Aftermath Read online

  Cindy filled a kettle and put it on the stove. From a sideboard, she lifted a leatherette case and, in full hostess mode, opened it toward me to display rows of tea bags in different flavors. At random I selected “wild persimmon honeysuckle” or something like that and then helped her set out teacups, saucers, and a full complement of sweeteners in the dining room. I would’ve been fine sitting at the vintage Formica table on one side of the kitchen, but she wanted to “put on the dog” as Mom would’ve said.

  “Milk or lemon?” she asked.

  “Neither, thank you. Please sit—this is too much.”

  “Nonsense. I haven’t had any guests since Thanksgiving, and I don’t want to get out of practice.” She disappeared into the kitchen again, where the tea kettle had begun to whistle. While I settled in to watch the snow through lace curtains, I heard a microwave purring. Cindy soon returned with a china teapot and a basket of miniature muffins with a sidecar of butter, jam, and honey packets.

  She poured hot water into my cup and sat across from me. As our tea bags steeped, we each selected a muffin—blueberry for me, cornbread for her—and prepared them with the spreads. She touched up her snack with a little more honey and asked, “What’s wrong at your father’s house?”

  “Just some security issues. I need to get the locks changed and alarm code reset.” I chewed a bit of the warm, buttery muffin. “Moving into a place where other people have had access, you want to make sure you’re safe.”

  Cindy looked at me over the top of her teacup. “I guess living up North in that big ol’ scary city would do that to a body.”

  Playing along, I said, “Yeah, typical New York paranoia.”

  Instead of dropping it, she replied, “Even if the only people with access have been Phil Pearson and the police?”

  “I wish that were the case, but I lost my keys.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. Otherwise, you liking the house all right?”

  “If you want to switch with me, it wouldn’t break my heart.” I gestured with my butter knife at the Blue Willow plates hanging on the walls and faux-British bric-a-brac. “This is much more my style—with the Danish Modern suite for sleeping, of course,” I added.

  “I haven’t seen it in years, naturally,” she started, and then paused, perhaps wondering if she’d opened a topic she didn’t want me to pursue. “Anyway, what’s it like?”

  “Imagine Ernest Hemingway and Laura Ashley each decorated half of it.”

  She sipped her tea. “You mean, randomly? Like an Ernest kitchen and a Laura dining room?”

  “No, very specifically. Ernest’s hunting lodge exterior carries inside to the great room, dining room, kitchen, and master. Then there are these wings upstairs and down with a suite in each. All four of those are by Laura.”

  I drank a little of the fruit-and-flower-scented tea and considered the point of no return I was about to cross. “Am I right to think a lot of women stayed there over the years?” I paused and then added, “Or was he mostly into girls?”

  She stiffened, making me think B.J.’s comment about “girls” had been more literal than I’d hoped. But they couldn’t have been girl-girls. They were girls who drove and whose cars had a space reserved in the garage. She still didn’t answer, now feigning interest in the snowfall, her face serious. The friendly mask she’d struggled to wear since my arrival had melted entirely.

  Girls who drove. Dad’s passion for photography and missing pictures on the basement walls. The hairy eyeball Gloria had given Tara. Cindy and her daughter both dating my father at some point in their lives. It all swirled in my mind and created an ugly picture. In a confiding voice, I said, “I know we’re taught not to speak ill of the dead, but I need to understand what happened here, what my father was like. Did he do…pornography with teenage girls?”

  “Oh my God, no, of course not!” She scowled at me. “Maybe that sort of thing goes on in New York City, but what kind of people do you think we are? We certainly wouldn’t let that happen under our noses.” The indignation was pitch-perfect. Either she was as good an actor as Bebe or I’d been way off-base. That was a huge relief—but still didn’t give me the real story.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I put two and two together and came up with seven. No one will talk about things directly, so I’m left to guess.”

  “Mary Grace would’ve been so disappointed—having a daughter who could conjure such a filthy idea.”

  “I think every daughter feels like she’s a disappointment to her mother. And sometimes vice versa.” I let that sink in. “I heard you dated my dad. Was that before my mom came along or after she left town with me and my brother?”

  Cindy blotted her lips, folded her napkin precisely, and said, “It’s a good thing you haven’t unpacked, because I’m demanding that you leave right now.”

  So much for my charm offensive. I stood and threw my napkin over my plate and teacup. Time to play the only card I had left. “How much do you want?”

  She leaned back in her chair, as if I’d slapped her. “What?”

  “How much to talk?” I gestured at the well-appointed room, the plaster ceiling that showed more than a few cracks and water stains. “Place like this must cost a small fortune to keep up. I happen to have come into a large fortune. Ten thousand to talk to me? Twenty?”

  She stood, fists clenched. “You certainly are Brady’s daughter. He thought he could buy anything with money. Loyalty, silence. You’re—”

  “So, he paid for your silence? I’ll double it so you’ll talk to me.”

  Her voice broke as she screeched, “Get out of my house.”

  Hopefully just one more push was all she needed, because my interrogation was starting to feel sadistic. I asked, “Did it involve your daughter? Do you want me to believe the worst rather than know the truth?”

  Cindy dropped into her chair and closed her eyes. “No, the truth is the worst. Just a different kind of bad.”

  “Tell me.” I leaned across the table. “Why do so many people in town look at me like I’m the daughter of the devil or they’re deciding how hard they want to punch me in the face? Do they think me and my dad are the same person?”

  “Not literally.” Eyes open again, staring at her folded napkin, she sounded about a hundred years old. “But maybe we can’t believe he’s really, truly, finally gone. You show up and it’s like what we feared all along—he’s come back to haunt us. Risen from the grave, like something from one of David’s books.”

  “But I’m not my father, dammit.” I found myself still leaning into her space, so I sat and waited.

  She turned and faced the window. A couple of pads of snow slid down it in long, icy rivulets. “We’re all damned,” she whispered. “Damned by our silence. Our complicity.”

  “Tell me why.”

  She misunderstood, answering the question maybe she and many others in Graylee had asked themselves countless times. Not why they were damned but why they’d chosen to be silent, complicit: “Money, of course. Big-city salaries, huge bonuses, with a small-town cost of living. Well, getting pricier all the time what with the upscale shops and all, but still—having nice things, good places to eat out, all in a tight-knit hometown. He would’ve shut it down, taken it all away, if we went against him.”

  Cindy finally looked over at me and continued in a rush. “‘Pick up my marbles and go,’ was how he’d put it. None of us could’ve had the lifestyles—the luxuries—without his willingness to pay much better than we could make otherwise. Better than Atlanta even. And everyplace else is so much more expensive.”

  “Golden handcuffs,” I said.

  “Leg irons, too.”

  “But why did he need to buy your loyalty and silence? What was he doing?”

  She chose to answer another earlier question. “I dated your father after your mother skipped town. He never looked at anyone else when Mary
Grace was around, thought she’d hung the moon.” Her gaze returned to the window. “I just knew she was crazy for leaving this brilliant man who was due to inherit the biggest estate in the county. Then I understood why she’d escaped.”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “Not in the ways you’d think. You know he was a genius, right?”

  “I remember the newspaper obit calling him ‘gifted.’ My mom never talked about him.”

  “Well, he was a genius, let me tell you. Remembered every word he ever read, everything he ever saw. Earned his mechanical engineering degree from Georgia Tech in just three years—and probably could’ve done it in two.” She shook her head in wonder. “You couldn’t help but feel dumb when you were with him, that mind going a thousand miles a minute all the time. It was impossible to keep up, and the more you fell behind, the more he let you know it.”

  “So, he made you feel small, ignorant?”

  “It was more complicated than that.” Her expression blanked, as if she were lost in memories. Finally, she murmured, “He slept like a cat—twenty minutes here, ten there. Two in the morning, he’d wake you up, want to talk about philosophy or finances or to dance or…other things. He became an expert at whatever he set his mind to.”

  A blush spread over her face and neck, but she persevered. “So, yes, being around Brady you felt overwhelmed, unworthy. But at the same time, you felt like you were smarter than everybody but him, because you didn’t—couldn’t—have the same conversations with any of your friends. You were more worldly, sophisticated, because every other guy was a fumbling, bumbling mess next to him, and none of your girlfriends could ever experience what you did on a daily basis. You seemed more alive than you ever had before. And were totally dead with exhaustion of every kind.”

  “Did he end it, or did you break it off?”

  She shrugged. “His attention span could be like a cat’s, too. Even while you were feeling those highs, you knew it wouldn’t last—because you were unworthy. Every girl was, except Mary Grace. You knew he’d start in with somebody else soon enough.”

  Thinking about her family portrait in the sitting room, I tried again but used a sideways strategy. In a gentle voice, I asked, “How long after that did you meet the guy you would marry?”

  “A few years. There was no one in between.” She looked away from me, embarrassed again. “It took a long time to get over Brady.”

  Noting the huge wedding ring on her finger, I asked, “Is your husband home?”

  “Died a few years back. Stroke. He was good to me and the kids, had a great job at the plant.” She gazed at the ring.

  “Either of your children still in town?”

  “No, long gone. Joe’s in Arizona, Ellie’s up in Virginia.”

  “And Ellie and Brady…?”

  I knew my relentlessness could be a bad thing—at least past boyfriends had told me so—but in this case it had worn down her resistance. Her shoulders slumped, breath hissing out. Clearly she wanted to confess to someone; I’d merely managed to push the right buttons.

  Cindy struggled to her feet and shuffled past me. I followed in silence as she led me upstairs to the room above mine, the only one up here with a deadbolt. The others all had knob locks, probably guest rooms. Maybe she’d put me downstairs in hopes I wouldn’t discover this outlier and get nosy.

  She unlocked the door and opened it, flicked on the ceiling-fan lights, and stepped aside. The room was unfurnished, but the hardwood floor was polished and dust-free. On all four walls were framed newspaper clippings, hung at eye level, each one showing a skillfully rendered portrait photo in black and white—maybe my dad’s work again. Girls in their late teens, dozens of them. Every picture had been glued to a backing that included the Lord’s Prayer in flowing script beside it. Above each teenager’s image, the newspaper had printed “Stapleton Scholar” and the year. Below each photo was the girl’s name.

  The annual award had begun in 1985. Starting on the wall to my left, these handmade plaques went in chronological order around the room, the newsprint going from yellowed to fresh gray-white as the dates drew closer to the present. To my right, the fourth wall was only half-covered, the line of framed clips ending with the previous year.

  If Cindy considered the Stapleton Scholarship an achievement, this room wouldn’t have been locked up and undecorated. This was not a place for celebration—it was a memorial.

  What the hell had happened in Graylee for more than thirty years?

  Based on the timeline Cindy had described, I figured Ellie would’ve been born in the mid-1980s. I went to the wall showing the Stapleton Scholars in the early 2000s. Sure enough, Elisabeth Dwyer was there: a lovely brunette with dark, wide-set eyes and a mouth quirked in a playful smile. It was impossible not to notice beside her beautiful face the middle portion of the Lord’s Prayer, which, in this room, seemed more like a plea to the Almighty:

  And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those

  who trespass against us.

  Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

  Cindy sniffed behind me. She wiped her eyes as I turned to her, but instead of looking miserable, she glared at me.

  Did she see my father standing before her? For a frightening instant, I thought she was going to shut me in there, with the newsprint faces staring at me for eternity. “I’m not him,” I reminded her.

  She took a step back and let me exit. As I waited for her to kill the lights and lock the door, I wondered whether the photos confiscated from the basement walls of my father’s house were the full-size version of these. If that were the case, who had removed them? Mr. Pearson, Cade, and the deputies were the only ones who were supposed to have access to the house following the murder. The lawyer had tidied up in other ways, so he could’ve cleared out those photos, too—which meant he knew about them. Knew about all of this.

  Of course he knew. Cade, too. As did Tim and David and everyone else who lived here. They all knew, but they didn’t do anything to stop whatever had happened for over three decades. I considered the lawyer I respected, the cop I was falling for, my best friend in Graylee, and the author I admired—and found it hard in that moment not to despise them all.

  Standing so close to Cindy in the hallway, with hate still burning in her own eyes and a steep hardwood staircase at my back, I chose my words carefully. “Will you tell me about those scholarships?”

  In a chipper voice barbed with irony, she recited, “Full-ride scholarship to any university the awardee could get into—Ivy League, the big tech schools, any of them—living expenses, a new car, tutors to help them graduate with a bachelor’s degree, whatever they needed. Plus, a huge bonus for the family.”

  I hurried down the stairs to get away from that room, with Cindy close behind me. Back in the foyer, feeling safer, I said, “But if these girls could go anywhere to college, why was there a spot in my father’s garage for their new car?”

  She kept up her eerily bright tone of voice, sounding like some of the insane people I used to encounter on the subway. “Your dear daddy made just one tiny little stipulation: to ensure the Scholar was ready for the university of her choice, during her last year of high school she had to live with him.”

  CHAPTER 19

  I staggered backward into the newel post as I groaned. My reassurance to Tara Glenmont from earlier that day now taunted me: There’s no conspiracy. No cover-up. No deep, dark secret people are hiding from you. I asked Cindy, “How could you? I don’t care how much money he offered, how could you sell your daughter to him?”

  “For God’s sake, we didn’t sell her. Anyway, you don’t understand it, the pressure he brought to bear. And the opportunity he offered.” She retreated to the luxurious parlor and collapsed into a chair beside the family photo, a moment captured before Ellie had matured enough to catch my father’s eye.

  I pursue
d Cindy and planted my feet in front of her, feeling the momentum shift back in my favor. “You could’ve just moved.”

  “Some did. Others took a stand, at least for a while.”

  “And what happened to them?”

  She sneered at me. “Things didn’t happen just to them. Your father gave everybody sixty days’ notice per the law that he was shutting down his businesses and laying everybody off. He also raised the rents on all of those storefronts a thousand percent. The family holding out either knuckled under fast or they fled, because the calls and messages would start coming.”

  “From my dad?”

  “No, he’d sent his message by picking up his marbles. The calls and all would be from more and more folks in town. They’d start out pleading and soon turn to threats. People wanted to save their jobs, wanted to be able to afford the leases on their businesses again, wanted everything back to normal. At any cost.”

  “So the people of Graylee became his partners in this.”

  She looked away. “That’s how it worked—the reason for the gold in our handcuffs and leg irons. It only happened once a decade or so. Usually if a family didn’t like his offer, they moved away quickly, but most people gave in—did it for the good of the town.” She stared at the family photo. “At least, that’s what we tell ourselves at night.”

  Not wanting to rub salt in, I made my voice gentle. “But you knew personally what he was like, what Ellie would go through.”

  “It actually helped in a way. I knew she would learn so much, grow in so many ways. Most of the Scholars have done very well for themselves over the years—we track their successes.” She looked around the room. “Their families have done well, too.”

  Maybe confession had purged her guilt for the moment. Cindy filled that vacuum with righteous anger and went on the offensive again. Rising from the chair, she got in my face. “Don’t you judge me. It wasn’t like we sold her into slavery. Ellie had her own suite of rooms. He even let her decorate it. She could lock her door and never have anything to do with him.”