Aurora 06 - A Fool And His Honey (25 page)

I got through the account of what had happened, yet again.

I could tell the sheriff had a hard time believing I’d started Margaret down the stairs. I was a librarian, for God’s sake. I reached up and touched the dreadful bruise and swelling on my forehead. I’d gotten a good look in the Granberrys’ bathroom mirror. Even touching as delicately as possible, my head rang with pain.

“You need to get checked out at the hospital,” the sheriff said. He was a big man, wide faced and heavy.

“After I see Martin,” I said, and didn’t speak again until we were there.

“I just want you to know, ma’am, that the deputy that questioned the Granberrys last night. . .

well, he won’t go without an official reprimand.”

I shrugged. It didn’t matter anymore.

Somehow I was in a wheelchair going down corridors freshly painted in a glossy beige. The rubberized flooring was a dark chocolate brown. The place smelled like a sure-enough hospital, the sharp odors of disinfectants and medicine and the bland smell of hospital food vying for supremacy.

Through the doors marked ICU we went, the nurse pushing me not offering any comment no matter how many questions I asked her. The tiny ICU unit had room for six patients, and Martin and Karl were the only two.

Cindy was in Martin’s glass-sided room, and she stepped out when she saw me coming. She started to say something to me and then thought better of it. Her eyes were red.

The nurse wheeled me right up to Martin’s bed. I looked at him in horror. His face had lost all its normal color, and everything that could be hooked up to a tube was. He looked twenty years older.

“He hasn’t said much,” the young man in the shadows of the room told me, and I saw that it was Barrett.

I knew then that Martin was going to die.

“Sweetheart,” I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking. “I’m here.” I stood and took his hand.

His eyes flickered open. He took in the bruise. “You got hurt,” he said faintly. “That’s why you didn’t come.”

“Yes.”

“I knew it.”

“Miss me?” I said, trying to smile, having no idea what to say.

“Oh, yes,” he breathed, almost smiling.

“I missed you, too,” I said, choking on the words. My eyes brimmed and welled over. I kissed him on his cheek, and wished with all my heart I was alone with him. But I couldn’t tell his son to leave.

That meant Barrett was there when Martin gave a rattling breath five minutes later and alarms went off, and Barrett was there when the technicians hustled us out in the hall and worked over my husband, and Barrett was there when the old doctor came out minutes later to tell me that my husband had died.

* * *

Regina had been deprived of both of the men she’d cared for; I’m not going to assume she loved them. Her mother had returned and promised to help her raise the baby, whom Barby claimed was the spitting image of a Bartell. I never held Hay-den in my arms again. Somehow I never wanted to.

Regina faced only nominal charges in the death of Margaret Granberry, since Luke himself attested they had held Regina and me prisoner. Without Margaret, Luke seemed to lose all his resolve, to become indifferent to his own life. But he recovered from his bullet wound to face three charges of kidnapping (Regina, Hayden, and me), two counts of murder (Craig and Rory), one count of assault with a deadly weapon (Karl). Since Luke pled guilty, I didn’t have to return to Corinth for the trial.

I would never go there again.

Two weeks after Craig’s funeral, Craig’s older brother Dylan charged Regina with being an unfit mother, citing her plan to sell her baby to the Granberrys. He and his wife Shondra wanted to raise Hayden along with their little girl.

But Regina and Barby together had too much Bartell determination for the judge. He ruled the baby should stay with his mother, but the judge did order Regina to take parenting classes.

She met an older man at the first session, a divorced thirty-year-old ordered to take the class after he’d slapped his child in a grocery store, and the next thing I knew, they were married.

Regina seemed to slip into marriage easily, not seeing it as so different from any other state of being.

* * *

Cindy had hinted that there was room in Martin’s parents’ plot, and Barby had done more than hint. But I can be mighty deaf when I feel like it. It was none of Cindy’s business; ex was ex.

And Barby had never been a favorite of mine.

Poor Mother. She had to try to tone down her joy at her husband John’s complete recovery from his heart attack, and he was twenty years older than Martin. I saw her efforts and pitied her in a remote way.

Poor John stood by the graveside trying not to look guilty. John was a rock to me, and his children, too. I’d always resented them a little, maybe, having been the sole child of my mother until she remarried, but his two sons and their wives were so kind and tactful that my petty irritation seeped away.

I was still in the stunned shell of numbness when the letter came. I’d stopped at the mailbox on my way back from work, and I shuffled through its contents indifferently. Bills, catalogs, occupant mail. But there was one personal letter, hand-written, no return address.

I slit it open when I got into the house.

I glanced at the signature. It was from Luke Granberry.

I dropped it as if it were a loathsome spider. But seconds later, I picked it back up.

Dear Mrs. Bartell,

I know you will never forgive me for what I have done but I wanted you to know why I even
thought of it.

Margaret and I moved to Corinth because I had discovered my mother lived there. At least
for a while.

I think Margaret told you I was adopted. I was lucky to be adopted by wonderful people. Not
only loving, but rich. My dad had made a lot of money in the tire business.

Like most adopted children, I always wondered who my real mother and father were. I didn’t
want to ask my mom and dad. I knew it would upset them. But I always felt that they knew my
mother’s name, that they had met her at the unwed mothers’ home, from something Dad let fall
once. After I married Margaret, she became as determined as I was to find out, and she was a lot
smarter than me at thinking of ways to do it. When my mother died, Margaret went through all
her papers, thinking she might find some trace, and sure enough she found a private detective’s
report on a Barbara Bartell Lampton. My mom had kept track of my birth mother that way. Why,
I don’t know. I guess she wanted to know how Barbara turned out. When Margaret read the old
story about Barby, the story about my mother getting thrown out of her stepfather’s church
because of an illegitimate pregnancy, Margaret knew she’d found my birth mother.

From the reports, we found out that Barbara didn’t live in Corinth anymore, but my sister
Regina did. So we bought the farm next to the one where Regina was living and set out to make
friends with her. We’d always wanted a baby, and when we saw what a mess Regina was likely
to make of her pregnancy, we felt like we had to take a hand. It seemed just exactly right since
Margaret and I had tried so hard for so long. If we couldn’t have one of our own, one that was
partly ours by blood was next best. Margaret never got over that woman in our building thinking
we would like to have her baby. She said she told you that story, about the woman leaving her
baby at our door.

We did everything for Regina without telling her I was her brother. We made her go for her
checkups. We paid for some of her groceries, so she’d eat the right food. We even went through
Lamaze, hoping she’d let us be there at the birth, but she didn’t want us there. She’d rather have
those two thugs there. At least she was sure one of them was the father of the child.

We just wanted the baby. We couldn’t kill Regina when it would
have been so easy to. No one would have known. But she is my sister, and I just couldn’t. We
believed her that night when she told us you and your husband had the baby. Margaret never
could have imagined that Regina would leave her baby, even for a moment, under a bed.

What I want to let you know is, we never planned for any of this to happen when we first
found out who my mother is. I wanted to know that, and I wanted a child of my own and
Margaret’s. I had a right to those things. I still think so. If Craig and Rory had just stayed out of
it, and I had been able to deal with Regina on my own, it would have worked out, since she’s my
sister.

I’m sorry.

Luke Granberry

I looked at this letter for a long time after I read it. I wondered if Regina and Barby needed to know about Luke. I decided that wasn’t my responsibility.

I went outside into the cold dry air with a match from the box on the mantelpiece. I hadn’t had the spirit to build a fire all winter, from the wood Darius Quattermain had strewn around the yard, the wood that Martin and I had gathered up and stacked ... I headed my thoughts off before I could tear up. I struck the match against a brick, and it ignited beautifully. I set the letter on fire, and when I could no longer hold it I dropped it into an empty flowerpot I’d never put away in the toolshed.

I thought about Darius again, though, about his singing and dancing in the chilly wind. I thought about the drug he’d been slipped, and about Rory’s unexpected sleeping jag after the woman at the liquor store had bought them beers in exchange for their help in getting her car out of a trough.

I grabbed my keys and drove back into town. Mostly these days I just drove to work and back, and the spontaneous errand felt very odd.

I knocked on the Lowrys’ door ten minutes later. As I’d hoped, Catledge hadn’t gotten home yet. Ellen was by herself.

“Come in,” she said instantly, all graciousness. “How’ve you been doing?” Everyone said that now. As if I’d tell them.

I stepped in, sure I was about to ruin my welcome for good, not caring. “You were the one doing it,” I said without preamble. “You put the pills in Mr. Quattermain’s bottle, and you drugged the beer you gave Rory Brown.”

“Rory Brown?” Ellen’s smooth brow wrinkled in puzzlement. “Oh, was he the scruffy blond boy at the liquor store?”

“Yes. He described you to me, and I remembered you coming in the garage door with that bottle of wine. You weren’t acting like yourself.”

“That’s funny,” Ellen said coolly. “I thought I was acting very much like myself.”

“Are you that cruel?”

“For a time, I was.”

I stared at her with something like hatred. Who knew how things would have turned out if Rory hadn’t been drugged?

“You’re pathetic,” I said. It was the worst thing I could think of to say.

“Yes, I am. I found all those pills in my son’s room this summer. I confiscated them. Of course, I should have flushed them down the toilet, but for some reason I didn’t. Catledge and I checked Tally into a drug rehabilitation program. You are the only person in this town who knows where he really is.”

I took a deep breath, let it out. Some of the rage seeped out with it.

“I couldn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t talk to Catledge about it, he absolutely refused. The program Tally was in, the head therapist said it was important he not get any visitors for a while so he could concentrate on the agenda. Catledge didn’t want me to work.” She threw her hands up in the air. See how the world had frustrated her?

“Don’t give me that,” I said. My tone wasn’t pleasant. “You could have worked anyway, no matter what Catledge said. You could have flown to wherever your son is and told them you were paying for his stay and by God you wanted to see him. You could have taken space heaters to poor old people. Instead, you slipped drugs to the unwary.”

Ellen looked down at me coldly. “I won’t do it again,” she said. “For one thing, I’m out of pills. But I’ve got to say, I kind of enjoyed it.” She gestured toward the door and I left.

Driving home tired me out. So many things seemed to tire me these days. I spent a lot of time watching television in bed, which had involved buying another television, getting it installed in a special stand up in our bedroom, and paying a higher cable bill. Reading didn’t seem as interesting to me . . . Nothing did.

Again, I pulled in the driveway and got out, looking around me at the familiar landscape.

The wind had picked up again, and as I watched it snatched up the ashes of Luke Granberry’s letter and began to scatter them from the flowerpot. I looked at the weather vane Martin had installed on the garage roof and saw that the wind was blowing the ashes west. Toward the cemetery.