Bittersweet (37 page)

“And what did you say?” I tried to ignore the lump welling in my throat.

“I told him I thought so. He said he didn’t like going behind my father’s back, but ‘love should get its chance.’ ”

I glanced at Galway, filling with emotion.

“Go on,” Galway urged.

“Anyway, it was an easy job,” Lu said. “All he had to do was swing by the bus station. I’d hide under a tarp in the back of the pickup. I know what you’re going to say—it’s not safe—but it wasn’t even on the highway, and it was only from the bus station to his mother’s house.”

I replayed that day. John had been with me that morning, until I told him Birch was his father, and then he’d sped off. He could have gone anywhere from there. “When did he pick you up?”

“I don’t know. One?”

A good three hours after he’d abandoned me on the Winloch road. “How did he seem?” I asked selfishly.

“We didn’t really talk. I just climbed in back and he drove me home.”

“So you were hiding in the bed of his truck because you didn’t want anyone to see you come back.”

She nodded. “I was supposed to stay in there until after dark. Because we didn’t want anyone to see me, and, you know, Aggie works there.” She caught herself. “Worked.”

Galway and I exchanged a look. She had seen something. I felt sure of it now.

I rubbed her hand reassuringly. “Whenever you’re ready.”

She took a deep breath. “He brought me a peanut butter sandwich for dinner. He made it look like he was getting something from the truck, but he was really making sure I was okay. Not too hot and stuff. And he made me promise I’d be out of the truck right after it got dark. Then he told me not to worry, he was letting Aggie off early, so as soon as I heard her car leave, I could sneak off without being seen.” A new round of tears bubbled up. “He was really nice to me.”

“Lu,” Galway said, obviously irritated that she wasn’t getting to the point, “what happened next?”

She shook her head. “I went back under the tarp and waited some more. It was impossible to tell what time of day it was, and, you know, I was under there a long time, so I started to get cramped. But then I reminded myself I could be dying of boredom here at camp, instead. So I just waited.”

“It got dark?”

She nodded. “I heard Aggie say good-bye. She got into her car and drove off. So I thought, you know, I’m free. I waited a few more minutes, and I was just standing up when one of the maintenance trucks came down the driveway. I ducked. It actually parked really
close to me, and I thought whoever was driving had seen me but …” She shook her head no. She was gripping my hand now.

“I thought, I’ll just hide under here until they leave or whatever. But they didn’t leave. Not for, like, a really long time. And then I heard shouting. From inside the house. And barking. The barking kept going on and on.” My fingers were losing feeling under the pressure of her grasp. “So I decided to climb out of the truck. It was really scary, like, so hard to do, but I figured if I could hear shouting, then no one would notice me running away, because it meant they were inside. It was really dark out, but there was all this light coming from John’s mom’s cottage, so I could see enough to get out of the truck.” She stopped to collect herself. “I started to run away. But then I heard …” She began to wheeze. Her fingers clenched mine. “I heard, like, a scream. Like a scream in a movie.”

“And what did you do?”

“I went toward it. I couldn’t help it. It sounded so scared, that scream, and I thought, I don’t know, I thought I could help or something.” She shook her head at the futility of it. “So I go to the cottage. Like, I creep, on my hands and knees around the side of the house, toward the porch, ’cause I figure there I can hide better in the trees and see more. Everything’s quiet.” She shuddered. “I shouldn’t have looked, but I did.”

“What did you see, Lu?”

Lu’s eyes were fixed on her brother. “He was standing over her. He had his hands around her neck. He was squeezing her so hard. I could hear her choking, her body was moving, like, back and forth, but he didn’t stop, he just pressed and pressed and pressed until she was still.” Tears were streaming down her face, but the words came easily.

“John?” I asked. “You saw him killing her?”

She frowned. “No! John was just lying on the floor. But then he woke up. He saw what was happening and he lunged, but he couldn’t
save her. And then they began to fight, and John ran out, and then he did too, right past me, into the forest, up the path. I followed them. I knew I couldn’t stop them, but I couldn’t just let them go either, so I followed them, and I hid in the bushes by the point. They were yelling at each other, punching and stuff, and then all of a sudden he pushed John, and John lost his balance, and then …” Her little hands released mine, sailing up into the air like doves. “Then John was gone. Over the cliff.”

“Who was it?” Galway pressed, sitting forward. “Who killed them?”

She nodded at the tragic inevitability of her answer. “It was Daddy.”

G
alway didn’t look all that surprised. But neither did he offer Lu any comfort. I realized then that he was calculating:

Motive.

Damage.

Our next move.

I put my arm around Lu’s shoulder as she told us what had happened next: terrified and disoriented, the world filling with Abby’s barks, she watched her father drive away in the maintenance truck. When she realized she was alone with two dead bodies, she first thought about running back home. But she wouldn’t be safe near her father, and anyway, her parents already thought she was at camp. Neither could she go to Turtle Point with Owen as she’d planned; she was sure her father would find her there. John’s keys were in the ignition. She’d driven Arlo’s car a few times, and John’s truck was an automatic. So she found a pair of work gloves in the shed, hopped into the driver’s seat, and, heart racing, drove to the bus station without leaving her fingerprints on the wheel. She hid the truck behind the shipping container and waited for the morning bus to camp. Camp was the only place she would be safe. But coming hadn’t made things any better, as what she had witnessed haunted her more with each passing day.

I whispered, between her sobs, that she was so brave, and nothing was going to hurt her. She pulled back from me when I said that. “If he knew …,” she said, and she began to make a shrieking sound, high and quick, adding, “What will I do if he finds out I saw?”

I took her face in my hands. “Shhhh,” I said, “shhhh,” and it was as though I was talking to my younger self, the part that had believed my life, too, might as well be over.

The girl calmed. I thought, I’m going to tell them now. All about what I did when I was a girl, and how it made me better, and more honest, and how I had felt so worthless but now I felt strong. But as I opened my mouth to begin, Galway stood. “I’m going to find Marian,” he said. “Have a chat, make a phone call or two. You girls okay here?”

“Galway,” I chided, “tell her it’s going to be okay.”

He frowned at my tone, then knelt before Lu. He wiped her tears with his hand.

“Horrible things happen in this world,” he said finally, “but I’ll do everything in my power to keep you safe.” She hesitated a moment, then wrapped her arms around her big brother. The look on his face as he comforted her was so wounded that I was forced to remember his own sister had just told him she was witness to their father committing double murder with his bare hands.

Once he was gone, we folded her clothes into her small suitcase. “I can’t go back to Winloch,” she repeated again and again. I assured her that we would work something out, although I had no idea what Galway had in mind, and, aside from offering her a spot on my parents’ couch—where Birch would find her in about five minutes—I had no resources.

I brushed her limp, greasy hair before the mirror, and realized she and Ev had deteriorated in much the same way. How quickly the Winslow girls had become nearly weightless. Translucent. As if trauma had swallowed their lives and bodies.

We heard footsteps on the path. I smiled at Lu in the mirror. Galway poked his head in the door. “You can put that down,” he instructed me. He meant the suitcase in my hand. I frowned in incomprehension. “Can we have a minute?” he asked.

I kissed Lu’s sticky, tearstained cheek and blinked back out into the day. I leaned against an old fir tree, searching the cabin’s windows for a sign of what was happening inside. Galway emerged alone. He hopped down the steps. Headed onto the path that led to his car.

“What about Lu?”

He turned and caught my eye. “It’s time to go.”

My voice raised to a cry. “We can’t abandon her, Galway. She needs us.”

“Trust me.” He walked on.

I glanced back up at the cabin, where, presumably, Lu was now watching me choose. I could stay here with her, but I had no money, nothing to offer but the comfort of my embrace. Still, to leave would be to pretend I didn’t care at all. Was Galway really this cruel?

A breeze skipped in off the small lake, lifting a clatter of girls’ voices from one of the full canoes skimming its waters. I was suddenly, terribly cold. I thought to go back, to tell her I was sorry, to tell Lu I was no use to her here, but out there, I would figure something out. But I knew that an apology would be worse for her, because it would have been worse for me. So I ran down the path as fast as I could, catching up with Galway, glad the cabin was out of sight and her eyes were no longer boring, longingly, into the back of my head.

In the car, Galway’s foot pressing the accelerator, I felt bile rise.

“We left her there,” I shouted, already regretting my decision a thousand times over. “We shouldn’t have done that, Galway, you should have taken care of her.” But on he drove.

At the fork in the road, instead of continuing on, which would
have led us back to civilization, he turned. “I asked you to trust me,” he said.

“What the hell does trust have to do with it?”

We skidded to a halt. A boulder, brought by some glacier millions of years before, sat on the other side of the road. It was the only landmark for miles.

Galway strained to see into the woods. “Because,” he replied, “you’ll really have to trust me in order to swallow what comes next.” As he spoke, I watched a white dot weave in and out of sight from behind the tree trunks. It grew larger and larger, revealing itself to be a T-shirt worn by Lu, as she sprinted from the forest, spotted our car, and ran to us.

The girl flung open the back door and tossed her suitcase across the seats. She brought the smell of the pines with her, a mossy dampness permeated by sweat. “Go!”

“Buckle up,” Galway insisted, turning the car as quickly as he could.

I looked between them as we accelerated. “You mean this was a plan?”

“It had to seem like you were really leaving me there,” Lu explained. “In case my father asks, because they’ll suspect you for taking me.”

“But won’t Marian just sound the alarm?” I asked, feeling hurt.

“Everyone knows Marian has gambling problems,” she went on, “so all Galway had to do was tell her he knew about her ‘financial issues’—”

“And offer to make an anonymous donation to the ‘charity’ of her choice,” Galway added.

“And then as soon as you guys left, I could just run down the other side of the mountain, and she gets to say I was a runaway, but she’ll keep her mouth shut for a while because she wants the money—”

“But we get to leave with Lu.” Galway laughed, hitting the steering wheel triumphantly. “Everybody wins!”

Were they actually enjoying this?

“Mabel,” Lu said, leaning forward in her seat, putting her hands on my shoulders, “I told him not to tell you. We want to put Daddy off the trail. You’re not the best liar, you know, and it has to look to everybody like I just ran away so he believes them.”

I started to laugh. I was exhausted, and angry, and scared. Unhinged, perhaps. Overwrought. Underestimated. I was many things, but a terrible liar wasn’t one of them. The laugh encompassed me.

They exchanged a bemused look in the rearview mirror. “Are you okay?” she asked. My stomach muscles began to hurt. I gasped for air. Another round of laughter overtook me. Then, as the sheer ridiculousness of all of this abated, I slapped Galway on his leg. “You could have told me once we got in the car.”

He rubbed at the spot. “But you’re cute when you’re mad.” I almost punched him in the jaw.

L
u curled like a kitten in the backseat. Soon, her snores were filling the small car. “Where are we going?” I asked.

Galway didn’t answer. I was sick of his insouciance in the face of all this tragedy, but I noticed, as I fumed beside him, that his hands were trembling on the steering wheel. He had turned pale.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Galway checked Lu in the rearview mirror.

“She’s out,” I said.

Only then did he let down his guard.

“When I was a kid,” he began in a low voice, “Father used to get in these rages. He’d belt us, that kind of thing. I assumed all fathers did that, you know?”

I did.

“But this one time”—he paused, confirming, once again, that Lu wasn’t listening, then lowered his voice as an extra precaution—“I was down at Flat Rocks with Mum and all the kids. Ev was little, so I must’ve been, what, six? I’d forgotten my comic book up at the house, and Mum said I could go get it by myself. I was in my room looking when I heard these strange sounds coming from the bathroom. Athol’d been telling me stories about raccoons, so I became convinced it was one, and I picked up a baseball bat and crept to the
door, and listened, and then, when I knew for sure something was in there, I tried the handle, and the door opened right up.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what that little boy had seen.

“And there, on the floor of the bathroom, was my father, with his pants down, one hand over the mouth of our au pair, the other pinning her down. Raping her, Mabel. She had this single tear …” He shook his head. “I can still remember the look on his face when he saw me—if he’d had a gun, he would have used it. I ran downstairs. He didn’t follow me. And I was a kid, you know? So I just decided I hadn’t seen anything. I didn’t even know how to say what I’d seen.