Bittersweet (38 page)

“Days passed. Nothing. I almost believed it hadn’t happened. But then a week or so later I was playing cards with Athol, and he accused me of cheating—he always accused me of cheating—and Father”—he swallowed, reliving it—“Father just appeared. With a poker in his hand. He came at me. Beat me, like a farmer beats a stubborn donkey. He broke my ribs, my wrist, my ankle. Athol just stood there, watching. Mum came home in the middle of it, but that was by chance. She stopped it, but it didn’t matter. I knew, once and for all. He would have killed me, easy, with no remorse.”

What invisible lines had Tilde drawn in the sand to justify staying with that man? He could rape the maids but not his daughters? In the rowboat, she had told me that marrying Birch had made her a Winslow. I wondered how she felt about that. How Galway felt about the blood running through his veins.

I kissed my hand and put it back on his leg. Let it grow warm there, between us, as he wept.

We rode on like that for a good while, until he cleared his throat and tried to talk in a businesslike tone. “What I don’t understand is what he possibly could have been doing there. At Mrs. LaChance’s. Why would he drive a maintenance truck out there? And why on earth did he kill them?”

“I told John something that day,” I said carefully. “Something
John might have wanted to confront Birch about. Maybe he invited Birch that night, so they could end it.”

“But why did Father drive a maintenance truck? Why not just come in his own car?”

“If the murders were premeditated, the maintenance truck was the perfect foil. No one would guess it was Birch behind the wheel. Especially if he drove over after night fell.”

Galway let this sink in. And then he asked the question I knew was coming. “So what did you tell John?”

I withdrew my hand from his leg. And then I told Galway what I had told his sister, and half brother, before him. “That your father was his father.”

Galway took the news stoically. “How’d you find that out?”

I told him about my discovery of the P. in Kitty’s journal, and how Masha, against her will, had confirmed John’s paternity. I told him of Ev’s pregnancy, and seeing John and Ev making love, and their subsequent elopement and planned departure. I told him I couldn’t bear to think of their life together not knowing who they really were to each other, and I told him, not quite knowing how to tell any more—but feeling that I must—that Ev had already known, that she had wanted, somehow, to be with her own half brother in that way. I told him that the way Ev had guessed John was her brother was that Jackson had come to her, and asked her if she knew that CeCe and Birch were his real parents, because someone in the family had confessed Birch’s sexual secrets, that he had raped his sister—and who knew what other relatives—not to mention the maids, and that that was the real reason Jackson had committed suicide. The knowledge that he was the product of a brother and sister’s miserable incestuous union had been too much to bear.

I told Galway almost everything, but held back the part about Indo insisting Kitty’s journal offered more secrets, or what those secrets were—that the Winslows had stolen, and been stealing, from
others for years. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Galway, it was more that, riding beside him, I couldn’t imagine delving into anything unproven. My throat was raw from talking. I wanted to leave it all behind—Indo’s dying wish, and what the journal might offer, and who had stolen it, and how I might be able to use it to prove a much deeper conspiracy than Birch’s rapes. I felt as I had when they had pulled me from the river, my body cold, my heart colder, but relieved, lighter, now that I had released my darkness into the world. I just wanted to believe that the truth, enough of it, had set us both free.

Galway slowed to the side of the highway. Chunks of macadam ticked under the belly of the car. I wondered if he was going to throw me out as John had. I would have accepted my fate.

But instead, Galway opened his own door. The traffic rushed past us, someone laid on a horn, the air in the car suctioned in and out, and at the changed pressure, the girl in the backseat stirred and grumbled.

Galway swayed at the edge of the rushing traffic. I knew that he was considering changing his fate. A Mack truck would make his departure quick, if painful. I undid my seat belt and placed my hand on my door, knowing I wouldn’t get there in time if that was what he chose. But instead, he crossed in front of the car, lurched toward the forest line, bent at the waist, and vomited.

We stopped for a late lunch on the outskirts of a small town. Galway made Lu wait in the car so we wouldn’t be seen together, which I thought was a bit overzealous—we were hundreds of miles from Winloch, a nondescript family riding in a nondescript car—but she was game, folding herself under a blanket in the backseat. Now that she was safely in our care, she seemed giddy at the intrigue of our situation, as though we were in a spy novel. As I sipped my chicken soup and kept an eye on the car from our window booth, my heart
almost broke with the thought of what she’d been bearing alone, and what she’d have to face once all this action was over.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked Galway. He had regained his color and will. As he sipped his coffee, I pushed away the realization that he looked like a younger version of his father.

“White River Junction,” he said.

“What’s in White River Junction?”

“Someone’s meeting us,” he murmured, summoning the waitress for the check, ordering Lu a gyro.

W
hite River Junction lies at the confluence of I-89—connecting Boston to Burlington—and I-91, which runs from Canada down to New Haven. The signs leading toward the town, as we made our way south on 91, seemed to advertise it as a bustling metropolis. But when we curled down the off-ramp and Galway turned in to the parking lot of an abandoned-looking warehouse, I’ll admit to feeling disappointed. We pulled behind the long, wide building so we were invisible from the road. Then we waited.

Galway checked his watch. Turned to address his little sister. “You sure you want to do this?”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“Do what?” I asked.

“You won’t be able to come back until he’s either in jail or dead,” he said. “You can contact me, but the rest of them—”

“I don’t want to see the rest of them. I don’t want him to ever know where I am. But I want him to know there was a witness, Galway. I want him to be afraid I’ll tell.”

Galway nodded as a navy pickup came around the back of the warehouse. I could make out a black-haired woman at the wheel. She was alone.

She parked nose to nose with us and hopped down from the truck. Her gait was easy, her legs long, her hair glistening. She sauntered over to Galway’s window. He unrolled it. She leaned in and smiled.

“Thanks,” said Galway.

“I owe you big-time,” she purred. Her voice itched at me—I had heard it before. I knew who she was, but it seemed impossible he would have asked her here without warning me. She caught the look on my face and smiled again, sympathetic. Stretched out her hand. “Marcella.”

I touched her fingers. They were warm.

“And you,” she said, turning her smile toward the backseat, “must be Luvinia.”

Lu straightened and smiled. “Thank you for helping me.”

“Like I said,” she gushed, eyes casting over her husband again, “big-time.”

She got in the backseat. They schemed. It seemed Marcella, as Galway’s wife, had access to his trust. She would use it to obtain the necessary documents and tickets to ferry Lu out of the country. “She can pass for eighteen,” she said, appraising Lu, “if we cut her hair.” With a careful eye, I watched this woman who had shared Galway’s bed, and realized the seriousness of what we were discussing. Worry began to gnaw my gut. “We’ll set you up,” she said. “You can trust us. Your brother has helped a lot of people.”

I kept my mouth shut, but I wondered what exactly “helping” people meant. Smuggling children out of the country? Because that’s what Lu was, after all.

“Want to take a walk?” Marcella asked, bringing me out of my reverie.

Lu and Galway deserved time alone together, but that didn’t mean I had to talk to Marcella. I slammed the door shut behind
me, crossed my arms, and made my way to a loading dock, littered with disintegrating cardboard boxes. Marcella got a cigarette from her truck, lit up, and smoked, her long throat tilting toward the sky.

She came toward me, inevitably. Leaned against the concrete. She smelled delicious. “Galway helped my mom and me get to this country. I admired him. Then he offered to marry me, see if he could pull some strings, get me a green card.”

“And did he?” I asked miserably.

“I’ll tell you a secret: I even thought I loved him.”

That was a secret I didn’t want to hear.

“But then, right after we got married, I met someone. Like, the someone. I admire Galway. But I’m not meant to be his wife.”

This made me feel only slightly better.

“He loves you,” she offered. I could feel her eyes darting over my face. “I’d know even if he hadn’t told me.”

I kicked at a pebble with my foot. “Oh, you would? How on earth would you know?”

“How he looks at you.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “I speak from experience: don’t waste your time being afraid of love.”

Lu flattened her palm on the passenger window of Marcella’s truck, a smile tucked bravely in the corners of her mouth. We had already cried, and hugged, and established that she’d send me an untraceable e-mail, as soon as she was safe, with the word
turtle
in it, so I’d know she had made it. I can still see her face in the moment they turned out of view, when Galway and I became just us two.

We sat in silence together. He started up the car.

“Let’s not go back,” I suggested.

He sighed. “I always knew what a monster my father was. But then, you know, I believed in Winloch more. In the Winslows. I thought we were sane. Honorable.” He shook his head. “I have to stop him. I have to try to save our family.”

We paid cash for a bed at the HoJo’s. Lay down beside each other.

“What happened to Abby?” I asked as the shadows grew long.

Tears filled his eyes. He waited for them to abate before he spoke. “When I got over there after you called me …” He began again. “Look, she was aggressive. She wouldn’t let anyone near her. Father came over— I know,” he said, as I startled. “I called the police, and got Father, just so someone with authority was there, but when Abby saw him, well, she went …” His eyes opened wide with admiration and sorrow. “She charged him. I thought it was just a dog who’d witnessed violence and snapped. I had no idea she was attacking her owner’s murderer. We called animal control.”

“They killed her?” I cried, my body dissolving into full sobs. Some part of me had known all along, but it was too much to bear.

We slept hard: like babies, like rocks, like the dead.

W
e reached Winloch by early afternoon. We were fortified and ready: we would confront Birch in broad daylight, in front of Tilde—what was he going to do, murder all three of us? We’d tell him we had a witness, the person who’d driven John’s truck out of Winloch and disappeared for good, but we wouldn’t reveal the witness’s name. Sometime tomorrow, he and Tilde would receive a call that Lu had just run away from camp. By then, Lu and Marcella would be long gone, with the lead time of a full day and a half. Birch would eventually suspect that Lu was the witness to his acts of murder—if he didn’t already—and, if he really was as much of a monster as he had already proved himself to be, would begin to hunt his daughter down the second he suspected she might speak against him.

As far as I was concerned, Tilde was our insurance policy. As unfeeling as she seemed, I had started to believe that her warning in the rowboat came out of a desire to protect me, just as her barking orders to Hannah to cover herself on Flat Rocks came from a need to shield that child. Tilde was the one who’d stopped Birch from breaking down the Bittersweet door. The one who’d insisted we put up the bolts in the first place. I was starting to believe she was in the business of protecting people from her husband.

If offered the choice between Lu and Birch, I was betting that Tilde would choose her daughter. That she would keep her husband at bay as long as she could, give Lu the chance to run. Galway wasn’t sure of this—he had become a nihilist overnight, sure he knew nothing and could trust no one (save me)—but I held fast to the promise of Tilde’s benevolence, because it was all we had.

It was another blinding late summer day, but we had brought Maine’s chill with us. Through my unrolled window the lake wind flowed. I wrapped my arms around myself as we turned the corner where Ev and John had discovered me the night I’d tried to run away.

Galway caught sight of the Dining Hall and exhaled. On a normal sunny afternoon like today, the building would be abandoned, quiet, the Winslows lost in outdoor pursuits. But today, the road leading to and from it was lined with cars. We slowed, parked at the back of the line, and got out.