I will myself to stand.
Petals are everywhere, glued to my knees, to the soles of my bare feet.
I reach down to brush them off.
They are not petals.
They are tiny, twisted scraps of Kleenex. Fragments of tissue that have disintegrated in the washer. The ones constantly nesting in the pockets of Effie’s robes and sweaters.
This is Effie’s trail. It leads to her front door, miles away from the grave where Tessie went to sleep.
Except Tessie is waking up. The old Tessie, who outran boys, who beat a plodding heart, who risked scabs and bones and scars, who did not lose because her dead mother cheered her across the finish line.
I see Tessie crouched on a track in blinding sunlight. Heat rises in visible waves. Her eyes are down. To finish first, she will spend the least amount of time possible in the air, over the hurdles.
Her fingertips are poised on gritty dirt.
Mine are twisting Effie’s doorknob.
Both of us, ready for the gun to go off.
Lydia, age 17
10 DAYS AFTER THE TRIAL
He’s like a serial killer Mr. Darcy, offering me his hand so that I can step into the boat bobbing away off the ratty dock. We took this wiggly little path down from the cabin to get here. His idea, the rental cabin. Our special goodbye night, he says, before he takes off for China or wherever he’s really going. This place is remote as hell. I wonder if he brought other girls here. Or does he choose a new spot every time? Everything’s black. The water, the sky, the forest of trees behind us. And what about that tarp in the bottom of the boat? Does he really think that Lydia Bell is this stupid? Of course, I’m stepping into a boat with a serial killer but that’s what you have to do when there’s no real evidence and you’re the very last hope.
“Careful,” he warns as I step down. “Want to drive?” While I sit, he’s yanking the outboard string, having a little trouble getting it all revved up. I could offer advice but I don’t.
“No, thanks,” I say. “I’d be scared. I’m just going to sit back and look at the moon if I can find it. I have a flashlight. Maybe I’ll read to you.” I wave the book in my hand, The Ultimate Book of Love Poems: Browning to Yeats, even though I have a photographic memory and I’ve read this book a billion times.
“I didn’t know anything was capable of scaring you,” he teases. Hmm, I’m thinking, the scared thing might have been too much.
“You’re going to love it out here on the lake in the dark,” he’s saying. “Just your style. Wait to read until we get to a good spot. I’ll cut the motor and we can drift a little. Drink a little wine.”
He’s about two miles out, slowing the boat down, when I flick on my flashlight, open the book, and begin. “‘You love me. You love me not.’”
The words get lost in the noise of the engine.
“What?” Impatient. “I told you not to read yet.”
I go silent, which is hard.
He kills the motor in the middle of the lake.
I’m prepared, of course. Ten questions are typed out in my head, numbered one under the other. I shut the book.
Question No. 1: “Did you kill those girls?”
“What girls, sweetie?”
“Did you think I wouldn’t love you anymore? That I would tell?”
“Lydia. Stop.”
“Did you know who I was that very first day in your office? That I was Tessie’s best friend?” I want him to say no. I want him to explain.
It’s hard to see his face in the dark. His body remains perfectly relaxed. “Sweetheart, of course I knew. I know everything about you and Tessie. You are fucked-up little girls.”
I’m watching his hands, fiddling with a coiled rope.
It’s official. Lydia Frances Bell loved a serial killer.
My heart is pounding pretty hard, which is to be expected. I keep my eyes on the rope. “Where are you really going on that plane?”
“Surely your big brain has better questions than this, Lydia. But to answer… I’m not sure yet.”
“I have ten questions total.”
“Fire away.”
“Do you really have a daughter named Rebecca?”
“I do not.” He’s grinning.
“No family? No friends?”
“Unnecessary, don’t you think?”
“My other three questions don’t matter.”
My fingers curl around Daddy’s gun in my coat pocket.
“I’m pregnant,” I say.
The gun, now aimed at his chest.
Blood drooling out of his shoulder instead.
I didn’t even hear it go off. A gunshot on the lake sounds like the sky is cracking. Like it might rain shards of glass. That’s what Tessie used to say.
I steady my hand.
“Wait, sweetheart.” He’s pleading with me. “We can work this out. You and I, we’re the same.”
Tessa, present day
2:44 A.M.
The foyer, dark.
“Effie?” I call out.
“In the kitchen, Sue.” Her voice traveling over from the next room. Lilting. Her panic erased. I smell something burnt.
I wonder if it’s gunpowder. If my neighbor has shot her digger snatcher dead with that little pearl-handled revolver she keeps loaded in her bedside table against my wishes.
You can do this. For Charlie.
I round the corner.
It is an ordinary tableau.
And a chilling one.
Lydia, a very alive, blond Lydia, seated at the table.
Effie, beaming and placing a blue-flowered china plate in front of her.
“There you are!” Effie enthuses. “False alarm! It wasn’t the digger snatcher after all. It was just Liz here. Which is a real treat.”
Lydia, smiling. Not buried in an anonymous grave. Not broken. Not sorry. A part of everything.
Her lips are slashed with bright red. I see the tiny, tiny black birthmark on her upper lip that one boy teased her was a tick. She’d held her hand over her mouth for a week.
Her left leg is crossed over the right knee at a slightly odd angle. She used to sit just like that one summer to hide a mark from her dad’s belt buckle. It became a habit she couldn’t break.
I knew her habits. I knew secrets that made her howl. I could tear her to shreds.
Lydia watches me carefully. Still not saying a word.
My gun clatters to the floor.
I don’t move. Because that was my move.
“You dropped something, honey,” Effie is saying. “Aren’t you going to pick it up? You might remember me talking about Liz. She’s the researcher from the national historical society who visits me now and again. She stored some of her boxes of Fort Worth research in my shed not that long ago. She visits societies all over the nation!”
I remember. Boxes, taped tightly shut. Charlie, helping Effie and a strange woman lug them to the shed.
“Liz came over tonight to get something she needs out of them, and didn’t want to wake me,” Effie continues. “I told her it was best not to skulk around here in Texas. She spends most of her time in more civilized places like Washington and London, isn’t that right?”
Lydia, this dyed, smiling, nodding Lydia, has been insinuating herself into Effie’s life. Pretending to be someone she isn’t. Spying, like she always did. Watching me. Watching Charlie. Delivering her diary to my doorstep. Returning my shirt, soaked in red. Playing her little games.
“Where is he?” I hiss at Lydia.
It was Lydia who always told me not to say the doctor’s name out loud. Seize control. Limit his power.
“The digger snatcher isn’t here, honey.” Effie, trying to clear things up. “Like I mentioned, it was Liz in the back yard. We were just discussing that little Mudgett man from Chicago who tried to build one of his murder castles downtown. Liz knows everything about old Fort Worth. I agree with her that a plaque should be erected on that lot where he planned his slaughterhouse for girls.”