The Caretakers

by Maxwell, Eliza

  “This is a beautiful place.” She glances around, and her eyes pause on the view from the kitchen window. “Let’s go outside,” Valerie says suddenly, standing up straight. “I want to sit by the water one more time before it all ends.”

  So with the sun setting on the lake that gave Tessa the best and brightest pieces of her childhood, the two women sit side by side in the grass, and Valerie Winters tells her story.

  “The first thing you need to know, Tessa, is that my father wasn’t the man the world thought he was. I was seven years old before I truly understood that.”

  Valerie stares intensely at Tessa for a moment, as if she’s weighing the impact of her words, then she turns forward to gaze at the water rippling over the surface of the lake.

  “I don’t know why he bought that stupid camper,” Valerie says. “We weren’t particularly outdoorsy and had certainly never gone on a family camping trip before, but there it was in the driveway one day after school.”

  A faint approximation of a smile flits across Valerie’s features, there one moment, then gone the next.

  “I was over-the-moon excited, as only a second grader can be. We took it out for the first time that weekend, to the Hazel Crest campgrounds. It was thirty minutes away from home, but it may as well have been another planet.”

  Valerie frowns. “For some reason, in my child’s mind, I thought that the . . . the specialness of that day would keep everything else at bay. That it would protect my mother and me, like a magic bubble.”

  Valerie squints out over the horizon, and shrugs. “I was wrong, though. I dropped the last hot dog into the fire by accident. It’s strange, the things that stick in your mind.”

  She shakes off whatever vision she’s replaying and continues in her quiet, controlled voice. “My father lost his temper, and Mom stepped between us. She didn’t always, but I remember that night she did, and my father turned on her. I suppose I should have been grateful to her, but I was so devastated. What had I expected? That a change of scenery and a little fresh air would turn my father into a different man?”

  Tessa’s heart breaks for the girl Valerie was. The little girl who deserved so much better.

  “I ran,” Valerie says. “I wasn’t trying to escape. Not really. But sobs were building up inside, and I knew I couldn’t let my father hear them. Tears only made things worse. So I ran into the woods, as far and fast as I could. Until I was lost. Or hoped I was. But then I burst upon another campsite.”

  The ghost of a smile is back. “The first time I met Oliver, he was kind to me. He and his brothers were camping at Hazel Crest too. The Barlow family had a bad reputation, and they’d had plenty of run-ins with my father and his men, but I didn’t know that then. I just knew that there was a kind man who knelt in front of me and wiped away my tears.”

  Tessa can picture it, and that image helps her to bring back into focus the Ollie she thought she’d known.

  “He held my hand, and he made me feel safe, and then he helped me find my way back to my parents. I didn’t really want to go back, but I didn’t want him to let go of my hand even more, so we went. And when we arrived, Ollie saw firsthand what kind of man Lloyd Winters really was.”

  Tessa sucks in a breath. “He never . . . he never told me this,” she says, thinking of the hours of conversations she and Oliver had shared. He’d talked about the Bonham PD being out to get him, but Tessa always assumed that was because of his brothers’ reputations. An assumption that Ollie never bothered to correct. “Why didn’t he say something?”

  A pained look crosses Valerie’s face. “We were coming through the woods when we heard the sounds of my father hitting my mom. She was trying to stay quiet, but she couldn’t hold back the cries of pain completely. I realized then what I’d done by bringing a stranger to witness this, and I stopped and pulled on his hand. ‘You can’t tell,’ I whispered to him, terrified. ‘Please don’t tell. If anyone finds out, he’ll kill us.’”

  Valerie lets out a pent-up breath, but the tension still crackles in the air between the women.

  “Oliver didn’t want to go. He stood there, stock-still, staring at my father. Finally, finally, he promised. He promised me he wouldn’t tell anyone. I ran back to the camper, but when I turned around, my father had stopped beating my mom. He was staring at the trees Ollie had disappeared into. I believe he saw Oliver that day. He saw him, and he knew his dirty little secret wasn’t a secret anymore.”

  “Gwen Morley was murdered the summer after that,” Valerie says quietly. “I didn’t understand at the time. Not really. It wasn’t until your documentary came out that I put it all together.”

  Valerie sits up and crosses her legs. She brushes off the palms of her hands and continues to stare out at the water.

  “Growing up like that, I guess in some ways it made me strong. No matter how scary something was, it didn’t compare to living in the middle of that. The careful way we were, with our actions and our words. Always so careful. ‘You don’t want to upset your father, Valerie,’ was my mother’s favorite phrase.”

  She sighs. “I confronted him. My father. Just once. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. He laughed at me, and I went away feeling as small and helpless as I had as a child. But I couldn’t forget the things he said. Things he admitted, because he knew I’d never have the nerve to go public.”

  She pulls a blade of grass from the ground and runs it gently through her fingers.

  “He told me about another suspect, a guy named Billy Tyson, who’d confessed to the crime. How he’d buried it. And he laughed. Laughed and admitted he was the one who planted that evidence in the first place, not the deputies. He was there for the search of Ollie’s room. He saw his chance when they found the car, and he took it, then let his men take the blame. Neither one of them are in law enforcement anymore. Two more victims of his personal vendetta.”

  She turns and meets Tessa’s eyes.

  “Because it was personal. That’s the one piece you didn’t have. That no one had. People in Bonham believed my father acted in good faith. They knew what Oliver’s brothers were like. They never saw Ollie as any different. They stood by their chief, one town against the world, because the world didn’t understand, and they believed they did.”

  She turns away again, curling the piece of grass around her finger, then straightening it again.

  “I should have spoken up. I should have told everyone the truth. Gone on the news and spilled my father’s secrets but . . . he was right. I wasn’t strong enough.”

  She flicks the blade of grass away, and it flutters through the air before it lands.

  “It weighed on me, though. This sense that I was responsible for everything that happened.”

  “No,” Tessa says. “Valerie, you were a child.”

  But Valerie continues as if she doesn’t hear.

  “It got easier when Oliver was released. A little. I wanted to believe everything was going to be all right then. He was free, and my father was under a cloud of suspicion. Things should have gotten better.”

  Tessa told herself the same thing.

  “I became a little obsessed, to be honest. I followed him sometimes. Oliver. Parked on the road outside his house. I know how creepy that sounds, but I just wanted . . . I needed to see that he was okay. Happy. To know I hadn’t completely ruined his life.”

  She shakes her head. “But there’s no such thing as happily ever after. I knew about the lawsuit. It was in the papers. It sounded like a crazy amount of money. Thirty million?

  “But I found out later his parents’ house had been mortgaged three times, all to try and get him out of prison. The settlement the state offered wasn’t going to save the house. Not after his dad lost his job. And Ollie’s wife? They’d only been married a few months when he was arrested. She was pregnant. His twins were born while he was in jail. She’d had a boyfriend for years that no one told him about.”

  Some of this Tessa knows already, but she’s ashamed of what sh
e doesn’t. She was supposed to be his friend, but she moved on and left Oliver alone to deal with the aftermath of the storm.

  “Things were circling the drain, but winning that lawsuit could have helped. I was devastated when he lost. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I felt like I’d personally let him down. Again. He found me across the street from his house, sobbing in my car like a baby. ‘Hey, kid,’ he said, knocking on the window. ‘Are you okay?’”

  Valerie runs her hands over her eyes, then pushes her hair back from her face.

  “Everything came pouring out. Everything. He didn’t remember me at first, and still, I was surprised by how kind he was. I guess I shouldn’t have been. In the end, he didn’t rage about the things I’d told him. All he cared about was making sure I didn’t blame myself. He was a good person.”

  Her voice drops to nearly a whisper, and for the first time, Tessa can hear tears forming behind Valerie’s words.

  “I think Ollie could have weathered losing his wife, losing his kids, losing his mom the way he did. Losing fourteen years of his life only for people in Bonham to treat him like a pariah. Losing the lawsuit. His dad losing his job. The bank taking his parents’ house. It was so much. So much loss for such a simple man. And I still think he’d have come through it in the end. But his father’s suicide tipped him over the edge.”

  Valerie’s face is calm again, her words stripped of the emotion she let slip out before.

  “I gave him my number that day he found me in the car outside his house, but I never expected him to call. But he did, a few weeks later, and when I answered the phone, I knew something, I knew everything was wrong. Ollie found his father’s body. And it broke him. He had nothing left to lose.”

  A shiver courses down Tessa’s arms, and her heart hurts for the man she turned her back on.

  “He called to say goodbye. He’d given up. But he . . .”

  Valerie’s voice breaks. She pulls in a shaky breath before she can go on. “He wanted to make sure I didn’t blame myself for what he was going to do.”

  Valerie pauses to compose herself. Tessa wishes she could give some comfort to the self-contained young woman, but there are no words that will help, and she can sense that a physical touch, no matter how well-meaning, won’t be welcome.

  Instead, she sits with her, and she waits.

  Eventually, Valerie continues.

  “Everything that came after, all this—” She lifts her hands, then lets them fall. “This is all my fault. I kept him on the phone, and I jumped in my car. I sped toward his father’s house. I wouldn’t give him what he wanted. I told him over and over, ‘Don’t do this, Ollie. I can’t live with the guilt. Don’t do this to me.’

  “And he was so empty, so hollow and lost, that I was able to fill him up again. I filled him with my own anger. Years and years of anger at the man who stole my childhood as effortlessly and as thoughtlessly as he stole Oliver’s life. I gave him a new purpose. A new reason to keep going.

  “I infected him with my hate. I used him.”

  The air is thick with Valerie’s remorse, and the tears finally come. She keeps going, fighting through them, and Tessa can feel her own begin to fall.

  “I used Oliver for my own revenge. It was my idea. All my idea. Ollie told my father it was a cellmate who’d contacted him, but that was a cover story. It was all me. I wanted my father destroyed. I wanted the whole world watching while his sins were laid bare. To see him playact the grieving father before I brought it crashing down around him. I wanted justice for Ollie, but I wanted it for me more.”

  Valerie swipes her hand across her cheeks, pushing away the tears she’s shed.

  “I’m sorry about involving you. I didn’t plan that. Everything just spiraled out of control. Ollie felt like you’d betrayed him. Said you’d be there to stand by him. Claimed you were his friend. He tried to call you first, that day, when he was planning to kill himself.”

  “And I didn’t answer,” Tessa finishes for her, regret in every syllable. “I hadn’t taken his calls for months. When he needed me, I wasn’t there for him.”

  “That’s why he chose this place. Why he dropped your name into the videos. He knew you wouldn’t have the answers the police were looking for. How could you? But he wanted you to know what it was like to be suspected by the whole world, to be vilified for something you had no control over. To have something you loved taken from you.”

  “Margot,” Tessa whispers, taking the blow to her heart. “That’s why he went after Margot.”

  “The last time Oliver and I spoke . . . he’d gone off the rails. My hatred ignited his, reminding him of everything he’d lost, and it . . . it burned away the man he used to be. I did that to him. And he took it out on you. I put you and your family at risk. I’m so, so sorry, Tessa. I never meant for that to happen.”

  But Tessa can still see him, shielding Margot from Winters’s bullets. Grasping her by the arm to keep her from falling.

  “He was still in there, Valerie,” Tessa says. It’s all she has to give. “He was still a good man. When it mattered most.”

  Valerie needs to believe that. And maybe Tessa does too.

  Whether it’s an effect of Tessa’s words, or a coping mechanism of her own, Valerie summons the restrained calm that seems to define her.

  “Well, it’s done now. It’s over.” She stands and watches as the final rays of sun wink out over the horizon. “I sent the last video to the press an hour ago, right after you arrived.”

  Then Valerie turns and walks slowly back to the cabin, leaving Tessa alone in the grass.

  46

  CORA

  A violin is crying somewhere above, and the baby wails her own discordant notes.

  The kitchen is full of shouting, and the sounds are scratching inside Cora’s mind. Her stepmother’s voice, her little brother’s cries. The baby upstairs, and always, above it all, the violin, rising to a crescendo that can’t be stopped.

  “You can’t send them away,” Peter cries again and again. “Please. Please!” Tears are coursing down his face, and he’s too young. He doesn’t know. No one cares if the world isn’t fair.

  “Let go of me,” Helena says. “That’s enough, Peter. It’s done, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Accept it.”

  But he doesn’t know how.

  Cora sits, still and silent, paralyzed by the scratching in her mind. The chaos swirls around her, flowing like ocean waves, beating them all against the rocks.

  “But you can’t! You can’t! Cora, tell her. Tell her, Cora!”

  Peter has cracked wide open, and all he’s held inside pours out of him, only to float away on the wind. But Cora has broken inward, crushed without a sound.

  She doesn’t answer him. He shakes her by the shoulder, but she doesn’t look at him, her sweet, too serious little brother. The baby they’ve raised who never knew his mother.

  They were all his mother. All but Helena.

  And the baby upstairs? Who will mother her?

  She cries out, plaintive baby wails, but only the violin answers.

  “Please don’t send them away! Please, Mother, please!”

  Cora swings her head, and her eyes find her brother now, clinging and begging at Helena’s skirt. His words cut her, and steal her breath.

  She rises to grab him to her. To shake him by the arms and shout, “She’s not your mother, you little fool. She never will be!”

  But her horror is dwarfed by the disgust on the second Mrs. Cooke’s face.

  “Never call me that!”

  Her face is contorted, and the flush of victory has turned to something small and mean.

  “Never!”

  She pushes him.

  Cora’s hands reach to grasp him, to catch him before he falls and hug him tight.

  “It’s okay, Petey,” she’ll whisper, and carry him from the room, as he cries into her shoulder. “I won’t leave you,” she’ll say. “I’ll never leave you,” until he cries himself to sl
eep and they wake together to face whatever pain the new day brings.

  But there’s nothing in her hands. Nothing but air. Cora can feel the loss of him, just out of reach, before she hears the sound of his skull connecting with the corner of the hearth.

  The violin plays on.

  They stand and they stare, Helena panting heavily as fear fills the room, taking the place of the shouts that were there just moments ago. But in Cora, there’s nothing. What light she had dies with the spark in her brother’s eyes.

  Cora stands, hands against her ears, as the scratching fills her head.

  Helena’s mouth is moving. She’s kneeling over his tiny, wasted body, nothing but muscles and bone now that will rot in a box in the ground. Useless to him, without his spark.

  Cora can’t hear Helena’s words, can’t care about the terror on her face when her stepmother shakes Peter. Slaps him and shouts at him, and the only response is blood pooling outward from the wound on his head.

  And then the waves are pounding Cora against the rocks, pounding again and again, but it’s her stepmother’s fists. Cora’s hands hang by her side. Hands that almost caught him but didn’t.

  “This is your fault!” Helena shouts, hitting at her, pounding, and her eyes are the eyes of a madwoman. “You did this! You!”

  Cora’s back comes up against the wall of the kitchen, next to the woodpile for the stove. The kitchen where her baby brother lies dead on the floor. The woman who took his life stands in front of her, spittle and hate flying from her lips.

  Cora’s hand reaches once again, but this time she grasps more than air.

  Her fingers close tightly. Everything she has left inside, everything she could ever be, everything her brother will never be, rises up to fill her and give her strength.

  Cora swings.

  She swings and she connects and the terrible sound rends the air for the second time. The sound of a skull cracking while a baby cries and a violin plays.

  Cora swings again. And again. She loses herself in the swings.

  One. Two. Ten?

  And then a gasp, and a clatter fills the air. Cora turns, her movements mechanical and stiff. Her face is a mask of blood that drips into her eyes. Her shirt, her hair, her hands.