NOVEMBER
HENRY
That evening, after I talked with Miz Bourdillon and Paige, they took me to a private room at the prison to meet with Detective Blaylock. Like always, my lawyer was with me. The detective didn’t say anything about my visit with Miz Bourdillon. He leaned over in his chair, elbows on his knees, and looked me right in the eyes.
“Henry, we’ve located Nick Lupton, and we’re bringing him in for questioning. Is there anything you want to tell us first?”
I started sweating real bad. What should I do? What if they couldn’t get enough evidence to put him away? He’d think I’d ratted on him, and then turn on Jase and Libby. And now with Jase out of the hospital and home!
I was gonna have to tell that detective what I knew about him. My lawyer, Zeke, had begged me to do at least that much. “Any information you provide will give us a much better chance for a plea bargain,” he’d said over and over. It wouldn’t help them track down Miz Bourdillon, because I reckoned Nick didn’t know anything about her. But maybe that detective would dig down and find out more dirt on Nick and that’d land him in jail.
“Detective, I’ve already told you—if you pick up Nick and then let him go, I swear he’ll kill—”
He interrupted me. “Henry, we’ve got a policeman with your boy twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And we’re watching out for Libby too.”
I let that sink in. “Well, I hope so. Like I’ve told you, Nick’s just the middleman. He connects the employer with the employee, if I can put it that way.” I fidgeted with the handcuffs. “Don’t know if it always works that way. Told you before, I’ve never done nothing like that before. I did it for my boy.”
Detective Blaylock was still leaning forward, listening. “Tell me about the instructions you received,” he said.
“Nick told me it all over the phone.”
“And what were these instructions?” His dark brown eyes were peering at me, like he was trying to pull something out of my mind.
“Told me where to find that lady and stuff.”
He sat up straight and pulled at his beard. “Can you remember anything else at all?”
“Nothing else.”
Then the detective surprised me by changing the subject. “Henry, do you have any idea why Mrs. Bourdillon would have a phone number on her phone that is also on yours?”
I sure did, but I wasn’t gonna say it. “No, sir, I don’t.”
He squinted his eyes, stood up, and leaned his arms on the table. “Think about it, Henry.”
But I wasn’t gonna tell. “No, sir. No idea.”
JOSEPHINE
Agitated. That was how I felt after Henry Hughes left my room at the rehab facility. No, not just agitated. Tormented. I had probably alarmed poor Paige with my actions, but something had seemed so important to communicate.
I struggled in my mind to remember.
———
2015 . . . “I need the money now! Now, JoJo! Look at me. They’re threatening me. I promise if you give me the money this time, it’ll be the last time.”
“I don’t believe you, Kit.”
“You are so selfish!” Kit let out a string of curse words. “All you care about is your precious Patrick and those girls! Well, I’m family too! Don’t forget it.”
Josephine closed her eyes and sighed. At almost sixty, Kit acted more like a teenager or a two-year-old throwing a tantrum. “I will not enable you, Kit. This pattern has repeated itself on and on for your whole life. We will not give you any more money. We will not lend it to you either. This is your problem to solve. I won’t have my family sucked into your drama.”
Kit, furious, eyes blazing, screamed threats and obscenities. “You cannot send me away! You cannot refuse me.”
“I can and I am.”
“Fine! But just know that if anything happens to me, it will be all your fault!” Then she added, “And don’t you think your Patrick is squeaky clean, JoJo! He’s no saint! He’s no better than me. No saint at all!”
Kit stormed out of the room and then the house, slamming the front door, and Josephine heard Patrick running after her.
———
What was I looking for? A folder, yes, a rainbow folder. Looking in my drawer for that stationery, my monogrammed stationery. So pretty. The girls liked that stationery. I would write the notes on this paper.
But I already wrote the notes! I gave Paige the cross.
What was I going to write in their letters? Oh yes. Take my life. Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee. Such a beautiful hymn. But someone was twisting the words. Take my life! Take my life!
Was I saying that or was she?
She was lifting her ebony arms to the sky and entreating the Almighty to take her life! I remembered now. She would not take her own life, but she begged God to take it. She was tired of living.
Oh, that poor, poor woman. Life had been so hard.
Had life been hard for me?
My head was aching. I saw in my mind’s eye the rainbow folder and the letters to Patrick and the girls and I heard the woman, Angel, screaming it. “Take my life!”
But Angel was my protagonist. I made her up. Didn’t I? What happened at the end of that story? Did she die? What happened to me?
I should ask Patrick. But I couldn’t. I had to ask him something else. About something Kit had said.
“And don’t you think your Patrick is squeaky clean, JoJo! He’s no saint! He’s no better than me. No saint at all!”
Another lie. Surely it was a lie.
What did she mean, Patrick? Patrick!
For all of our marriage, I had never once doubted him. Now I was afraid.
Had Patrick given up on me? Had he given in to Kit?
Was our love a lie? No! Of course not. Right?
I needed to ask Patrick.
It was too complicated, twisting and turning in my mind.
And if Patrick . . .
“Take my life!” She said it! Did I say it? Did I pray it, dear Lord?
The woman in my story sang those words, sang the whole hymn. But then she had used them against herself. She kept saying, “Take my life, take my life!”
Had I said that too? The pounding in my head grew louder, and the rainbow swirled into a dark cloud and then the thunder was crashing through the windows, the lightning blinding me. Surely not! Not darkness again.
I sat up straighter in the wheelchair. I tried to cry out. Had I signed my death warrant? Was I remembering it now? Was I the person who had hired Henry Hughes?
PAIGE
Daddy had protected Momma the first time, but should I do it now? I had no idea. I paced and cried and all but beat my head against the wall in Daddy’s office. What in the world should I do? I stuck the letters and the Huguenot cross back in the folder for the time being. I could not even bring myself to read the rest of Momma’s letter to me. I felt so confused, but right under that confusion lay a bubbling mass of anger.
My mother had hired a hit man to kill herself!
And I knew why.
She wanted us to think it was perpetrated by someone else. We had discussed the issue of suicide before. My grandmother’s . . . the guilt, the horror for the family. And I distinctly remember Momma saying, “I understand the effects of depression, how off-balance it can make someone, but I cannot imagine doing that to my family.”
Except she had attempted it during The Awful Year.
And now, she had imagined something else!
How dare she?
She was out of her mind, and I hated her for it.
Thank goodness Drake was on his way home for the weekend. I texted him, Please come to the house ASAP. Bad news.
As I waited for him, I closed my eyes and thought back to what I’d told Drake and Hannah that first night we’d been together after the shooting. That Momma seemed normal; that Momma and Daddy were fine.
But in truth, I had been so preoccupied with my life during those weeks before the shooting that I had no idea how they were doing. I was starting my junior year, preparing for and taking the SAT, playing first-string on the girls’ soccer team, and we had a good chance to win the regionals this year. I wasn’t home. At all. And I certainly hadn’t been taking my job as Momma’s assistant as seriously as I should have. I should have never shown her those two threatening letters. My one responsibility was to protect her, and I’d failed.
If I’d been paying more attention, I’d have seen that Momma wasn’t fine or normal.
I closed my eyes and knew it, knew it so clearly.
In those recent weeks, Daddy had been afraid Momma was going to try to take her life again. Like the other time. I could barely admit that thought.
So why, why, why did I show her those letters? How could I have been so naïve, so caught up in my life?
At that moment, I felt such crushing guilt—and I wasn’t one to feel guilty. Anger and resentment I had aplenty. But guilt? No way.
I pushed the guilt away, shoved it to the back corner of my mind and let the rage brew so that, by the time Drake arrived, I was so angry I couldn’t see straight. He read wrath on my face and said, “Let’s take a walk, Bourdy. You look like you need to get outside.”
As we began our climb to the highest point on Bearmeadow, I spit out my story. “My mom is the biggest hypocrite of all! Why do the people I think model living as Christians the best do incomprehensible things? Momma tries to kill herself, and Daddy lies about it and gets so stressed out that he gets a DUI and goes to jail. And then she actually hires someone to kill her! What do I do with all this?”
We’d reached the top and stared out at the vista of mountains, void of color, just endless variegated browns that looked stripped of life. I was heaving, out of breath from the climb.
To his credit, Drake said nothing for a long, long time. He stood behind me, his arms wrapped around me as if he could harness the anger. I kept staring out at the mountains and thinking about Momma sitting in the wheelchair and mumbling those words that led me to the truth.
Then my mind drifted to the character in Momma’s most recent novel, the freedwoman who’d wanted to kill herself. A hundred years earlier, she had stood where I was standing, at least in Momma’s imagination. And she’d begged God to take her life.
He hadn’t. That would’ve been a real downer for one of Momma’s novels, which generally have somewhat satisfying endings.
And God hadn’t taken Momma’s life either, in spite of her twisted plans. I felt the anger build again. How could she?
“Why did she do it?” I said, breaking free from Drake’s hold. He remained silent again, until I said, “Drake, I’m really asking a question. Tell me something to make sense of this! Please!”
He took my hand, and we began to trace our way along our favorite mountain path. “Bourdy, you don’t really know depression. You know anger.” He stopped me and brushed his hand on my cheek. “But depression can take you places that are incomprehensible to those around you. Remember The Awful Year for me?”
I nodded, seeing in my mind’s eye a teenaged Drake, miserable and agitated and so needy. The anguish on his face had scared me.
“During The Awful Year, I sank into a deep depression. Sure, it was caused by my parents’ separation and eventual divorce. But sometimes depression is just part of a person’s makeup. And that’s your mother. I think she lives with low-level depression, and at times of great stress, that has morphed into nervous breakdowns. Or what psychiatrists call clinical depression, complete with suicidal thoughts and actions.” He stopped and looked me in the eyes, peering into my soul. “Faith and mental instability aren’t mutually exclusive, Bourdy.”
I chewed on that for a moment. Faith and mental instability aren’t mutually exclusive.
Poor Momma.
Drake tiptoed up to what he said next. “I think she chose this convoluted plan out of love for you and Hannah and your dad. Yes, it was twisted and crazy, but that was all her mind could invent.”
She hired someone to kill her because she didn’t want us to think she was committing suicide. Yes, that had been my conclusion, too, although I had not seen any love in it.
“And what do I do now, Drake?”
We were still facing each other. I looked into his blue-green eyes, intense and filled with love. He reached forward with both hands and firmly held my shoulders. We kept each other’s gaze for a solid minute or more without saying a word. Finally he said, “You know what to do.”
I thought of my family’s lies, how Daddy had protected Momma too much, had loved her too much. I thought of the years we lived with secrets, and I thought of the newfound freedom Daddy had gained—really, we all had gained—when the real story was finally told.
“I’ll tell the truth.”
———
We hiked the mountains for three solid hours, sometimes in silence, and sometimes I’d come to a full halt and let loose with another string of angry accusations. I even confessed how guilty I felt for not doing my job well those weeks before the shooting.
“So many things drove her to it, I guess. Living with the lie from The Awful Year, the stress of the books, Aunt Kit’s crazy antics, the threatening letters.” My poor mother. “Will she be arrested?”
“I don’t think that’s a worry.”
“Daddy will want to keep it secret.”
“He might surprise you.”
I wanted to tell the truth, but I thought of all the vitriol on social media that was already spinning out of control as people hypothesized about the real culprit. If the world found out that it was Momma, what would happen?
We’d tell the truth to Detective Blaylock, I decided, and to those closest to us, but not to the world. I imagined it would eventually become public knowledge, but not from me.
We came to a little stone chapel on the crest of the mountain. Momma had told me its history—it was over one hundred-fifty years old—when she was researching for These Mountains around Us. Ivy climbed along the outside walls, giving it an almost European look. Drake knew how much I loved to sit on a wooden bench inside with the stones from yesteryear around me. I’d dream up stories and type them into my phone. On this day, I shivered. I’d perspired on our hike, from physical and emotional exertion, and now I felt chilled.
He came and sat beside me, put his arm around me, and took both my hands in his other one. “Someday I’m going to marry you in this place.”
Of all the things that could have come out of his mouth, this one had never crossed my mind. I felt my stomach drop. Then the anger came. “Are you serious? This better not be your proposal because it absolutely stinks! I haven’t got on any makeup and you’ve never even kissed me, and I’m not even eighteen. . . .”
He gave that deep, annoying belly laugh of his and gathered me in his arms, and then he kissed me, really kissed me so that everything in my whole body started tingling.
He let me go way too quickly, his eyes dancing. “Satisfied, Bourdy? And no, it wasn’t the proposal. I was just letting you in on my thinking.” Then he kissed me again and said, “Now please, hurry and grow up!”
Much later, hand in hand, nearing my house, I asked him, “Why do you put up with me, Drake? I’m a hot mess.”
He shrugged. “I figure once all the anger leaks out—and hear me, Bourdy, some of it is perfectly legitimate—the real Paige will shine even brighter.”
“I’m not so sure the anger will ever be gone,” I countered.
He scrunched up his nose and acted like he was in deep thought. “Trust me. It’ll be okay.”
I wasn’t convinced. “What do you think about me not attending church?”
“I’m a lot more concerned about your heart than your church attendance.”
“Henry thinks Jesus wouldn’t be hanging out with the church folks. He thinks he’d be eating with the sinners.”
“Sounds rather biblical to me,” he said.
I stuck out my tongue at him. “I really appreciate Henry’s way of looking at faith. And his real questions, honest with no hypocrisy. He asked Momma if she believed in forgiveness and grace. The ultimate hypocrisy is that Henry sees it in Momma’s books, but she doesn’t believe it for herself.”
“It’s irony, Bourdy. Not hypocrisy. The whole thing is ironic. But she does believe it. You know good and well she believes it. She just went on a rabbit trail in her mind, and she didn’t receive it for a while. Almost every Christian I know has done that at some point in his or her journey.”
He nodded my way, and I almost retaliated in anger. But instead I whispered, “What if I never come back around to faith? What if I just stay on this rabbit trail forever?”
“It’s a journey, Bourdy. You’ll come back.”
When he said it so simply, with assurance, I wanted to come back. I felt a stirring way down in my soul.
We’d reached the house, but before we went inside, Drake said, “I have no doubt about it. Jesus is a gentleman, and He won’t force His way in, but once He’s there, He woos us back, one way or another. With you, it might be a little rough. I personally wouldn’t challenge the God of the universe to a wrestling match, Bourdy, but if you must, you must. He always meets us where we’re at.”