Up until this moment I’d not heard Kat say the word mama. I’d called myself Mam to her, and if I instructed her to give Mam something or do something for Mam, she would readily do it for me. I’ve felt like I was her mother and so I’d been expecting that when I did hear something akin to that word coming from her, she would be talking to me. But she’d been able to parse out the words in Candace’s letter, and it was Candace she was referring to now.
Martin told me Candace had died at home in the middle of the night. I’d asked him early on if Kat had seen her mother or had been able to say good-bye, and he’d replied that the body had been taken away by the undertaker while Kat still slept. Martin had thought it unwise for a five-year-old to behold her mother’s dead body. Kat had been told when she woke up that her mother had gone to heaven, and then she and Martin left Los Angeles for good five days later. I had imagined Kat’s reaction to the news of her mother’s passing half a dozen ways: tears, shock, rage, pitiful silence, and also just as I see her now with Candace’s letter in her hand. She looks as though she’s been put under a spell and will disappear if I don’t run to her. I am at her side in seconds and I kneel so that her face and mine are close. I put my hands on her shoulders.
“Kat! Look at me, darling! Look at me!”
She so very slowly turns her gaze to me.
“All will be made right,” I tell her. “I’m going to take care of you. I’m going to take care of this.” I nod toward the letter. “I’m going to take you to her.”
“Mama,” she whispers again, and she’s looking at me but not seeing me, and I feel hot tears sting at my eyes. Oh, how I want to scream at a world that allows someone like Martin Hocking to keep breathing its air.
“I’ll take you to her,” I say again, and my voice breaks into pieces as I say these words. I draw Kat even closer so that she can rest her head on my shoulder if she wants, but she is stiff and limp at the same time. I could kill Martin for what he’s done to this child, for what he’s done to all of us. I can hear Belinda sniffling behind me.
“She . . . she . . . I didn’t . . . I didn’t . . .” But Kat doesn’t finish what she wants to say, and I shudder as I recall what Mrs. Lewis told me, that Kat thought it was somehow her fault that her mother had died. I can’t help but wonder now if it was Martin who first put that thought in her head.
I hold Kat at arm’s length so that I can look into her eyes. She stares back vacantly, as though she, too, is trying to make sense of what her father did to her.
“Listen, love,” I tell her. “As soon as the sun is up tomorrow morning we’ll be on our way. We’re going to send Miss Belinda home and then you and I will go find your mama, all right? I’ll take you to her, I promise.”
Kat blinks at me.
“Do you understand, my sweet? I’ll take you to her.”
She grants me a barely perceptible nod.
“I need the letter back, Kat. I need the address.”
Kat lets me take the letter out of her hand and I place it back in its envelope. I gather the other documents and the strongbox—which I will try to pry open later—and I hold them to my chest.
“Let’s go have a bit of supper, shall we?” I say, as brightly as I can. “And we’ll go to bed early so that tomorrow will come quicker.”
We head to the kitchen and I heat leftover soup and warm some bread in the oven. No one has much of an appetite. While Belinda and Kat clean up the dishes, I return to the library to use the telephone, and I place the call to Las Palomas. The night nurse tells me that, yes, Mrs. Candace Hocking still resides as a patient there, and, yes, she’s able to receive guests for short visits in the afternoons out on the patio. I don’t tell her who I am and the woman does not ask. The full confirmation that Candace is still alive doesn’t surprise me, and I’m glad there is no small part of me that hoped Candace had died. I don’t want that crushing disappointment to fall on Kat. Not now. Not twice. When I am done with the call, I close the library door so that the room will look at first glance just as Martin left it.
Upstairs, Belinda helps me pack Kat’s things for our trip and then we head to my bedroom, where I do the same. I choose a few dresses, my mother’s old hat, my da’s word book. When we are done, we take the travel cases downstairs and set them by the front door. I place the files and the strongbox and the pieces of gold ore—which I have dried off and put into a drawstring bag—onto the entry table by the front door.
When everything is ready for our dawn departure, we head back upstairs.
“We can all sleep in here, in my room,” I say. I know Belinda will not want to sleep in Martin’s bed, and I certainly do not. And I don’t want Kat sleeping alone, either. I pull her mattress off her bed and drag it into my room and place it on the floor next to my bed. And then we change into our nightgowns—I loan Belinda a loose-fitting one of mine—and braid our hair for sleep as if it is just an ordinary day. I sing my grandmother’s Gaelic lullaby to Kat until her breathing finally slackens to that of slumber. In the darkness after she is asleep, I hear Belinda begin to softly cry beside me. I have to remind myself that she lost her husband tonight, and, yes, the man she loves does not exist, but she thought he did, and the loss feels the same.
“Will you be all right?” I ask her.
“No. Yes. I don’t know,” she says in a tired, grieved voice. “I don’t feel well. I don’t . . .”
She lets her voice trail away.
“There was a time when I felt like my world was ending, too,” I tell her after a pause. “But you’ve reasons to keep living, Belinda. And even if you were able to convince yourself you don’t, the sun always comes up the next day. It does. And the next and the next. It just keeps coming up.”
She says nothing, and minutes later she falls into an exhausted sleep.
As I lie there in the dark on the mattress where I let Martin touch me and delight me, where I cried out in pleasure at the union of our bodies, I am suddenly overcome with revulsion. I know it was not love between us at those times, but I’ve been blindly thinking it had been some kind comfort to us both, and I’m sick now that he was only pleasuring me to keep me compliant and content, like a stupid animal. I feel my gorge rising within me and I get myself out of bed as gently as I can so as not to wake Belinda or Kat, and I run into the water closet to heave into the commode what little supper I ate. When I’m done, I turn to run water in the bath as hot as I can stand it to cleanse myself of him, to wash any lingering fragments of his body from me. I cast off my nightgown and lower myself into the steaming water, nearly yelping at the heat, and I scrub myself until my skin is red and nearly raw.
I was stupid to think I could remain so naïve about Martin’s comings and goings, and knowing so little about his job. I was stupid to think he grieved his wife when I never saw him shed a single tear over her, never saw him looking at Candace’s photograph in Kat’s room, never saw him staring off into the distance as if she might emerge from it. I have been stupid, duped by my own desire to have what I wanted. And now I am going to lose it all.
I let the tears fall then.
I don’t care about this house and my fine clothes and the little sapphire on my finger and my new last name. I don’t care that I’m not married to anyone, legally.
I’d give it all up to keep Kat. Yes, I’ve long wanted what my mother had, and what I had with her, back when she had it. I wanted a cozy, warm home. A gentle man to share my life with. Children to raise and love. When I helped Mam care for the wee ones whose mothers worked at the docks, I used to imagine the tots were mine. I loved pretending they were mine.
I know now Kat is what I had wanted most of all.
But Kat is not my child. She never was. She is Candace’s little girl.
Why in God’s name did Martin bring me out here? He didn’t need me. Why bring Kat to San Francisco in the first place when he could have just as easily left her on Candace’s father’s doorstep when her mother was whisked away to that Arizona sanatorium? Why complicate his appalling endeavors with the annoyance of caring for a child he does not love?
Why, why, why?
The water is cool when I finally pull myself out of it. I towel myself dry and put my nightgown back on. I head back to my bedroom, my head throbbing with unanswered questions. I crawl back into bed and beg for sleep to come. Many minutes later, it finally does.
I wake well before daybreak, and I know slumber will not return to me. My heart is aching as I dress in the dark. I know I am setting out to do a grand thing—reuniting a child with her mother is the grandest thing I could ever do—but my soul is still heavy. I am wondering as I work my buttons if perhaps Candace will let me stay and care for Kat while she convalesces. Surely children are not allowed to live at the sanatorium with their mothers. And yet I can easily see Candace’s father sending me away after I return Kat to Candace because he can pay a reputable nanny to watch over his daughter’s child. Why would he or Candace trust me to care for Kat? I’m a stranger to them. I am pondering these thoughts when I hear a noise downstairs, the sound of a key in a lock.
Icy dread immediately courses through my body. Only one other person besides myself has a key to the front door lock. Martin.
I hear the door creak open. I hear a footfall on the tiled entry. At the sound of the door’s closing, Belinda sits up in bed.
“What was that?” she murmurs.
“It’s the front door,” I whisper. “Get up!”
I move to the bedroom door, which I left open as we slept. I hear Martin pause in the entryway and I know he is looking at the travel cases and the neat pile of folders and the little drawstring bag.
I step out onto the landing so that he will look up at me and take his eyes away from everything Belinda and Kat and I need to make our escape. When I get close to the stairs, I see that he has the little drawstring bag in his hand. He has opened it and in his palm is a dirty gold nugget. He looks up at me.
Martin flipped on the electrical light that hangs in the foyer because the morning sun has not yet begun to rise, and in that light, his beautiful eyes hold my gaze. I do not see hate or rage or dread in those eyes, because those responses require human emotions, and I no longer think Martin possesses them.
“What is all this?” he says in a tone void of inflection.
I summon courage from some unknown place inside me, because I feel nothing but cold fear. I walk to the edge of the staircase, putting a buffer of space between him and the bedroom behind me. “Kat and I are leaving.”
He drops the nugget back into the drawstring bag, pulls it closed, and places it atop his own valise, which is resting at his feet.
“Going where?” He takes a step toward the stairs. Toward me.
“Stay right there!”
But he takes another step and another and then he places his hand on the banister.
“Stop!” I shout.
“Or what?” he says, but he stops.
“I know,” I reply. “I know what you’ve done. I know Candace is still alive. I’m taking Kat to her, and you’re not stopping me.”
He is on the first step.
“I have told the police everything!”
“I don’t think you have,” he says as he takes another step and another.
I look for anything to use as a weapon to defend myself against him if I must, but there’s nothing on the landing except a little table and a vase for flowers made of delicate blown glass. I whisk my attention back to him. “The police have seen all the files, Martin,” I say, trying to sound bold and confident, but I can hear the uncertainty in my voice. And yet I go on. “You’d be wise to go. Take the gold if you want. Just take it and go and leave us alone.”
He takes another step. “I don’t think the police have seen anything. I think you just found those documents.”
“You’re wrong!” I shout as he takes another step and another and another.
“I don’t think I am,” he says calmly. Martin is nearly at the top of the stairs when Belinda appears dressed and brandishing a letter opener that I had on my dressing table. Kat is right beside her. I shouldn’t have shouted at Martin to stop. God, I shouldn’t have. I awakened Kat and she should not be seeing this or hearing this. But I can’t think about that now. Between the three of us and the door to freedom is Martin.
The sight of Belinda, however, is enough to cause him to freeze in his ascent.
I expect him to be taken aback in shocked surprise at seeing Belinda standing there, but he merely cocks his head.
“I thought I might find you here,” he says to Belinda. “I was in San Rafaela yesterday. Your dear friend Elliot told me you asked for a ride to the train station so that you could go to San Francisco. He said you were looking for me, that you found an address in my coat pocket and that you were worried about me.”
It is as he is on the last stair, just inches from me, that I see his coat and shoes are mud spattered and his hair is mussed. He’s been traveling by foot to get back here. I can’t puzzle out why. Belinda raises the arm that holds the letter opener.
“You!” she says, her voice trembling at the same speed as her shaking hand. “How could you do what you did to me? What you did to your daughter? How could you tell your little girl her mother was dead?”
Martin stares at Belinda for a moment, as if her questions are too trivial to answer.
“It was easier,” he says finally.
“Easier?” Belinda echoes desolately.
“It is easier to remove obstacles that complicate my endeavors than to tolerate them,” he says calmly, evenly. But his eyes narrow a bit, and I can see that right now, in this very moment, Belinda and I are obstacles. I can see, so very clearly, that, yes, he did do something to cause Annabeth to be thrown from her horse, and, yes, he would easily find a way to dispatch Belinda if he no longer needed her, and, yes, he would do the same to me. I mean nothing to him. Neither of us does. Would he harm Kat, though? His own flesh and blood? More than he already has?
As if reading my mind, he tells Kat to come to him.
“Stay where you are, Kat,” I say.
“Kat,” Martin says coolly, motioning downstairs with his head. “Go into the kitchen and shut the door.”
I move to block her from his view. “Kat stays where she is. Go, Martin. Go now.”
Martin’s mesmerizing eyes turn dark with purpose. I don’t think he will harm Kat. He needs her for some reason. It’s why he didn’t leave her in Los Angeles. But Kat’s presence on the landing is what is keeping Belinda and me from harm in this moment. My mind races for a way out, but I am not quick enough to envision one.
In one swift movement, Martin takes the last step to the landing and lunges for Belinda and the letter opener in her hand.
The next moment is a cannonball of shouting, of screaming, and of hands and arms outstretched. We are, all of us, reaching out in all directions for different reasons, and I am stunned for a second by the overwhelming remembrance of a moment very much like this one, when arms had been extended, and hands and fingers had been stretched open like sea stars. I am suddenly back in Donaghadee and time seems to stand still for a second. I hear a whack-whack-whacking sound, but at the same time, I smell the tang of sea air and I feel the cold mist of evening fog.
And then in the next moment, I am back on the landing with Belinda and Kat beside me, and our arms and hands are back at our sides. The three of us are staring at Martin lying at the bottom of the staircase.
There is silence where there had been a rush of noise only seconds earlier. Martin is not moving. A knee is bent at an awkward angle, and blood smears a marble stair where his head smacked it on his tumble down.
Belinda is the first to speak. The letter opener is still tight in her hand.
“Is he . . . is he all right?” she whispers, dread thick in her voice.
For a second I cannot answer. Kat is standing next to me, looking down at her father’s crumpled form.
“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I say quickly, turning to face Belinda. “He just took a nasty spill because he wasn’t being very nice. You take Kat into her room and I’ll go down and help him on his way.”
“What?” Belinda says, as if I am mad.
I fix my gaze on her. “I said, I’ll go down and help him on his way. I’m sure he is fine. He just got knocked out when he fell. That’s all.”
Belinda stares at me, slowly comprehending what I am, without words, trying to tell her.
“Take Kat into her room and see that she is dressed,” I say, injecting my voice with an ease I do not feel. “We’re still leaving. Just like we said.” Then I bend to Kat’s height and turn her toward me. She stares at me, glassy-eyed. “It’s his own fault that he fell. Do you understand? He fell down the stairs because he was angry and he wasn’t watching what he was doing. But he’s been mean to us and we don’t want to see him right now. We want to go see your mama and we want him to leave. So I am going to help him on his way. All right?”
Kat just stares at me.
“All right, Kat?” I say, in the most authoritative tone I can muster that still rings gentle.
She nods slightly.
“Don’t leave Kat’s room until I call for you,” I murmur to Belinda.
Belinda nods, pale and wide-eyed, and leads the child away. I take to the stairs.
When I reach Martin, his beautiful eyes are open and his breathing shallow. Blood has bloomed at his nose and mouth. I crouch to look at him.
Martin is moving his lips slightly, but no words come. I think perhaps his jaw is broken. Half of me hopes he is dying; the other half knows our situation will be that much more difficult if he is. And yet the question on my mind as I bend to look at him isn’t what I shall do if he dies.
“Why in God’s name did you marry me?” I whisper to him. “I have no money. I wasn’t like Annabeth or Candace or Belinda. Why did you marry me?”
The moving lips produce no answer.
“Why did you take Kat from her mother? Why did you tell her Candace was dead? Why didn’t you just leave the child when you left Los Angeles? You don’t love her! You don’t love anyone.”
But he just stares back at me as though surely now that I know everything else, I know the answers to these questions. But I don’t.
I glance over at our travel cases. The documents. The gold. I need a different plan. And I need to get Kat out of this house without her seeing Martin lying here like this.
I grab Martin under his arms and drag him across the foyer and into the kitchen to get him out of sight. He moans, but he can hardly open his mouth. I stop at the far end of the kitchen, and I deposit Martin in the corner by the butler’s table. He groans softly. Dawn is just beginning to peel back the night. A pale moon peeks at me through the window glass above the table, its pearly light already fading. I stand with my hands on my hips to catch my breath and look down on Martin, who is gazing up at me in surprise. He can hardly believe he is not the one in charge of this moment, that I am. I can see the amazement in his eyes.
“This is not the way I had planned it,” I say. “You weren’t supposed to be here right now.”
He says nothing.
“I need to take Kat to her mother,” I continue. “And I need to get Belinda home. ’Tis pretty simple, the way I see it. If luck is on your side, you’ll find a way out of this house after we leave. If it’s on my side, you’ll still be here when I get back. And if you should die before I return I will have kept my promise to Kat. I will have sent you on your way. Straight to hell.”
“Don’t,” he whispers.
“What? Don’t leave you? After all that you’ve done, you think you deserve my help? You killed Annabeth Bigelow, didn’t you? I’m not afraid to leave you here like this, Martin. I’m not. Not after what you’ve done.”
I kneel down to close the distance between us so that I can whisper something I didn’t think I would ever say to him, not even in the beginning when I thought a time would come when Martin and I might at least be friends. “You don’t even know why I’m not afraid to leave you like this, do you?”
“I . . . know . . . ,” he murmurs.
Only the slimmest sliver of doubt pierces me. “No, you don’t.”
He tries to spit. Red foam forms at of the corner of his mouth. “I . . . know,” he says in a gasping whisper. “You’re running.”
I stare down at him.
He returns the stare, daring me to prove he’s mistaken. But I do not speak of my secrets. To anyone. Not even to myself.
Besides. I owe Martin nothing. Nothing. What I owe is an easy exit out of this house for Kat.
“You should have left when you had the chance.” I stand and turn to the sink. I wet a cloth to wipe up the bloodstain at the bottom of the stairs, my mind spinning. I don’t know what I will do with his body if he’s dead when I get back. And if Martin is still alive when I return? I look down at him. He is staring up at me and struggling feebly to rise. If he’s alive when I come back, perhaps he and I can strike a deal in exchange for my summoning a doctor.
But, no. I don’t think Martin is the kind to strike a deal.
It is all too much to consider at once, and I whisper aloud what I told Belinda last night when she was asking too many questions. I’ve whispered it to myself before. I only need to get through this day. Just this one.
As I wring out the cloth I must push away the image of finding Martin’s corpse when I return. A shudder runs through me as I attempt to shake off that repulsive thought. The trembling strangely intensifies, and it’s as if the very house is quivering at what might await me when I come back to this house.
But then the floor beneath me begins to tremble, and then heave, and then a deafening roar like a gale over the ocean fills my ears. For one lone second I think the earth is going to open up beneath me and swallow Martin whole to save me the trouble of having to do it later, but in the next second I know it is not just for me the world is shaking.
It’s an earthquake, and not just a gentle rocking akin to what I’ve experienced a few times before. This is like a beast, huge and loud and monstrous, awakening enraged from slumber. The house rumbles angrily and I suddenly remember Kat is on the second floor.
I pitch forward on unsteady feet and run sideways, careering into walls as I stagger away from Martin and out of the kitchen.
I call for Kat as I run, but my voice is lost in the deep groanings of the earth. And then as quick as it started, the roaring stops. The quaking ceases, but everything within me senses that the beast has not yawned and gone back to sleep. The air around me crackles with foreboding.
I see Kat and Belinda at the top of the stairs. Belinda has her arm across her abdomen and another protectively around Kat, whose eyes are wide in terror. Plaster has rained down on them like confetti.
“Come to me!” I shout as I reach for the banister to rush to meet them. Belinda and Kat start down the stairs as I start up. We are halfway to meeting each other when the roaring and pitching and violent twisting start up again, worse this time. The beast tosses us to the wall and I scream for Belinda and Kat to get on their bottoms and scoot as the landing above us splits and the staircase begins to sway.
I can hear dishes breaking, doorframes splitting, floorboards snapping, as Belinda, Kat, and I make our way, half crawling, down the buckling stairs. I throw open the front door and grab our travel cases and the files as Belinda and Kat stumble past me.
The earth is rocking like a ship on a furious sea as we stagger out into the amber light of daybreak. Chimneys from houses up and down the street are crumbling to the street as I pull Kat to me. Belinda cries out, and I turn to her, thinking she’s been hit by falling bricks, but she’s holding her stomach as blood and water gush to her feet.
The familiar moment returns to me.
I’ve been here before, too.