She took my hand, for the very first time, and her palm felt cold against mine. A thin sheen of damp covered her fingers and they trembled in my grasp.
“You must know. You must know how much he loves you.” Her voice sounded small, like a child's whisper.
“He doesn't want me here. He won't trust me-”
“He's so afraid of losing you. He knows now, what with Lolly's threats against you, her death-he should never have brought you here. He doesn't want you to pay for our sins.”
“Sins?” I leaned in closer to her, our noses and mouths nearly touching. Our voices were mere murmurs.
“Do you love your father, Jordan? Do you?”
I took a long, shuddery breath. “I'm still not used to thinking of him as my father-”
She stilled my talk with her cold fingertips. “Enough analysis. Enough posturing. Enough denial. Push has come to shove. His life may depend on this. Tell me. Do you love him?”
His life may depend on this. Her fingers felt icy against my lips, her palm smooth against my jaw. I pressed my tongue hard against the roof of my mouth. “Yes,” I managed to croak. “Yes, I love him.”
Gretchen closed her hand around my face and for one moment I thought she would kiss me. Her eyes were half-closed and she breathed slowly, her mouth open, her breath smelling of mint gum.
“I want to help him, but he won't let me. Why?” I whispered.
She pressed her lips together and regarded me again with surprising frankness.
“I was afraid-because I'd been such a bitch-you could never love him. Could never accept him. I used to want that, I wanted you never to want him as your daddy. But no more.” She clasped both my hands in hers. “You've got to help me, Jordan. Help me protect him. I don't think I can do it alone.”
“Tell me.”
“You have to promise me. You'll help protect Bob Don. Please.”
I wavered for a moment. “Just what did he do?”
“Promise me!” she insisted.
“I promise. I'll do everything I can to protect him.” I kept my words barely louder than a soft breath. “He and I aren't distant blood, right?”
She shuddered. “Blood again. This has been a place of needless death ever since those sailors were butchered on the beach. I want to leave here and never come back.”
“Tell me.” I squeezed her hands.
Long silences-the ones that last years and graft themselves into your very bones-are the hardest to break. She tensed, like steel had hardened in her arms and legs, and she didn't look at me for minutes. I held her and waited. The outside squall roared and the rain went from drops to solid sheets, enveloping the house in rattles and hums.
“Paul. He killed Paul.” She forced the words out like a dying cough.
“But Paul committed suicide,” I whispered. “That's what Deborah said…”
“Ruled suicide. The body was never recovered.” Now that she'd made the dreaded admission, the words came a little easier. Tears dribbled from the corner of her eyes and she smeared them across her face with the back of her hand.
“Deborah said Paul left a suicide note-left it on the front door. Said he walked into the ocean because he couldn't live with the guilt of shooting Nora. But Deborah's sure her father didn't kill her mother.”
“I am,” Gretchen said. “Oh, I am. Because after Paul killed Nora, he came here to kill me.”
Down the hall, a door slammed, and I heard a sharply angry Deborah bickering with Aubrey that he had to go talk to Mendez next. Aubrey sounded reluctant and morose. Deborah urged him along, and shortly their voices faded down the stairs. Lightning flashed its hard light in my window, and I oddly imagined God taking a snapshot of Gretchen and me clutching each other's hands.
Her tongue flicked over her lips. “There's a taint in every family, something in the blood that can warp any poor soul that gets too much of the bad ingredient. In mine it's loving booze. My brother was a drunk, too. And our grandmother before us, although no one ever wanted to admit it.”
“Yeah. In my family it's being sharp-tongued and nosy,” I whispered back.
She laughed then, briefly, and I felt the first true connection between us take shaky life. I watched her wipe away another tear.
“So what's the taint of the Goertz blood?”
“Silence. And a horrible, horrible pride. The kind of pride that forces an entire family to its knees in its service. A pride that leads to insanity because it shackles you so. Paul suffered from it, and Lolly did, too. That's why they're dead.”
“Tell me what happened.”
She spoke now without hesitation, relieved to have her needed ally. “Paul was an artist, a gifted sculptor. When I left him he quit working. He became terribly depressed.
Mutt and Lolly insisted-Lolly and Paul were always close, they were cut from the same cheap bolt of cloth-that he go into treatment. He met Nora when he started work again; she was his favorite model. They married soon after.” She paused. “Deborah's so like her mother-trusting, kind-hearted, smart, but maybe too book smart. And Nora was sweet. It would have been easy for her to hate me, considering what I'd done to Paul. But she never did. At least she didn't ever show me anything but kindness. I loved her, too, and she didn't deserve such a terrible death.” A sob broke her words and I stayed quiet while she composed herself.
“We all thought Paul was finally happy. Deborah and Brian were born in fairly quick order and he seemed to settle down. He and Bob Don didn't speak-the resentment, the hatred between them went too deep. They'd loved each other once, but no more. My fault.”
“No, not your fault. Their choice,” I said.
She ignored my attempt at consolation. “It wasn't over. Paul started sending me these.” She pulled from her pocket a creased and yellowed envelope, worn with handling. She offered it to me and I carefully removed a card.
It was an old-style greeting, discolored with years. The paper felt coarse but fragile beneath my fingers and smelled of a dusty closet. The cover of the card showed a huge round yellow smiling face, the eternal grin of the 1970s. No text was written on the front, but when I opened the card, I saw the preprinted greeting: YOU MAKE ME SMILE. Scored in faded words beneath the kindliness was an ugly intimation:
ESPECIALLY WHEN I THINK OF YOU DYING.
I handed her back the card, feeling sick. She slipped it back into the envelope quickly and wiggled her fingers, as if dusting some foulness off her hands.
“My God. Just like the cards I received.”
She swallowed. “It was Paul's sick joke. He sent me others, but I had them destroyed. I never told Bob Don. I knew he'd go after Paul. I just wanted to forget Paul existed. I never thought-” She covered her face with her hands. “I'm so ashamed, I was so foolish.”
“You couldn't know, it's not your fault.” I squeezed her hands. How odd life is. A year ago this woman was my mortal enemy, and now we sat trying to muddle together through a dark and torturous past, united by the love we felt for the same man. Family makes strange bedfellows.
“I know. Hindsight is hell. But whatever was wrong with Paul, Nora couldn't fix. He killed her, shot her in the face.”
“Deborah claims her father, since he was an artist who had sculpted Nora so often, wouldn't kill her the way he did.”
Gretchen shook her head. “Deborah clings to hope. No one wants to believe her daddy could kill her mom. I knew her father better than she did. Blasting away Nora's face makes perfect sense for Paul. Did Deborah tell you he marred or destroyed all the sculptures in his studio after he killed Nora?” The expression on my face answered for me. “Of course she didn't, Jordan. That fact won't support her theory of her father as the wronged victim.”
Another round of thunder rumbled above the roof, but fell faint quickly, and the rain began to ease against the windows. The band of the storm seemed to be passing us.