It’s something Sarah’s always wanted, too. An explanation and a chance to forgive her mother. She’s resented her all these years and she wants to be rid of the anger. Why would a child leave forever? Why would a mother? There is nothing that would ever keep Sarah from her daughters. No mistake or choice they could make would ever change or diminish her love for them. She could never leave them. It goes against nature for a child to forsake her mother just as it does for a mother to abandon her child. With the exception of abuse or neglect, no fight should be enough to sever those ties, no disagreement too great to not make amends. Why did her own mother leave and never come back? Why would Becca?
Sarah takes another look at the wax shapes … and it is suddenly obvious. A place so familiar, she can’t believe she didn’t recognize it right away. Her tree near the river. A place that connects them both. The Bilyks and the Webbs.
But what of the jagged lump?
Impressions are flitting through her mind like frightened birds as she studies the second shape more closely. She’s always wondered about Becca’s sudden disappearance. Why did she leave without saying goodbye to her or contacting Jack — if she loved him so much — with a message?
She picks up the rough piece and holds it on the tips of her fingers. There is a small marking like an irregular cross on its face. Jagged. Smooth. Limestone. Granite. Fist-sized or boulders. Churned up out of the earth then cast aside in a pile beneath the elm tree.
And a thought, one that may have always been there, folded tight and stitched loosely to a dark corner of her mind, takes shape.
What if Becca never left at all?
It’s a perfect harvest day, the kind you might find on a picture in one of those calendars that grocery stores once gave away. Wispy white clouds like pulled-apart puffs of cotton stretch across a clear blue sky. Golden heads of wheat rattle in an autumn wind. Shorty is on his backhoe, the huge roaring machine grappling with the biggest boulders and setting them aside. He picks off the smaller rocks, one at a time, more and more carefully as he gets closer to the bottom. Once the earth is bare, he lowers the blade and tips it, removing slices of dirt. Sarah stands beside Jack, leaning into the hollow beneath his shoulder. She thinks she can hear the beat of his heart.
Shorty continues probing, moving slowly along, removing scant bites of earth until they see a strip of tattered cloth. Jack jerks up his hand and stills it against the sky. Shorty stops and climbs out of the backhoe. Jack picks up his shovel and begins to dig, slowly, taking care with every scoop until he unearths the truth: yellowed bones, long and tapered. A human skull.
Shorty walks back to the house to call the RCMP.
“All this time, she was here.” Jack shakes his head. “It’s no wonder he never wanted us to knock the tree down and bury the stone pile. He couldn’t take the chance we might find her. The old bastard must have used a tractor to knock the rocks off on his side of the pile. Once he cleared them away, he dug a shallow grave. Laid her in it and covered her up then loaded the rocks back into the bucket and piled them back on. No one would ever think someone was buried here.”
Sarah is quiet, overwhelmed by the extent of the cover-up. “Caroline told me he was out late that night,” she finally says. “Came in raging, piling all the blame for Becca leaving on her. And here he’d been, hiding his own tracks, while his mother came and packed up Becca’s clothes then went home to dream up a story real enough for everyone to believe.”
“And he kept on piling,” Jack’s voice cracks. “More and more stones weighing her down.”
Only three living souls had known Becca was dead and they all went to their graves with the secret. Sarah is struck with the pains Elvina took to conceal the truth. She’d involved her sister, Irene, in her scheme, each of them deceiving Caroline, making her believe it was her fault Becca had gone away. What had compelled Elvina to do it? Was it the public shame of Caroline’s secret being revealed, as Caroline was led to believe, or Eldon’s guilt of his crime? Would any mother do the same to protect her child? Would she?
* * *
Later, when Sarah tells Caroline they’ve found Becca’s body, her face seems to crack in two. Her mouth falls open. “She can’t have been dead all these years!” she cries.
“I’m so sorry, Caroline.” Sarah gets down on her knees and puts her arms around Caroline’s fragile shoulders. She feels the old woman quake as the truth takes hold and she starts to sob.
Tears trail down Sarah’s cheeks, too. Caroline needs time to mourn. All those lost years, Caroline believed Becca was alive and too angry with her to come home. Sarah’s thought the same about her own mother except she’s been the one holding on to the anger, blaming her mother for staying away. She never considered that maybe her mother wanted to come back but someone or something kept her from it. Maybe Mom died alone, long ago, too.
“You’re absolutely sure?” Caroline is saying and Sarah leans back to sit on her heels. “The police are sure it’s Becca’s body you found?”
“They’ll want a DNA sample from you, just to confirm it.”
Minutes go by before Caroline pulls a tissue from her sleeve and dabs her eyes. “It’s my fault. If only she hadn’t found out Nick was her father, she’d be alive. I should have followed her out and told Eldon myself. He could have killed me instead.”
“It must have been an accident,” Sarah insists, still unable to believe the gall of Eldon and his mother, pretending all those years Becca was really alive. No one, not even her own mother, considered Becca a missing person when Eldon and Elvina claimed she was living on the other side of the country. “Eldon could have gone to the police and explained.”
“That wasn’t likely to happen. The whole sordid story would have come out and Elvina couldn’t let that happen. The Webb name and status meant more to her than all her money and that fancy new house. She’d come from nothing and couldn’t tarnish a reputation she’d spent her whole lifetime creating.”
“So you think Eldon killed her intentionally?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” Caroline said. “Eldon had a hair-trigger temper; she surely set it off when she told him she wasn’t his child. He would have flown into a rage, as he often did with me, although he’d never hit Becca before. He could have struck her, knocked her flat on the ground. She’d have meant no more to him at that moment than a stray dog.
“I have no doubt in my mind he would have killed Nick, and me, too, had he ever found out about us. He was the kind of man who would do that. Eldon could never be bested by anyone, even in the smallest way. He always had to keep the upper hand. Who’s to say he didn’t choke the life out of her? He might have done it to take it out on me. It’s the ultimate punishment for a mother, isn’t it? Taking away her child?”
Sarah can’t even contemplate that despicable possibility.
“In any event, their cover-up kept me right where Eldon wanted me. When he asked me to marry him, he said he was going to keep me forever. He told me I could never leave him. But I would have if I’d known Becca was dead, and he knew that. He was my jailer and hope was my prison. Like always, Eldon got what he wanted.”
The small funeral and subsequent interment is held at St. Michael’s. At Caroline’s request, Becca is laid to rest in the Bilyk plot beside her father.
While the priest gives the closing prayer and blesses the casket for the last time, Sarah offers Caroline another tissue. She looks up from under the veil of her black hat, her eyes red-rimmed.
“Are you okay?” Sarah asks, concerned about the way Caroline is slumped down in the wheelchair, the weight of this day more than she can bear.
“I will be,” Caroline says. “Once this is over.”
Addie comes up and leans down to give Caroline a hug. “She looks so tired,” she says to Sarah. “I think I should just take her back.” There’s a luncheon planned for the few guests at Sarah and Jack’s house, and Sarah agrees there’s no need for Caroline to come.
“The last weeks have been just too much for her, processing all that’s happened and then insisting on helping with the arrangements,” Sarah says quietly. After the forensic analysis of Becca’s remains, they learned the back of her skull had sustained blunt force trauma, the cause undetermined. Sarah and Addie help Caroline into the waiting van while the cars slowly leave and everyone heads back to the farm.
Jack lingers beside the grave. Sarah comes up and puts her hand on his shoulder.
“It’s not only Becca lying here,” Jack says. “My child died that day, too.”
“I know.” Sarah hugs him. “I’m so sorry. We have to mourn for him, too.”
“You said him,” Jack says, stepping back and looking down at her. “I’ve always felt it was a son I lost, but you’ve never said it before.”
“All these years, in my mind, a little boy’s grown up ahead of our girls. He looks like you, with the same stubborn lift to his chin. I thought about him when each of the girls was born. When I lost the others.” Her voice wavers. “At every special occasion, there he was.”
“I always thought losing him was punishment for getting fooled by Becca and going along with it when she offered herself up when all along it was you I really wanted. I’m so sorry for that. I’ll regret it till the day I die.”
She steps back and gazes up at him. “At least now we know there never was a baby born and given away, but if there had been, I know I would have loved him. Because he was yours.”
Jack touches the soft pad of her cheek with a rough finger. “I know it,” he says.
In the distance, combines growl in the fields, gathering up the grain, the end of another cycle like all of the others. It’s the pattern of their lives, this ebb and flow of seasons.
“I need you to know something, Sarah,” he finally says. “You’ve been the best wife I could have ever asked for. I know that everything you’ve ever done, you’ve done for me and the girls.”
Tears well up in Sarah’s eyes again. “I know it, Jack. You don’t have to tell me.”
“I know I’m not one for words. For saying what I’m thinking or feeling.”
“Like, hey, you, instead of honey, or baby?” Sarah says in a teasing way. She’s smiling up at him.
Jack looks surprised. “But it is you. It’s always been you. You’re the only one I’ve ever wanted.”
“I know it, Jack.” All the love she’s ever needed has been right here in the circle of Jack’s arms.