The Secrets She Carried (39 page)

She sees me, I know, in all this moonlight. We cannot make out each other’s eyes, but the effect is the same, an instant of loathing so pure it feels like a live thing crackling across all that dark distance. It’s me who looks away first, me who hurries off to the shed with my basket, pretending I’ve imagined it all.

The woodshed is ancient, windowless and so rickety it sags on its dry-stone foundation. Henry talks about knocking it down and putting up a new one, but there’s always something else to do. For now it keeps the wood dry, but only just.

A plank of oak bars the door. I shove my basket into the crook of my arm and wrestle the thing out of its rusted iron brackets. I’m almost inside when I hear something, a sound that might be wind in the trees or might be voices. I slip around the side. There’s no one there, just an old tin bucket and a pile of filthy rags. I leave them for now, too cold and too mindful of Jemmy to think of putting them away.

But my legs won’t move. I can’t shake the feeling that someone has been there, is still there. I listen to the quiet beneath the wind, an uneasy kind of quiet, the sound of bodies gone still, breaths being held. The hair on my neck bristles. More silliness, I tell myself as I turn back to the shed and step inside.

The moon spilling through the open door is all the light I have as I make my way to the pile of seasoned firewood Henry has put by for the winter. I have just picked up the first log when the wind slams the door and darkness swallows me. Before I can move, I hear the plank drop into its brackets, a telling thud that makes my blood run cold. I grope my way back to the door, already knowing I will find it bolted from the outside. I call out but there’s no answer, just the fading scrape of feet, and then silence.

It’s several minutes before I catch the first whiff of smoke, before
my heart leaps into my throat and I realize what’s happening. I grope at the door, but there is no handle, nothing at all to grab hold of. I throw my weight against the wood, screaming in a voice that isn’t mine, a voice made wild by rage and panic. No one comes.

I will myself to go still, to get my bearings. Moonlight leaks through the chinks in the walls, turning the air gray in places. For the first time, I see the fingers of smoke curling between the bone-dry boards and remember the pail and the rags, and I know sickeningly why they were there. I wonder if Susanne is still watching from her window. And I wonder where Maggie is.

It’s a hideous thought, but there’s no time to complete it. There is the sudden, oily stench of kerosene, then a roaring rush of wind as the back wall goes up. The flames spread like liquid, lapping up the tinder-dry walls and a winter’s worth of firewood. The air boils around me, hot and thick as tar. When the coughing starts, it nearly drives me to my knees. I try again to call for help, but I realize, very soon, that I must choose. Breathe or scream. The smoke is too thick now to do both.

Behind me, I hear the pop of wood knots as they catch and explode, spewing sparks into the searing air. There is a peculiar kind of wind in the tiny space, a storm of smoke and ash, and my mind flashes back to fist-thumping sermons about fire and brimstone and the wages of sin.

My eyes are streaming now, my face running with tears and sweat and mucous. There is a hideous rasp in my ears. It takes a moment to realize it’s the sound of my own breath, a wet grinding that fills me with terror. I drag my scarf down over my mouth and nose, but it does no good. I can see a little, but only because the flames are raging on three sides now, splashing my shadow against the door in a grotesque sort of dance. I hurl myself at it, clawing at the wood until I feel splinters drive beneath my nails. The door holds. There is nowhere to go.

When my legs buckle, I go down like a sack of corn. I don’t get up again. There’s no reason to get up. How long, I wonder? How much will I feel—and for how long?

I need to pray. But I can’t pray. I can’t think. There’s something I need to remember, something I need to do. I reach for the thought, but it slips away, lost in the ashy air. I’ve stopped coughing, or if I haven’t, I can no longer hear it. The sounds around me begin to grow faint, the smoke like a blanket, curling tighter and tighter. There isn’t much time now, I know. I think of Henry and Maggie and Mama. Pray, I tell myself. Pray now, before it’s too late. Instead, I wonder who will comfort my poor boy when he wakes up alone in the dark.

T
he smoke has already taken me by the time Henry arrives.

I feel no pain, only a queer sense of detachment from my arms and legs, as Henry yanks me out into the cold, clear night. His hands are on me, on my face, in my hair, his lips moving silently, prayerfully, urging me back to him. But I am gone, capable now only of watching his misery, as if I am caught in a dream from which I cannot seem to wake.

Finally, he seems to understand. It is a terrible moment. I long to touch his shoulder, his face, to comfort him, but that is no longer possible. He is as out of reach for me as I am for him. How cruel it seems to me in that instant, that when the body dies, the heart must live on, that in that quick and quiet snuffing of our flesh, love turns to loss, and joy to ache, unfinished things we must carry through our separate eternities.

Henry’s cheeks are soot streaked and shiny with tears as he carries me to the barn and locks me inside. His clothes are scorched, his hands and face already blistered. By the time the police arrive, the fire has begun to burn itself out; only a heap of smoldering wood remains, coughing occasional showers of spark up into the breeze. He’s numb as he answers their questions, his eyes hollow as they continually
shift back to the barn, where he has left me cocooned in an old wool blanket.

When they leave he goes to the cottage to check on Jemmy, asleep like an angel in the narrow bed we used to share. He tucks the poor little thing up in a blanket and scoops him onto his shoulder, then carries him downstairs and across the lawn. Everything in me rails when I see what he means to do. I don’t want my boy in that house, or anywhere near that woman, but he cannot hear me, and so up the stairs he goes. Maggie doesn’t stir when he pulls back the covers and slips him in beside her. I wonder what she will think when she wakes to find Jemmy beside her—and what Susanne will think.

He comes back to the barn then and locks himself in with me. He wipes the soot from my face and touches his lips to mine, whispering all the while that he is sorry, so very, very sorry. I almost believe I can smell the smoke clinging to his clothes as he draws up a chair and drops down beside me. I cannot, of course; I am beyond such things, but there is some small measure of comfort in feeling connected, even by this tenuous thread.

He’s still at my side when the sun comes up.

He has watched over me through the night, while I have watched over him. I have never put much stock in the idea of messages from the beyond, but now I find myself praying that there was at least some tiny shred of truth in all the charlatans back home, with their candles and their crystal balls. In the only way I know how, I beg him, and the angels, too, to watch over my boy, to keep him safe from whoever bolted that shed and struck the match, to please, please, send him to Mama.

B
ad news always did travel fast in Gavin.

There’s an article in the paper the next morning, but I am not mentioned. No one knows I was inside, and Henry does not tell. I am glad he doesn’t. No good can come from the questions that would arise. I am gone, and nothing will change it.

Hollis Snipes has already seen the paper when Henry walks into his hardware store to buy a load of pine. Hollis guesses he means to put up a new shed, and Henry doesn’t tell him any different as they load the boards into the back of the old truck. He waits ’til the sun is down and the hands have all gone home for the day before locking himself in with me again and setting to work.

He measures and saws and hammers all night, sanding and fussing over the join work like he’s building a bed instead of a box to bury me in. His hands are bandaged now, but he seems not to feel his burns as he works. When he’s finished, he lines the inside with the quilt from our bed and shuts me up inside.

He sleeps for an hour or two then, until the sun comes up, his backside on a stack of old wood crates, his head on the lid of my box. It’s the first sleep he’s had in two days. He looks awful when he finally wakes up. His face is ashen, his eyes red rimmed with smoke and
sorrow, smudged with the blue-gray shadows only grief leaves behind. At the cottage he changes clothes and downs a cup of coffee. Maggie doesn’t ask any questions, just gulps noisily and blinks two big fat tears when he asks her to look after Jemmy a while longer. She knows all too well what has happened and what her father has been about.

He drives me to the top of the ridge then—to our place. It takes every ounce of strength he has left to dig that hole and get me in it. He’s on his third shovelful of dirt when he begins to sob in earnest, the reality of the deed striking full force as the top of the box begins to vanish into the earth. It’s a terrible sound, like a wounded animal, or a very young child, and I’d give anything then to touch his face once more, to say I’m sorry for leaving him.

He stays there on his knees until he’s all cried out and his lips are blue with cold, one hand clutching his book of poems, the other resting on the fresh mound of earth that covers me. I can feel the warmth of his fingers leeching through the soil, way down into my bones, but I want him to go now. He needs warmth and food and sleep. There’s nothing more to be done for me.

Leslie

L
eslie flipped over the last page and closed her eyes, her throat scorched with unshed tears. She had no idea what time it was; she hadn’t been out of the house in two days, unable to step away from the pages Jay had left on her doorstep.

She saw now why he’d earned the moniker Master of Heartbreak. He had done an amazing thing, capturing both the joy and the sorrow of Henry and Adele’s love, page after page of emotions so raw they stung, spun out in a voice that felt like memory. She had devoured it all greedily: the grief of a girl longing for home, the awakening of a young woman’s heart, the joy and shame of a love that should not be, and finally, a life cut tragically short.

Leslie shivered as she recalled the fire chapter. A young mother deliberately murdered, and in such a hideous way—it was inconceivable. But fires didn’t start out of nowhere, and doors didn’t bolt themselves. Her mind and stomach were churning again. In her mind she could feel the splinters wedging beneath her own nails, taste the smoke at the back of her throat.

And yet he’d never so much as hinted that he thought Adele’s death might have been anything other than an accident. In fact, he’d gone to great lengths to dissuade her from that notion. When had he
changed his mind? He’d mentioned once that Maggie had a secret that tormented her in her last days. He also said he was glad she’d never told him what it was. She had asked him why but hadn’t given his response much thought. Now, suddenly, it made her uneasy.