Spirit: Blackwood Security Book 10.5

by Elise Noble

  Mina nodded. “When my aunt was younger, she didn’t celebrate Christmas. Her father didn’t allow it.”

  “Why not?”

  “His church shunned pagan holidays. But after he died in an accident, my grandma, aunt, and mom went crazy with it. Mom and Aunt Rhoda help with the Halloween and Easter Extravaganzas too. Halloween’s more my thing.”

  “Mine too. Still, I’m sorry to hear about your grandfather.”

  “Don’t be. Nobody ever talks about him, but I don’t think he was a very nice man. And my family did just fine without men. When I got engaged, my aunt sighed and told me it was important to learn from my mistakes.”

  “You didn’t find that a little…insulting?”

  “Well, yes, but she meant well.”

  “Your aunt never married?”

  “I don’t think she even dated. Grandma and Aunt Rhoda were very self-sufficient when they were younger. Hunting, shooting, fishing. DIY and car repairs. Even though my aunt’s in her seventies, she still chops wood faster than anyone else I know, and she can hit a bullseye with a rifle at five hundred yards. Hey, there’s my mom!”

  Meriah Lewis was three inches taller than her daughter but shared the same slight build. And do you know who else she reminded me of? Gwendolyn. They had the same narrow nose, the same wide-set eyes. But Meriah had modelled her hair on Bradley’s—red with white tips. She’d fastened the front back with a holly-shaped clip, and the rest swung around her shoulders as she flung her arms around Mina.

  “You got here! When your first flight was cancelled, I thought you weren’t going to make it.”

  “So did I,” Mina choked out as her mom squashed the breath from her lungs.

  “Which airline did you come with in the end?”

  “No airline. A…private…jet.”

  Meriah loosened her grip. “A what?”

  “Mom, I met these people in the casino last night, and they offered to fly me here.”

  “What people? Why would they do that?”

  I held out a hand as Meriah looked me up and down. Her wrinkled nose said she didn’t like what she saw.

  “I’m Emmy. Sorry about the outfits. We had to cobble something together at the last minute.”

  “What do you want from my daughter? Nobody flies someone in a private jet out of the goodness of their heart.” Meriah glanced at my outfit again. “She’s not that sort of girl.”

  Mina winced visibly at the comment. “Mom, it’s okay.” Then to me, “I’m so sorry. My family can get a bit overprotective. Mom, Emmy actually wants to speak with you and Aunt Rhoda.”

  “What? Why? Who is she, exactly? This is what I was afraid of when you moved to Las Vegas. People taking advantage of your good nature to do…whatever this is. Mina, have any of these people asked you for money?”

  “Maybe we could find somewhere quieter to talk?” I suggested.

  “I’m about to judge the junior costume contest.”

  “Mom, it can wait.”

  “No, it can’t. The schedule says two o’clock.”

  “Mom, it can wait.”

  Finally, Meriah got the message, and her “don’t mess with my family” expression morphed into a mask of worry that mirrored Mina’s from last night.

  “Perhaps I could get somebody else to judge the contest. What’s going on?”

  “Please, Mom, just find Aunt Rhoda?”

  Fifteen minutes later, Dan, Valerie, and I sat in a small meeting room with three of the four members of the Lewis family. And I was certain now that all four women were related. Rhoda and Gwendolyn looked so much alike it was uncanny.

  Expectant faces stared at us. Where should we start?

  “My name’s Valerie, and I’m a genetic genealogist.” Well, okay then. Valerie had obviously done this a few more times than I had. “And these are my colleagues Dan and Emmy. They’re private investigators from Virginia. We were engaged to research a client’s family history, and an analysis of her DNA suggests you might be related.”

  “Like, they think she might be my aunt,” Mina said. “But that’s not possible, right? So I was wondering if maybe we have more relatives on your side that we don’t see?”

  Mina had directed her question at Rhoda, but it was Meriah who answered. “This is unexpected. Really. Another family member would be a gift, but I just don’t think there’s anyone close. Mom—your Grandma Beulah—was an only child, and so was Grandpa Enoch. I guess it’s possible that there’s someone farther back. What would that make them? A second cousin? A third cousin? I never really understood all that ‘once removed’ business.”

  “If one of Mina’s great-grandparents had children, that would make them Mina’s first cousin twice removed. The ‘removed’ part refers to the generation. Following down the family line to the same generation as Mina, that would be a third cousin.”

  “I’m still not sure…”

  “Shall I draw a diagram?”

  “That’d be mighty helpful.”

  Meriah was the one speaking, but I was too busy watching Rhoda to listen. She’d gone absolutely white. And her breathing was funny as well. How long had it been since my last first-aid refresher? I was probably due another one soon.

  “Rhoda? Are you okay?”

  “I… I…”

  “Auntie?”

  Rhoda’s voice dropped to a strangled whisper. “No… Nobody was meant to find out.”

  “Find out what?” Mina asked.

  Were we about to get some answers? Because from the look of Rhoda, I wasn’t sure I wanted them. Valerie had tried to warn us, hadn’t she? But I’d been so focused on whether we could find the truth for Gwendolyn that I’d never properly stopped to consider whether we should. Fuck. We’d started off in a Hallmark Christmas movie and somehow taken a wrong turn into Jurassic Park.

  “I-I-I might know who she is. There’s nobody else…” Rhoda closed her eyes and heaved in a breath. “But I thought she was dead. She was meant to be dead.”

  “Who? Who was meant to be dead?”

  “Your aunt.”

  “I have another aunt?”

  “No, you only have one aunt. Sarah.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “Sarah and Meriah. Such pretty names. Such pretty girls.”

  “But I don’t understand. You’re my aunt. Aren’t you?”

  Rhoda shook her head sadly. “I’m so sorry.” Her knuckles turned white where she gripped Meriah’s hand. “Merry, I’m so sorry.”

  Meriah glared at us. “Perhaps you should leave.”

  If only. This was like watching a slow-motion car crash.

  Rhoda sucked in a breath. “Mina, I-I-I’m your grandmother.”

  Boom.

  Dan’s eyes went wide, and Valerie’s jaw dropped. Shit, shit, shit. Allegedly, this was supposed to be the happiest time of the year, yet here we were, three and a half thousand miles from home and tearing a family apart. I wished with all my black little heart that we could turn back the clock. Bradley had already bought Gwendolyn’s slippers. The only thing I’d needed to do was add a bloody gift tag.

  “What?” Meriah gasped. “Then…then…you’re…you’re…”

  “I’m your mother, not your sister.” Rhoda was crying freely now, and Valerie fumbled for tissues in her purse. Had she been taking lessons in preparedness from Dan? “This is all such a mess. Such an awful mess. It always has been, but how could I tell you? Mom—my mom—forbade me to.”

  “Who’s my father? If you’re my mother, then who’s my father?”

  “Your father.”

  “Yes! My father!”

  “Your father is still your father. And Sarah’s father too.”

  No, this wasn’t just a car crash, this was an interstate pile-up.

  “But…how…?”

  “Enoch, that sick, sick beast, he started molesting me when…when…” Rhoda paused to wipe her eyes. “When I was nine years old. And when I was twelve, I became pregnant with Sarah.”

  “What happened to her? What the
hell happened?”

  Now Meriah was crying too, and if we weren’t careful, we were going to run out of tissues. Me? I just felt sick. Perhaps I could text Bradley? Please bring hankies and a bucket.

  Valerie reached out and squeezed Rhoda’s hand. “I understand how difficult this is. You’ve been bottling this up for a long time, haven’t you?”

  “Most of my life. I mean, Mom knew. Not at first, but later.”

  “You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”

  “But I’ve started, so I have to finish, don’t I? The lies, the past… I’ve hurt so many people. But I honestly didn’t think Sarah was still alive. How could she be? Mom said…she said she buried her. Not a day has gone past when I haven’t thought of Sarah, I swear.”

  I believed her. This was a woman whose secret had been eating at her from the inside out for nearly six decades, and now the dam was breaking. How much damage would the flood of truth do?

  “Enoch said he’d kill me if I told Mom what he’d done. Kill my baby, too. So I pretended it was a boy at school, a boy I refused to name, and said I’d been stupid. Mom was furious. Horrified. Appearances were important to her, so was the church, and back in those days, unwed teenage mothers were unacceptable, especially in our hometown. So they just sort of…hid Sarah away. She had a room in the basement. Nobody except us knew she was there.”

  “They planned to keep her down there forever?” Valerie asked.

  “I-I don’t know. I think maybe they panicked, and then it was too late to change the situation. It became normal, having Sarah downstairs. I used to sit with her in the evenings. Sing to her. Mom started homeschooling me so it wouldn’t happen again, but then it did. Two years later, I became pregnant with you, Merry, and this time, Mom realised the truth.” Rhoda balled the tissue up in her hands, then began picking bits off it. “Th-there was a fight. A big one. Even when I was a child, my ears didn’t work properly, so I didn’t hear everything that was said. But Mom didn’t leave the house for months afterwards. And when you were born, Mom said you’d sleep in the room beside mine, not Sarah’s, but we all had to pretend you were my sister and not my daughter. What was I supposed to do? I was fourteen years old, and I didn’t want to put another baby in the b-b-basement.”

  “Auntie, you did the right thing,” Mina said, her voice shocked but strong. “Grandma. I mean Grandma. I’m sorry. So sorry that you went through this.”

  “Merry, I used to take you to sit with Sarah. You loved her smile. It made you giggle. And you used to tangle your little fingers in her hair.”

  “What happened?” Meriah asked. “How did Sarah get out of the basement?”

  “She got sick. So sick, but Enoch wouldn’t let us take her to a doctor. Mom had insisted I go back to school by then, and one day when I arrived home, she said Sarah had gone to live with the angels. I overheard her telling Enoch that she’d buried her in the woods.”

  “She was abandoned on the altar of a church in Anchorage,” I filled in. “There was a TV appeal for her parents to come forward. You didn’t see it?”

  “We didn’t have a TV. Enoch said they spoke the devil’s words.”

  “Why did Beulah stay with Enoch?” Meriah asked. “She could have left and saved all three of us.”

  “I don’t know for sure. Even after he died, she refused to speak about him. But I think they were both weak in their own ways. And in those days, our old town was ruled by the church, not by the mayor or the governor. The pastor’s word was law, and Enoch was the pastor’s son. If Mom had spoken up, who do you think the folks around there would have believed? DNA testing didn’t exist back then.” The tissue was in tiny pieces on the floor now, and Rhoda started picking at a fingernail. “The day he passed was the happiest of my life. Mom’s too, I think. When the police left, that was the first time I saw her smile. Properly smile.”

  “It was the happiest day of my life too,” Meriah whispered. “The night before, he came into my room. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what was happening, or why, only that it hurt and Daddy told me not to tell anybody.”

  Rhoda pulled Meriah into her arms, and then Mina hugged both of them. And then it struck me that perhaps we hadn’t so much broken a family apart as pushed them closer together. Rhoda and Meriah were both free of their burdens now.

  A small smile played across Valerie’s lips. “Maybe there was a higher power at work.”

  “I don’t think so,” Mina said. “I got curious and looked Grandpa up in the newspaper articles at the library. Somebody shot him between the eyes. The police said it was a hunting accident.”

  “I heard the shot,” Meriah said, her voice hollow. “And then I heard the back door close.”

  Was she saying what I thought she was saying? Bloody hell. This made my family look positively normal, and considering my sperm donor of a father had tried to kill me and my birth mother lived in a rehab clinic, that was a big statement to make. Dan touched my hand in support because she knew exactly what was going through my mind.

  “The healing process is always difficult, but you have each other,” she said, her words aimed at the Lewis family. “Never forget that. Is there anything we can do to help? If you need somebody to talk to, a therapist to help you to process things, we can arrange that.”

  “I just want to see Sarah,” Rhoda said. “Do you think she’ll speak to me after the way I abandoned her?”

  Fortunately, Gwendolyn had struck me as the understanding type. “Her only Christmas wish was to share the day with you. If you want, we can fly you to her, but you’ll have to hurry up and pack or we won’t make it to Virginia in time.”

  “She’s in Virginia?”

  “Near Richmond. And we’ve got a plane waiting at the airport.”

  “Then we should go.”

  “All of us?” Mina asked.

  I shrugged. “Why not? We’ve got enough seats.”

  Rhoda scrambled to shaky feet. “We need to leave. We need to leave right this second.”

  CHAPTER 17

  WHY NOT? I’LL tell you why not. Because by the time we’d dropped the Lewises’ dog off with neighbours, helped them to carry their suitcases to the car, and driven to Ted Stevens Airport, the place was bollocksed. Completely bollocksed. An incoming cargo plane had skidded off the runway and ended up in a snowdrift.

  So we were stuck there, and most likely would be for several more hours at least. And just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, Bradley decided to start a Christmas sing-song in the departure hall. When my phone rang, I practically ran to the nearest stairwell because even if it was a telemarketer, that was still better than listening to “Jingle Bells” for the seventeenth time.

  “Are you near a TV?” James asked.

  “No, I’m stuck in a bloody airport.”

  “You had to work on Christmas Eve?”

  “Yes and no. I got caught up trying to grant one more wish for Bradley’s cockamamie scheme, and now I’m in Anchorage with no way to get home in time.”

  “In time for what? Christmas dinner?”

  “I don’t give a shit about Christmas dinner. No, I’m meant to be taking that little girl flying tomorrow morning, remember?”

  “The one I sent the model of Air Force One for?”

  “Yes, her. But a plane missed the runway, and who knows how long it’ll take to get cleared up? Even when the place reopens, they’ll have to land the flights in the air first, so we won’t be able to take off for hours, and if we don’t leave by ten o’clock, it’ll be too late. Bradley’s trying to charter a plane from another airport in between singing the full repertoire of Christmas favourites, but it’s not looking hopeful and my eardrums are about to burst. Dammit, I hate letting people down. Sorry, rant over. How are you?”

  “It’s been a busy day. I have a dinner to attend with one speech to give before dessert, and then I’m hitting the sack. What happened in Anchorage? Other than the runway incident, I mean?”

  I c
aught James up on the Christmas convention nightmare, my holly jolly hooker outfit, and the discovery that Gwendolyn’s family was more fucked up than my own. “So the sister’s actually now the mom, and the father’s dead. And it looks as if the old-mom-slash-grandma killed him.”

  “Sounds like karma to me.”

  “Sure does. Karma’s a bitch, but a smart one.”

  I heard somebody talking in the background, and James groaned. “Shit. Got to go. Nine thirty—watch the news.”

  “For what?”

  “You’ll see. Happy Christmas, Linny.”

  And then he was gone.

  Back in the departure hall, the hours ticked by. I bought a travel pillow. Catnapped. Ate three cheeseburgers. We had a good view of the action near the runway through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and there seemed to be an awful lot of standing around going on. I was tempted to send Bradley out to help, firstly because the plane would be moved faster but mostly because even through my earplugs, I could still hear every note of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and it wasn’t so much an earworm as a brain-eating amoeba.

  At nine twenty-five, I found myself a quiet corner in the farthest bar, ordered a gin and tonic, and tuned in to MSNBC on my phone. Ana slid onto the stool next to me with a vodka on the rocks.

  “Sometimes, I wish to go back to the prison cell. At least there was no drama there.”

  “Is there room for two?”

  “Always.”

  “I suppose at least there was a happy ending.”

  “Da.” Ana gave a one-shouldered shrug.

  “You don’t think so?”

  “A shot between the eyes? Too clean. Too easy. Too kind.”

  “True. I’d have jammed Enoch’s leg into a bear trap and waited for nature’s consequences.”

  “I would have strangled him with his own intestines.” Ana cracked a rare smile. “Made it look like an accident.”

  Maybe it was the alcohol or maybe it was the day I’d had, but I started laughing. And then Ana started laughing. And we both laughed and laughed and laughed until the bartender gave us a funny look. Oops.

  At precisely nine thirty, James appeared on-screen. He always had been a stickler for timekeeping. Every date we ever went on, he’d been five minutes early and I’d been five minutes late. It had become a standing joke between us. And it wasn’t as if I deliberately dithered either. Shit just always went wrong. One time, I stopped at the pharmacy to buy condoms on the way to dinner because we’d gone through his entire supply, and a dump truck broke down and blocked my car in. When the vehicles either side of me eventually moved and I was able to do an eleventy-million-point turn, you’ve guessed it… James was already at the restaurant.