One of Us Read online

  I try to get my composure back.

  “What about Wesley?” I ask. “And his children? Won’t they inherit, too?”

  Would she be capable of killing an entire family? I wonder. How would she do it? It would have to involve explosives.

  “I guess we can share,” she says, not sounding pleased with the idea. “I’m not unreasonable.”

  “Then you have no intention of going public? Of letting the world know what happened?”

  “Is that why you got upset? Is that why you’re all mad and mopey?”

  She smiles at me again.

  “I’m sorry, but we can’t let anyone else know. Don’t take it the wrong way. I’m not embarrassed or appalled. I don’t care that my real family is white trash. I’m thrilled to find out that you’re my big brother.”

  I watch and listen in amazement, knowing there’s nothing I can do or say that can make her understand that there’s something terribly wrong with her. She can’t feel empathy or compassion. Half the time she doesn’t realize she’s hurting people and the other half she doesn’t care.

  “And there isn’t anyone else who knows,” she continues. “Believe me, Gwen isn’t going to say anything, and Walker doesn’t know—”

  “He doesn’t know?” I interrupt her. “How is that possible?”

  The man I met knows everything that goes on in his home and business. There’s no way anyone, even his wife, could keep something this big hidden from him. Scarlet should realize this, but her narcissism would make her prone to missing details about others.

  “Trust me, he doesn’t know. That just leaves you and me. You didn’t tell Candy Cop, did you?”

  “No.”

  I think about Wade’s insistence that Rafe is in danger. Could the little dog be onto something?

  “What about Mom?” she says.

  Hearing her call my mom “Mom” makes my stomach lurch. There’s no affection or even regard attached to the word. She makes it sound indecent.

  “What about her?”

  “I’m kind of disappointed in her. How does a woman let someone steal her baby? And then when the other baby was found, how could she have believed it was hers? Don’t good mothers have some kind of intuition, some kind of maternal tracking device? Where was her due diligence?”

  “Mom always knew the dead baby wasn’t her baby,” I say in Mom’s defense, “but no one believed her. Except for her father. Even I didn’t believe her. I thought she did it.”

  When I look at Scarlet again, I still see pieces of my mom, but trapped in something cold and hard like her reflection seen in shards of broken glass.

  “I suppose you think we should tell Mom. She’s spent all this time wondering what happened to me and wondering who that dead baby was in her backyard.”

  “No,” I say forcefully. “No, she shouldn’t know. Her mental health is too fragile. It could cause her to have a psychotic break or it might not register at all. Nothing good could come of it.”

  I don’t want Scarlet anywhere near my mother, but thinking about my love for Mom reminds me of something.

  “You’ve forgotten someone. There’s someone else who knows.”

  Scarlet gives me her full attention.

  In my head I picture the first Walker Dawes standing near the gallows nodding his head to the executioner.

  So this is how it feels.

  “Our dad knows,” I tell her.

  “Anna’s boyfriend,” she says slowly in the same tone of eerie giddiness she used when talking about Moira’s red shoes.

  She finishes her drink, gives me one more stunning, empty smile, and stands to go.

  “I’m sorry, Danny, but this is a lot to take in. I’m going, but I have one more question for you. What were you hoping to get out of all of this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why did you tell me?”

  “If you had found out first would you have told me?”

  “Good question. Assuming I hadn’t run into you the way I did and I didn’t know you at all? Would I have sought you out or any member of our family? Probably not. I’m only being kind. I’m only thinking of all of you. I think we can both agree you’d probably be much better off not knowing.”

  She slips into the glossy heavy black fur.

  “One more thing,” she says. “What’s my name?”

  I conquered my worst fear today only to come face to face with a brand-new one.

  “Molly,” I tell her. “You’re Molly Doyle.”

  I FIND TOMMY DOZING in his favorite chair with a book in his lap when I arrive back at his house. I go into the kitchen and pour milk into the battered saucepan that never leaves his stovetop.

  “There he is. Our hero,” he says to me upon waking.

  “Don’t call me that. I didn’t do anything heroic. I went into a coal mine, something you did almost every day for forty years.”

  “But you were afraid of the mines,” he says. “You put aside that fear to help someone else. That’s bravery. That makes you a hero.”

  One of his coughing spells wracks his body. He reaches for his empty coffee can and spits.

  “But I want you to know there’s no shame in being afraid of the mines,” he says once he settles back into his chair. “I never knew a man worked in them who wasn’t. Every shift you think, ‘This might be my last glimpse of the sky, my last breath of fresh air,’ but you put those thoughts aside and concentrate on your job.

  “I had a fellow work with me, a bolter. The most dangerous job in the mines. He went in and secured the roof for the rest of us. Young, strong, fearless as they come. One bright sunny Sunday afternoon he slipped and fell down his basement stairs. Broke his neck and died.

  “Everyone took his death very hard. It seemed like a slap in the face, some kind of joke. He survived all the danger around him only to die in an almost silly way.”

  He clasps his big, scarred, knotty hands together over the spine of his book.

  “The randomness of life. Hard workers end up in the poorhouse while the lazy make fortunes. Health nuts drop dead of heart attacks in their forties while someone like me lives into his nineties. Terrible people have good things happen to them and decent people have awful things happen to them. There are no guarantees. No foolproof ways to protect ourselves from anything. If you stop to think about it too much, you’ll go mad.”

  I wait for him to say more.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Don’t you have some words of wisdom to add?”

  “No. I just wanted to tell you not to think about it too much.”

  I shake my head at him.

  “Come into the kitchen with me.”

  “I’m not going to be around that much longer,” he says while raising himself out of his chair with his cane.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s a fact you’re going to have to face. Don’t feel bad about it. I’ve lived much longer than I had a right to.”

  He follows me and takes a seat at the table.

  “My only regret is that I never made it to Ireland.”

  “Put it on your bucket list.”

  He laughs.

  “I’m too old for a bucket list. The only list I have is the list of instructions for my funeral.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Blue suit.”

  I set a cup of hot chocolate in front of my chair and a half cup of hot milk in front of him. I pour in a little maple syrup and give him his bottle of Jameson.

  “What’s wrong, Danny? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  I sit down and try to steady my voice.

  “Grandpa,” I begin, “tonight I’ve got a story to tell you.”

  twenty-five

  SCARLET

  GWEN IS
A STRIKING woman even in her seventies. She doesn’t need to wear makeup and rarely does, but today she’s dusted her face in perfumed powder, rouged her cheeks in pink, smudged the lids above her worried blue eyes in copper, and painted her lips in harsh ruby. She’s trying to hide her disease. Alcoholism doesn’t disfigure, but it discolors and ages.

  She thinks I might kill her and she wants to look good when her body is found.

  “I love the countryside,” she says from her vigil at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows in the great room.

  I don’t know what she’s looking for. A knight in shining armor? A guardian angel? The pizza delivery guy?

  I just ordered one: pepperoni and double cheese.

  “I guess it’s ironic that you’re part of two families who’ve made vast fortunes raping it,” I comment.

  I take the wrapper off a piece of Rafe’s candy. I have a little pile of it sitting here on a marble-topped end table set in an elaborately carved base covered in gold leaf.

  I know most of the stuff in this room is priceless, but the reason for having it isn’t any different from what motivated Marcella Greger to accumulate her treasures. It’s all crap to me.

  Gwen turns and looks at me, holding her chin a little high, at an angle, to pull the flesh tight beneath it.

  “When I was dating your father, he brought me here and I fell in love with his family’s estate, the house, and the land.”

  “Did you fall in love with him?”

  “I thought I did, but I didn’t know him. He put on a good show while he was courting me, but once we were married he became a different man. Cold, controlling, self-obsessed. All the Dawes men were that way. I worried Wesley might turn out the same but he didn’t.”

  She stops speaking at the mention of her son.

  Her hair is long and loose today. It falls below her shoulders in a satiny cascade of white that blends in with the ivory silk of her blouse. She’s wearing pants of the same color and some of her family’s diamonds in her ears and on her fingers.

  I’m fire; this woman is ice. There’s no resemblance between the two of us. I never thought about it before.

  “Go on,” I encourage her.

  “You think you know everything,” she says, her voice trembling, the calm she’s been struggling to maintain dissolving away.

  “I’m pretty sure I do. My real brother filled in all the blanks.”

  “You don’t know everything. Even I don’t know everything. There are only two people left alive who know everything.”

  “Owen Doyle . . . ?”

  “And Walker.”

  I stop clacking the candy against my teeth. This can’t be true. Walker would have never brought someone not of his own blood into his house. He would have never raised a miner’s child as his own, and especially not a McNab.

  He has always believed I’m his daughter. His love for me is genuine. I’m his Button. And not because I’m cute as a button. Walker despises cute things. He explained the nickname to me once. It was in reference to the alleged red button the president would press to launch a nuclear attack. I was the most powerful object in his world. I was his little doomsday missile.

  “Anna’s confession or whatever you want to call it is only partially true. It’s true that my Scarlet died and was switched with the Doyle baby, but I never knew about it.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I always suspected there was something terribly wrong with you but . . .”

  Her voice catches in her throat.

  “I used to blame myself. I thought I must be a monster. What kind of woman doesn’t love her own child?”

  She stops herself once again. The look she shoots me is pure terror. I don’t know what she thinks I’m going to do to her. I don’t know if I should be insulted or flattered.

  “It’s okay, Gwen. I always knew you didn’t love me. You were a lousy mother. It wouldn’t have bothered me except you were a good mother to Wes.”

  “Please leave him alone.”

  “Stop bringing him up and maybe I will.”

  She turns away from me. I watch her take a tissue out her sleeve and dab at her eyes.

  “Until Marcella Greger came to me several months ago and showed me that note, I didn’t know that you weren’t my real daughter or that I had killed her.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “I went to Walker and showed him the note. I knew he was the only one who might know what Anna had been talking about.”

  She’s openly crying now. Tears roll down her cheeks and leave damp spots on her silk.

  “I killed her. I killed my own child. It was an accident. You have to believe me.”

  Her words come rushing out in a string of violent hitches.

  “It was a difficult pregnancy and a difficult birth. I didn’t want anything to do with my baby at first. I didn’t care. I was sick and in pain. I was doped up half the time on medication; when I was lucid people were always forcing her on me, telling me how much she needed me.

  “I took her into bed with me one night. I wanted to love her. I wanted her to love me. But I had taken a lot of pills and I was drinking. I passed out on top of her,” she finishes in a whisper. “I suffocated her.”

  She raises the tissue to her face again. This time it comes away smeared in shades of beige and rose and streaked in black.

  “Anna found us. I never knew. I was unconscious through the whole ordeal. She went to Walker. He was the one who decided to cover it up. His plan was to dispose of the body in a way that no one would ever find it and make it look like a kidnapping, but then Anna came up with her idea, one that would serve her own ends.”

  “What were those?” I ask, her tale finally beginning to interest me.

  “She wanted to run away with Owen Doyle, but he had a wife and a child and now a new baby. She had never been able to convince him to get a divorce and leave with her. This plan solved her problems. The wife and baby would be out of the picture.”

  “What about Danny?”

  “I don’t know what they planned to do with him.”

  “This still doesn’t make sense. Anna died when I was ten. Why did they wait that long? Why didn’t they leave right away?”

  “They couldn’t. Owen had to stay through his wife’s trial and play the wronged husband and grieving father.”

  “But why wait ten more years?”

  Gwen stops her sniffing. She comes paddling up through the murk of her misery and briefly resurfaces into her usual crystalline perfection.

  “Anna grew attached to you. She didn’t want to leave you.”

  She gives me time for the full meaning of her revelation to sink in.

  “That’s right,” she says, a note of triumph in her voice. “You killed the one person who loved you.”

  I think back to the day Anna told me she was leaving. She seemed sad when she should have been happy, but I thought she was faking to make me feel better.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t believe any of this.”

  Gwen’s brief recapture of poise melts away.

  She wipes again at her face vigorously this time, almost rubbing it. She’s trying to remove all the makeup. Now she wants to be a clean corpse.

  “You understand he did it to protect me,” she says.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I scoff at her. “Walker Dawes never gave a thought to protecting you. If anything he was protecting himself. You think he wanted to live with the stigma of a boozehound wife who killed her own baby?”

  The idea appeared in my mind uninvited and the words poured out before I could stop them, but after hearing them I realize they could be true.

  Protecting his reputation was more important than holding firm to his principles. I was never his beloved child. I was a random convenient nobody brought in to solve a proble
m. I was a replacement part.

  If it’s true, then Gwen was another victim. If she had been held accountable for what she did, she would have been forced to get help. She might have had a healthy life instead of drinking it away trying to drown the voices in her head that were constantly telling her there was something wrong with her daughter and herself.

  “Do you understand what he did to you?”

  “He was protecting me,” she repeats.

  “Do you understand what he did to Arlene Doyle?”

  She breaks into more sobs.

  “Yes. Oh God. That poor woman. Her family . . .”

  “Why would Anna claim you switched the babies in her note? She was pretty devoted to you. I think she could have forgiven you for the accident, but why would she want to make you sound guilty when it was really Walker who covered it up and destroyed an innocent family?”

  She continues crying. I wonder if this is the first time she’s allowed it, or did she go to her room after Marcella Greger and then her husband presented her with this incomprehensible truth, possibly the same room where she unknowingly killed her child, and wept? Has she done it every day since then?

  I think this is only the beginning of her tears. She has aged centuries in the past few minutes, no longer even looking human to me, more like a part of this ravaged countryside she claims to love so much that’s also been ripped open and robbed.

  “Excuse me, miss.”

  I turn and see Clarence in the doorway.

  “Your pizza’s here.”

  “Great.”

  He notices Gwen’s condition.

  “Is everything all right, ma’am?”

  “Mrs. Dawes is under the weather today,” I answer for her. “She’s going to go to bed.

  “I’ll check on you later,” I tell her.

  I’m done with her for now. She doesn’t need to say anything more. She doesn’t have to explain to me why a descendant of Peter Tully decided to place the blame entirely on her and let her husband off the hook. Anna told me the story many times of Peter’s mother fainting at the execution of her only son and how she poisoned herself and followed him into the grave a month later. In my purse I have the lace handkerchief his mother had painstakingly sewn in the hopes Peter would wear it in the pocket of his wedding suit someday, but had clutched it in his cold dead hand at the age of nineteen instead.