Time to go.
Holly gets up, starts to leave the room, hears her mother’s imperative voice (Leave it like you found it—how many times have I told you?), and goes back to smooth out the tartan coverlet. For who? A woman who is dead? It’s one of those laugh-or-cry situations, so Holly laughs.
I’m still hearing her. Will I be hearing her forever?
The answer is yes. To this day she won’t lick frosting from the beaters (you can get lockjaw that way), she’ll wash her hands after handling paper money (nothing so germy as a dollar bill), she won’t eat an orange at night, and she’ll never sit on a public toilet seat unless absolutely necessary, and then always with a frisson of horror.
Never talk to strange men, that was another one. Advice Holly followed until meeting Bill Hodges and Jerome Robinson, when everything changed.
She starts for the stairs, then thinks of the advice she gave Jerome about Vera Steinman, and goes down the hall to her mother’s room. There’s nothing she wants here—not the framed pictures on the wall, not the clutter of perfumes on the dresser, not any of the clothes or shoes in the closet—but there are things she should get rid of. They’ll be in the top drawer of the night table next to Charlotte’s bed.
On the way, she diverts to the wall where the framed pictures form a kind of gallery. There are none of Charlotte’s late (and not much lamented) husband, and only one of Uncle Henry. The rest are mother-and-daughter photos. Two in particular have caught Holly’s eye. In one she’s about four, wearing a jumper. In the other she’s nine or ten, wearing the kind of skirt that was all the rage back then: a wraparound with a showy gold safety pin to hold it closed. In her bedroom she hadn’t been able to remember why she hated the coverlet, but now, looking at these pictures, she understands. Both the jumper and the skirt are tartans, she had blouses that were tartan, and (maybe) a sweater. Charlotte just loved tartans, would dress Holly and exclaim, “My Scottish lassie!”
In both pictures—in almost all of them—Charlotte has an arm slung around Holly’s shoulders. Such a gesture, a kind of sideways hug, can be seen as protective or loving, but looking at it repeated over and over in photographs where Charlotte’s daughter progresses from two to sixteen, Holly thinks it can convey something else as welclass="underline" ownership.
She goes to the night table and opens the top drawer. Mostly it’s the tranquilizers she wants to get rid of, and any prescription pain meds, but she’ll take everything else as well, even the Every Woman’s multi-vites. Flushing them down the commode is a no-no, but there’s a Walgreens on the way back to the Interstate, and she’s sure they’ll be happy to dispose of them for her.
She’s wearing cargo pants with voluminous pockets, which is fortunate; she won’t have to go back downstairs to get a gallon-sized Baggie from the rickrack drawer. She begins stuffing the bottles into her pockets without looking at the labels, then freezes. Beneath her mother’s pharmacy is a stack of notebooks she remembers well. The top notebook has a unicorn on the cover. Holly takes them out and thumbs through one at random. They are her poems. Terrible limping things, but each one from the heart.
Even though she’s by herself, Holly can feel her cheeks heating up. This stuff was written years ago, it’s the juvenilia of an untalented juvenile, but her mother not only kept it, but kept it close by, possibly reading her daughter’s bad poetry before turning out the light. And why would she do that?
“Because she loved me,” Holly says, and the tears start, right on cue. “Because she missed me.”
If only that were all. If not for the crying and wailing about the dastardly Daniel Hailey. She had sat at the kitchen table of this house on Lily Court while Charlotte and Henry explained how they had been gulled. There had been much breast-beating. There had been stationery and spreadsheets. Charlotte must have told Henry what they would need to convince Holly of their lie and Henry had supplied it. He had gone along, as he always did with Charlotte.
Holly thinks that if Bill had been at that family meeting, he would have seen through the deception almost at once. (Not a deception, a con, she thinks. Call it what it was.) But Bill hadn’t been there. Holly should have seen through it herself, but she was new at the game then, and in spite of the dizzying amount they were talking about—a seven-figure amount—she hadn’t really cared. She had been absorbed in her new love of investigation. Besotted, in fact. Not to mention blinded by grief.
If I had investigated my own family instead of hunting for lost dogs and chasing bail-jumpers, things might have been different.
So on and so on.
Meanwhile, what will she do with the notebooks, those embarrassing relics of her youth? Maybe keep them, maybe burn them. She’ll make that decision after the case of Bonnie Rae Dahl is either wrapped up or just peters away to nothing, as some cases do. But for now…
Holly puts them back where they came from and slams the drawer shut. On her way out of the room, she looks at the pictures on the wall again. She and her mother in each one, no sign of the mostly absent father, most with her mother’s arm around her shoulders. Is that love, protectiveness, or an arresting officer’s come-along? Maybe all three.
Halfway down the stairs, the pockets of her cargo pants bulging with pill bottles, Holly has an idea. She hurries back to her room and yanks the tartan coverlet off the bed. She balls it up and carries it downstairs.
In the living room is an ornamental hearth containing a log that never burns because it’s really not a log at all. It’s supposed to be gas-fired but hasn’t worked in years. Holly spreads the coverlet on the hearth, then goes into the kitchen for a trashcan-sized plastic bag from under the sink. She shakes it out as she walks to the front hall. She sweeps all the ceramic figurines into the bag and takes them into the living room.
The money is still all there. Holly has to give her mother that much. Even her trust fund—the part Holly threw into the so-called investment opportunity—is still there. She feels sure her mother bought the jewelry out of her own share of the inheritance, but that doesn’t change the fact that her mother’s only reason for making up the whole thing was so Finders Keepers would fail. Would die a crib death. Then Charlotte could say Oh, Holly. Come and live with me. Stay for awhile. Stay forever.
And had she left a letter? An explanation? Justifications for what she’d done? No. If she’d left such a letter with Emerson, he would have given it to her. It all hurts, but maybe that hurts the most: her mother didn’t feel any need to explain or justify. Because she had no doubt that what she had done was right. As she felt that refusing to be vaccinated against Covid was right.