One of Us (10 page)

Again, I try to imagine what went on here. I picture the men lying on the boards, looking up at the one small window, watching the ever-present
flakes of black soot twirl through the openings between the bars, listening to the construction twenty feet away from them of the means of their demise.

The sound would’ve been deafening in the jail, but it didn’t matter where you were in town. There would have been no escaping the grinding of the saws and the ringing of the hammers. The mothers, wives, and sisters would have had to listen to it as they went about their daily chores.

I pause to read the descriptive plaque. It goes on and on about the deplorable conditions in the mines: the frequencies of explosions and roof falls, the dying canaries, the pitiful wages, the debt passed down for generations, the lack of schools, the absence of any labor negotiating power.

I know what it would say if Walker had written it: Life isn’t fair.

I take a final look at the gallows on my way back to my car. This time I try to imagine what Simon Husk felt as he stood here during his last moments on earth. What horror visited him that was powerful enough to stop his heart? Not a curse but his belief in a curse, or did the ghost of Prosperity McNab appear to him again after all these years? If he did he must not have had his trusty lipstick with him this time. The desire to draw a big red clown smile on Simon’s face would have been irresistible.

ten

A
NNA GREGER WAS NOT
a happy woman. I don’t think I ever saw her smile or heard her laugh or say a nice thing about anyone. I assumed part of her disposition had to do with how she’d been treated by her boyfriend and by the bad-hair fairy. Imagine my surprise then when her cousin turns out to be cheerful and chatty, almost annoyingly so, once she gets over the initial shock at seeing me on her doorstep.

“I’m Scarlet Dawes,” I announce to the stunned face of Marcella Greger.

I don’t need to ask who she is. The family resemblance isn’t striking but it’s there. She’s obviously much older than Anna was when I knew her. She’s much heavier, too, and has big, blunt features that make me think of a face carved into a totem pole. She has the same hair, though, only Anna let her curls grow long and wild; Marcella shears hers close to her head like a carroty sheep’s wool. She has the same dark eyes, too, but these ones don’t seem to have any intelligence behind them so they don’t glimmer; they’re the flat brown of mud.

She slowly opens her mouth and her chin disappears into the folds of her neck. I wait for her to speak but she just stares at me.

“I assume you’re Marcella Greger, Anna’s cousin.”

“I-I-I,” she begins to stammer.

“Oh, come on,” I say, smiling at her. “You can’t really be that sur
prised to see me after sending me that letter then refusing to talk to me on the phone. You had to know I’d be intrigued.”

She continues to stare and say nothing.

“Anna had a terrible secret about our family that she didn’t blab to the world while she was still alive?” I go on. “I’m sure that fact alone will turn out to be more unbelievable than the actual secret. Can I come in?”

“Yes,” she’s finally able to answer me.

I lead and she follows.

From outside, her house is nothing: a little white, vinyl-sided affair with a one-car attached garage sitting all alone on the side of a rarely traveled country road. Her nearest neighbor is on the other side of a hill and not visible from her yard. Across the road is a sagging barn, stripped of paint, its walls gaping with holes, and what looks like an abandoned farmhouse, but you can never tell around here. Someone could still be living there.

Inside, the house is something else. I have to pause for a moment to get my bearings before diving in. I’m a minimalist, and Marcella Greger is obviously an accumulator.

Every available space in the small front room, including the windowsills, is covered with knickknacks: figurines, candles, blown-glass animals, vases, perfume bottles, teacups, piggy banks, seashells, commemorative plates. The one common quality the items seem to share is that they are all ungodly bright colors. Even the shells are painted in neon greens, oranges, and blues.

The walls are peony pink and the carpet is lavender. A rainbow-striped afghan is thrown over the back of a sofa piled with stuffed animals and rag dolls. The table lamps have plastic shades depicting scenes from Disney cartoons. Suncatchers made of bits of colored glass hang in all the windows and freckle the room with yet more color. I feel woozy.

“I’m sorry. It was such a shock seeing you out there. I forgot my manners and everything.”

Marcella hurries around in front of me and plants herself in my way. For the first time since meeting her, I notice what she’s wearing: turquoise blue stretch pants, furry green frog slippers, and a yellow
sweatshirt with Minnie Mouse cavorting across the front of it in her traditional red and white polka dots. Shrink her down to four inches in height and Marcella would make a very nice addition to her own collection of crap.

She smiles fondly at me and for one very uncomfortable second I think she’s going to hug me.

“It’s so nice to meet you. Anna loved you to pieces.”

“I know. I was her best friend.”

“Can I get you something?”

“Blinders.”

She laughs.

“I know it’s a little crazy in here. Some people think it’s too much.”

“No,” I say, feigning disbelief.

“Yes, they do,” she assures me with a nod of her head. “I guess it is very colorful. I can’t help it. I love colors. The brighter the better. I think it comes from my childhood. My dad was a miner. Matter of fact, he worked in one of your dad’s mines. I guess that’s no surprise being from here. Anyways, I grew up in a world of soot and smoke. Everything was gray. Even flower petals got soot on them. Didn’t seem like we had any color at all in our house. I think that’s why I love it so much now.”

She comes to the end of her childhood account and gives me a wistful look. Once again I think she’s going to hug me. I let my attention be diverted by a large rainbow, at least two feet long, sitting alone on its own shelf in an obvious place of honor. At one end of it is a pot of gold and at the other is a lecherous-looking leprechaun.

She catches me staring at the piece.

“Isn’t that something?” she says rapturously. “One of my nieces got it for me for my sixty-fifth birthday. It’s a real sculpture. Made of bronze. Signed by the artist and everything. Try and pick it up. Go ahead. You won’t believe how heavy it is.”

I do what she asks and make a show of how I can barely pick it up. She laughs appreciatively. It has a nice heft to it. With a good swing, the weight of it could be lethal.

“Can I get you something to drink?” she asks me.

“A drink would be nice.”

“You mean a drink drink? I don’t keep alcohol in the house except for a few beers in the fridge. Well, and I also keep a bottle of Southern Comfort I use to make hot toddies in the winter when I catch a cold. It’s something my family’s always done. I got used to it. But I don’t drink otherwise.”

“Southern Comfort’s a little sweet for me, but if you put it over ice and mix in a little water it should be fine.”

I follow her to the kitchen but don’t step inside it. Like the other room, it’s overwhelmed with clutter and chaotic color. Her refrigerator door is completely hidden beneath clipped coupons, store flyers, overdue bills, and notes to herself all stuck to the appliance with an array of mismatched, random novelty magnets ranging from farm animals and flamenco dancers to prancing picnic food and the cast of
The Flintstones
.

“I have a terrible memory,” Marcella explains to me, motioning at the refrigerator.

She catches me studying the individual notices and doesn’t seem to like it.

She looks nervously back and forth between me and a large number 228 written in red marker and underlined five times on a piece of paper tacked to the middle of the door with a Pittsburgh Penguins magnet. She suddenly steps between me and the refrigerator.

“Why don’t you go sit down in the living room and I’ll bring your drink?”

“Fine.”

I walk back to the couch, move aside some stuffed animals, and take a seat.

“It’s interesting to find out about you after all these years. It never seemed to me that Anna had any kind of a personal life,” I call to her while I wait.

“Well, you were a kid,” she shouts back at me. “You probably don’t remember. And it wasn’t like she had much of a personal life.”

She joins me again, carrying a watery bourbon for me and a mug of microwaved stale coffee for herself.

“So what is this secret she told you?” I ask.

“Well, she didn’t exactly tell me. I found a letter she wrote. Well, it wasn’t exactly a letter. It was more like a confession. Or no, not even that. A statement.”

“A statement?”

“Yes. I suppose I should start at the beginning.”

“I suppose,” I sigh.

“When Anna died, all her belongings came to me since I was her closest relative. I gave her clothes and things like that to Goodwill, but I kept a box of papers and personal items I meant to sort through one day but I never got around to it. Her death was so horrible, I didn’t want to think about it at the time, so I put the box up in my attic and forgot about it.

“Recently I’ve fallen on some bad financial times. I won’t go into all that unless you want me to.”

“No, that’s not necessary,” I tell her.

She looks disappointed.

“I might have to sell my house. My sister and her husband have a trailer on their property that their son and his wife and kids used to live in when they were just starting out. Well, actually, it was after they were starting out. See he got into some trouble with—”

“I get the picture,” I interrupt her.

“Well, I’ve started to go through some things and I finally went through Anna’s box and I found this letter. Or statement. Or whatever you want to call it.”

“May I see it?”

“I don’t have it with me. I put the original copy somewhere safe. Not in the house. But I did make a copy for myself.”

“Then can I see the copy? I won’t doubt the authenticity of the original one.”

She hesitates.

“Why did you go to the trouble of contacting me in the first place if you didn’t mean to show me the letter or at least tell me what it says?”

My words apparently make sense to her. She gets up slowly from the couch and thumps over to a desk in the corner of the room. I didn’t
notice it earlier because it, too, is hidden beneath dozens of gaudy knickknacks.

She opens the middle drawer and takes out a piece of standard white paper with a small amount of print on it. She gives it to me and I read it in an instant. It’s only four sentences long. I even recognize Anna’s handwriting. She was left-handed and wrote in rigid, backward-slanting capital letters. She told me once she never learned to write properly because the nuns at her Catholic school wouldn’t let her use her left hand because they believed it was a sign of the Devil. They even went so far as to lash the evil hand to her side with a piece of rope. She was never able to master her right hand and almost flunked out of school because her assignments were illegible.

“Why would she make something like this up?” Marcella asks me. “It’s too weird. If she wanted to make up something bad, aren’t there a lot easier things to make up? And why write it down?”

I don’t respond.

“I didn’t know what to do so I went to see your mother.”

“My mother? You showed this to my mother?”

She nods.

“And what did she say?”

“She said it was nonsense. It was obviously the ravings of a lunatic. And she reminded me how she killed herself. But I knew Anna probably better than anyone. I never believed she killed herself. Especially in that way.”

“You didn’t know her better than I did,” I correct her. “And if it wasn’t suicide, how did it happen? She was murdered?”

“No, no, no, nothing like that. I don’t know what happened. It just never made sense to me.”

“Well, I was with her all the time. And I’d have to agree with my mother that she was a disturbed woman. This is crazy.”

I set the piece of paper on the coffee table and take another sip of my drink.

“So let me see if I have this straight. You didn’t get any reaction from my mother so you decided to try me next. Why not my father?”

“Oh, I could never talk to your father.”

“Why not? My mother is much scarier and far more dangerous than my father. He’s actually very open-minded. I’m sure he wouldn’t have believed this either, but he would’ve been entertained by the idea of it.”

“This is more about you than him.”

“I disagree. I think he’d find this much more upsetting than I do.”

“This doesn’t upset you? I mean, if it was true?”

“It’s not true.”

“But if it was?”

Marcella’s beginning to annoy me. I stand up and stroll across the small room, my heels leaving indentations in the pale purple plush of her carpeting.

I catch sight of my reflection in one of the windows. A woman dressed like me in a place like this is so wrong, it almost seems right. I envision a haute couture photo shoot for
Vogue:
“Paris Malaise Meets Flea Market Nausea.”

I turn back to Marcella.

“Why did you go see my mother? What could you possibly gain?”

Her face reddens.

“Who said I wanted to gain anything?”

“You asked her for money, didn’t you? And now you want money from me.”

“I wouldn’t want much, just enough to keep my house.”

I’m surprised by her answer. She doesn’t make any denials or beat around the bush. Even though she’s trying to blackmail me, I know she doesn’t think she’s doing anything wrong. The Dawes family has plenty of money. She’s only asking for a little of it in exchange for doing us a favor. This way she’ll be able to save her kaleidoscopic little nest and we’ll be able to save our lily white skins.

“The problem with blackmailers is that they can always come back for more,” I tell her. “And even if you do pay them, there’s no guarantee that they won’t talk.”

“I’m very trustworthy. Ask anyone,” she replies, not seeming at all offended by what I’ve just called her.

“Somehow I don’t see me wandering around Lost Creek asking people if you can be trusted.”

I walk around behind the couch. She doesn’t turn to watch me but keeps looking straight ahead, trying to maintain her composure.

“If I don’t give you the money, what are you going to do?”