The Unremembered Girl: A Novel

by Eliza Maxwell

  “You don’t think Jonah had anything to do with it?” Henry demanded, his voice rising more than he’d planned.

  Brady shook his head, casting a quick, short glance at Henry, then looking away again.

  “No. No. I mean, he couldn’t do something like that. Jonah? He wouldn’t.”

  Henry wondered which one of them Brady was trying to convince.

  “No,” Henry said firmly. “He wouldn’t.”

  “I know. I know,” Brady said again. “It’s just that . . . I should have told Del. I should have told him, and I didn’t, and I can’t help but wonder if I had, if things would be different. But, Henry, Jonah’s my brother. If he did something . . .”

  “Jonah didn’t do anything, Brady! Jonah had nothing to do with this. Did he tell you he did?” Henry demanded.

  “No. No, nothing like that. Just a comment, an offhand comment. You know how Jonah is. It was nothing, just foolishness.”

  Brady lifted his beer bottle again, then sat it back down when he remembered it was empty and leaned back on his palms with a sigh.

  “I’ll tell you something else, though, Henry.”

  Uneasy, but grateful to shift the focus of the conversation away from Jonah, Henry waited.

  “Del and me, we’ve been side by side for twenty-five years. Neither one of us was willing to run for sheriff because we couldn’t do that to the other one, so we just did the job and let the old man sleep off the booze.”

  Henry had no words of encouragement. He had no words left at all. He was empty right down to the bottom.

  “But Del was my brother too, Henry. You know? I owe it to him to find out what happened to his dad. No matter what that means.”

  The unmistakable sound of a baby crying came from inside the house. Henry looked back in that direction, and by the time he turned his face again to Brady, he was rising to go.

  “I’ve got to get out of here, Henry. Left the sheriff in charge. That’s never good. You take care, okay.”

  And with a clap on the shoulder, he was gone.

  But his words remained, running circles around Henry’s mind.

  What was he supposed to do now?

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Henry watched the night go by in silence. He couldn’t sleep. Didn’t even try. Eve was resting in the bed that they had shared for months; the crib that Henry had brought out of storage was set up near the foot of it, cradling the new life who’d come into the world riding a wave of sorrow and pain.

  He’d woken in the night, the baby. When he cried, Henry had gone to him, not wishing to wake Eve, who slept facing the wall.

  He’d bundled the baby in his arms, cooing and rocking him, making soothing noises.

  It helped. It helped to hold the child and remember why he’d done the terrible things he’d done. The guilt didn’t lessen, but the acceptance of it gave it a strong base to rest upon. Henry needed that base to be strong, because the guilt was there to stay.

  “He’s hungry,” Alice whispered from the doorway.

  Henry looked up into her face, which was mottled and puffy from the grief that held her in its grip. But her eyes were soft as she looked at the child.

  “Should I wake her?” Henry asked, nodding to Eve.

  Alice shook her head and walked toward Henry.

  “Let her sleep,” she said, running one fingertip across the baby’s forehead while Henry bounced him gently. “It’ll be a hard thing to come by in the months ahead. I brought some formula a few weeks ago, we’ll get him a bottle. Come on.”

  Henry followed her into the kitchen as Alice cooed to the baby boy, both of them careful to step around the sleeping women and children scattered about the floors and couches.

  Henry saw the woman who’d helped him carry Del was still awake. She sent him a small smile, her arms wrapped tightly around her daughter’s sleeping form. Camilla, Henry remembered. She’d said her name was Camilla, at some point during the evening. Her daughter was named Mariana. She called her Mary.

  Henry wished Del had had a chance to know that. That the child he’d protected was called Mary.

  “Eve tried to nurse him a bit earlier,” Alice said while she prepared a bottle. “Sometimes it’s hard for first-time mothers, though.”

  Henry watched the baby’s tiny little mouth open and close, testing out the taste of the world around him, his face so wrinkled and new.

  “Has she chosen a name?” Alice asked.

  Henry shook his head. He’d asked, but Eve had only murmured that she didn’t know.

  “That’s okay,” Alice said. She held up her arms to Henry when the bottle was ready. “May I?”

  He nodded, handing the newborn over to Alice’s more experienced care.

  The baby took the bottle with vigor, and Alice gave a chuckle. “No worries. Something will come to her. Something just right. Won’t it?” she said to the baby with a smile.

  Henry watched the two of them together. Alice would have been a wonderful mother. He’d always known that, but seeing her there with another woman’s child in her arms, seeing the love that she showered on him, in spite of the fact that she’d inevitably have to face the pain of giving him back, drove that home.

  Family. Family was everything. And Henry knew better than most that family wasn’t restricted to those who shared your blood.

  “Alice, I need to go out for a while,” he said.

  She pulled her gaze away from the baby and looked at Henry quizzically.

  “Everything’s fine, I promise. Just something I need to do before tomorrow gets here.”

  A frown pulled her face low.

  “You’re not going to tell me you’re going out to have a beer, then show up here with a bullet in your gut, are you?” she said harshly. “Because I’ve had about all of that I can handle, Henry Martell.”

  “No. No, I promise you, Alice. But it is important,” he said softly.

  “Well, it damn well better be,” she shot back at him.

  She put her eyes back on the baby, and some of her anger subsided, replaced by a profound sadness.

  “My parents never liked Del. Thought I’d settled,” she said quietly. “Truth is, I did settle. But we had Mari in common, and we liked each other well enough. It took time, Henry. Time and patience. A lot of damn patience. And I looked up one day and realized that I might actually love him.”

  She sat at the kitchen table with a sad sigh, and Henry could see the truth in her eyes.

  “But it wasn’t until he was dead at my feet that I was sure. So don’t you go out and put yourself in harm’s way, or I swear to God, Henry, I might have to kill you myself. You have a lot to come back to. A lot to live for. They need you here. We need you here.”

  Henry nodded. “Thank you, Alice.”

  There was nothing else to say.

  “Go on, then. Do what you need to do. We’ll be here when you get back.”

  So Henry did, knowing he was leaving them in good hands. The best of hands.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  “Henry, let’s just calm down, okay,” Ms. Watson said to him. Dawn was breaking over the day, bringing the long night to a close, but Henry didn’t feel any sense of relief at watching it go. Inside, he thought the night might never end.

  They were standing on the pier. Jonah had been bleary-eyed with sleep when he’d brought the pirogue over to pick Henry up at the toll of the bell. Henry’d felt sorry for waking him, and said as much, but Jonah only grinned.

  “No trouble,” Jonah had said with a gigantic yawn.

  And Henry knew, in Jonah’s mind, it wasn’t.

  Ms. Watson had met him at the pier in her house shoes, belting a robe over her faded nightgown. She’d sent Jonah back to the house to make himself a bowl of cereal for breakfast.

  “What’s happened?” she’d asked without preamble, those eyes set in her faded, wrinkled face as piercing and inscrutable as they’d ever been in her youth.

  Henry had told her. He told her about Del, abo
ut Eve and the baby, about the dead men in the swamp and the lost women and children sleeping on his floor. And he told her about his conversation with Brady.

  “He thinks Jonah had something to do with it! I don’t know what he said to him, but I can’t let Brady think Jonah’s somehow to blame for this. I’ve got a lot of things sitting on my conscience right now, and every one of them I deserve, but I can’t add that to the list, Ms. Watson. I won’t.”

  She cautioned him to stay calm. “Brady’s not going to jump to any conclusions. Not when it comes to his brother.”

  “But that’s just it. I don’t know if I can live with Brady even thinking Jonah might have had something to do with it. How can I stand by and say nothing and leave that hanging over their heads?”

  Ms. Watson placed her hands on her hips and stared Henry down.

  “Do you really think that boy has one single care about what people think? He doesn’t even care what they say, as far as I can tell. Not Brady. Not anybody. Jonah lives in his own world, and as long as there’s no threat to take him away from that world, I think you really need to calm down.”

  “You’d really let Brady think Jonah did this?”

  “Brady doesn’t think that! He might think maybe Jonah knows something, that maybe he saw something he shouldn’t have, and he doesn’t even realize it, but Brady doesn’t think his brother’s a killer.”

  Ms. Watson sounded exceedingly sure of that, and Henry wished he could share the strength of her convictions.

  “So what do we do?” he asked her.

  “Nothing,” she said after a moment. “For the moment,” she added firmly.

  “But—”

  She held up a hand in his direction, shaking her head.

  “No. We’d just be borrowing trouble, and more trouble is exactly what we don’t need. I’ll talk to Jonah, see if I can figure out what it was he said that set off his brother’s radar, but that’s where I think we need to leave it for the moment.”

  Henry didn’t like it. He didn’t like it one bit, but he couldn’t think of a reasonable alternative, short of turning himself over to Brady and spilling the whole truth. Every decent part of him was screaming at him to do just that.

  “Unless you’re ready to say good-bye to that girl and her baby already,” Ms. Watson added, squinting her eyes up at him.

  And just like that, she’d brought it back to the crux of the matter.

  “God,” he said, scrubbing his hands across his face. “Not if I don’t have to.” He raised his eyes to hers, a determination there that was a match for her own. “But I will, if it comes down to it. I won’t let Jonah go down for this. Alice would take care of Eve and the baby. I’ll take it all, every last drop of blame, if it looks like Jonah’s in the crosshairs of this.”

  “Then we agree. I wouldn’t expect any less,” she said. “I’ll get Jonah to take you back over.”

  And it was settled, Henry thought.

  For now.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  When Henry walked up the steps to home, it was still early, but he could hear the bustle of women moving around the house. The smell of fresh coffee hit him, and memories of his mother nearly overwhelmed him.

  Not everyone was awake, but Henry could see Alice and Camilla sitting at the kitchen table. He leaned into the doorway, and his sister-in-law’s relief was a living thing when she caught sight of him.

  He saw her swallow hard.

  “Everything okay?” she asked mildly.

  “Yeah. As okay as it’ll get for now anyway. Is Eve up yet?”

  She shook her head. “The baby ate, then I laid him back in the crib. Not a peep from either of them for a while now.”

  “All right. Thank you, Alice. For everything.”

  “Get some rest, Henry. If you can. It’s going to be a long day. There’s a lot to sort out,” she said with the smallest inclination of her head and a meaningful glance in Camilla’s direction.

  “Yeah.” Henry sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”

  Henry walked down the hallway and slowly pushed open the door to the room he shared with Eve. He didn’t want to wake her or the baby if they were sleeping, just wanted to look at their faces. He needed to see their faces.

  He was surprised, but relieved, to see that Eve was awake. Her back was to him and she didn’t turn. She must not have heard him open the door. She was standing next to the crib, staring down at the baby.

  Henry made no noise. Only stood watching, taking in the serenity of the scene, letting it soothe him. It was a balm over his open wounds.

  He didn’t know how long he watched. Seconds turned into minutes, but eventually the two of them drew him into the room. Walking on quiet feet behind her, he slid his arms around Eve’s shoulders.

  She flinched and gave a small shriek.

  He smiled and kissed the top of her head.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you. He’s beautiful, isn’t he?”

  She looked back down into the crib at the sleeping form of her son.

  “Have you thought of a name?”

  She didn’t speak, but he saw her shake her head.

  He hugged her from behind, closing his eyes and resting his cheek lightly upon hers. He wished for nothing more than to stay there, as they were. Just the three of them, apart from the world.

  Henry didn’t see that Eve never smiled as she stared down at the child. He didn’t know the thoughts that ran panicked through her mind, alternately screaming and whispering to her that nothing would ever be the same.

  He couldn’t know that she was a woman standing on the edge of a steep and dangerous cliff.

  He couldn’t know.

  Or he chose not to see.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  “Human trafficking is ‘problematic,’ they said.” Brady snorted. “What kind of word is that? ‘Problematic’? Politician’s word, that is.”

  The days and weeks that had followed on the heels of the night at the shack had passed in a mundane haze of questions and paperwork and the never-ending need to hurry up and wait. Even Del’s funeral had passed them by without any real sense of closure.

  There were too many unanswered questions for that.

  Brady and Henry were headed to the Watson house. They had a promise to keep. Jonah was waiting for them to go fishing with him.

  “They’re not really going to deport them, are they?” Henry asked. “After all they’ve been through, you’d think they could catch a break.”

  Brady shook his head.

  “I don’t know. It’s been thrown around, but the guy in charge, Richardson, he’s not so bad as some of the others. He gave me a card for an advocacy group that specializes in immigration situations. They provide legal help, counseling, that sort of thing. They say they might even be able to help Camilla and Mary relocate, find a more permanent living situation. A job.”

  “That’s good news, isn’t it?” Henry asked. Judging from Brady’s face, he could see the deputy didn’t find it particularly uplifting.

  “Yeah. I suppose so. She’s cooperating with the investigation as much as she can. They say that helps her chances of securing a visa.”

  Brady parked the SUV near the marsh and slammed the door behind him when he stepped out.

  “Then what’s climbed up your butt?” Henry asked as he got out of the other side of the vehicle. “You’re pissed off about something.”

  “Iowa,” Brady said with an angry yank on the bell hanging from the tree.

  Henry just looked at him in confusion.

  “They asked her how she felt about moving to Iowa,” Brady explained, seeing the look on Henry’s face.

  “And this upsets you because . . . ?”

  “What the hell’s in Iowa? Nothing, that’s what. Corn. A bunch of damn fields full of a bunch of damn corn. And Cam gets this dreamy look on her face and says, ‘Wonderful. That sounds wonderful,’” Brady mocked in a high voice.

  Henry sighed. In the two months since Del’s death,
the dust had begun to settle back upon the sleepy town and its inhabitants, full of people living out their own small dramas and tragedies. Dust tends to do that, even after the biggest of storms.

  Most of the women and children were long gone. A few had disappeared in the night, the very night that Del had died, fearing arrest and deportation. Others were taken to the families they’d been searching for when they’d paid the men to smuggle them over the border.

  Only Camilla and her daughter, Mary, remained. They had no family to go to and no desire to continue running under the cover of the night. So Camilla had decided to stay, facing down whatever would come next, even if that meant deportation, with a firm resolve that Henry admired.

  “Have you told her?” Henry asked, spotting Jonah heading their way, the wooden boat skimming over the top of the water.

  “Told her what?” Brady asked gruffly.

  “That you want her to stay?”

  Henry considered Brady’s face. He thought there might be the faintest signs of redness creeping up his neck. He looked like he planned to protest, but in the end, he just pushed his hands down into his pockets.

  “Don’t see the point,” he said. “If she wants to go to Iowa, who am I to stop her? Woman’s got a right to happiness, doesn’t she? And if a bunch of corn makes her happy, well, I don’t see how I can compete with that.”

  Henry shoved the tackle box he was carrying into Brady’s hands and reached out to help pull Jonah’s pirogue up to the shore.

  “You know, Brady,” Henry threw over his shoulder, “I used to think you were the smarter of the pair. You and Del. But now I realize I gave you too much credit.”

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” Brady asked, stepping into the boat.

  “You heard me. Just tell the woman you care about her, you moron. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Brady opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. Henry thought he might try to argue the point, but he was glad when he didn’t.

  “How you doing, Jonah?” Henry asked. “I brought you some jelly beans. They’re in the tackle box.”