“Get the baby and go!” I shout to Charmaine.
Charmaine grabs the baby carrier, but Lo isn’t strapped in, so she pauses to secure him. Leaving him at her feet, she rises to open the back door. In that second, Rachel bites my hand. Her teeth sink into my flesh and instinctively I pull back. She breaks my grip.
Rachel rolls away from me, panting. My gaze goes to Charmaine and Lo. How close are they to being out the door?
A big dented skillet is blocking the door. Charmaine kicks it aside and opens the door, propping it with her foot as she reaches back for the baby carrier.
Rachel rises with a long shard of pottery in her hand.
I don’t scream. I don’t think.
I throw myself over Lo’s body as the blade comes down.
White heat but no pain. A spurt of red, red blood.
Is it mine? Or his?
Chapter 39
The sitting room at Bretton Pines is stifling, but Clothilde awaits me in a cashmere sweater and pearls. Her eyes widen she sees the sixty-two stitches that stretch from my ear to my shoulder blade.
“Mon dieu! You look like Frankenstein’s monster!”
Gee thanks, Clothilde. Tell me what you really think. “It looks worse than it is. She only nicked an artery.” I sink into the wing chair across from her. “The plastic surgeon says I’ll barely have a scar.”
Clothilde keeps her hands clutched together in her lap. “Where is she?”
“The hospital. She’s had a complete psychotic break. They’re trying to stabilize her, but she may never be competent to stand trial.”
“For attacking you?”
I shake my head. “What she did to me doesn’t matter. There’s a lot I have to tell you, Clothilde. I’m afraid it’s very painful.”
“The DNA test? The blood on the sheet belonged to Leonie?”
I nod. The police plan to speak to Clothilde once they have all their ducks in a row, but I wanted to talk to her first.
Her blue eyes meet mine, but I can see the tremor rising from her clenched hands. “Nothing can be worse than not knowing.”
So I tell her what we think happened that night nearly thirty years ago. Parker and Leonie were staying at Eskews’ house the night before their trip because it was closer to the Palmyrton airport where Parker kept his plane. Gilbert was traveling on business, but Rachel and Marjorie were home. Leonie had been sleeping in Parker’s room, the room where we found the suitcase with the bloody sheet. Perhaps her pregnancy made it hard to rest comfortably and Parker moved to the guest room to get a good night’s sleep before their flight. In the middle of the night Rachel entered the room and attacked Leonie and her unborn son with a knife. By the time Parker responded to her screams, it was too late. They were both dead.
Hours passed before Parker left for Palmyrton airport. We can’t know, but he must’ve spent the time agonizing over what to do. The truth was so horrific that he must have decided that his own family and Leonie’s family would be less distraught if they believed the three of them had perished in a plane crash. And Rachel would be spared a lifetime in prison.
Certainly, he had no desire to go on living himself.
Even eight months pregnant, Leonie was petite. Parker must have found a duffel bag big enough to hold her body. He probably intended to bring along the purple suitcase that held the bloody bedding, but in his grief he left it behind. Rachel was shrewd enough to hide the bag.
Then Parker flew to North Carolina and sent his plane into a nosedive on a deserted stretch of beach. The resulting fire destroyed any evidence of the attack on Leonie. Her bones, however, were found in the passenger seat.
He flew with her corpse beside him.
“She knew.” Clothilde exhales the words when I’m done. “She was there that night.”
“Marjorie Eskew? I don’t think so. She was probably passed out drunk that night. She was an alcoholic, but no one acknowledged it. Her drinking during her pregnancy caused Rachel’s problems: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. But Marjorie considered her younger daughter to be incompetent and willfully immature. If she had known what Rachel did, Marjorie would have cast her off.”
“Someone knew,” Clothilde insists.
“Tom knew. After Parker died, he took over the role of Rachel’s protector, but not willingly. Maybe the drinking and screwing around are his way of coping. When his mother was murdered, his worst fears were confirmed. He knew Rachel had done it. He knew what she was capable of.
“When the cops suspected Darlene, Tom saw it as a godsend. He struck a deal with her to plead guilty in return for paying her son’s fees at the therapeutic school. Scandal averted and Rachel rescued once again.”
“They protect this monster!”
Is Rachel a monster? I certainly don’t relish defending her to Clothilde. Yet she should know that the attack on her daughter didn’t come out of the blue. “There’s one more detail you should know. It doesn’t excuse what Rachel did, but…”
“What? What defense could there possibly be?”
So I tell her how Gilbert and Marjorie had had their daughter sterilized as a teenager. How they wanted to make sure that Rachel’s shortcomings weren’t passed along. How Rachel had had a breakdown requiring hospitalization when she realized she would never have children. How Parker had left Harvard to be closer to his sister.
Clothilde’s eyes have grown a little misty, but she hasn’t allowed the tears to spill over. Despite the horrors she’s had to absorb, she’s still totally in control. A Bretton Pines aide heads toward us bearing a tray of tea and cookies. Clothilde causes her to change course with one forbidding glare. “Why now? Why did Rachel kill her mother now?”
I take a breath. “There’s more, Clothilde. Remember when you told me you felt there was a hole inside Parker, a darkness that surrounded the family?”
“So, it was not my imagination?”
“No. You wondered what happened to Myron Eskein, Gilbert’s brother, after he went to prison. Myron was released from Attica in 1978, the year Parker was a senior in high school, about to apply to Harvard. He’d served over twenty years, and was well into his sixties. He was penniless and too old and tired to resume his life of crime. Of course, he’d never worked a legitimate job in his life.”
“So he came to his brother for help?” Clothilde asks. “How do you know this?”
“Tom.” I reach for her hand. I expect her to bat me away, but she doesn’t. “He’s here, Clothilde. Out in the lobby. He’d like to tell you this next part himself.”
Now she does shake me off and draws herself up tall. “He expects my forgiveness? Never!”
“No, I don’t think he expects that. He simply wants you to have some information that only he can provide.”
She glares at me. “You know. You tell me.”
“I know the facts,” I concede. “But only he and his sisters know about the darkness.”
Clothilde grips the arms of her pastel flowered chair, as if in preparation for the dentist’s drill. “Fine. Bring him in.”
Tom Eskew has aged ten years in the past week. His face is gray and haggard; his jaunty bearing has morphed into a dragging shuffle. I escort him across the sitting room, past two silver-haired ladies working a jigsaw puzzle and an elderly gent reading the Wall Street Journal. I know he hasn’t seen his brother’s mother-in-law since Parker and Leonie’s funeral. He extends his hand to Clothilde, but she declines to take it. Disconcerted, he shoves both hands into his pockets and drops into a chair across from us.
“I’ve told Clothilde about your uncle, Tom.” I say. “You can pick up from the night when you met him.”
Tom nods. He focuses his eyes on a potted lily behind Clothilde’s shoulder and starts talking. “It was an evening in late September. Still daylight savings time, so there was some light after dinner. I know it was a Monday because Rose, our housekeeper, had her day off and was visiting her sister. Mother had already gone to bed—passed out, as usual. We kids were doing our homework in the morning room wh
en the doorbell rang.
“I was always happy for any reason to goof off, so I went to answer it. Rachel trailed after me. When I opened the door, there was a man who looked just like our father, except older and more worn out, and badly dressed. He asked if my dad was home, and his voice was just the same as our father’s. That’s when Rachel started crying—it freaked her out. Parker and Kara came running, and the four of us stood staring at the guy. He was obviously related to our father, but Dad had always told us he had no living relatives.
“So Parker took charge, as he always did. He sent the rest of us back to our homework, and he took the man to our father’s study. A few minutes later, Parker came back, obviously rattled. But he wouldn’t tell us anything. Kara sneaked down the back hall and came back to report they were shouting at each other, but she couldn’t understand what they were saying. Parker forbade her to leave the room again.”
Tom gazes around at the cheery chintz furniture and cozy gas fireplace in the Bretton Pines sitting room like he doesn’t know what planet he dropped into. He takes a deep breath and continues. “About twenty minutes later, our father appeared in the morning room. At dinner, he’d been wearing a sweater over his shirt, but now he was just wearing the shirt. He was agitated and distracted. I’m sure he didn’t realize there was a big, dark stain on his gray flannel pants, but I noticed. So did Kara.
“Dad told Parker to come with him, and told the rest of us to go up to our bedrooms and not come out until morning. Kara’s bedroom and mine faced the backyard. I heard the back door opening. I looked out my window and in the last glimmer of twilight, I saw Dad and Parker carrying something between them. They stumbled and staggered and at one point, Parker dropped his end and Dad yelled.
“I knew where they were headed. That summer, Dad had decided to have a clay tennis court installed at the end of the garden. He wanted us to practice more and improve our games. That week the workmen had come with an excavator and dug out the spot. Then it had rained.”
Tom pauses. When he resumes, his voice is weaker, breathier. “About an hour later, I heard the back door open and close again. I heard my father and Parker come upstairs. I heard their bedroom doors close. I wanted to go to Parker, but I was afraid. I remembered the look in my father’s eye when he said we weren’t to come out until morning.”
We all sit in silence. The clock in the Bretton Pines lounge chimes the hour. Tom speaks again. “I was awakened on Tuesday by the sound of the workmen. They got an early start laying the clay surface. When we got home from school that day, we had a new tennis court.” For the first time, Tom looks Clothilde in the eye.
“Dad made us practice every day.”
Chapter 40
Clothilde rests her head against the chair and closes her eyes. “Gilbert destroyed his children while Marjorie stood by and did nothing. So their daughter destroyed my daughter. And my grandson. Yet both of them got to die not knowing the abomination they set in motion.”
Marjorie Eskew had her head pounded in with a rock wielded by her own daughter; I wouldn’t say she had an enviable death. Still, I see Clothilde’s point. She thought the truth would bring her some peace, but believing that the Eskews died in blissful ignorance is galling.
I glance at Tom. “Do you think she knew?”
His eyelids are at half-mast. “Who knows? Mother was an expert in not knowing. She kept herself pickled so she didn’t have to see, didn’t have to hear, didn’t have to act. Parker wrote me a letter dated a week before the crash. He mailed it to my college dorm. I didn’t get it until well after the funeral. He told me to watch after Rachel when he wasn’t there because Mother and Dad couldn’t be trusted to do what was best for her. For years, I convinced myself that he really had written it well before he died, that all he meant was to ask for my help when he was busy. But as the years went by, I knew.”
Tom closes his eyes completely. “Rachel attacked Kara with a hot curling iron two weeks before her wedding.”
“That scar above her collar bone?”
Tom massages his temple. “A very unfortunate hair-styling accident, according to Mother.”
Clothilde pounds the end table with her fist. “Willful ignorance! I want to rub her face in the truth. Why should she not suffer as I have?”
I feel helpless in the presence of her anguish. Could I relieve that pain, even if it involves stretching a hunch into certainty?
“In the days before she died, Mrs. Eskew was very agitated, Clothilde. She said something to me one day when I was in her room. At the time, it didn’t make sense. Now it does.”
“What? What did she say?”
“She was telling me that she was afraid, that she didn’t have a choice about something. That she was to blame.” Then she said, “Only Parker was brave.”
I lean toward Clothilde and whisper, “She knew. She knew the sacrifice Parker had made. For Rachel. For her.”
Chapter 41
When Ty and I roll up to their apartment in the AMT van, Darlene and Judah are waiting for us on their front steps.
Ty hops out and fist-bumps JJ. “C’mon, let’s see what we gotta move.”
They head upstairs, leaving Darlene and me standing awkwardly. Her face is still covered by an ugly bruise fading from purple to yellow.
“It’s real nice of you to help us move our stuff. Doesn’t amount to much, but it wouldn’t have fit in the car.”
“We’re happy to do it. I’m so glad you got this new job. What a terrific opportunity.”
Darlene gives a short bark of a laugh. “ ’Bout time I caught a break. I thought Kenny would have to leave The River School at the end of the semester, but it turned out they were looking for a live-in aide to work nights and weekends. They have trouble keeping people. I told ‘em they’ll have trouble getting rid of me.”
She gives her harsh laugh again, but I detect a little mistiness in her eyes. “I’ll still be giving baths and handing out pills, but for kids, not old people. I think I’ll like that. And I get to be near Kenny all day.”
“What about Judah?”
“Counselor at the college got him hooked up with an old lady near campus who lets out a bedroom in her house in exchange for help with the yard and the garbage and stuff.”
“And Rob?”
Darlene turns away. “Didn’t your boyfriend tell you it was Rob’s dealer crew that put out the hit on me to get beat up in jail?”
“He told me they were afraid you’d talk about how Rob pressured you to take pills from Mrs. Eskew. But you didn’t talk.”
Darlene faces me with her lips pressed into a thin line. “I have to keep this job for Kenny. And for me and JJ. I can’t let Rob ruin this.” She clenches her fists into tight balls. “I hope your man arrests Rob. I hope he arrests him soon. Otherwise, Rob’s going to get killed. He can’t stay ahead of this trouble much longer.”
I put my hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Darlene. I wish…”
I wish what? That Darlene hadn’t gotten mixed up with two different men who refused to father their children? That she could’ve had a shot at a job where she earned enough to pay the heat, electricity and phone bills all in one month? That she didn’t have to choose between visiting her son at the cemetery or the jail?
She shrugs away from me as she hears Ty and JJ approaching. “I’ll tell you this, my son might be screwed up, but he’s not as screwed up as those Eskews.”
The real estate closing is on one of those bizarrely warm November days that only happen in New Jersey. When Sean and I pull up at our new house after signing all the paperwork at the lawyer’s office, the party is already in full swing. Never ones to be deterred by lack of a key, Sean’s father jimmied the back door lock so the female members of the Coughlin family could arrange the potluck spread on the kitchen island. Grandma Betty is pushing aside some corned beef to make room for her fried chicken and potato salad. Everyone’s brought their own lawn chairs, which are set up throughout the empty rooms. My dad and Natalie ar
e here, perched on the folding canvas chairs awarded them for their NPR donations, looking a little shell-shocked as Coughlins swirl around them. The kids can’t decide who’s more fascinating, baby Lo or Ethel.
“Looks like the house is plenty big enough to hold us all,” Sean says.
“Do you like it as well as the one we lost?’ I ask him for the hundredth time.
He answers me the way he has the last ninety-nine times. “This is the house we were meant to have.”
As I look at everyone laughing and talking surrounded by the shag carpeting that has to be pulled up and the flowered wallpaper that has to be pulled down, for the first time, I believe him.
“The king and queen of the castle have arrived!” Terry announces, pushing beers into our hands. “I sure hope you guys own this place now, or we gonna have some ‘splaining to do.”
“This is one hell of a way to impress our new neighbors,” Sean mutters.
“Don’t worry—we invited them,” Deirdre calls out as she passes.
Sean cranes his neck to survey the crowd. I know he’s looking for Brendan; he wants his big brother’s approval for this landmark event in our lives. I know Sean won’t find Brendan because Adrienne is here with the kids. Right now they’re living apart—taking a breather, Adrienne says—and seeing a therapist once a week.
Ty lopes up. “Jill just texted me from the train station. I gotta pick her up. Be right back.”
The gang’s all here.
It’s loud.
It’s chaotic.
It’s fun.
After an hour of nonstop eating, drinking, and talking, I need a break. I find Grandma Betty out on the porch swing. Baby Lo is sprawled across her lap, his mouth open, his tiny fingers loosely curled around the edge of a blue blanket.
“I do believe this child is the most beautiful of all my grandbabies. Don’t you agree, Audrey?”
I know better than to point out that Lo is not technically a blood relation. If Grandma Betty has declared him a grandbaby, he’s a grandbaby. “He sure is, Betty. He’s going to be every bit as handsome as Ty.”
This Bitter Treasure: a romantic thriller (Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series Book 3) Page 24