve seen it. I’ve seen all your work. What kind of sister do you think I am?”

  A short bark of laughter burst from Tessa’s mouth, and Margot shrugged, a small smile on her face.

  From the little screen on her phone, they watched as Tessa asked about prison life.

  “How do you keep it from getting to you, Oliver?”

  His mouth twisted a little and one shoulder came up. “Oh, you know. It does, sometimes. Lots of times, I guess. But when it gets too bad you just have to go somewhere else. You know what I mean?”

  “Like meditation?” Tessa asked.

  “No,” he laughed. “Nothing fancy like that. No woo-woo in prison, Ms. Shepherd. That’s a good way to get your ass kicked. Pardon my language.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “You know,” he said with another little shrug and a half smile. “You just lie on your bunk, like you’re sleeping. You close your eyes and think about a time or a place when things were good. Or at least, not so bad. Someplace peaceful.”

  “Ollie, I hate to say it, but that sounds a lot like meditation to me.” Her recorded voice was amused, and Tessa can remember how it felt to sit across from the man, fascinated by the humanity in his eyes that even a prison-issued uniform couldn’t strip away.

  “No,” he said, laughing again. “It’s just . . . thinking. Everybody does it sometimes. You don’t have a place in your mind you go when things get hard?”

  There was a pause. Tessa couldn’t remember exactly what she was thinking at that moment on that day, but she had an idea what she was going to say next.

  “Yeah, I guess I do, now that you mention it.”

  “You can picture it?” Oliver asked. He looked interested, like a friend would be. Like they weren’t in a prison with concrete walls but seated across from each other at his mother’s kitchen table.

  “It’s a lake,” Tessa said. “My grandparents’ cabin on Lake Cormere.”

  “What’s it smell like?”

  Tessa laughed, but Ollie nodded his head with a smile. “It sounds stupid, but if I think about a smell, it takes me back every time.”

  Tessa paused, thinking. “I don’t know. It always smelled vaguely like bait. And campfire. Hot dogs. Bug spray. And that smell that fireworks leave behind.”

  Another beat of silence followed.

  “There it is,” Oliver said, nodding at Tessa, hidden somewhere behind the camera. “It worked. I can see it on your face.”

  “You’re right. I haven’t thought of that place in a long time.”

  “You looked peaceful.” Oliver’s expression was wistful, but proud almost, to have shared something good with her.

  “That was a special place. One of those memories you wish you could bottle and take with you. There’s a term for it . . .” Tessa paused. “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

  The rattle of keys came from somewhere behind them, and Oliver sat up straighter in his chair.

  “Time’s up, Barlow,” a bored voice said.

  The smile was gone, but Oliver spared Tessa another glance. “I’ll look it up for you,” he offered with a wink. “For next time.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Ollie,” she said.

  He stood, and the camera caught the glint and rattle of handcuffs on his wrists before he moved out of the frame.

  “No big deal, Ms. Shepherd. I’ve got nothing but time.”

  They never spoke of it again. Not that Tessa can recall. Not until that moment before his bloody hand let go of hers and he plunged to his death.

  Halcyon.

  It wouldn’t have been hard for Oliver to find the address of the Ashwoods’ cabin. A public records search would have pulled it up.

  It was a nice spot. A peaceful spot.

  When Tessa pulls up the long driveway that takes her to her grandparents’ cabin, she’s struck by the similarities to Fallbrook. Not the house. The cabin on the lake is simple and small, built of logs culled from the nearby forest. But the sense of isolation is the same.

  Every memory associated with this place is good, and Tessa has a flash of anger that Oliver has tainted that.

  She hopes she’s wrong, but she’s not.

  Tessa parks the car and walks slowly toward the cabin. Lined by trees on both sides, Lake Cormere glistens behind it, water as smooth as glass, a shining reflection of the sky above.

  She tries the door first, expecting to find it locked, and isn’t disappointed. She rises on her tiptoes, feeling blindly for the key Granddad always kept on the ledge above the door.

  Her fingers come away with nothing but dust and a few spiderwebs.

  Tessa sighs and glances around.

  Several hours away, there’s a key hanging in her mother’s cupboard, clearly labeled, Tessa is certain.

  Still, she didn’t come all this way to stop now. Tessa moves to the nearest window. She saw a jacket tossed in the back seat of Margot’s car. She can wrap it around her elbow to break the glass if she needs to.

  The jacket looked expensive. Margot will not be pleased.

  Tessa tries to push the window frame up first, just so she can say she tried.

  As she expected, it’s locked.

  She cups her hands on either side of her face and leans forward to peer through the glass.

  Tessa screams and jumps back, her heartbeat thumping as blood pulses through her veins.

  A face peers back at her from inside the cabin.

  The face of Valerie Winters.

  45

  Valerie moves around the kitchen inside the cabin, quiet in socks and sweatpants, as she prepares two cups of tea.

  The young woman’s familiarity with the place is unnerving. Two tangential parts of Tessa’s life she never expected to overlap.

  The cups rattle against each other when Valerie takes them from the cupboard. Her hands are shaking, despite an outward mask of calm.

  When she unlocked the dead bolt and held the front door open for Tessa, she asked only one question. “It’s all over, then?”

  She doesn’t seem like a prisoner. And she’s certainly not a murder victim.

  “The world thinks you’re dead,” Tessa says in a hoarse whisper. “Your family thinks you’re dead.”

  Valerie’s hands grow still, the tea bag suspended midair, but she doesn’t turn around.

  She doesn’t know about her father is the thought running through Tessa’s mind. She’s going to have to tell this woman her father’s dead.

  How do you find words to express something like that?

  “I’m sorry, there’s no milk,” Valerie apologizes. She carries two cups in one hand and Grandma Beth’s sugar bowl in the other. Her movements are as restrained as her words, and Tessa wonders if she’s always this way or if it’s a reaction to the circumstances.

  “Does anyone know yet?” Valerie asks.

  Tessa doesn’t pick up her cup. She simply stares at the woman whose death was a weight she was prepared to carry for the rest of her life.

  “I’m not going to try to hurt you if you say no,” Valerie says with a small smile. “I’m just asking in case we’re about to be overrun with police and reporters.”

  “No,” Tessa whispers. “I mean, yes. My sister. She knows I’m here, but no one else.”

  Valerie’s shoulders relax a little. “Then we have some time.” She stirs a spoonful of sugar into her tea. “Does Oliver know you’re here?” she asks.

  Tessa hesitates. �
�Valerie . . . I’m not sure how to tell you . . . Oliver . . . Oliver’s dead.”

  The woman closes her eyes, and her shoulders pull in as if to protect herself. She’s shaking, but she holds herself so tightly, all her focus turned inward. From nowhere, Valerie’s hand shoots out and slams onto the kitchen table, making the cups rattle. Tessa flinches, pulling back in her chair.

  “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry.” She wraps both her arms around herself, tucking her hands beneath her arms, and ducks her head, as if she’s done something terribly bad.

  She struggles to compose herself.

  “I told him,” she murmurs in a wavering voice, almost to herself. “I told him this was going to happen. I warned him to be careful.”

  Her words answer one question. Valerie Winters isn’t here under duress.

  “Was it my father?” Her head comes up and she spits the word father like it’s something slimy and foul. “Did my father kill him?”

  Tessa shakes her head. “No . . . not exactly. Valerie, I’m afraid . . . your father is dead too.”

  Valerie stares at Tessa. Other than a slight widening of her eyes, she has no reaction.

  None at all.

  “What happened?” she asks quietly.

  It takes much less time than Tessa feels it should to share the events of the previous day with the woman the world presumes is dead.

  By the time Tessa is finished, Valerie has gathered her emotions and safely hidden them away in whatever quiet place she keeps such things. Tessa may as well be speaking about the weather for all the reaction she can see on Valerie’s face.

  It’s unsettling.

  Valerie stands and walks to the kitchen counter without a word. She empties her untouched tea into the sink and carefully rinses the cup.

  “I guess you’re wondering what my part is in all of this.”

  Tessa doesn’t bother to deny it. “Only if you want to tell me,” she says.

  Valerie turns and gives her a small smile. “Oliver said you were like that. Easy to talk to. Easy to like.”

  “He kidnapped my sister,” Tessa reminds her. “He held her at gunpoint. I’m not sure that’s how you treat someone you like.”

  Valerie leans her back against the counter and studies Tessa, her face settling into a sad sort of resignation.