A Sound Among the Trees (17 page)

As she knelt to clean the stain, she noticed the pictures on the wall were crooked, as if Adelaide had bumped them all when she fell. All except Susannah’s. She hadn’t bumped up against Susannah’s …

Marielle finished and left the cleaner by the stairs to put away later. She righted all the portraits as she took the stairs, stopping at Susannah’s for just a moment. She pictured the photographer asking Susannah and Annabel to stand like statues as he readied his camera. Susannah’s hands were folded in her lap, empty, curled into each other. Her head was turned and tipped, just a bit, to perhaps better catch the light. The sepia tones gave only hints of the
color of Susannah’s eyes, not dark like brown. Blue, maybe. Or gray. A small upturn in her closed mouth suggested she might’ve smiled had she been given the freedom to. Her full skirt spilled into the photo like a bell made of foam. Annabel, in white, stood at her side, her countenance like her mother’s—obliged into solemnity by an outside force.

Marielle reached out to touch Susannah’s face, the size of a half-dollar under the glass …

A low rumble of thunder sounded and she slowly withdrew her hand.

She turned and continued up the stairs, aware she was walking into Susannah’s old bedroom to shower and put on dry clothes.

An hour later, Marielle sat in the family room, the former drawing room, with the TV on low for company. A plate with a few tangled coils of linguini sat on the coffee table in front of her. Her cell phone was next to the plate, still warm from talking to Carson. He had apologized again, the third time that day, for not being there when Adelaide fell, for not having been able to spend the day at the hospital with her. He was sorry she had to spend the night alone at the house.

And she’d laughed and reminded him she’d lived alone in her condo in Phoenix for eight years. “So I suppose you didn’t get a lot done today,” he had said, after a moment’s pause.

The journals were sitting next to her on the sofa when he said this. She fingered the spine of one of them. She wanted to tell him about the journals with as much intensity as she didn’t want to tell him. It felt awkward not to tell him.

“I didn’t have a lot on the agenda to get done today,” she answered.

And then she had changed the subject and asked how his parents were and what the kids had done that afternoon after the long drive. They had
talked for twenty more minutes about the children, his parents, the lovely mundane. Just like old times.

Marielle stood, took her plate to the kitchen and rinsed it. Outside, rain fell in chaotic cadence against the house as she poured a second glass of Chardonnay. She went back into the family room, turning off lights as she walked, but then she returned to each switch and turned the lights back on. Too much talk of ghosts.

She settled back onto the couch and picked up Sara’s second journal. The first entries were dated from what was probably Sara’s first year at college. She wrote about the rhythm of the city, the plight of the poor, the beauty of the seasons, the grandeur and anguish of romantic love. The heady exhilaration of stretching her wings. The hell of being rejected by her parents.

Sara had felt a rush of release and vulnerability when she left Holly Oak for college, a loosening, like a scab that suddenly releases its grip on the tender new skin underneath.

She’d written of relationships Marielle was fairly certain Carson knew nothing about, but also about falling in love with Carson, of their engagement, their wedding, the birth of her first child, and of being pulled back to Holly Oak like a magnet that she couldn’t resist.

An hour later Marielle closed Sara’s third and final journal, running her hand across its stretched leather back. She reached for her wine glass and swallowed the last of it, warm from sitting out, its sweetness flattened by the temperature of the room.

Sara had been a different girl than Carson’s descriptions had led her to believe. She was not just the busy, outgoing woman with unconventional artistic flair but also an unsure woman, wounded by rejection, and needing her art to help her stay focused on beauty rather than ugliness.

Or perhaps Carson had just seen what he wanted to see, as men in love can sometimes do.

On their third phone call, when Marielle was first beginning to feel the pull of romance, she had asked Carson to tell her about his first wife. She had wanted to know what the woman who’d first won Carson’s heart had been like.

Carson seemed relieved to be able to tell Marielle that Sara had been creative, engaging, devoted to her family, thoughtful, a good mother, and a giving person. She didn’t like waste or pretense.

And when Carson told Marielle that Sara had no idea who fathered her and had been abandoned by a substance-abusing mother, she’d asked how a person overcomes hurdles like those. Carson said Sara had been one of those people who managed to flourish despite hardship. The conditions of her upbringing had made her resilient rather than needy and bitter.

But the journals revealed a different kind of girl.

It seemed to Marielle that Sara had been able to relax her apparent resilience when she wrote in her journals. The poems and bits of prose spoke of a woman dealt a heavy hand, a girl grasping for handholds, for meaning, just as Marielle imagined she might have if the same destiny had been handed her.

Sara had wrestled with bouts of depression, with flash-thoughts of suicide during college, and had sought escape in temporary relationships—before she met Carson—which Marielle knew she had not told him about.

Marielle now knew that Sara had sensed something amiss about the house, just like Adelaide, just like Eldora, and she had released those misgivings onto the pages of her journals, writing of a sense of liberation when she left for college and of a veiled reticence when she returned seven years later with a husband.

One of her last poems had been about Hudson’s presence somehow diluting the aura of regret. Hudson wasn’t an extension of Susannah’s troubled spirit. He was a boy.

He was different.

Carson couldn’t have known Sara had toyed with thoughts like these. She wondered if Adelaide knew.

Sitting there in the quiet, a room Sara had surely been in hundreds of times, it was almost as if Marielle was being invited into the secret. And she didn’t know what she was going to do about it.

A peal of thunder rumbled in the distance, sounding like a great stone being rolled from the mouth of a cave. Marielle closed her eyes and pictured standing at the entrance. If she showed the journals to Carson, would it change anything between them? Would he love her more and Sara’s memory less? Or would these new discoveries about the wife he thought he knew open the door to grief he’d told Marielle was closed for good? Marielle had been up-front about relationship choices that she now wished she could go back and unmake, but Sara had led Carson to believe she had never been with anyone else.

She pondered what would change if Carson knew Sara’s resiliency was actually a thin veneer she excelled at keeping intact, that his first wife contemplated thoughts of suicide the year before she died.

If she put them back in the studio, he would surely come upon them. He’d already told her the studio needed to be emptied of Sara’s artistic remnants. That chore was long overdue.

Which meant the journals were destined to be discovered if she put them back. He would find them, and she would have to say something like, “What are those?” And it would feel wrong and deceitful.

Marielle leaned forward and massaged her temples. What to do? She needed an unbiased opinion from someone she trusted. She reached for her cell phone and scrolled down her contacts to Chad’s name. She pressed the call button. A few seconds later he answered.

“Married Marielle,” he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice.

“Hey, Chad.”

“You get the seeds I sent? Did you see I sent poblano peppers too? I figured, what the heck.”

“I got them. And thanks. I just … I’ve come across something, and I’m not sure what I should do. You got a minute?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

Marielle spent the next ten minutes updating her brother on her lunch with Pearl and Eldora, Adelaide’s fall that day, why she went into the studio, and the discovery of Sara’s journals. And what she’d read inside them.

“And now I don’t know what to do with them,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, should I put them back and pretend like I never saw them, or should I hide them away somewhere else? Or should I just show them to Carson?”

“What makes you think you shouldn’t just put them back?” he said easily. Too easily. Like there was nothing to think about.

“Because then I’ll have to pretend I’ve never seen them,” she answered. “We’re going to clean the studio out. It’s highly likely we’re going to come across those journals while we’re together.”

“Why pretend anything, Elle? Just put them back, and when he comes home tomorrow tell him you found some of Sara’s journals in her studio and you’re not sure what he wants done with them.”

“But I think Sara kept them hidden from Carson for a reason,” she said. “And I think if she were alive she’d want them kept secret.”

“But she’s not alive. And keeping secrets from your husband usually isn’t a great idea, Elle. He’s your husband now, not hers.”

Marielle felt her cheeks grow warm. “I know that! I just feel like some of the stuff she wrote will hurt him. Will change the way he thinks about her. And maybe it will change the way he thinks about me.”

Chad hesitated a moment. “Well, I think you should just put them back. And let what would’ve happened anyway, happen. Tell him you found them but you put them back. Or tell him nothing and let him find them.”

She frowned. “I don’t like that idea.”

“They aren’t yours, Marielle. Have you thought about that?”

“I know they aren’t mine. I just … I need to think about what to do.”

Chad sighed. “Don’t wait too long to decide, Elle. If he finds them in the house, that could be awkward. And I don’t mean just for him.”

“I won’t wait too long. Thanks, Chad.”

“No prob.”

Marielle clicked off her phone and tossed it onto the couch.

Chad was right about one thing for sure. The journals weren’t hers. She needed to put them somewhere safe until she could decide if they should go back to the studio, somewhere inside the house, in a room no one spent time in.

She could only think of one room like that.

Marielle grabbed the journals and headed for the stairs, keeping her eyes on her feet—away from the faces in the photographs.

At the second floor landing, she stepped into her bedroom and grabbed a flashlight from her bedside table. Then she went back into the hall and made her way to the last bedroom at the back of the house.

The room Carson said he didn’t go into anymore.

The room he had shared with Sara.

Marielle opened the door and reached for the light switch. She’d peeked into this room before. The master bedroom furniture had been removed and replaced with a brass day bed and wicker end tables, chairs, and a settee. The cabbage-rose upholstery sang pink and cornflower blue. Adelaide had told her the redecorating of the room had taken place the summer before. Prior to that, the room had been empty for a year. Before that, it had housed Carson and Sara’s bedroom furniture, and Carson had slept in it alone for two years after Sara’s death.

Marielle had been glad Carson had already been out of this room when he met her. It had been more than just his bedroom with Sara; it had been Sara’s bedroom since she was a child.

Marielle walked over to the closet and opened it, hoping that inside she would find what she had seen in every other closet on the second floor—a crawl space.

Boxes lined the floor, folded throw rugs and bed pillows lay on top. Marielle knelt and moved the boxes away from the wall and saw the glimmer of a glass knob, the handle of a crawl space. She opened it, flipped on the flashlight, and peered inside. Stuffed animals like the kind from county fairs sat against the wall, looking tall under the low ceiling. Around them, high school yearbooks, swim team trophies, ribbons from debates gathered dust. A neat stack of books lined the opposite wall, covered in plastic. Marielle could read a couple of the spines in the dim light.
Island of the Blue Dolphins. The Pigman. The Secret Garden. Where the Red Fern Grows
.

She moved an ample-sized yellow bear, his paws outstretched as if to say, “Give them to me.” The space behind him was dry and clean. She reached for one of the throw rugs behind her, wrapped the journals inside, and set them down on the wood floor. She shoved the bear against them, concealing them completely.

She sat back on her knees, staring at the bear and his cartoonlike eyes.

The things in this space were Sara’s. These were things that had been kept.

Adelaide might be the one to find the journals if she left them here.

And getting the journals out of this room once Carson and Adelaide were back home might be difficult to do without attracting attention.

No.

Marielle shoved her hand under the bear and pulled the rug-wrapped bundle out from underneath it. She’d have to find another place.