Bittersweet (26 page)

As I strode over the hill into the great meadow, toward Trillium, morning sun warming my limbs, I remembered the tone of Birch’s voice with Galway in the Dining Hall, how he’d ignored CeCe, his own sister, on Winloch Day, and the quick kick he’d deliberately delivered to send Fritz flying.

My feet diverted to Indo’s door.

I checked my watch again. It was 7:30, a perfectly reasonable hour to knock, especially in a state of concern. Indo would be levelheaded, cynical even, about Ev’s departure, and calm my nerves with her reassuring pessimism. I’d laugh when she called Ev a selfish little brat, and nod when she told me I was ten times the girl Ev was.

I knocked twice on the locked door to the kitchen, but the world was still. Fritz’s familiar bark did not come. I tried again, this time on the window, my raps peppering back off the water. Nothing.

There was another door to Indo’s, on the water side, up into her screen porch. I’d noticed that it, too, was lined with locks, but the wood of the doorframe was so punky that a sturdy push might break through. I knocked.

I heard a whimper in response—what I took to be an animal, but I’d been wrong before.

“Indo?”

Fritz raced from the bedroom hallway, through the living room, and onto the porch. He clawed at the screen. He wasn’t being territorial. He wanted me to come inside.

I tested the handle and sized up the frame, then took in the rest of the meadow to see if anyone was watching. With one hefty slam against the door, the rotting wood gave way.

I followed Fritz into the cottage, back past the bathroom, and to the surprisingly elderly bedroom I’d glanced over that first day in Indo’s cottage. As I pushed open the door, I uttered a silent prayer that I wouldn’t find her doing what I’d found Athol and the au pair—or, for that matter, Ev and John—engaged in the last time I’d followed an animal-like sound. I was met with the single gruff woof of one of Indo’s lesser dachshunds. I followed his nudge to the sight of Fritz pawing at a pile of clothing upon the pistachio rug. I stepped closer. Indo’s favorite pup was licking frantically at the pile. And then I
realized, from the graying braid sticking out from below the clothing, that the pile was Indo.

The next moments passed as though I were in a dream. I called Indo’s name. Felt for a pulse. She was breathing, but her eyes remained closed. I called for help, but no one could hear me. I told her I would return, running back the way I’d come. As I vaulted off the porch I started shouting “Help! Help!” and ran in the direction of Trillium—I could only imagine the expression of annoyance I’d meet on Tilde’s face—when Lu and Owen bounded up the steps from Flat Rocks.

“Indo’s unconscious,” I gasped, gesturing toward Clover. “She collapsed.” Owen, resourceful boy that he was, declared, “We’ll call 911.” The three of us ran toward the Dining Hall. At Indo’s cottage I peeled off, calling, “She’s in the bedroom.” They headed toward the only Winloch phone (why hadn’t I thought of that?). Indo’s hand was cold by the time I made it back to her side.

“Indo,” I said, “Indo,” shaking her by the shoulder. Fritz frantically licked her ear, and I tried to gather him into my arms, but he was determined to help her. I inventoried her—intact arms and legs, no blood, no vomit, no urine. After an exhaustive tally, I watched her chest rise and fall, then touched her cheek—it was soft and worn, like a beloved children’s blanket.

Her eyes fluttered open. “Is it raining?” she asked in a dry voice.

I started giggling—hysterical, nervous, relieved. Pulled Fritz away.

“What happened?” She glowered.

“I found you here, on the floor. Lu went to call the ambulance.”

She tried to get up but couldn’t even lift her hand.

“Do you remember what happened?” I asked to keep her speaking. “Why are you here on the floor?”

She shook her head, baffled.

“The EMTs will be here to help you any minute.”

“No,” she said vehemently, “I said I don’t want any goddamn doctors.”

“It’s okay.” I took her hand, as much for my own comfort as for hers.

“What time is it?”

“Eight in the morning.”

“What are you doing here so early?” she asked. Something had shifted in her questions—she was fully present now. She seemed to know who, and where, she was.

“I was having—I was just wondering if you’d seen—” I was going to say “Ev,” but she cut me off with an exasperated growl.

“I can’t hold your hand; you’re going to have to figure it out for yourself.”

I took my hand off hers. I thought she was speaking literally. “I just thought you might have seen—”

“You think I can give you my house if you don’t have proof? Numbers and figures, written down and added up by men. They stole it, they grew it, they live off it and know the truth of where it came from. Blood money, blood money, blood money.” She moaned as if in excruciating pain. “My poor mother! She made me promise—keep it a secret, keep it a secret—but I can’t anymore. I can’t. You can only cut out a tumor for so long before it simply infects the whole body. The time for sentimentality has passed.”

“You should rest,” I said firmly. I’d been wrong; she was not herself.

She lifted her head in a remarkable feat of strength and looked right at me. “Mabel Dagmar, listen clear. I gave you my mother’s diary because it tells the truth. The truth you have to find. If you want to be a Winslow you will have to change what being a Winslow means. You will have to take them all down.”

“The truth?” I asked meekly, as I heard an ambulance whining toward us through the woods.

“Pay attention to the when of it,” she said, her eyes rolling back in her head.

“But I’ve read it over and over,” I whispered, as the siren grew louder. She did not respond. “What am I supposed to be looking for?” I might as well have been asking a wall.

The siren was met with a rising chorus of howling, barking canines drowning out the Winloch silence until the blaring vehicle halted outside. The EMTs descended upon us, shaking the little cottage with their efficiency. They rolled Indo out to the flashing vehicle, and loaded her in as bewildered cousins emerged from their cottages, grasping their robes around themselves. At the far end of the meadow, Birch and Tilde poked their heads out of Trillium.

As the EMTs closed the door of the ambulance and Birch started to run toward us, I put my arm around Lu’s shoulder. Two words ricocheted through my head:
blood
and
money
.

I
took Indo’s dogs back to Bittersweet, tossed their hair-covered pillow onto the floor of the kitchen, and ordered them down. Fritz gratefully licked my hand, as though not a thing had changed. I thought, with a pang of sadness, of how much Indo doted on him. Sure, he’d stayed by her side when she collapsed, but he didn’t seem to care now that she was gone.

Lu knocked sulkily on the door half an hour later. I didn’t tell her Ev was gone, but she seemed to take it as a given; we both knew Ev would have never allowed Indo’s mutts into her domain. I washed my hands and fixed us egg sandwiches and black coffee. Lu slumped dramatically on the porch couch.

“Indo’s going to be okay,” I said, intending to comfort her, instead opening the floodgates. She sobbed, her salty tears falling on the crusts of the leftover toast. “Really,” I said, “you’re a hero; thank you for calling, I didn’t even think of that,” but still she bawled on. I took the plate from her. “We did everything we could,” I said, rethinking all of it, telling myself we really had, when she mumbled something incoherent. I asked her to repeat herself.

“They’re sending me to sleepaway camp,” she cried, “in Maine,” wailing as another round of tears overtook her. She wasn’t crying about Indo after all.

“Why?”

“Because of Owen,” she said, as though it were obvious.

“Start at the beginning.”

She wiped her nose on the back of her arm like a toddler. “Owen and Arlo and Jeffrey took some stuff out to sell in the rowboat that night after we all went skinny-dipping. It wasn’t a big deal—they were just doing it for kind of a joke. And okay, sure, they made some money. So they decided to do it again the next night, just mostly because they were bored. But then Daddy caught them or one of the Canadians complained or something and then Arlo and Jeffrey totally sold Owen out and said it was all his idea, and then Daddy lectured him about how bad it was to sell—”

“Why is it bad?”

“I don’t know, May,” she said, frustrated, “he just didn’t want them to do it anymore—it was demeaning or something. And then he told Owen he had to go home.”

“Demeaning to whom?”

“The Winslows.”

I rolled my eyes. “Because Winslows aren’t in sales?”

“Can you just listen?”

“Sure,” I sighed, equally exasperated. “Why are they sending you to camp?”

“Owen was supposed to go home yesterday. But he didn’t. He stayed. He was just going to stay a few more nights, we found a place for him to hide out, but then you were freaking out about Indo”—she sounded accusatory, as though in calling for help I’d plotted against them—“and we were down on the rocks together but Owen heard you calling for help.” She shook her head. “We shouldn’t have come. They saw us together.” She crumbled.

I felt the worst for Owen; the rest of the parties involved, Lu included, seemed to have forgotten that Indo had collapsed, and that the boy was the one who’d called the ambulance. I thought of his
sweetness that day at Turtle Point, wondered if Lu understood that he loved her, if she believed she loved him back. “When are they sending you away?” I asked.

“Tomorrow,” she said, pouting. “Mum called. It’s all done.”

It was already late July. She’d survive.

She sat up straighter then, and did a frighteningly dead-on impression of Tilde: “Off to camp, Luvinia. It’s time to learn a lesson about consorting with the wrong sort of people.” She slumped back into her normal self. “Unless.” I could feel her eyes on me. “Maybe you could say something?”

“To whom?”

“Daddy’s always talking about what a great example you are. Please, May? Just tell them you think Owen’s a good person. That you’d trust your own daughter with him. Or whatever—you know what to say.”

I thought about it. Lu was a good kid, and I could tell Owen had the purest of intentions. Still, was it wise to butt into Tilde’s affairs? Lu was only fourteen. If her mother wanted to send her to camp, that was her prerogative. But no, I thought, recalling the admiring way Owen had looked at Lu on Turtle Point, I should do what I can for love.

“I don’t know why they care about his family anyway—it’s not like I’m going to marry him,” she added derisively, swiping her arm across her nose again.

“You never know.”

“He’s from the Bronx,” she scoffed. “You think I’d marry someone from the Bronx?” The place name rolled off her tongue with a disdain that didn’t seem the least bit manufactured. As though the word was falling from her mother’s mouth.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t.”

“Please.” Lu pleaded with her puppy dog eyes.

“They’re your parents,” I insisted.

She pulled away from me. “Fine.”

“I’ve got myself to consider.”

“Right, I get it.” She stomped to the door, then turned and looked at me over her shoulder. “Like what the hell you’re going to do once I tell them Ev’s gone?”

“Do you know where she is?” I asked, my voice shaking involuntarily.

She had the upper hand. She stood over me, looking just like Tilde. “How long do you think they’ll let you stay if she’s not here to look after?”

I watched Lu run around the bend toward Trillium. I bolted the door. I didn’t need some privileged child marching back into my home and threatening me for doing what was right. If she was going to tell, she was going to tell—there was nothing I could do about it.

I knew I should turn to Kitty’s journal—Indo had been vehement, hadn’t she?—but already I doubted my memory, and Indo’s sanity. Blood money. That was what I was supposed to be looking for. But the last forty-eight hours seemed ridiculous enough without bringing some overwrought family secret into the mix. What I needed was a conversation with Galway. He would set me straight. I’d quell the butterflies in my stomach with a walk to the Dining Hall and telephone him, girl on the other end of the line be damned.

I grabbed an apple and water bottle from the kitchen,
Paradise Lost
and a sweatshirt from my bedroom, and put them into a canvas bag I plucked from the peg on the porch. I placed my hand on the front door but held back, deciding, at the last minute, to take Kitty’s journal from its spot under the bathroom sink. I unearthed the journal from its hiding place and wrapped it inside my sweatshirt, shoving the bundle into the bottom of the bag. I remembered the pilfered family tree and added it, then a beach towel, filling the stained tote that had once carried Antonia’s library books and potato chips to happier picnics on happier days. Perhaps I’d find a peaceful spot in the world and have a moment of clarity.

Just then, there was a banging. Loud and insistent. I emerged from the bathroom to discover Birch’s face against the screen, his fist pounding at the door that separated us.

I made an effort to say something welcoming, but I was drowned out by the sound of his fist and a growl rising out of Birch’s lips. “Open this goddamn door right fucking now, you—”

“Birch!”

He stopped short at the sound of his name, called from behind. Over his shoulder I saw Tilde and Lu. They were panting, as though they had run to catch up. Tilde’s hand was clamped tightly around Lu’s wrist. The girl was crying.

“Birch, dear,” Tilde commanded again, as she might one of her dogs. The effect of her voice on the man was profound. He moved away from the door, down the steps. I was frozen, not allowing myself to think what might have happened had the bolt been unlatched, or Tilde not been on his tail.