“None of that matters now,” Ed said. “Why are you bringing it up?”
“I think it might matter a lot. We’ve got something we didn’t have when Mary Lee was a child—DNA testing. We could prove conclusively whether she’s your daughter. Whether she’s a McClure at all.”
In the bad light, Tom couldn’t read any emotion on Ed’s face. “Are you planning to do tests?” Ed asked.
“Would you be willing to give a blood sample?”
“For God’s sake, leave Mary Lee alone! She doesn’t deserve to have this ugly mess dragged up again. I don’t give a damn about myself, but I won’t let you ruin her life. It’s a family matter. I’m telling you to let it be. Do you understand me?”
He sounded like his obnoxious brother Robert now, spouting orders to a cop. Tom opened his mouth to fire back, but he swallowed the angry words before they escaped. He didn’t want Ed to shut down yet.
Keeping his voice level, he changed tack. “Robert hated Pauline. He thought she conned Adam into marrying her, then had another man’s baby but ended up with all of Adam’s money. Maybe Robert hated her enough to kill her.”
Ed’s laugh sounded bitter, scornful. “Robert’s a weakling. He makes a lot of noise, but he lets lawyers do his dirty work. He wouldn’t have killed Pauline because he’d be too afraid of getting caught.”
Although Robert’s hatred of Pauline seemed to make him a solid suspect, Tom tended to agree with Ed. Robert didn’t have the guts to commit murder. Tom asked, “How did your wife feel about your affair with Pauline? She knew about it, didn’t she?”
Ed paced several feet to the right and for a second Tom thought he was walking off. Tom followed and almost bumped into him when Ed turned.
“Yes, Natalie knew. What are you getting at?”
“I can understand how she might have felt. If you fathered Pauline’s child, then continued the affair for years— How much can a wife take, after all?”
“This is utterly absurd,” Ed spat out. “You’ve seen my wife. Do you think she could— could—” He stuttered to a stop.
“Split Pauline’s head open with an ax?”
Groaning, Ed stumbled away.
“Yeah, she could have done it,” Tom said. “Or hired somebody.”
“I have nothing more to say to you.”
“If you’re withholding information—”
“I want you to leave.” Ed strode up the path, shouting back to Tom, “Get off my property.”
Tom dogged his footsteps all the way to the house, but Ed didn’t speak another word before he entered through the patio door and slammed it in Tom’s face.
One second Holly was standing outside the paddock, watching the chestnut mare, and the next she hoisted herself onto the fence and dropped to the other side.
“Hey!” Rachel yelled. “What are you doing?” She made a grab for Holly, but the girl eluded her.
“I’m okay.” Holly fixed her attention on the horse twenty feet away.
The mare, Marcella, snorted and stamped in the snow.
“She’ll be all right,” Joanna McKendrick said. Windblown tendrils of strawberry-blonde hair hugged her cheeks. “Just wait and see.”
“Marcella has the nastiest disposition of any animal I’ve ever encountered,” Rachel said.
“And Holly’s never been near a horse in her life.”
Joanna poked her with an elbow. “Look at that.”
Rachel watched the little drama in the paddock with amazement and a twinge of envy. Marcella had already abandoned her effort to terrorize Holly into retreat. Rachel could see that Holly was speaking as she approached the mare but couldn’t hear what she said. Three feet from the horse, she pulled off a mitten and extended her hand. Rachel held her breath, waiting for Marcella to chomp off those vulnerable fingers. Marcella snuffled, a curious rather than angry sound. Holly stroked the white blaze on the horse’s forehead.
“Unbelievable,” Rachel said.
“This girl has got the magic. She ought to be working with horses.” Joanna turned to Rachel with mischief in her blue eyes. “I could offer her more money.”
“What kind of friend are you, stealing my staff?”
Joanna laughed. “Yeah, I know how shorthanded you are. But I’m going to teach her horse care. Maybe she’ll work for me part-time. I could give her a permanent place to live too—I’ve got plenty of room, and I’d enjoy her company. I wouldn’t even mind having a goose in the house, with a few restrictions.”
At their feet Holly’s goose, Penny, brushed aside snow with her beak to get at the grass underneath. Joanna’s beloved flock of gray geese browsed nearby, but Penny seemed to want nothing to do with them.
“I don’t think the goose would be your biggest worry if Holly lived with you,” Rachel said. “She’s got some serious problems.”
“What kind of problems?” Frowning, Joanna edged closer and lowered her voice, even though Holly couldn’t possibly hear her over the cawing of crows in a nearby pecan tree. “Emotional?”
“Both nights she’s been with me, she’s had awful nightmares. She wakes up screaming. And she talks in her sleep.”
“About what?”
“Something to do with her mother.” The night before, Holly’s agitated cries had again drawn Rachel to the door of the girl’s room. She’d stood in the hallway listening.
Leave my mama alone! You’re hurtin’ her! Stop it!
Unable to bear the panic in Holly’s voice, Rachel had gone in to wake her.
“Well, if her mother abandoned her when she was little,” Joanna said, “I guess it would leave a mark. But nightmares about it at this late date—”
“It’s more than that. I haven’t told you everything. Tom Bridger thinks Holly knows something about her aunt’s murder. I promised I’d try to find out what she remembers.”
“For heaven’s sake, that’s not fair. Tell Tom to do his own work.”
Rachel shook her head. “No, I’m glad he’s not trying to force anything out of her. She’s too fragile. And I doubt she was an eyewitness to the murder.” She watched Holly stroke Marcella’s neck. “Not her aunt’s murder, anyway.”
Joanna grasped Rachel’s arm. “What are you saying?”
“I’m afraid the second skull the police found might belong to Holly’s mother. And Holly’s father might have killed her.”
***
The stale air in his parents’ bedroom reminded Tom of Pauline’s boarded-up house. His footsteps on the braided rug raised a swirl of dust motes. He wasn’t much of a housekeeper even in the rooms he used, and since he never used this one he always left it for his aunts to dust when they showed up for their periodic cleaning blitzes.
If any evidence existed that his father had an affair with Pauline, Tom didn’t think he’d find it here in the room John Bridger had shared with his wife. He’d come to collect his father’s keys, which might get him into more likely hiding places.
He wouldn’t take sly looks and innuendoes from people like the Turners and Mrs. Barker as proof of anything. The notion that they’d gotten together to decide on a strategy was too far-fetched to take seriously, but they were all holding something back, possibly trying to set him off on a personal mission so he’d be diverted from the murder investigation.
Wasn’t that exactly what was happening? Here he was, letting questions about his dad’s past eat away at him. If his father had been involved with Pauline— If Mary Lee wasn’t Adam McClure’s daughter—
Get on with it.
He unlocked a window, shoved it up, let the cold, clean air sweep in.
His former fiancée, Sheila, had stood in this spot when she told him she was not going to marry him.
“I can’t live in this place. I’d go out of my mind.”
Tom had watched her resistance grow as he drove her around the county, seen the dismay in her eyes when she examined the old farmhouse, but he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge what was happening. He’d been rattling on about knocking down a wall and turning his parents’ bedroom into a master suite when she stopped him and told him she wouldn’t marry him if he insisted on moving back to Mason County.
Remembered hurt and anger rose in him again, but with them came a new emotion: relief. He realized now that he and Sheila were so different they would have been miserable together even if he’d stayed in Richmond.
He smiled, thinking about Rachel Goddard, her gentleness, her warm, husky laugh, that amazing auburn hair that he itched to get his fingers into. For a while he’d been seeing an old girlfriend who now lived in Roanoke, but that had ended when Rachel moved to Mason County. She was the only one he wanted, and he would wait as long as it took for her to let him into her life.
His smile faded as he turned away from the window. On his right, one of his mother’s beautiful quilts covered the bed in white, gold, and blue. The top of his mother’s maple dresser, on his left, was bare.
He stepped across the room to his father’s highboy chest and swung the doors open to expose a shelf and four drawers. The drawers were empty. While Tom was hospitalized after the accident, his grandmother and aunts had removed all his parents’ clothes, except for his father’s uniforms, and given them to a charity.
The shelf above the drawers held his parents’ keys, wallets, and watches. Tom’s grandmother had retrieved them from the hospital after the accident.
He pocketed his father’s keys. One of them would open the steel box where his father had stashed his pistol every night when he came home. If John Bridger had hidden anything, it would be in that box.
As Tom started to close the doors of the chest, his father’s wallet made him pause. His mother would never have dreamed of going through her husband’s wallet. His father could have kept anything in there without fear of her finding it.
Tom had to call his left hand into service when he looked through the wallet, but he tried not to jostle his injured arm in its sling. The dry, stiff cowhide wallet made a faint creaking sound when he pulled it open. Inside he found only the usual things: driver’s license, credit and insurance cards, organ donor card.
He fingered the donor card and his mind filled with the racket of the emergency room, the controlled panic, the flurry of motion and the squeak of rubber soles on the floor. A doctor leaning over him.
I know this is a difficult time…need to act quickly…
Will you sign? Will you give consent?
In a daze, Tom had signed the forms, and organs had been taken from his parents and brother. Bits and pieces of his family lived on in the bodies of strangers.
He shook off the memory and tossed the wallet back onto the shelf.
He turned to leave the bedroom, go downstairs to the study and get that box open, but the bookcase in one corner caught his attention. The shelves held the mysteries his mother had devoured and the biographies his father had favored, but on the bottom were six slender high school annuals, three for each of his parents.
He squatted, pulled out the yearbook with the latest date and dropped it onto the floor. Gretchen Lauter had said that Pauline attended Mason County’s only high school at the same time as his father. Flipping the pages, he searched for names, faces.
He stopped on the pages that pictured his father and his mother, Anne McGrail. Both in the same grade. In their senior photos, they had hairstyles that must have been outdated already—hers flipped up on the ends and his only slightly longer than a crew cut. The late-sixties revolution might have raged around them, but Tom’s parents had never been hip.
Farther on in the seniors section, he found a young, cocky Troy Shackleford. He’d looked like trouble even then. Shackleford had probably been in classes with both of Tom’s parents.
Pauline had been a sophomore, two years younger than Tom’s father. Her picture jumped out at him as soon as he turned the page. Tom wanted to see a witch, her cunning and selfishness plain on her face, but instead he saw a beauty that made his breath catch in his throat. A fall of shining black hair, a heart-shaped face, long-lashed eyes, full lips that curved in an innocent smile. But nothing about her had been innocent. She knew the value of what nature had given her, and she didn’t sell it cheap. She’d set her sights on the richest man in the county, and she’d snagged him, despite an age difference of nearly twenty years.
Had Tom’s father become part of her life as early as high school? Wouldn’t he have been attracted to her? Not only was she beautiful, she was Melungeon. Maybe some deep ethnic connection had drawn John Bridger to Pauline.
But Tom had always heard that his parents never so much as dated anyone else. His father served in Vietnam, and his mother attended nursing school while she waited for him. Soon after John Bridger came home, they were married.
When Mary Lee was born, John Bridger was already a father. Pauline had been married to Adam McClure for several years. Why hadn’t she produced a child earlier, to cement Adam’s ties to her?
Tom summoned a mental picture of Mary Lee, sitting across from him in her living room a few days ago. He’d registered her lack of resemblance to the McClures. But she didn’t look like a Bridger either. She was all Turner.
The school yearbook told him nothing he didn’t already know. Tom tossed it aside and went downstairs.
His computer and printer sat on the big oak desk, but he hadn’t changed anything else in the room that had been his father’s study. With its walls covered in photos of family and friends, its deep easy chair, the room felt inviting and comfortable, and Tom understood why his father had retreated from the household hubbub to read in this quiet spot. Every time Tom came in here, he imagined he could smell his father’s English Leather aftershave.
The metal box was where it had always been, on a closet shelf. Standing on a footstool he’d brought from the kitchen, Tom stared at the box, his throat tightening, and wondered if he really wanted to do this. What did he want to find? Nothing. He didn’t want to find anything that would tie his father to Pauline. Disgusted with his reluctance to face the very truth he was searching for, he slid the box forward on the shelf. He couldn’t lift anything this heavy with one arm. He maneuvered his left arm free, gritting his teeth against the pain, pulled the sling over his head and tossed it behind him.
When he had the box out of the closet and on the desk, he found the right key and coaxed the old lock to click open. An odd mixture of relief and disappointment washed through him when he saw only his father’s pistol and holster inside the box. The gun was the property of the Sheriff’s Department. He ought to return it. He lifted out the pistol and holster. Then he spotted the envelopes in the bottom of the box.
His heart kicked into a gallop. He set the gun and holster aside and scrabbled in the box, gathering all the envelopes, at least half a dozen.
His hands shook as he opened them. Birthday cards. Christmas cards. The same signature on every one.
With love, P.
Tom suddenly imagined his mother finding these things, here in the house she’d shared with her husband, and his stomach clenched with fury. What the hell was wrong with his father, bringing his cheap affair into their home?
How far did the cards go back? They hadn’t been mailed, the envelopes had no dates stamped on them. Each was addressed simply
John Bridger.
Someone had delivered them personally. Pauline’s housekeeper? Tom shuffled through them. Three birthday cards. Three Christmas cards. Mrs. Barker had been telling the truth about his father and Pauline toward the end of her life. That didn’t mean they’d been involved as far back as when Mary Lee was conceived.
A last envelope, this one letter-sized, lay in the bottom of the box. Tom slid a folded sheet of blue note paper from the envelope and stared at it. Jesus Christ, was this a love letter from Pauline to his father?
Feeling sick, he opened it.
J—
Ed has been following you, spying on you. I could strangle him! He’s threatening to tell Anne we’re having an affair. And he says he’s going to tell everybody the truth about ML. Dear God, I was out of my mind to confide in him! I don’t know if I can get through to him, but I’ve got to try. That silly wife of his was here, making accusations about Ed and me. She doesn’t know about ML, but I’m so afraid everything will come out in the open if I don’t get Ed calmed down, and ML and your wife are the ones who will be hurt.