The heat in Margot’s voice has risen, but she takes a deep breath and blows it out slowly through her nose. A trick Tessa learned in therapy.
“It was too much to process at once. It took a lot of time, a lot of self-reflection, and yes . . . a lot of therapy, to understand what I did to you. To us.”
One side of Tessa’s mouth twitches upward. “Anger management?” she asks.
“Oh yeah,” Margot says without hesitation. “And then some.”
Tessa looks down at her hands. Her nails are ragged and dirty, and she stinks. None of that matters right now.
“I pushed you out because I couldn’t control the anger when I looked at you. Not with the shadow of NYU and a future you’d never have always at your back. I pushed you out and I channeled that anger into physical therapy. Into walking again. One foot in front of the other. On my own. Not because I blamed you, but because I blamed me. I said terrible things, truly awful things to you, and I’ve never said I’m sorry.”
Margot reaches for her hand, interlaces her fingers though Tessa’s. She clenches her hand as hard as she did after their mother’s funeral. As hard as she ever has.
“When you didn’t call, and the days stacked on top of one another and turned into years, I told myself I’d done the right thing. You didn’t need me. You were better on your own. But inside . . . inside, I always secretly hoped that wasn’t true, and a part of me, I’m ashamed to say, never stopped blaming you for listening. For leaving like you did. And I’m sorry for that too.”
Tessa closes her eyes, dizzy at the sudden shift in the world.
It’s tipped again.
This time, in the right direction.
48
Four days later
Tessa parks near Fallbrook, which looks as if it’s been through a war. In a way, it has. The debris of the fallen front porch and balcony has been pushed aside by emergency services, enough to give them access to the scene inside.
The bodies are gone now, of course, but yellow crime-scene tape still flutters in the wind.
It’s all over, Tessa thinks. Or maybe it’s just begun. Valerie’s miraculous resurrection and final video have sent shock waves through the public and the legal system.
The footage begins with Oliver offering Lloyd Winters a chance to confess, publicly, to his crimes. The man doesn’t know the exchange is being caught on tape. His response shows the world exactly what kind of person the upstanding Chief Winters truly was.
For the remainder of the video, Valerie and Oliver, together, lay it all out, everything Winters wasn’t willing to say. The admission to his daughter that he planted the evidence himself. The burying of Billy Tyson’s confession and DNA evidence. And the reason for his vendetta against Oliver Barlow in the first place.
Tessa can’t watch it through to the end.
Seeing Oliver’s face is too hard.
There have been some tough questions asked of the attorney general’s office about the extent to which they were aware of Chief Winters’s corruption, considering their months-long investigation into the matter, and whether they covered for him to save the state from paying out on a thirty-million-dollar lawsuit.
Tessa’s voice mail is full of questions about her next project. It seems her professional reputation has recovered along with Valerie, both alive and well.
That’s part of the reason she’s here.
Deirdre Donnelly appears out of the woods, walking slowly along the trail from the cottage. Tessa waits, hands deep in her pockets, and studies the house where her mother spent the first year of her life.
Jane died, aware of the place, yet somehow willing to leave the house and its history in the past. Margot feels the same. But there’s something in Tessa, something she doesn’t understand, and certainly something her sister doesn’t understand, that won’t allow her to let it go so easily.
“You’re back,” Deirdre says. “I had a feeling you would be.” She doesn’t sound happy about that.
“I remembered the graves,” Tessa says quietly. “We left them half finished. I thought I’d help you clear the rest.”
Deirdre studies her, but the older woman finally nods.
“Come to the cottage with me and I’ll get my things. You can choose roses from the garden to take.”
They walk in companionable silence, and Tessa takes her time deciding which roses to clip while Deirdre collects her basket and gloves.
There’s plenty that needs to be said, but they have time.
The forest is the same today, the same as it’s been for hundreds of years. And will be for hundreds more, God willing. There’s a serenity to be found in that, and Tessa lets the sounds of the birds and the brook soothe her jumbled thoughts.
When they arrive at their destination, Deirdre kneels at the graves. She’s quiet, her hands resting in her lap, and Tessa wonders if she prays.
When she opens her eyes and reaches for her gloves, she doesn’t look at Tessa when she speaks. “What is it you believe you know, Ms. Shepherd?”
She leans forward and clears away the grass and moss.
“Only what I’ve read,” Tessa says. “There isn’t as much as I’d expect. Not for a crime this big. It’s like the world has forgotten them. But that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
Deirdre doesn’t answer.
“I know enough to know I’ve been lied to,” Tessa says, her brows knitting together. “Enough to know there’s a story here. One you want to keep hidden. I have my own ideas about your reasons why.”
Deirdre glances up with a look that says she doubts Tessa understands anything at all. “People lie for all kinds of reasons. And for no reason at all.”
“You have a reason, though,” Tessa insists.
Deirdre sighs. “I suppose I do. Are you going to make your movie, then? Is that what this is about?”
Tessa won’t lie, not in this place. “I think they deserve their story to be told, don’t you? To be forgotten this way . . . it’s not right.”
One corner of Deirdre’s mouth moves upward slightly, but there’s only sadness in her face. “Right and wrong. It’s a nice idea, but a costly one.”
Tessa stares at the woman and tries to tamp down her frustration. She’s talking in riddles, as she has been from the beginning.
“Will you tell me the truth?” she asks softly. She can’t ask more plainly than that.
Deirdre sits back on her heels and sighs. She reaches into the pocket of her sweater and removes an envelope, then runs her fingers across the front of it, slowly, carefully. Her gestures are telling. The writer was precious to her.
“This will explain better than I can,” Deirdre says softly, then holds it up for Tessa to take from her hand.
The envelope is thick, yellowed and brittle from age. Deirdre must have collected it from the cottage while Tessa was clipping roses. She’d known Tessa would have questions.
Deirdre’s name is scrawled across the front in ink that’s faded from black to gray.
“A letter from Aiden,” Deirdre says. “His last.”
Tessa glances up at the elderly woman, who simply nods for Tessa to go ahead. She slips the folded letter from the envelope.
Her heart is fluttering in her chest, her fingers tingling with anticipation. What secrets are sealed in these pages, the words of a man so long dead?
Tessa begins to read.
To Dee, my sweet, sensible, unfailingly loyal sister. I beg your forgiveness, both for what I will do, and for what I’ve already done.
I’m handing you the burden of my sins. I wish there was another way, but there are some truths you must know.
This is my confession.
For me, every story begins with Ruby. Always. My beginning and my end. My everything.
I had no delusions she felt the same, but that didn’t stop my wasted heart from wanting.
Last year, after a night with my friends, I stumbled home, but my happy mood turned pitiful along the way. I would never have her. She
couldn’t love me, a poor Irish boy with nothing to my name.
But drunkenness had loosened my tongue, and I called to Ruby’s window from the ground, whispering loudly, tripping over my words. She didn’t come, so I tossed up a pebble that bounced off the glass. The curtains moved. She was listening. I confessed my undying love in my clumsy, uncouth way. But the curtain didn’t move again, and the window didn’t open. I was no Romeo, and she had no interest in being my Juliet. Who was I kidding?
I staggered toward the barn, knowing I’d never hear the end of it if Mam saw me that way.
I curled up on the fresh hay, and I let the drink carry me to sleep. Even in my dreams, Ruby haunted me. Lovely, beautiful Ruby, who would never be mine.
And then she was there, slipping between my arms, her lips warm and sweet against mine. She did hear me, and she came to me, and my precious Ruby was mine.
I awoke the next day a changed man. I knew now she loved me back, and with all the swagger and confidence of a young man with a full heart, I searched for her until I found her, leaning against a tree by the pond with a book in her hand.
I crossed the distance between us and she stood to meet me. I didn’t stop to think or second-guess, and that smile was still on her lips when I kissed her.
We told no one. It was our secret. We worried what her father would say, but we would have a future together, one way or another. Still, we hoped for the approval of our families, if they would give it.
The months that followed were full of so many things. Worry. Excitement. Wonder. New beginnings and fear of what those beginnings might bring to an end. Ruby and I were wrapped up completely in each other.
Mam looked at me knowingly a few times, like she suspected something was changing, but she accepted the excuses I gave.
And I wasn’t the only one facing changes. Cora was sent off to boarding school. Ruby made an effort to please Helena, hoping perhaps she’d be on our side, when the time came.
But the months dragged past, and there never seemed to be a right time. Imogene was born, and Cora returned home sometime after. Then Lawrence Pynchon moved in. The world was moving on, and I was growing tired of secrets.
I can admit, my impatience grew seeing the way he looked at her. Pynchon.
She swore it was nothing. And I believed her. But I wasn’t blind.
When Helena discovered us, it was a relief. No matter what happened then, the truth was out. No more hiding.
Mr. Cooke’s acceptance was more than I ever hoped. He was a distant man, difficult to read, but seemed genuinely pleased for the two of us. And my world was right.
For a little while, my whole world was right.
If only I could have made things right for Cora.
To say I didn’t know of Cora’s feelings would be a lie. I knew. Ruby and I both did. We spoke of it once, of Cora’s jealousy of her sister. I’m ashamed now of the way I laughed it off. A silly schoolgirl crush. I was flattered, when I bothered to think about it. Which wasn’t often.
When Cora came to me after Ruby and I became officially engaged, I was barely listening. And once I realized what she was saying, I could hardly comprehend.
It wasn’t Ruby in the barn that night, Dee. Ruby never came to me, never let me hold her in my arms. It was Cora, who only wanted me to notice her. Cora.
In my drunkenness, I took her, and she let me.
I can barely write these words, Deirdre. Just the thought of it makes me sick. I’m a monster. I committed a terrible, terrible deed. Upon a child who trusted me. Someone I loved, though not in the way she thought she wanted. But I did love her, Deirdre. I still do, as a brother to another little sister, and never anything more. Please, even if you can’t find it in your heart to forgive me for what I did to your friend, please know that’s true.
I never wanted to hurt her. But I did hurt her. And then, in my shock and my stupidity, I hurt her more.
She’d brought the candlesticks, Dee. They were her mother’s, she said. It wasn’t stealing. We could sell them, and run away together.
Just the two of us.
And the baby.
The baby? Deirdre, I stared at her like she’d gone mad. For one shining moment, I hoped she had. That something had gotten into her blood, poisoned her, and all her wild talk was nothing but the fantasy of a deranged mind.
I shouted. I took her by the arms, trying to shake the madness out of her. I told her we weren’t running away together and we weren’t kidnapping her baby sister.
And then she smiled, Deirdre. She smiled and, in that moment, I understood. My life was over.
She smiled sweetly, and she put her hand on my cheek, and my blood went cold.
Not my sister, Denny, she said. Our daughter. Our little girl.
Deirdre, they knew. Cora’s parents knew. There was no boarding school. Helena faked a pregnancy, knowing a baby would have to be explained somehow. Cora claimed Everett forced Helena to do it, but that she didn’t want to be a mother. She’d never love Imogene like we could.
I had used her, Deirdre, then her parents had hidden her away like something to be ashamed of. She wouldn’t tell them who the father was. To protect me, she said. Because they wouldn’t understand. So she was sent away.
In a home for unwed mothers, Cora gave birth to a baby girl who was taken from her arms and given to the woman she hated most in the world, to be raised under her nose as her sister. And the person she believed she loved, the father of her child, was going to marry her other sister.
And at that moment, when it mattered most, I failed her further still.
My only thought was for Ruby.
I told her to go home, and my voice was harsh and cold when I crushed her hopes.
I took the candlesticks from her, and I sent her away with nothing but loss in her eyes.
I went straight to Ruby and confessed my sins. I had no choice. I was on my knees, Dee, begging her forgiveness the way I should have begged for Cora’s. At that moment, Cora was far from my mind.
Ruby was quiet and still. Her face was so pale and her limbs didn’t move. She swayed in her seat, and I was afraid she might faint. She couldn’t look at me. She sent me away, just as I had Cora.
I was devastated. Destroyed.
I took the candlesticks back to the dining room, to return them where they belonged, the only thing left that I could put right. But Helena caught me along the way.
Deirdre, I didn’t even care.
Things couldn’t get worse. And then they did.
Ruby burst into the room and accused me in front of her father. The hatred, the pure contempt in her eyes, it ground what was left of my heart beneath her heel.
And I deserved it all.
Everything that happened after, every step along the way, was a chain of events I set in motion with my callous, thoughtless actions.
Cora was not to blame for what she did. I treated her with careless indifference, believing somehow that her feelings didn’t count, didn’t run as deep. Just childish things, things she’d grow out of soon enough.
And now lives are stacked like cordwood at my feet. My sweet Ruby. Her family. Even Lawrence Pynchon. News of his death has reached me just this hour. And I find it’s one too many. The death of a man guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The price for my carelessness is too high. I cannot face it, day in and day out. Tell Mam I’m sorry. So sorry. The rest, I leave with you, Deirdre. You always were the strong one.
Forgive me,
Aiden
Tessa wipes at her cheeks, taken low by Aiden’s words. The paper and ink have blended together in places, stained by tears. How many were Aiden’s and how many Deirdre’s, it was impossible to say.
She folds the letter carefully back along the crease.
“Aiden hanged himself after he wrote that,” Deirdre says quietly. “So much death. It leaves a scar on the earth. There was another, you know. One with no grave at all.”
Deirdre looks
up at Tessa with a frown. “I always leave an extra rose for that forgotten life. Helena was pregnant herself, at one time. She came to Mam, hoping she would help her, but when Mam refused, Mam believed she found what she needed somewhere else.”
Tessa stares. “And Cora?” she asks.
They were all forgotten, by everyone but the woman kneeling in front of her. Cora, perhaps, most of all.
“There’s a great deal I still don’t know and never will. I’ve wondered how Mam could have been fooled by Helena’s fake pregnancy, considering how much she knew about midwifery. Or if she was never fooled at all but held her tongue for Cora’s sake. Would she have recognized the signs of pregnancy in Cora before she was sent away? How and why she kept her secrets from me of all people, I . . .” Deirdre shakes her head. “But it makes no difference now.”
“Cora killed them.”
Deirdre nods.
“She was just a girl.”
“Fifteen, the same as me. Tessa, a girl’s mind can break as easily as anyone’s,” Deirdre says. “She suffered so much, alone and in silence. I don’t believe she killed Peter, though.” Deirdre’s voice is adamant, daring Tessa to argue. “I refuse to believe that. They said he died from a fall, and I think . . . I think his death pushed her over the edge.”
She’s clearing the last grave in the row. Gently she lays the roses Tessa has chosen and slowly stands, brushing off her hands.
Tessa walks to her side, reads the names and the dates carved there. “What happened to her, Deirdre?” she asks quietly.
“You know the answer to that already, don’t you?”
Tessa studies the woman by her side, the softness in her expression as she stares down at the graves. A softness that Tessa’s rarely seen in her before.
A single, silent tear slides down the old woman’s cheek.
49
DEIRDRE
Dee flings the little ax as far as she can, but it’s broken now, and the iron blade falls at her feet, while the handle clatters across the air through the entryway, toward the stairs. Her hands are shaking. Kitty is shaking.
The Caretakers Page 25
