Die Before I Wake (17 page)

“And we will continue this discussion at a more appropriate time. The girls and I are already late.”
And it’s all your fault.
That was the rest of his sentence, the part he didn’t say out loud. But it was implied. It was there, written on his face, in his stance, between the lines of the words he did say, if only I were interested in reading those blame-laden white spaces.

Neither of us said another word. Tom left the painting propped against the kitchen wall, its presence a clear message that he expected me to return it to the place where I’d found it. I listened as the girls followed him downstairs, still loudly protesting his seizure of their precious
objet d’art.
They went outside, Tom uncharacteristically silent, the girls as noisy as a pair of brood hens. I heard the car doors slam, the engine start up, the faint squawk of tires as Tom left the driveway.

The breakfast dishes still sat on the table where we’d left them. Mechanically, I gathered them up, rinsed them in the sink, and loaded the dishwasher.

Both girls had left without eating breakfast. I wasn’t sure Tom had even noticed, so intense was his fury toward me. With the wet dishcloth, I wiped down the kitchen table, dropped the crumbs in the sink, then turned on the faucet and rinsed them away.

Who was this man I’d married? The funny, light-hearted, caring man I’d fallen in love with had a dark side I didn’t much like. It was a shock to discover he had a temper; the shock worsened when he turned that temper on me. Over something so trivial as an oil painting hung in a place where he didn’t think it belonged.

Had his anger really been about the painting? Or had it, at its core, been about something more basic: his belief that, as his wife, I should obey him?

We’d joked about it more than once, this notion of men expecting their wives to kowtow to them, and every time the topic had come up, Tom had seemed to find it as ridiculous as I did. The word “obey” had deliberately been left out of our wedding vows. Even if I’d been a traditionalist, I wasn’t a fool. Hell would freeze rock solid before I’d take a vow to obey any man.

But what about Tom? What if he’d been hiding his true feelings for fear of frightening me off? I’d made my opinion on the topic clear; he had to know that I’d run like a scared jackrabbit if I thought he intended to cage me. Was it possible that the man I thought I knew didn’t really exist? Was my Tom, the charming man I’d fallen in love with, a figment of my imagination?

My grandmother—she of the lethal frying pan—

had been fond of apocryphal adages. One I particularly remembered:
Marry in haste, repent at leisure.

When I was a teenager, my cousins and I used to laugh behind her back. Now I considered that maybe Gram was right. Had I already, after only a few weeks of marriage, reached the repentance stage?

Impossible. No way was I that poor a judge of character. Tom hadn’t spoken the words he said to me this morning because of some overdeveloped male ego; there’d been something else fueling those words, something else fueling the intensity of his emotions.

Fear? Anger? Grief? Was he still in mourning for his first wife? Or had Beth done something so terrible that the very thought of her sent him into a blind fury? Was there some rational motivation behind his seemingly irrational behavior?

Somehow, Beth was the key. I knew it instinctively, even if I didn’t know how she was connected, or what it all meant. I just knew that Beth was at the center of all this. And as her successor, I was tangled up in it whether or not I wanted to be.

Upstairs, they called to me, those boxes that had been shoved way back into the shadows beneath the eaves. I wondered what secrets they held, wondered if I dared to try to uncover those secrets.

I considered the possibility that I was being melodramatic, that the boxes held nothing more sinister than Beth’s high school yearbook, a rusted tin box of recipes, and a moth-eaten cheerleading sweater.

I had to go up there. Tom had made it clear that he expected me to return the painting. If I’d wanted to be difficult, I could have told him to return the damn thing himself. But that would just prolong the argument. It wouldn’t serve anybody’s purposes. On the other hand, if I took it back up to the attic myself, I’d have a legitimate reason to be up there. And in order to squeeze the canvas back into the tiny space where it had been stored, wouldn’t I have to first move those boxes that were in the way? The ones that had Beth’s name written on the sides?

To fortify myself for the job ahead, I took the blueberries from the fridge and, leaning over the kitchen sink, ate the rest of them right from the cardboard container. Tom would be proud of my antioxi-dant intake. If he was still speaking to me, that is. I tossed the container in the trash, grabbed the painting, and scooted up two flights of stairs to the attic.

At least today it was sunny. I’d brought a flashlight, but the windows faced the east, so the morning sun that streamed in illuminated all but the darkest corners. With barely a twinge of guilt, I set to work dragging Beth’s boxes out of their hiding place and into the square of light that fell on the floor in front of those two gable windows. With a heavy sigh, I tucked the painting back where I’d found it, beneath the dusty old sheet. I’d tried to do right. It wasn’t my fault that Tom was a dunderhead who failed to understand the needs of his daughters. I’d continue to fight the good fight. Maybe, sooner or later, some of what I was telling him would sink in. Another of Gram’s old sayings came to mind:
You can always
tell a doctor, but you can’t tell him much.
Yeah. We had that going on in spades.

The first box I opened held treasures, but not the kind I’d hoped to find. There were no clues in here—

clues to what, I wasn’t sure—just random pieces of a woman’s life, items that brought Beth Larkin alive for me. I took out a small, wooden music box, round and made of cherrywood. When I opened it, I found a winter scene inside, a charming cottage situated on the frozen steppes. I wound the key and the theme from
Dr. Zhivago
poured out. A little tinny; a little off-key, but its haunting melody sent goose bumps racing up and down my spine. As it played, I could clearly see the faces of Yuri and Lara, could feel the bittersweet agony of their illfated love. As a young girl, I’d yearned for a love like theirs, a love that tran-scended time and war and even death. It had taken me a while to understand that a love like Yuri and Lara shared existed only between the covers of Russian novels.

But the ghost of that romantic young girl still resided in me, and I felt a strong kinship with Beth Larkin, for at some point in her too-brief life, she’d known those same yearnings.

I set aside the jewelry box, picked up a bottle of inexpensive perfume. Uncapped it and took a whiff.

The scent was delicate, faintly floral, not overpow-ering, but just right.

Her yearbook was next. I opened it, flipped through the pages, realized I didn’t know her maiden name. There were bound to be a half-dozen Elizabeths. The best I could do was guess.

I was paging slowly through the club pages—

glee club, golf club, camera club—when I heard the distinctive thud of the front door slamming downstairs. Book in hand, I went to the window, but it looked out over the side yard, so I couldn’t see the driveway.

I moved to the head of the stairs and peered down into the upstairs hallway. “Hello?” No answer. But I hadn’t imagined hearing that door. Somebody was in the house. As Tom’s wife—

even if we were barely on speaking terms right now—I supposed it was my duty to go down there and make sure some junkie wasn’t making off with the silver. There probably weren’t too many junkies in Newmarket, but I wasn’t so naïve that I believed there were none. Even a town like this one had its share of crime. Hadn’t I already fallen victim to it myself?

On the other hand, maybe it was Tom, come home to apologize for going off on me the way he had. I descended the attic stairs and paused in the upstairs hallway. With a tremulous smile, I said,

“Tom? Is that you?”

Still no answer. But I could hear sounds from the kitchen. A drawer opening and then closing. Just my luck. Somebody really was stealing the silver.

Book in hand, I crept down the last staircase to the ground floor. At this time of day, with the sun at the back of the house, the front hall had all the ambiance of a dungeon. At the end of the hall, morning light flooded the kitchen, and footsteps—footsteps that sounded furtive to me—moved about the room. I took a breath. “Hello?” I said one last time. “Who’s there?”

Nobody answered, but the refrigerator door opened and closed. What kind of intruder helped himself to the leftovers in the fridge? I looked around for a weapon, decided that Beth’s yearbook would have to do. Heavy as it was, I could give somebody a pretty mean whack if I had to. I crept down the hallway, raised the book over my head, took another breath for courage, and stepped boldly into the kitchen.

Just as the intruder was stepping out.

We collided. I let out a soft little squeak and raised my weapon. Riley nearly dropped his dish of ice cream, and I was halfway to knocking him senseless with the yearbook when my brain made the proper association and managed to halt my arms before the book could connect with his head.

My brother-in-law was quick. He ducked and danced, somehow managing to hold on to his bowl of ice cream while at the same time yanking the iPod earbuds from his ears. “Christ in a sidecar,” he said. “What in holy hell are you doing?”

“I thought you were a burglar.” Now that the time for fear had passed, my heart was speeding faster than Mario Andretti on race day. I lowered the book and struggled to hold steady the knees that had gone as weak as day-old spaghetti. “I called out, but you didn’t answer.”

“I couldn’t hear you. Headphones.”

“I can see that now. You scared the bejesus out of me.”

“Likewise. My friggin’ life flashed in front of my eyes. That book’s a lethal weapon.”

“That was the idea.” I eyed his dish of ice cream with suspicion. “I thought you lived in your own apartment over the carriage house. Don’t you have a refrigerator?”

“Yeah. But mine isn’t stocked with Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia. Which is starting to melt.

Do you mind?”

“Would it matter if I did?”

“Probably not. I’m headed for the front porch.

You’re welcome to join me as long as you promise to let me eat in peace.”

I followed him out to the veranda. “Why aren’t you at work?” I said. “You’re always hanging around the house. I don’t see any evidence that you’re gain-fully employed.”

“I’m flattered that you’ve taken so much notice of my comings and goings.” He plunked down on a wicker chair, raised his booted feet, and leaned back on his tailbone. “I’m between jobs. Where’d you find the yearbook?”

“In a box in the attic.”

“Snooping again, were you?”

“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer. I was looking for Beth’s picture in here, but I don’t know her maiden name, so I couldn’t find her.”

“Shickler. Now can I eat my ice cream?”

“I’ve already forgotten you’re here.” I opened the book to the senior section, paged through it until I reached the
S’
s. “Sanders, Sears, Selby. Shickler,” I said. “Elizabeth.”

Even with the pouffy 1980s hair, Elizabeth Shickler was stunning, blond and delicate and beautiful, with a smile that could melt marble. Finally, I knew where Sadie had gotten her looks from; the family resemblance between the two was as strong as that between Tom and Taylor. So this was my predecessor. This was the woman who’d had it all and tossed it away when she jumped off the railing of the Swift River Bridge.

Or was pushed off.

Practically devouring Beth’s photo, I said distractedly, “Riley? Why are Elizabeth’s paintings crammed into a dark corner under the eaves in the attic?”

Riley paused, his spoon halfway to his mouth.

Mildly, he said, “I didn’t know they were.”

“Some of them are. About a half-dozen. But Claudia tells me there should be more.” He resumed eating. “I’d think there would be,” he said through a mouthful of Cherry Garcia. “Beth painted for years.”

“So where are they? The rest of them?”

“Beats me. Maybe Tom sold the lot of them after she was gone. He never said a word to me.”

“Hmm. Maybe.” I studied Beth’s senior portrait, trying to find the answer in her face. If only I knew what the question was. “That seems to be a sore spot with him. We had a massive go-round this morning because I brought one of them down from the attic and hung it in the girls’ room. I did it because Sadie asked me to, and I thought it would be nice for the girls to have something of their mother’s to remember her by, but Tom went into total meltdown mode over it. I saw a side of my husband I’d never witnessed before.”

“And that should tell you, just in case my words the other night didn’t get through your thick skull, that some things are better left alone. The topic of Beth Larkin being one of them.”

“I don’t understand why! What the hell is the big deal, Riley? What’s the deep, dark secret that everybody knows but nobody’s telling me? I’m starting to feel like a pariah.”

“There is no deep, dark secret. Tom’s been through a lot. We’ve all been through a lot. Elizabeth’s death was sudden and senseless. Maybe you don’t understand this, but it takes time to recover from that kind of loss. We’re all just doing the best we can.” I slowly closed the yearbook. “Are you implying that I don’t know about loss?”

Riley shrugged. “If the shoe fits…” And he took another bite of ice cream.

“I had a baby.”

The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them. He fixed me with a steady gaze that was impossible to interpret. His silence seemed to be urging me to continue, but it could just as easily have stemmed from a total lack of interest. I wasn’t sure why I was telling him this, but it was too late at this point to turn back. “I carried her for nine months,” I said. “I wanted that little girl—
loved
that little girl—so much. Jeffrey and I named her Angel.” Riley was silent, but his eyes weren’t unkind.