“Rest up,” she said. “I’ll keep coming back. I’ll come when no one else is here. That’s how it’s always been. I came along after everyone else was gone. What I remember are the good summer afternoons. The garden. Your study with all those books. I used to read them up in the attic. I had an old rocking chair up there, and I liked all the old clothes and the way I could look out over the hills and pretend I was a princess.”
She sat for another hour while he slept. Then she leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Bye, Papa. I’ll be back soon.”
At the house, Alice and Mary were finishing dinner.
Mary said, “Ree is back, Mama.”
Alice turned and said, “Oh, that’s good. I’m so glad.” Perfectly normal, for her, just as she always was. Vague. Distant. But composed and seemingly present. The exterior that Regina knew so well. As if the night before had never happened. “I think I’m going to have to go lie down.”
Fragile too. Easily exhausted.
At Mary’s quick warning shake of the head, Regina bit back a dozen questions.
When Alice was out of earshot and Mary had returned from helping her mother up the stairs, Regina said, “I would never guess from the way she acts that she could be as far gone as she was last night.”
“Things can seem strange to us all in the middle of the night. She’s worse than most people. But it’s a passing thing. Are you hungry? There’s plenty.”
“Let me.” Regina took the plate Mary was about to serve for her and set it on the table, empty. “Is this the way it is? Is that how she is all the time? I mean, if you look under the surface, is she that completely out of touch with the present?”
Mary made a small gesture and began washing up.
“Do the others know?”
Mary hesitated. “I don’t think so. Having a crowd in the house helps her. It’s distracting. She sleeps better.”
“Do they know she lives in the past—really thinks it’s 1925—like she did last night? Because she did, Mary, she thought she was going to have a big party, with roses from Papa’s garden.”
Mary made a gentle admonishing noise. “It’s like sleepwalking. It’s a retreat from reality. Some people do that to protect themselves. They live in a dream world to escape what they can’t bear to live with.”
“Is she often like she was last night?”
“She roams the house at night sometimes. Yes, reliving the distant past. Why is that so bad? She goes back to the time when she was happy. She gets upset if she remembers Eugenie. So she lives in the time before it happened.” She shot Regina another warning look. “Anyway, it just is. Nothing we can do about it. She’s up in years, Ree.”
“Sixty-seven. That’s not so old.”
“It’s an individual thing. Some people are a lot less physically healthy at her age. Others, like her, deteriorate in their minds.”
But Regina’s mind had already circled back to what was for her the central question. “Rawley’s alibi is not worth much. His own parents say he was in the field mowing all day. How much is there to mow? He could have been within a mile of where it happened.”
Mary lightly mimed pounding the counter with both fists. “Oh, Ree.”
“You wonder why I keep digging into this. I do it because everywhere I look I find more reason to wonder about it.”
“Why do you want or need to know anything about it?” She expelled a huge breath. “What difference does it make now, all these years later? There was no evidence that she was murdered.”
“Then why did Robert accuse him?”
Mary’s shoulders slumped and she looked at the ceiling.
Regina pressed her advantage. “Last night she said she saw him.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“She may skip from one thing to another, but that doesn’t mean that nothing she says is true. She said last night that she saw him before and after. She told Robert and Robert believed her.” Mary sighed, and Regina pressed on. “She said her father thought two people killed someone as sure as if they held her under the water.”
“As sure as if. Blame, Regina. Anyway, she’s talking about her sister. And her father, who died long before anything happened to our Eugenie.”
“Who was it that Alice said her father blamed for her sister’s death?”
Mary grabbed the dish towel and wrung her hands dry.
“Who was Maisie? Tell me.”
“Maisie helped around the Rectory when Mama was a little girl. I don’t know if she was exactly a nanny. I’ve heard she drank and had a boyfriend. I’m not sure where that got started. I’ve heard Bebe, who embroiders things, say that Maisie was drinking and fell asleep, or that she had a boyfriend and she was with him, but how would she know? You wouldn’t think the Wilcoxes would have trusted a girl like that to watch their daughters. Grandma Wilcox told me the girls weren’t supposed to swim unless one of their parents was there, because they didn’t trust Maisie to watch.” Mary dropped into a chair and folded her hands resignedly on the table.
“What she told me last night, that her father blamed Maisie and her boyfriend—that’s probably true, right?”
“That he blamed them? That’s probably true. He never said anything like that around me, but I think he may have blamed that girl and her boyfriend, who he thought distracted her.”
“She also says she saw Tiberius Rawley when Eugenie drowned. Before and after, she said.” Regina frowned. “That’s all she said. I wish I knew exactly what she saw. I’m afraid to bring it up.”
Mary was quick to second this thought. “It can’t do anything but harm.”
“What if you asked her when she’s like she is now, calm, normal?”
Mary shook her head.
“But what if it’s true? I don’t mean about Maisie. I mean about Eugenie. What if somebody drowned her on purpose? What if he’s still out there? What if someone killed her and got away with it?”
“Regina, listen to yourself!”
“Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“I do know what happened.”
Regina slapped the table harder than she intended. “You didn’t see it.”
“I got there within minutes of Alice. I tried to revive Eugenie, but she was already gone. I should have been watching more closely.”
“No!”
Mary cast aside eyes that glistened with tears.
“It’s not your fault that you weren’t there. Plus, you didn’t see her drown. If you had, she wouldn’t have drowned. You would have saved her.”
“Oh, Ree. It was horrible.” Face in her hands. Muffled voice. “I see it every day.”
“But you didn’t see her fall in. You didn’t see how she came to be in the water.”
Mary dropped her hands, eyes closed.
“You didn’t see how she died,” Regina said.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because it ruined my life! It ruined hers. It ruined her. I’d like to know how that happened. Or why!”
“How can that possibly help?”
“What if the blame were entirely on someone else?”
“We weren’t watching her. Don’t you see? It wouldn’t make any difference!”
“You couldn’t watch her every minute of her life. There were so many times when I was alone in the yard by the lake. All it takes is a few minutes. Do you watch any five-year-old every minute of every day?”
“Near the water, yes.”
“But you didn’t know she was near the water, did you?” Mary fled to the dining room, looking for a dish out of place and finding none. Regina followed her. “You’ve never talked to me about this. I think I have a right to know.”
“It was a misunderstanding. I thought Alice was watching her. Alice thought I was. But Alice—Alice never watched the little children. I knew that.”
“Where was I? Who was watching me?”
“With Eugenie? I don’t know. At first, we couldn’t find you. We were afraid you might have drow
ned too, but we found you. You were hiding. I guess you saw all the panic and confusion and thought you’d done something wrong.”
“Where were you?”
“When?”
“When she drowned.”
“In the cottage.” Mary moved to the window and looked out at the lake. “I realized how much time had gone by, and I ran out on the lawn. I just thought—I don’t know why, but I thought something bad might have happened.”
“Why?”
“Just worrying. That’s all. When you watch little children, you worry. A million times you think, ‘Oh dear God, no,’ and then they’re all right.”
“Alice was there before you. She might very well have seen something you didn’t.”
Mary held up a hand. “Regina.” Mary’s voice, as quiet and gentle as ever, took on a ring of steel. “Stop this. Please. It’s upsetting to me, and I can’t even imagine what it would do to her at a time like this if she heard you talking this way. Let it go. At least while Papa is—the way he is. Just don’t.”
Regina’s cheeks burned. Then in a softer voice, she said, “I saw him today.”
“You did?” Mary turned to her and sat against the windowsill. Tension drained from the air.
“Before I came here. He seems the same. I don’t know what he was aware of, but he was awake part of the time.”
“He was awake earlier too.”
Regina brightened. “Really? Is he better?”
“Don’t get your hopes up. The doctor doesn’t seem to think so. He may rally, but that doesn’t mean anything. In fact, it can mean that he’s near the end.”
Regina’s heart sank. “Well, I told my boss I could get some work done while I was here. I should get to it.”
Regina set up to tackle her project at the table in the attic, overlooking the lake, where she’d studied and drawn and painted as a girl and a teenager. She flipped through the brochure for Haven Acres and thought back on Ron’s words. Rebellious. Wild. Run off. The brochure made her sick in half a dozen ways. She hated where she was going to have to go to do this project.
In the file for Haven Acres, Ron had written in the margin, “A face. Something like this.” This being the figure of a young woman humbled by shame, the very picture of disgrace.
“No!” She looked up and studied her reflection in the darkened window, turned away, a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach.
She was transported to an earlier time when she was alone in the attic. Robert flashed in her memory. Self-righteous. Always criticizing her and quoting scripture. She’d gone to the attic to escape him.
She shook off the memory, picked up the Haven Acres brochure, then tossed it aside, facedown. She opened to a fresh sheet in her sketch pad and allowed her mind to go blank. Then to travel. She sketched a female form, leaving the face blank. She was quite good at figure drawing, but she soon flipped the page and instead sketched a dress.
She was surprised to remember that she’d wanted to be a fashion designer. When? When she started high school. There wasn’t much money in their home for the kind of clothes the other girls wore. Robert needed money for his missions. Mary never asked her parents for money, though they had plenty. It wouldn’t have occurred to Alice, living in a dream world as she did, to buy Regina clothes. Mary, child of the Great Depression, sewed and taught Regina to sew during the long evenings when Robert was gone. How to cut out the pieces of a dress, how to stitch and hem and make buttonholes.
He came home when she was fourteen, and she saw the shock in his eyes when he first saw her. Shock and something else. His eyes narrowed as he took in her changed body. She squirmed under his eyes.
“We’ll have to keep an eye on that one,” he said to Mary, and at the time, Regina didn’t understand what she had done wrong.
Regina pushed away the drawings, stood and paced, arms clasped around her middle. Paused at the distant sound of a closing door. Then, with a little gasp, she remembered the key. She would look for it now.
She crept to the foot of the attic stairs and paused, listening. All quiet, except for a soft cough from inside Alice’s room. No lights were visible under Alice’s or Mary’s doors. She relaxed. Then, after waiting another while, she slipped out into the second floor hallway, and quiet as a mouse, padded through the hall to the stairs.
She scampered down to the side table in the first-floor hall, and there, in the back of the drawer, she found her father’s heavy key chain. She eased it out of the drawer, holding it firmly to keep it from clattering, and crept into the study, heart beating faster. She had pushed the desk back against the wall after her first search. She braced herself and eased the massive mahogany desk away from the wall. She listened. Heard nothing. Used the small brass key to open the middle drawer.
Bank statements, business correspondence, papers of all kinds—irrelevant, nothing of interest. She emptied the drawer and found a small, old key, just the right size, in among paper clips and pens. She snatched it, returned the papers to the drawer as quickly and quietly as possible, relocked the middle drawer, and eased the desk back to the wall. Listened again. Tiptoed to the hall. When she was sure no one was moving in the house, she quietly returned the key ring to the side table. She held the old key in her fist against her heart and sighed with relief, temples pounding.
Back in the attic, she inserted the little key in the writing box and turned it, felt the spin of a well-oiled tumbler. With a mixed thrill of guilt and triumph, she carried the box to her mattress and sat cross-legged in front of it. What would her father keep under lock and key? She raised the ivory-inlaid lid.
Inside, under a wooden writing surface and an ink-stained blue velvet blotter, she found stacks of letters. She sorted through them. Most—dozens of them—were addressed in a dashing hand that was vaguely familiar. Regina puzzled a moment but could not place it. The earliest letter was addressed to William Hannon at Blue Lake; the rest had been sent to her father’s post office box in town. Remembering what Frank had told her, Regina guessed these would all date from the nineteen-thirties. A quick scan of the faded postmarks, those she could make out, confirmed this. One letter, late in the series, had been redirected by the postmaster to Blue Lake. That one must have come after the PO box had been closed.
She dug deeper and found a letter addressed to William Hannon at Blue Lake, no return address, postmarked in Florida, November 1945, two months after Eugenie’s death. That one made her heart speed. At the bottom of the writing box, a small envelope postmarked 1919 bore Sophie’s name and address in the upper left-hand corner. With a little start, Regina recognized the handwriting as the same she’d seen on the letters from the thirties.
Regina held Sophie’s letter a long moment, torn between curiosity and reservation. Her father and Sophie were both still alive, old friends. What right had she to read their correspondence? But having gone so far as to pry into the locked writing box, she was unable to resist.
She opened the envelope, unfolded a single sheet of notepaper, and read. William, I write to apologize. I wish you both only the greatest happiness. I ask that you not impart any base motive to my actions. I confess I was distraught and, in any case, have no position or knowledge to say what I did. Sophie.
1919. The long-ago quarrel? The “falling out”? The letter held no clue as to substance, and after a long moment’s puzzlement, Regina set aside Sophie’s letters and opened the envelope from an unidentified sender. Inside she found four pieces of notepaper with a printed name and address across the bottom—Doctor Hamilton Carter, pediatrician, with an address in Farmville. The pages, which looked as though they might have been torn from a prescription pad, had been carelessly stashed in the envelope, some upside down, facing this way and that. The writing was a caricature of a physician’s illegible scrawl.
Regina rearranged the sheets, smoothed them, and slowly worked out what the doctor had written to her father. Forgive this rough note. I am in ill health. I jot down these thoughts in hopes I can be of some assis
tance. My housekeeper will address and mail. Much of it was indecipherable, somewhat rambling, with reference to his practice and caveats about his own expertise. I must tell you that it would not do any good for you to bring her to me, as you suggest, he said as the first page ended.
Mystified, she picked up the next page.
with her mother. I am not qualified to evaluate or advise you in these matters, which, to be fully examined, must touch upon such issues as normal vs. abnormal childhood development, (illegible), sibling rivalry and etc. Children have their God-given natures, which neither they nor their parents can transform by will.
Not qualified to advise him about what? She reread the phrases normal vs. abnormal childhood development and sibling rivalry and her heart sped up. With dread, she continued reading.
I heard the sad news of your daughter’s death. I, too, am a parent and I understand how painful your dilemma. You must do what is best for your family. The next sentence was illegible. She skimmed to the last line of the page until her own name jolted her: The little girl Regina cannot be left alone for a moment—
Regina’s hand shook as she turned to the next page.
—because she is by nature willful, headstrong, and jealous.
Regina rocked back as if struck across the face. Holding up the damning pages, she stared, read, and reread. Regina cannot be left alone for a moment.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, cheeks burning.
Too much for her. Mary had always said she was a lively, healthy child, and that she was too much for Alice, who was “fragile” or “not strong,” but here was this Doctor Carter, pediatrician, saying she could not be left alone for a moment because—her eyes returned unwillingly to the words willful, headstrong, jealous. Saying he could not advise her father about his “painful dilemma.” This letter had to be about what to do with her after Eugenie’s death.
He concluded, I wish I could be of more assistance.
Regina took deep breaths, calmed herself, and considered. Her father had consulted this Doctor Carter, who advised him that a willful and difficult child would need constant watching. And Alice, suffering from the death of her other child, was incapable. It was what she had always been told, that she was too much for her mother. But she couldn’t help smarting at the way she’d been described.
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