Third Degree
Page 26
He looked around, seemingly deciding how much he wanted to share with me. Finally, I guess he decided that there were no more secrets to keep and he just let it out. “The affair. With that scum, Wilmott.” The menace that I detected drained out of him and all that was left was a grief-stricken husk. He was a big, powerful man who couldn’t hold it in anymore. “She couldn’t live with herself. Once I got out and it was clear that I had nothing to do with his death, she was done. ”
“But you didn’t know.”
“Not until right before she died. I don’t know why but she told me.” Again, the rueful laugh. “I never would have found out if she hadn’t let her guilty conscience get in the way.” The last part he muttered under his breath, but it sounded to me like “stupid broad.” “Wait here,” he said, and disappeared into the house. When he returned, he held out an envelope. “Here. Take this. It’s addressed to you.” A single tear dripped down the side of his nose.
I took the small white envelope from his hand, still sealed, and looked down at it. My name was on the front. “What is this?”
George shrugged and, with that effort, folded in on himself. “I don’t know,” he said, beginning to sob. “All I know is that it was with the suicide note that she left me. And it’s addressed to you. You’re Bergeron, right?”
“I’m Bergeron,” I said, now figuring out why Ginny always referred to me by my last name. It was obviously a habit she had picked up from her rough-hewn husband.
As I turned to walk away, Ginny Miller’s note in my hands, I heard him say one last thing that I hoped would be the last I would ever have to hear him say unless it related to garbage pickup.
“I would have forgiven her, you know.”
According to the note she left me, which I read in my car in front of the Millers’ house, Ginny didn’t think he would have.
And according to the note, Ginny was terrified of George finding out, and clearing his good name was the only way she could atone for her sins.
According to the note, which had been left under George’s pillow, Ginny Miller had been deathly afraid of George, a fact that surprised me more than anything else I had learned in the past week. I figured it would be the other way around, having gotten to know Ginny as well as I had.
And according to this note—which I wished I had never seen—not only had Ginny Miller never cared for my mother, she had never even met her. She had only found out about my beloved mother, Giselle, and her death through a memorial note that I published in the local paper every year on the anniversary, in which I expressed my love for my mother and my profound sadness at her passing. After that, it wasn’t hard to figure out that she had been treated at Phelps while Ginny was working there, even though Ginny was working in maternity at the time and had never even considered oncology as a profession. It was all there in Ginny’s handwriting, the words seared into my brain.
She asked for my forgiveness, but I wasn’t in a very forgiving mood. And the only person who could help me reach full forgiveness was still not talking about his alleged transgressions and was still very angry at those who accused him of things he would never dream of doing.
I tore the note up into what seemed like a thousand little pieces, and as I drove away, scattered them on the Millers’ street. I had been emotionally blackmailed into helping a woman exonerate her pig of a husband, and if that wasn’t the stupidest thing I had ever done, I wasn’t sure what was.
The only place I could think to go was a short drive away and flanked by the highway on both sides. This was the place that was supposedly Babe Ruth’s final resting place, as well as that of Miles Davis, so to say that its residents were quite an illustrious and talented group would be an understatement.
My mother’s grave was under a giant oak toward the center of the cemetery, and even though the day was hot and humid, I was chilled by the time I got there. I wrapped my arms around myself as I knelt before the stone, just to the left of my father’s, and wiped away a year of grime that had collected in the etched letters that showed her name: Giselle Bergeron.
“I’m getting married, Mom,” I said as if she were standing right in front of me; the tombstone was just her stand-in. “You’d love him. He’s nice, he’s smart, and best of all, he’s tall!” I imagined her beautiful smile and her melodic laugh; she always told me that I was the funniest person she knew but it wasn’t until after she died that I realized that that was a compliment and not a criticism. “And he loves me. I’m not sure why, but he does.” I stared at the words on the stone until the letters blurred together. “I’m going to see if just letting myself be happy for a while works out.” I laughed. “I know! I’m maturing finally. You always hoped that would happen.” I looked around but I was the only person in this section of the cemetery. The trees were still in the mucky humid air. “He would have loved you just as much as I did. Just as much as I do.” I put a hand on the stone which sat beneath an angel that had watched over my mother since she had arrived here. I reached up and touched the toes of the angel, something I did every year while I made a wish for the coming year. I don’t know when that had started but it was something I continued to do.
It was on the toes of this angel that I had wished for Crawford, although I hadn’t known his name at the time.
In my heart, I knew that wishing on the angel was a little silly. I also knew that stonecutters worked from the same molds and that there were probably a thousand angels in this cemetery and even on Catholic college campuses everywhere that looked just like this one. But when I looked up and discovered that this angel was exactly the same as the one that had been stolen from school, right down to the chipped wing tip, I knew that it was more than a coincidence.
“See you next year, Mom.”
Thirty-Seven
I stretched my body on top of Crawford’s, feeling the cool air from the air conditioner in my bedroom wash over my bare skin. I kissed him. “You know, we met once before. A long time ago.”
His hand, the one that he was running down my spine, stopped, settling on my hip. “What?”
“We met. At St. Thomas.”
“We did?”
I’m really good at breaking the mood. I rolled off him and pulled the duvet cover up over my chest. I was glad the room was dark because I didn’t want to see the look on his face after I confessed what I knew. “Remember that story you told me about the stolen cab?”
He was silent as he put all of the pieces together. Slowly, it dawned on him. “You were the RA.”
“Yep.”
He rolled over on his side, propping himself up on his elbow. “And when were you going to tell me this?”
“I just figured it out. When you mentioned it at dinner. It all came back to me.”
“You lied to me,” he said, but I could detect, even in the dark, the smile on his lips. He could hardly believe that I had kept it from him for the last several weeks but found the humor in the situation, as well.
“I had decided a long time ago that I was going to take that piece of information to my grave,” I said. I had also decided that if I was going to keep Lydia Wilmott’s secret, I had to let another one out. Otherwise, I decided, I might explode. I didn’t tell him that, however. Max’s secret seemed like the most innocuous one to reveal under the circumstances. “Do you remember anything about that RA?”
“I remember that she looked like she was going to throw up,” he said. “I remember that she was tall. And I remember that she kept staring at my undershirt.” He traced a heart on my shoulder. “And I remember that the nun looked like Billy Martin.”
I took his hand in the dark. “Max was in the closet right next to where we were talking.”
He started laughing. “You must have thought you were going to die.”
“That about sums it up.”
He chuckled again. “Why the hell are you friends with her again?”
“Because I love her,” I said. “Remember? When you love someone, you don’t want to see her
suffer. Know what I mean?”
He knew exactly what I meant. He didn’t subject me to the Crawford cross fire, and I didn’t subject him to any more of my dithering. I had stopped my excessive overthinking on the subject and he had let go of the fact that his family needed to have any say in the subject of his happiness.
* * *
We boarded a plane the Friday of Labor Day weekend at Kennedy Airport, our destination Hamilton, Bermuda, and the Elbow Beach Resort, armed with a couple of bathing suits, a marriage license, a simple off-white dress for me, and little else. We even left Max and Fred behind, knowing that what we were going to do didn’t need anyone else in attendance.
As I lay beside Crawford in bed, the ocean visible beyond the balcony of our hotel room, I realized that the wound, which I thought would always be a part of me, had closed for good.
ALSO BY MAGGIE BARBIERI
Final Exam
Quick Study
Extracurricular Activities
Murder 101
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THIRD DEGREE. Copyright © 2010 by Maggie Barbieri. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
ISBN 978-0-312-59328-5
First Edition: December 2010
eISBN 978-1-4299-2631-7
First St. Martin’s Press eBook Edition: November 2010
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Also by Maggie Barbieri
Copyright