One of Us Read online

  Scarlet’s eyes widen, and if I didn’t know better I’d think she was going to give Brenna a hug.

  “Your sister was the girl with the red shoes,” she says almost gleefully.

  “Moira.”

  “Why does that name sound familiar? Don’t tell me that cow behind the convenience store counter used to be that skinny little blond disco queen?”

  Brenna doesn’t flinch, demonstrating the exquisite self-control required by her former profession, but I feel the anger coming off her in waves.

  Scarlet is obviously getting some personal satisfaction from all this. She leans forward as if about to take Brenna into her confidence.

  “Does she still have those shoes?”

  Brenna doesn’t respond.

  “Please tell me she still has those shoes.”

  Brenna gets up quickly, almost knocking over her stool, and pulls some crumpled bills from her purse, tossing them onto the bar.

  “I gotta go.”

  “Wait, Brenna.”

  Scarlet smiles at me again.

  “Did I just ruin your evening? She’s not going to believe you if you tell her we’re just friends. No one ever does.”

  “I don’t know what just went on here between the two of you, but you obviously upset her and I think it was intentional.”

  “I’m innocent as a lamb,” she says. “Have a drink with me?”

  “No.”

  I hurry outside to see if I can catch Brenna in the parking lot.

  A freezing wind has kicked up since I went inside. The snow clouds above are the same shade of white as the snow on the ground. It’s not exactly dark and not exactly light and difficult to tell where earth and sky and day and night begin and end.

  I find her about to get into her truck.

  “How can you have anything to do with that . . . that . . . that thing?” she stutters at me in her rage. “Are you sleeping with her?”

  “What? I barely know her.”

  “She seemed to know you pretty well.”

  “I just met her the other day.”

  She begins pacing back and forth rather than get in her truck and leave.

  “What was she talking about?” I ask her.

  She continues pacing. I don’t think she’s going to answer me and I know better than to ask again. I think she might belt me.

  “Moira’s husband,” she blurts out. “They were only married two months. He died in the explosion. She, she . . .” Her voice begins to quaver. “She went there to identify him. She wore this dress and shoes he bought her on their honeymoon.”

  She stops and draws in a sharp breath. She begins pacing again. Tears glisten on her cheeks among the melting snowflakes.

  “It was out of respect. I suppose she looked ridiculous. Who cares?”

  She’s openly crying now.

  “She loved him so much. She was so happy. She wanted to have a bunch of babies. Instead . . . instead . . .”

  She doesn’t have to say more. I think of the Moira I know, unmarried, childless, and not exactly the happiest person I’ve ever come across.

  Brenna regains her composure with a swipe of her coat sleeve across her face.

  “She never got over it,” she finishes.

  THE SNOW IS COMING down hard by the time I get back to Tommy’s house. His truck is gone. He could easily end up stranded somewhere tonight or be in an accident. I curse again the fact that he refuses to get a cell phone. He’s impossible to track down.

  I close the door behind me, hang up my coat, and brush the snowflakes from my hair.

  My concern is situational, I tell myself. This man has managed to survive for ninety-six years without any help from me. I never worry about him when I’m back in Philly. It’s only because I’m here in his house that his welfare weighs on my mind.

  I know I can’t expect him to babysit Mom all the time, but after my dealings with Scarlet today, I’d feel much better if someone were here with her.

  I don’t think Scarlet Dawes is going to attack my mother, but Marcella Greger probably never dreamed the gorgeous heiress would show up at her house one day and crush in her skull with a rainbow. Or did she? Marcella Greger knew something Scarlet didn’t want her to know. I’m convinced of that. But what?

  Scarlet is a very specific kind of murderer. She wouldn’t have thought she was doing anything wrong in killing her nanny and her classmate. In her mind, they needed to be eliminated. Each had done something unforgiveable in her eyes and their further existence would have gnawed at her.

  I highly doubt she runs around randomly killing for the sake of killing. Someone has to get under her skin or get in her way, but how far under her skin or how much in her way?

  I told Brenna before she drove off that she and Moira should be careful. I let her think my concern stemmed from Marcella’s anonymous killer still remaining at large. I couldn’t tell her the real reason, that all these years later Scarlet remembered a young Moira and even the shoes she wore, and it excited her. I’m fairly sure it’s not a good idea to rouse strong feelings in Scarlet, even positive ones. Especially positive ones.

  It’s barely ten o’clock, too early for my mom to be asleep if she’s well. I need to check on her.

  I go into the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. I’m going to try and get some work done tonight.

  On my return to the front room, I give the deer head a caress on his nose then take one of the dish towels from his antlers and cover Fi’s portrait with it.

  I start making my way up the stairs, almost welcoming the cold lump of dread in my stomach. The sooner it begins, the sooner it will be over.

  I don’t know how many times I’ve made this trip, my stomach bunched in a knot of wariness, my pulse thudding heavily in my throat, never knowing what I might find when I finally enter my mom’s room.

  The door is slightly open. I peek inside. The curtains are drawn. The lights are on. She’s lying on the bed in her bathrobe staring at the ceiling.

  A cup of cold hot chocolate sits on the nightstand. A piece of lint floats in the skin on top.

  When I was a child, this was always the worst way to find her. If her eyes were closed, I could tell myself she was sleeping and run away, but if they were open and she wasn’t moving, I knew she could be dead. I was never able to see her chest rise or hear her breathing, so I got in the habit of putting a mirror under her nose to see if it fogged up.

  I’m wondering if I should do that now when she turns to look at me and gives me such a start, I jerk backward against the nightstand and slosh cocoa onto the carpet.

  I go to the bathroom for a towel to clean it up.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. Would you like me to make you a new cup of cocoa?”

  “I’m not feeling good tonight, Danny,” she says dully.

  “Then this is the best place for you to be. You should get some sleep. Let me help you get under the covers.”

  She sits up and I move to her side.

  “I heard someone killed Marcella Greger,” she tells me. “I didn’t do it.”

  “Of course you didn’t do it.”

  “She hated me, but I didn’t hate her. If someone killed me it might’ve been her. That would make more sense.”

  I pause in tugging the comforter out from under her.

  “What are you talking about? I didn’t even know you knew Marcella Greger. Why did she hate you?”

  “Because her cousin Anna hated me. I stole her boyfriend.”

  “What are you talking about?” I say again.

  “It was an accident.”

  My mother accidentally stole someone’s boyfriend. I’m not sure how someone does this, but it sounds like something she’d believe.

  “He said I trapped him,” she goes on. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t even want him. You don’t trap som
ething you don’t want. It was more like the time that possum fell in the window well. It was his own fault. Then he couldn’t get out. When I tried to help, he got mad at me. Hissing and baring his teeth. I kept telling him, ‘I’m trying to help you.’ But he didn’t care. He blamed me for not being able to free him.”

  “I don’t think possums can feel blame. He was probably afraid of you.”

  “His eyes were shiny and black with hate,” she insists.

  I push her feet beneath the blanket and pull it up over her legs.

  “I told him we didn’t have to get married.”

  “The possum?” I ask, smiling at her.

  Mom’s delusions don’t usually involve talking animals, but anything is possible.

  “He wanted me to kill you. I wouldn’t do it. I already loved you.”

  The content of her story has taken a serious turn.

  I sit down on the edge of the bed.

  “You’ve lost me, Mom. Who are you talking about?”

  “Your dad.”

  “What are you saying? Dad wanted you to have an abortion when you were pregnant with me?”

  “I wouldn’t do it, then he said if I was going to have his baby, I had to marry him. He said he wasn’t going to let me find some other guy to raise his kid.”

  This sounds like something my father would say.

  “Tommy wanted to shoot him,” she adds.

  “Dad?”

  “The possum. I wouldn’t let him. I put a board down for him and he crawled out in the middle of the night.”

  She sighs and sinks into her pillows.

  I trace her jumbled thoughts back to her original statement the same way I used to help her separate the colorful tangle of her embroidery threads.

  “Dad was Anna Greger’s boyfriend?”

  She nods and rolls over onto her side, pulling her knees to her chest, her signal that she’s done talking.

  “I’m too tired to make you breakfast,” she mumbles.

  There’s no point in explaining what time it is.

  “It’s okay, Mom. I can make my own.”

  Back downstairs, I pour a cup of coffee and sit alone at Tommy’s kitchen table thinking about my father and how much I don’t know about him.

  Dad and Anna Greger? But why not? They were the same age living in the same small town. There’s no reason why they couldn’t have been involved before he met my mother.

  The foreboding feeling I had when I asked him if the dead baby in our yard was Molly returns, and I finally realize why his response troubled me so much at the time.

  He wasn’t shocked by my question, and for someone who found his child murdered and watched his wife go to prison for it, this particular question should have been inconceivable. He didn’t even seem to wonder or care how I had come up with such a wild idea. He exhibited his usual reflexive anger and defensiveness, but strip away his bluster and he was a man almost willing to have a rational conversation on the subject. Then who was that baby in our yard, huh? Then where’s your sister, huh?

  I meant what I told Scarlet about my feelings for my sister. I was too young to understand death. I didn’t even understand babies. Molly was a week old when we lost her. All I knew about her was that she was soft, smelled like talcum powder, and my mother loved her.

  Mom kept telling me about all the fun we were going to have together, how we were going to be a family, repeating this word “family” over and over again as if I didn’t know its meaning or had never taken part in one.

  Maybe Mom, Dad, and I didn’t make a family after all, I remember thinking. Maybe we needed Molly to complete it. I thought she was going to solve all our problems. I loved the idea of her for that reason, but I can’t say that I loved her. I was never given the chance.

  This didn’t keep me from thinking about her, though. I imagined her to be the complete opposite of the heavy, bristly, black goblin that had clung to Rafe’s back as he fought his way through the jungles of hell.

  Molly was feather light and translucent, her presence marked only by a pale rosy shimmer dancing before my eyes as if she were dusted in the pink sugar our mom favored for her heart cookies.

  I never knew when she’d appear. I could never conjure her to help me deal with the worst of my melancholy, my loneliness, or my fear. She would appear at the oddest moments, times when I didn’t think I needed her, but it would always turn out later that I did; moments like now, when her tiny spirit hovers near me and seems to whisper that I may yet find a way to save us all.

  twenty-two

  PROSPERITY’S STANDING IN LINE at the company store waiting for his pay and watching the waning light outside. Another summer has passed. Before long, the days will grow short and he’ll leave for the mines in darkness, work in darkness, and get home in darkness, his life no better than an earthworm’s.

  Each day since he’s arrived in Lost Creek he’s watched the coal dust stream from the doors and windows of the colliery settling on everything, even the petals of wildflowers and the wings of birds. The interior of the building is always filled with a foggy blackness, and the silent shadows of men appearing and disappearing in the sooty haze makes him think of damned spirits floating in the storm clouds of hell, which was probably where they were all going to end up no matter how many rosaries they said. He knew God was male and therefore his biggest concern was making sure he was obeyed, but the Virgin Mary was a woman and a mother and she would have been appalled at the mess.

  Bill Fahey had been in prison back in Ireland and he said a far more cheerful lot of men could be found there than in these mines. Prosperity had discussed the possible reasons why with him: was it the filth they lived and worked in, their constant exposure to danger, the strain of the physical labor?

  There was something more. He knew what it was but he would never say it out loud because to hear the words spoken would make his fate all too real.

  His turn comes and he steps up to the counter.

  The superintendent, Llewellyn, looks down at a sheet of paper in front of him and begins to read, “Coal mined . . . twelve cars at sixty-six cents a car. Total—seven dollars and ninety-two cents.”

  He knows better than to put his hand out yet. He waits.

  “Less . . . two kegs of powder at two dollars and fifty cents a keg—five dollars. Two gallons of oil at ninety cents a gallon—one dollar and eighty cents. Repairs to one drill and one lantern—thirty cents. Replacing one pickax—sixty cents. Total—seven dollars and seventy cents.”

  Llewellyn looks over at the company store manager keeping track of the books who nods his head.

  “Wages for the week—twenty-two cents.”

  A few coins are extracted from a steel box and dropped into Prosperity’s hand. The nod meant he was in the tick on his household account. This was nothing new. The debt would be more than his meager earnings and it would reappear again next week even if he could pay it off.

  Fi wasn’t going to be happy, but she never was. She had proven to be a difficult woman to manage. Sometimes he had to strike her, yet despite the problems between them, nothing could diminish the awe he felt for her as a mother. Her endless patience with Jack, her protectiveness, the sweet smile she bestowed on him for the most undeserving reasons made him think of his own valiant mother, and he’d fiercely miss the care from her he never knew and the green woebegone hillside where she had lain all these many years among a multitude of tiny deaths.

  He jingles the coins in his hand while watching a pair of emaciated canines doing the deed in the middle of the rutted dirt road not far from the steps of the store’s porch. Eyes glazed with hunger, ribs protruding from beneath patchy, flea-bitten fur, their tongues lolling, panting for all their worth; they’re probably enjoying the act more than he ever did on the rare occasions when Fi was willing and he had enough energy to get it up.

 
He gazes longingly at the Rabbit where a pint and the camaraderie of the Nellies were waiting to help dull his pain.

  He knew a man could endure the worst kind of poverty and abuse if he had even the slightest expectation of something better, but that was what was missing in the company town: hope. There was no hope here, and its lack created a vacuum that had the power to suck the very souls out of men. Only shells were left behind.

  He looks around him as he crosses the road. There seem to be more men than usual wandering about, but on closer inspection he realizes they’re not men at all. They’re hard, blackened carcasses of men.

  A giant hand reaches down from the sky. A woman’s slim, milky white hand wearing a flashing ruby ring. It touches them one by one and they shatter into piles of smoldering onyx bones.

  I sit bolt upright on the couch gulping for air and instinctively look toward Fiona. Her portrait’s still wearing the dish towel I covered her with last night.

  Tommy’s sitting at the kitchen table having breakfast.

  He glances my way, not at all concerned. I must not have screamed.

  “Still having those nightmares?”

  “No. Not exactly. They’re different nightmares now. Sort of.”

  I look around at the open folders and papers scattered about. I fell asleep in my clothes again.

  “Come have some breakfast,” Tommy suggests.

  He raises his bowl to his lips and slurps up the sugary cream left after the cereal is gone.

  I join him, pour a cup of coffee, and put my face over the steam, hoping the caffeine will seep directly into my pores.

  “I had a strange talk with Mom last night,” I tell him.

  “That would be a first,” he says with a wink.

  “Is it true that Dad was dating Anna Greger before he met Mom?”

  He puts the bowl down with a clunk and makes a noise that’s a cross between a snort and a gag.

  “Not dating. He and Anna were engaged,” he replies. “And he had met your mother long before he started sniffing after her. They went to school together. They always knew each other.”