Deidre Schmacker arrived in yellow sweats, stripped of makeup but as brisk and awake as if it were noon. She brought an entire platoon of people in blue vests that ever-so-subtly announced they were the FBI in large yellow letters on the back. Armed with flashlights, they combed the lawn and fingerprinted the dock and the deck posts and all but dragged the river, while Deidre questioned Sullivan in the kitchen and I made her tea. I hoped they’d be gone before Bethany woke up, though I wasn’t sure how she was sleeping through any of it.
Sullivan was polite and cooperative, patiently going over and over the details until I wanted to ask if Grandma Schmacker needed to get a hearing aid.
“Can you think of anything at all that might help us identify him?” she said for what must have been the twelfth time.
“From what I could tell, I think he was shorter than me,” Sully said again. “Didn’t have much heft. Wiry.” He nodded at the ice bag I’d given him. “He was strong enough to take me out.”
“And you’re sure he didn’t say anything?”
I ground my teeth and plunked the teapot in front of her. Did she want it in blood?
“Just that one four-letter utterance I told you about, when he tripped and fell. If he hadn’t, I never would have gotten hold of him.”
When Schmacker launched into a review of what the cloth felt like, I was ready to head for the pantry and devour its contents.
“Dr. Crisp, you’ve been very helpful,” Agent Schmacker said finally. “Now if you’ll excuse us, I’d like to speak with Mrs. Coffey privately.”
I froze, fingers around the teapot handle. “I would rather he stayed.”
“This will just take a few minutes.” Her eyes did their grandmother droop. “If you don’t mind, Dr. Crisp.”
He gave me a reassuring look, but I felt less than bolstered as I went mechanically to the counter stool she nodded to. I was reenacting a scene that had happened to me before.
What now? I was about to be implicated in the continued threats on my sister’s life?
“This is a nice tea,” she said. “Won’t you join me in a cup?”
“No, thank you,” I said. I would rather drink hemlock.
“You don’t care much for me, do you, Mrs. Coffey?”
As hard as I tried to remain expressionless, I knew my eyebrows shot up.
“I’m an observer, just like you are,” she said. “I see these things.”
I shrugged. “Does it make any difference whether I like you?”
“It makes a difference that you trust me. I know this must be hard for you. I looked into it—you had a rough go with the FBI when your husband was arrested. That can leave a bitter taste in your mouth.”
She obviously wouldn’t leave me alone if I didn’t give her something.
“Okay,” I said. “I did come across some hate mail for Sonia, just yesterday, that I was going to call you about.”
“I’m not accusing you of holding anything back, Mrs. Coffey, although I would like to see those.”
“I’ll go get them.”
She put an unwelcome hand on my arm. “That can wait. My concern right now is not for Sonia. She’s in a safe place—unlike Bethany.”
The air in the room went dead. I was surprised I could breathe in it.
“Bethany,” I said. “You think whoever came on the property was after Bethany?”
“I think we have to consider the possibility. Someone obviously isn’t done with Sonia yet, and anyone who would go to the kind of professional lengths that this person did would also know that she is not here.”
Everything on me shook. I gripped my hair, my knees, the counter.
“Put this on,” she said. She hung her sweat jacket around my shoulders and filled the teacup, which she slid toward me. “Drink that.”
“You can’t mean that somebody would try to hurt Bethany to get at Sonia,” I said.
“We don’t know. No direct threats have been made, but we’ll have the house watched. And you’ll let us know if you see or hear anything the least bit suspicious.”
“Of course I will.” My hands went to my temples, and I pressed until my thoughts began to line up. “The list—Bethany said Holly, one of the nannies, was fired because she stole from Sonia.”
“Good. We’ll look into that.”
“And Patrick Fargason.” My teeth jittered against each other. Dear God, please don’t let me throw up. “He came here about eight o’clock tonight.”
I somehow managed to describe the visit, eyes closed, words pinning the details like tacks on a board. His ruined brother. The missing money. Their hatred for Sonia.
“You say he was stocky,” Deidre said.
I nodded.
“Dr. Crisp described tonight’s intruder as being thin.” She paused. “That is incredibly helpful, Lucia. I know you would do anything to protect that child. It’s obvious that you love her.”
I could feel my eyes narrowing. “You aren’t just suggesting she’s in danger so I’ll give you information.”
“I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“You did it to Sonia.” I shoved my forehead into my hands. “I’m sorry—I’m just upset.”
“Of course you are. If you’re referring to our posing the possibility that Sonia might have arranged her own near-death experience, it was a theory we worked with. We’ve had more than one celebrity beat himself up and claim to be mugged, just for the publicity. In Sonia’s case, we’ve now discarded that. Which brings us back to Bethany. And yourself. You are part of Sonia’s family too. We have spoken to your father, by the way.”
I brought my head up. “Is he a suspect?”
Agent Schmacker smiled. “No. And you don’t have to regard everyone as suspicious. You can leave that to me.”
I detected a twinkle in the liquid gray eyes.
“I do it so well. But I hate having to alarm you,” she said.
“I needed to know. I have to take care of Bethany.”
“Then keep things as normal for her as possible.”
“She starts school Monday. Should I not send her?”
“No. Just don’t put her on a bus. Drive her yourself. We can talk about precautions.” She slid the tea toward me again. “You have to take care of yourself, Mrs. Coffey. This is a stressful time, and you need to be in the best possible condition to help us.”
I took a sip from the cup and made an involuntary face.
“You don’t like it?” she said.
“It’s not my favorite,” I said.
“That’s a shame. Tea is so good at taking the edge off the uglies.” She looked at me with grandmother sadness. “And I’m afraid we will still have more of those to deal with.”
Monday I drove Bethany to school myself, as Agent Schmacker suggested. If she’d told me to dress her in a suit of armor, I would have. Normal, normal, she’d drilled into me. Warn her about strangers, of course. I’d told her there was no need. Bethany already had a suspicion of unknown people that made her a good candidate for the FBI.
By the time I walked Bethany inside the school, the sweat matted my hair to my forehead and soaked through my top. Why did these Southerners send their children to school when it was still ninety degrees? The anxiety alone emptied my sweat glands.
When I saw Bethany’s teacher, Miss Richardson, in the classroom doorway, it occurred to me only briefly to hate her. She was a rail-thin blonde in her late twenties, wearing horizontal stripes that would have made me look like Tweedledee or Tweedledum. Or both. But she squatted down to greet Bethany and asked her name in a voice that made me want to stay and be in first grade.
Bethany looked up at me.
“This is Bethany Cabot,” I said.
“Can you introduce me to your mom?” Miss Richardson said.
Bethany nodded, bouncing her curls. “This is my mom, Aunt Lucia.”
“How lucky are you?” the teacher said. She stood up and smiled at me. “We’re going to be just fine, Aunt Lucia Mom.”
To be certain of that, I went to the headmaster’s office to inform her that Bethany would need to be watched closely on the playground—that no one else but me was authorized to pick her up—that Miss Richardson and I were to make contact before Bethany got into the car with me when I collected her in the afternoon— that I was to be notified if anyone from the UPS man on up took an unusual interest in her.
“A Deidre Schmacker from the FBI was here first thing this morning,” the headmaster told me. “Your Bethany is safe with us.”
If I could have cried, I would have, all the way out to the car, just like any other mother who took her baby to her first day of school—her baby who was in danger of giving up more than just her childhood for her mother.
And fear wasn’t the only thing that nagged at me. By the time I walked into the empty kitchen that still smelled like the blueberry waffles and sausage patties I’d fixed Bethany for breakfast, loneliness had descended on me.
I hadn’t felt lonely in that pointed a way for a long time. Maybe, I decided as I threw myself into doing the dishes, because lonely had become a way of being.
“Your life may be a pile of crap,” my father had said when he got out of rehab, “but if it’s a familiar pile of crap, you’ll live with it before you’ll risk exchanging it for something else that might be worse.”
Sonia had instructed him to turn the pile of filth—she would never utter the word crap—over to the Lord, and He would transform it.
That had always been about as helpful to me as “Don’t worry. Be happy.” All I knew was that loneliness dulled the longer you just lived with it. Now that Bethany had filled my hours with her rare giggle and her emerging chatter and her enchantment with every ordinary childhood thing I introduced her to, I had gotten a taste of living without that loneliness. Her absence now was painful.
Made all the more so by the additional ragging from my mother’s voice as I nearly scrubbed the Teflon off the waffle grill.
Don’t get attached to her like you did before, Lucia Marie. I know you have a tender heart, but Bethany doesn’t belong to you. She’s Sonia’s. You’re the strong one. You’ll go back and fix your own life sooner or later.
My own life.
What the Sam Hill was that anymore? Right now I was suspended in a strange place, hauled out of Sonia’s healing, but only beginning to poke my toe into my own. I didn’t know whether to plunge in or run. I wanted a Hershey bar.
I went to the pantry and unearthed one and pulled the wrapper half off. There was no one there to stop me.
But there was also no one there to make me want to consume it so I could get through the next hour with him or her. Or without them.
I buried the bar back in the stash and escaped from the kitchen, out onto the deck. Harry the Heron looked up from his distant stance in the river as if he, too, were missing Bethany and James-Lawson and Wesley—who, I remembered, I needed to call to tell her we wouldn’t be needing her, at least not for a while. That made me feel worse.
I looked back at the serene Harry. He just stood. His stillness wasn’t the kind I always tried to accomplish. He seemed so sure of his place there in the shallows at the bank. He didn’t try to make himself invisible. He didn’t hate his life. Not like I hated what mine had become before I came here. That’s what I’d told Sullivan.
Dear God, do I really feel that?
This time, I was sure God answered me, because my soul cried out a resounding yes. It burned and it scraped and it clawed and it wouldn’t be pushed down. It was too real.
When I heard a car pull in, I jerked out of my reverie, heart slamming. Sullivan was still at the guesthouse.
I got myself back inside the house and locked the French door behind me. Someone was already knocking at the front door, and only by sheer force of will did I go to it, fingers curled in my pocket around the phone I’d keyed Deidre Schmacker’s number into.
“Who’s there?” I said.
“The cleaning lady,” a familiar voice said. “Lucia, it’s Wesley.”
I was a puddle of pure relief when I got the door open.
She greeted me with her magnificent smile and a handled shopping bag.
“Swimming suits,” she said. “You and me and the children, this afternoon.”
My heart took a dive. “Come on in,” I said. “But Sonia isn’t here.”
“She isn’t here?” Wesley stepped in and scanned the foyer as if Sonia might be hiding in the umbrella stand. The search stopped at the blank wall.
“She got you to take down the mirrors,” she said.
“No, she did it herself,” I said. “The hard way. You want some coffee?”
“Try and stop me.”
While I brewed another pot and brought out the banana nut muffins Bethany and I had made the day before—with raw instead of refined sugar—I brought her up to date. Even as I told the weekend’s story, including a rendition of me fending off a few local reporters who’d gotten wind of the FBI’s presence, I had a hard time believing all of that had happened in just three days.
Wesley listened with her warm-oil eyes, giving the occasional nod and stirring her coffee in a meditative fashion. I sank onto a stool beside her when I was finished, spent but somehow calm, as if merely saying it all took some of its bite away.
I hesitated to say it, but I had to. “I’m glad you came by,” I said.
Wesley pulled in her chin in that way she had. “I didn’t just come by. Sonia told me Friday she wanted to work with me twice a day. I’m here for my morning shift.”
“She said that?” I shook my head. “That was before the FBI showed up and triggered the whole mirror-smashing thing, I guess.”
“Miss Sonia was ready to smash things long before that. She’s right where she needs to be.”
“Absolutely.”
“And where does that leave you?”
I shrugged. “Here with Bethany. I’m definitely not leaving her now, with all this going on . . .”
I let that trail off. Wesley lowered her head to look at me.
“What?” she said.
What was the thing Sullivan and I talked about—how I needed to become I. Why that came to me at that moment I didn’t have a clue, but I reached for the wisp and pulled it in.
“I know what I’m doing for Bethany,” I said. “But I don’t know what I’m doing for me.”
A smile rose on Wesley’s face. “Well, I know a good place to start. Pick you a bathing suit, girl. We are goin’ swimmin’.”