ou lied, June. And now you’re goin’ to pay for it.”“Y
The tone of Caleb’s voice was flat as we turned right onto the river road, away from town. When Sam’s car went the opposite direction, my stomach turned.
Caleb’s hands gripped the steering wheel, his frame swaying left to right as the car rocked over the uneven road. I could feel him looking at me in the rearview mirror now. Those were the same eyes that had bored into me across the table at the police station. The same ones that had followed me at the Midsummer Faire.
Caleb knew he’d won, and he wanted to watch, second by second, as I realized it.
“The truth has a way of makin’ itself known, doesn’t it?” he said, reaching into the glove compartment for an amber glass bottle. It looked like whiskey. “My father taught me that, and it’s somethin’ I’ve never understood about people. It doesn’t matter how small the town is or how well you cover things up, there are always traces left behind. There’s always someone out there who saw somethin’ or knows somethin’ or heard somethin’. It’s only a matter of time before it washes up.”
He took a long drink from the bottle before he turned the wheel, taking us onto one of the county roads that wound deep
into the hills. The sweet, oaky smell of the whiskey filled the car.
“I never liked you. Mostly because I had to keep an eye on my father once you came to town. He was erratic, possessed by this idea that you weren’t who you said you were. I have to say, I agree with him, June. So, imagine my surprise when I found that picture of him in your house.” His hand gestured to something in the front seat.
I leaned forward just enough to see it. The stack of papers he’d taken from my bedroom were sitting on the closed folder beside him, the photograph of Nathaniel and Susanna, our parents, on top.
“I had to ask myself. Why would this woman have that photograph?”
“Susanna was family,” I said.
According to what the town knew, that was true. I was a relative of the Farrows from Norfolk, Virginia, just like she’d been.
“Maybe. Or maybe there’s more to it than that.”
I met his eyes in the mirror.
“This picture got me thinkin’. All this mystery about that shoe and no one being in total agreement about exactly what you were wearin’ that night. I hadn’t thought about the photographer.”
The white-hot flash of the bulb ignited in my mind again. I could smell the smoke from the spark. The photographer from the Jasper Chronicle had been there that night. Taking pictures for the paper.
I clenched my teeth.
Caleb reached into the folder on the seat and raised something in the air, handing it to me. I pulled it into my lap,
my heart sinking. It was a blown-up black-and-white photograph of the Midsummer Faire in 1950. The image was of the dance floor, a blur of people smudged across the frame.
But in the background, I was in focus. I stood beside one of the tent poles, Annie asleep in my arms. We were both wearing what looked like white dresses, and I was wearing those shoes. They were exact matches to the one Caleb had at the police station. The one I said I’d never owned or seen before.
“How’re you gonna explain that to a jury, June?” Caleb laughed, taking another sip of whiskey.
He was right. He had what he needed. There was a recorded tape of me saying I’d never seen that shoe before, and a photograph to prove I was lying. Then there was Mimi’s statement. The items he’d found in my house. The reports of Eamon threatening Nathaniel. It was only a matter of time before they arrested him, too.
“What’d you do with the dress? Burn it?” he asked.
Those flames were like beacons behind my eyes, their glare making me wince. I could still see Eamon’s black shape as he crouched before them, feeding our clothes to the fire.
“I thought it was Eamon who killed him and you who’d helped cover it up.” Caleb continued. “But now I’m thinkin’ you’re the one who did it. Those scratches on his arms and his neck. That’s a woman’s work.”
Caleb’s foot pressed the gas, and the car picked up speed, taking the curves faster.
My hands pulled against the cuffs, metal biting into bone.
“Where are we going?” I said, the prickling fear constricting my throat.
He ignored me, dumping the rest of the whiskey into his mouth. “Part of me understood when I saw you—why he
couldn’t leave you alone.”
I braced myself.
“It’s not right.” He shook his head, voice straining. “It’s not right how much you look like her.”
I remembered that crazed glint in Nathaniel’s eyes as he pushed me down into the water. The unnerving tone of his voice. He’d known. Somehow, he’d known. The question was how much did Caleb remember about our mother? And how much truth was there in what Esther had said about what was passed down in the blood? My own veins were filled with it, too.
“Why do you look like her?” His voice changed with the question. It took on an unnatural tone that made me shiver.
His eyes were on me again, instead of watching the road.
The car drifted into the gravel before he righted the steering wheel.
He was really asking, really trying to make sense of this.
He’d been just a boy the day Nathaniel drowned our mother in the river, but he’d been there. He’d lived with that. The ghost of Susanna had haunted him, like it had me, and now he needed answers.
“I think you know why,” I said.
He went rigid, and I was glad that I’d caught him off guard.
Maybe he hadn’t expected me to answer, but there was no point in hiding anymore. Something told me that Caleb knew a lot more than he wanted to admit.
He jerked the wheel, and the car slid off the road completely, into the ditch that edged one of the fields. I slammed into the door as the car slid to a stop, the keys swinging in the ignition as Caleb stared out at the road.
My heart was racing again, heat licking like flames up my arms. My throat. I couldn’t tell what he was going to do. Drag me into that field and shoot me? Kill me, the way his father tried to?
Without warning, he reached for the door and got out, as if he were making a move before he could change his mind. He came around to the passenger side and pulled me out of the back seat by the sleeve of my dress, shoving me into the road.
I stumbled, sliding in the gravel before I got my footing.
I looked around us, to the expanse of golden fields that stretched in every direction. An unsettled sea of wheat whispered in the wind.
“Who are you?” he shouted, but his face was different suddenly. More human. His hands fell heavily to his sides as he watched me, still scrutinizing the planes of my face. He looked so tired.
“I’m June Rutherford.” My throat burned as I said the name out loud for the first time in my life. I was sure of it, because what it did to my insides was something I would have remembered.
Caleb was shaking his head, hands raking through his hair.
A red flush painted his skin before he pulled the pistol from his belt. “No.”
“I am,” I said.
“I told him he was crazy.” His words warped. “That he was imagining things.”
“He wasn’t.”
“He said that you were a demon come to haunt him. To punish him.” Caleb was breathing hard now. He paced to one side of the road and back again. “June Rutherford died as a baby. She’s buried in the church cemetery,” he mumbled, desperately trying to reason himself out of it.
“Then dig up the grave. There’s nothing there, Caleb.”
He stared at me.
“He wanted me dead. She thought he was going to kill me, so she lied. She told him I died when he was in Charlotte, and he believed her.”
“Then where have you been all this time?”
“Does it matter?”
Trying to explain the door to him would only convince him that I was lying about everything else. There was no chance his mind would be able to hold it.
“When I came back, he knew. Deep down, he knew who I was, and he started following me. Waiting for me in town.
When he saw me walking home that night with Annie.” The vision materialized so vividly across my mind that I could hardly draw breath. “He wanted to hurt me. Make the demons go away.”
There was no reaction in Caleb’s expression. He was placid and cold, like none of this surprised him. And that was exactly what I wanted him to think about—the fact that he knew his father. I couldn’t imagine what kind of horrors he’d endured growing up in that man’s house.
“You knew what he was,” I said. “Didn’t you?”
He sucked in his bottom lip, a gesture that made him look like a little boy, and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. But then he lifted the pistol, pointing it at me.
My hands reflexively flew up in front of my face. I was shaking all over, still searching the road for any sign of a car.
But this was a remote stretch. It would be a miracle if there was anyone for miles.
“You were there,” I stammered. “You were five years old, Caleb. You have to remember.”
His jaw clenched.
“I think you know that she didn’t jump from the falls that day. Deep down, you always knew that, right?”
A gleam shone in his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“They didn’t find her body because he buried her.”
His lips parted, his eyebrows coming together. “What?” If he was lying now, it was convincing.
“Nathaniel told me. Right before he tried to drown me in the river.”
His chest rose on a sharp inhalation of breath. This, I could tell, was the thing he really needed to know.
“Yes,” I answered. “I killed him.”
The gun went off, the sound exploding in my ears, and it echoed into the hills. I waited for an eruption of pain in my chest. My stomach. But when I looked down, there was no bloom of red. He’d fired the gun, but he hadn’t shot me.
Slowly, my eyes lifted. Tears glimmered in Caleb’s eyes as he stared at me, and I didn’t know if they were for Nathaniel or for Susanna. Only one of them deserved any kind of pity.
“He held me under the water.” My voice broke. “He held me there while my daughter watched from the riverbank.”
He believed me. It was etched deep in the lines of his face.
The tears brimming in his eyes finally spilled over, but his face didn’t change. He stood there, freed from the lie he’d been telling himself for his entire life. He’d been a child who believed the story he’d been told because he needed to survive.
Now it was time to let that story go.
“You’ll find our mother buried under the oak tree at the corner of the woods beside the falls. She deserves a grave, Caleb.”
He moved to reach for his belt, and I flinched, drawing my cuffed hands back to my chest. But he hooked one finger into a small set of keys and tossed them to the ground, turning his back to me. I watched, completely numb, as he got into the car. Stood there frozen as it pulled onto the road.
Leaflets of paper flew out the driver’s side window as he took off, fluttering in the air before they floated to the ground.
I walked toward them as they scattered in the road, stopping short when I looked down at the one beside my feet.
It was the photograph. Nathaniel’s sharp-edged form. That cigarette in his hand. My mother, face turned as she smiled at him. She’d had no idea what that sinister love would set into motion.
