The Reckoning at Gossamer Pond

by Jaime Jo Wright

  “Do you believe in grace, Miss Sheffield?” Jacobus moved out of the way of two gentlemen passing them on the walk. His movement urged Libby to take a step closer to the drugstore window.

  She blinked in surprise. “Pardon me?”

  “You believe in wrongdoings, but do you believe there is grace?”

  Libby nodded. “I do.”

  She didn’t. She wanted to. Or perhaps she did believe in grace of some sort. The eternal, distant grace offered her in exchange for repentance.

  He stepped closer to her and lowered his head so he could study her. The lines by his eyes were not harsh like his brother’s, but there was still something about him that made Libby question whether she could trust him. Maybe it was his brother, or maybe it was the way her nerves stood on end whenever he was near. As if the man had known her for years, known her heart, known her secrets. As if he could reason through her mind and conclude who she was simply based on the facts he found there. It was a disconcerting feeling, believing someone could administer a verdict about you and be correct.

  “Your sins, Miss Sheffield, can be forgotten by the Lord. He will not hold them against you if your heart is contrite. But it is a horrible place to wallow when you cannot forgive yourself.”

  He knew. Somehow, Jacobus Corbin knew everything.

  Libby could sense the warmth leaving her face, and Jacobus tipped his head.

  “Be careful, Libby,” he whispered. But it wasn’t threatening, as she might expect. Instead, it was telling. Very telling. As if he knew of dangers she had yet to discover and was giving her a warning, to save her, as Elijah once had.

  Chapter 22

  Annalise

  Annalise left the door to the trailer locked, opting against fresh air in exchange for a modicum of safety. The trailer still reeked, but she had ceased trying to pinpoint the exact smell. What with the empty liquor bottles, piles of dried-out cans from soup dinners, and a few mouse carcasses she’d discovered, this place needed to be torched. But, here she was, pilfering through junk to try to uncover more clues regarding what had been going on in the mind of Eugene Hayes in the days before he died.

  She paused to pull out her cellphone. Christen was supposed to meet her over ten minutes ago and she hadn’t arrived yet. Annalise could feel Brent’s glare from a mile away and hear his admonition.

  “You’ve had a break-in and we’ve found no answers as to who slashed your tires. You do not go to that trailer alone.”

  Of course, on further thought, even if Christen did show up, he probably wouldn’t approve of the mother of his children being her bodyguard.

  Running late. Sorry. Babysitter got held up. Didn’t have heart to tell her to hurry.

  Annalise smiled. Christen did try to be all things to all people.

  She turned her attention back to the task at hand. She’d already cleared off most of the desktop, gathering more photographs of herself and random scribbled notes that really made no sense to her. The walls were empty now since she’d unpinned the photographs. But with the new revelation that in a roundabout way, Eugene Hayes was cousin to Garrett, Annalise had to return to the trailer. In case she’d missed something. Somewhere.

  Two deaths in 1907, one a Greenwood and another a direct relation to a Greenwood. That couldn’t be happenstance. It was too convenient. A supposed suicide and a drowning. Neither were normal deaths by any means. It wasn’t as if there’d been an outbreak of smallpox or even a bad flu. Something happened in the Greenwood history, and it seemed Eugene Hayes was connecting more dots than even Annalise could see now. Then why would it be her pictures displayed across the trailer wall of the recluse instead of Garrett’s? Or Garrett’s father, or for that matter, the entire Greenwood family? She had no ties to the Greenwoods, except for her one confidential, guarded secret. That Eugene Hayes would have figured it out was hard to believe. He’d have had no reason to even look.

  Annalise knelt on the floor, glad she’d worn her oldest pair of jeans. Puffs of dust in the carpet tickled her nose, and she was almost certain that the carpet was damp. Reaching for the top newspaper on a pile of papers, Annalise browsed the headline to make sure it had no significance before she threw it in the black garbage bag next to her. It was from 2013. She reached for the next and the next until half of the pile was depleted. There went 2013 into the trash. Annalise tried to recollect that year, but like many others, they all melted together in her mind, always with Gia in the forefront.

  The image of her infant daughter was never going to stop crowding out life. The guilt ridiculed Annalise daily. Better choices, better care, better responsibility. She should have been . . . better. And, she was trying, wasn’t she? A penance of sorts, especially her work in the food pantry. Helping those who needed saving. Those who needed grace. Someone had told her once—maybe it had been someone at church when she used to attend—that grace couldn’t be earned. It was given. Annalise had yet to find that present wrapped under her spiritual Christmas tree. Maybe she was doing something wrong. Something she hadn’t put her finger on yet.

  She attempted to rein in her tempestuous thoughts. Lately, her brain was on a virtual merry-go-round of emotions, facts, questions, and bullet-pointed lists. Oh, for more bullet-pointed lists and less emotions! She was a thinker—an overthinker, truth be told—and she wanted to be in control. But this chaos? It was enough to send her to a therapist.

  She reached for the next newspaper. Moving backward to 2012. Her eyes dropped to the remaining one-third of the pile, and her chest tightened. A few fast blinks and Annalise knew she really was seeing it. Hidden between 2013 and 2012 was another picture. This one of a very pregnant eighteen-year-old Annalise. Her breaths came in quick staccato intakes and exhales as she reached for the photograph. It was the only one ever taken of her pregnant, and it’d been taken by her Aunt Tracy. She remembered the moment the picture had been snapped. It was as clear in her mind as if it’d been yesterday.

  Fingering the bent corner of the picture, Annalise sat back on her heels, tears burning the backs of her eyes. There she was, eight months’ pregnant, in the garden outside of her aunt’s home in Connecticut. The place she had gone to hide, as if she lived in 1950 and bore the full shame of an overtly promiscuous girl. It didn’t matter that it was really 2006 and most pregnant eighteen-year-olds just registered for college anyway, or got a job and started single-parenting. No. The plane ticket had arrived, and Annalise was flying her way east before she could think for herself.

  It was in that moment she’d almost been convinced God had completely washed His hands of her. If it hadn’t been for her mother’s older sister, Aunt Tracy, she would have been. But Tracy had some sort of crazy faith that she took with her to the grave. Annalise wouldn’t have minded lambasting God for every bad dish she’d been handed, including Aunt Tracy’s stage-four breast cancer. But, it was Tracy who claimed that God had enough grace to cover her through her dying process, and Annalise needed to give Him a chance.

  The memories invaded like old ghosts long locked away. The picture shook in Annalise’s hand. Fresh air. She needed fresh air. Grasping the arm of a chair, Annalise hefted her way off the floor, her toe kicking the remaining pile of newspapers and sending them sliding across the floor. She stumbled to the door, her throat sore from holding back unwanted tears. She’d gone almost twelve years being numb, finding a semblance of sanity during torturous memories. Now, from the grave, Eugene Hayes had the audacity to dig it all up with a picture he shouldn’t even possess.

  She cleared the three rickety steps of the trailer’s porch and hiked a few yards into the woods, taking deep gulps of air. The breeze rustled the new leaves on the oak and maple trees. Glowing almost emerald green with vegetation, the forest was beautiful. Like life should be if one could only look ahead and forget the ruins they’d left in their past.

  Annalise ran her thumb over the image of her eighteen-year-old face. Three weeks after the picture was taken, she’d heard Gia’s cry. Muted, short, and wobb
ly. The vision of her tiny little arms flailing their way out of the swaddling blanket, fighting, as if to tell them all she would not be held down, but she would fly.

  The day the picture was taken was the last day she’d allowed herself to consider being a mother. It was the day her future and Gia’s future permanently changed.

  Brushing away the tears that wet her face, Annalise glanced around her. No one was there. She needn’t be embarrassed mourning for a child few knew she’d had. The trees crowded around her and were suffocating. Undergrowth tangled around her ankles. Annalise turned toward the trailer. Christen hadn’t come yet, she was a mess, and Brent’s warning kept coming to mind. Inside the trailer was one thing, but here? She was too exposed.

  Without thought, Annalise crumpled the photograph in her hand as she took a step back toward the trailer. It wasn’t a memory she wanted, and it wasn’t one Eugene Hayes should have ever seen. Annalise drew her hand back to throw the picture into the woods. She glanced at it in her palm and stopped. There was ink on the back of the photograph. Probably a date, but it was enough to give Annalise pause. She lowered her arm and un-crinkled the picture.

  Annalise Forsythe

  Garrett Greenwood

  Harrison Greenwood

  Libby Sheffield

  Corbin twins

  Dorothy Hayes

  Dad (Lawrence)

  Me

  The list of names had been penned in the same handwriting as other notes in Eugene’s trailer. It was as if he’d created a character playlist on the back of her picture. Libby Sheffield? That was a new name, but the fact he’d penned “Me” gave Annalise more pause than anything. Eugene had connected himself to all of them. Somehow.

  She smoothed the picture on her leg, emotions calming with the diversion of the mystery yet to be solved. Annalise looked up when a rustling sounded in front of her. Her searching eyes landed on a black squirrel that scampered from one branch to another. She took a few more steps toward the trailer, then glanced down at the photograph as she walked. Something else had been written under the list of names, but it had obviously at one point been set in water and smeared. The handwriting—from what she could see of it—seemed different. More cursive and loopy.

  Annalise stopped, lifted it closer to her face, and squinted. “Save?” she muttered to herself, thinking she’d deciphered the first word. She adjusted her glasses and tilted the photograph toward the light filtering through the treetops.

  Save Annalise

  Her mind registered the fateful words just as a twig snapped behind her. Annalise spun, her feet rustling in the fallen leaves of last summer. A scream choked in her throat just as an arm swung at her, a fist colliding with her face. Catapulting backward, Annalise’s backside slammed against a tree root. Her attacker leaped on her, pushing her shoulders into the ground. As the face covered with a ski mask blurred in Annalise’s vision, blackness filled in as if her eyes were closed.

  “Eugene was wrong about you.” The words hissed in her ear as the weight of the man pressed down on her body. “You don’t deserve to have anything.”

  His callused hands were on her naked skin at the waist of her jeans where her shirt had slipped up.

  Dear God . . . No. The prayer screamed from her subconscious. For now, in the abandoned property of Eugene Hayes, it was only God who could hear her screams.

  She blinked, clearing fog from her vision. The room was dim, a rhythmic beeping greeted her ears, and the smell was a mixture of bleached sheets, sterile air, and beef stroganoff.

  “Annalise?” Christen’s voice came from the blur. Annalise turned toward the outline of her friend, and slowly Christen’s face gained clarity. Worry in her expression was the first thing Annalise noticed. Second was the sprawling body of Garrett, draped across a hospital room couch behind her. He was sound asleep.

  Annalise swung her attention back to Christen. The woods. The picture. The hands groping her body. She clawed at the sheets scrambling to sit up. Christen’s calming hand on her shoulder pressed her gently back down.

  “Shhh, honey. Don’t make sudden moves. You have a concussion.”

  Annalise could believe it. Her head pounded as nausea sprung up, eliminating any interest in the beef stroganoff being served up in the hallway to patients. She assessed her body by concentrating on where she hurt. Her backside felt bruised, her shoulders too, and her head felt like it weighed three tons.

  Christen’s murmur interrupted Annalise’s frantic mental assessment. “You were attacked at Eugene’s trailer. Do you remember?”

  “What happened?” Annalise whispered hoarsely.

  “It could have been worse. Much worse.” Christen lifted a plastic water bottle and positioned its straw in Annalise’s lips. Annalise took a long draw of cool water and closed her eyes.

  For a moment, she was petrified it’d been an assault of worse proportions. A rustling sound caused her to open her eyes, and when she did, her gaze collided with the concerned brown eyes of Garrett looking over Christen’s shoulder.

  “Hey.” His voice was gentle, and Christen shifted so he could edge closer to the bed.

  “He’s been camping out here,” Christen explained, pointing her thumb at him, a Be nice glint in her eye.

  Annalise offered him a neutral smile before diverting her attention back to Christen. She didn’t know what to make of Garrett standing sentry over her while she’d been out.

  “How’d I get in the hospital?”

  Christen tipped her head and raised her eyebrow with a stern arch that had no impact because of the sheen of anxious tears that glossed her eyes. “My babysitter finally showed up.”

  “Huh?” It was all so cloudy, so confusing.

  “I was supposed to meet you at Eugene’s trailer and I was running late. When I finally got there, you were lying on the ground just outside the trailer. Brent thinks my car must’ve chased away your attacker.”

  That was a little too much for her brain now. Annalise let her eyes slip shut, and she listened to Garrett and Christen mumble. A nurse came in and took her vitals, fingertips cool against her skin. Then, after what seemed like hours, the room was quiet.

  Annalise braved opening her eyes, sensing even Christen had departed now. The room was dim, lights having been lowered. The hospital room curtain was pulled to shield her bed from the doorway beyond. Annalise released a shaky breath.

  “You okay?”

  The deep voice gave Annalise a start and she yelped, swinging her hand up as if to strike her attacker. Garrett’s fingers curled gently around her wrist as he stepped from the shadows.

  “Hey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Or make me rip out my IV?” Annalise rubbed where the taped needle penetrated her skin at the back of her hand. “Why are you here?”

  It came out almost as a plea. A part of her she really didn’t like was touched he’d been holding vigil by her bed. But, it wasn’t as if she were dying, although that might have been the outcome if her attacker had more devious intent. Still, Garrett had no business being here. None. At least she tried to convince herself of that.

  Garrett pulled up a chair with wooden arms and orange pleather-covered cushions. It squeaked as he lowered his weight into it. Annalise took a moment to study him. At some point since the last time she’d seen him at the historical society, he’d had his hair trimmed. This time he looked less like Shaggy and more reminiscent of—well, a man who cared to comb his hair. His creased chin was clean-shaven, and he wore a button-up, blue plaid cotton shirt. The sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, revealing corded forearms that now rested on bare knees as he leaned forward. He still wore ratty shorts, with strings hanging off the coffee-colored material.

  If she were brutally honest with herself—and maybe when she had a concussion wasn’t the best time for that—she had never, ever been attracted to anyone the way she was to Garrett Greenwood. Yet something in his demeanor had changed since high school. Maybe he’d just become even more
laid back, more than he’d even been in high school. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe he was at peace.

  That created a tiny twinge of jealousy she was hesitant to explore.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Annalise ventured before she could stop herself. “Why are you here?”

  Garrett shrugged. “I told you I’d help.”

  “Help with what? I successfully achieved having my tires slashed and engaged in a one-sided fight that wound me up here.” Annalise attempted a laugh, to lighten the mood, to sound less bitter and unfriendly. But she winced as a wave of throbbing pain shot across her head. “I think I’m handling things just fine,” she mumbled.

  Garrett’s mouth quirked up in a sideways smile, but his eyes narrowed with feeling. He didn’t address her poor attempt at snark. Honest transparency reflected on his face. “I wasn’t here twelve years ago. So, I’m here now.”

  Annalise turned her head away. A lone tear burned a trail down her cheek. She swiped at it, careful not to rip the IV cord from her skin. Her bottom lip quivered as she responded, even while she stared up at the ceiling.

  “It’s a little late, don’t you think?”

  The pleather squeaked again as Garrett shifted his weight. Annalise didn’t look at him—couldn’t look at him. Whatever happened between them twelve years ago had come full circle. The consequences were still being meted out, this time in terrifying form.

  “I know you think I just—left.” Garrett’s voice was raspy.

  Annalise studied the paint bumps in the ceiling.

  He continued. “It looks like I took off for a great career and left you here to—to have the baby alone.”

  “Actually, I was in Connecticut with my Aunt Tracy.” Annalise grimaced at the memory. “So no one would know the Forsythe girl had seduced the Greenwood boy.”

  “It was the other way around,” Garrett said.

  “Right?” Annalise nodded, her eyes widening to affirm her point. A wave of pain sliced through her head again and she closed her eyes. “You came after me.”