One of Us (26 page)

twenty-five

SCARLET

G
WEN 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 problem. 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.

In Anna’s mind Walker’s cruelty was to be expected; he could be excused, but not a mother who didn’t know her own child.

I INTRODUCE MYSELF BUT
feel it’s unnecessary. He knows who I am, and he’s known I’d eventually show up on his doorstep someday. He’s been expecting me for thirty-eight years.

Fear flickers through his eyes, but then I almost sense some relief on his part. Looking around at the dank, dark, dirty house, I can tell this is a man who stopped living a long time ago. He did an unforgivable thing with the intention of freeing himself, but ended up trapping himself in a tomb of his own filth instead.

“Dad,” I say with a smile. “We need to talk.”

I walk past him while handing him the copy of Anna’s letter that I took from Marcella’s house. I took the original from her lockbox, too.

He doesn’t say anything at first. He’s absorbed in the piece of paper.
His lips move as he reads its contents.

I can’t believe Danny and I are descended from him. We must get our brains from Mom, but hers are mush.

I catch sight of my reflection in a mirror hanging on a wall the color of tobacco-stained teeth.

I don’t look like a Molly. It’s a sweet name. A cute name. I’m definitely a Scarlet. But Molly should have been my name and this might have been my house. My life would have been vastly different from the one of wealth and privilege I had with the Daweses, but if I never knew that life, I couldn’t miss it.

Lost Creek isn’t so bad. Chappy’s makes a good burger. The Kelly girl found great red shoes somewhere. Danny survived and made a success of himself.

Who am I kidding? Being poor sucks. Anna understood that. Anna saved me. Anna put me in the castle.

“It’s a lie,” Owen announces.

This man is going to be one big disappointment after another.

“Come on, Dad. Let’s not go there. I know it’s the truth. I’ve had a nice long talk with Gwen. Danny confirmed it, too.”

“How would Danny know?”

“I forgot to ask at the time, but Danny is much too levelheaded to make up something like this or to believe it if he didn’t have irrefutable evidence. I suppose that’s why I didn’t doubt him.”

“Does Tommy know?”

“Tommy who?”

His house is disgusting. He never washes a dish or does a load of laundry or even throws out a beer can, but he has a state-of-the-art, five-foot-long plasma TV mounted on his wall.

He notices the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and the six-pack of Coke I brought with me. The bourbon has been heavily laced with Gwen’s sleeping pills.

I glance upstairs.

“Are the rooms up there a little less disgusting?”

“Danny’s old room hasn’t been touched in years.”

“Grab a couple glasses and let’s go.”

He and his beer gut roll into the kitchen and come back out with the glasses followed by the rest of him.

I follow him up the stairs and regret putting myself downwind of him. He reeks of sweat and liquor. I give Gwen credit. She keeps her boozing as hidden as possible. She always smells good, but there’s no perfume and mouthwash that can cover up slurred speech and hand tremors.