Bittersweet (42 page)

She rolled down the passenger window. “Get in?”

It was not a demand. I weighed my options. What was she going to do, mace me? I placed my fingertips against the metal handle and opened the door.

The climate was supple in there. The air smelled of leather. Tilde had driving gloves on—I didn’t even know they made those anymore.

“I know about the swastika,” I began. I considered going on, but I figured that was enough. A threat to break the silence.

We sat together for a moment. I wondered if she was going to drive me somewhere, but no. “I hope you’ll reconsider,” she replied.

I shook my head. “I’m telling.”

“Not about telling, goodness. About leaving.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. Had she been paying attention to any part of my agreement with Birch?

“I like your influence upon my children,” she explained.

“That’s not how your husband sees it.”

She removed her sunglasses and tilted her head, examining the
pines swaying in the breeze above us. “Birch has his way of seeing things,” she said carefully, “but the world is not so black and white.”

“What he said is true.” My heart was pounding. “About my brother. I tried to kill him.”

She closed her eyes and rubbed a slender finger over her temple. “Why,” she asked calmly, “do you think I requested you as Ev’s freshman roommate?”

It took a moment to get my mind around her response.

“Oh, dear girl,” she continued, “you think Birch is the only one who knows people? I wanted you the second I read your file.”

I shrank from her. That is the only way to describe what I did in that car—I wanted to get out and run, my mind racing. She had known all along I’d tried to murder Daniel? And she had picked me—knowing I had applied to Ev’s college, gaining access to my sealed court document, intuiting my innermost secret—because of it?

She surprised me with her vigorous laugh. “Everyone makes mistakes,” she said warmly, as though my past were a mere trifle; an attitude, I supposed, central to surviving a marriage to Birch Winslow. She lifted a finger. “But not everyone has a conscience.”

“Galway does.”

That only made her laugh harder. “My dear, who do you think has been footing the bill for his exercise in slippery borders?”

My jaw dropped.

“Galway talks a noble game. He believes in helping people, yes. But he is his father’s son. Everyone can be bought, my dear. Every single person on this earth has a price.”

With it all laid out like that, it was tempting to think of turning around and going back. But I shook my head.

“It’s the painting, isn’t it?” Tilde said, sounding perturbed.

“It’s that you participated in the theft and murder of millions and who knows what else!”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter whether you actually did. You’ve been profiteering, knowingly, for decades.”

She smiled. “She told you, didn’t she?”

“Told me what?” I should have kept my mouth shut.

“You weren’t the first person she tried to enlist. Poor Jackson, he was so mixed up in his final days. He came to me, one night, weeping, telling me she’d told him the Winslows were rotting from the inside. That it was too late to cut the tumor out, that the cancer had spread to us all. Of course, I had no idea what he was going to do”—she shivered—“that poor boy. There were others too, others she tried to lure over to her side, to the notion that, if she couldn’t get her own way, she’d bring us all down.”

I swallowed.

“You don’t agree with her, do you?” she asked. “You don’t think we’re all bad?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course, someone would need proof.” She sighed. “And my guess is that, although Indo had plenty of rumors, and suggestions, and fairy tales, she didn’t give you much in the way of solid evidence.”

“That painting’s not yours,” I said, trying to sound confident, “no more than it was Indo’s, or her mother’s.”

“So if I returned it, would you come back with me?”

I snorted. “Who would you return it to?”

She waved her hand dismissively. “We’d locate the descendants, have a ceremony, start a foundation. You could run it! Don’t look so gloomy, that’s how these things are done.” She turned up the air-conditioning. It whirred below her voice. “Dear girl, think of your education. Of Daniel. Bind yourselves to us, and doors will open. Leave, and what will you take with you—a rumor about a painting we’ve already given back? If you think you’ll get access to our taxes or bank records, you’re much more naïve than I thought.”

My heart sank.

“Yes,” she mulled, watching my face carefully, “I think that’s just what we’ll do. I’ve been wanting to redecorate the summer room anyway. We’d save so much on insurance …”

If they gave back the painting, and condemned their ancestors’ actions, I had not a thing to hold against them. For she was right; what Indo had told me, by itself, proved nothing.

“Come back,” Tilde purred. Then she lifted her purse onto her lap and removed a familiar journal. Kitty’s. “Under the floorboards—you think you’re the only one to think of such a hiding place?” She flipped through the journal. I caught the handwriting and felt a lurch of nausea at who Kitty had really been. “I wanted to destroy it. I wanted to end Indo’s assault against this family once and for all. But then I thought: why do away with something that can be put to work?”

She fumbled open the journal and searched for a moment, then thrust it into my hands, her finger gesturing to an entry I’d read a hundred times: “We are being joined this week by Claude, Paul, and Henri. B. and I are so looking forward to offering them shelter until they decide where to settle.”

I searched her face. “So?”

“Surely you know about the other paintings?”

I realized what I had been missing in that journal. “Claude” was not a person. He was a painting. A nickname Kitty had applied to a pilfered work of art, likely by Claude Monet. “Paul” might be a Paul Klee. And “Henri”—perhaps one by Henri Rousseau.

My mind raced over the dozens of such entries, naming “guests” and their arrivals and departures—to New York, San Francisco, Chicago. Just as Indo had promised, this journal was the key to tracing the locations of hundreds of stolen works of art.

Tilde smiled. “Think of the difference we could make.”

I understood, in a flash, that this was what had been done for her. A recruitment. A mother-in-law—Kitty, in Tilde’s case—luring
back her son’s mate, making promises for a life Tilde could have only ever imagined. She was paying me the favor that had been extended to her. The invitation.

But then I thought of Birch. The locks that had disappeared from Bittersweet’s doors as soon as he realized he’d nearly lost his power over Ev. The horrifying childhood scene Galway had described, of opening a bathroom door to find his father plowing the nanny. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, knowing that man was roaming the grounds. Besides, going back to his domain was, if not an implicit approval of his actions, then an idiotic move—hadn’t I promised I’d leave forever? If I left, I would know Lu was safe, and I wouldn’t have to be afraid anymore.

“No,” I said sharply.

Tilde cleared her throat. There was a catch in the sound, something odd. I glanced at the steering wheel and realized, with surprise, that her hands were shaking. I followed the lines of her arms, up to her shoulders, and there, upon her face, I saw something I never could have imagined: tears. She spoke unsteadily. “If it’s Birch you’re worried about, I’m taking care of it.”

“What does that mean?”

“For years, I’ve been the only thing standing between him and everyone else. I signed up, you see, and I believed, in order to have this life, I had to endure everything being married to him requires of me. That I, alone, could keep my family safe.”

She wiped a tear from her cheek. “But then you came along. I’ve never seen someone so small as you, someone who he underestimated so much, stand up to him. I suppose, in watching you, I began to realize that all I had justified—his violence, his cruelty—was not necessarily what I deserved. Still, I could bear his … attacks, if that’s what you want to call them, if it meant my babies were safe. He always promised me he’d never lay a finger on his children. But then
he killed John. John, after all, was his son. So that worried me. But still, I thought, well, at least my children are safe. But then …” She shook her head in disbelief, and fury. “He threatened to go after Lu. Our baby …” Her sentence ended in a gasping sob.

I waited for her to calm. I felt certain I was one of the only people in the world she had ever spoken to so honestly, at least in recent years. I didn’t want to waste my chance. “So what will you do?” I asked definitively.

“He thinks he won,” she said, her jaw tightening. “But I know people too. I am people.”

And in that moment, I realized two things. First, that Tilde and I were more alike than I had ever imagined. And, second, that Winloch would be a very different place without Birch in it.

She brings the flowers to the table. “Where’s Galway?”

“Getting the sawhorses.” I unfold the tablecloths Masha insisted on bringing down from the attic all by herself. I spread them across the lawn to air them out just as she instructed me, knowing the ancient woman is watching my every move from the Dining Hall. I know better than to cross Masha.

Tilde checks her watch. “They’ll be here soon.”

I place my hand on hers and squeeze. “And we’ll be ready.”

And so it comes to pass that the Winslows descend upon the Midsummer Night’s Feast as they have for generations, spreading the cherry pies and watermelon and cucumber sandwiches across the groaning board. The winged children come, and the dogs, and the girls return, swirling about me with their needs and complaints. I kiss the tops of their sweaty heads and draw my arms around Galway’s waist, nuzzling gently at the back of his neck until goose bumps form.

We came to our reconciliation over time, after he explained that
he had learned of the swastika—and his family’s ongoing theft from the world’s saddest places—only after I sent him digging into his family’s fiscal history. He had been waiting to tell me what he knew, but all that had happened with Lu and his father had gotten in our way. It took me time to forgive him, to listen to his first wife’s advice about letting myself love. But then I did, and, in a life full of many choices, it is the best I’ve ever made.

It was strange, and sudden, an extra burden and tragedy for this storied clan, that one early Saturday morning at the end of that very same August when John and Pauline LaChance were found dead on Winloch grounds, Birch Winslow decided to swim out to the far point all alone. He was in tiptop shape—he’d had a physical only a few months before—but when he hadn’t been seen for a few hours, his devoted wife, Tilde, put out the alarm, and the cousins went looking in a rowboat. The Coast Guard was called. They searched and searched, first from the surface of the water, and then with divers. The next day, his bloated, ghostly body washed up near Turtle Point.

A heart attack.

In the days afterward, Tilde and I kept our silence. A pill, I thought, a pill to make it look like that, was that even possible? She knew people. She had promised me, he would pay.

And then, at the September funeral, yellowing maple leaves shaking above us, Lu weeping, and the minister waxing poetic, they lowered his bulky coffin into the fertile earth. Tilde’s eyes swept mine, and in that flinty moment I knew.

“We find ourselves together again,” she says, her voice lifting clear above the din, until, one by one, we turn to her. “Another year gone by. Another decade. And yet the Winslows keep on. Can’t get rid of us.” Laughter ripples the crowd like a breeze off the cove.

From behind the food table, Athol sulkily sips his gin. He has become sharp-edged and reedy, Emily long gone, even his children desperate to be away from him. He wants to talk business with me, has been trying all week, desperate for information on the foundation, and whether I located the Degas, and if I’ll be flying to Berlin again, and how much money has been budgeted for the annual fund-raiser. To ingratiate himself and prove himself invaluable to the Winslows’ cause is now his prerogative, since, funnily enough, upon Birch’s death, the Winloch Constitution seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. A will was found in its stead, a will that reverted the entire estate not into the hands of Birch’s one presumptive heir—Athol, his firstborn son—but to any person with Winslow blood flowing through her veins.

They surround us now, the 132 equal owners of this property, who, the year after Birch’s death, voted in overwhelming majority to create the Winslow Foundation, dedicated to tracing goods stolen from honest people by the craven Winslow ancestors, and returning them to whom they rightfully belong. The majority vote came about, as these things do, because of some behind-the-scenes wrangling; namely, the hideous threat that, if such a foundation were not established, and Winslow funds not put into it, our name would be sullied forever. Damning evidence existed, somewhere out there, that would bring us all down. So we could choose—hold on to our hoard as it was ripped from us, or take the first step in generosity, having discovered such atrocities in our past, and become leaders, experts, lauded philanthropists in a field that had been so underfunded and so ignored.

It worked. Jolly Banning, whom we affectionately call the Mayor, shows off the new Labrador puppies; Arlo feeds his six-month-old a bottle so that his wife can enjoy a night of relative freedom; CeCe Booth sips her glass of Sancerre.

“Aunt LuLu! Aunt LuLu!” the girls cry, and here she comes, braid
all atangle, carrying a bucket of frogs for the children, smelling of the water. Her overalls are damp and her forehead is smeared with mud.

“Sorry I’m late,” she apologizes, and I tease her, for she is always late—Luvinia Winslow, Ph.D.—especially now that she has the lake to study, her degree as a freshwater marine biologist serving to solve the mysteries of her childhood: the dead turtles, the disappearance of the otters, the spread of invasive duckweed. Now a woman, Lu still frets at night about our changing world, the rising waters, the spreading droughts. Some evenings, she lays her head on my lap and I offer up a thanks that she is safe.