A Slow Ruin

by Pamela Crane

  I yanked my arm away. His touch burned me. “And you don’t know that it’s not her! Don’t talk to me like you know what I’m going through—it’s not the same. You’re not a parent.”

  Cody shrank away from me, face etched in hurt.

  “I’m going to ignore what you just said, because it comes from a place of pain. And for the record, I want to be a father, but unlike you, not all of us can get what we want when we want it.”

  “You—a father?” I scoffed. “You couldn’t even be a loyal husband and brother.”

  I had no idea if Cody had ever wanted children, or thought about having kids with Marin, but I struck a nerve...and instantly regretted it.

  “You’re one to talk. It wasn’t all me that night. You are just as responsible for what happened as I am.”

  “I think it’s time we called it a night.” Rather than letting it all pour out—accusations I knew I’d regret later, a defense that couldn’t hold water—I pointed to the porch steps leading out into the night. An owl screeched in agreement.

  Cody slid out of his chair, pulling keys from his pocket. “You know—” He paused, one foot on the top step, and turned to look at me. The edges of his face hid in the gloom. “I could have gotten you if I wanted you. Just like I could have destroyed your entire life but chose not to. Remember who you’re talking down to.”

  Then he was gone.

  And shame took his place.

  I ran inside, bolting the door shut, locking Cody and his words out where they couldn’t reach me. Heading upstairs, somewhere in the recesses of the house Oliver’s voice echoed, but I couldn’t hear him through the blood pounding in my eardrums. As I rounded the corner to my bedroom, I slowed at the doorway to Vera’s room, my eyes skimming the black innards.

  No, not today, daughter.

  Gripping the banister for support, I turned down the hallway, past the stained-glass power couple hidden in gray, into my bedroom, straight to my bedside table. Twisting the lamp on, the room burst into light. I pulled open the drawer, revealing a stack of books—mostly book club to-be-reads—and slid out a small wooden box tucked beneath them. Home to Vera’s journal. The vault to her secrets.

  From the moment I found it Oliver warned that I should give the journal to the police, and I fervently agreed. In word, but not in deed. What he didn’t know was that her possible salvation was my damnation. Within the pages not only was I a monster, but I had committed a heinous crime that would put me behind bars. No one could ever know the truth about my past, about what I had done for the sake of love. Not even Oliver. Especially not Oliver. But Vera had somehow found out.

  I had memorized most of the words in my redundant search for a clue that would help me find her. The scribble was full of typical teen grievances, heartbreaks, friend woes, and first loves…except for one. One entry that shook me to my core. One confession that meant she was running for her life, or had died trying. I took the journal out of the box and reread one of the early entries that lingered long after I heard Oliver put the house to bed for the night, doors shutting and deadbolts clicking:

  Today Nana told me the story of my great-great-grandmother Alvera Fields, the woman I was named after. It’s pretty crazy, actually. She was basically forced into marriage to some rich guy, even though she wanted to be a women’s rights activist. But then she had a baby, and a couple months later on April 16, 1910, she disappeared. Her family and the cops thought she was kidnapped and murdered by a group of men who used violence to try to stop the suffrage movement, but it makes me wonder what really happened to her…and it makes me worry about what might happen to me because of what Mom did.

  Oliver’s family history took a dark turn back then, and all these years later the darkness returned for Vera. It was a haunting, chilling thought—first Alvera disappeared, then her namesake Vera. Both on April 16.

  Holy hell. I had never noticed the date until now. Both disappeared on the same exact date, one hundred and eleven years apart. Certainly that couldn’t be coincidence. But there was no possible way they could be connected…could they? Whoever had been alive back then was long dead now.

  Several entries later Vera mentioned someone named BS. The writing was furious, angry slashes across the page. Though the initials didn’t ring a bell, I needed to know who this BS person was that deeply affected Vera. Maybe a friend turned foe who had threatened her.

  “No, please tell me you didn’t.”

  I snapped the book shut and hid it behind my leg as if Oliver, standing in the doorway with arms folded judgmentally, hadn’t already caught me red-handed.

  “I had to hide it from the police,” I replied. “You know I did.”

  “Why, Felicity? You’re only going to make things worse by keeping secrets from the people who are trying to find her.”

  “How can it get any worse, Ollie?”

  There was nothing worse than what I had already done before our daughter disappeared.

  The Pittsburg Press

  Pittsburg, PA

  Monday, October 17, 1910

  HUSBAND OF MISSING WOMAN THINKS WIFE WAS SLAIN

  As a result of the visit that Robert Fields, husband of Alvera Fields, paid to District Attorney Whitman late Sunday night, the district attorney dropped all of his regular duties and confined himself to running down a clue that Fields gave him.

  When Mr. Fields was asked about his talk with Mr. Whitman, he said:

  “I feared from the first that my wife is dead. Since I publicly expressed this belief, I have received letters convincing me that my theory is correct, which I have communicated to Mr. Whitman. I have given him my word that I will not divulge these letters, but I will say that I have every reason to believe that Alvera was kidnapped on April 16, and afterward murdered. Her body, I am convinced, has been disposed of.”

  He continued to say:

  “The stories that my family has been concealing information are absolutely without foundation. We are in perfect harmony with the police and working with one objective—to find Alvera if she is alive or dead. No one is more anxious than I am to clear up the mystery.”

  A number of personal advertisements, which have appeared over the signature of “Suffragette C,” have been generally credited to one of Mrs. Fields’ chums. One of these advertisements appeared in a Pittsburg newspaper this morning. It was as follows:

  “Expect you here this week. Affairs will be arranged to your satisfaction. SUFFRAGETTE C.”

  Chapter 9

  Marin

  Cody had two tells when something was wrong.

  The first was when he came home from his brother’s house drunk. Check.

  The second was when he dredged up past grievances. Check.

  When the front door slammed shut, shaking the bones of the house, and Cody muttered his way throughout the first floor about being the only family member with any sense, I had a feeling he’d crossed out both on the list. Checkmate.

  “They underestimate me, but I’ll show them,” he grumbled somewhere in the…kitchen? “They think they’re better than me? They’re nothing. Nothing!” His argument with himself had reached the foot of the stairs and grew louder as his footsteps rumbled closer. Closer. Until they were stomping into the bedroom where I was lying on the bed reading by lamplight. He moved with a lumbering gait.

  “I hope you got an Uber,” I said.

  “I’m not drunk, Marin. I only had one beer.”

  “Just one?”

  “Fine, two. But I swear I’m not drunk. I’m just pissed.”

  More like piss drunk. But whatever. He was home. “Another fun family get-together?” I smirked.

  Cody scowled.

  “I’m so sick of being treated like garbage by them. You know, I was always the smart one. Oliver just got handed everything to him while I worked my ass off. Fuckin’ assholes—all of them!”

  I had forgotten about his third tell: swearing like a sailor.

 
I set the book down and turned on my side, propping my head up on my hand.

  “Want to talk about it?” I offered.

  I had no desire to put my meager relaxation time on hold to hear all about the competition that constantly brewed between the Portman brothers. Oliver had clearly won before the race even began. He was gorgeous, a brilliant businessman, rich…Mommy’s favorite. It was obvious how Debra doted on him like he was a prince, with Cody the lowly serf. But what did it matter as long as Cody was happy? The whole sibling rivalry was so three decades ago.

  “No…you don’t want to hear about it. You look…busy.” He gestured to the paperback beside me, a tattered pink dahlia splashed across the cover.

  “I’m never too busy for you.” I patted the mattress. “Come. Vent. I’m all yours.”

  He sat, turned to me. “It feels wrong bitching about my family when your family was crazier than mine.”

  Crazy. An awful, empty word that reduced people to objects, good or bad, normal or deviant. Was that all I was? An insulting, outdated label pegging me mentally ill and therefore damaged goods? Worthless? Capable of any number of horrors? I felt like the attention-seeking wannabe actress who would do just about anything to catch the spotlight.

  A memory with my mother flitted into my mind, then hit me with a closed fist. Our last words before she died. How she pleaded for my forgiveness. How I had called her a crazy, selfish, horrible person. My mother had morphed from the hero in my life into the villain, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the transition started. Sure, I had been angry with her for letting the darkness win and take over after Dad died, the lurid sadness that held her captive. All that time I thought she was crazy, but maybe I was the crazy one. Crazy for not understanding her, or loving her through the struggle. Crazy for ever judging another person’s crazy.

  I wanted to say all of this to my husband, but I didn’t.

  “Well, if you change your mind, I’m here to listen,” I said instead.

  “I’m going to jump in the shower. I’m too mad to talk about it right now. You wouldn’t understand anyway. You never had asshole siblings or asshole parents who always think the worst of you.”

  Not ones that I cared to talk about, at least. Cody knew the basic details, like my dad’s unexpected passing when I was nine and losing my mother when I turned thirteen. While their deaths weren’t directly connected, they sort of were. From the moment Dad’s remains returned stateside from Afghanistan in a flag-draped transfer case, Mom had become a different person. Cue her self-medication, and it wasn’t hard to link the cause and effect. Some wounds simply didn’t heal, no matter how much time you gave them.

  While Cody had probed me for more backstory throughout the years, I had blotted out most of my troubled past—especially the dark spots. There were too many of those stains, and they would have scared him away. I couldn’t risk losing the one good thing I had found, not after all I’d already lost.

  Except for one tiny confession, one single slip of the tongue. By that fateful summer night we’d been dating for two months. His arm slung around me, my side pressed up against his in the backseat of his car as we watched Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever at one of the last drive-ins still standing in Western Pennsylvania. My dad had been a huge admirer of the trailblazing Black auteur’s work, and when I’d turned old enough to appreciate the nuances of Spike’s movies, I’d become a student of them too. The Starlight Drive-In was hosting a week-long retrospective of Spike’s joints (as he waggishly called his films), and that fateful Wednesday Jungle Fever, a provocative romantic drama about an interracial affair between a Black man and an Italian-American woman, was on the bill. Although the racial roles were reversed, it paralleled to Cody’s and my relationship, which I thought made the film a must-see together.

  Despite the movie’s deadly serious tone, we’d both gotten a little silly from too much wine. When stars Wesley Snipes and Annabella Sciorra started having hot sex on a desk, Cody joked, “I got jungle fever, baby, and there ain’t no cure.” I turned to him, smirking, and he’d stolen a kiss. Realizing I was turned on as much as he was, I coaxed his tongue into my mouth.

  For the first time it just felt so right being with Cody. He felt like the one. Wrapped in each other’s arms, kissing softly, Cody had taken his finger and written I love you Mare on the steamed-up back windshield.

  I felt like I could tell him anything. Everything.

  So I did.

  I had said too much, though at first I didn’t think Cody heard me. He remained silent. I had expected a reaction, a dismissal, anything but nothing. Yet he acted like what I confessed was the most normal thing in the world.

  So I had said it again, making sure he heard me. Dumb, I know. But I had never told anyone my terrible secret, and it felt freeing to release it out into the wild.

  “Did you hear what I said? I killed my mother, Cody.”

  Our conversation came to a standstill for a long minute, and then he kissed me. “I heard you, Marin. And it’s okay. Whatever you did in your past, it’s not who you are now.”

  And that was that. No explanation needed. Or so I thought back then.

  It was that one too-comfortable moment that brought my entire house of cards tumbling down. A peek into my shadows that would become my demise. Because it remained a part of me.

  In retrospect, telling Cody was a mistake, a huge one. I was pretty sure he in turn told his brother and Felicity. I didn’t have concrete evidence of this, but when Vera disappeared I suddenly saw judgment in their eyes—that I was the “crazy one” in the family. Capable of anything…like kidnapping their daughter. Or murder. It wasn’t a far stretch after what I’d already done.

  While Cody stripped out of his clothes and bumbled into the shower, I glanced at my phone on my bedside table, as if the text I had received earlier burned a green thought bubble on the screen and in my head:

  Vera isn’t coming back.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. It was never supposed to come to this. Vera was never supposed to disappear. Now I knew for sure that I was the reason she was missing. What I couldn’t figure out was why.

  I needed answers, and there was only one person who could give them to me. Sliding off the bed, I grabbed my phone and shuffled to the window. An endless row of brick houses depressingly identical to mine stared back at me. My finger trembled as I found the number and pressed the call button. This was my last chance, the only person who could help me bring back Vera. After a single ring it went to voicemail. Of course it wouldn’t be so easy. I decided to leave a message.

  “Hey, we need to talk,” I whispered. “Please. Call me as soon as you get this. It’s urgent.”

  As I ended the call, Cody’s voice seized my last bit of nerves. “What’s so urgent at”—his gaze slid to the alarm clock—“two in the morning?”

  The phone slipped from my hand, clattering on the floor. There was no way out of this now.

  Chapter 10

  Marin

  The hum of the lawnmower outside my bedroom window pulled me awake. I turned over and saw the clock blink a new minute: 8:06 a.m. My first thought was last night’s fight with Cody after I lied my way through an explanation about the “mysterious phone call” I had made. Eventually I convinced him it had to do with an errand my boss had asked me to run that I had forgotten about. He didn’t press for details after that, but I felt the lie widen between us as we climbed into bed, his body nearly hanging off the mattress to avoid even the slightest waft of heat from mine.

  This morphed into my second thought, the truth about my phone call. And the text about Vera. I was as empty of answers as I had been last night, but not for long. I knew where to find them.

  I got out of bed and peeked between the blinds. Two stories below, Cody tramped back and forth across the yard, shirtless and glistening, earbuds pumping old-school Eminem into his brain. I could tell by the lyrics he rapped. Or at least tried to rap.

 
Neatly cut rows trailed him as he pushed the mower through the tall grass. If I hurried, I could make it there and back before he finished the backyard and still have time to serve breakfast and an apology.

  With heavy Pittsburgh traffic, it took over half an hour winding through the rolling, twisty hills that made driving in this city a nightmare when I finally pulled into the driveway of the Grandview Avenue house atop Mount Washington. I barely appreciated the view that lured tourists to this spot, paying five bucks a head to ride the oldest and steepest incline in the United States up the sharp mountain for a sweeping panorama of the Steel City.

  Across the street from the house, and miles below, mid-morning sun warmed the city alive. The sparkling landmark skyscrapers of the Golden Triangle sat nestled at the point where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers met to create the mighty Ohio, where fifteen bridges crisscrossed the scene like yellow spokes.

  Although the beauty of the sights escaped my accustomed eyes, the history had always fascinated me. From childhood Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was a hometown favorite, and the 1983 flick Flashdance, following the trials and tribulations of aspiring ballerina Jennifer Beals, was a guilty pleasure. Steelworker by day, exotic dancer by night—really? The movie was so corny it was cool, but the music was electrifying, and who could forget that iconic scene where Beals’ underdog character, Alex, gets doused with a bucket of water and beats the living daylights out of an innocent chair? Too funny. (Knowing that Beals had an African-American father and an Irish-American mother always stoked me too.)

  Pop culture touchstones aside, the firetruck red incline making its ascent before me was a rightful bragging point. Once upon a time these machines carried passengers and freight between the coal mines, local neighborhoods, and rail yard. Even in our high-tech world of drones and 3D printers and augmented reality, it knocked me out that 1870s ingenuity had created this mechanical marvel.