The Widow's Watcher

by Eliza Maxwell

  “But you’re determined not to let anything get in your way, aren’t you? And you always accused me of being stubborn.”

  Jenna pushed Cassie’s words away. One opinionated teenage girl was enough to deal with at the moment.

  “Dinner should be ready in thirty,” Lars said, placing the salad he’d thrown together in the fridge to stay fresh until then.

  He plunked a bowl of baby carrots and a prepackaged container of vegetable dip on the table and pulled up a chair with Owen and Jenna.

  Owen studied his dad’s version of appetizers. Judging by the look on his face, this wasn’t normal behavior.

  Lars had called his family here for a reason.

  “Dad, what’s this about?”

  “Patience, boyo.” Lars didn’t seem inclined to say more, but Owen stared him down.

  “Fine,” the old man said after a moment when no one filled the silence. He rose from his chair and shoved his hands deep in his pockets as he began to pace the kitchen.

  Jenna glanced at Owen, but he gave nothing away.

  Lars stopped, then turned to the two of them. “I’ve got a proposition for you,” he said.

  Owen remained silent, but his brow dipped lower over his eyes.

  “For . . . whom, exactly?” Jenna asked, her gaze moving back and forth between the Jorgensen men.

  “For both of you.” Lars locked his eyes onto something behind them and over their heads.

  Jenna and Owen exchanged a glance.

  “What kind of proposition?” Owen asked.

  “Well, now, that’s the thing. I need you to hear me out,” Lars began.

  “I don’t like the sound of this,” Jenna murmured.

  “That’s exactly what I mean, missy. Passing judgment before you even hear what I have to say, that’s the sort of thing I’m talking—”

  There was a light rap on the door, and Lars practically leapt in that direction, seizing the interruption as if it could save him from a conversation he himself had initiated.

  “Come in, come in.” He welcomed a small bundle of a woman with bright eyes beneath a stocking cap of cherry red.

  “Oh, Lars, why you still insist on living out in the back of beyond year-round is a mystery to me,” the tiny woman said as she unwound from her winter gear.

  “Can’t imagine being anywhere else, Beverly.”

  The visitor had already drawn past the old man, dismissing him once she spied Owen.

  “There’s my boy!” she crowed, holding her arms wide. Owen rose with a smile lighting his face and engulfed the tiny woman in a hug that lifted her off her feet.

  “Dad didn’t tell me you were coming,” Owen said, clearly pleased.

  “Where’s that girl of yours—”

  “Nana!” Hannah cried, having looked up from her homework at the commotion.

  The child hurtled across the room and was welcomed with an enthusiasm equal to her own.

  Jenna’s throat tightened. If she scratched below the surface, she’d find a deep envy for this family who still had one another to cling to, but the moment was too touching to mar with her own loss, and she purposefully took a deep breath and basked in their glow instead.

  A soft smile played across her lips when the woman turned in her direction.

  “And who do we have here?” the newcomer asked, her head tilted to one side.

  “Beverly, this is Jenna Shaw,” Lars said.

  The woman glanced from Lars to Jenna to Owen, trying to work out what role Jenna played in their little tableau.

  Their visitor was older than Jenna had assumed. Though at first glance she seemed near Lars’s age, there was a fragility that gave her away.

  A memory clicked into place.

  Beverly Soderholm, Lars had called her.

  The woman who’d joined them wasn’t Hannah’s grandmother, as the name Nana implied. Not directly. She was Owen’s.

  Beverly Soderholm was Audrey Jorgensen’s mother.

  32

  Dinner passed in a series of sometimes awkward but mostly pleasant moments that Jenna found a bittersweet pill to swallow. She struggled not to weigh the evening down any more than her presence, as a virtual stranger in their home, already did.

  Luckily, Ms. Soderholm picked up on the way Jenna redirected the questions put to her, and the older woman didn’t push the conversation into uncomfortable territory.

  Instead, she was lively and engaging, as effusive in her gestures and conversation as she was in her affection for her family.

  Listening to her, Jenna thought she saw hints of the kind of electricity Lars claimed had first pulled him to Audrey.

  An image of the broken Audrey’s fearful face passed across Jenna’s mind, and her smile grew stiff.

  In spite of these moments, dinner was remarkably and notably . . . normal.

  Right up until Lars said the words that dropped a ticking grenade into their midst.

  “I had a reason for asking you all here tonight,” he began on a prophetic note. “I know I said years ago that it was time to shut the door on the past, to live for the family we still have . . .”

  Owen placed his glass on the table and sat back in his chair, watching his father closely.

  “And I believe it was the right decision at the time.”

  “It was the only decision, Lars,” Beverly interjected in the most somber voice Jenna had heard her use since she’d arrived.

  “Maybe,” said Lars.

  “Not maybe, Dad. It was. You were drowning in it,” Owen said softly.

  A look passed over Lars’s face as he watched his son run a finger through the ring of condensation his glass had left on the table. There was sorrow in the old man’s expression. Sorrow and regret.

  Lars cleared his throat.

  “Be that as it may, it’s time to open that door again,” he announced. “I’d like Jenna to look into the facts of the case. From beginning to end, if she’s willing. And I expect cooperation from all of you.”

  Hannah was the first to speak into the stunned silence that fell.

  “Jenna? This Jenna? The lost lady?”

  Lars shot his granddaughter a chastising look.

  Jenna shook her head, pushing back from the table and this man and his ridiculous announcements. No one was paying her any mind, least of all Lars.

  “Dad, why? Why now, why her? You’re not making any sense.”

  “Jenna’s a reporter.”

  “What?” the other three people around the table asked in unison as they turned to stare at her accusingly.

  Jenna backed away from the combined heat.

  “Former,” she clarified. “Former reporter. Not anymore, not for a long time.”

  “And you’re what? Digging into all this to put yourself on the map, make a name?” Ms. Soderholm asked.

  “No!” Jenna interjected. “No, I’m not!”

  “She’s not,” Lars tried to reassure them. “She has nothing to do with this.”

  The family appeared only slightly mollified.

  “But I’d like her to,” Lars added, throwing Jenna straight back into the hot seat. “Maybe there needs to be a book written about all this after all.”

  “What?” Jenna exclaimed as the table exploded with noise, everyone clamoring to be heard at once.

  “Dad, I don’t understand why—”

  “Lars, you know how I feel about—”

  “Grandpa, you don’t even know this—”

  “This is crazy. The last thing I need is—”

  Lars put his pinkie fingers to the corners of his mouth and let out an ear-shattering whistle capable of cracking the ice on the lake.

  “That’s enough. If you’d all kindly allow me to finish . . .”

  Mutiny was evident in their faces, but, miraculously, each of them held their tongues.

  “As I was saying . . . Jenna is a reporter.”

  Jenna opened her mouth to correct him again, but he held up a finger in her direction.

  “Was
a reporter,” he adjusted.

  She wanted to ask how he knew that, but Lars continued, saving her the trouble.

  “Eleanor Lutz, the librarian, mentioned it, and I did a little research on my own.”

  “You googled me?” Jenna asked. Like she had any right to be offended.

  “Of course I did,” he said. “You’re not a bad writer.”

  Jenna couldn’t help the small spark of satisfaction at his words. She shook it off, but there’d once been a time she’d taken pride in the work she did.

  “What exactly are you asking, Lars?” she said.

  “I want you to go through it all. To investigate. To dig. I know it’s asking a lot, but—”

  “I’ve never done investigative work. I wrote news reports and I did freelance features. This isn’t really . . .” She trailed off. Now hardly seemed the time to mention how much the idea would have once appealed to her.

  “Dad, we’ve been down this road, and it only ends in heartbreak. Do we really need—”

  “Yes,” Lars said. “Yes, we do.” He turned away from his son’s tortured face. “Jenna, will you help me? Will you help me try to find my children?”

  She didn’t know what to say, and she heard herself begin to stumble over a response.

  “Please, Jenna,” Lars said.

  “I don’t . . . Lars, I’ve seen your notes and the reports from the private investigators. I think it’s really unlikely that I . . . of all people . . .”

  “She’s right,” Beverly chimed in. “I want to know what happened as badly as you do. You know that. But this girl, she’s a stranger. What do you think she’ll be able to bring to the table that no one else could?”

  Lars shrugged. “Nothing.”

  The answer was so unexpected that conversation ceased.

  “Jenna could probably comb through everything available about the case and still come away empty handed.”

  “Then why?” Owen said, the words a desperate plea. “Why do this to yourself again?”

  “Because I have to try. One last time, I have to try.”

  “But, Dad, there’s always going to be one more last time. It’s the same thing all addicts say.”

  Lars rose from his chair, looking away from them out the kitchen window. He stared at the gathering dusk over the snow-covered landscape.

  “Lars, this won’t bring back those babies.” Beverly rose and placed an aged, bony hand on her son-in-law’s arm. “You know if it would, I’d open a vein right here and let this woman write an entire book in my own blood.”

  Lars raised a hand and patted Beverly’s, but the troubled look never left his face.

  “No,” Owen said fiercely into the silence. “I’m not doing this. Not again.”

  His face was shadowed, unreadable, but there was a leashed anger in his words.

  “Hannah, get your things.”

  His daughter’s eyes were large as she stared at her father.

  “Come on,” he said.

  She scrambled to her feet, searching for her stuff.

  “Son, I know it’s not fair to ask—”

  “No, it’s not. Hannah, get a move on.” Owen made an impatient gesture toward his daughter, who quickened her step.

  He fished a set of keys from his pocket and pressed them into Hannah’s hands.

  “Go start the truck. I’ll be right behind you.”

  She opened her mouth to argue but must have thought better of it when she caught sight of her father’s face.

  “Night, Grandpa. Bye, Nana.” She ran to give her great-grandmother a quick hug, then left without any fuss.

  “Dad, I can’t stop you from doing this, but I won’t have any part in it,” Owen said to his father once the door had shut behind Hannah. “It almost killed you before, and I won’t stand around and watch it happen again.”

  Owen was shrugging into his coat when Lars spoke again, pulling the pin from the grenade that had been sitting among them, waiting for this moment.

  “I’d like you to reconsider, Owen,” Lars said quietly. “Think of it as an old man’s dying request.”

  With those words, the explosion came, silent and deadly, sending smoke and shrapnel around the room.

  33

  The lamplight was burning low and casting shadows when Ms. Soderholm padded through the room on quiet feet.

  Jenna had taken a blanket and pillow to the sofa and left the spare room to the older woman. Sleep had proven elusive anyway.

  Beverly Soderholm was quiet as she rummaged around the kitchen.

  “Join me for a nightcap?” she asked Jenna.

  “Of course.” Jenna folded her legs beneath her to make room for the small woman at the other end of the couch.

  “Can’t sleep,” Ms. Soderholm said, though she looked done in. She passed Jenna a glass with an inch of dark liquid sloshing around the bottom and took the offered seat.

  “Lars told me a bit about you, Mrs. Shaw.” A hush hung over the cabin that seemed to amplify every creaking sound the old house made. The two women kept their voices low.

  “I apologize if we were out of line. Accusatory,” she went on.

  Jenna waved her hand. “Not necessary,” she replied, swirling the liquid in the glass.

  She was strangely comfortable with this woman she’d only just met.

  “I suppose you’ve all had your fill of reporters,” Jenna said.

  “Vultures, the lot of them,” Ms. Soderholm agreed unapologetically. “Are you going to go through with this? Do as Lars asked?”

  She peered at Jenna closely, measuring, judging.

  Jenna sighed. “I’ve been sitting here trying to figure out a way to say no and still be able to face myself in the mirror.”

  Not to mention how to deal with her daughter, who had a decided opinion on the matter.

  Ms. Soderholm had no answer for that, and the two women sat in an almost companionable silence, each lost in their thoughts.

  “Audrey was a beautiful baby,” Ms. Soderholm said suddenly with a wry twist of her lips. “Not easy—Lord, never that—but beautiful.”

  Jenna studied the woman’s profile as she stared into the embers of the fire that burned low behind the grate.

  “I was a single mother,” she went on. “Told everyone I was a widow. It wasn’t true. He was married. To someone else.”

  “Ms. Soderholm—”

  “Beverly, please. Call me Beverly.”

  “Beverly. You don’t have to—”

  “I’m not ashamed,” the older woman broke in. “He, on the other hand. He should have been. I was just a kid, drunk on the attention of an older man.” She took a sip of her drink. “I’ve paid for my sins.”

  “Somehow, I doubt he ever did,” Jenna ventured to guess.

  Beverly gave a short stab of laughter. “Oh, he paid plenty. Through the nose he paid, like clockwork.” She raised her glass in salute. “All I had to do was forget I knew him, which wasn’t nearly as hard as it should have been. Audrey never wanted for a thing. Neither did I, come to that. A situation I won’t apologize for.”

  “It couldn’t have been easy, though,” Jenna said, with a new respect for the woman sitting next to her.

  “Not easy, no,” Beverly agreed, shaking her head. “But looking back, perhaps it was right that it was just the two of us. Audrey . . .”

  The woman’s face clouded.

  “She was seven years old when I realized there was something about her. Something not . . . right. Up until then, I told myself she was just difficult. Some kids are, you know. I used words like creative. Temperamental, high-strung. Told myself she took after me.”

  Beverly ran a hand across her eyes, and Jenna wondered what time it was. Though, she supposed, these kinds of conversations were best suited to whispers after midnight.

  “Winters were bad. Her mood shifted, and she seemed lost in some dark place no amount of persuasion could pull her from. When the first signs of spring showed up, I used to breathe a sigh of relief. Soon
enough, that was full of worry too. Because summers . . . Summers could be so much worse.”

  Ms. Soderholm—Beverly, Jenna reminded herself—pushed farther back into the couch cushions, perhaps trying to find some distance from the memories.

  “There’s a name for everything now, isn’t there? Some official label doctors cook up with a dismissive little acronym to go along with it. Seasonal affective disorder, they call it. SAD.” She turned her head with her cheek still lying against the cushion and gave Jenna a look that was difficult to decipher.

  “I can recite Audrey’s recipe card by heart. Stir together a strong helping of disorders, equal parts bipolar and manic depressive. Add a dash of SAD and a pinch of oppositional defiance, then top it all off with a sprinkle of postpartum depression. Mix and bake.”

  Jenna’s brow creased at the litany of phrases.

  Beverly took another deep drink. “My apologies if I sound flippant.”

  “No,” Jenna whispered.

  “I’m not.” Beverly studied her glass as if answers might be found there. “Far from it. I haven’t been flippant about anything concerning Audrey since she was a child and climbed onto the roof of the house one day with the neighbor girl and jumped off.”

  Jenna stiffened.

  “The other little girl thankfully had enough sense not to jump, though Audrey tried her best to convince her to.”

  “Oh my God,” Jenna murmured. “Was she . . . ?”

  “Hurt?” Beverly asked. “Of course she was. She broke her leg.”

  Jenna raised a hand to her mouth.

  “To this day, I couldn’t tell you what her intentions were. It was spring and she was on a terrible upswing. The other child—Pamela, her name was—told us Audrey was convinced she could fly. That she’d tried to convince Pammy she could too. But when I asked Audrey, she told me she thought it would be a good way to die.”

  Beverly threw back her head and drained the last of the amber fire, then set the empty glass on the coffee table. She rose, their midnight heart-to-heart apparently at an end.

  “Knowing my daughter as I do, Mrs. Shaw, my money is on a little bit of both.”

  The older woman showed every bit of her age as she walked out of the room.

  Jenna set her own untouched drink next to Beverly’s empty glass.

  Sleep was farther away than ever.