Her Mother's Shadow (21 page)

Nola opened the door, and without a word, Mackenzie walked past her into the living room. He could see her flip open her phone.

“Hi, Mrs. Dillard,” he said. She looked nearly the same as she had the last time he'd seen her. White hair. Navy blue suit. A little less tanned than she used to be, and she had that wind-blown look some women got when they'd had too much plastic surgery. She also looked a bit stunned at the sight of him.

“I never would have recognized you,” she said.

He smiled, fighting the urge to apologize to her for everything he'd ever done wrong in his life.

Nola did not plan to invite him in, that much was clear. She kept one hand on the doorknob. “Lacey said you took Mackenzie on a tour to see the horses,” she said.

“That's right.” He could feel the sun burning the skin on his head. “I think she had a good time. She has a thing for animals.”

Nola glanced behind her. “I'm frankly disappointed in Lacey for letting you spend time with Mackenzie alone,” she said. “This early, I mean. You just met her.”

“I wanted to get to know her better, and—”

“And did you?” Nola interrupted him. “Get to know her better?”

“A bit, I think.”

She tightened her lips.

“I understand how you must feel about me,” he said. “I was an…” He started to say “asshole,” but caught himself. “I was a jerk when I knew Jessica. I'm not a jerk any longer. Okay?”

“I just didn't see the point of bringing you into her life,” Nola said. “Mackenzie has enough to deal with right now.”

He nodded, trying to look empathetic. “Lacey felt it was the right thing to do.”

“Lacey's a child herself.”

This was going nowhere and never would. “Well,” he said, “I'm going to take off. I hope you two have a good visit together.”

He turned and walked back toward the bus, feeling sorry for Mackenzie that she had to spend the next twenty-four hours with her grandmother, the ice queen.

F
aye walked into the enormous closet—really a small room—on the lower level of Jim's house and wasn't certain whether to laugh or cry. He had sent her down there to find the rafts and other pool paraphernalia, but that was not going to be easy. The walls were piled high with boxes and tools and cookware and every other thing imaginable. She did not know where to begin looking for the rafts. She walked back through the lower level and called up the stairs.

“Jim?” She knew he was in the kitchen pouring them glasses of wine. He'd had the pool and the hot tub filled the day before, and this evening would be their first venture into the water. He hadn't felt like using the pool since before Alice's death. “She loved it,” he'd said. “I just couldn't make myself go in alone.” Faye thought it was a good sign that he felt up to using the pool again.

“Did you find the rafts?” he called down to her.

“I'm sorry, Jim, but I don't know where to start,” she said. “Can you give me a clue?”

She could hear him laugh. “I'll come down and help you,” he said. “Give me a minute.”

She went back into the closet and sat down on a trunk. This was one of the strangest parts of being in a relationship, she thought: starting to feel at home in someone else's house. To cook there, as she had several times in the past couple of weeks. To have her toothbrush and toothpaste, her shampoo and her robe in the guest bathroom. To sit in a huge closet, filled with personal items, that had not been cleaned out in twenty years. To see the history of your lover's life stacked up against the walls and piled on shelves.

It was too soon to be in love with Jim, she told herself, yet there were moments when she had to bite her tongue to keep from saying those words to him. They were truly in sync with one another. Intellectually, professionally, physically. She had never expected to have this sort of partnership with a man, and she was not quite over the surprise of it yet.

Jim walked into the room and handed her a glass of Chardonnay. “This closet is a mess,” he apologized, standing in the center of the room and looking around him. “I'm embarrassed for you to see it. I just threw all the pool equipment in here when Alice died without thinking that I might want to find it again some day.”

“You were grieving,” she said, looking up at him from her seat on the trunk.

He took a sip of his wine. “I think it had more to do with…I don't know. Laziness,” he said. “Lack of caring.”

“Depression.”

“I guess that's what it was,” he said, as if he'd never thought about it before. “I just didn't feel like doing anything for the longest time.” He walked across the room to her and tapped his glass lightly against hers. “Thanks for changing that.”

She stood up and put her arms around his neck, balancing the wineglass carefully in her fingers as she kissed him. She would have loved to forget about the pool and go up to his bedroom with him. She had rediscovered sex. In some ways, it felt as though she was actually discovering it for the first time.

He knew what she wanted. “Can you wait?” he asked her with a smile. “I couldn't relax right now, with all I want to get done today. And it would be so nice to sleep with you tonight after we've had a swim and some time in the hot tub.”

Besides letting the pool go, Jim hadn't filed a single piece of paper since before Alice's death. All the bills and receipts and other important papers he'd received during that time were piled on the desk in the study across the hall, and Faye knew that he finally had the energy to put his life back in order. She would not stand in his way.

“I have an idea,” she said, lowering her arms from his neck. “You go into your study and file your papers, and I'll organize this closet.”

He stared at her as though she'd lost her mind. “I can't let you do that,” he said.

“I
like
organizing.” Her husband had called her anal retentive, and she had not been able to argue with him about the label. She liked having everything in its place. In a trailer that had been barely twice the size of this closet, that had been a challenge.

“Do you really mean it?” he asked.

She nodded.

“I'll leave the door open so we can talk across the hallway,” he said.

“I need some big garbage bags.”

He looked around the room and set down his wine to pull a dusty box of black bags from one of the top shelves. “Just
promise you'll ask me before you toss out anything that looks important,” he said, setting the box on the floor for her.

“Of course,” she said. “Now, go.” She handed him his wineglass and gave him a gentle shove.

She started in one corner of the room, emptying shelves of an eclectic assortment of items, from men's boots to old Tupperware. Across the hall she could hear him shuffling papers in the large study, and she wondered what his mood would be like after he'd gone through them. Almost certainly, many of them would be reminders of Alice. Old medical records, perhaps. Death certificates. Bills for her care. Most of the time, he was good-natured and good spirited, but grief occasionally still tugged at him. He let her see him in those moments, and she knew that was an honor.

She tried to organize the things she was finding, piling kitchenware in one place, clothing in another, magazines and books in a third. There were old tools and car parts, two irons, an ancient food processor and a silver tea service, thick with tarnish. What a mess. She carefully pulled the tea service from the shelf, and what she saw behind it made her scream. A
gun.

“What's wrong?” Jim called from the study.

She couldn't speak, couldn't make her mouth form the word. After a moment, he appeared in the doorway.

“Why do you have a gun?” she asked. She was standing in the middle of the closet, fist pressed to her mouth.

“A gun?” He followed her gaze to the shelf. “Oh.” He laughed. “I haven't seen that in years. Alice insisted we have a gun when we first moved here. There'd been some serious burglaries in the neighborhood.” He reached toward the gun.

“Don't pick it up!” she said.

“It's not loaded.”

“I don't care. I hate guns.”

“I'm not crazy about them, either,” he said. “I'll get rid of it. Toss it in the trash.” He reached for it again and she sprang forward to grab his arm.

“Don't!”

“Faye.”
He looked perplexed by her irrational response, and she wished she could prevent her nearly phobic reaction. It could only lead to a long conversation she did not want to have. It had been two weeks since she'd told him her husband had murdered someone. He had not pressed her, and she'd hoped—irrationally—that the subject could rest there. She wanted to move forward. She had hoped never to look back at her past.

She let go of his arm. “Are you sure it's not loaded?” she asked.

He hesitated. “I'm sure. Or at least, I don't remember it being loaded…it's so long ago. We
did
have it loaded at one time. But I—”

“Please don't touch it then. If you're not sure.”

“How am I going to get rid of it if I don't touch it?”

“I'll do it,” she said. “You go away and I'll check it and make sure it's not loaded, or if it is, I'll take the bullets out and throw it away.”

“You don't trust me?” he asked, and she knew that must be how it sounded. Men could snap.

“I trust you,” she said. “Just…please. Let me do it. Let me have control over this.”

“Do you know how to handle a gun?”

“No, but I don't think it would be that hard to figure out how to unload it.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then reached for her hand.

“Come on,” he said, leading her out of the closet. She let him walk her out the back door, their wineglasses forgotten.
They crossed the patio surrounding the pool to a wrought-iron bench at the edge of Jim's property, where they had a view of all of La Jolla and the Pacific. It was a bit overcast, as it often was in La Jolla, but that kept the air cooler, and the view of expensive homes and greenery and blue sea were muted in a way that appealed to her. The gun suddenly seemed very far away, and her reaction to it overblown enough to embarrass her. Still, she was trembling as she sat down on the bench.

“So.” Jim sat down, too, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, hands together. He turned his head to look at her. “Does this have to do with your husband?” he asked. “With the murder he committed? He used a gun?”

She nodded. Her mouth felt too dry to speak.

“I think it's time you told me everything,” he said. “Okay?”

“I overreacted,” she said. “It was silly.” But she knew she wasn't getting out of it this time.

“What was his name?” Jim asked. “Your husband?”

“Zach,” she said. “He was…” She shook her head in frustration. In spite of more than a decade of trying to analyze the situation, she had never understood what had happened to her husband. “We had a pretty good marriage,” she said. “He was…you know…a decent man. He was a terrific father to Freddy, our son. Freddy was fifteen when…everything happened, and he was going through a rebellious phase, but Zach was still good with him. He'd tell me how Freddy was behaving like a normal kid, that he'd been the same way at his age and not to get on his case so much. They were close.” She remembered the earlier years, the happier times before Freddy's adolescent hormones had kicked in. “Freddy was my baby,” she said. “My little sweetie when he was little, but he and Zach definitely bonded as he got
older.” She'd felt peripheral to the two of them at times. The two men. They'd filled the trailer with talk of sports and fishing. She had loved that they had a strong bond but had felt lost outside them at times.

“How was he as a husband?” Jim asked.

It took her a moment to answer. “The only thing we ever argued about was money,” she said. “I had my nursing degree and was a school nurse, but I always wanted to get my master's and work in a hospital. There was no hope of doing that, living where we were. It was just a little coastal village. Zach loved it there, though, and he was really against moving to a larger town, although he told me that when Freddy got out of school, we could live wherever I wanted. He just thought it was best for Freddy to grow up in Manteo, like he did.”

“You had to put your dreams on hold, huh?”

“Yes, but it was okay,” she said. “I knew I'd get my chance eventually.”

“What kind of work did your husband—did Zach—do?”

“Well, he'd gone to college,” she said, wrapping her hands around her knees. “That's where we met. He had a bachelor's degree in sociology. But he loved Manteo so much that we moved back there after we got married, and of course there was no work for anyone with a B.A. in sociology, so he took a job in one of the little shops.” Zachary had been a sales clerk, selling flip-flops and sunscreen to the tourists. “He was completely content with that, even though he barely made enough to pay the phone bill.”

“You know, though,” Jim said, “there's something to be said for someone who can be content with so little.”

“Yes, I agree,” she said. “And I knew that even back then. I thought I was lucky to have such an easygoing husband.”

“He couldn't have been that easygoing, though, if he killed someone.”

She shook her head. “He snapped.” She snapped her fingers. “He…I still haven't really figured out what happened. We started…just not getting along. Things I said seemed to irritate him. He was drinking too much. He always drank a fair amount, but he was getting inebriated from time to time. And he picked fights with me. That's how it felt, anyway, that he'd turn everything into a fight. He never hit me or anything, but he would scream at me. He'd
curse
at me.” She shuddered at the memory. “I'd never heard him use that kind of language before, and we'd been married sixteen years. It seemed like, if he wasn't yelling, he just wouldn't talk to me at all.”

“Was he depressed?” Jim asked. “It sounds like he sank into a clinical depression and needed help.”

“He
was
depressed, I have no doubt about it in retrospect,” Faye said. “But I couldn't see it then. I just knew he was different and that I was getting…well, I felt afraid of him sometimes. Like I said, he never hit me, but I thought it was only a matter of time. I do blame myself for not pushing him to get help. I was a nurse, after all. I should have realized how desperately he needed it. But it seemed more like anger and frustration than depression, and I just didn't recognize it for what it was.”

Jim said nothing, waiting for her to continue. In the distance, the clouds lifted a bit and the rooftops grew clear and sharp in the sun.

“He had a couple of guns,” she said. “That wasn't unusual where we lived. He kept them locked up from Freddy—I insisted on that.” She still berated herself for not insisting he get rid of the guns altogether. Would that have made a difference in the way things had unfolded? “We lived very close to our neighbors.” She still couldn't make herself say the words “we lived in a trailer park” out loud
to Jim. “They could hear us when we fought. Zach had a loud, booming voice, and I guess it carried all over the neighborhood. On Christmas Eve in 1990, I got a phone call from a woman who worked at a battered women's shelter. She said that she'd received two calls from people who were worried about Freddy and me. One was from a neighbor. The woman wouldn't identify who it was. The other call was from some friend of Zach's who was also afraid Zach might hurt me. I still to this day don't know who those callers were. The woman from the shelter—her name was Annie O'Neill—said she thought we should come there right away.” The story sounded so ludicrous, so sordid, from the vantage point of a bench high above manicured landscapes and blue, kidney-shaped pools. “I thought the whole thing was ridiculous, at first,” she continued. “I told her my husband was just very loud and that he'd never laid a hand on us. But Annie went on about how stressful the holidays could be for people who were already troubled, and how Zach's friend was worried that he was mentally ill and knew there were guns in the house. It was like I couldn't deny it any longer, when she said that. Someone outside the family had noticed he was different. It wasn't just me.” She was barely aware of Jim sitting next to her now. The story was taking on a life of its own as she told it aloud for the first time in more than a decade. “Zach's friend said that he—that Zach—had said something about using his guns soon. He didn't know if that meant Zach planned to kill me or Freddy or himself or maybe all three of us. That's when I started getting afraid. I felt as though I didn't even know my own husband, and the truth was, I didn't. Whoever he'd turned into wasn't the man I used to know. Then Annie said that, even if I didn't care about protecting myself, I owed it to Freddy to protect him. She was very persuasive and I fi
nally agreed to go. Even though I just couldn't picture Zach actually hurting us, she let me know I couldn't take the chance. And she was right. I got Freddy from one of his friend's houses and told him we needed to go to the shelter.” She shook her head, remembering her son's reaction. “He was furious!” she said. “He didn't understand at all and kept saying we couldn't just leave and not tell his father where we were going, especially not on Christmas Eve. He was crying when we drove away from the house. I felt terrible. I was afraid that Freddy was right, that what we were doing was crazy and I was overreacting, but as it turned out, Annie O'Neill saved our lives.”