“Yeah, I’m sure.” I kissed his cheek.
We walked up the three flights of stairs and were almost at the top when Rita’s door opened and she and Joi walked out.
“Is something wrong?” Rita asked.
“I just wanted to check on you. To see how you’re feeling,” I said. That wasn’t true, of course. I had a few questions for her—about Bernie, about the twins, and about the last time she saw that gun.
“I’m fine. Joi and I were just chatting.” She turned toward her daughter, who nodded in confirmation.
“Bernie’s back,” I said.
“From where?”
“The police station. McIntyre was questioning her about George’s death.”
Rita looked confused.
“Hadn’t you heard?” Jesse asked. “I thought the others were talking about it today.”
She moved her head slowly from side to side. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
She looked at Joi, who nodded encouragingly at her, as if she were hoping Rita would say or do something. Rita seemed at first to resist; then she took a deep breath, walked passed her daughter, me, and Jesse, and down the stairs. We followed her as she stopped on the second floor and turned toward Bernie’s room. I couldn’t tell if she was angry, so I wasn’t sure if I should stop her. The last thing Bernie needed, after a day with the police, was an angry widow making accusations.
But Rita’s knock on Bernie’s door was gentle. If she was angry, she was doing a masterful job of hiding it.
Bernie answered the door, buttoning the last button of her pajama top as she did. “Rita. Is everything all right?”
“The police brought you into the station,” Rita said matter-offactly, almost as if Bernie wasn’t aware of it.
“McIntyre was trying to clear up a few things.”
“He can’t possibly think that you had anything to do with it.”
“I lied to him about something,” Bernie said.
“I know. You lied about George calling you and asking you to come up.”
Bernie looked toward me, and I shook my head. She turned back to Rita. “How do you know that?”
“George told me.”
I moved toward Rita. “When?”
Rita looked at me. I could tell she was wondering why I felt it was my business, but she answered anyway. “The day he called. At first we thought you would come up to help, like the others, but when Susanne gave him a list of the names, so we could have rooms ready, yours wasn’t on it. Then George suggested he just call you directly. I didn’t think it was a good idea but he insisted, and George was usually right about these things, so I went along.”
“Why did he call Bernie?” I asked.
“He did it for me. I wanted to see her.”
“Then why didn’t you call me yourself?” Bernie stood back from the door, which Rita, Jesse, Joi, and I took as an invitation to enter. Bernie and Rita sat on the twin beds that were next to each other, Jesse stood near the window, Joi took the only chair, and I leaned against the desk. When everyone was in place, Rita finally answered.
“You wouldn’t have talked to me. You’ve hated me for too many years to accept a call from me.”
Bernie didn’t say anything, so Rita went on.
“And I really needed to talk to you,” she said.
“Because you’re sick,” I blurted out.
Rita just stared at me. “You are the strangest girl I have ever met,” she said. “How do you know something like that?”
“I guessed,” I lied. There was no way I was going to reveal how I found out, and since no one actually told me that Rita was sick, in a sense I was telling the truth. “You’re so fragile,” I said, instead of going into a longer, and more accurate, explanation.
She nodded and seemed to accept my answer.
“What’s wrong with you?” Bernie reached out and took Rita’s hand. All the animosity Bernie had felt when we first arrived, only six days ago, seemed to fall away after George died. And now, with this latest news, she’d gone even further, offering compassion and perhaps even friendship. Standing there, I wondered if I had Bernie’s capacity for kindness.
“She has a heart condition,” Joi said, when Rita didn’t answer the question. “I’ve been begging her to tell you since I found out yesterday.”
“It’s a minor inconvenience.” Rita looked to her daughter, a stern look crossing her face before softening to a smile.
Joi wasn’t having it. “She needs a heart transplant, which she’s not going to get.”
Bernie looked from mother to daughter and back again. “Why not?”
“It’s too late, and I don’t deserve it. I’ve not been a good person. If anyone knows that, it’s you, Bernie.”
Bernie took a deep breath as if she were taking it all in. “Are you on a transplant list?”
“She’s not,” Joi said strongly. It was clear that she’d had this conversation with her mother, which probably explained why a reunion that began with a flying toaster had turned out so peacefully.
Rita put up her hands as if to stop the discussion. “I don’t want to be, and I’m not qualified to be. I just want to live the rest of my life in peace, and to die in peace, and maybe God will be merciful and let me spend eternity with my beloved George.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “I know you think I’m callous for not having grieved for him more, but all I can think of is that I’ll be with him soon, which is selfish, I know. But he used to say that he didn’t want to outlive me. And I guess I made sure that he didn’t.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, he was shot in the heart, wasn’t he? Who do you think is responsible for that?”
CHAPTER 46
“I’m not a very nice person,” Rita said again, and out of politeness we all pretended to disagree. “I’ve done a lot of things in my life I’m ashamed of. I’ve hurt people to make money, so I could have things.” She waved her arm around Bernie’s bedroom, a barely decorated room in her broken-down inn.
She seemed so deflated that I felt guilty for having disliked her, but she had made it so easy. I wondered if it was an act, a way of protecting herself from getting too close to anyone. If it was, and my powers of observation were even close to what I thought they were, I should have seen through it. It made me wonder what else I had missed.
The others were clearly not thinking about my observational skills. They were waiting for Rita to explain her remark about George. Yet there was something in her body language that made me think she didn’t see her words as needing further explanation. I saw Jesse shift his weight slightly, and I knew that he had given up waiting.
“Why are you responsible for George’s death?” he asked quietly.
She looked toward him. “You’re a nice young man,” she said. “I understand you care for Nell.” He nodded. “You’re lucky. Nell is a good person who uses that intrusive personality of hers to help other people. I can see why you love her.” She smiled at me and I smiled back. “If you love someone, you want to please them, like George wanted to please me. And little by little he became like me. He wanted money. He wanted things. We lived for that. We cared about ourselves, and now look what it’s cost us. My heart is failing from lack of use, and his . . .” Tears welled up in her eyes. “His is gone.”
“You’re not responsible,” I said quietly. My dislike for Rita, and the way Bernie had felt about her, made me want her to be the killer, but it was clear that she had neither the motive nor the strength.
Rita looked up at me. “You are so nice to me. All of you. You wouldn’t be if you knew what I did for a living.”
“I don’t think that’s true. Whatever you did . . . ,” I started. “We already know you didn’t inherit this place from your father, and it doesn’t matter.”
“No, I didn’t. My father never had a dime in his pocket. We just said that because people can be so curious about money.” She looked at me but there was no accusation in it. “George and I had vari
ous businesses,” she went on. “We never did anything illegal, but we cut a lot of corners. We set up an Alzheimer’s foundation and gave only a percent or two to research and kept the rest for ourselves. We ran a business that was supposed to help people in foreclosure, but we were really buying their houses out from under them and selling them at huge profits.” She gasped for breath. “George was charming, and I was all business. People trusted us. And we thought . . .” She stopped. It seemed she couldn’t bring herself to admit any more.
Joi finished for her. “They thought they deserved to have whatever material possessions they wanted, no matter who got hurt. They wanted me to help with their schemes. It tore us apart.”
“I wanted the kind of security I didn’t have growing up. I thought if I gave that to Joi, she would have everything.” Rita sighed. “And in the end all I really did was hurt my only child and my oldest friend.”
“So you were going to cheat me out of money?” Bernie looked as if she were trying to keep up with a story she could hardly believe. “Nell thought, when we first arrived, that you believed I’d inherited some money from my first husband and that you needed it.”
Rita waved her hand to dismiss the idea. “We have money. We have more money than we’ll ever need. More money than Joi will ever need, and she’ll do good things with it.” She smiled at her daughter, who was softly crying. “I didn’t want to cheat you out of money, Bernie. I already cheated you out of George.”
We’d heard the others walking up the stairs but were all too riveted by Rita’s story to pay attention. When I finally looked toward Bernie’s open door, I saw my grandmother and Susanne crammed into the room’s entrance, trying to be inconspicuous, without any success.
“It was a long time ago, Rita.”
Bernie had come all this way and been through so much to find out what really happened forty-five years ago. And yet, as she was about to find out, it seemed clear that she didn’t really want to know.
Rita must have sensed her hesitation, but having come this far she was going to tell the whole story. She looked toward Eleanor and Susanne at the door and motioned them to come in. They crowded around us, looking for someone to fill them in on all they had missed, but that would have to wait.
“How did you cheat her out of George?” I asked.
Rita collected herself and went back to her story. “When we were young we were best friends, Bernie and I. But I always envied the courage she had. She left the area to go to college. She wanted something bigger for herself. I used to think she had a gift for seeing the future. She seemed so certain of it.”
I glanced over at Bernie, who was blushing.
“I wasn’t so sure of myself back then,” Rita continued. “I guess that came later. All I knew was that I wanted a good man to take care of me, someone as unlike my father as I could find. Someone with ambition and dreams. To me that someone was George.”
“But he was Bernie’s boyfriend,” Joi said. “I never knew that until last night. He always said you were the only woman he’d ever dated.”
“I made him say that. I was so jealous of Bernie that I wanted to erase her from our memories.”
“But if he chose to be with you over Bernie,” I cut in, “what’s to be jealous about?”
“He didn’t. At least not at first. Bernie was away at college. He was lonely. I missed her, too. We used to steal whiskey from his parents’ liquor cabinet, cheap stuff, and drink together and talk. One night when we both had too much . . .” She stopped and took another breath. She buried her head in her hands and we all waited. For a moment I wondered if she was too ill to go on, but then she lifted her head and started again. “That’s a lie. That’s the lie I told him so many times that I began to believe it. One night when he had too much to drink, I pushed myself on him. He was eighteen. He didn’t need a lot of persuading, but, still, it was my idea.”
“And you got pregnant,” Bernie said.
Joi let out a gasp. “You had another baby?”
“No.”
“But, Mom,” Joi said, “that was ten years before I was born.”
“I wasn’t pregnant.” Rita looked at her daughter and then at the rest of us, “I just told Bernie that I was. I went to visit her at school and I made up this whole elaborate lie. I told her I hadn’t said anything to George and I didn’t know if I should. I told her my father would beat me if he found out I was going to have a baby out of wedlock.”
Bernie nodded. “He would have,” she said quietly.
“Probably. But there was no baby.”
I looked at Bernie, who had let go of Rita’s hand and was shaking her head in disbelief. “What did George say when you talked to him?” I asked her.
“I didn’t,” Bernie said. “I mean, I asked him if anything had gone on with Rita and he admitted it. I didn’t ask about the baby because, well, what Rita just said. She told me he didn’t know.” She sighed. “I don’t think it really matters. He’d betrayed me, baby or no baby. That was enough. I went back to school and met Johnny, and then we got married. I heard things about Rita and George from my mother from time to time, things she’d heard in the neighborhood, but I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to hear about their growing family or their great life, so I shut out as much as I could. I just assumed there was a baby until I met Joi and realized she was so young.”
Joi stood up. She looked as if she was about to storm out but couldn’t quite leave. “You trapped Dad into marrying you?”
Rita shook her head slowly. “The one decent thing I did in my whole life was to tell George the truth. After Bernie confronted him, he came to me and we talked. I told him about the lie, and I fully expected he would leave, but he didn’t. I’m not sure why. I knew he loved Bernie and I guess he figured it would be too late to win her back, so he stayed.”
Bernie gasped, as if she were out of breath. Then, slowly, she leaned toward Rita and took both her hands, holding them in her own. “If he loved me,” she said, enunciating each word, “he would have called your night together a mistake. He would have come after me, fought for me, done something to win me back. But he just let me go. Because he wanted to be with you.” The way she spoke, it felt to me that Bernie wasn’t just saying it to Rita; she was finally realizing the truth herself.
Bernie stood up, pulling Rita up with her. The two old friends stared at each other for a moment, then fell into a long hug. When they let go, Rita turned to her daughter.
“Can you get my sleeping aid?”
Joi nodded and left the room. A few minutes later she returned with a glass filled with a pale yellow liquid.
“Is that lemonade?” I asked.
Joi nodded. “My mother puts a liquid sedative in it. She has trouble sleeping. And she has trouble swallowing pills.”
“Did George know that?” I asked Rita.
Rita shook her head. “He thought if I took a sedative I wouldn’t wake up, so I put it in lemonade. He hated lemonade, so I knew he’d never catch on. I didn’t want to worry him. We never fought, so there was no reason to start over something so small.”
I shifted uncomfortably, unsure if this was the time to point out that that wasn’t exactly true. After a moment I decided it was. “I saw you and George through the window,” I said. “It seemed like you were fighting.”
“I was upset and scared. I thought I would die before I’d made things right. George was trying to calm me down, but I think it scared him too.”
I thought of that day in the kitchen and how George told me things were harder than he thought they would be. I realized now, he wasn’t talking about running an inn. He was talking about the possibility of losing Rita.
Rita turned back to Bernie, and the two women sat on the bed telling us stories of their childhood antics. The tears of a few minutes before were replaced with loud laughter.
“She got what she came for,” Eleanor whispered to me. “Now we can all go home.”
“No,” I whispered back. “Not with Geo
rge’s killer still out there.”
CHAPTER 47
Rita was exhausted from finally having told her story, so Joi took her up to bed. Bernie, too, was tired, and after a few minutes of talking, it was clear that the others also needed sleep.
But not me. I went downstairs to the sitting room. The scene in Bernie’s room kept playing in my head, as did everything that had happened in the last few days. It hadn’t even been a week since we’d left Archers Rest, and yet I felt like I’d been gone from there for a lifetime. I wanted to go home. Even though most of my closest friends were asleep upstairs, I felt far away from much of what mattered to me—Someday Quilts, my grandmother’s house by the Hudson River, Jitters coffee shop, and the feeling that everything makes sense. Here, in this rambling old house with sad people who lived sad lives, nothing seemed to.
But as much as I wanted to go home, I knew that if we didn’t find the killer, if a cloud still hung over Bernie’s head, I would never feel at ease. It annoyed me that I couldn’t be more like Rita—a thought I’d never imagined I would have. She could make her peace without having the answers. I doubted I ever could.
I sat in the darkened room, looking at the freshly painted walls, and the empty spot above the fireplace where the gun had been.
I went over the clues in my mind. There was the gun, the dead dog shot with the same kind of bullets that had killed George, the seam ripper with the red mark that I’d found by the murder scene, and the witness McIntyre wouldn’t share with us. And there was still so much that Rita hadn’t explained. Maybe all of it pointed to the killer. Maybe none of it did.
If Rita was telling the truth, and in my heart I knew she was, she had no reason to kill George. But neither did anyone else. Except Bernie. Finding out the truth tonight did nothing to eliminate her motive. My mind kept going back to what McIntyre was probably thinking, and it didn’t reassure me.
There were still a lot of unanswered questions, but for tonight, anyway, I knew I had to stop reaching for them. As Oliver had said before I’d left Archers Rest, I had to look beyond the obvious. And to do that I needed to stop trying so hard. Instead I just sat and stared and thought about all that was wasted in being afraid of the truth. George had loved Rita for all these years, but she was so certain she had been second choice that she’d never really trusted it. And Bernie had walked away from her chance to find out the truth and spent more than forty years wondering what might have been. It was a lesson I knew I was learning; not to be afraid of the truth. In fact, I found myself obsessed with it, though somehow it was just outside my grasp.
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