The Four Ms. Bradwells (46 page)

“I think Mother wanted to make sure Margaret could show she didn’t know what was in the note until after Mother died,” Ginger quietly agrees with Mia. “To protect her friend.”

I nod. They probably can’t see me nodding. “That makes sense,” I say.

Laney floats on her back in the water. Her face and her breasts break the surface. But the rest of her is submerged. Mia paddles over to the wooden post anchoring the pier. She puts a hand up on the wood slats above her so she no longer has to tread water. The skin of her arm is pale in the moonlight just breaking through the clouds now. Pale as it was thirty years ago when we went skinny-dipping with the guys.

How stupid I’d been back then. I hadn’t given a thought to how bad it would look for Laney and me should Trey or Frank mention our skinny-dipping to anyone at Tyler & McCoy. The firm she was going to work for and the firm I meant to join after my clerkship. I’d been all tied
up in my jealousy of Mia. Trying to find a way to turn Beau’s attention from her to me.

“If Margaret didn’t know what was in the envelope,” I say, thinking it through, “then how would she know when ‘the time’ had come? We’re saying Faith left the note to … to protect anyone else who might be accused of”—I hesitate, but then I say—“of killing Trey, right? But how does Margaret know that’s what it’s for?”

If Ginger is half as cold as I am she doesn’t show it as she dips back in the water to clear her hair from her face. It doesn’t float out across the water like fine seaweed as it did when we were young. I was so surprised the first time I’d seen her after she cut it. She’s pretty by any measure. But it was all that hair that turned men’s heads. She’d only shrugged, though, and said she’d needed a change. It was Laney who told me, and years later, too, that Ginger had donated it to make a wig for a child who was as bald as Zack had been when he died. It’s the side of herself I think Ginger least understands. The place her poetry comes from. It’s what keeps us loving her. Will always keep us loving her despite the total pain in the ass she sometimes is.

“Margaret knows the same way we would know,” Ginger says. “Because she was Mother’s best friend. It isn’t exactly that she knows at the time so much as that, when she receives the envelope, she realizes what maybe she’s always known about her friend but hasn’t been quite able to piece together.”

“Or maybe hasn’t wanted to,” Mia says.

“But Aunt Margaret is dead now, too,” Ginger says. “If she was an accessory after the fact, it’s too late to hang her for that now. So I can just burn it?”

I imagine the headline:
ADVOCATE FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS INVOLVED IN BIZARRE SEX-RELATED MURDER
. I think of the irony of this. After years of resisting Faith, Ginger now wants to protect her mother’s reputation. But it’s not that simple. In protecting her mother’s reputation she protects her own.

“If the note says anything about this, Ginge,” Mia says, “it could save Betts’s chance of the Court.”

“If the note says anything that will destroy Faith’s reputation,” I say, “it will cast a pall on so much of the work she’s done. Not that it should. Not that this has anything to do with that. But it will.”

“She’ll be tried in the press,” Laney says, “and everything she did’ll be dragged out and reconsidered, found flawed.”

“It will set us back,” I say.

“By ‘us’ you mean women in general?” Mia says. “Not us in particular? But
you
in particular, Betts,
Laney
in particular—that’s progress, too.”

“Progress that maybe happens if the explanation for Trey’s death doesn’t involve you loading up a rifle with bullets, Betts,” Laney says. “Mia is right. We need to clear your name.”

“Loading a
shotgun
with bullets,” Mia says. “A twelve-gauge. The kind Hemingway used to kill himself.”

“Shells,” Ginger says. “You don’t load a shotgun with bullets. You load it with shells.”

“It doesn’t save my appointment,” I say. “An explanation that involves me knowing facts I withheld?”

“Suspicions,” Laney insists.

“The
fact
that Faith might have had a motive for killing Trey,” I say.

“A motive for the
accidental
death of Trey Humphrey?” Ginger says. “No one thought it was anything but an accident.”

“No one but me,” I say.

“Shit, I’m freezing,” Laney says.

“Laney said ‘shit’?” Ginger says.

“Laney said ‘shit,’ ” Mia confirms.

“Shit, it must be time to get out, then,” Ginger says.

We climb from the water. Wrap ourselves in the towels. Stand there for a moment trying to get warm.

“Are you really that smart, Betts?” Mia asks. Her face in the moonlight looks almost young.

I look up to see the moon through a thin gauze of cloud now. Its light sifting through.

“Did you really sort this all out so quickly back then?” Mia insists. “Trey shows up dead and you deduce in the space of the few chaotic hours we had between when he was found and when we left that it wasn’t an accident? That a woman you’d spent the last three years aspiring to be like did something you could never in a million years have imagined her doing?”

The question stops me. I want to say that of course I knew. But did I? How could I have put that all together so quickly when I still couldn’t believe
that Trey raped Laney. When I was still thinking Ginger’s story about Trey and her might just be Ginger trying to hold everyone’s attention, not wanting to share even such an awful spotlight?

“The thing is, y’all, we just need to tell whatever truth we know
now
,” Laney says. She speaks so softly that we all step toward her. Our heads bend together like football players waiting for the quarterback to call the play. “I need to do that,” she says. “I need to say ‘This is what happened to me.’ I need it for myself and I need it for Gemmy. I need to reclaim my … my certainty about who I am.” She pulls her towel more tightly. “If it costs me the election, then it costs me the election. I don’t want to feel shamed anymore.”

I look to the horizon. Definitely lightening now. I think of Matka. Wonder how it would feel not to be ashamed anymore.

“I don’t think the question is what we say about Faith or even about Trey,” Laney says. “I think the question is what we say about our own selves.”

Again I think of my mom. It’s the way she lived her life. She went from being a doctor in her country to cleaning toilets to put me through school. Living in that crappy little apartment. But she never doubted her choices. She is the kind of woman I should aspire to be. She even more than Faith. All that stuff I was saying to the Judiciary Committee about how great Matka was. The Widow Zhukovski stories Mia urged me to tell. I thought I was just saying all that because it sounded good. But it turns out to be true.

“The only thing is, I don’t want to be the one to have to say it,” Laney says. “I just want to have it be done. It’s not even that I’m a coward, although I expect I am. It’s just that I’m afraid I’ll do it poorly. It’s important that it be said well, and I don’t know that I can.”

I shiver in the cold silence. We all do.

“I can do it, Lane,” Ginger whispers. “I’d like to do it.”

Let me do this for you, this one small thing
.

“Call it an homage to my mother,” she says.

Laney balks. She didn’t mean to foist this off on anyone else. She was just talking about how she
feels
.

“It will keep you and Betts out of the limelight,” Ginger says, “and it doesn’t really matter to my life. I’m not anyone.”

I want to object. But the objection that comes to mind is that she is the daughter of Faith Cook Conrad. Which would only make her feel
worse. She is the daughter of Faith Cook Conrad with no accomplishment to claim as her own.

“The weird thing is that if Mother had been raped, she would have endured all the humiliation in the world to change things,” Ginger says, “but she wouldn’t put us through shit.”

She’s more surprised than any of us at the truth of this.

“We wouldn’t put Izzy or Annie or Gem through anything either,” I say.

“Which is why we have to speak up now,” Ginger says. “If change is needed and it doesn’t start with us, then where the hell does it start?”

“If it doesn’t
continue
with us,” I say.

“If it doesn’t continue with us,” Ginger agrees.

A shock of sunlight bruises the horizon then, leaking mauve through the thinning clouds.

“Carpe diem,”
I say. “Seize the day.”

“Hey,
I’m
Ms. Cicero-Bradwell,” Laney says with a raised finger cross to me. She smiles in a way that (I know when I see it) I haven’t seen since we left the Hart Building. “And
pluck
the day is the more precise translation, actually.”

Mia

THE CHAWTERLEY PIER, COOK ISLAND
MONDAY, OCTOBER 11

G
INGER AND
I stand and watch for a moment as Laney and Betts pad up the pier. It strikes me that I feel comfortable in my nakedness despite the fact that I’m no taller and certainly no thinner than I’ve ever been. I’m cold as hell, but comfortable.

“You think either of them stands a chance no matter what I tell the press?” Ginger asks.

I look to the horizon, to the first edge of sun smearing an intense red across a friendly horizon of clouds, like lamplight between sill and shade. That this day has finally come seems no more real than the sunrise looks.

“An homage to your mom?” I ask. “The way your mom would have done it?”

Ginger looks at me then. She smiles ever so slightly, her wide lips pressed together with the barest upturn at the edges. She lifts her arm and touches the back of her neck. I wonder if she’s conscious of the gesture, if she is surprised her fair trade, eco-conscious, fruit of the gods hair clip isn’t there any more than her long hair is. I wonder where the child she gave her hair to is today. Or children, I suppose; all that taffy apple hair would have made wigs enough for a few children.

“I don’t suppose Mother ever told you she kept that African women article all these years, did she?” she says.

I shake my head. “I’d probably still be a lousy, unhappy, somewhat more well-to-do lawyer if not for your mom.”

“I should have told you,” she says.

As I’m considering this, imagining how much confidence it would
have given me to know Faith framed that article, she asks, “Are you happy, Mi?”

I say, “Instead I’m a lousy, unhappy,
penniless and unemployed
journalist. Thanks, Faith!”

Ginger watches the sunrise for a moment. How long does it take to rise at this latitude, this time of the year, in this atmosphere?

“Seriously,” she says. “Being a journalist, I mean.”

I look out at the sea, thinking of the many places I’ve listened to water lap against shore, how different the backdrops to it are and yet there is some consistency to the water itself, something that doesn’t ever really change.

“I like to write,” I say. “I feel like I …”

Contribute, I guess is the word, but I don’t say it.

“Are you happy being a poet?” I ask.

“ ‘There is no happiness like mine. / I have been eating poetry.’ ”

“Seriously,” I say.

Her hand again goes to the back of her neck, where her hair is plastered flat. “I’m … less sad when I write.” She pauses, considering what she has just said, perhaps recognizing only now that she is sad, that she has carried around a deep sadness for as long as I have known her.

“I figure I have to tell the whole truth,” she says.

She might be talking about the poetry she writes—telling all the truth, but telling it slant, like Dickinson suggests—but I don’t think she is.

“Everything?” I say.

“About me and Trey, too. But I have to explain it to Annie first.”

We both look to Laney and Betts making their way up the stone path toward the warmth inside the house.

“How do I explain it to Annie, Mi?” she says.

We stand watching as a boat heads out from Max’s pier, the ferry taking him across to collect the journalists again, as he’d promised; Max is a man of his word. I don’t have an answer for her. I don’t think she expects one.

“I’d like to stand beside you when you speak to the press, Ginge,” I say.

“I can do that part. No point in more than one of us exposing ourselves.” She smiles slightly, adjusting the hand that holds her towel. “No pun intended.”

“I’d like to,” I say. “I have my own penance to pay.” I wasn’t the blogger,
but I may as well have been. “I thought I loved him. Doug Pemberley. I thought he loved me.” I reached out and lifted her wet hair from her neck. “I wasn’t the one who was raped, but somehow it’s always felt like I was violated back then, too.”

“We all were, weren’t we?” Ginger says. “Yes, we all were.”

She’s right, of course. We were all different people when we got back into Mrs. Z’s dented-bumper Ford at the yacht club than we had been when we’d arrived.

“I’d like to stand beside you, Ginge,” I repeat. “Everything is easier with a friend.”

Ginger doesn’t agree, but she doesn’t object again either. She says, “I warned you not to let Doug Pemberley sing to you, you know.” Then, “I’m thinking right here. What do you think?”